9 September 2026
E ngā mana, e ngā reo, e ngā Rangatira mā
Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa
My mum never got to meet her cousin Pilot Officer Neil Couper. He was killed in action on 20th September 1944 as part of Operation Market Garden, the day after mum was born. He was 21.
Why am I telling you this when you’re probably expecting me to discuss intelligence?
I will come to intelligence shortly, but first, I want to explain why I do my job. My family connections with the RNZAF are central to that story. It also emphasises the deep connection that exists between the NZDF and the New Zealand Intelligence Community.
So back to Pilot Officer Neil Couper.
Like me, Neil came off a family farm in the South Island, he was from Oamaru and I’m from Ashburton. He enlisted in July 1942. After flight training in Taieri, then Canada and the United Kingdom, he carried out his first bombing raid over France on 18 February 1944, in a Whitley. He then transferred to 295 Squadron, who flew converted Stirling heavy bombers and specialised in supply dropping operations.
Having already completed three supply drops that month, he and his crew took off on 20th September bound for Arnhem to resupply the 1st Airborne Division. They were in a desperate and ultimately futile battle to hold the town’s famous bridge, the Bridge Too Far.
On approach to the drop zone, the aircraft came under intense anti-aircraft fire, resulting in heavy damage. Despite this, the crew was able to conduct the supply drop as the plane filled with smoke. After the drop, the aircraft was hit again several times as it turned for home and was set on fire. Neil ordered everyone to bail out, both the flight crew and the two army dispatchers. Flight Sergeant Ken Nolan, an Australian wireless operator, was the last crew member who managed to escape the burning aircraft. According to Ken, he helped Neil with his parachute, who gave him the thumbs up as he fought to hold the plane steady. But just after Ken bailed out, the aircraft exploded with my mum’s cousin still on board. The Stirling crashed at 1520 local time near the villages of Druten and Boven-Leeuwen.
A few years ago, when I was the DG, GCSB, I was in the Netherlands for meetings and made it my mission on a free morning to visit Neil. He had no descendants and Mum and I were unaware of any other members of the extended family having made the journey. When our Dutch partner agency heard about my plan, they very generously made available a Special Forces officer, who had served alongside New Zealanders in Afghanistan, and his driver to accompany me. With their help, I found Neil in the Commonwealth War Graves section of a Catholic church yard in the little village of Puiflijk.
There he was, alongside three young Brit soldiers who were killed in the area in the final few months of the war, and a Dutch Sergeant who died in Afghanistan in December 2008.
As I was coming to terms with connecting with my brave ancestor, my new Special Forces friend realised that he had commanded the young Dutch Sergeant in the firefight where he had been killed. Now each year on the anniversary of Holland being liberated, he and his family visit that little churchyard to put a poppy on those two graves. Sometimes he sends me a photo.
Pilot Officer, Athol Addison, my dad’s uncle, did come back from war, unlike the 1,850 New Zealanders who were killed in action while serving with Bomber Command. The survival rate was no better than two to one.
Athol was also off a farm, but he was a North Islander from the Bay of Plenty. He was called up for service in 1941 and met Aunty Lill, my grandma’s sister, when he was training on the Tiger Moths in Mid Canterbury. You can still his class photo on the wall of the Ashburton Aviation Museum.
Like Neil, Athol had further training in Canada and then the UK before joining 166 Squadron in late 1944, flying Avro Lancasters. His first operation was 18 April 1945, just three weeks before the end of the war in Europe. The target was Heligoland, a heavily fortified German island in the North Sea. The 166 Squadron took part in several other tactical raids before switching to urgent food drops to starving civilians in the Netherlands – once again an example of that intertwining of countries and people that occurs in wartime. Its final mission involved repatriating Allied prisoners of war from Europe back to the UK.
Uncle Athol was promoted to Flight Officer and then demobilised in December 1945. My Grandad met him at the wharf in Lyttleton, he married Aunty Lill in 1946 and they were off to Ohope, where he farmed dairy cows, got involved in community service and in later life fished and made rustic pottery. He passed away in 2002, aged 82.
