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Overview
In this moving, funny, and sometimes chilling book, leading Australians open their ASIO files and read what the state's security apparatus said about them. Writers from across the political spectrum including Mark Aarons, Phillip Adams, Nadia Wheatley, Michael Kirby, Peter Cundall, Gary Foley, and Anne Summers confront—and in some cases reclaim—their pasts. Reflecting on the interpretations, observations, and proclamations that anonymous officials make about your personal life is not easy. Yet we see outrage mixed with humor, not least as ASIO officers got basic information wrong a lot of the time, though many writers have to contend with personal betrayal. Some reflect on the way their political views have—or haven't—changed. Meredith Burgmann and all those who were spied on have produced an extraordinary book where those being watched look right back.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781742241753 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | UNSW Press |
| Publication date: | 07/01/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 384 |
| Sales rank: | 964,975 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Meredith Burgmann taught industrial relations at MacquarieUniversity for 20 years and was a Labor member of the legislative council of the New South Wales parliament for 16 years.
Read an Excerpt
Dirty Secrets
Our Asio Files
By Meredith Burgmann
University of New South Wales Press Ltd
Copyright © 2014 Meredith BurgmannAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74224-681-9
CHAPTER 1
HOW TO READ YOUR ASIO FILE
David McKnight
For more than twenty years the files of Australia's internal security agency, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), have slowly been coming to light. Individuals who have been under ASIO surveillance have been able to read what was said about them and historians have been able to piece together ASIO's secret operations during the Cold War. Nearly 10 000 ASIO files are now publicly available at the National Archives of Australia (NAA) in Canberra.
Reading an ASIO file is an unusual experience, as I can personally affirm. The file can evoke anger or amusement. A personal file can reawaken old memories, long forgotten. Most people who were the subject of ASIO's attentions are bemused by the extraordinary effort and expense that led to tiny details being recorded and now revealed in the files. They are often shocked by the intrusiveness of the surveillance, which included placing informers within political groups or the use of telephone taps, as well as more prosaic methods such as copying birth certificates, immigration files or newspaper clippings.
An ASIO file is a window into a previous era, into the passions and prejudices of the Cold War. But the window is invariably narrow, offering a distorted glimpse and depicting twisted images. In this chapter I want to put some of the contributions to this book into context by talking about the nature of ASIO's files, its information gathering methods, structure and ethos.
When it was founded in 1949, ASIO took possession of the files of several older organisations that had conducted political surveillance up to that point. The most significant of these wasthe Commonwealth Investigation Service (CIS), formed in 1946 and the forerunner of the Commonwealth Police (now known as the Australian Federal Police). The CIS had, in turn, inherited records from the wartime Security Service, which collected information on threats from pro-Japanese and pro-German groups. Another set of files handed over to ASIO in 1949 was from the Directorate of Military Intelligence, which unofficially collected information on a very wide circle of people deemed to be sympathetic to socialism and communism.
So some ASIO files pre-date the organisation's formation in 1949 and are a treasure trove for historians of the twentieth century. The early files of novelist Katharine Susannah Prichard, a well-known radical and feminist who joined the Communist Party in 1920, derive from early police 'special branches' and military intelligence. They contain, for example, a 1912 report kept by the WA Police Special Branch detailing how, in London, 'she busied herself with various reform movements such as Communal Kitchens and Co-operative Housekeeping'. The consequence of these radical activities was that 'she has become notorious for her extreme, almost revolutionary, socialism and communism'.
The files also cover the other end of the twentieth century, notably the rise of the student movement and the New Left in the 1960s and the beginnings of feminist and anti-racist movements and social movements for cultural and political change. These movements posed a problem for ASIO. Its central target was communism and the Communist Party of Australia. This increased scope did not prevent ASIO from spying on a variety of non-party organisations and individuals, but the justification for this was always that these people and groups were 'front organisations' of the CPA, or in some way under the CPA's influence. The movement against the use of the atom bomb in the 1950s and 1960s, even though led by religious figures, was a case in point. Other supposed 'fronts' were the earliest groups fighting for justice for Indigenous Australians. Such movements, in which many CPA members played an active part, were deemed legitimate targets under the ASIO doctrine, which regarded anyone who co-operated with communists as a 'dupe' or worse, a fellow traveller.
Seeing the hand of the CPA in many places was not entirely a misperception. The CPA dominated the organised left in Australia from the 1930s until the late 1960s at least. For a considerable period it was difficult to be active in the Australian left and not have some connection with the CPA. The influence of Marxist ideas went well beyond the organisational boundaries of the CPA and the party had a strategy of working broadly with all kinds of people around short-term goals. But the new movements for social change were clearly not front organisations and this posed something of a dilemma for ASIO. It resolved the problem by stretching the definition of subversion (which it was legally tasked to oppose) to include movements such as the Vietnam moratoriums, which were largely against the longstanding Liberal–Country Party government, rather than having any revolutionary potential.
