A minute’s walk from Parliament in central Wellington, down a small side street, stands a very ordinary government office block set back from the road between the National Library and the National Archives. This is the Freyberg Building where, above nine storeys of military and other govern-ment offices, the headquarters of the Governgovern-ment Communications Security Bureau is located.
Looking up at the building you can see the tell-tale security curtains on the 10th to 14th floors. You can also see cooling units on the 11th and 12th floors, giving away the location of some computers. If you visit after dark you can see that the lights stay on all night in the corner of the top floor, the site of the 24-hour communications centre.
That is not much information. But those two paragraphs have prob-ably told you more about what is inside New Zealand’s largest intelligence organisation than you could find in the neighbouring National Library or National Archives, the two great repositories of information about New Zealand.
Like all the UKUSA intelligence organisations, the GCSB goes to a lot of effort to ensure that the public has no idea what goes on beyond those curtained windows. The following chapters provide a rare glimpse inside this
intelligence organisation to see exactly who works there and what they are doing in the unlabelled offices that line each corridor. Anyone who reads what follows will know more about the internal structure and workings of the GCSB than most of the people who work there.
The GCSB is New Zealand’s largest intelligence organisation, twice the size of the Security Intelligence Service (SIS) and with an annual budget of about $20 million. It is directed from the Freyberg Building headquarters and has two interception stations: one at Tangimoana for intercepting other countries’ radio communications and one at Waihopai for intercepting satel-lite communications.
While the SIS conducts intelligence operations within New Zealand (it is the equivalent of the British MI5 and Australian ASIO), the GCSB spies on other countries. In late 1977, controversial new legislation widening the powers of the SIS went through Parliament in almost the same month as the GCSB was established. While the SIS achieved national notoriety, the GCSB began with and retains almost total anonymity.
The few New Zealanders who have heard of the GCSB (whether they could remember its name correctly is another matter) know it for its All New Zealand’s intelligence agencies are within a few minutes’ walk of each other in central Wellington. The GCSB is by far the largest, most secretive and least known of them.
Claire Mortimer
HeadquartersGCSB
Beehive &
Parliament Buildings External
Assessments Bureau (obscured) Security Intelligence Service
Directorate of Defence Intelligence
National Library (roof)
intelligence collection activities: the stations at Tangimoana and Waihopai.
The organisation’s biggest secret is its significant intelligence production capability: turning raw intercepted messages into more useable intelligence reports. It is these sections of the organisation that lie at the heart of the intelligence operations. The complex systems and procedures within which they work show the nature of the GCSB’s foreign links. The organisation is not large—but it has no need to be. Its spying capability relies not on staff numbers but on high-tech equipment, computer power and assistance from the UKUSA allies.
One of the striking discoveries made while researching the GCSB headquar-ters was uncovering details of a UKUSA-wide operation targeting Japanese diplomatic communications. Not only are these one of the GCSB’s principal targets, but all the UKUSA agencies have sections established specifically for this Japanese work.
Japan allows over a dozen United States signals intelligence bases to be located on its territory, the NSA Far East headquarters is located in Tokyo and Japan is reported to be a third par-ty to the UKUSA agreement, including extensive US-Japan intelligence co-operation,1 yet Japan is itself a major target of UKUSA operations.
The Japanese diplomatic intelli-gence produced by the five agencies is referred to in alliance shorthand as
‘JAD intelligence’ (‘JA’ for Japan, ‘D’ for diplomatic). Special traffic desig-nators at the top of reports containing intercepted Japanese embassy cables begin JAD-, followed by several numbers indicating which specific embassy communications link has been intercepted.
At the GCSB, this JAD analysis occurs in the KE section. The work began in 1981 when a Japanese linguist called Peter Ashen, an Australian Royal Air Force officer from the DSD, shifted to the GCSB to establish what was then called the K3 cell. The KE section’s JAD work is oriented entirely to UKUSA co-operation. Co-ordinated by the NSA, but with all five agencies participating, it involves analysis of communications intercepted from all the key Japanese diplomatic posts around the world.
