On Borrowed Time

by Robert Manne

  The Turnbull government’s announcement of the US deal was accompanied by military bombast and a preposterous legislative proposal that reflected with precision Canberra’s groupthink and its loss of touch with reality over the supposed asylum-seeker threat. On 14 November 2016, Malcolm Turnbull announced nothing less than the “largest maritime operation” in Australia’s peacetime history aimed at intercepting asylum-seeker boats. In addition to the already deployed six Armidale-class ships, there would be an Anzac-class warship or guided missile frigate plus a substantial increase in air forces plus several additional patrol boats. All this was called Australia’s new “ring of steel”. For his part, Peter Dutton introduced extraordinarily foolish, cruel and pointless legislation into the parliament that would prevent every asylum seeker on Nauru and Manus Island – even after settlement in the United States or elsewhere, even after fifty years, even if they had family in Australia – from ever being allowed to visit our shores.

  The logic was quite insane. Apparently the minister believed that, without this legislation, asylum seekers would be willing to pay people smugglers thousands of dollars for the privilege of setting out for Australia in a boat with a real likelihood of sinking, with a near-certainty of being intercepted by the Australian navy and returned to point of departure, with a minuscule chance of reaching Australia, and with the certainty if they reached Australia of being transferred to Nauru for a period of indefinite detention. Thankfully, because of Labor and cross-bench resistance, Dutton’s preposterous legislation was quickly and quietly withdrawn.

  Since the Turnbull government’s announcement, even though the whole border control policy is still hidden behind an indefensible anti-democratic wall of secrecy, so far as one can tell not a single asylum-seeker boat has left Indonesia or anywhere else for Australia. Things might change, but on present indications it seems as though Canberra’s fears about a flotilla of asylum-seeker boats setting out for Australia at the slightest sign of a softening of our five-pronged deterrence system were what they always appeared to be – symptoms of a fevered imagination. As so often in history, “intelligence” has proved itself disconnected from intelligence in the really existing world and from what might justly be called common sense.

  The evidence is now becoming clear. There has been no sign of a resumption of the people-smuggler trade following the deal with the United States for the settlement of the people on Nauru and Manus Island. While Australia retains its policy of naval interception and return, where possible, to the point of departure, there will be no return to the asylum-seeker situation of 2010–2013 and thus no likely prospect of the arrival of large numbers of asylum-seeker boats.

  All of this matters profoundly. The lives of 32,000 refugees are presently being destroyed by our government and our national reputation is presently being trashed because of the persistence within the bureaucracy and both sides of politics of a demonstrably false and fantastical fear.

  At present 30,000 asylum seekers are living in misery in Australia with no idea about what their future holds or whether they will ever see their families again. If the policy of turnbacks is retained, there is no reason why those found to be refugees should not be allowed to apply first for permanent residency and then full citizenship, as in Australian history every other refugee wave has been.

  At present there are, in addition, 380 or so people from Nauru or Manus Island who are in Australia because of their own severe physical or mental illness or because of the illness of a member of their family. With the policy of turnbacks, there is no reason why they cannot be allowed to stay here.

  In 2017 and 2018 we shall learn how many (if any) refugees are to be settled in the United States. There are certain however to be very many refugees on Nauru and especially on Manus Island whom the United States or other countries will not settle. It is not difficult to imagine the excruciating pain and despair that those who are rejected after their hopes have been raised will feel. Almost certainly, significant numbers of asylum seekers, we now know, will not set out for Australia while the policy of turnbacks is retained. There is no reason, therefore, why those marooned on Nauru and Manus Island cannot be settled in Australia, as the equivalent cohort was during the Howard years.

  After fifteen years of bitterness, experiment and cruelty, Australia’s asylum-seeker problem has almost certainly been solved. Why we have done what we have done over the past fifteen years can be explained without recourse to negative stereotypes about the eternal character of the nation. Without any adverse consequence, the fifteen years of cruelty can be ended. A new chapter of humanly decent policy with regard to asylum seekers, more reflective of the many fine and generous impulses in our history of welcoming refugees, can at long last be opened. For pity’s sake, let it be.

