Late on the night of July 16, 1984, while four National Cabinet Ministers were meeting in the Beehive office of Deputy Prime Minister Jim McLay, plotting the ultimate downfall of outgoing Prime Minister Sir Robert Muldoon, another crisis was building up in another part of the capital.
The United States Secretary of State George Shultz, along with a 45-strong media contingent, had checked into the James Cook Hotel.
They had come for the annual ANZUS talks between Australia, New Zealand and the US.
New Zealand’s outgoing foreign minister, Warren Cooper, was to be the New Zealand representative, but Shultz would have his own private meeting on Wednesday with the incoming Prime Minister, David Lange.
With Shultz was Paul Wolfowitz, the Assistant Secretary for East Asia and the American Ambassador H Munro Brown.
There was no official record kept of that meeting and the US and New Zealand participants have different recollections about what was actually said.
Each side made assumptions about the other that proved to be wrong.
Those faulty assumptions led to New Zealand’s expulsion from ANZUS. As the years unfolded and the original reasons for the rift became less relevant, what emerged was what Bill English called New Zealand’s “truly independent foreign policy.”
Or as one of English’s Ministerial colleagues, Tim Groser, said, New Zealand had an awful lot to thank those 1980s lefties for.
But it all started with what amounted to a misunderstanding after a meeting.
Speaking to reporters after that meeting with Lange, Shultz said the talks had been “cordial and worthwhile.”
“I think the net of it is that we will work together co-operatively, across the board, on the areas of interest between the very friendly people of the United States and the very friendly people of New Zealand,” he said.
Lange said the chief thing was that there would be a continuing “association and dialogue” between the United States and New Zealand.
“My commitment, on behalf of that Government, is that we have a pledge based on our history, economic reality, and security terms to have the closest possible relationship with whomsoever holds office in the United States,” he said.
When asked if he was prepared to change Labour’s policy on the entry of nuclear-armed or nuclear-powered ships to New Zealand ports, Lange said, “I am not prepared to answer questions on the hoof about policy changes.”
Dick Teare, who was the Deputy Chief of Mission at the US Embassy, later told a State Department oral history that the understanding that the rest of the American side got was that Lange was going to look for ways to preserve access to the New Zealand ports by nuclear-capable ships of the United States Navy.
Shultz told a New Zealand TV crew in 1995 the same thing and also said that the Australian Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, had assured him at the Saturday night stopover on the way to New Zealand that Lange would modify the New Zealand position.
However, the only New Zealand official at the meeting, the Secretary of Foreign Affairs, Mervyn Norrish, maintained it was not as straightforward as that.
“I did not interpret Mr Lange’s comments that way,” Norrish said in 2004.
“He did indeed say that he would be talking to party members about the issue of Labour branch conferences over the six months ahead.
“Perhaps there was some ambiguity there, but he did not say that he would bring about a changed outcome.”
The then head of the Prime Minister’s Department, Gerald Hensley, a former diplomat and friend of Norrish, later said the Americans believed Lange had said that if he were given six months, he would change his party’s stand on ship visits.
The problem the American Embassy presented was that it saw what it wanted to see.
It had been closely monitoring opinion over ship visits within the Labour caucus and the trade union movement from well before the election.
Just days before the election, a CIA report said several moderate Labour members of parliament had said that once in office, a Labour Government would remain firmly committed to ANZUS.
“And senior New Zealand Foreign Ministry officials have said that some sort of compromise over ship visits would evolve,” the report said.
“Lange has privately assured US officials that he is personally satisfied that nuclear propulsion is safe and that his reservations are centred on nuclear weaponry.”
The Embassy had read the political winds well.
Labour was divided between a left-wing that looked to Jim Anderton for leadership and a right-wing that looked to Lange, Prebble, and Douglas for leadership.
The Moscow-aligned Socialist Unity Party led by Bill Andersen and Ken Douglas dominated the trade union movement, which still had considerable sway over the Labour Party.
Other declassified CIA documents from 1984 report that the Embassy’s contacts said that at least 28 trade unionists had visited the Soviet Union in 1983 and that the number of free airline tickets to the USSR available through FOL leaders continued to rise.
“About 30 per cent of the current Labor Party parliamentary caucus has travelled to the USSR or Eastern Europe under Soviet auspices, according to Embassy estimates,” the CIA claimed.
Another 1985 CIA report said the Embassy had estimated in August 1984 that only 26 of the 56 Labour MPs supported Lange, and 24 supported left-wing leader Jim Anderton.
