NZ Gov Joined CIA in Interfering with French Election

NZ Government Joined CIA in Interfering with

the French Presidential Election By Simon Monrad Gough

If you were wondering what the price of the National government’s détente with Washington after decades of cold NZ-US relations is, Wikileaks has you covered. According to leaked documents published by Wikileaks on 16th February, the CIA spied and made dossiers on all major candidates of the French Presidential election in 2012. Several other states, including New Zealand, were asked to provide assistance to the operation.

The CIA compiled intelligence dossiers on all major presidential candidates of the 2012 Presidential Election in France. This included the likelihood of Sarkozy’s re-election and what various outcomes would mean for the stability of the EU. It is implied by the leaked documents that the CIA’s methods involved having human assets infiltrate French political parties and gather on-the-ground intelligence. New Zealand was listed among states whose intelligence services were part of the operation.



Previously, the investigative journalism of Nicky Hager in the 1990s revealed New Zealand’s contributions to the UKUSA/ECHELON framework of worldwide NSA spying. That was primarily in signals intelligence, or SIGINT. The revelation that New Zealand’s spy agencies have been further involved in human intelligence, HUMINT, is new. Whether that translates to on-the-ground assistance is not yet known. Though it seems unlikely given the limited funding available to a small power like New Zealand for its spy agencies, HUMINT implies precisely that conclusion: that SIS had intelligence assets on the ground, infiltrating France’s political parties.

Electoral interference by the CIA per se should not be surprising. The history of the CIA is a history of electoral interference, training right-wing terrorists and funding death squads, and suppressing by violence democratic and leftist movements wherever they appear in the world. Similarly, the NSA has few qualms about collecting intelligence on friendly leaders. German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone conversations were monitored by the NSA despite Germany being a security ally of the United States. No one is exempt from the surveillance state or American exceptionalism’s reach. What is surprising is, instead, the willingness of the New Zealand government to become entangled in the CIA’s global web with regards to a European ally such as France.

This story will likely pass by quickly on the TVOne/TV3 conveyor belt of attention-deficit news, if it appears at all, but it bears scrutinising. It bears discussion, consideration, and a debate as to where we go from here. New Zealand’s public sector has been ebullient about this country’s continued high rankings by Transparency International. It is worth remembering that TI only measures perceptions of corruption. As Hager and now Wikileaks have shown, one reason the New Zealand public has low perceptions of corruption about its government is that we know so little about how our deep state operates. The thin veneer of egalitarian democracy has begun to be slowly stripped away, a recent example being that wealth means a person may purchase exemptions to our laws.

Of what has been uncovered of the New Zealand deep state, the elimination of basic civil liberties stretching back to Magna Carta is a key development. Recall that Hager had his house ransacked and bank account searched by police without a valid warrant for engaging in real journalism in New Zealand. For the Key (now English) government, that has never been allowed. Furthermore, Snowden’s leaks included involvement of the GCSB in the NSA’s global network of metadata trawling. New Zealanders are being spied on, having their civil liberties eroded, and information of their activities stored somewhere in a base in Utah twenty-four hours a day.

Subordination to a confluence of the interests of capital and the American intelligence community alike, entwined as they are, is of primary concern to the Fifth National Government, even more so than under Clark’s Labour Government. It is not enough to run New Zealand as a client state for banking sectors and drafting legislation to re-regulate the economy for international finance. Interests of authoritarian, imperialistic elements within the US must be served, even if that means betraying a European democracy like France, interfering in their Presidential elections.

There is little that is democratic about successive New Zealand governments engaging in secret foreign policy and securitisation agreements with powers like the US. The existence of ECHELON would not have been known to the public were it not for the investigative journalism of those like Hager. Perhaps what is of most concern is not the revelations so far of collusion between the GCSB/SIS and NSA/CIA, among other agencies, but that it is (to draw out a tired analogy) merely the tip of the iceberg. What lies beneath the water, a murky swamp of international espionage and the continual abrogation of basic citizen rights, is of concern to the public.

The revelation that NZSIS provided human intelligence to the CIA on France’s political candidates is only the latest in a series of logical steps from thawing US-NZ relations. Snowden’s NSA leaks and Hager’s UKUSA investigations provided earlier parts of the puzzle.

Along with endless foreign wars, as I wrote in my previous article, this is the price of détente with Washington. Membership in an international spying network which seeks to project US dominance across the world; for PM English, an inability to articulate as to when a racist immigration policy is racist; and now interference in the elections of European allies like France and collusion with the CIA.





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