The Russians are Coming! The Mikhail Lermontov Sinking, 16 February 1986
➳ This "Darkest Days by Dates Down Under" series explores how New Zealand’s crises are thematically encoded with historical riffs to signal authorship, cooperation, scapegoats and caution — while telegraphing hidden objectives.
New Zealand’s staged crises occur with spooky precision timing to riff off historical events so that the newsmaking psycho-dramatic terror theater, simultaneously performs as cryptic signals intelligence, boasts its ritualized spectacular power and functions to maintain discipline among a cryptocracy that rules from the shadows.
This dispatch was originally posted on The Snoopman Files (July 19, 2025).Introduction:
The demise of a 20,000 tonne Russian cruise ship at the head of Queen Charlotte Sound, New Zealand, in 1986 is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
The strange sinking of the Mikhail Lermontov, in the Marlborough Sounds on February 16 1986 is most remembered for being framed as an odd maritime misadventure by an overworked harbour master, who was overzealous in showing off the scenic sights.
The cruise ship, which was owned by the Baltic Shipping Company, had set sail at 3.10pm from the port at Picton, located at the top of the South Island of New Zealand.
The 155 meter-long vessel was sailing under the command of the Marlborough Harbour Master, Captain Donald I. Jamison, if the official narrative is to be believed.
At 5:37 pm, travelling at 15 knots, the ship struck rocks at Cape Jackson, while passing through a narrow channel on the shoreward side of Cape Jackson Lighthouse.
Under Captain Vladislav Vorobyov, the ‘Poet Class Liner’ departed from Sydney on February 7 with about 740 passengers and crew on board, on a voyage billed as the “experience of a lifetime”. After stopping at the Bay of Islands, Auckland, Tauranga, and Wellington, the Mikhail Lermontov set sail from the capital on February 15.
As former Māori Television news and current affairs editor Steve Snoopman mentioned in the introduction to his “Darkest Days by Dates Down Under” series, the date February 15 marks the beginning of a 30-day period ending in the Ides of March, March 15. In the play, Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare has the soothsayer character warn Caesar to “Beware the ides of March”. More precisely, the Soothsayer warned Caesar a month earlier to beware of this 30-day period, as Barry Strauss reported in “Julius Caesar’s Forgotten Assassin”. The critical question of timing is answered by consulting the 1973 edition of A. W. Reed’s It Happened Today in New Zealand.
One of the enduring mysteries of the Mikhail Lermontov Sinking, was why exactly would the Marlborough Sounds Harbour Master of 16 years, sail the vessel through the rocky shallow channel between the lighthouse and the land at Cape Jackson?
As any kid knows, lighthouses warn ships of rocky waters. Although the collision occurred at 5.37pm, the lighthouse was visible since it was still summer. (Every lighthouse has its own distinctive signal or character, as the children’s show, Spot On, reported in its very first episode in 1974). So, why?
The clue is in the date. And the date had everything to do with a fraud in the South Pacific archipelago’s maritime history that was intended to buy time for Britain to colonize New Zealand. And that fraud was primarily to stifle French expansionism.
And so, the Snoopman presents a compelling case that the shipwrecking of the Soviet cruise liner required a novel fraud to stifle Russian expansionism in the South Pacific.
This ground-breaking dispatch is laced with historical riffing so intriguing, that Snoopman believes it reveals the ‘matrix code’ used by transnational deep state networks to signal their chess moves to one another as a looming season of hostilities approaches, and into the aftermath to control the damage as allegiances are jolted.
As a modus operandi, such historical riffing signals authorship, cooperation, caution and to telegraph objectives. The signals indicate players are communicating their cooperation to take a plot ‘live’, convey hidden objectives, and to broadcast psychotic humour, thereby posting themselves like hostages — as applied game theory predicts.
In this “Darkest Days by Dates Down Under” series, Snoopman surveys the curious coincidences of calamities, catastrophes, or crises that jolted the nation while power, wealth and control were accumulated. In this disturbing multi-decade sketch, Snoopman traces the creepy trail of spooky minds, who he believes plot machinations with an eye on the past and a dark vision of the future. The circumstantial evidence reveals an awful picture of each new administration becoming embroiled in a cover-up of a staged event made to appear as an accident, a natural disaster, or a crisis caused by an unhinged man, or an ‘unsolved’ crime. The modus operandi of metaphor laden-historical riffing continues because most monkeys suffer from symbol illiteracy.
As with part 5 of this series, “Accommodating France — Rainbow Warrior Bombing, 10 July 1985”, Snoopman suggests another ‘French Connection’. Since the link to the French sinking of Greenpeace’s Pacific flagship was not supposed to be discovered by those monkeys outside a ‘classified circle’, the ‘Russian Question’ embroiled NZ, its appears. The fallout over the Warrior sinking caused the ANZUS military alliance rift to widen into a chasm, since the New Zealand Labour Party’s electoral mandate to legislate New Zealand as a nuclear free zone became a consensus at the South Pacific Forum summit in Rarotonga in early August of 1985; a draft text was agreed upon.
Since the termination phase to set the bombs had to occur after dark, recall how the frog-man who set the timers ticking never understood why they were ordered to make the countdown just three hours? And that it was this short timer delay that led to two French spies getting caught two days later? Snoopman made the compelling case that the reason for the short timer countdown, was so that the after dark bombing would historically riff off the time that a French frigate arrived after dark at the Bay of Islands on July 10 in 1840. That French mission was to claim the South Island.
What are the odds that two sinkings in seven months would riff off the foreign nation connected with those crisis events? Thanks to the French screwing up, N.Z. found out.
And as I took a second look at this strange sinking, I wondered where in the dates the Russian scare of the 1880s would come up. But, as I looked I found there was a hoax scare published by a Daily Southern Cross on February 17th in 1873. The editor, David Luckie, was concerned about the possible threat of a Russian invasion since the South Pacific seemed unprepared ever since the Crimean War. So the front-page story’s headline, carried an asterix referring to a date almost three months in the future.
The fake news story reported that in the wee hours of 16 February 1873, the fictional Russian ironclad Kaskowiski slipped into Waitemata Harbour, taking a British warship, after boarding and disabling its crew by means of a ‘mephitic water-gas’, a kind of fuel gas, a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. A ransom of $250,000 was demanded. The Kaskowiski set sail into the night with about half that sum.
And so gullible Aucklanders were alarmed to read that marines on the ironclad cruiser, Kaskowiski (cask of whiskey) had seized gold and taken the city’s Mayor, Philip Philips, hostage. Ergo, on 17 February 1873, Aucklanders awoke to the alarming news that a Russian warship had entered Auckland’s harbour undetected and landed troops.
And since the Mikhail Lermontov sank at 10.27pm on 16 February 1986 in Port Gore Bay, New Zealanders woke to the alarming news that the Russian cruise ship sank.
What are the odds? Naturally, a Soviet-era cruise liner sinking would mean the Russian officials would be coming to the far-flung South Pacific archipelago.
Ergo, this dispatch attempts to answer why exactly the sinking occurred that evening, given that it’s timing was uncanny. The morning newspapers’ were essentially signalling: “The Russians Are Coming!” This ‘preliminary finding’ raises the question regarding whether or not the obvious damage control and the cover-up that set-in almost immediately, actually occurred because the sinking was a staged operation.
The plausibilty of another staged operation may seem far-fetched. Until you consider that in 1985, Britain’s MI6 had ‘learned’ the French DGSE were planning to use New Zealand as a staging post to foil a gun-running ring to Melanesians in French New Caledonia, as the Rainbow Warrior: The French Attempt to Sink Greenpeace, mentions.
And, so this dispatch re-explores the circumstances with reference to the uncanny historical riffs, to decipher the hidden objectives to comprehend how France’s ‘paranoia’ about the Russian KGB infiltrating Greenpeace in New Zealand, may have been a layered cover-story for using the bomb plot itself as a staging mission to firm up plans to sink the Mikhail Lermontov in early 1986 before its Pacific Islands cruise.
