Soviet documents ‘identify New Zealand diplomat as KGB spy’
August 11, 2014 3 Comments
By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org
A batch of documents from the so-called ‘Mitrokhin archive’, which were made public late last week, have reportedly identified a former New Zealand senior diplomat as a Soviet spy. William Ball Sutch was born in 1907 and received a PhD in economics from Columbia University in the United States in 1932. Shortly afterwards, he returned to his native New Zealand in the midst of the Great Depression. At around that time he traveled to the Soviet Union, but showed no outward interest in communism. He entered government service, working for several departments, including the Ministry of Supply and the Department of Industries and Commerce, where he rose to the post of secretary in 1958. Prior to that, he had represented Wellington at the United Nations headquarters in New York in the early 1950s. He retired in 1965 as head of New Zealand’s Department of Industries and Commerce, and died in 1975. A year before his death, however, Sutch was the main subject in the most sensational spy scandal in New Zealand during the Cold War. He was arrested in a counterintelligence operation in Wellington while secretly meeting Dimitri Razgovorov, an officer of the Soviet KGB. Sutch, who had been monitored by the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service (NZSIS) for quite some time prior to his arrest, was charged under the country’s Official Secrets Act. But eventually he was found not guilty after an eventful five-day trial, which took place amidst a media blitz in the Kiwi capital. Now, however, the Wellington-based Dominion Post newspaper says it has acquired copies of internal KGB documents that identify Sutch as a KGB recruit. The Australian-owned newspaper says the documents are part of the massive archive transported to the United Kingdom in 1992 by the late Vasili Mitrokhin. Mitrokhin was a Soviet archivist for the KGB, who painstakingly copied tens of thousands of pages of the spy agency’s files prior to defecting to Britain following the dissolution of the USSR. The latest batch of papers, which were made public at Cambridge University’s Churchill College, indicate that the New Zealand diplomat worked for the KGB for 24 years prior to his 1974 arrest. Read more of this post
intelNews.org 
Soldier with far-right links becomes first convicted spy in New Zealand history
August 19, 2025 by Joseph Fitsanakis 1 Comment
According to reports, a member of the New Zealand Defence Force, who has not been named, drew the attention of the authorities in the aftermath of the 2019 Christchurch shooting. The attack was carried out by Australian white supremacist Brenton Tarrant, who stormed a mosque with an automatic weapon, killing 51 and injuring nearly 100 people. The terrorist attack sparked a widespread investigation into far-right militancy in the Australian and New Zealand armed forces, which continues to this day.
The soldier was found to have contacts with a number of local far-right groups, including the Dominion Movement and Action Zealandia. Government prosecutors said that, while observing the soldier’s activities, government agents found out that he had “made contact with a third party, indicating that he was a soldier” and signaling his desire to defect to a foreign country. They eventually approached the soldier using an undercover officer who pretended to be a representative of the country whose officials the soldier had previously contacted. The soldier told the undercover officer that he was prepared to “get a covert device into army headquarters” and offered to provide “mapping and photographs” of classified government facilities.
During his trial, the soldier pled guilty, admitting that he had tied to spy for a foreign government, and adding that his ultimate goal was to “leave New Zealand and get to what I thought was safety”. Following the soldier’s conviction, the three-judge military panel said it would announce the sentence later this week. The country for which the convicted soldier offered to spy has not been named.
► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 18 August 2025 | Permalink
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