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STATE SECRETS

BEN C VIDGEN.

WARNING!

In 1995 someone tried to blow up British Prime Minister John Major during his visit to New Zealand for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Conference.

A massive explosive device was located at Auckland's Sheraton Hotel. Police decided not to inform the hotel or evacuate guests or alert the media, for fear of creating panic. They took the risk and defused the device in situ.

On another occasion, the lives of everyone on board an airliner carrying a visiting world leader came within a nano-second of destruction, when an armed police officer shot a hole in the aircraft.

The common denominator in both cases? The public have never been told.

What else haven't they told you?

FOREWORD

For hospitality workers and anyone else who has ever had to deal with troublemakers on a daily basis.

Every day in crowded cafes all over the world, people read newspapers as they wait to be served. And every day, in crowded cafes all over the world, they find themselves drawn to specific articles - articles upon which they, the reader, may have some related first-hand knowledge. When this happens, people in crowded cafes all over the world promptly draw the conclusion that what is reported and what is reality are separate things.

Although purposeful suppression of information happens from time to time within the corridors of the corporate media, generally, the telling of half-truths falls more into the category of technical failure, ie. incompetence, rather than being an example of orchestrated manipulation.

Often the reason why the final copy from your press hack misses the point completely lies in the erroneous belief of many journalists that they are "jacks of all trades" or, as one journalist put it, "we're paid to act like smarmy little know it alls, to be the universal expert".

This is a task bound to fail, due to the very human factor that not everyone can speak knowledgably about everything. When specialisation is discarded, the end product becomes a glaring declaration of the journalist's own general ignorance regarding the specific history and particular culture of the organism which they have been sent to scrutinise in the first place. The more complex the issue, the more appropriate and likely this gross generalisation becomes.

On both television networks, for example, the journalists for the most part have no expertise in any one area. The same talent they bring to bear on a story about a missing pet will be brought to bear on any other story they do.

They are given a formula to build their stories with: an introduction for the newsreader, then two paragraphs, then a seven second "interview" with one protagonist, then three more paragraphs, then a seven second interview with another protagonist, then a final two paragraphs and the story is complete.

In Kindergarten this is called "joining the dots", in art terms it is "painting by numbers" and in television it is "the network news".

The inability to report accurately is often compounded further by the fact that the media, as a collective creature, simultaneously suffers from ADD (attention deficit disorder), illiteracy, and gross amnesia. To translate information into byte form, the media defines the term "news" literally - "yesterday is only ever mentioned today if there's space to be filled".

Once in a while, mutants do come along to test this hardened formula; however, the need to earn a paycheck normally has the desired effect, and the search for truth and justice soon gives way to the pressure of mortgages and hire purchase repayments. In the press, the offenders most likely to be found swaying to the tune of maintaining the status quo are the "political commentators" - sad little creatures who take their cues from the civil service, where incompetence, self-importance, office politics, careerist motivations and hangovers dominate like decaying wood on a dead tree. In New Zealand a few mavericks, such as Bill Ralston and Warren Berryman, do exist. Yet the rule of thumb clearly states that in the norm, political journalists who are commercially successful, socially acceptable and actually talented (though operating under the spirit-destroying pressures of self-censorship) are rare.

In theory, a political analyst should be objective, without ideological bias, and should realise that to understand what's going to happen tomorrow today, one must first understand what happened yesterday. In short, the ideal is that they should be educated and without a political agenda.

The sins of the press gallery runneth over, but they shine brightest when the media is assigned to deal with the truly complex - defined as any event where the spin doctors at the Beehive fail to release a press kit or where they use the words "No comment", the standard response the Government wheels out whenever the issues of intelligence or espionage are raised.

"Catholic" style conspiracy theorists say that such a response is proof of the corporate media's duplicity with the powers that be, the power of the intelligence agencies, and plans for world domination. The truth, however, is (probably) raw and boring. The media's inability to report on espionage can be compared with an individual attempting to umpire a game in which they are ignorant of the protocol, having failed to study the rules - an attitude which, if applied to the grading of students, would result in an appropriate F for effort.

Conspiracy theories involving the media and the powerful do exist, ie. Robert Maxwell and Mossad, Cecil King and MI6, Tony Blair's "New" Labour and Rupert Murdoch. Yet basically, the reasons for poor media coverage of (at least) espionage lie in the fact that there just are not that many journalists specialising in intelligence matters. It is simply not a good career move - and after all, why base your reputation and livelihood on people who are as fond of interviews as a royal in a French tunnel. From an editor's point of view, it is more logical to invite a former government analyst to write a column on the subject whenever such deviant issues escape long enough to become news. This option saves the editor the logistical and political problems of assigning a journalist to become specialised in this area. So what if, as a consequence, objectivity is put at risk? Some call it damage control, the editor calls it practical.

In exotic places like London and Washington there do exist small cliques of journalists specialising in espionage matters. Yet here in New Zealand, where no "friendly" agency has been caught red-handed sticking a dagger in the back of some law-abiding citizen (bar the Rainbow Warrior affair), the editor is safe to ask, "Why bother?" - ignoring the possibility that crimes may in fact be succeeding due to the failure of the Fourth Estate to investigate. The irony of the situation hasn't escaped the New Zealand intelligence community, in that the danger of unaccountability stems from the unclear position regarding the nature of its charter. Professional press coverage would certainly increase the pressure on policy makers to be more decisive in their dealings with the security services.

As for why this situation exists, and why there is so little in-depth reporting on a bureau that is certainly in need of constant vigilance (as much for the agency's sake as for the sake of the public), it is time to ask the waiter for the reality check. The corporate media is not about delivering information (at least not to the public): it's about making dollars. This is why it is called the corporate media, and not the "tobacco kills people media", or the "war is profitable media". The corporate media doesn't want to educate people, it wants profit.

Herein lies the primary explanation behind the rise of "infotainment". Crap sells newspapers, and the number of newspapers sold equals the quantity of advertising space sold. In the owner's uncomplicated mind, this equates to the number of holidays spent in the South of France. The tradition is set - so what if you can't swim in the surrounding sea because some other corporation (whose public relations department contributed heavily towards the purchase of your second Lear jet) has dumped so much toxic ooze there that the fish will glow in the dark for the next 20,000 years.

Modern newspaper owners do not want their "journalists" earning their keep by investigating organisations which have the potential to affect the paper's sales in a number of ways - such as leaking details of a sister company's own toxic dumping project, or the delivery of sensitive economic details to competitors.

This is not a cover-up - the term "cover-up" implies hiding details. In the owner's case, they simply don't want to go looking in the first place, on the offchance that something might actually be found. The average owner of your average Republican-orientated "Pax Americana" trans-national news syndicate (cynically referred to as "information brokers") is, of course, unlikely to give you such an in-depth answer.

What this book attempts to do is to correct this situation by doing what the media has failed to do - to examine the role of covert operations conducted within New Zealand by foreign intelligence agencies; to examine the role New Zealand has played in covert operations within the Pacific (and sometimes else where); to look beyond the headlines and into the rotten heart which produces such a complex blasphemy. It is a story which critics will no doubt label just another conspiracy theory - to which I reply: "Of course it is." History is full of conspiracies. Why? Because shit happens, all over the world, every day - sometimes even in crowded cafes.

Introduction

"The city was built to see what makes us tick last night...one of us went off" (Dark City, the movie, 1998)

If you are absolutely desperately keen to get into the action of this book, you can skip through to Chapter One, but if you'd like to know the context behind this book I strongly suggest you read the following:

I am looking at my bed - or I would be if it wasn't hiding under a stack of papers. It's laughing at me as I haven't seen it in the last 48 hours (deadlines are a bitch). In fact my entire office looks like someone has chucked a hand grenade into a stationery shop. The ashtray is overflowing and the coffee cups litter the place in various stages of decay and evolution.

Most of the work has been done and now I am left with the task of telling the readers exactly what this book is about and why you should consider the contents within.

The publisher tells me that my self-selected title "The Nasty Bastards Hypothesis" has been replaced with the current title (which is a suitable title except perhaps I would have called it Secrets of the State - a minor change but I feel a significant one). (And one, the publisher notes, that unfortunately was too close to Enemies of the State, another book on a similar subject)

I suppose I should start by explaining what a nasty bastard is, why I view what I have written as a hypothesis (and not a theory), and put your image of Ben C. Vidgen in its proper context.

A nasty bastard is a stupid person. A person who through their fear of themselves, feels that they must have power, that they must be in control at all times. It's their fear that makes them stupid, it's their fear that makes them dangerous, it's their fear that leads them into such lines of thought as "the ends justify the means", and it's their fear that causes them to lash out at anyone who challenges their position.

A nasty bastard is a terrorist, someone who uses terror to instil fear in others. A nasty bastard is an ill person infected with a highly infectious disease. This book is about Nasty Bastards, it's about what they do, where they can be found, how they operate and most importantly I hope this text underlines why they choose to operate in the manner that they do. It is my hope that if we can understand such people then we don't have to fear them. For it is my belief that if you can understand fear then you don't have to live with it.

