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The CIA interferes with Aotearoa
27 Plays2 years ago
Josh and M discuss a recent article by Murray Horton, over at Covert Action Magazine, about the CIA's purported role in the Māori Loans Affair of the late 1980s.
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
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Transcript
Encountering and Funding Conspiracies
00:00:00
Speaker
As you know, sometimes in my study of conspiracy theory theory, I come across evidence of actual conspiracies and the people who run them. Indeed, Josh and I have been luring these people to give us money for the last couple of years for... Well, it's not entirely clear why they give us money, but that is by the by.
Investigative Efforts Uncovering New Players
00:00:22
Speaker
But sometimes the good professor misses a few tricks and it's left to me, in my investigative prowess, to find out who has been recently inducted into the conspiracy. You see, our well-meaning doctor has a few blinkers, and one of them is Romania. Recently, when researching an episode of what the conspiracy which definitely isn't about a certain castle in the north of their country, I found decisive evidence that a Romanian is involved in whatever the conspiracy against us is.
00:00:46
Speaker
Yes, their codename appears to be Philip, although I think it's much more likely that Philip is a reincarnation of one Lauren Fortuna, whose IKEA and conspiracy theories we've covered in episodes past.
Mystery of Philip and Romanian Connections
00:00:59
Speaker
This raises an interesting set of questions, none of which can be answered without my going to a certain bar in Lipskarni and knocking on a particular door three times.
00:01:11
Speaker
Well, at least you know what to spend your research monies on. So, is Philip really Lauren Fortuna? Did Mem M once meet with Lauren at a bar, perhaps near Cottrocini? Why are there no longer feral dogs wandering the streets of Bucharest at night? And what exactly happened at Control Bar on September the 3rd, 2016? You know I can't talk about that. Ah, but Philip might be able to. We're watching you, Philip, like you appear to be listening to us.
Introduction to Hosts and New Patron
00:01:51
Speaker
The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denton.
00:02:00
Speaker
Hello, you're listening to the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy. I am Josh Addison in Auckland, New Zealand, and in Zhuhai, China, it's Associate Professor of Philosophy and Udo Keir's stunt double for a period in the late 90s, Dr. M. Dentist. It's true. I was in a lot of films as Udo Keir back in the day due to our remarkable resemblance. It turns out that me, as a teenager, looks exactly like a middle-aged German man.
00:02:26
Speaker
Yeah, it's long been remarked upon. So we have a new patron. That's nice. A Romanian patron. Patrons are good. They give us money. Romania being, of course, my second home, even though I've got I've got no actual claim for Romania and lived there for a year and a half. But I feel Romanian in my heart. Hmm. Hmm.
00:02:47
Speaker
I agree. So this week, it's not a what to conspiracy. It's not a conspiracy theory masterpiece theater. It's not an anniversary of any kind. It's just kind of an episode. I don't really have anything interesting to say about it. No, it's an episode about good old dear home.
00:03:03
Speaker
Mmm. Yes, this is... I can't even remember how I came across this link. Somebody... It was somebody who was not from New Zealand was talking about New Zealand on Twitter and then somebody dropped this link in to talk about how the CIA has in the past tempted to interfere with New Zealand politics.
CIA's Alleged Political Interference in New Zealand
00:03:23
Speaker
And it's this topic that we'll be addressing today. The CIA interfering in New Zealand. Those wacky scamps can't stop interfering, can they?
00:03:32
Speaker
Sounds like an 80s song, can't stop interfering. Journeys can't stop interfering. Good work. So unless you have anything else to say up the top here, shall we play a chime and just get straight into it? Indeed.
00:03:53
Speaker
So what we're going to be talking to you about today came from an article called How the CIA Tried to Overthrow New Zealand's Progressive Labor Government by Stoking White Racial Rage Against the Indigenous Māori Population. Bit of a mouthful. It was an article that was published in September of 2021 in Covert Action magazine. Well, what do you know of Covert Action magazine?
