Gordon McLauchlan: Intelligence hardly the word to define our spies

In the late 1960s, when the Cold War was thawing a little, the Russian Embassy in Wellington held the odd party for the press. At that time, the Russians front-of-house man for journalists was a guy called Vladimir Something-I-couldn't-pronounce, who was what I called a Hollywood Russian - large, flat-faced in a cartoonish Slav way.

It was hard to take him seriously. He was a major boozer, and the first time I went to a party at the Russian Embassy in Karori, he poured a full tumbler of vodka, handed it to me and clinked his own full glass against mine. He obviously thought I was going to throw it down as he planned to do.

Fully aware that if I threw it down I would soon be throwing it up, I declined as manfully as I could. It was said that Vladimir was the KGB man at the embassy, but then that was said of all the staff assigned to mix with the locals.

His successor was Evgene Podzniakov (to put it phonetically), a small, dark-haired man, rather like an Italian both in appearance and manner. He spoke English well enough to make puns and could be funny in a self-deprecating way.

He became an occasional lunch companion and one day we were sitting eating sandwiches on the band rotunda at Oriental Bay when he nudged me with his elbow, nodded towards a man sitting opposite in a trench coat and fedora, typical of the garb of movie spies, and murmured: "One of yours?"

I said I didn't know but maybe he was one of theirs. "Not possible," he said, "I know all of ours."

Immediately before the 1967 election, he was asked by a newspaper editor who he would vote for in the forthcoming election. "My Holyoake," he famously replied.

"Really," said the editor, "I thought you would vote Labour."

"No," said Podzniakov with a straight face, "we Russians tend to vote for the man in power."

He was an engaging and amusing man with a lovely, warm wife and he became the first Russian to send his children to a New Zealand school, Northlands Primary.

At this time, some minor crisis in New Zealand-Russian relations occurred and our Government ruled that Russian diplomats would not be allowed to travel more than a few miles from Wellington without providing an itinerary. Then I received a phone call from an SIS agent, asking me to meet him for discussions on my relationship with Podz, as we called him.

Being preternaturally inquisitive, I agreed, and he said I was to knock on the door to, say, Room 242, in the Grand Hotel opposite my office, at such-and-such a time. The doors in the hotel were recessed at an angle. When I knocked on the door as instructed, the door immediately behind me opened. A tall man in late middle-age with glasses like the bottom of Coke bottles, stuck his head out into the passage, looked around and pulled me into his room.

I thought I was in the middle of some satirical television show. He asked me if I would report back on what Podz discussed at lunch, and particularly if he said anything about travelling out of Wellington.

I recalled the remark by the great English novelist, E.M. Forster, that if he had to choose between betraying a friend or his country, he would probably betray his country. Podz wasn't that deep a friend but I was uneasy. It seemed to me that if the SIS couldn't keep tabs on these guys in a country the size of New Zealand, then they were pretty inept. Everything I had to do with them after that convinced me they were pretty inept.

I guess some spies must be smart and thorough in collecting and assessing intelligence but I wonder about the Bond-style romanticising of many operatives. And two colossal blunders in the past 30 years suggest that collectively they lack common sense: Iraq, of course, and the demise of Russia. The CIA was still taking Russia seriously years after businessmen who visited there easily guessed the economy was close to collapse.

FOOTNOTE: Last week, I wrote about the futility of war, how it achieves nothing, brutalises everyone involved, and should not be used as an instrument of foreign policy. I mentioned that those who seemed in love with war were not generally soldiers but slightly unhinged armchair warriors. Among the emails I received were these two:

"You and others like you, with your sanctimonious pontificating, may be prepared to wait until the Indonesian jihadis are crawling ashore on Bondi and Takapuna. Not me. Thankfully, because of US pre-emption and its role as the globes super-cop, we won't have to." - George Fleet.

"So war fixes nothing, does it? Must be why the British all learn German now. Why we and the Aussies all speak Japanese. War has achieved nothing, except for ending slavery, and Soviet Communism, and Nazi fascism. Try thinking before you write. Moron." - Amber Tern.

I pointed out that Allies were fighting a defensive war against nations using war as an instrument of foreign policy. I don't know if those names are genuine but I leave it to readers to decide whether they are slightly unhinged or not.

Gordon McLauchlan is an Auckland journalist and author.