The importance of intelligence cooperation with the Pacific

An address by NZSIS Director-General of Security Andrew Hampton to the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs, Wellington

6 March 2025

Tēnā koutou katoa, thank you very much for the opportunity to speak with you this evening.

There have been some interesting speeches, debates and conversations about New Zealand’s national security held in this room over the years so it’s a genuine pleasure to be here.

I can’t promise that this speech will scale the heights of oratory seen on this platform in the past but I do hope you get to walk away today with a bit more knowledge about what your Security Intelligence Service does to protect New Zealand and its work in our region.

Today, I am going to talk to you about the role we at the NZSIS can and do play in the world of intelligence cooperation. This phrase will mean different things to different people. Sometimes people talk about intelligence diplomacy, meaning the sharing of intelligence, and guidance informed by intelligence, with decision-makers in other governments. The act of sharing is the important bit with the ultimate aim of achieving mutually beneficial national security outcomes.  As you will hear, intelligence cooperation with the Pacific is an increasing focus for the NZSIS.

I thought a good place to start today would be to give you a short NZSIS 101 explainer to provide you with some of the why, what and how of a security intelligence agency.  This will include a brief overview of some of the national security threats we see facing New Zealand, with a particular focus on strategic competition and how this is driving foreign interference and espionage. I’ll then discuss in a bit more detail those parts of our work that involve intelligence cooperation of various kinds.

Role of the NZSIS

Our mission at the NZSIS is to keep New Zealand and New Zealanders safe and secure.

As an organisation we are driven to protect New Zealand as a free, open and democratic society for future generations by staying ahead of the threats we face.

That’s what is prescribed in our legislation, the Intelligence and Security Act 2017, and is the mission that drives our staff.

We are New Zealand’s lead agency for security intelligence. That means we detect, deter and disrupt threats to New Zealand’s national security. In carrying out this role we aim to deliver a range of impacts:

First is countering foreign interference and espionage:

• By foreign interference we mean activity undertaken by foreign states, or their proxies, which aims to influence, disrupt or subvert our national interests in ways that are deceptive, corrupt or coercive.
• Espionage describes the clandestine collection activities that foreign states use to gain an advantage against New Zealand and achieve their objectives. Espionage tactics are often used to facilitate foreign interference.

Next is countering violent extremism and terrorism:

• We detect and investigate threats of violent extremism in New Zealand and overseas, and we partner with other agencies to stop these threats escalating into acts of terrorism. 

We also have a foreign intelligence mandate:

• This is not a function we have traditionally spoken a great deal about. It involves collecting, analysing and sharing intelligence to further New Zealand’s interests and those of our region. Intelligence cooperation is an increasing feature of our foreign intelligence function.

This leads me on to our other major function, protective security:

• We have a responsibility to enhance the ability of New Zealand government agencies to protect their people, information and other assets by taking a holistic approach to security and resilience.
• One of the ways we do that is by producing and maintaining a best practice framework – the Protective Security Requirements or PSR. While the PSR is focused on supporting New Zealand government agencies, the framework is free and available for use by any organisation via the PSR website along with a wide range of helpful resources. 
• The work of our PSR team includes supporting Pacific partners to build their own protective security frameworks and resilience.

Sometimes when I talk about our functions, I get accused of skipping over some of the more tantalising information about how we undertake our intelligence functions. People want to know how we actually detect, disrupt and deter national security threats.

Some of what you might see in the movies, we do in New Zealand: running human intelligence sources, undertaking physical and technical surveillance and intercepting of communications.  But we also co-operate closely with international partners, make use of data sets and information available in the open source, and receive leads from members of the public or through community engagement.

We, of course, work very closely with the Government Communications Security Bureau, who are the government’s signals (or electronic) intelligence and cyber security agency, which I had the privilege of leading before joining the NZSIS. Between us, we share a number of enablement functions, such as technology, finance, people and capability (or HR), policy and strategy.

We operate under the Intelligence and Security Act 2017, which allows us to use extraordinary powers to gather intelligence in ways that would otherwise be illegal. However, we can only use these powers with the proper authorisation through an Intelligence warrant. This applies whether we are operating domestically or abroad. Everything we do is subject to rigorous oversight by the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security.

