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August 27, 2005

The post war roots of the investigative tradition in Australian journalism

This article was first published in Curthoys and Schultz, Journalism: Print, Politics and Popular Culture, University of Queensland Press, 1999.

The decade of the 1980s was a ‘golden age’ of investigative journalism in Australia, of which the best known outlets were the National Times newspaper and ABC TV’s Four Corners program. The period spawned a number of Royal Commissions, several minister of the crown resigned or were sacked and the issue of corruption in politics and the police force were established in the public mind as never before.

The investigative journalism of the 1980s burst on the scene in a way which seemed unprecedented yet this style of reporting had roots in the period since the Second World War and even earlier. Smith’s Weekly, published from 1919 to 1950, had ‘a special Investigation department staffed by journalists with a bent for sleuthing.’ One of its many exposures is credited with dealing a fatal blow to the New Guard, an incipient fascist movement of the 1930s.

The most detailed historical work on investigative journalism has been done in the United States. The writer Robert Miraldi argues that there are two traditions in journalism: objectivity and muckraking. These are peculiarly American terms but capture an essential truth. By objectivity he means the tradition in journalism that sees itself as detached, disinterested and impartial; by muckraking he refers to a tradition in journalism which sees itself as a public watchdog whose job is to expose and therefore reform some large or small aspect of society.

I accept this as a useful conceptual framework both because it both reflects actual schools of thought within journalism and because it focusses on the intention of the journalist. Using this framework we can begin to link the upsurge of investigative reporting in Australia in the 1970s and 1980s to what might appear to be a quite different phenomenon: the populist exposures by newspapers such as the Truth in an earlier period. These targets of these exposures were quite different. In the popular press the target, for example, was likely to be an individual quack doctor whereas in the 1970s and 1980s, the target was more likely to be a Health minister or an entire health system. The American scholar, W. Sprague Holden, writing in 1961 after visiting Australia referred to the tradition of muckraking when he argued that ‘no great cause was ever led by newspapers dedicated to keeping boats on even keels. No worthy crusade was ever accomplished by a policy of not rousing the animals.’

The muckraking or investigative tradition in Australian journalism shows other similarities to that in the United States. Because of its moral stance and urge to reform, it often occurs in periods when social reform is on the agenda in the wider society. In the United States the classic period of the muckrakers’ was between 1900 to 1915 which was also the age of progressivism in the USA. This was the period of the ‘robber barons’ in which Ida Tarbell wrote her indictment of the Standard Oil company, when Upton Sinclair exposed the Chicago meatworks in The Jungle and when Lincoln Steffens exposed corruption by police and city officials. In Australia we see an upsurge in muckraking in the immediate post war period in Australia when the hopes of a post war ‘new order’ were high. The housing shortage and the conditions of the mentally ill were two targets here. Similarly, the cultural and political revolution beginning in the 1960s gave rise to a revival of investigative reporting but this time, unusually, in the quality press and television.

In their study of the investigative tradition and of its ability to initiate reform Protess et al have pointed to the weaknesses of what they call the ‘mobilisation model’. In this schema, the journalist writes or broadcasts an exposure of an injustice, for example, thereby informing and mobilising public opinion. The public then demands reforms from legislators and thus muckraking (or investigative) journalism leads to social reform.

Protess demonstrates convincingly that the ‘mobilisation model’ is too simplistic and linear. A great deal of investigative reporting is only possible (and is at its most effective) when it is consciously allied from the beginning with reformist sources in the wider society. Typically, certain sources give inside information to the reporter and in return the investigative reporters highlight an issue and implicitly call for reform. The piece of investigative journalism adds to existing forces for change (such as political lobbying often by the journalist’s sources). The journalist does not stand outside society or political process but is an active participant and even dealmaker. We find this in Australia. Tom Farrell’s work on the case of convicted murderer McDermott meant that he closely worked with the forces calling for an inquiry into a miscarriage of justice. Denis Warner’s exposure of mental hospitals relied on doctors’ co-operation. In a different way, Truth’s close contact with its readers who came to it with instances of injustice was also an example of the close alliance of sympathetic sources with investigative journalists.

In post war Australia, investigative journalism by newspapers occurred in two different forums. The most pervasive was that of the popular journalism which thrived on scandal and muckraking. Less frequent was that of the broadsheet or quality press.

Two newspapers exemplified each of these styles. The first was the Sydney Truth, part of the Norton empire with weekly sister papers in Adelaide, Brisbane and Melbourne. Muckraking was most clearly expressed in its popular form as a ‘journalism of exposure’. The second was the Melbourne Herald, which, while a popular newspaper in the sense that it had a high circulation, was highminded, conservative and more subdued in its brand of campaigning journalism.

The exposure journalism of Truth newspaper

In the period following the Second World War Truth had a style of journalism was high pitched, sensational and melodramatic. These features are hardly remarkable in the popular press but Truth differed from later tabloid journalism because of its attitude to its readers. Truth not only claimed to stand up for its readers but actually had a close relationship with them. Readers would write, call or visit its offices with stories of injustice to tell -- and Truth’s journalists would listen. The result was a populist expression of the role of the press fourth estate with journalists as proto-ombudsmen. Truth’s stock in trade was exposure of injustice or of fraud on the public.

For example, complaints by readers during the post war housing crisis led to regular Truth exposures. One builder, Alfred Wingrove ‘has been fleecing people for a period of five years’ by accepting deposits for houses which were never built. His carefully worded contracts and criminal record dating back to the early 1930s were exposed in 1947. Another reader had had his flourishing plant nursery closed down and forcibly resumed by the Housing Commission which then ignored the land for three years. The housing shortage also produced mini-exposes of poverty (‘Truth finds couple living in wardrobe’). Truth’s reporters, like those of today, made use of public registers of company records and modern investigations of corporate malpractice have their roots in exposures of shady conmen. Truth’s role as a consumer ombudsman was by no means limited to housing: ‘A drive yourself hire car company which sold out on Friday will be no loss to the community.... Atta Pty Ltd. sold out a couple of weeks after Truth started investigating its activities.’ In this case, too, customers were led to believe something quite opposite to the contracts they signed.

Truth’s exposures were quite limited and often confined to small personal injustices. In some cases they related to larger social issues (e.g. the housing crisis) but in many cases no connection was hinted at with political and social issues. In the era in which Truth published, journalism, including crusading journalism, was narrowly confined to particular events and people and in this sense there are close parallels with modern TV current affairs. Broader issues (government policy on hospital funding; doctors’ criteria for admission to hospital) were rarely taken up. For instance, a number of stories in Truth and elsewhere implicitly cried out for a probing investigation into police bashings, ‘verbals’ and protection rackets -- yet almost nothing systematic was done until the late 1970s. For reasons probably to do with what was acceptable as journalism, the individual stories of Truth, the Daily Telegraph and all other newspapers remained largely as stories of individuals.

Undercover methods of news gathering have been a staple of in-depth and investigative reporting for many decades. They were used in Truth’s frequent exposures of unqualified or quack doctors. These often relied on reporters presenting themselves as patients with a bogus complaint: ‘The next patient to visit Rupert was the same man who had his gallstones tickled by “Gallstones” Hoffman, the quack who says he can remove gallstones by massage.... On a second visit the patient disclosed he was from Truth .....and Rupert came clean with his story of his quackery.’ The exposure of sharp practices by the hire car company mentioned above was also achieved by a Truth reporter anonymously hiring a car. They were also used by Daily Telegraph reporter Tom Farrell to witness council trucks delivering council building materials to the private home of a municipal mayor. In this case, Farrell acted as a gardener in the house of a neighbour. The roots of hidden cameras modern TV current affairs lie in precisely this tradition -- though whether they are always used in matters of public interest is another question.

Truth’s stance was aggressive. After revealing that a child with a broken pelvis had twice been turned away by the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, Truth listed the eminent names of the hospital board, including Sir Marcus Clark, Professor Harold Dew, Sir Charles Bickerton-Blackburn, and Mr W.J.V. Windeyer. A story about a mason was ‘one of the most despicable rackets Truth ever exposed .... It is the story of a ghoulish, utterly unprincipled, self-styled monumental mason who robbed many citizens of money they had advanced him for the erection of grave headstones which have never materialised. This loathsome individual is Barry John Wood...’

A tradition of crusading and exposure journalism was by no means always politically radical or consistent. When a newspaper campaigns or exposes injustice, its own political and social stance is revealed in a way not immediately apparent in straight reporting. Both the old style exposure journalism and its modern descendant, investigative journalism, usually spring, in part, from a moral stance which is often linked to a social or political purpose. Truth ran regular exposures which centred on the real and imagined crimes of Asians (‘Immigration scandal: Pakistani’s flight from sex charge’) and (‘Asians flout awards: Some Asian diplomatic missions are treating their Australian employees like coolies.’). This clearly reflected the prejudices of many Truth readers as well as reflecting the support by its proprietor, Ezra Norton, for the White Australia policy. A blind spot for Truth was corruption associated gambling and boxing -- at least when it was connected to Melbourne criminal John Wren who was a friend of Norton’s.

In 1960 Rupert Murdoch purchased the Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror (the new name of the Truth) and appointed Cyril Pearl as editor of the Sunday Mirror. The Sunday Mirror’s attitude to racism underwent a revolution. Stories about Aborigines have often required some degree of investigative commitment because of the remoteness of many communities from city journalists. In addition, to campaign against racism in a popular newspaper required a degree of courage. By 1961 the Sunday Mirror was doing both. A three part series in March 1961 by Keith Newman on the atrocious living conditions of Aborigines with drawings by artist Russell Drysdale won an award for Newman but later Cyril Pearl was sacked by Rupert Murdoch. Thenceforward the Sunday Mirror resumed its trajectory toward sensation emptied of investigative content.

The Daily Telegraph and the freeing of Frederick McDermott

One major piece of investigative journalism which clearly exposed injustice within the law was in the Sydney Daily Telegraph in 1951. For many years what was known as the Lavers-McDermott case was regarded as an unsolved mystery and apparent murder by the press and public. A number of reporters investigated the events both before and after the 1947 conviction of Frederick McDermott for the murder of William Lavers. While at least one, Tony White of the Sun, played a role, the impetus for the Royal Commission which freed McDermott came from Tom Farrell on the Daily Telegraph.

Lavers, a shopkeeper in central NSW, had disappeared early one morning in 1936 after serving petrol to unknown customers. His body was never found however in 1946, the police charged an itinerant shearer, Frederick McDermott with his murder. McDermott was convicted the following year and sentenced to death. The case however, disturbed the R. W. Hawkins, the Public Solicitor, who helped defend the semi-literate shearer. Hawkins approached a number of journalists who looked into the case. One those was Tom Farrell, who convinced the Telegraph’s owner, Frank Packer (who was ‘more an editor in chief than a proprietor’) that it was worth digging into the Lavers case. Farrell on one occasion examined the key exhibits, still held in the Bathurst police station. One was a giant plaster cast of the wheel tracks found outside Lavers’ shop, another was part of the dashboard of an Essex car allegedly owned by John Parker, a friend of McDermott’s. The police case rested on placing McDermott in the vicinity of the murder as a passenger in an Essex car owned by his friend Parker.

Hawkins’ low key campaign was assisted by some young legal talent one of whom, Chester Porter, later an eminent QC felt the key to the puzzle lay in the Essex car. Farrell knew about Essex cars because his father’s garage had once sold them, and his investigations led him to the attic of a garage in Forbes where 20 years of old ledgers and records lay under rubbish and dust. He eventually found a record of the sale of a 1926 Essex to Parker, complete with engine number and chassis number. Farrell knew that the dashboard put in as a police exhibit at McDermott’s trial could have only come from a 1927 or later Essex and car technical manuals showed no Essex cars had track-width measurements fitting the plaster casts made at the store.

