The United States interference in Australian domestic politics was confirmed by Jimmy Carter, former President of the United States, in an apology to Gough Whitlam via the President’s envoy at a breakfast meeting in the Qantas lounge in 1977.
Whitlam conveyed the substance of the meeting to the House of Representatives in 1977 and it is recorded in Hansard.
Whitlam’s dismissal has kept Labor’s leadership subservient to the United States ever since.
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The Whitlam government of 1972 to 1975 responded to a wave of progressive activism and ushered in a new political era. Australia, briefly, became an independent state as Whitlam ended colonial servility. He moved Australia towards the non-aligned movement, supported zones of peace and Labor opposed nuclear weapons testing.
While Whitlam was not from the left, he held some social democratic principles including that a foreign power should not control the country’s resources, nor dictate its economic and foreign policies. His government gave diplomatic recognition to the People’s Republic of China and drafted the first Aboriginal Lands Rights policy.
One of his first popular acts after being elected was to end the National Service Act and conscription, releasing those in jail. He withdrew the remaining Australian troops from Vietnam, as the US was doing the same.
While Labor, including Whitlam, did not endorse the anti-war Vietnam Moratorium movement, some senior Labor members, who subsequently became ministers, did.
Tom Uren was jailed at least once for supporting the anti-conscription movement. Dr Jim Cairns led the massive moratorium marches in Melbourne where, in May 1970, 100,000 blocked the roads in protest.
After Whitlam’s election, when some ministers publically condemned the US bombing of North Vietnam as “corrupt and barbaric”, Frank Nepp, a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer in Saigon said: “We were told that the Australians might as well be regarded as North Vietnam collaborators”.
Whitlam knew the risks he was taking. The day after his election, he ordered his staff not be “vetted” or “harassed” by ASIO. He demanded to know if, and why, the CIA was running a spy base at Pine Gap, near Alice Springs. As Edward Snowden later revealed, the so-called joint facility is a giant “vacuum cleaner”, allowing the US to spy on everyone.
Snowden also revealed that, in the minutes of a meeting with the US Ambassador, Whitlam said: “Try and screw us or bounce us and Pine Gap will become a matter of contention”.
Victor Marchetti, assistant to the Deputy Director of the CIA, told journalist John Pilger: “The threat to close Pine gap caused apoplexy in the White House … and a kind of Chilean Coup was set in motion.”
, in an article on Nugan Hand, the CIA and ousting of the Whitlam government in 2017, stated that “there was however, no statement of intent from Whitlam that his government intended to close Pine Gap”.
Pine Gap
The Pine Gap Treaty was signed on December 1966 for an initial nine years; either party could terminate it by giving one year’s notice.
The critical date for continuing or giving notice was December 9, 1975. Whitlam told parliament on April 3, 1974 that: “The Australian Government takes the attitude that there should not be foreign military bases, stations, installations in Australia. We honour agreements covering existing stations. We do not favour the extension or prolongation of any of those existing ones.”
Whitlam would have been empowered to act on Pine Gap, on December 9, 1975, but he was sacked a month earlier.
Pine Gap’s top secrets were de-coded by a CIA contractor, TRW. One decoder was Christopher Boyce who was later tried for espionage by the US, for revealing that the CIA had infiltrated the Australian political and trade union elite.
When Whitlam learned that ASIO personnel were working as proxies of the CIA in destabilising the Salvador Allende government in Chile, he ordered them home. Whitlam later ordered ASIO to terminate all communications with the CIA. But ASIO Chief Peter Barbour ignored him.
Matters started to come to a head in 1975, when Whitlam dismissed the heads of ASIS and ASIO, the former because he had been secretly assisting the CIA’s covert operations in East Timor during its civil war.
Then, at the beginning of November, 1975, the Australian Financial Review revealed that a former CIA officer, Richard Stallings, had been channelling funds to Doug Anthony, leader of the Country Party, then in the Opposition.
Ray Atcheson’s 1974 book Looking at the Liberals claimed the CIA had offered Australia’s opposition parties unlimited funds to defeat Labor in the 1974 elections. Marchetti told Pilger that the CIA had funded both opposition parties. The Sydney Sun on May 4, 1977 stated that the Liberals had been on the receiving end of CIA funds since the late 1960s.