00:04:16
Speaker
I know they're a magazine that exists, so I know of their work. I think they're one of those magazines which is by and by considered to be on the level, but also occasionally prone to engage in hyperbole, and I have a feeling
00:04:34
Speaker
As we'll go through this article, this is one of those ever so slightly hyperbolic pieces because it's a really interesting story, which is very, very poorly sourced to the point where it makes some rather big claims with no evidence whatsoever. And you end up going, actually, you would probably be a slightly better story if you weren't engaging in such hyperbole. I also want to point out
00:05:01
Speaker
that because this is an American magazine, whoever the copy editor is of the magazine has at points in time decided to relabel our Labour Party with a US-style spelling. Which is confusing. Australia spells Labour in the US style, and Aotearoa New Zealand does not.
00:05:25
Speaker
And because it talks about Australian governments in the second half of the article, it is ever so slightly confusing as to which Labour government they might be referring to from time to time.
The Maori Loans Affair and Government Response
00:05:36
Speaker
Nevertheless, it's now it's written by a man called Murray Horton, who is apparently the organizer of the Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa and an advocate of a range of progressive causes for the past four decades. So he's very
00:05:52
Speaker
It's quite easy to see that he's very much against any sort of US influence here in the Antipodes and doesn't seem particularly fond of when our government buddies up with the US.
00:06:08
Speaker
In particular, he's talking about one particular instance from the 1980s, when the Labour Party... I'm just going to interrupt here. So I did a little bit of a survey online as to whether Murray Horton is the kind of source that we should be listening to, because I really wasn't aware of his work or the campaign against foreign control of Aotearoa, also known as CAFCA, which I have seen some surveys.
00:06:36
Speaker
Yeah, I'm assuming it is some kind of reference to Kefiria, so if it's not, they're really missing a trick there. And the responses I got were, yep, he's been a solid campaigner and activist in the past... dot dot dot...
00:06:52
Speaker
might be a little xenophobic in the present, dot, dot, dot. So some people go, yep, absolutely on the level. Other people go, yeah, I used to read his newsletters back in the day, but they've become problematic recently. But it certainly is the case.
00:07:09
Speaker
that within the last government, when Treasury has been making policy recommendations about foreign control or foreign interests in our economy, they have asked for his advice. So he certainly is someone who is respected amongst certain activists in governmental circles. So this isn't an article by a crank. This is by someone who has a long standing history
00:07:36
Speaker
of being interested in foreign interference in our own policy, even if some of his former fans are now going, we're not entirely sure about his recent work, but historically he's done really good stuff. So the guts of this article is that supposedly the CIA was... Can I just say, I want to interrupt again.
00:07:57
Speaker
Is Australasian English the only one that would use the term the guts of this article? I think so, yes. Just chucking in a bit of local flavour there, given the subject matter. Felt appropriate.
00:08:11
Speaker
Oh yeah, oh no. It certainly occurred to me because I'm spending a lot of time, of course, teaching people in China and becoming very, very aware of how many idioms I use in everyday language and then halfway through a sentence in class I'll go, they probably have no idea what I'm referring to there. And I went, guts.
00:08:32
Speaker
Guts of articles, I mean that's a real mixed metaphor when you think about it, the idea that an article has kind of intestines and where we're puncturing the article to tear the intestines out and like some kind of soothsayer putting those intestines onto an altar and going what does divine providence tell us about this article with its guts exposed?
00:08:57
Speaker
Oh, I think that's it. That's quite an apt to metaphor. Frankly, I'm glad I made it. See, as we're talking about a scandal from the late 1980s, I don't see how I can stop you. I'm really trying, but I cannot find a way to stop you.
00:09:13
Speaker
I'm just interrupting here just the sheer fact that I've interrupted twice already. I really thought I should complete the trifecta. Please do continue. Very well. The Maori loans are fair. Now, this is interesting symmetry with one of your, what, the conspiracy episodes from a month or two ago, where you talked to me about the secret plot to make Aotearoa non-nuclear.
00:09:39
Speaker
Whereas this is a secret plot to destabilise New Zealand because it became non-nuclear. So I don't know, it seems that you almost get the impression of these sort of warring groups of conspiracies tugging us one way or another. Well I mean there is a point that gets made in his article towards the end that
00:10:00
Speaker
Because we're dealing with the Cold War and because we're dealing with stuff back in the 1980s, through little countries, little countries and to America and Russia, we would have been considered a third world country back in those days. Little countries were kind of the basis you do your little, your little expressions of the Cold War. So you can imagine a version of history where the KGB
00:10:25
Speaker
orchestrate making our country go non-nuclear, and then the Americans orchestrate trying to topple the government as a reaction of KGB interference.
