Invaluable Service: The secret history of New Zealand’s signals intelligence during two world wars
Desmond Ball, Cliff Lord & Meredith Thatcher

Paper/220x156. 496 pp. Illus.
With 42 pages of plates.
ISBN: 9781877431234

This book describes the secret activities of the many people and places involved with listening to and decoding the enemy’s signals during two world wars. Known as SIGINT for Signals Intelligence, this is New Zealand’s unseen contribution.
The authors have unearthed and brought to light much of what has been lost or hidden during these years, including New Zealand’s significant contribution to the nerve-wracking scramble to locate the Scharnhorst battle cruiser in the northern Atlantic Ocean in 1943.
Because secrecy was paramount, their station locations and personnel, their triumphs and failures, were never reported. And this secrecy continues to the present day, having all but sunk out of sight. As Dr Warren Tucker, the Director of the Security Intelligence Service, comments in his foreword “I am delighted that this book now puts firmly into the public arena a record of New Zealand’s small but important SIGINT contribution to the wartime Allied effort.”
This book is a must for all with an interest in intelligence matters, as well as those who enjoy insider histories of the war.

Contents

Chapter 1	The Beginnings of SIGINT in New Zealand
Chapter 2	Direction, Organisation and Cooperation
Chapter 3	Awarua Radio (ZLB)
Chapter 4	Musick Point, Auckland
Chapter 5	Wellington Radio (ZLW)
Chapter 6	New Zealand’s SIGINT activities in Fiji
Chapter 7	New Zealand Army SIGINT activities
Chapter 8	Naval Wireless Station, Rapaura
Chapter 9	Waiouru Naval W/T Station
Chapter 10	Monitoring Enemy Radio Broadcasts
Chapter 11	‘Incalculable Aid’
Appendix	Report on ‘New Zealand Naval “Y”, H/F D/F and Special Intelligence Organisation’, 17 December 1942. DECLASSIFIED

IMPORTANT
All veterans of Sigint, service "Y" work, or involved with the dissemination of Sigint-derived materials, should click here to find out more about a new Commemorative Badge from the UK Government.