by Matt Hammond
The President merely smiled his urbane, indulgent smile. He could always rely on Paddy McCluskey not to mince his words.
“Senator McCluskey, gentlemen, let me reassure you …. let me reassure every single person in this room this morning that what I am proposing will be for the benefit of not only the economies of both New Zealand and the United Sates, but for the greater good of the whole world. Let me further reassure you that not a single shot will be fired, not one uniformed American serviceman will land in New Zealand during the course of this operation as part of any invasion force either overtly or covertly, and not one New Zealander will even have the slightest suspicion that his country’s good fortune in securing a multi-billion dollar deal to supply what they will believe to be a home-grown technological breakthrough was actually instigated, controlled and manipulated by us in the first place, and will continue to be so throughout the lifetime of the fuel production program.”
The President aimed his smile around the room once again. Paddy McCluskey nodded and smiled back. He had been placated. “Gentlemen, I have another pressing engagement. I shall leave you in the capable hands of our esteemed colleague.” With that, the door behind him opened, the committee stood once more, and he was gone.
Elmerstein got straight to the point, as usual. “Our intention is to infiltrate the economic and political system of New Zealand at every level, using perfectly ordinary members of the public. As the President has already said, there will be no military intervention and minimal use of professional intelligence staff. Within five years, people sympathetic to our intentions will own or control the means by which the fuel can be produced, and through both overt and subliminal persuasion, we will be pumping bio-fuel across the Pacific and into California within twelve years.”
“We’re gonna run a pipeline across the Pacific?”
“Absolutely. It’s perfectly possible from an engineering point of view. It’s also safer and cheaper than using tankers and allows us full control in terms of supply. No more shortages caused by political unrest, weather, mechanical failure, terrorism or maintenance downtime.”
A number of senators were scribbling notes, and whispered discussions were taking place at a number of points around the table.
“How do we fund this?”
“How are we gonna get these New Zealanders to agree to all this?”
“How do we know this fuel works?”
“Fuel from milk? Never heard of it!”
“Who is the President of New Zealand anyway?”
The questions grew into an excited cacophony. Elmerstein took this as subdued enthusiasm. He had them. “Gentlemen, gentlemen, all in good time. I will be making an appointment to see each and every one of you separately over the course of the next few weeks to discuss your department’s role in more detail, but the key thing at this stage is that you know only what role your own staff will be playing. Let me just say this to you. The key to the success of this whole plan is that there is no plan. The theory model indicates each Department must work in isolation, only implementing its assigned tasks. In this way, there remains a natural fluidity, an evolution if you will. Things seep out. A minor act by one Department will have an effect in another which may influence someone in, say Illinois, or Japan, or Germany, hopefully a great many people. But these people will not recognize the source or even the influence itself.”
Elmerstein began to encircle the table. He was in his element. “Let me give you an example. You will all be aware that I was involved in many of the decisions made around our space program in the seventies and eighties. Who can remember our original Strategic Defense Initiative announced by President Reagan in 1983?”
The sudden direct question startled the assembled politicians and there were a few mumbles and nods.
Senator Duggan spoke for them. “You mean the star wars program Elm?”
“No, Star Wars was a movie about a galaxy far, far away. But it’s what SDI became known as, right? But does anyone remember how? Who in this room thinks we can trace the origins of the nickname of our multi-billion dollar sub-orbital missile system back to one man? And I don’t mean George Lucas. Well, we can. Because the term was coined by a Doctor Bowman who worked on the project from 1977 until it was made public by the President in 1983. Bowman realized that such a controversial plan would need to capture the American public’s imagination in order to receive its unquestioning backing, so he decided that we should borrow from the most popular movie franchise at the time, capture the youth of America. And we did.”
Elmerstein paused and leaned over the table, placing his large craggy palms face down on the burnished maple. He shot a dramatic glance, catching the gaze of every man as his eyes swept the room. “Why was the first space shuttle called 'Enterprise'? I’ll tell you why. Popular myth has it that it was due to a public campaign to persuade NASA to begin a dynasty of spaceships that would carry the name hundreds of years into the future, blurring fact with television fiction. To boldly go where no man has gone before etc etc. A romantic notion, which again captured the imagination of a public actually pretty bored with space travel at that time. So it was decided to call the first Space Transportation Craft 'Enterprise'. The public thought they had influenced the choice of name and it became their spacecraft. Anyway, gentlemen, I digress. Nowadays the corporate guys have gotten hold of the idea, and the technique they are using is termed, I believe, 'viral marketing'. It’s just starting to be looked at as a serious marketing tool in the commercial world but we believe we can also use it to good effect.”
‘Vile what?”
