by John Pilger
Shortly afterwards Boyce and a close friend, Andrew Daulton Lee, were discussing Watergate and the military coup in Chile. When Lee deplored the CIA role in Chile, he was told by Boyce, ‘You think that’s bad? You should hear what the CIA is doing to the Australians.’64 This and a great deal more emerged in 1977 at the trial of Christopher Boyce who, with Lee, was convicted of passing secrets to the Soviet Union. Boyce’s defence was that he opposed American foreign policy not only in Chile, but also in Australia, and that he had been blackmailed by Lee, a heroin addict and pusher.
Boyce was a young Christian idealist who almost certainly would not have got his sensitive job had his FBI father not vouched for him. In agreeing, as he said in his evidence, simply to circulate ‘a statement concerning what I believed to be violations of law perpetuated [sic] against the Australians’, Boyce had cast himself in the role of a dissident hero who would serve his country by exposing the illegalities of the CIA’s Australian campaign, just as the Pentagon Papers had exposed the corruption of the United States’ role in Vietnam.
Boyce maintained he had never intended the information about Australia to go to the Russians, that Lee had agreed to make it public through one of his father’s influential friends in a way that would not immediately implicate Boyce. Whatever the truth of that, Lee flew to Mexico City, went to the Soviet Embassy and sold the document to the Russians, naming Boyce as the source. The market value of national defence secrets is not something that is published in the Wall Street Journal and is subject to many unknown variables, but the Boyce case can be compared with that of a CIA officer found guilty of selling a top-secret manual about a spy satellite, a transaction described by the CIA as having ‘seriously harmed’ America’s national security. For this the KGB paid $US76,000.65
In his evidence Boyce said that, during the briefing for his job in the black vault, he was told that most of the communications would be coming from Pine Gap, and that although the United States had signed an Executive Agreement with Australia to share information from Pine Gap, the agreement was not being honoured and ‘certain information’ was to be concealed from Australia. He described the ‘daily deception of an ally’ and said that Pine Gap was being used to ‘monitor’ international telephone calls and telex messages to and from Australia of a political character. He said the CIA had campaigned to subvert Australian trade unions ‘particularly in the transport industry’ and had funded the opposition political parties. Later, in an interview for Australian television, Boyce said that Whitlam, ‘by wanting to know what was going on [at Pine Gap] and publicising it, compromised the integrity of the project and made his Government “a threat”’.66
Boyce’s disclosures caused a sensation in the United States. The prosecuting lawyers made no attempt to refute his allegations and successfully objected to any further evidence about Australia. Boyce’s lawyer said that the judge had complied with a direct CIA request, and agreed that his client would not mention the ‘Australia information’ at his trial if, in return, the Government did not use it against him – such was its sensitivity. The New York Times report of the trial said that these machinations and Boyce’s behaviour had convinced many observers in the courtroom that Boyce was telling the truth.
This view was reinforced when both Boyce and Lee were found guilty and Lee was given a life sentence and Boyce was sent for ‘psychiatric observation’ – indicating that he might be treated leniently. However, Boyce had made it consistently clear that he was so outraged at the ‘betrayal’ of Australia that he intended to talk. He was subsequently given forty years in Marion Federal Penitentiary in Illinois, the ‘Alcatraz of the 1980s’, where, with other ‘unredeemable criminals’, such as rapists and multiple murderers, he is kept in solitary confinement. Whenever he leaves his cell, he is manacled, handcuffed and accompanied by two guards. It is said that his only hope of freedom rests on his continued silence about what happened in Australia.
In an interview he gave to Australian journalist William Pinwill, Boyce made special mention of one name. He said, ‘There were references to your Governor-General by the Central Intelligence [Agency] residents there at TRW,’ and that once in the black vault Joe Harrison (the CIA chief) referred to Sir John Kerr as ‘our man Kerr’.67
John Kerr, the son of a boilermaker, grew up in working-class Balmain, on Sydney’s dockland, in the 1920s. Almost everything Kerr pursued in his career denied his roots: from his passion for imperial pomp and ritual to his conspicuous consumption of Laurent-Perrier vintage champagne. In his black top hat and ‘Ruritanian flak jacket’, Sir John Kerr, Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St Michael and St George, Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order, Knight of the Order of Australia, Knight of the Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem and so on, rivalled Menzies as the embodiment of imperium in Australia.
