We Speak From Experience, As It’s Happened To Us In The Past

The Anti-Bases Campaign (ABC) adds our voice to the chorus of condemnation of Solid Energy’s use of a spy working on behalf of the SOE’s private investigations contractor to infiltrate and report on the Save Happy Valley Campaign.

Saving Happy Valley is not our issue but this is of more than academic interest to us. Two of our committee members are also involved in the Save Happy Valley Campaign, one a very high profile leading figure. As Thompson and Clark, the private eyes, were reading all internal Save Happy Valley Campaign e-mails, that means that they were also reading internal Anti-Bases Campaign e-mails. We demand their assurance that our private correspondence, gathered incidentally to their spying, be deleted immediately and no records kept or passed onto to anyone else.

Spies, of the official Government variety, are our bread and butter, of course. We also know a thing or two about spies of the infiltrator variety, having encountered a few of them in the two decades that we’ve been campaigning to close the Waihopai spybase. Having been a political activist for several decades, I’ve encountered these people in a number of groups with which I’ve been involved. On the very first activity of the Campaign Against Foreign Control (CAFCA), an undercover police officer was outed.

In CAFCA’s early years we had a committee member who had no “back story” (to use today’s jargon) and who was very interested in looking after our membership records. He duly vanished, only to resurface in another part of the country as a policeman (finishing up as a senior detective). Other people with no back stories have appeared on the scene when major protests have been planned, then just as suddenly disappeared, never to be seen or heard of again.

My all time favourite example is the fellow who turned up, a total stranger, at a 1990s’ ABC meeting which was planning a protest at the Waihopai spybase, complete with video camera. When asked to stop filming he protested that he was doing a project to film how people run meetings! Yeah right! That particular cowboy rode off into the sunset too.

The Save Happy Valley Campaign spy saga has two different features to the ones I’ve mentioned. In this current case, the spy has confessed, unlike the other infiltrators (we knew what they were, because they fitted the profile to a T). And this is not (directly) official, State, spying but one done by a corporation, on behalf of an SOE (therefore paid by us, the taxpayer, and supposedly accountable to us). This contracting out of spying represents a deplorable new trend and one which needs to stamped out by the Government which is responsible for SOEs.

ENDS

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