In May 1985, officials of the Joint Intelligence Committee at Whitehall in London were informed of a French operation that was planned to occur in New Zealand. This Whitehall Intelligence Committee comprises the Anglo-Saxon maritime nations’ pact between Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Word was filtered to MI6 that the French DGSE were planning a sting because New Zealand was allegedly being used as a trans-shipment point for a gun-running ring to Melanesians in French New Caledonia seeking independence, according to the 1986 book Rainbow Warrior: The French Attempt to Sink Greenpeace by Morgan and Whitaker.
The United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and France were concerned about Russian diplomats courting the leaders of Pacific Island nations, for fishing rights. In March 1985, Kiribati signed a US$2million per year deal with Soviet envoys in Sydney for fishing rights. In their 1985 book, The Rainbow Warrior Affair, Richard Shears and Isobelle Gidley wrote that every Russian trawler carried an array of antennae, and the skippers curiously tended to hone in on fishing spots near the zones of naval exercises and splash down sites of space probes. In April 1985, former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser had said in Paris at a meeting of former government leaders that the Russians will start with a fish processing facility, with a refuelling station that will repair plant requiring an airfield that will become a base.
In the meta-data of metaphor-laden historical riffs, the entangled past of New Zealand and Australia jolts thematically with Britain, France, America, Germany and Russia.
➳ Key Findings:
Embedded in this strange sinking is the fiction that Captain Don Jamison was irresponsible for piloting a 20,000 tonne passenger ship through a narrow rocky channel. Yet, the meta-data of dates reveals ‘coincidental’ correspondences with historical events featuring uncanny metaphor-laden themes related to the real events in the Hi-8 home video days of 1986. As with the lead-up to the Rainbow Warrior Bombing, a looming season of hostilities was encoded into the docking and departing dates, locations and events, in Australia and New Zealand, as if a special ‘ANZUS Project’ was communicated as ‘signals intelligence’ among a clandestine network.
New Zealand was used as a staging ground to foil a Russian arms-trafficking operation supplying the Kanaks of New Caledonia Melanesia via the Mikhail Lermontov. In the aftermath of the Rainbow Warrior Bombing, it was revealed that British spooks at MI6 learned that New Zealand was to be used as a staging post for a covert operation in New Caledonia. But until now, the French Connection to the Mikhail Lermontov shipwreck was not publicly known. The casting of New Zealand as the stage for a sequel in French-authored terrorism theater was signalled by the chosen date, February 16, since in the annals of New Zealand’s colonial newspaper history, the 47th day of the 1873, was the date when the Daily Southern Cross claimed a Russian warship had entered the harbour at Auckland and taken the city’s mayor hostage. Ergo, the Mikhail Lermontov Sinking was an ‘echo’ of the hoax news from 1873, to signal a staged sabotage-cum-terrorism operation — to the intelligence world.
Mikhail Lermontov Sinking, 16 February 1986 — Death Toll: 1
The sinking of a Russian cruise liner, the Mikhail Lermontov, on the evening of Feburary 16th 1986, could have been New Zealand’s worst maritime tragedy.
The Mikhail Lermontov sank in ‘33 metres’ of water in Port Gore Bay, after the engines failed and the ship couldn’t be beached, amid the incoming tide; 742 people survived.
One crew member, 33 year old refrigerator engineer is presumed to have drowned, in the ship’s bow by seawater rushing in from the port side hull, that rocks had severed like a sharp camping knife slices through a tin can. The ship was mortally wounded.
The strange sinking following the decision, attributed to N.Z. Captain Don Jamison, to take the vessel through the narrow channel at Cape Jackson on the shoreward side of a lighthouse, embroiled the Transport Department and Transport Minister, Richard Prebble, and the Marlborough Harbour Board and the Beehive — in an epic cover-up.
The Harbor Master, Capt. Jamison, who allegedly was piloting the vessel, supposedly had drinks at a reception held aboard the vessel that afternoon. The Russian crew were relying on him to guide the way in the Sounds, while showing off the scenic sites.
At least, that’s the official narrative. But, what if Captain Jamison instructed the bridge crew to go around the Cape Jackson Lighthouse and the Russians wouldn’t listen? And, what if he was drugged to impair his capacity to assert authority, and prevent him jumping on the radio to make a piracy distress call? Ergo, what if the bridge crew had been bribed and/or blackmailed by the French to sabotage the vessel?
Despite the Ministry of Transport conducting a ‘preliminary inquiry’ immediately after the sinking, led by Chief Marine Inspector, Captain Steve Ponsford, this ‘probe’ was done and dusted on March 6th 1986. Fittingly, the Express newspaper reported on March 7, 1986, that the inquiry found Mr Jamison was responsible, but Mr Ponsford would not say what explanation Mr Jamison gave him for trying to take the ship through the passage. Prebble claimed all of the facts were known within a day.
Yet, the Associated Press reported that no mention was made of passengers saying they heard an argument over the ship’s public address system between the pilot and the Soviet captain. Nor, any mention about pilot Jamison announcing to passengers, before the collision with the reef, that he was handing over the helm to the crew.
In this white-wash theater, Mr Ponsford said, “All the inquiry had to establish was the facts of the sinking. It was not our role to go into the reasons for Captain Jamison’s actions and I’m not a psychologist,” the Express quoted the inquiry chairman.
In the grand tradition of an Old Boys’ Network, Ponsford recommended that no formal investigation be held. This view was backed by the Transport Minister.
Mr Prebble said on the 20th anniversary of the sinking that as Minister of Transport, he had written to the Russians to offer an inquiry, but was told it was not necessary. The Russians held a tribunal and Australian passengers sued the ship’s owner.
The Lermontov Sinking deserves a second look not only because the event itself was odd. Also, since the messy aftermath stage was packed with strange behaviours.
Prime Minister David Lange appeared to have sympathy for the ship’s Chief Navigator Sergey Stephanishchev, who was on the bridge. Lange said it was Captain Jamison who was legally in charge of piloting the ship. Stephanishchev was jailed for four years, while Captain Vladislav Vorobyov, was confined to a desk job for some years.
The Russians found that Stephanishchev could have over-ruled the pilot (Jamison).
Yet, there are accounts that say Jamison’s role had ended when the vessel reached its ‘pilotage limit’, beyond the north end of Motuara Island, which was at 1720 hours. (Cook claimed sovereign possession from atop Motuara). Captain Jamison concluded his spoken commentary to the passengers. According to Maritime Radio, Captain Vorobyov had not returned to the bridge and the officer of the watch did not assume control, and so Captain Jamison continued to supervise the navigation of the vessel.
This is how the corny story of blaming Jamison occurred. Corny, because who in their right mind would obey a local pilot telling them to take a 20,000-tonne ship into a narrow channel between the headland and the lighthouse on the reef — instead of out into the open sea on the starboard side of the lighthouse and well within view?
According to the widely repeated story recounted by Pete Mesley’s Dive Excursions:
“Jamison ordered the first of three incremental course changes to port that would send the ship onto the rocks at Cape Jackson. Had this first new heading been maintained, it would still have allowed the ship to safely clear the headland and the reef that extended out to Walker Rock. Jamison had been giving a commentary on the ship’s public address system up to this point then said goodbye to the passengers. He hung up the microphone and told Second Mate Gusev he no longer required the P.A. Apparently the microphone may have been left on as some passengers reported hearing what sounded like an argument between Jamison and someone else on the bridge as the ship approached Cape Jackson.”
As Associated Press reported, Ponsford’s inquiry didn’t examine these anamolies.
DIVER magazine dismissed the idea of an espionage type conspiracy to sink the ship, in order to provide a cover for Russian spies to gain more intelligence in New Zealand.
But, diving experts in divers magazines aren’t deep divers into conspiracies, are they?
Evidently, the CIA maintained their Southern Hemisphere intel base at Blenheim, where the Air Force is located, within easy harrier hawk flying distance of Picton. Reportedly, there were KGB agents aboard the Lermontov to keep an eye on the crew.
The intrigue thickens with the apparent ‘spooks in suits’ bit-part role of a man who seemed to be doing his best to be a young KGB doppelgänger of Vladimir Putin.