Farrell that day filed a story to the Daily Telegraph saying this proved McDermott, who had by then served more than four years in jail, had been wrongly convicted. The Government immediately announced a Royal Commission. At the commission, evidence from experts incliding the Detroit makers of Essex cars, swore no Essex ever made could have made the wheeltracks. McDermott was released.

Farrell’s story was a high point. Normally the newspaper’s investigations were on consumer issues of direct concern to readers. In the same period of Farrell’s piece, the Telegraph investigated on rackets in the fruit and vegetable trade, butter and meat. As well as this, Telegraph owner Frank Packer waged a campaign against tax rises which, a year later, became hysterical when the Federal Treasurer proposed a tax which hit Packer personally.

Facts behind the Liquor Commission

One of the rare times when police corruption was revealed was at the 1951-52 Royal Commission into the liquor industry. Unlike later Royal Commissions in the 1970s and 1980s which were initiated or at least followed by an upsurge of independent press inquiries, little was done after its sudden closure in 1952. One unusual piece of exposure journalism was the pamphlet, Facts Behind the Liquor Commission, printed by the Communist Party of Australia at its underground printery which set out to expose capitalism in the shape of the ‘brewery barons’. Written by a journalist (probably Rex Chiplin) who had a racy turn of phrase (“Bottled beer was as rare as a bankrupt Vice Squad sergeant”) the pamphlet incidentally exposed corruption in the labour movement. It accused the then Governor General, Sir William McKell, of corruption:

Incidentally, throughout his political career, McKell was paid a large retainer by the breweries. As their legal adviser, of course. (Of course).

The source of such corruption, it argued, was the Liquor Trades Defence Council, run by the breweries, which provided bribes to politicians, police, lawyers and union officials. The pamphlet also related that CIB chief Detective Wylie had taken part in a meeting of police discussing the Commission at which, as a joke, someone recorded on a wire recorder. When the joke was revealed and the discussion was played back, there was pandemonium. Wylie pulled out his service revolver and shot the machine to pieces, according to the pamphlet.

The Melbourne Herald

The tradition of newspaper campaigning in the quality press of the 1940s and 50s was exemplified by the Melbourne Herald. The crusades of the Herald were far less strident than the Truth group. They could range from a crusade to influence voters in a national election but were more commonly on issues which affected the readers in a more immediate way. For many years the Melbourne Herald built a healthy circulation and carved a distinctive reputation as a newspaper which campaigned on issues of civic virtue based on the city of Melbourne. Vandalism by both individuals and by civic authorities (in the name of progress and ‘development’) were particular targets of its disapproval. The Herald’s campaigns were run against the backdrop of its own role as a key civic institution, sponsoring art exhibitions, garden competitions and charity fund raising drives. The Herald and other quality newspapers occasionally revealed a tougher side of campaigning as they did when they campaigned against the death penalty. Most famous among these was the crusade of Adelaide News against the hanging of Rupert Max Stuart.

In the late 1946 the Melbourne Herald published one of the first serious investigations of the conditions in Victorian psychiatric hospitals. Denis Warner, later a well known foreign correspondent, wrote a series of four leader page articles on the subject, of which the first, ‘Kew Conditions Horrifying’, set the tone. The previous year Warner had written a number of articles looking at rackets in sly grog and housing and at the conditions in abbatoirs and this seemed a natural follow up. The suggestion to look at the hospitals arose from a conversation between Sir Keith Murdoch and a doctor. With the doctors’ help, Warner visited Kew Mental Hospital dressed in a white coat and stethoscope to see for himself. One doctor also suggested that he be admitted as a patient which Warner rejected. ‘I thought I might never get out,’ he recalled. The conditions appalled Warner and his subsequent articles called for a Royal Commission which was supported by leading psychiatrists.

The expose of Kew, Royal and Mont Park Hospitals had another unusual consequence. In March 1952 the Melbourne Herald learnt of a case where a mentally ill boy had been tethered to a clothes-line post in his parents’ backyard. It turned out that the parents had done this in desperation partly because they knew from the Warner’s expose that the conditions in state hospital were so bad. The Herald decided to look again at the plight of mentally ill children and their parents and in particular at one state institution, Kew Cottages. Two articles by Bill Tipping (himself the father of a spastic child) lead to spontaneous donations by the public which ultimately raised £24,000 which the state government matched and greatly improved the cottages. Herald Editor Cecil Edwards said ‘If [a headline] was all we wanted, we had it: a shriek in the night, and then on to the next sensation. Instead, approaching the same basic material from a different direction and with a different purpose, we marshalled public support that forced a reform in a system’.

The Kew cottages stories were part of a philosophy of the press as fourth estate in which straight reportage and campaigning for causes sat side by side and were not seen as contradictory. Edwards again: [A good newspaper] must identify itself with the community’s life. It must be prepared to tap the springs of charity for those who cannot help themselves, to flash the light of publicity on problems and needs that have been neglected or abandoned.’ The majority of the Herald’s causes and campaigns were quite different from later notions of investigative reporting. Many concerned the civic beauty and reputation of Melbourne and this became part of a highly successful formula of localism. One campaign was to save the graceful trees which lined St Kilda Rd, another was to save parklands. Others were campaigns against the size of the federal government and the growing number of public servants. The Herald ran such a campaign throughout January 1955 and this was echoed by the Sydney Truth two years later. Another underlying Herald campaign was, of course, anti-communism, which became relentless after 1948 when it published revelation by former CPA leader Cecil Sharpley which led to the Lowe Royal Commission on communism.

The campaign against the death penalty

Standing for causes and campaigning for them sometimes meant going against public opinion and changing it. Such was the case in 1962 when the Herald conducted a ‘no holds barred’ campaign against the death penalty allotted to Robert Tait for the murder of a vicar’s mother. Ultimately the Bolte cabinet reprieved Tait. The Tait case was one of a series of newspaper campaigns against death penalty which the former editor of The Australian, Adrian Deamer, argued led to the abolition of the capital punishment. Journalists and editors, he argued, played a much underestimated key role along with church people, academics and trade unionists.

Perhaps the most outspoken campaign against the death penalty was that waged in 1959 by the Adelaide News under editor-in-chief Rohan Rivett against the execution of Rupert Max Stuart. Stuart was due to be hanged after he was convicted of having raped and murdered a small girl at Ceduna in South Australia. The News made the case a crusade. It widely publicised statements by a Catholic priest, Father Dixon, which seemed to provide an alibi for Stuart. When later on trial for seditious libel, Rivett said: ‘When the News had obtained Father Dixon’s story of evidence of an alibi for Stuart I formed no definite opinion except that it should be investigated.’ [emphasis added].

The News campaigned on the Stuart case, as it had earlier against the White Australia policy, the biassed electoral system and on the stuffiness of the Adelaide establishment generally. But it was Tom Farrell, by 1959 on the staff of the Sydney Morning Herald, who sparked nationwide interest in the case. Farrell persuaded a priest who had had talked to Stuart in his native language, to speak out against the verdict, first for the Herald then on television. Along with journalists from the News, he tracked down some of Stuart’s companions who belonged to a travelling funfair. Ultimately they provided evidence which threw doubt on on whether Stuart committed the murder. A later Royal Commission found that Stuart had been rightly convicted but criticised police methods which by modern standards had all the hallmarks of a frame-up.

As the Sydney Observer noted: ‘In the big cities crusading newspapers are a part of everyday life. they may be a misguided, annoying or inconvenient element; they may have to be fought and countered; but they do not call forth wrath and indignation. The fury that descended upon Rohan Rivett in South Australia was remarkable. The parliament was full of extreme epithets about ‘mob rule’ and ‘trial by newspaper’.... [i]t was all an orgy of naked anger, and Adelaide’s Establishment made no secret of the fact that it intends to “sweat off” Rohan Rivett.’ The revenge of Playford state government followed the Royal Commission. Rivett was charged on nine counts including ‘seditious libel’, defined as ‘an intention to bring into hatred or contempt ... the administration of justice’. Rivett was found not guilty on all charges but on one which the jury could not agree. After months of waiting the Crown withdrew the charge. Shortly afterward, amid widespread surprise, Rivett left his position as editor-in-chief and an editor from another Murdoch paper replaced him.

The decline of exposure journalism

The muckraking journalism of the popular press changed between the post war period and the late 1960s. While the popular press retained the sensation and shouts of scandal, its content began to change.

Muckraking exposures had always meant taking a moral approach and this had underlain the exposures of many injustices. But the reflex of exposure could also be allied to moral conservatism. This was expressed in a series of stories about the release of prisoners on parole and about ‘crime waves’. By the late 1960s the popular press-inspired moral panics about crime waves remained and grew while the moral outrage and their investigation of rip-offs and poor public services had declined.

In addition, the sheer size of exposure stories shrunk. For example, the Sydney Truth’s exposure in 1953 of favouritism in awarding school building contracts ran over three pages and 3,000 words. Such length (and depth) in a tabloid 15 to 20 years later would be unheard of. Less obviously, the ‘running story’ declined and became largely confined to politics. The running story was a series of stories over days of weeks continuously covering, for example, a major crime and its investigation by police. In such cases reporters followed up every aspect of the event and kept public interest high in the performance of public officials. In this way running stories were sometimes expressions of the watchdog role of the press.

The change in the nature of exposures and investigations was most apparent in crime reporting. Crime and court stories have always provided a staple of tabloid newspapers and indeed Truth even hired ex-policemen such as Reg Foster as reporters. The Truth and the Daily Mirror, with the encouragement of owner Ezra Norton, were often highly critical of police in the post war period. Later they praised them uncritically as heroes, embodying all that was good and just. Yet it was during this later period from the 1960s onward, that police corruption associated with organised crime increased markedly. This process not only went largely uninvestigated by the traditional police roundsmen, and it is also arguable that journalists’ abrogation of their watchdog role contributed to it.

The embodiment of this style of crime reporting was the Daily Mirror’s police roundsman, Bill Jenkings. In his memoirs, As Crime Goes By, Jenkings referred admiringly to a number of police such as Fred Krahe and Ray Kelly whom a later generation of investigative journalists showed were linked to corruption. Gerald Stone (later executive producer of the Nine network’s Sixty Minutes) was a younger reporter at the Mirror, noted:

One of the things that struck me was that Bill [Jenkings] was a hard man, but loyal to his contacts. He knew the cops and protected them, and sometimes that brought conflict. Some of the all-round reporters like myself might sometimes write a story stitching up one of the cops. You could always count on Bill to give you a lecture about it, saying how he had to work with them and he’d been placed in a bad position because of the story.

Another illustration of what happened when the journalists were captured by their sources, that is, senior police, can be seen in the treatment of a story in 1960. In March that year both the Sun and the Mirror reported that a number of schoolboys had discovered a cache of about £40,000 in the storage yard of Bullen’s circus. No-one came forward to claim the money and from the beginning of this intriguing story, the Sun’s police roundsman, Noel Bailey, reported prominently that the father of one of the boys had already reported the find to the local police. Bailey was the first to report (followed by the Mirror) that detectives were being questioned about their lack of diligence in following up the father’s statement.

