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July 19, 2006

Broadcasting and the enemy within: ASIO's political surveillance of the ABC

In May 1965 the Director General of Security, Sir Charles Spry ,and the newly appointed General Manager of the ABC, Talbot Duckmanton, sat down to dinner in Sydney. At the dinner, which had been arranged two months earlier, the two men discussed matters of security affecting the ABC including ASIO’s regular liaison with the ABC at state leve

All this and more we know, thanks to newly released archival files of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO).

Earlier, in March, Duckmanton had met both Spry’s deputy chief and the head of the Counter-Subversion branch of ASIO. The two senior ASIO officers expressed concern about the forthcoming National Television Congress, an early initiative promoting Australian content and highbrow television whose supporters included left wing figures, some in the ABC. The officers also brought with them a list of ‘certain personnel’ in the ABC with potted biographies and information about their left wing connections. The listed people ranged from a secretary, a set finisher to journalists, TV producers and editors who were past or present members of the Communist Party of Australia or ‘sympathisers’ with that party. Also discussed was Radio Australia, the Indonesian crisis and the Department of External Affairs. The meeting ended with Duckmanton confirming that ABC assistant general manger, Arthur Finlay, would remain as ASIO’s ‘liaison contact’ but that Duckmanton ‘would appreciate being kept informed personally on major matters, e.g. the list of personnel in the organization’.

A second meeting in April 1965 between Duckmanton and ASIO officers again discussed this list of ABC personnel, which included film editor, Rod Adamson, play editor, Leslie Rees, Talks supervisor, Allan Ashbolt and TV presenter, Bob Sanders, producer Bob Allnutt, senior broadcaster John Thompson and journalists Kevon Kemp and Gary Scully. The meeting ended with the arrangement being made for the dinner between Spry and Duckmanton in May.

Just a few months later, Sir Charles Spry wrote to Attorney General, Billy Snedden. Spry sent Snedden lists of names of news commentators who had spoken on ABC radio and TV about whom ASIO held ‘adverse information’ of ‘a substantial nature’. They included academics Ted Wheelwright, Dr Peter Russo and Professor Oscar Spate, the eccentric churchman, Francis James, and a Melbourne businessman, Paul Morawetz.

Unlike the ABC, ASIO’s impact on the cultural and intellectual life of Australia has been scantily and imperfectly recorded. Perhaps this is not only because ASIO’s role was secret but also because it was just one of the raft of prevailing influences of conservative Australia, expressed variously through government ministers, Establishment artists and academics. Certainly, ASIO was no rogue elephant but a body whose actions were approved of by the Prime Minister in strict accordance to the conventions of the Westminster system. But ASIO’s activities had some special characteristics. It was a body of some 500 full time staff armed with a vast filing system and substantial powers of inquiry whose total energy was devoted to identifying left wing influence in Australia and planning operations against it. ASIO was the powerful, sharp sword of Cold War Australia aimed at skewering the communist-influenced Left whose activities (apart from the more traditional trade unionism) ranged broadly across the visual arts, theatre, filmmaking, journalism, academia, radio and television. In this respect, there are similarities with operations of the American FBI in relation the mass media. Like the FBI, ASIO was broadly concerned with ‘communist propaganda’ in public debate, including in the media.

In this article I will examine the ASIO’s role in relation to the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) where many of the cultural and intellectual strands in Australian life intersected. Particularly after the coming of television to all capital cities (1956-60) the ABC was subject to close surveillance by ASIO, fearful that radical ideas might be broadcast by this new medium which they regarded as extraordinarily powerful. In part this article describes the bureaucratic mechanisms which operated to ensure conservatism within public broadcasting; in part it is an example of the hegemonic struggle to maintain an official culture of anti-communism in all public institutions during the Cold War. The latter included the targeting of nascent ‘anti-British’ nationalism ranging from plays and programs on bushrangers and convicts to a more independent foreign policy stance.

My analysis relies on a series of files recently released under the the Archives Act. These internal files, never intended to be released, are a window into the bureaucratic and often humdrum business of internal security procedures of the Commonwealth of Australia during the Cold War. The classification by ASIO of its files into two broad categories (Personal and Subject) has meant that in order to understand political surveillance of the ABC it is necessary to reconstruct a narrative using a large number of files in combination with broader histories of the ABC, such as Ken Inglis’ This is the ABC and with contemporary press coverage. As with all studies which rely on secret files it is important to guard against what might be called a ‘a file-centred’ point of view which exaggerates the power of covert actions and covert agencies. The literature discussed below gives some indication of overt government pressure on the ABC although this was largely unnecessary until the mid-1960s because of a conservative hegemony within ABC management and its government-appointed board.

Given this institutional conservatism of the ABC it is difficult to unpick the influence of ASIO from a tangled strand of influences. One clear point of ASIO intervention, however, was through its power to withold the all-important security clearance to existing or potential ABC employees. This process, colloquially known as vetting, (or more bluntly, blacklisting) applied to all white collar Commonwealth employees. As we shall see, ASIO influence grew from this basis so that from the late 1950s ASIO began to systematically monitor ABC radio and TV broadcasts. When ‘matters of security interest’ appeared they discussed their concerns with senior ABC personnel such as Assistant General Manager Arthur Finlay and Director of Talks, Alan Carmichael At the state level local ASIO officers took up vetting and security concerns with state ABC managers. The effect of such a security presence making itself felt can only have been to reinforce a politically conservative agenda and to have a chilling effect on cultural and political innovation. ASIO helped shape a cautious and conservative ABC which was ill-equipped to face the upheavals as the political and cultural revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Origins and background

In May 1951 the Director General of Security Spry informed his staff that arrangements had been made ‘with the Headquarters of the Australian Broadcasting Commission for co-operation with ASIO in matters of security affecting the Commission’. The month before he had written to the ABC’s general manager, Charles Moses, outlining a system of security clearances for checking three types of staff: new appointments to key positions, ‘personnel who could be a risk from a sabotage or propaganda aspect’ and ‘any employee about whom doubt may exist’.

Shortly afterwards, the ABC began to submit to ASIO long lists of prospective employees and ABC workers seeking promotion. This system of security clearances covered not only the entire federal public service, (including bodies like the CSIRO and ABC) but also the entry of migrants and those who wished to become Australian citizens. The vetting of people in ‘key points’ (a defence term denoting installations ranging from the BHP steelworks to major dams) meant that vetting extended to the state public services and even to private enterprise.

Perhaps because of the enormity of its national vetting tasks, ASIO was surprised when the ABC assistant General Manager, Arthur Finlay, insisted that ASIO widen its vetting to include ABC typists, commissionaires, messengers etc. Finlay told an ASIO officer who interviewed him that ‘the Organisation and physical layout of Broadcasting Stations allowed more persons than would be expected to have access to places where sabotage is possible or written material which could be distorted into propaganda was present.’

Initially at least, ASIO resisted such suggestions. Later, with the coming of television, Finlay requested that ASIO again widen its vetting of ABC staff to all new employees. Finlay argued that staff movement was fluid. ‘A dispatch assistant can be switched overnight to a broadcasting job. A typist might be required as Secretary to a senior executive.’ His concerns were summarised in 1957 by ASIO thus: ‘ABC already has a fair proportion of staff with adverse security records found as a result of our vetting (...) They want to check everybody to avoid getting any more staff with adverse records.’ In the interests of its own bureaucratic efficiency (its delays were notorious) ASIO resisted wider vetting and continued to focus on journalists, producers, editorial and senior staff. Liaison was carried out through Arthur Finlay, recruited by Moses in 1934 from his position as master at Sydney Grammar School. His main function in this role was to discuss cases of individuals raised by ASIO’s checking of the security records of prospective and present ABC employees.

One example of the way in which the vetting system worked can be seen in the case of journalist Jack Child who was a active trade union member of the Australian Journalists Association and who had had contact and possibly membership, of the Communist Party of Australia at some time. In July 1959 the ABC’s Superintendent (Administration) passed Jack Child’s name to ASIO for vetting along with 26 others. At that time Childs was working as a photographic artist on the Television News Times (later TV Times) and had applied for the position of ‘Temporary Creative Artist’ within the ABC.

ASIO’s investigation resulted in a closely typed five page report. The report noted that Childs’ name had been found in papers seized from the raid on the CPA’s Marx House in July 1949 which showed him and his father as artists on the Sun newspaper. Another report showed his name on one of the Communist Party’s own lists of members of its Journalists Branch and later both Jack and his wife Marie were reported to be members of the CPA’s Mosman Branch. Sources at the ABC commented that he ‘gives the impression that he is a rat bag’ while another person opined that he was ‘not a communist and that all artists were ‘queer people’.’ But most damaging of all, in view of what later happened, was that one informant reported that Child ‘has been overheard to make derogatory remarks about Royalty’. During the visit of Princess Alexandra ‘he made a few scathing comments on the utility of the visit.’

These reported sentiments then became the basis for denial of a security clearance. The compiler of the report noted that the ‘adverse attitude to the Royal Family on the part of the Subject suggest that there has not been a material change in Subject’s sentiments.’ When a senior figure in ASIO suggested Child be cleared, he was overruled by ASIO’s chief, Brigadier Charles Spry who noted:

‘I do not hold that a person who does not accept the principle of royalty is necessarily a communist, or disloyal to his country for any other reason, but I do feel that when a person has been known to be a Communist or near-Communist in the past, the fact that he holds such views now indicates that he has Communist sympathies still. That is to say, I cannot conceive of him making a definite break with Communism, but still retaining his Communist strong feelings about the Royal family.

The upshot of Child’s application for a promotion and transfer was that in May 1960 the ABC sacked him.

Surveillance of ABC programs

While staff vetting was ASIO’s initial concern, from the mid 1950s onward, ASIO began to see a role for itself in surveillance of the content of ABC programs. In 1955 one alert ASIO officer reported on ‘A Hero has been Slain’ a radio feature presented by the writer-poets, Douglas Stewart and Nancy Keesing. The title was from a ballad on Australian bushranger, Ben Hall. ‘The tone of the feature,’ the ASIO man recorded, ‘was that the bushrangers were noble and brave and the police brutal, callous and cowardly. Anyone holding a contrary opinion was referred to as “Mr Respectable Opinion”.’

The rich and resonant voice reading those poems was that of actor Leonard Teale, (later of Homicide fame). Teale had been singled out by Finlay in an interview with ASIO in 1955 when, once again, Finlay requested wider vetting, this time of the Children’s Session, including the Argonauts. An ASIO officer reported that Finlay worried about persons,

who were clever enough to cloak their subversive political views, to be appointed and gradually exert their influence to change the tenor of the Session. Mr Finlay remarked that he was very glad to see the last of Leonard Thiele [sic] (known as “Chris” on the session) who has recently resigned, as it was only after he was contracted for the work that he had heard that Thiele was “quite pink”.

ASIO already had a file on Teale and after Finlay’s request, prospective staff for the Argonauts session were subject to security clearance. Such a craven and conservative attitude expressed by the public broadcaster undoubtedly laid the groundwork for closer surveillance of the ABC, especially its drama and current affairs programs.

Another ABC staff member who received early ASIO treatment was Federal Play Editor, Leslie Rees. An ASIO officer in 1957 heard Dymphna Cusack’s play ‘Pacific Paradise’ and concluded ‘it could be offensive to the United States of America’ because of its anti-atomic bomb message. Spry then authorised the NSW ASIO director to approach a senior officer of the ABC to inform them of ASIO’s suspicions that the CPA was using the ABC for propaganda. Spry’s memo noted disingenuously that ASIO was ‘merely advising the ABC and are not in any sense bringing pressure to bear’. Rees survived and worked at the ABC until he retired.

