A Secret Country

by John Pilger

  On the afternoon he had intended dramatically to inform Parliament of the South Vietnamese ‘request’ for Australian help, Menzies was in a fury. He had no confirmation, no piece of official paper to quote and wave. Moreover, ‘some bastard in the Cabinet’ had leaked the news that Australia was to send troops to Vietnam.65 When Parliament returned after the dinner adjournment Menzies’s luck was in; he was handed a letter from the South Vietnamese Prime Minister, Dr Phan Huy Quat, confirming the Saigon Government’s ‘acceptance of an offer’ of Australian troops.

  Menzies stood up and lied that a ‘request’ had been received. He made no mention of an ‘offer’. The evidence of his duplicity was not tabled in Parliament for six years, until shortly before the last Australian soldier was withdrawn from Vietnam. That this episode should have passed into the public domain without serious challenge seems barely credible. Neither the Labor Opposition nor the bureaucracy nor the intelligentsia nor the media sought out the truth. Except for maverick voices, there was approval or there was silence. ‘Throughout the war’, wrote the peace campaigner Alex Carey, one who did speak out, ‘our leaders punished or intimidated any Department of Foreign Affairs scholar or diplomat who dared to question the Vietnam commitment, or provide evidence against the myths by which it was justified.’66

  In the mid-1960s, with reports of coups in Saigon on the front pages of American newspapers, President Johnson appeared to falter in his crusade to ‘stem communist aggression’ in south-east Asia. There was alarm in Canberra. Australian officials in Washington lobbied the administration almost every day. Why, they asked, had the President ‘gone quiet’ on the war? Surely now was the time to prosecute the war with renewed vigour and to bomb North Vietnam? Menzies wanted none of this to reach the Australian people. Although it is now known that Australia opposed and lobbied against peace negotiations with Hanoi, the only available record is a heavily censored American memorandum. A vital meeting between Menzies and Johnson at the White House went unrecorded because Menzies requested no minutes be taken and no third party be present.67

  It is highly doubtful that Australian pressure precipitated the escalation of the war that followed. But the relief with which Australian Ministers and Labor opposition politicians alike greeted ‘Rolling Thunder’, the most sustained aerial bombing in history, gave President Johnson the comfort he clearly appreciated. Said he:

  There’s not a boy that wears the uniform yonder today that hasn’t always known that when freedom is at stake and when honourable men stand in battle shoulder to shoulder that Australians will go all the way – not a third of the way, not part of the way, not three-fourths of the way, but all the way until liberty and freedom have won.68

  Soon after the President made that ringing speech, Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs expressed diplomatic frustration about the lack of information received from Washington on the progress of the war. The British, it was said, were better informed than America’s Australian comrades in arms. To which the Assistant Secretary of State, William Bundy, replied, ‘We have to inform the British to keep them on side. You are with us, come what may.’69 As the war dragged on, Australians stirred. Many opposed the war with consummate skill and courage and ensured that when President Johnson came to Australia he did not receive the acclaim he might have expected in a country he had once called ‘the next large rectangular state beyond El Paso’.70 Instead, he met confusion, anger and bitterness in the streets; blood-red paint was splashed over his limousine in Sydney and people threw themselves in front of his motorcade. In moratorium rallies hundreds of thousands filled the cities as never before.

  A new generation, and others not used to speaking out, wanted an end to the war and to the demeaning status described by William Bundy. Like the developing peoples of their own region, they wanted to live lives beyond the terms of a ‘protector’. They wanted the right to identify and defend their own causes, not to act as pawns or surrogates; and the right to examine their own national myths and to make their own mistakes. They wanted independence.

  The 1960s saw an Australian awakening. Small events carried great significance: the establishment of the first Chair of Australian Literature at Sydney University, the opening of the Australian Ballet School, the rebirth of the Australian cinema and theatre, the publication of the first volume of Manning Clark’s History of Australia and of Donald Horne’s ironic and brave book The Lucky Country, both of which struck at imperium’s distortion of the Australian past and present. The Female Eunuch, a book by an Australian woman, Germaine Greer, changed lives all over the world. In 1967, more than 90 per cent of the population voted to give the Federal Government the power to negotiate justice for the first Australians. It was, wrote Donald Horne, ‘our time of hope’.