A week later the Sun front paged the outcome: ‘Sack for 2 police’ which reported that the detectives had been dismisssed though no criminal charges were laid. While the Sun’s story was straight forward, the Mirror story (presumably written by Jenkings) prominently featured the meritorious records of both sacked police. One had ‘recently figured in a dramatic gunpoint arrest’ while the other ‘is a former Rugby Union footballer’ and ‘received special commendation for the part he played in the arrest of a violent gunman in Burwood’.

What lay behind the Mirror’s special pleading for the police and the Sun’s more straightforward approach was a different attitude by reporters to their sources. A colleague of Jenkings, on the Mirror, Dave Dixon, recalled feeling a certain admiration for his rival Noel Bailey who, he said, by his harder reporting of the inquiry and sackings must have realised the risks in showing the police in a bad light. Another Mirror reporter, C. J. Mackenzie, recalled an incident at the CIB yard where reporters had gathered. Bailey, standing in a group of reporters was pushed to the ground by a detective who made it clear that stories highlighting police corruption constituted a betrayal. The detective, Frederick Krahe, was later exposed as notoriously corrupt. But Bailey’s preparedness to exercise a modicum of independence in relation to his police sources was more the exception than the rule. It was not until the 1970s when a new attitude toward crime reporting emerged that strong investigative reporting of crime could begin to expose what had been ignored in the 1950s and 1960s.

While the 1960s saw the crusading tradition of the popular press degenerate into mere sensationalism and voyeurism, there were sporadic exceptions. The Melbourne Truth under Sol Chandler from the London Daily Express underwent something of a revival from 1965. Chandler’s reign was phenomenally successful in boosting Truth’s circulation and as Hurst points out this ‘was due almost as much to its exposes of deceit and dishonesty by people in public life as to the “tits and bums” formula which was later relied on by cruder imitators”. A key Melbourne Truth expose which signalled a new era in investigative reporting was Evan Whitton’s report on police protection of abortionists which led to an inquiry and the jailing of several officers. Interestingly, the initial prompting for the stories came from the pro-abortion movement including the feminist Beatrice Faust.

Evan Whitton (one of the few whose career spanned the last of the tabloid muckraking years on the Melbourne Truth and the new wave on the National Times) believes that corrupt police made a conscious decision to get the press on side.

The corrupt police make it their business to supply the people at the sharp end of crime reporting with a very good service. If you have got those guys [on side] they become a prisoner of the source and never drop [the corrupt police] in it. So you’ve virtually wiped out any investigation if you have got to the guy who is the crime- roundsman. [Investigative reporting into police] has got to be done from outside traditional police reporting. The roundsmen cannot do it.

Whitton attributes part of his success in breaking the mould to the fact that he had not been trained as a reporter and had not adopted the bad habits of police roundspeople.

I always thought that the best training I ever had was doing a couple of university subject in history.... you’ve got to footnote everything in history essays, so it teaches you a bit of rigour and interest in facts and patterns of events. I applied that at the Melbourne Truth.

While the exposure style of investigative reporting declined in the tabloid press through the 1950s and 1960s, the desire by reporters to write in-depth exploratory journalism did not. From the late 1960s the quality press and quality television, at first falteringly, began to show more interest in probing stories and especially about stories of social, rather than individual, injustices.

On ABC television a new program was created whose name in years to come would symbolise probing journalism. Four Corners was not initially an investigative program though it had moments when it probed beyond the normal range. One such instance was a 1961 story on the appalling living conditions of Aborigines at Box Ridge in northern NSW. Few, if any TV cameras had been to such a place and the story caused ‘shock waves’. The new Murdoch national daily, The Australian, under editor Adrian Deamer, was also a place where the revival of investigative journalism began. Deamer gave his staff on The Australian the one absolute essential for investigative reporting -- the time in which to do it. Deamer was deeply opposed to racism and showed a keen interest in stories exposing injustice to Aborigines, breaking the story on the strike of Aboriginal stockmen at Wave Hill which is credited with founding the modern land rights movement. Such stories did not please Murdoch. According to Deamer, he regularly complained about the ‘long haired’ and ‘bleeding heart’ content of The Australian. ‘Aboriginals don’t read our papers,’ Deamer recalls being told. In 1971 the Fairfax group launched a new newspaper, the National Times. It soon became a focus for a series of probing articles and by the 1980s, especially under editor Brian Toohey, its name, like Four Corners, became synonymous with the revival of muckraking.

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This study of muckraking and investigative journalism over 30 years leads to a question. Does the exposure of surprising new information on matter of public interest actually ever actually change anything? This is forcefully raised by Denis Warner’s exposure of Victorian mental hospitals. What Warner wrote in 1946 has been repeated many times over the years. At the time of writing yet another inquiry has been published into ‘inhumane, unsafe and illegal practices’ in institutions for the intellectually diabled. In between there have been dozens of both journalistic and official inquiries into such state institutions. Many have revealed abuses, yet the abuses seem to continue. What price the power of the media in face of entrenched social attitudes which simply disregard the mentally ill?

The evidence is not all one way. A counter-example from the same era, that of the miscarriage of justice in the McDermott case, makes the opposite point. Immediately after Farrell’s story appeared in the Daily Telegraph, the NSW state government announced a royal commission and McDermott was later released.

The social power of journalism therefore depends on many factors in the wider society. But it also depends on the complexity of the subject matter. As a form of public information journalism is strongest when reporting concrete and specific facts about a particular situation. This is the ‘who, what, when, where,’ beloved of traditional journalism. When these facts disclose an injustice or the like and, most crucially, when the injustice can be remedied without a challenge to deep seated social attitudes or social power, then journalism alone can indeed be powerful. This was the case with the McDermott jailing. But when journalism discloses facts which are inextricably tied deep seated social attitudes (or entrenched power) then mere disclosure, as a vehicle for reform, is at its weakest.

The great strength of muckraking in the post-war popular press was that it tackled simple subjects capable of being exposed and remedied -- quack doctors, not systemic problems in health care. Its great weakness was that systemic problems, like police corruption were never tackled.

This was the distinction of the ‘golden age’ of investigative reporting in the 1970s and 80s. Both the site and the subject of the muckraking changed. The source became the quality press and ABC television; the subject became the systemic problems. For example, corruption by police or government officials, racism, abuse of power by intelligence agencies. And while government ministers were sacked and royal commissions initiated, these did not necessarily bring deeper change, with the sole exception of the Fitzgerald Royal Commission in Queensland. In contrast to the post war period, disclosures about deeper social problems were the great strength of investigative journalism in the 1970s and 80s; but in terms of significant reform, such complex subjects also revealed one of the weaknesses of journalism and the media.

Posted by David at 07:31 PM | Comments (0)

The puzzle of the Cold War

A speech given at Old Parliament House, Canberra, on the opening of exhibition on the Petrov Affair, 17 August 2004.

Tonight I want to give a broad sketch of the period of the Cold War, rather than to focus in on any particular aspect in depth. But I do want to discuss what I call the puzzle of the Cold War – how do we – from this period in time -- understand the fear of communism which characterized that time?

I want to begin by defining what we mean by the Cold War. Many people attribute the phrase to the British writer, George Orwell, whose used the term ‘cold war’ in 1945 to contrast that period to a period of hot war – that is a war involving guns and bombs. But this is a little misleading. During the Cold war, it is true, that there was no direct military conflict between the communist bloc and the capitalist West, though the Cuban missile crisis in the early 1960s nearly precipitated nuclear war.

But the Cold War did involve plenty of guns and bombs-type conflicts. There was, for example, the Korean war and later the Vietnam war, both costing millions of lives as well as a strong of smaller wars. Whatever their local and specific causes, these conflicts were fought as wars by proxy between the US and communist bloc.

When did the cold war begin and end? Some argue the cold war started in 1917, the year of the Russian revolution and, effectively, the beginning of the utopian tragedy of the Soviet state. This view has a lot going for it, since the Cold War’s central defining element was the conflict between capitalism and communism, and communism’s first and strongest government was the Soviet state which lasted until 1991.

For the purposes of tonight, I will concentrate on what is regarded as the early cold war - -the period from the late 1940s to the early 1950s, culminating in the Petrov defection and the resulting Royal Commission on Espionage in 1954-55.

This was a period in which events swung decisively against the labour movement and the Left. It was a period in which the Right became alarmed at the strength of communism, especially internationally, and mobilised political support on this basis.

And this transition to what became known as the Cold War happened very rapidly – just in the space of a few years – because when World War Two ended, the US, Britain, Australia were in alliance with the Soviet Union.

But, by 1948 it was clear that the victorious Soviet Union was determined to colonize eastern Europe -- which it did with some brutality. The airlift of supplies to Berlin symbolized to many people that communism simply denied civil freedoms which were taken for granted in the West. The popularity of the phrase ‘the Iron Curtain’ which appears so melodramatic today, had some popular currency at the time.

In the late 1940s Communism was on the move elsewhere. In former colonies of Europe strong independence movements emerged, often with communists playing key roles. In Malaya and Viet Nam such struggles ensued against respectively the British and French colonial powers. Most significant of all, was the communist victory in China in 1949 which sent shock waves around the world and gave rise to a belief that even more countries would fall like a line of dominos. In Australia this victory later allowed the Right to speak of a double barreled fear of a red and yellow peril. And all these fears were heightened when the Soviet Union detonated its own atomic bomb, breaking the US monopoly.

At home, the communist party -- the CPA -- was on the move as well. It emerged confidently from the Second World War with a large membership and a powerful base in the unions. It also had big plans. Initially, the challenge it made was within the labour movement. The bitter coal strike of 1949 was as much as challenge to the political leadership of the ALP as it was to the mine owners. In many other industries, the CPA urged a strongly militant stance and strikes were widespread.

The victory of the Liberal and Country parties in 1949 did much to dash the hopes of many of the Left and labor movement – in part because one of the winning elements of Menzies’ campaign was fear of communism. Once in office he lost no time in drawing up a law to ban the CPA. Menzies regarded the communists as a treasonable force. So shortly after the bill passed through parliament, a series of raids on communist offices and the homes of CPA officials took place around Australia. But this plan also had a rallying effect on the targets of repression. And the Communist party, rather than challenging other forces on the Left, now began to seek allies to try to politically defeat the law to ban it.

The law was defeated - -first by the High Court in March 1951 and then the following September by a popular referendum to change the constitution – this defeat being one of the most remarkable events in the Cold War in Australia.

This is all the more remarkable because in the middle of the debate about the ban on the CPA, North Korea had invaded South Korea and Australian troops and pilots were sent to fight there.

But while a majority of Australians judged Menzies had gone too far with his ban on the CPA, for many people the fear of communism remained a legitimate concern because of the communism’s victories overseas. These in turn created a climate in which many people began to believe that a new war would become possible. And for people who had just suffered a war this was a potent fear.

To many people this remains one of the puzzles of the early cold war. To us today the message about the fear of communism appears exaggerated, hyped, and hysterical. I believe there certainly was an air of hysteria. And it is certainly true that fear of communism was a very politically useful weapon which the conservative parties used to great effect at election after election. Beating the anti-Communist drum seemed to drown out discussion on any other issues and to scare people into singing the one tune or staying silent. The accusation of communism was able to close off debate and shut people up. Nor are these criticisms new -- such criticisms were made at the time.

But the puzzle remains: why were these fears accepted by a large number of people? Why was the accusation of communism so potent a weapon?

It is of course very easy to judge a previous historical period.

The people are always more stupid than us – or more naïve --- or more noble. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. But the people and the political players of the cold war were in fact very much like us – in the given circumstances of the time.

