I am writing this preface as the United States begins its invasion of Iraq in March 2003. It is a disturbing time to be thinking about the role of intelligence operations in world politics and what it means for those of us who live in countries within the US intelligence alliance.
During a war, the public is mainly aware of the brute force of bombs and weaponry. But the unseen side of the fighting, the intelligence operations, are often as powerful and devastating as the weapons they target and guide. Both Japan and my country – New Zealand – as close intelligence allies of the United States, invisibly help to fight all US wars by assisting the US intelligence agencies.
Secret intelligence collecting was just as important during the intense diplomatic negotiations leading up to the invasion. Remember the period when British and US diplomats were pressuring various small Security Council members to back the war? A US intelligence memo was leaked to the British Observer newspaper that described how the US intelligence agencies and their foreign allies were spying intensely on these countries to find weaknesses and pressure points to help secure pro-war Security Council votes.
The memo, dated 31 January 2003, requested a “surge” of surveillance activity against the diplomatic communications of UN Security Council (UNSC) members, such as Angola, Cameroon and Guinea. It also requested “attention to non-UNSC members”, specifically all “UN-related and domestic communications” containing anything relating to the Security Council. The goal of the surveillance, according to the memo, was to collect inside information on the countries’ “negotiating positions”, “alliances” and “dependencies” – “the whole gamut of information that could give US policymakers an edge in obtaining results favourable to US goals”.
Intelligence allies like Japan and New Zealand definitely will have helped in this spying, whether or not their publics and governments agreed with the diplomatic tactics being used or the US goals being pursued.
The author of the memo was a senior official in the US National Security Agency (NSA). This agency – the largest intelligence agency in the world – is at the centre of all the revelations in this book. All the high-tech surveillance systems, the special rules and procedures and the targeting orders described in the book originate in the NSA’s huge Washington DC headquarters.
The NSA is also the origin of strict secrecy regulations that mean, except for very rare leaks like the memo described above, almost no information about the NSA and allied agencies ever reaches the public. All their activities are supposed to remain completely secret.
That is the purpose of this book. By describing in detail the workings of New Zealand’s main foreign intelligence agency – effectively a South Pacific outpost of the NSA – I hope that readers will understand much better how modern surveillance is done and the part it plays in international politics. Thanks to the New Zealand intelligence staff who were willing to be interviewed during my research, many alliance-wide operations are now known.
Their stories relating to Japan were revealing. Japan is a loyal ally of the United States and also, at the same time, a major economic competitor. This creates the strange situation where Japan co-operates closely in intelligence operations and hosts important US intelligence facilities yet is also a constant target of US spying itself.
In the book I describe New Zealand officers whose daily work is translating intercepted Japanese diplomatic communications – called “JAD intelligence” – and forwarding them to the NSA headquarters. New Zealand started this work in 1981. What is the point of this spying on Japan? As the NSA official explained about the UN Security Council monitoring, it is to gain “the whole gamut of information that could give US policymakers an edge in obtaining results favourable to US goals”.
Since I wrote the book, more information about the main NSA station in Japan has emerged. In chapter six I speculate that the NSA’s Misawa station in northern Honshu could be part of the Echelon system, automatically monitoring ordinary phone calls and e-mail sent via satellites above the Pacific and Asia. Thanks to official US Government papers obtained by US researchers, we now know that this is certain. Japan hosts one of the key elements of the worldwide Echelon surveillance system.
But Japan is also, itself, a major target of that same Echelon system. Right up to the present there are Japanese language experts still being hired by the New Zealand intelligence agency to continue the Japanese monitoring. You would expect this situation to be politically controversial in Japan, but intelligence activities are so secret that they can evade normal political debate and accountability.
I have spent many years investigating intelligence agencies so I am well aware that many things written and said publicly about intelligence are outdated, incomplete or completely false. Sometimes myths are repeated for years in respectable publications simply because it is so hard to establish what is true and what is not in the secretive world of intelligence. So why should readers believe what is written in these pages?
Throughout my research I was confronted by this problem of proof. I had to keep the identity of my sources secret or they would be punished, so most of the information I gathered could not be referenced to particular sources. My main task had to be hiding and disguising sources, not documenting them. Eventually the only solution I could find was to include so much detail that it would be clear to readers that I must have very good sources of information. Thus I have described the layout of secret facilities (sometimes room by room), which staff do what jobs, how exactly the monitoring systems work and precisely what intelligence was being targeted and collected. I hope it will be evident how many intelligence staff contributed information so that the story could be told.
Since the book was published in New Zealand – revealing details of the Echelon surveillance system for the first time – its revelations have prompted a year-long European Parliament investigation and also some further revelations about Echelon from other countries. But there have been no more large leaks of contemporary information about the NSA and its allies. Thus the information in this book is likely to remain the most detailed insight into the inner workings of these agencies for years to come. I am pleased and grateful that this information can now be available to Japanese readers.
Many of the underlying political themes of the book – about how secret alliance ties can compromise the independence of a country – apply as least as much to Japan as they do to my country. Some of the themes are more urgent than they were when I was writing the book, as the role of the United States in world politics has been changing rapidly.
As I write we are witnessing the most extreme United States Administration for decades. In the “war on terror”, Cold War-era officials and politicians appear to be trying to create a new cold war of continuous confrontation, including polarising all other nations into a “for us or against us” framework. This time the enemy is said to be Islamic fundamentalism but I believe that, like the first Cold war, the underlying function of the confrontation is to justify more aggressive pursuit of US economic and political objectives around the world. It is this role – rather than “fighting” terrorism or ensuring national security – which best explains the intelligence operations documented in the book.
My view is that, despite lots of exaggerated talk of terrorist threats, countries like Japan and New Zealand face minimal risk from terrorism. The best way of increasing the risk and making ourselves a target will be to take sides with the US Administration in the growing confrontation. This is the same lesson my country slowly learned during the Cold War: that detaching from the nuclear confrontation was much safer for New Zealand and other countries than taking sides in it.
Faced with fundamentalism to the east and west, it is a crucial time for countries like Japan and New Zealand to reconsider whether they want to continue as subordinate allies within a US-dominated alliance. I hope that this book will be of use as Japan faces these big issues of the twenty first century.
Nicky Hager, Wellington, March 2003.