KEY POINTS:
When are the spies - and their government masters - going to admit they're on to a loser, dragging "mad monk" Peter Murlane and his two bucolic friends through the courts for deflating the Waihopai spy balloon. On Monday they were bailed on the promise they would keep any sharp objects well away from the government's rubber balls until a further hearing on June 9.
If the government wants the tittering to end, it should give the perpetrators a big tube of super glue, persuade them to mend the puncture then quietly give them diversion back to the priestly cell and organic farms from whence they came. That's what the Australian government finally did with the television jokesters who dressed up as Osama bin Laden last September and broke through all sort of security barriers at the Sydney APEC conference of world leaders.
The balloon poppers' action, in piercing one of the two 30m rubber domes covering the Marlborough-based spy satellites dishes, might have been a more serious act of cheeking officialdom, but the effect of the stunt has been much the same. Who, on seeing the iconic picture of the two domes, one all puffed up with its own self-importance, the other all limp and shapeless, can't resist a smirk. Even spy boss, Air Marshal Bruce Ferguson, seemed to be having difficulty keeping a stern face when he appeared on television the night it happened to admit that the defences of this once scary place had been well and truly breached.
It's taken the New Zealand spy industry a generation to get over the farce of one of their operatives leaving his briefcase on a journalist's front fence - containing a meat pie and a Penthouse magazine. Do they want to go through a trial where the accused is charged with popping a government balloon and they say things like "Peace be with you" from the dock? Do they want to stand up in court and admit how three odd-balls managed to breach the three lines of perimeter fencing of this so-called top secret base?
As a child of the Cold War era, I lived under a constant barrage of propaganda about the red peril waiting to pounce. With China gone communist, our leaders came up with the nightmare domino theory. They scared themselves to sleep with visions of the red and yellow perils combining, and with the help of gravity, tumbling down the globe to engulf us. Even if you didn't buy in to this nonsense, some of the scare tactics must have rubbed off, because every time I saw a picture of Waihopai after they went up in the 1980s, a little shiver went up my spine. They were like giant multi-faceted fly eyes, each segment seemingly eavesdropping on a private conversation somewhere in the sky. You had the vision of Bletchley Park during WWII, with rows of Waafs sitting with their headphones, monitoring the airwaves for dastardly Germans and Japanese.
Now, with a swing of sickle, the emperor is revealed in all his skinny-legged ordinariness.
The giant eye is nothing but a boring, giant-sized Sky dish. What's more, the white shroud it was wrapped in is optional. It was only there as a modesty blanket to hide which way the dish was pointing at any particular time.
Perhaps the homesick American operators didn't want to be caught out spying on the latest baseball games from the mainland. As for the alleged $1 million worth of damage, one can only imagine our secret squirrels have been trading with those American defence contractors making a fortune out of the Iraq war. If the dishes have to have a raincoat, then why not a nice, locally made gazebo. Alternatively, surely Team New Zealand's world class sail-makers could sew the existing cover back as good as new for rather less.
Perhaps the best reason for the Government quietly dropping any charges is that once more the spotlight is back on the dubious benefits of New Zealand playing the junior partner to the United States-British led Echelon eavesdropping exercise. There's something offensive and immoral about the wholescale spying of the world's electronic conversations. And on a pragmatic level, what does New Zealand gain from playing with the big boys?
The state sabotage by one of our so-called allies, France, of the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour in 1985, answers that. Our various allies knew, but didn't pass on the information. The government's Tangimoana radio surveillance base apparently picked up conversations of the fleeing spies aboard the yacht Ouvea, but by then they were long gone.
Reading Lawrence Wright's Pulitzer Prize winning investigation probe into the destruction of the World Trade Centre, The Looming Tower suggests all their spying didn't do the American's much good either. The CIA spies refused to share their information with the FBI and boom, down came the towers.
If it's not even working for them, why do we think it's good for us?