00:10:39
Speaker
Now, Pawson doesn't talk about any kind of communist attempt of takeover or the rationale behind why we stopped American nuclear ships from ever coming into our harbours. But yeah, there is a weird confluence of events here, even though I think in both cases, the people making these claims are going well beyond the evidence. But let's get into that evidence.
00:11:03
Speaker
So the idea is the CIA was behind a particular scandal which was designed to inflame white New Zealand resentment at supposed perceived special treatment for Mallory.
00:11:20
Speaker
and shake up the government and ultimately topple the government in favor of one that was more New Zealand friendly. So the article basically has it as this was directly a reaction to New Zealand's nuclear free policy that came about in the 1980s, which we've talked about in previous episodes.
00:11:44
Speaker
Now, the article says it's written, as you say, for an American audience. So it goes through a bit of the history of New Zealand and the fact that we have the Treaty of Waitangi. It says, despite that treaty, Maori have disproportionately featured in all the negative statistics until now. This was the scab that the US covert state decided to pick.
00:12:03
Speaker
you if you want to go for your gross metaphors there. The US Embassy commissioned private opinion polls that showed there was a wellspring of white racist resentment at quote-unquote special treatment for Maori ripe for exploitation. Doesn't doesn't give a source for these private opinion polls, although in the 1980s you could probably just stick your head out of any window and pick up on the fact that there was. In the 1980s you could stick your head out of any window and say Kia ora
00:12:30
Speaker
and have people writing to the government saying you're engaging in offensive speech because that literally happened. That literally happened. So yes, I mean, what's interesting about this is this is one of many claims that Horton makes with no supporting evidence whatsoever.
00:12:45
Speaker
And the thing is, I don't think this claim is implausible. I can actually imagine the CIA. I mean, the CIA compiled dossiers about nation states all the time and attitudes in those nation states. So, I mean, there's the CIA World Book, which is the online resource where the CIA have all the information about the current state of the world, populations, the way the economies work, how the political systems work. It wouldn't be surprising the CIA in the 1980s
00:13:15
Speaker
doing some research about, look, one of our allies, Aotearoa New Zealand, they have an indigenous population. What is the attitude of the dominant white majority in the country to their indigenous population?
00:13:31
Speaker
So I can see them doing a survey there and doing it for non-malign purposes, simply going, we want to know what is the state of racial tension in this particular country that we're allied with at this time. But at the same time, I would actually like to see a reference that this was being done, especially since the suggestion is it's being done for malign purposes. The CIA are polling the country not to find out the state of affairs there, but to go, ooh,
00:14:01
Speaker
Can we weaponise this racial resentment? I would like to see a reference that actually backs that particular inference up. So to the details of the affair itself. So the two figures involved were Coro Eteri, who was at the time the Minister of Maori Affairs, and Tamati Ridi, who was the head of the Maori Affairs Department.
00:14:25
Speaker
It initially came about in 1986 in Hawaii, interestingly enough. There was a Maori trade expo in Honolulu, which apparently didn't do particularly well. But while they were there, officials from the Department of Maori Affairs were there looking for business opportunities that could benefit the Maori people back in New Zealand.
00:14:47
Speaker
They were approached by a businessman from Rotorua, a fellow New Zealander, a guy called Rocky Crib, who, as this article puts it, just happened to be on holiday there, with quote marks around happened. And he basically said, hey, I can give you guys a hand. I can put you in touch with some people who might be able to come to a mutually beneficial arrangement with you. And the arrangement that was set up
00:15:16
Speaker
was alone, basically, working through a bunch of business people who they sort of met in Hawaii. And we'll get to the exact nature of these business people shortly. But supposedly, the idea was they're going to set up a loan that was the equivalent of 600 million New Zealand dollars in Middle Eastern petrodollars. I don't know what a petrodollar is. Is that still a thing?
00:15:42
Speaker
No, I must admit, I'm not entirely sure whether that's just a discussion about the way the Middle East produces money due to its oil well, or whether there really was a use of exchange in the 1980s. But at any rate, $600 million of currency of some kind, including a finder's fee of $20 million,
00:16:02
Speaker
This loan would be made so that the Department of Maori Affairs could set up a Maori Resource Development Corporation, which would use Maori labour to prefabricate houses for export, so creating jobs and bringing money into the country through export.
