If they ever make a movie out of this GCSB saga, I reckon Geoffrey Rush would make a good Wolfensohn.
OK, this is going to be the last post where I'll take the piss out of this old overclocked spymaster, but there had to be some interesting way to open yet another post on this whole enchilada.
I'm wary that you, dear readers, might be tiring of the monomaniacal subject repetition about cloak and daggers, smoke and mirrors, and more lies than an Erebus Inquiry. Hence the alternation between satire and serious posts.
The Kitteridge report has been mysteriously leaked. Papers like that aren't usually left lying around on street corners, and the Sutch toilet on Aro St isn't so much as a pot to piss in these days.
The report has been dug through by better hounds than me. The department seems to function (or rather, dysfunction) in a parallel universe where Rod Deane hadn't taken a chainsaw to the Public Service
Manual back in the 1980's.
The smell of the security services mentioned within pinged an old memory of the time I went to Government House for a job interview. This was well before the extravagant refit. It looked like a 1960's Bond set, clunky phones and all. Or was it Callan? (I didn't get the job.)
Wolfensohn seems to have acted as Jack-of-all-trades for the GCSB over a period of many years, covering every job description from legal advisor and office manager, through to spymaster, tea lady and, most recently, scapegoat. If he's the spook lawyering up, it would certainly make Thatcher's Spycatcher saga look like a doddle.
It has been illuminating to see so many timelines in the media, one of the more tactfully used being John Campbell's respectful cross-examination of State Sevices Commissioner Iain Rennie.
It appears that the GCSB was leaderless at the time of the Dotcom raid. Chains of command don't work that way. Not the ones I know about, anyway. Leadership always falls upwards.
Which ever way you look at it, the buck ultimately stops with John Key. It may be time for Monkey to come down off his cloud.