This book is the hypothesis behind that belief. I use the word 'hypothesis', for a theory is insufficient to describe the point of this tasking. A theory is when someone says 'I think this because of that'. Yet theories are a dime a dozen.

It's my objective to say 'this is the theory, how can we test it?', for that is the nature of a hypothesis. It's my theory that answers are best discovered following the asking of questions. You might not ever find the truth but that's no reason to stop searching for it. How did I come to reach this verdict? Once upon a time there was a little boy who liked to write stories. One day he moved to a new school and they couldn't understand his hand-writing so they asked his mother 'why?' She replied, 'oh, he's dyslexic.'

They didn't understand what that meant and they didn't ask. But that didn't stop them from taking him out of his class without explaining to the little boy or his parents, what was happening. They put him back with the "little kids". He wasn't allowed to write stories there. He had to write the alphabet over and over and over again. Here he had to read "Spot Sees the Ball" books. The little boy thought this was kind of silly and as the teacher didn't want to listen to the little boy, the little boy walked out of the school, went home and read "Lord of the Rings" instead.

The school wasn't very happy about this so they sent the truant officer to the boy's home. The truant officer also happened to be something called a Maori elder. The boy didn't really know what that meant but he thought the Maori elder had a really cool-looking walking stick. The truant officer looked around and saw the boy reading, and he said to the boy's mother "don't worry, I'll keep them off your back", and he did. Oh, and the little boy kept writing stories.

At some point during all this the little boy thought he might want to be a soldier, and eventually he heard of the Special Air Service. He primarily wanted to be in the SAS not because they were the best, not because they were tough, but because he had seen them slide down ropes and rescue people who were being held hostage by terrorists. He didn't really understand what that word meant, but he knew what terror was, and for reasons that even now I can't explain the little boy felt his jaw go tight and, he knew that any one who inflicted terror wasn't his friend. During this same period the little boy saw a film, made by a man with a name that burnt itself into his young mind. The name was John Pilger. The film was called Year Zero, and it was about a different kind of terrorist. What impressed the little boy was that this man liked to write stories and that his stories had caused people to give without asking a quarter of a million pounds to the victims of these terrorists. The man had managed to make people care: the little boy thought that was pretty cool. The little boy had just had his first lesson in journalism. The little boy thought that maybe he'd like to become a journalist. At around the age of thirteen the boy started developing spots and a little reality started creeping into the lad's mind. Though at this stage the lad could tell you a whole lot about the SAS, terrorism, and guerrilla warfare, for his entire book shelf was devoted to these subjects (minus the magazines under his bed). He decided because he was told so, that he would probably not make a very good SAS soldier. So instead he thought he might like to be a counter-terrorism analyst (the lad was a bit weird).

Still, at fifteen he hadn't given up the idea of journalism, until an English teacher asked that eternal question: "What do you want to do when you leave school?"

When the boy told the English teacher he was met with a derisive laugh. The little boy suddenly re-emerged and the lad decided that soldiering was an eminently more sensible career choice.

The lad went to a new school shortly afterwards and met some teachers who didn't seem bothered about his hand-writing, in fact they encouraged him to write and the lad went onto university. The lad always remembers that school very fondly, he remembers especially his English teacher, his history teacher and his psychology teacher, and his friend Bill the teacher. Oh, and what did he study in psychology? Terrorism and the nature of aggression.

By the time the lad reached university he had heard of an organisation called the Security Intelligence Service and he thought that they sounded like the ideal organisation for him to join. To this end at university he studied political science, history and any subject that he thought might make him stand out to the SIS. All his essays were either about political terror or military conflict. If they weren't then he'd go to his lecturers and ask if he could change the essay so that it connected to this subject. The lecturers seemed to like the lad so they always agreed.

In the meantime the lad was keeping his options open, and to supplement the architecture of his CV he joined the Territorial Force. He chose the Royal Artillery Regiment for two reasons. Firstly this was the branch that his grandfather had belonged to. And secondly they were the only TF unit that allowed you to go straight into intelligence through the position of Artillery Intelligence Operator. How was he as a soldier? The answer is best encapsulated by one of his NCO's who once said "Vidgen, I like you on the field, in the barracks you're a complete failure" (and he was).

The lad stuck with soldiering as a TF soldier, and he was always looking for intelligence openings. From time to time he would get lucky. Yet the response was always the same. Certain individuals, and he noted that they were ones with a passion for their job, liked the lad and indeed they seemed to find the lad refreshing and subsequently they said many things that they probably shouldn't have. However the units were always controlled by the kinds of people who seemed more concerned with their image. They were the kind of people who did certain things in a certain way because that was the way that they had always been done. But to the lad the thing they seemed to hate the most was the fact that he did not just accept the status quo: he would always ask 'why?' or 'how come?' Nor were they particularly impressed by the lad's complete disregard for the chain of command. They didn't like the lad's big mouth, or his gung ho attitude, it seemed to scare them.

As for the SIS, well, they contacted him once but before they had a chance to ask him any questions, something scared them as well and they ran off at a very fast pace. This really didn't bother the young man for by now he wasn't really so sure if working for the SIS was the thing that he really wanted to do any more. For, during his four years at university, he'd looked long and hard at terrorism, its history, its ideology and its methods, and the lad came up with some uncomfortable questions. Likewise his time in the Army, the conversations he had with some of these people, had also raised a lot of questions and the young man didn't like some of the answers that he was starting to get. In the meantime the young man had heard of other organisations where he could apply his talents, all he needed was a higher academic qualification and if he didn't get in there, the lad thought, he could always hide himself away as an academic instead. He looked at the fact that he didn't have any lectures on a Friday or a Monday and his day didn't start before ten. He looked at how much skiing he was getting in, and he found the idea of an academic life rather comfortable, even tempting.

But things were changing in our young man's country, things were changing rapidly. Suddenly without warning, without the time to plan, student loans were introduced. Suddenly the part-time jobs that the young man had always had were being snapped-up as student allowances were taken away. Suddenly the bank didn't care that the young man had always paid his loan off on time every year. He went to a new bank. They were understanding, for a while. Then that manager was replaced and the new manager wanted his money, the money off the young man, the money off all the young man's friends and they wanted it now. The young man was bloody-minded, so he fought and he hung on, he ducked and dived and he sold Marijuana (and through this he met a lot of interesting people).

So he got his piece of paper in the end, where others had simply quit, but he knew the odds, it was time to resign from academic studies, time to get a job. The young man did what all BA students do: he became a waiter.

He found being a waiter very difficult, primarily because the chefs had trouble reading his hand-writing. He found doing a number of tasks difficult because they normally involved tills. Tills involved numbers, and the young man had - and continues to have - problems with numbers. Numbers meant thinking in a linear fashion. The lad's mind just didn't work like that, his mind was visual, it required something he could picture. His mind jumped all over the place, it allowed him to take all the little pictures and format them into one big picture. And other jobs? Well, they didn't allow him to think and he got bored and then he would get frustrated.

The lad went to the bank to see how much of his debt had been paid off. The lad was surprised to find his debt had gone up. He discovered that the amount of interest he had been told he would have to pay was in fact at a rate much higher. The lad did the figures and worked out how long it would take to pay off his debt, how long it would be before he could go back to university. Then the lad got angry.

The lad looked at the fact that his wage was half of what it had been when he had started waiting tables five years earlier. The lad felt it was unfair and that it seemed that the only way to get ahead these days was by cheating. He went to the bank and asked them to lower the interest rate. The bank, naturally enough, said no. He looked at his options and he thought that the bank was being rather silly. The lad went and declared himself bankrupt and hey presto his debt disappeared and so did his credit rating.

The lad didn't care. If that's how they wanted to play the game so be it. The lad resumed selling marijuana and he nearly moved into other forms of crime as well. The lad discovered that he didn't really like crime, but he didn't know what to do. He couldn't think. He was scared. He was becoming afraid of the future, he was afraid he was a failure.

Although his situation was a little different, on the whole he wasn't alone. A lot of his friends felt scared. Some sold pot, some sold their bodies, others took their high IQ's and they invented new forms of crime. Eventually most realised that this was not the way and they adapted, they created new plans. Some of these friends never stopped being afraid, some went under, some never figured out how to beat the fear. The young man slowly grew up and he made his share of stupid mistakes. He was helped however because at one stage he realised that if he didn't sort himself out he was going to be a joke all of his life. He thought he deserved better than that.

He re-joined the Army because, for all of its faults, he knew it was bloody good at kicking people in the arse. It was a good decision this time around. One of his NCO's was in fact a soldier from 1 Squadron of the SAS (recovering from an accident), the little boy's idols. This soldier never shouted but the fact that he always had his own shit sorted out made you willing to listen, willing to do what he said quickly and as well as possible.