00:16:18
Speaker
Now, this loan, when people looked at it, it really did seem much too good to be true. Oh, yeah. I mean, we had a loan which only had 4% interest over 25 years, which seemed very, very low. And apparently the source of the loan, one Akhmed Omar of the Kuwaiti royal family, had a very specific problem.
00:16:48
Speaker
He didn't exist. And then there had other, according to this article, there was a telex, which is, is that an old fax? Is that like a, I don't even know what telexes are anymore. Or is it like, like sort of a special text? A telex is kind of the predecessor of the fax, which is still like using Morse code to send information over a signal wire.
00:17:14
Speaker
Anyway, 1980s, great fun. So apparently, there was a telex from the embassy in Washington, which said that the money was probably laundered, fraudulent or non-existent. Now, making matters worse, the loan was negotiated with Tamatee Reedy himself, who wasn't actually authorized to take on loans for the government. Only the Minister of Finance could sign loans like this.
00:17:38
Speaker
But, Josh, this was in the 1980s. It was probably snorting a large amount of cocaine and doing business deals in rooms filled with naked people walking around. I mean, in the 80s, this kind of thing actually was, strangely enough, acceptable. The price of doing business. Yep, enormous shoulder pads, people murdering each other over the quality of their business cards, as is my understanding. And excellent theme music. Long dissertations on Phil Collins.
00:18:05
Speaker
Apparently, some people had got wind of this. Apparently, some people, who was the name Graham Scott of the New Zealand Treasury, had heard about this and said, no, this isn't a great idea. Other ministers were aware that these negotiations were happening, but didn't actually stop them.
00:18:25
Speaker
Now, in the end, it never actually went ahead. The official word from the long-year government at the time is that as soon as the higher-ups found out about these deals that were going along, it scrapped everything to begin and said, no, no, this is obviously nonsense. It's a bad deal and put the kibosh on it pretty much straight away.
00:18:53
Speaker
As a result of this, Corruetere offered his resignation, although it was not accepted, and the actual effect on the government. The article talks about how it didn't actually bring down Corruetere, it didn't bring down the government, but it did exacerbate racial tensions. It doesn't give much of a source for that. If this was in 1987, I was 11, so I'm not really one to judge whether or not the
00:19:22
Speaker
the state of race relations in the country was significantly affected. Not just 11, but living in a very, very, very white part of Auckland. Quite white. As was I. Mount Roscoe, yes. As was I. But the other thing, I mean, so it is exacerbated racial tensions. And once again, unsourced claim, racial tensions were actually not particularly good in the country, regardless of what's going on with the Māori loans affair.
00:19:47
Speaker
because this is the point in time where you're getting an awful lot of Maori and Pacific Islanders moving into the big cities to start working in industries there. So historically, one of the reasons, not one of the reasons, one of the ways in which we managed to maintain a kind of weird racial harmony in Aotearoa, New Zealand, is that white people lived in the big cities and Maori lived outside of them. And that way,
00:20:17
Speaker
white people could ignore the fact that they were living on the land of another people. The 80s changed that with the way that industrialization occurred, with Maori and Pacific Islanders moving into traditionally white strongholds. And that is what actually calls the racial issues in our country. I say what calls them, what exacerbated the racial issues. Those issues were pre-existing, but suddenly they were visible and on the street, quite literally.
00:20:44
Speaker
The other claim he makes is that this scandal placed the Labour government on the defensive and divided the party. But the problem was actually if you look at the history of that Labour government,
00:21:00
Speaker
It's not the Maori loans affair which causes the party to be divided. It's the really lax leadership of the premier, David Lange, who was really good at giving speeches and very, very bad at leading a party that was working as one. Because of course, the 1984 Labour government is the 1984 Labour government that brought in
00:21:24
Speaker
the Roger Douglas economic reforms and there were huge fights in the party at the time between those who felt that we needed to restructure the economy completely and people who felt that was going to be a very bad idea. This was occurring before the Maori loan scandal was even an inkling in anyone's eyes.