One of the challenges for people like myself who was only just born in the period of the early cold war is to try to think our way into the feeling of the times. This became clear to me when I was writing my book on the history of ASIO and the Cold war. For example, it gradually became obvious to me that my picture of the former ASIO officers some of whom I interviewed and about whose files I read, courtesy of National Archives, were rather different creatures from what I imagined. I had imagined that they were a rather grim, fanatical bunch who opposed the high minded and idealistic lefties who wanted to change Australia for the better. What I realised was that many of the ASIO officers and the anti communists were of course, also idealists. And that in many ways the things which they did – and with which I disagreed --- were the action of idealists – driven by ideals to sacrifice some freedoms in the passionate belief that that this was necessary to save even a greater freedoms. Driven by ideals to label people who disagreed as soft on communism.

The other challenge to understand the cold war is one faced by anyone looking at history back over 60 years . And that is, that when we look backwards , we have to realise that what is now in the past was once in the future.

For example, we now know as a simple matter of fact that no direct conflict occurred between the Soviet Union and the West in the 1950s. But looking toward the future from a standpoint in 1950, this was by no means clear. A third world war was a possibility, it was genuinely believed.

This point of view was something which came home to me forcefully again, when I was writing my account of ASIO and the Cold War. Like many other historians of that period, I was surprised by the vehemence and bitterness of the anti-Communist cause. It became clear to me as ÃŽ researched the now-released files that Western intelligence and defence officials sincerely believed that a Third World War with their erstwhile ally, the Soviet Union, could soon break out. Moreover this view was shared by the intelligence and defence officials of the Soviet Union, which made various preparations, including alerting communist parties around the world to be ready.

So with both sides believing that a war could take place, some drastic plans were made. Some of these plans I discovered in my research, In particular in the early 1950s the Australian government made plans to intern over a thousand communists in camps in the event of war. This would involve the full gamut of repression –, the construction of internment camps, dawn raids on homes by police, difficult questions of whether to intern wives and small children, the shaky legal basis of interment etc .

To us today this seems bizarre. It seems all of a piece with attempts to ban the Communist party, and to fight almost any kind of non-conformism. But of course it all has be seen in context.

We usually have no difficulty seeing the context as it was seen by the victims of the Cold war. The communists and other people on the left saw the arguments of anti-communism as just another tactic by conservatives and by employers to beat back social change and perfectly reasonable reforms. They had faced such opposition since the beginning of the days of the trade union movement. They were accused of being merely an extension of the Soviet Union and they knew that that was quite incorrect. Rather, they represented the continuation of a radical tradition in Australia that long pre-dated the creation of the Soviet Union.

It is harder today to understand the context as the anti-Communists and the Right saw it. They were concerned that Stalin -- whom they knew was responsible for mass murder of his own people -- was armed with the A bomb. We now know that no Third World war ever took place. But this was not known in 1952 or 1953 or 54.

And that is the context for trying to understand the Royal Commission on Espionage which followed the defection of the Petrovs. It is true that on one level, it was a piece of political theatre, designed by a canny Menzies to drive home a lesson for the Australian people; but on another level it was quite understandable that some kind of investigation had to follow the defection of two Soviet spies, given that war with the Soviet Union was a possibility.

I am not saying that somehow the anti Communists were right, merely that today we have to make an effort to understand their perspective. For a long while, the Cold War has been a battle ground for what today are called the ‘history wars.;’ that is, a battle over the prevailing interpretation of the Cold war. By and large the Left has won this battle. Most people today look with incomprehension at the stifling of dissident opinion during the most intense period of the Cold War.

And so it takes an effort of imagination to see another point of view.

Finally, why would we bother to develop such a point of view ? Essentially because the Cold war has really, definitively finished and what we need now is a balanced view , not a partisan view of that period. This is not only the challenge to historians but to all of us who try to look back at anything in the past – whether it is family history or global history – we need to try and understand the perspective of people with whom we might have little sympathy. That us to say, we need to exercise a little empathy.

Posted by David at 07:26 PM | Comments (6)

The quiet Americans

This article, on US intelligence and the labour movement, appeared in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald on 20 February 2003.

The recent reprimand delivered to the Labor leadership over the outspoken comments of some MPs about President George Bush and US policy toward Iraq has brought to light an intriguing aspect of US diplomacy in Australia.

Since the Second World War US embassies have include a special kind of diplomat, the Labor Attache. The Labor Attache , like the defence attache and cultural attache, promotes US interests in countries where the trade union movement and Labor parties are strong.

These have been the Quiet Americans, holding private pow wows with MPS and union leaders, handing out trips to the US and reporting all their observations to the State Department. During the Cold War, they worked covertly with anti-communist forces in actions that constitute interference in Australia’s internal political life. As well, there are good reasons to believe that Labor attaches may have in the past been closely linked with US intelligence.

Much of the work of Labor Attaches is now visible in recently released American archives obtained by this writer. They offer a fascinating insight into internal Labor politics as well as the machinations of US diplomats. These documents cover the late 1960s when Australia’s trade union movement was confident and strong and when white collar unions were moving to merge with the blue-collar ACTU and major industrial disputes occurred in protest at decisions of the Arbitration Commission.

A key figure in these documents is Bob Hawke, originally an ACTU advocate, then ACTU president and later Prime Minister.

Hawke was of interest to Labor Attaches such as Bob Walkinshaw and Emil Lindahl because they closely watched the political struggle within the ACTU. By the mid-late 1960s they were aware that the existing President, Albert Monk, was ill and a political struggle over his succession had broken out. . They noted that Monk ‘takes frequent drinks of whisky and beer during the day … [although he] is never referred to as an alcoholic’.

Bob Hawke was one of a number of contenders for Monk’s job and a bitter battle ensured over it. Hawke, said a US official in 1966 ‘is regarded as brilliant and by some people even as a possible future Prime Minister of Australia’. One US official, Doyle Martin, added that Hawke personally cultivates trade union leaders and ‘is a competent performer at the saloon, as well as the forensic, bar’.

Two of their most sympathetic sources for interpreting the ACTU were the anti-communist forces, such as BA Santamaria’s ‘National Civic Council’ (NCC) and Tom Doherty of the right wing Australian Workers Union. At one stage Bob Walkinshaw, the Labor Attache, sent the State Department copies of the NCC’s analysis of the Australian communist movement, and commented: ‘Santamaria is generally known as an authority on communism and has been a reliable source of information to the reporting officer on this question’. He added: ‘Although it can be presumed that Santamaria would obviously be somewhat prejudiced, the contents of this pamphlet can be taken as reflecting a fairly accurate and objective analysis’. Such comments indicate just how wildly distorted was the vision through American eyes.

Several of the US Labor Attaches cultivated Hawke and had many long private conversations all of which were written up and relayed to the State Department and are now available for public scrutiny. An intriguing picture emerges of the young Hawke in his late 30s dealing with US diplomats. The Labor Attaches were unnerved by his militant aspirations and his association with communists. But on the other hand they began to see that he was a charismatic and ambitious man with aspirations beyond the union movement.

During 1969, the dynamic Hawke moved to take the leadership of the ACTU from its plodding officers. The Labor Attache, Emil Lindahl, watched these developments carefully and noted that while he was ‘brilliant and effective’, his enemies ‘feel he is subject to flights of irresponsibility, including drunkenness, playing around with women, and brawling’. After intimately discussing the contest between Hawke and his rival, the ACTU President Harold Souter, the report concluded: ‘Both Souter and Hawke can be considered friends of the US’.

The reason for this can be seen in Hawke’s own astute judgement of the Labor Attaches. In December 1969, Lindahl attended a church meeting where Hawke spoke passionately about the ‘holocaust in Vietnam’. Afterwards, Lindahl reported, Hawke came and sat with him, and asked ‘Did I hit you too hard on Vietnam?’ Lindahl replied, ‘I know you can hit harder’. After a beer and more discussion together, Lindahl reported: ‘…[Hawke] puffed on his newly acquired cigar with a great deal of self-satisfaction. This very confident young man appears to be the master of his own destiny’. Lindahl was puzzled by Hawke’s public vehemence on Vietnam and his private warmth. He had found this also when speaking with Jim Cairns and Clyde Holding. His report speculated about whether it was ‘an effort at trying to make us believe that they are really responsible middle-of-the-roaders plagued by extremists’ ? Or was it a ‘Machiavellian scheme to disarm us’ while planning an attack on the Australian Government?

Immediately after his election to the presidency of the ACTU in September 1969, the US ambassador, cabled that the Australian Government ‘can expect nothing but trouble from Bob Hawke’ who was ‘all too prone to look upon strike action as best [sic] means of obtaining trade union goals’. Nevertheless, Rice added, the ACTU needed ‘the breath of fresh air Hawke will put into it’.

The US Labor attaches were also intimate observers of the Labor Party, as well as the union movement. An American assessment of Whitlam, soon after he announced his bid for Labor leader argued that he ‘has offended almost everybody by his bland assumption that his election will be automatic.’ On the positive side it noted that ‘[Whitlam] would make considerable effort to remove the anti-American image the Party now casts’ but ‘as the Embassy has previously reported, his views on the long term future of China and Southeast Asia conflict strongly with those of the United States’

Victoria was of special interest to the Labor Attaches. It was also home to B.A. Santamaria and his political organisation and both were friendly sources of much information to the Labor Attaches. . In December 1969, the Labor Attache, Emil Lindahl, met the key anti-communist B.A. Santamaria at lunch at the Victorian Employers Federation where Santamaria was speaking. Santamaria was, according to Lindahl; ‘his usual erudite self’.

In New South Wales, the Labor Attache cultivated the bright young things of the trade union movement. These included later NSW Premier, Barrie Unsworth and union king-maker John Ducker.

Of them, one American official wrote in 1967: ‘Ducker and Unsworth are both energetic, democratic and sternly anti-communist young men…. The promotion of Ducker and Unsworth in the New South Wales Labor hierarchy has more than ordinary significance. The two are active in an informal group of younger trade union leaders who are consciously grooming themselves to be the next generation of New South Wales trade union leaders who are sternly anti-communist’.

The close relationship between the US embassy and Barrie Unsworth was revealed after the US embassy planned to bring anti-communist Vietnamese trade union leaders to Australia in 1966. The original plan involved a group called ‘Committeee for the Defence of Australia’. But when the embassy asked Unsworth about this he said the group was ‘ultra-rightist’ and ‘a political kiss of death’ to the Vietnamese unionists. Instead, the cables say, Unsworth proposed that his union, the Electrical Trades Union, would sponsor the trip, which pleased the Americans.

Labor’s fears about the real agenda of Labor Attaches go back some time. In 1966 the federal executive passed a resolution ordering an inquiry ‘into the activities of the US Central Intelligence Agency’. Doyle Martin, a counsellor for political affairs noted in a cable: ‘According to rumour this statement was aimed at the Embassy’s political and labor officers whose interest in following ALP affairs has caused them to be suspected by left wing supporters of having some covert responsibilities.’

The truly murky part of the story on the ALP and the role of US Labor Attaches concerns the covert operations by US intelligence organisations such as the CIA. On the archival documents available to this writer, the CIA certainly received reports of the Labor Attaches on Australia. Next to each report is a distribution list for Government agencies. A typical cable from March 1969 shows that the State department received 29 copies, the CIA received 20 copies with the US Information Agency receiving 10 while the Agency for Internal Development receiving 12.. The US Labor Department received only 6 copies.