I remember when I was about 10 proudly sending him a photo of me holding an Airfix 1:72 scale Lancaster that I had made, and another time a painting I’d done for school of him and his Squadron flying over Germany, under attack from Messerschmitts. Among my most prized possessions, although I thought they were lost for three decades, is an 11-page letter he wrote to me about the technical specifications of the Lancaster and a Box Brownie photo from his cockpit of other 166 Squadron aircraft on operations.
Athol was always happy to talk about his great love of flying and the technical stuff. But once when I asked him about actual raids he took part in, he said “we really only flew diversions to fool the Germans”, something which doesn’t really line-up with 166 Squadron’s operational records for those last intensive weeks of the bombing offensive. But nor do I judge him for shielding a kid from the horrors of war. He would have been mindful of the consequences for those who were on the ground where the bombs fell or, possibly was suffering from his own survivor guilt for making it back home when so many of his peers did not.
My son is an excellent scale modeler – much better than his Dad ever was. He has built 1:72 scale replicas of Neil’s Sterling and Athol’s Lancaster, right down to the exact serial numbers.
Neil and Athol, along with my other relations who served, and in some cases, perished, at Gallipoli, Messines Ridge, Tobruk and Cassino, drove an interest for me in the two World Wars. Not in a glorifying way, but in order to understand what caused these conflicts, their enduring impacts and what war meant to those who fought. This led to a broader interest and ultimately study in history, politics and international relations. I wanted to understand those big events and forces that have shaped our country and our place in the world.
After spending the first two decades of my public service career in Crown-Māori relations, courts administration and various public sector change leadership roles, I have worked for the last 11 years in the New Zealand Intelligence Community, focused on protecting and promoting our national interest in an increasingly contested and volatile world.
The relationship that exists between NZDF and the two intelligence agencies that I have had the privilege of leading is rooted in history and is enduring. This is a multifaceted relationship that’s mutually beneficial, and most importantly, is fundamental to our country’s national security. NZDF assists with vital intelligence collection in accordance with our respective legislative authorities. We in turn provide a spectrum of support to military operations including providing staff who have been deployed overseas. You are customers of our services, including classified intelligence, cyber security, protective security and security clearance vetting, as well as being a key customer of the Top-Secret Network run by GCSB. And, of course, we work closely on staff training and capability development.
Having uniformed and former NZDF personnel as a constant presence in our locations is a great source of pride and reassurance to me, as I’m sure the large number of young NZIC staff wearing hoodies in your locations is for NZDF!
During today’s earlier session, we talked at a Classified level about the range and nature of the national security threats facing New Zealand and the wider Pacific region. These threats include violent extremism and terrorism, espionage and foreign interference, witting and unwitting insiders, and covert attempts by state actors to access or establish dual military/ civilian use technology. These threats are being driven or amplified by heightened geo‑political competition and uncertainty; increased polarisation and the normalisation of extremist rhetoric, both online and in the real world; and the impact of rapid technology change especially Generative AI.
Another feature of the current global context is armed conflict, including in Ukraine, Gaza, Iran and Sudan. New Zealand experiences the downstream consequences of these conflicts through our cost of living and in the hate that is often directed at people here who have connections or perceived connections to these conflicts. But we also see states increasingly willing to use grey zone or hybrid warfare tactics – the blending of conventional and non-conventional tactics to aggressively achieve a state’s strategic objectives while keeping below the threshold of armed conflict. This includes: cyber-attacks; dis-and-misinformation campaigns; the use of proxies including criminal groups; and, potentially, maritime blockades.
All of us here this evening, as intelligence professionals have a vital role to play in collecting, assessing, reporting and disseminating classified and open-source intelligence. In doing so, we support New Zealand decision makers, both civilian and military, to respond to this very challenging threat environment.
Intelligence has a key role in understanding an adversary’s intent and capabilities, providing early forewarning and helping to avoid strategic surprise or miscalculation. We as intelligence professionals not only help to protect what is most important to New Zealand and New Zealanders, but we can also help to avoid tensions, disputes or misunderstandings between states escalating to armed conflict.
