Unholy Fury (45 page)

But the tumult and the shouting were not quite all done. During Green's 1975 visit back to the United States, the very same one in which he would hail in public the new, more mature alliance, Green had also taken the time to chat privately with Defense Secretary James Schlesinger. And here, again, the old Cold War statecraft was back in action. The two spoke of Whitlam, and Australian politics
more generally, in the way puppeteers would talk of their marionettes. ‘Hardnosed' was how Green had initially been instructed to approach the task in Canberra, but now Whitlam was ‘on our side'. They agreed that where Cairns was concerned, Whitlam was certainly the lesser of two evils, and that even a conservative takeover would not solve all the problems in the alliance. In short, they wanted Whitlam to stay in office for ‘a respectable period' as he had continued to publicly defend the installations. Overall, they judged, it was better for the US ‘if the two parties alternate in power at respectable intervals'. Schlesinger was happy to play the game as long as the Australians behaved, and Green believed a ‘low profile', for the moment, was best. But as Green put it ‘we could heat up the crucible at any time, either accidentally or intentionally'. And even though the installations were safe for the time being, two factors could always intervene to throw their survival into question: Cairns's elevation to the leadership of the Labor Party, and ‘if current investigations in the US became linked with Australia, the resulting storm might shorten our stay'.
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Although neither of the two mentioned precisely what these ‘investigations' were, much less their explosive nature, it is highly likely Green was referring to a Senate Select Committee, formed in early 1975 and chaired by Democrat Frank Church, that was inquiring into US intelligence activities abroad, especially covert US attempts to subvert foreign governments. At the very least, the conversation suggests a distinct edginess at the highest levels about possible revelation of some kind of CIA activity in Australia.

The question of Australian ‘behaviour' was to return soon enough. And it came at a time of great sensitivity in the United States, following the communist victory in South Vietnam in May 1975, and shortly after in Cambodia and Laos. Earlier in the year Washington expressed its strong displeasure at the decision by Australia to allow the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam—recognised by most communist states as the legitimate government of the country—to establish an office in Canberra. American officials also reported Whitlam's ‘unremittingly hostile' attitude to the US-backed South Vietnamese government, and claimed that Deputy Prime Minister Jim Cairns was ‘virtually exultant' at the impending
communist victory, adopting an ‘I told you so' attitude. Green read the situation correctly: Whitlam and many of his colleagues were looking at the last days of the conflict through the prism of the political trauma the conflict had caused Labor in the 1960s—thus the defeat of the South Vietnamese ‘they regard as justifying retrospectively everything they have said and done regarding Vietnam in [the] past 15 years or so'.
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With the fall of Saigon in April 1975 Whitlam was accused by his political opponents in Australia of blatantly favouring the communist north, and editorial opinion ran strongly against the government: one newspaper decried Whitlam's ‘ingratiating handshake for Hanoi and the political wing of the Viet Cong, and a backhanded swipe for not only the fallen government but the frightened refugees of South Vietnam'.
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When Whitlam called on President Gerald Ford around the same time, the US commander in chief was briefed that his guest felt ‘vindicated by the final outcome' in Indochina, noting that he wanted to establish early relations with the new communist governments there and provide economic assistance to all of the states affected by the conflict. As soon as the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh fell, Australia had recognised the communist-backed regime (or GRUNK) there—which from 1970 had essentially been a Khmer Rouge-backed government in exile and based in Beijing. And it was widely expected that Canberra would follow suit with the new government in Saigon.
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Speaking to the National Press Club in Washington, Whitlam was careful not to strike a discordant note, declaring—surely with an ironic twist—that the last thing the United States needed were ‘sermons and homilies from foreigners'. Equally he did not shy away from pointing out that both the United States and Australia should accept responsibility for their mistakes in Vietnam, maintaining that the primary problem in Indochina had been great power intervention, not North Vietnamese expansionism. ‘What was defeated was not the United States', he said, ‘but a policy of foreign intervention that was bound to fail', conveniently forgetting his own earlier attitude to the presence of US forces in Vietnam. The
Australian
newspaper lamented that he had spoken to his US counterparts ‘like an optimistic headmaster'.
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To be sure, Whitlam
could not resist the temptation to instruct his hosts. Keeping faith with the message he had preached since coming to power, he added that now was the time to ‘end our long preoccupation with military alignments in Asia, our ideological confrontations, our cold war hang ups and open a new chapter in Western cooperation'.
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The Democratic majority leader in the US Senate, Mike Mansfield, had Whitlam's address read into the Congressional record, labelling it a ‘speech from a great friend of America, a critic of America's war'.
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It would have been enough to make Nixon's blood boil.

Moreover, Australian defence authorities did not see their country as being threatened as a result of the communist victory in Vietnam, and thus the new understanding of the ANZUS alliance was also carried over into its defence policy. In October 1975, a month before Whitlam was dismissed from office in the midst of a constitutional crisis, the Defence Committee approved a new strategic basis for defence policy which stated that Australia's alliance with the United States did:

 

not mean that in all circumstances Australia must support the United States or can expect to be supported by it. Nor does it mean that there could not be circumstances modifying or supplementing the United States association when Australia could act in co-operation with USSR or China or Japan or India and other powers which had common interests at the time with Australia.
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All the American warnings about the fragility of détente and the wider strategic situation in the region had fallen on deaf ears. The Australian advice was set within an environment where the government did not envisage Australia having to face a direct threat to its security for a decade or more. With the Defence White Paper of 1976, the policy of defence self-reliance became set in stone.