00:21:45
Speaker
So once again, it seems that there's a large amount of hyperbole placing the collapse of a government on one thing, when actually that collapse had already started by that time.
Internal Labour Party Conflicts
00:21:58
Speaker
Yes, so I mean, it's certainly true. This was going on in sort of 1987. 1989, David Lange resigned after his leadership was challenged by the rest of the party, becoming
00:22:10
Speaker
The first elected Prime Minister to resign while in office, up until that point, the only time, the only reason Prime Ministers had left the office was because they had either died or been defeated at an election. And yeah, it was all around the economic policies that were brought in, that were referred to as Roger Nomics, sort of mirroring Reaganomics that was going on in America at the time.
00:22:31
Speaker
And although we actually kind of went slightly harder than Reaganomics did, Reaganomics kind of started things. And Roger Knox said, oh, well, this is the way things are going to be. We're going to complete the project now. And Reaganomics did not go as far, which meant that we sold all of our infrastructure, expecting everyone else in the West to do so. And then when everyone else in the West didn't, we were going
00:22:55
Speaker
But we did what you were telling us to do, and then you didn't follow through. And now we've completely and utterly scuppered the country. That was a bit stupid. Yes. So and yeah, there was a lot. I mean, I again, I was a child at the time. This is just what I've sort of been told afterwards. But long while he was an excellent orator and good, good sort of public face of the of the country, his he didn't have the strongest economic mind.
00:23:24
Speaker
and was quite sort of conflict averse as well. So these tensions boiled up to the point that people started leaving and splintering and forming their own. Jim Anderton, MP, splintered and formed the new Labour Party.
00:23:41
Speaker
Eventually, that's what always gets me, is that these days we have the Act Party, which is the far right right party here in New Zealand. That was started originally by the likes of Roger Douglas, Labour ministers, who splintered off from. Roger Douglas, Richard Preble and other people whose names we can't recall. But the point is,
00:24:01
Speaker
Longi resigns in 1989, succeeded by Geoffrey Palmer. Geoffrey Palmer lasted about a year in the position before he was replaced by Mike Moore just ahead of the 1990 election, where Labour lost to national came into power. And lost in a landslide. It was a major, major loss.
00:24:21
Speaker
So, I mean, the party very much did fall apart, but it's hard to say that this particular scandal was a great cause of it. Nevertheless, it is a scandal that it seems can be traced to the CIA. Now, Television New Zealand, the state broadcaster.
00:24:38
Speaker
sent people off to Hawaii, did an investigation to sort of track down the figures behind this this Maori loan scandal, and identified a number of companies that appeared to be fronts for the CIA and people who worked for them. So apparently, according to this article, several of the businessmen who floated the loan worked for a CIA front company called Bishop Baldwin Rare World Dingam and Wong, which acted apparently on the instruction of Honolulu's CIA Station Chief Eugene Welsh.
00:25:06
Speaker
I mean, couldn't I have come up with something with a better acronym? B-B-D-R-D-W. Well, actually, apparently, so Mr. Wong was someone who ran this company, but there was no Bishop Baldwin, Rewald and Dillingham. Apparently that was a thing.
00:25:26
Speaker
you'd stick lots of names on your company name to make it sound like a big illustrious company just to pad it out. But yes, so they mentioned the names Robert Coleman Allen and James Heiner, who were supposedly the businessmen who worked for the CIA front company. There's a claim in the article that I didn't
00:25:43
Speaker
see a source for that, or rather just linked to another article that said the same thing, that attempts to subpoena Mr. Allen as a witness during the case were stopped by the CIA on the grounds of national security. Now, admittedly, that sounds bad initially, but Americans do this all the time with any investigation of
00:26:03
Speaker
their personnel overseas. There was a comment made recently that Biden has said that Vladimir Putin should stand for war crimes, and people have pointed out that neither Russia nor America are signatories to the International Criminal Court, which is the only organization we've got that can try people for war crimes.
00:26:25
Speaker
who's a bit rich for Biden to go prosecute this man for war crimes using a system that my government does not support, made even worse by the fact that the standing policy of the United States of America is that if an American military personnel member is arrested and charged by the ICC for war crimes, America is pledged to invade that country to get that person back.
