JOAN COXSEDGE and GERRY HARANT continue a debate about ASIO with David McKnight.
Instead of responding in endless detail to McKnight's reply (to our criticism of his book, we concentrate on the ideological divide between us. Reverting to the "Petrov affair", we clearly stated in our own book Rooted in Secrecy that the Petrov "defection' was a stunt to help Menzies win the election.
We drew this conclusion from what was known about the circumstances of the case as well as from the behaviour and modus operandi of Asio itself, but which McKnight suggests is an "overblown assertion". It seems we have to wait until he comes along with his documents to prove our point!
As far as we are concerned, no-one in their right political mind, either with or without documents, would believe that Menzies was merely an innocent bystander in the events surrounding the Petrovs, except perhaps the editor of Quadrant. Other analyses in our book — none of which have been proved wrong so far — apparently also have to wait for official pieces of paper.
To back up our credentials to speak on secret agencies, apart from many and varied actions "on the ground" over a 15-year period, we not only wrote Rooted in Secrecy — which is still selling — but three booklets, numerous submissions, articles, papers and an endless stream of letters to a variety of publications. More recently, we appeared before a federal parliamentary committee looking at the release of ASIO archives, which ASIO was vigorously opposing.
ASIO is not the only vehicle for social control masquerading as a security agency. Thought police around the world exist to protect the interests of the ruling class, which is why their activities are kept secret. No government can afford to admit, least of all in its laws, that its purpose is to protect the power and privilege of an elite. No government can therefore rely solely on ordinary police forces working within the framework of the law and the constitution.
The objectives of secret agencies are not clearly defined, nor do they need to be, since the agents themselves understand that they are free to persecute people who have broken no law except the unwritten one that says, "Thou shalt not challenge those in power". They will not turn a hair when challenged themselves, to claim they are working on behalf of the state, the crown or the law, which are conceived as abstractions standing above the people and parliament.
These factors common to all secret agencies make their actions predictable. By observing their personnel and their targets, we were able to build up a very clear picture of their real role. ASIO's work is carried out by threats, by public service procedures, by cooperation and maintenance of selected key media people and by feeding bullshit to the government.
It doesn't even work on behalf of the Australian establishment, but quite openly on behalf of the United States. A few years ago the then head of ASIO, Harvey Barnett, brazenly stated at the Combe Royal Commission that those who opposed the CIA were "enemies of Australia". Here was an Australian heading an agency set up ostensibly to protect our interests, paid for by our taxes, stating that if you dare to criticise a foreign agency known to interfere in the internal affairs of countries all around the world (including Australia) and which is involved in blackmail, torture, assassination and starting full-scale wars, then you are a traitor!
And we don't want to hear the line that now there is a "new" bloke in charge and a new set of guidelines, everything has changed for the better. We've been fed that line for the past 20 years, and it's a load of old codswallop.
And how do you reckon Australian politicians would go — even if they had the will — to effectively control a secret organisation which is internationally linked and dominated, when no other country in the world has been able to do so?
We've had all-party committees, royal commissions, tribunals, internal reorganisations, new directors-general and so on. The irony is that the input from these pro-ASIO apologists far exceeded any useful output from ASIO itself. Any time ASIO officers appeared in public masquerading as counter-intelligence agents, they made gigs of themselves — a classic example being the Combe/Ivanov Affair. This debacle alone cost the taxpayer untold millions of dollars, and for what?
ASIO couldn't even keep the identity of its own operatives secret. After we exposed long lists of snoops, ASIO had to have a law passed to protect itself. We were then accused of being members of the KGB. Of course, the smear of being "in the pay of a foreign power" goes back a long way. Against this background, any notion that ASIO is somehow unique in the spying fraternity by pursuing "real" spies is more than a little hard to swallow.
McKnight scrapes the bottom of the barrel when he compares super-spies Burgess and McLean with Communist Party members paraded during the Petrov debacle. At the time of Burgess and McLean's recruitment, they were pillars of the British establishment, not members of a party known to be under constant surveillance.
But with the collapse of the communist world, in line with other CIA-run outfits, ASIO suddenly discovered that the real threat was terrorism, even though we have more deaths in this country from people being bitten on the bum by red-back spiders than from terrorists. You get the feeling that there are some in Australia who are actually hoping for acts of terrorism to justify taking away even more of our hard-won rights. Scarcely a day goes by without a story in the media about some government demanding fresh anti-democratic powers.
An entire industry has grown up around this non-threat, with special paramilitary squads armed to the teeth with the most lethal weaponry and sophisticated communications equipment. To claim that ASIO plays any real role in this burgeoning empire of official violence is stretching the truth to a ridiculous degree. Its targets will continue to be anyone who is critical of our lousy system and actively working for social change.
While David McKnight has unearthed a few titbits and scraps of documents released by ASIO, we ask readers to use their own judgment in interpreting historical facts. If this leads to our being accused of having an "utter disregard of the need for evidence", so be it. In any case, the most significant secret agency agreements were not written down on pieces of paper but were made by word of mouth without reference to parliament.
Rather than concentrate on a handful of communist "agents of influence", McKnight should look at the real traitors in our midst, who have connived with the most reactionary elements around the world to turn Australia into a second-rate satellite of the United States. The intelligence club remains a key element in this process.
Perhaps we should heed the words of that super paranoid, Herbert Vere (Doc) Evatt, a man who constantly believed that he was under surveillance, when he actually was under constant surveillance (that's what paranoia does to you). Wearing his historian's hat in his book Rum Rebellion, Evatt stated that while it is unpardonable for historians to make wild guesses where no evidence exists, it is equally unpardonable for them not to draw conclusions where no other interpretation is possible.
We conclude with the quotation from the back cover of Rooted in Secrecy:
"As the Establishment fear of an impending economic collapse deepens, the drive for repression, headed by the global intelligence network, deepens with it ... these clandestine forces increasingly dominate our entire political life. Unless others join with those few of us who recognise and oppose this dangerous trend, our future will not be determined by where we want to go, but rather, where we will be allowed to go ..."