It has now been long established through various independent reviews that our agencies do not, and never have, undertaken “mass surveillance” either in New Zealand or our region. 

Strategic Competition

We are currently operating in the most challenging global security environment in a generation.

In recent years, we have seen a sharp rise in strategic competition and global tensions, including armed conflict in Eastern Europe and in the Middle East. In addition to the tragic loss of thousands of lives, this has driven supply chain disruption, global economic uncertainty, and the erosion of the rules-based order that is so important for a small trading nation such as New Zealand.

Strategic competition is a term that often gets flung about but it essentially means seeking to advance competing visions for regional or global order.  Pacific countries, very much including New Zealand, are often stuck in the middle of these competing visions. Within this context it is not unexpected to see a surge in efforts to win influence through normal diplomatic means, but increasingly too, we see signs of foreign interference and espionage in the Pacific by states who do not share our values.  I will return to this shortly.

Strategic competition happens on multiple levels – some of it is in our interests but it can also cause serious harm.  For example, state actors and their proxies use malicious cyber activity to advance their interests. They may be trying to steal sensitive information or simply want to cause disruption. New Zealand organisations have been subject to significant cyber-attacks from both state-backed and criminal actors. Fortunately, many others have been prevented.

Over recent years the Intelligence Community has called out foreign interference and malicious state-sponsored cyber activities in New Zealand when it is in New Zealand’s interests to do so. You will remember last year when our Government called out an attempted compromise of our parliamentary networks as being linked to a state-sponsored actor linked to the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

While emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, quantum computing and next generation telecommunications all have potentially huge benefits, they too are being leveraged by states for strategic purposes, including for espionage, cyber-attacks and dis-information.  Indeed, some of the sharpest competition playing out at the moment involves the race to secure intellectual property and global market share for emerging technologies.

New Zealand is experiencing the effects of strategic competition in more ways than many people would expect. The nature of the security threats New Zealand faces is evolving rapidly, and strategic competition is a key driving force behind that pace of change. Suffice to say, there is plenty happening in this space to keep all of us in the intelligence community on our toes. 

Foreign interference and espionage in New Zealand

I think it’s fair to say that New Zealanders have probably struggled with the concept that a foreign state could be interested in our affairs.  In the past New Zealand has seen its geographic isolation in the south Pacific as a defence against many forms of harm. Even if that was ever true, it is certainly no longer the case.

NZSIS’s public threat assessment, published last September, said there are a small number of states who conduct foreign interference and espionage in ways that can be a severe infringement on the rights and freedoms of New Zealanders.

The assessment notes in particular that the People’s Republic of China remains a complex intelligence concern in New Zealand. Russia and Iran have also been identified in our assessments as among other illiberal states conducting foreign interference.

The type of activities we see include:

• Foreign intelligence officers who seek to conduct espionage here under the guise of legitimate activity; 
• State actors or their proxies seeking to covertly build long-term influence with individuals in our national political environment;
• Local government is becoming a more common target;
• Our business and research communities are increasingly susceptible too, including state sponsored attempts to steal hard-earned intellectual property or other sensitive information;
• Māori organisations are sometimes targeted for influence and leverage; and
• The monitoring and harassment of ethnic communities is becoming more sophisticated and even more insidious.

As a security intelligence agency, part of our role is to detect and investigate these threats, and to raise awareness about what we are seeing. Alongside this work we have a range of protective security guidance filled with best practice advice on how organisations can manage risk, build resilience and make themselves harder targets for malicious state actors.  We are working hard to make this important information more accessible domestically and increasingly across our home region, the Pacific.  This brings me back to intelligence cooperation.

Intelligence cooperation

I use the term "intelligence cooperation" because it aligns with one of the big shifts we’re making as an organisation, which is to deliver national security impacts by working with and for others. The word "cooperation" is at the heart of our strategy but also recognises that an agency like ours achieves little success by working alone.

The term "intelligence diplomacy" is often seen in the literature and is used by some of our partners but our people often tend to leave the diplomacy to the Foreign Ministry.

Intelligence cooperation or intelligence diplomacy – call it what you will but at its essence is about how the intelligence and protective security guidance, which we and our partners produce, can be shared more widely for the mutual benefit of New Zealand and other countries in our region.

