A Secret Country

by John Pilger

  At this, I decided to dissent and proposed a toast to Gough Whitlam as ‘Australia’s first truly independent national leader’. Mouths opened and eyes squinted, fingernails and Adam’s apples were inspected and excuses made; the port clearly would be taken in company other than mine. ‘Up ’em,’ said my father-in-law as we sat alone.

  The ‘right people’ were back in power, if only for the time being. The paternalism cast by Menzies would be adhered to by Fraser; but beyond Canberra power was shifting in unexpected directions, as if those like Fraser, who were beneficiaries of the coup against Whitlam, were themselves being overtaken by others slicker than they: men not of the Melbourne Club but of the main chance, men from the ‘big end of town’ and their political suppliants, who were forming a new Australian establishment. This would be known as the Order of Mates.

  Unlike the Melbourne men, Bob Hawke, who came from faraway Western Australia, wore suits that shone, wide bottomed trousers and shirts with the buttons undone. A ‘bodgie’ was a 1950s Australian Teddy Boy and ‘Hawkie’, with his thick, grey-black coiffure, was the Silver Bodgie. He also talked out of the corner of his mouth in an accent which was said to be ‘ocker’, or working class, although Hawke himself was of the middle class and Oxford educated. Indeed, while he was President of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, much of Hawke’s popularity rested on his reputation as a ‘larrikin’: an Australian sobriquet as good as a bestowed title in another society. A larrikin is admired because he likes a beer and gets into trouble and does not mind the consequences. Most of all a larrikin never forgets his Mates.

  Australia has an historic reverence for booze, having been ‘on the grog’ since rum was the accredited anaesthetic for the cruelties visited upon the convict nation. What was remarkable about Hawke – and perhaps this could happen only in Australia – was that during much of his ascendancy to power he was one, two or three parts cut; and that regardless of this, or perhaps because of this, his popularity as a public figure grew. The following incident, recounted by journalist Brian Toohey, is not untypical. Toohey describes Hawke’s first meeting with the Sydney publishing scion, Sir Warwick Fairfax and his wife, Lady Mary.

  Hawke was in his 100-drinks-a-day phase . . . The occasion was a Parliament House reception in Canberra where the guests had spilled into the courtyard outside the non-members’ bar. While Sir Warwick and I conducted the usual, polite tour de l’horizon, the putative PM was most solicitous of Lady Mary’s sexual welfare (nodding to Sir Warwick), ‘I bet this old bastard doesn’t give your cunt much use.’ Considerable effort was then devoted to explaining in florid detail that, fortunately, a remedy was available in the form of R. L. J. Hawke himself.

  Lady Mary was too much of a lady, naturally, to respond in other than the most graciously off-hand manner. The flattery was somewhat undercut, however, by Hawke’s attention being diverted intermittently to a young journalist in the group, Jo Hawke. ‘Your name’s Hawke, eh, then you’d have to be a good fuck.’

  These initiatives were temporarily interrupted when a friend of mine, then a Labor Party staffer, poured a cooling glass of beer over Hawke’s head. However, as Toohey recalled,

  this minor lapse aside, Sir Warwick and Lady Mary were sufficiently impressed to invite the future statesman to Fairwater, their harbourside pile in Sydney. From there the relationship grew, until Hawke felt free to call Sir Warwick whenever he felt some slight upon his good name had sullied the pages of the Fairfax papers.1

  As a trade-union lawyer Hawke understood well the complexities of the arbitration and ‘awards’ system which govern Australian working conditions; and although his public image was that of an aggressive, often belligerent man – ‘Hawke by name and by nature’ – he did more to ‘cool’ strikes (his word) than to back them. He did this with the maximum flamboyance, by skilful use of the media, especially television, through which he would castigate ‘the bosses’ (and the television interviewers if they probed too deeply) while appealing for ‘common sense’ among workers who ‘you can bet will do the right thing as good Australians’. Precisely what this meant, and whose interests ‘the right thing’ favoured was never entirely clear. At the end of his ACTU presidency in 1979, the average weekly wage in Australia was a modest $A216.

