INTRODUCTION
Declassified Australia today publishes the writing of John Pilger extracted from the chapter titled ‘The Coup’ in his best-selling book, ‘A Secret Country’. The extract appears courtesy of the estate of John Pilger.
The lessons learned from the Whitlam government dismissal 50 years ago are playing out in real time.
John Pilger, when asked two years ago to write an article for Declassified Australia on the lessons learned from the Whitlam government and its dismissal now 50 years ago, responded, “The answers to all but the contemporary questions are laid out in ‘A Secret Country’.”
More recent revelations are providing the detail and context to the American interference in Australia to bring down the Whitlam government. The investigative discoveries by John, and a host of other writers before and since, have confirmed the essential circumstances spelt out in John’s revealing 1989 book ‘A Secret Country’.
John agreed to prepare with assistance an update of the chapter, ‘The Coup’, from that book. He planned a studied comparison between the actions and attitudes towards American dominance, of the Labor governments of Gough Whitlam and Anthony Albanese, but his illness stole that opportunity away from him. However, the tenor of his intended comparison was clear:
“The point is Gough Whitlam was a giant, a maverick. Albo is a political flea, an unprincipled flea at that, who represents the ‘roll back’ times begun by Reagan and Thatcher. He is a Thatcher, a Blair, a Bush, a Morrison, all in one,” said John Pilger.
The contemporary fallout of the coup, John would no doubt agree, is laid bare by the present Prime Minister’s statements of continuing colonialism and imperial servility made during his most recent foreign trips to see the King and the President.
Peter Cronau
On December 2, 1972 the first Labor Government for twenty-three years was elected. The Prime Minister was Edward Gough Whitlam.
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.
The events that followed rapidly Whitlam’s election caught much of the world unaware, for nothing like it had happened in a modern democracy. An American observer wrote that no country has ‘reversed its posture in international affairs so totally without first having passed through a domestic revolution’.
Independence asserted
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.’
That turned out to be a considerable understatement. Frank Snepp, a CIA officer stationed in Saigon at the time, said later [as reported by Bill Pinwill],
‘We were told that the Australians might as well be regarded as North Vietnamese collaborators.’
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 the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, 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; 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.
When Whitlam was elected, ASIO’s real power derived from the spirit of the UKUSA Treaty [now generally known as the Five Eyes 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…
‘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 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 [cited by writer James A Nathan in Dateline Australia]. 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’.
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. No one in the agency would ever believe that I would subscribe to any activity that was not coordinated with the chief of the Australian internal security.’ (Emphasis added.)
The Australian Secret Intelligence Service, ASIS, has played an important part in the implementation of American foreign policy and has participated in secret American operations against other countries.
Whitlam 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 PM and the Ambassador
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’.
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 [cited in Brian Toohey’s The Eye, July 1987] 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.’ (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.
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. [Editor: Now there are 45 radomes and satellite dishes at Pine Gap.]
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’.
The Pine Gap agreement was for ten years. Notice of renewal was to be given one year before expiry on December 9, 1975.
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.’
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.’
Whitlam’s tolerance of ‘other peoples’ secrets’ was soon to be put to the test. Leaked Australian Defence Department documents [obtained in 1977 by Denis Freney] 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 Cambodia. 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. Australians 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 [reported in 1981 by filmmaker Gil Scrine in Home on the Range].
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.
The ‘Coupmaster’ arrives
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.
A senior Minister in the Whitlam Government, Clyde Cameron, reported a visit by Green to his office during which Green threatened that if the Labor Government handed control and ownership of US multi-national subsidiaries to the Australian people ‘we would move in’ [cited by writer Joan Coxsedge in Rooted in Secrecy].
When I met Green in Washington in 1987 I reminded him of his threat. He said he had been speaking in a ‘half-humorous way’ and that his words had been given ‘the wrong implication’.
‘Well, what did you say?’ I asked.
