by Brian Toohey
17
BLUSTER AND BELLIGERENCE
‘We have been seriously embarrassed by US failure to convey relevant information on this matter in a timely way.’
Bob Hamilton, Australian Defence official1
Most sensible ministers are irritated when classified information leaks (other than when it leaks for their own political advantage). The Fraser Government’s defence minister, Jim Killen, was different: leaks drove him into extraordinary rages.2 In May 1978, he fiercely denied the accuracy of an article by me in the AFR while simultaneously asking his department to berate US officials for not telling him about the information in the article.3 Killen’s fury was triggered by my report saying that contracts had been let for the US to build a new satellite ground station at its politically sensitive base at North West Cape. This was the first either Killen or his senior departmental policy advisers had heard about it.
The article said the US Defense Department’s evidence in the 1977 congressional budget hearings showed that it had contracted the American company Philco Ford to build the new ground station at NWC as part of a worldwide system of stations linked to a new series of satellites for US global military communications.4 Construction at NWC was due to start in the second half of 1978 and finish in 1980.
My report from the congressional record caught Australian defence policy advisers off-guard. They reacted by accusing the US of breaching the January 1974 Schlesinger–Barnard agreement that required it to give Australia ‘full and timely information’ about the installation of significant new equipment and any other notable changes at NWC.
Despite denying the article when it appeared, Killen asked a senior official in Defence’s Strategic and International Policy Division, Bob Hamilton, to send a tough message to Australia’s Washington embassy. On 10 May 1978 Hamilton instructed the head of the embassy’s defence section to personally inform the relevant Pentagon officials that ‘We have been seriously embarrassed by US failure to convey relevant information on this matter in a timely way’. In the same cable, Hamilton instructed the embassy to ‘register our strong concern that this material is being made available publicly in US Congressional hearings, which is of direct interest to the Australian government, but no steps have been taken either to inform Australia or to seek prior formal clearance from here’.5
He then told the embassy to inform the Pentagon: ‘No consideration can be given by the Australian government to the proposed replacement of the satellite terminal at NWC until a formal proposal is received from the US, and that it is necessary for the minister so to inform the Parliament.’ The embassy would not have relished delivering these instructions, which were blunter than any complaints the Whitlam Government had made to the Pentagon.
Hamilton also told the embassy that Killen wanted the Pentagon to provide full information on whether the new terminal would extend the capability or function of NWC. The terminal was the key component of twenty-one new AN/MSC-61 ground stations being built around the globe to transmit a wide range of US military communications over the latest Defense Satellite Communications System (DSCS 111). Hamilton said he was concerned this enhanced system would plug NWC into the entire US global military communications networks in ways that could make significant changes to the station’s existing satellite systems.
Killen became directly involved when he wrote stiff letters to the US ambassador, Philip Alston, on 25 May and 29 May asking him for answers from the US about other equipment installed earlier at NWC without the Australian government’s approval. In his 29 May letter, Killen wrote that the equipment for receiving and transmitting signals to the US fleet provided a ‘particular type of capability not hitherto installed at Harold E. Holt [NWC]’.6 He said he could not be expected to publicly support changes at NWC in the absence of authoritative advice from the US government, and that the proper course would have been for the US to have provided ‘the requisite information and sought formal concurrence. Failing such action already, I believe that it were best done now.’
The Americans were not accustomed to such a sharp rebuke from an Australian defence minister, especially from the Coalition. It is unclear why Killen muddied the waters by raising a less contentious piece of equipment than the new one he asked Hamilton to complain about. Alston replied on 31 May that this older equipment was a simple ground-station receiver that did not alter NWC’s function. He also reminded Killen that he had written to him on 16 May explaining that the Australian deputy commander at NWC was always fully informed of what was happening there. At least Alston’s answer gave Killen grounds for complaining about the failure to obtain Australian government approval before letting this contract, even if Defence’s internal communications should have been better. Alston ended on an insouciant note: in order to ensure that there were ‘no surprises at policy levels’, he said he wished to inform Killen that staff at the station’s newspaper would be moving into new quarters and new colour TV equipment would be installed.7
In a further setback for Killen, I reported in the AFR on 23 May 1978 that the US embassy had received a State Department cable the day before telling it that the US was now taking the hard line that the Australian Defence Department had been informed about the NWC proposals.8 My article also reported that local Defence sources said the US had briefed a senior Australian officer, Air Vice Marshal John Jordan, in detail in 1977 about the proposed new ground station while he was working at Defence’s headquarters at Russell Hill in Canberra, and that he had distributed a minute reporting what was said.
This article was partly based on answers the local head of the US Information Agency, Robert Nesbitt, had given to questions from me. Later that day Hamilton called Nesbitt and the US embassy’s political counsellor, Dixon Boggs, into his office. An embassy official later told me that Hamilton criticised Nesbitt for talking to a journalist about Jordan and other matters. His tone infuriated the impeccably mannered Boggs, who told me when we met up in Washington in 1980 that he had ‘never been dressed down so rudely’ in his diplomatic career. He particularly resented Nesbitt being admonished for doing his job of answering journalists’ questions. According to Defence’s record of the conversation, Nesbitt explained that he couldn’t have been the source of the information about Jordan as he had never heard of him until that morning.9 Hamilton seemed to have missed my article’s clear statement that the source was an Australian official.
