Wellington economist Brian Easton has written extensively about the life of Dr Bill Sutch, the senior public servant who was tried and acquitted in 1975 of passing information to a Soviet KGB agent. As I wrote yesterday, the affair is in the news again with the release of various Security Intelligence Service files on it.
Brian Easton’s writing has never been without a sense of humour, but this gem, about the dark, wet night that Sutch met the spy Razgovorov near the old public toilet in the park at the corner of Holloway Rd and Aro street, is wickedly priceless:
Some of the events involving the arrest had a keystone cops aura. For instance while Sutch presented himself as a fastidious man, but do not forget his tramping background. So instead of availing himself of the nearby public lavatory, he used the bushes. Had he been more delicate, he would have entered a building in which a number of policemen were secreted, presumably pretending to be the Holloway Road Gay Club. Instead, some poor cop had to search through the nitrogenated bushes in case Sutch had put something else there.
You can read the entire article here.
In another article, Brian Easton speculates why Sutch met the KGB agent:
To make it clear, Sutch was meeting Razgovorov, and one cannot rule out that he was intending to pass “information” which seems most likely to have been his commentary of material in the public domain – say opinions about politicians. What Sutch thought he was doing this for, what Razgovorov was doing, I do not know. I think Sutch was foolish. There may be some credibility to the theory that towards the end of his life his judgement was poor, a view supported that his autopsy showed some atheroma of the brain.
In the same article, titled Trying to Understand Dr Sutch, Brian Easton looks at Sutch’s family roots in the Methodist Church and his interest in Fabianism to try to learn what motivated him, concluding that Methodism was more important to Sutch than Marx, assuming Sutch ever read Marx. It is a topical and fascinating read.