“Many of the new MPs—about 12 are first-term members—were recruited through the Anderton party machinery,” the CIA analysis said.
“Several first-term members subsequently abandoned Anderton, preferring, we believe, to link their political fortunes with Lange, and by the end of October, the US Embassy reported Anderton’s faction numbering only 15.
“Oral reports from political observers during the last two months indicate that Anderton may now command as few as five or seven votes on many issues.
The analysis concluded that caucus members’ attitudes toward the United States fell roughly into four categories, not always corresponding to members’ Anderton-Lange factional affiliations.
“According to our estimates, there are 21 caucus members generally pro-US; 14 apparently open to the United States; 13 usually anti-US, though not extreme left; seven anti-US and left wing.”
So the Embassy pushed ahead, convinced that the Caucus was ripe for change and reassured that Lange had said he could lead that change.
The Americans had convinced themselves that New Zealand would never implement the nuclear-capable ban.
The Democrat congressman, Stephen Solarz, who chaired the Asian and Pacific Affairs Subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, became a constant figure in the nuclear ship debate.
A declassified secret CIA despatch from Singapore quoted him shortly after the Shultz-Lange meeting as telling Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew that he had the impression that the leader of the New Zealand Labour Party (Lange) would like to scuttle the nuclear ship visits issue.
The Embassy’s savvy political counsellor, James Morton, who arrived in Wellington as the crisis was in its early days in 1984, later said that the Ambassador, H. Monroe Brown, “refused to accept the reality of the moment.”
“He would just not let any reporting go in that showed that there would probably be a crisis in no time,” said Morton.
“So, we did it by phone and by other ways.
“But there was also a tendency in Washington of not wanting to hear the situation on the ground out there, though we would be talking to people who were at the country director level. I mean, you have [Secretary of Defence] Casper Weinberger and George Shultz, and everyone saying that these are alliance partners and they will accept our ships.
“So, we had a problem at both ends.”
Against that background, the US Embassy in Wellington had decided to host a function at the James Cook Hotel to enable the media group travelling with Shultz to meet local journalists.
Some of the biggest names in American journalism, like Marvin Kalb, were travelling with the Secretary of State.
Ordinarily, the Piano Bar at the Cook would have been packed for a function like that.
But not that Monday night. Back at the Beehive, the constitutional crisis was playing out, and the Press Gallery had all but forgotten that the ANZUS heavyweights were in town.
Eventually, near midnight, two New Zealand political journalists turned up.
Except for the Embassy’s ebullient Public Affairs officer, Chuck Bell, the Americans had gone to bed.
So Bell pinned the two journalists down and assured them that Lange would buckle, that the Embassy knew that a substantial number of his caucus members would not support a weapons ban and that New Zealand would remain a member of ANZUS.
Bell’s other claim, presumably derived from the reports of Shultz’s meeting with Lange, that Lange was ambivalent about the policy had some validity too. |
Labour had implemented a nuclear-propelled ban in government between 1972 and 1975, and the Americans had not objected.
But that ban had gone no further.
American naval vessels were still welcome if they were conventionally powered.
By August, a month after the election, something was clearly happening in the relationship between New Zealand and the United States.
The August 22 agenda for a CIA East Asia “Warning and Forecast” meeting involving all the US intelligence agencies included just five topics, one of which was “New Zealand and ANZUS”.
“What is the likely course that the Lange government will follow? What constraints will the Labor Party put on Lange’s freedom to manoeuvre? How vulnerable is ANZUS?” the agenda said.
However, the section on New Zealand in the meeting minutes has been redacted.
The Embassy’s Deputy Chief Mission, Dick Teare, has confirmed that there was a good deal going on, in secret, in the background.
“Over that period in the second half of 1984, a lot was going on beneath the surface,” he told a subsequent oral history.
“Both Ambassador Brown and I were in frequent conversation with four or five people in the New Zealand Government.
“These were career officials, for the most part, who had carried over.
“They didn’t change with an election. The Secretary of Foreign Affairs, Mervin Norrish, who had been Ambassador to Washington, was the equivalent of the National Security Advisor to the Prime Minister. Gerald Hensley, the Secretary of the Ministry of Defence, was Dennis McLain, who later became Ambassador to Washington.
“The Chief of the Defence Force was Air Marshall. Sir Ewan Jamison.
“There were a few others as well but more junior policy advisors.
“These guys, the career New Zealanders, were given some latitude at least, not specific instructions, from Lange to go ahead and see what could be worked out in the way of a compromise.”
Teare said they were proposing that the United States would find an innocuous looking ship that would nevertheless be nuclear capable.