Whitlam's own political difficulties, following a turbulent twelve months since his second election win, began to sharply increase in the middle of 1975. And it was not just the series of ministerial resignations, sackings and reshuffles, a devastating by-election loss in Tasmania and the attempts to rein in rising inflation. Whitlam had
also approved the attempt by Rex Connor, minister for minerals and energy, to try to secure a $4 billion dollar loan from the Middle East, then flush with ‘petrodollars', to finance his vision for an Australian economy harnessed to the resources sector. But the loan, supposedly to be secured through a London-based broker, Tirath Khemlani, never arrived, and the Labor government's credibility—especially on the question of economic management and, indeed, probity—was further eroded. The events only further energised Opposition leader Malcolm Fraser to step up his attack on the government, especially in the Senate.

Needless to say, such drama did not greatly disturb the White House. When Kissinger and his senior advisers first discussed the Australian political crisis in early July, the secretary of state seemed more interested in the fact that a ‘good-looking woman'—he was referring to Junie Morosi, Jim Cairns's principal private secretary—had been ‘thrown into it'. News of the firing of Cairns, Rex Connor and the ‘financial skulduggery' involved, and the ‘extreme trouble' in which the prime minister found himself, played second fiddle to thoughts about what an election might bring in terms of alternative leadership. Kissinger could simply not remember whether he had ever met Opposition leader Malcolm Fraser, but he had greater difficulty remembering the identity of the ‘last conservative prime minister' in Australia. Nor could his advisers, until one of them suddenly recalled: it was ‘the guy with the wife—McMahon'. If that said something about what was really remembered about McMahon's time in office—Sonia's eye-catching dress at a White House dinner in 1971—his successor as Liberal Leader, Billy Snedden, was referred to in millinery terms: ‘Stetson'. Fraser and Shadow Foreign Affairs Minister Andrew Peacock had passed the test: the former described as ideologically ‘way over to the right side', ‘smart' and ‘well disposed'; while the latter had ‘done a lot of travelling' and was ‘very vigorous'. On the American checklist of sound Cold War values, both leaders had passed with flying colours. Kissinger's final remark on the Australian situation at that point perhaps summarised—as only Kissinger could—nearly three years worth of US frustration with the Labor leader: ‘I don't think Whitlam is any loss'.
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‘BLOWING THE LID OFF'

Fate itself could not have brought a more bitterly ironic denouement to the Whitlam government's management of the American alliance. It ended as it had begun—in a blaze of publicity and panic about the threat the party posed to the nation's intelligence relationship with the United States. In December 1972 the concern had been over the waiving of security clearances for members of the new prime minister's staff; this time, in the days immediately preceding his dismissal from office by Governor-General Sir John Kerr on 11 November 1975, US anxiety was related to the prime minister himself. On 2 November, speaking at a Labor Party rally in Port Augusta, and with the political situation in Canberra on a knife edge, Whitlam threw caution to the wind. After all the self-control he had shown in previous years on the question of the US facilities; after all the firm assurances he had given about them to American counterparts; and after all the times he had hosed down those flame throwers on the left of his party gunning for their removal, he finally succumbed to temptation.

In an impassioned attack on the Opposition's policy of deferring the Budget until an election was called, Whitlam alleged that the leader of the National Country Party, Doug Anthony, had ‘associations with CIA money in Australia'. His political opponents—and he referred directly to the shadow minister for primary industry Ian Sinclair and Malcolm Fraser—‘were getting more and more desperate, these men who are subsidised by the CIA'.
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Anthony immediately denied the allegations. When news of the speech broke in Washington, Kissinger instructed the US embassy to make it known at the highest levels in Canberra that the US government categorically denied the allegation, adding that it ‘could have damaging fallout on other aspects of US-Australian relations'.
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That would prove to be the mildest of rebukes, but over the succeeding week, the alarm levels in the US intelligence community were to reach boiling point.

In the days following Whitlam's speech a range of stories appeared in the Fairfax press suggesting that CIA money had ‘flowed into Australia aimed at influencing Australia's domestic political situation
with a view to protecting America's interests'.
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At no stage did that newspaper provide any substantiating evidence to support the claim, but journalist Brian Toohey did reveal that, in 1966, Doug Anthony, when a junior minister in the Coalition government, had rented his home in Canberra to an American official, Richard Stallings, who had gone on to become the first head of the Pine Gap intelligence facility. According to one account of this crisis, Labor Party staffers had started to investigate Stallings's background in October, after tip-offs were received about his tendency to openly discuss his intelligence connections when living in Adelaide in the late 1960s.
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In the days before his speech in Port Augusta, Whitlam had been furious because Stallings's name did not appear on the list of covert American intelligence officers provided to him by the Department of Foreign Affairs, and it was only when the prime minister's office requested a separate list of CIA operatives, held by Defence, that Stallings's employment by the CIA was confirmed.

Whitlam repeated the allegation against Anthony—but without naming Stallings—in a television interview on 6 November, saying that ‘Mr Anthony had an undue association with a CIA chief in Australia extending over several years and this was against Australia's interests and a senior politician like Mr Anthony should have known better'.
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Anthony claimed not to have known at the time that Stallings worked for the CIA. A number of fiery exchanges between Whitlam and Anthony in the parliament ensued, and the
Canberra Times
dismissed the prime minister's charge as ‘cheap, nasty and irrelevant', accusing him of ‘scurrility and irresponsibility'.
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But Whitlam was determined to push on: intending to go into the parliament and reveal Stallings as a CIA employee. This was a high stakes move: it would amount to the virtual revelation that the CIA, and not the Pentagon, was in charge of Pine Gap, and that its functions might therefore be more sensitive than those originally declared. What became more galling for US observers, however, was the speed with which the situation unravelled: the Australian press not only published a photo of Stallings, but soon after also revealed the names and faces of three other covert CIA officers—one being the station chief in Australia, John Walker.