by John Pilger
After two hours in the air the waves and ripples of the great red earth-ocean below stopped. Now there were few trees and no sign of desert life. No tracks in the sand; no red kangaroo. Only coils of the indestructible spinifex rolled along empty concrete highways, which had not been used for more than thirty years. The roads formed a series of baseball diamonds. At the centre of each stood an obelisk. This was Ground Zero, the point of the bomb’s explosion. There were obelisks to the horizon. Then a town appeared, decapitated. The buildings had been torn out, leaving only the foundations and a water tank. We began to land on one of the longest airstrips in the world, now deserted.
Two Federal policemen were waiting outside a tin shed. I had permission, but they were theatrically suspicious. ‘What are the real reasons for your visit?’ said the senior officer. ‘Is there something you haven’t revealed to us? . . . You must not speak to anyone. There must be no interviews.’ In the tin hut where the policemen lived three months at a stretch were 1950s murals, a picture of the Swiss Alps, a poster of Samantha Fox and a depressing collection of paperbacks and videos, including the four Death Wish movies. Food and water were shipped in; the little that grew could not be eaten. Each man wore a radiation tag on his trousers. ‘Mine lights up’, said the junior one, ‘when it hits the ground. Now don’t you fellas pick anything up; don’t you touch anything; and when we’re driving out to Ground Zero, keep the windows wound up tight. Remember, the wind is your enemy.’
We drove through two lines of fences, each marking the degeneration of the land. Past the first fence there were petrified trees of haunting ugliness, as if the leaves had been frightened off them. Past the second fence, with the gate locked behind us, we drove into the equivalent of a nuclear battlefield, the size of Wales and Ireland combined. The ground was coated with a grey stubble, like a permanent frost. Nothing grew. Nothing moved. Standing in the midst of this nothingness was a concrete base with a lavatory bowl in it, an Australian joke, an appropriate symbol.
We had arrived at Taranaki Ground Zero, with its crater and obelisk, on which is inscribed, ‘A British atomic weapon was test exploded here on 9 October 1957.’ On the rim of the crater was this sign:
WARNING: RADIATION HAZARD
Radiation levels for a few hundred metres around this point may be above those considered safe for permanent occupation.
The sign was in English, Italian, Greek, French, Spanish and Arabic. The only people who might have seen the sign were Aborigines, for whom there was no warning.
From one side of the crater it was possible to see across the wilderness dotted with obelisks, each marking a nuclear explosion. In silhouette they appeared as gravestones. When someone in our group picked up a stone, the senior policeman commanded, ‘Put that down!’ Raw plutonium lay all about, scattered like talcum powder; a speck of plutonium contains more radioactivity than it was safe for a person to ingest over a year. When the first of our two vehicles left the vicinity, the second waited until the dust had settled. With the second fence now behind us, the senior policeman said, ‘Well mate, you’re now back in Australia.’
During the tests there were thirteen Aboriginal settlements within 200 miles of the Maralinga range. An Australian safety committee belatedly set up in 1955 to advise the British knew that Maralinga was a highly unsuitable place to continue testing. But the chief British scientist, Sir William Penney, denied to the McClelland Royal Commission that he had been told about the Aborigines.