The ‘Putin Doppelgänger’ was on watch detail of Chief Navigator Stephanishchev, and also Captain Vladislav Vorobyov. Enter local Police Chief Stuart McEwen, at stage left. McEwen construed manslaughter was not an option because the body of Refrigeration Engineer Parvee Zagliadimov was officially never found. He was working in the Refrigration Compartment. His workmates said they felt the deck buckle and bend, while the ship’s hull bent and ripped as the vessel travelled in the narrow strait between a rocky shoal with a lighthouse and Cape Jackson while dinner was in preparation. The refrigeration workers said they bolted, but that Zagliadimov would have become trapped as trolleys with meals slammed into the door and water filled the ship from below, and while the cruise liner listed about 12 degrees. At least, that’s the account that conforms to the official narrative that would have served more effectively to threaten Captain Jamison with a manslaughter charge if he didn’t toe the line, for causing a drowning in the first minutes of calamity. This version which in effect said, the refrigerator engineer stood no chance, would have been some comfort for Zagliadimov’s wife and daughter, rather than, say, drowning while retrieving his record player. That would’ve sounded too clichéd, like it was scripted by Hollywood, in this corny story complete with “The Russians are Coming” subtextual hysteria, when a scenario was needed to scare the pilot into playing a scapegoat role.
Like a maritime redux saga of the Erebus Disaster — where the chief inspector of air accidents effectively pointed his finger at pilot error, causing the crash of a DC-10 aircraft flying a scenic route in 1979 — the chief maritime inspector fingered pilot error as the cause of the “casualty”, like Zagliadimov’s death was a war-time loss.
The connection between the missing refrigeration engineer and Captain Jamison’s command as pilot, was claimed to be not strong enough to prosecute for culpability.
Like a stage actor in a play that might be called The Russians are Coming!, Police Chief McEwen acted like one of an ensemble cast repeating memorized scripted lines.
McEwen asserted there was no relation between the act or omission possibly committed by Captain Jamison. This may have been truer than skepticism suggested.
There was no trial in New Zealand, so the forum to contest the blame was forgone.
Under the Harbours Act, as pilot of the vessel, Jamison could theoretically have been prosecuted for endangering the ship or endangering the passengers. The maximum fine was $1000 or two years in prison or both. The excuse McEwen performed for not pursuing this prosecution course, was that the trial involved costs to pay for Russian witnesses to appear in a New Zealand courthouse, were considered too high to be worthwhile. But, this narrative ‘assumed’ a face value case of causes that offered four options for blame, like in a multi-choice test, with no fifth option: ‘none of the above’.
What caused the vessel to run aground on a reef marked with a lighthouse: (a) the pilot was drunk; (b) the pilot was tired; (c) the pilot was showing off; (d) the Russian crew trusted the harbour master as pilot even though he was drunk, tired and showing off?
This cover-up is deeply suspicious. After all, you would think that New Zealand’s international reputation for shipping would have taken a hit, especially if the nation was seen to be lenient on a harbour master who had acted with such woeful disregard.
Yet, the apparatus of authorities with prosecution powers, legal responsibilities and diplomatic relations all closed ranks, as if they had strings attached to the same puppet master in a theater company performing to a plot-line omitted from ‘the news’.
For the 1985-86 summer cruise season in the Southern Hemisphere, the Mikhail Lermontov had been chartered to travel company “Charter Travel Club” (‘CTC’) in the South Pacific with stopovers in Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands.
The Mikhail Lermontov sailed from Sydney Harbour on the night of February 7 1986.
Potently, on February 7 1770, Captain Cook sailed out of Queen Charlotte Sound and the HMS Endeavour sailed through the strait that he had ‘discovered’ on January 31 1770 — with great excitement — since it proved there was two large islands in the archipelago. And therefore, the discovery was far superior to Abel Tasman’s scrawls.
In a brief article headlined “Historic Waters” the New Zealand Herald noted that Ship’s Cove was Cook’s favourite anchorage, and that this cove was not far from where the Mikhail Lermontov sank. And the Herald mentioned that New Zealand’s worst maritime disaster was the sinking of the HMS Orpheus, when 189 drowned at the entrance to the Manukau Harbour, Auckland, on February 7 1863. As such, the date February 7 was embued with historic potency and foreshadowed looming disaster.
The HMS Orpheus was carrying 259 naval officers, Royal Marines and sailors. Instead of rounding North Cape to reach Waitematā Harbour, Commodore William Burnett decided to berth at Onehunga in the Manukau Harbour to save time. His charts were outdated and the channel through the bar had moved. Lookouts on shore signalled a warning when they realised the ship was off course, but the Orpheus missed the message. Rescuers arrived too late to prevent a catastrophe. How strange, that in the shipwreck tale of the Mikhail Lermontov, the channel at Cape Jackson was construed as a logical shortcut by Captain Ponsford, while interviewed for Destination Disaster.
On 15 February 1986, the soon to be doomed ‘Poet Class’ cruise liner departed from the port at Wellington, the country’s capital city. Given the ship’s refrigeration crew were busy with meal preparations deep in the ship’s hull at the time of Mikhail Lermontov sailing through the narrow channel at Cape Jackson, it is uncanny that on February 15th in 1882, the world’s first exported frozen meat shipment by sea, sailed from Port Chalmers to Britain. On that voyage, the captain almost froze to death in the hold while sawing holes to add ventilation, while the ship was becalmed in the tropics. What are the odds that the local pilot would be blamed for shredding holes in the hull, on the following date, February 16th, and the refrigeration engineer drowns?
Also on February 15th in 1840, a land syndicate led by Australian settler-speculators, W. C. Wentworth and John Jones, construed to gain the signatures of five Māori chiefs for the alleged purchase of the South Island and Stewart Island for £500, as It happened Today in New Zealand records. Europe’s canon powers exported an expropriation ethos.
Ergo, the settler-colonizer history of Britain, Australia, and NZ was entwined.
And on 15 February 1955, the New Zealand Combined Signals Organisation (NZCSO) was established, which formalised the New Zealand arm of the UKUSA network. The NZCSO was responsible for all N.Z. signals intelligence until the GCSB took over.
It would appear that the Lermontov’s sailing from Wellington was a ‘get set’ signal.
The date of the sinking, February 16, also carried potency with reference to New Zealand’s maritime history. On 16 February 1770, Banks Peninsula was sighted by Captain Cook. But, according to the book Lying for the Admiralty, Cook changed his maps, journals and diaries in Batavia after hearing of a French vessel heading south.
Captain Cook hid harbors to buy time for Britain to establish settler colonies in New Zealand, with ports for trade. The sinking of the Mikhail Lermontov on the 16 February date was potently symbolic as a historical riff, since Captain Cook subsequently rubbed out his peninsula lines to create “Banks Island”. That is to say, Cook created the fiction of a narrow body of water, between ‘Bank Island’ and the ‘Mainland’ while he was in Batavia, Java, because he’d learned about the presence of French navigator Sieur de Bougainville, who had also been in the Batavia with two ships two days prior.
Ergo, Cook created the fiction of a potentially hazardous passage to pass through to hide both harbours that were located at Banks Peninsula; one to the north, where the entrance to Lyttleton Port is now located, and the other on the southern coastal point, at Akaroa — where the French eventually formed a little settlement. Cook had charted the jaggery coastline of Newfoundland with the forbearance that the French could mount attacks after they were given nearby islands, St. Pierre and Miquelon. This wisdom sprang from a shadowy figure, Phillip Stephens, Secretary of the Admiralty for thirty-two years, de facto chief of the Secret Service and architect of empire.
Captain Cook charted Queen Charlotte Sound and Mercury Bay well, but left most other harbours unidentified or poorly drawn, or deliberately altered. Cook changed Stewart Island to a Peninsula to obscure the entrance to the deep harbour at “Bluff”.
It appears that Capt. Cook’s historical fraud to create “Bank’s Island” became a riff in the Lermontov’s sinking, by making the ship pass through a hazardous narrow channel. And “Gore Bay”, located in North Canterbury just to the north of Bank’s Peninsula, which was named by Captain Cook after one of his officers on the Endeavour in 1769, also seems to have become a riff, since the Russian cruise ship sank in Port Gore Bay.
