A Secret Country

by John Pilger

  Shackley’s message to ASIO bordered on the hysterical. He berated Whitlam for suggesting the CIA funded the Opposition, for threatening to name agents and, above all, for wanting to ‘blow the lid off those installations in Australia, where the persons concerned [Stallings and other CIA officers] have been working and which are vital to both of our services and countries, particularly [Pine Gap]’. Shackley described his threat as ‘an official démarche on a service-to-service link’, which meant that it was to bypass the Government and that ASIO was to continue to lie to Whitlam about the bases, and to pressure the Government into accepting CIA demands. If this was not done, Shackley threatened, the ‘sharing’ of secrets would be broken off. Brian Toohey, who first published the message, later met Shackley. He gained the clear impression that the threats had had the full authority of the Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger.83

  According to the former Deputy Director of Intelligence for the CIA, Dr Ray Cline, the CIA passed information to Opposition politicians not only to discredit the Whitlam Government but also to put pressure on Australian civil servants, who in turn ‘would have been pressuring the Governor-General’.84 Another senior CIA source, who cannot be named, was more explicit. On the weekend of November 8–9, a top civil servant was directly in touch with Sir John Kerr to pass on the CIA’s demands, as spelt out in the Shackley message.

  Kerr’s denials are interesting. ‘I have never had any direct or indirect association with the CIA or with any British intelligence organisation,’ he has said. ‘In fact, I have never during my Governor-Generalship, or at all, had any intelligence contacts whatsoever.’ He has also denied specifically having any contact with Australian intelligence. ‘I didn’t seek to know them,’ he has said.85 These are remarkable statements.

  Kerr’s intelligence career and his association with the CIA are matters of record. There is also the matter of his documented whereabouts on Sunday, November 9. On that day Kerr travelled to the ultra-secret headquarters near Melbourne of Australia’s most important spy organisation, the Defence Signals Directorate, DSD, where he was briefed on the ‘security crisis’. He then asked for a telephone and spent twenty minutes in hushed conversation. According to the base’s commanding officer, he demanded that the phone be ‘secure’.86 This fact alone represents an important discrepancy in the story of a man who not only denies having had ‘any intelligence contacts whatsoever’ but who emphasised that he ‘didn’t seek to know’ Australian intelligence. Kerr has never explained this, or allowed himself to be subjected to public scrutiny on these or any other matters.

  For the CIA, December 9 remained a critical date. The agency was certain Whitlam would announce the cancellation of the Pine Gap agreement on that day. If the conservative coalition was to be elected in time to ‘protect the sanctity of the bases’, an election would have to be held before the Christmas holiday period. And this would mean calling the election no later than the week of Remembrance Day, November 11.

  If what was about to happen had not been planned, the indiscretions of one Andrew Peacock six weeks earlier would have amounted to an astonishing coincidence. Peacock, then a member of the Opposition and now its leader, was visiting Indonesia and briefed Government officials there on the current state of the Australian political crisis. He described in detail the events which were about to take the nation, and presumably himself and his conservative colleagues, by surprise. A record of the briefing was later read into Australian Hansard. This is an extract:

  Whitlam will not agree to hold an election . . . the Governor-General would be forced to ask Malcolm Fraser to form a Cabinet. But this Cabinet would not be able to get a mandate to govern, because Parliament is controlled by the Labor Party . . . Fraser is appointed PM, a minute later he asks the Governor-General to dissolve Parliament, following which a general election is to be held.87

  And that is what happened.

  On November 11, the very day Whitlam was to inform Parliament fully about the CIA and American bases in Australia, he was summoned by Kerr from Parliament House and, without warning, sacked. Kerr’s cunning was such that at the moment he was dismissing the Prime Minister, he had Malcolm Fraser hiding in another room. He had even seen to it that Fraser’s official car was parked where Whitlam would not see it. With Whitlam off the premises, Fraser emerged and was made caretaker Prime Minister.