‘I said, “Well, you know in the old days, the Americans would probably send in the Marines. We don’t do things like that anymore.” Just to be funny, I accompanied it with a laugh.’
Another Whitlam Minister, Kep Enderby, who later became a judge, told a similar story about Green. In early 1974 Green addressed the Australian Institute of Directors.
The following day Enderby received a call from a member of the Institute ‘in a state of alarm’. He reported that the Ambassador’s speech had amounted almost to ‘an incitement to rise against the Australian Government’ and that Green had gone on to say that Australian business leaders ‘could expect help from the United States’, which would be similar to the help ‘given to South America’. (The CIA orchestrated overthrow of Allende in Chile had happened only a few months earlier.)
In April 1974 Labor was re-elected with a slightly reduced majority in the House of Representatives, with the balance held by two independents.
Two months later Dr Jim Cairns was elected Deputy Prime Minister by his parliamentary colleagues. Cairns was the leader of Labor’s left wing. He had been a highly effective opponent of the American war in Vietnam and believed in Australia’s total independence from Super Power politics.
Whitlam described ‘American terror’ at the thought that Cairns would have to be briefed on Pine Gap and the other ‘joint facilities’; and although Cairns never asked to be briefed, the possibility was always there, in the words of one staff member, ‘like some ulcer that could erupt any day’. For the Americans, the unthinkable was that Cairns might end up running the country.
The discrediting of Cairns became urgent. ASIO’s leak of its ‘Cairns file’ to the Bulletin magazine in June 1974 was almost certainly timed to coincide with Cairns’s election as Deputy Prime Minister. The headline read: ‘CAIRNS: ASIO’S STARTLING DOSSIER’. But abuse of a popular man with an unblemished record is too crude.
A few weeks later ASIO tried again, with a second file passed to journalist Peter Samuels, who frequently publishes CIA and other intelligence ‘leaks’. Under the headline, ‘The Pathway to Terrorism’, Samuels wrote that ASIO’s prime concern about Cairns was the ‘terrorist’ potential of his part in the anti-war movement.
The resource curse
In the wake of the Middle East War the cost of energy rose as never before and the Australian economy fell into extreme difficulties. By the end of 1974 inflation and the money supply were rising at an alarming rate. The Whitlam Government, however, remained determined to honour one of its main election promises and to ‘buy back the farm’ – that is, to reclaim national ownership of minerals, oil refineries, the motor car and other industries which had been sold to mostly American transnational interests.
In the 1970s a source of funds for a number of Western countries was the Arab world, which then had more petro-dollars than it knew what to do with, as well as potential investors wanting to diversify their new-found wealth. Whitlam instructed two of his Ministers to scour the Middle East for what would have been the largest loan in history: $A4 billion (later to be reduced to $A2 billion).
Enter Tirath Khemlani, a Pakistani ‘commodities merchant’ who, with others, succeeded in preparing a government for destruction.
When Khemlani met the Minister for Minerals and Energy, Rex Connor, in November 1974, he was working for the London brokers, Dalamal & Sons. Khemlani was a con man, who had been sent to approach Connor by a Hong Kong arms firm closely associated with Commerce International, a Brussels-based armaments company with widespread links with the CIA.
Commerce International was set up as a front for Task Force 157, an intelligence-gathering arm of the US navy which had evolved into a highly secretive CIA covert action or ‘dirty tricks’ organisation [reported by Philip Fraser in Mother Jones in 1984]. National Times journalist Marian Wilkinson, who had established Commerce International’s role as a CIA arms dealer, was told that if she continued her enquiries into the company, she could end up having her head blown off.
On July 3, 1975 the National Intelligence Daily, a top-secret CIA briefing document for the President, reported that Jim Cairns had been sacked ‘even though some of the evidence had been fabricated’. Much later an ASIO officer speculated publicly [in the Bulletin in 1976] that ‘some of the documents which helped discredit the Labor Government in its last year in office were forgeries planted by the CIA’.