After studying law, Kerr began his long association with political and military intelligence as a member of the top-secret ‘Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs’, whose job was to counter ‘enemy elements’ in Australia during the Second World War. He was sent to Washington, where he was seconded briefly to the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, which became the CIA. After the war he continued his service in intelligence with the Government’s School of Civil Affairs, where he helped to establish a national police force for New Guinea.
Although he joined the Australian Labor Party early in his career, Kerr has always been a conservative: a monarchist, an Anglocentric and a vigorous defender of the extreme right in the Australian labour movement in the 1950s. He was chief legal adviser to what became known as the ‘Industrial Groups’, which sought to dominate trade unionism and were linked to the Democratic Labor Party. The DLP was an extreme ‘anti-communist’ organisation whose split from the Labor Party and subsequent spoiler tactics kept Labor in opposition until Whitlam’s election in 1972.
Kerr was an enthusiastic member of the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom, described by Jonathan Kwitny, in his book The Crimes of Patriots, as ‘an elite, invitation-only group . . . which in 1967 was exposed in Congress as being founded, funded and generally run by the CIA’.68 In researching his book, Kwitny, a senior journalist with the conservative Wall Street Journal, had unusual access to Kerr. He spoke twice to him, once to check the accuracy of what he had written about him. Kwitny wrote:
In the 1960s Kerr helped organise and run (as founding President) the Law Association for Asia and the Western Pacific. He travelled to the United States to arrange financing for this body from a tax-free group known as the Asia Foundation; that, too, was exposed in Congress as a CIA-established conduit for money and influence. In fact, Victor Marchetti, the retired CIA officer says in his book with former Foreign Service Officer John Marks, that the ‘Asia Foundation often served as a cover for clandestine operations’, though ‘its main purpose was to promote the spread of ideas which were anti-communist and pro-American’.69
‘The CIA’, Kwitny concluded, ‘paid for Kerr’s travel, built his prestige and even published his writings, through a subsidised magazine . . . Kerr continued to go to the CIA for money.’70
All this was on the record when in February 1974 Prime Minister Whitlam selected Kerr to succeed Sir Paul Hasluck as Governor-General of Australia. The Governor-General is, or ought to be, a living anachronism. He (never a she) represents the nominal Head of State, the English monarch, who is also ‘King or Queen of Australia’. He is not elected; the job was once a sinecure, mostly for lesser breeds of the English aristocracy, and the duties are ceremonial; or so the Australian people believed.
Certainly Whitlam believed it. According to Richard Hall, Kerr’s biographer, Whitlam saw Kerr’s appointment as appeasing ‘those who wanted a titled Governor-General and would accord with Labor principles against creating knighthoods’. Whitlam also believed Kerr had ‘a good presence’ for representing Australia overseas and ‘as a lawyer, Kerr would be aware of the development of Constitutional Law and the principle
s of responsible government’.71
For a man who supposedly understood the nature of the forces ranged against a reformist Labor Government, Whitlam’s naïveté in appointing Kerr was astonishing. Kerr’s associations with the far right, with intelligence operations and the CIA were not at issue when the appointment was announced. I remember reading much about Kerr’s membership of the Labor Party and his rise from ‘battling poverty’. A friend of his was quoted as describing the future Governor-General as a ‘pre-war Socialist’. The press made few enquiries of its own, reflecting both an idleness and general uninterest in the ‘anachronism’.
Indeed, when Kerr was sworn in, he attracted headlines with his announcement that women were no longer required to curtsy to him. Like so much about the man, even this was not as it seemed. Those fortunate enough to be presented to the vice-regal personage were given the impression that they should curtsy. None the less, the women’s section of the Sydney Daily Mirror gave him the ‘yum’ award for this vital reform.
