Rosemary McLeod: Encounter with Cold War spy

Bill Sutch with wife and daughte after his trial had ended. Photo / File

I couldn't have known, when I met Bill Sutch years ago, that his name would make headlines so long after his death.

We've had impressive intellectuals, but few will have earned the reverence he did, as an author and senior public servant. I was nervous walking into his office, as if he had the power to tell how second-rate my own mind was by comparison, and I can't say he put me at ease.

I left the room as scared as when I entered it, clutching a piece of information I needed for a story I was working on, and hoping I'd get it right because his scorn would be crushing.

Sutch had a singular coldness of manner. I wasn't the first person to experience that. Most men in positions of influence are inclined to be pleasant to a polite young woman, but that was not his style. Just the same, I remember him addressing my school prize-giving, how lucid he was then, and how idealistic about this country's future.

At that distance, he was warm and one remark he made that night stayed with me: that all learning connects in the end, although we can't see it happening at the time. It was, of course, true.

A new report, based on released KGB documents, that he was a Russian agent took me back to the Cold War era, and the glamour of Russia in the left-wing imagination. I taught myself the Russian alphabet, as a teenager, but that didn't change the world, and I forgot it.

Some of us remember the paranoia about the government security service, then known as the SIS, in the 60s and 70s. In left-wing circles, it was spoken of as an unseen presence, spies believed to be planted in every peacenik meeting, and suspected of tapping phone lines of radicals and sympathisers.

The Vietnam War was current, attracting many people to the left-wing cause in protest against our military involvement. Hiroshima had happened only 20-odd years before, and we feared an all-out nuclear war. Our parents had lived through the Great Depression of the 1930s, and our fathers had fought in World War II, which seemed recent. The future looked scary again - as it has done ever since.

Right-wing intellectuals were few, if there were any. Nobody in the creative arts, teaching, or in trade unions was impressed with what the National government had to say, and reports about Russia and China that showed them in a less-than-glorious light were dismissed as CIA propaganda.

Against this backdrop, the ageing Sutch was seen having furtive meetings at night by the Aro St public toilets with a man from the Russian Embassy. Grainy black-and-white photographs of the Russian scurrying off with his umbrella, and Sutch being led to a police car, are now iconic, if tinged with farce. They show how poorly trained, or poorly equipped, our spy photographers then were.

Former SIS agent Kit Bennett was there that night and, unsurprisingly, is more convinced than ever that Sutch was leaking top-secret documents to the Russian. The contents of Sutch's briefcase were unrevealing, although a half bottle of milk (was it leaking too?) testified to his eccentricity - or his memories of childhood poverty.

Since our agents and police could not search the Russian diplomat, we will never know what Sutch gave him. It could have been copies of Playboy. A jury found him not guilty. It could not do otherwise, and nothing has changed. He is still innocent, though the latest news will vex his family, as it must every time the strange story resurfaces.

Sutch's former home, designed by emigre architect Ernst Plischke, is a celebrated building. He had great taste. The Tang horse that featured in photographs of its interior vanished in a burglary many years later, possibly tossed into a ditch by a bored teenager. Was it real? Was any of this real? Could we really have been that interesting? Aro St was tinged with glamour for that short while in 1974. The Cold War came to life.

Rosemary Mcleod is an author and journalist