In January 1958, Spry began to broaden the ambit of security intervention into the ABC. Reports had been received, he told his regional directors, that ‘undue opportunities have been given to Communist speakers, authors and producers to propagate their views’ through the ABC. Spry asked them to survey the previous twelve months and provide reports on the extent of Communist influence. The 1958 survey turned some ASIO officers into putative censors based on extraordinarily meagre indications of left wing influence. Two weeks after Spry’s memo, the NSW region advised that the first of a series of 12 weekly telecasts aimed at schools would deal with bushfires, New Guinea, and the Eureka Stockade.’ The NSW ASIO director noted ‘These subjects, of course, are topical sources of propaganda by the Communist Party of Australia.’ A later and fuller response by NSW observed that a number of Australian writers and actors had appeared including Leonard Teale in the serial ‘Commander Brady’ and that Dr Stephen Macindoe had given a talk on ‘Wheat in NSW’; the compere of Kindergarten of the Air, Joyce Hutchison, who had sympathies with the peace movement, was also noted.

In Canberra ASIO noted that six people known to ASIO had made broadcasts. They included academic Lord Lindsay who arranged a program of Asian music; Professor Geoffrey Sawer, who spoke 22 times in ‘Notes on the News’ and Professor A. D. Hope who reviewed books three times. The Victorian office of ASIO provided a copy of names the panel used by the ABC to draw speakers for programs such as ‘News Commentary’, and ‘Australia and the World’. It noted lamely that ‘persons of ‘Left Wing sympathies’ usually made themselves available to speak at any time whereas some difficulty was encountered in obtaining the services of the more conservative members of the panel’. The SA branch noted seven people had spoken who were adversely recorded, including Max Harris, who was described as ‘Associate of Communist Party members.’

According to a national report drawn up for the Director of ASIO’s Counter-Subversion section, the 1958 survey showed that only one known CPA member, writer Stephen Murray-Smith, had spoken on the ABC. Nevertheless, ‘persons on record in all states, except Tasmania, have been given opportunities to broadcast by the ABC, in some cases, regularly and repeatedly’. The report, however, concluded that the 1958 survey was ‘quite inconclusive’. ASIO officers had to work from months-old printed program notes which often did not mention speakers’ names or topics. The only real way to determine the extent of propaganda was to actually listen to the broadcasts and, it noted, when this was done sometimes broadcasts by people on record were actually ‘quite innocuous’.

Eighteen months after its first sortie, ASIO broadened its media operations. On 18 June 1959 ASIO’s Director General of Security, Brigadier Charles Spry informed his regional directors of a second, wider operation which would assess ‘the degree of communist penetration and/or influence’ in commercial and ABC television and radio and non-communist newspaper and periodicals. Essentially, this first meant identifying ‘individuals who are adversely recorded’ who are employed in press radio or TV and secondly, identifying any media outlet ‘pursuing a communist line’. Television had not yet come to Tasmania, South Australia, Canberra or West Australia and the survey in these states was largely of press and radio.

The most thorough analysis of leftwing influence on press, radio and TV was done by the Victorian Regional Office of ASIO in late 1959. It noted weekly talks by left wing writer Alan Marshall on ABC TV although ‘So far ... no Communist slant has been detected.’ One communist sympathiser, Norman Rothfield, had given a talk on China, and other sympathisers were detected working as drama producer (who was, interestingly, said to be ‘in no position to influence ABC policy’) and another as a set painter. On HSV 7, ASIO noted the presence of Shirley Broadway (McDonald) who was described as ‘a TV star’ who had come out of the radical New Theatre and whose husband was a CPA member. An artist, Hyman Slade, also worked for HSV 7. On GTV 9 was a journalist, Malcolm Bryning, of whom ASIO had a ‘trace’ as a member of the Eureka Youth League. In ABC radio ASIO found six journalists (including writer John Hepworth) had security records. Many were casuals and most were ‘communist sympathisers’ rather than confirmed CPA members. The most dangerous was John Scott Nelson, a permanent ABC officer and acting chief of staff who, in staccato ASIO-speak, was described as ‘Highly regarded. Could influence ABC policy.’

The Victorian report also outlined left wing influence in the press which was clearly more pronounced that in radio and TV. The biggest concentration of left wing journalists was on the Herald and Weekly Times group, publishing the Melbourne Herald and the Sun.

The investigation by the Sydney office in response to the 1959 memo also offers an interesting insight into the early days of commercial television. The new television industry was clearly was clearly drawing on the existing theatre and film culture and personnel. The main channel into commercial TV for subversive ideas was believed to be the Left-influenced union, Actors Equity. But Sydney advised ASIO headquarters that they had little to fear:

We are advised that in the Commercial Stations, unless there is co-operation between the sponsor, the script reader and the station management, there is little likelihood of any script writer, actor or announcer being able to influence the programme with any propaganda. The procedure appears to be that “a show” is usually prepared by a free lance producer or script writer, who then sells the show to a sponsor who, of course, checks the script. The producer then contracts with the Broadcasting or Television Company to put the show on and he arranges for musicians, actors, announcers, as necessary. The script is carefully checked, an if necessary, censored by the script reader, and subsequently by station management.

In NSW ASIO identified five CPA members or sympathisers in the ABC. They were film editor, Rod Adamson, floor manager Rob Allnutt, journalist Christopher O’Sullivan, play editor Leslie Rees and the secretary to the news editor, Norma Saunders.

ASIO was alarmed at the case of film editor Rod Adamson and advised the ABC that he should be sacked. Their inquiries suggested that he could have been trained in espionage after he lived in eastern Europe between 1947-49 and noted that he later had contact with the Soviet embassy in Australia. In this case, the ABC resisted. ‘[We] were informed that the ABC Executive considered the matter and decided that as Adamson was doing such a good job and would be hard to replace he should be kept on but that the situation should be watched... Adamson is not permanent and could be dismissed at a week’s notice ‘if there were grounds for such action’.’’

The government’s sanctioning of ASIO surveillance of the ABC and Spry’s 1959 memo gave a licence for security intervention to prevent programs being broadcast. In his memoirs, Pictures on the Margin, Clement Semmler relates a telling incident. Semmler was an admirer and friend of author and CPA member Frank Hardy who had been tried for criminal defamation over his controversial book Power without Glory in 1950. In the 1960s Semmler had commissioned a series of TV scripts on an Australian theme which became Hardy’s Yarns of Billy Borker. He was surprised to receive an agitated phone call from General Manager, Sir Charles Moses who asked him about Hardy’s CPA affiliations and whether the project could be stopped. Semmler refused unless he received written instructions which never came. Semmler recalled:, ‘Some years later I was told by one of Moses’ secretaries (though I could not verify it) that the complaint had come because of an approach to Moses from the Australian security service.’ At one point in the early 1960s ASIO opened a file on Semmler which contains very little but includes the following short report: ‘It is reported that Semmler, described as a strange, highly strung temperamental person, is a close friend of Frank Hardy, a CPA member and author and that Hardy has often called to see Semmler at the ABC.’

Many smaller instances exist where ASIO officers reported any and every programme or news item which they suspected could be communist inspired. In October 1959 an ASIO officer noted ‘good propaganda for the communists’ in an item on the 7pm TV news bulletin which showed ‘the facilities enjoyed by the workers at a Black Sea resort where the home of a former landowner had been made available’. That same month another ASIO officer noted that the ABC radio’s News Review included a recording of a Czech orchestra’s performance to Sydney waterside workers. Wharfies’ comments (‘‘Where they come from, of course, the workers get this sort of thing every lunch hour,”) were also broadcast to the chagrin of ASIO’s watchdogs. In September 1959, an item on the 7pm news on schools in Hungary which showed the issue of free text books and school satchels and new desks and chairs was ‘of value as propaganda for the Communist countries’. On this basis ASIO’s Victorian director made inquiries about the origin of such items.

A similar inquiry was made when far-right Liberal MP, Sir Wilfred Kent Hughes, criticised an ABC radio serial whose story line mentioned the Czech capital Prague in a neutral way. Other criticism surrounded a report on the program, ‘Window on Asia’ which dealt with life on a Chinese rural commune. Following the public controversy, ASIO officer Phillip Bailhache contacted Talks Director, Alan Carmichael and asked for the scripts and discussed Kent-Hughes outburst. Carmichael was able to reassure the ASIO officer that the Prague reference was simply a passing mention in a travel serial. The report on the Chinese commune was simply factual.

Four Corners and the early 1960s

The early 1960s saw several conflicts involving the ABC and the Federal Government. Inglis suggests that this may have arisen because of a realisation by Menzies that television had a greater power to stir people up than radio. Certainly, from the early 1960s onwards, ABC TV became something of a battle ground between the federal government and the younger, more innovative program makers, on the new Four Corners program and, especially after 1967, on such programs as This Day Tonight. In 1960 federal cabinet directly intervened to stop the ABC making a series of documentaries with broadcasters in the US, Canada and the UK. In March 1963 the Postmaster-General instructed the ABC not to broadcast an interview with former French Prime Minister, Georges Bidault.

Given this level of overt interference, ASIO’s eagerness to inquire into the ABC whenever a government backbencher complained is not surprising. In April 1963, Senator Hannan attacked the ABC panel show ‘Any Questions?’ over ‘insulting references’ to the Queen. ASIO quickly checked the security records of the participants. They included journalist Cyril Pearl (‘a particularly biting tongue and has some early trace of communist sympathy’) Francis James (member of Australia-China Society, Australia Soviet Friendship Society) Mungo Macallum (member of Committee for Nuclear Disarmament). All this was done ‘as the matter may be subject of Ministerial inquiry’, said ASIO in anticipation. (Hannan was appointed to the Broadcasting Control Board a few years later.)

In May Minister for Housing Senator Spooner bullied a ‘right of reply’ out of Four Corners on which he had, the week before, refused to appear. His interviewer was Bob Sanders, who had the previous week run a critical discussion on housing policy to which Spooner had declined to appear. Sanders had earlier attracted ASIO notice through his interview of a Russian visitor, Nelia Naslova, on his program ‘People’. Something Naslova said aroused ASIO interest and later an ASIO officer ended up interviewing Sanders by phone. After a few minutes Sanders objected. The incident later became public in TV Week and Spry was forced to write to Menzies explaining the incident. ASIO discovered that Sanders had been a member of the Adelaide University Socialist Club and had joined the ALP. On ‘People’ he had interviewed left wing supporters of the peace movement although by then his own views had changed. Meanwhile, in an intercepted telephone call, the editor of Tribune, Alec Robertson, was heard to praise Sanders and this was noted on his file. Thenceforward Sanders was placed on a ‘Watch’ list of ABC employees against whom no connection with the CPA was found but who nevertheless were of interest to security.

But it was Four Corners under Allan Ashbolt that detonated major controversies and galvanised ASIO to examine subversion in the ABC more closely. Ashbolt was already something of a controversial figure when he became editor of Four Corners. His first edition in August 1963 on Hiroshima Day ‘could encourage public support for the Communist ‘peace’ front,’ according to one ASIO officer. But it was his program on the culture and politics of Returned Soldiers League (RSL) which caused nation-wide controversy, with Menzies calling for the script of this program and several others for ‘review’. At ASIO Spry dictated an urgent memo to an unknown underling:

Would you therefore ascertain most discreetly [original emphasis] who were the people who appeared on the programme, and provide me with details of any who may have adverse traces. This is urgent.

In the weeks that followed ASIO investigated individuals associated with Four Corners. They re-examined known leftwing employees of the ABC who, they speculated, might have formed ‘a secret Party branch’ in the ABC. The former included the urbane Four Corners presenter, Michael Charlton, who had left the program before Ashbolt arrived. ASIO found that Charlton had never been security checked but it found that he had had contact with the Czech and Polish consuls when he had tried to arrange visits of an ABC team to eastern Europe. It probably also received information from MI 5 on Charlton. About Ashbolt ASIO found that he had ‘worked with a large number of persons of security interest in the entertainment field’ and had tried to start a theatre with actor Peter Finch and others after the war. Ashbolt was also observed and ‘overheard’ [phone-tapped] talking to the Soviet diplomat Ivan Skripov but apart from a friendship with Judah Waten there was no a trace on file of any real connection between Ashbolt and the CPA.