Kerr occupied a world unimagined by his fellow Australians – ‘a formidable little principality’. The Governor-General’s Canberra residence, ‘Yarralumla’, was a sixty-room mansion surrounded by more than 130 lush acres. There were fifty staff, of whom thirty were classed as domestic servants. There was a Sydney residence, known as Admiralty House, set in three splendid acres overlooking the harbour. And there were twelve Rolls-Royces awaiting him throughout Australia.72
Among the guests at the vice-regal table were often those from the ‘defence and intelligence community’, who were deeply hostile to the Government. According to Richard Hall, Kerr ‘ensured that the names of intelligence personnel were not included in the vice-regal guest lists’. He also ‘asked for and was given codeword material, and once sought a special briefing from ASIO on Communism in Australia’.73 In addition, he received briefings on ‘international affairs’ from the United States Ambassador, Marshall Green.74 With this special access Kerr would have had an insider’s knowledge of matters which were to dominate Australian national life during 1975: the ‘loans affair’, the ‘supply crisis’ and a succession of controversies involving the Australian intelligence organisations and the CIA.
On October 14, 1975 the loans affair appeared to be reaching its climax when Whitlam forced a second Minister to resign. Like Jim Cairns before him, Rex Connor, the Minister for Minerals and Energy, was accused of misleading Parliament. Connor had maintained contact with Khemlani after Khemlani’s authority to negotiate a loan had been withdrawn. In his own defence Connor argued that only a massive overseas loan would give the Government the funds with which to resume control of Australia’s vital industries. He continued to believe Khemlani could raise such a loan without the controls demanded by the International Monetary Fund. His ideals and judgment were poorly matched.
Connor’s sacking had a disastrous effect on the Government’s rating in the opinion polls. Malcolm Fraser called it a ‘reprehensible circumstance’ and made his move. The next day the Opposition used its slender Senate majority to defer a vote on the Budget Appropriation Bills, thus blocking money supply indefinitely. The clear implication was that when the money ran out essential public services would cease to function. In its seventy-four years, the Senate had never used its power in this way.
Fraser warned that the bills would not be passed until Whitlam had agreed to an early election – in spite of the fact that the Whitlam Government had won two elections in less than three years. Six of Australia’s leading professors of law declared publicly the manoeuvre to be ‘constitutionally improper’. Within two weeks the opinion polls showed a dramatic change; 70 per cent of the public disapproved of the Opposition tactic and substantial support was returned to the beleaguered Government. Why did the conservatives attempt such high-risk action when it was plain that all they had to do was wait for the Government to fall apart under the strain of the loans affair and an election within six months might well have seen them in power?
Six months was too long to wait; notice of the renewal of the Pine Gap treaty, which would determine the future of the CIA’s most valuable overseas base, was due in less than two months, on December 9. Moreover, the uncertain future of the bases, and the ‘instability’ of the Australian Government, now obsessed the CIA. William Colby, the CIA Director, later wrote that the ‘threat’ posed by the Whitlam Government was one of the three ‘world crises’ of his career, comparable with the Middle East War in 1973, when the United States considered using nuclear weapons.
After Whitlam had threatened in private and in Parliament not to extend the lease of the bases, the CIA made a series of direct moves to get rid of him: that is, to persuade others with shared, vested interests to do the job. The information for this comes from the highest sources in US intelligence: up to the level of a former Deputy Director of the CIA, as well as Regional Director and Station Chief. They are not renegade officers. They agreed to speak only after being given guarantees of confidentiality, and they have provided detailed briefings on what happened to the Whitlam Government, why it happened and how it happened.75
During 1974 the CIA Station Chief in London, Dr John Proctor, got in touch with the British security organisation, M16, and asked for help with ‘the Whitlam problem’. Proctor was close to the British and had been Director of Strategic Research for the CIA. His speciality was satellites and, according to one source, ‘he had a unique understanding of what could be lost if Pine Gap was shut down’. In early 1975 William Colby himself directly approached his opposite number, the head of MI6, Sir Maurice Oldfield. Later the CIA sought assistance from MI5 and MI6 liaison officers based in Washington. In all these contacts the CIA emphasised to the British that ‘if this intelligence capability was lost, then the Alliance would be in danger . . . the Alliance would be blinded strategically’. Australia, it was argued, was ‘traditionally Britain’s domain’.
