Lindsay Smith

John Lindsay Smith (March 6, 1926, to September 11, 2002) was a New Zealand army officer and, from 1983 to 1991, director of the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service (NZSIS).¹²

Army

Born at Kumara, Westland, and raised in a working-class family in Christchurch, Smith worked as an uncertified teacher at Haupiri, attended teachers' college in 1945, and took a BA at Canterbury University. He served with the occupation force in Japan, in the Korean War in 1952 with the 16th Field Regiment of the Royal New Zealand Artillery, and in Borneo and Vietnam; he later commanded the Army Field Force and the New Zealand force in Southeast Asia, and was Deputy Chief of General Staff in Wellington until he retired in 1981. He then worked as the government affairs adviser to BP New Zealand.¹ The Vietnam War veterans' roll lists him as a major and his service number as 207087, and notes that he retired as a brigadier and received the MBE, the CBE, and, after his service as director of the NZSIS, the CMG.²

Security Intelligence Service

Smith succeeded Paul Molineaux as director in 1983, at a time of what his obituary called "some mistrust in the country about the scope and style of the service's covert operations." He described himself as "a pretty conventional sort of chap," kept his home telephone number listed, and said: "I'm the visible member of the organisation. That's what I'm meant to be." He cited the rule that the service was not to be involved with "the class of person engaged in lawful protest or dissent," saying, "You can't get anything clearer than that." In 1983 the New Zealand Party leader, Robert Jones, alleged that the service had tried to infiltrate his party in Auckland.¹

In June 1984, asked whether the police search for the American known as Dr Stanley Stokowski, who had fled the country in March on a stolen passport, involved security grounds, Smith said he had no comment: "It is a matter for the police and for customs."³ The man was the fugitive R.C. Horsch.

After the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour in July 1985, a briefing he wrote, later declassified, stated that Prime Minister David Lange "would have been well pleased if the French couple, once apprehended, were removed from New Zealand jurisdiction quickly," and that "once they chose to plead guilty and accepted their sentence, we were subjected to French political and economic pressures." He retired from the service in 1991 and was succeeded by Don McIver. He died aged 76 and was given a full military funeral in Tauranga.¹