When the Feds come to town
The director of the FBI, Kash Patel, was sprung by a Herald journalist lurking in the basement of the Beehive. His appearance came after another reporter twigged that the FBI's plane was sitting on the tarmac at Wellington airport.
The avalanche of mumbling 'no comment' from MPs was quickly followed by a release from the US Embassy about exactly why such an exciting guest was here – the FBI hanging its shingle out in the Capital.
'Kash Patel being spotted in the Beehive basement felt like the start of a good spy movie,' says RNZ political reporter Anneke Smith.
But the FBI has long had a presence in New Zealand, and a former spy spoken to by The Detail says it's no big deal. So why did we get so excited about it?
Maybe because everyone loves it when a secret gets out.
Today on The Detail, Smith tells us how the story unravelled, and a Senior Lecturer in Security Studies at Massey University, Dr Rhys Ball, questions the significance of the event.
Patel himself said – through a carefully curated media package and video that was rigged to look like a press conference, though it wasn't – that it was all about transnational crime including countering the narcotics trade, cybercrime, and 'countering the CCP', the Chinese Communist Party.
The FBI was 'opening up our law enforcement attaché office here in Wellington,' he said, to show 'the world that the FBI is actually prioritising a permanent presence across all Five Eyes countries, and here in New Zealand we had not had that until this historic moment'.
The China comment was a very different line to what the New Zealand Government took, says Smith.
Ministers later that day were reiterating that it was all about cracking down on crime in the Indo-Pacific.
Foreign Minister Winston Peters said the issue of China hadn't come up in their meeting.
'Two very different tacks I think taken from New Zealand and the US,' says Smith, 'the US being quite bolshie in terms of framing this up with the wider context in terms of the geopolitical contest in the Indo-Pacific region.'
China called the FBI director's statements 'groundless assertions' and described his comments as part of a 'Cold War mentality'.
And that's why our politicians played that aspect of this visit down.
'New Zealand(ers) will be well aware we have an important trade relationship with China, they're our biggest trading partner, they're about a third of our exports, a lot of meat and dairy go to China so a really significant trading relationship there,' says Smith.
'We walk very much through the centre line of a lot of hefty controversial subjects on that because of our trading relationship.
'The US, on the other hand, doesn't hold back.'
Kash Patel is a controversial figure and a Trump loyalist, who's a conspiracy theorist, supporter of the rioters on the Capitol, an anti-vaxxer and has been accused of perjury.
'I don't think any of that came up during his visit to New Zealand last week,' says Smith.
'That was all about opening the office and signalling it's here in the Indo-Pacific.'
Dr Rhys Ball says the move isn't really a big deal.
'It's part of the usual relationship or engagement that intelligence and security agencies have,' he says. 'Particularly in the Five Eyes community. The legal attaché role within the FBI is a simple liason office role, and there's been engagement with Bureau legal attachés for a long time.'
He says there are New Zealand police liaison agents in other countries around the world, and that's usually a quid-pro-quo situation.
The difference now is that where the legal attaché in Canberra used to be responsible for New Zealand, that person is now in Wellington.
'One perhaps can speculate that particular role for the Canberra Legat office has got quite big now and the business that needs to be discussed has expanded to the point where the Bureau, and Wellington, feel the need for a permanent presence in Wellington,' says Ball.
He says cooperation between various international law enforcement agencies has increased in the past five to 10 years, particularly between the United States, Australia and New Zealand.
'Things are picking up to the point where there's benefit in a permanent presence in Wellington.'
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