Killen was still stewing about the issue in late June when I put new questions to his department about another change at NWC. He banned his department from answering any questions from the entire Fairfax media group before accepting advice from Defence’s PR director, Harry Rayner, that he confine the ban to the AFR. Killen wrote to the AFR’s acting editor, Fred Brenchley, on 29 June stating that my initial 8 May article was ‘utterly false. One question asked of my office by Mr Toohey could have prevented the false and mischievous assertion he made.’10 But asking Killen’s office would have been futile, as neither he nor his office staff nor his departmental policy advisers knew the answer—hence the complaints to the US about not being told. Had my article been ‘utterly false’, a normal Cabinet minister, unlike Killen, would not have instructed Hamilton to berate the Americans on the basis that it was true.
Rayner suggested to Killen on 5 July that he might lift his ban after the Australian Journalists’ Association (AJA) proposed banning its members from handling any material from the minister or his department.11 Rayner also noted that the Melbourne Sun News-Pictorial’s bureau chief, Laurie Oakes, had asked a series of questions ‘basically the same as those which Mr Toohey posed before the ban’.
Killen directed his department to answer Oakes’ questions but not mine. The executive assistant to department head Arthur Tange wrote a note to Killen on the same day saying his stand was jeopardising the D-notice system of voluntary censorship of specified information, because the AJA, which was due to meet the Press Council the next day, would be even less disposed to sympathetically consider
the D-notice issue than hitherto.12 Killen lifted the ban later that day, but Defence was not suddenly converted to open government.
I asked the department a question on 27 November 1978 about the installation of an improved version of a vital piece of equipment at NWC that was used to communicate with submarines. A senior official, G.R.Marshall, explained in a minute to Killen on 29 November that Defence was willing to say that this version (designated ISABPS) had been installed with Australia’s approval, but it didn’t want to acknowledge that it was linked to another piece that had been installed in October (designated IEMATS). Marshall said IEMATS allowed emergency action messages, which may ‘include firing orders for US submarines’, to be sent directly from the continental US to nuclear submarines (via NWC) rather than relayed more slowly from elsewhere.13 Moreover, the messages no longer had to be ‘manually processed before they can be relayed from NWC’. In other words, IEMATS eliminated the previous small chance that some Australian staff member at NWC could discover what was happening and inform the Australian government. Marshall said, ‘Given the potential significance of this system, we consider this information should not be volunteered to Toohey.’
Marshall left unsaid the fact that denying me the information was much less important than keeping the Australian public in the dark about what was being done in its name. A follow-up minute in December said Defence needed to be prepared for the possibility that I knew about IEMATS and would claim that ‘we were being deliberately deceptive’.14 Marshall’s minutes demonstrate they were being deliberately deceptive. More importantly, the fact that the US had developed this automated system to send firing orders to its nuclear subs was not kept secret from the American public. Once again, Defence decided it should conceal information about a base in Australia from the Australian public when the US didn’t conceal the information from its own citizens.
18
NORTH WEST CAPE: MORE DANGEROUS THAN EVER
‘Donald Trump sets goal to create US military space force by 2020’
ABC News, 10 August 2018
By the 1990s, the North West Cape communications base had become less important to the US than in previous decades for ballistic-missile-carrying submarines. It handed the management of the base to Australia in 1999, but retained the ability to automatically relay signals to its submarines through NWC without Australia knowing. However, it has recently become more important than ever, playing a potential role in space warfare as well as terrestrial nuclear war.
By the early 2000s, the US wanted a new long-term lease—something the Whitlam Government had vowed it would never grant after the initial one expired. For Whitlam, choosing not to renew the lease was the only realistic way to restore the sovereignty that had been lost by hosting a base that a foreign country could use for a nuclear war without Australia’s permission.
In July 2008, the Rudd Labor government dutifully signed a new treaty, giving the US ‘all necessary rights of access to, and use of, the station’ for the next twenty-five years.1 The US wanted the new lease for two reasons that had emerged by 2008. Firstly, NWC was well situated for contributing to the US military-industrial complex’s latest frontier: space warfare. Secondly, the rise of China made NWC more important in letting the US communicate with its nuclear-powered ‘hunter killer’ submarines in the Asia-Pacific via VLF underwater signals.
American hunter-killer submarines and Australia’s conventionally powered ones are now the main users of the base’s VLF transmitters.2 China’s submarines are effectively trapped not far from their coastline by a US-Japanese network of undersea and overhead sensors that monitor the various choke points preventing easy access to the open ocean.3 In the unlikely event of any of China’s four new ballistic-missile submarines reaching the relative safety of the open ocean, the most important task of America’s nuclear hunter killers is to trail these boats and sink them at the outbreak of hostilities.4
This strategy is extremely dangerous. China’s land-based retaliatory missiles have always been vulnerable to highly accurate US missiles, including non-nuclear ones. Sinking the submarines would destroy the supposedly invulnerable component of China’s small retaliatory capability. Faced with a choice of using or losing their sea-based missiles as well as those on land, Beijing would have an incentive to launch first if it considered an attack was imminent. It has always vowed never to do so, but this may change.