“It would be advanced by us as the candidate for the first port call under the Labour Government, and it would be accepted by the New Zealanders without any public question or comment,” he said.
“But the New Zealanders would be able to say to themselves that it was an old rust bucket that wasn’t bristling with weapons; its last deployment was not anywhere where it would have carried nuclear weapons in all probability, so it was probably safe.
“The idea was that once we had brought in one ship, we could then bring in subsequent ones periodically with no great rush that would be less innocuous.
“So, we would preserve the tradition, and everyone would be happy.”
Lange went to New York in September for the United Nations General Assembly. While there, he met with Shultz and invited him to submit a request for a non-nuclear-powered vessel to enter a New Zealand port.
At the end of November, the Chief of the Defence Force, Sir Ewan Jamieson, was sent to the US Navy’s Pacific headquarters in Hawaii to select an “innocuous” ship, which he did, proposing that the Americans apply for entry a destroyer, the USS Buchanan.
After Christmas Lange went off to visit the Tokelau islands but had yet to tell his deputy Geoffrey Palmer about the ship visit.
So when it leaked (from Washington), the anti-nuclear movement mobilised and put pressure on the Caucus and Palmer, who was acting Prime Minister.
He despatched Chief Press Secretary Ross Vintiner on the Air Force VIP 727 to Pago Pago in American Samoa, where Lange was due to dock after the Tokelau trip.
Vintiner carried a stack of papers assembled by Palmer to convince him that the Caucus and the party would not accept the vessel’s entry without a declaration that it was not carrying nuclear weapons.
The then External Intelligence Bureau had produced a secret report finding there was no way anybody would be able to tell if a ship carried nuclear weapons; therefore, there was no way the Prime Minister could assure the public that it was complying with the policy.
The EIB report was leaked.
It was a key paper in Vintiner ‘s briefcase, which he took to Pago Pago.
“I argued that it was not possible for any New Zealand PM to credibly declare a US vessel was or was not nuclear-armed,” he wrote in an article on “The Spinoff” on Sunday.
“The US would neither confirm nor deny nuclear weapons on board.
“Doubt would undermine public trust in that PM.
“How could that inspire and unite a nation?”
But Vintiner didn’t need to worry.
Palmer had convened a Cabinet meeting for the day Lange and Vintiner were due back from Pago Pago, but they were not expected till the afternoon.
So, in the morning session, Palmer secured Cabinet’s agreement that the Buchanan should not be admitted.
The Americans were furious and believed they had been conned.
For Shultz, it was more personal.
He had an emotional attachment to the Pacific, where he had served as a Captain of the Marines during the Second World War.
And in Washington, there was a long-standing rivalry between him and Reagen’s Defence Secretary, Casper Weinberger.
Shultz told the TV crew as they set up in 1995 that based on his discussions with Lange in Wellington and New York, he told Reagen there was no need to worry about New Zealand and ANZUS.
He said Weinberger had delighted in reminding Reagen of that assurance when the Buchanan was turned down.
Perhaps that personal hurt was why he didn’t brief Lange privately before he went public with the US retaliation against New Zealand in August 1985, barely a year after that meeting in Wellington and the misunderstandings that flowed from it.
ANZUS would play one further role in Lange’s life.
On ANZAC day 1988, in a speech at Yale University, he declared ANZUS a dead letter.
When news reached the Cabinet, there was an uproar because he had assured them before he left that he would not make that declaration. Lange’s leadership began to unravel.
I reported the uproar on Eye Witness News.
I had been alerted to it by Jonathan Hunt, who arrived at a function to farewell the US Ambassador, Paul Cleveland, saying that when he was a student, he had stood outside functions hosted by the US protesting against the US government, but this time, he was coming inside to protest against his own.
Lange issued a statement from Ottawa claiming my report was “totally false.”
Hunt and Phil Goff began rounding up numbers to topple Lange and replace him with Geoffrey Palmer.
In late June, the Caucus only narrowly defeated a vote of no confidence in Lange. Then, in August, after the by-now rebellious Caucus had voted to reinstate Roger Douglas (who Lange had sacked) back into the Cabinet, it was all over.
Lange resigned.
The irony was that Lange was right. ANZUS was a dead letter, but Labour had tried to pretend for too long that it could ban US ships and stay within ANZUS.
The breakdown began with that ambiguity, and it seemed the Caucus wanted it to remain the foundation of our foreign policy.
That was never going to work. Instead, slowly, the independent foreign policy emerged.
Only now, for unclear reasons, is the government making any serious attempt to revive the US security arrangement.