00:26:53
Speaker
So it's just kind of a standing thing that you can ask for cooperation by the Americans when it comes to investigations. And typically they'll say no, and they'll say no using national security as a rubric for simply going, we're not going to tell you why, we're just going to say, nah, you can't investigate this particular person. We're just not interested in having that conversation. National security, national security.
00:27:22
Speaker
Yes, so then they also mentioned another person called Steve Thomas, who supposedly replaced Mr Eugene Welsh as the Honolulu's station chief. Now, he was a guy who was apparently feeding information about all this to the New Zealand media and to a plucky young firebrand in the National Party by the name of Winston Peters.
00:27:48
Speaker
Winston Peters. We've talked about Winston Peters, the old man of New Zealand politics. Winston Peters, who was always kind of in it for Winston Peters, but he loved any opportunity to get a bit of attention. He also loved showing up the government of the day.
00:28:11
Speaker
So, during this time, when Labour is in government, Enwin St Peter's is a member of the National Party. He was quite happy to show up the government of the day. When the wine box inquiry occurred, Enwin St Peter's had been kind of demoted for his activities. He was quite happy to show up the national government of the day because nothing makes Winston Peter's happier
00:28:35
Speaker
than making the claim that the government of the day is bad and what you really need is a Winston Peters in charge. Yeah, he was always best in opposition. That was always the problem. Once he actually got any sort of power, then it made it a lot harder for him to do the sort of... Although the last term of the current government, he really did go out of his way to be the opposition member who was also deputy prime minister.
Political Fallout and Historical Parallels
00:29:02
Speaker
Mm. Yes, no, that was, who was it? Someone talked about the fact that, you know, it's, Labour's attitude to Winston Peters seemed to be, I'd rather have him, I'd rather, what's the expression? Rather have him inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in, but in this case it was, we've got him inside the tent pissing in rather than being outside.
00:29:22
Speaker
He was inside the tent stabbing people. We'd rather have him inside the tent stabbing people than outside of the tent not stabbing people. Why would you want him stabbing people inside your own tent? Send him to another person's tent. Send him to the national party tent.
00:29:39
Speaker
But anyway, between Winston Peters and the media, it was certainly the CIA, it was claimed, made damn well sure that everybody found out about this. And that's kind of it for the Maori loan affair, but that's not it for the article. So one thing, so going back to much earlier in the discussion where we were talking about what is a TALEX,
00:30:06
Speaker
There's something which kind of struck me about this article, so we are told the embassy in Washington kind of sends italics to Aotearoa New Zealand saying you should be really cautious about this lone thing. So why are the Americans warning the New Zealand government about a sting operation essentially being run by one of the intelligence agencies of the American government? That seems weird.
00:30:32
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that was one of the bits that didn't seem to quote a source. So I'm not sure exactly that came from. It's possibly. I mean, most of this doesn't quote a source. When you actually look at the sources, most of it is an article by Bill Ralston, who is a New Zealand journalist. And that's basically most of the sources are from one article that and John Pilger.
00:30:55
Speaker
Yeah, there's also, it's not listed as sources, but it does link to electronic copies of contemporary, what looked to be left-wing magazines at the time. There's a link to a PDF of the covert action bulletin from 1988.
00:31:13
Speaker
which talks about this article. It has a link to an online version of Peace magazine from 1987 that also talks about it. So some of the wording here is taken straight from those, but then those ones don't cite their sources, I don't think either.
00:31:29
Speaker
Yeah, it's taken—there's a lot of repetition of what other people have said, but not all of the sourcing is as diligent as you might want. But it paints an interesting picture, and then that picture becomes more detailed when they talk about the Australia loans of fear.
00:31:47
Speaker
which is something that had happened a decade earlier. And it's basically, the point it makes is that the CIA had done this before, that the Australia loans of fear basically was the template for what the CIA then tried to do in New Zealand. So from 1972 to 1975, the Australia's Labour Party leader and prime minister was a man called Gough Whitlam.
00:32:17
Speaker
who was a very left-wing Labour Prime Minister. He was apparently very critical of the Vietnam War, which obviously the Americans were too fond of. He tangled with his own, with the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, so his own sort of country's intelligence organisation. Which I should point out, I think is called Asshole. ACO. It sounds like Asshole to me. I mean, it does a little bit.
