by Brian Toohey
We then began negotiating with the officials—Kim Jones from Foreign Affairs and a senior ASIS officer—over what could be published. The negotiations were plain sailing. At the conclusion, the ASIS officer said he thought the book was ‘fair’ even though it gave a detailed account of his service’s secretive activities and blunders.
We said in the authors’ note at the start of the published book that the negotiations ‘were conducted in a sensible and professional spirit and the government responded speedily to the various drafts submitted to it. Apart from one major deletion identifying a public relations firm, we are satisfied that the amendments and rephrasing which resulted from our negotiations have not impaired the overall integrity of the book.’
Ian Macphee, the Coalition’s shadow foreign minister, had no qualms about accepting our invitation to launch Oyster. He lost the shadow portfolio before speaking, but said the book revealed much that ‘should concern and alarm [the Australian public]’.6 His insightful speech is reproduced as the foreword to the paperback edition of Oyster. No subsequent minister or shadow minister has defended the publication of classified material as sometimes a healthy part of our democracy.
Writing in The Age later, Robert Haupt revealed the information that had been deleted from the book. The government had accepted that we could include this information as an appendix in the paperback edition of Oyster. The appendix explained that Eric White Associates, established in 1947, had a lengthy role, unknown to most of its employees, in providing cover for ASIS’s overseas operatives as supposed employees of the firm. Its owner, Eric White, was a close friend of Prime Minister Bob Menzies. White did the government a favour by helping ASIS, but he could expect the government to favour his clients in return. By 1964, he was running the third-largest PR company in the world. Its appointment in the late 1960s to advise Tunku Abdul Rahman’s Malaysian government created a well-placed source of information for ASIS; a contract with the Indonesian government followed. White’s Bangkok office was opened specifically as cover for ASIS. In 1974, the company, along with its embedded ASIS operatives, was taken over by an American PR conglomerate that was swallowed by another group, which dropped the name Eric White Associates. White left the company in 1986. The sky did not fall in when this deleted information was revealed in newspapers and in the paperback edition of Oyster.
Another deletion from the book was merely silly: the government insisted that no previously unnamed ex-ASIS officer could be named.7 The stated reason was that it might help a country identify the agents (informants) the named ASIS officer ran there. This rigid rule meant we could not name an early ASIS official posted to Indonesia who didn’t have any agents and preferred to spend most of his time drinking with fellow expats.
While government censorship was forcing Oyster to obey this rule, bookshops were simultaneously selling the memoir of one of ASIS’s ex-deputy directors, Harvey Barnett.8 His book’s dust jacket identified every country where he had been posted, including Indonesia, with no concern about the potential to identify his local agents. At least he had some agents, unlike the incompetent officer whose name we couldn’t mention.
39
EMBARRASSING THE GOVERNMENT, INFORMING THE PUBLIC
‘Why should the public not know … to what extent the Americans exert influence over Australian decisions?’
Michelle Grattan1
The Hawke Government raced into the High Court following revelations in the September 1988 edition of the independent magazine The Eye that US Secretary of State George Shultz had dictated a new Australian policy overturning the long-standing position of previous Coalition and Labor governments that nuclear-armed warships could not enter Australian harbours.2 Shultz intervened after the defence minister, Gordon Scholes, followed departmental advice and announced on 13 December 1983 that the government would apply the existing bipartisan policy and ban the British aircraft carrier HMS Invincible from entering Sydney Harbour. Shultz immediately rang Prime Minister Bob Hawke, who told Foreign Minister Bill Hayden to call Shultz.
Shultz told Hayden he would send a new announcement and not only dictated the policy, but also the press release. After seeing the text, senior diplomat Geoff Miller sent Hayden a minute warning: ‘It would be most unwise to issue a statement of this sort without detailed consideration.’ Negotiations dragged on until Scholes backed down and announced Shultz’s policy on 26 February 1984. Warships coming into Australian harbours no longer had to declare whether nuclear weapons were on board. Scholes, a decent and thoughtful man, was demoted to the junior ministry.
The announcement began: ‘The Australian Labor Party and this government’—words written by Shultz, not the Australian government. To illustrate the extent to which the US was dictating policy, The Eye published extracts from Shultz’s text alongside Scholes’ near-identical version. The Coalition’s acting shadow foreign minister, Alexander Downer, told the ABC’s 7.30 Report on 31 August that it was a ‘most extraordinary thing’ to allow the Americans to write press releases for the Australian government. The account of the government’s backdown was one of a series of short articles that The Eye dubbed ‘The Hayden Papers’. The series began by saying the magazine had discovered the details of Shultz’s intervention among an estimated 10,000 pages of documents and assumed (perhaps wrongly) that Hayden had discarded the documents as of no relevance to his forthcoming job of governor-general.
Following the court case, The Eye reported that the government had sought an order from the High Court to search my home in Sydney but it gave the wrong address.3 Thankfully, Chief Justice Tony Mason refused to grant this rarely used ‘Anton Piller’ order, which allows the government to ransack the occupants’ home.