Rather than accommodating the Australian passengers to allow time to interview them for their accounts of what occurred after sailing from Picton, they were rushed back on a flight over the Tasman Sea to Sydney on 17 February, the very next day.
Potently, on February 17th 1934, the first special trans-Tasman airmail flight by Lieutenant Ulm took place. Therefore, it was ironic to note that the Chief Marine Inspector’s ‘preliminary inquiry’ commenced on February 17th given that on February 17 1958, the first sitting of a permanent court of appeal occurred at Wellington.
The psychotic joke that “the Russians are coming” hit the news on February 17th.
The strangeness of the Mikhail Lermontov running aground between the Cape Jackson and the Cape Jackson Lighthouse becomes obvious with maps. Beyond this peninsula — that extends like a long twisted finger of blame broken by henchmen for failing to pay for gun shipments to a mafia — is the Cook Strait, which swirls between the imaginatively named North and South Islands. Cape Jackson is also located at headwaters of Queen Charlotte Sound, which was the one that Cook charted thoroughly of all of the sounds in the Marlborough Sounds. Given the Lermontovs’ demise, it is poignant to note that Queen Charlotte Sound was the first anchorage place for many British ships to head. Freemason Captain James Cook named Cape Jackson after Sir George Jackson, one of the Admiralty secretaries and a friend and patron of Cook. In gratitude, Cook also named Port Jackson in New South Wales.
But, Cook didn’t explore the Harbour and didn’t draw it in the published maps.
He mentioned the inlet in his log, claiming that “from 2 or 3 miles out there looked like there was a bay or harbor … [with] a safe anchorage which I called Port Jackson.”
In these nuggets of historical fraud, Australia’s and New Zealand’s past is entangled.
In his review of Margaret Cameron-Ash’s brilliant 2018 book Lying for the Admiralty, Paul Brunton, curator of the State Library of New South Wales, stated the author has demonstrated that Cook’s so-called observation errors on the eastern coast of Australia were in fact subterfuges, and part of his strategy (and the Admiralty’s) to prevent others, and particularly the French, learning of discoveries which they could turn to their advantage. Cameron-Ash mounts a strong circumstantial case that Cook discovered Bass Strait and actually gazed upon Sydney Harbour by walking overland from Botany Bay to the harbour. It seems, Cape Jackson at Queen Charlotte Sound, was chosen as the location to stage the Lermontov grounding, to signal that a secret deep state network had themed a special ‘ANZUS Project’ to help out an ally, France, by sabotaging the Soviet Russian’s arms smuggling plans in New Caledonia.
To ensure this would happen without a re-run of Operation Rainbow turning up the French as culprits again, the apparent circumstances infer an extensive capture of the state apparatus. Did the Americans tell Lange to get with the program? Was Lange told the French were worried they would loose New Caledonia to the Russians? Was Reagan told by Mitterand that if Lange didn’t back down over French culpability for the Rainbow Warrior Bombing — France would leave the Pacific to the Russians?
Crucially for this second look at one of New Zealand’s underperforming darkest days, Jackson was made Deputy Secretary to The Admiralty in 1766 and appointed Judge Advocate of the Fleet in 1768. In this capacity, Jackson was largely responsible for the court martial over the conduct of Admiral Lord Keppel in 1779, and the subsequent enquiry into the evidence of Sir Hugh Palliser. This dispute over performance during the tail end of the American Masonic Revolutionary War (1776-1783), occurred when Keppel served as First Lord of the Admiralty. Previously, Keppel was Commander-in-Chief of the Channel Fleet. Ergo, in this New Zealand tale of an underperforming ‘darkest day’, the subtext in the historical meta-data suggests the casting for the plot elements afforded opportunities for psychotic humor. Naturally, there would need to be a performative inquiry, carefully stage managed as an exhibition of state-craft.
Enter Chief Marine Inspector, Captain Steve Ponsford, from stage right. Ponsford claimed he established the facts leading up to the sinking, and a formal investigation in a court would achieve nothing further. Any smart nine-year old reading the paper would have coughed, “cover-up”, over his or her skippy cornies, and let them go soggy.
When the survivors returned to Wellington Port before sunrise, there was a lack of Police to ensure that key people were detained for questioning. In spite of the Wellington Rescue Coordination Centre being active throughout the ‘incident’, and the fact the lives of 743 humans were in peril, the capital city’s constabulary remained tucked in bed, content that they’d taught the French not to mess with NZ.
And with this strategic withdrawal of security, Captain Don Jamison’s union colleagues spirited their man away from the authorities. On arrival in Wellington, Captain Jamison was under guard of two Russian officers, who did not let him out of their sight, said Captain Gary F. Neill, Marlborough’s Deputy Harbour Master. Union Secretary John McLeod arranged for Don to go the toilet and they gave the Russians the slip. Captain Brew lent Jamison a jersey to hide the gold braid of a captain, said McLeod, and they got past the Police as well, McLeod bragged.
In an interview for the documentary, Destination Disaster: The Sinking of the Mikhail Lermontov, Chief Marine Inspector Captain Ponsford said that he had known Jamison for many years, as a friend and as a seasoned sailor. Yet, these conflicts of interest were no bother to the Minister of Transport, Richard Prebble, who stated before the Parliamentary Press Gallery that the cause of the grounding was the pilot’s decision to take the narrow passage between Cape Jackson Lighthouse and Cape Jackson.
Indeed, casting Captain Ponsford was critical to communicating ‘cooperation’ since the Chief Marine Inspector’s friendship with the Marlborough Harbour Master worked to signal safety to the scapegoated pilot, Captain Jamison. With Jamison’s buy-in, Ponsford would ensure the investigation would be a whitewash and go no further.
And Minister Prebble accepted Captain Ponsford’s recommendation that there be no further inquiry or court case. In effect, All The Prime Minister’s Men lied for the Admiralty. As Destination Disaster observed, there was much evidence and counter-accounts that should have been scrutinized in a rigorous court trial. Jamison had been a Harbour Master pilot in the Marlborough Sounds since 1970. Captain Neill, the Deputy Harbour Master, said he visited Jamison at his home in the Sounds where he had been laying low, since the media hounded him for some time, not surprisingly.
Gary Neill asked a while later why had he taken the ship through the Jackson passage and he replied that he “felt like he was driving off the road in the middle of the night, drifting off into the gravel.” Was he saying he’d been drugged? It opens the question about whether the Chief Navigator Sergey Stephanishchev was bribed or blackmailed.
At the inquiry, Jamison had claimed he was just worn out, and stressed due to fatigue.
But, the makers of the documentary Destination Disaster pointed out the Australian lawyers representing the passengers from over the Tasman, found that Jamison had had an eleven day break in January and February. And in the previous two months, his work sheets showed average hours a week; but with long hours the week prior.
The Russians claimed they asked him why he was ordering them through the passage, since he allegedly ordered the bridge crew to steer the ship 10 degrees to port-side. Jamison is alleged to have answered he wanted to show passengers that particular tragic place, where several ships had perished, Helmsman Anatoliy Burin claimed.
According to this version, at such a pace at 15 knots, the bridge crew had no time to abort. After Captain Jamison allegedly gave the crazy order to head on a course between the lighthouse and shore, Helmsman Burin claimed he looked over as Chief Navigator Sergey Stephanishchev walked over to talk to the pilot (Don Jamison). Burin said Jamison was standing in an unnatural way by the port, leaning against the bulkhead between the two windows. His head was against the wall and his right hand against the porthole, Burin told the Destination Disaster documentary crew. This observation is consistent with the version that Jamison had drank two vodkas and a beer at a reception — hosted by the Russian crew aboard the Lermontov for the Marlborough Harbour Board before lunch — and that he was overworked.
One theory is that the Mikhail Lermontov was scuttled as an insurance job, whereby the Russians supposedly intended to milk the Marlborough Harbour Board’s insurers.