British intelligence had a vested interest in the concern expressed by Washington. MI6 operates its own base at Kowandi, south of Darwin, where its highly secret activities are concealed from the Australian Government and people. They include widespread intervention in other people’s communications and covert operations in Asia.76 The Australian Secret Intelligence Service, ASIS, also operates from this base, and is so integrated with MI6 that London is still referred to as ‘head office’.77 In approaching MI6 about Whitlam, the Americans wanted to invoke the British/Australian old-boy network. Between 1974 and 1975 the number of calls from British intelligence to ASIS almost doubled.78
At the same time the infamous Peter Wright and his colleagues in British intelligence were busy destabilising the Labour Government of Harold Wilson. Wright was a close friend of James Jesus Angleton, the head of CIA counter-intelligence, and by all accounts a figure of fanatical tendencies. Between them, according to British journalist David Leigh, author of The Wilson Plot, Wright and Angleton ‘targeted’ three Western leaders they regarded as ‘communist agents’: Wilson, Whitlam and Willy Brandt in Germany. Leigh says the proof of a plot against Whitlam is in ‘unpublished correspondence by Peter Wright either to other intelligence officers or that which he never thought would see the light of day’. Wright was personally bitter about Whitlam who, in removing the head of ASIO, Peter Barbour, had dashed Wright’s plan to move to Australia as a ‘counter-espionage consultant’ with Barbour’s approval. Wright’s letters, says Leigh, ‘show him conspiring with Angleton [who was] directly involved in the pursuit of Whitlam’.79
In the latter part of 1975 Whitlam began to grasp the precise nature of what was being done to him. He discovered that British intelligence had long been operating against his Government. ‘The Brits were actually decoding secret messages coming into the Foreign Affairs office,’ he said later, ‘ . . . the reason they make such an assault on me is that they hope I will crack.’80 Having already removed the heads of both ASIO and ASIS, Whitlam was now moving against the CIA. When he heard that a CIA officer, Richard Stallings, was a friend of
the National Country Party leader, Doug Anthony, and had rented Anthony’s Canberra home, Whitlam called for a list of all ‘declared’ CIA officers who had served in Australia during the previous ten years. Stallings’s name was not on the list. He then learned that another, ‘confidential’ list of CIA officers was held by the Permanent Head of the Australian Defence Department, Sir Arthur Tange. He demanded to see this list and found Stallings’s name on it.
Tange, a conservative ‘mandarin’, effectively ran Australian intelligence and was its principal contact with the CIA and MI6. He was enraged by Whitlam’s outspokenness. On November 2, 1975 Whitlam accused the Opposition of being ‘subsidised by the CIA’.81 In Parliament Doug Anthony confirmed that Stallings was his friend and challenged Whitlam to provide evidence that Stallings belonged to the CIA. Whitlam prepared a reply which he intended to give when Parliament resumed on the following Tuesday, November 11. Tange was now frantic. Not only was the Prime Minister about to ‘blow’ the cover of the man who had set up Pine Gap, proving that the ‘joint facility’ was a CIA charade, but the future of the base itself was to be subjected to parliamentary debate.
On November 10 Whitlam was told that the acting Director of ASIO, Frank Mahoney (who had been appointed by Whitlam himself) had received a telex message from the ASIO station in Washington which required urgent attention. ‘What’s it about?’ Whitlam asked a member of his staff. ‘It’s about you,’ was the reply. The message said, in effect, that the Prime Minister of Australia was a security risk in his own country.82
The message had been virtually dictated by Theodore Shackley, head of the CIA’s East Asia Division. Shackley is one of the most controversial figures the CIA has spawned. He made his name in ‘covert action’, first as head of the CIA’s Miami-based operation against Castro, then as CIA Station Chief in Laos and Vietnam. He worked on the CIA campaign in Chile at the time of Allende, and since leaving the CIA he has been involved in Central America.