KEY POINTS:
Top New Zealand diplomat Simon Murdoch was so certain that the Air New Zealand charter flights taking Iraq-bound Australian troops to the Middle East were within Government policy, that he emailed an underling that he guessed they would have the "support" of Prime Minister Helen Clark and other Cabinet ministers.
Murdoch's judgment call, disclosed in Ministry of Foreign Affairs emails released under the Official Information Act this week, raises new questions over why Clark and her ministers "went dog" on the airline after reports on the flights were beaten up in an Investigate magazine story.
Murdoch, probably the country's top public servant, is not the sort of person to suddenly "go troppo" on as critical an issue as Iraq. But he has ended up taking the fall for what now appears to be a political crime - when other senior officials who also had advance knowledge of the flights have not been similarly censured.
The email trail reveals the Foreign Affairs boss sought advice from Daryl Dunn, who heads the ministry's Middle East division, after he received a call from Air New Zealand chief executive Rob Fyfe on January 15.
"Further to last night's telecom, I rang Rob Fife [sic] this morning - left him a message saying you and I had conferred quickly - cd see no policy constraints and wd guess that our ministers, incl PM, wd be supportive (ie, no obvious political constraint). I suggested he update us on their negotiations closer to [Australian PM] Howard's visit," Murdoch emailed Dunn on January 17.
Murdoch isolated the main risk factor: Were there any diplomacy sanctions imposing on the Air New Zealand flights?
Both officials agreed: No.
The alarm bells did not ring either when Air New Zealand went back to Dunn in mid-April before the final contract was signed.
Nor did they ring the following month when a cast of influential civil servants from Defence, Police, the SIS and including the private secretaries for Foreign Minister Winston Peters and Defence Minister Phil Goff, were sent a report by the Combined Threat Assessment Group headed "Air New Zealand military charter flights to Kuwait" before the June operation.
No one has owned up to reading this report, let alone judging it alarming enough to warn the two ministers. It also appears that Clark's own officials, who include the SIS, did not think the flights sufficiently untoward to draw to her attention either.
The political context is important. When Air New Zealand first approached Murdoch in mid-January, Iraq was top on the Government's mind. Just days earlier Clark had to issue a smoothing statement after Cabinet minister Jim Anderton likened the situation in Iraq to Vietnam.
It was of great concern to New Zealand and to the whole international community, said Clark, recounting that President George W. Bush's revised strategy now had the Iraqi Government taking the lead in confronting the insurgency.
"Attempts to bring peace to Iraq have foundered in the face of a bitter insurgency, marked by sectarian violence. The current situation in Iraq is also destabilising within the region," Clark said.
"The challenges for Iraq are enormous. Its survival as a nation relies on its communities rising above their differences and working towards a common goal. Iraq's neighbours and the broader international community have a role to play in supporting reconciliation between Iraq's communities."
The Prime Minister was then waiting for Washington to confirm a formal invitation for her to visit Bush at the White House. When it came, the main topic the President wanted to discuss was the war on terror: Iraq and Afghanistan.
In the circumstances, it hardly seems surprising that Murdoch believed Clark was on side with the attempts by the US and its Australian ally to quell the insurgency so that the United Nations could safely expand its own role (as UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon is now preparing to do) so New Zealand could make a further contribution.
It is unfathomable that so many public servants did not twig that the flights countervened Government policy as Clark and her senior ministers now claim.
Either the bureaucrats are incompetent, in which case the tumbrils should roll. Or there is no clear Government policy on Iraq, as the Australians believe. Or the Government (which was angered that the Investigate story undercut its attacks on National leader John Key's vacillating stance on Iraq) shifts policy according to how much domestic capital it believes it can extract.
The Government has suppressed the CTAG report, and, also a report by New Zealand High Commissioner to Canberra John Larkindale over the dressing-down he received from Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer.
Peters said the release of such documents would be likely to prejudice the security, defence or international relations of New Zealand. But this is a nonsense. International relations, particularly our friendship with Australia, have already been damaged by the swingeing attack Clark and Goff made against Downer after he banned Air New Zealand from tendering for Australian military charter flights. Getting the truth out might just redress the balance.