For years Aboriginal people tried to tell the world what the British had done in Australia. Few listened. It was only when British and Australian servicemen and others who had worked on the tests began to suffer and die from cancers that the horror of the bombs began to emerge. Dr Hedley Marston, the scientist who researched the fall-out patterns, disclosed that ‘extensive areas of Australia have been contaminated’.43 Patrick Connolly, who served in the RAF at Maralinga, was threatened with prosecution by the security services after he had revealed that ‘during the two and a half years I was there I would have seen 400 to 500 Aborigines in contaminated areas. Occasionally, we would bring them in for decontamination. Other times we just shooed them off like rabbits.’44
When an extended Aboriginal family, the Milpuddies, were found in the test area, a cover-up was instigated. The journalist Robert Milliken described it:
the men working on the Maralinga range were called together and told to keep quiet about the Milpuddie affair. One of them was John Hutton, a 19-year-old soldier in the Australian army [who] recalled the men being mustered together and addressed by a colonel who told them they had not seen the Milpuddie incident because the British and Australian governments had poured a lot of money into the atomic tests and if it got out to the newspapers the money would have been wasted. The colonel reminded them, said Hutton, that they were bound by the Official Secrets Act, and they could be shot or sent to jail for 30 years if they were found guilty.45
The McClelland Royal Commission found that, despite the British claim to have cleared up the ranges of Maralinga and Emu, the test site was left ‘heavily contaminated’ and that there was a ‘significant hazard’ to Aborigines in the area.46 The Commission urged immediate action and, as James McClelland later wrote, ‘the British – who, after all, had befouled the area lent to them by their admirer Bob Menzies, without consulting even his Cabinet – should pay for the clean-up . . . What’s the position today? (1991) The plutonium is still out there . . . and the British are refusing to pay up’.47
Today the people of Maralinga live at Oak Valley, some forty miles to the north of the test site. At any time there are between sixty and 300 of them, depending upon the season and their travels. Since 1984, when they drew all their people together and made a triumphant return, they have received freehold title to land promised to them twenty-two years earlier by the South Australian Government. It is a harsh life, particularly for those of the young men who are not as spiritually rooted there as the elders; and water has to be trucked in at twenty cents a gallon. But the community is strong and its council employs specialist advisers, teachers and a nurse, and alcoholism has been kept at bay. Such is their resilience.
Shortly before I flew to Maralinga I read that an official of the Australian Atomic Energy Commission, Des Davey, wanted the Oak Valley community ‘to help’ by wearing plutonium monitors and by subjecting themselves to an anthropological survey. Davey insisted there were no health dangers. ‘The people understand very well’, he said, ‘what vegetation areas they should stay away from and it is a characteristic of plutonium that there is very little danger from eating contaminated animals.’48 He did not say precisely what he meant by ‘very little danger’. Plutonium is so dangerous that a third of a milligram gives a 50 per cent chance of cancer.
Two weeks later it was reported that plutonium had been found in the Oak Valley camp and that scientists were ‘puzzled at the appearance of the radioactive material [which] was unexpected’. The Australian Radiation Laboratory subsequently announced that the plutonium levels ‘are clearly well below acceptable safety levels’.49 More than thirty years earlier scientists had given the same assurance. Indeed, Menzies himself had said that injury as a result of the atomic tests was ‘inconceivable’.
During the 1950s Australian newspapers seldom published analyses of events in their own region by knowledgeable Australians. Commentators were more often than not British and American, whose columns were bought as part of cheap syndication deals. Thus, the American sage Walter Lippmann could wax eloquent to his Australian readers about US policy in their part of the world without ever mentioning Australia, let alone Australia’s special interests. To the Australian press this was a natural state of affairs, just as I Love Lucy, the Reader’s Digest and Ronald Reagan B-movies were adopted as ‘ours’ by default of the Australian film and television industry. I suspect that much of my generation’s perception of Asia was shaped by the sub-human stereotypes John Wayne would see off single-handed at a Saturday afternoon ma
tinée. So it was not surprising that events then unfolding in Indo-China were not understood in Australia.
In 1956 President Eisenhower endorsed the sabotage of democratic elections in Vietnam – elections which had been agreed at a United Nations conference in 1954 and which Eisenhower later conceded would have been won by Ho Chi Minh ‘with eighty per cent of the vote’.50 The result was the artificial division of Vietnam and the invention of a South Vietnamese ‘ally’ by the United States. A State terror apparatus was set up and run by the CIA and was so successful that at one point it accounted for half of all the world’s torture cases registered by Amnesty International. The CIA even provided a ready-made Prime Minister, Ngo Dinh Diem, whose ‘triumphant return’ to his homeland from the United States was the work of one Colonel Edward Landsdale. Diem described himself as ‘the George Washington of Asia’. News of these machinations rarely reached Australia.
