A Secret Country

by John Pilger

  After Cambodia’s Prince Sihanouk broke off diplomatic relations with the United States in 1965, the CIA looked to ASIS to fill the breach. From 1966 to 1970 two ASIS officers acted as proxies for the banned CIA, even though Australian policy then was one of strict neutrality. When Sihanouk was overthrown in what was widely regarded as a CIA-inspired coup, US land forces invaded Cambodia and American bombing was intensified. The bombing laid waste much of the countryside and served as a catalyst for the accelerated rise of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge. Subsequently, at least one million people, perhaps many more, died.

  Whitlam also discovered that ASIS agents were working for the CIA in Chile, ‘de-stabilising’ the democratically elected Government of Salvador Allende, which the Whitlam Government supported. Although he delayed his decision, Whitlam eventually ordered them home. However, one ASIS officer and an operational assistant remained in Chile, under Australian Embassy cover and without Whitlam’s knowledge, until shortly before Allende was murdered and his Government destroyed. Whitlam later ordered the transfer of the head of ASIO, and dismissed the head of ASIS over secret ASIS involvement in East Timor. As events unfolded, it became clear that their removal had serious consequences for the survival of his own Government.

  The most secretive Australian intelligence organisation is the Defence Signals Directorate, DSD, which is modelled on the American National Security Agency, NSA. The DSD’s birth in 1947 is testimony to the extraordinary secrecy embodied in the UKUSA Agreement. According to Professor Desmond Ball:

  No more than a handful of Australians have ever seen this Agreement; it was certainly never shown to any Labor Minister (including the Prime Minister) during the Whitlam period, and in fact may never have been shown to any Minister. Central to the UKUSA Agreement is the relationship between NSA and DSD, a relationship which, at least until recently, was never disclosed to the responsible Minister.14

  The DSD is part of Washington’s ‘Naval Ocean Surveillance Information System’. This means that it spies for the Americans in the Indian Ocean, the south Pacific and south-east Asia. The principal DSD base was in Singapore, until Whitlam closed it down. It was then moved to Darwin, where it monitors communications within Australia and throughout Asia for the NSA. As many as fifty NSA officers have been based at the DSD’s Melbourne headquarters.15

  The list does not end there. There is also the Joint Intelligence Organisation, JIO, established in 1970 under the supervision of the CIA’s analysis division; and the office of National Assessments, ONA, whose job is to co-ordinate and analyse Australia’s wealth of spookery.

  The question begs: why should a relatively small country find itself with such a plethora of spies and hi-tech dirty tricksters? Why should the CIA become so active in Australia that, at one point, the head of ASIS requested it to ‘draw in its tentacles’?16 The answer is surely that Australia is important to the United States and has become even more so since Washington was forced to abandon Indo-China. In 1973, as the last American regular troops were withdrawn from Vietnam, American planners sought to ‘contain’ the region by linking Japan, Australia and the American-supported Association of South-East Asian Nations, ASEAN. Of these, Australia was the only Western nation and ‘traditional ally’ with a record of ‘political stability’. This stability was now crucial. What had been regarded by some US strategic planners as a backwater was now, in the words of one CIA executive, ‘the big jewel of south-east Asia’. A major influence on this re-assessment was the discovery of vast deposits of uranium. Potentially Australia was the world’s largest supplier of uranium: the ingredient of nuclear weapons.

  On January 8, 1973 the American Ambassador in Canberra, Walter Rice, called on the new Prime Minister. His intention, after pleasantries, was to upbraid the US’s ‘traditional ally’ for the unprecedented criticism by Government Ministers of American bombing of civilian populations in North Vietnam. There was also the question of a personal letter Whitlam had sent to Nixon. Whitlam believed his protest was ‘moderately worded’. Former US ambassador Marshall Green, who was in the White House when Whitlam’s letter arrived, told me that its effect on Nixon was to make him apoplectic.

