FBI office in New Zealand will defend against Chinese influence, Patel says

FBI Director Kash Patel visited New Zealand over the weekend to launch the bureau’s new office there, saying the country was a crucial partner for fighting Chinese influence in the Indo-Pacific region.

Patel said the international field office, known as a legal attaché office, was the first such office to open in decades. The FBI has more than 60 offices across the globe designed to focus on international threats and intelligence building.

Fresh off a meeting with Five Eyes partners in the region, Patel laid out the FBI New Zealand office’s priorities.

“Some of the most important global issues of our times are the ones that New Zealand and America work on together, countering the CCP (Chinese influence) in the INDOPACOM theatre, countering the narcotics trade, working against cyber intrusions and ransomware operations, and most importantly, protecting our respective citizenry here in New Zealand, at home in America and across the world,” Patel said in a statement.

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The Five Eyes alliance is a decades-old global group of five countries that share intelligence with each other for national security purposes. In addition to the United States and New Zealand, it includes the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. New Zealand has faced pressure to align more closely with the United States on China while also balancing its own relationship with Beijing, according to The Associated Press.

China took issue with the FBI’s announcement in remarks on Friday, saying it did not support the two countries teaming up against a third country. 

“Seeking so-called absolute security through forming small groupings under the banner of countering China does not help keep the Asia Pacific and the world at large peaceful and stable,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said.

Judith Collins, New Zealand’s communications security bureau minister, said the FBI’s presence would help with crime.

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“I think it’s about the transnational crime that we see, the increasing influence of major drug traffickers across the Pacific, but also interference in countries; systems, particularly when I look at some of the gun-running sort of type behavior that we know goes on [in] the Pacific,” Collins said, adding that “it’s just the reality is we have similar issues that we have to deal with. And it’s great to have the FBI upgrading its presence.”

From racing against China to achieve technological advances to prosecuting possible instances of espionage and raising worries about China’s ownership of a small fraction of U.S. farmland, the U.S. government has signaled a heightened concern with Chinese influence on numerous fronts.

China has also been a driving force behind the opioid crisis in the United States. The Drug Enforcement Administration found in 2020 that the illicit drug flow into the country originated primarily with China.