The instructor once said something that stuck in the young man's head "discipline is not doing something because you're ordered to or because you have to, discipline is always living up to your own standards". The lesson didn't sink straight in but eventually it got there. In the meantime an adult in his mid-twenties started working as a freelance journalist and researcher (thank God for word processors).

Researching wasn't so difficult but as a journalist he had to teach himself. He had to learn about source authentication, about checking facts, about never taking a person at their face value (which I still find difficult to do). His early stories make him blush today but he was not too hard on himself for he knew that whatever he wrote, that in time he'd look back and think it was crap. You learn, you adapt, you develop.

Having spent some time in Australia the novice journalist returned to New Zealand where he heard a specific story. The story was significant because it was part of a story that I had known in my guts would be a story as early as way back in 1989. It was a story that I had been collecting information and been asking questions for ever since. This part of the story was the missing part and now I knew where to find the other parts. Now I felt that I had learnt enough to write the story properly, that I had learnt enough to treat the story with the justice it deserves. This book is that story in it's whole.

How do I think people will react when this book comes out. I suspect a lot of people are going to cross me off their Christmas card list. I'm not that worried as most of these people are what I consider "Nasty Bastards". But there are four other means by which the Nasty Bastards might react.

The first is the most sensible. Do nothing and wait until the TV generation finds a new flavour of the month. The problem with Nasty Bastards is that they're stupid and stupidity makes people dangerous.

So in the second instance I could open the door one day to have my pretty little computer blown out through the back of my skull, for writing this story, as my more dramatic friends keep informing me. I think that's unlikely. The Nasty Bastards aren't that stupid. Besides if they did decide to respond in this manner it's more likely that I'd meet with a sudden unexpected accident or even a sudden illness (as has happened before). Yet if this did happen all it would do is serve to authenticate my claims. But even if it is a possibility it doesn't really bug me that much, for I'm doing what I love. I'm not a martyr (I look stupid in a toga) but I do believe in the human soul, and I believe the soul is bullet proof, and if it's not then it doesn't really matter does it? To me it's that simple. The third thing that the Nasty Bastards could do, if revenge was their kick, if they were truly stupid, is to get at me through my weak spots, to target my fears.

For me that would be my people, those who I care about. My initial thought was that if anyone touched any of my people, a sequence of events would be set in train, and then someone would be having a bad day, A VERY BAD DAY INDEED. I took a step back and decided that that sort of reaction would be the worst thing I could do. It wouldn't help my people, and it would destroy everything that I have worked towards. That sort of reaction stands for everything that I'm against. So I wondered what it was that I should do. I spent a lot of nights thinking (and dreaming) and remembering all the means by which the Nasty Bastards could hurt those I consider as my most valued treasure. Then I took these scenarios and I broke them down by the numbers. At this point I grabbed a large pot of coffee and a carton of cigarettes (food fit for a king) and went and did some thinking, and from this I created a plan.

In the military the plan that I came up with would be termed 'defence in depth'. A series of intertwining and mutually-supporting defences, like the 'photographs, tapes, funny files and other bits of undisclosed information copied many times and placed in a lot of locations' 'Defence'. The 'remember why Switzerland was never invaded' defence, a cryptic remark which specialists in economic and information warfare might understand. The 'for goodness sakes, if you're going to play poker with cheats then take along a fifth ace' defence, and finally the 'Polish Intelligence Defence'. These are all defences that are designed to ensure that certain terrorists keep their dogs on their chain.

The thing I like about these specific types of defences is that they allow me to tell the story, as it should be told. They're honest defences and I don't think Nasty Bastards really comprehend what that word means. It's just too scary for them to understand. The core of my defence plan however is that if someone did go after my people and I was left standing then I would go after them. I would go after them by targeting their fears. The fact that they felt so scared by what it was that I was doing that they felt that they had to resort to this level in the first place would demonstrate to me where to aim. Some people may consider such a defence as being rather ruthless. They're correct, but it's also the most effective way of protecting my people.

The fourth means by which the Nasty Bastards could respond is by besmirching my name, by discrediting this work by attacking its author, the assassination of character. The fact remains I've done a lot of stupid things. The fact remains that by conventional standards I can be described in a word. That word is dodgy. History is full of good people who were brought down by lies regarding their reputation. In my case there are many things that if told out of context or spun in a certain way could make me look bent. Yet in my case there are things that don't even have to be spun. They are bent. What can I say, I have a habit of taking the rule book and tossing it over my shoulder. Yet the fact is if any of my past came back to haunt me it would only do so because by daring to stick my head up I have given the Nasty Bastards the motive to chuck something at me. If I hadn't they would have left me alone. But I won't do that because the only motive I have to do so is fear and I refuse to be afraid of the Nasty Bastards, they're just not worth it. So the Nasty Bastards can do what they please, I don't give a damn. Maybe they could find something, maybe not. At the end of the day the people who know me know what I would or wouldn't do and I know what I am, and to me these things, not my reputation, are the things that are important. In my twenty nine years I have only ever done one thing that I cannot forgive myself for, one thing for which I still feel deeply ashamed. One thing for which I have no justification. In May 1994 I burgled a flat in St Albans Street. I took some cash, some personal effects, and the World War I medal of the flat owner's grandfather. It was the stupidest, nastiest, most inexcusable action I have ever committed. For the rest I claim the Robin Hood defence.

That medal became my own Poe's haunt. Eventually I chucked it in the Wakatipu (the trough of monsters) and I can still hear its heart beating. It reminded me of my own grandfather, and it reminds me of what he stood for in my own eyes. My grandfather was a quiet man and my grandmother did a pretty good job of keeping us out of his way, he obliged her by keeping out of our way.

The first time that I ever gave him any real thought came when I was about nine. I was tearing through the house trying to find some reason not to go to bed. I went screaming past my grandfather who was reading a book in the lounge. I screeched to a halt, asking my grandfather what he was reading. We ended up having a conversation on history - that is to say, my grandfather taught me what history really meant. He did this by telling me about my own ancestry.

Aside from the fact that my family tree seemed to be full of sword-waving loonies, it was the fact that I wasn't really his grandson but his step-grandson that stunned me. Yet he cared enough about me and my siblings to know this information about our family tree. From that point on and ever since I have considered Pop, grandfather in full. The next day Pop went and did something that to my knowledge he had never done before. He took one of his grandchildren shopping. I was allowed anything, as long as it was a book. I saw a brightly coloured tomb displaying a one-eyed man chewing a cigar and firing a machine gun on the cover. The title bore the legend "BATTLE ACTION", and it was my first love. I seized the book with both hands, I looked to my grandfather for approval of my decision. For just a second my heart sank as a disapproving glance danced across Pop's face. Yet when I looked again Pop was smiling. "Yahoo". I grabbed Battle Action and headed for the counter.

I never forgot that look and I think about it often. My grandfather had spent five years in some of the bloodiest theatres of World War Two. It was not uncommon for him to wake up and breakfast with his mates and to end the day having seen some of these friends torn to pieces before his eyes in the in-between. Yes I think I know what that look means now.

Pop never took me shopping again but the next year he sent me a book titled "Valoons Lives", the author's name escapes me. But I remember three things about that book. It was published in the summer of 1939 and it's author didn't have a very high opinion of Mr Hitler. Secondly each chapter started with an academic historical biography of a particular character in history. It then went on to the hypothetical scenario of what would happen if you could sit down and have dinner with such characters. It took dates, places, and figures and turned them into people whose motives, feelings and dreams could be understood. It turned history into people, took deeds and gave you emotion, it took something dead and gave you something alive, for history is a living thing and that should never be forgotten.

Thirdly it was the best book I have ever read to date. Pop always gave me encouragement. He wasn't a great talker and for many years I was under a false impressions about what his politics and beliefs were. Then one day I suddenly realised that it was my grandmother who did all the talking while Pop sat back, listening, and let you make a fool of yourself. The cunning old sod. After his funeral my grandmother gave me first choice from his library. They had moved and it was a lot smaller than it used to be. But that didn't matter, I only took three books. One on the history of the Royal New Zealand Artillery, one Peter Arnett's Live from the Battlefield, and one entitled Friends in High Places.

I read those three books, and I suddenly wished I hadn't stayed away from Pop as much as I had in his last years. I stayed away because of the medal. It had stopped me from being able to look Pop in the eye. I was afraid that he would be disappointed in me. Fear makes you stupid. I never got caught for that burglary (or for any of my mischief for it has to be said I was a good criminal) so you might ask why I am talking about it now?

When I was in Sydney I was introduced to a man who, let's just say, was well acquainted with the Irish Republican Army (IRA). We were having an interesting conversation on terrorism, a lively subject for we both knew something of the matter from, of course, different perspectives. It was also made interesting in that I wasn't being critical.