  5

  THE COUP

  We have never interfered in Australian politics. And so, whatever the charges, the answer is no. We don’t interfere in Australian politics period.

  William Colby, ex-Director of the CIA, 1981

  The CIA’s aim in Australia was to get rid of a government they did not like and that was not co-operative . . . it’s a Chile, but [in] a much more sophisticated and subtle form.

  Victor Marchetti, ex senior CIA officer, 1980

  ‘DO YOU BELIEVE in miracles?’ Prime Minister Menzies was asked when he retired in 1966. ‘Well,’ he replied, ‘when I look back on the last seven federal elections, I know they happen!’1

  In all the elections for the Australian House of Representatives during Menzies’s reign – from 1949 to 1966 – support for his own misnamed Liberal Party was never more than 34 per cent of the popular vote, and for his conservative coalition 42 per cent. A divided Labor Party was one explanation for Menzies’s sustained rule. The gerrymandering of electoral boundaries was another; vast rural electorates with more sheep than people greatly devalued the voting power of the crowded cities, where almost 90 per cent of the Australian people live.

  When Menzies retired in 1966, he was succeeded by a series of conservative politicians of such minimal stature – the last, William McMahon, was described succinctly by the famous CIA man, Harry Goldberg, as a ‘nincompoop’ – that the system finally yielded. On December 2, 1972 the first Labor Government for twenty-three years was elected. The Prime Minister was Edward Gough Whitlam.

  A tree of a man almost six and a half feet tall, Whitlam was a politician from the old middle classes, the son of the Deputy Crown Solicitor, a classicist, constitutionalist and a Queen’s Counsel. Whereas Menzies, the son of a working man, was a contrived grandee, a figure of fearsome superficiality, Whitlam was entirely patrician. Indeed, Whitlam had never been identified with the left of the Labor Party and on several occasions had moved decisively against the left. He was and remains an individualist of maximum proportions: at once arrogant and generous, passionate and quixotic. When he is on form, he is a fine political orator: inspiring, withering, ironic and funny; when he is out of form, he raises his chin and goes on, and on.

  In 1972 Whitlam was, above all, a leader of remarkable imagination and devout principle. Those who remind us that Whitlam was ‘no radical’ are right in a narrow sense; but they surely miss the point of true radicalism. That he understood so clearly what had to be done, and what could be done quickly and perhaps even irrevocably, was his enduring strength.

  ‘Men and women of Australia,’ he said on election night 1972, and went on to use the same words and phrases spoken by John Curtin, the wartime Labor Prime Minister. It was a time of high emotion. People laid siege to Whitlam’s home in his electorate in working-class western Sydney. Throughout Australia similar streets stayed awake all night. The moment and thrill of Labor’s victory are still recalled by millions of Australians, who believed that ‘the chance’ at last had been won.

  For above all other descriptions, Australia is a ‘nation of battlers’, the colloquialism for the descendants of the ‘lags’ and ‘screws’ and the immigrants who have come in waves from almost everywhere. Mo
st Australians are wage-earners; fewer than 20 per cent employ others or are self-employed. ‘We are’, wrote Joan Coxsedge, Gerry Harant and Ken Coldicutt, ‘overwhelmingly working class, a fact that will not go away, in spite of the efforts of academics to promote workers to the middle class on the basis of home ownership or white collar employment or false political consciousness.’2

  The events that followed rapidly Whitlam’s election caught much of the world unaware, for nothing like it had happened in a modern democracy. Whitlam had a ‘period of grace’ before the Party caucus elected the Cabinet. Working only with his deputy, Lance Barnard, he began to honour his campaign promises in a series of edicts, many of which led to historic legislation.