In spite of the CPA's genuine influence in some areas, a study of ASIO's files reveals that it had an exaggerated idea of the political influence the CPA had on people and events. ASIO assumed radical ideas were a contagion that infected anyone who worked with communists. Some historians speak of the 'disease model' used by internal security agencies like ASIO. Other assumptions smacked of the doctrine of Original Sin. Once tainted by contact with the CPA, an otherwise independent individual was considered to have 'fallen', and became a legitimate target worthy of a file and of ongoing attention. Even the most sensible reforms, such as a global ban on nuclear bomb testing, became suspect if the CPA supported them. Most non-communists who co-operated with the CPA did so with their eyes open, even if ASIO tended to assume that non-communists had no minds of their own and were mere putty in the hands of the party.
ASIO files are also windows into the activities and assumptions of the organisation and the people who compiled them. It is important to remember that ASIO files were drawn up as internal working documents. They were never intended to be publicly released. The fact that the information in the files would never be tested in a court case meant that all kinds of suspicions and speculation could be aired. As well, especially with files on people who were not dedicated members of the organised left, it is important not to assume that ASIO was always consciously targeting particular individuals. Sometimes personal files were merely repositories of odd bits of information picked up during surveillance of others.
As unusual as it was, it must be remembered that ASIO was part of the traditional public service. Its internal correspondence is carefully formal, usually dry, and obsessive about detail. It operated according to the public service's bureaucratic routines and its internal hierarchy. But because ASIO officers worked on a certain set of political assumptions, its files are unlike those of other government agencies. They are infused with an air of suspicion and distaste toward anything deemed subversive or 'a threat to security', sometimes a very elastic phrase. The language of ASIO files reflects a military ethos. ASIO officers talked of the strength of the CPA in terms of its 'order of battle'; they planned 'operations' against party members and organisations which were described as 'targets'; they addressed senior ASIO officers as 'sir' and calculated time, as in the Army, by a 24-hour clock. The use of courtesy titles from wartime military service survived much longer in ASIO than elsewhere in the bureaucracy.
Near the start of most personal files appear one or more documents that attempt to establish the identity of the person in question. Very early in its existence, when the Menzies Government was trying to pass the bill to ban the Communist Party, ASIO provided Menzies with the names of people alleged to be CPA members. It turned out that many of those named were not who ASIO claimed them to be, and had never been members. Menzies was embarrassed by this and privately castigated ASIO. From that time on ASIO took unusual care to establish the precise identity of the individuals on whom it opened files. This was done by obtaining and spelling out the individual's full name, their date of birth and their parents' names. To get this information, field agents usually began with a check with the Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages, a check with the electoral roll, and sometimes a check of immigration files, driving licences and telephone subscriptions. Very occasionally there was a physical check on the home address of the individual. In the case of public servants, ASIO received copies of the Personal Particulars form completed by all employees.
Personal files vary. ASIO collected information on some people on an almost daily basis. The leader of the CPA, the late Laurie Aarons, has at least eighty-four volumes in his personal file, stretching back to the 1930s. Other files may consist of a slim single volume that is little more than a passive collection point for documents referring to other individuals or organisations rather than to the subject of the file. These items were placed in an individual's file only when he or she occasionally brushed up against bigger and more active targets. As well, the activities of some individuals on the broad left simply never triggered the creation of an ASIO file, which disappoints and puzzles them when they discover this years later.
THE STRUCTURE OF ASIO
To fully understand the contents of many of the ASIO files that have become public, it is useful to understand ASIO's internal structure. ASIO was modelled on the British Security Service(MI5) and ASIO's internal structure largely replicated it. Although the names for different parts changed over the years, the basic structure of ASIO during the Cold War consisted of four main branches:
— the Counter Subversion branch (B1 branch)
— the Counter Espionage branch (B2 branch)
— the Protective Security branch (C branch)
— the Operations branch (Q branch, or later, Special Services Section).
The other major division was between headquarters in Melbourne and regional offices, which existed in all states and, until the early 1970s, in Papua New Guinea. Unlike the British Security Service, which tended to use police Special Branch officers for field work such as interviewing the referees for government jobs and handling offers of assistance from the public, ASIO developed its own 'field section'. Related to this was a squad of officers specialising in the physical surveillance of individuals, known by the acronym OBE (Operations Base Establishment).
The main work of OBE was the trailing of suspected KGB officers based in the Soviet Embassy in Canberra and the consulate and trade offices elsewhere. Less often it would follow domestic subversives. Each regional office had a field section which did most of such field work along with physical surveillance.