I've sat down, over the years, with a number of people with this man's disposition and I've learnt one thing, don't judge. You listen. You learn. You become informed.

To us Northern Ireland is twelve thousand miles away, we have the luxury to choose sides, to be able to label one side as patriots and the other side as murderers. To these people it's an emotional issue. It's something they live, it's something they are brought up in the middle of. It's an environment of hate, a climate of fear. It affects them, their families, their friends, their grandparents and even their great-grandparents. They didn't choose a side. Rather, it was beaten into them. They're simply a product of their environment, as most people are.

We had been talking for a while on the subject of the IRA's methods, when we got to a story about the IRA accidentally killing the wrong person, at which point I exploded (diplomatically) "I understand that you hate the British, I can understand that you believe in what you are doing, but for goodness sake how do you expect the people to give you any authority when you turn around and do the very same thing that you accuse the British of doing? If you ask me you should take that man's killers and hand them over to the authorities, acknowledge the crime.

"Because if you don't, people are always going to think that you're just another bunch of hypocrites."

He looked at me and started to protest, then he stopped and his mouth hung open. "You know boy, I think you might be on to something." I thought so.

I believe in what I write, but then everybody these days claims to know the truth. How in the hell are you meant to believe what I say as being more valid than anyone else's expert opinion. I can't answer that question but at least you know to what degree I'm prepared to face the consequences for not only my words but my actions. You know the basis of my authority, you know my intent. I have chosen to introduce myself in this manner because over the past two years I've told people what I'm doing and how I am doing it. It seems to have struck a chord and people, often without having been asked to, have chosen to help me out. From the people who fed me 'Ben Bagels' and turned a blind eye to the size of my tabs, allowing me to eat when I was on the bones of my ass, to the people who have literally put their necks on the line: I'm indebted. If I didn't do it this way I would be abusing the faith they have chosen to show in me, and I couldn't do that to my people, for that would be an abuse of trust and I think they're owed more than that. If I did that then I'd just be acting like a Nasty Bastard, so I'll keep my end of the bargain. I keep it gladly.

What I did at St Albans Rd was wrong, it's that plain, it's that simple. The bottom line is that I was feeling bad about myself and I went and took it out on someone who had never done me any harm. I took that person's feelings and I considered them of no significance, I took the trust that person had held and I went and pissed on it like it meant nothing, I inflicted terrible hurt, childish is as childish does, and that is inexcusable, it cannot be justified, so I won't try.

I could keep it a secret and not face the consequences, but if I did that I'd be doing exactly the thing that causes me to detest the Nasty Bastards as much as I do. Was I a Nasty Bastard? No I was just being stupid. If I was to describe a real Nasty Bastard I'd take my friend Jason. Jason is in jail for rape. When I think what it is that he has done I'm torn. Part of me feels "Oh God, buddy, were you really feeling that scared, were you in that much pain, that you had to go and do something that terrible to let us know, oh my poor poor friend."

Another part of me looks at what people like Jason have done, what they have done to so many of my friends, and I just want to walk up to him and shoot him in the head.

I do know that as much as I love this guy I never want to see his face for the rest of my life, and I hate that feeling and I hate him for making me feel that way. For me the worst part is not what Jason did but the circumstances and the consequences of his actions. He was at a party, he met a girl, they started smooching, somehow they ended up in another room. Jason started his assault, the girl said no and then she resisted, then she started fighting and screaming and as she screamed Jason raped her, laughing as he did so. In the other rooms the rape could be heard. People knew what was happening, they looked at each other and they simply pretended that it wasn't happening. They let it happen. The girl knows this and now she not only has to live with the illogical but unbeatable guilt, not only does she have to live with the fear it instilled in her but for the rest of her life she has to live with the fact that people knew it was happening and they did nothing. What do you think that does to her trust. Her trust in people and more importantly her trust in herself. It takes that trust and it blows it out the window. The probability is that the woman will for the rest of her life (or at least for a long time) be putting herself in stupid situations, setting herself up to fail and generally beating herself up, she'll punish herself. She'll some how think it's her fault that some how she should have known, that somehow she deserved what happened.

In reality she didn't do anything but trust someone, the consequences are just sad. For why in the hell should she trust anyone again, and why should she trust herself? She did that once, and look what happened. I write this, and I'm filled with hatred for my friend, and I hate that. That's what Nasty Bastards do, that's why I can't abide them. I can't forget my friend, the person who always gave me his support, who was always interested in what I was doing, the person who loved his family and who with good reason was loved by his family. But nor can I forget what he did to that woman or how he must have made her feel. Jason hurt, not just the woman, but he hurt her family, he hurt his family, he hurt her friends, and he hurt his friends, and in the end he hurt himself. What a fucking waste. Yet what Jason did to a single individual, and the circle of people connected to these two people, in one brief act we have witnessed happen to this entire country, nay the entire globe, slowly and repeatedly over the last decade. The statistics for crime, suicide, alcohol and drug abuse, increasing debts, all indicate the truth of my claim (in regards to this country), yet it's the look on peoples faces these days that proves it to me.

And how do people react? They react like the people at the party. They behave like the woman after her ordeal. We've become a country of victims, the victims of terrorism. This book looks at an aspect of terrorism, the face of corruption, of terrorists with guns. But these are just one form of terrorism. When I sat in the bar with the IRA man, a friend had been serving us: she'd be dead a year later from a different form of terrorism.

I burgled a man's home, that was another form of terrorism, and Jason is yet another mask of the face of terrorism. Big business and the APEC groupies (who arrive in this country in the not too distant future) would suggest yet another form of terrorism. But in the end terrorism is simply the act of scared people attempting to steal power off others, to hide their own fears. It's stupid but that's Nasty Bastards for you. So let me display for you some of their fears, the things they try to hide from us.

There is perhaps one final incident which I should cite which perhaps alludes to my motives and demonstrates how my mind works. In 1987 I left school and, prior to going to university, I went to work in Queenstown as a waiter. I hadn't been in town long when I walked into a clothing shop for no particular reason, just window shopping. I hadn't been in the shop long when I was descended upon by the saleswoman. She was in her thirties and reasonably attractive in a rather haughty manner.

I remember thinking that my first impressions of her were, if I had to sum it up in a word, avarice. I immediately went on the defensive thinking "bloody Queenstown salespeople". I looked at her face and sure enough there was the false "hey, I'm your friend" smile, the consciously projected look of "hey I'm not going to rip you off" in her eyes. But I was immediately struck, when I looked at those eyes, by the feeling of there being some kind of wall around this woman.

To this day I could not tell you what colour that woman's eyes were. In fact I could not tell you what her hair looked like, and my recollection of her face as a visible picture is faint. But when I think of those eyes the first word that leaps into my mind is sapphires. I don't know if I imagined this or not but it suddenly seemed as if I was struck by a wave of emotions, and they didn't seem to be mine. Then I encountered something and it hit a deep nerve in me, the feeling was so overwhelming that I felt mutually drawn and overwhelmed. Its intensity was so strong that it scared the hell out of me. It was like looking into a mirror and seeing your reflection turn into someone else. I suddenly felt very naked, I suddenly became acutely aware of her eyes boring into me and I was no longer the microscope examining the insect, the roles had been reversed. I got the hell out of the shop very quickly, very quickly indeed.

We live in a strange world, and sometimes a very sad world. You take the bravest, most confident person you can name and I suspect that behind all that bravado you will find a soul that not only has courage and dreams but fear and hurt. The same is true of the darkest of beings. There are no good souls, no bad souls. The soul is a blend.

In that moment I suddenly felt this person had seen the part of me which I try to hide away. The part that my conscious mind would prefer to pretend doesn't exist.

In realising this I was struck that behind all the feelings of false pretence that I was picking up that those eyes belonged to someone with an array of feelings and complexity. Those eyes belonged to a person. The experience was one of a handful of incidents that have happened to in my life and when it happens I can only say that my world has been rocked. That woman would be dead in less than six weeks. Her murdered body chucked over the side of a bridge. What she saw when she looked at me I don't know, but I wish that instead of getting scared that I had asked that question. What harm could it have done?

Her name was Maureen McKinnel, she was widely known to be a high class hooker or, as friends that I have who work in the trade prefer to be called, a whore. I considered, when I wrote this section, going to the library and checking my facts. In fact I started to but apart from a few references to the case, there is no trace of Maureen left. It's like she never existed at all. So instead I'll write it as I recall, so if there are any errors then they're simply the tricks that the mind will play on itself, but while the mind may alter the subject it does so to retain the theme of what the mind's subconscious has detected.

She had let the murderer into her house, leading the police to originally theorise that she must have known her killer. The photographs feature her living room (they never showed the photographs of the crime scene in her bedroom). The clear part of my mind sees a tastefully decorated room. The magazines are in the right place, and the photographs of family exist but they're not hung up prominently, you're not encouraged to inspect them. You are struck by the thought that this is not someone's home but the reception room of some highly professional law firm. But you are also struck by the fact that this is the quarters of a highly private person. Yet on the verge of my mind I can picture certain personal artefacts that were more than decoration. The body when recovered was in a high state of decay but the police never mentioned sex crime as a motive.