  Conscription was ended immediately and the last Australian troops were ordered home from Vietnam. Young men imprisoned for draft evasion were freed unconditionally. The Federal Government assumed responsibility for Aboriginal health, education and welfare and the first land rights legislation was drafted; the Aboriginal people were drawn into administration of their own affairs for the first time. Racially selected sporting teams were banned from entering Australia.

  Equal pay for women was introduced. Wages, pensions and unemployment benefits rose. A national health service was established, open to all. Spending on education was doubled and university and college fees abolished. Censorship was ended and the divorce laws reformed, with the establishment of the world’s first ‘family courts’. Legal aid became a universal right. A range of cultural initiatives for Aborigines, women and immigrants were encouraged and funded; ‘access’ and ethnic radio networks were set up. The arts were elevated; and the already resuscitated film industry was given the flesh and blood of extensive Government funding. Creative Australians, driven overseas during the Menzies years, began to return home. Royal patronage was scrapped and, with it, imperial adornments such as knighthoods and ‘honours’ proclaiming such nonsense as ‘Membership of the British Empire’. (These were retained by several States.) An Australian anthem replaced ‘God Save the Queen’. The ‘Commonwealth Government’ was renamed the Australian Government.

  An American observer wrote that no country has ‘reversed its posture in international affairs so totally without first having passed through a domestic revolution’.3 Not only did Australia finally withdraw from the Vietnam War, but Australian Ministers publicly condemned the American conduct of the war. The Nixon/Kissinger bombing of Hanoi during Christmas 1972 was called the work of ‘maniacs’ and ‘mass murderers’. A senior Minister, Dr Jim Cairns, described the Nixon administration as ‘corrupt’ and called for public rallies to condemn the bombing and for boycotts on American goods. In response, Australian dockers refused to unload American ships. Whitlam himself warned the United States that he might draw Indonesia and Japan into protests against the bombing.

  Australia moved towards the Non-aligned Movement, expressing support for the Indian Ocean Zone of Peace, which the United States opposed, and once again speaking up in the United Nations for small nations, as well as for the rights of the Palestinians. ‘Pariahs’ were given diplomatic recognition: China, Cuba, North Korea, East Germany. The French were condemned for testing nuclear weapons in the south Pacific, and refugees fleeing the Washington-inspired coup in Chile were welcomed into Australia: an irony later to be savoured by Whitlam.

  On the day after his election, Whitlam announced that he did not want his staff members vetted or harassed by the security organisation, ASIO, because he knew and trusted them. Richard Hall, in his book The Secret State, reports that the next day he was told by an American Embassy political officer (CIA agent), ‘Your Prime Minister has just cut off one of his options.’4 That turned out to be a considerable understatement. Frank Snepp, a CIA officer stationed in Saigon at the time, said later, ‘We were told that the Australians might as well be regarded as North Vietnamese collaborators.’5

  Alarm in Washington rose to fury when, in the early hours of March 16, 1973, the Attorney-General, Lionel Murphy, led a posse of Federal police in a raid on the Melbourne offices of ASIO. Murphy and Whitlam wanted to know if ASIO had allowed local fascist Croatian groups to carry out terrorist acts both in Australia and against Yugoslav diplomats abroad.

  Since its inception in 1949, ASIO had distinguished itself by not uncovering a single spy or traitor (this is still the case); yet it had become almost as powerful in Australia as the CIA was under William Casey during the Reagan years. ASIO’s speciality was, and is, the pursuit of paranoia.