However, this theory only makes sense, amid a closing of ranks, if the Russians were taking their turn as the next state — following the French — to penetrate the state bureaucracy to go along with a cover-story so flimsy, it required an ensemble cast of officials who could keep straight faces while being okay with a corny Russian insurance plot narrative. And since it’s my contention that the ‘Mount Erebus Disaster’ was a take-down led by German intelligence to persuade key insiders of the Establishment to get aboard with moving bureaucratic mountains to prepare the way for the envisaged corporate heist of the economy (that transpired), it makes more sense that Lange and his closest officials, including Prebble, were brought into the plot and told that you’ll face a South Pacific that falls to the Russians if you don’t.
The over-arching objectives, or the meta-conflict, are signalled by the meta-data. The themed historical riffing reveals the hallmarks of a staged sinking, and it points to an alliance-sponsored operation to support France’s sovereign hold over New Caledonia.
And, because the meta-data carries the same modus operandi of ‘signals intelligence’ of a staged maritime operation so soon after the bungled French-sponsored terrorist operation of July 10 1985, and it metaphorically screamed “the Russians are coming!”, the circumstantial evidence points to a French-borne operation with local buy-in.
After all, the Sunday Times’ journalists found out in the aftermath of Operation Satanic being blown wide open, that Britain’s spooks at Military Intelligence Department 6 (MI6), had ‘learned’ the French DGSE were ‘planning’ to use New Zealand as a staging post to foil a gun-running ring to Melanesians in French New Caledonia, as the Rainbow Warrior: The French Attempt to Sink Greenpeace, mentions.
The stakes were high with 743 humans aboard. Without the bravery of local sailors in 23 small vessels, and of a ferry and a tanker, who over-rode stand-down orders and a navy launch, the event could’ve been an epic tragedy instead of completing a hattrick of New Zealand’s under-performing darkest days, following the Trades Hall Bombing and the Rainbow Warrior Bombing. In all three, one person died apiece, amazingly.
After gaining a quick assessment of the damage below from his crew, Captain Vladislav Vorobyov ordered the general alarm to be sounded six minutes after the collision. With this switch, the water tight doors shut and pumps were automatically activated. But with the hull gashed half a meter wide over a length of 25 meters, Captain Vorobyov calculated at around 6pm the ship would sink in four hours.
At 7.15pm, seawater in the engine room overwhelmed the electrical circuitry and mechanical mechanisms and the engines cut out and couldn’t be restarted. The attempt to beach the ship in Port Gore Sound failed and the 155m long ship slipped away from the shore into deeper water. While the ship was sinking, the noise was said to be deafening as bulkheads blew under huge water pressures. As gushes of air were forced outward, sounds of hissing, whistling, and squealing emitted, and buckling, breaking and booming explosions, and then silence soon after it sank at 10.27pm.
Due to the rescue efforts, 742 survived and only one perished. At 11pm, the NZ sailors pointed lights in a cross pattern over the area where the Lermontov had sank. A storm of tears followed. All of the passengers, crew and the sailors who came to the rescue cried. Little did they know, the calamity had the evil hallmarks of a staged sabotage.
Given that this strange sinking had the same hallmarks of themed historical riffs as the sudden sinking of the Rainbow Warrior seven months earlier, Snoopman contends the low death toll in the Lermontov’s demise must have disappointed its planners.
The loss of the passenger ship wasn’t enough of tragic splash to make a New York Times headline above the fold, like the time an Air New Zealand-owned DC-10 slammed into Mount Erebus in 1979 on the anniversary of Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s team sighting the trans-Antarctic mountains on November 28 in 1911.
Instead, the story headlined SOVIET LUXURY LINER SINKS OFF NEW ZEALAND was placed on the front-page in the bottom right hand corner, on February 17th.
On March 6th 1986, Captain Steve Ponsford ‘preliminary inquiry’ was over. Since this scoping probe commenced on the same historical date as the first sitting of a permanent court of appeal to occur at Wellington, it’s uncanny that its finish appeared to riff off the first public performance on March 6 1947, by the NZ National Orchestra, at the Wellington Town Hall. Cue the media to perform as a national orchestra.
On March 6th 1966, the inaugural broadcast of Country Calendar occurred. Crucially, the rural focussed programme occasionally featured rehearsed spoof segments. One satirical episode depicted scenarios where the farm dogs were purported to be radio controlled. The show triggered complaints to the Royal Society for the Protection from Cruelty to Animals. Another featured comic genius John Clarke as Fred Dagg strumming fencing wire. Ergo, an orchestrated litany of lies was signalled.
On September 1st 1986, the Office of the Minister of Transport released the Soviet Marine Inquiry into the Mikhail Lermontov Sinking, reporting the findings were consistent with the New Zealand Ministry of Transport’s Preliminary Inquiry.
On September 1st 1962, the first Outward Bound School, Cobham School — which was the former guest house “Anakiwa” in Queen Charlotte Sound — was opened by the Governor General, Lord Cobham. Ergo, sound schooling in the outdoors needs to be instilled in youth to mitigate foolhardy actions like showing off while risking lives.
The cover-up over the strange sinking of the Mikhail Lermontov so soon after the Rainbow Warrior Sinking, becomes more intriguing when one considers how news outlets remarked upon the similarity of a Russian figure who was filmed and photographed with both Captain Vladislav Vorobyov and Chief Navigator Sergey Stephanishchev during the trans-Tasman investigations. The papers noted the figure bore an uncanny resemblance to Vladimir Putin, who at the time was a KGB agent.
Especially, since MI6 had ‘learned’ the French DGSE were ‘planning’ to use New Zealand as a staging post to foil a gun-running ring to Melanesians in French New Caledonia, as the Rainbow Warrior: The French Attempt to Sink Greenpeace, mentions.
After all, it was common knowledge throughout the so-called ‘Cold War’ that the Russians were supplying arms to independence movements across the world.
Mikhail Lermontov had undergone a US$15 million refit and strengthened for ice in 1981 to make all of the passenger cabins contain their own bathrooms. This reduced the maximum number of passengers from 750, to carry 550. At the time, there were 372 passengers and 348 crew, plus 13 British and 9 Australian “Charter Travel Club” (CTC) staff. Perhaps, during the refit, compartments were built to hide guns.
A French Connection?
In his 1999 book State Secrets, Ben C. Vidgen writes about how New Zealand became a location for hosting forums, conferences and secret summits during the Halcyon Days of the anti-nuclear free furore, and the fallout over the Rainbow Warrior Bombing.
The forging of South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone (SPNFZ) Treaty occurred at the South Pacific Forum summit in Raratonga; the text was agreed to on August 6 1985, by which time the ‘French Connection’ to the Rainbow Warrior Bombing of July 10 was established. It was precisely the result the French Government did not want.
In his amusingly titled chapter six, “Here Come the Generals”, Vidgen wrote that the transnational engineering corporation, Bechtel, co-sponsored the 1985 South Pacific Forum, with the Asia Foundation, that he said had a history of providing CIA covers.
Concurrent to this 13-member Pacific Forum at Raratonga, former cabinet ministers in Muldoon’s Government met secretly in hotel rooms for private discussions.
Television New Zealand’s current affairs programme EyeWitness got wind of these secret ‘conferences’, such as ‘Red Orchestra’ and ‘Oceania’, which sounded like they could have been lifted from a draft of George Orwell’s dystopian novel, Nineteen Eight-Four. The “Honourable Men” included Muldoon’s Minister of Trade and Relations, Hugh Templeton, who used to go on Sunday walks with Ron Trotter, who chaired the corporate behemoth Fletcher Challenge, that came to own 250 companies and became a conduit for foreign ownership, while the Commerce Commission were evidently too busy playing with a Monopoly board box set to notice anything was awry.
And Muldoon’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Brian Talboys. Amid dire warnings about the Soviets, Muldoon’s “Honourable Men” were meeting retired U.S. Admiral Lloyd Vasey and Herbert Levin (who Vidgen said was widely considered to be a CIA officer).
But, after the Iran-Contra Scandal broke, Vidgen said it was discovered that the code names Red Orchestra’ and ‘Oceania’, were merely fronts for Project Democracy, a Reagan era organization for a secret war out of which the Iran-Contra network sprung.