They talked of a sole operator loading her body into her yellow Honda and that her killer had lifted her body over the railings, a task of strength. The killer strangles her with his bare hands, causing extensive bruising. He took his time. The police would talk of a struggle in the bedroom. I'm left with an impression of some one having had fun, of playing, of someone who desperately 'needs' the high of having power. I think of the types of eyes that belong to such a person and I think these were the last set of eyes that Maureen McKinnel was looking into as her life drained away. I think of her eyes, of the fear that existed within, motivating the image she projected of herself as a means of keeping that world at bay and in the end it didn't keep that world out. I don't think Maureen McKinnel really liked those parts, she kept them to protect herself. I don't think they made her feel very good about herself.

In the end they didn't do her any good, in the end as she fought for her life there must have been a part of her that realised this and that part must have felt terrible. The killer knew this, and he wanted us to know this for he knew it would scare us, for his hunger, his addiction told him falsely that this would keep his own fear away, that it would give him power. Yet as Maureen struggled there must have been another part of her that screamed "see, I told you so, monsters do exist!", and had she somehow survived, I suspect that it would have been this part, in all probability that would have become stronger, having been fed by the fear of the incident.

Maureen didn't survive, yet the newspapers soon forgot about Maureen the person (not that they ever looked that deeply) leaving us only with the residue of fear. Because it's fear we choose not to look at it, but because we choose not to examine it it's in our heads that fear creates new fears within our subconscious, making our ability to remember the person that much more difficult.

Afterwards the police ruled out robbery, the only things missing were two pieces of jewellery with inscriptions which, to my knowledge, have never been revealed. The police never stated what these pieces were or why they might have been of significance to the killer. Unusual in this age of Crimewatch, don't you think? Maureen had a diary. Afterwards the joke around town had been if you were local and over forty then you were a police suspect. It wasn't really much of a joke. It was almost true. Politicians, businessmen, even media people were all questioned. I wondered where the police had drawn their list of suspects from.

The diary would go missing as well. In the end the police stated that they had a suspect, a vagrant passing through. A vagrant whom Maureen McKinnel had let into her house? The police even went so far as taking DNA samples. These were sent overseas and four years later we were told the results were inconclusive. I think about that police investigation, I think about where those police stayed and where the staff of that place can be found today. I think of how well those police officers were treated, of how certain locals and the local police made the 'boys' visit comfortable. How at the end of the day those boys had beers and chatted and talked about the case. Do I think they were involved in a cover up?

No, probably not, but they were lazy and they gave away a lot of intelligence. From my point of view this has its positive side in that off the record they said a lot of things to a lot of the locals (many of whom were suspects). Some of it slipped into the media, and I took that information and I cross referenced it against the final official verdict and it told me a lot about police procedures, and police politics, in this country. I believe that kind of politics has stuffed up a lot of homicide investigations.

I take myself back to that bridge and I look around and I see a lot of buildings and properties owned by a lot of people (some of whom are mentioned in this book) and I think how easy it would be for this little community to make problems go away. A telephone call here, a word there, and the other means by which those with power, money and influence, protect their own. The weirdest aspect of Maureen's death is that if I take a ruler and mark Maureen's body and then I draw a line: on that line I find three more bodies. One, for complete lack of data, gets discarded as coincidence of a pure and genuine nature. The other two both have the same M.O. - lazy police work, a lot of unanswered questions, surrounded by a deep sense of unease, expressed by those who are witnesses to this community, but not invited to be a member of it.

How come all the bodies fall on that line? I don't know, I just know that they do. The line ends at a large stone building, it has no windows, it has no signs. It tries to give the impression of saying "I'm important, and within we discuss important things, SECRET things". In reality the style translates to the same crayon characters that you will find on large cardboard boxes turned into a boys clubhouse. The sign reads "Top Secret: Girls keep out". You walk into that building and it's like walking into a Salvador Dali painting.

Strange symbols and items denoting 'important' secrets are scattered throughout. It's a sick place. The men within wear suits, and are very careful about appearing as sensible people. People would be surprised to find what goes on inside such mens' heads, they're men who hold things very close to their chests. To them secrets mean power, and the more secrets you have the more powerful you are. They compete against each other to learn more secrets. The reality is the club is not as powerful as they would like to believe, or as they would have outsiders believe, but shhhh, that's a secret too. It's just another cog in the wheel, in a large ancient machine with cogs of many different sizes, shapes, and thought, all moving at different speeds, and if any of its members had any brains they'd see that there's a great big sign hung over this machine, it reads "Booby-trap Organisation for Suckers and Losers with a penchant for time wasting and red herrings".

The reality is the secrets that these kind of men think they're protecting (they're not) have been on this earth a lot longer before they or any other such club existed. The fact is it's not a secret, it's neon writing surrounds us all the time and it can be deciphered with ease by anyone who is willing to listen. Fear makes people deaf. Do I think that this club, and its silly mysticism, had anything to do with Maureen McKinnel?

The answer, in this case, is irrelevant, I'm not going to waste my time on red herrings. In the end the machine didn't kill Maureen McKinnel, a man did, and regardless of the fashion in which that man's belief was dressed, his beliefs remained the same as any killer's belief. It was a belief motivated, and steeped, in the killer's own personal fear.

Yet within this specific clubhouse there existed one little boy: a man who by society's standards is a powerful man, he takes his club house secrets very seriously, they're all he's got, so he feels. This man is very aware of his status and at all pains he will preserve it. He's an arrogant man who loves displaying his temper for he loves to see the fear that people have of him. The part of me that understands how this man operates loves seeing this man and the first time I ever set eyes on this man it was the first time that I truly understood the term bloodlust. Except in his case it was power lust.

Every time I see this man a part of my brain yells 'you're a piece of shit, I know exactly what you are'. It doesn't care how powerful this man is or how large he is or the fact that he is literally a professionally trained killer, it just wants to rock and roll. I spent a lot of time finding out about this man and a lot of time trying to let the newspaper let me go after this man. They weren't keen to oblige so when ever I could I took pot-shots at this man. He's a dangerous man because he thinks secrets are important, and he's a stupid man, I can't abide stupidity. I walk down the street and the man knew who I was and I loved it. For our eyes would lock every time, and just for a second, we would glare at each other. He had all the bullets, all the authority, and all the might by society's standards. Yet every time it would always be his eyes that would turned away. The part of me that was him loved that. His eyes would turn away because he knew I knew what he was under his facade and that scared him. For all his pretence, for all his carefully and desperately created façade, he was weak, he was a nothing, and when he looked at me he suddenly saw his own reflection not as it was but how he feared it to be.

The reality was he was simply seeing a part of himself, not his entirety, but sadly he will never give the other part of himself a chance: he's become too much a slave to his own fear.

When we failed to address the questions of Maureen McKinnel's death, when we chose to let those questions go away, we weren't being fair to Maureen. Maureen wasn't just a murder victim, she wasn't just a whore, she was a person and she deserved to be treated as such. But then again we weren't being fair to ourselves. So let's move on to the book. Before we do, if I may say, should you read this and not believe the subject content within then I hope at least that the theme entertains you. For entertainment, in itself, is not without its educational value.

Thank you, yours - Ben Charles Vidgen - 9 August 1999

PROLOGUE: THE ZERO G PRINCIPLE

Kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out

"It is a terrible thing to say, but it is as equally terrible not to say it: for the world ecology to stabilise, 380,000 people must die every day" - Jacques Cousteau

She was 22 years old, beautiful, intelligent, independent, and a blue-skinned corpse in a box.

The cards flowed in from all over the world. We sat in the back yard on one of those incredibly Tuscan summer days that only Christchurch can produce, half-listening to her favourite music, as her mother read the many messages of condolence.

"Deepest sympathy" seems to be the fashionable statement of the day - why don't they just say it as it is.

"FUCK!" her mother said, releasing the last word in a blurt with all the rage she felt.

I would not dare to claim that I have any idea what it is like to lose a living daughter, yet every time I think of the circumstances that led to my friend's death I find words horrifically insufficient. The closest that I can come to explaining is a black fantasy where I find someone that I can hold as being accountable, grabbing them by the hair and repeatedly slamming their head into the concrete until their skull becomes a bloody pulp. However, even this is insufficient to convey the scale of my anger - one wishes that if a supreme guilty being could be found, that you could get inside these people's brains, tune in to where they feel pain and fear the most and then target these points specifically to ensure maximum hurt.