After an investigation by Headquarters, Spry ordered his NSW branch to conduct a wider survey. He summarised the Headquarters findings thus: that ‘we have nothing reflecting on Charlton; Bob Sanders is of interest through his communist associations of 1949-52 (which are known to the CPA); Ashbolt’s connection with [Soviet] diplomatic personnel are of interest;’. A year later, Ashbolt was removed as editor of Four Corners over a different series of issues although there is nothing to suggest ASIO had a direct hand in this.

Conclusions

The newly released archival files of ASIO (which only cover the years to 1966) clearly reveal a significant aspect of the history of ABC which has not so far been known or understood. They need to be read in context of the more broad ranging history such as Ken Inglis’ This is the ABC. They show the regular and ‘normal’ ASIO contact with the highest levels of ABC management. Sir Charles Moses had regular contact with ASIO and did his successor, Talbot Duckmanton. For vetting and administrative matters ASIO frequently dealt with assistant general manager, Arthur Finlay. ASIO’s routine requests for scripts of radio and TV programs ‘of security interest’ were filled by Talks Director, Alan Carmichael, who also answered ASIO’s queries about programs. We have already seen ASIO’s interest in assistant general manager Clement Semmler. At a lower level. mundane matters were handled through contact between ASIO regional offices and ABC state managers. Overall, at least throughout the 1950s and 60s, a security watchdog was peering over the shoulder of the ABC and regularly querying employees’ background and program content.

ASIO’s surveillance also had a significant role in the bolstering the ABC’s cultural conservatism. Part of ASIO’s alertness to communist influence in ABC television, for example, was based on the fact that the CPA-influenced Left had successfully cultivated, from the late 1930s, a radical nationalist perspective on culture (Russel Ward’s pathbreaking The Australian Legend was associated with this). By the late 1950s and early 1960s a desire to look for Australian (as opposed to British) traditions began to express itself in the ABC, especially through television. Thus, for example, ASIO began to notice long-time targets like writer Alan Marshall had begun to contribute to ABC TV series like ‘Off the Beaten Track’. Many other artists and writers with who shared a ‘soft nationalist’ position and left wing values also set off alarm bells when they or their work appeared on ABC radio and TV.

To what degree did this secret political surveillance strengthen political and intellectual conservatism in the ABC? Apart from instances like Moses’ attempt to quash the Frank Hardy series it is not easy to find direct and unequivocal examples. Yet ASIO’s continuous surveillance, its requests for transcripts, its continuous vetting of staff, its letters to Ministers listing subversives who had spoken on the ABC must have had a substantial effect in setting boundaries for acceptable debate and issues.

The problem here is separating the influence of ASIO from other influences which surrounded the ABC and which fashioned it as part of a conservative political and cultural establishment. While ASIO was the eyes and ears of Menzies, the Prime Minister also had personal contact with the ABC’s general manager Sir Charles Moses. Various chairmen of the ABC board were selected from among a conservative Establishment after the usual lobbying. Part of the conservative ethos involved other factors such as the ABC’s deference to the most conservative aspects of BBC practice. Then there is the self-censorship and internalised caution by ABC managers about controversy which was undoubtedly fuelled by the ASIO presence. Some eager ABC officials saw matters of security as self-evidently important and regarded ASIO with an awe which seems bizarre to our eyes.

Yet in spite of this many sided political surveillance, the ABC opened up in the late 1960s and early 1970s and its conservatism slowly began to crumble. (For example Bill Peach’s This Day Tonight gives a lively insight into some key battles, as does Inglis’ history.) Part of the reason must lie in the fact that the challenge presented by younger journalists and producers was in no way linked to a formal left wing position. These younger forces, such as Peach, Peter Luck, Mike Willessee, Mike Carlton, Peter Manning and others were unassailable in the terms of the Cold War -- in spite of accusations of communism. The machinery of political surveillance therefore failed in its ultimate purpose. However, for the definitive picture of ASIO surveillance at the ABC on the all-important period from 1968-1975 we will have to wait while the 30 year delay prescribed by the Archives Act unrolls.

Posted by David at 11:28 PM

July 09, 2006

The New Left and the Old Moles

Chapter 19, 'Australia's Spies and Their Secrets' (David McKnight, Allen & Unwin, 1994)

On a quiet Sunday morning early in 1972 three ASIO officers stood in the nondescript office of a fly-by-night mining company, Kalamunda Mineral Reserves, above Flinders Lane in the city of Melbourne. The main sound apart from the odd distant car was the distant, insistent hymn singing of a religious sect who occupied rooms below and the occasional squawk of a walkie-talkie held by one man. From another man, hunched over a desk with a small box of tools by his side, a metallic sound rasped through the room

He was feverishly filing a blank key into shape. At one point the rasping stopped as an ASIO field officer acting as a ‘cockatoo’ reported over the walkie talkie that a police car was slowly cruising down the Flinders Lane. Other than this problem -- quickly solved with a quiet word from the watcher -- the operation went smoothly enough. The object of the exercise was entry to a suite of offices situated on the third floor of Goodwin Chambers at 386 Flinders Lane which were occupied by W. Alexander Boag, an accountancy practice which audited a wide spread of companies and individuals, including barrister Ted Hill, the leader of the Communist Party of Australia, (Marxist-Leninist).

Once the lock to Boag’s rooms was picked, the ASIO team retired to nearby Kalmunda offices to make a key. Cracking the ‘impregnable’ Rivers lock which Boag used allowed ASIO officers entry for the next 18 months. The initial achievement of the men from Operations branch was to photograph Hill’s tax and financial records.

Two months before the events described above, ASIO’s Operations branch had registered Kalamunda as a company (with the help of a retired MI5 man in West Australia) and leased rooms in Goodwin Chambers down the hall from Boag’s.

On this and many other operations ASIO had one of the finest locksmiths in Australia to help them. Apprenticed in 1933 to Chubbs, ‘Leon’ had learnt the arcane skills of cracking combination safes and complex locks from the company who made them. Though he joined ASIO only in 1963, ‘Leon’ had actually done jobs for ‘the Show’ in Melbourne since he was first approached for an intelligence burglary in 1951.

The Communist Party of Australia (Marxist Leninist) was a prime target of ASIO since its formation in 1964 when Hill and other pro-China communists split from the CPA. From 1966 onwards the CPA (ML) experienced a transfusion of new blood with the rise of the student and New Left movement in Melbourne’s universities. These Maoist students,who took their ideological lead from Ted Hill, were organised in the Worker-Student Alliance and had a tendency to physically confront police, university authorities and US diplomatic premises. Maoist students deeply worried ASIO.

ASIO’s view of the New Left was mixed. On one level, like most of conservative, conformist Australia, it had a simple gut rejection of the cultural revolution of which it was part. Long haired, incense burning and protesting students left its older officers cold. An ASIO analysis of alienation at the time said the student New Left fell into five categories: draft (conscription) protesters; career rebels (‘those rejecting money-making pursuits’); the children of ‘Old Left’ parents ; ‘drug using beatniks and other social deviants’ and Christian radicals. The younger intelligence officers were intrigued. The New Left defied all known sense and reason since they were not old style communists (initially at least) nor did their rebellion stem from hunger or unemployment. It was hard to put them in a box with a lable on it.

The cultural-political tide of non-conformism and revolt which washed over Western societies from the late 1960s worried ASIO wherever it penetrated. Before the 1966 elections the Liberal Party suffered a minor split when the anti-war Liberal Reform Group (later the Australia Party) broke away, led by transport millionaire and free thinker, Gordon Barton. ASIO noted that Liberal Reform ‘not only ran candidates against government represenatives but co-operated with the pro-communist peace movement and the Anti-Vietnam war protest organisations in the campaign.’ The creation of the Australia Party (ideological forerunners of the Democrats) was indeed a sign of the times. The fact ASIO saw this as relevant to security speaks volumes of its notion of national security whereby any challenge to Menzian conformism was suspect.

By the early seventies break-ins were not an unusual occurence although extreme care was taken to ensure officers were not caught in the act. -- it was after all illegal. The beauty of break-ins was that, like phone taps, it gave access to raw intelligence of the inner most activities and thoughts of the target. Often tell tale signs were left to make it look like an amateur burglary by kids. An earlier break-in carried out by Operations (D) branch occurred in January 1971 at the Clifton Hill, Melbourne, home of New Left academic Doug White, from La Trobe University. White was at that stage one of a score of campus figures demonised by ASIO and the Commonwealth Police as ringleaders of the New Left. Among his friends were key ‘China-liners’ such as Humphrey McQueen and student leader, Barry York. He was also one of the board members of Arena, a key New Left intellectual journal and Ted Hill had once visited his home. Through a student informer, D branch knew that White’s wife was frequently ill and he was often away at weekends seeing her at a holiday home on Phillip Island. On the appointed day (chosen almost certainly through a phone tap aimed at learning his movements) a small team of cockatoos and public service burglars broke into White’s home at 34, The Esplande, Clifton Hill (Vic). The most likely object of the search were to photograph files of Arena especially its mailing list. In the event, they got nothing. The Arena subscription list was held elsewhere. White arrived home on Sunday night to see his wife’s photographic negatives strewn on the floor and noticed a couple of bottles of beer and some paperbacks were missing. White concluded correctly it was a security job, designed, he believed, to intimidate him. He belief was reinforced by an incident six months later. White had helped Queensland student radical get a teaching job in Victoria. One night a man knocked on the door just as White was preparing for bed, saying he was from the Motor Registry and wanting to speak to the student who, he claimed, had given White’s address when he registered his car. When White told him he didn’t live there, he said ‘Oh, so where can I contact him?’ It was tired old tactic, crude in its execution. ‘It was as phoney as hell,’ White recalled.

The key to the New Left was the student movement and as the dimensions of challenge to social norms became clearer, ASIO recruited students as agents. One recruit in the late 60s was a young engineering student at Monash University, Peter Higgins. Higgins, a naive and conservative Catholic student who was unhappy with the turmoil at Monash. One of his initial tasks was to see if he could find sources of income of the Labor Club and whether any funding came from China or Russia. Needless to say nothing was found. His bread and butter consisted of passing on uni leaflets and political gossip and identifying students by name who attended anti-war demonstrations which ASIO photgraphed. When asked to find out information on the sexual activity of particular students he refused. ‘It was obvious that it had nothing to do with their political activities and was only going to be used as blackmail.’ Higgins decided to become politically active himself, a stance discouraged by his ASIO case officer. He joined the Engineering Socialists, a Maoist group, and realised that a couple of members of the 20 person group were mixed up with Bob Santamaria’s National Civic Council. ‘I reported that but the ASIO contact refused to record their names. I had a go at him and said ‘You are only picking on the Left’. He said they actually worked very closely with the NCC and they would never report on each other.’ Eventually Higgins’ politics evolved further leftwards and after seeing police violence at a 1971 demonstration against the touring South African football team, he went public with his story in the student newspaper Lot’s Wife.

ANOTHER BIZARRE piece of political busybodying by ASIO involved their surveillance of rebellious high school students. In December 1968 ASIO’s Special Projects section produced a background paper on ‘The Significance of Militant Developments among Secondary School Students’. In July 1969 it circulated ‘Programme for Revolution in High Schools’ and an updated version in April 1970.

Extraordinarily close parallels appear between this latter paper and a small pamphlet School Power published over the name of Peter Coleman, the then Liberal Member for Fuller. The pamphlet, subtitled Is your child being manipulated by Political Operators? was sold widely through newsagents. The ASIO paper states that a Sydney organisation called High School Students Against the War in Vietnam (HSSAWV).
‘publishes a journal ‘Student Underground’ and a newsletter which have been distributed in up to 100 schools. In October 1968 it ran a weekend camp near the Jenolan Caves to discuss communism and guerrilla warfare tactics. It claimed to have a mailing list of about 500 students in 1968.’
The group also published underground sheets for various schools including:
Yellow Submarine Fort Street Girls’ High School
The Spark Cremorne GirlsHigh School
Bleah Castle Hill High School
Super Rat Caringbah High School
Out of Apathy Cheltenham and Strathfield Girls High Schools
The Sydney Line Sydney GirlsHigh School

Coleman’s pamphlet stated that HSSAWV ‘claimed in the early months to havea mailing list of 500 student subscribers, to be distributing ‘Student Underground’ in 100 high schools, and it had effective control of a number of separate high school papers such as:’ [the same list followed with Fort Street Girls shown as producing ‘Yellow Subterranean’.] It then added: ‘In October 1968 it also ran a weekend camp near Jenolan Caves to discuss guerrilla warfare tactics.’