Mason made separate orders on 1 September 1988 that required me to hand over not only the documents relating to the Hayden Papers, but seemingly any Defence or Foreign Affairs documents, or extracts therefrom, no matter how old or innocuous. In an affidavit to the court, I explained that I couldn’t hand over the Hayden Papers because I’d destroyed them (on security grounds). I refused to comply with the rest of Mason’s order as the transcript suggested it was not limited to classified documents and could mean I was supposed to hand over any press release, ministerial statement or departmental report I’d obtained going back to the 1940s.4 Justice Daryl Dawson, who took over when the court resumed on 6 September, said Mason’s orders were no longer in force, awarded costs against the Commonwealth and flicked the case to the Federal Court. No further hearing was necessary as the case was settled on 8 September.
The articles in the Hayden Papers series included many revelations apart from those about the government’s humiliation over the nuclear ships issue. One article, called ‘Holding ONA at bay’, gave examples of papers from the Office of National Assessments, which was headed by the hawkish Michael Cook. One of these papers tried to reverse Labor’s policy of supporting a Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty to slow the nuclear arms race. ONA’s fatuous argument was that the treaty would ‘present the US weapons laboratories with problems in preserving career opportunities to attract good staff’.5 The article reported that a memo on 8 December 1983 from the Arms Control Branch in Foreign Affairs expressed astonishment that this factor had been mentioned. It also took issue with ONA’s reference to the opposition to the treaty as the ‘Western arguments’, pointing out they were only the arguments of the Reagan administration, and that supporters of the treaty included Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Canada, Japan, New Zealand and Australia. Hayden never leaked any classified information to me, but he did tell me that Justice Bob Hope had told him that Cook had complained to him that Hayden’s ‘anti-Americanism’ was a problem. Hope, who had conducted the Royal Commission on Intelligence and Security beginning in 1974, looked a little surprised to see me coming in Hayden’s door as he was leaving, after imparting this message only a couple of minutes earlier.
One of the government’s justifications for taking court action was that the
articles would damage relations with Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. They didn’t: Indonesia subsequently signed an agreement on offshore oil boundaries that was highly favourable to Australia; and PNG’s prime minister, in a droll put-down of Hayden’s dismissal of PNG’s leaders as ‘immature’, said he was too mature to bother about it. The government’s claim that the article would ‘embarrass’ Hayden as the governor-general designate was legally irrelevant as well as baseless. Although the leaked documents sometimes put him in a bad light, he happily told me he wasn’t bothered. The new departmental head, Dick Woolcott, correctly predicted that the fuss would soon blow over.6
Because there was no official collection of documents called the Hayden Papers, the government didn’t know which documents it was trying to injunct. The Press Council dryly observed, ‘As the Government does not know what was in these papers, other than what was published, the injunctions lack a certain degree of precision.’7 Referring to the case against The Eye, Michelle Grattan, a senior journalist renowned for her unbiased analysis, said the dangers from suppression were greater than those from leaks: ‘Why should the public not know … to what extent the Americans exert influence over Australian decisions? … Just because information has a secrets stamp on it, it gains an aura it would not have if it were conveyed verbally, for example, in a ministerial leak.’8
Postscript: Bill Hayden’s often prickly attitude to some American policies attracted the ire of US intelligence services. A highly placed Australian official with an intimate knowledge of what happened told me on a non-attributable basis that a US agency tried to damage Hayden. The official explained that this agency asked an Australian intelligence officer in Washington in the 1980s to send a damaging transcript of audio recording to the officer’s Canberra headquarters. The recording was allegedly of Hayden in bed with a woman in Cairo who was a local CIA contact. The intelligence officer subsequently put the material through his security blender. When I questioned Hayden about this, he said that other than in official meetings, his wife, Dallas, was with him the entire time he was in Cairo.
40
EVANS: A VEXATIOUS LITIGANT UNDONE
‘We relied on speculation in mounting the court case.’
Gareth Evans1
Less than two months after the government lost the Hayden Papers case about leaked classified documents, Foreign Minister Gareth Evans obtained a special late-night High Court hearing on 8 November 1988. The upshot was that my colleague Bill Pinwill and I were accused of causing the death of Australian spies.2
Evans lodged an affidavit with the court claiming to ‘verily believe’ that the November issue of The Eye would carry an article disclosing the identity of an ASIS officer in South-East Asia. The problem for Evans and Justice Bill Deane was that the November 1988 edition was already circulating in Parliament House and contained no such article. Nevertheless, Deane issued an injunction against The Eye to prevent publication of this non-existent article. Because the case could have dragged on for many costly months, he should have demanded plausible evidence instead of relying on Evans’ flimsy assertions about what he ‘verily believed’.
If Evans wanted to establish the truth before rushing to court, he could have phoned me and discovered there was no such article in that edition and none was planned in future. He was unrepentant in the Senate the next day, claiming he had acted on ‘a reliable source’. The reliability of this source was never tested in court as the case was settled with costs against the Commonwealth once it became clear that its allegations were totally false. The Commonwealth also accepted my assurance that I had no intention of ever publishing what it had alleged.