In 1981 the NSA pushed the GCSB to join a UKUSA-wide operation spying on Japanese diplomatic communications.
Japanese embassies use different ciphers for communications of different sensitivity, with anything regarded as sensitive supposed to be sent in one-time ciphers which are impossible to break.2 Getting these communications would require other types of covert spy operations directed at embassy buildings and their staff. But there are other types of embassy communications, sent in lower grade ciphers, which the UKUSA agencies can and do intercept.
The communications being targeted and analysed at the GCSB are routine diplomatic business (visas, cultural events and so on) and large quantities of regular diplomatic reporting about all sorts of subjects and events in the country where the embassy is located. They are communications not regarded as highly sensitive; the Japanese realise they may be intercepted. Apparently little of this is new information; what it provides, if anything, is a Japanese perspective on foreign policy and trade subjects and commentaries on the countries concerned. The Japanese diplomats are said to write reports about everything.
The UKUSA stations monitor nearly every Japanese diplomatic post in the world; and specific links are divided up between the five agencies. The GCSB has been allocated the links between certain Japanese embassies in the Pacific and Tokyo, providing information particularly about trade, aid, fisheries and meetings of regional organisations. These are mostly telex messages.
This is a worldwide division of analysis. Wherever the actual interception happens to occur, the five agencies share out the work of producing finished intelligence reports. It has occupied about a third of the GCSB’s analysts since 1981. Until New Zealand opened the Waihopai station, which was capable of satellite interception, this country could not intercept Japanese embassy communications, most of which are transmitted by satellite.
From 1981 to 1989, all the Japanese diplomatic intercepts analysed at the GCSB came from overseas interception stations, including from the NSA’s Yakima station. The raw intercept would arrive through the GCSB com-munications centre, still in Japanese codes, and be passed to a staff member who decoded it, using special codebreaking programmes developed for the purpose.3
In the 1990s JAD communications are intercepted at the GCSB’s satel-lite interception station at Waihopai and through its sister stations in the ECHELON network. Some of this interception may even occur at the NSA’s Misawa satellite interception station, which is located in Japan. Once the intercept arrives at the headquarters, the GCSB analysts sort for messages of interest, translate them and write them into the standard formats of UKUSA reports for sending back into the global network. Because the intelligence
reports produced in KE show that Japanese diplomatic codes have been broken, they are all classified as TOP SECRET UMBRA, the highest of the three main special signals intelligence classifications.
The NSA provides computer programmes it has developed to break the Japanese codes, and even recommended which computer the GCSB should buy to do the decoding. The GCSB simply contributes analysts to the NSA project and gets access to some of the product. The GCSB analysts are more likely to understand the South Pacific and the subjects being discussed in the Japanese messages, and so ensure a higher standard of intelligence reporting.
The huge investment of resources throughout the UKUSA system in JAD intelligence is surprising, considering the less secret types of traffic being netted. One argument used within the GCSB for this work is that, although most of the communications are very routine, every once in a while a Japanese official may slip up and send more sensitive information in the lower-grade codes.
Perhaps the biggest intelligence coup to make it into GCSB folklore occurred in the early 1980s. A Japanese diplomat accidentally sent out infor-mation, about how high Japan was prepared to go on a particular commodity price, in plain diplomatic code (rather than the high-level codes usually used in such cases). It was a big boast for some time afterwards about how much money the GCSB had saved New Zealand.
Yet, despite the mystique surrounding this kind of secret intelligence work, such achievements are few and far between. I heard this same, lone success story still being told by GCSB staff in the early 1990s. By then the word was that that one piece of information had saved New Zealand enough money to pay for the Tangimoana station (which was completed in 1982).
The story refers to a New Zealand producer board (which would have access to the signals intelligence information) negotiating a price for meat exports with a Japanese purchasing organisation.