When we do our jobs right, we contribute to the safety and security of all. That’s why our people come to work each day – it’s that mission I discussed - to keep New Zealand safe and secure but also to make a contribution towards an open, stable and resilient Pacific region.

I recently saw intelligence diplomacy described by a former senior Australian foreign affairs official as the use of intelligence actors and relationships to conduct, or substantially facilitate diplomatic relations.

That same former official was even more succinct and said it’s about "doing good deeds quietly."[1]

I think that just about sums up how we like to go about our work at the NZSIS.

Five Eyes intelligence cooperation

Before I talk further about our work with our Pacific partners, I’ll touch briefly on the most long-standing and impactful intelligence sharing partnership in our history - the close relationship with our Five Eyes partners.

It is a relationship that has persisted through multiple changes of administrations across each of the member countries

Each Five Eyes member operates in accordance with its own independent foreign policy and its own legislative settings and authorising frameworks. But it is also a high trust arrangement based on a long history of working together where our interests align and for our mutual benefit.

The sharing of Five Eyes intelligence insights has, without a doubt, enhanced the safety and security of New Zealand. Intelligence we receive from partners is frequently leveraged to improve the security and resilience of New Zealand, including to help protect information, assets and people.  At the same time, New Zealand also makes a unique and highly valued contribution to the partnership.

I regard the Five Eyes relationship as intelligence cooperation in the purest form.  But in the current global environment our partners, like us, have been expanding their own use of intelligence cooperation or intelligence diplomacy in new ways.  One of the most prominent recent examples of this has been in the build-up to and during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

There is a saying that the first casualty when war comes is truth, and for the people of Russia this has sadly been the case. Moscow attempted to fabricate stories about attacks on ethnic Russians in the Donbas, and the presence of Western bio labs on Ukrainian territory. Russia used disinformation to vigorously promote its rationale for its illegal and unprovoked invasion and its distorted view of how the conflict is progressing.

During the early stages of the conflict, when I was Director-General at the GCSB, that agency was a key conduit of partner intelligence. Thousands of intelligence reports on the Russia-Ukraine crisis were being provided to New Zealand government customers through our shared Intelligence Customer Centre.

Often within hours this intelligence would be declassified by partners and made public – something that at the time, I had not seen before. Indeed, I recall heading to the Beehive to urgently brief Ministers on the latest classified intelligence about Russia’s plans and then hearing that same information on the radio the next morning.

The CIA Director at the time said that sharing accurate and precise insights and information in this way helped cement the solidarity of the global effort in support of Ukraine. Sharing intelligence outside of classified channels can never be taken lightly, given the importance of protecting sources and methods, but in this case it brought crucial transparency at an important time.

Using such tactics reflects the need for new thinking and new ways of operating in this demanding era for intelligence.

Supporting resilience of Pacific partners

As I mentioned earlier, strategic competition is not just affecting the threat environment in New Zealand, countries across the Pacific are arguably feeling it far more intensely.

The 2018 Pacific Islands Forum's Boe Declaration makes plain the array of national security concerns affecting Pacific countries. Strategic competition is far from the top of their list. When I speak with our Pacific counterparts, they often say their greatest concerns are with the future of their existence due to climate change, economic security, and transnational crime. 

Even so, supporting a secure, stable and prosperous Pacific region has been an enduring intelligence priority for successive New Zealand Governments. Indeed, Pacific resilience and security is publicly listed as a National Security Intelligence priority on the DPMC website.

Our agencies' efforts in the region help to inform New Zealand and increasingly, Pacific decision-makers, on how strategic competition is playing out.

The PRC’s ambition is to link economic and security cooperation, create competing regional architectures, and expand its influence with Pacific Island countries across policing, defence, digital, disaster relief, and maritime spheres. With regard to strategic infrastructure, we have spoken out on the risks associated with ground-based space infrastructure in particular.

It is our role to watch out for signs of security posturing, and with other relevant agencies ensure the New Zealand Government is well informed about what is happening.

We think it’s important to ensure our Pacific partners are aware of the risks too. We have been open with them about the challenging situations we have faced with regard to foreign interference and espionage in New Zealand and are comfortable sharing any lessons learned. We have also been working on ways that we can provide intelligence to Pacific partners that they may find useful. Access to a wider set of information can support more informed decision-making on issues of national or regional significance.

