The spy I knew

I don't normally move in circles where I would encounter spies, but did come to know Bill Sutch, who according to Soviet intelligence documents had been recruited as a Soviet spy in 1951. Dr Sutch was at the time part of the New Zealand mission to the United Nations in New York. Just a few years later, when I was a university student, he advertised on the university notice board for students to help him excavate his section in Brooklyn. He commissioned the renowned Austrian architect who found refuge in New Zealand, Ernst Plischke to design a house for him, but he wanted to save the soil that had to be excavated to have a garden by the time the house was built. I was one of the students who helped Bill Sutch to excavate his section. We would chop away with our picks and shovels all morning, then sit down, have a beer, and engage in stimulating discussions before moving a few more wheel-barrows full of soil. I don't recall either saying much or drinking much, but I was there along with a whole generation of students who would possibly become senior public servants in the future. Who knew then that Sutch, a stimulating conversationalist full of broad encompassing ideas was a spy? Later, over the years I ran into Bill Sutch on various occasions, we greeted each other, but never had much of a conversation, until, while I worked for the Oxford University Press, he came in with the proposal that we reissue his book Quest for Security in New Zealand in a new edition. We consulted people in Oxford, almost certainly Dan Davin, like Sutch an old time lefty, and he thought that the proposal had merit and we could go ahead with it. The original book had a chequered history. It was commissioned by the government as one of the volumes of the centennial publications to be published in 1940. When Sutch delivered the manuscript the commissioning editor was horrified. The book had such a left-leaning angle that it could not be endorsed and published by a government department, even under a Labour government, so Sutch sent it to Penguin, who had a Left Book Club and they published it. It was a short radical account of New Zealand history. It sold well enough and by the 1960s, when I worked for Oxford, the time was right to up-date it and bring out a new edition. I, a totally inexperienced editor, was put in charge of it. The original Penguin was perhaps 120 pages, certainly no more than 160-180, a slim little book. Sutch turned up with a revised manuscript at least three times as long. The small paperback that we had planned became a chunky brick. Sutch's account was still controversial, perhaps more so than in 1940. He had some harsh things to say about the Federation of Labour and its leaders, F. P. Walsh in particular, who, Sutch believed, betrayed the labour movement. It was good fiery stuff. The book sold well, sold out. No one suggested that I should have stood up to Sutch, get him to shorten the book, cut out some of the dubious controversial bits. You didn't argue with Bill Sutch, he was a bulldozer. He also lacked any sense of humour. Every conversation was dead serious. He was a talented man, interested not only in economics that was his professional expertise, but also the arts. He later became head of the Arts Council. As an economist his views were radical, he believed that New Zealand should aim to be economically self-sufficient and free itself from its colonial dependency on selling primary produce to Britain. He encouraged industrial development, including car manufacture. New Zealand had its own Trabant, a jeep-like vehicle put together in Nelson, with a Skoda engine. I suppose Sutch's ideas cut across too many vested interests, he was dumped together with his economic programs. Forty years ago the then Prime Minister, Norman Kirk, was informed that his trusted mentor and intellectual power house behind the economic planning of the Labour Party, Dr. W. B. Sutch, was a  Soviet agent. Sutch was tried for treason, the first treason trial in memory, and was acquitted, but unquestionably he had acted foolishly, meeting at night a contact from the Soviet Embassy at at the end of Aro Street and handing him a package the content of which remained unknown. I had been reading a bit of John Le Carre. This seemed to me a real life spy mystery story. Sutch was not a venal man, he would not have worked for the Soviets for money. He was a conceited man, full of his own superior intellect. As a student in the 1930s he travelled in the Soviet Union, claimed that he walked across the land, but apparently he travelled like everybody else on public transport. Still, he knew about Russia, and saw what he was allowed to see. After the war, in 1951, in New York, he realised that the world had learned nothing from the terrible slaughter of the war, that the injustices that precipitated the war would be perpetuated, and helping to put the world right by sharing some of his knowledge with the Soviets seemed like a reasonable thing to do. Now intelligence records from the Soviet era that have come to light show that Sutch was indeed a Soviet agent, even if he was acquitted of the crime. Granted that spies lie, that the spy who wrote the report might have claimed more credit for recruiting a top New Zealand civil servant than he deserved, but John Le Carre knew better. Spies come in all shapes and sizes, all with their own egos and weaknesses.