When Whitlam repeated the charges against Stallings, insisted on an investigation into Pine Gap to identify its true purpose and demanded a list of CIA operatives in Australia, alarm bells sounded at CIA headquarters in Langley in the US.
The military-industrial complex was spurred into a flurry of activity. Coxsedge, Ken Coldicutt and Gerry Harant write in Rooted in Secrecy, that on November 6, 1975, the head of the Department of Defence reportedly met with the Governor General, Sir John Kerr, and afterwards declared publicly: “This is the greatest risk to the nation’s security there has ever been”.
On the November 8, Kerr briefed another senior defence official about the CIA’s allegations that Whitlam was jeopardising the security of US bases in Australia.
The same day, the CIA in Washington informed the ASIO station chief that all intelligence links with Australia would be cut unless a “satisfactory explanation: was given about Whitlam’s behaviour.
John Kerr
Kerr had been a member and subsequently on the executive of the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom in the 1950s, an organisation spawned from the CIA’s front organisation, Congress for Cultural Freedom. He was a regular contributor to the organisation’s publication, Quadrant.
Kerr helped found Lawasia, a prominent CIA front for propaganda in Asia, in 1966 and became its first president.
According to Boyce, decoder at Pine Gap until he was tried for espionage, the CIA often referred to Kerr as “our man”. Boyce also revealed that the CIA had infiltrated Australian unions and been “manipulating the leadership”.
Wall Street Journal journalist Jonathon Kwitny, in his book Crimes of Patriots, said that not only was the Australia Association for Cultural freedom, of which Kerr was an executive member, funded by the CIA, but it paid for Kerr’s travel and helped build his prestige.
When Whitlam was re-elected for a second term in 1974, Marshall Green was sent to Canberra as US Ambassador. Green, a sinister figure, was known as the “coup-master”. He had played a central role in the 1965 coup against President Sukarno in Indonesia, which cost up to a million lives.
One of his first speeches to the Australian Institute of Directors was described by an alarmed member of the audience as “an incitement to the country’s business leaders to rise against the government”.
On November 10, 1975, Whitlam was shown a top-secret message, from ASIO’s office in Washington, sourced to Theodore Shackley, the notorious head of the CIA’s East Asia division who had helped run the coup against Chile’s Salvador Allende two years earlier.
Shackley’s message was read to Whitlam. It said the PM was a security risk in his own country.
The day before Kerr had visited the headquarters of the Defence Signal’s Directorate, Australia’s NSA, where he was briefed on the “security crisis”.
On November 11, the day Whitlam was to inform parliament about the secret CIA presence, he was summoned by Kerr who invoked the little known “reserve powers” to sack him and the government.
The “Whitlam problem” was solved, and politics never recovered. There is no doubt that the US was involved in the sacking of the Whitlam government.
In Hansard in 1977 Whitlam was quoted talking about President Jimmy Carter, saying while he had never met the President he had had “a significant meeting” with his Assistant Secretary of State for Asia and South Pacific, Warren Christopher.
On July 27, 1977, Alston had arranged a breakfast meeting in the Qantas VIP room at Sydney Airport with Christopher, his Aide, Whitlam and his Aide.”
Whitlam said of Christopher that he “made it clear to us that he had made a special detour in his itinerary for the purpose of speaking to me.
“The President had asked him to say that he understood the Democratic Party and the ALP were fraternal parties. That he respected deeply the democratic rights of allies of the US.”
Whitlam continued: “I ask the honourable members of Parliament to note what he says next. ‘That the US administration would never AGAIN’ – I repeat those words — ‘Would never AGAIN interfere in the domestic political processes in Australia’ and ‘That he would work with whatever government the people of Australia elected’.”
Whitlam made a prediction on October 29, 1975, 11 days before he was sacked. “The question is whether any duly elected reformist government will be allowed to govern in the future?
“What is at stake is whether the people who seek change and reform are ever again to have confidence that it can be achieved through the normal parliamentary processes.”
[Bevan Ramsden has been a peace activist since the Vietnam Moratorium campaign. He is a member of the national coordinating committee of the Independent and Peaceful Australia Network and is editor of its monthly publication, Voice.]