ASIO's B1 branch was largely devoted to collation and analysis of subversive activity.
Within it were sub-sections dealing with CPA influence in the trade union movement, the public service, and the supposed 'fronts', such as the peace movement. There was also a sub-branch dealing with 'aliens' (overseas-born non-citizens).
The Counter Espionage branch (B2) was much smaller than B1 and was oriented almost exclusively to the USSR and Eastern European countries. It closely watched diplomats suspected of being intelligence officers, as well as Australians and Eastern Bloc nationals who had contact with them, often through a variety of commercial or cultural activities. B2 was a super-secret section within ASIO. It largely ran its own agents and kept many files within its own registry. Relatively few of these have been requested and deposited in the National Archives and consequently we know little of ASIO's counter-espionage work, other than through high-profile events such as the Petrov Affair and the later expulsion of Soviet diplomat Ivan Skripov. A point of confusion is that the acronyms B1 and B2 are also used as part of a coding system (A to E and 1 to 5) to evaluate the reliability and source of information.
ASIO's biggest branch was C branch (Protective Security), which carried out routine security checking (called 'vetting') of potential public servants, military recruits and migrants. It also checked applications for citizenship, and in the early years even vetted applicants for grants from the Commonwealth Literary Fund. It was largely for the purpose of vetting that the main body of ASIO personal dossiers and files on organisations was most frequently used.
The heart of ASIO's efforts against subversives (and hencethe source of most information recorded within personal files) was a branch known initially as Q branch or Special Services branch and, by the late 1960s, as 'D branch'.
The initial tasks of this branch were to maintain an index of 'current, discarded and blacklisted agents, registered contacts and potentials'; to maintain a 'target index'; to guide the recruitment and running of agents; and to co-ordinate 'milking' operations with 'friendly unofficial intelligence collecting agencies' (largely BA Santamaria's 'Movement'). This branch was the planning and operational centre for collecting information on the Communist Party and other targets. For many years these basic operational activities of ASIO were either illegal, such as burglary and phone tapping, or outside the law, such as electronic bugging.
Limited forms of telephone tapping were legalised and after 1960 ASIO would apply via the Attorney-General for a warrant from a judge for tapping phones under the Telephonic Communications (Interception) Act. Material from ASIO's phone taps appears today in archival files, usually flagged with the phrase 'telephone intercept'. Telephone interception was a vast, time-consuming task and took place behind closed doors within ASIO's regional offices. From 1949 to 1960 ASIO tapped 181 phones, which generated 40 000 pages of transcript. The physical limits of tapping and typing up transcripts were real but a single telephone tap (for example, on an active office of the Communist Party) would pick up information from vast numbers of individual party members, sympathetic contacts, members of the public and the families of party employees. Phone taps on prominent individual cultural figures who were communists collected information from a quite different circle of writers, intellectuals, members of parliament, businesspeople, and so on. So the interception of 181 phones would cover the conversations of many thousands of people who in turn would discuss other people, organisations and events.
A file on the interception of the phone of Francis James, a radical and eccentric religious figure, reveals that the Sydney office of ASIO had available a maximum of twenty-four 'channels' for interception, which presumably all functioned simultaneously. Within ASIO, those running phone interceptions would first produce a 'log' – in effect, a running sheet – with the date, time and parties to a call and a brief description, and this would go to the desk officer who would then decide whether to order a full transcription of particular conversations. A shorthand code in files referring to material gathered from phone interception was 'Hawke' (short for 'Operation Hawke') and this was later changed to 'Operation Bugle' in the light of Bob Hawke's growing political prominence in the early 1970s.
The other central task of the Operations branch was agent-running. The results of this are frequently seen in personal files which contain, for example, direct observation accounts of closed meetings. Each agent was assigned to an 'agent-master' (later described as a 'case officer') who would debrief him or her regularly, typing the results up in a 'contact report' or 'agent record sheet', also sometimes called a 'Q report'. These reports frequently feature on their right-hand side two lines, each with a date. The first begins with the letter 'I', denoting Information, and this refers to the original date that the information was obtained by an agent. The second is 'R', denoting 'Recorded', which states the date that the case officer recorded the agent's information. Many files carry a reliability code usually abbreviated as EVAL and CRED. The evaluation is the reliability rating of the source. A very reliable agent would be rated as 'B'. The credibility is a numerical rating with '2' commonly used for something directly heard from a target such as a conversation. Though all kinds of alpha-numeric combinations were possible under this system, the vast majority of files are designated as B2, denoting an evaluation of B and credibility of 2.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Dirty Secrets by Meredith Burgmann. Copyright © 2014 Meredith Burgmann. Excerpted by permission of University of New South Wales Press Ltd.
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