  The Monthly blog, 21 December 2016

  AUSTRALIAN HISTORY

  BURCHETT AND THE KGB

  Among Australian journalists there has been no individual more lionised or demonised than Wilfred Burchett. Burchett’s supporters include some of Australia’s more prominent left-wing journalists, academics and filmmakers, such as John Pilger, Phillip Knightley, Ben Kiernan, Gavan McCormack and David Bradbury. They regard Burchett as one of the most brilliant and independent twentieth-century reporters, whose greatness is found in his unfailing humanity and, in McCormack’s words, “uncommon moral passion”, and in the courage it took to report world affairs during the Cold War from what is customarily called “the other side”. They regard Burchett’s famous report of the conditions in Hiroshima after the dropping of the first atomic bomb and his ten or more years of reporting the Vietnam War from behind communist lines as his greatest achievements. And they regard the fact that Burchett was stripped of his Australian passport by the Menzies government after the Korean War as one of the most shameful abuses of human rights in the history of Australia.

  Burchett’s enemies include (or included) some of Australia’s most influential post-war anti-communist or conservative activists, journalists and intellectuals – B.A. Santamaria, Denis Warner, Frank Knopfelmacher and Peter Coleman, the former editor of Quadrant. In the 1980s I was associated with this group. We regarded Burchett as a lifelong communist propagandist, who shamed himself in particular by his defence of the Stalinist show trials in Eastern Europe; by his work on the enemy side during the Korean War where his journalism was directed and paid for by the Chinese government, where he visited prisoner-of-war camps holding Australian soldiers under atrocious conditions and where he was involved in the process of producing forced confessions from captured US air pilots on trumped-up charges of germ warfare; by his support for the Soviet army’s brutal crushing of the anti-communist Hungarian uprising of 1956; and by his breathless enthusiasm for Maoist China in general and for the Great Leap Forward in particular, in which, it is now estimated, up to 40 million Chinese starved to death.

  Possibly the most damaging and controversial charge the anti-Burchett camp ever laid against him was the claim that he was an agent of the Soviet Union’s Committee of State Security, the KGB, one of history’s largest and most brutal secret police empires. The only direct evidence on this matter came from Yuri Krotkov, a playwright and part-time KGB worker, who had defected to the United Kingdom in 1963 and who gave open testimony before a US Senate Committee in 1969. What follows is his Washington story.

  Krotkov claimed he became friendly with Burchett in the Soviet sector of Berlin in 1947, at a time when Burchett was working as a reporter for the conservative British newspaper the Daily Express. Krotkov believed that Burchett had grasped that he was connected to the Soviet security service and that he was interested in establishing some kind of covert relationship. Before anything of substance developed, however, Krotkov was ordered to return to Moscow.

  For the next nine years Krotkov heard nothing from Burchett. In early 1956, or so he claimed, Burchett was in Moscow and phoned him out of the blue. Krotkov’s KGB controller, Krasilnikov, agreed that they should meet to see what
Burchett wanted. Burchett now laid his cards on the table. He told Krotkov that he was an underground member of the Communist Party and had been working in China, North Korea and Vietnam where the regimes had supported him financially. Because of his Korean War activities, Burchett could not hope to find employment with a capitalist newspaper. Although he might work as the Moscow correspondent for the American “progressive” newspaper, the National Guardian, he needed financial support from the Soviet Communist Party. He told Krotkov that “the foreign correspondents in Moscow have 10,000 roubles, in old money and that he needs particularly this money”.

