John Daniel

Many years after he'd stepped down as Prime Minister, David Lange told a journalist that New Zealand had helped win the Cold War, but he wasn't allowed to tell anyone about it.

Yeah, we're going to come back to this a little bit later on.

But in the first episode, we heard from another Labour politician, Andrew Little, who was the minister in charge of the intelligence agencies for six years from 2017 to 2023.

And when we spoke with him in September of 2025, he said,

He said he was confident Five Eyes would be strong enough to continue in spite of the current turmoil.

And Andrew Little had another caveat, that Five Eyes should stay in its lane.

Yeah, even in an area like immigration, which at first glance seems a long way from those concerns, New Zealand is part of an international alliance that shares information around national security related to immigration.

This one is called M5, Migration 5, but the members are the same as Five Eyes.

And we've seen that the Central Intelligence Agency doesn't operate in a vacuum.

They're going to work with their military and domestic and foreign affairs in a coordinated way to push forward political aims laid down by the government.

Yeah, and there was a Nicky Hager story on Newsroom about the discovery of papers at a Salvation Army thrift store that detailed a meeting in London about the interlinking of our military with other Five Eyes partners in preparation for conflict with China.

Now, these aren't coincidences.

While it's true that we run training exercises with a number of countries, it's not as if we run them with China or Russia or North Korea or Iran.

We're part of the Western Bloc, so broadly speaking, we're allied with our intelligence partners, although we probably retain a bit of wiggle room around foreign affairs.

There's that connective tissue between the intelligence agencies.

You know, your exchange is part of that.

You know of other people who work with ASIO.

We have people from the service who've gone to MI6 as well.

So that connective tissue has been strong in the past.

What sort of healthiness, you know, how important is it that it is healthy?