In the mid-1990s Japanese diplomatic intelligence remains a priority for the Waihopai station and GCSB analysts (the newest Japanese linguist was appointed in early 1996)—and Australia too. It was clearly intelligence reports based on these low sensitivity Japanese communications that were the subject of a front-page story, headlined ‘Japanese secrets tapped in Can-berra’, in the Sydney Morning Herald in May 1995. The newspaper reported that copies of Japanese cables were being regularly seen by staff in various sections of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, where they arrived
in a special locked bag. A senior diplomat was quoted as saying: ‘It’s funny to read an embassy’s account of a visit you have made to their mission and their interpretations of your conversations’.4 There was no evidence in the story that sensitive Japanese communications were involved. The intercepted cables may have given insights into how the Japanese diplomats saw the
issues at the meetings, but the highly expensive, TOP SECRET UMBRA intelligence was still only telling the Australians about things like meetings they had already been at.
This information about the Japanese interception, and many other GCSB spying operations, came to light during investigation of the work of the GCSB’s Operations Division, which includes all the important parts of the GCSB headquarters’ intelligence work, the interception operations at the Tangimoana and Waihopai stations and the signals intelligence operations conducted for the GCSB by the New Zealand Defence Force.
It is here that the raw intelligence from the GCSB station Dictionary computers and from other parts of the ECHELON system is decrypted, translated, studied, written into finished intelligence reports—such as the JAD ones—and disseminated to New Zealand and overseas users. For example, Foreign Minister Don McKinnon chats with Japanese Prime Minister Miyazawa while the GCSB spies on his ambassadors. Is it in New Zealand’s interests to be spying on neighbours and trading partners on behalf of old northern hemisphere allies?
Japan Information & Cultural Centre
the Dictionary computer at Waihopai may pick out the text of a fax (sent uncoded) from the Kiribati Prime Minister’s office to a political ally. If it looks interesting, it will be translated into English, written into a report by an analyst in the KP section and distributed to all UKUSA intelligence organisations with an interest in Kiribati.
The Director of Operations until mid-1996 was Warren Tucker, who joined the GCSB in 1982. This Director, who is called O, oversees all the operations through the two station officers-in-charge and the managers of units called K, C and L.
The Operations Division includes the two stations, the SIGINT Produc-tion K Unit, the SIGINT CollecProduc-tion C Unit and the Customer Support L Unit. Altogether the Operations Division has about 120 staff—about 60 percent of the GCSB’s staff.
The division dates from 1978 when the first Deputy Director of Op-erations (DDO), Jim Blackford, was recruited from the GCHQ. In 1982 he was replaced by Larry Lynch, who filled this position until 1989 (apart from a brief period as the GCSB representative at the NSA in 1984) when Tucker took over.
The K Unit is central to the GCSB’s intelligence production role. There are two intelligence analysis sections, KE and KP. Here analysts, like Geoff Holmes, translate intercepted messages into English and write the informa-tion into reports which are then distributed through the UKUSA network.
There is also a small KH section, where cryptanalysts (codebreakers) use computers to try to break some of the codes that are used to protect target communications.
The Manager SIGINT Production, called K, is Glen Singleton. This is the job he ended up in after he left the NSA and became a GCSB employee.
Part of his work as an NSA officer had been checking the quality of intel-ligence reports produced by the GCSB for the alliance. Now he is directly in charge of the GCSB’s report production. He had returned to New Zealand after leaving the NSA and been given a four-year contract as a consultant in the Policy and Plans Division (starting in February 1990). Later he was transferred, still as a consultant, to the Operations Division in mid-1992. He applied for and received New Zealand citizenship during this period.
The important position of K has previously been held by John Brandon, Bas Keane, Brian Gore and Ian Brownlie.
The development of the K Unit began in the late 1970s when John Brandon (now Director of Information Systems Security) was appointed as Executive Officer (SIGINT). From 1980 he oversaw the creation of the three
K sections: the K2 Russian cell, the K3 Japanese cell and the K4 French cell (these were later restructured into KE and KP).
According to GCSB staff, each of the three cells was established at the suggestion of the UKUSA allies. Staff from the time say that there was spe-cific pressure for these developments from the NSA and GCHQ. Clearly the areas of analysis—Russian, Japanese and French (and later South Pacific)—
would have been established in exactly the opposite order had New Zealand interests been the basis of the structure. As one GCSB worker explained,
‘There is a careful carve-up of areas of responsibilities between the agencies:
areas, subjects, languages. It certainly wasn’t New Zealand deciding what was necessary for New Zealand.’