  Shortly after, while Burchett travelled to Sofia, Warsaw and Berlin, his proposal was carefully considered by the KGB. On his return, Krotkov informed Burchett that his offer would be accepted. According to Krotkov, Burchett returned to Moscow two years later. In fact it was in 1957. Krotkov took up the case with his new KGB controller, Churanov. Churanov seems not to have been briefed by his predecessor. At first he was not interested. According to Krotkov, Burchett went off in high dudgeon to see two Australian communists then in Moscow. Soon after, the misunderstanding was smoothed out. Burchett was provided with a fine apartment in one of the most prestigious blocks in central Moscow. Krotkov learned that Burchett had been handed over to Victor Kartsev, a decorated Stalinist secret policeman who had been reduced to part-time work following the Khrushchev “thaw”. Krotkov’s contact with Burchett now ended, except for a chance meeting at a petrol station where Burchett complained about Kartsev’s character, particularly his anti-Semitism. Of Burchett’s operations for the KGB, Krotkov had only the vaguest knowledge.

  Krotkov’s testimony about Burchett did not have much impact at first, even in Australia. Parts, however, which were read into the records of the Australian Senate by Vince Gair, the leader of the anti-communist Democratic Labor Party, formed the basis of an article about Burchett as a KGB agent published in Focus, an obscure DLP magazine. By this time, even though working behind communist lines, Burchett was possibly the world’s most influential anti–Vietnam War journalist. As Krotkov’s claims were potentially extremely damaging, Burchett decided to sue the publisher of Focus, Senator Jack Kane. The trial in Sydney took place in 1974. Because one of the Whitlam government’s first decisions had been to restore his passport, Burchett was able to appear. In the witness box, he agreed that he had been friends with Krotkov but denied all other aspects of his testimony. Burchett was of course asked whether he had ever been paid by the KGB. He swore that he had not. Even though the court accepted that Burchett had indeed been defamed, he lost the case on the ground that the Focus article was an accurate report of Hansard. Heavy costs were awarded against him. He now was forced into what he called a second exile.

  On account of his Burchett testimony, Krotkov was abused by members of the Burchett camp. Gavan McCormack, who thought of Burchett as Australia’s Dreyfus, described Krotkov as “a fabricator of malicious lies”. John Pilger and Burchett’s recent biographer, Tom Heenan, using the identical words, called him “a liar, pimp and perjurer”. Ben Kiernan, later to become a professor of history at Yale, was responsible in 1986 for the most detailed academic deconstruction of the Krotkov testimony in a volume he edited, Burchett: Reporting the Other Side of the World. But by far the most flamboyant and brilliantly constructed demolition of Krotkov can be found in the chapter of Burchett’s posthumously published autobiography, Memoirs of a Rebel Journalist, sarcastically entitled “How I Joined the KGB”.

  Not only Burchett’s supporters doubted Krotkov’s testimony. In On Burchett the Hungarian journalist Tibor Meray – who had worked alongside Burchett during the Korean War – showed that Burchett had taken instructions from the Chinese government and lied shamelessly about a Budapest meeting with members of the liberal intelligentsia he had arranged for Burchett on the eve of the 1956 Hungarian revolution. However, even he thought Krotkov’s case for Burchett’s recruitment to the KGB unproven. So did Justice Taylor, the conservative judge in the Kane–Burchett defamation trial. Taylor delivered a lecture to Kane’s counsel: “You show me where there is any evidence on which the jury could find that it was true that [Burchett] applied to become a member of the KGB, and then became one; that he was put on the pay-roll, that he indulged in espionage … or worked for the KGB.”

  *

  Vladimir Bukovsky was one of the Soviet Union’s most courageous dissidents, fully worthy of taking a place by the side of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov. Because of his political struggles for democracy and human rights, Bukovsky spent twelve years from the early 1960s in prison, labour camp or psychiatric hospital before being exchanged in 1976 for Luis Corvalan, a Chilean communist imprisoned by the Pinochet regime. When the Soviet Union collapsed in August 1991, Bukovsky returned to Moscow. His ambition was the establishment of a commission that would expose the staggering crimes of the communist era. Although formally given access to the Soviet archives, for many months Bukovsky’s attempts to locate the most telling documentary records were frustrated by the foot-dragging obstructionism of former Soviet officials.