As the loans affair reached its climax in the spring of 1975, a ‘blizzard’ of documents, including copies of telexes, descended upon the Australian media from as far afield as the United States.
In 1981 a CIA ‘contract employee’, Joseph Flynn, claimed he had forged some of the loans affair cables and had ‘bugged’ a hotel room where Gough Whitlam was staying. He said he had been paid by one Michael Hand, cofounder of the Nugan Hand Bank [reported by The National Times in 1981].
In its short life, the Nugan Hand Bank was associated with serious crime on an international scale and with CIA ‘covert’ activities in Australia and around the world. It ‘laundered’ money and dealt in arms, drugs and blackmail. In so doing, it helped to undermine the political opponents of the United States.
Michael Hand was a former ‘Green Beret’ in the US Special Forces in Vietnam, and he settled in Sydney in the late 1960s after his discharge from the army. Sydney then was the most popular ‘R & R’ (rest and recreation) centre for American troops serving in Vietnam. One of Hand’s closest friends was Bernie Houghton, a US Naval Intelligence officer who worked closely with the CIA.
Houghton ran three night clubs in Sydney popular with GIs – the Texas Tavern, the Bourbon and Beefsteak, and Harpoon Harry’s. A large, expansive man, seldom without a bodyguard on either side, Houghton had a network which included John Walker, the CIA Station Chief in Canberra, senior ASIO officers, and CIA agent Edwin Wilson, who worked with ‘Task Force 157’ (and who was later sentenced to forty years in an American prison for ‘freelance’ arms dealing with Libya).
Frank Nugan was a Sydney businessman/spiv whose family ran a fruit-packing business near Griffith in southern New South Wales, a district famous for its marijuana crops and gang murders. Nugan and Hand set up their bank with the dubious claim of paid-up capital of a million dollars, which Nugan said he had acquired by trading in mineral shares. Bernie Houghton became the third partner.
One of Nugan Hand’s distinctions was that its managers had virtually no experience in banking. But they did have considerable expertise in other fields, and were described [to James A Nathan] as ‘of a calibre and number to run a small sized war’.
They included US Air Force General LeRoy Manor, Chief of Staff of the US Pacific Command and a specialist in counter-insurgency; army General Edwin Black, the Commander of US forces in Thailand; Rear- Admiral Earl Yates, former Chief of Staff for Policy and Plans of the US Pacific Command; and Patry Loomis, a CIA officer who helped Edwin Wilson recruit a team of Green Berets to train Libyans. There were numerous others who, in one guise or another, had worked for and were still working for the CIA. Notable among these was William Colby, who until 1976 had been Director of the CIA.
Nugan Hand was, in intelligence jargon, a ‘conduit’: an influence felt by Australian politicians, trade union officials and journalists, some of whom were unaware of the source of favours and of disinformation.
Former Nugan Hand principal Karl Schuller provided evidence that the CIA transferred a ‘slush fund’ of $A2,400,000 to the opposition parties in March 1973, four months after Whitlam’s election [reported by Nancy Grodin in Covert Action Information Bulletin]. Schuller made this admission to South Australian Corporate Affairs investigating officers who were convinced he was telling the truth. Former CIA officer Victor Marchetti confirmed [to the Sydney Sun] that the CIA had funded both opposition parties.
In 1982 the CIA issued an unprecedented statement prior to a visit to Australia by Vice-President George Bush, who had been CIA Director following Colby’s retirement. The statement [reported by James A Nathan] said:
‘The CIA has not engaged in operations against the Australian Government. [The CIA] has no ties with Nugan Hand.’