  Whitlam did not return directly to Parliament, but went instead to The Lodge, his official residence, where over lunch he struggled to reconcile his shock and rising rage with the innate stoicism of one who believed, above all, in respect for the law and procedure – even though his dismissal was, at best, constitutionally dubious. Back on the floor of the House of Representatives he moved a motion ‘that this House expresses its want of confidence in the Prime Minister and requests Mr Speaker forthwith to advise His Excellency the Governor-General to call on me to form a Government’. This vote of confidence in a twice-elected Prime Minister was approved by an overwhelming majority of the House of Representatives. Indeed, six motions proposed that day by the Government, including a motion censuring Malcolm Fraser, were passed by absolute majorities.

  Parliament’s clear message of confidence in the Whitlam Government was delivered personally to the Governor-General by the Speaker of the House. Kerr refused to accept it, although he did accept the Supply Bills, which were also passed after he had dismissed the Government. Thus, an unelected official made his arbitrary decision and the legitimate acts of a democracy amounted to nothing. In modern Australia democracy had been usurped, said the Melbourne Age, by ‘the right of Kings and Queens to unilaterally appoint Governments’.88

  There are no Kings and Queens in Washington.

  ‘The CIA’s aim’, said former CIA officer Victor Marchetti, ‘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’.89 The sophistication and subtlety were described by the CIA’s former Chief of Clandestine Services, Richard Bissell, in a secret speech. In this passage Bissell portrays the Agency’s ideal foreign agents in ‘destabilisation’ operations:

  Covert intervention is usually designed to operate on the internal power balance . . . to achieve results within at most two or three years . . . The essence of such intervention is the identification of allies who can be rendered more effective, more powerful, and perhaps wiser through covert assistance. Typically these local allies know the source of the assistance but neither they nor the United States could afford to admit to its existence. Agents for fairly minor and low sensitivity interventions, for instance some covert propaganda and certain economic activities, can be recruited simply with money.

  But for the larger and more sensitive interventions, the allies must have their own motivation. On the whole the Agency has been remarkably successful in finding individuals and instrumentalities with which and through which it could work on this fashion.90

  The Washington investigative journalist, Joseph Trento, interviewed former CIA officers who were among the Agency’s ‘top seven’ in 1975. In an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald in 1988, he was quoted as saying,

  Whitlam was set up. The action that Kerr took was so extreme that it would take far more than . . . a constitutional crisis to cause him to do what he did. There are other ways out. This is what I was told by a Deputy Director of the CIA. He told me, ‘Kerr did what he was told to do.’ [The Deputy Director] did not tell me – and I asked him – that Kerr worked for the CIA. He did not tell me that Kerr did any favours for the CIA, that there was any quid pro quo: simply that Kerr did what the British told him to do.91

  Kerr – who died in 1991 – denied that anyone told him to act. The senior Government official who was directly in touch with Kerr – and ‘directly in touch’ was emphasised by the CIA source – was neither American nor British, but Australian. He was described by the CIA source as a man with whom he had regular contact, ‘an honourable man’. He was the principal messenger,
the ‘conduit’. As the source cannot be named, neither unfortunately can the official.

  During the first week of the coup the Australian army was recalled to barracks and there were reports that units were issued with live ammunition. Army brass insisted that their ‘experts’ ride in the engine cabs of trains in New South Wales ‘to observe the condition of the tracks’. According to Whitlam, Kerr was prepared to call out the Army, of which, he had once boasted, he was the Commander in Chief.92

  There were demonstrations throughout Australia; and people in working-class streets gathered through the hot night, as they had done on election night. Now the mood was incredulous and becoming embittered. ‘Maintain your rage,’ Whitlam had said on the steps of Parliament House that day. Many ordinary people, the losers, maintained it.

  The unions began to mobilise and prepare for a general strike. But this required leadership, and there was none. The President of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, Bob Hawke, summoned the press and delivered a stirring, almost tearful speech which effectively cancelled Whitlam’s call to his supporters. Working people, said Hawke, ‘must not be provoked . . . we have to show we are not going to allow this to snowball’.93 Hawke’s intervention was critical; an American reporter wrote that Australia ‘is strangely quiet’.

