In an extremely thorough and very heavy tome called The Defence of the Realm, Christopher Andrew says that in 1947 some Russian telegrams were broken by a decryption process called VENONA because agents were re-using one-time pads. The decryption revealed that the Russians had received top secret British documents on post-war strategy from their mates in the Australian Department of External Affairs, thereby demonstrating that Canberra was insecure. Promptly, the United States and England turned off the top-secret tap. It just wasn’t safe to tell those Aussies anything.
Sir Percy Sillitoe, the Director General of MI5, was sent to improve Australian security, without telling anyone in that notoriously chatty place how England knew something was wrong. (They had a cover story.) This attempt came up against HV Evatt, the Minister for External Affairs, a man with many faults but a fine and razor-sharp legal mind. When informed that a ‘Soviet defector had told us that Australia was insecure’, Evatt slashed the feeble cover story to bits. The British bit the bullet and let the Australians know about the decryptions.
Thereafter, the old system was abandoned and a shiny new one, modelled on MI5 and called ASIO (or Australian Security Intelligence Organisation), came into being on 16 March 1949. ASIO was required to consult the Security Liason Officer, an Englishman called Hambly, before they did anything but happily, Hambly reported that everyone was behaving like good little colonials and doing their best to trace and stop the leak.
ASIO had three main suspects, identified from the VENONA decrypts. One was a Tass journalist called Andreyevitch Nosov (Tass is an international news agency based in Russia). His code name was TEKHNIK and VENONA said he was the main point of contact for all Russian spies in Australia. Mr Andrew’s account of ASIO attempting to bug Nosov’s flat would have made good material for the Keystone Kops. Apparently they drilled a hole in the floor of the flat above to insert a microphone, only to find the Nosov carpet covered in plaster dust. If the spy had looked up, wondering about the source of the dust, he would have seen a really visible microphone in his ceiling. Subtle.
ASIO managed to get in and clean up Nosov’s flat but it wasn’t an encouraging beginning. The next person identified by VENONA was Jim Hill, who was appointed first secretary to the Australian High Commission in London early in 1950 so that the experts at MI5 could keep an eye on him. Hill was interrogated by Jim Skardon, MI5’s lead interrogator and the man who had coaxed a confession out of Klaus Fuchs (a German-British theoretical physicist and atomic spy). All he got out of Hill was complete denial and protestations of innocence but the discovery that Hill had been questioned led to the defection of the third person of interest, Ian Milner, whose codename was BUR.
Milner was an Australian diplomat, who had become a Communist at Oxford in 1934. He had been seconded to the United Nations in New York in 1946. After he heard about Hill, although possibly for other and unrelated reasons, he packed up and left for Prague, where he spent the rest of his life peacefully teaching English Literature at the university. Meanwhile, Hill returned to Australia, resigned from the External Affairs Department in 1950 and vanished out of history
The weird thing – to me, at least – is that everyone who was anyone knew that the main Communist agent in Australia was Wally ‘Pop’ Clayton, codename KLOD. That sounds far too much like Tintin to me. KLOD, indeed. Clayton had a circle of like-minded friends and was described as ‘shadowy’ and ‘furtive’ but also ‘not unlikeable’. Because the source of the intelligence was far too secret to disclose, Wally was never prosecuted.
Andrews says that arrangements were made by the Russians to fly him to Moscow but his passport was revoked before that could happen. In any case, he ended up as a snapper fisherman in Nelson Bay.
That never happened in Callan.
Wally Clayton was missing between 1947 and 1952, presumably in Russia, so he probably didn’t know Somerton Man. But this Communist scandal was to provide Robert Gordon Menzies with fuel for scare campaigns for the rest of his seemingly endless career. It is hard to sort out what actually was happening, due to the difference of opinion among historians. The Left have insisted all along that there was no Communist spy scandal, that it was all a beat-up. The Right insisted that it was real and serious. Now that a large number of documents have been released, clear analysis has been obscured by the Right saying ‘nyah nyah na na-na, we told you so’. None of which is helpful. It was real; it wasn’t just a beat-up. Surely we can agree on that?
Having agreed, what we got was an attempt to outlaw the Communist Party, known as The Communist Party Dissolution Act, which passed into law in 1950. It was promptly challenged by the Waterside Workers Federation (of which my dad was a member), and they managed to attract the formidable Doc Evatt as their spokesman. The High Court struck down the Act by a majority of six to one, largely because it had a reverse onus – that is, you had to prove you weren’t a Communist. The court also stated that the penalties were too heavy – five years’ jail – and that the act precluded an appeal to a higher court. (Courts absolutely hate being precluded.) So Menzies decided to put it to a referendum, even though referenda have a truly sorry history in Australia.
One of the most quoted speeches in Australian legal history was made by Evatt. I was required to read it as a law student.
First the Reds, then the Jews, then the Trade Unionists, then the Social Democrats, then the Catholic Centre Party, then the Roman Catholic and Lutheran Churches. It is the old Totalitarian road; the road that led to the horrors of Belsen; the way that lost millions of lives in the Second World War and untold sacrifices of our peoples in the world struggle against Hitler, Mussolini and Japan.
It was a version of the speech attributed to Pastor Martin Niemoller:
First they came for the Communists and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the Socialists and I did not speak out because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.
As my Welsh ancestors might have admiringly said, ‘There’s words’.
Evatt’s speech had its effect. The referendum in September 1951 failed and the Communist Party was allowed to continue to exist. And presumably Australia got better at spying.
Where atomic secrets were concerned, the places to be were Maralinga and Woomera. At Woomera they probably were testing rockets. Deserts are useful for that sort of thing. No chance of a wayward rocket wiping out anything other than the occasional kangaroo or the inconvenient and unimportant native. Or, indeed, Australian soldiers who didn’t matter, either. As for Maralinga, it was relatively near to Adelaide (in Australian terms, 300 kilometres to the west) and the British were planning on exploding something there with more bang than any given rocket, so there one could expect Russian spies to be positively swarming, like the serpents.
The main port for both Maralinga and Woomera was Port Augusta, which would have been full of unionists. On the wharf itself there were Painters and Dockers, Carters and Drovers, Waterside Workers Federation, Seamen’s Union and Railway members, a lot of whom were Communists and all of whom knew how to keep a secret. If there were spies trying to winkle out atomic secrets, you would have expected to find them in Port Augusta, not Adelaide. But the train does take you from Port Augusta to the city and various commentators have thought that Somerton Man got off a train on 30 November. Was it a train from Melbourne or, perhaps, from the other direction? Was Somerton Man coming into Adelaide with a dangerous secret for which someone killed him?