  According to minutes of the meeting with Ambassador Rice, Whitlam began by speaking ‘virtually without interruption for 45 minutes’. The sum of his remarks was that ‘the US should be in no doubt regarding [my] determination to do everything possible to end the war’. He told the Ambassador it would have been ‘difficult to avoid words like atrocious and barbarous’ at a press conference planned the next day had the United States not been prepared to return to the peace talks in Paris. The minutes recorded that:

  Mr Whitlam said there had been a lot of speculation about US/Australian relations. There had been extravagant talk about a trade war and about the US ‘doing a Cuba’. He did not imagine the US was about to do ‘any more Cubas’.

  On ANZUS he was aware of the institutional arrangements for the US bases in Australia and, as he understood it, they did not harm Australia and could help the US. He did not propose to change these arrangements. But to be practical and realistic, if there were any attempt, to use familiar jargon, ‘to screw us or bounce us’ inevitably these arrangements would become a matter of contention.17 (Emphasis added.)

  This was the first hint that America’s top-secret installations in Australia, about which Australians knew so little and which included the two most important American bases outside the United States, were in jeopardy.

  At seven o’clock every morning a convoy of two or three buses with dark tinted windows moves through the streets of suburban Gillen in Alice Springs, in the ‘red centre’ of Australia. Gillen, with its squat brick and tile houses, is where most of the Americans live. The buses return at three in the afternoon and at eleven at night.18 These are the three shifts worked at Pine Gap, officially an American-Australian ‘Joint Defence Space Research Facility’. The name is a cover; Pine Gap is an American spy-satellite base, planned and set up by the CIA and run by the CIA with the American NSA.

  Pine Gap is fifteen miles from Alice Springs in the country of the Aranda people, one of the world’s oldest communities. When I first went to Alice Springs in the 1960s there were two giant silver radomes; now there are six. These are made of Perspex and designed to protect the enclosed antennae from the elements and from ‘unfriendly’ observation. In the early evening, with the sun setting against the Macdonnell Ranges, the light striking the domes has a laser effect and they appear as stars fallen to earth.

  Pine Gap has been described by the CIA’s Victor Marchetti, who helped to draft the Pine Gap treaty, as a ‘giant vacuum cleaner’ which can pick up communications from almost anywhere. What the Russians do in Europe, Pine Gap is told about by satellite directly overhead. Those who seek to justify the base’s presence in Australia say that it performs a necessary task in verifying the Soviet side of nuclear arms limitations agreements, but this is debatable. According to Owen Wilkes, an authority on electronic espionage bases and arms control, ‘only 0.37 per cent of Pine Gap’s work is verification’.19

  Pine Gap’s primary function is the collection of data from CIA sources and transmitters, in order to track and target ‘the enemy’ and to prepare for nuclear warfare. According to James Jesus Angleton, Pine Gap’s importance is such that ‘unlike any similar installation that may be in any other place in the free world, it elevates Australia in terms of strategic matters’.20 This means that Australia has been positioned in the front line of a prospective nuclear war on the other side of the world – a fact underlined by numerous Soviet statements that the bases are nuclear targets. In 1987 Washington belatedly offered Australia ‘early warning’ of Soviet ‘retaliation’ against the bases.21 The CIA’s attitude was straightforward. Robert Crowley, a former CIA ‘special operations’ executive, told me, ‘We had so much in Britain, we couldn’t fit anything more on there. So Australia was real attractive real estate.’22

  The history of Pine Gap and of the other dozen Ame
rican installations is one of secrecy, wilful official ignorance and official lying. Pine Gap was established by a secret treaty in 1966 drawn up by Richard Stallings, a CIA officer working under cover of the US Defense Department. Stallings later became Pine Gap’s first commander. Victor Marchetti, who as Chief Executive Assistant to the Deputy Director of the CIA, helped Stallings write the Pine Gap agreement, told me, ‘You know it was very funny. We were sitting there laughing, the two of us were just scribbling this thing out. Dick had found in this old law book something about a peppercorn arrangement . . . that in return for a peppercorn from Washington, Australians would allow us the use of the land and their facilities . . . it just broke me up.’

