Words: Nikki Macdonald Photo: Robert Kitchin
It was far from the week Nicky Hager would have hoped for. He was supposed to be on the offensive, pushing for an inquiry into a botched SAS raid, which his new book alleges killed six Afghan civilians.
Instead, he’s been defending Hit & Run‘ s accuracy, conceding he and co-author Jon Stephenson mis-mapped the raid’s exact location, with the ensuing confusion threatening to undo all those thousands of hours of research. A stray ‘‘bollocks’’ emerged from those usually tightlycontrolled lips, in the face of Defence Force denials. Yet here he is, mid-firestorm, talking about his life and motivations in that same quiet, calm, even tone that is his trademark.
Any post-release ‘‘turbulence’’ is minor compared with the effort of writing a good book, Hager explains. And he doesn’t believe in putting his personality too much into his work.
Which is why he finds it weird that 25 years of ‘‘talking in what I think is a calm and reasonable way about things’’ has earned him a long legacy of personal insults, ranging from ‘‘sanctimonious lying commie creep’’ to the ‘‘Left-wing conspiracy theorist’’ tag favoured by former prime minister John Key.
His champions call him a defender of democracy and decency; his critics call him a politically-motivated smear merchant and master of PR, who stage manages his book releases for maximum impact and trashes people’s reputations to make money.
Hager (rhymes with lager) calls himself an author or investigative journalist. Not an activist - he hates that term. And not a Labour or Green Party stooge. But certainly political, in the sense he’s motivated by morality and social issues and the need for change.
‘‘Do I have a party political agenda? Not in the slightest. Do I have social and political motivations? Of course. Why else would I spend hundreds and thousands of hours working on things? That’s why I do it.’’
Sitting in the modest harbour-view house he built himself, Hager looks an unlikely public enemy. He’s the quiet, bright kid who sings and tramps and can name all the plants in the bush. The 58-year-old doesn’t have a cellphone or television as they waste precious thinking time. As he puts it - ‘‘I organise the choir, I spend my life trying to do what I think is right’’.
But he likes delving into subjects others would rather keep secret, from his first book Secret Power, investigating previously unknown spy agency GCSB, to the latest, Hit & Run, which alleges New Zealand SAS involvement in civilian deaths, and a defence force cover-up.
His books fall broadly into two categories - war (intelligence gathering being an extension of military work) and dodgy politics. The first is personal - Hager comes from a family ‘‘really shockingly influenced by the fact the world had gone to war’’.
He grew up in Levin, the son of immigrants with a social conscience. His father Kurt fled Austria and the Nazis as a