  In the spring of 1992 the Soviet Communist Party went to the Russian Constitutional Court to appeal against its outlawing. The Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, who was responsible for the ban, sprang into action. Bukovsky’s reputation as a human rights democrat was such that he was one of the witnesses Yeltsin most wanted to appear. Bukovsky’s condition was that he be granted genuine archival access. Four months earlier Bukovsky had not been allowed by the bureaucrat in charge of the archives to see the documents concerning his own persecution. Now, because of the order of Yeltsin, access was granted to the party’s most secret records: the “‘special files’, KGB reports, International Department reports. The Holy-of-Holies of the Central Committee”. Bukovsky understood that even then he would not be granted permission to photocopy these documents at will. Over several months he arrived again and again at the Central Committee archive with a Japanese computer and handheld scanner, a form of technology unknown in Russia at that time. In December 1992 someone noticed a flash of light. “He’s copying everything!” Bukovsky walked quietly from the room. His research was over. However, as he later explained, “That is how the pile of papers marked ‘secret’, ‘top secret’, ‘special importance’ and ‘special file’ came into my hands. Thousands of priceless pages in our history.” These documents can today be accessed electronically simply by googling “Vladimir Bukovsky archives”.

  *

  One of the documents Bukovsky scanned was a memorandum sent to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union by Comrade Serov, the chairman of the KGB. It was dated 17 July 1957.

  The memorandum began with these words: “I am reporting that at the end of May of this year, a worker of the Committee for State Security established operative contact with the correspondent of the newspaper National Guardian, the organ of the Progressive Party of the USA, W Burchett, who is accredited in Moscow.” The memorandum outlined in some detail what was known “about the personality of Burchett and his activity”. The Central Committee was informed that Burchett was “an Australian of English origins” born in 1911 “in the family of a farmer” who in 1934–1935 joined “The Friends of the Soviet Union” and in 1936 the Australian Communist Party. Having “failed in any way to distinguish himself”, Burchett soon decided to leave for London. “Since that time, he has not had any organisational links with the party.”

  The Central Committee was informed that Burchett was the author of “many progressive books” and that while “a correspondent for bourgeois newspapers of a rightist direction, he simultaneously covertly collaborated with progressive and communist newspapers and journals”. Before arriving in Moscow, Burchett had lived in Hanoi and Peking. In the Far East he had established “major connections in political and journalistic circles”. Before that, as Berlin correspondent for the Daily Express, he had travelled extensively in the “people’s democracies – Czechoslovakia, Hun
gary, Bulgaria”. In 1948 Burchett had been accused by the Czechoslovak head of the Telepress agency, Jaks, of being an English spy. As a consequence, his Bulgarian wife was expelled from the Communist Party. Subsequently it was discovered that Jaks was a “provocateur and was arrested by the Czechoslovak organs”. Burchett’s wife was now “rehabilitated and reinstated in the Bulgarian communist party”.

  The Central Committee was informed that when Burchett visited Moscow “twice” (the dates are mentioned but are illegible), a KGB agent was “brought close” to him. Burchett was advised “in a cautious way” that he should seek accreditation from a newspaper. When Burchett gained appointment as correspondent for the National Guardian “the relevant authorities took a decision on his accreditation and the provision of an apartment for him”. The newspaper could, however, not provide for him. The Central Committee learned that Burchett’s “condition” for working in Moscow was that he receive “a monetary subsidy, and also the opportunity of unpublicised collaboration in the Soviet press”.

  The formal recommendation of the Chairman of the KGB to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union now followed:

  During the period of contact with Burchett we have succeeded in sufficient measure in studying his personal qualities and possibilities, the character of his links in the political world abroad, among diplomatic corps and foreign journalists in Moscow, and also in receiving an array of interesting materials from him in written form.

  Considering that Burchett, by his personal qualities and extensive links in political and journalistic circles represents unquestionable operative interest, we have taken a decision to engage Burchett in collaboration with the organs of the KGB.