New Zealand’s military admitted it was “seriously embarrassed” yesterday after an inquiry revealed it granted high security clearance to a scientist who lived in an elaborate fantasy world.
The head of the Defence Technology Agency Stephen Wilce quit last month after it was revealed he falsely claimed to be an ex-Marine combat veteran and an Olympic bobsledder who raced against Jamaica’s “Cool Runnings” team.
Details of an inquiry released yesterday unveiled the extent of Wilce’s claims to incredulous colleagues, saying the defense force’s top scientist had admitted to telling tall stories about himself since childhood.
It said Wilce claimed to be a helicopter pilot who served with Prince Andrew, a spy with British intelligence and a special forces soldier who was on an IRA death list.
Among numerous other fabrications, he also said he had been a member of the Welsh rugby union team, captain of the Royal Navy swimming team and a guitarist on the British folk music circuit.
The report found Wilce had embellished his resume when he was hired in 2005 and his appointment was made with undue haste. It called for tighter vetting procedures in defense force recruitment.
“Some dumb decisions were made,” Defence Force chief Lieutenant General Jerry Mateparae told reporters.
The report found that British-born Wilce had not posed a significant threat to national security.
“Mr Wilce may, however, present a risk to the reputation of New Zealand with its international and security partners,” it concluded.
The report said concerns were raised about Wilce’s tendency to “big note” himself when he was hired, but they were not properly followed up.
He headed 80 staff at the agency, which provides technological support to New Zealand’s military, for five years.
Defense finally launched an investigation into his past last July, but he resigned before it was concluded when commercial broadcaster TV3 revealed his fanciful claims.
They included being a combat veteran and a member of Britain’s bobsleigh team at the 1988 Calgary Olympics, where he supposedly competed against the Jamaican team that inspired the 1993 film Cool Runnings.
“I know them all,” Wilce said in footage filmed by an undercover reporter. “I know all the Jamaican guys ... mad, absolute nutters.”
Previous employers and colleagues told the program that Wilce was a “Walter Mitty” character who claimed he designed guidance systems for Britain’s Polaris nuclear missiles, a defunct system launched 50 years ago during the Cold War.
“When you put all of the things together, when you connect all of the dots, it’s bloody embarrassing,” Mateparae said.
He said that while screening procedures had proved inadequate, most of the failings lay with Wilce’s “reprehensible” conduct.
“He represented his work history, military career, achievements, academic qualifications and activities in other fields in a way that was neither honest nor complete. Not only have his actions damaged his reputation, they have damaged the morale of those he led at the Defence Technology Agency, and they have damaged the reputation of the New Zealand Defence Force,” Mateparae said.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS