Kerr briefed on CIA threat to Whitlam http://theage.com.au/news/20001015/A51154-2000Oct14.html EXCLUSIVE: THE NATIONAL LIBRARY TAPES By ANDREW CLARK Sunday 15 October 2000 The first evidence of possible CIA involvement in the dismissal of the Whitlam government in 1975 has been revealed by the defence minister at the time, Bill Morrison. The American intelligence connection is linked to a crucial meeting called by the Governor-General, John Kerr, a few days before he sacked Prime Minister Gough Whitlam. Sir John sought and received a high-level briefing from senior defence officials on a CIA threat to withdraw intelligence cooperation from Australia, according to Mr Morrison in an interview with The Sunday Age. Speaking at his home in Sydney's southern suburbs, Mr Morrison, a career diplomat before entering parliament and a former Australian ambassador to Indonesia, said: "Kerr loved the cloak and dagger. I don't think (the briefing on the CIA threat) was decisive, but I think it reinforced his position (about sacking the Whitlam government). "The CIA was pissed off because their cover as far as Pine Gap was concerned was blown. Kerr could say that as Commander-in-Chief (a formal position the Governor-General holds under the constitution) he could take briefings from Defence," Mr Morrison told The Sunday Age. Mr Morrison's revelation - 25 years after Australia's greatest constitutional crisis - underlines the significance that Sir John, who had an intelligence background, attached to the CIA threat. It has previously been reported that three days before the sacking Sir John was briefed on security issues by the Defence Department, but the CIA threat and the Pine Gap furore have never before been identified as part of the briefing. The US Government has officially denied any involvement in the dismissal of the Whitlam government. Sir John sacked Mr Whitlam on November 11, 1975, and appointed Opposition Leader Malcolm Fraser caretaker prime minister on the condition that he called an immediate election. The CIA threat was made after Mr Whitlam revealed that the American spy agency ran Pine Gap, the powerful satellite-tracking station in central Australia that played a crucial role in America's Cold War readiness for a nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union or China. Pine Gap was used to eavesdrop on military movements in China, the Soviet Union and parts of Europe. Its crucial significance to the US military remains today, even though the Cold War has ended. In a cable sent to ASIO on November 8, 1975, the CIA said: "They (the CIA) feel that if this problem cannot be solved they do not see how our mutually beneficial relationships (with Australian intelligence agencies) are going to continue." On the 25th anniversary of the opposition's decision to block supply, a Sunday Age investigation of the dismissal, which has accessed special tape-recorded interviews made by key figures for the oral history section of the National Library, also reveals how close Australia came to a breakdown in the system. The investigation shows that: Gough Whitlam, when he returned to parliament after being sacked, asked defence minister Bill Morrison: "Who's got the army?" Former Liberal Party leader, the late Billy Snedden, said Australia came close to an insurrection. Crises "don't come bigger than that without a few shots", he said. The Labor government's upper house leader, Ken Wriedt, said that he had "no doubt" that the caretaker government led by Mr Fraser would, "if need be", have called in the army. The late Clarrie Harders, a former head of the Attorney-General's Department, revealed that less than three hours after he had dismissed Mr Whitlam, Sir John rang him up to discuss the latest parliamentary manoeuvres. "Looking back," Mr Harders sensed "a desire by Kerr to seek protection in the circumstances he had been faced with and to endeavor to enlist others in supporting the action that he had taken." Mr Snedden said that only days after the dismissal he was "sickened" and "ashamed" at a drunken display by Sir John when he was Sir Robert Menzies' guest at a dinner of the Melbourne Scots at Leonda, in Hawthorn. Mr Fraser confirmed earlier reports that Sir John raised the issue of the conditions under which Mr Fraser could agree to be a caretaker prime minister in a telephone call with him at 10.15am on November 11, nearly three hours before Sir John sacked Mr Whitlam. The claimed involvement of the CIA in Mr Whitlam's dismissal comes against a backdrop of traditional distrust of the ALP by the US during the Cold War. This distrust dates back to World War II, when H.V. Evatt was foreign minister and the sensational proceedings of the Petrov royal commission, which investigated Soviet espionage in Australia, implicated members of Dr Evatt's staff. The US State Department has formally denied any US involvement in the dismissal of the Whitlam government. But it has not directly rebutted Mr Whitlam's claim that the former US secretary of state, Warren Christopher, referred in a private meeting to US interference in Australian domestic politics. Mr Whitlam claimed in his book, The Whitlam Government, that Mr Christopher, then the State Department's assistant secretary for Asia and the Pacific, told him in Sydney in 1977: "The US administration would never again interfere in the domestic political process of Australia." The reported Christopher comments, if correct, appear to back the claim that the CIA had been involved, directly or indirectly through Australian intelligence agencies, in the dismissal. Mr Whitlam declined to be interviewed for this story. Shorn of spy jargon, the CIA theory rests mainly on the crisis in intelligence relations between Australia and the US in October-November, and that this might have influenced Sir John - in timing and manner - in his dismissal of the Whitlam government. At the height of the constitutional crisis that followed the opposition's blocking of supply in the Senate, Mr Whitlam claimed the coalition parties were funded by the CIA. Denied by the National Country Party leader, Doug Anthony, the claim led to Richard Stallings being identified as a senior CIA officer working in the officially joint US-Australian communications base at Pine Gap. The Australian Government was due to decide whether to renew the joint agreement on the operations of Pine Gap, and at the time of the Pine Gap furore this reporter was told by a senior US official that if relations deteriorated further, the US Government would move the entire facility to Guam, a US island possession in the South Pacific. The CIA theory, and the specific revelation about Sir John's briefing about Pine Gap and the CIA threat to withdraw cooperation with Australia, cannot be checked with Sir John because he died in 1991. However, Bob Ellicott, QC, a former attorney-general in the Fraser government who spoke regularly to Sir John in his latter years, said Sir John never once mentioned the CIA briefing to him. In his book The Falcon and the Snowman, New York Times journalist Robert Lindsay speculated that information sold by two US spies to the Soviet Union about the operation of the CIA in Australia may have been relayed by the Russians to the ALP, and may have helped touch off the government-CIA dispute shortly before Sir John sacked Mr Whitlam. Mr Lindsay wrote the book after one of the spies, Christopher Boyce, claimed at his trial it was CIA activities in Australia during the Whitlam years that incensed him and turned him into an anti-American activist. Boyce worked for a communications company, TRW, that received and retransmitted CIA communications from, among other places, Pine Gap. Boyce claims that as the political crisis in Australia deepened, he heard agents at TRW refer to the governor-general as "our man Kerr". What this phrase means - and after the significant assumption that Boyce's claim is true - is unclear. However, Sir John had an intelligence background, working for the shadowy Directorate of Research in Australia in World War II under the enigmatic Alf Conlon. According to Jonathan Kwitny, a journalist working for The Wall Street Journal, in 1944 the Curtin Labor government sent Sir John to the US to work with the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) which in 1947 became the CIA. In the 1950s he joined the Australian Association of Cultural Freedom, which, according to a US congressional report, was heavily subsidised by the CIA. In the 1960s, according to Mr Kwitny in his book The Crimes of Patriots, which has never been published in Australia, Sir John helped to organise and run the Law Association for Asia and the Western Pacific, which was helped by the Asia Foundation, a body exposed in Congress "as a CIA-established conduit for money and influence". Victor Marchetti, the retired CIA officer, says in his book The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (written with former US diplomat John Marks) that the Asia Foundation "often served as a cover for clandestine operations". "The CIA paid for Kerr's travel, built his prestige, and even published his writings through a subsidised magazine," Mr Kwitny claims. However, as Mr Kwitny acknowledges, there is no more evidence than the facts, speculation, and claims listed here to connect the CIA with Sir John's decision. But as Australian expatriate journalist and intelligence expert Phillip Knightley writes in his recent book, Australia: A Biography of a Nation, "the whole point of a covert intelligence operation is to leave no trace that it ever took place, much less who organised it. So there is no paper in the CIA archives setting out how the Whitlam government could be destabilised". ========================================================= Forwarded as information only; no endorsement to be presumed. *** COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. Section 107 doctrine of international copyright law, any copyrighted work in this message is distributed under fair use without profit or payment to those who have expressed prior interest in receiving this info for nonprofit research and educational purposes only. http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml *** -------------------------- eGroups Sponsor -------------------------~-~> <FONT COLOR="#000099">eGroups eLerts It's Easy. It's Fun. Best of All, it's Free! </FONT><A HREF="http://click.egroups.com/1/9698/16/_/475667/_/971612844/"><B>Click Here!</B></A> ---------------------------------------------------------------------_->
