We all like to know what others are up to, and ask why. Without such inquisitiveness we wouldn’t be half as intelligent as we are, and human knowledge would be a far cry from what it is.
Sometimes, though, this drive for information goes too far.
Gossiping is the negative and often destructive practice of those who enjoy finding out about others’ misfortunes and take delight in spreading them around.
And then there is state-sponsored nosiness, snooping and meddling through what is often said to be the world’s second-oldest profession — espionage.
After all, knowledge of what your friends and enemies are up to equals power.
Fifty years ago tomorrow evening, one of the strangest events to play out in Cold War New Zealand took place in an unassuming neighbourhood in inner-city Wellington.
It was just a few weeks after the death of Labour prime minister Norman Kirk, in a year when the country had revelled in the Christchurch Commonwealth Games, 10,000 people had marched on Parliament in an anti-abortion protest, and National Party leader Robert Muldoon was told by his own party to tone it down if they wanted to win in 1975.
A Tegel size 6 chicken was $1.89 and a roll of Purex toilet paper was just 12c at Four Square.
That evening economist and retired public servant Dr Bill Sutch walked from his office in downtown Wellington to meet a KGB officer in a small war memorial reserve in the Aro Valley. He had been under the surveillance of the SIS since he was first spotted meeting Dimitri Razgovorov, from the Soviet Embassy, five months’ earlier outside the Karori Bowling Club.
The SIS never found out exactly what Dr Sutch passed on to the KGB that night half a century ago, though it may have been lists of other high-profile New Zealanders who could have been useful contacts for the Soviets. Mr Razgovorov handed on the package to his driver, who then took it back to the embassy.
The enigmatic Dr Sutch died a year and a day after his arrest. Any expectations or hopes that the case might die with him, however, were quickly dispelled. While his family and supporters still think he was innocent and merely helping Mr Razgovorov defect, many others believe the evidence he was a spy is incontrovertible.
The original Cold War may have come and gone in the decades since, but it’s worth pausing to reconsider the fallacy that we are so far away from the rest of the world we are immune to its power games.
We have had our share of infiltration since the Sutch affair. Who can forget the French Secret Service spies Alain Mafart and Dominique Prieur, who blew up the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour in 1985?
Then, 20 years ago, we were shocked again when Mossad agents from Israel were convicted of using fraudulent New Zealand passports for their shady dealings.
Both instances led to formal apologies from the two governments. But while many have forgiven those events, we should never forget them.
If those were the actions of nations we might classify as friendly, imagine what damage espionage from a hostile country might wreak?
There are various reasons people become spies. Some are motivated by naive notions of improving the world, others are turned through blackmail or just want to do it for the money and excitement.
But as John le Carre’s Alec Leamas says in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, they can be "a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too ... people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives".
The Soviets in Dr Sutch’s day clearly saw New Zealand as an easy way into the Western intelligence world.
We must guard against complacency that we might still be viewed the same way.