“Viral marketing, taking a pre-existing social network, say a group of kids the same age, or members of a particular profession, and manipulating them to create what is known in the commercial consumerist world as brand awareness. So an example might be, say kids in a school yard talking about a new T.V. show, and the next week more kids tune in. It’s a word of mouth thing.”
“And this is gonna help us invade New Zealand? We’re gonna do it by word of mouth?”
Senator Elmerstein could not resist a smile at how his own over-simplification had been taken so literally. “Yes, well kind of. Over the next few years, we need to make sure we are those kids in the school yard, sowing the seeds, nurturing the dreams and aspirations of thousands of people, shaping their perceptions, allowing us to control, as much as we are able, the kind of men and women who we need to be in New Zealand in the next ten years. But I have said enough already. The key to our success is that you each in turn put in place the strategies I will outline to you individually over the coming weeks. I know you have many questions, and I will try to answer them all, but I will do so face-to-face, one-on-one, at the proper time.” Senator Elmerstein raised himself from the table slowly, as if to emphasize that the gravity of the proposal was actually weighing him down. “Thank you for your time, gentlemen. This meeting is now closed and the detail will, of course remain confidential and un-minuted as necessity dictates. God bless America.”
Over the next few weeks during July and August of 1997, Senator Elmerstein visited each of the Chairs of the twenty one standing Senate Committees. To each man he gave a dossier and a two hour explanation of what was expected of his Department over the next eighteen months to two years. After that time there would be an update meeting where progress so far, and the next steps forward, would be discussed.
The dossier each Senate Chair received contained a summary of the meeting which had taken place at the Whitehouse a few weeks before. It highlighted the United States’ huge appetite for energy, and forecast the likelihood of dwindling world oil reserves within forty years.
It pointed out some startling facts relating to the Military’s energy consumption to emphasise America’s insatiable thirst for oil. It was noted that in 25 minutes an F-15 fighter jet burned 625 gallons of fuel, more than an average motorist used in a year. An aircraft carrier used that much in 7 minutes. In 1989, the US Military had consumed about 200 million barrels
of oil, enough to run the entire US urban mass transit system for 14 years.
There was a page devoted to a draft speech the President intended to make to the United Nations Convention on Climate Change in Kyoto in December that had been written shortly after the Senate had voted that the United States should not be a signatory to what was to become known as the Kyoto Protocol on the basis that it contained no binding targets or timetable for either developing or developed nations. In the speech, the President called for all countries to work together to develop existing and new technologies which would rid the planet of its addiction to oil.
The President would propose international co-operation on the construction of a vast North Atlantic wave farm, an array of wave energy converters stretching over 500 square miles, 70 miles off the North West coast of Scotland. The harnessed energy, it had been calculated, could supply enough power for the five biggest cities in Western Europe or, more importantly, the major cities of the US eastern seaboard.
He proposed international funding for what he had personally christened the Felin Project, an ambitious plan to construct a ring of solar panels around the equator - passing through jungles, deserts and across the oceans - to harness the unlimited power of the sun at that latitude. Cables radiating out from the belt north and south would carry the converted power, supplying an estimated five per cent of the world’s electricity. The final suggestion was the conversion of vast tracts of agricultural land into fuel production farms, growing grasses or fast growing trees which could be converted to fuel. The stumbling block, of course, being this would mean using land currently in food production.
But the speech was never made. The Senate Committee Chairmen, one by one, realized that the President was actually blackmailing them. He was preparing to offer American technology, scientific knowledge and financial resources to the world for free unless they backed his plan, the one technology not mentioned in the speech - bovine caseinate additive.
They read on. Sections specific to their own committee’s terms of reference had been placed in individual dossiers. There were paragraphs relating to military and trade relations with New Zealand and policy suggestions over the next ten years designed to keep relations between the two countries cool, at least at a political level.
In the dossier handed to the Chair of the Senate Committee for Agriculture Nutrition and Forestry was a specific section on the President’s recommendation that an agreement be reached to allocate funds for research into the possibility of using crop-related technology to produce bio-fuel. That was all, no budget allocation, no further clues as to which university or private company was currently engaged in research into such a thing. In this way the agenda remained completely hidden. The individual seeds planted into each committee would be nurtured by its respective chairman until slowly, over a number of years, the tree would grow almost unnoticed, spreading its branches into every facet of American politics, business and beyond.
Alex Weisner, the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, was, as he had anticipated, handed a particularly weighty dossier. He speed-read the summary of the meeting with the President fifteen days earlier and was keen, excited almost, to learn what had been delegated to his team. He was therefore somewhat taken aback when he opened the dossier to read the first heading.
Identifying nurturing and encouraging investment by companies and individuals expressing an interest in developing motion picture opportunities in New Zealand.