The ASIO paper had this to say about the high school student revolt in Brisbane:
c) Subsequently, a body entitled Students in Dissent (S.I.D.) was set up to organise student protest against the education system. This body had a High School Action Committee which organised demonstrations and produced literature for distribution among students. Both bodies co-operated with SDA and FOCO, and received support from radical university groups and academics, communists, and the Young Socialist League (Y.S.L.). The SID currently appers to be inactive.
d) Another radical body Students for Revolutionary Action (S.R.A.) was set up in February 1969 using the address of SDA, the YSL and FOCO. It has distributed a pamphlet urging students to seize weapons used by school cadets units. It produced a newsheet entitled ‘Spark’. It also appears to be currently inactive.

On page 11 of Coleman’s School Power, the following appeared:
Next, Students in Dissent (S.I.D.) was set up. It had a high school Action Committee which produced literature such as ‘The Black Dwarf at Inala High School and organised demonstrations among high school students, especially over the suspension of Miss Margeret Bailey, a prefect at Inala HighSchool, who was suspended for refusing to accept the Principal’s orders. It was supported by the Communist Party’s Young Socialist League. A third body was set up in February 1969, Students for Revolutionary Action (S.R.A.) which had the same address as the Young Socialist League, Foco and the S.D.A. It distributed one pamphlet to schools urging students to seize the Cadet Corps’ weapons. It also produced the paper ‘Spark’.....

The ASIO document contained seven diagrams for the seven capital cities showing how radical university students, high school students and the communist and trotskyist movements were interconnected. Virtually identical diagrams were part of School Power. Many more instances of similarities become apparent when comparing them.

Coleman’s pamphlet is a diatribe against the burgeoning opposition to authoritarianism, to RSL-style patriotism, the prefect system, school uniforms and religion. Many aparents welcomedsigns of independence of spirit in the young, said Coleman. But, he solemnly intoned, ‘If it were a genuine movement of independent and critical minds in the schools it would be welcome. It is in fact the product of soemthing new, anti-educational and reactionary. It is the first attempt in Australia to turn schools away from education and convert them into political centres. It is a political operation, a deliberate and conscientious attack on the integrity of schools...It is organised not by educationists but by a variety of sometimes competing revolutionary parties. It is still in its early stages and it is not too late to take appropriate counter measures.’

‘Operations’ and ‘counter measures’ -- this also was the language of ASIO.

THE SIXTIES also saw a growing challenge to the racism of Old Australia with the Left, progressive christians and aborgines themselves to the forefront of the struggle. The participation of the CPA and its reporting of struggles in the Tribune and Guardian newspapers drew ASIO’s attention. In 1966 the modern land rights movement was born through the strike by Aboriginal pastoral workers at Wave Hill station in central Australia. This became ‘a focal point for CPA propaganda,’ according to ASIO. ‘Strenuous efforts were made by the party to gain trade union support for the strikers,’ it added. The CPA also opposed the government program of assimilation and its support for the retention of the Lake Tyers (Vic) area as an Aboriginal reserve was seen as part of CPA strategy which, as early as 1965, supported land rights. CPA support for an amendment to the Constitution providing for Commonwealth control of Aborognal affairs was also singled out, along with statements supporting Commonwealth laws which would temporarily discriminate in favour of Aborigines. Ultimately in 1967 the Constitution was amended. The CPA of course was utterly cold blooded about all of this, according to ASIO. ‘The Aboriginal problem was seen by the party to be merely one element in its new political programme for a ‘coalition of the Left’ based on a loose programme for social change, and the encouragement of a “new radicalism” in the community at large, designed to create a new social order in which the Party would control political power.’ Another ASIO analysis was a touch more apocalyptic. ‘It can be see nthereforethat the develoopment by the CPA of a militant Australian Aboriginal ‘nationalism’ would enable the CPA to draw the aborigines into the Soviet government’s international anti-colonial and anti-imperialism cmapaigns ..... the CPA is prepared to [do this] becsause it is working to use the aborigines and their problems in every way in its own local united front cmapaign for “peoples’ power” and communism in Australia. And to do this it works ... to penetrate, use and ultimately transform into CPA front organisations those existing organisations concerned with the true welfare of the Australian aboriginal people.’

THE QUALITY of analysis of the New Left and the youth revolt varied from crude alarmism to a something a little more sophisticated.

Shining through the analyses is a complete failure to understand that the roots of the youth revolt. One lengthy analysis of populism quotes Dr Bruno Bettlheim to the effect that ‘Viet Nam and the Bomb serve youth as a screen for what really ails them’ which is their feeling that “youth has no future” because modern technology has made them obsolete -- that they have become socially irrelevant and, as persons, insignificant’. Paraphrasing, the ASIO analyst concluded, ‘Since America’s technology is the most advanced, it is America, Americans, their way of life and their government’s policies whcih become the main target.’ Thus was youthful political opposition to Vietnam ‘psychologised’ away. Another lengthy paper titled ‘Alienation in the socio-political sphere’ (1970) analysed Marx’s youthful writings on alienation and those of a raft of right wing American and British sociologists. On this basis it promoted another apolitical interpretation of the meaning of student protest against the war in Vietnam, thus:
The state of passive alienation by itself generates frustration, discontent, apathy and indifference -- states of mind which may or may not lead or be lead to active alienation which seeks an outlet via hostile action... such hostile action must be pursued by a group of individuals...... their activitites are best described as being those of a ‘mass movement’ [emphasis in original]

It was but a short step to conclude that ‘alienated’ opponent of the war or conscription were simply frustrated malcontents with a psychological problem. Given that ASIO held that the status quo was unquestionably the best of all worlds, the description of opponents as essentially irrational or psychologically disturbed inexorably followed . ASIO’s analysts also committed two cardinal mistakes. For instance, they described the communists’ role in the late 1960s, as promoting ‘the so-called ‘new left’ ...which is encouraged to build itself onto an ‘anti-establishment public’ and to operate in the community as an ‘extra-parliamentary opposition’ -- both under the aegis of the CPA and its programme for a ‘Coalition of the Left’ in Australia. Such phrases as ‘anti-establishment public’, the ‘coalition of the left’, the ‘extra-parliamentary opposition’ were all drawn from the language of radicals themselves. Nor was this an accident. ASIO’s analysts mistakes were first, to accept at face value some of the wilder fantasies of the Left as expressed by the Left itself ; and second, to look overseas models for guidance -- the US andFrance, especially. (The Left duplicated precisely these problems in its analyses at times!). For ASIO such mistakes left it to advise the government that Australia was headed down the road for urban guerrilla warfare, or to use ASIO’s phrase, ‘internal war’.

Another ASIO paper, Peaceful Co-existence and the role of the ‘New Left’ traced the rise of the New Left back to machinations of the Soviet Communist Party under Leonid Brezhnev. ASIO dated the New Left’s origins from the 1956 exposure of Stalin by Krushchev and the Soviet-China split of 1962-63. This was a period which saw the Soviet Union adopt ‘peaceful co-existence’ as the basis for its dealings with the West. The top priority of this policy was to avoid nuclear war with the West at all costs. But partly under pressure from the Chinese who argued that the Russian communists were betraying the anti-imperialist struggle, the Soviets were always careful to continue their verbal support for socialism in Western countries. Seizing on this revolutionary rhetoric and pointing to actual Soviet support for Vietnam, ASIO’s analysts warned of dire consequences. They knew that in the May-June 1968 revolt in France the French Communist Party acted ultimately against the student revolt. Their fear was that the new international trotskyist and anarchist groups would successfully capture the student and intellectual component of the New Left. This in turn would force the pro-Moscow parties to compete for the allegiance of the student movement and other components of the New Left. On top of this the New Left was even more radical than the Old. ‘The aim of the new left is not a ‘coup d’etat which is all that the orthodox communist parties are currently aiming at, but a complete change in the entire structure of society. To do this they plan to apply the theory and tactics of guerrilla warfare ...’ Using these tactics the New Left is ‘to be used to focus the activities of growing mass movements of protest, dissent and criticism..... Guided by the communist parties, the logical outcome of this ... can lead to large scale civil disobedience and violence.....this process could easily result in civil and guerrilla warfare which, by disrupting the whole fabric of authority and of social stability, would prepare the way for a revolutionary seizure of power.’ Once again, because it accepted at face value the rhetoric and romantic dreams of its target group and because of its own fertile imagination, ASIO cried wolf, long and loud.

A slightly more sophisticated ASIO analysis recognised that the Australian New Left was a mixed phenomenon. Consensus in Australia and the Aims of the Left argued that on the one hand it was different from the classic communist parties which were authoritarian and conservative. On the other it was linked to them by common opposition to the Vietnam war and notions of egalitarianism, communalism etc. The New Left lacked a firm and coherent ideology and instead wanted to develop of counter culture. It went on: ‘All rigid ideology, including scientific socialism as promoted by the CPA is rejected, and replaced by types of ethical and voluntaristic socialism reflecting populist, syndicalist and anarchist ideas of mutual aid, communalism, humanism, the personal will and direct action.’

Under the influence of the new ideas of the 1960s the CPA itself was changing and ASIO recognised it was reaching out to the New Left. For a start ‘the CPA was prepared to reject the official Soviet interpretation of basic Marxist-Leninist ideology, which meant a recognition of the possibility of creating a new consensus in Australian the basis of anon-Soviet type of Marxist interpretation and definition of core values...’ The vehicle for this dangerous linkage between the Old and New Left, ASIO recognised, was the CPA’s notion of a ‘Coalition of the Left’ (an implicit rejection of the elitist notion of a vanguard party). At that time the CPA was breaking with the classic insurrectionist approach to revolution and the idea that narrowly defined working class interests were the only significant ones. Consensus in Australia stated: ‘The CPA recognises that “great social transformations are only possible through action taken by the majority when people passionately feel the need for it” and considers that the “development of modern Australian society, the war in Vietnam and other international problems are throwing up issues affecting all social classes and strata.” The CPA concluded that “the conditions are developing to make fundamental social change a real possibility.’ On its own criteria and with the knowledge that it had broken with the Soviet Union and was exploring a quite different approach to social change ASIO should have disengaged from spying on the CPA. This finally happened in the mid 1980s and then only after internal ructions.

One major fear expressed in Consensus in Australia was that the revitalisation of the extra-parliamentary Left would affect the Labor Party, causing its left wing to grow stronger and take revolutionary politics into the mainstream. In all of this Dr Jim Cairns was a pivotal figure. ‘The most recent and significant of these New Left groupings is the Socialist Left of the ALP,’ it said, after quoting CPA leader John Sendy who said that during the 1950s and 1960s ‘hundreds of ex-communists found their way into the ALP’. Interviews with Cairns and Socialist Left leader Bill Hartley in the CPA’s Australian Left Review in May 1971 were particularly alarming. Both discussed the prospects for socialism in Australia and agreed that a revolution of sorts was necessary. ‘Both Cairns and Hartley emphasise the importance of gaining control of the State, and criticise radicals .... for thinking that it can be destroyed by direct action. They are advised that it is a “base of power” to be won.’

The problem with the ALP Socialist Left was that it wanted to change the way the Australian parliamentary system worked. According to Consensus. the recognised function of parliament ‘is the adjustment of conflicts between sectional interests, while that of Australian governments is to act as administrators rather than legislators, to administer existing laws within the framework of “settled policies” about which there is public consensus and upon which there is political commitment. However, the “socialist left” like other radical and revolutionary bodies... clearly wishes to change these functions on the basis of opposition to the established parliamentary party system; of action by a revolutionary party to gain control of the State and Parliament and to change “the course of community, social and government action” .’