The election of John Kennedy in 1960 was regarded as a ‘new beginning’ for American-Australian relations. President Kennedy, a liberal, began by announcing that the United States had a ‘mission’ in the world. In far-off Vietnam, this ‘mission’ was translated into extensive bombing, the introduction of death squads and the spraying of forests and crops with toxic herbicides. The aim and effect of this was to drive several million people off their land and into concentration camps known as ‘strategic hamlets’, where they were ‘protected’ from those of their compatriots resisting the foreign attack.
The resistance to American terror was described by the liberal thinker, Adlai Stevenson, as ‘internal aggression’. The Australian response was, as ever, a call to arms on the side of the invader. In May 1962 the Australian people were told that an ‘Army Training Team’ was going to Vietnam, at the ‘request’ of an embattled people. This was false. A memorandum, from the head of the South-East Asian Division of the Department of External Affairs, Gordon Jockel, declared, ‘Although we have stressed the fact publicly that our assistance was given in response to an invitation from the Government of [South] Vietnam, our offer was in fact made following a request from the United States Government.’51
The Australians would be ‘advisers’ providing ‘instruction in jungle warfare’ and ‘village defence’. It all sounded proper, and there was no fuss; Vietnam then was a footnote. For their part, the Australian public remained ignorant of the truth that many of their soldiers in Vietnam were to run assassination squads, which would torture and murder civilians. The Australians would take orders from the CIA and write reports which would be kept from the Australian army and the Australian Government. They would enlist mercenaries and dress in the uniform of the enemy. Once again, they would be fighting somebody else’s war, only this war would be secret.
While Menzies and his Ministers spoke incessantly about the ‘downward thrust of Chinese communism’, even urging the United States to use nuclear weapons against China,52 senior CIA officers in Vietnam knew that Chinese involvement was nominal. The National Liberation Front, NLF – whom the Americans called the Vietcong – was a nationalist resistance movement and any fraternalism with communist China belied the ancient and strategic differences between the two peoples. The famous American counter-insurgency adviser, John Paul Vann, wrote in a memorandum to Washington that the majority of the people in South Vietnam ‘primarily identified’ with the National Liberation Front and ‘a popular base for the [American-propped] Government of South Vietnam does not now exist’.53
The Australians who worked for the CIA operated under a cover name, the Combined Studies Division, CSD, and it was this which appeared in official documents. It was not until 1984 that Ian McNeill, a former Australian army Major researching an official history, found an admission in US Congressional evidence that the CSD was part of the CIA.54
Some of the Australians were integrated into the American ‘Phoenix Programme’, which is credited with between 30,000 and 50,000 murders of Vietnamese, most of them civilians. The aim of Phoenix was to terrorise people who supported the NLF, that is the majority of the population. Names were supplied by corrupt village informers who were paid on a ‘quota’ basis. Civil servants, nurses, midwives, teachers and engineers were shot or had their throats slit at night. The first Commander of the Australian ‘Training Team’ in Vietnam, Colonel Ted Serong, later admitted, ‘Yes, we did kill teachers and postmen. They were part of the Vietcong infrastructure. I wanted to make sure we won the battle.’55 Serong was later seconded to the service of the US State Department in Vietnam. He was ordered not to wear an Australian uniform and to have as little as possible to do with Australian troops.56 Defenders of the Phoenix Programme insist it was essential for ‘intelligence gathering’ and that murder was never the intention. An American CIA expert on ‘counter terror’, Barton Osborne, told a Congressional enquiry, ‘I never knew in the course of all those operations any detainee to live through interrogation. There was never any reasonable proof that any one of those individuals was in fact co-operating with the Vietcong. But they all died.’ He also said that ‘by late 1968 . . . we were getting into a bad genocide program’.57
Brian Day, an Australian Warrant Officer, was in charge of a death squad, known as a ‘hatchet team’ and a ‘black team’. He described its operational method:
