Australia's Spies and Their Secrets
ASIO after the Cold War
In his important book, Australia's Spies and Their Secrets, author David McKnight takes the lid off the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), using never before released ASIO archives and interviews with more than 30 former intelligence officers.
Green Left Weekly printed extracts from the book in issues 150 and 151 that dealt with ASIO's working relationship with sections of the labour movement as well as employers; its partnership with the Liberal and Country parties; its plans to intern thousands of Australian dissidents in time of war or "emergency"; and its "operations" against the peace movement.
But by the late 1960s, a wind of change sent a shiver through the political establishment. ASIO's cosy relationship with the federal government came to a sudden end with the election of Gough Whitlam in 1972. After years of connivance with the Liberal and Country parties against the federal Labor Party, a mutual antipathy and distrust governed the relationship between the spooks and their new paymasters.
Attorney-General Lionel Murphy eventually led a Commonwealth police raid on ASIO's St Kilda Road, Melbourne, headquarters when he believed vital security information was being withheld from him. ASIO then decided to spy on Murphy, its boss, suspecting he could be linked to the KGB. In this venture, ASIO was assisted by British intelligence. McKnight relates the recollections of journalist George Negus, then Murphy's press secretary:
"Lionel had asked for the files of the six most dangerous or subversive people in Australia", recalled Negus. When they arrived, Murphy found they were of several CPA unionists and people such as CPA leader and peace movement activist Mavis Robertson.
"Lionel looked at them and laughed, and said to the bloke 'I know these people. They are not subversives, they're old fashioned Marxists whom you needn't worry about. We know what they are. Can you get me some real subversives? Some Russians who are in the woodwork out there?' An hour later at the airport, Murphy, brimming with good humour at the incident, rang Whitlam and asked him if he would like to know the names of the 'six most dangerous people in the country'. When he told Whitlam they both laughed — and they seldom laughed together."
Here FRANK NOAKES interviews DAVID McKNIGHT for Green Left Weekly.
David McKnight says that ASIO is no longer interested in the left or the environment movement. Curiously it seems, most of the former agents interviewed for the book shared a pro-environmental sentiment which they claimed was only common sense. "Their world view has changed just as the world has changed", says McKnight.
"While it might be colourful to think that the CIA, MI5 and ASIO still undermine their own governments if they're social democratic or Labor, there is no evidence for it, not today; they certainly did it through the '70s and no doubt the CIA still has a capacity to assassinate people and so on, but ASIO was never a local CIA or even FBI."
Charles Spry, ASIO's long-serving director who died recently, was a very "proper", very "British" character: conservative and anticommunist, but not one for taking ASIO on the sort of crazy adventures that J. Edgar Hoover took the FBI on, according to McKnight.
McKnight is not persuaded by the argument that ASIO was behind the Hilton Hotel bombing. "The Hilton bombing would be out of character for ASIO", he says, recognising that some "people on the left don't like hearing that". Perhaps ASIO had something to gain from the deadly explosion, but that doesn't convict it, McKnight notes. There is no evidence of ASIO employing physical violence in its work — although McKnight's book offers confirmation of them "heavying people". The state Special Branches were far heavier.
ASIO never had the powers or broad policing role assigned to the FBI. Australia has had a division of labour between the Commonwealth police and ASIO. "That's why ASIO's future has always been under a cloud, because it can't justify itself in normal policing terms: stopping drugs and organised crime etc. There has been, in my view, a sort of thrashing around looking for a role, certainly in the last few years.
"I think the process of change with ASIO began with the first royal commission into ASIO by Justice Hope. While I think his report was pretty poor, I think the mere fact that ASIO had to start accounting to an independent body began to change their culture, their internal values and practices. From that point on I think they moved away from the old authoritarian, military, anticommunist culture to a sort of less defined and less political role.
"Essentially, they concentrate on counter-espionage, which has always been their brief; anti-terrorism, which is mainly from the right; and basic security measures for government departments and documents etc. So its role today is a pretty innocuous one, I think, which is another thing many left-wing people don't like to hear.
"It's mainly peopled by young graduates; I'm not saying it's a great organisation, but I think its values and targets have changed in the last 20 years. They dropped the Communist Party as a target around 1983, and while that was very late, you might say, it was over 10 years ago. It's not unaffected by all the changes that have gone on. It's just part of the defence bureaucracy now as far as I'm concerned.
"What's happening at the moment is they're going through their second inquiry in the aftermath of the Cold War; the first inquiry was a couple of years ago. What came out of that was a small scaling down of their activities. The present inquiry is headed by Michael Cook, who is a top public servant, and that arose specifically from a KGB defector's information which led to the arrest of an ASIO linguist who is now facing trial on espionage-related charges in Canberra. This inquiry is specifically on the question: have ASIO and other intelligence agencies and other government departments been penetrated by Soviet intelligence officers?
"That's all happening in the context where the Russians are in reality not the threat they were perceived to be in the Cold War. But while the tension has gone out of the Cold War, the Russians are still a major power in the world, and like all major powers, they engage in espionage. That is partly why Australia still has its spy service — because everybody else has one."
Today, ASIO would probably tend not to be interested in the labour movement. "How subversive is the labour movement today?" Whatever people might think about the Prices and Incomes Accord, argues McKnight, the Accord has further "legitimised" the trade union movement [others might argue coopted and weakened it too].
The Labor Party too, is clearly no longer perceived by the establishment as a threat to the current social, economic and political system. And although ASIO's close relations with the NSW ALP and union right probably extended to other states, says McKnight, and may have persisted until the late 1970s, it would no longer exist.
Rather than worrying about ASIO, which has had a level of accountability imposed upon it, McKnight believes our concern should be focused on the shadowy organisations such as the Australian Secret intelligence Service (ASIS), which remain unaccountable. ASIS was responsible for the armed "raid" on the Melbourne Sheraton Hotel that terrified staff and guests alike in 1983.
McKnight, who was himself a "subversive" anti-Vietnam War activist and one-time editor of the Communist Party's Tribune newspaper, had his interest in the clandestine world of ASIO revived when he visited the Australian archives to research a story as a journalist for the Sydney Morning Herald.
The way McKnight sees the book, he says, is that there is the overt level of politics that we all see, and then there's another, covert, level at which patronage and influence are brought to bear. "That's the story and always has been the story. When you've got that covert level of politics, in which you've got this well-paid, 400-500 person organisation that's highly political and aimed at a Communist Party and other left people, it has a lot of effect on the overt politics of society.
"What the book is really about is saying: let's look at this other dimension of labour history, of Australian political history; it's another dimension that has been speculated about, but no-one has ever been able to document." It can certainly be argued that McKnight is overoptimistic about ASIO's teeth having been pulled. But he documents that "other dimension" well.