  An election was called for December 13. ‘Whitlam and his colleagues’, wrote Joan Coxsedge, Ken Coldicutt and Gerry Harant,

  had been deprived of the normal prerogative of a retiring Government of choosing the date and the issues for an election. The nature of their dismissal had placed them in the position of convicted criminals, lending credence to the continuing cries of scandal from anti-Labor forces. The former Government was even deprived of access to information that would otherwise have been available. For example, Treasury had revised its Budget forecasts, and believed that recovery would be under way in June . . . This would have allayed the fears of the middle class . . . In any event, it appeared as if the Labor leaders were dazed by the coup and were incapable of analysing how and why it occurred.94

  During the election campaign three letter bombs were posted to Kerr, Fraser and the ultra-conservative Queensland Premier, Johannes Bjelke-Petersen. Most of the press, led by Rupert Murdoch’s papers, concluded that the bombs were sent by left-wing extremists within the Labor Party. There was not a scrap of evidence to support this and no culprits were ever found. But the issue of ‘terrorism’ was used to effect by the Opposition.

  This, and one final, bizarre episode, delivered the coup de grace to Whitlam’s chances of re-election. Four days before the election, Bjelke-Petersen called a special session of the Queensland Parliament to hear ‘dramatic revelations’. He claimed to be ‘in possession of material’ which made clear ‘that two Ministers of the Whitlam Government . . . were due to receive staggering sums of money as a consequence of secret commissions and kickbacks’. At this, his Police Minister, Russ Hinze, interjected, ‘Murphy [the former Attorney-General] will be a surfie by the time we’re finished with him!’95 Bjelke-Petersen moved quickly to gag any debate and to prevent the State Labor Opposition leader from calling before the bar of Parliament one Henry Wiley Fancher, the source of the ‘revelations’. Fancher was an American rancher who had done foreign deals for the Queensland Government and had much in common with Bjelke-Petersen. He had settled in Queensland, he said, ‘to avoid living near negroes’.96

  The undisclosed ‘revelations’ made large headlines. No ‘material’ or evidence of any kind was ever produced. Whitlam lost the election.

  Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser renewed the Pine Gap Treaty for another decade. He also offered Washington a naval base at Cockburn Sound, even though the Americans had not requested it. He began the mining of uranium, the ‘strategic material’ whose short supply in the United States had prompted a lawyer acting for Westinghouse Electric, a leading manufacturer of nuclear materials, to comment prophetically a few weeks earlier, ‘If the Labor Government in Australia is kicked out within the next five weeks . . . we can get the uranium we thought we had.’97 In his first budget, Fraser increased the size of ASIO and gave it more money, proportionately, than any other Government body. Kerr, too, was given an unequalled pay rise of 170 per cent and was promoted to ‘Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St Michael and St George’.

  Many people never forgave Kerr and saw to it that he seldom had peace; they followed him and taunted him, almost until he died. He resented this, believing that he had not only preserved the friendship between the United States and Australia, but had saved the entire Western alliance. He drank heavily, and on one memorable occasion following Australia’s principal horse race, the Melbourne Cup, he slurred abuse at a hostile crowd, his black top hat wobbling precariously on his snowy crown.

  Inside his ‘principality’ in Canberra nothing changed; the booze was excise free, the fifty servants still awaited his word, as did the Royal Australian Air Force and the chauffeurs of his Rolls-Royces. One evening, when the Queen was visiting Australia, the Governor-General, wrote Richard Hall, was ‘in an expansive mood’. He dropped next to her on a sofa, and with his considerable girth protruding, slid his arm behind her. Malcolm Fraser was horrified, and shortly afterwards announced the retirement of the man to whom he owed so much.

  ‘He feels’, said Fraser, ‘that the events of 1975 and the association of his office with issues of state which arose at that time evoked partisan feeling in the Australian community which have now substantially subsided [but] which have left feelings which might be resolved more quickly if he now makes way for a successor.’98

  Whitlam maintained his rage, but directed it at first against Kerr and Fraser and not the secret forces that stood behind them. When I interviewed him three months after the coup, he seemed almost stunned. He spoke at length about the anomalies of the Constitution, and deflected questions about the CIA back to the duplicity of the Governor-General and the then Opposition leader, whom he called ‘Kerr’s cur’.