  When I reminded him that Australian Governments have always denied that Pine Gap is anything but a joint facility, with an equal arrangement between the two countries, he laughed. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘the CIA runs it and the CIA denies it. I mean, that’s the way things are done in our business.’23

  Marchetti told me that the Australian Government did not question a line of the treaty he and Stallings drew up. This is hardly surprising as Australia was then in the hands of Menzies’s successor and protege, Harold Holt, who had become to the Americans what Menzies had been to the British. History remembers Holt for his statement on the White House lawn before a grinning Lyndon Johnson that, in its prosecution of the war in Vietnam, Australia was ‘all the way with LBJ’. Holt’s successors displayed similar faith. Prime Minister John Gorton said, ‘I don’t even know what Pine Gap is all about . . . I could have asked, but it didn’t arise.’24 Prime Minister William McMahon reflected on his ‘increasing doubts’ that Australian Governments knew ‘the entire truth’ about the bases.25

  So secret were the plans for Pine Gap and the other principal base at Nurrungar in South Australia that it was not until 1969, shortly before Pine Gap became operational, that Parliament debated the purpose and value of the bases to Australia. The quality of the Government’s contribution to this ‘debate’ can be judged by the remarks of the Minister of Defence, Alan Fairhall. ‘I do not believe for a moment’, he said, ‘that the people of this country will not trust the judgement of their government.’26 He was supported by a fellow conservative member, H. R. Holten, who said, ‘It is my opinion that the average Australian must have faith in the people in authority in the United States and Australia who make responsible decisions which are in the best interests of the defence of this country.’27 Here again, to borrow from the historian Greg Lockhart, was ‘the sub-imperial reflex in its most exquisite form’.28 The Pine Gap agreement was for ten years. Notice of renewal was to be given one year before expiry on December 9, 1975.

  ‘The Australians’, wrote an American observer, ‘have accorded the [Pine Gap] facility remarkable hospitality. People and cargo routinely fly in and out, entering and exiting without the burden of customs or immigration checks. The place enjoys almost extra-territorial status.’29 This was confirmed to me by a former senior US intelligence officer, William Corson, with much experience in south-east Asia. Corson told me in Washington in 1988 that the CIA ran between ten and fifteen ‘black airfields’ in Australia during the Vietnam War. ‘Hot’ CIA agents were flown from Vietnam for ‘cooling off’ and debriefing. In 1975, as South Vietnam crumbled, massive supplies of drugs which had been stashed in Vietnam were flown into the secret Australian airfields. The drugs ‘did not stay in Australia’, said Corson, but were redistributed to ‘regional drug banks’, thus providing the ‘reserve currency’ of international criminal activities associated with CIA covert action.30

  Pine Gap is supplied direct by the US Air Force Military Command. It has its own water and power supply, luxury accommodation and enough food for at least a week. There is a seven-mile ‘buffer zone’ in the surrounding bushland, and air-traffic controllers at Alice Springs have standing orders not to allow aircraft to fly within a four-kilometre radius of the base. The notion of a ‘joint facility’ is an open fraud. According to P. L. Kealy, a former computer-programmer at Pine Gap:

  What the Americans did was to make a huge list of all personnel at the base, including those in the unclassified area outside perimeters, who included housemaids for the motel units, cooks, gardeners. This allowed the Americans to satisfy the 50–50 relationship admirably, but leaving almost entirely all Americans in the Top Secret sector. [Pine Gap] is not a place where Australians can feel comfortable.31

  The base at Nurrungar is even more secret. Opened in 1971 in an area of extreme isolation, its twin radomes have been seen by few outsiders. To my knowledge, only one press photograph exists of Nurrungar, and that is dominated by a sign offering trespassers seven years in prison. Nurrungar is linked to a ground station in Colorado. The two bases are part of the US ‘Defense Support Program’, which was set up to detect a Soviet attack on the United States and to contribute to nuclear war fighting strategies.

