Phillip Deery on Australia’s secret Cold War, and its victims

In August 2020, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) broke with its normally secretive protocols and launched a Twitter account. Using hashtags like #ASIOhistory and #tradecraftTuesday, the organisation now shares images, objects and stories going back to its foundation in the early Cold War. In so doing, it seeks to show that ‘while technology’s [sic] evolved since the 1950s, our mission to protect Australia... from #terrorism and #espionage hasn’t’. Contrary to the Get Smart schtick they present on social media, Phillip Deery’s impressive new volume Spies and Sparrows reveals an organisation whose original mission – to counter espionage and ‘subversive’ activities in Australia – was dramatically overstepped throughout its first three decades. He spotlights the toll it took, on agents and those they targeted. Deery is an eminent historian of the Cold War – and particularly of its shadowy underworld. Spies and Sparrows follows a formula utilised in his 2014 volume, Red Apple: Communism and McCarthyism in Cold War New York, whereby biographical studies of often-overlooked individuals serve to tell a larger story. That earlier volume focused on the ‘red scare’ of the late 1940s and 1950s in America, fermented by Joseph McCarthy and his House Un-American Activities Committee. While not a spy agency, McCarthy’s powers were wide, and the damage he did to a range of people believed to be harbouring treasonous thoughts was significant. Careers were ended, reputations shattered and lives lost. Australia’s McCarthyite reverberations were reflected in a failed bid to ban the Communist Party, and the establishment (by a Labor government) of ASIO in 1949. Intercepted Soviet cables – codenamed Verona – revealed that Australia was a ‘security risk’ to the Western alliance, and the spy agency – modelled on Britain’s MI6 – was meant to reassure the United States of Canberra’s reliability. ASIO’s key responsibility at its inception was the identification of a spy ring led by Communist Party of Australia member Wally Clayton, which Deery classes as more ‘an informal grouping of about ten contacts’ than the close-knit cabal of spy-thrillers (6). The meat of Deery’s book details how ASIO ‘made little meaningful distinction between the handful of... covert communists who engaged in espionage activity and the thousands of CPA members and fellow travellers who... sided with the underprivileged and the dispossessed; and who were neither aware of espionage nor would have sanctioned it’ (7).