Sapho was, as are most of the victims of this malevolent guided plague, a person with a family and friends who cared for her. None of this mattered to the killers - to them she was just fresh meat for the grinder ("body count, body count, Boom Boom," Ice T)

It's true, as one individual callously stated, that "no one held a gun against her head and forced her". Such a response is as simple as it is sadly callous - nor does it go far enough to explain the scale of this epidemic. She was a sensitive individual in an age of the desensitised, born in an era that treats its youth not as a valuable resource but as expendable. My friend's generation was brought up not to trust, but to live in a permanent state of fear - a generation raised on the message: "Don't plan, don't bother, dreaming is foolish, there is no future."

The consequence of this subtle psychological warfare is that regardless of the manner by which the lethal injection is delivered, Sapho and those like her remain as much the victim of murder as those in the killing fields of Rwanda or Cambodia, for if you destroy a person's dreams, you destroy their will to live.

During the 20th century the drug culture has flourished, flooding every corner of the globe with the guile and cunning of the rodents that once carried the black plague across Europe. Successfully using marketing techniques borrowed from their legal (but equally deadly) cousins in the alcohol, tobacco and pharmaceutical industries, the narcotics industry is now estimated to be the second most profitable industry in the world.

The effect of this industry, without counting the direct deaths involved in narcotics abuse, is as destructive as the land mines that render children into bloody pulps or mutilated cripples. A designer virus has been created which depletes countries of their natural resources, destabilises states, and affects geopolitics more effectively than any natural epidemic - though the two are often partners. The main difference between the carnage of the drug trade and the destruction caused by war is that in the case of drugs, the victims are largely unaware that they are being bombed. In this silent war the civilian defence is comparable to wearing a paper raincoat in a monsoon - "Just Say No," a defence based upon a suicidal ignorance of the nature of the narcotics industry.

Just Say No is a cliché which is expected to compete against an advertising budget exceeding hundreds of millions of dollars. There are yet to be billboards saying "Welcome to Cokeland", or a catchy mascot like Joe Camel, yet the illicit narcotics industry is advertised widely, albeit subliminally, throughout Western popular culture. On the surface there are the obvious examples such as the films Pulp Fiction and Trainspotting, based on Irvine Welsh's bestseller. The glamourisation of drugs - both legal and illegal - occurs through their attachment to a specific lifestyle, using the indoctrinating methods of consumerism - a point repeated in a variety of modern music such as gangster rap, dance music and various forms of "alternative" music.

The links between the attractive flickering lights of death, consumerism, and narcotics also reveals itself in the fashion world, the strongest in-your-face symptom of this symbiotic relationship being the "heroin chic" fad of the 1990s. ("Coke is out, heroin is in" as one women's fashion magazine would write) It is not that I am anti-narcotics - I'm as hypocritical as your average citizen of the developed world, an active smoker, a drinker whose level of consumption is based on years of education via association to the hospitality industry and, like 85 percent of New Zealand males aged between 18 and 35, I still occasionally indulge in cannabis. My beef is, perhaps surprisingly, not with the consumption of drugs but with the criminalisation of narcotics - the primary cause of drug-related fatalities via a subsequent lack of effective drug education, the hypocrisy of legislation that binds the hands of those involved in drug rehabilitation, and the associated violence and social casualties of drug abuse. Criminalisation also plays an active role in promoting the growth of corruption within law enforcement agencies. ("Once upon a time you could trust anyone in law enforcement; now you take your chances." - Senior New Zealand law enforcement officer, 1998).

The primary defence against this killer lies in the hands of a sound bite so ineffective that its architects now mumble it in hushed tones, faces crimson with embarrassment, while an uneducated public remains indifferent to it all.

Just Say No does not inform the potential market about the social and spiritual destruction caused by narcotic abuse, or the reality of a life with hepatitis or HIV. It does not prepare the uninitiated for the sociopathic nature of genuine addiction - the horrors that come from deteriorating health, the mental injuries that come from the sex industry, from thieving, lying, and the other cons associated with any form of advanced substance abuse (Killing In The Name Of The Machine - Cyprus Hill).

Inadequate government budgets and the pathetic lemon of private funding compete against an industry that pitches with the hunger of Susan Sells, using the latest techniques to continually advance its edge in the hard sell of its product. For example, the price of soft drugs may suddenly escalate "because of a reduced supply", while the price of hard drugs drops. This method is often combined with cutting off a foreign supply of narcotics.

Smaller independent dealers are also targeted for elimination by the larger criminal organisations. Such methods, commonly reported in New Zealand's "Pill City", Christchurch (the city has more opiate abusers per capita than anywhere else in Australasia), seem to coincide with a police crackdown on soft drugs and smaller dealers. This is not to directly accuse the Christchurch police, as an organisation, of direct corruption, but it is no secret among criminal subcultures that police informers (who often have links to organised crime) use their relationship as a means of removing the competition whilst enhancing their own profit.

Another means of boosting sales is to lace drugs perceived as soft with drugs labelled by society as being more "hardcore". For example, in Sydney, and to an extent Australia's east coast, Ecstasy - which aside from no longer being the traditional MDMA - is now allegedly mixed with approximately 10 to 12 percent opiates. Since the late 1980s the amount of heroin thought to be arriving in Australia has increased by 1300 percent. According to one press report, in 1995 alone Sydney saw an increase in consumption of 175 percent. The city has an estimated 90,000 to 150,000 users, according to the Sydney Morning Herald (the reports in fact said "addicts" but the media has a traditional habit of being unable to distinguish between the two).

Illicit drug abuse cost the Australian government $1.68 billion in 1992, resources which otherwise could have been spent on social welfare, education or economic growth.

I cannot help but suspect that in the next five years I will bury more friends as this tidal wave spills over on to New Zealand - a feeling escalated by the knowledge that sources are starting to inform me that heroin (not morphine opiates) is becoming more common in prisons and in Auckland (largely, I suspect, through the pilfering of shipments passing through on a transit route set up by Asian-dominated cartels via South America).

In a 1997 issue, the Listener would also indicate that heroin was returning to Auckland within the yuppie circles (which in the case of Mr Asia is where the epidemic of the 70's also began). The question of whether or not heroin will spread beyond these lines depends on whether greed will outweigh the risk that the distribution network is exposed to in a country of New Zealand's size. Just Say No has not been proven to work. A number of studies into alternative strategies have been conducted in England, the Netherlands and Switzerland, and show more promising results. The Swiss model, the most widely publicised, is based on controlled distribution of heroin to addicts. Using "1146 subjects treated for 18 months, there were no overdose deaths, only three new HIV infections, four new hepatitis B infections and five new hepatitis C infections. Reported income from illicit and semi-legal activities decreased from 69 percent to 10 percent, the number of offences dropped 60 percent, court convictions declined significantly, employment increased from 14 percent to 32 percent, and there was a net saving of approximately $A45 per patient per day" (from an article published on the Internet by the Medical Journal of Australia, February 1998).

Such strategies are based on treating the narcotics plague as a social and health problem - the approach used before the worldwide criminalisation of narcotics in the early 20th century.

In the long term, social programmes work towards making drug abuse extinct via built-in control methods ("Drug Law Reform Project: Harm Reduction Model of Controlled Drug Availability", Redfern Legal Centre). Such methods aim to provide drugs only to those already suffering addiction, for the purpose of normalising the addict's life, thus reducing the cost to society of drug-related crimes such as theft, violent crime and prostitution. A single addict must steal (so the sums of one press story claim) nearly $NZ600,000 a year. This is certainly a classic case of media exaggeration, but the cost is certainly high, especially as the lion's share of the cash and stolen property will end up in the hands of organised crime. By removing the profit incentive associated with drug dealing, decriminalisation would, in effect, destroy the capital base from which organised crime's influence originates.

In 1998, despite all of the above (or perhaps because of it), Australian Prime Minister John Howard killed the study, saying: "I remain unconvinced there is a social benefit (in legalising the drug)", and that the programme would be sending "the wrong message". Three years earlier, more than 75 Australian parliamentarians and senior health workers, and several police commissioners, had concurred with the preliminary findings in their call for the creation of a drug study similar to the Swiss model. Howard, however, chose to retain his faith in Just Say No, and this was followed by the traditional increase in the law enforcement budget which occurs whenever drugs become a public concern. In fact, the $A100 million increase, besides failing to make up for previous budget cuts, is recognised by its very benefactors as a complete waste of resources:

"All the evidence shows, however, not only that our law enforcement agencies have not succeeded in preventing the supply of illicit drugs to the Australian markets, but that it is unrealistic to expect them to do so." - Report by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on the National Crime Authority, "Drugs, crime and society" (Australian Government Printing Service, Canberra, 1989). The committee's findings have been echoed in the United States, where, despite the multi-billion-dollar "War on Drugs" (including a foreign aid budget which, it has emerged, was largely in the form of arms sales to repressive regimes - arms used on civilians and not dealers), law enforcement as a means of combating drugs has failed.

In 1993 a congressional study mission to Latin America reported that the drug war's foreign aid had "failed to bring any meaningful and long-term reduction in the production and traffic of narcotic drugs in the countries affecting the United States". The production of drugs in most of the countries visited by the mission had in fact "dramatically increased".