  On the northern coast of Western Australia is North West Cape base, renamed in 1966 the ‘US Naval Communication Station Harold E. Holt’ after the Prime Minister who went all the way with LBJ. As Desmond Ball has pointed out, the Australian Government made ‘a conscious decision not to inform the Australian public or Parliament as to the whole truth regarding the nature of the North West Cape facility’. The announcement by Menzies in May 1962 that the base was to provide ‘radio communications’ for American and Allied shipping was a deception. He made no mention of the nuclear-missile-carrying Polaris submarines whose battle orders would be transmitted through the Australian base.32 It was left to an American magazine, the Reporter, to charge that ‘the Australian Government deceived the public’ over a base that was ‘a priority target in any nuclear war’.33 With Prime Minister Holt beaming at his side, American Ambassador Ed Clark – a Texan crony of President Johnson – inaugurated the base with these words:

  Now our friendly Australian landlords haven’t yet demanded their rent, but we Americans will always be good tenants. We want you to know we pay our bills promptly. Here then, Mr Prime Minister, I want to present you with one peppercorn payment. In full for the first year’s rent. I thank y’all.34

  During the first months of the new Labor Government, in spite of Whitlam’s implied threat to the bases if the Americans ‘try to screw us or bounce us’, the bases probably were as safe as they had been under the conservatives. Whitlam wanted to reform the alliance with the United States, not destroy it. On the second day of the new Parliament, Labor’s Minister of Defence, Lance Barnard, seemed to go out of his way to reassure Washington. ‘Although we are going to make changes [to the bases agreements]’, he said, ‘we are not making a fresh start . . . there is no doubt in our minds that the data being analysed and tested in the stations must be kept highly secret if the two installations are to continue to serve their objectives.’35 In March 1973 Whitlam himself said, incredibly to some ears, that he would not reveal any of the secrets of Pine Gap or Nurrungar ‘because they are not our secrets. [They are] other peoples’ secrets.’36

  Whitlam’s tolerance of ‘other peoples’ secrets’ was soon to be put to the test. Leaked Australian Defence Department documents disclosed that in 1972 high-frequency transmitters at North West Cape had helped the United States to mine Haiphong and other North Vietnamese harbours; and that satellites controlled from Pine Gap and Nurrungar were being used to pinpoint targets for the American bombing of Cambodia37 – a bombing so intense that during one six-month period in 1973 American B52s dropped more bombs on the populated heartland of Cambodia than were dropped on Japan during the Second World War, the equivalent, in tons of bombs, of five Hiroshimas.38 Both these actions were undertaken by the United States without the consent or knowledge of the Australian Government.

  Then in October 1973, during the Middle East War, President Nixon put US forces on nuclear ‘Level Three alert’, through the base at North West Cape. When Whitlam found out, he was furious and said that the Third World War could have begun in Australia without the Government knowing. Austr
alians had become involved in a war whose battlefield was half a world away. This of course was not unusual; the new dimension was the potential nature of this war. Shortly afterwards the US Defense Secretary, James Schlesinger, gave secret testimony to a Congressional committee that bases such as North West Cape would be ‘the most likely targets’ in a nuclear war.39 On April 4, 1974 Whitlam told Parliament, ‘The Australian government takes the attitude that there should not be foreign military bases, stations, installations in Australia. We honour agreements covering existing stations . . . but there will not be extensions or proliferations.’ (Emphasis added.) For Washington further proof of the ‘instability’ of the Australian Government was hardly needed. Yet further proof would be forthcoming.

  Within six months of Whitlam’s election a new American Ambassador was appointed to Australia. In marked contrast to his predecessors, Marshall Green was the most senior American career diplomat ever sent to Australia. Green was a top-level US policy planner for south-east Asia. He also had the distinction of having been involved in four countries where there had been coups, and he was known widely as ‘the coupmaster’. A courtly, cultivated man, Green protested that he was nothing of the kind. However, as Ambassador to Indonesia from 1965 to 1969, Green had contributed to the decisive part the United States played in the events that led to the massacre of between 500,000 and a million Indonesian ‘communists’ and the overthrow of President Sukarno. Soon after he arrived in Australia to take up his post, Green was asked about this. He said, ‘In 1965 I remember Indonesia was poised on the razor’s edge. I remember people arguing from here that Indonesia wouldn’t go communist. But when Sukarno announced in his August 17 speech that Indonesia would have a communist government within a year, then I was almost certain . . . what we did we had to do.’40 (Emphasis added.)