July 19, 2006

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Origins and background

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Surveillance of ABC programs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Four Corners and the early 1960s

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusions

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by David at 11:28 PM

July 09, 2006

'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 co