the outside world.
How America Britain Australia
The Forgotten Coup
by JOHN PILGER
Across the political and
media elite in Australia, a silence has descended on the memory of the great,
reforming prime minister Gough Whitlam, who has died. His achievements are
recognised, if grudgingly, his mistakes noted in false sorrow. But a critical
reason for his extraordinary political demise will, they hope, be buried with
him.
Although not regarded as on
the left of the Labor Party, Whitlam was a maverick social democrat of
principle, pride and propriety. He believed that a foreign power should not
control his country’s resources and dictate its economic and foreign policies.
He proposed to “buy back the farm”. In drafting the first Aboriginal lands
rights legislation, his government raised the ghost of the greatest land grab
in human history, Britain ’s colonisation of Australia , and the question of who owned the island-continent’s vast
natural wealth.
Latin Americans will
recognise the audacity and danger of this “breaking free” in a country
whose establishment was welded to great, external power. Australians had served
every British imperial adventure since the Boxer rebellion was crushed in China . In the 1960s, Australia pleaded to join the US in its invasion of Vietnam , then provided “black teams” to be run by the CIA. US diplomatic cables published last year by WikiLeaks
disclose the names of leading figures in both main parties, including a future
prime minister and foreign minister, as Washington ’s informants during the Whitlam years.
Whitlam knew the risk he was
taking. The day after his election, he ordered that his staff should not be
“vetted or harassed” by the Australian security organisation, ASIO – then, as
now, tied to Anglo-American intelligence. When his ministers publicly condemned
the US bombing of Vietnam as “corrupt and barbaric”, a CIA
station officer in Saigon said: “We were told the Australians might as well be
regarded as North Vietnamese collaborators.”
Whitlam demanded to know if
and why the CIA was running a spy base at Pine Gap near Alice Springs ,
a giant vacuum cleaner which, as Edward Snowden revealed recently, allows the US to spy on everyone. “Try to screw us or bounce us,” the
prime minister warned the US ambassador, “[and Pine Gap] will become a matter of
contention”.
Victor Marchetti, the CIA
officer who had helped set up Pine Gap, later told me, “This threat to close
Pine Gap caused apoplexy in the White House. … a kind of Chile [coup] was set in motion.”
Pine Gap’s top-secret
messages were de-coded by a CIA contractor, TRW .
One of the de-coders was Christopher Boyce, a young man troubled by the
“deception and betrayal of an ally”. Boyce revealed that the CIA had
infiltrated the Australian political and trade union elite and referred to the
Governor-General of Australia, Sir John Kerr, as “our man Kerr”.
Kerr was not only the Queen’s man, he had long-standing
ties to Anglo-American intelligence. He was an enthusiastic member of the
Australian Association for Cultural Freedom, described by Jonathan Kwitny of
theWall Street Journal in
his book, ‘The Crimes of
Patriots‘, as, “an elite, invitation-only group… exposed in Congress
as being founded, funded and generally run by the CIA ”.
The CIA “paid for Kerr’s travel, built his prestige… Kerr
continued to go to the CIA for money”.
When Whitlam was re-elected
for a second term, in 1974, the White House sent Marshall Green to Canberra as ambassador. Green was an imperious, sinister figure who
worked in the shadows of America ’s “deep state”. Known as the “coupmaster”, 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 in Australia was to the Australian Institute of Directors – described
by an alarmed member of the audience as “an incitement to the country’s
business leaders to rise against the government”.
The Americans and British
worked together. In 1975, Whitlam discovered that Britain ’s MI6 was operating against his government. “The Brits
were actually de-coding secret messages coming into my foreign affairs office,”
he said later. One of his ministers, Clyde Cameron, told me, “We knew MI6 was
bugging Cabinet meetings for the Americans.” In the 1980s, senior CIA officers
revealed that the “Whitlam problem” had been discussed “with urgency” by the
CIA’s director, William Colby, and the head of MI6, Sir Maurice Oldfield. A
deputy director of the CIA said: “Kerr did what he was told to do.”
On 10 November, 1975 , Whitlam was shown a top secret telex message sourced to
Theodore Shackley, the notorious head of the CIA ’s
East Asia Division, who had helped run the coup against Salvador Allende in Chile two years earlier.
Shackley’s message was read
to Whitlam. It said that the prime minister of Australia was a security risk in his own country. The day before,
Kerr had visited the headquarters of the Defence Signals Directorate, Australia ’s NSA where he was briefed on the “security crisis”.
On 11 November – the day
Whitlam was to inform Parliament about the secret CIA
presence in Australia – he was summoned by Kerr. Invoking archaic vice-regal
“reserve powers”, Kerr sacked the democratically elected prime minister. The
“Whitlam problem” was solved, and Australian politics never recovered, nor the
nation its true independence.
John Pilger can
be reached through his website: www.johnpilger.com
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