  On his progress through committee rooms, television studios and bars, Bob Hawke grasped the hands of many Mates, but none so warmly as those more influential than him. Abroad he was welcomed as a fervent Zionist and anti communist, and he cultivated many ties with powerful groups and individuals in Israel and the United States. George Shultz, who held several Cabinet posts under Presidents Nixon and Reagan, developed what he called ‘a fine partnership’ with Hawke. The two first met when Shultz was head of the huge Bechtel Corporation, which has worldwide interests in construction and energy and was then linked to the political extreme right in the United States and later to the Reagan administration.

  During the Whitlam years in the early 1970s Hawke pursued these ties in his dual capacity as union boss and President of the Australian Labor Party in office. The American Ambassador at the time, Marshall Green, told me he found Hawke so amenable to ‘our common cause’ that ‘Bob gave me his private telephone number and said if anything ever comes up that desperately needs some action, this is the number to call’.2

  In the 1970s the trade-union movement of Australia had long been infiltrated by American intelligence: the Australian Council of Trade Unions was based in Melbourne, and the US labour attaché had his office nearby. ‘It was generally accepted in the trade-union movement’, said John Grenville, assistant secretary of the Victorian Trades Hall, ‘that the labour attaché was the station agent for the CIA.’3 In a secret speech, the former Chief of the CIA’s Clandestine Services, Richard Bissell, described the two main activities of these agents. The first was that which could be ‘initiated through CIA channels because they could be started more quickly and informally but do not inherently have to be secret. An example might be certain exchange of persons [in] programs designed to identify potential political leaders and give them some exposure to the United States.’4

  This ‘exchange’ is usually in the form of ‘study’ or ‘scholarship’ trips which are offered to trade-union officials as they rise through the hierarchy of their unions. In 1950 the US ‘labour attache”, Herbert Weiner, handed out the first of what were known as ‘Leader Grants’, which, funded by the US Information Service, sought to influence prominent figures in politics and the trade unions and incidentally to provide subject material for the CIA to survey and occasionally choose ‘agents of influence’.5

  Thus, the General Secretary of the powerful Australian Workers’ Union, Tom Dougherty, was fêted across Cold War America and returned to boast that he could always arrange a Leader Grant for a ‘worthy’ person. The CIA later admitted giving money to Dougherty to ‘fight communism in the AWU’.6 Four years later the National Secretary of the Federated Ironworkers’ Association, Laurie Short, made the first of many sponsored visits to the United States long before the disclosure of CIA funding made both sponsors and recipients more cautious. Short met President Eisenhower and Vice-President Nixon and was lauded as a crusader against communism. ‘Somebody should strike a medal for Laurie Short,’ wrote New York columnist Victor Riesel.7 On his return a Brisbane newspaper noted that, ‘in 97 days in the United States as a State Department grant holder, Laurie Short travelled 16,300 miles . . . all on a travel allowance of 12 dollars a day, and the generosity of people all round the country’.8 Most Australian iron workers were then getting less than $A30 a week. Washington’s largesse, not surprisingly, was much sought after in those austere times.

  Richard Bissell described the essence of the CIA’s influence in a country’s ‘internal power balance’ as ‘the identification of allies who can be rendered more effective, more powerful, and perhaps wiser through covert assistance’.9 The effect of ‘study trips’ on right-wing union officials could be quite dramatic. Laurie Short returned to
Australia determined to get rid of ‘the Commies and their friends’ from the Labor Party and the unions. He also delivered the clear message that ‘in America, the trade-union movement looked to Australian unionists to help counteract the spread of Communism in the Far East’.10

  One of the Australians’ most important mentors in Washington was Arthur J. (‘Harry’) Goldberg, a senior official of the Free Trade Union Committee of the American Federation of Labor, which was later exposed in Congress as CIA-funded. In 1960 Goldberg visited Australia to draw up a secret report for the CIA on Australian unions. ‘In regard to Communist influence,’ he wrote, ‘I find the situation is even more serious than I thought it to be . . . The vermin have infiltrated more extensively into the Labor Movement than I had thought.’ But Goldberg found the ‘situation far from hopeless’ and noted that ‘the Labor [union] boys . . . who are fighting an uphill battle versus the commies . . . are looking to us and only us’. He added that ‘all these groups are more or less loosely in touch with each other’.11