Jim Cairns, it concluded, had ‘an uneasy foothold’ in both the New and Old Left camps whose programmes could ‘lead in practice to adventurism, opportunism or anarchism.’ His call for participatory democracy, for ‘a high level of democracy in each and every social unit’ in Australian society and for extra-parliamentary ALP action ‘could lead via civil, industrial and political anarchism to the growth of elitism in every sphere, to the manipulation of the people by demagogues, to the fascist cult of the personality, to the worship of force and to the destruction of the democratic parliamentary system.’ Considering the trajectory of the Whitlam government and of Cairns’ role within it, ASIO could not have been more wrong.

As we have seen ASIO’s war on subversion led ultimately to watch the ALP and hunt out dangerous subversives within it. It was not as if ASIO set out to undermine and attack the ALP as such (as we shall see it had very good relations with the NSW right wing ). The problem arises when an organisation has a brief to fight ‘subversion’, that is, wrong thinking. Ideas and thinking are slippery things and spread into all corners of society. Once certain ideas are tagged as ‘communist’ or ‘subversive’ an internal security agency will inevitably find linkages between the full time subversives, the merely occasionally radical and the mainstream members of parties like the Labor Party. If ALP groups or individuals habitually take part in organisations along with ‘infected’ individuals with wrong thinking,. then inevitably all in these ‘front’ organisations will be considered infected. Before long the security agency is deeply involved in mainstream party politics, a long day’s journey from its original targets and its supposed non partisan approach.

Before leaving the war on subversion in the late sixties, it is worth examining one more aspect. The period saw an upsurge in trade union militancy as well as intellectual revolt. According to current left wing conspiracy theory and mythology, ASIO worked hand in glove with the bosses. In fact this ‘conspracy theory’ was absolutely accurate.

‘Blacklisting’ is a nasty word and no ASIO officer interviewed for this book ever admitted to conniving with employers to get rid of workers with ‘undesirable’ political views. However one ASIO officer described his dealing with BHP at one of Australia’s major industrial cities in the following terms. ‘All [management’s] doors were open to you .... the day to day stuff was at middle management level but it was sanctioned at higher levels.’. Such contact with BHP saved ‘an awful lot of time and effort’. Indeed it was symbiosis. The BHP industrial officer would tell the ASIO field officer of comrade X’s daytime leadership of the shop committee while the ASIO man filled in comrade X’s after hours activity in the local metalworkers’ union and peace movement. ‘[BHP] saw it as a common interest, after all what we were doing was assisting stability in the community at large,’ said an officer who maintained such contact for several years in Newcastle.

ASIO’s surveillance of the union field was based on its ‘legitimate’ interest in the CPA. This meant that all CPA tactics and strategy were carefully studied all the better to oppose it. But because CPA trade unions members and leaders were intimately involved in the wider industrial movement, this meant that ASIO had to keep in contact and understand the whole of the Australian trade union movement. The activity of the CPA in each union was not hermetically sealed and around the dwindling number of CPA militants was a periphery of non party militant workers who respected their leadership. As well, the CPA had to deal with Labor Left figures which sometimes resulted in power sharing arrangements in major unions. Shifting alliances with the unions also saw the CPA deal with centre and even rightwing factions of the union movement. Thus when ASIO mounted operations to spy on individuals whether they were steelworkers or union bureaucrats they were interfering directly in an aspect of political life which in principle they and their minister disavowed.

Abhorrence of intelligence activity in unions was widespread in the labour movement with the exception of the NSW Right and the National Civic Council both of whom co-operated closely with ASIO. When the Labor government was elected in 1972 one of Lionel Murphy’s many crimes was to order ASIO to freeze its B1 sections dealing with unions, a situation not changed until 1976 after the Fraser government was elected.

COUNTER ESPIONAGE work against the Russians continued unabated while the Counter Subversion branch watched the student revolt and the anti-war movement in the 1960s. The expulsion of Ivan Skripov in 1963 had cooled Australian-Soviet relations but unlike the Petrov spy scandal the Soviets did not break off diplomatic relations. Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s ASIO played a cat and mouse game with KGB officers stationed at the Soviet embassy in Canberra, attached to visiting delegations, or to cultural groups like the Moscow Circus. The Soviet Embassy was regarded as having primarily an intelligence rather than diplomatic purpose on Australian soil and ASIO estimated that half to two thirds of its personell were agents or officers of the KGB. Of particular interest, largely because of their need to mix with locals and travel as part of their job, were trade and commercial counsellors and correspondents for Pravda and the Tass newsagency.

The primary task of ASIO’s B2 (later E) branch was to identify the most senior KGB officer, the ‘Resident,’ from the run of the mill consular, trade and diplomatic officials. All such officials had to notify the External Affairs Department of their names, backgrounds and intentions. The Department then dutifully passed the details to ASIO who forwarded them to MI5 and the CIA who provided a ‘form guide’ for the official and an assessment of whether they were spies. In this fashion Scripov was successfully identified, targetted and exposed as an intelligence officer.

One of the main targets in the post-Scripov era were Ivan Stennen, a second secretary of the Soviet Embassy who arrived in Canberra in late 1965 and another second secretary, I ? Volkov who arrived just before him. ASIO soon satisfied itself that CIA and MI5 suggestions that they were intelligence officers were true and that in fact Stennen was the KGB Resident. This identification led to placing Stennen and Volkov under total surveillance every time they moved out of the Russian Embassy in Kingston. It was well known for years that ASIO had a static observation post above a funeral parlour opposite the main gate of the Soviet Embassy. What is less known is that the post was tiny part of the Operations Base Establishment (OBE), a surveillance unit, whose job it was to provide the masses of raw material to the analysts in B2 Branch. Its members had the frustrating task of following and watching men like Stennen and Volkov for the evidence of espionage. It could be two second ‘brush contact’ with an ostensibly unrelated person on a street. Or it might be that the Soviet target while on a drive to Sydney stopped and to urinate in the bushes and appeared picked up something next to roadside post and slip it into his pocket. ‘You would keep a card index of every place a KGB guy would go to and stop at, said one B2 officer. ‘So you could work out that he went this place once a month -- that’s his meeting place. Why does he go there? What’s he do when he goes there? He sits in his car. Who else is in the car? Who else is in the area? Does he have an aerial in the car. Over and over and over.’

‘There were plenty of examples of [Soviet officials] shaking surveillance off. Or possible brush contact. The standard operating procedure is: take the contact, drop the target. And you take the contact home and it turns out to be some innocuous little nerd. Is he a sleeper, an agent master? Or what is he? Or is he just someone who bumped into the Soviet in a shop?! It would just go on and on and on. No stone was left unturned. Even a contact with a schoolchild, would be followed up.’

The OBE units operated entirely separately from the rest of ASIO regional offices in order to defeat any counter-surveillance operations by the Soviets. While on operations all radio communications between OBE cars and watchers (who were wired up) were conducted in a jargon which, if overheard by Soviet scanners, would sound no different from a small delivery firm. Targets would be ‘picked up’ and ‘taken down Northbourne Avenue’ and then ‘dropped off’. The level of paranoia about counter-surveillance was high. One watcher recalled: ‘Our attack fellows suspected that [the Soviets would be scanning radio channels from inside the embassy and so we took evasive action. We would swap from one channel to another or we would hire 20 vehicles and have transceivers in the boot and used them in a network 2kms away rather than having a base radio. As well we would set up false radio signals emanating from cars close to embassy to confuse and distract them.’

A more sophisticated kind of operation, straight out of spy thrillers, was ‘drag a woman across the path’ of a KGB man. In the case of Ivan Stennen, whom ASIO judged to have a particular susceptibility to women, this was attempted several times. ‘At one stage we convinced a woman from whom he hired cars to go along with him to dinners and dances. We used to pay for her hair dos and frocks for the occasion. We told her it was up to her just how far she went with him. But [eventually] she told us [she found] his bald head was a real turn off.’ Another counter espionage officer from the sixties recalled a more elaborate operation in 1967 when a very attractive woman ASIO agent agreed to try and get to know Stennen personally. The operation took several months to run from the time it was conceived. The Canberra regional director arranged through a contact for a large social function to be held at a private home. Top public servants and a smattering of Liberal ministers made it an attractive proposition for Stennen who was also invited. Tension was high when the big night came. The agent was introduced to Stennen and ‘all going well ... but then two senior members of the Australian parliament took over and they kept Stennen in the background while they spent all their time with this rather attractive girl.’ The whole delicate operation, which included getting Stennen into bed with the woman, failed on this account.

Another Soviet target in the sixties was [ title????} [first name] Dobrogorski. He had the puzzling habit of regularly driving up the steep gravel road from Canberra to the top of Black Mountain. On arrival he would sit in his car for an hour and then return to the Embassy The OBE unit and Canberra never found out why. Various theories were put forward. That the Russians would tune into the OBE radio and listen to the jargon and description as they tracked Dobrogorski up to Black Mountain, thus preparing themselves to take counter-surveillance measures on a real operation. Other theories included that he was broadcasting radio signals or that he drove up the mountain road because a signal, perhaps a chalkmark, Le Carre style, had been left on a road sign or similar.

Dobrogorski, like Stennen and every other suspected KGB officer, was placed in an ASIO ‘goldfish bowl’ with every waking movement studied. Nothing was to trivial or intimate to be passed over. For example, it was discovered after ASIO’s technical section had placed a bug in Dobrogorski’s Canberra home, that the passion in his marriage was spent. An ASIO officer recalled that one night after quick sex, his wife complained ‘ you never say you love me any more’. Dobrogorski muttered, rolled over and went to sleep. The officer commented: ‘You’d pick up those sorts of things over listening devices. The telephone intercepts made you realise that these people are human, and you started to get more inclined to see them in a human way. When you picked them up talking about their kids, you’d listen that, because that might be a weakness, something you could exploit. If [a KGB officer] had a sick child, then he may be emotionally off balance and more susceptible to an approach, from a female for instance, with a shoulder to cry on.’ (An even less savoury approach concerned a Soviet diplomat who was diagnosed in the 1970s as suffering from bowel cancer. Counter espionage officers discussed approaching him cold with a bribe of some sort but the disease progressed rapidly he died six months after diagnosis.)

While most attention focussed on diplomats another string to the counter espionage bow was the search for Soviet ‘illegals’ who would be inserted in Australia. ‘Illegals’ (so called to distinguish them from the spies posing as accredited diplomats) are the classic spies of intelligence folklore. Once inside a country with a cover story and papers their movements are undetectable, unlike those of diplomats. Apart from the time when an illegal slipped through ASIO fingers during the Skripov affair, there was no hard evidence of such spies in Australia, though almost certainly some existed at various times. The one case which looked promising was similar to the thesis of Le Carre’s Smiley’s People. It concerned a White Russian family in Australia which tried to sponsor a son from the USSR . On investigation, ASIO concluded that the sponsorship could be an attempt to land an ‘illegal’ in Australia. The long lost ‘son’ would probably be a KGB agent masquerading -- including to the family -- as the genuine article. The investigation of the Russian family became very complex. At a certain point the B2 branch decided that the KGB had given up on the sponsorship but were pursuing it in order to divert the attention of ASIO whom they knew by now were interested. At one point a member of the Russian family complained to a Minister anbout ASIO ‘harrassment’ over the sponsorship. In the end ASIO’s suspicions came to nothing. ‘There was smoke but no fire,’ commented one retired officer.
.

ASIO managed very few operations involving ‘double agents’ in which an ASIO agent was ‘recruited’ by a Soviet intelligence worker. Only one seemed to get anywhere. It concerned an Australian who formed an association with a suspected Soviet intelligence officer in the mid-late 1960s. The officer arranged for the man to meet some Soviet ‘friends’ in Mexico, on a trip which he had already planned around 1968. While in Mexico he was given elementary training which included the use of a particularly ingenious type of dead letter boxes. After a briefing in a park he picked up the DLB -- which consisted of a piece of plasticine coloured and shaped to look like a dog turd and dropped near a nominated tree. After contact in Mexico he was told that when he returned to Canberra he would be met at a certain place on a certain day, and that if that didn't occur then three days later at the same time and spot. If that failed too a further rendezvous was nominated. At all three the man was left twiddling his thumbs and was never again picked up by Soviet intelligence.

Such failed operations were one cause of a highly secret fear that gripped the upper echelons of ASIO in the mid-sixties. The fear was a spin off from the ultra-paranoia that gripped US and British intelligence from the time of the escape of Kim Philby in January 1963. Philby had been one of the USSR’s most successful spies in the West since 1937, ending his career holding senior positions in MI6. The Philby revelation caused a chain reaction in British and US intelligence. In MI5 Peter Spycatcher Wright became involved in a series of investigations into the possibility of Soviet penetration. Wright believe that his boss, Sir Roger Hollis was almost certainly a Soviet agent, a shakily based view which he propounded in his book Spycatcher. In the CIA the head of counter intelligence, James Jesus Angleton, fell under the spell of one Soviet defector, Anatoli Golitsy. Based on Golitsyn’s expertise, Angleton thereafter rejected many other genuine defectors as false, as outlined in Tom Mangold’s excellent biography of Angleton Cold Warrior. A year after final proof of Philby’s espionage came the revelation via the FBI that the Surveyor of the Queens Pictures, Sir Anthony Blunt, had been a Soviet spy. The year 1964 also saw other Soviet spies from the 1930s generation, John Cairncross and Leo Long, exposed. It was a catastropic time for British Intelligence.

The work of Wright and the paranoia of Angleton fed each other at may levels, including at the first CAZAB counter intelligence conference held in Australia in 1967. One of the reasons for CAZAB -- a conference of the Canadian, British US, Australian and New Zealand counter espionage groups -- was a joint effort to root out moles from Western intelligence. Recalled Peter Barbour: ‘When an op failed you always thought about this [penetration] And, while this was going on, we heard about moles in other, bigger organisations and we asked ourselves, ‘what’s so special about us?’

But while the hunt for the ‘ring of five’ and the ‘Cambridge traitors’ was high drama, mole hunting in Australia was low farce. This fear of an ASIO mole and the internal investigation which arose from it is one of the Organization’s best kept secrets.

The first many officers came to hear about it was in the form of rumours that Spry, in his cups, would mention the names of a number of middle ranking ASIO officers who had been recruited from Britain in the early years of the Organisation. Nothing which they did had aroused suspicions. It was just that in each case there were a number of ‘indicators’ that might point to mole beneath a well manicured exterior. One of the officers suspected was Ernest V Wiggins, a former military intelligence officer assigned by Spry in 1949 to lay the foundations of Australia’s security screening of migrants from Europe. By the mid sixties ‘Wiggie’ had risen to Regional Director, South Australia, but after coming under suspicion he was transferred to head West Australia, a Siberian posting designed presumably to keep him out of the mainstream of ASIO activity. Reportedly, one reason suspicion attached to him was the fact that he had been a British intelligence officer in Germany immediately after the war where all kinds of double and triple agent games were played.

The other suspected mole was John Cecil Elliott, a linguist who rose to head B1 and C branches at different times in his career. Elliott’s problem was two fold. First he was an aloof eccentric, a’Walter Mitty type’ as one officer described him. ASIO officers would recount rumours which were invested with great mystery. He often declined to drink with his fellow officers and gave every impression of being a teetotaller. Yet he was said to have been seen at an out of the way bar one night holding a glass of hard liquor, ‘almost as if he was waiting for someone’. His other problem was that his identity was difficult to check. Elliott was born in Oslo, Norway, rather than the UK or Australia. He had lived in there until he was two and then his family moved to Denmark until 1937 before moving to England. These fact cast a pall. An uncheckable and unverifiable birth, went the logic, meant that the man claiming to be John Elliott could have been anybody, including a Soviet mole.

In fact the suspicions against Wiggins and Elliott came to nothing and were utterly false. No evidence was ever gathered which pointed to their guilt. In any case Elliott continued to be promoted in the early 1970s. That they came under suspicion at all says more about the atmosphere of ASIO and the frustration at a series of failed operations against Soviet intelligence.

The final counter-espionage effort which we shall examine also came to nothing. When diplomatic relations re-opened with the USSR after the six year Petrov break, Soviet ships began to visit Australia. For much of the 1960s whaling fleets and oceanographic vessels were the main visitors. In November-December 1969 the Australian air force tracked a Soviet submarine and two other ships up the Queensland coast amid national publicity. The ships were accused of carrying with signals interception equipment and of ‘listening in’ to the US intelligence base at Pine Gap. A year of so later Australia experienced the first of a series of scares that would continue until the 1980s when Soviet ships began to sail in growing numbers in the Indian Ocean. ASIO had always had an interest in the visit of Soviet ships to Australia. Apart from anything else there was a regular trickle of quiet defections from sailors and engineers who were debriefed for their scanty knowledge and then allowed to resettled.

In the early 1970s when Russian cruise ships began to undertake commercial tourism in the Pacific an ambitious counter espionage officer pushed to upgrade the Organisation’s attention to the ships. There were a number of espionage possibilities which the cruise ships raised. A colleague recalled: ‘The cruise ships caused us on the KGB desk a lot of concern because ... they were ideal place for compromising someone [by photographing illicit sexual activities]. More importantly, it was a perfect meeting place for a long term debriefing of an existing informant.... The [Soviet] case officer could be part of the crews. It made us shudder. ‘We had people on the ships from time to time. You didn’t who the operators were,. You didn’t know who the KGB people were. ... Another thing that used to worry us was [an agent] meeting a Soviet submarine at sea. The person on the cruise ship would go out the Sydney Heads, the agent’d go over the side onto a Soviet submarine and then go in the sub to somewhere else for the duration of the cruise and then go back on the ship just outside the heads at night. [Agents] could go off, be specially trained; illegals could be brought onto the ships, people being substituted. Your mind ... could just run rampant with it -- and it did -- but what the hell could we do about it?’

For a time at least ASIO did something about it. Passenger lists were checked looking for public servants who worked in sensitive departments and could be targets for compromise. Crew lists were also checked and at times run past MI5 and CIA to see if any known KGB agents were on board. The thesis put forward by the young ambitious officer that the KGB would use the cruise ships appealed to the older generation of ASIO chiefs. But there was a catch. ‘The only problem was that there were so many bloody cruises that you have just described an unsolvable problem.’ To deal with the ‘problem’ the counter espionage E branch began to demand an ever-increasing mass of resources from the Organisation. Fairly soon the other branch heads within ASIO began to complain and to attack the thesis that the cruise ships constituted a major security risk. Detailed ASIO surveillance on cruise ships never proceeded.

Posted by David at 10:24 PM

'Is Murphy a KGB agent?’

From : Australia's Spies and their Secrets (David McKnight, Allen & Unwin, 1994)

On Saturday 17 March 1973, the day after Murphy’s raid on St Kilda Rd, the revolt in ASIO against the Whitlam Government began in earnest. A group of senior ASIO officers clandestinely visited the Opposition leader, Billy Snedden, and appealed for help. They told him that ‘Barbour had gone to pieces and would not be reliable’ . Instead of accommodating Murphy he should have defied the Attorney and the Commonwealth Police.

Snedden agreed. ‘[Barbour] could have refused Murphy entrance and he could have refused to open locks [on safes], but he did not. He had acquiesced in it all.’ Barbour ‘did not have the guts to stand up and fight.’

This surreptitious and improper meeting between the Opposition leader and senior ASIO officers was not the first such contact. An earlier meeting occurred soon after the MacMahon Government lost the December election when ASIO officers informed Snedden that Murphy had demanded that ASIO no longer target student groups and peace organisations. Snedden took the complaints seriously. In 1963-66 as a young Attorney General hehad been impressed by Spry and his officers and since that time maintained ‘innocent’ social relationships with some ASIO officers as well as having more formal contact as Minister for Immigration (1966- 69).

Snedden was not the only Opposition politician contacted by Labor’s enemies in the security agency. The leader of the Country Party, Doug Anthony, also met with an ASIO officer shortly after the raid, thinking he might get ‘some ammunition’ from him. The officer bitterly complained about the raid and confided that ‘Murphy went there to get his own file. He believed [ASIO] had a file on him but he couldnt find it’. Anthony also recalled that he had heard around the same time that ‘Murphy’ was not Lionel Murphy’s real name. These two assertions, about the ‘real’ reason for the raid and the change of name, became part of the most bizarre aspect of the ASIO’s encounter with Labor: an investigation of Lionel Murphy instigated by the hardline officers which included checking the suspicion that Murphy might have been working for the KGB.

Quite apart from this investigation the officers’ extraordinary actions in approaching Snedden and Anthony confirmed that they and their Organization had become so entrenched in Cold War anti-communism that they could not deal with a democratically elected government propelled into office by deep social changes which had been signalled for years. Just as it had been for the previous 20 years and since the First World War under ASIO’s antique ancestors, Labor had become a security threat.

FOR HIS part Snedden must also have had anxious anticipations that Murphy’s March 15-16 raids were just a foretaste. Having demanded and got ASIO files once, he feared Murphy could go on looking for ‘dirt on politicians’ files’, according to a staffer . Snedden and others stood to lose much if there was a fullscale Labor exposure of ASIO’s links with Liberal politicians, senior public servants and businessmen. These fears became even more pronounced that same weekend after a National Times article. . Without naming names, the article described a planned ‘spoiling operation’ involving ASIO’s Special Projects section and a network whihjc included conservative politicians, anti-communist intellectuals and journalists. The article’s author, journalist Robert Mayne, stated ‘from personal knowledge’ that ASIO had provided information for a magazine to be called The Analyisis’ to ‘expose’ leftwingers. Although the magazine had ultimately never been published, those involved were ‘a leading NSW Liberal parliamentarian’ and a ‘Sydney businessman’. A Country Party MP planned to print the magazine. The article was the first to confirm what many had suspected for years. One of the unidentified politicians was soon known. Company records showed that a compnay owned by Peter Coleman, the Liberal member for Fuller, had registered the business name The Analysis. Mayne’s article said he had admitted he had ‘used [ASIO information] in Parliament and in articles he occasionally wrote.’ The magazine was to be published by another politician, Henry Sullivan, a Country Party member of the Upper House who owned the Moree Champion newspaper.

Fearing similar exposures Snedden and his deputy Phillip Lynch had reason to take care. When DLP Senators later demanded a judicial inquiry into the affair, Snedden and Lynch opposed the idea because they were ‘not sure what further documents designed to reflect on them might be produced by Murphy,’ according to a DLP staffer.

That same weekend at a council of war in the Murphy camp, it was reasoned, offence was the best form of defence. Murphy’s colleague and friend, Senator Jim McClelland, and press secretary, George Negus, both urged him to go to cabinet the following Tuesday and seek permission to sack Barbour. If this was not done, both warned, it would be his own head on the block. Murpjhy agreed. Murphy’s staff briefed journalists and Monday papers predicted that Whitlam would join the attack, that Murphy would ‘drastically curtail’ ASIO and that Barbour would be sacked. Murphy then changed his mind. Barbour stayed.

Barbour responded to the raid with more sophistication and care than his indignant and angry colleagues. On the same day that, unknown to him his officers met Snedden, Barbour met Whitlam at the Lodge and protested vigorously about the raid. The meeting confirmed to him that the raid might be only the beginning and that the very existence of the Organisation might be at stake if he did not tread carefully. In the succeeding weeks and months as Opposition pressure stepped up Barbour began to realise that the raid was as much the result of 23 years pent up frustration and suspicion. Later under pressure he refused to condemn the Government, to the mounting dismay of his staff.

A few days later the Bejedic visit went off without incident amid unprecedented security. Ten days later on March 27 Murphy finally answered his critics with a ministerial statement on Croatian terrorism. The speech was a blistering indictment of indifference to terrorism. Its target however was not, as expected, ASIO, but previous Liberal Attorneys General such as Tom Hughes and Ivor Greenwood. It quoted an unnamed ASIO officer that the attitude of the previous government to Croatian terrorism was one of ‘indifference’ and that ASIO ‘was not given proper Ministerial directives’. The speech showed that Greenwood had twice simply lied to parliament by stating that police had no credible evidence of organised Croatian terrorism. The police had advised Greenwood that a Yugoslav aide memoire protesting the 1972 Bosnian incursion had ‘a core of irrebutable fact’. Yet in parliament Greenwood had claimed the allegation had no basis. Greenwood had rejected police and ASIO advice to deport or deny passports to men of whom there were strong indications of terrorism. To prove his points Murphy dramatically tabled over 60 documents drawn from police, ASIO and departmental files. Among many other things they showed that financial support and training for the Bosnian incursion in mid-1972 was organised in Australia by a number of Croats. This information was in Greenwood’s hands yet he told parliament that no evidence of organised terrorism existed.

While Murphy masterfully exposed the Liberals’ role in turning a blind eye to terrorism, he found it hard to convince Whitlam of the justness of his precipitate raid on ASIO. As Liberal pressure mounted over the raid, the two fell out. After a quick inquiry by his own department Whitlam told parliament that the March 2 minute which caused the raid had wrongly reported the views of the top bureaucrats. The incorrect minutes were written by an ASIO officer. The raid, he explained, was consequenoy based on a misunderstanding. Whitlam’s implication was that Murphy could have found out the actual situation but instead chose a more dramatic path. The raid, he explained, was consequently based on a misunderstanding. Whitlam’s acceptance that senior bureaucrats had been ‘misinterpreted’ flew in the face of the facts. The March 2 meeting was clearly an attempt by security bureaucrats to play down the terrorist threat and thereby justify the previous government’s complacent stance. Whitlam’s view that the ASIO minute-taker had misinterpreted the meeting did Murphy no good at all. But Whitlam’s point that the raid was unnecessary was absolutely correct. Two weeks later, just before leaving for overseas in April another row broke out between the two rivals. Whitlam learned abruptly of the execution in Yugoslavia of three Croats who had been captured during the incursion. All were Australian citizens. Whitlam fired off an official protest to the Yugoslavs that his government had not been notified in advance of the official announcement. The protest grabbed front page headlines and angered the Yugoslav Ambassador who replied that he had told Murphy of the executions several days before the official announcement. Murphy had not passed on the information and caused Whitlam to make a fool of himself, possibly the worst sin in the calendar. AT any rate such blunders kept the ‘raid’ alive. A few months later Whitlam stated that the raid was ‘unquestionably’ the point of maxiumum political embarrassment in its first six months.

WHILE MURPHY was beating back his detractors both within his own camp and within the Opposition another, more secret campaign was underway against him. Shortly after Murphy’s ministerial statement and the tabling of the 60 documents, an incident occurred which convinced the hardliners that they were dealing with a possible KGB agent, not just a hostile politican with a penchant for drama.

When Murphy released the documents he expected that the revelations to blow the Opposition out of the water. The bulky documents included large quantities of material seized in raids. These showed that ministerial letters from the previous Liberal regimes which argued that the bombings were the work of isolated individuals were demonstrably untrue at the time they were made. Murphy reckoned without the Canberra Press Gallery. The documents were dense and then, as now, it is the sensation of the moment which journalists follow and editors demand. The documents were given a perfunctory skim and were soon yesterday’s news. Murphy confided this frustration to his long time colleague Senator Arthur Gietzelt and asked him to get the ALP Left Steering Committee to write and publish a substantial pamphlet using the documents. Gietzelt told him that the committee had neither the skills to research such a pamphlet nor the apparatus to distribute it. The only sympathetic body which did, he said, was the Communist Party, which employed journalists on its weekly Tribune and had a national network of supporters who would help distribute such a pamphlet.

Fine, said Murphy, get a set of the documents to them and ask them to publish post haste. Gietzelt and another Labor left figure then arranged to meet two leading CPA figures, national secretary, Laurie Aarons and national industrial organiser, Joe Palmada. Such a meeting was also an opportunity to discuss the the first months of the Labor Government and the position of the left. The arrangement for the meeting was discreet, as such contacts had always been. They met in Sydney then travelled down the South Coast towards Wollongong and then picked a motel at random for the discussion. All went according to plan. The box of documents was not passed over at the meeting but an arrangement was made for them to be picked up from Gietzelt’s daughter at the University of New South Wales.

A few days later, as Palamada was driving toward the university to pick them up, he casually noticed a van which pulled up alongside him. He thought nothing of it until, after collecting the documents, he again saw it behind him in the traffic. Intrigued, he drove a circuitous route and found it followed him at a distance through several twists and turns. He drove home to Waverley where the van finally left him. Such an incident could, of course, be the result of a fertile imagination, though Palmada was not normally given to such things. In fact two senior ASIO officers confirmed to the writer that this surveillance took place . Not only that but the private meeting between leading figures from the Gietzelt, Aarons and Palmada was watched by ASIO and that the meeting came at Murphy ‘s instigation.

Barbour then faced the question of whether to inform Whitlam of the meeting. After several days thought, he decided against it, believing it would only aggravate the delicate situation. A little later Murphy was told that Palmada believed he had been tailed. Murphy became angry with Barbour for not informing him immediately. After a heated discussion Barbour explained that the plan to cover the clandestine meeting arose through surveillance of the CPA members, not of Gietzelt.

Barbour’s deputy, Jack Behm disagreed with Barbour’s initial decision and believed Whitlam should have been told immediately. Twenty years later he recalled the meeting between Gietzelt, ‘a member of the Government’ and members of the CPA. Such a meeting, he commented ‘[was] a matter which should create some interest -- both to ASIO and the Labor Party.’ He assumed that Gietzelt ‘was discussing things which he should not have been discussing -- that’s why it was clandestine.’ He also defended the approach to Snedden arguing that the ASIO Act authorised the Director General to speak to anyone. When I pointed out that the DG was not among those nominated by Snedden as present, he said he was ‘pretty certain’ the DG would have been informed. Barbour however says he was unaware of this contact. And although Behm would be one of the ‘top four officers’ mentioned by Snedden he denies attending the meeting with Snedden.

Behm had risen to the position of deputy DG from the bottom. Before joining ASIO in 1949 Behm had been income tax assessor in Queensland and during the war in an artillery company of the Seventh Division. He soon became one of ASIO’s big guns, taking over as Controller of the Special Services Section in 1959. After a stint in B2 he had become deputy in 1970, appointed by the also newly installed Barbour.

The fact that Murphy was implicated in this confidential Labor Left -CPA meeting ‘fitted’ with a theory which seized the minds of hardline officers from an incident during the ‘visit’ to the Canberra office. To their collective mind Murphy’s claim that he acted because he was denied information was transparently false. As well, they believed the raids were premeditated which was also partly true, contrary to Murphy’s later claims. The hardliners leaped several steps further and concluded that he had therefore totally contrived a reason for entering the Canberra office in the middle of the night. Once inside, accompanied by an uncleared secretary and in company with an ASIO enemy, former police officer Kerry Milte, he had rummaged through the file registry and made threats to Brown and Hunt. As ASIO’s regional director in Canberra, Colin Brown, was to later describe, Murphy made a particular point of searching the index cards under ‘M’ and reportedly made a remark to the effect ‘Heaven help you if my name is here’. Not finding what he wanted (his own file, they presumed), he then flew to Melbourne at dawn in the process breaching security again by helping himself to an ASIO courier’s mail. At St Kilda Rd he had broken the law by ordering in the police, humilated the staff and irreparably damaged the Organization in the eyes of great and powerful friendly intelligence agencies. He had done enormous damage. In fact, if he had been a KGB agent, he could not have done more damage.

The theory that his real purpose was ‘looking for his own file’ became an incontrovertible fact within 24 hours of the Canberra ‘visit’. Later that year he made an unannounced visit to the Adelaide office, then run by Ernie Redford. Redford recalled that Murphy soon began checking the card index to files, and suspects he was looking for his own file . The case of ‘Murphy’s file’ was one of the the most bizarre sidelights to the clash between the Whitlam Government and ASIO. It posed the question, why ws Murphy so concerned about hisfile.What mnight it contain? The conclusion became obvious: Murphy was a KGB agent. Such theories were not confined to Australia. Similar suspicions that prominent social democrat or Labour politicians were also KGB agents pervaded the darker corners of British and US intelligence. Murphy’s actions took place at a time when MI5 believed Harold Wilson was a possible Russian agent a view shared by the CIA’s head of counter-intelligence, James Jesus Angleton who threw in Sweden’s Olaf Palme and Willy Brandt for good measure. Gievn this it was not surprising that ASIO began to investigate Lionel Keith Murphy’s background and true identity.

To investigate such a possibility the first task normally is to assemble all the documented facts about a person and to scrutinise them carefully. Registries of Births, Deaths and Marriages are combed for certificates showing the person’s full name, precise date and place of birth, their parents names, nurses and doctors who attended at the birth. Similarly the marriage certificate is checked for the names of witnesses and the presiding cleric. In a thorough check the identities of these people are checked. All of this and much more was done to investigate Lionel Keith Murphy.

ASIO’S INVESTIGATION of Murphy was homed in on a number of other facts. Lionel Murphy was a man of the Left, who owed his Senate seat to his connection with the Gietzelt brothers. As a Labor lawyer in 1952-54 he fought to assist a union activist, Ray Gietzelt, to wrest control of the Miscellaneous Workers’ Union from officers associated with the Industrial Groups. By 1960 Arthur’s astute use of the numbers from Left unions and branches saw Lionel pre-selected to the Senate ticket. ASIO files from 1960 show that at that time the Organization believed that Ray Gietzelt and his brother Arthur were both members of the Communist Party, though both also held tickets in the Labor Party. ( Both brothers in fact broke with the CPA).

The investigating officers also discovered facts about his personal life and disturbing connections to the East. By 1973 Lionel Murphy had been married to Ingrid Gee for three and a half years. A stunning catch, Ingrid Gee was a fashion model and a minor TV celebrity hosting a daytime quiz show on Channel Ten in Sydney. Little interested in parliamentary politics until she met Lionel, she nevertheless had progressive views supporting abortion rights and child care at a time when such radical ideas were part of the new wave of feminism. After a short study ASIO officers found that Ingrid Gee was not her real name. As a young woman her family name was Grzonkowski and she had been born in Poland. As a young woman she had changed her name to Gee for convenience sake -- or so she said.

The field inquiries of the C branch which conducted the Murphy inquiry then peeled back another layer. Ingrid Gee was Murphy’s second wife. Details of his first wife were obscure. When a new Senator took his or her place they qualified for entry in Who’s Who. Routinely a man in Who’s Who listed his wife’s first name, her parents’ name and details of children would be given. Murphy omitted all this. Only to Murphy’s intimate circle was his first wife known. Born in the town of Chita in the far flung Siberian East of the USSR , Nina Murphy was the child of White Russian parents who emigrated from Vladivostock to Australia in 1925. She had met Lionel while he was at Sydney University and married him around 1950 The marriage which lasted for about 15 years ended in divorce.

A second line of investigation concerned one of Ingrid Murphy’s friends -- Junie Morosi. Morosi was introduced by Murphy to Jim Cairns who by mid 74 was deputy Prime Minister.

The fact that both Murphy’s wives were born in the East fascinated the hardline ASIO officers By this time Western intelligence discovered that a new kind of Soviet agent was being placed in the West. These agents were not recruited from highly placed individuals in the host country but were Soviet or East Europeans intelligence officers who inserted themselves in the West with a false identity. Over years of preparation they established this false identity (their ‘legend’), as well as their language and cultural skills. These ‘sleepers’ carried out no intelligence activity but merely established their documentation and reputation. As well, they looked for opportunities to work or live close to an intelligence target, be it a defence laboratory -- or an individual. Another possibility was that Nina Murphy might be blackmailed by the KGB to carry out intelligence activities. Such were the theories bandied about to explain Murphy and his wives.