Senator Weisner could not think of a single film or TV show he had ever seen that originated from that small country. He was expecting to be dealing with political, even military, influence. How was encouraging Hollywood to make some kind of film in New Zealand going to encourage people to want to go and live there? Weisner sighed. This was going to be even harder than he expected. The title of the following chapter, however, whetted his politician’s appetite:
Maintaining the diplomatic and economic status quo whilst ensuring there is no Free Trade Agreement between the US and NZ until 2015 and beyond.
Now that was more his sphere of interest and influence.
And so, in the late summer of 1997, the seeds were sown. All the Administration had to do now was to wait patiently. No one would even be able to detect the germination phase; that took place out of sight; subtle, unnoticeable. Eventually a combination of apparently unrelated factors would come together to create the environment for the next phase of the program to take its course. No-one was directly controlling what was happening since no one person or group could be seen to be influencing the decisions that were being made as a result of that initial secret meeting in July 1997.
For the experiment and the migration manipulation policy to work, it had to be left to take its own course.
Chapter 6
David and Katherine Turner pulled away from the hotel and headed down the street. After five minutes they realised they were heading into the city, not away from it. “We need to be going south. Are we going in the right direction, David? Pull over there.” Katherine was pointing to a small car park. “Let’s get our bearings and work out a proper route.”
David remembered being told about maps in the glove box. “Look at this lot. This is a bit generous.” There was clearly more than the usual basic tourist information. There were detailed maps of both islands as well as a plain white envelope marked 'Private and Confidential'.
Katherine handed it to him. “This must be your Mission Impossible tape, Tom.”
David hesitated before taking it. “Do you think I should read what’s in it?”
“I don’t see the harm in reading something, do you? Have a look while I work out these mobile phones.”
David was hoping it contained some answers. He felt he had earned the right to at least some of the detail, if that was what the envelope contained. He read it to himself.
The world’s supply of oil is running out. Experts predict that within one hundred years all projected reserves will have been extracted. The industrialised world in which we now live will slip back to the dark ages within ten years. It is anticipated that before this happens the major economic powers will have already taken steps to secure the remaining stocks of oil, and that this scramble for the last reserves will result in catastrophic global conflict This scenario has been recognised by the major economic powers for some years and they have all been working towards a solution. The United States favours pursuing alternative forms of energy, coupled with a decentralisation of primary industries. This policy is not favoured by America’s allies, since it could involve the covert strategic integration of a number of territories into a situation where they are under the direct governance of the United States.
“What does it say?”
“I’m not sure yet, but it’s to do with oil. Let me finish.”
For the past thirty years, successive American Governments have pursued a policy designed to covertly destabilise a number of ostensibly allied countries. The most successful example of this was Ireland throughout the seventies and eighties where they actively invested in the Republic whilst funding, through third parties, a paramilitary civil war in the north. In that situation, the economic investment was seen as positive for the region. Consequently Ireland became the ‘green dragon’ economy of Europe. In fact the Americans succeeded in reducing their own domestic energy bill by a few billion dollars by successfully transferring some manufacturing industries to another sovereign state. The saving made has been used to fund the next stage of their plan.
“Apparently the Americans invaded Ireland in the seventies and no one noticed.”
America still needs to satisfy its huge thirst for oil and a number of oil companies have developed successful alternative energy sources based on ethanol. These discoveries are not secret and there have long been rumours of inventors being paid off in order to keep the price of crude oil high. But already ethanol is a widely used additive in petrol and there are currently under development a number of advance prototype
cars, ships and planes capable of running on these new fuels. But the stumbling block is getting enough of the fuel. Unlike oil, ethanol cannot just be extracted; it has to be man–made. There are two primary sources of raw material, forestry - ethanol from wood pulp - and dairy, ethanol as a by–product of whey.
“Hey, guess what? This is all about cows and trees!”
These two primary sources are also the primary industries of New Zealand, and this is no coincidence. There is growing evidence to suggest that over the last few years, American business, with the support of its own government, has been investing huge sums of money into New Zealand, purchasing vast tracts of land, together with the businesses which currently occupy it. During this time, the US Government has deliberately cultivated and nurtured a cool diplomatic relationship with New Zealand, aided, unwittingly, by the New Zealand Government itself and its staunch anti–nuclear policy. Ironically it is this very stance against one kind of fuel which is allowing the United States to launch a stealth invasion to cultivate its own source of fuel.
Katherine interrupted. “Have you finished that yet? Here, I’ve set your mobile up for you. Just keep it plugged into the car to charge the battery for a few hours.”
David glanced over what he had just read once more, noting the frequency of the word 'government'. The paper was marked at the bottom, 'Summary of report to be presented to Cabinet by Professor Patrick O’Sullivan University of Otago. Page 1 of 15'.