  Few rank-and-file trade unionists have heard of the ‘Australian Trade Union Training Program at Harvard Foundation’. Set up in 1976 by the American Chamber of Commerce in Australia, the seventeen-week course provides ‘training’ for senior union officials. Its aim is to prevent ‘counter-productive disruptions’ (strikes) and to create ‘union leaders who are reliable professionals’. The ‘training’ includes a month-long tour of the United States to ‘see the Harvard-learned principles in action’. Meetings with leading union and Government officials are arranged and paid for by the US Government. However, as Richard Bissell pointed out, such schemes ‘are more effective if carried out by private auspices than if supported officially by the United States Government’.12 The Harvard Training Program is funded mostly by the American Chamber of Commerce and American-based multi-national companies. Its original trustees included two of the then most powerful figures in the right-wing machine which runs the Labor Party in New South Wales, Neville Wran and Barrie Unsworth. The year the Harvard scheme was set up Wran was elected State Premier; ten years later Unsworth succeeded him.

  Together with ‘study trips’, Bissell identified the most important activity of CIA ‘attache’s’ as the process of cultivation. He said, ‘Many of the “penetrations” don’t take the form of “hiring” but of establishing a close or friendly relationship which may or may not be furthered by the provision of money from time to time.13 The US labour attachés in Melbourne are invariably gregarious, even ‘larrikins’, have an apparently inexhaustible expense account and throw memorable parties for the Mates they cultivate in the Australian trade-union establishment. That it was ‘generally accepted’ they were CIA agents did not deter the forging of close friendships with important trade-union officials. For example, Bob Hawke was considered a Mate by three of the best-known labour attachés: Robert Walkinshaw, Emil Lindahl and Edward McHale.

  Robert Walkinshaw was labour attaché from 1962 to 1964. During his time in Melbourne, a trade-union publication, Spotlight, was set up, funded and run by the CIA. Spotlight was so well informed that in 1964 it predicted the outcome of the ballot for positions in the South Australian branch of the Australian Workers’ Union, as well as the action the union’s federal executive took the following year to dismiss those elected in the ‘ballot’!

  Walkinshaw was named in Parliament as a CIA agent by Clyde Cameron, who later became Minister of Labour in the Whitlam Government.14 Cameron told me:

  Some weeks later I was invited to have dinner at the US Embassy where Walkinshaw challenged me to repeat my charge in the presence of our host. The host commented, ‘Well this is a pretty serious charge, Mr Cameron.’ I replied, ‘Well, it is serious; and what I’m saying to you is that now that the mask has been torn from Walkinshaw’s face and we know what he is, I don’t think he will be very effective in carrying out his mission in Australia much longer.’ My host feigned deep shock and [denied] that US Embassies anywhere employed CIA agents and that it was part of the Soviet’s propaganda against the US.15

  Walkinshaw’s next CIA posting was Indonesia during the military coup, in which hundreds of thousands of alleged communists and communist sympathisers were murdered. Walkinshaw worked with the head of the army-approved trade-union movement, Agus Sudono, who was accused of pointing out communist trade unionists for ‘elimination’.16 Sudono visited Australia in 1977 and, in spite of demonstrations pointing out his complicity in the massacres, he was met by the President of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, Bob Hawke.

