KEY POINTS:
There is little in the Wellington office of retiring SIS director Richard Woods to give any clues about the personality of the country's spy master.
He laughs and explains that his gallery of photos, paintings and souvenirs has been boxed up and carted home.
Mr Woods, 65, then lovingly describes what used to be in his office: keepsakes from an earlier distinguished and eventful diplomatic career which took him to postings in Iran, Russia, the United States and France, a fragment of an Iraqi shell casing he found after an air raid during the Iran-Iraq war and displayed in his Tehran apartment, his collection of Russian toys and an original Persian miniature.
There were two photos of Mr Woods with a beaming smile - one of him dancing with an attractive woman in the Cook Islands when he was on an aid mission, and the other of him holding a leg of frozen lamb at the opening of a coolstore in Bahrain.
"My wife [Katherine Mansfield biographer Joanna Woods] says that I seem to be enjoying both kinds of diplomatic activity with equal enthusiasm," Mr Woods says.
But there was nothing from his seven years as director of the SIS. If there was, he probably wouldn't tell you, assuming you found your way to his office in the first place.
The SIS is not listed on the building's floor directory, and there are two security checkpoints before you reach the inner sanctum.
The cheerful, avuncular Mr Woods smiles indulgently whenever anything verging on the operational business of the SIS comes up.
He is not going to say anything he doesn't mean to say, to the extent that he has already prepared a set of written responses to pre-arranged topics for discussion. What the agency's 170 staff are up to isn't one, and security considerations mean he can't say much about past operations either.
The SIS is a "bunch of excellent New Zealanders", and that is about as far as Mr Woods, sporting cufflinks depicting the New Zealand coat of arms, will go in talking about its successes.
The "failures" of the SIS - real or perceived - tend to be much more public and have on occasion conspired to coax Mr Woods out of the office.
In December 2003 he had to give evidence during a court case involving Algerian asylum seeker Ahmed Zaoui, and last year he urged Prime Minister Helen Clark to breach protocol and comment on the SIS after it was alleged the service was spying on Maori.
Helen Clark heeded Mr Woods' advice and repeated his assurance that the story was fiction, comments later backed by the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security.
In both cases Mr Woods feels aggrieved, but unable to give full voice in defence of the SIS. He restricts himself to saying he stands by his actions relating to Zaoui, and that many comments about the case have been misleading, unfair or wrong.
Regarding spying on Maori, he says that claim and others about the SIS are equally without foundation.
A cool head, a thick skin and a sense of humour have proven essential as SIS director, Mr Woods says.
If he fails to live up to the stereotypical view of a spy, it is probably because he never was one. A product of Christ's College and Canterbury and Oxford Universities, Mr Woods joined the Department of Trade and Industry in 1966, before transferring to Foreign Affairs in 1973.
He, Joanna and their two sons led a nomadic life that took the family to Athens, Tehran, Bahrain, Moscow, Washington and Paris. Wherever his job as ambassador took him, Mr Woods was an outdoorsman who loved skiing, sailing, camping and travel.
Former colleagues say he was an enthusiastic and popular ambassador for New Zealand.
Former Ambassador to Iran John Hayes, now a National MP, inherited the Woods' german shepherd dog when they moved from Tehran. He said Mr Woods was known as a man of integrity who was good with people. He was congenial, personable, and something of an adventurer.
"When you go to places, you know those who have done well before you and those who haven't by their reputation. I think Richard was particularly well suited to the posting in Iran. He was well known and well liked by the Iranians, and he was clearly a very active ambassador."
Mr Woods' greatest ambition as a diplomat was to be New Zealand's ambassador to France - a position which turned out to be no comfortable pre-retirement posting. He had to manage New Zealand's already prickly relationship with the French in the wake of the resumption of nuclear testing in the South Pacific.
Former Prime Minister Jenny Shipley, who appointed Mr Woods to the SIS post in 1999, said his period as director coincided with a time when the SIS and the public wanted a wider and better understanding of what the service did.
"I think Richard has handled that extremely well, in terms of the publication of some material and his general approach to the role," says Mrs Shipley.
"Richard's qualities were very well suited at that time to both do the substantive part of the role but also to participate in that transition.
"He's charming, and I think has had a really nice touch in the way he has handled the role."
Mr Woods was evidently regarded as having been a success as SIS director and had his five year-term extended by two years. Helen Clark has praised his career in the public service and said she has enjoyed working with him.
Mr Woods says he never had set times to meet and brief the PM, who is also minister in charge of the SIS, but rather saw her on an as-required basis.
"She always makes time available when it's needed."
He would also brief the Leader of the Opposition on security matters, but less frequently.
Briefings became more frequent in the wake of the September 11 attacks, which accelerated what was already a growing shift in the role of the SIS to focus more on counter-terrorism work.
"No one could have envisaged 9/11. Certainly it has had a profound impact on the nature of the work of security services around the world," Mr Woods says.
"All of a sudden we realised there was a new-found capability for international terrorists to cause massive destruction on a scale previously unseen within the terrorism context.
"Since then we have had Bali, London, Madrid and Mumbai. All security services are doing whatever they can to prevent terrorist activity, but it's not easy."
While New Zealand may seem a world away from international terrorism, it is at our doorsteps, Mr Woods says.
He says that during his time at the SIS people have come to New Zealand hoping to spend their time here learning about or making weapons of mass destruction. He will not go into details, but says all such attempts failed.
"We need to ensure that we in New Zealand don't unwittingly become used as a safe haven for people who are a security risk," Mr Woods says.
"We can't believe that our geographical location is something that provides us with an immunity from that risk. Not that the risk of a terrorist attack in New Zealand is more than low - it's possible, but not expected.
"We have been very keen to ensure that New Zealand is not a safe haven for people who could plan, encourage, facilitate and carry out an act of terrorism elsewhere."