However, there have been, and will continue to be, times when the New Zealand Government deems it to be in our national interest to deploy NZDF personnel to conflict zones. The most important function you as military intelligence professionals will perform, often supported by staff from the GCSB or NZSIS, is the provision intelligence to protect New Zealand soldiers, sailors and airmen and women who are put in harm’s way.
The final point I will make this evening is that the current threat environment New Zealand and our region is facing requires an all-of-society response. As capable as our organisations are, national security is not something that can just be left to us. As I’ve said many times, the New Zealand Intelligence Community is not all seeing and all knowing, and of course we should not be in a democracy like ours.
Our agencies, like NZDF, have unique technical capabilities; vital international partnerships, including with the Five Eyes; legal authorities that enable us to undertake activities others aren’t allowed to do; and most importantly, well trained and incredibly committed staff.
We do everything we can to monitor known threat actors and discover those we don’t know about. But whether it’s violent extremism, foreign interference and espionage, or potentially harmful insiders, the fact is that communities, businesses and individuals will experience these threats in different ways, and are as likely to see concerning activities and behaviours as our agencies are.
A big part of our job as intelligence professionals is therefore to share information in accessible ways with the public to raise awareness about those threats and the concerning activities to look out for. That’s why NZSIS’s annual Threat Environment Report, the fourth one of which was released last month, is such a big deal for us. We also need to assure our diverse communities that if they are seeing or experiencing foreign interference or violent extremism, this it is unacceptable in our liberal democracy, and that when they report concerns to NZSIS or the Police they will be taken seriously.
A whole-of-society approach to national security also requires us as intelligence professionals to provide practical and accessible advice to different sectors of society about how they can make themselves more resistant to those threats, to make themselves and society as a whole harder targets. Examples of this include our guidance to elected representatives on overseas travel and countering foreign interference; advice to the tech sector on protecting their innovation from espionage; and the publication of observable signs of someone who may be radicalising towards violent extremism.
A recent NZIC product is our Tiaki Pākihi Māori protective security advice for Māori entities, which developed in partnership with Māori security specialists. Another is guidance issued with our Five Eyes partners warning about PRC Military Intelligence using professional networking sites to covertly recruit people with access to sensitive information, including military personnel.
We are taking the same approach to the Pacific, which is of course experiencing heightened geo-political competition, compounded by the effects of climate change, transnational organised crime and the fuel crisis. Recently we’ve been working with Pacific partners to counter covert attempts by foreign interference actors to establish ground-based space infrastructure along with other foreign interference and espionage activities in their countries. This complements the excellent regional assistance that NZDF provides.
The Swedes have an all-of-society approach to national security called Total Defence. Representatives from the Swedish military have been in New Zealand recently running tabletop exercises with government and civil society. Some of you may have been involved.
Total Defence involves a comprehensive national strategy that integrates military and civil preparedness. It’s built on the premise that the active participation of the entire society is needed to protect Sweden’s population and its sovereignty.
Sweden’s threat environment looks a lot different to ours. For starters, we don’t have Russia on the front doorstep like they do. However, I think, New Zealand is at the beginning of adopting a similar approach, but more organically.
We are promoting the idea that all New Zealanders have a role to play in protecting our national security. I’ve learned from my public engagement over the past 4 or 5 years that there are plenty of New Zealanders who see themselves as capable of making a contribution. Our job is to continue to expand our thinking about who else can help, what can they do, and to make sure they always understand the why – why we need their help.
If my Mum’s cousin Neil was around today as a farmer in Oamaru, we might not be calling on him to fly a resupply plane into a combat zone, instead these days, a valid question we could be asking him is how he could contribute to community resilience in North Otago. That might be through knowing and understanding the signs of violent extremism or foreign interference, deploying good cyber hygiene, or even how would he support his community to be resilient in the event of a natural disaster or climate event.
In any case, it’s always about making a contribution and knowing that partnership is about working both with and for others.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you this evening.
Ngā mihi nui kia a koutou.
Nō reira, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa.