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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 9, 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 second curious feature was that the story simply consisted of only of quotes from the telex with a number of paragraphs which pointed out how strongly it appeared to contradict Whitlam's denial of a 'complaint' from ASIO. Whoever wrote it had not bothered to seek a comment from the Opposition or from the Government. This latter fact could have arisen if the telex was only received virtually as the paper is going to press but even so it is unusual for such a story to have no 'comment paras'. Yet we know the telex was circulating surreptitiously among the Opposition in Canberra long before. Though first mentioned on 'Federal File', Lynch said an 'executive member of the Liberal Party' was aware of the telex's existence 'some months ago'. This makes the absence of 'comment quotes' less explicable in terms of a last minute, breaking story. We now know there was a calculated conspiracy between the ASIO hardliners, Snedden and Lynch. The Australian story suggests to my mind that a senior executive of News Ltd also played a role.

Whitlam was angry at the turn of events. Deputy Opposition leader Phillip Lynch charged that Whitlam appeared to be lying, adding that he knew that newspaper stories quoting the telex were accurate. The DLP Senator Jack Kane called for Whitlam to appear before the inquiry. This was just grandstanding but his other call, that other ASIO officers give evidence was designed to get Barbour's deputy Jack Behm and the Canberra chief, Colin Brown, to appear. They would tell a different story to Barbour. Murphy's key person on the Senate inquiry, Jim McClelland, hit back with what sounded like a classic conspiracy theory. He accused Senators from the DLP of being party to the leakage to the Australian. Whitlam also believed that the affair sprang from an DLP-ASIO nexus, stating that he had 'some misgivings about a security organizations which lets out telexes to one's political opponents.' The following Tuesday when parliament next sat, the Opposition hammered Whitlam over the obvious and glaring inconsistency of his March 28 answer stating that Barbour had not complained and the telex complaining about the 'unprecedented, extraordinary and gravely damaging' raid by Murphy. Whitlam's trump card was a letter from Barbour which stated that while the telex contained the word 'complaint', he had not in fact 'complained' to Whitlam on the day after the raid. He had simply said, as shown in the telex that the raid was 'unprecedented, extraordinary and gravely damaging'. It was a distinction without a difference. But when Whitlam produced Barbour's letter, the trap, so carefully laid, snapped shut without its prey.

There would now be no mercy shown to Barbour by the hardliners.

THE RAID changed Murphy's relationship with ASIO 180 degrees. Soon after Murphy's relations with Barbour became quite reasonable. Barbour knew that the raid was in fact a damaging over-reaction based on a mistake rather than the wilder conspiracies theories which gripped some of his fellow officers. Having purged his mind of the suspicions which he had brought with him from Opposition, Murphy gave little detailed attention to ASIO from then on. His mind turned to other items on his radical agenda for legal reform. He arranged more regular and temperate meetings with Barbour. A legacy of the raid was the seconding of the young ASIO courier, Don Marshall to his staff as a liaison man. After the tumult and shouting, it seemed that things would settle down. A few weeks after the Opposition squeezed the last drops from the affair, Whitlam revealed that he was actively considering the appointment of a judge to inquire into ASIO, due to the leaking of the telex. Nothing was to be heard of this for nine months until June 1974 when the next ASIO crisis broke out.

___________________

END NOTES

B.M.Snedden and M. Bernie Shedvin Bill Snedden, An Unlikely Liberal Macmillan 1990 p161
Interview with a member of Snedden's staff, 21 July 1993. This interviewee was quite positive that a meeting had taken place before the raid andthat it stemmedfrom Snedden's 'innocent social relationship' with ASIO officers he had known since he was AG.
Interview J D Anthony, 21 July 1993
Interview, Snedden staff member.
Robert Mayne 'How ASIO exceeds its charter', National Times March 19-24, 1973
Denis Strangman 'The ASIO-Croatian Affair of 1973' in Les Shaw (ed) The Shape of the Labor Regime Harp Books Canberra 1974, p 84.
See The Australian 'Appeals Court likely' and SMH 'PM's aid to Murphy on ASIO expected' 19 March 1973
Ministerial Statement on Croatian Terrorism by the Attorney General, 27 March 1973.
Interview between Age editor Graham Perkin and Whitlam, SMH 5 June 1973
Interview Jack Behm 3 August 1993
Interview Ernest Redford July 1993
Stephen Dorril and Robin Ramsay Smear! Wilson and the Secret Service (Fourth Estate London 1991) shows MI5's penetration and surveillance of the Labour PArty on a scale that far exceeded ASIO's work in the ALP. Angleton had 'no doubt whatsoever' that Wilson (British PM (1964-76) was a Soviet agent, accordingto Tom Mangold's excellentCold Warrior.
ASIO file on Ray Gietzelt CRS A6119/79 item 832. Pages from this file around 1960 refer to Arthur Gietzelt as an 'undercover member of the CPA'. A 1959 report states 'that Ray Gietzelt was to be issued with a current CP of A card but he was not to be attaached to any branch.' It also noted that 'He was at that time president of Sylvania Branch ofthe ALP.'
Confidential interview.
Detials of the marriage which something of a celebrity news story appeared in the Australian , Mirror and Sun newspapers on 24 November 1969.
Quoted in Sunday Herald (Melbourne) 11 March 1990
BrianBuckely Lynched! The Life of Sir Phillip Lynch p.36-37
The view that Murphy was born in Tasmania(rather than in Sydney as Murphy maintained) was told to the writer by a senior ASIO officer in mid 1993. The confusion may have arisen from an article by Gavin Souter in SMH 22 December 1972 which stated that his father emigrated to 'Launceston where Lionel was born 50 years ago'.
Confidential interview
Strangman p.83
Interview, Michael Shildberger 26 July 1993
Australian 10 August 1973
Australian 28 August 1973
SMH 18 August 1973
Aust. 20 August 1993

Posted by David at 10:17 PM

Enemies and friends in the Labor Party and the unions

From 'Australia's Spies and Their Secrets' (David McKnight, Allen and Unwin, 1994)

A man is walking briskly down the footpath beside Goulburn Street in Sydney in 1964. A careful observer would notice that he walks with a slight limp, his finger are stained with nicotine and his hair is greying, parted in the middle. He turns abruptly into a side entrance of the Sydney Trades Hall, an architectural oddity being one of Sydney's few multi-story Victorian buildings built almost entirely of brick. As he walks familiarly down one of its ill-lit, high ceilinged corridors he acknowledges a brief, knowing nod from an official of a minor right wing union.

He moves on. Behind rimless glasses are a pair of intelligent and searching eyes. He walks past the the Pastrycooks and Felt Hatters unions, their names scrolled in faded gold on brown wood. He stops at one of the bare reception rooms and begins to help himself to several copies of the union journal, crudely printed copies of a strike bulletin with an appeal for funds and a copy of an forbidingly dull pro-Soviet peace journal. ASIO's foremost trade union and Labor Party expert, Jack Clowes, is on his rounds.

By 1964 Jack Clowes had been in ASIO for fifteen years and would remain in it untl 1971 when he reached the mandatory retirement age of 60. For much of that time, he had the closest possible relations with key figures in the NSW trade union movement and the NSW branch of the ALP. The image of ASIO has been that it was an enemy of Labor and clashed with it repeatedly. On the Labor side ASIO was the object of scorn and ridicule by such figures as Clyde Cameron and Eddie Ward. Between Evatt and Spry there was a gulf of hostility. Yet a key part of ASIO's war on subversion involved buildinga network of anti-communist allies wherever they were found, in academia, in business, in the press and also in the unions and the Labor Party.

The revelations of profound intelligence involvement in the internal struggles within the Labor Party came from a key Labor figure who formerely held office inthe NSW branch. He spoke at length to this writer of his own personal dealings with ASIO through Clowes which extended over 16 years. In the course of a long, unattributable interview he emphasised several times that the contact between ALP Right and ASIO was done to protect Australia. 'It was in Australia's national interest, because it was threatened by people whose first loyalty was to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.' He realised 'it all seems inexplicable now'.

The former Labor figure (whom I shall refer to as 'Smith' for convenience sake) held Clowes in very high personal regard and no doubt the feeling was mutual. According to him Clowes 'played an ambassadorial role both for ASIO in the labour movement, and for labour movement in ASIO.' It was certainly a two way process. To selected senior Labor figures over the years Clowes passed a stream of information gathered from surveillance and phone taps. He warned them of CPA dalliances with members of the ALP Left and of ALP members who had joined the CPA but kept their Labor tickets. While such contact may now be justified as 'in Australia's national interest', the effect of it was also to greatly strengthen Movement-based Right in the NSW branch and all the patronage and power which accompanied it. 'Smith' believed Clowes' assistance in defeating the Left also had national ramifications. 'The NSW ALP became a beacon for the rest of the ALP after the Whitlam defeat [in 1975] and if New South Wales had got it wrong in the 1960s and 1970s, then this would not have happened. [In this sequences of events] the influence of Jack Clowes was an indentifiable feature of the Right getting it right.' The much vaunted role of the NSW Right as an effective, shrewd and powerful force in Australian politics takes on a new dimension in the light of this revelation. We will return to Jack Clowes but first it is necessary to outline the roots of ASIO's long standing but little known connection with the people and events which shaped the Labor Party.

WHEN FORMER CIS officers were recruited to ASIO they brought with them their sources within the union movement, most of whom were from the Catholic Labor Right. The CIS had found that Catholic Action* [footnote for same page: I Early ASIO files use the generic term Catholic Action to refer to the Catholic based political forces which existed before and after the 1955 split] very useful as a source of intelligence on the Communist Party's struggles in the trade union movement. The zealously anti-communist Catholic Action was part of a worldwide lay movement which aimed to put Catholics imbued with the church's social teaching into influential positions which had been denied to them by religious (and anti-working class) prejudice. In 1947 the ALP had formed its own 'Industrial Groups' within unions, largely to combat the communist presence. Many Groups were soon dominated by the secretive Catholic Action and the seeds of the shattering 1955 ALP split were sewn. As well as the CIS contacts which filtered into ASIO, top level contact occurred between Santamaria and Spry through an introduction by Liberal External Affairs Minister Casey.

Problems began to emerge in ASIO's contact with Catholic Action which would dog the Organization for the next thirty years. Both organisations needed each other but the question was 'who was using whom'? The liaison was at times very close but it had a rocky beginning. Much of this emerged in the course of an internal investigation which ASIO carried out in 1953 to discover how ASIO information came to fall into the hands of Catholic Action. A memoranda from an officer in the NSW Special Services Section asking for guidance from the Regional Director noted that in 1950 an ASIO 'agent master', Norman Spry, was paying a Catholic Action officer 'a sum of money at regular intervals' for information gathered by Catholic Action. Relations were cautious on both sides. The Catholic Action liaison officer with ASIO made it clear that the two pounds a week he received was deducted from his salary fpaid by the group. What interested the liaison officer was not money but information. He persistently asked for Spry and other ASIO agent masters for a formal information exchange but they 'sidestepped' all requests. One ex-CIS officer in ASIO reported during the investigation how he came to be caution in this way. Once in CIS he had deliberately fed a CA agent 'some imaginary information'. 'I later found that identical information was received back at CIS having been channelled to it by [ blank]'. Nevertheless, the CA source was profitable. In 1952 he gave ASIO three shorthand notebooks recording 'high level party meetings'. But in September that year, the CA informer asked whether his organisation could receive information on CPA plans in the trade union movement on an 'unofficial' basis from ASIO. For example, he said, the Archibishop to know whether Johh Burton was a communist and had asked CAtholic Action to find out. When the ASIO officer demurred, the CA official complained and demanded to know if Government policy to CA had changed. His predecessor had 'an open slather with the Navy files and all the usual departments like Immigration'. The anonymous author of the memo warned of the 'penetration' of ASIO by Catholic Action 'which is in itself an intelligence agency' but on the other hand pointed out that it had supplied 'productive and worthwhile' information.

AT that stage ASIO decided that it would refuse to exchange information with Catholic Action. When told of this Catholic Action decided that it would downgrade ties with ASIO and 'would probably decide to trade information wherever the best exchange could be effected.' ASIO's reluctance at that stage to deal full bloodedly with Catholic Action stemmed partly from the fact that its infomration was of a very patchy quality and totally uncheckable, since they accepted whatever their sources told them. (Copying MI5, ASIO had an elaborate system of grading the reliability of sources). Another reason was that ASIO had its fingers burnt early in the piece. Because of what was later termed 'irregularities and improper agent control' a CA agent had been allowed to work out of an ASIO sub office at Edgecliff. This left the Organization 'open to grave repercussions'. If this became known to 'persons unkindly disposed' to ASIO' they could 'imply that ASIO and Catholic Action were 'hand in glove' and working in common to the point of sharing the same office. Further, some agents, it will be remembered, also visited and worked at that office.' The investigation appears to have concluded with denials all round and the disciplining of an officer.

The 1952-53 upset did not last long. As a new entrant to the intelligence field ASIO needed above all a network of agents and the most logical place to find them was among the members of Catholic Action. In February 1954 an officer from Special Services Section approached a CA representative to discuss 'the possibility of some of your people being prepared, as individuals, to infiltrate the Communist Party'. If a suitable Catholic was recruited as an ASIO agent on CA's nomination, his or her information would be passed on by ASIO to CA. The Sydney leadership of Catholic Action initially rejected the approach, largely because the ASIO officer reiterated the impossibility of handing over other information to CA. But this attitude soon changed and for several years ASIO and Catholic Action ran a number of joint agents which they debriefed separately. This arrangement whihc spanned the traumatic 1954-55 split in the ALP lasted until around 1957 when the National Civic Council was formed. In that year Spry, for example, found it necessary to order the cessation of the use of a Catholic Actionist in Ballarat as a 'talent spotter for ASIO agent running operations'. From around that time, at an official level anyway, the NCC-ASIO relationship seemed to be less close, though on the ground it was a different matter. While ASIO found the NCC an enormously valuable source of intelligence for many years, it greatly feared that it would be penetrated by the NCC,which was, after all, an intelligence agency itself. At least once this led ASIO to tap the phones of the NCC to ensure that it stayed on top in the relationship.

During the ealyr 1950s the liaison with 'Catholic Action' was just one of a number of relationships with anti-communist forces and individuals which ASIO forged. But events within the Labor Party in 1955 catapaulted Catholic Action to the centre of national politics and the significance of ASIO's liaison with it was similarly greatly magnified. At the March 1955 Federal Labor conference at Hobart, 17 of the 36 delegates -- the Victorian and NSW delegations -- walked out . The conference went on to disband and de-recognise the Industrial Groups. The response of those whom ASIO called Catholic Action (more correctly 'the Movement' or Industrial Group forces) was twofold. In Victoria, they chose to split from Labor. Departing Labor MPs withdrew their support for the Cain government and this ushered in the Bolte government which was to last 27 years. In NSW however, the Movement forces remained within the ALP where they faced a hostile alliance of left and centre determined to contest political power with them. For much of the remainder of the decade and for all of the 1960s a pattern was established. The Victorian Branch of the ALP was solidly left wing with a vociferous but weakened Right. The NSW Branch, after an initial period of centre control, reverted to control by ASIO's allies, the old 'stay put' Catholic Right.

THE VICTORIAN branch of the ALP was of great interest to ASIO. Melbourne was the home of the Catholic forces with whom ASIO officers dealt closely and ASIO agents within the unions and Labor Party provided a stream of reports thoughout the 1960s on the Labor Left, their contacts with the CPA and inner party battles. The surveillance also extended to formal 'vetting' of Labor election candidates. During both the 1958 and 1960 state elections, ASIO's Victorian office checked ALP candidates against its records, 'to ascertain those of interest'. One candidate in 1958 , a barrister, Alfred O'Connor, was noted because his name was forwarded by someone else to an East German magazine as someone who might be interested in receiving free copies. The candidate for Mornington, Gordon Anstee, had been a member of the Soviet Friendship League in Warrnambool in 1945, it was noted. Another barrisiter, Alan Brenton, was an associate of CPA lawyer and leader, Ted Hill, and 'would appear to have left wing sympathies.' Arthur Poyser, later a Labor Senator and ASIO critic, was 'assessed by contact of this Office as anti-Communist'.

In May 1960, a similar report was compiled for the Victorian state elections. The candidates for Balwyn was Edmund du Vergier, who had 'the reputation of being a 'red hot communist' and had also attended the 1959 peace conference. His wife was one of four women 'who talk at regular tea table conferences on current affairs, including Summit talks.' Geoffrey Blunden who standing for the seat of Brighton was the subject of a police report. The name of taxi-driver, Jack Kagan who stood for Ripponlea had been passed to ASIO by an overseas intelligence agency, probably MI 5. The report also detailed at length the record of an activist in the ALP womens' organisaiton, Gwen Noad, one of whose activities was to protest the Sharpeville massacre in South Africa. Jim Brebner, the secretary of the Pulp and Paper Workers Union, was 'a CPA sympathiser' although the bulk of his record was simply reports that CPA members regarded him favourably.

Shortly after the June 1960 Victorian ALP conference elected a new executive an ASIO officer ran a security check on its members, including its president, Albert McNolty and vice president Jim Brebner. Former Trades Hall president, Ron Alsop, was noted , as was a young plumber, George Crawford, whom the files showed had once been an official of the Eureka Youth League, a CPA dominated youth group. Though grouped around the 1958-60 period it is likely that ASIO interference and surveillance of the Victorian ALP continued into the 1960s, if not the early 1970s.

The ongoing struggle against the 'groupers' in Victoria also illustrated a classic case of the rule that in a dynamic political society any surveillance of one sector would invariably mean surveillance of other 'legitimate' forces. By 1958, the influential and long standing secretary of the Victorian Trades Hall, Vic Stout, was in regualr contact with communist leader and barrister Ted Hill. Stout was by no means a sympathiser with the CPA but saw the communists as useful allies in fighting the Groupers whose policies he did oppose. In April 1958 Spry authorised that a file be opened on Stout in reponse to a minute noting Stout's 'close association' with Hill and Stout's role as union leader and Labor spokesman on a daily session on Radio 3KZ. Nor was ASIO surveillance confined to the top level of the ALP. During the 1960 state elections, an ASIO field officer in Mildura debriefed an agent who had watched those handing out ALP how-to-votes. Some, the agent claimed, were CPA members who were also ALP members. But he saw fit to record several ALP members who were not CPA, such as Ted Innes (later federal parliamentarian) described as 'extreme left wing ALP' and Ivan Hodgson, later chief of the Transport Worker Union, of whom the agent said was 'strongly believed to be a communist'.

ASIO's INVOLVEMENT with the Labor Party also arose from its general brief to watch and to counter the activities of the Left in the trade unions. The formal brief of D desk in B1 branch was the surveillance of 'communist influence in the unions' but following the dictum that 'you follow the target wherever it leads' this automatically extended to surveillance of Labor Party affairs as well. '[E]very major operation mounted by the Communist Party,' said a 1960 analysis by Clowes '... has been based on the trade unions and it always became evident early in the operation that the ultimate aim of that Party was to involve the ALP, using the unions as the lever or springboard.'
The unions were simultaneously the numerical and financial base of the ALP as well as the vehicle for workers' struggles for better conditions. In the latter role the communists were strong and respected far beyond the limits of their own membership because they were a street wise, dedicated and collective force. CPA officials led over a dozen key blue collar unions and a host of smaller ones and many were affiliated to the ALP.

The communists were thus key allies to the ALP forces who opposed the Industrial Groups and their right wing policies. Prior to and just after the split a broad left and centre coalition, including the communists, fought the Industrial Groups. From 1956 to early 1960s this coalition gradually weakened especially after the old Movement consolidated its power within the NSW branch and the AWU resumed its anti-communist role. In 1956, anti-Grouper unions including the AWU, co-operated in key industrial disputes, such as the 1956 shearers' strike. Later, in 1959 the AWU joined the 'Groupers' and tried to split the ACTU and form an 'Australian Federation of Labour' after the ACTU levied unions to support the visit of Chinese trade unionists to Australia and made pro-peace gestures. The key bulwark against the Groupers in the unions was the practice of Labor Left and CPA members combining on a single united ticket in union elections. These 'unity tickets' were a prime target of the Liberal Government, the DLP and the NCC forces. The battle over them was partly a shadow play for several hidden attempts to re-unite the DLP and ALP. They were also a target of ASIO's B1 (d) desk which regarded them as a key method of communist subversion because they united the union Left and thereby strengthened the hand of the CPA. Similarly scandalised was the centre-right leadership of the ALP which nominally banned the practice of 'unity tickets', a move which only debilitated the whole party.

The unions which welcomed assistance from ASIO included at least the Clerks' Union and the Ironworkers' Association. In the case of the Clerks' Union a former official said he would have had contact with Clowes a dozen times over a seven year period from the late fifties to early sixties. Clowes was 'a marginal figure' but would provide information if it suited him. The Clerks' official nominated several other officials from his union who also knew Clowes. A former official of the Ironworkers also confirmed personal contact with Jack Clowes. When I requested an interview about Clowes with the key FIA leader of the period, Laurie Short, he declined in such a way as not acknowledge whether he had contact with Clowes. In any case ASIO files show that he was of some help to ASIO. When Laurie Short, applied for a US visa in 1953 the US asked ASIO for a security clearance of Short. This was given, although information about his previous activities as a leftwinger was also passed on, which caused some complications. In any case the US authorities were told by ASIO 'he is 'clear' with this Organization to which he has been of some assistance.'

So deep was the division in that period that the Clerks, Ironworkers, Shop Assistants, Engineers, the AWU and the NSW Labor Council refused to join the communists in a campaign against the penal clauses of the Arbitration Act, which could be used against all unions. Their logic was that penal clauses could be useful as a disciplining measure against the communists. Ultimately the penal clauses were used against many unions, including the Ironworkers' and a united campaign made them unworkable after 1969. The divisiveness over penal clauses and the Right's attempt to split the ACTU are indicative of the gulf which separated Right and Left in the late 1950s. In the eyes of the Right, CPA support for even the most sensible reforms tainted them. Similarly with ASIO. An analysis almost certainly written by Clowes of that period regarded all kinds of issues as having 'a CP of A flavour about them' They included 'proposals on [abolition of] Penal Clauses, Equal Pay, Automation, Leave, Daylight training forAppprentices, Day Labour, 35 hour week, [opposition to] Court Controlled Ballots, Interference in Union Ballots, Price Control, Coal Fields Industries, Socialisation, Peace, 10 per cent of National Revenue for Local Government and Bans on Nuclear Weapons.'

Little hard evidence exists of Spry's personal view on the Labor split and its aftermath although they can be imagined from his atttitude to Evatt and the activities of ASIO under his direction. One piece of hard evidence is an unsolicited letter he wrote to the Minister for Labour and National Services, Mr MacMahon, suggesting certain answers to a parliamentary question. The question, by Jim Cairns, tried to discover whether the government intended to outlaw the use of unity tickets in union elections. Spry's suggested answer was 'There is only one body that can prevent the use of unity tickets and that is the Australian Labor Party. Action by the Australian Labor Party to prevent such destructive collusion which can only harm our national security is sadly overdue.' Officially, of course, ASIO did not interest itself in trade union activities as such, as Spry said through Menzies in answer to a question from Clyde Cameron in 1960. He added a qualification however: 'The organization is, of course, vitally interested in Communist activities wherever they may be carried on, including in the trade union sphere, but this is entirely a different matter to the honourable member's suggestion.' Such a distinction was simply unworkable and false in practice.

JUST HOW far did ASIO's knowledge of the internal life of the ALP extend? More importantly, to what extent was this knowledge used in ASIO's operations ? The answer to the first question is that it was vast and intimate to a frightening degree. The answer to the second we shall probably never know. Even under liberalised rules covering the release of the hardest files to obtain concern what are coyly known as 'operations' and 'spoiling operations' on particular. I

The intimacy with which ASIO case officers knew the personal and political affairs can be seen from the surveilance on a leading left ALP politician, Les Haylen, who held the Sydney seat of Parkes between 1943 and 1963. Haylen was also an author and numbered among his friends, the communist writer Judah Waten; another associate was Evatt's secretary, Alan Dalziel. The telephones of both Dalziel and Waten were tapped and transcripts of all their conversations with Haylen were placed on Haylen's file . Labor contact with the young media baron, Rupert Murdoch is revealed:
Waten then asked when Haylen would be in Adelaide again. Haylen said he could go anytime. Waten asked if Haylen had had a personal talk with Roland Rivett (phon.) or with Murdock (f.n.u). Haylen said that Rivett had been sacked -- he had heard the news today -- he had been the victim of Playford (phon.) Waten thought that this would be the worse double cross in history, because Rivett was doing this for Murdock.

Tension between Dalziel and Haylen was also revealed. After Dalziel was dumped by the ALP when Evatt retired, he used Haylen's office. Haylen complained that Dalziel 'sits around my place like a migratory b------- flamingo -- nowhere to put his long legs.' Haylen's files also records that he took a woman who was high on ASIO's list of spy suspects, Lydia Janovski (Mokras), on a tour of parliament in December 1959. 'Janovski claims that Dr (HV) Evatt was very charming to her and was anxious to assist in any way hecould, including the offer of providing a car for her use. Others met by Janovski include Les Johnon, Fred (u.i.) from Victoria, Mr Cannes, [sic] Mr Crean, and Mr Morrison (u.i.) from South Australia.' (Attempts were made to restrict the access to such transcripts of phone taps on parliamentarians but security within ASIO was not tight when it came to trusted outsiders. Mr 'Smith' the Labor official interviewed for this book, knew the identity of two ASIO agents, a fact I was independently able to verify. )

IN NEW South Wales ASIO identified CPA leader Jack Hughes as a key figure in relations between the CPA and Labor Left. Hughes was a former leader of the NSW branch of the ALP who had led a breakaway party to join the CPA in 1944. Hughes was a guiding light and 'was regularly meeting with three members of the NSW state executive of the ALP for weekly discussions in regard to tactics to be employed at weekly meetings of the State executive of the ALP,' said one ASIO report. From an illegal phone tap it was deduced that Hughes was meeting with a member of the NSW ALP executive member, Norm Woodley, a waterside worker had been earlier been expelled from the ALP for taking part in 'unity tickets' with the CPA. . An analysis on Hughes file noted that 'With his background [a reference to his role as ALP leader in the late 1930s] Hughes is an ideal choice for any type of work associated with penetration of the ALP.' More generally ASIO rated Hughes as 'a key member of the communist hierarchy and 'undoubtedly a threat to ASIO, insofar as any one person can be, and as such must be a key target.' .

At least from the early 1950s the CPA had a highly secret fraction of members who had joined it while being members fo the ALP and remained publicly Labor ticket holders. As well, in outlying area isolated CPA members were sometimes advised to join the ALP. Such members worked to strengthen the Labor Left, defeat the resurgence of the Groups and have united CPA and Labor Left leadership. All of this, including the identities of many involved, was known to ASIO and most if not all was passed on to top Labor officials in the NSW branch. Surprisingly, the threat posed by the existence of 'dual ticket holders' in ALP branch membership was not considered significant. In an analysis in 1960 Jack Clowes noted that the ALP had 19,000 members and 521 branches and concluded that these figures 'indicate the practical impossibility of influencing to any great degree the ALP through the political wing'. He pointed out that bugged speeches by people like Jack Hughes welcomed the exodus of disillusioned members from the ALP to the CPA. The report went on to note that a 'survey recently completed by B1, NSW, indicates that penetration of the ALP by the CP of A in this State when compared with actual membership, is neglible. .

As we have already seen the central figure in the liaison between the NSW branch of the ALP and ASIO was Jack Clowes. Clowes first made contact with members of the industrial groups justbeforethe great LAbor split of 1955. His period of cloest liaison was from the late 1950s through the 1960s until 1971.

As part of the research for this book I interviewed two former officials of the NSW Right who held various senior positions, one in the union movement during the 1960s and 1970s, the other in the 1970s. The first, 'Mr Smith' explained that as a member of an Industrial Group and an up and coming trade unionist he had first met Clowes around 1954. In succeeding years a close relationship grew up between 'Smith' and other Labor and union officials and Clowes. The group, which included union leader John Ducker, shared all manner of information and gossip and often met for lunch at the Knights of the Southern Cross Club in central Sydney with Clowes.

The alliance between John Windsor Clowes and the anti-communists in the NSW branch was not that of puppeteer and puppets, but rather of people who shared the same ideological stance and who were useful for each other. Clowes' devotion to Labor politics, albeit of the Catholic Right, was genuine. It began as a young man in Queensland during the Depression after which Clowes became something of a protege of the Premier Ned Hanlon, according to an ASIO colleague. In the post war clash between East and West Clowes'anti-communism firmed, joining the CIS under Bob Wake in Brisbane. When ASIO was set up he moved initially to Sydney, then to the Perth office for a short period. After returning to Sydney around 1952 Clowes developed contacts in the union movement and gradually became the acknowledged expert on the byzantine complications of the left and right in trade unions. Recalled one ASIO officer, Clowes 'helped to build up a complete picture of Communist penetration of the union movement. His knowledge of personalities was unrivalled. He had an incredible card index system of his own. ...[with] hundreds and hundreds of names, and everything about each individual. It was almost his life's work. He was so dedicated, fanatical.'

Clowes' political sympathies lay with the leadership of the NSW branch of the ALP rather than that of the National Civic Council of BA Santamaria. 'But he didn't serve two masters. He was working for us, primarily. Any contact he had with the NCC would have been as ASIO officer, seeking information,' said a retired officer. Unlike their Melbourne co-thinkers, the NSW groupers, as we have seen, decided to 'stay in and fight' the Left within the NSW branch of the party. This combination of pragmatism and dedicated anti-communism had the approval of Clowes. Said 'Mr Smith': 'He did not agree with the fanatical part of the Movement. He disagreed with Santamaria's tactics of trying to destabilise the ALP, because he could see that the CPA might step in to fill in the vacuum. He also didn't agree with the anti-working class flavour of the Santamaria forces,' said one senior Labor figure. He had an 'instinctive recoiling from the excesses of Santamaria.'

'Smith' and other contacts in the Labor Party sing Clowes praises as a man who was on the side of 'legitimate unionism'. His reports which are now being released under the Archives Act confirm that his politics were pro-union and pro-Labor and have a decided touch of prosyletising fervour about them, urging readers to familiarise themselves with labour history and literature, such as Billy Hughes' classic Crusts and Crusades which one officer remembers Clowes urging him to read. His reports also indicate a rather proprietary attitude to the ALP, speaking about the 'audacity' of the CPA in trying to 'interfere in the affairs of that organisation.' Presumbly Clowes regarded the intense involvement of a government intelligence body in the ALP as perfectly legitimate.

Within ASIO some looked askance at his contact with right wing unionists, largely because the very labour movement itself was regarded as a subversive force, even when led by anti-communists. At one stage Clowes' career suffered because of his overt support for the labour movement. 'He believed unions and the ALP were legitimate, in contrast to some of the 'old school tie' people in ASIO, said 'Smith'. Clowes was thus regarded as 'our man' inside ASIO. 'He knew there was always a danger that the extreme Right in the Liberal Party ... would try to use ASIO to damage their political opponents.' Clowes evidently warned 'Smith' and his colleagues that some of his ASIO colleagues 'made no distinctions between traditional squeaky clean Laborites and others.... They saw someone like Cairns who was idealistic and intellectual and thought he was security risk -- which he was not. He was misused by CPA but he was not a real CP-oriented person.'