The whole investigation of Murphy was a close secret within the small group of ASIO hardliners. Barbour himself denies knowledge of it. His deputy Jack Behm knew of the inquiries and recalled them when I spoke to him. He was also aware that both Murphy’s wives were born in the East and that he married Ingrid Gee in Hong Kong. When I asked him the significance of these inquiries he brushed my question aside stating that ‘it was no significant enough for you to worry about’.

Another senior officer however verified that the investigation was done and recalled that he felt ‘intrigued’ by the marriage to Ingrid Gee. One of the checks initiated by C Branch involved asking MI6 or MI5 in Hong Kong to report on Murphy’s and Ingrid’s connections in the colony. Yet the marriage in November 1969 was not secret in any way although it was sudden. Ingrid Murphy freely told the Australian press about it and the fact that the British High Commissioner was present along with an ‘old lawyer friend who is now a magistrate’.

The use of British intelligence was hinted at in a press interview by former deputy head of MI5, Peter Wright, who said that Murphy had ‘something Russian in his pedigree’. Other more detailed but garbled accounts of the ASIO investigations appear in two privately published books. One is Lynched! by a former staffer of Liberal MP Phillip Lynch, Brian Buckley, the other Anatomy of a Coup by journalists Stephen Foley and Marshall Wilson. Both are peppered with intelligence scuttlebut from ASIO source(s) (possibly the same ones). Buckley claims that ‘In Hong Kong [Murphy] was followed by a special branch of the local police and his contacts with criminals and people suspected of working for the Russians was monitored. Murphy also formed an association with expatriate journalist Wilfred Burchett. Their contact point was Hong Kong.....’ The investigation into Murphy’s identity also surfaced here: ‘One intelligence source claims that no-one knows for sure who Murphy was, that his stated antecedents and place of origin were investigated and found to be dubious. It is even claimed that he had his birth certificate changed....’ Buckley also claims that ‘Murphy had for many years been in close contact with agents of the KGB, his first wife being from the USSR and blackmailed.’ [!]

The Foley-Wilson book states much of this at great length and repeats the fantastic allegations that ‘many observed in Murphy the signs of ‘tradecraft’ and that he ‘consistently refused to authorise taps on any of the Soviet bloc embassies’ [A rather attention-grabbing and ill-advised behaviour by a Soviet agent, one would have thought! It is also totally false.] The authors repeat that the view that the real purpose of the raid was to recover his own ASIO file which showed, among other things, his ‘close association’ with the Soviet spy Ivan Skripov, expelled in 1963. That both books are full of unsubstantiated assertions presented as facts is of no relevance. Rather their significance lies in giving an insight into the authors’ ASIO sources who believed and promoted bizarre suggestions of Murphy’s ‘KGB connection’.

The notion that there was something strange or inexplicable in Murphy’s origins also surfaced in the press at the time. The Bulletin’s Peter Samuel, a recipient of ASIO material, stated as early as May 1973 that ‘Murphy’s origins are somewhat obscure’ and recounted a rumour that he had changed his original ‘Jewish’ name to Murphy. While discounting the ‘Jewish name’ theory, Samuel states that ‘It is said on his behalf that he is of Irish background with one repeated report being that his father was an Irishman from Tipperary...’ and ‘Born in 1922, his primary schooling and childhood cannot be established...’ Such remarks are odd since in both the 1962 and 1968 editions of Who’s Who he stated that he was born in Sydney and educated at Kensington Public School. The mysterious ‘repeated report’ of his father’s origins was also stated perfectly clearly in the same directory.

The investigation into Murphy’s birth, ancestry, marriages and associations was an extraordinarily far fetched rogue action. It arose not from any well based suspicion but because of the trauma of the raid and the counter espionage mentality which saw a potential KGB plot behind legitimate political dissidence and the blunders of politicians. It represented the full flowering of a mentality which had grown in the closed hot house of ‘security’ for 20 years.

THE MURPHY probe was ultimately a sidelight. The main game in the revenge sought by some ASIO officers concerned a well laid plan to ambush first, their own boss Peter Barbour and second, Gough Whitlam. The ambush was in two parts. In the first instance it was intended to force Barbour to tell the ‘truth’ of the raid and the ‘truth’ of his protests to Whitlam. The second part was to prove the Prime Minister was liar and, with any luck, force his resignation. It almost succeeded. But Whitlam, with Barbour’s help, slipped out of the ambush. Barbour’s role in this would not be forgotten.

On the afternoon of March 16, a hour or so after Murphy departed, the branch heads and senior officers of ASIO met in acouncil of war. The atmosphere was explosive and the men were ‘furious’ and felt ‘bloody awful’ . ‘To have this idiot enter with armed police in a punitive expedition and direct me to stay in my office and not open my safe! To the day I die, Murphy is a scoundrel and a crook, ’ said one.

What to do? As the meeting proceeded it became clear that while the hardliners wanted dramatic action, the Director General, Peter Barbour counselled caution. He wanted to protest vigorously but in the back of his mind feared the Government may then dismember or abolish ASIO. In any case it was agreed he would see Whitlam the next day and protest. This he did, but when he reported back it was ‘unsatisfactory’. The hardliners (and the bulk of ASIO staff) expected far more. ‘If necessary he should have led the Organisation into the wilderness,’ recalled a senior officer. The effect of this, they all knew, would have been a domestic political crisis and a crisis in defence and intelligence links with the British and Americans.

Barbour refused to go down this path. In the months following his initial protest, he co-operated with the government and refused to throw fuel on the fire which the Opposition (with hardliners’ help) was stoking. The hardliners’ attitude spread throughout the Organization and only a small group of younger officers supported Barbour’s policy of careful negotiation with the new Government. In Parliament Barbour’s refusal to publicly complain was Whitlam’s top card thrown onto the parliamentary table to trump his critics.

On the morning of March 28, the day after Murphy’s ministerial statement and the second day parliament had sat since the raid, Snedden rose to his feet and asked:
‘Has a complaint or have complaints been made to him directly, to him through any member of his staff or to hisGovernment by any member of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation about the ‘raids’ ... on 16th March by the Attorney General with Commonwealth Police on the Melbourne and Canberra offices of ASIO?
Whitlam gave a fateful reply:
The only member of ASIO, or the only person whom I know to be a member of ASIO, with whom I have had any communication since the Attorney General’s visit to the headquarters of the Organization in Melbourne on 16th March has been the Director General himself. He made no complaint at all.

The statement brought anger and disbelief at all levels with ASIO. The rank and file officers had been told that Barbour had protested strongly to Whitlam. Since the raid hundreds of agents, ex-agent and ASIO contacts had panicked and sought assurances of their anonymity. A few hours after Whitlam’s statement Barbour drafted a long telex to all ASIO regional offices to set the record straight both on his meeting with Whitlam and to quell some of the wild rumours which had the Organisation in a state of ‘internal turmoil’. The telex set out factually what happened; that Murphy had seen a report in Canberra which ‘alarmed him’; that he decided to come to Melbourne ‘to find out ...whether this meant that relevant information was being suppressed by ASIO’; that ‘the Attorney General now regards that report as inaccurate’.

But the telex went on to direct contradicted Whitlam. Under a subheading ‘Complaint’ it read:
[The Director General] saw the Prime Minister personally, gave him full details of the actions of the police and told the Prime Minister that he regarded them as unprecedented, extraordinary and gravely damaging to the national security interest.’ [emphasis added]

The telex enjoined officers to ‘close ranks at this time and to maintain strict discipline’. They were reminded to ‘maintain complete discretion and to make no comment to the Press or other public sources’. Discretion was less than complete. Shortly after he sent the telex Barbour began to realise that the Opposition was being fed material by some ASIO officers. By that time it was too late. His telex which implied Whitlam misled parliament had already clattered out over the wires to regional offices.

In May the Senators of the Democratic Labor Party (DLP) succeeded in establishing a Senate committee to inquire into the ‘civil rights of migrant Australians’, i.e. the Croatian community which had been subject to various police raids on its members around the visit of Bejedic. Senator Frank McManus had particulalry close relations with the Melbourne Croatian community. Senate committees have the power to call witnesses and examine them and with this lever the DLP hoped to force the truth about the raid from witnesses such as Kerry Milte and Peter Barbour. While the parliament was in winter recess the DLP Senators and other committee members such as Peter Durack prepared.

The first major witness was to be Peter Barbour scheduled to appear on Wednesday 8 August. Three days before on Channel Nine the program Federal File had a scoop. The two journalists who ran it, the veteran Alan Reid and the younger Michael Shildberger reported that ‘a prominent politician had seen a photostat of the telex message and was prepared to produce it if necessary. On that same Sunday, committee member Senator Jack Kane (DLP) announced he would urge the committee to compel the journalists to give evidence. On the Monday Snedden joined in. ‘Either the Prime Minister is not telling the truth or the Director General has concocted a story.’ Leaking of the telex to Federal File was designed to stampede him into revealing the content of the meeting with Whitlam. This in turn would gravely damage Whitlam. It was a well laid ambush. The fact that it did not come off was in no way due to any dilatoriness by rebellious ASIO officers.

What was little appreciated at the time was how isolated Barbour was from his troops and generals. Many months before an ASIO officer had shown journalist Michael Shildberger a number of documents ‘in the back seat of a car in the back block of Canberra’ . The officers were frustrated by what they saw as continual lies about the ASIO raid being promoted in the public arena. Shildberger was pretty confident of his sources -- he had dealt with ASIO officers for seveal years -- but not absolutely sure. So he and Reid sat on the story. A weeks before the story went to air Bill Snedden grabbed him in the corridor told him he had seen a copy of the telex which had the word ‘complaint’ as a heading. This confirmed the authenticity for Schildberger and Reid. The story was aired at a time when it placed maximum pressure on Barbour. The unspoken message of the leak was clearly that if he did not reveal that he had complained, the actual telex would be leaked and he would be shown to have misled the committee.

When asked if he had complained to Whitlam, Barbour’s answer was simple. He refused to discuss meeting with Whitlam. ‘It is not for me to say what the nature of the discussion was.’ Senator Jim McClelland then asked two questions. Was the Attorney General within his authority in visiting ASIO? Was he within his authority in authorising the presence of Commonwealth Police and the sealing of safes? To both Barbour answered with a single word: yes. Enormously frustrated, the DLP and coalition Senators, tried a different tack. Senator Peter Durack asked a series of probing questions then choosing his words carefully asked:
Durack: But did you not regard that as rather an extraordinary situation, that you, as Director General of Security under an independent Act of Parliament, were recieving instructions ....from an Inspector of Police with a bit of paper in his hand...?
Barbour Yes I did.
Durack You regarded it as quite extraordinary?
Barbour Yes
Durack And totally unprecedented?
Barbour Yes.

These were, of course, words from Barbour’s own telex and he could hardly disavow them. Nevertheless it was not enough to hang Whitlam. The day after Barbour’s evidence Liberal and DLP Senators proposed that other ASIO officers give evidence. McClelland retorted that the committee wanted to ‘degrade Senator Murphy. They are disappointed that Mr Barbour evidence failed to do so.’ One of the few journalists who hinted about what was actually going on was Alan Ramsey who described ‘A senior member of ASIO [who is] waiting in the shadows ofther political controversy that now threatens to swallow ASIO’s Director General, Peter Barbour. If give the chance he was to have been the star witrness in the political inquisition ofthe Government that has been loosley masquerading as a Senate inquiry intothecivil rights of migrants.’

During these early committee hearings Whitlam was overseas. On the evening of August 15 his plane touched down. That morning the Australian ran front page lead story. The headline was ‘Murphy raid damaging, ASIO chief told the PM’ It is not unusual for someone to leak a document at a strategic time however the story also had two unusual features. Stories in the Australian often did not have by-lines but stories from its Canberra bureau and on its front page nearly always did. This front page story did not have a by-line. The only hint given by the curiously reserved journalist was that the story ‘leaked out in Canberra’. Its sec