While the CIA’s funding of intellectuals through the Congress of Cultural Freedom is not only old news but is the subject of a recent scholarly book, Who Paid the Piper?’ by Frances Stonor Saunders, there is no book on other CIA covert operations in the trade union field. Saunders herself refers, in passing to one of the key figures in the operation, Irving Brown who was the International affairs officer of the US trade unions, the AFL-CIO (referred by some as the AFL-CIA). Another writer, Jonathan Kwitny, in his The Crimes of the Patriots, on the Nugan Hand bank refers to the ‘CIA’s long standing secret co-operation with the AFL-CIO, in bringing potential union leaders to the US’. Dozens of Australian union leaders took advantage of these ‘freebies’. The CIA’s interest in the Australian participants was presumably in talent spotting for future contacts though it has never been clear what other co-operation may have occurred. The selection of the beneficiaries of these trips were the Labor Attaches. (Suggestions of security links of Labor Attaches are emphasised by the censoring of the archival documents on ‘security’ grounds.)

Figures like NSW Labor king maker John Ducker now admit to extensive contacts with ASIO as part of the Right’s anti-communist struggle. On the international front, similar connections are becoming clearer with Labor attaches and the American union movement playing key roles.

It should not be assumed, of course, that US was the only country with an intelligence interest in the labor movements of the West. The Soviet Government also ran a program of free trips to Russia and no doubt the KGB did talent spotting for potential recruits.

Posted by David at 07:21 PM | Comments (0)

Western Intelligence and SEATO’s war on subversion, 1956-63

Between the French defeat in Vietnam of 1954 and the beginning of significant US intervention in Vietnam in 1964-65, Western and South East Asian intelligence and security bodies co-operated in opposing subversion and armed insurgency under the auspices of the South East Asia Collective Defence Treaty, signed in Manila in 1954. The ‘Manila Pact’ saw the establishment of the South East Asia Treaty Organisation, (SEATO) a regional equivalent to both North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and the Baghdad Pact or Central Treaty Organisation (CENTO). SEATO's signatories were the United States, Great Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Pakistan and the Philippines.

This article examines one part of SEATO activity which was the work of the Committee of Security Experts (CSE) a secretariat liaising between the security and intelligence organisations of SEATO signatories and convening biannual meetings of those organisations.

The birth of SEATO took place in a region still in the throes of decolonisation and challenged by communism. The Pacific war had fatally disrupted European colonial control and allowed both nationalist and communist forces to emerge and strengthen. In Europe, the communist challenge lead Truman to enunciate in 1947 his doctrine of containment which was to be sharply tested in Southeast Asia. That same year saw a radical turn in Soviet foreign policy which spurred on communist forces to mount significant armed challenges in Malaya, Indochina and the Philippines, and lesser ones in Burma and Thailand.

But the decisive events in the strategic situation of Southeast Asia were the victory of Mao's communists in China in 1949 shortly followed by the Korean War. Doubts about US commitment to the region evaporated and US policy toward the region turned from non-intervention to intervention.. In the case of Indochina, US material support for France, initially for reasons of co-operation in Europe, was dramatically bolstered to contain communism. The American fear was that Indochina would create a 'knock on' effect enabling other communist parties to seize power.

It was the surrender in May 1954 of the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu and the subsequent Geneva Accords which led to the creation of SEATO. The Geneva Accords temporarily partitioned Viet Nam at the 17th parallel, ceding the north to the communists led by Ho Chi Minh. The agreement also provided for reunification elections which were never held, largely because the communists were widely expected to win, according to former Director of Central Intelligence, Charles Colby. After the signing of the Geneva Accords Cambodia effectively declared its neutrality, a worrying move to the US, as was its later recognition of the Peoples’ Republic of China.

By the time of the creation of the SEATO administrative structure in 1955 communist groups in South East Asia had reached very different stages of development. While the communists had gained part of Viet Nam, military insurgencies led by communist parties in Malaya and the Philippines had been defeated.

In Thailand, where the administrative bodies of SEATO were established, small communist groups existed in some urban areas, in the remote north and in the far south which was also a safe rear area for the Malayan Communist Party (MCP). With its common borders with Laos, Cambodia, Burma and Malaya, Thailand was regarded as the key to Western efforts to counter communism and was the main base for the Central Intelligence Agency operations in the South East Asia in the period. The CIA was closely involved in training and arming the Thai Border Police in a series of growing counter-insurgency operations from the early 1950s onwards.

The Republic of Indonesia, founded in 1949 after a long period of Dutch colonial control, had a significant, growing communist party which had won nearly one quarter of the popular vote at the 1955 election. In 1958 the CIA had encouraged a group of dissident military leaders to start a local revolt directed at the central government. Using its Civil Air Transport, the CIA provided covert military support in an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow Indonesian President Sukarno. Sukarno, a leftwing nationalist who sponsored the neutralist Non-Aligned Movement, was known for anti-Western sentiments and had designated two communists as ministers without portfolio in his government in 1962.

By 1955 the guerrilla challenge in Malaya had effectively ended although a new challenge was emerging in the form of full political independence for Malaya and Singapore. In the latter a relatively strong left-wing movement existed. Singapore was Britain’s key base east of Suez and projected British power as a deterrent to China and as protection for North Borneo, Sarawak, Brunei as well as Singapore and Malaya. In Burma a small communist insurgency existed with the greater fear that China might intervene militarily to support it. In Laos fighting had flared in July 1955 between the communist Pathet Lao and the pro-Western government. A period of stabilisation followed but broke down into a series of coups and counter coups which saw Laos turn into a war by proxy between the USSR and USA. By 1961 the US proposed to intervene militarily using SEATO but this was blocked by France and Great Britain. The conflict in Laos proved to be a turning point for SEATO, demonstrating its ineffectiveness and internal divisions.

While some Western states always had doubts about the effectiveness of SEATO, the Americans were keen to promote it in its early years, with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles attending every Council meetings between 1955 and 1959. SEATO as a whole was, until around 1960, central to US plans to counter what they saw as the deterioration of pro-Western governments in South East Asia, especially Laos. According to the US Defense Department, the use of a multilateral SEATO force to counter communist insurgency, which would include Asian military forces, was attractive because it would be politically acceptable. During the 1961 ‘Laos crisis’, a proposal by the Thai Government for a SEATO force to intervene was supported by US Secretary of State Dean Rusk but this proposal was shelved due to strong opposition from the French and British. The consequence was that the US relied increasingly on its covert military aid through the CIA, including its recruitment of the Laotian ethnic minorities as counter-insurgency units.

Britain was also genuinely committed to SEATO from its inception. It reinforced British status in the Western alliance as well as offering a practical deterrent to communism. Unlike France it had successfully fought a communist insurgency while granting independence to a former colony. This experience in Malaya was highly regarded by the American who later sought to apply its lessons in Viet Nam. But Britain’s participation in SEATO was predicated on its continued ability and desire to keep significant military forces in Singapore. By the early 1960s the likelihood of an independent Singapore continuing to permit British forces on its territory was dim. At the same time Prime Minister Harold Macmillan determined to cut defence expenditure east of Suez and to encourage bi-lateral agreements (for instance with the Republic of Vietnam) rather than multilateral ones such as SEATO.

Southeast Asia was a key theatre of conflict between the Western powers and communism, having gone close to the nuclear brink at least twice and seen several armed insurgencies culminating in the Vietnam war. Yet in the immediate postwar period, the attention of London and Washington was focussed on Europe and the Middle East and Asian intelligence targets were low status. Western intelligence in this region was complicated by demobilisation and the imperial legacy as well as being in a state of ‘dilapidation’. The literature on this region is uneven. Busch notes that the key defence agreement in the region, SEATO, has not attracted a great deal of scholarly attention. Compounding this problem, studies of intelligence and security in the region are thin on the ground by comparison with Europe. The most extensive and richest knowledge we have concerns the Central Intelligence Agency . Coverage of the British Secret Intelligence Service and Security Service is negligible by comparison although South East Asian operations are mentioned in a number of general studies In recent times the Malaya Emergency has been a particular focus and a specialised collection on the clandestine cold war in Asia also recently appeared. Until now the work of SEATO’s Committee of Security Experts (CSE) is unrecorded in the literature discussing intelligence activity. Study of it however can give insights into the thinking of British, American, French and Australian intelligence bodies in the crucial period leading to the war in Viet Nam. This article is based on archival records of the Committee of Security Experts which include position papers produced by each intelligence service for CSE meetings and the accounts of those meetings by Australian security and foreign affairs participants. (These documents have only become available in recent years after negotiations between archive agencies of the original signatories to the Manila Pact.)

The work of the committee of security experts

The overall policy for SEATO was made by annual meetings of its Council, comprising the Foreign Ministers of member countries. The bulk of the work of SEATO was carried out by the military and civil wings based at its headquarters in Bangkok, supervised by Bangkok-based diplomats of SEATO signatories. SEATO’s Military Planning Office (MPO) planned counter-insurgency operations and prepared for military intervention in both Laos and Thailand. It also conducted twenty three major military exercises from 1955 to 1962 . However, SEATO had no dedicated military forces and its purpose was the co-ordination of its members’ armed forces.

A less well known aspect of SEATO’s purpose involved intelligence liaison aimed at countering the rise of communism in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaya and Singapore, as well as the countries of Asian signatories. This liaison was conducted through the Committee of Security Experts (CSE) which was based in Bangkok, Thailand and which met every six months. The CSE was formed in 1955 initially under the name ‘Committee to Combat Communist Subversion’, at the instigation of the CIA. Working with the Committee of Security Experts (and also staffed by security and intelligence officers) was an Office of Counter Subversion and a Research Services Office. In 1963, as the military conflict deepened in Vietnam, the Committee of Security Experts was re-named the Intelligence Assessment Committee and its functions altered. This article mainly concerns its work between 1955 and 1963.

The biannual meetings of CSE saw delegations headed by the local representatives of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Britain’s MI 5 and MI 6, the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) , New Zealand’s Security Service, the Philippines National Intelligence Coordinating Agency (NICA), the Pakistan Intelligence Bureau, and the Thai Directorate of Central Intelligence. The CSE role was twofold. First, to provide intelligence-based assessments of subversion and insurgency to the SEATO Council and its Military Advisers. These ranged from studies of subversion in schools and universities, trade unions, and agricultural communities to a more purely military analysis of the weaponry and personnel. Second, to develop political warfare through ‘counter-measures’, particularly in the ideological field, which were usually carried out in conjunction with the Research Services Office. The Research Services Office specialised in ‘exposure papers’ for selected release to governments and journalists. Early suggested topics included ‘Communist Exploitation of Neutralism’, ‘Communist Exploitation of Overseas Chinese’, ‘Living Standards in Communist Countries’ and ‘The Communist Record and Views on Religion’. Less formally, the time spent at CSE meetings discussing threat assessments functioned in part as an education forum for the Asian security agencies. As well, CSE was a regular venue for personal contact between Asian-based Western intelligence officers. An early report referred to its ‘normal cheerful, club-like atmosphere.’ Within SEATO, the work of the CSE was co-ordinated by a dedicated Liaison Officer, at first H. M. Askew until he was replaced in 1960 by Peter Joce, both British intelligence officers.

Two of the two key intelligence figures who participated in the CSE in its hey day were MI5’s Michael Serpell and the CIA’s Bangkok Chief of Station Bob Jantzen. Jantzen was something of a legendary figure, ‘a gregarious, six-foot-four inch, red headed, back slapping extrovert’, according to former CIA officer, Ralph McGehee. Another former CIA officer, Joseph Smith, portrays him as superficially friendly and accommodating but with a pushy style. A hint of his personal style is given in a report of a CSE meeting in May 1959: ‘Jantzen’s chairmanship of the meeting was poor and his impatience and lack of tact gave unfortunate offence to some Asian members, particularly [Colonel Nicanour] Jimenez [leader of the Filipino delegation]. Jantzen scarcely concealed his belief that the Asian members were not pulling their weight’.