Yet it was Clowes' poltics that made him extraordinarily useful to ASIO and made him acceptable to the Labor Right. 'He could read the minds of the EV Elliotts and the Pat Clancys and the Jim Healys because he knew where they were coming from. He knew their phobias, he knew who who was a tippler and who was a rose gardener.'

Clowes' contacts with employers were also overt and known to 'Smith'. 'One of his main contributions was that he enabled employers and employers' organisations [to have] a more accurate insight into union affairs and industrial action.' He gave them 'an objective, impartial appreciation of a strike'. So that they 'were able to react in a balanced and effective way.' He knew in which strikes the Communist Party was involved and of the CPA's 'hidden agendas'. All of this was passed to employers.

THE RELATIONSHIP between Clowes and key individuals in the National Civic Council and the NSW Labor Right was enormously useful two way street. From 'Smith' and others in the ALP he gathered up to date inside information on the union movement, the CPA and the State Government which was Labor controlled until 1965. Clowes happily shared information drawn from his access to telephone taps and physical surveillance. During the 1950s details of the CPA's group of 'dual ticket holders' in the ALP were largely known to ASIO and the basic facts were conveyed to 'Smith' and his ALP contacts. .By the early 1960s the CPA presence in the ALP through 'undercover' members had largely dissipated and instead it concentrated on working directly (but discreetly) with leaders of the Labor Left. While day to day contact often occurred in union offices, on special occasions senior CPA leaders would meet some leaders of the ALP Left at a discreet rendezvous outside of Sydney. When ASIO was able to find out in advance of such events, the particpants were bugged and photographed -- and Clowes' ALP and union contacts were often informed. Clowes sometimes alerted the right of the union movement that a particular CPA union official was disenchanted with the party. The union official would soon find a warmer than normal greeting when he met certain Right officials and would be cultivated. 'Knowledge is power,' 'Smith' commented drily to the writer.

'Smith' instanced a particular case in 1971 when Clowes' knowledge proved highly useful to the Right then under seige from the Left. That year the Left split a small group calling itself 'Socialist Objective' emerged. The information Clowes provided enabled the Right's John Ducker to 'deal with and share power' with these people knowing that they were genuine non communists.

Talking to 'Smith', one striking fact that became apparent was his knowledge of ASIO's internal workings and structure, the obvious result of a high degree of trust that existed between him and the ASIO officers. So close was the relationship that 'Smith' knew the identity of a key ASIO agent in the NSW union movement. Several retired officers as well as 'Smith' and anotehr former Right union official alluded to the agent who was described to the writer as 'an industrial link man between the CPA and the Labor Left.' 'Smith' said the agent was one of a group of people who 'were loyal to the left Labor point of view but who did not believe that this meant advancing the interests of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union'. This man (in a nursing home at the time of writing) was an official of a Left union and played an important role in a successful spoiling operation run by ASIO and key NSW branch figures in the early 1970s.

Another instance of 'Smith''s closenes to operational activity concerned ASIO's counter-espionage branch. In the early 1970s 'Smith' was told of ASIO's interest in a particular female member of the ALP Left who had been sent a dozen red roses on May Day by an official of the Cuban consulate, an event interpreted as the start of a cultivation by the Cuban who was believed to be an intelligence officer. (By this time Clowes had retired and this gossip came through another ASIO officer who was also a 'Labor man'.)

Another field where intelligence co-operation with the NSW Labor was apparent concerned the peace movement. It was an article of faith shared by ASIO and the men who ran NSW Labor that the peace movement was a communist controlled entity with no redeeming feature. When Australia sent troops to the Vietnam war NSW Labor decided to ban its members from participation in the anti-war movement on the excuse that anti-war candidates had stood in the disastrous 1966 federal election. Ultimately the move came to nothing.

According to 'Smith', anti-Labor conservatives in ASIO and the wider intelligence world had their own contacts with senior Liberal politicians who urged them to leak information derived from unwaranted phone taps. Through Clowes and other contacts in ASIO 'Smith' believes he stymied several such moves by tipping off certain ALP leaders 'At different times it was suggested to me that different people [in the ALP] should be very careful with their phones because of unauthorised taps being put on,' he said. .

Just how co-operative was Clowes? 'Smith' described it simply. 'If you asked Clowes what he thought about X, he would tell you.' It is clear that this co-operation extended passing on ASIO research, the results of surveillance or the vetting a potential members of the ALP. So close were the links between Clowes and leaders of the NSW Right that when he retired from ASIO in late 1971, he was employed for two years as a research officer in the NSW Labor Council library.

END NOTES

Fol = page ;

Catholic Action Part 2 CRS A6122 item 1222
W.J. Hudson Casey OUP Melbourne 1986 pp 257-58
This statement and the subsequent ones are from two short ASIO files titled 'Catholic Action', CRS A6122 items 1198 and 1222. The most interesting file was released only after a major legal battle undertaken by its requestor, Mark Aarons, in 1992-93.
Memo to Acting Director, NSW of 19 September 1952
Memo to Director, NSW 'Irregularities and improper control of Q Sources' 15 October 1953
Memo to Senior Section Officer, S branch 10 February 1954
Spry memo to RD Victoria 25 November 1957
This point was stated by an interviewee who had personal knowledge of the situation which he said lasted until 1957 or thereabouts.
Minute for PSO B1, 26th May 1958 in CPA Interest in ALP Vol 1 (refernce ) fol 119
Memo of 6th May 1960 to Headquarters from Regional Director, Victoria. Vol 8 CPA interest in ALP (reference ?)
JV Stout personal file (reference )
Report from agent dated 11 September 1961. Vol 2 CPA interest in ALP
Folio 118 of CP of A Interest and Influence in Trade Unions Affiliated to the ALP (NSW) dated 23 August 1960 in CP A Interest in ALP Vol 8 [Citation number needed]
Laurence Elwyn Short CRS A6119 item 386 fol 28
Report of 23 August, op cit fol 102
Report of 23 August, fol 104

Leslie Haylen CRS A6119 item 501.
Ibid folio 96
Ibid Folio 94
Ibid fol 88

Vol 9 of personal file M J R Hughes, (referecne )
Report of 23 August 1960, fol 134, 110,106 CPA Interest in ALP Vol 8 op cit
Report of 23 August op cit fol 93
This description was confirmed by two interviewees both of whom held official positions in the NSW ALP
'The Communist role in the anti-Vietnam war and anti-conscription protest movements' (ASIO analysis in author's possession). p. 25.
Such warnings (which covered taps by intelligence agencies other than ASIO) continued until the mid 1980s, 'Smith' claimed.

Posted by David at 10:09 PM

From the underground to espionage

From Chapter Five
Espionage and the Roots of the Cold War (Frank Cass, London, 2002)

In the 1920s the repression faced by newly created Communist Parties demonstrated the need for the clandestine techniques developed in Russia before the Revolution. In the following period, which began when the ultra-leftist 'Third Period' coincided with the 1929 Wall Street crisis, another expression of konspiratsya made itself felt in the West. Soviet intelligence began to recruit middle class American, German and British communists/

The vehicle for the recruitment was frequently the Communist International and a number of recruits believed, initially, that they were working for Comintern rather than for Soviet intelligence. This period also saw the Comintern intensify its call for legal communist parties to construct an illegal apparatus. Specifically, Comintern also issued instructions for parties to select a group of members who would cease to be open about their membership. These two interconnected tracks, one covert and the other overt, one involving espionage and the other underground political work, form the subject of this chapter.

The American communist underground

The Central European and Russian tradition of underground work was brought to the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) not only by Comintern doctrine but also by the many immigrant workers who for a long period made up the majority of that party's membership. This tradition was so strong that in the early stages of the formation of the CPUSA Comintern ordered the party to cease operating as underground cells and to have a public presence.
During the 1930s however, Soviet intelligence agencies co-operated closely with the political underground of the CPUSA. The details of this co-operation and of the functioning of the CPUSA's underground figured prominently in one of the Cold War's most controversial episodes, in which an ex-CPUSA member, Whittaker Chambers, testified that a leading civil servant, Alger Hiss, was a secret party member and had collected information to give to the Russians. The broad sweep of Chambers' allegations are now beyond doubt. Recent searches of the Comintern archives have revealed a number of documents that not only tend to confirm Chambers' claims but also give some insight into the methods of konspiratsya. These documents show the close and witting connection between leaders of the CPUSA, such as Browder, and Soviet intelligence and the close co-operation between the NKVD and Comintern, the former often using the files of the latter to vet candidates for espionage tasks.
Chambers had been a CPUSA member since 1925, had worked as journalist on the Daily Worker and in 1932 was briefly appointed editor of New Masses, a party literary journal. In 1932 he was asked by the CPUSA to work in its underground organisation. The underground in the period of the early 1930s closely and elaborately followed the practices of konspiratsya. In his account of his work in the CPUSA underground, Chambers devoted a section to outlining techniques which are very similar to those in the Comintern's Rules for Party Conspiratorial Work.
All meetings were by pre-arrangement. For example when I met Don [John Sherman] we would agree before we parted when and where we would meet next. Telephones were always assumed to be tapped... For unscheduled or emergency meetings there was a 'reserve meeting place.' .... Before any meeting, at least half an hour and preferably one or two hours, should be spent wandering around town, changing conveyances and direction to make sure there was no surveillance.
Meetings were arranged in busy public places like diners or movie houses, with punctuality always vital. If members of the apparatus were arrested they had to assert their innocence at all times and divulge nothing. 'Decades of underground experience had shown that any suspect who admits to one fact, however trifling he may believe it to be, will end by telling all,' declared Chambers. During Chambers' first period in the underground a New York dentist, Dr Phillip Rosenbliett, was an important link. His surgery and waiting room acted as a liaison point, with 'patients' who were given messages or material when they saw the dentist. In the slang of the Russian underground, Rosenbliett's surgery was a yafka..
But while the New York underground group knew the theory, they did not always practise it. In this first period, as Allen Weinstein noted, the underground apparatus was 'crude and haphazard'. Chambers was very indiscreet, maintaining non-party friendships and ostentatiously hinting to some party members that he was doing 'secret work' (behaviour which brings to mind the behaviour of Guy Burgess, below). Some members of his underground group knew each other socially and met collectively at a safe house on 51st Street, a practice which later changed to prevent members of the same group knowing the identity of others, Chambers recalled. Chambers' New York based underground group was responsible for maintaining a communications system (using microfilm and 'secret writing') which used German seamen as couriers between Germany and the Soviet Union and the United States. Its other role was to gather industrial and military information on behalf of the Soviet Union. In this period, Chambers' group acted in liaison with a succession of Soviet illegals who were their bosses. Chambers' personal role was a courier between the Soviet illegals and Max Bedacht, the head of the CPUSA's various underground groups.
The illegals represented the GRU, the intelligence wing of the Soviet Red Army which, at that time, was the main Soviet intelligence organisation. The most significant of the illegals was 'Ulrich' (Alexander Petrovich Ulanovski) who had been a revolutionary under Tsarism and had worked in the 1920s for the GRU in China. In the 1932-34 period the New York group had little success in industrial espionage and, in one instance, when they contacted CP members working at a submarine building company and were able to photograph blueprints, one worker soon confessed to the FBI. The compartmental structure of the underground organisation preserved it from exposure.
In 1934 the GRU agent Ulrich disbanded the group and began transferring agents like Whittaker Chambers to the-then leader of the CPUSA underground, Joseph Peters. Peters' experience with underground work began in Czechoslovakia and Hungary. After being transfered to the CPUSA in 1924, Peters became responsible for organising its underground group in New York in 1930. In 1931-32, he was in Moscow, attached to the Anglo-American Secretariat of Comintern, as a trainee in organisational matters.
In 1934, Peters introduced Whittaker Chambers to the next phase of his work for the underground. He was to be a courier and liaison worker for a CPUSA party branch of government officials in Washington. The branch, known in accounts of this period as 'the Ware group', after its key member, Harold Ware, met as a group in an apartment. Members knew each other by their real names, paid dues and discussed how to operate in the 'New Deal' government agencies for which they worked. In this period, although members of the group copied government documents for the CPUSA the group was not primarily an espionage group. Later though, some members engaged in espionage.
Many of these CPUSA members worked for the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) and a number lost their jobs when it was purged of left wing influence in 1935. By this stage, a key player in the events, lawyer Alger Hiss, had moved from the AAA to a Senate committee investigating the armaments industry and, according to Chambers, copied a number of State Department documents which were then photographed and given to Russian contacts. Hiss's transfer to the Senate committee prompted Peters to separate Hiss and another communist, Harry Dexter White, from the Ware group and form the basis of a more secret group. Both were clearly 'going places' and conspiratorial safeguards were stepped up.
In one odd episode in 1936, Peters proposed that the purloining of government documents become more systematic and that they be sold to their Russian contact, 'Bill' to raise money for the CPUSA. Apparently 'Bill' saw one set of documents obtained from a senior Treasury officer, Harry Dexter White, and rejected them as uninteresting. But shortly afterwards his attitude changed and the 'second apparatus' began to pass secret material to the Russians. In part this was because Hiss had moved once more, to the office of the Assistant Secretary of State, Francis Sayre, and because a new Russian contact, Boris Bykov, had begun to urge Peters and Chambers to begin to systematically collect government documents. This they did, using a number of covert CPUSA members.
The techniques of konspiratsya followed by Chambers, Peters and their Soviet contacts in this period generally accorded with that of The Rules for Party Conspiratorial Work, although there were differences. Chambers' adherence to conspiratorial methods in this period became more discreet than it had been in New York. However, as he noted himself, he broke at least one rule of underground work and became a personal friend of Alger Hiss. This action did exactly what the designers of the conspiratorial techniques feared: it endangered Hiss's security. Years later Hiss had to explain to the House UnAmerican Activities Committee how it was that he had known Chambers so closely, including lending him money.
Another breach of the practice of compartmentalising underground work occurred when, according to Chambers, Bykov also arranged to meet Hiss face to face to discuss how the latter could obtain State Department material. While such a meeting was a breach of conspiratorial method, in other instances Bykov rigidly (and absurdly) followed his tradecraft training. Bykov evaded non-existent surveillance by violent and rapid movements, jumping on subway trains as they were about to leave, entering large stores and leaving by a second exit, suspecting all window-shoppers as geheimpolizei (secret police). Bykov also insisted, for example, that Chambers give money to four of his Communist Party sources, a proposal that Chambers rightly rejected as crude and dangerous. After negotiation, Chambers agreed to give each an expensive Oriental rug, along with words of thanks from Soviet authorities. This too featured in establishing a case against Hiss and other recipients. But another side of Bykov's behaviour, Chambers argued, damaged some of the unwritten rules of underground work:
by almost every word he uttered, and the tone he uttered it in, he gave me pointedly to understand that he did not trust me. Underground work cannot exist without mutual trust. For a man not to be trusted in the underground is the next step to being charged with disloyalty to it. And the fact that a man is suspect destroys in advance practically any chance that he might have to establish his innocence. The walls simply cave in and the ground drops from under his feet.
By 1938, extensive espionage was under way in Washington but Chambers' feelings of disillusionment were growing, partly because of the great purges in the USSR, partly because of Bykov's outlandish behaviour. Worried that his defection could bring reprisals, he preserved some government documents and microfilm as 'insurance'. Years later they were produced as evidence to establish Chambers' credibility and to damn Hiss. These documents show that Soviet intelligence had a significant window into secret American diplomacy. They included a large number of copies or summaries of State Department documents and cables dealing with military and foreign affairs matters between January and April 1938. Other material was in Hiss's handwriting and some copied cables and documents appeared to be typed on Hiss's typewriter. Clearly far more than this was given to the Russians and Hiss's espionage and that of others continued during World War Two.

The 'Cambridge group'

In Britain in the early 1930s the overlap between Comintern and Soviet espionage was less pronounced than in the United States, as far as we know. The best known group of spies, Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Anthony Blunt, all studied at Cambridge University where they developed into communists. Unlike the Washington-based apparatus of the CPUSA, they did not operate as part of any underground political apparatus but worked directly with Soviet intelligence officers. Even though Philby placed himself in the tradition of underground workers, there was no history of underground work in Britain, nor any real need for it, as compared, say, with Russia.
The actions of this group during the 1930s, as they moved from university leftism towards espionage, form a case study both in the links between Comintern and Russian intelligence and in the practical application of the rules of conspiracy. While the stories of the Cambridge group have been told and re-told, it has to be remembered that this trajectory of recruiting young enthusiasts on the basis of politics in an advanced, democratic society and transforming them into intelligence agents, was, at the time, a step into uncharted territory. Cold war accounts by journalists promoting the myth of Philby's 'icy calculation and ruthless dedication' have been dented by accounts based on Soviet archives which show instead his psychological dependence and vulnerability. Similarly, the following re-interpretation, based on several studies which use KGB files, emphasises the compromises with the rules of conspiracy, rather than the imagined well-oiled machine of Soviet espionage.
The recruitment of the key figure, Kim Philby, shows the seamless nature of the distinction between the Comintern underground and Soviet intelligence. In 1933 the conclusion of Kim Philby's studies at Cambridge coincided with his decision to become an active Marxist. In doing so he asked the advice of a Cambridge academic and CPGB member, Maurice Dobb, 'how I should go about it'. As others have remarked, instead of simply recruiting him to party membership, Dobb advised him to contact the Paris-based World Committee for the Relief of Victims of German Fascism.
Though the founder of the Committee, Willi Munzenberg, was a talent spotter for the KGB, there is no evidence he saw the potential of Philby. Members of his Committee in turn advised Philby that he could best help the anti-fascist cause in Vienna working for the Comintern-based group which went under various names, International Organisation for the Assistance of Revolutionaries, Red Aid or MOPR, its Russian acronym. Years later Philby explained clearly his transition. The Munzenberg group was 'a perfectly legal and open group'. This group then 'passed me on to a communist underground organisation in Vienna.' The work of MOPR became crucial in the period 1933-34 which saw a bloody attack on the Austrian Left, with the shelling of workers' apartments and the lynching of a number of its leaders. Thousands of Austrian communists and socialists were on the run, joining thousands more fleeing the first waves of Hitler's repression in Germany.
Philby's work for MOPR began his underground career. Working first as a courier then as an activist smuggling refugees out of Austria, Philby came in contact with the tradition of konspiratsya. It is clear that this was a purely political activity and Philby had not yet been recruited to Soviet intelligence because at this stage he made little attempt to hide his leftists beliefs from other Britishers whose assistance he sought. As well, we now know from a personal memoir in the KGB archives to which limited access has been given, that Philby initially tried to join the CPGB on his return from Austria. A suspicious party official told Philby to come back in 6 weeks. Participating in May Day was the last open action Philby took as a communist. A number of accounts have credited KGB illegal Teodor Maly with the spotting and recruitment of Philby in Austria. But in his KGB memoir Philby indicates that it was the left-wing Austrian photographer, Edith Tudor Hart, who met him through his wife and passed his name to an KGB illegal worker in Britain, Arnold Deutsch. Deutsch personified the trajectory of many revolutionaries-turned-spies, having worked as a courier for Comintern's OMS, in Europe, Palestine and Syria. Deutsch recruited Philby and instructed him at great length in the art of konspiratsya, to the extent that sometimes Philby expressed frustration with his teaching:
Otto and I met regularly. And he taught me the rules of conspiracy. He hammered them into my head: how to call the necessary person on the phone, how to check, how to recognise a tail in a crowd, and other basics. I got sick of it once and asked politely: 'Otto you are telling me this for the tenth time. In the same words. I have memorised it. Like poetry.' 'The tenth time?' he asked, 'Well that's only the beginning'.
From 1934 onwards, Philby constructed an identity to hide his real beliefs and behaviour, joining the Anglo-German Friendship Society and running a pro-German newsletter . He successfully angled for a position as journalist on The Times and covered the Franco side of the Spanish Civil War and systematically cut off connections with left-wing Cambridge friends. By mid-1940 Philby, with Burgess's assistance, had secured a low-level job in the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI 6). There he taught something similar to underground technique to agents who were to be dropped into occupied Europe to conduct sabotage and propaganda. As he later noted, he was uniquely qualified for this. 'The first fact to distinguish me from my colleagues was that I was alone in having had personal experience of life underground. Not one of the others had ever dreamt of lowering his voice when passing a policeman in the street.'
Philby's conspiratorial practice was more thorough and careful than that of Burgess and Blunt. Yet like all of his colleagues he was several times betrayed by his sloppiness, only to be rescued by the incompetence of others. His memoirs, My Silent War, opens with a dramatic incident in which he was picked up by the Francoist Civil Guards while he was a Times journalist in Spain. He was questioned about his reason for not carrying a trifling local permit and his luggage thoroughly searched. Unknown to the police, he was still carrying rice-paper instructions on enciphering messages in his pocket which he had received from his Russian contact in England. As a search of his body was about to begin he emptied his pockets, throwing his wallet in such a way that his captors turned to make a grab for it, allowing him a second for 'a crunch and a swallow' to destroy the dangerous rice-paper. As Philby later concluded, 'the really risky operation is not usually the one which brings most danger, since real risks can be assessed in advance and precautions taken to obviate them. It is the almost meaningless incident...that often puts one to mortal hazard.' A better justification for the 'rules of conspiracy' could hardly be found.
Throughout all this time, Philby was in regular contact with his Soviet case officer, meeting regularly in Narbonne, a French town just over the border from Spain. Another, more dangerous incident in Spain was to surface in 1951 when he was interrogated while under suspicion from SIS. Asked how he had supported himself in Spain while not on the Times staff, Philby faltered. The whole exercise had been in fact financed by the Russians who had even used Burgess as a conduit for funds. His interrogator, MI 5's Dick White, took this stumble as 'absolutely significant' and Philby was sacked from the SIS shortly after.
Donald Maclean was the first of the Cambridge group to enter the heart of the British government when he successfully applied to join the Foreign Office in 1935. Recruited personally by Philby the previous year, he was probably the most productive agent of the group, sending thousands of cables and reports from London, Paris and Washington over 16 years.
One of the most striking episodes throwing light on his conspiratorial practice occurred in 1938 when he began a sexual liaison with his Soviet case officer, known only by her code name 'Norma'. The choice of a female case officer was perhaps an example of too-clever conspiratorial practice, in which women were often thought to arouse less suspicion than men. In this case the KGB estimated Norma and Maclean's late night contacts would be less likely to arouse suspicion, according to Costello and Tsarev. The liaison resulted in exactly the kind of security problem which the Russians feared: 'Norma' revealed to Maclean the codename by which he was known ('Lyric') as well as her own. The Russians came to know this because of another elementary breach when Maclean hand-wrote a letter, signed 'Lyric' to the KGB, welcoming the resumption of contact which had been broken for six months because of the Stalin purges of the intelligence services. Later that year Maclean was assigned to the Paris embassy and 'Norma', although reprimanded, was also re-assigned to Paris. The problems with their relationship did not end there. Maclean then fell in love with an American woman, Melinda Marling, in Paris and a stormy confrontation broke out between himself and 'Norma' in January 1940. On top of all this Maclean compounded the problem by revealing to Marling his actual role as diplomat-spy. With some difficulty, the matter was resolved by physical separation of 'Norma' from Maclean, largely due to the German invasion of France.
The most indiscreet of the Cambridge group was Guy Burgess as many accounts have repeatedly pointed out. We now know that his recruitment to Soviet intelligence was forced on his recruiter, Alexander Orlov. As Maclean began cutting his ties with overt communist politics and building up a right wing front, Burgess refused to accept this and eventually forced Maclean to admit his real reasons and then demand inclusion in the conspiracy. The incorporation of Burgess into the group introduced a continuing unstable element, which in 1951 finally proved disastrous when he defected on the spur of the moment with Maclean. Burgess thereby drew attention to Philby, his close friend.
Another reason for KGB reluctance to recruit Burgess was his membership of the CPGB from 1932 and his trip to Russia in 1934, on which according his own fanciful account he said he met Piatnitsky and Bukharin. The separate visits to Russia by both Burgess (1934) and Blunt (1935) are also a testimony to the contingent and almost haphazard process of recruitment, in contrast to the portrayal in popular accounts of a well-oiled plan run by all-knowing Soviet masterminds. According to the rules of conspiracy, such a wanton show of political preference was absolutely ruled out if one was being recruited to the intelligence service. Burgess later joined the staff of an extreme right-wing parliamentarian and became a member of the Anglo-German friendship society. Yet both as a BBC talks producer and in private his left wing beliefs continued to bubble to the surface. In 1936 Guy Burgess told a friend Goronwy Rees whom he was trying to recruit: 'I want to tell you that I am a Comintern agent and have been ever since I came down from Cambridge.' Whether Burgess believed his work was for Comintern or whether it was merely a convenient way of initiating the recruitment, it indicates that on some level there was a seamless connection between working for the Comintern underground and working for Soviet intelligence. Despite his erratic conversion to the Right, Burgess joined SIS in 1938 though he was later terminated in 1940, only to join the Foreign Office some years later.
Anthony Blunt, a Cambridge don by the early 1930s, was formally recruited to Soviet intelligence in 1937, according to recently released KGB documents, much later than earlier accounts. This explains the seemingly cavalier act (for an intelligence agent) of openly writing left-wing art criticism such as his 1937 essay 'Art Under Capitalism and Socialism'. His initial role was largely as a talent spotter and he recruited the son of a wealthy American family, Michael Straight. Straight later recalled a briefing by a Russian on conspiratorial technique who 'said a few trivial things about telephoning from public booths to avoid detection. Then he departed. He was more like the agent of a small time smuggling operation than the representative of a new international order.' After this Straight was given half a torn paper as a recognition symbol for a later meeting in the US and worked with Soviet intelligence until the Nazi-Soviet pact.
Blunt's left wing articles, and his 1935 trip to the USSR, subsequently almost blew his cover. In 1939, as he took tentative steps toward his goal of penetrating British intelligence by joining in the Field Security Police, he was questioned about them. Again, wartime laxness saved the day. In any case Blunt was accepted into MI 5 in 1940 where he soon transferred to his preferred section -- counter-espionage -- enabling him to report on measures against Soviet and German intelligence.
There is another element which should be mentioned in any discussion of konspiratsya and the tradecraft of espionage. Burgess and Blunt, while they were surely instructed in the methods of konspiratsya, must surely have already learned a great deal about clandestine meetings, messages and the habits of secrecy from their experience as homosexuals in a deeply repressive British society. In this sense they were prime candidates for intelligence. Similarly, Whittaker Chambers was a repressed homosexual, having a number of casual lovers during his period in the CPUSA underground. In this context the comment of one of Guy Burgess' lovers, Jack Hewit, about the milieu in which they moved, is telling. 'There was a sort of gay intellectual freemasonry which you know nothing about. It was like the five concentric circles in the Olympic emblem. One person in one circle knew one in another and that's how people met.' Though they are not concentric, the analogy of the Olympic circles is an apt representation of the compartmentalised structure of a conspiratorial organisation, which was sometimes know as the 'chain' system. In addition, Burgess's charm and his ability to make contact with homosexuals in high places was one of his most useful qualities for the Russians, even though they scorned his sexuality as a perversion and detested his bohemian and libertine character.
The KGB defector, Alexander Orlov, who was personally aware of the recruitment of Burgess, singled out the targetting of homosexual Western diplomats for special mention. Writing in the mid-1950s, he observed that his strategy had been 'remarkably successful'. Orlov goes on to make a point remarkably similar to Jack Hewit comment about ' gay freemasonry': 'The Soviet intelligence officers were amazed at the sense of mutual consideration and true loyalty among homosexuals.' He was almost certainly referring to Burgess and his recruting attempts in his circle.
The most significant lesson that can be learned from the history of the Cambridge group is that while the 'rules of conspiracy' are easy to formulate, concrete circumstances temper or occasionally sweep them aside. The elementary principle of compartmentalising different underground workers was breached from the start when Philby personally recruited Maclean. The recruitment of Burgess, initiated independently of Moscow by Orlov, compounded this breach of konspiratsya much to the anger of Moscow, as Costello and Tsarev note. The three even referred to each other, jokingly, as 'The Three Musketeers'. In 1936 Moscow Centre complained at length about this breach of security but little could be done.
Later, in 1941 Moscow became increasingly alarmed at continuing contact between Philby, Blunt and Burgess. It demanded that its case officer stop this practice but he replied that it was 'impossible' and this breach of conspiratorial practice became an added element in the Centre's growing suspicion that Philby might have been a double agent.
The original handlers of the group, Maly, Deutsch and Orlov, were men who originally learned the rules in political circumstances and then applied them to intelligence. Unlike later professional KGB officers, they tempered the rules to fit the situation and this probably explains both the daring success of the Cambridge group as well as its flaws. Yet they also drummed the lessons of konspiratsya into the group. It is interesting to note Deutsch's reasons for the need to imbue the Cambridge group with awareness of conspiratorial practice:
WAISE [Maclean], SYNOK [Philby] and our other agents in England have grown up in a climate in which the legality of our Party is upheld in an atmosphere of democratic illusions. That is why they are sometimes careless and our security measures seem exaggerated to them. If any relaxation of security was permitted on our part, they would become even more undisciplined. That is why, when running them we should stick strictly to the essential security measures even at the risk of cutting faintly ridiculous figures.
The breaches of conspiratorial practice were not all on the side of the 'relaxed' agent-handlers like Maly, Deutsch and Orlov. Philby's secret reports from the Franco side in Spain were mailed by him to an address in Paris which he later found was the Soviet embassy. Though coded, in invisible ink and signed by pseudonyms it would not have taken long to identify him, had the reports been copied by the French police and passed on to the Franco side.
The eventual exposure of the Cambridge group, however, was not due to such breaches but to the breaking of coded Soviet cables which pointed to Maclean as a source of information when he was stationed in the US. That they were not identified until relatively late was partly due to the success of conspiratorial technique (and also to the inefficiency of British intelligence and the tumult of the Second World War).
Comintern's underground : combining legal and illegal means
From the earliest days of the Great Depression, Comintern had strongly promoted the construction of underground organisations in affiliated parties, arguing that depression would quickly lead to war with consequent savage repression. In the democratic west, this did not occur but the triumph of Nazism in Germany was sufficient to sustain this strategy throughout the 1930s. In 1933 Comintern issued its most definitive public statement of 'conspirative' principles. Much of the statement drew on the 'Rules for Party Conspiratorial Work' already discussed. In the concrete circumstances of the early 1930s, namely the brutal attacks aimed at communists in central Europe, this statement argued that illegality provided the best defence. Slowness in accepting this, it said, was due to 'legalist superstitions'. In the place of Leninist doctrine calling for the combination of legal and illegal work, Comintern tipped the balance toward illegal work. Its cardinal point echoed the experience of the Russian underground.
The basic principle of illegal work of the Communist Parties -- worked out through decades of Bolshevik underground activity -- is the ability to preserve the mass character of the party in its underground activity during the most savage terror. The essence of illegality does not lie in hiding a small group of people from the enemy; it lies in carrying on uninterrupted mass work.
Compartmentalisation was one key. Important sections of the party, such as the leadership and the printing and distribution apparatus had to be isolated from each other. It was 'impermissible to use the same address or quarters for different organisations. Tying them up in one big knot aggravates the dangers of a raid', it argued. Another hazard of underground work, based on the Russian experience was the tendency to concentrate too many secrets in the technical (printing and administrative) apparatus and then to neglect this apparatus. Codes, address lists and safe houses had to be frequently changed. An illegal party had to be surrounded by 'a large cadre of sympathisers and revolutionary, non-party activists'. The German experience meant that centralisation of party work, so long a feature of Bolshevism, had to be tempered so that central organs were at least physically separate. An independent local leadership was also needed 'which will be able to react immediately to events, without waiting for directives from the centre.'
This and other calls by Comintern for conspiratorial organisation took root in individual communist parties not only because of their loyalty to Comintern but also because it responded to local conditions. The upsurge in communist militancy in the West, as a result of the Depression and the 'Third Period' leftism led to an accompanying tightening of legal and extra-legal repression aimed at that militancy. In turn this provided the conditions in which the practical application of the principles of konspiratsya became a realistic option. In the following section, I examine an aspect of the political underground which was downplayed by Comintern in the early 1930s-- the struggle to combine legal methods as well as the more usual illegal methods.

Combining legal and illegal methods

For most of the decade of the 1930s the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) was engaged in a battle to remain a legal political party. Although its struggle through the courts set important legal precedents Australian common law, its use of 'bourgeois justice' began in an almost shame-faced manner. The leadership of the party was clearly wary of appearing to believe in 'legalist superstitions'. The struggle took place during the long reign of a conservative federal government from December 1931 until 1941 which also passed laws aimed at repressing militant unionism.
At the beginning of this period, the Communist Party of Australia was in the throes of internal upheaval. In December 1929 the annual CPA conference had dismissed most of its existing leadership for 'right wing deviationism'. This internal upheaval was followed by the intervention of a Comintern 'instructor', Herbert Moore Wicks, who 'bolshevised' the CPA. Wicks (who used the name Herbert Moore in Australia) was a member of the CPUSA and encouraged a dogmatic approach, brooked no opposition and expelled several leading communists.
The election of 19 December 1931 saw the sweeping defeat of a brief, ineffectual Labor government which had been overtaken by the events of the Depression. Its replacement was a government led by the United Australia Party under Joseph Lyons and his deputy John Latham. It took office amid popular fears of communism and a campaign promise to outlaw it.
One week before this triumphant win by conservatism, the CPA leadership realised that it was not prepared to face outlawry and that there was '[a]lmost complete absence of satisfactory underground contacts' and this put the party into 'a very weak position to meet the situation of illegality'. The Political Bureau decided on an elementary plan of action which sketched out a pattern which would become familiar for the next 30 years. '[An] Apparatus must be prepared so that we can function in the event of being declared illegal' and a 'second line of leadership' had to be developed to replace arrested leaders.
At the end of December 1931, a report to Central Committee spelt out precautionary measures in more detail.
Where mail is used for confidential letters, addresses unknown to our enemies must be used. In the localities, a system of couriers must be organised to establish personal contact with the various Party organs when delivering instructions and literature...In the event of arrest, members must not answer any questions either at the preliminary hearings or in the Courts. The Party will wage a strenuous struggle for a legal existence....
To meet the threat the CPA responded in two ways. First, it was determined to continue its activity under conditions of illegality. It urged its supporters to learn from the negative example of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) which collapsed after being banned in the First World War.
The IWW made no definite preparations to meet the capitalist attack, nor did they take any steps to protect their organisation. They helped the capitalists to suppress them with their romantic talk of 'filling the capitalist gaols' and in many cases seeking voluntary martyrdom.
Second, it placed a high priority on remaining legal. 'Opportunist ideas that the Party 'will grow under illegal conditions' must be exposed as tending towards the liquidation of activity.' Mass activity against war and fascism was the answer to the proposed ban. But while it hailed 'legal methods' in principle, its practice was less than whole hearted.
The new conservative Attorney General was John Latham, a man who 'vehemently despised' communism. In May 1932 he placed before parliament a series of tough amendments to the Crimes Act, similar but more far-reaching than previous amendments introduced in 1926-28. Both were aimed at militant unionism and the CPA. The 1926-28 amendments included one year's jail for members of unlawful associations; jail or deportation for those who 'by speech or writing' advocated revolution or the destruction of property; six months jail for selling literature of an unlawful association and the confiscation of all property held by an unlawful association.
The new amendments would give power to the High Court or state Supreme Courts to 'declare' a body of people to be 'an unlawful association', thus remedying a defect in the 1926 law. Under its provisions averments presented by the Attorney General to the court constituted a prima facie case and the onus of proof lay on the body of people to establish it was not an unlawful association.
Introducing the Bill, Assistant Treasurer, Stanley Bruce, argued that it would 'help the Government excise a social cancer.' 'In these restless times when subversive doctrines are being preached, and the loyalty of the community and the stability of our institutions are being undermined, the widest power to deal with unlawful associations is essential in the interests of society,' he said.
On 1 September the federal government summonsed the publisher of the Workers Weekly , Harold Devanny, charging him under section 30 D of the Crimes Act with soliciting funds for an unlawful association. To fight Devanny's prosecution and thereby defend the legality of the party, the CPA had engaged solicitor Christian Jollie-Smith. Jollie-Smith, a founding member of the CPA, and a non-party barrister, Clive Evatt. Evatt's view was that the CPA could retain its legality through making a case on purely legal grounds. In the Magistrates Court he argued that the section of the Crimes Act under which Devanny was charged were all unconstitutional. As well, he argued '[t]here is nothing unlawful about being opposed to war.' The pleadings were to no avail and Devanny was convicted and sentenced to six months hard labour. Evatt announced an immediate appeal to the High Court.
With outlawry a real possibility and little faith in the High Court, the CPA dramatically foreshadowed its imagined future:
We must ... utilise the remaining breathing space to make sound preparations to ward off the blows of the bourgeoisie, to prove ourselves worthy comrades in arms of our heroic brothers in the Communist Parties of the White terror countries -- China, Italy, Hungary and others -- who have not only maintained but successfully built Bolshevik parties and conducted revolutionary struggles under conditions of pitiless terror.
Far from being pitiless terror, the government's legal offensive was pitifully incompetent. As the CPA's lawyers probed the government case, they found it fraught with legal blunders to the extent that the original summonses were withdrawn and re-issued. But the crucial weakness was that simple facts could not be established. The government's document conflated the work of the CPA with a number of closely affiliated front organisations such as the Militant Minority Movement (MMM), the Unemployed Workers' Movement, the International Labour Defence and the League Against Imperialism. In this case, there can be no doubt that the ad hoc committee planning the anti-war demonstration was effectively in the hands of the CPA, but the government's case assumed rather than proved this.
Behind the scenes the CPA had its own wrangles. Clive Evatt's advice provoked a torrid debate in the CPA leadership about defence tactics. From the start of the case the Political Bureau was concerned to guard 'against creating legalistic illusions'. Advice from Jollie-Smith and Evatt was firmly that the case could be won on legal grounds without the need for a leader of the CPA to enter the witness box. The Political Bureau rejected this and insisted that the president, Lance Sharkey, appear as a witness to 'put the party position -- that they attack the Party as the spearhead of the working class movement, to vindicate the party and show it as the champion of the workers' struggles.' In the event, Evatt's advice prevailed over Sharkey and no revolutionary statement from the dock was forthcoming. This was later condemned by the Political Bureau, but excused as 'due to inexperience'.
The High Court case before six judges revealed grave weaknesses in the case against Devanny. On December 8, 1932 the court uphheld Devanny's appeal, quashed the conviction and a majority of five judges criticised the Crown's case. It was a stinging slap in the face to the federal government.
Yet the significance of this legal and political victory in the High Court was hardly understood by the CPA which took great pains to minimise it. The reasons for this are bound up in the CPA's view of democracy in capitalist society as as a sham. To hail the decision would be to give credit to a conservative institution of capitalist society. It would also mean acknowledging that power in capitalist society was dispersed in a number of institutions which sometimes clashed on major issues. Thus the Workers Weekly headlined the article on the Devanny judgement with the words 'Prelude to new attacks' and 'We must have no legalist illusions'. The article warned that 'the High Court is not in any way a defender of the right of workers to organise and collect funds for their struggle against capitalism; it has only decided that Latham must try again.'
The taste of outlawry in 1932 impelled the communists to redouble their efforts in constructing an underground for the rest of the decade. Shortly after the High Court decision the Central Committee emphasised that the threat of illegality was still present and that the party still had to prepare a strong underground organisation. In part this was due to their sheer disbelief that the handling of the Federal Government case could have simply been incompetent. Party secretary J. B. Miles confessed to a Central Committee meeting that he was 'suspicious about the stupidity in the Devanny case. It was so awfully stupid that it looks as though it was real.'
The Central Committee man charged with reporting on illegality, Sam Aarons, emphasised that further attacks were expected. He signalled two key themes which were to be central to the handling of illegality by the CPA over the next two decades. The first concerned the paradox of defending the legality of the party under capitalism. On the one hand communists were deeply cynical about the law and viewed liberal democracy as a sham as their response to the High Court judgement demonstrated. On the other, Aarons argued that 'We have to contest every position, fight to the last ditch on every small point, where the democratic rights and freedoms of the workers are concerned.' He contrasted this determination to defend democratic rights with 'a tendency to get underground at the first approach of the threat of illegality.'
Aarons' second point also appeared contradictory or paradoxical. He argued against those who separated mass work from the question of illegality.
The question of whether the party shall have a continued legal existence will only be determined in so far as we have penetrated the ranks and taken up the immediate questions of the working class....The factories are our basis, in the question of the fight against illegality. If we have strong nuclei in the important factories no action can drive the party out of existence
The Central Committee meeting of December 1932 had before it a clear directive from the Communist International regarding preparations for illegality. This letter was prefaced by a statement that 'increased persecution of communists requires the strict fulfilment of the directives of the ECCI'. It described elaborate conspiratorial methods to be used in factories but linked mass work to underground work:
The names of the members of the nucleus must be kept secret, the meetings of the nucleus must be held in private houses, only the members of the nucleus must know the place and time of the meetings and the place of the meeting should be changed as often as possible. In the cases when the members of the Party in the factories, e.g. among the miners , are already known to the management.... the names of the newly accepted members must be kept secret. The illegal work of the nucleus must in no case lead to a restriction of the mass work of the nucleus, to its separation from the workers [emphasis added]
This last point as we have seen was a key strategic concept derived from Lenin's re-working of the Russian conspiratorial tradition. It was crucial to political survival and contains the rationale for going underground in the first place. It was both the method and the goal.
The Comintern directive laid down strict guidelines for the reconstruction of the CPA in the event of the Federal Government successfully banning it:
There must be such a reconstruction of the party committees that will allow of the greatest flexibility in their work, the closest contact with the lower organisations and the ability to display great initiative and self reliance. In particular, it is advisable in the future to set up Party committees with a small membership (7-11 members), changing the existing practice in which the District Committees have 25 or more members.
The issue of going underground was openly discussed in the CPA newspaper which reprinted an article by Comintern leader Osip Piatnitsky:
A great number of examples from the history of the Parties of the Comintern show that when Parties and revolutionary trade unions without any organisations in the factories are driven underground, they immediately lose contact not only with the masses but in many cases even with their own members. There is absolutely no guarantee that the Communist Parties in the most important capitalist countries will not be driven underground.
Piatnitsky's latter prediction soon came true. In January 1933 Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany and later that year the German Communist Party was outlawed.
The brush with illegality in the second half of 1932 combined with the advent of Hitler meant that the CPA began to employ more seriously conspiratorial methods which emerged from the experience of European and Russian socialists. The result was a plan drawn up in 1934 for an illegal apparatus.
The 1934 plan is posited on the possibility of an attack on the CPA with little warning, including a rounding up of members of the Political Bureau by police. It therefore proposed that two members of the eight-person Political Bureau 'go into illegality' immediately and work from private homes rather than party offices. The other six would follow them into 'complete illegality' at signs of 'approaching critical events or anticipation of attack'. The plan recognised that this raised the problem that the Political Bureau would effectively be isolated from the membership and from the district leadership of the party. The answer was to create an alternative leadership, described as a 'working leadership'. These leaders would be a small group of 3-5 whose main qualification, apart from some organisational and political ability, was that they were not known to the police or public as CPA members. This construction of a second, illegal 'working leadership' was to be followed at the lower levels of the party and in the CPA's street units (local branches).
The key determinant in the success of the plan was the successful functioning of a communication system. In the city of Sydney, where the national leadership worked, the preferred method was personal contact and the use of couriers between Political Bureau members and the District leadership. Another method was material 'deposited in a certain place (house, office etc) to be collected by comrades receiving the instructions, or by specially appointed comrades'. This was clearly the method which later became known in espionage training as 'the dead letter drop', a method which did not use the official postal system and which created a 'cut-out' between the sender and the receiver of the message.
In other major cities the use of the normal postal system was necessary. In order to do this successfully two things were needed: first, a system of what is usually known as cover addresses or accommodation addresses, second, 'a cipher system for all important Party directives'.
The plan also took account of the need for reserves and sympathisers. These were to be drawn from 'fraternals' -- closely allied bodies such as the Friends of the Soviet Union, the Militant Minority Movement, the League Against Imperialism and the International Labor Defence.
The 1934 plan concluded:
Only the P. B. [Political Bureau] and the Secretariats of the various D.Cs [District Committees] would know of the existence of the illegal apparatus and only the P. B. in Sydney and the Secretaries of the DCs would know the actual composition of the central groups. Outside of these comrades and the members of the illegal apparatus, not one party member would know of the existence or personnel of such an organisation...
The attack on the CPA did not come in the form which its plan expected. However, some elements of the plan did have an immediate application in the CPA's drive to build party groups in factories. In many factories such groups had to operate as underground cells and in this way party members received elementary training in secrecy. An article in the Communist Review talked about the process following the recruitment of a small number of workers in a factory:
The first procedure is for the comrade who did the recruiting to visit each member personally [original emphasis] and make arrangements for a meeting. Each comrade should be given a pseudonym and should be known by it within the party. It is well to remember that in all capitalist countries the factory unit is illegal. Bearing this in mind every meeting should be organised on a conspirative basis.
These points were not lost on the nemesis of the CPA, the Commonwealth Investigation Branch which watched the CPA closely and was aware of its underground activities both in political life and in military circles. It also grasped the connection between these techniques and the Russian underground tradition, arguing that
There is a distinct failure to appreciate the secrecy with which the Communist Party works. The local party is trained by men, in turned trained in technique in Russia, by people who were hounded for years by the police of Europe and perforce had to learn every trick of secrecy and evasion of authority.
Yet as events would show, the defence of the party's legality depended once more on courts rather than than conspiracy.
While the CPA felt more comfortable in agitational political activity than in the conservative world of the courts, it was to win another legal victory in the latter half of the 1930s. The High Court's rejection of Devanny's conviction allowed the CPA and its fraternal organisations to continue to function legally but with a major disadvantage: they could not openly use the postal system to distribute copies of their publications. The postal ban was part of the Crimes Act they had not challenged.
These bans were quite effective in disrupting the political work of the CPA and its fraternals. The circulation within Australia of newspapers like the Militant Minority Movement's Red Leader dropped and in order to send copies of it to the RILU in Moscow, seamen were enroled as couriers when they travelled to Vladivostock, Hamburg and San Francisco. Between 1932 and 1937 the CPA found it very difficult to receive copies of Comintern publications like Inprecorr.
In 1933 the CPA began publicly protesting against the postal bans. Workers Weekly revealed to its readers that '[w]ithout any publicity scores of working class publications are being seized and condemned. And the veil of silence with which the authorities cover their work makes it more effective'. The Weekly noted that '[w]hen Norman Lindsay's pornographic novel 'Red Heap' was banned then the liberal Press protested loudly against this unnecessary interference with the 'liberty of the subject''.' With some reluctance the CPA appealed to liberal intellectuals to join it in campaigning to overturn the ban while insisting that in any case, the ban was an inevitable consequence of capitalism.
In May 1935 the Friends of the Soviet Union (FOSU) demanded to know the reasons for the ban on their magazine Soviets Today and threatened the government with legal action to overturn it. When the issue came before federal cabinet it appeared that the ban would be overturned. Acting Attorney General Thomas Brennan advised that the ban on the Soviets Today 'had not proved effective to prevent the distribution of that publication' and that the ban should be lifted 'rather than become involved in litigation in which the Commonwealth may not be in a position to produce evidence satisfactory to a Court'. The change in policy, he suggested, could be explained by the improved relations between Britain and Russia and on Russia's admission to the League of Nations.
But Brennan's advice was rejected at a cabinet meeting in May 1935 and in June the CPA demonstrated its newfound acceptance of the weapons offered by bourgeois legality. A member of the CPA and FOSU, W. Thomas, sought an injunction to restrain the Commonwealth from destroying copies of publications and from preventing their transmission by post. He also boldly claimed $5,000 damages because of the ban. This time, the CPA clearly overcame its fears of 'legalist superstitions'. The Commonwealth responded by raising the stakes and commencing legal action to have the High Court declare both the FOSU and the CPA as illegal associations. This galvanised the CPA and in an article in the Comintern's Inprecorr, Sharkey vowed that the CPA and the workers 'will fight this latest attack of the ruling class to the last ditch.'
In November, the CPA and FOSU began a strategy of using its legal standing in the case to demand detailed information from the Commonwealth on which it based its case. This would effectively place the onus of proof on the Commonwealth, thus reversing the roles of the parties and giving the CPA and FOSU an advantage. At one court hearing the Commonwealth noted that the legal action by CPA might force the revelation of information held by the 'Intelligence section' of the Commonwealth Government. The second attempt to ban the CPA dragged on until 1937. The case was settled by an out of court agreement which saw the government lift the postal bans in exchange for the dropping of the case.
The CPA's successful defeat of the second attempt to ban it showed a positive acceptance of legal means and illustrated just how far the CPA had come since its reluctance to use 'bourgeois legality' three years earlier. In this way the CPA had arrived at the classic Leninist formula of combining legal as well as illegal methods of struggle.