Such intelligence when coupled with best practice protective security advice helps our Pacific partners make their own decisions on how to build resilience. Examples of resilience building could be correcting loopholes in law, understanding the background to investment applications and adopting protective security measures designed to make nations harder targets for threatening activity.

Working with the Cook Islands

We have worked with a number of states around our Protective Security Requirements framework. Over the past few years, we were proud to collaborate with our Cook Islands partners to help them develop their own PSR. Our work together created a foundation for them to progress their own framework which, over time, will establish a system for classifying sensitive documents and protecting their information and assets.

In addition to supporting the Cook Islands with protective security, we have also shared classified intelligence with them on foreign interference and espionage risks. This was the purpose of my recent visit to the Cook Islands, which has been referred to in the media. It’s important that my agency is able to share insights we have on evolving and shared security challenges. With the Cook Islands is developing deeper relationships with other parties, this will necessitate an even stronger focus from my agency on national security risks.

Outside of the Cook Islands, we were pleased to provide intelligence support at last year’s CHOGM in Samoa and Pacific Island Forum in Tonga. Joint training and information exchange sessions with a range of Pacific partners are becoming more common. I regularly discuss intelligence and security matters with Pacific leaders face-to-face when I am in the region and also when they pass through New Zealand, including with the PM of Niue just this week. This kind of dialogue is important but should also come as no surprise.

I think these are examples of cooperation which show how the NZSIS is uniquely placed to leverage both our protective security and foreign intelligence mandates. The strong historical, cultural and people-to-people connections New Zealanders have with the region is also key.

At the end of the day, we want Pacific partners to feel like our partnerships are enhancing national security with them, not for them.

This is not a one-way flow of information either. Intelligence received from Pacific partners is consistently key to filling missing pieces of the intelligence puzzle about what is happening in the region.

Making intelligence insights more broadly available

It’s not just through sharing with decision-makers in other governments that intelligence can make an impact, there’s a much broader domestic audience here in New Zealand for whom our insights can help make a difference.

As I’ve said, the NZSIS is committed and geared towards detecting foreign interference and espionage activities, as well as violent extremism and terrorism. We are keen to involve a broad range of New Zealanders in the conversation on what to watch out for and how to be harder targets for such activity.

Key to managing these threats is intelligence and security agencies, such as my own, working with the private sector, academia, local government and our diverse communities. Such partnerships can probably be considered as an extension of the principles of intelligence cooperation.

As I have already touched on, there is a suite of products we have created at an unclassified level designed to raise awareness of the threat environment and to provide advice on managing risk.

A real game changer for us has been the production of an annual public threat assessment on the nature of violent extremism, terrorism, foreign interference and espionage in New Zealand. These assessments have made it considerably easier for us to tell our story as an agency and to show the threats we face are real and affect a broad range of New Zealanders.

I think an increasing focus of our work over the coming years will be finding ways our intelligence insights can be leveraged even more widely to deliver impact.

Concluding remarks

I thought I would conclude my talk by reflecting on the impact we can make by just talking about this topic.

The very fact of my standing in front of you today talking about intelligence cooperation could be considered an example of it. When I put this speech up online, which is my practice, it will likely be noticed, and perhaps dissected, by people from other governments, and I’m very comfortable with that.

Similarly, raising awareness of the foreign interference that happens here, and calling out activity carried out by particular states can shine a spotlight that can act as a deterrence. We need to have a level of understanding about foreign interference in this country where New Zealanders can confidently identify and call out such activity, and where those targeted know they shouldn’t have to put up with foreign interference in an open democracy like ours.

Look out for more examples of "calling-out" foreign interference in the future too. We will act when the nature of the threat necessitates a response.

These are more examples of how the sharing of intelligence insights with a broader audience can be an effective tool for managing and mitigating risk.

Call it what you want: intelligence cooperation or intelligence diplomacy or even simply sharing, but whichever term we use, the aim is to make sure our insights have an impact.

We will continue to do good deeds quietly, but increasingly you will see our intelligence agencies not afraid to make a bit more noise.

Thank you very much for your attention.

Ngā mihi nui.