Also in attendance at these hotels visits, was former U.S. Ambassador to Australia at the time of the CIA-backed ousting of Gough Whitlam as Prime Minister, Marshal Green. Vidgen said that Wellington Confidential (January 1985) reported Ray Steiner Cline, who’d been head of CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence, the agency’s analytical branch, was planning to visit New Zealand in early 1985. These activities coincided with the creation of a special ANZUS project, in conjunction with Georgetown University’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, nicknamed ‘U.C.I.A’.
And in a chapter titled “Gold Merchants, Gun Runners and BCCI”, in Ian Wishart’s fun read, The Paradise Conspiracy (1995) there’s a reference to a New Zealand Herald article from August 1986, in which a former CIA operative warned that Lange’s Labour Government was being subjected to a CIA destabilization operation. When asked what were the signs the former CIA operative saw, Ralph W. McGeHee said:
“Well, these can range from recent visits from some pretty prominent and hawkish Americans to infiltration and destabilisation of organisations such as labour unions. You’ve recently been visited by such people as Ray S Cline, now a prominent American academic but formerly a Deputy Director of the CIA. Under his academic guise of clean, ideological inquiry, such a man is in an excellent position to push official American policy.”
Wishart wrote that he also unearthed a front-page story from the defunct New Zealand Times that reported in November 1984, that Ray Cline and Henry Kissinger, the Nixon-era National Security Advisor (i.e. CIA pointman to the White House) and Secretary of State, were making moves to set up a think-tank in Washington D.C. Evidently, Lange Government’s anti-nuclear stance was the impetus for moving the Center for Strategic and International Studies away from Georgetown University to Washington.
And so, this ‘ANZUS project’ included Kissinger, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Carter Administration National Security Advisor; the head of the National Security Council, who was the architect of the Russian-Mujahideen War codenamed Operation Cyclone.
As Eric Shibuya observed in his 2004 paper, “The Problems and Potential of the Pacific Islands Forum”, it was in the critical year 1985 that the South Pacific Region reached a consensus over its opposition to French nuclear testing, and found legal expression with the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone (SPNFZ) Treaty. This consensus, reached on August 6 1985, was eventually registered at the U.N. on 11 December 1986.
Given the matters at hand, these two dates carried potency. On August 6 1841, Governor Hobson received the first public seal of New Zealand. And on August 6 1914, British Secretary of State for War requested the NZ Government to seize the German wireless station at Samoa. And on 11 December 1939, an advance party of the NZ Division’s First Echelon sailed for Egypt. Ergo, sovereignty, war, and defiance of the allies’ wielding nuclear terror, all collided in these historically-themed date riffs.
Naturally, these developments would have got ‘stuck in the craw’ of President François Mitterrand’ and his brother, Jaques Mitterand, who was the Grand Master of the Grand Orient de France, or French Templar Freemasonry. For his part, the French President was a conservative Catholic educated by Jesuit teachers who applied a Jesuit education model. He claimed he became agnostic after observation of Nazi concentration camps at the end of World War II. Although President Mitterand won power on a socialist party ticket, this brand did not even penetrate Mitterrand’s skin wrote Richard Cottrell, the author of Gladio: NATO’s Dagger at the Heart of Europe.
Amusingly, Cottrell said François Mitterrand’s political personality was fluid and his pre-World War II schooling was in a “nursery of political parties that skidded to a halt a hairsbreadth short of full-blown fascism”. Ergo, a socialist uprising by the Kanaks would surely lead the French DGSE spies to wonder if the KGB commies were supplying arms and ammunition to destabilize France’s hold over New Caledonia.
In his New Zealand Listener article “Blood on their Banner” (27 October 1984), David Robie reported on the competing interests in nickel-rich New Caledonia.
Robie wrote that the Kanaks’ independence movement had been frustrated by the South Pacific Forum leaders, meeting in Tuvalu during August 1984, because politicians again cautioned against putting too much pressure on France. Jean-Marie Tjibaou, who was at the time of the Kanak independence movement, and Vice-President of New Caledonia’s Government Council, the highest elected post, told Robie he had felt disillusioned. However, David Lange’s sudden “reconnaissance mission” to Nouméa in early October 1984, changed that feeling of hopelessness.
Did French spies infiltrate the Mikhail Lermontov? Was the sinking a French operation inflicted as a way to stop the refitted liner’s “South Pacific Cruise” being a cover operation for a KGB gun-running to ‘support’ the Kanaks independence movement?
If it seems outlandish that the Russians might have been using the Mikhail Lermontov as an arms trafficking vessel to overthrow the French by arming the Kanaks as proxies, to achieve an objective of gaining New Caledonia for the Russian Empire, then consider some circumstantial evidence that the passenger liner had a double life.
In testimony to the N.Z. Department of Transport’s ‘Preliminary Inquiry’, a Radio Officer, Anatoliy Krutkov stated upon hearing the shocks he rushed to the main radio room. The first thing the Chief Radio Officer did was instruct the three radio operators to establish communications with Vladivostok Radio Station, home of Soviet Navy Intelligence, and it’s Pacific submarine fleet headquarters. Intriguing?
On request, Vladivostok allotted a separate frequency for their radio communications.
Krutkov said the Chief Radio Officer, Mr. Moskovkin, reached the Russian Embassy in Wellington and gained the home phone number for Mr Ivanchishin the Russian Ambassador to New Zealand in Wellington. Moskovin reached Ivanchishin by satellite radiotelephone. Vorobyov told Ivanchishin about the ship’s state of peril.
In Vogue Industry, Angel Austin wrote (25 January 2025), the Mikhail Lermontov as a luxury cruise ship quickly became the leader among all Soviet Ministry of the Navy passenger ships, since it had state of the art equipment. It was built under Project 301 in the shipyards Wismar City, since the Soviets continued to demand merchant ships as ‘war reparations’ from World War II, even though airline travel was taking off.
News outlets have stated that Prebble reportedly sealed documents for 50 years.
A report marked “top secret” that was found in David Lange’s private papers reveals the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), the government’s electronic spy agency, had received specific sections of the ship’s bridge log, the captain’s log and the engine room log. These communications, that were marked “top secret umbra” were passed to Defence (GCSB) for translation for the Department of Transport marine inquiry, noted the file entitled GCSB ANNUAL REPORT 1985/86.
The director of the GCSB, Colin Hanson, described the relationship between the agency and other government agencies as a “mixed state of official caution and private cordiality”, reported the Sunday Star Times in 2006, following Lange’s death in 2005. The volume of overseas intelligence reports increased by 33% in 1986, compared to the previous year, according to the GCSB, which was unregulated until 1996, since the impending publication of Nicky Hager’s Secret Power, was set to expose the agency.
Ergo, intelligence traffic improved over 1986; a year kicked off by the Lermontov saga.
Poignantly, the release of the Soviet Marine Inquiry into the Mikhail Lermontov sinking by the Office of the Transport Minister, occurred on September 1st 1986, as I mentioned previously. This date carried potency for the matters at hand, because the GCSB came into formal existence on September 1 1977, which was the anniversary of establishing the Australia-New Zealand-United States (ANZUS) military alliance in 1951. Ergo, the Transport Ministry’s release of the Russian report into the sabotage of the Soviet cruise liner, appeared to signal a special ‘ANZUS Project’ with local buy-in.
If it still seems like Australasian spies wouldn’t get up to the same intrigues as their French counterparts, consider how the Australian ‘secret service’ (ASIO) shredded documents in the aftermath of the Nugan Hand Bank collapse. This merchant bank, which had a roster of CIA shareholders, was laundering heroin money from the opium Golden Triangle of Laos, Cambodia and Thailand, and was a conduit for CIA payoffs.
As ex-TV3 News journalist Ian Wishart recounts the telling remarks of CIA spook, James Angleton, who was Chief of Counter Intelligence, to interviewers over the silent coup by to get Prime Minister Gough Whitlam sacked by Governor General Phillip Kerr in 1975. In his 1995 classic, Wishart quotes Angleton:
“I will put it this way very bluntly. No one in the Agency would ever believe that I would ever subscribe to any activity that was not coordinated with the chief of the Australian internal security.” — James Angleton, CIA Chief of Counter-Intelligence [Paradise Conspiracy, p. 115]
Whitlam had ordered documents pertaining to Pine Gap, a secret spy facility, that had been set up as part of Australia’s buy-in to the Five Eyes Echelon surveillance network. Australia’s P.M. dared to know who the foreign spies were at Pine Gap.