Posted by David at 9:53 PM

July 5, 2006

The Comintern underground in Shanghai

[This is part of Chapter 4 of 'Espionage and the Roots of the Cold war' (Frank Cass, London). The book deals with the connection between underground communist political activity and Soviet espionage from 1917 to 1940s.]

On May 1, 1929 an unusual meeting of trade unionists took place in Shanghai. The communists who organised the meeting later regarded it as 'perhaps the biggest single feat of illegal organisation' at the time.

It was a copybook version of the kind of illegal activity under conditions of savage repression which was described by the Comintern Commission on Illegal Work:

"A guildhall on one of the busiest thoroughfares in the Settlement was booked. Factory workers went to the hall in groups of three or four. Their times of arrival were carefully staggered. They were still arriving when a policeman walked into the hall to ask what was going on. He was politely disarmed and locked in a small room. The meeting was held, 400 people heard a 45 minute May Day address and dispersed into the night. Then the policeman was released."

The description is by a British communist, George Hardy, who worked underground in Shanghai for Profintern, Comintern's trade union wing. Hardy's task was to stimulate the left wing trade union movement in China and in South East Asia and he worked closely with historic leaders of the Communist Party of China (CPC) such as Chou En-lai, Deng Hsiao-ping and Liu Shao-chi who were all active in the underground trade union movement, particularly that part centred in Shanghai.
In the period 1928-32 Shanghai was an industrialised city and a busy centre of trade. In the extra-territorial International Settlement and the French concession, British, Japanese, French and German businesses flourished. With its protected status, its relatively modern communications and its European community, Shanghai provided the logical place for building an underground apparatus which would represent the ECCI to the Communist Party of China. It was the contact point from which Comintern military experts could be spirited through the lines separating the Nationalists and the Red Army; it was the place where the future leaders of the American Communist Party were blooded. Shanghai drew writer Agnes Smedley to Red China's cause. The Shanghai underground drew German communist, Richard Sorge, who later worked for Soviet intelligence in Tokyo.
Little wonder then, that when an American military intelligence official investigated 'the Sorge affair' and Soviet intelligence he was led back to the Comintern apparatus in Shanghai, a city he described as 'a veritable witch's cauldron of international intrigue, a focal point of Communist effort'.

* * *
China had been at the centre of hopes and fears of a second communist revolution for most of the 1920s, especially after the defeat of the German uprising in 1923. Although the Communist Party of China (CPC) ultimately carried through a revolution based on its strength among peasants, in the period between 1920 and 1933 its strategy included a primary role for the urban working class.
The period between the defeat of the CPC in 1927 and the departure of most CPC leaders from Shanghai to the soviet areas in 1932-33 has been somewhat neglected by historians, partly because of a certain orthodoxy in scholarship which saw urban events largely in terms of their relationship to rural revolution.
This chapter will study the Comintern's apparatus for underground trade union work in Shanghai in the period 1928-32. This period was one of savage repression directed against the Communist Party of China and the trade union movement which it heavily influenced, the All-China Labour Federation (ACLF). The focus of Comintern trade union activity was the Pan Pacific Trade Union Secretariat (PPTUS) which, under its Russian name TOS [Tikho Okeanskii Sekretariat] was the far eastern wing of Profintern. The PPTUS in Shanghai was responsible for both support for the ACLF and for developing 'red trade unionism', as it was called, in South East Asia, Korea, Japan and India. The PPTUS apparatus was in turn, part of a larger network of clandestine organisations in Shanghai, notably the Far Eastern Bureau of the Comintern and Soviet military intelligence.
The underground work of the PPTUS can be schematically divided in the following way. In the initial period between 1927-1929 the American communist Earl Browder was the leading PPTUS figure; between 1929-1930 the British communist George Hardy was in charge of the work; between 1930-1931 when the trade union work was controlled by 'Leon' and 'Kennedy', the code names for two American communists who appear to be James Dolson and Charles Krumbein. In June 1931 the underground apparatus in Shanghai was severely disrupted, though not destroyed, by the arrest of two Russians who were officers of the Comintern's International Liaison Department (OMS). The two OMS officers administered the apparatus which supported the PPTUS and the Far Eastern Bureau of Comintern and worked as a language teacher and his wife under the pseudonyms of M. and Mme Hilaire Noulens. Their arrest meant the capture by the Shanghai Municipal Police of a vast quantity of administrative records which are now held in Washington, USA. Together with newly opened Comintern archives, in Moscow, they allow a valuable insight into the functioning of the Comintern and Profintern underground apparatuses in urban China.
The Communist International through Grigory Voitinsky first made contact with Chinese radicals in 1920. The following year Voitinsky helped found the Communist Party of China (CPC) which remained very small until 1925. In this year a national trade union conference formed the All-China Labor Federation (ACLF) whose leaders included many prominent communists and which immediately affiliated to trade union wing of the Communist International, Profintern or the Red International of Labor Unions (RILU).
The period 1925-27 saw the Chinese labor movement reach its zenith, only to crash to defeat. In large part, the growth of the labor movement depended on the political alliance formed between the Communist Party of China (CPC) (with the full support of the Soviet government) with the nationalist Kuomintang (KMT). In May 1925, shortly after the formation of the ACLF, a strike at a Japanese textile mill in Shanghai was brutally suppressed leading to nationwide boycotts and strikes against foreign companies and institutions. In June British troops shot Canton students and workers sparking a 16 month strike against the British in Canton-Hong Kong. In Shanghai workers twice rose up against warlord control in late 1926 and early 1927. Finally, in March 1927 an armed workers revolt took over Shanghai shortly before KMT troops entered and took control. But in April, alarmed by the unrest, Chiang Kai-shek turned on the CPC and its union supporters, bloodily breaking the alliance between them. From that point onwards the KMT government used systematic police and military terror against real and alleged communists and all CPC political and trade union work in cities was conducted in secret.
These epic events in China in 1927 coincided with an idea originated in Australia and taken up vigorously by the Communist International. In 1921, amid rumours of a new war, the Australian trade union movement proposed that a regional organisation of Pacific trade unions be formed. Though raised by Australian delegates at the 1922 Profintern congress the idea languished until 1925 when the general secretary of Profintern, Alexander Lozovsky informed his executive bureau of the Australian plan to convene a conference of Pacific trade unions in Sydney in 1926. While supporting the initiative, one of the Comintern's Far East specialists argued that Sydney was too far from the 'main lines of communication' and that Australia's racist immigration policy made difficult the entry of delegates from Asia. 'It might therefore be proposed , that although the initial step is being taken by the Australian comrades, the congress should be convened not in Australia but in a real Pacific country in Shanghai or Canton', he said. This is what occurred. Organised at too short notice, the conference attracted few Pacific unions, however a Profintern delegate, 'Comrade Rubanoff', (Rubinstein) ensured that groundwork was laid for a further conference in China in 1927.
The 1927 conference of Pacific unions, planned for Canton, was suddenly moved after a counter-revolutionary coup which destroyed the ACLF and its local leaders. The venue then moved to Hankow which was controlled by a local government of Left KMT and communists.
The Pan Pacific Trade Union Conference opened on May 20 at the People's Club in Hankow after a welcome parade of tens of thousands of workers organised by the local trade unions. In the course of a week the conference heard reports on political and labour movement conditions in Indonesia, Japan, the United States and China. Among the speakers from the All-China Labor Federation was Lui Shao-chi. Fourteen of the 22 Japanese delegates were arrested on their way to China and the Australian government refused to grant passports to its trade union delegates.
The importance of the gathering and the relatively legal conditions in which it was held was indicated by the presence of the secretary general of Profintern, Alexander Lozovsky. But even while the conference was sitting, the Soviet mission in Peking was sacked. The American communist Earl Browder emerged as a key leader from the conference which also elected him editor of the Pan Pacific Worker which was initially published openly in Hankow. Browder forecast a triumphal future for the PPTUS which would 'help tear down the numerous barriers of language and race prejudice which have kept the mighty armies of workers in the Pacific apart for so many years.' But the CPC-KMT split of 1927, ending with the defeat of the ill-judged Canton uprising in December 1927 forced Browder and the PPTUS to operate in a period of savage repression and deep clandestinity.
Browder had led an American trade union delegation to the founding congress of Profintern in 1921 and in the 1920s, when he spent most of his time in Moscow or China, he was a leading member of the American communist party. From 1930 to 1945 he was secretary of the CPUSA. Working with Browder for the PPTUS was the less well known figure, Charles Johnson (whose code names were 'Stein', 'Steinberg' or occasionally 'Charlie'), a 46 year old Latvian who was born Karl Ernestovich Yanson. Already a Bolshevik, in 1908 he migrated to the United States where he later headed the left wing of the American Socialist Party which split in 1919 and helped form what became the Communist Party of the USA. From 1920-22 he represented the American party in Moscow at the Communist International and from 1923 was a member of the Profintern Executive Committee where he became known to the head of Profintern, Lozovsky and Pavel Mif (Mikhail Firman) a specialist on China.
From its formation in 1927 the Pan Pacific Trade Union Secretariat was responsible for a number of functions. First, it wrote and printed various publications initially, the Pan Pacific Worker then, after this was moved to the United States, the Far Eastern Bulletin which appeared in both English and Chinese. Second, it provided both advice and money to ACLF. At this time, before the real beginning of guerrilla war, this was the strategic core of the Chinese communists and the PPTUS officials met weekly with the All-China Federation of Labor leaders. Third, it supported and promoted red trade union work in the Philippines, Japan, Malaya, India, Indonesia and other South East Asian countries.
The PPTUS was quite open about its own existence within Shanghai. Publications, such as the Far Eastern Bulletin, defiantly proclaimed on their masthead that they were published in Shanghai. The Statutes of the PPTUS stated that the 'seat' of the Secretariat 'is to be situated in the city of Shanghai, China. The Shanghai police and the Kuomintang authorities thus knew that the PPTUS operated under their noses and were constantly alert. And although no Comintern officials were arrested until June 1931 a number of officials and militants of the All-China Labor Federation who worked with Comintern were arrested, jailed or executed.
To conduct such work a variety of conspiratorial techniques were used to send and receive mail, to hold meetings, to print and distribute documents, to hold larger conferences and to distribute money. For uncoded letters, a system of couriers operated irregularly between Shanghai and the Soviet Union via Harbin, with the dangerous border crossing often assisted by Soviet diplomatic staff and the Soviet security police, OGPU. However most mail was sent using the normal postal system (with people such as Browder signing himself 'Russell' or 'Morris') with a variety of cover addresses. A great deal of mail to and from Moscow was addressed initially to cover addresses in Berlin where Comintern had an elaborate 'post office' for re-routing mail to its true destination. In case of casual postal inspection, the letters were sometimes couched in a personal tone. For example, those to Profintern's chief, Lozovsky, from the Comintern representative in Australia, Sydor Stoler, usually began 'Cher Papa!' and were signed 'Votre fils qui vous respecte et aime.' . Left wing newspapers and magazines intended for the Far Eastern Bureau of ECCI could be sent openly by addressing them to the 'Universal Clipping Service, GPO Box 1565, Shanghai'.
Yet carelessness and misunderstandings by Moscow and its Berlin 'post office' dogged the communications of the Far Eastern Bureau (FEB) and PPTUS. Bulky envelopes aroused the suspicion of customs authorities who opened mail and questioned the box holder. An exasperated letter from Shanghai reported that 'owing to all these acts of carelessness on the part of our comrades, we have now lost three safe addresses within the last six weeks, and they are now keeping a very close watch on all post boxes.' The commercial cable system was used for urgent messages but 'business' language was employed. When Johnson ('Stein') left Shanghai he cabled Alexander: 'leaving Shanghai turned over business new manager i gave also complete outline immediate business transactions joint meeting chinese shareholders - steinert.' [sic] (An attempt was made in 1930 to send information from Moscow via radio but this appears to have been an experiment. )
The PPTUS illegal apparatus in Shanghai was funded from Profintern headquarters in Moscow. The budget of the PPTUS is unclear but at one point in October 1929, the PPTUS representative, George Hardy reported that he had been without funds for two months and asked Moscow to 'cable $10,000 (Gold) and despatch messenger immediately with balance'. The PPTUS, in turn, regularly gave money to the All-China Labor Federation, to the Philippines Congress of Labor and to other Red unions in South East Asia. Profintern paid for the Australian edition of the Pan Pacific Worker, for instance, cabling $200 from Germany to the Australian union leader, Jock Garden, in June 1929. Much of the Russian funding for Profintern's activities worldwide was remitted in complex transactions through Swiss and German banks to businesses established by the OMS, typically import-export companies which habitually use cables and exchange money.