In New Zealand, the cycle has repeated itself. Customs and law enforcement officers have admitted to me in private that no matter how much money is spent, "it would still amount to a drop in the bucket, while legislation continues to make drug dealing profitable". In turn, the profits to be made from drug dealing ensure that, as one drug enforcement officer said, "the Mr Bigs remain well-sheltered and out of the dollar reach of justice".

The biggest reason why Just Say No fails, why the Mr Bigs remain untouched, and why my friend is dead, is that in the end, Just Say No hasn't got a hope of succeeding.

Why?

It was never meant to succeed.

Just Say No's biggest obstacle is that it is competing against the proponents of the Zero G principles - as in zero population growth. These are very concrete and powerful forces who use drugs purposely, with the effectiveness of a military force (unsurprisingly, the two are closely linked). They sabotage the genuine means of combating narcotic abuse at every turn, assisted by those who claim to be our servants, yet who in reality are the enemy within.

Yes I should just say "No" to smoking pot - it's bad for me. But I should also just say "No" to cigarettes and the most lethal narcotic on this planet - alcohol. So don't you dare tell me what to say, not when you're doing your utmost best to ensure that I'm fed with the narcotic that you deem legal, when your representatives can be found profiting from the conditions created out of prohibition - hasn't any one seen 'The Untouchables'?

This internal enemy will no doubt use the yawningly repetitive excuse "for reasons of national security" as a means of protecting themselves from the public ever finding out about the reality of their sordid little secrets. Claiming that the failure to combat the drug problem is deliberate sees the old boys close their subversive ranks and label such an accusation a "conspiracy theory" - a title which has taken on a different meaning than its original intention.

Today's hacks have forgotten that a conspiracy theory has other names. In the military, it is called intelligence; in government circles, analysis; in law, a proposition; in science, a hypothesis; and once upon a time (before Murdoch started swallowing Fleet Street) the press would have called a well-thought-out conspiracy theory "investigative journalism".

The existence of sub-atomic particles is - by the standards of wet-behind-the-ears journalists and newspaper editors - nothing more than a conspiracy theory. The speed of light is a conspiracy theory.

A conspiracy is (if formulated correctly) not a wild romp into mysticism, but the establishment of a correlation between two or more observable interconnecting elements, that confirm common trends regarding desire, motive, opportunity or ability, with multiple indications or inclinations that the said motive was acted upon. I call it "the caveman meets fire principle". Whether or not it is a conspiracy is secondary - the principle of theory lies in the rationalisation of an abstract idea.

It is ironic that scientists have battled so hard to teach us that things and events happen for a reason, while some journalists, businessmen and officials try to lull the public into believing that things happen by accident - the so called 'coincidence theory'. Strangely, some otherwise rational people will put themselves into absolute contortions to explain away as "coincidence", events that those with inside knowledge know for a fact are deliberate.

Coincidence theory is a bit like thumbsucking. It is non-threatening, it doesn't require any thinking or stressing out, you simply pigeonhole the offending piece of data and move on in blissful ignorance. There are still some who argue that the disappearance of six million Jews in the Holocaust was merely a coincidence. The mainstream press, for various reasons, long ago dismissed the concept that developed countries have participated in promoting drug-related genocide. Yet evidence to the contrary continues to exist throughout the globe. I will shortly testify to this, highlighting the motive, method and opportunity of those involved, with evidence of the consequences. Yet before I continue, stop and think: if the drug trade is ranked as the number two capital earner in the world; responsible, in some nations, for revenue exceeding 40 percent of their GNP (in Mexico and Colombia it is estimated to be more than 75 percent of GNP); earning, according to conservative figures produced by the US DEA, CIA and United Nations analysts, more than $300 to 400 billion worldwide every year; how can any state not have a relationship with the narcotics industry? In light of this unavoidable conclusion, why do states insist on lying about the nature of their relationship with these merchants of death? Whether it is a hidden agenda or simply greed, the consequences remain. The madness and greed of the numbers game has conquered the logic of resource management.

CHAPTER ONE MURPHY'S LAW

The principles of the Five O'Clock Follies

To the members of the fearless fourth estate - will the last one out please turn off the lights.

The description given in the foreword of the reasons for the news media's reluctance to investigate intelligence issues is, of course, sartorially simplistic, but in essence it represents the core of the situation. A prime example of this phenomenon in action - which provides a more detailed image of the relation of the media to intelligence issues - arose in 1997, when the infamous AUSTEO (Australia Eyes Only) report wandered into the hands of a Reuters reporter. Officially, AUSTEO was found on a coffee table among other generic press releases during a South Pacific Forum economic ministers' meeting in Cairns, Australia in July 1997. Unofficially...?

The report, compiled by the "elite" secret squirrels from the Office of National Assessment, was a sort of bureaucrats' traveller's guide to the Pacific. It wasn't very useful in terms of telling readers how to avoid German backpackers, but it could accurately tell you the going rate for bribing a junior minister in Vanuatu. The report, when made public, proved at face value to be a bigger public relations disaster for Australia than "Sylvania Waters".

Acting opposition leader and former foreign minister Gareth Evans gloated, with just the slightest hint of envy, "in one instance we have offended 15 countries". Yet the media hacks, seeing an easy meal, sank their teeth into a meaty bone before discarding the substantial carcass of AUSTEO as a whole, choosing to focus mainly on how an official report had dared to use colourful verbs and undiplomatic language.

The closest thing to insightful reporting on this issue came when Sydney-based journalist Jemima Garrett honed in on the report's bias against nations opposing Australia's foreign policy. Garrett was a minority among hundreds of Australian (and New Zealand) journalists who hardly bothered to stop for more than a quotable sound bite when asking those countries about their own feelings towards the report.

She stood further above the pack when she paused to consider how the report might affect Australia's future dealings with its smaller neighbours. Regarding AUSTEO's revelations - or more importantly, Australia's response to those countries following its faux pas - it took the form of bullying Fiji into withdrawing its official complaint. Garrett noticed that no one else had said a thing. Stimulated by Garrett's remarks, I phoned her in August 1997 to probe further. During our conversation I asked her whether, considering the mysterious manner in which a highly classified document had been discovered, it was possible that the Commonwealth-aligned Howard government had been set up. Garrett remained unimpressed. "Ah... it sounds a bit like a conspiracy theory to me." Flattered, Don Quixote charged on.

"Didn't it just seem a bit peculiar that AUSTEO had been left lying around, despite having been labelled in a manner clearly educated to the Australian civil service's intellect limits?"

Garrett, however, remained loyal to her conviction "no screw-up is too royal for the Australian bureaucracy". True, she confessed, those lovable scamps holding court at the press bar in Canberra had apparently floated similar ideas (but hadn't been willing to put their prawns on the barbie, so to speak), but she wasn't buying. Besides, she retorted, "I don't see where the percentage is" - referring to the lack of personal gain for the Treasury, Foreign Affairs, or whatever clown from whatever Australian intelligence service may have been responsible in the event of intrigue. Furthermore, as she pointed out in an enlightening revelation, it wasn't just Australia which stood to be embarrassed by the report. AUSTEO had "used material collected by the New Zealand intelligence services" as well.

Garrett's revelation of New Zealand's role in the report was confirmed to a degree when the security-conscious Minister for Biosecurity, Simon Upton, decided to lend a hand to Australia's damage control exercise care of his column in the Dominion in August 1997. Simon thought the best way to ensure that everyone did not get too worried about confidential dirty laundry was to inform the masses that important papers were lost every day.

Reading Upton's article, one could be forgiven for thinking that it was a script for a New Zealand variant of "Yes, Minister". To prove his point, the minister responsible for protecting New Zealand from the likes of ebola and calicivirus regaled his readers with his own expertise in the art of misplacing documents. Subsequently, Upton reported on the loss of his ministerial briefcase during an important mission to Paris, saying he had: "Visions of the briefcase ceremoniously blown up in front of invited television cameras as the moral beachhead created by the Rainbow Warrior were washed away by the bathos of a ministerial blunder". In the end, however, such French deviousness as envisioned by the good minister did not eventuate, and the lost case was eventually returned "in a flawless piece of diplomatic condescension".

Astonishingly, Upton, although obviously not averse to a good conspiracy theory himself, did not consider that a nation capable of sending agents halfway around the world to blow up a bunch of anti-nuclear protesters was equally as capable of rummaging through the contents of a negligent foreign minister's lost case, without resorting to the James Bond civilian concept of spying. Perhaps if he had, he would not so quickly have revealed how his own blunder had itself been covered up.