Development of the Russian and Japanese cells was part of a co-ordinated allocation of responsibilities between the UKUSA allies. The smaller allies were being asked to do segments of the analysis for global interception projects. Thus both the Australian DSD and Canadian CSE also have sections for Russian and Japanese analysis (as, of course, do the large United States and British agencies). In the 1980s, for example, the DSD had three analy-sis cells—Russian, Japanese and Indonesian—in one division and a separate division for its Chinese operations.
The CSE produces signals intelligence reports from interception of Rus-sian ships in the North Pacific, the GCSB from the South Pacific and the DSD from South East Asia and some of the Indian Ocean. Similarly, the GCSB produces reports of intercepted Japanese diplomatic communications from the South Pacific and perhaps a few other areas, while the DSD covers South East Asia and elsewhere and the CSE covers Latin America.
The GCSB’s French nuclear testing analysis also appears to have been part of a UKUSA division of work. While the DSD focuses on the Chinese nuclear programme for the alliance, the GCSB has covered the French tests.
The K2 Russian cell was the first to be set up, in 1980. Clive Comrey, the British signals intelligence officer brought to New Zealand to set up the cell, was joined by Barry O’Shea, a Russian linguist posted from the DSD.
He was the first of a succession of Russian analysts on two-year postings from the DSD, all or most of them Australian naval officers. The K3 Japanese cell was established a year later, followed by the K4 French cell, which was set up in 1983 staffed by two New Zealanders.5 The DSD has no French analysis;
all work relating to French in the South Pacific is allocated to the GCSB.
Between them, these three cells accounted for all the GCSB’s intelligence production for more than a decade. Although these cells no longer exist in this form, virtually all the areas of intelligence analysis now described were
transferred to the KE and KP cells that replaced them in 1992.
The work of the K2 cell was analysing all the Russian language intercept from the GCSB’s Tangimoana station and its predecessor at Waiouru. In the absence of better Russian targets to offer the UKUSA network, most of this work focused on Russian fishing vessels in the South Pacific. K2 also served as the alliance’s source of information about the South Pacific region for a United States computer data base that tracks all Russian naval and commercial vessels.
Tangimoana intercepts Russian Morse code and radio telex messages being sent back to the fishing companies on the Russian Pacific coast, which give details of the ships’ positions, personnel matters, catch sizes and the types of fish. The K2 reports produced from this intercept were sent over-seas and were also given to the New Zealand fisheries authorities. The best reason that could be given inside the GCSB for why Russian fishing fleets (and not those of any other countries) were monitored was said to be that
‘We don’t trust the Russians, so we’ll just watch them anywhere they are near us.’
Some of this information was recorded on a large lockable fisheries chart on the wall in K2, where the positions of the ships were plotted to assist
Radio messages from Russia’s Leningradskya base (pictured), and all other Russian Antarctic bases, are targeted by the GCSB as part of the UKUSA preoccupation with spying on Russia.
Greenpeace/Morgan
the analysts’ report writing, for example, indicating when a trawler left the fishing grounds for port. The intelligence collecting was definitely not to check whether the fishing boats were doing covert spy work, as alarmist media stories sometimes suggested. The cell also took a close interest in the occasional Russian research vessels in the South Pacific and any other Rus-sian activities in the South Pacific (such as the RusRus-sian fishing negotiations in Kiribati in the mid-1980s).
The other area covered by K2 was Antarctica, mainly the communica-tions from the Russian bases but some other (non-UKUSA) countries’ bases too when they were intercepted. The Russian messages were described by an analyst as ‘utterly unimportant personal messages, and messages about
The other area covered by K2 was Antarctica, mainly the communica-tions from the Russian bases but some other (non-UKUSA) countries’ bases too when they were intercepted. The Russian messages were described by an analyst as ‘utterly unimportant personal messages, and messages about