To convey a sense of the cooperation between, for instance, America and Australia worked to unseat Whitlam, Ray Cline told Australia’s National Times newspaper:
“The CIA would go so far as to provide information to people who would bring it to the surface in Australia. Say they stumbled onto a Whitlam error, which they were willing to pump into the system so it might be to his damage … if we provided a particular piece of information to the Australian intelligence services, they would make use of it.”
In short, the CIA officials were divulging how they can destabilize an ally government that fails to ‘toe the line’, with the cooperation of the domestic intelligence agencies’ chiefs and through operatives stoking narratives to gullible or complicit newsrooms.
As I argued in my article, 40 years Ago: The Rainbow Warrior Bombing, those who weren’t privy to the plot set to go down in New Zealand after dark on July 10th 1985, were cast into the ‘politically deaf community’. In the aftermath, it was found that the Joint Intelligence Committee that met on Wednesdays at Whitehall, London, ‘learned’ that New Zealand was going to be used as a staging ground for a sting on a gun-running operation that was due to supply arms to the Kanaks in New Caledonia.
Ironically, when divers found wet CTC Cruises travel brochures for Pacific destinations such as New Calendonia, floating in the wreckage of the Lermontov in 1986, they didn’t know the sinking’s purpose was to foil an arms trafficking operation.
In the mid-1980s, New Caledonia had 13,000 guns. According to 2022 data from the High Commission of New Caledonia, there were 64,000 registered privately-owned weapons and somewhere between 64,000 and 128,000 additional unregistered weapons.
There was much to irk the hawkish Americans in the Reagan White House too.
After all, Lange had rejected a visit by the USS Buchanan in February 1985, after the frigate had sailed into Sydney Harbour in January the same year. Yet, the Lermontov, carrying KGB agents, could travel to New Zealand, and it appears Putin easily infiltrated the New Zealand Labour Party as a shoe salesman in the mid-1980s.
And so, this riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, that is the strange sinking of the Mikhail Lermontov on the same date, February 16, that the Daily Southern Cross had claimed a hostile Russian ‘ironclad’ warship had sailed into the harbour at Auckland in 1873, has the hallmarks of a staged grounding to wreck Russia’s arms trafficking operation to New Caledonia, it seems. The apparent plot to shipwreck the Lermontov, seems to have been embroiled the Lange Administration before the corny excuses were recited the parrot media like budgies thinking they had uncovered a scandal. This political capture, I contend, occurred because Lange and All The Prime Minister’s Men were faced with brinkmanship in the aftermath of the Rainbow Warrior Bombing. Without embarrassment, the anomalies dropped proudly like budgies shit in cages while attention seeking. Where the death of the Rainbow Warrior photographer, Fernando Pereira, had triggered a homicide inquiry, the death of Pavel Zaglyadimov did not even trigger a prosecution for murder or manslaughter.
Inspector Owen Dance said communications were difficult between the Wellington Rescue Coordination Centre and the Port Gore Communications due to geography, as well as the high volume of radio traffic. There was controversy over who cancelled a MAYDAY call. Accusations flew that it was the New Zealand pilot, Captain Jamison, or whether it was the ship’s Master, Russian Captain Vorobyov. Or, perhaps it was a message inserted into the busy traffic by an intelligence agency, or by the NZ Navy.
Curiously, Mr Dance claimed he was told by several mariners at the Rescue Coordination Centre (RCC), who evidently reckoned it should have been possible to get the ship through the gap, as long as the tide and ship’s position were right.
But, Nimrod sailor, Dave Fishburn, said that although there’s room for a ship with a 100-foot wide berth to make it, the running tide would catch the ship as it sailed through and the bow would get caught on the rocks on the portside or starboard hull.
It seems the ‘Reckoning Mariners’, who were at the Rescue Coordination Centre, ran rings around Mr Dance, whose answers to the Destination Disaster film-crew appeared to typify the gullibility of so many of Wellington’s state managers. Ergo, the ‘Reckoning Mariners’ appeared to perform the function of seeding a narrative to confuse, while providing a cover-story to deflect probing attention from a staged plot.
Accommodating France? The Mikail Lermontov Sinking
Since Captain Jamison was contracted to pilot the Lermontov in Milford Sound, he had stayed aboard the ship, while his deputy Captain Neill, had disembarked at 4:30pm.
It would appear, therefore, without his deputy, the Marlborough Sounds Harbour Master became ensnared in a plot to shipwreck the 20,000 tonne cruise liner.
The French were planning to build a navy and air force base in New Caledonia.
So, even without a looming Russian gun running operation, the French Ministry of Defence would have taken the prospect of 330 Soviet Russian crew, as well as passengers, visiting New Caledonia, as a provocation that had to be met.
New Zealand’s officials knew of the operation, including the top brass of NZ Navy, according to what Snoopman has been told. Certainly, the cover-story was so cornie, Snoopboy’s weekbix went soggy reading the ‘too stupid to be stupid’ news stories.
Evidently, the Mikhail Lermontov could out-run the French Navy’s frigates. The vessel appeared to be dual purposed, and would go along way to explaining ‘Project 301’, as a Cold War era military intelligence operation. It was greeted with an ‘Allied Exposure’.
Since the date the Mikhail Lermontov scraped through rocks on the shoreward side of a channel marker, and sank in Port Gore Bay on the historical date that a colonial era newspaper sparked “The Russians are Coming!” scare of 1873, this uncanny ‘coincidence’ gives away the strange sinking as another ‘too stupid to be stupid’ crisis.
Ergo, after the fallout over the Rainbow Warrior Bombing, David Lange and key officials were brought around to staying in the good graces of the Western Alliance.
The Beehive officials faced a game of brinkmanship and they buckled. In part 5: “Accommodating France — Rainbow Warrior Bombing, 10 July 1985”, Snoopman made the case that the French operation to bomb Greenpeace’s Pacific flagship was blown open, not merely because the DGSE agents screwed up due to rushed planning.
But, also since a mission parameter set by the Defence Minister Charles Hernu, that the bomb timers’ countdown had to be set for three hours, this short counter delay was not enough time to flee the country, the DGSE agents were required to lay low. It led to panic, mistakes and suspicion. The presence of French tourists wanting to dive in winter, their rendevous adventures in strange spots, and their clambering in mud muttering French with dinghies attracted attention, would become memories for leads the police gathered to catch two agents two days after the bombs exploded.
The short three hour timer-delay ensured the two limpet mines would explode before midnight, and therefore the date of the Warrior Bombing would forever be known as July 10 1985. And thus, the bombing riffed off the time in 1840, when the French Navy Captain Charles François Lavaud arrived in the Bay of Islands in the French frigate, L’Aube, after dark on the night of 10 July. Unhappily for France, Lavaud was beaten in his mission to claim the South Island as a colony, by the British Royal Navy warship, HMS Britomart. Captain Lavaud stated in his report, Akaroa, that Jean-Baptiste François Pompallier had advised him to press ahead and annex the South Island.
As such, I conclude that the circumstantial evidence, including the meta-data of dates corresponding with thematic metaphor-laden historic events, points to a staged take-down of the Russian passenger ship. France followed up the Rainbow Warrior Sinking with the Mikhail Lermontov Sinking to protect its sovereign power in French Polynesia, and as well as preventing New Caledonia from becoming Russian territory.
Therefore, in mid-February 1986, the Russians were incentivised to play along with the takedown of their passenger vessel, since it would be damaging for their tourism industry. The world would wonder what other planes, trains and motor vessels were dual purposed for arms trafficking. Given that America was (and still is) the world’s premiere propaganda superpower, it would have been a losing proposition for the Russians to say “they do it too!” Power knows hypocrisy well, as its vulgar harlot.