00:32:43
Speaker
who obviously, so the Australian intelligence community, had close ties with the American one. And things kind of came to a head when he threatened to close the US spy base, which operated at Pine Gap near Ella Springs in Australia. So he sort of made fairly blunt threats that if you guys keep giving me grief, then we might have to think about whether or not we let you continue to operate your base in Pine Gap. And so... No, I'm trying to remember whether we ever talked about the infamous
00:33:12
Speaker
Pine Gap security issues several years ago. I'm sure Pine Gap has come up before. Yeah. But this was a particular story where people will be aware that many, many, many years ago, there was a security breach with respect to certain fitness tracking apps. So wearables people were using to track their running or their walking. And tech
00:33:37
Speaker
Technically, members of the military are not meant to use wearables because they collected data, and it turned out that someone at Pine Gap was walking the perimeter of Pine Gap on a daily basis.
00:33:52
Speaker
And Pine Gap is one of those, no one's really meant to know much about it, let alone whether it actually really does exist. And one thing you definitely don't want to know, or at least you don't want people to know about, is the exact shape of the Pine Gap facility. But it turns out that when people were looking at the leaked data from these fitness tracking apps, they were going,
00:34:14
Speaker
Oh, we're actually fairly sure we now know the exact footprint of Pine Gap because someone seems to be walking the perimeter of it every single day in a way which is a really nice map of Pine Gap and its installation. I just did a quick search episode 163. We talked about that story. So there you go. That was a long time ago. Yes.
00:34:38
Speaker
It's more than half the podcast ago. But at any rate, so in response to their dislike of Prime Minister Whitlam, basically the same thing happened in Australia as happened in New Zealand 10 years later. CIA-associated business people set up a fraudulent loan with Whitlam's government. And when this came out, there was a great big scandal, basically.
00:35:04
Speaker
didn't play up the racial angle, as they claim this one did, but nevertheless it appears to have been more immediately successful. Although in New Zealand the Labour Party did fall apart a couple of years later, but it's unclear whether or not the scandal had anything to do with it. In Australia, Whitlam was rolled in fairly quick succession,
00:35:27
Speaker
and Labour lost its next, Australian Labour lost its next election. The article goes on to say it was even more than that. Quoting this article, it is worth noting that the covert state did not just want Whitlin gone as PM, they also wanted him gone as leader of the opposition to remove any chance of him coming back into power.
00:35:44
Speaker
In 1976, a few months after the bloodless coup in Labour's landslide election defeat, Australians had voted for stability and to knee into political crisis, Whitlam was under attack again.
Conclusion and Updates on Scandal Figures
00:35:54
Speaker
The Murdoch newspapers ran stories claiming that he had personally received large sums of money for his election campaign from a Saddam Hussein's Iraqi intelligence agents. It was another setup in a complete media beat-up by Robert Murdoch, who was personally writing the articles. No source given except for the Pilger article as far as I can see.
00:36:12
Speaker
And yes, and then the rest of the article, which is a good third of it or so, is basically just talking about New Zealand's relationship with America and... Oh no, no, not just America, Josh, the US Empire.
00:36:29
Speaker
The US Empire doesn't talk about America. He talks about the US Empire again and again and again. And part of me appreciates that, Moxie, because the US is a kind of imperial power. But at the same time, US Empire being repeated again and again and again in one in one article does make it faintly ridiculous towards the end.
00:36:54
Speaker
Yes. Yeah, so I mean, when you get down to it, the non-nuclear policy was not affected by any of the stuff that happened. Over time, relations with America have sort of become better. Obviously, the
00:37:09
Speaker
New Zealand's non-nuclear stance at the time saw us kicked out of the ANZUS Australia New Zealand US alliance, which we're still not a member of, I think, but we are part of the whole Five Eyes spying program under... And we still engage in military activities with Australia and the US. We just don't
00:37:31
Speaker
do it under the label of Anzus anymore. And now, of course, they're replacing Anzus with Orcus, which is the Australian, United Kingdom, United States alliance. And they're now talking about bringing Japan in on that, which would make it the Nippon, Australian, United Kingdom, US alliance. It would be Norkus. They're going to institute Norkus, Josh. It's going to be Norkus all the time. I'm actually okay with that.
