Dialogue: Gordon McLauchlan

Be wary of spooks and intelligence 'experts'


Watched the Assignment programmes on TV One covering the alleged spying for Russia by Bill Sutch and Paddy Costello. All very dramatic. I learned nothing substantive that I didn't know before. The evidence remains pretty thin.

It was the youngish defence and intelligence commentators on the programme who pointed the finger most directly at the two New Zealanders, but there remained at the end only one piece of new evidence - that they were listed by the KGB as "agents." As for the "Romeo spy," I believed hardly a word he said.

I'm wary of intelligence experts. In my personal experience, our spooks were pathetic. During a particularly chilly time in the Cold War I was working on a country newspaper in a two-cop town in the Waikato, boarding with a widow who had four sons. One evening, my landlady told me the local sergeant of police had called, asked what sort of books I read and could he have a look in my room.

She said she hadn't taken much notice of my books, and didn't think it right to visit my room without me there. She stood firmly in the doorway and he went away.

Next day, the sergeant called on me, said he had reason to believe I read Karl Marx and had a book about Stalin, and asked me straight if I was a communist. I said no I wasn't and I would lend him the offending books.

They were more pamphlets than books - one on Stalin by H.G. Wells and the other a condensation of Das Kapital. I had bought them from a second-hand bookshop and read them both, the Wells book sceptically because my father had already spotted his anti-Semitism, and the Marx with interest but little fervour. I showed them to the sergeant and he furrowed his brow and urged me to consider what I read or I could end up in trouble.

At that time, a branch of the police handled national security and I imagined the old sergeant was following some head office instruction to watch for radicals who might endanger the state. I figured that if the state was in danger from me at that time it was a very fragile entity.

A few years later, I was working in Wellington. I, and a number of other journalists, had befriended - or perhaps had been befriended by - a member of the Russian Embassy named Evgeny Podzniakov. Podz, as we called him, was a clever and amusing bloke who spoke excellent English and was very interested in New Zealand idiom.

If you said something like "bludging" (I remember that one in particular), he would stop you mid-sentence and say, "Bludging, what's bludging?" and very carefully concentrate on your answer. If he was a language spy, he was very good.

Security was now in the hands of the SIS and someone asked me if I'd like to meet an SIS officer to discuss my relationship with Podz. I agreed and was told to go to a room in the Grand Hotel opposite Wellington's New Zealand Herald office. I knocked. No response. I knocked again and suddenly a door behind me opened and a tall man wearing glasses with lenses as thick as the bottom of Coke bottles asked in a whisper whether I was truly I and whisked me into the room. All very Boys Own.

Would I report to them my conversations with Podz? I remember saying, "probably not." Pressed, I agreed I'd tell them if he revealed anything I thought could subvert our democracy - as I would, of course, have done anyway.

Well, they contacted me from time to time but Podz never said anything heavy and never pumped me and, anyway, I had no information he couldn't get elsewhere. It was all very ineffectual.

What I do remember was his wit. Another journalist and I were eating our lunch on the band rotunda at Oriental Bay one crisp autumn day, when Podz nodded towards a man in a trenchcoat and fedora, the classic garb of movie spooks, sitting a few yards away.

"Do you reckon he's one of yours or ours?" he asked me. "Dunno," I said. "He must be one of yours," he decided. "I'd probably know him if he was one of ours."

The SIS spooks insisted that Podz was KGB. His children were the first from the Russian Embassy to be allowed to go to one of our schools, which may have meant he was more important than your usual press attache. I don't know.

He came to dinner during a return visit a decade after he finished his tour here. His health had declined and he seemed less spirited, but he was still good company.