The contentious role of US hunter-killer submarines may explain why Australian officials have become more secretive about NWC. When I asked Defence Media on 22 June 2016 if US nuclear submarines would receive VLF signals relayed through NWC in future, it replied by email: ‘Defence does not comment on submarine operations nor capability’ (other than when it suits it). A Defence official said privately that I might have a better chance asking the Americans. Another source verified that US submarines would definitely use NWC.
In a separate development, the Gillard Government let the US establish new facilities in Western Australia to improve the Pentagon’s space-fighting capabilities. During the annual Australia–US Ministerial Consultations (AUSMIN) in November 2010 and 2012, the Australians agreed to let the US install space surveillance radar and an advanced space surveillance telescope at NWC. The radar is operated remotely from the Australian Air Force base at Edinburgh in South Australia. The US military was more forthcoming on this equipment than Australia.5
Australian ministers announced that both the radar and the telescope could help locate space junk, but they failed to say that the principal task of these sensors is to track and locate Chinese and Russian surveillance and communications satellites so that they can be disabled or destroyed. During AUSMIN 2010, the Foreign Affairs Department released a fact sheet denying that the new facilities would contribute to the militarisation of space, claiming instead that ‘Australia, the US and other countries recognise the right of all nations to access space for peaceful purposes’.6
Once again Australian ministers and officials appeared ignorant of readily available information about major strategic issues involving the nation. Contrary to the official claims, the new facilities are incompatible with Australia’s ratification of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty preventing the militarisation of space. Melbourne University’s Professor Richard Tanter explained that the radar and the telescope would contribute to the militarisation of space because much of the data from the sensors will go back to the US Combined Space Operations Center, which supports the component of the US Strategic Command whose mission includes destroying or disabling Chinese and Russian satellites.7 Although some of the administrative arrangements have changed, the US subsequently expanded its preparations for space warfare.
President Donald Trump took a further step to militarising space when he announced on 18 June 2018, ‘We must have American dominance in space … We are going to have the Air Force and we’re going to have the “Space Force”.’8 The White House announced a starting date of 2020 for what it called the sixth branch of the US military.9
Australian governments are still to tell their citizens that a base on their soil contributes to this sixth branch of the US military in violation of the nation’s treaty obligations. Perhaps Australians will find out when some the world’s communication satellites suddenly stop working and global war begins.
19
THE MAN WHO THOUGHT HE OWNED THE SECRETS
‘What other contractors to the CIA, who may or may not employ Russian spies, are privileged to receive, analyse and transmit data from facilities on Australia soil?’
Gough Whitlam to parliament, 4 May 1977
The security seemed impenetrable at the windowless vault in the TRW corporation’s compound in Redondo, California. The vault was a core element of the deeply secret eavesdropping satellite system called Rhyolite that TRW had built for the CIA. One of the vault’s main functions was to handle messages to and from the satellite ground station that TRW operated under CIA guidance at Pine Gap near Alice Springs.
Redo
ndo’s security did not prevent Christopher Boyce, a young dope-smoking high-school dropout, from taking highly classified information from the vault in 1975 and 1976 and selling it to the Soviets. After the 24-year-old Boyce was sentenced in 1977 to forty years’ jail for espionage, he explained to congressional committees and journalists how security really worked at Redondo. He said he and his co-workers held daily drinking parties in the vault, mixing daiquiris in a special blender meant for destroying code cards. Staff regularly took secure communication satchels out of the vault to carry back liquor supplies.1 Boyce also took out classified documents in the satchels and returned with liquor. As was widely reported, he sold the Soviets detailed information about Rhyolite’s ability to intercept a wide range of electronic signals and US plans for the next generation of satellites.
Meanwhile, the head of Australia’s Defence Department, Sir Arthur Tange, took extreme measures to prevent Australian ministers knowing about the Rhyolite secrets. He insisted on briefing new prime minister Gough Whitlam and his deputy, Defence Minister Lance Barnard, about Pine Gap immediately after the Australian election in December 1972. The briefing, which included information about the US base at Nurrungar near Woomera, was inexcusably skimpy, confused and misleading. Tange insisted that neither Whitlam nor Barnard could tell the public that Pine Gap and Nurrungar were ground stations for satellites, although the Coalition defence minister, Allen Fairhall, had told parliament on 29 April 1969 that ‘Pine Gap and Woomera [Nurrungar] … are concerned with satellites’. Whitlam and Barnard should not have agreed to be briefed in the intensely busy period immediately after the election—they should have waited until their staff could help them challenge Tange’s refusal to let them repeat publicly available information, such as the links to satellites. This would have been at least a tiny step towards honouring their clear election promise to tell the public more about the bases.