The Browder-Johnson period
The first major task which faced Browder and Johnson in this period was the holding of a full meeting of the Secretariat in February 1928 under conditions of complete illegality. Chaired by the Australian delegate Jack Ryan, who represented the ACTU in Shanghai, the meeting was attended by representatives from the Philippine Workers Congress, the Trade Union Education League (USA), the National Minority Movement (UK), the Japanese red trade union federation, the Hiogikai, the Far Eastern section of the Russian unions, an Indonesian union group and the All-China Labour Federation. The meeting discussed the difficult new conditions in China and the collapse of the ACLF. A report noted that in the recent revolutionary upheaval 'the red unions never had any well planned and detailed organisational system. So at the blow of the political reaction and in the process of transformation (from legal to underground) the organisation has been disintegrated [sic].' Another resolution, drafted by Johnson (Stein) urged the ACLF to fight for legalisation and to use 'all existing legal possibilities'. The February meeting decided to hold its next conference in Australia, prior to the 1929 congress of the Australian Council of Trade Unions.
Apart from organising this meeting and arranging delegates for the Fourth Profintern Congress in Moscow in March, the work of the PPTUS had been confined to the production of the Pan Pacific Worker which was done under conditions of savage repression. 'Our printing arrangements have broken down entirely,' reported Browder in May.
The trouble came from the Chinese workers in the shop, who resigned in a body rather than continue to print what they thought endangered their necks. The crisis came after another print shop, suspected of having printed a 'red' leaflet had its whole staff of 17 workers taken out and shot. It seems impossible to resume printing at this time, although we may be able to soon, having some encouragement from the proprietor who 'wants the money'.'
Although banned, occasional statements by the PPTUS were published in China Outlook, an American missionary publication. Largely because of these difficulties an Australian edition of Pan Pacific Worker began to appear in April.
While the Pan Pacific Worker hailed the red labour movement of China, the actual position was very different. In early 1928 Browder reported to Lozovsky that in Hankow the labour movement had been 'completely wiped out. Of the large cities, only Shanghai and Canton have any open labour movement and in both places it is under the control of the Kuomintang. The illegal trade unions are largely destroyed'. The 'yellow' unions of the Kuomintang, were 'gaining in power and influence'.
But the problem was even worse. When 35,000 silk filature workers went on strike the red union, the ACLF, was taken by surprise. Browder complained that the Chinese Communist Party had effectively fused the ACLF with the party. By allocating the leading ACLF cadres to other political work, it had 'practically abolished' the ACLF. Generally, Browder argued, the Communist Party displayed 'inexcusable confusion about and underestimation of TU work'.
The equivocal position of the Chinese Communist Party on political work in trade unions was a problem which for years dogged the successive Comintern cadres who staffed the PPTUS in Shanghai. Ultimately, the success of the CPC would lie in its work among peasants but in this period its outlook strongly influenced by the Russian revolution decreed that the working class would transform China. Even so, a resolution from the central committee of the CPC in April 1928 noted that practice did not necessarily fit theory:
In regard to the situation in all of China, it seems in general the peasants are radical and the workers are backward. The workers are now engaged in no active struggles, and show no development of the illegal trade union organisations. Although the Party organs have committed many military opportunist mistakes in the peasant uprising yet they still lead such actions continuously ..... Even where formally a trade union is maintained in fact it is only another name for the Party nucleus, and there are no non-Party members in it (as in Shanghai).
The resolution went on dutifully to urge a 'fight against the tendency of neglecting the labor movement' and urged that the party should 'make the labour movement [the] most important and fundamental work of our Party' so that the workers become the 'advance guard of the peasants and toiling masses.'
In spite of police terror, radical working class action was not entirely absent. When Japan staged a military incident in Manchuria in 1928 spontaneous anti-Japanese feeling erupted in Shanghai which the yellow (KMT) unions tried to channel. A trade union committee against imperialism was established on which the Communists had 7 out of 21 positions but after the local garrison commander took charge of one meeting the seven communists 'were so terrorised that they did not dare to say a word.' On May 30, National Humiliation Day, six factories in East Shanghai went on strike and an anti-KMT demonstration which Browder estimated at 1,500 took place in the international sector of Shanghai. In the Chinese sector of Shanghai, slogans were milder but industrial action more widespread. The Times correspondent reported that 'Communist agitation around Shanghai, though underground, is very active. Elsewhere on the street walls appear mysteriously defaced slogans such as 'Down with Chiang Kai-shek', 'Down with the Kuomintang'....The strike in the French concession holding up the tram and electricity and water services obstinately continues and is a purely political affair, the men having no real complaint.'
In the last half of 1928 relations between Browder and Johnson deteriorated, with Browder making official complaints to Lozovsky and during his absence even refusing to leave the key to the PPTUS post office box with Johnson. In December, Browder returned to the United States and from there began to edit an American edition of Pan Pacific Worker.