Michael Serpell lead delegations to meetings of the CSE in 1960-62 and was based in Singapore at Security Intelligence Far East (SIFE). SIFE was the joint operations centre for MI5 and MI6 for Southeast Asia and was housed in the offices of the British Commissioner General for Southeast Asia at Phoenix Park. Serpell's particular contribution to CSE was to report on the British sphere of influence covering Malaya, Brunei, Sarawak and Singapore. In the late 1940s Serpell had been personal assistant to MI 5’s Director General, Sir Percy Sillitoe, and wrote one of the early reports on looming Soviet espionage after the Nunn-May affair. Other British officers who participated in the CSE include Dick Thistlethwaite, who lead delegations from 1956 -59, and Michael Wrigley, the SIS station chief in Bangkok, who led them between 1963 and 1969. Other security officials included Brigadier H.E. Gilbert (New Zealand), Captain P. Collinet (France), Police General Chamra Mandukananda (Thailand) and Colonel Nicanor Jimenez (Philippines).

An important and tangible result of CSE meetings was the arrangement of specialised training for Southeast Asian intelligence agencies. Given the high regard for its successful counterinsurgency in Malaya, Britain took a major role in training, using Special Branch School in Kuala Lumpur. It conducted more specialised training at Security Intelligence Far East (SIFE) in Singapore.

Internal tensions

The functioning of the CSE was hampered from the start by a number of factors which made it quite different from the intelligence co-ordination of its European equivalent, NATO . An attempt by SIFE in 1956 to broaden the terms of reference of the CSE lead to a perceptive analysis by the New Zealand Department of External Affairs:

The root problem has been that the committee consists fundamentally of representatives of the national security services each of whom can speak authoritatively only on the security problem within his own national frontiers … This problem is complicated by the fact that the major non-Asian powers have sources of intelligence other than those of their national security services concerning the subversive threat to the Treaty area. In some respects these sources and the evaluations made by the intelligence bodies give a much fuller picture of the problem in particular countries… Further more they may be more accurate than the intelligence material and evaluations presented to the Committee by the Asian powers since … these are distorted either because the Asian intelligence and security agencies are not as efficient as those of the Commonwealth and the United States, or because for political reasons they are consciously or unconsciously falsified

This disparity between the partners in SEATO was a continuing problem. An Australian CSE participant commented in 1958 that ‘the committee tends to be monopolised by the Western members’ because of fears of wasted time and that ‘little will be achieved unless the Asian members send competent delegations to the CSE meetings.’ Within the standing SEATO bureaucracy certain offices were designated to filled by the nationals of particular member states, regardless of skill or appropriateness. The director of the Research Services Office was to be a Pakistani while his deputy was American (initially Jack Lydman of the CIA). But the initial director, M. Hadi Hussain, was ‘indolent and inefficient’, according to the Australian ambassador to Thailand, J K Waller. Such appointments undermined the CSE’s ‘exposure program’ and counter propaganda effort. Colonial attitudes also survived. An Australian and a Pakistani delegate took Richard Thistlethwaite (MI5) to task at an early meeting after his attempt to ‘rush proceedings’ by letting it be known that he had a more pressing engagement after the CSE meeting.

Tensions between the Western intelligence agencies also hampered the work of the CSE. From the earliest days of SEATO the British preferred a less fundamentalist approach to anti-communism to the US. For example, in 1955 the British distanced themselves from an American proposal for SEATO to issue a strident anti-Communist declaration. The British argued that such a declaration would be ‘out of place’ in the context of the emergence of the Non-Aligned Movement after the 1955 Bandung meeting. Britain and the US were also divided on the question of ‘neutralism’. The British, supported by France, advocated a policy of neutrality for South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos to create a buffer between communist and Western-aligned areas of the region. But for the US, there was no room for neutrality because it gave openings to communist forces. American fundamentalism was observable when, during the Laos crisis, the US told Australia privately that they were critical of British intelligence assessments which suggested that the local disorders were ‘spontaneous’ rather than ‘the result of outside Communist inspiration’, as the US believed. Later at one senior CIA officer admitted the failings of this approach which helped precipitate civil war in Laos in 1960-61. Former deputy director of plans, Richard Bissell has described how the CIA financed one Laotian political front then shifted its support to a more anti-communist group which staged a coup. Yet the latter had little local political support. The problem with the former was that it ‘advocated pro-Western neutrality’, said Bissell, and this was enough to condemn it in US eyes.

Outside the CSE proceedings, such tensions between British and US intelligence agencies were longstanding. In spite of agreements between them that they would not run operations in the other’s sphere of influence, this was routinely disregarded by the CIA in Singapore and Malaya and through the activities of the Asia Foundation, an object of suspicion by the British intelligence, according to Joseph Smith. In 1956, the CIA was covertly intervening in Singapore to block the growing strength of the Peoples Action Party and its left-wing allies.

Marked strategic differences were regularly displayed between France and the US at many meetings. At the 13th CSE meeting in November 1960, a US assessment of South Vietnam spoke simply of the Diem government’s ‘bold counter-measures’ and the communists’ ability to ‘exploit dissatisfaction with the government’. The analysis of the French spoke frankly of the government’s ‘corruption and excesses’ and its ‘panicky measures’. An Australian report of the meeting noted the isolation of the US because of its ‘over-confident’ view on South Vietnam.

The attitude of the Pakistan Intelligence Bureau was a regular problem at CSE meetings because most of its work was directed at the threat from India, rather than from communist subversion. This became most critical during the Sino-Indian border dispute in 1964, when the Pakistan Intelligence Agency argued that there was little threat from Communist China and objected to the term Chinese ‘attack’ and preferred a reference to the ‘aggravation of the Sino-Indian border dispute’. After 1965 France and Pakistan formally reduced their participation in the military structure of SEATO and lowered their profile at Council meetings.

The dilemmas of political and cultural warfare

In the period under study, the main thrust of Western intelligence through SEATO was to encourage political and cultural warfare against subversion. To this end the CSE organised two public seminars under the auspices of SEATO at Baguio in the Philippines, in November 1957 and at Lahore, Pakistan in February 1960. Delegates to the seminars included intelligence officers and anti-communist journalists, trade unionists, politicians and educationalists. These included the former communist Douglas Hyde who spoke at Lahore and John Rayner, from the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department who discussed ‘counter action’ to subversion. Apart from its overt aim of exchanging views, the purpose of the seminars was to provide quotable material in the form of reports, documents, film and speeches for in ‘exposing communist tactics and techniques’. Speeches and resolutions at the seminars strongly emphasised freedom and democracy in contrast to communism. The Baguio seminar recommended that ‘Communist subversion is often most effectively precluded or defeated by positive action to support the concepts under which the nations of the Free World are established… positive values [such] as freedom, human dignity, religion and spiritual worth…’. This reflected the Pacific Charter, signed along with the Collective Defence Treaty, which pledged to ‘invigorate the foundations of justice and liberty’.

The articulation of such values highlighted one of the dilemmas of the position of the CSE security agencies (and their governments) which was that countering subversion was regarded as a higher priority than preserving democratic freedoms, including those associated with elections.

Some of this emerged during a CSE meeting which discussed the ‘historical review of the communist threat’ in May 1959. The Pakistan Intelligence Bureau reported that all communist activity had been suppressed by the Pakistan Government in 1954, although the Communist Party of Pakistan had won five seats in the East Pakistan elections held that year. The following year, having abandoned neutralism and joined the Baghdad Pact, Pakistan declared the local communist party illegal. Repression of communist infiltration of peasant, student and trade union groups followed a military coup in October 1958. The experience of the intelligence authorities of Pakistan in suppressing communist electoral activities was summed up in paper on ‘Communist Exploitation of Elections’ given to the CSE in August 1960.

The aims of counter-subversion also conflicted with democratic norms after a coup in Thailand in 1958. The coup lead to the arrest of the chairman of the Socialist United Front and over 400 alleged communists and their sympathisers in the press, political parties, trade union and student organizations. Fourteen publishing firms and 29 newspapers and magazines had been closed, according to a Thai intelligence report to the meeting. In the British colony of Singapore, reported the British delegation, ‘police action in 1956 effectively disrupted the communist plans for the complete domination of the Singapore Trade Union Congress’. In Malaya, the MCP continued to work in the unions and concentrated on what was termed ‘legal subversion’ by supporting left-wing parties.

Apart from purely political activities, the CSE’s counter-subversion effort extended to broader cultural and intellectual areas. In 1959 the SEATO Council welcomed a series of CSE recommendations which called for a survey in member states on the extent and influence of communist textbooks, literature and films. Existing laws on the importation of such material should be examined and ‘regular examinations should be made of the syllabi and textbooks (especially foreign publications) in use in schools to prevent the spreading of Communist propaganda among young people’, said the Council. A survey of subversion at universities in South East Asia reported that governments in Pakistan, the Philippines and Singapore screened potential university staff for communist tendencies. In response to a related CSE recommendation about university staff who visited communist countries, the Philippines reported that such university staff had been closely interrogated and ‘are under constant surveillance’.

Of particular concern in the cultural and educational sphere were overseas Chinese communities which had originally been encouraged by the colonial powers in South East Asia. After the 1949 Chinese revolution, these communities were sometimes used by local communists as launching pads for various political struggles, with the Chinese community in Malaya being the most obvious example. In a similar way the Chinese Peoples’ Republic was prepared to use these communities to develop cultural and other ties with their host countries. (This ‘cultural offensive’, in the parlance of the intelligence agencies, was regarded as a major threat. A 1959 paper by CIA officer and the deputy director of the Research Services Office, William Coolidge, argued that ‘cultural exchanges serve to open up the country to communist penetration… because cultural ties seem “innocuous”’.

The British delegate (either Serpell or Thistlethwaite) reported that in the territories of North Borneo, Brunei and Sarawak the ‘China-born nostalgia’ of the 22 per cent Chinese minority was kept alive by ‘vernacular films, travelling “opera” companies, and a continual leakage of mainland news through clandestine channels’. To stem this, in North Borneo, 37 publications had been banned and nine teachers deported as undesirable immigrants. In Sarawak two Chinese had been deported for using a ‘subversive song book’ which contained songs ‘in praise of Communist China, intended to create a sense of grievance’. In Singapore, the new government had banned the publications of 43 Chinese mainland publishers and ten from Hong Kong. In Malaya, a search of a factory workers’ union office had ‘yielded 120 books , three quarters of which were communist, including communist song books’. In Thailand the new government ‘ordered the arrest of all known communist and pro-communist elements, including those who had visited Communist China on “cultural missions”.’

Restrictions on travel to communist countries (and associated surveillance) was another aspect of counter-subversion reviewed by SEATO intelligence officers. An American paper described the Chinese tactic of ‘peoples’ diplomacy’ which encouraged travel to China particularly by visitors from Third World countries who might be impressed with its achievement. The actual purpose of ‘peoples’ diplomacy’ was to increase pressure for formal diplomatic recognition of China and to establish ‘propaganda channels’ particularly in African and Latin American countries. The CSE Liaison officer warned against certain tourists to communist countries whom he described as ‘busybodies who think that, with the knowledge gained from the visits, they can, single-handed, bring about a relaxation of tension between the West and the East’.