There were, however, other clues in Upton's confession as to the mystery of the leaking of the AUSTEO report. First, he said: "In the meantime, agencies on both sides of the Tasman can solemnly file this article as evidence in support of whatever conclusions they want to draw." The spooks just wrote the report; they didn't lose it (maybe) - and what is this about "both sides of the Tasman"? If that's too surreal, how about this gem: "Everyone has behaved beautifully. Politicians on both sides of the Tasman have declined to comment." As Tonto said to the Lone Ranger when they came to be surrounded by hostile Indians: "What's with this 'we' stuff, paleface?" Or, as Upton himself points out: "In fact, things were in danger of being so cordial that Tau Henare decided to inject a bit of frank humour into things in case we had to be nasty to each other again". As two world wars and several rugby world cups have testified, New Zealand and Australia are only pleasant to each other when someone else is shooting at both of us. Simple Simon had inadvertently hit the nail on the head, and leaked the reality of the situation. We were all being far too nice to one another than national character permitted.

One does not have to be armed with Dr Spock to spot a child's mischief when an empty cookie jar lies nearby. In this case, the jar was a second AUSTEO report detailing how England was asking Australia to lean on New Zealand to spend more on defence at the expense of social welfare spending. This news received no coverage in the mainstream Australian and New Zealand media.

It was understandable why no one was willing to use these reports as cheap ammunition in the war of egos. It was too risky, and the duds were likely to go off in your face, especially when the next South Pacific Forum meeting was to be held in the Cook Islands. Wellington did not have any wish to rip the plaster off that particular festering wound, and taunting Canberra with the AUSTEO reports, despite the temptation, posed such a risk (though shortly afterwards a Wellington High Commission report would be leaked, revealing what New Zealand diplomats thought of Australian spies). If everyone shut their mouths, Australia alone would bear the brunt of the islands' anger at the forum, after which the problem would go away.

In reality, the danger of the AUSTEO affair lay not in the powerless, political amnesia-afflicted Pacific. It was as one drifted through Micronesia to Asia that the ripples of AUSTEO's carcass drew the big sharks. Malaysian leader Dr Mahathir Mohamed must have cackled with glee as the report publicly revealed Australia's fears that Papua New Guinea's economics minister Chris Haiveta would prove to be an obstacle, in that he went "along with (Prime Minister Sir Julius) Chan's effort to cultivate the Malaysians in trying to reduce PNG's dependence on Australia". This sort of revelation could not have arrived at a worse time for Australia - not only was it preparing for the South Pacific Forum meeting, but Minister for Foreign Affairs Alexander Downer was about to travel to Malaysia to attend the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) regional forum.

The idea that someone was out to nobble the cohesion of the Commonwealth, or at least the Howard Government's position in the Pacific, seemed to receive verification when the Sandline mercenary affair detonated, like a well-placed shape charge, literally at the moment when Downer's plane touched down in PNG. In fact, his aircraft was parked between the two giant Aeroflot Ilyushin freighters used to fly in the Sandline mercenaries closely aligned to apartheid-era South Africa, the British Security Services and Western multinational corporations. In this case - as with the publicity surrounding the Australian government's delivery of military helicopters used to quell the secessionist rebellion on Bougainville - the corporate media pointed the finger at the Commonwealth-aligned Liberal-Conservative Australian government, while being careful to not ask to whether the Australian military or intelligence services had been directly involved, and to what degree they had been acting with or without official government sanction. Sandline also had ties with the United States Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), while CIA involvement extended to Pacific Express, a New Zealand-based airline (discussed later in this book) that undertook contracts in PNG for Evergreen Aviation - a former CIA-owned airline which also had links with the DEA and retains its connections to the US military complex today. Further US involvement could be seen via the role of Century Arms in shipping arms to the Solomon Islands (believed to be destined for PNG), after first gaining approval from the US State Department.

The covert struggles of PNG seemed in many ways to reflect the rivalry between the Old World Order and the New World Order, then being displayed in the former Yugoslavia. It was in the Balkans that one got as close as perhaps one can to defining the often chameleon-like alliances that operate beyond the confines of nationalist borders. The conservative autocrats, represented by Socialist "Gaullist" France, Britain (whose ruling monarchist Conservatives, the chief advocates of the Commonwealth, had yet to lose to Tony Blair's Labour, supporters of Pax Americana) and Russia were pitted against the neo-liberal industrialists, the "New Republicanists", represented by the core nations of the United States, Germany and China. The former, pursuing their goals, had shipped arms to their traditional friends the Serbians, while the latter, with similar motives, had flown weapons to the Muslim Bosnians and their Croatian allies - a move seen by the Republicanists as essential to the expansion of NATO.

In essence, such a state of affairs - despite the so-called special relationship of Whitehall and Washington - was not surprising. These two forces were the only rumblers left in the ring following the economic high noon of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Now the rush was on for the spoils of war. With the Soviets out of the way, it was time to exploit to the fullest those resources that lay waiting for those willing to take advantage of their "right" of inheritance. "Veni, vidi, vici," roared the transnationals, pausing momentarily to sacrifice the Asian tiger. Meanwhile, autocrats dreamed dreams of Hong Kong on its knees, as the followers of Mao coyly played with their Rolexes.

Such considerations are, of course, beyond the 500-word limit of corporate journalism. Subsequently, it is no wonder that the media failed in its reporting of the significance of AUSTEO. If those reporters had ceased their sniping at the impropriety of AUSTEO's schoolboy English, they would have been faced with the stark reality of how screwed up politics in the Pacific were, and stumbled upon the reality that it is only going to get worse. The crooks described in the report hadn't actually murdered anyone - for the time being, they're happy to settle for simply embezzling their entire nations' savings, a crime not without life-taking consequences.

Proper analysis of AUSTEO would have disturbed anyone, when combined with the terrorism of first Belau and now PNG; the laundering of heroin money in Vanuatu; the international crime rings of Fiji; and the cocaine money of Tonga - even in the short term it becomes clear that cases of Uzis, Kalashnikovs and M16s are turning up in "paradise" with increasing regularity.

The road to potentially violent instability has been paved by the island politicians' attraction to the money offered by organised crime and other exploiters of human suffering (as AUSTEO alludes to), yet time after time the allies of such malignant forces turn out to be closer to the CIA and other so-called protectors or advocates of the free world than the media-manufactured bogeyman of the day.

Perhaps this critique goes too far. A few journalists did, in fact, stick their heads out of the press bar long enough to pen articles with titles in this vein. Pacific Island Monthly's "Open Secrets: Too Close to the Bone" correctly states: "... the report, it must be admitted, only reiterates what is already known." Further, none of the traditional establishment-oriented papers in either New Zealand or Australia, though unwilling to give AUSTEO any merits publicly, had the gall to suggest that the report was exaggerating, let alone risking the argument that it might be just plain wrong. This would have been difficult when even the nations in question were candidly admitting that life in the tropics was not all sun, sand, sex and coconut milk. As Open Secrets reported, "Nauru has never denied that it is going through a period of economic difficulty" - quoting a press statement released by the Nauru consulate-general in Melbourne.

Fiji was the only exception, with Finance Minister Berenado Vunibobo crying "I doth protest" as the country's national bank visibly disintegrated - the result of serial pilfering by dodgy banana farmers (predominantly representing white colonial interests) supporting Brigadier Sitiveni Rabuka's illegal military dictatorship (explored in detail later in this book). Even my great-great-grandfather George Griffith, the first editor of the Fiji Times - a prime believer in the right of one man to seize another man's property, if that other man wasn't white or a Christian - would have been disgusted at the extent of the thievery within Fiji's current generation of colonial-inspired privateers.

Yet the criticism remains - the press failed to zero in on what was right, and not what was wrong with AUSTEO. Had the media considered this point, they would have been on the path to discovering the significance that reached beyond the contents of AUSTEO. Yes, the Pacific Island states were corrupt on a scale that would have had the suppliers of Imelda Marcos rushing to open shoe shops on every island. Yet these states were corrupted primarily as a consequence of infiltration by outside forces.

Perhaps it was because of this "Ugly European" element, this very ugly truth, that the corporate media acted more like a toothless, overweight, geriatric Golden Labrador than anything resembling the fearless Rottweilers of the Fourth Estate. The warriors of the press were all at home tucked up in bed with hotties and Horlicks, saying, "Oh no, that's far too rough for me".

Had AUSTEO been combined with related issues like the growing involvement of Pacific Island governments in passport scams, money laundering and the drug trade, a new world would have emerged into the public's awareness - a world of organised crime, heroin and gun trafficking, and toxic waste dumping. It would have revealed an environment that would have displayed, had history been allowed to testify, shadowy alliances; the offspring of covert operations, theft, terrorism and assassinations, all played out with the blessing of the protectors of the "free world" - the Western intelligence services.

All of this is happening on the borders of New Zealand and Australia, yet the public know little of it.

The smugness of AUSTEO's authors would have been stripped away as the level of corruption in the "developed" states of New Zealand and Australia was revealed, alongside the disclosure of the intelligence community's complicity in crimes against the peoples of the Pacific states.

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