A business consultant says it was ‘drop dead easy’ to unearth the truth about a senior Defence Force official who has been unmasked as a CV liar and cheat.
Stephen Wilce was the centre of a 60 Minutes investigation, which aired last night.
For the last five years he has been privy to the most sensitive of defence information in his job as the Director of New Zealand’s Defence Technology Agency.
Mr Wilce’s role comes with the highest levels of security clearance, but it is a job he was given on the basis of a string of lies, many of which were on his CV.
Steve Saunders interviewed Mr Wilce for a job in the 1990s and discovered he was telling lies back then.
He says he has never seen anything like some of the lies that Mr Wilce told him.
“This was very much at the high end of the scale. In fact, he is the top of my scale.”
With little difficulty he found out the truth about some of Mr Wilce’s claims.
“Drop dead easy. Takes a bit of time, a few phone calls.”
“It wasn’t difficult for me. I did it at the time and I’m a small show and I took it upon myself to pick up the phone. Because of the calibre and level of appointment I took it upon myself to do those phone calls and talk like that to the person concerned rather than trust it with someone to do that standard reference check.”
Mr Saunders believes Mr Wilce should not have his job.
“Our defence force has a very proud record. The defence personnel are of the highest standing they’re good people, integrity, honesty characteristics and anyone who’s in a leadership position should be squeaky clean in my view. So if I’d been asked to recommend him for employment for the military the answer would have been an emphatic, ‘no’. “
Mr Wilce is a Briton who has been in New Zealand and Australia since 1993, his Government role earns him $250,000 a year.
The 80-person agency he heads provides scientific advice to the military on things such as weapons systems.
From his Devonport base, all recommendations on defence technology and upgrades go through Mr Wilce.
As Chief Defence Scientist, he reports directly to the Chief of Defence.
Former Defence Technology Agency scientist Chris Reid says it is important that the person that holds that position is beyond reproach.
“Well it’s incredibly important because this is pretty high level stuff and it’s also very important that there’s good personal relationships and a high level of credibility between, for example, our TTCP principle and … the US. So there needs to be a lot of trust there and a lot of credibility in order to freely facilitate the cooperation in those areas.”
Mr Reid says Mr Wilce is not capable of doing the job.
“If we want to have good relationships with our allies and have trust on … sensitive matters like defence technology, that has a material effect on the capability of our defence forces, I think it’s self evident that it’s very important that we have trust between ourselves and other countries and internally, that we actually have a chief defence scientist that’s capable of doing the job.”
Last night it was unveiled that Mr Wilce has claimed to have been a member of the British Olympic bobsleigh team in the 1980s. No one from the team or the British Bobsleigh Association has ever heard of him.
Despite his claims to have been a Royal Marine, no record of him ever having been so exists. No evidence supports his claims to have been decorated in battle either.
Immediately before rising to his current job leading 80 people, he was chief executive of a small Australian housing company in charge of about 10 people. They jokingly called him a rocket scientist because of what he’d told them about his past.
Watch the full 60 Minutes investigation.