The debate on 'civic action' and counter-insurgency

Differences within the intelligence agencies operating in South East Asia were evident in discussion over a paper on ‘Civic Action’ delivered by the US at the 13th CSE meeting in November 1960. In a familiar approach to guerilla warfare, the US emphasised the non-military aspects needed to win, such as the political and psychological support of ordinary people.

‘Communism thrives where discontent, poverty, corruption ineptitude, abuses and other social ills exist. Guerrilla warfare is not only a military war but also a political, psychological and socio-economic war,’ the paper said, echoing similar analyses by communist theorists of guerrilla war. The manner in which the counter-insurgency forces behave toward the people ‘greatly influences the course of events’. To build popular support for counter-insurgency, forms of civic action were needed including road building, health and medical assistance, the installation of honest local officials and the distribution of food. Honesty, respect and consideration for local populations were to be prized.

In stating this , the US was referring to the methods used by the CIA’s Edward Lansdale to defeat of the Huk rebellion in the Philippines some seven years before. His strategy included civilian-commando units to defend local communities, civilian advisory committees, keeping elections free, as well as road building and other public works. Another aspect was the resettlement of civilians into temporary villages, screened from the visits of communist guerrillas. This had ‘proven very successful’ in the Philippines and was being practised in Vietnam where 150,000 people ’mostly from the over-populated lowlands’ were re-settled in ‘agrovilles’ in the high plateaux or the Mekong Delta. Combined with other civic action in Vietnam, including building schools, bridges, markets, the strategy had lead to ‘much of the war-torn economy [being] rehabilitated’. The American paper gave similar optimistic examples of civic action in Indonesia, Burma and Laos.

The US optimism about civic action as a remedy to communism in South Vietnam was not universally shared. The French delegation lead by Captain Pierre Collinet at the 1960 meeting was scathing about what it regarded as the superficiality of the US approach and warned that civic action was ‘no panacea against Communism’. In South Vietnam after the 1954 settlement, he said, many disorganised programs of civic action were initiated by government agencies. One consequence of this was that ‘no one was willing to take responsibility for the ensuing failures and set backs’. The successes of civic action programs were often spoilt by ‘arbitrary arrests, extortion by rural government officials and operational units in the field, delays and errors in the agrarian reforms and favouritism’. Civilians were often left with the impression that the aim is to ‘woo’ the masses which was ‘in itself a confession of the weakness and possibly even insecurity of the regime,’ said Collinet. The methods of civic action were copied from the enemy who was in fact more skilled in articulating the populace’s grievances. In addition, many people resented the boredom of having to attend pep talks and saw the Government propaganda as just ‘eye wash’. But the American paper was well received by the other intelligence services represented at the meeting with the Australian ASIO officer, Colin Brown, commenting that most thought was ‘one of the more useful works produced in the committee.’

The failure of SEATO's counter subversion work

The heightened level of insurgency in Laos and Vietnam in 1961-62 marked a turning point for the Committee of Security experts. It became clear that the war on subversion was taking a decidedly military turn and that the counter-subversion effort had to be stepped up.

Acting on a suggestion from the US State Department, the foreign ministers on the SEATO Council in August 1961 commissioned an expert group to report on new ways to fight communist subversion. Led by G. R. (Ron) Richards, the deputy director-general of ASIO, the group’s report successfully proposed the creation within SEATO of a high-level Office of Counter Subversion (OCS) led by a Special Assistant who ranked third in the hierarchy of SEATO. The Special Assistant position was initially filled by a CIA officer, George Aurell, a former Lieutenant Colonel in the US Army who had headed the CIA’s Far East Division in the Philippines from 1952-58. Given extensive bilateral American intelligence and paramilitary activity in Thailand which was quite independent of SEATO, his appointment was seen by some as a guarantee that the CIA would face no interference from SEATO-associated intelligence forces. According to a former intelligence officer, Aurell’s appointment to the SEATO role was denounced by Radio Peking several days before he arrived in Bangkok, reinforcing doubts about the security arrangements of SEATO’s Bangkok bureaucracy.

Under Aurell, the Office coordinated several assistance programs to member states, especially Thailand. It also organised security training assistance to the Thais, including a two year attachment to the Thai Provincial Police by an Australian officer, Douglas McPherson. Aurell may not have been the most suitable person to run the office, given his preferences for military operations rather than civic action by the CIA. During his time in the Philippines, he is reported to have complained: ‘What in hell is an intelligence agency doing running a rural resettlement program?’ A New Zealand account comments that Aurell ‘did little’ and that his re-appointment therefore suited New Zealand which was sceptical of the worth of SEATO counter subversion strategy.

By the mid 1960s, the weakness of SEATO’s work in the field of counter subversion was extensively detailed in a report by an Australian intelligence officer who was seconded to work in the Office of Counter Subversion. Among the barriers he faced in undertaking counter subversion work was a lack of co-operation from Thai officials. The Director of the OCS at this time was a Major-General Thamrang Parnsingha, an expert on psychological warfare who ‘is extremely suspicious of personal contact between foreigners and Thai officials on matters of security. In the 10 months he controlled the office, Thamrang managed somehow to avoid any material involvement with counter-subversion in Thailand,’ said the disgruntled officer. The failure of the SEATO Office of Counter Subversion stands in stark contrast to the extensive CIA para-military counter-insurgency program within Thailand under bilateral agreements with the USA. The paralysis and irrelevance of SEATO, said the officer, ‘is leading increasingly, and very understandably, to a reluctance on the part of American officials to discuss locally any matters graded confidential and above.’

Conclusion

In the terms set by SEATO itself, notably the prevention of the spread of communism, particularly in South Viet Nam, SEATO failed to achieve its goals. The reasons for the its failure are complex but the continuing participation of the United States as the key player in SEATO was decisive. From 1962 onwards in the wake of the Laos crisis the US began to circumvent SEATO in favour of bi-lateral relations and direct intervention. In the looming crisis in South Viet Nam both methods would soon be become its preferred modus operandi rather than working through cumbersome multilateral bodies like SEATO. Added to this problem were several other factors, including a more definitive British withdrawal east of Suez, deepening passivity of France about South East Asia and its preoccupation with the events in Algeria. Thus SEATO, including its civilian intelligence side, became what Pearson refers to as a ‘paper machine with a momentum of its own’ where multilateral discussion and editing of position papers tended to substitute for meaningful action.

Behind this failure of the administrative expression of a defence pact were three deeper differences among its signatories and these were expressed at the level of the Committee of Security Experts. The first involved drawing a distinction between communism and nationalism in a decolonising Southeast Asia. This was a point made by SIS’s Michael Wrigley who believed that much of the unrest in Southeast Asia was inspired by nationalism rather than being directed by Moscow or Peking. Such conclusions were unpalatable to the United States. The second was differing attitudes to neutralism. The US refused to countenance any form of neutralism while the former colonial powers in the region, Britain and France, were prepared to accommodate some form of neutralist governments in Viet Nam, Cambodia and Laos. The third concerned China. While the existence of the Peoples’ Republic of China provided a unifying focus for Western intelligence co-operation in Southeast Asia this co-operation was dogged by disagreements, with Britain having recognised the government in Beijing while the US remained opposed such diplomatic recognition. This difference extended to analysis of intelligence with British and Commonwealth allies more inclined to see a defensive stance rather than an aggressive one.

While the Committee of Security Experts provided a venue for liaison between the security agencies in Southeast Asia and training for regional security bodies, its participating intelligence agencies proved unable to overcome these broader differences at the strategic and diplomatic level of their parent nations.

Acknowledgments: I would like to thank Michael Boyle for his insightful comments.

Posted by David at 07:14 PM | Comments (0)

Australian film and the cultural cold war

This article was published in the media journal, Media International Australia, in May 2004. It is based on the 2003 Ian McPherson Lecture delivered by the author at the 50th anniversary of the Sydney Film Festival.

The Cold War between the communist bloc and the capitalist countries is traditionally seen in terms of the grand politics of international relations, including rivalry in the deployment of nuclear weapons, or by proxy wars, like Vietnam and Korea. While an ideological dimension has been studied, most prominently in the attacks on communist influence in Hollywood, interest has been revived in the wider cultural conflict between Left and the anti-Communist Right on the terrain of literature, the arts, journalism, television, radio and cinema. (Saunders, 1999; Lashmar, 1998; McKnight,1998; Eldridge, 2000, Urban, 1997)

The article examines the long term cultural effects of the Cold War on the Australian film industry, on film culture, such as festivals, and on the emerging industry of television. I want to suggest that this global ideological clash considerably affected the direction of government policy toward Australian film, the lives and work of film-makers and the cultural climate of film festivals. In particular I want to examine the interaction between the main government agency responsible for security matters, the Australian Security Intelligence Organization, and the film industry component of what might be broadly termed ‘the cultural Left’ in Australia from 1945 to 1965. I will explore this through four issues which were of great concern during the Cold War: the involvement of left activists in the film society movement; the screening of films from the Soviet bloc; the activities of left wing film-makers, especially in connection with the Commonwealth Film Unit; and the activities of the trade union, Actors’ Equity, in favour of Australian content, especially in the emerging industry of television.

The association between film and politics was established very early. The reason for this was that, from their beginning in the last few years of the nineteenth century, films proved to be cultural form which aroused immediate and broad popular interest. Films fascinated the mass popular imagination, much as television was to do in the late 1940s and 50s. On the basis of this ability to fascinate and excite large numbers of people, film was widely assumed to be an influential medium that could shape minds and political opinions. Democratic governments wanted to use film and cinema for education, for national unity and for propaganda about the nation and national interest. Fascist and Communist governments wanted to use film as unadorned propaganda for their ideological causes and for their national legitimacy. The Venice Film Festival, founded in 1932, was born in an Italy dominated by Mussolini and was a de facto vehicle for celebrating the new fascist society. In 1937 Renoir’s La Grande Illusion (1937) was denied the top prize because of its pacifist sentiments and this led later to the formation of the Cannes festival in France. (Turan, 2002:18)

In Australia prior to World War Two, political activists particularly in the Communist Party of Australia (CPA), used film to promote Soviet socialism and mobilize people in support of Republican Spain. (Merewether, 1985) In a similar way, both radio and television were believed to be enormously influential, a belief that continues to this day. A concomitant to this was that film, television and other cultural activities were seen as especially dangerous if they fell into the wrong hands. This largely explains, I believe, the degree of political surveillance exercised over film, radio and television from the post-war period onwards.

An indication of this attitude can be seen in a speech by the Victorian Labor MP Mr Cremean. In debate over a bill to control the screening of films in 1948, Mr. Cremean damned the screening of Soviet films and said: ‘This poison seeps into the mind of those who otherwise would be well disposed to democratic procedures… People who have been indoctrinated to adopt Communism in that way seem to become the most vicious of the Red propagandists.’ (Cunningham and Routt, 1989:204) The Bill which Cremean supported was never passed, but the attitudes he expressed were widely held on the Right, and from 1949, the federal government passed to the Right in the shape of Sir Robert Menzies’ coalition government. In office Menzies was determined to defeat the influence of communists and appointed a new head of ASIO, Colonel Charles Spry, with whom he developed a relationship of mutual respect. (McKnight, 1994:39-41) While initially established to protect defence secrets, ASIO soon exercised a broad brief against subversion, including in the field of culture and media.

Film societies

One of the early security concerns of ASIO in the cultural field was centred on the growth of small film societies. These were often suburban-based groups of enthusiasts who projected films in community halls, in private homes and sometimes out of doors. In Australia there had been something of an upsurge in film societies during and immediately after the Second World War and on the crest of this wave was born the first Australian film festival, which was held at Olinda, near Melbourne.

