Peter Carey - Amnesia

Later it would be said that it was the world recession that had undone the Whitlam government. Of course that didn’t help. But Nixon had made Marshall Green his ambassador before the recession hit. Marshall Green was the same guy who had overseen coups in Indonesia in 1965 and Cambodia in 1970.

Why didn’t we see what the appointment of the coup-master would mean for us? Because the pilot fish thinks it is safe to swim beside its shark? Because we were not Chile? Because we thought it was our own country and we could do what we liked in it? Our newly elected representatives could actually raid our own security service and read all the misinformation in their secret files. Whose security service was it? The Americans thought it was theirs. We knew it was ours. We were thrilled to see the vaults of ASIO open to the air.

We were naive, of course. We continued to think of the Americans as our friends and allies. We criticised them, of course. Why not? We loved them, didn’t we? We sang their songs. They had saved us from the Japanese. We sacrificed the lives of our beloved sons in Korea, then Vietnam. It never occurred to us that they would murder our democracy. So when it happened, in plain sight, we forgot it right away.

When the time came, no aircraft bombed the Australian Treasury, but our elected government was attacked continually and relentlessly in so many different ways from so many different quarters. Scandals were seeded in the clouds by hacks and circulated by Packer, Fairfax, Murdoch most of all. Misinformation rose into the sky above Canberra, like rockets that flared and died and left their lies on our retinas so we continued to see what was not true.

Gough’s ministers set out to raise a loan to “buy back the farm.” It’s a shame they did not go about it in a more worldly manner, that they were forced to act without the hostile Treasury, that they permitted the minister for mines to get himself involved with a broker named Khemlani. Khemlani was a CIA stooge. His job was not to buy back the farm but bring down the government. Of course he never raised a penny of the $4 billion loan the government approved.

Finally Khemlani would arrive in Australia with a fat briefcase full of “evidence” showing that the Labor ministers were all taking kickbacks from these loans. He was escorted before the cameras with bodyguards. He made a statutory declaration in which he swore his evidence. On the strength of his word, the free press was happy to report the people’s government were crooks.

It was a death of a thousand cuts. Scandal, scandal, scandal. It was next reported that a Bahamas bank had issued a letter seeking $4,267,365,000 for the Australian government, an outrageous $267 million being “proposed profit.” It didn’t matter that the government had not sought the loan. The headlines were the size of bricks.

Then Cairns was also offered money by a Melbourne dentist and property developer named Harris. Harris came to Jim’s office and offered to raise $300 million for a “one time commission”: of 2.5 percent. He had a letter he wanted Jim to sign. Jim, who had resisted the Khemlani loan, now refused this.

In parliament the opposition claimed he had approved this loan.

Jim denied it, naturally.

The opposition then tabled a letter which made our man a liar. There it was: his signature, giving his approval to pursue the loan on these terms. Thus was Jim ruined by a letter he had never knowingly signed. Today the question is, who slipped the letter in the pile? Who was the dogsbody? After the “evidence” had been obtained, who fed it to the press and the opposition? Who destroyed the Treasurer? Who killed Jim Cairns?

There was more to come.

Gough Whitlam had told the American ambassador that Australia would probably, but not necessarily , extend the lease on the so-called “US signals facility at Alice Springs.” This was and is Pine Gap, the same base that lets the US guide its drones today, but we did not have a clue what happened there, none of us, not even the Prime Minister knew what happened at Pine Gap. But the US would react so drastically to the threat of its closure, it was (and is) clearly so much more than a “signals facility.”

The American trauma can be seen and measured in a cable, dated days before the Whitlam government was deposed. It is from the CIA to its close collaborators at ASIO. As a kindness to the reader, the following is both edited and summarised. SHACKLEY CHIEF EAST ASIA DIVISION CIA REQUESTED ME TO PASS THE FOLLOWING MESSAGE TO DIRECTOR GENERAL OF ASIO.

The CIA, the cable stressed, had cause for serious complaint. The Prime Minister of Australia had stated that the CIA had been funding the conservative opposition in Australia. This was true, of course, although the cable admitted no such thing. The American embassy in Australia had approached the Australian government “at the highest level.” At this meeting the Americans “categorically denied” that CIA had given or passed funds to an organisation or candidate for political office in Australia.

Next day the US State Department relayed the same message to the Australian embassy in Washington. The CIA had not funded an Australian political party.

The effect of this, as the cable reveals, was unexpected.

PRIME MINISTER GOUGH WHITLAM PUBLICLY REPEATED THE ALLEGATION THAT HE KNEW OF TWO INSTANCES IN WHICH CIA MONEY HAD BEEN USED TO INFLUENCE DOMESTIC AUSTRALIAN POLITICS.

The Australians then publicly identified CIA agents working in their country under US State Department and Defense Department cover. This was outrageous enough. Then their Prime Minister revealed that Richard Stallings, the head of the Pine Gap facility, was a CIA agent.

CIA IS PERPLEXED AS TO WHAT ALL THIS MEANS. DOES THIS SIGNIFY SOME CHANGE IN OUR BILATERAL INTELLIGENCE SECURITY RELATED FIELDS?

The CIA were then forced to confer with their cover agencies and these agencies (State and Defense) stuck to their stories. This involved them claiming that Pine Gap’s Richard Stallings was a “retired Defense Department employee.”

Oh, really?

CIA CANNOT SEE HOW THIS [public dialogue] CAN DO OTHER THAN BLOW THE LID OFF THOSE INSTALLATIONS WHERE THE PERSONS CONCERNED HAVE BEEN WORKING AND WHICH ARE VITAL TO BOTH OF OUR SERVICES AND COUNTRIES, PARTICULARLY THE INSTALLATIONS AT ALICE SPRINGS … CIA FEELS IT NECESSARY TO SPEAK DIRECTLY TO ASIO BECAUSE OF THE COMPLEXITY OF THE PROBLEM.

That is, the American secret service could not talk to the elected leader of Australia. They had not forgotten Gough’s threat to permanently terminate the lease on Pine Gap which, as events transpired, was only days from expiring. Whitlam told the US ambassador: “If there were any attempts, to use familiar jargon, ‘to screw or bounce us’ inevitably these arrangements would be a matter of contention.”

IS THERE A CHANGE IN PRIME MINISTER WHITLAM’S ATTITUDE IN AUSTRALIAN POLICY IN THIS FIELD?… CIA FEELS THAT EVERYTHING POSSIBLE HAS BEEN DONE ON A DIPLOMATIC BASIS.

If ASIO could not fix this troublesome government, the CIA did not see how OUR MUTUALLY BENEFICIAL RELATIONSHIPS COULD CONTINUE … THE CIA FEELS GRAVE CONCERNS AS TO WHERE THIS TYPE OF PUBLIC DISCUSSION MAY LEAD … THIS MESSAGE SHOULD BE REGARDED AS AN OFFICIAL DEMARCHE ON A SERVICE TO SERVICE LINK … THE ASIO DIRECTOR-GENERAL SHOULD BE ASSURED THAT CIA DOES NOT LIGHTLY ADOPT THIS ATTITUDE.

Two days following the transmission of this cable the government was illegally dismissed.

Of course there was a conspiracy. We are old enough to know this now. There are institutions whose task it is to conspire all day long. They spy in every corner of our lives. They employ hundreds of thousands of workers and build acres of employee parking lots. If they are inefficient they are not always ineffective.