Spies and Sparrows: ASIO and the Cold War

Having authored the second volume (The Protest Years) and co-authored the third volume with Rhys Crawley (The Secret Cold War) of the official history of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), I felt I had a good grasp on ASIO and its first four decades from 1949 to 1989. I was pleasantly surprised at what Phillip Deery managed to uncover and the engaging way the story is told, revolving around the recurring concern over trust: between allies, colleagues, handlers, agents and targets. The book explains the Australian context to the Cold War onset and the significance of decrypted Soviet diplomatic messages (codenamed ‘Venona’) which prompted startling revelations about a ‘nest of spies’ in Australia. Their presence, with high-level access to sensitive documents, brought into question the reliability of Australia as a trusted US and UK security partner. In 1949, with the Cold War looking likely to turn into yet another hot war, these appeared to be genuine concerns. These events would lead to the creation of ASIO, following the mould of its British counterpart, MI5. Deery revisits the problem that others have highlighted: once created to catch these spies and rehabilitate Australia’s international standing, ‘ASIO made little meaningful distinction between the small handful of “non-legal” or covert communists... and the thousands of CPA members and “fellow travellers” who immersed themselves in daily struggles for social justice’ (7). That problemwas exacerbated as the once mighty Communist Party of Australia (CPA) progressively lost its way following the suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and the Prague Spring in 1968, leaving the CPA moribund. Die-hard revolutionaries moved to smaller breakaway groups like the Trotskyist Socialist Workers League (SWL) and Socialist Youth Alliance (SYA). Deery provides a fascinating and important look at ASIO, not through the prism of the organisation itself, but through that of those who were employed as spies and sparrows (that is, undercover ASIO agents hired and handled by ASIO officers) as well as those affected by their handiwork. To shed light on the task from a variety of angles, Deery selected eight candidates, all with strikingly different backgrounds, skills, motives and experiences. First is the radar and radio-physics scientist, Tom Kaiser, seen as a ‘fellow traveller’ who had to be dismissed as ‘part of the price paid for the Australian access into the highly coveted secret world of American and British high technology weapons systems and atomic development’. Next is William Dobson, a member of the anticommunist Australian Labor Party (ALP) Industrial Group, known as the Groupers. Neither recruited by ASIO as a sparrow nor regarded as a threat to national security, his actions ‘starkly silhouette the twin issues of trust and betrayal’. Third is the story of Paul Reuben James, ‘a minor casualty of Australia’s Cold War’, who was dismissed without recourse for having condemned the Communist Party Dissolution Bill. His case is a ‘litmus test of the political imperatives in Australia’ early in Menzies’ government. Fourth is Anne Neill. This conservative, church-going monarchist and war widow was self-effacing and proved to be one of ASIO’s most effective sparrows. She ingratiated herself with the South Australian branch of the CPA. She was such an apparently conscientious Party member that she was invited to China and the Soviet Union as a CPA representative. Eventually, suspicions arose over how she could afford to go to conventions far and wide (which ASIO funded for her). Afterwards, she went public. Her ‘betrayal’ generated vitriol. Deery suggests that in pursuing the CPA in Adelaide, ASIOwas ‘tilting at windmills’. Perhaps so, but Adelaide was the site of concern relating to the expulsion of Russian Ivan Skripov in 1963.