The Hardy period

In February 1929 Charles Johnson (Stein) handed over the Profintern work in Shanghai to a new cadre allocated by Comintern, the British communist, George Hardy. Hardy, whose code name in his reports was 'Mason', had been a member of the Industrial Workers of the World in Canada, the USA and Australia before becoming a member of the Political Bureau of the British Communist Party in 1925-26. In 1923 he participated in the German revolution and in 1928 he became a member of the Profintern Executive Bureau. Before travelling to China posing as a well-to-do businessman, Hardy had experienced underground work in several countries. In Shanghai he became a key figure in Comintern liaison with the Chinese Communist Party. When Profintern tried to withdraw him from Shanghai in late 1929 the Political Bureau of the Chinese Communist Party protested, arguing that he understood conditions in China better than other functionaries with whom they dealt.
One of Hardy's tasks in the first half of 1929 was to organise the attendance of union delegates at the second Pan Pacific Trade Union conference to be held in August. After the 1927 Hankow conference, Australia had been proposed as the venue of the next conference with the support of the new national trade union federation, the ACTU. But in June 1928 the conservative Bruce government, fearful of the threat to the British Empire and White Australia, announced that it would ban the entry of delegates. The PPTUS therefore decided that the second conference would be held on Soviet territory in Vladivostock. The conference was dominated by the recent Soviet-China border clash and the need to 'defend the Soviet Union' and by the prevailing leftist approach which saw reformism as the main danger to the workers' movement. To this extent the conference marked the Soviet domination of a body which originally had a more genuinely internationalist appeal. Alert to the gathering, Japanese, Chinese and British police prevented many delegates from attending Vladivostock and a second, secret conference was held in Shanghai, attended by delegates from Japan, China, the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaya.
Hardy's approach to trade union work in China was, like Browder's, critical of the CPC's labour movement strategy. At one point he reported to Moscow that 'in China the Party as a whole has not even fully grasped the full significance of trade union work' and 'even the PB [Political Bureau of the CPC] is not clear on all [trade union] questions.' Nevertheless, during 1929 there was mild resurgence of the labor movement. 'Terrorist tactics' were less readily applied by the KMT, reported Hardy. 'This does not mean that there is any evidence that white terror is being discarded as a weapon against the workers for hundreds are still being executed and tortured and it only means more are receiving long prison sentences for such offensices [sic] as distributing literature ... instead of being sent indiscriminately for execution.' In June 1929, according to The Times, the Nanking Government issued 'drastic regulations' for a weekly search for communist literature in all bookshops. The KMT-influenced Printers Union warned its members that printing such literature 'will be punished mercilessly'.
During this period the ACLF organised its May Day meeting at a guild hall in the centre of Shanghai referred to above. Such tactics were discussed later at a special conference in Moscow of trade unionists who worked illegally or semi-legally where a Chinese union organiser, 'Liu Tsien', described conditions in Shanghai. Meetings were organised within factories in such a way that they could disperse in a few minutes. For example, sometimes two communists would start a fist fight and workers would gather. The 'fight' would then stop and the fighters would then deliver a short speech to the crowd. At other places, workers' meetings were organised under the cover of a small company shareholders' meeting. 'Liu Tsien' reported that meetings in theatres were held where police were captured to prevent them raising the alarm. But he warned that poorly organised attempts at such meetings had resulted in the loss of many comrades. His report also confirmed Hardy's view that the role of factory nuclei was practically nil and that party committees substituted themselves for workers' nuclei.
While underground techniques had to be rapidly adapted and applied, another key problem which confronted Hardy was to convince the Chinese communists to take advantage of the extremely small 'legal' possibilities in the situation. After the defeats of 1927 the ACLF had strength only in the seamens' union and the railways union. A number of red unions had been taken over by KMT forces while the union of postal workers and the Mechanics Union had never been under the ACLF umbrella. The postal workers, for example, were run by 'disciples' of a Shanghai underworld figure who played a considerable role in the 'yellow unions'. Yet the only 'legal' opportunities for trade union work were those created by the existence of 'yellow unions', a designation which covered a range of non-communist unions under the control of the KMT or of employers.
Such legal work was difficult for at least two reasons quite apart from the obvious problems of illegality and terror. First, at the level of the Chinese Communist Party, a 'putschist' approach was strong. This tended to downplay demands based on the basic needs of workers and to emphasise revolutionary calls for uprisings and armed struggle. Second, the Communist International itself, from the Sixth World Congress in 1928, followed a strategy which was similar to the local 'putschism', emphasising the imminence of revolution and damning any co-operation with 'reformist' forces.
In spite of these evident similarities between the CPC and the ECCI, the question of legal work in yellow unions crystalised differences between the two. The CPC leadership tended to dismiss the minority within its ranks who favoured legal work as Rightists. The memory of the bloody defeat of 1927 after a period of open, legal co-operation with Kuomintang forces was still very fresh. As well, a number of communists who had recently worked in 'yellow unions' had gone over to the KMT. Yet legal work in reactionary organisations was an established principle of conspiracy. Hardy had the difficult task of resolving this contradiction. At a plenum of the ACLF in February 1929 Hardy criticised the minority within the ACLF which wanted to concentrate on forming red unions within all yellow unions. This amounted to accepting a minority status and relinquishing the possibility of independent red unions. In place of this Hardy urged a flexible strategy. In areas of traditional ACLF strength, red unions would be maintained; but in yellow unions, red fractions would be built to take advantage of legal opportunities, as the minority suggested. Elsewhere, in what he called the 'fascist unions', the ACLF would keep trying to build a small cautious base.
The weakness of the ACLF was due to a number of factors, according to Hardy. Apart from the effects of terror, the CPC often failed to distinguish between itself and the union federation. Thus instead of the unions calling for struggle for better wages and shorter hours, it issued calls for armed revolt. Such calls when expressed by the CPC leader Li Li-san were later to lead to a major split between the CPC and Comintern. Thus within the party opposite tendencies existed, one wanting to do mainly legal work in yellow unions to avoid repression, the other ignoring any legal possibilities.
At the Tenth Plenum of the ECCI in July 1929, the Comintern's key expert on organisation, Piatnitsky turned to this question and asked: 'But why do the Chinese comrades still waver on the question as to whether to work or not to work in the Kuomintang unions? What is the result? The Red unions are small outfits and the Kuomintang unions are mass organisations.' In response a representative of the Chinese party, 'Tsui Wito' [Chu Chiu-pai] asserted that some work was being done in yellow unions but also linked the desire to conduct legal work with the bogey of 'Right opportunism.'
In September 1929 the ECCI officially endorsed the direction of Hardy and Piatnitsky, criticising the 'remnants of sectarianism which still prevail' in the party. At the same time it argued that the Communist Party of China 'must raise the question of resumption of a legal existence by the Red trade unions, even if it were under another name and without official sanction, in connection with the revival of the labour movement. The actual leadership of these unions however, must continue to work on a conspirative basis'.
In November 1929 the Fifth Congress of the once mighty ACLF was held under illegal conditions in Shanghai. Hardy gave a report, which concluded with the silent 'shouting' of slogans in illegal fashion: 'by one comrade announcing the slogan and each forcibly raising their right hand with a clenched fist'. Although he estimated that 'we can reasonably expect some improvement in the proletarian base of the party', this was to be the last national ACLF conference until 1948.
Underground struggle in South East Asia
While direct contact with the Chinese labor movement was possible in Shanghai, elsewhere in South East Asia the cultivation of left wing trade unions by Comintern took place at several removes.
The most successful activity occurred in the Philippines where an organised trade union movement, the Congresso Obrero de Filipinas (COF) was well established and operated with a degree of legality. While the COF was prevented from attending the 1927 PPTU conference, it later affiliated and sent a delegate to the February 1928 Secretariat meeting in Shanghai. The PPTUS maintained close contact with both COF leader, Crisanto Evangelista, and the leader of the peasants' federation, Jacinto Manahan, who were undoubtedly among those Browder earlier referred to as 'as nucleus of devoted and energetic comrades' in the Philippines.
Both men visited Moscow to attend the Fourth Profintern congress in early 1928 and in early 1929 there was an upswing in class struggle which George Hardy attributed to 'close contact the PPTUS maintains with our Filipino comrades'. At the same time Hardy had to deal with a personal clash between Manahan and Evangelista after the former withdrew from the COF because Evangelista criticised him for allowing prayers at a peasants conference. But in May 1929 the COF split, with Evangelista leading a breakaway group. The Far Eastern Bureau of Comintern accepted the split and Hardy reported that the new COF (Proletariat) soon greatly increased its membership. Hardy issued instructions that the COF (Proletariat) hold a workers conference to decide on a 'national programme of action and demands' and to discuss Soviet-China tensions and other international trade union questions. McLane's linking of this split to the formation of the Communist Party of the Philippines in August 1930 is borne out by Hardy who argued that '[o]ur position will always be weak in the Islands until we can form a party group. Evangelista is hesitant ... [and] has given press interviews of a very social democratic character'. To remedy this Hardy urged the dispatch of an American comrade who could work there illegally.
A letter from Hardy to Australian communist Jack Ryan telling him that 'the Philippine comrades are doing extremely well' gives the flavour of the PPTUS work:
We are contemplating organising a united front conference in the Philippines in order to make a final effort to destroy all the reactionary elements and their organisation. Already their membership has fallen to 8,000 and their main strength is in the tobacco industry..... we are now engaged in a strike which involves unions affiliated to the reactionary organisation as well as our own. If we can win this strike it will give a great impetus to our position in this industry.
Overall, the Comintern archives tend to confirm McLane's analysis which emphasised the significance of the PPTUS and of American communists in shaping the Philippines political and union situation.
In Singapore and Malaya there was less success. The roots of the communist movement in Malaya lay in the contact between communists such as Sneevliet, Tan Malaka, Alimin and local leftists and trade unionists in the 1920s. By mid-1928 Browder could report that in 'Singapore and the Straits Settlements, an underground trade union movement is very active, which is led principally by Chinese workers who have been trained in the Canton trade union movement'. But the following year, George Hardy reported more coolly that there was 'some evidence of activity in Singapore'. In Malaya, he said, 'most of the members of the Committee of the Chinese Communist Party' had been arrested and some were executed including 'our representative'. But he added that Shanghai was 'completely isolated from Indochina, Indonesia, Siam and Korea'.
Overseas Chinese workers were organised in the Nanyang Federation of Labour, which attended the 1929 conference in Shanghai for delegates barred from the Vladivostock conference. Hardy established that the federation was based in Singapore, had 5,000 members including a small number in Thailand and Indonesia and used seamen as couriers to communicate with its members.
In February 1930 Hardy sent his 'best confidential translator and a very good comrade' to Singapore to urge local red trade unionists to become delegates for the Fifth Profintern Congress but this plan collapsed in a wave of arrests in Malaya in April. The arrests occurred immediately after the founding of the Malayan Communist Party at a conference attended by Nguyen Ai Quoc (Ho Chi Minh). Some of those arrested were later executed after deportation to China. Yong, following earlier scholars, interprets the founding of the MCP as a 'brilliant tactical move' by the Russian-based Comintern to weaken CPC influence in Southeast Asia but while there was tension between the Comintern representatives such as Hardy and the CPC, there is no evidence in Comintern archives of a rivalry taken to such extreme lengths.
Contact with India was a problem for the PPTUS which was never solved. In 1927 the Indian Trade Union Congress tried to send delegates to the Hankow conference but they were not permitted to leave India. At the beginning of 1928 a PPTUS representative, probably the British communist T. R. Strudwick, went to India but he was not allowed to land. The Australian communist, Jack Ryan, attended the Ninth All-India Trade Union Congress in December 1928 having departed secretly from Australia aiming to secure TUC affiliation to the PPTUS. He reported that 'CID men followed me night and day ever since I reached Bombay' and that an American union delegate was arrested and deported. But a vote by the AITUC to affiliate to the PPTUS was narrowly lost. Hardy also tried to make contact with radical forces in British colonies such as India and Malaya through the British Communist Party but complained: 'They look upon the PPTUS as they look on all colonial work -- it is of third rate importance to them.
Communists and left trade unionists in Indonesia had early contact with those in Malaya but the situation in the Dutch colony was, if anything, more repressive than in Malaya. At the 1927 Hankow conference the delegate from Indonesia, Musso, reported that trade unions could not function legally and that simple conspiratorial techniques were used: 'Javanese workers find other means of coming together and preparing actions against their oppressors. Numerous auxiliary organisations in the form of social and sports clubs have sprung up in spite of the vigilance of the police and the spies.' Browder reported 'no direct connections' with Indonesia while in early 1929 Musso wrote that attempts to reorganise the party 'have been crushed' and the unions dissolved. Sugono, the chairman of the Central Committee was tortured by the Dutch. In February 1929 Hardy sent a Chinese courier to arrange for delegates to the Vladivostock conference but this had proved fruitless.
Delegates from Japan's left wing union federation, Hyogikai, attended the Hankow conference and meetings of the PPTUS in Shanghai in 1928 as well as the 1929 Vladivostock conference. Repression of red trade unions and of the Japanese Communist Party was savage from the late 1920s onwards and this made regular contact with Shanghai very difficult. The necessity to operate illegally made even simple communication very complex. Hardy complained that he was forced to write totally coded letters to safe addresses which changed four times in the space of 12 months. At the June 1929 conference the Japanese delegate did not appear because Hardy received the details of the rendezvous from Japan only half an hour before the appointed time and the delegate left Shanghai without making contact. The methods of maintaining contact included the discreet publishing of certain numbers in the left wing Japanese press denoting the current codes, a method used by the Bolshevik press. While in 1928 the PPTUS hailed the left Hyogikai, Hardy privately acknowledged that it had lost much of its strength.
The PPTUS under 'Leon' and 'Edward': 1930-1931
Hardy left Shanghai in mid-1930 and went on to lead the Profintern's maritime work through which it operated an international courier service. His replacement by 'Leon' was accompanied by a sharp deterioration in the security of Comintern activities and a break in contact between Moscow and Shanghai which lasted from June until late 1930. The security of the conspiratorial work in Shanghai also changed. In September 1930 Leon reported to the Profintern in Moscow that the bureau had issued its first bulletin but this was 'technically almost unthinkable and extremely risky'. However the Bureau continued to work closely with the ACLF and maintained good contacts with the left wing Filipino trade unions. An organiser was based in Hong Kong with a brief to work with trade unions in Indo-China and Malaya.
In January 1931 after this period of disruption a new plan for work was decided and the leadership of the PPTUS was reconstituted on instructions from Profintern. New leaders of the PPTUS, 'Leon' and 'Edward', were appointed and their activities can be followed using both the new Soviet archives and the long standing records of the Shanghai Municipal Police. 'Edward' (or 'Kennedy') was an American, Charles Krumbein, who arrived in Shanghai in early 1931. The previous year he had been jailed in Britain where police believed he was a Comintern representative. While in jail his partner, Margaret Undjus, visited him. In Shanghai, the two lived together under the names Mr and Mrs Albert E. Stewart with Undjus using the name 'Alice'. The identity of 'Leon' is less certain but a British intelligence analysis suggested that he was probably James Dolson, an American journalist and communist who had been associated with Comintern activities in China from 1927-28. Dolson's presence in Shanghai in 1931 is confirmed by other Russian material.
The major preoccupation of the PPTUS was assistance to the ACLF, including the re-commencement of the journal Pacific Worker. But the ACLF was badly damaged by a major split in the CPC (see below) and much of the first half of 1931 was spent re-building small trade union groups within the tram, rail, textile and seamen's unions. A wave of spontaneous strikes in the cotton and silk industries where the workers were mainly women lifted hopes that the tide was turning and 'Alice' made systematic contact with women workers.
Beyond Shanghai, the work of the PPTUS continued. In April-May 1931, 'Leon' visited the Philippines where he found 'the same handful of 4-5 comrades' were trying to manage the new Communist Party, the trade union federation and the peasants' federation. The arrests of the Filipino trade union and peasant leaders Manahan and Evangelista for sedition following the founding of the Communist Party of the Philippines in November 1930 led to a PPTUS campaign of solidarity. In early 1931 the PPTUS began to have regular contact with Japanese communists and the trade unions which they led. Around May the Indonesian communist, Tan Malaka, was found living in Shanghai in a debilitated state. After medical treatment and rest, he was due to go south to establish contacts in Indonesia and India. Their continual frustration with colonies like Indonesia, Malaya and India led the PPTUS to write an 'open letter' criticising American, Dutch and French CPs for neglecting colonial work and demanding that the Executive Bureau of Profintern discuss this.
This frustration also resulted in determination to develop work based in Singapore and Malaya, evidently because it offered access to India and Indonesia, as well as having a growing left wing movement. This decision to work in the British colony was later to become crucial to the fate of the PPTUS. In early 1931 the PPTUS decided to send two cadres on visits of 6-8 weeks 'during which time they are to find out and establish permanent connections with Indonesian and Hindoo comrades in Singapore and through them with these respective countries.'
At the beginning of 1931 the underground trade union movement in China received a serious blow. This came not from the KMT government but from within the Chinese Communist Party. Over the previous two years criticism by the ECCI had been growing of the adventurist political strategy proposed by a key member of the CPC Politbureau, Li Li-san. This had culminated in a letter from Comintern in November 1930 and the arrival at this time of a Comintern representative, Pavel Mif, who helped unseat Li Li-san at the fourth plenum of the CPC in January 1931. The plenum also isolated the 'Right' faction (creating a three-way split) one of whose key leaders was a leading trade unionist, Lo Chang-lung.
The ACLF, perhaps closer to the day to day concerns of workers, was a base of opposition to Li Li-san's strategy which called for immediate armed uprisings and political strikes. In February 1931 'Leon' reported disturbing information among the state of underground communist work among trade unions in Shanghai. At a fraction meeting of ACLF cadres, 18 out of 19 had voted against the line of the fourth plenum, that is, against the clear wishes of the Comintern and the CPC majority. This split in the party resulted in most of the union activists in the ACLF breaking away and this left the CPC and the PPTUS with very few forces, reported 'Leon'. He railed against the treachery of the 'Right' faction. 'This faction used our people, our apparatus, our printing press, our money -- for their own fractional purposes. The Treasurer of the ACLF (Ou-Yu-Min) absconded with over 3,000 Mex, probably under Lochanlun's orders.'
Worse than this, all earlier assumptions about the strength of the underground union movement were discovered to be false. Before the split, he explained, he had believed that the membership of the red trade unions in Shanghai was between 700-800. 'It is now clear that what really existed was -- an apparatus, self-contained and almost completely isolated from the mass and their daily struggles (with but very few exceptions).' When he asked about previous claims, the Chinese comrades 'smile and shrug their shoulders and say they were never true!' To help retrieve this drastic situation, 'Leon' also passed on to Moscow the request of Chinese party that Lui Shao Chi be sent back to help lead the trade union work.
The situation worsened in April and June 1931 when two events badly damaged the Comintern apparatus in Shanghai and severely tested the effectiveness of its conspiratorial practices.
The first occurred in April 1931, when a member of the Political Bureau of the CPC, Ku Shun-chang, was arrested by the KMT in Hankow and revealed details of CPC organisation leading to the arrest of a large number of communist cadre in Shanghai. Key CPC leaders who escaped arrest disappeared but in spite of such precautions the general secretary of the CPC, Hsiang Chung-fa, was arrested and executed in June 1931 .
The arrest of Ku Shun-chang and his co-operation with the KMT meant that the Far Eastern Bureau of Comintern and PPTUS apparatuses also had to take rapid precautions and a 'wild state of disorganisation' followed as they struggled to preserve their lives and their organisation. Just before his arrest, Ku had organised an unsuccessful attempt to smuggle two Soviet military advisers to the Red Army and so they had to leave immediately.
The PPTUS leader, 'Leon', was on the point of returning from the Philippines, to rejoin his colleagues Krumbein ('Kennedy') and Margaret Undjus ('Alice'). On June 9 Krumbein reported to Moscow that most of the members of the Far Eastern Bureau had left and that the arrests since April had 'to a very large degree shattered our apparatus'. He closed his letter with the following: 'we feel certain that if we once can get our comrades on the correct track that things will take a rapid turn.'
A rapid turn began on June 1, when a courier for Comintern's OMS, Joseph Ducroux, was arrested in Singapore. Ducroux had travelled from Shanghai to Hong Kong where he had met the Vietnamese communist, Ho Chi Minh. Shortly afterwards, British police intercepted an 'invisible ink' letter from Ho Chi Minh to a leading Malayan communist which set up a meeting with Ducroux. This plus some unusual behaviour by Ducroux led to the his arrest along with several members of the Malayan Communist Party immediately after the meeting.
Ducroux had been on a mission for OMS to India and when passing through Shanghai had been given a Shanghai postal address used by OMS. When arrested, police found both the Shanghai address as well as some reference to Ho Chi Minh. This breach of conspiratorial practice which broke down the compartmentalised structure of two other fields of work led to the arrest of Ho Chi Minh and to the arrest in Shanghai of two key Comintern cadres, Jakov Rudnik and Tatiana Moiseenko. The latter, working under the pseudonyms of M. Hilaire Noulens and Mme Noulens, posed as a language teacher and his wife.
In fact, Rudnik and Moiseenko stood at the conspiratorial heart of the Comintern's Shanghai apparatus. Both had worked for Soviet intelligence in the 1920s and then for Comintern's OMS. As OMS officers, they were responsible for the entire technical and administrative support for the Far Eastern Bureau of Comintern and for the PPTUS. On top of this, following the crisis engendered by the April arrest of Ku, a large number of the PPTUS and FEB documents were given to Rudnik and Moiseenko for safekeeping since it was accurately assumed that Ku was unaware of the identities of the OMS officers.
Shortly after the British police arrested M. Noulens (of whose activities they had no inkling at first) they began to discover a treasure trove of letters, cables, finance records, addresses, ciphers and bank books, all related to the Comintern. These is turn allowed them to establish the movements of Comintern officials as well as their code names. In an analysis of the 'Noulens case' one year later, British intelligence declared that it 'afforded a unique opportunity of seeing from the inside, and on unimpeachable documentary evidence, the working of a highly developed Communist organisation of the 'illegal' order ... one moreover which ... is still in operation in spite of the set-back'. Of particular interest was a large number of letters from 'the notorious Annamite communist, Nguyen Ai Quac' (Ho Chi Minh). The 'most outstanding document' was a report from the CPC on the revenge killings of members of the family of Ku, carried out under the direction of Chou En-lai.
With their identities still unknown, the two OMS officers were tried, sentenced to death, then jailed instead and survived to return to Russia in 1939, a date which, ironically, ensured that they survived the worst Stalinist repression. On their return, they wrote a detailed report which is now available. Combined with other Soviet archives and the British analysis, we can now grasp the underground structure in Shanghai and get a picture of its operation. The Far Eastern Bureau, staffed by eight or nine Europeans, was oriented to China and was the source of an annual subsidy to the CPC of $95,000. It was also responsible for the selection of students to attend the Communist University of the Peoples of the Far East. The PPTUS had a staff of three Europeans and directed a subsidy of about $25,000 per year to the ACLF, as well as liaising with red unions in South East Asia, Japan.
The conditions in Shanghai required a high degree of skill in conspiratorial work. The OMS judged that meetings between Comintern officers and the CPC in public places such as cinemas, cafes and parks were far too dangerous and so private apartments had to be used. Rudnik ('Marin') noted that before he began work in Shanghai, he was told that a number of professional people would be able to make their apartments and offices available for conspiratorial purposes. But nothing like this occurred. Renting multiple apartments, he discovered, was complicated because most of them were leased by four large companies. This meant that a large number of passports and pseudonyms had to be used by Rudnik and Moiseenko to avoid obvious questions regarding one man's apparent need for so many apartments and offices. To add to this, the two most senior figures in the FEB, Pavel Mif and Ry'llski ('Austen') spoke only Russian, making translation and interpreting a major task. Mif could not walk around Shanghai in daylight hours because it was judged that, as the former director of the Communist University for the Peoples of the Far East, he might meet former students who had betrayed and now supported the KMT.
Both the FEB and PPTUS used the normal postal service but all letters between Shanghai and Russia were sent to Berlin to the address of 'some petty communist' who transmitted them to an intermediary from whom they were sent to Moscow. Long cables were broken into coded portions, 'each portion being sent to a different address and out of its proper sequence in the composite message'. Similarly, a system of couriers operated between Russia and most of the major centres in East and Southeast Asia.
Rudnik was meticulous in his conspiratorial technique, but not perfect. An American report into the 'Noulens Affair', prompted by the discovery that Richard Sorge had spent 1930-32 in Shanghai, noted that while under arrest, Rudnik asked to change into a grey suit. Examination of the suit by the Shanghai Municipal Police revealed that 'the three tabs bearing the tailor's name had either been deliberately cut out or frayed, so that they were illegible. Most of the buttons had been changed too. The trouser buttons, however, were untouched.' Tailor's marks on the buttons led to the identification of Rudnik with another person, 'Mr Alison', adding another small piece to the jigsaw puzzle of Comintern in Shanghai.
How effective was the system of conspiracy which was used by the Far Eastern Bureau, the PPTUS and the two OMS officials?
On first glance it would seem to have failed dramatically. The arrests of Rudnik, Moiseenko, Ducroux, the Malayan communists and Ho Chi Minh were severe blows; the apparatus and connections from Shanghai to Singapore were unusable; the mass of documents offered British and American intelligence an insight into Comintern which was unparalleled since the Arcos raid in Britain in 1926.

Yet the damage was limited. In spite of being able to identify a number of Comintern officials by code name, residence, dates of arrival and travel and personal habits, the British were unable to arrest any of these individuals. Except in the case of 'Edward' and 'Alice' (Krumbein and Undjus) no independent identification was established, meaning that figures such as Pavel Mif and Gerhart Eisler (later a top official in East Germany) slipped through the net. As well, there is no evidence of damage to the officials and apparatus of the Chinese Communist Party. We can conclude therefore first, that the system of establishing false identities and the use of pseudonyms largely worked well. Second, in spite of the collapse of compartmentalisation between the FEB and the PPTUS (Rudnik held the records of both), the more significant 'compartment', between the CPC and the Comintern, remained solid. Third, the raid did not affect Soviet military intelligence based in the city and one of its principal officers, Richard Sorge, followed the progress of the trial and did not leave Shanghai until late 1932.
This was also the conclusion of the British police and intelligence who thought it 'unwise to take too optimistic a view' of the raid and arrests. It was 'to be regretted that Austin, Schneider, Stewart (Kennedy) and Margaret Undjus (Alice) should have been able to cover their tracks and slip away unscathed. And it is a tribute to the efficacy of the system of concealment employed by these people that, except in the case of Stewart and Margaret Undjus, so few of their personal details have been betrayed by the papers as to render their reappearance in the same area, or elsewhere, free of any grave risk to themselves.'
Moreover, the British discovered that the Rudnik-Moiseenko arrests did not stop the continued functioning of the Comintern apparatus. While the trial of those two OMS officers was proceeding during the latter half of 1931, they had reason to believe that the remnants of Comintern were reporting it to Moscow:

[E]ven when the confusion resulting from the Noulens' raid was at its worst, the conspirative system previously estasblished was still effective enough to afford freedom of manoeuvre to the remains of the organisation for the purpose of remodelling its lines and withdrawing its threatened personnel, that the organising centres at Moscow and Berlin never really lost their grip on the situation and that gradually and furtively the Comintern's Far Eastern staff are re-establishing themselves.
We can be less certain about the consequences for the Chinese Communist Party's underground trade union work but it is clear that the practice of the CPC underground was much less successful. This was not only because of severe repression but also because of major strategic mistake. The fundamental problem lay in the CPC's unwillingness or inability to work in a 'mass' way in the manner prescribed by Lenin's re-invention of the Russian conspiratorial tradition. The only way to break out of conspiratorial isolation was to look to the 'yellow' trade unions and to conduct 'legal work' within them. This was made impossible by a combination of the ECCI's Third Period policies which discouraged this and by the CPC's own putschist orientation and its memory of the 1927 disaster which was preceded by co-operation with KMT forces. The consequence was that, as more recent Chinese scholarship points out, 'the [CPC] underground had no strategy to join hands with the neutral elements in the labor movement ... and attacked all organisations other than the red unions.'

Posted by David at 11:11 AM