Fortunately for the government, the case ended so promptly that it couldn’t use a Foreign Affairs briefing note that recommended bizarre points to use in a press conference or a court about the dangers of leaking the name of an ASIS officer.3 In one puzzling example, the note warned about what had happened when the New Zealand government tried to jail the French secret service operatives who sank the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour in 1985. It said France had responded with ‘threats to trade access, attacks in international forums, spoiling of export products and restrictions on embassy access’.4 What should New Zealand have done? Apologise for catching murderous terrorists who were intelligence officers? The note also referred to Indonesia’s retaliation against Australia after David Jenkins published articles in the Sydney Morning Herald in April 1986 about President Suharto’s immense wealth. No leaked Australian information was involved, but the briefing note implied that the SMH shouldn’t have mentioned the dictator’s corruption.
The most astonishing proposal in the Foreign Affairs note was that the government should say it was common knowledge in major countries that espionage occurs, but that countries in South-East Asia and the South Pacific were not aware of this. In essence, Australia’s diplomats were saying that these countries were too backward to realise that espionage occurs. The note also claimed there had been no repercussions from the publication of the Hayden Papers because they didn’t deal with ‘espionage operations conducted against friendly countries’. On the contrary, one of the articles revealed that a secret memo with the code word ‘Spoke’ showed that HMAS Cessnock was carrying a team from the DSD to conduct electronic espionage against Indonesia. At the time, Australian newspapers were hyperventilating about how Russian trawlers can carry eavesdropping gear. Acting on his own advice, Evans made an emotive claim to the judge that this article would endanger the life of an ASIS officer and his family. This officer was near retirement, working in Canberra, not in South-East Asia, had no family and was not in danger.
Evans later admitted on the ABC’s PM on 23 November 1988 that he had relied on ‘speculation in mounting the court case’ and only a ‘bit of evidence’. Yet he had asked that an injunction give him the right to censor all references by me to ASIS activities overseas in future, no matter how outrageous. Evans had been the attorney-general during the scandalous ASIS ‘raid’ on Melbourne’s Sheraton Hotel in November 1983, but now was demanding that I be subjected to ongoing censorship about anything this erratic agency might do. No such constraint would apply to any other journalist.
Rather than showing remorse for stuffing up in the High Court, in the same PM interview Evans tried to justify what he had told Justice Deane by saying that two ASIS contacts had been murdered during the past eighteen months in ‘circumstances where a connection was easily able to be drawn between them and our operation’. The sensational claim received widespread publicity, with repeated suggestions in the media that people who wrote about ASIS were likely to cause the murder of its agents. The clear inference was that The Eye and Bill Pinwill and I, as co-authors of Oyster, might be responsible for these deaths. The only known instance where ASIS’s local contacts have lost their lives was in Indochina, and no one has ever pretended that the media were responsible for that tragedy. ASIS officers are rarely in danger of being killed. If one is caught in Tokyo receiving confidential information on natural gas negotiations, he or she won’t be taken outside and shot.
Grattan wrote shortly after his PM interview that Evans had admitted to her that no connection could be drawn between ASIS and the deaths of the two people he had referred to in that interview.5 On 18 January 1989 he sent Pinwill a letter acknowledging that ‘Our working assumption has certainly been that the identity of the ASIS officers in question as ASIS officers remains unknown and that the victims were not killed as a result of these contacts.’ This was a blunt repudiation of his claim on PM on 23 November that the connection could easily be made and the offensive inference that Pinwill and I were somehow responsible for their deaths. ASIS has enough trouble recruiting good contacts overseas without its minister publicly suggesting they could be murdered as a result of their work—a suggestion seemingly prompted by nothing more than Evans’ need to justify his reckless accusation about The Eye. Unhappily, similar impetuous behaviour sullied Evans’ often outstanding contribution to pub
lic life.
There is nothing necessarily wrong with naming ASIS officers. Former ASIS officers have done so in books; so have journalists in newspapers. I had long known the identity of the ASIS officer whom Evans said in his affidavit was in danger of being killed, but I never saw any reason to publish his or her name. For legal reasons, the officer is called ‘Z’ here. I hadn’t named Z earlier when someone in ASIS told me he was disturbed that Hayden, while foreign minister, had asked the spy agency to arrange for an officer to approach a young Australian journalist, Gwen Robinson, to become an informant (agent) when they were both working in the same South-East Asian country. Robinson told me that Z had asked her, somewhat hesitantly, to pass on information she picked up on rebels in a dangerous part of the country. As one of the few Western journalists in this country who was invited to parties by the local defence minister, Robinson was well aware that if it became known she was Z’s informant, she could face serious harm from the rebels and/or the minister. It was plausible that this link could emerge: an Australian diplomat in the country had been known to mention Z’s name and ASIS job during dinner parties with Australian and British journalists.6 This diplomat also supplied Evans with the ‘speculative’ information he relied on in court.
ASIS should be required to follow the 1970s US practice of banning the CIA from using journalists as agents. If the connection is exposed, it puts the lives of other journalists serving overseas at risk because they can also be suspected of spying. Today, CIA officers again pose as journalists, while ASIS and Australian paramilitary operatives sometimes pose as aid workers.