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New Zealand

Five Eyes member whose Waihopai station fed ECHELON, where French agents sank the Rainbow Warrior in 1985, where Peter Thiel received citizenship in 2011, and where the Christchurch mosque attacks took place in 2019.

New Zealand

Signals Intelligence

New Zealand's Government Communications Security Bureau is a member of the Five Eyes alliance under the UKUSA Agreement of 1946, with the National Security Agency, GCHQ, and the Australian and Canadian agencies.1 Its station at Waihopai was a collection site of ECHELON, a network first described in detail in Nicky Hager's 1996 book Secret Power: New Zealand's Role in the International Spy Network, which drew on interviews with the bureau's employees.2

Operations and Attacks

In July 1985 agents of the French DGSE sank the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbor, killing a photographer; DGSE officers were convicted in New Zealand.3 In the 2019 Christchurch Mosque Shootings of March 15, 2019, Brenton Tarrant, an Australian who had lived about two years in Christchurch, attacked the Al Noor Mosque and the Linwood Islamic Centre there, killing 51 people; on March 26, 2020, he pleaded guilty to 51 murders, 40 attempted murders and a terrorist act, the first terrorism conviction in New Zealand, and he was sentenced to life without parole.45 New Zealand designated The Base and the Proud Boys as terrorist organizations in June 2022, and the Order of Nine Angles in 2025.67

Thiel's Citizenship

Peter Thiel was granted New Zealand citizenship on August 4, 2011, under an "exceptional circumstances" provision that waived the residency requirement, having visited the country four times and never lived there; the grant was disclosed in February 2017. He bought a 193-hectare estate near Lake Wanaka.8

Other Records

At the University of Otago in Dunedin, the psychologists David Marks and Richard Kammann began in 1975 an investigation of the remote-viewing experiments of Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff at Stanford Research Institute, and reported in Nature in 1978 that cues in the transcripts let judges match them to the targets without visiting the sites.9 R.C. Horsch worked as a chemist in Timaru under a stolen identity until he was caught re-entering the country with five false passports in 1984.10

Sources

  1. Bamford, James. Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency. Doubleday, 2001. ↩
  2. Hager, Nicky. Secret Power: New Zealand's Role in the International Spy Network. Craig Potton Publishing, 1996; European Parliament, Report on the Existence of a Global System for the Interception of Private and Commercial Communications (ECHELON interception system), 2001, as cited on the ECHELON page. ↩
  3. King, Michael. Death of the Rainbow Warrior. Penguin, 1986. ↩
  4. New Zealand Ministry of Justice, Crown Law terrorism case summary, August 2020; "Christchurch mosque attacks: Life without parole for Brenton Tarrant." Radio New Zealand, August 27, 2020. ↩
  5. Royal Commission of Inquiry. Ko tō tātou kāinga tēnei: Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the terrorist attack on Christchurch masjidain on 15 March 2019. New Zealand Government, 2020. ↩
  6. "New Zealand designates Proud Boys, The Base as 'terrorist' groups." Al Jazeera, June 30, 2022. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/6/30/new-zealand-designates-proud-boys-the-base-as-terrorist-groups ↩
  7. OpenSanctions, "Order of Nine Angles (O9A)," New Zealand terrorist designation list entry. https://www.opensanctions.org/entities/nz-terr-order-of-nine-angles-o9a/ The New Zealand Gazette notice was not examined. ↩
  8. "Documents reveal how Peter Thiel was granted New Zealand citizenship." The Guardian, February 1, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/feb/01/documents-reveal-how-peter-thiel-was-granted-new-zealand-citizenship ↩
  9. Marks, David, and Richard Kammann. The Psychology of the Psychic. Prometheus Books, 1980; their letter "Information transmission in remote viewing experiments," Nature, vol. 274, August 17, 1978, pp. 680-681 (abstract only examined). ↩
  10. "How a pornographer's violent fantasies blurred fact and fiction as cops searched Olney house for missing women." The Philadelphia Inquirer, August 2, 2026. ↩

Connected to by shared pages

9 shared · Placevia Pine Gap, Brenton Tarrant, UKUSA Agreement
Australia
8 shared · Placevia 2019 Christchurch Mosque Shootings, UKUSA Agreement, ECHELON
Canada
5 shared · Programvia Pine Gap, UKUSA Agreement, ECHELON
ECHELON
5 shared · Organizationvia UKUSA Agreement, ECHELON, Five Eyes
Five Eyes
8 shared · Placevia UKUSA Agreement, ECHELON, Five Eyes
United Kingdom
4 shared · Placevia Pine Gap, UKUSA Agreement, ECHELON
Menwith Hill
4 shared · Personvia Richard Kammann, David Marks, Hella Hammid
David Marks
4 shared · Programvia UKUSA Agreement, ECHELON, Five Eyes
UKUSA Agreement

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    CountryFiveEyesSignalsAccelerationismPeterThiel