This was not the conclusion drawn from an investigation by a special New South Wales police task force and the New South Wales Corporate Affairs Commission. In calling for criminal charges for ‘drug, conspiracy, perjury and passport offences’, the Commission’s cautious report [cited by Brian Toohey and Marian Wilkinson in The Book of Leaks] said that:
‘Many links were found between individuals connected with [Nugan Hand] and individuals connected in very significant ways with US intelligence organisations, specifically the Central Intelligence Agency and the Office of Naval Intelligence [Task Force 157]… at times those links appear to have been an intrinsic part of the then ongoing activity and have the appearance of the direct involvement of the US intelligence community itself.
The Deputy Director of the CIA, Admiral Bobby Inman, was asked about the collapse of the Nugan Hand empire. He expressed deep concern that investigation of Nugan Hand would lead to disclosure of a range of ‘dirty tricks’ calculated to undermine the Whitlam Government [cited by James A Nathan].
The ‘daily deception of an ally’
Christopher Boyce, the twenty-one-year-old son of a former FBI officer, was given a special job by TRW Incorporated, a Californian aerospace company where he worked as a cipher clerk. TRW is an important CIA contractor, and Boyce was to work in the black vault, the code room where top-secret messages were received and deciphered from American bases and satellites all over the world, including Pine Gap.
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.’
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.
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 [by Ray Martin on 60 Minutes], 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”’.
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.
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.
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.’
Boyce said that once in the black vault Joe Harrison (the CIA chief) referred to Sir John Kerr as ‘our man Kerr’.
John Kerr, the son of a boilermaker, grew up in working-class Balmain, on Sydney’s dockland, in the 1920s. 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.
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’.
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. Kwitney 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.’
Kwitny concluded:
‘The CIA 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.’
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.
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.
Among the guests at Kerr’s 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’.
In addition, he received briefings on ‘international affairs’ from the United States Ambassador, Marshall Green [told to me by Green in a 1987 interview]. 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.
The CIA’s ‘direct moves’
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. I am indebted to Joseph Trento and William Pinwill for much of this research.
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’.
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. He later said:
‘The Brits were actually decoding secret messages coming into the Foreign Affairs office… The reason they make such an assault on me is that they hope I will crack.’
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’.
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.
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.
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.
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’.
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, [as reported by Bill Pinwill].
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’ [reports Times of Sunday citing Mungo McCallum, February 1988].
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.
After the ‘coup’
In modern Australia democracy had been usurped, said the Melbourne Age, by ‘the right of Kings and Queens to unilaterally appoint Governments’.
There are no Kings and Queens in Washington.
Former CIA officer Victor Marchetti said:
‘The CIA’s aim was to get rid of a Government they did not like and that was not co-operative… it’s a Chile[coup], but in a much more sophisticated and subtle form.’
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’. [Clyde Cameron, The Cameron Diaries.]
According to Whitlam, Kerr was prepared to call out the Army, of which, he had once boasted, he was the Commander in Chief.
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’. Hawke’s intervention was critical; an American reporter wrote that Australia ‘is strangely quiet’.
An election was called for December 13. 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.
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.’
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’.
Christopher Boyce’s revelations in May 1977, that the CIA had de-stabilised his Government, produced vintage Whitlam. He told Parliament,
‘There is profoundly increasing evidence 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.’
Later, in a television interview, he described the CIA’s actions as ‘an onslaught on Australia’s sovereignty’.
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 domestic political processes of Australia’. (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 Whitlam Government left in its wake many secrets which, until they are made known, leave Australian politics disfigured and national independence as remote as ever. Some individuals and groups understandably fear that, with the passage of time, more pieces will fit the puzzle and the whole truth will emerge.
The spirit of their campaign survives, ensuring that the public memory remains short and the truth obsolete. In this way, historical amnesia is induced. Facts already on the record are omitted or obscured; vital connections are not made because of ignorance and idleness, and only sensational snippets are published.
Analysis suggesting the culpability, even criminality of established forces is denigrated or ignored; and professional propagandists, or ‘lobbyists’, are allowed to fill a vacuum where there ought to be real and challenging journalism.
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