NZ Soldier Caught Giving Secrets to What He Thought Was a Foreign Power

The soldier was caught in an undercover operation after he contacted a foreign country asking to defect.

A NZ soldier drives a vehicle as part of Exercise Wayfinder. Courtesy of New Zealand Defence Force

A New Zealand soldier has been dismissed from the army and sentenced to two years in military detention after being court-martialed for handing over sensitive information to someone he thought was an agent of a foreign government.

His contact was actually an agent of the NZ Security Intelligence Service (SIS).

It is the first time someone has been convicted of espionage or attempted espionage in New Zealand, and the first military prosecution for those crimes.

At a court-martial hearing at a military camp near Palmerston North this week, the soldier, whose name is temporarily suppressed, admitted to charges of attempted espionage, dishonestly accessing a computer system, and possessing objectionable material.

The man was a member of nationalist groups Action Zealandia and the Dominion Movement. He had previously been questioned by police after the Christchurch mosque attack in 2019.

In a statement read to the court, he said the intense scrutiny at the time led him to feel that he was being unfairly targeted by the state. As a result, he offered to defect to a foreign power, the identity of which is also suppressed.

In response, the SIS, aided by the Defence Department and the NZ Police, established an undercover operation.

He was contacted by an agent who he believed represented the foreign country. After some negotiation, he agreed or attempted to hand over sensitive material, including maps of defence bases, his password to the Defence Force Integrated Exchange System, and even his military ID card.

Mosque Attack Video Discovered

When his home was searched, a copy of the video of the Christchurch mosque attack and the attacker’s manifesto were discovered.

The soldier said he kept them out of a sense of rebellion because the government had made both illegal.

Judge Kevin Riordon and a military panel of three senior officers heard the case.

“There is no such thing as a non-serious act of espionage. There is no trivial act of espionage,” Riordan said in passing sentence.

“You obtained the property of the Defence Force with the intent of handing the material on to someone you thought was an agent of a foreign power.”

He acknowledged that the agent could have stopped the interactions at any time, but so could the soldier.

“Each one presented you with an opportunity to say: ‘Stop. What am I doing? This is wrong. This is a breach of my oath of allegiance,” the judge said.

While the material he handed over, or tried to, was classified as restricted or not classified at all, possession of them by a foreign power could still cause harm, and would have made the soldier vulnerable to blackmail.

“The court wonders how you could be so naive,” Riordan told the man.

Chief of Army, Major General Rose King, said in a statement that the man’s offending “strikes at the core of the oath of allegiance all members of the NZDF take when joining the armed forces, which commits our personnel to faithfully and loyally serve in the defence of New Zealand.

“In this case, the offender sought to disclose official—including classified—information to a foreign entity. The prejudice to New Zealand’s national security was assessed by an independent expert to be significant,” she said.

“The actions of this individual were deplorable.

“They were incredibly poorly judged and brought risk to all of those he served alongside, as well as the wider New Zealand public, and struck to the very core of what we as a Defence Force have a sworn duty to protect.”