Security interest in film societies began in May 1951 when the ASIO Director General asked all states to provide details of film societies which had been penetrated – such was the language of the memo -- by the Communist Party of Australia. Of particular interest was the Sydney Film Society whose president was John Heyer, and whose vice president was Anthony Michaelis, both of whom had ASIO dossiers. Heyer is well known to anyone who has studied post war film in Australia. Heyer worked at the Film Division of the Dept of Interior (later Commonwealth Film Unit) between 1945-1948 where he made a number of documentaries which expressed an idealistic populism about post war reconstruction. (Moran 1991: 49) He later worked for the film unit of the Shell Oil company where he made a landmark documentary, The Back of Beyond which was one of the highlights of the first Sydney Film Festival. Heyer was suspected by ASIO of being a communist.

In early 1954, ASIO drew up a summary of its concerns about film societies. It noted that since 1952 there had been a marked increased in non-commercial film societies in Australia and that some of these screened films from the Soviet bloc. The ASIO report said :

While claiming to be purely cultural societies, concerned with merely providing high class international films for the public, these organizations do, in fact, exploit those films which show the Soviet Union and her satellites in a favorable light, thereby providing the Communist Party with an effective means of spreading propaganda in Australia.

This ASIO report was shown to certain public figures to alert them to the dangers; this was quite outside the charter of ASIO and constituted an early tendency for ASIO to be a player in politics and not simply an observer.

While ASIO was busy investigating film societies, hostility to communism was present within the film society movement. One anti-Communist was a film lover, Neil Gunther who wrote an article in Film Guide entitled ‘Goodbye Mr Red’ in which he urged all film societies to force communists out as soon as possible. (Cunningham and Routt, 1989:208) Such people were not genuine enthusiasts, their enthusiasm was ‘in proportion to its usefulness in promoting Communism’. The Film Society Red, he said, was:

a battler for discussion groups, purely for the use he can make of them in thought-direction. For the same reason he is in favour of the society running a journal. He’s sold on the idea of a film-society federation, for concentration of power in a few hands has long been the goal towards which he has worked. With such power he can hope to swing the film society movement his way, import more films to be used in the fight against freedom and get more backing for his censorship quarrels.

Partly as a result of such moves, the constitution of the NSW Film Users Association was amended in 1954 after a bitter argument, to make it compulsory for all candidates for office to submit a statutory declaration that they were not members of the Communist Party. As a result the Sydney University Film Group left the Association. (Donaldson, 2003)

Mr Gunther’s action was significant because it illustrates an important point. It is tempting sometimes to look back on the Cold War and see things in the simple terms of ‘good idealistic film people’ versus ‘big, bad government agency’. But in many film institutions, the Cold War was fought out internally at the grass roots between leftists and anti-Communists, most of whom acted independently and some of whom co-operated with ASIO.

Film Festivals in Australia

One of the consequences of the popularity of the film societies was the creation of an audience for broader film festivals, the first of which was held at the village of Olinda in the Dandenong Ranges near Melbourne in January 1952. The Olinda festival has attained a legendary character now among film lovers and film historians. It was a raging success and a triumph of grass roots improvisation. It highlighted the vitality and vision of alternative cinema exhibition in Australia. Its long term success was the impetus to the creation of both the Sydney and Melbourne Film Festivals.

The program for the Olinda Festival featured a congratulatory message from Prime Minister Robert Menzies. Paradoxically, at the same time ASIO was collecting information on the event. In a sense this would have flowed naturally from its surveillance of left wing influence in the film societies movement but another reason may have been that the Olinda festival had planned to feature two films from the Peoples Republic of China, ‘The White Haired Girl’ (1950) and ‘Daughters of China’ (1949). It also featured several Soviet films, including ‘Forest Story’ on the underground life of a family of beavers in Russia. But ‘The White Haired Girl’ was not shown. The Commonwealth Censor banned it on the extraordinary basis that it was likely to be ‘offensive to a friendly nation’ that is, Nationalist China. The Censor did not pass ‘Daughters of China’ in time.

Film society enthusiasts who were influenced by or were members of the CPA presumably wanted to show these films because they would humanize the Chinese and undermine the war which the US was waging at that moment in Korea and which many feared would extend to the People’s Republic of China. The Olinda festival was held four months after a referendum which attempted to ban the CPA in Australia.

When the Olinda Festival opened, the organisers were amazed at the response. Every guesthouse and possible bed in the mountain village was booked by film enthusiasts. Among the enthusiasts was a field officer from ASIO who was also amazed to find that three of the seven members of the organizing committee had ASIO dossiers. After watching some of the discussion sessions, he noted the presence of pro-Soviet speakers and tried to get the names of a group of about 25 film-goers who clapped them and who seemed to be enthusiastically pro-Soviet. The field officer spent quite a bit of time looking and listening at the Olinda Schoolhouse which held the most obvious Communist Party presence at Olinda -- an exhibition of Russian and East European photographs and posters. He noted that Ken Coldicutt, from the Realist Film Association, seemed on good terms with the organizers. He also recognised Betty Lacey who, he noted in his report, 'was once employed by the Victorian State Film Centre, but dismissed because of Communist tendencies.’

The ASIO officer concluded that communists had a strong presence on the organising committee of the festival but also noted that one member of the committee was from the ‘Victorian Amateur Cine Society’ which has a clause in its constitution which prevented communists from becoming members. He concluded that the festival was not communist inspired, although he noted that a number of Olinda locals and festival subscribers believed it was. Several contemporary newspaper reports of the Olinda Festival highlight the political undercurrent during the event. Before it was held, something of a red scare was mounted, so much so that a few days after the big success, Roberts Dunstan on the Melbourne Herald wrote an article reassuring readers that the Olinda festival, in his words, was not a ‘Communist Show. Dunstan reported that in a forum on censorship, CPA members argued for ‘freedom on the screen’ while their much more numerous opponents were worried about moral aspects of cinema. But all in all, he said in the overblown rhetoric of the time, ‘the Reds took a hiding’ at Olinda. Nevertheless the CPA regarded the Olinda Festival as a ‘cultural landmark’ in part because , it argued, it showed that people were sick of seeing American horror films and because they responded enthusiastically to old Australian films such as Longford’s The Sentimental Bloke and O What a Night by George Wallace (Guardian 7 February 1952) .

The Olinda Festival was clearly seen by both sides in the Cultural Cold War as a battleground. It was a chance for the CPA to popularize films from the Soviet Union and China as part of their political work, and this called forth a hostile response from both some within the film community but especially by the government security agency. By the time of the third Melbourne Film Festival in 1954, the CPA newspaper The Guardian complained that no Soviet, Czech or Chinese films were screened. ‘The Festival organizers may believe that by avoiding controversy they will curry favor with the government authorities and the commercial film interests but this is no way to build a strong film society movement’, the newspaper argued. (Guardian 1 July 1954) It also argued that unlike the Olinda festival, the subsequent festivals did not allow participants to discuss the films or other subjects of interest.

The CPA’s cultural policy at this time attacked US cultural influence generally and championed a national culture especially in popular forms such as film and later, television. In September 1952 a conference of the CPA-inspired Australian Cultural Defence Movement warned that many Australian artists could not possibly find work in Australia and had gone overseas. In large part, conference speakers argued, this was due to the fact that Australian drama and book publishing were actually in decline while at the same time there was a growing importation of American movies, syndicated radio, magazine articles and comics. The conference argued that along with local cultural decline went growing political conservatism. The painter Lloyd Rees opined that ‘I hope the beautiful colour vermillion is not eliminated from our palette.’ The left-wing conference also called for a National Opera and criticised the disbanding of the Victorian Ballet.

The Commonwealth Film Unit (Film Australia)

In those early and formative years of the cultural cold war there was another institution which drew a lot of attention from Australia’s security authorities. This was the film division of the Department of the Interior, later the Commonwealth Film Unit and after 1973, Film Australia. It had emerged from wartime documentary enthusiasm which included a visit to Australia from John Grierson who successfully urged the Minister for Information, Arthur Calwell, to set up such a body. (Moran 1991) But like all federal government bodies, the unit was open to the scrutiny of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization which was charged with conducting security clearances for government employees.

In addition to this surveillance, the film makers of the Unit were divided politically and aesthetically. One group tended to be younger, animated by idealism about the social purpose of film and interested in artistic issues. They were largely directors and producers. The other tended to be older, more artistically conservative and uninterested in the social purpose of film-making. They were largely editors and cameramen. (Moran 1991:33)

A number of film makers in the first group had worked on Joris Iven’s 1946 film, Indonesia Calling, though not officially. One Film Unit employee, Catherine Duncan wrote the commentary which was spoken by left wing actor (and later Hollywood star) Peter Finch. Indonesia Calling, which was a stirring piece of political filmmaking, was part of the Left’s struggle against the attempt by the Dutch to re-establish their colonial rule in Indonesia.

At the other end of the political spectrum, the unit produced a strident film warning of the dangers of communism, called Menace (1952). Originally suggested by Ernest Turnbull, the general manager of Hoyts Theaters, the film was sponsored by the Minister for the Interior, Wilfred Kent-Hughes. The film’s producer, Jack Allan wrote to ASIO’s Director-General and described the film as ‘a pretty scorching indictment of the menace of communism’. He invited ASIO to vet the script which they did in June 1952. The film had the biggest distribution of any Film Unit film since the war being released in September 1952 through Hoyts, Greater Union and MGM cinemas. After the success of Menace, Allan went on to make One Man’s War, a film based on an Australian soldier who fought in Korea, which he told ASIO had ‘a strongly anti-Communist theme’.

But such films were unusual. From the film unit’s founding in 1945 until around 1953 it produced many documentaries imbued with an optimistic nationalist streak, promoting civic consciousness and often depicting the lives of working people. But from the mid-1950s to the late 1960s, the unit’s output became much safer and less interesting artistically. Moran notes: ‘The federal security service was suspected of having a plant in the unit. Factionalism continued and whether out of mischief or patriotism, some in the unit reported innocent political activities of fellow members to the security authorities. There were two sackings (although the two were later reinstated) in which politics were implicated.’ (1991: 35) A number of files released by National Archives now confirm that there were informers and close surveillance of the Film Unit.

One of the key concerns about the unit was that its members often made classified and defence-related films on topics such as the British A-bomb tests and missile testing. On this basis, film unit members were subject to security scrutiny and the participation of a number of them in Indonesia Calling damned them in the eyes of ASIO.

In 1958 a detailed report on the Film Unit was undertaken by the security division of the Department of Interior which also worked closely with ASIO. Apart from describing the political views of many film-makers, the report contains a vicious personal attack, to a degree which was actually unusual in such files. It concerned a female member of the Film Unit who was described as ‘an undoubted communist’. It outlined her alleged sexual liaisons and her ‘unusual moral code’ and, on this basis, her ability to influence senior men at the unit. The source appeared to be someone working at the Film Unit.

The 1958 report named several other people as security risks or as possible communists such as Frank Bagnall, Bern Gandy and Malcolm Otton. The report also described another person of security interest, cameraman Ted Cranstone, who had been sent to make a film on the testing of tanks on Manus Island and was then brought back to Sydney after security concerns. Even the head of the unit, the respected British producer, Stanley Hawes, was regarded as a possible member of the Communist Party for a number of years.

Another director of the unit, Richard Mason, aroused security concerns because of his connections with the Waterside Workers Film Unit and New Theatre. According to an ASIO source, probably within the unit, he also apparently made it known that as a Methodist lay preacher, he would never offer prayers for the Royal Family in church services. Given all of this it is surprising that