The tolerance of another ‘too stupid to be stupid’ crisis event belies a ‘don’t rock the boat’ sentiment that pervades the remote archipelago. Snoopman considers this ‘don’t rock the boat’ ethos to be a cultural-wide psychological disorder, which he terms Small Island Spectrum Syndrome Impairment (or SISSI). Because it is endemic to N.Z., a hyphen followed by an E may be added on the end of the acronym to render: SISSI-E.
Because New Zealand ‘developed’ as a small island plantation, where every industry, bureaucracy and municipality is generally dominated by a ‘Little Britain’ Élite at the top, whose bristle feathers are prone to stiffening, and because the Little Britain Land was becoming dominated by market monopolizing cartels — amid a staged corporate heist of the economy — New Zealanders were (and still are) afraid to ‘rock the boat’.
This SISSI-E habit meant the inhabitants were scared to whistle-blow, and it caused the media to pull their punches, and this behaviour was also the root of the dysfunctional flaccidity in its watch-dogs’ over-sight, investigations and punishments.
Ergo, the gambit to stage a sinking in historical waters was not only a way to signal authorship, cooperation, sponsorship, threats, promises, caution, a scapegoat and hidden objectives. The location was selected also as a way to mitigate loss of life.
Grounding the ship at Cape Jackson meant the stricken vessel was radioing its distress in the stomping ground of so many who had been touched with the ethos of instilling tenacity in adventure, hazards and emergency into youth, long before Outward Bound came along. The Mikhail Lermontov was visible from the Baker family’s farm, who operated Radio Cape Jackson, with a VHF transmitter for handling marine vessel traffic. Where the ‘Reckoning Mariners’ at the Wellington Rescue Coordination Center had Inspector Owen Dance believe the ship should have been able to get through the passage with the right appraoch and tide, and had reckoned the alleged radio call off the MAYDAY sounded right, the locals sprung into action.
The reason why Captain Don Jamison, the Marlborough Sounds Harbour Master for 16 years, would pilot a 20,000 tonne cruise liner through a narrow rocky passage marked by a lighthouse located on the reef, with 740 lives in his hands, has been unfathomable for New Zealanders old enough to recall the strange sinking in 1986.
Jamison did not sail the 155-meter vessel through the slim gap at Cape Jackson.
The Mikhail Lermontov was run aground because the cruise liner was living a double life. From the perspective of France’s Defense Department, including its Navy and France’s equivalent of the CIA, the Direction Générale de la Sé-curité Extérieure (DGSE), the Russian passenger ship needed to ‘die’. New Zealand was cast as a stage.
The Rainbow Warrior Bombing can now be properly seen as the Act I climax in a three act theatrical production, where the ship-wrecking of the Mikhail Lermontov was supposed to be the Act II climax, leading to the story’s resolution or denouement.
In this French-authored sabotage-terrorism operation, it can be discerned that the climatic scene in Act III was supposed one where France could needle the Russians from the shadows, to stay out of French New Caledonia. But the plot to sink the Rainbow Warrior had been blown wide open, like the hull of Greenpeace’s Pacific flagship, seven months earlier in 1985, on the historical evening of July 10, precisely 145 years after a French naval corvette had arrived in the Bay of Islands — after dark.
And so with a clandestine cuteness the shipwrecking of the Mikhail Lermontov after dark on the same historical evening that a fictional Russian warship, the Kaskowiski, had reportedly docked at the port in Commercial Bay, and had terrorized the city.
Ergo, in this ‘too stupid to be stupid’ trans-marine empire episode, the corny comic book story of an experienced overworked captain being fatigued, tipsy and wanting to make a name for himself for pulling off a daring navigational feat — crashed the news.
To fathom the shipwrecking of the Mikhail Lermontov is the comprehend the overarching objectives, or metaconflict, about geopolitical rivarlies between a nuclear great-power and a nuclear super-power. The staging of this three-act political spy thriller, featuring terrorism as theater, in New Zealand, was because of the Voltarean ‘playwrights’ at French Ministry of Defence, decided the South Pacific archipelago’s leadership needed a ‘live Cooking demonstration’ in novel trojan horse coups d’état.
But, this season of hostilities was not simply for the ‘benefit’ of New Zealand’s Establishment insiders. Since terrorism is theater aimed at the watching audience, and since this season of hostilities comprised two sinkings — albeit by very different methods — the intended primary audience was Western Elites. The ruling classes of Western Alliance countries were, in effect, being told to get their domestic activists back under control, because any further defections from the military alliances that underpinned the Anglo-American Empire, would be exploited by Russia.
Despite the exposure of the French-sponsored night-time bombing of the Rainbow Warrior on the anniversary of the arrival of the French frigate, L’Aube, after dark on July 10 1840, the French DGSE and French Navy were able to get away with bribing and blackmailing their way into the covert operation to sink the Mikhail Lermontov.
The corny narrative passed through the filters of the state bureaucracy, because the state managers of the Lange Administration were already compromised by their damage control in the aftermath of Rainbow Warrior Bombing. Moreover, with the brinkmanship that France would leave the South Pacific to the Russians, if the United States didn’t bring Mr Lange to heel over the exposure of Operation Satanic, the French operation to shipwreck the Mikhail Lermontov required Lange & Associates to play along. The psychotic humour was codified into the demise of the Soviet cruise liner, since the date February 16th signalled the ‘Russians would be coming’ to make sure those involved would remain tight-lipped about the foiled gun-running plot.
Therefore, the framing of the Marlborough Harbour Master as culpable, for the course the 20,000 tonne ship took through a narrow rocky channel — which was marked by a lighthouse located on the reef — also had everything to do with dealing blows to the three biggest threats facing the French nuclear power, seven months after the Rainbow Warrior Bombing in Auckland: Greenpeace, the New Zealand Government’s anti-nuclear stance, and the Russian Empire’s ambitions in the South Pacific.
And those threats had everything to do with attempting to ensure there weren’t anymore defections from the Western Alliance. NZ was placed in the naughty corner.
The geographically-isolated archipelago continued to be a staging ground for novel trojan horse coups d’état, while its some of its inhabitants and visitors were unwittingly cast as extras, pawns and non-player characters. In this Act II climatic psycho-drama, New Zealand became the setting to act, once again, as the closet Empire’s lightening-rod, its laboratory and its light-house, to run a corny sabotage-cum-terrorism plot, to deal the Russians a blow in this Third Hundred Years’ War.
Editor’s Note: The original title graphic contained an error. Instead of 16 February, the date 16 Nov. was typed. Feckless snoop-graphics department … into the hold!!!
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Back when Steve Snoopman was ‘Snoopboy’, he delivered the Auckland Star during the dark days of the Reagan White House. He forged his superpower to ‘Thunk Evil Without Being Evil’ while writing a thesis on the Global Financial Crisis. Upon quipping that Batman had failed to bust any Gotham banker balls — since his ass is owned by DC Comics — he consequently realised New Zealand needed a Snoopman.
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SEE related: Darkest Days by Dates Down Under series introduction
Moving a Mountain — The Crash of Flight TE901: November 28 1979
Darkest Days by Dates Down Under: Part 1 [The Snoopman Files]
The Great Divide — 1981 Springbok Rugby Tour, New Zealand
Darkest Days by Dates Down Under: Part 2 [The Snoopman Files]
Transport Themed Terrorism — Wellington Trades Hall Bombing, March 27 1984
Darkest Days by Dates Down Under: Part 3 [The Snoopman Files]
Kiwi Dollar Weaponized as Ransom Notes — ‘Bastille Day’ Currency Crisis, 1984 Darkest Days by Dates Down Under: Part 4 [The Snoopman Files]
Accommodating France — Rainbow Warrior Bombing, 10 July 1985
Darkest Days by Dates Down Under: Part 5 [The Snoopman Files]
See also: “Terror Archipelago Down Under? Pt 1 Industrial Sabotage, Ritual Terrorism, and Police State Formation in New Zealand” on Snoopman News
SEE also: ‘Price of Power’ Themed-Terrorism: Rainbow Warrior Bombing Inflicted to Save the Empire from Losing N.Z. [Snoopman News, July 10 2020]