00:38:00
Speaker
And officially, apparently, it was under the Obama administration, and New Zealand officially became, was restored to its status as an American ally. Yes, because we even allowed an American warship to enter our harbour in 2016.
00:38:17
Speaker
which was a covert admission by the Americans that this particular warship was not nuclear powered because of course what has stopped American warships from ever visiting our ports is that we simply require them to announce whether they're nuclear powered or have nuclear armaments on board because of our non-nuclear status and America won't won't do that except in 2016 they did it once by going this frigate which is diesel powered and cannot
00:38:45
Speaker
have any nuclear armaments on board, it can definitely visit because there's just no way it can be a nuclear ship. And that's kind of it. The article runs out with a little bit of a sort of a where are they now, which is dead in many of the cases. Corueta died in 2018. David Longi died in 2005. Nice big picture of Jacinda Ardern standing next to Donald Trump.
00:39:09
Speaker
Not really sure what the point of that one is, but... And talks about Winston Peters and how he refers to him as a loyal servant of the US empire and says how he did well by cozying up to the US in his various official capacities over time. Well, actually, that's one thing we didn't mention. So Murray Horton does make a very big deal out of the fact that when Winston Peters was shopping the Maori loan story around,
00:39:38
Speaker
People pointed out to Peters that there was a CIA angle on it, but Peters wasn't willing to talk about that aspect of the story. He only wanted to focus on the scandal for the New Zealand government and not talk about potential foreign interference, which is why Horton is making the claim that Peters is a loyal servant of the US Empire.
00:40:04
Speaker
It's the implication that Peters knew what was going on back in the 1980s and didn't say anything. When he became foreign minister, the first diplomatic meeting he had was in the US, so it was with the... Oh, I can't remember who he met in Washington at the time, but it was a very big issue. Condoleezza Rice? Then his first diplomatic meeting may be. Was that the first one? I don't know.
00:40:32
Speaker
But, yeah, there was a it was a very, very big thing that the first meeting he took was with the Americans. And so that's why Horton was going, look, he's a servant or he's not a servant. He's a loyal subject of Americana because he's not willing to accept America's interference here. And he is willing to play up the relationship between our country and theirs. Hmm.
00:40:55
Speaker
So there you go. An interesting, another interesting little piece of New Zealand's conspiratorial history. But a frustrating one, because there's so many claims which are just not sourced. And so many hyperbolic claims that if you remove them from the article, wouldn't actually ruin the argument, but wouldn't also cause me to go, but why are you making this particular claim? I mean, give us some evidence, please. And there you have it.
00:41:25
Speaker
I don't think I have anything else to say about this. Do you have any final words? Were those your final words? Well, I mean, I could just interrupt you one more time. Well, for that, I'd have to be talking and talking and talking, and I don't really see that there's any possible way that could continue. I just have to, for no apparent reason, have to start rabbiting on and on and on and on and on and on to give you the opportunity to interrupt me. And I don't, frankly, I don't see that happening. Do you see that happening? I don't see that happening.
00:41:53
Speaker
No, it didn't happen. So in that case, I guess it the only thing we need to do is give a bit of a preview of the bonus episode. We're going to be cooking up for our patrons. Would you like to do the honors?
00:42:06
Speaker
Indeed, we have Watergate Part 2, the Trump edition, the return of the notebooks of one Charles Darwin after 22 years on vacation, and a UFO invasion from 2014 that was averted by one clever man.
00:42:26
Speaker
So if you'd like to hear about those and you're a patron, then just stay tuned and you'll get a patron bonus episode somehow through Patreon or something. I don't know how these things work. If you're not a patron and you'd like to hear about this sort of thing, then just go to Betrayon.com, search for the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy and sign yourself up.
00:42:46
Speaker
And if you don't want to be a patron, well then that's all right because you've listened. How long have we been recording for? About 50 minutes or so. You've listened all the way through this and you're part of our audience. Quite frankly, that's good enough for me. And it's good enough for Josh. So in that case, I really don't think there's anything left to do except for me to just be a crazy maverick firebrand like Winston Peters himself and say goodbye. Durango.
00:43:17
Speaker
The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy is Josh Addison and me, Dr. M.R. Exdenteth. You can contact us at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com, and please do consider supporting the podcast via our Patreon. And remember, remember, oh December, what a night.