Australia's Spies and Their Secrets
By David McKnight
Allen & Unwin, 1994. 350 pp., $24.95 (pb)
Reviewed by Phil Shannon
David McKnight takes the knife to the boil of Australia's secret police in his history of ASIO. In a very detailed and racy narrative, McKnight confirms the anti-democratic, conservative nature of ASIO. ASIO, established in 1949, has overwhelmingly spied on and damaged the careers and lives of "militant unionists, left wingers, non-conformists and other 'subversives' of all kinds" in order to "protect property and privilege".
ASIO saw "subversion" as any "wrong-thinking" that would threaten the political and economic foundations of capitalism. It attempted to "filter out ideological impurities" by denying progressive writers government grants, hounding radical academics and vetting public servants, left-wing migrants and applicants for citizenship. ASIO ran a black list of union activists — management's door at BHP, for example, "was always open" to ASIO officers. Until the early 1970s, ASIO maintained a list of up to 10,000 "undesirables" to be interned in military camps in the event of war or other "national emergency".
ASIO was a part of the conservative establishment in business, academia, the media and the Liberal Party, and also found allies in those quislings of the ruling class, the Cold War anticommunist union bureaucracy and the ALP right.
ASIO welcomed European fascists and Nazi war criminals, including a Hungarian mayor who had directed the deportation of 25,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. ASIO revealed the dagger behind its snooper's cloak by providing training for the murderous secret police of South Vietnam and other dictatorships.
Even ASIO's counterespionage work merged into its broader campaign against the left. In tracking down an alleged Communist Party spy ring purported to be leaking confidential documents to the Soviet Union, it mistakenly saw the CPA's preparation for illegality under Menzies — establishment of underground printeries, safe houses, couriers, etc — as evidence for spying, not the fight for survival of a key part of the left and its supporters.
Together with Menzies, ASIO turned the Petrov defection and resulting Royal Commission on Espionage into a show trial which achieved its aims of smearing the left as a tool of the Kremlin and ensuring Menzies' electoral advantage, even though no spies were ever charged. We do not know (nor should we care) whether Australia had its Kim Philbys. Any such people would have been prompted, as was Philby, by disgust at capitalism. If they did spy for the Soviet Union, that was not a crime but a political distortion of a worthy motive.
ASIO's Cold War lustre, however, began to dim when it confronted the anti-Vietnam War movement from 1965-72. These were years of "great political renewal and dynamism" when establishment values were challenged and transformed for the better. ASIO's analysis of dissent as conspiratorial, directed from the Kremlin via the CPA which manipulated unsuspecting dupes, bombed out in the face of a broad revolt which frequently outpaced the CPA and which earned ASIO ridicule and scorn along with RSL patriotism and stuffy Menzian conservatism. ASIO did, correctly, see the CPA as pro-Soviet but failed to see the CPA as also "part of an Australian tradition of working class radicalism", a tradition which brashly resurfaced in the '60s.
Change was now on the cards for an antiquated ASIO. In the mid-1980s, ASIO dropped the CPA as an official target (to mixed feelings of relief and disappointment, as I recall). The Whitlam government set out to reform ASIO — Attorney-General Lionel Murphy raided its headquarters and Whitlam set up a royal commission.
The ALP, however, only tried to re-spot the leopard. It did not have the socialist politics to see ASIO as an arm of the capitalist state which would inevitably act to protect inequality of wealth and power. The ALP government never considered abolishing ASIO because it never considered abolishing capitalism.
Whitlam repeated the political blindness that the Chifley Labor government displayed in 1949 when it created ASIO. McKnight argues that ASIO's establishment was "totally out of character" for Chifley. Chifley, however, was no friend of the working class — he maintained a wage freeze for two years after the war, opposed the 40-hour week, opposed strikes and sent the army in to break a national coal strike, jailing union officials and whipping up a Communist scare campaign.
Federal Labor governments had earlier presided over a Commonwealth Investigation Service, staffed by anticommunist officers, which spied on and vetted radicals. Another golden boy of ALP mythology, H.V. Evatt, initially opposed ASIO, believing "the Commonwealth had no role in watching 'subversion'", but only because he thought the state police special branches should do it. When ASIO was established, he argued for it to be free from ministerial control.
McKnight argues that Chifley's aim in setting up ASIO was legitimate counterespionage to ensure access to US rocket technology for the British-Australian rocket program at Woomera. But, even accepting that developing delivery systems for nuclear weapons was a good thing, ASIO would never restrict itself to a counterespionage role — none of its predecessors or its overseas counterparts had.
Unfortunately, McKnight's view of ASIO has some of the same political defects as the ALP's view. He concludes that "nowadays, ASIO activities on the domestic front are largely directed at the racist and violent Right". This rather torpedoes his own, thoroughly constructed, model of ASIO as a protector of private property and profits. If it is indeed the case that ASIO has now been modernised, reformed and "definitively changed" towards targeting the real right-wing villains, this is still no reason not to abolish ASIO, for the best defence against the neo-Nazis and racists is not a secret spy outfit but mass political mobilisation.
But has the left been reprieved from ASIO's snooping? It is true that there is now no single organisational focus of left-wing opposition to capitalism with the size and influence that the CPA once had, but it was never just the CPA but a far wider oppositional movement that ASIO pursued. That broad resistance still applies and will so as long as capitalism exists. We should still keep tabs on ASIO.