The black team was usually given a mission of a target figure, a target figure being a person who was suspected of selling out to the enemy or being a double agent, or someone who the province chief suspected of black marketing and therefore affecting the war effort. He would be numbered, he would be pinpointed and at an opportune time a black team would go out, usually dressed in the enemy’s gear, carrying enemy equipment, and then of course the next day you’d read a report where the VC had annihilated a particular person.58
Today Brian Day is disabled from his war injuries and suffers an illness associated with the effects of dioxin, the poison in the herbicide spray, ‘Agent Orange’. He now believes the war was a ‘criminal act’ and that Australians were merely used by a ‘new political master’:
I remember one night a very senior American officer, who was a close friend of mine, said he had nothing but praise for the expertise and discipline of the Australian soldier. He told me, ‘We really like having you guys here,’ and I said, ‘Why’s that?’ and he said, ‘You’re very good, you’ve helped us a lot . . . it’s like the British having the Gurkhas, we have the Australians.’59
Brian Day’s honesty is rare among his former superiors. Just as German political and military leaders at the end of the Second World War rushed to deny they knew about the crimes against the Jews, so Australia’s leaders and top brass have denied complicity in the CIA’s ‘bad genocide programme’. In August 1987 the Australian edition of Time magazine described this ignorance as ‘an extraordinary fact’. Time reported two former Chiefs of the General Staff as saying they knew ‘nothing’ about the murderous work of Australians in the Phoenix Programme. ‘The whole show’, said Lieutenant-General Sir Mervyn Brogan, ‘was really in the hands of the US. We sent our troops up there. They did what they were told by the Americans . . . we were really on the tiger’s back.’60 Former Prime Minister John Gorton said he was ‘never told’ that Australian soldiers were fighting for the CIA and that he was ‘quite sure’ his predecessor Harold Holt did not know, and that he ‘very much doubted’ if Menzies knew. Colonel (now Brigadier) Ted Serong, who led the Australian ‘Training Team’, thought otherwise. ‘There were other channels to Menzies than the military hierarchy’, he said, ‘and I had sufficient feedback through those channels from Menzies to cause me to believe that he knew.’61
So successful were the Australian ‘advisers’ that by 1963 the Americans wanted more. They also wanted supporting units to ‘share in our combat casualties’, as the US Ambassador to Saigon, Henry Cabot Lodge, put it.62 More Australians meant ‘putting out more flags’ for the American cause in Vietnam. In May 1963, the Australian Minister in Washington, Alan Renouf, thought it would be ‘admirable’ if Australi
a could comply quickly. He explained why in a message to Canberra:
Our objective should be . . . to achieve such an habitual closeness of relations with the US and sense of mutual alliance that in our time of need . . . the US would have little option but to respond as we would want. The problem of Vietnam is one . . . where we could without disproportionate expenditure pick up a lot of credit with the United States.63
Warrant Officer Conway was the first of 494 Australians to die. Thousands were maimed and otherwise scarred. For the Vietnamese, the ‘disproportionate expenditure’ amounted to at least 1,300,000 people killed, untold millions maimed and their once bountiful land devastated.
In April 1965 Menzies announced that Australians would be conscripted and sent to Vietnam. ‘The takeover of South Vietnam [by the NLF]’, he said, ‘would be a direct military threat to Australia. It must be seen as part of a thrust by Communist China between the Indian and Pacific Oceans.’64 There was no ‘thrust’ by China and no ‘threat’ to Australia. Young Australians were to be compelled to fight and die in a country whose people were resisting an invasion by a great power determined to enforce its regional dominance.
In seeking a pretext, Menzies did not confine himself to a ‘thrusting’ China. For several months before his announcement Australian officials in Saigon had badgered the South Vietnamese regime to ‘request’ Australian regular troops. They had failed. The regime in Saigon knew not only that the population would oppose the presence of foreign armies, but that this would be a gift of propaganda to the NLF and compound the difficulties of pursuing a ‘Vietnamese peace’.