The sensational trial of a high-flying civil servant on spying charges reflects the ongoing misalignment of New Zealand's security agenda with the foreign policy interests of other countries, according to the late man's son-in-law.
Keith Ovenden's new book, Bill & Shirley, takes an intimate and candid look at the lives of his parents-in-law, the Wellington power couple, Bill Sutch and Shirley Smith.
Bill Suitch and Shirley Smith Photo: Massey University Press
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Each led their lives in the spotlight and were influential in their own right.
Bill Sutch was a brilliant left-wing economist and civil servant who had a painful fall from grace. He was arrested, but later acquitted for espionage in 1975. Shirley Smith was a glass-ceiling breaker, with a name for championing the underdog as a lawyer, when few women worked in the field. She was the first woman to lecture in law and become a full-member of faculty.
Ovenden, a commentator, researcher and author, tells Kathyrn Ryan his father-in-law's arrest and trial reflected a intelligence service misguided by the interests and political hegemony of the United States and Britain.
He also cites the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior by French state actors and the massacre of Muslim worshippers by a far right terrorist in Christchurch as examples of this failure.
“I would like, if I could through this book, to redirect the focus of not just media but historians on what happened to Bill in 1974-75. Almost everything that could be written about him has now been written, there isn’t anything more to write except perhaps the details of his growing up that brought him to this path.
“But there is an awful lot to be written about the security and intelligence services and its subservience to the American view of the world. This really intense anti-communism, which a recent writer Vincent Bevins who has written a very good book called The Jakarta Method on what the United States did at this time in the time in the early 1970s. And he comes to the conclusion that that it was produced by American zealotry.
“Those people in power were zealots about anti-communism and our people picked up on that and applied it and couldn’t see anything else. This has continued into the present. Where was the security service in 1985 when the Rainbow Warrior was sunk. Nowhere. Yet we had experience of 40 years of French state terrorism in west Africa, which anyone with any intelligence or background could have read about, and informed about, and our people simply weren’t.
“Don’t even talk to me about the Muslim community in Christchurch, I mean what on Earth where they doing then? I can tell you actually - they were focused on Muslim males aged 15 to 40 who represented a terror threat to the rest of us.”
In September 1974, Sutch was arrested and charged under the Official Secrets Act 1951 following a series of clandestine meetings with KGB agent Dimitri Rasgovorov, an official of the Soviet Union's embassy in Wellington.
The SIS could not provide specific details of what information Sutch had passed to the Soviet diplomat. Sutch claimed his meetings with Soviet officials came after the Russian approached him in his capacity as a stalwart of the NZ Friends of Israel, for information about who were the Zionists in New Zealand, and to discuss China.
The security services found no evidence Sutch was a member of the Communist Party. No conclusions were reached at the trial and the case was dismissed.
Ovenden says Sutch never discussed those meetings with him, but that he had never denied these took place. What strikes him looking back however, is the security services' conduct and their inconsistencies in court.
“He didn’t conceal them, he confessed them and wrote a letter to the then Attorney-General stating that he had indeed been meeting Rasgovorov. He also said he didn’t know what it was Rasgovorov wanted.”
“The security services’ surveillance that led to his arrest was hopeless. The actual arrest itself on the night was incompetent and very poorly conducted and the presentation of evidence at the trial was a disaster. The SIS made a mess of it from beginning to end.
“God knows what their followers in the United States and Britain, who were both eagerly following the case, would have made of their incompetence, I do not know. As a result of this, there was an overhaul of the security services.”
Bill Sutch Photo: Alexander Turnbull Library
The security apparatus and focus had been largely dictated by overseas allies and that is still the case, a situation incongruous with New Zealand’s independent foreign policy, Ovenden says.
“We need to have a security policy that reflects our true status as an independent country that pursues its own foreign policy. We managed to do this for foreign policy by the 1970s and into the 1980s.
“It was difficult into the '80s and '90s, because people who had set the policy in place previously were still alive and could make life very difficult for governments. But eventually, by the mid-1990s every New Zealander understood that our foreign policy was our own business, not anyone else’s. We need to do the same with our security policy.”
The question of whether Sutch was a ‘spy’ is easy to answer for Ovenden. He points out there is absolutely no evidence he passed on damaging information, secrets or documents to the Soviets.
“His whole history indicates a person dedicated to the development of this society and it’s impossible for me to believe that he would have betrayed it in the hope of changing it and altering it definitively to some foreign power.”
Ovenden married the couple’s only child Helen, after meeting her in Oxford in 1967. They married in Wellington four years later.
Four years after that the family were thrown into convulsion by the arrest of Sutch. The year that then followed was intensely painful. Sutch then died of cancer in September 1976.
“It was an extremely difficult year at the end of which our first child was born and really dense and complicated part of my life. I have gone on living it in retrospect ever since,” he says.
His book took two months to write, but took 45 years to put it into perspective.
“I had some very clear ideas about Shirley, in particular because she lived to a great old age. She was in her 90s when she died, and I knew her throughout the last two thirds of her life and we became good friends.”
The book is not a biography of Bill or Shirley, but about himself, an intimate family memoir.
He only knew Sutch for four years, a relationship he described as ‘sticky’ at times, although he believes, had he lived on, a friendship would have developed. '
Shirley had opposed her daughter’s marriage, and Bill backed his wife. Shirley’s family had a history of enmity to marriage.
Part of the reason for their discomfort with the marriage was they weren’t used to a boyfriend of Helen'snot being drawn to her because of her parents high public profile, Ovenden says..
“I think the second reason was I think Helen discovered Oxford was not what it was like in the 1930s like it had been for her mother.
“And this had been her mother’s golden period, she had loved it…and the fact Helen couldn’t enjoy it in exactly the same way, she thought it was my fault because I had come to dominate her social life.”
A previous boyfriend of Helen’s had been very well liked by Shirley, which also compounded the situation.
Family events and meals were strained, as Helen strove to avoid being forced to take sides ans choose between her family and Ovenden, who on occasions took tranquilizers to get him those family gatherings.
Bill Sutch (left) arriving at Wellington Magistrate's Court with wife Shirley Smith and lawyer Mike Bungay in October 1974. Photo: NATIONAL LIBRARY / Ref: EP / 1974 / 6745a / 8aF
The arrival of the couple’s first child made it easier, Bill and Shirley were drawn to supporting the relationship more. The second child clinched the deal, with Shirley accepting the marriage completely, something Keith had to adjust to as well.
“I think I’m one of the very few people that understood the dynamics of Shirley’s life and why it turned out in the way that it did… and the events that moved her, as it where, from one side of perception to another and changed her outlook on the way.
“And that happened at several different times where she really apologised to me one night… she was, in a way, dramatizing similar insights that she had had about her other commitments, political commitments, family commitments and aspects of her life she felt she misunderstood and got wrong and now needed to correct and she was very good at doing that.”
Sutch on the other hand may not have been as good at accepting folly and correcting it.
“Bill was very confident he was right and a lot of the time he was of course,” he says.
But this didn’t make him repulsive. Large numbers of people admired him for his principle and talent.
“This was especially true in the Department of Industry and Commerce, when he was a real leader for the transformation of things in this country and the staff there followed him.”
Shirley's legal career was focused on what really mattered for ordinary people - an ability to use the law as a means of redress.
"What really mattered to her was that the principle of equality before the law applied to everybody and not just to the people who could afford to purchase their equality before the law.
"Alongside that everyone equally had the right to access the law to remedy their problems. She took on lots of domestic cases - domestic abuse through to divorce cases, through to simple things like house purchases and all the things that solicitors do... even on occasions where it was clear there was not going to be any financial reward."