  I now believe that Whitlam’s reticence in discussing the part played by the intelligence organisations had to do with his extraordinary sense of propriety. After the dismissal he told a Labor caucus that, because he would never breach confidential information that came to him while he was Prime Minister, ‘my place in history will bring no discredit on me, my country or on my family’.99 According to Clyde Cameron, one of his Ministers, ‘He knows a great deal, but will not tell . . . He was duped over Pine Gap, but he is not prepared to make admissions that will confirm this.’100

  However, the same sense of propriety which inspired his compulsion to respect Government secrets sharpened his resentment at the suggestion that he had been deceived. Christopher Boyce’s revelations in May 1977, that the CIA had de-stabilised his Government, produced vintage Whitlam. ‘There is profoundly increasing evidence’, he told Parliament, ‘that foreign espionage and intelligence activities are being practised in Australia on a wide scale . . . I believe the evidence is so grave in its detail and so alarming in its implications that it demands the fullest explanation. The deception over the CIA and the activities of foreign installations on our soil all affect Australia’s independence.’101 Later, in a television interview, he described the CIA’s actions as ‘an onslaught on Australia’s sovereignty’.102

  Yet it was typical of Whitlam that he should bury the most damning confirmation of this ‘onslaught’ in a large, dry book not published until 1985. In The Whitlam Government, 1972–75, he revealed that, in the wake of the Boyce disclosures in 1977, President Carter had sent a personal emissary to meet him over a private breakfast in the VIP lounge at Sydney airport. The envoy, Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher, was on his way to an ANZUS meeting in New Zealand. ‘He made it clear’, wrote Whitlam, ‘that he had made a special detour in his itinerary for the sole purpose of speaking to me.’ The crux of Carter’s message was ‘that he respected the democratic rights of the allies of the US, and that the US administration would never again interfere in the domes
tic political processes of Australia’.103 (Emphasis added.)

  There remains an exquisite irony to all this. On August 21, 1975, Whitlam, in a parliamentary reply, said that his Government had no intention of terminating the Pine Gap agreement. Moreover, those close to him say that he meant it; that he sought only the respect of ‘our great ally’ not its indifference to and veiled contempt for the rights of small nations; his warnings and strictures about the bases were proper, if unfamiliar, responses to the arrogance of American imperial assumptions; and that the CIA’s paranoia, the histrionics of Shackley, Angleton, Wright and others and the web of sub-contracted plots, were wholly unnecessary. That is beside the point now; how an elected Australian Government fell is the point.

  The established wisdom is that the Whitlam Government disintegrated as a result of its own incompetence and that the CIA and its accessories merely watched with satisfaction ‘from the sidelines’. In public discussion ‘conspiracy’ was made into a pejorative word, so that those who dared to mention it were themselves ‘paranoid’ or ‘left wing’, the contributors of ‘theories’ and ‘scuttlebutt’. This was an odd attitude. That conspiracies by definition provide predominantly circumstantial evidence and are difficult to prove in a legal sense does not make them less true, or less likely to happen. As Denis Freney has pointed out, ‘conspiracies are in fact an everyday part of political, economic and social life. Politicians conspire to win power by fair means or foul; organised crime figures conspire naturally to corrupt and influence police and politicians . . . And intelligence services conspire to de-stabilise Governments, sabotage, murder, or what you will.’104

  But could this happen in Australia?

  During 1987 the ‘Iran/Contragate’ hearings at the US Senate in Washington were shown live on Australian television and preoccupied much of the Australian press. The list of conspirators appearing before or named in the hearings read like a Who’s Who of the Nugan Hand Bank of Sydney; but this was barely acknowledged and only by those journalists who understood Nugan Hand’s links with international crime, the CIA and the overthrow of Whitlam; and they are a diminishing few and in uncertain employment.