  For example, in 1970 the South Australian Labor Premier Don Dunstan discovered that his State had a ‘Special Branch’ whose existence he had known nothing about, even though he had been the State’s Attorney-General. Dunstan asked a judge to make enquiries and learned that ASIO had helped to set up and maintain a secret police organisation within his bureaucracy and had kept files on all Labor candidates and members, union leaders, members of the Council of Civil Liberties and anyone holding an opinion ‘to the left of an arbitrary centre point fixed by someone in Special Branch . . . with the assistance of ASIO . . . Even prayer meetings for peace were watched and recorded.’6

  A leaked ASIO file on Jim Cairns, Deputy Prime Minister under Gough Whitlam, was more to the point.7 Cairns, as a leader of the anti-Vietnam War movement, echoed ‘communist views’ and his activities could lead ‘to the fascist cult of the personality . . . and to the destruction of the democratic system of government’.8

  When Whitlam was elected, ASIO’s real power derived from the spirit of the UKUSA Treaty, with its secret pact of loyalty to foreign intelligence organisations. To many in the ASIO bureaucracy, ‘headquarters’ was not in Canberra but in Langley, Virginia, home of the CIA. This was demonstrated dramatically when the National Times published extracts from tens of thousands of classified documents under the headline: ‘How ASIO Betrayed Australia to the Americans’. Brian Toohey, the editor, wrote:

  Members of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation handed over potentially damaging information to American authorities about prominent Australian figures during secret visits to the US over many years, according to a super secret supplement to a Royal Commission report.

  The Royal Commission, headed by Mr Justice Hope, found that the practice had been highly improper and definitely not in Australia’s national interest. The practice had gone on for decades before it was uncovered by Hope, who had been appointed in the mid-1970s to investigate Australia’s intelligence services.

  One problem with the handing over of the material is that it gave the recipient – the CIA – ammunition to use against Australian politicians and senior officials regarded unfavourably by ASIO . . . the information is understood to have ranged from accusations of subversive tendencies to concern about personal peccadilloes.

  The information gave the CIA the opportunity to work against the people who had earned ASIO’s disdain in ways which ranged from blackmail to efforts to block their careers.9

  During his dawn raid on the ASIO offices, Attorney-General Murphy came to M in one file. Murphy turned to a senior ASIO official, who had been called from his bed, ‘God help you if my name’s in this.’ It was not.10 The CIA’s public response to the Murphy raid came in an interview with James Jesus Angleton, for twenty years the head of CIA counter-intelligence. He said:

  We . . . entrusted the highest secrets of counter-intelligence to Australian services and we saw the sanctity of that information being jeopardised by a bull in a china shop . . . How could we stand aside? You don’t see the jewels of counter-intelligence being placed in jeopardy by a party that has extensive historical contacts in Eastern Europe, that was seeking a new way for Australia . . . seeking roads to Peking.

  (At that time President Nixon was also ‘seeking roads to Peking’.) Angleton went on to say that the CIA had been given ‘assurances that the antics and cowboy tactics were not to be of concern to us, that the precious information would be held intact’.11

  Who gave these ‘assurances’?
He did not say, but he gave the strongest clue in his answer to a question about CIA funding of Australian trade unions. ‘I will put it this way very bluntly,’ he said. ‘No one in the agency would ever believe that I would subscribe to any activity that was not co-ordinated with the chief of the Australian internal security.’12 (Emphasis added.)

  While ASIO is run as an internal organisation, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, ASIS, operates abroad and is less well known. Code-named MO9, its existence was acknowledged only after the Whitlam Government came to power in 1972. As Opposition Leader, Whitlam had never been briefed on ASIS, and knew nothing about it until told by the Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister, Tun Abdul Razak. The following extract from an ASIS top-secret document describes its activities:

  Definition of Covert Action

  Special Political Action

  Clandestine action against another country designed to further the foreign policy aims of the Australian Government, primarily in the politico/economic field. Operations may be broadly classified as support, disruption and deception (examples are funding of political parties on one side or the other and the use of propaganda).

  Special Operations

  Clandestine action against another country in wartime or in a serious situation short of war. In this case, operations may involve the provision of arms, explosives and other equipment. An example would be the equipping and training of a local guerrilla movement. It goes without saying that operations in either category are deniable and, if discovered, should afford no proof of the instigation or even connivance of the Government.13

  ASIS has played an important part in the implementation of American foreign policy and has participated in secret American operations against other countries. In two striking examples ASIS worked against Australian foreign policy.