  Walkinshaw renewed his contact with Australia in 1970 when he was posted as CIA adviser in Phuoc Tuy, Vietnam, where the Australian army and Australian CIA advisers were based. Over lunch in Giadinh province with the journalist William Pinwill, Walkinshaw asked after ‘my good friend’ Bob Hawke. ‘Hawke stays in my apartment in New York when he’s in town,’ he said.17

  Emil Lindahl also found his way from the US labour attaché’s office in Melbourne to Vietnam. Known among Australian trade-union officials as ‘the Big Swede’, Lindahl was a popular and influential figure when Bob Hawke began his campaign for the ACTU Presidency in 1969. John Grenville

  recalled:It was around about this time there was a visit by some American officials to Melbourne and a reception was held for them at the Downtowner Motel. Bob Hawke was there and a number of other trade-union officials, myself included. The Labour Attaché, Emil Lindahl, got Bob Hawke aside and he and Lindahl and Harry Goldberg and Gerry O’Keefe left the room for some period and then they came back. Bob Hawke seemed rather pleased and the message I got loud and clear was that the Americans would be supporting Bob Hawke.18

  The three Americans closeted with and ‘supporting’ Bob Hawke all worked for or with the CIA. Gerry O’Keefe was filmed by Granada Television in Chile in 1973 and exposed as a major CIA operator in right-wing Chilean unions which helped to overthrow the Allende Government. He was later named as a CIA agent during the hearings of the Church Committee of the US Senate.19

  Ed McHale was labour attaché in the early 1970s when Hawke, as ACTU President, was one of the most powerful union bosses Australia had ever had. He was a guest at Hawke’s Melbourne home and, according to former US Ambassador Marshall Green, ‘spent a great deal of time with Bob Hawke and knew him extremely well . . . they had a close personal relationship’.20 McHale was internationally known as a senior CIA officer, having long been Assistant Director of Radio Free Europe, which had been set up, financed and run by the CIA.

  Hawke denied he knew that the three attachés worked for the CIA. When told by Pinwill about Walkinshaw, he expressed surprise and said that it was normal practice for a trade-union official to have close contact with the labour attachés of a friend and ally. He also explained to the Nation Review:

  I’ve never known them to try in any way to traduce people. I’ve met them all the way back to Walkinshaw and I’ve never been aware of any sort of activity that would make me identify them as CIA agents. That proves nothing of course. You could think of them asking more specific questions which would make you wonder. But they have never done anything other than ask questions which one would associate with a sensible and lively interest in the labour movement.21

  Clyde Cameron told me that the Americans actually opposed Hawke’s candidacy for ACTU President, as Hawke was known as the ‘darling of the Left’.22 Certainly, Hawke wooed the vote of the left and was judged more militant than his opponent, who was an uninspiring leftover of the traditional trade-union leadership. But if Hawke’s aggressive image was confused with left-wing militancy, he himself would correct this by his subsequent actions.

  In 1977 Gough Whitlam told Parliament he believed the American Christopher Boyce, convicted that year of spying for the Russians, was ‘a man in the know’ about CIA activities in Australia. Whitlam referred specifically to ‘the manipulation of unions’.23 In an interview following his trial Boyce had described one instance when his company, a CIA contractor, had ‘hardware, softw
are and personnel’ to ship out to the CIA base at Pine Gap near Alice Springs. He said there was concern about strikes at Australian airports that ‘could wreck our schedule’ and referred to a telex from CIA headquarters which said, ‘CIA will continue to suppress the strikes. Continue shipment on schedule.’ Boyce said he concluded that ‘either the CIA directly, or through intermediaries, would have to have infiltrated the hierarchy of [Australian] trade unions’.24

  Business International is a worldwide American organisation of ‘consultants’ which represents the top multi-national companies in Australia, including those concerned with ‘strategic materials’, such as the formidable mining companies. It dispenses information, corporate strategies and informed assessments such as ‘corporate risks in the Australian political environment’. In December 1977 the New York Times exposed Business International’s clandestine links with the CIA.25

  In April 1981 senior executives of nineteen corporations assembled in Melbourne’s Noah’s Hotel for a ‘forecasting round table’ organised by Business International. More than five years after the overthrow of Whitlam, ‘the big end of town’ (as corporate business is known in Australia) was concerned about the resurgence of the Labor Party under Bill Hayden, who had held senior portfolios in the Whitlam Government and who described himself as a republican and a democratic socialist. The nineteen had come to hear American-trained economist Alan Carroll, of Business International, ‘forecast’ the future of the Labor Party and its leader.