ASIO and Those Unanswered Questions

More Cloak than Dagger is Molly J. Sasson’s personal story of her forty years in the secret services monitoring Nazism and communism in Britain, Holland and Australia. (She retired in 1983 before the era of terrorism.) But it is her cool appraisal of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) that will command most attention and raises still unanswered questions of great importance.

Despite ASIO’s historic success in managing the defection of the Petrovs in 1954, it remains Sasson’s conviction that “a number” of ASIO officers betrayed Australian, British and US secrets to the Soviet Union over many decades. She relies largely on the testimony of Soviet defectors Major-General Oleg Kalugin and Colonel Oleg Gordievsky, both senior officers of the KGB. But she believes that the most significant disclosures of the KGB’s “penetration” of ASIO came from Vasili Mitrokhin, a former senior archivist of the KGB.

In 1972 the KGB gave Mitrokhin sole responsibility for supervising the moving of 300,000 top-secret files from the overcrowded Lubyanka in Moscow to a new location. It took him twelve years. But the more he examined the archives the more horrified he became. “I could not believe such evil,” he said. Like the Stasi agent in the great German film The Lives of Others, he could no longer control or suppress his conscience. He carefully made notes of the files and smuggled them home in his shoes or trousers, and buried them at weekends in tins and milk churns under the floor of his dacha. He hoped in due course to publicise his records but there was no possibility of this until after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

In 1992 he was able to take a holiday in Latvia where he asked the American embassy in Riga to allow him to defect to the United States, with his archive. But the CIA officials decided the sample files Mitrokhin showed them were fakes. He did not have original documents, only copies and notes. They turned him away. But the British embassy quickly recognised his importance. The problem was that most of Mitrokhin’s files were still buried in his dacha outside Moscow. Six MI6 officers dressed as workmen unearthed six trunks of files and loaded them into a van. They then “exfiltrated” Mitrokhin, his family and files to Britain, where they finally arrived on September 7, 1992. The American FBI described the files as “the most complete and extensive intelligence ever received from any source”. Mitrokhin lived under police protection, and under a false name, for the rest of his life. He died in January 2004.

But soon after settling in Britain he began collaborating with Professor Christopher Andrew of Cambridge to publish two volumes based on his archives. The first appeared in 1999 and the second in 2005. They examined most countries in the world but not Australia—although MI6 had almost immediately passed to Australian authorities the Mitrokhin material about the KGB operations in Australia and in particular in ASIO. The Keating government thereupon ordered two inquiries into ASIO. The first, by the Australian Federal Police, was codenamed Operation Liver. Its findings remain secret, but according to Sasson, were “so sensational” that the Keating government appointed Michael Cook, a former director-general of the Office of National Assessments and Australian ambassador to Washington, to write a full report on suspected KGB penetration of ASIO. The Cook Report has also remained secret.

Sasson concludes: “Surely the Australian people have a right to know if real spies were operating, and for how long, in our government departments, instrumentalities and intelligence agencies.” They should have been exposed and prosecuted, but they were allowed to retire with full pension rights. She calls for the publication of Mitrokhin’s revelations, the results of Operation Liver and the contents of the Cook Report. We need not worry, she says, about what our American and British allies might think. “They would know this already! They have lived with our ‘problem’ for far too long.” There may conceivably be a good explanation for the silence of the authorities. If there is, it should be made public. It is extraordinary that Mitrokhin’s revelations about almost every country in the world have been made public, but not Australia, with no reason given. Small wonder that Sasson asks: Why the cover-up?

She asks the same question about a number of other issues in the history of ASIO and of the British and Dutch intelligence services in which she has served. (She devotes a chapter to the allegation that Roger Hollis, a former director-general of MI5, was a Soviet agent. She leaves the question open.) Scholars are now writing a three-volume official history of ASIO. Volume two, ASIO 1963–1975: The Protest Years by John Blaxland, has just been published. In More Cloak than Dagger Sasson contributes her experience, ideas and doubts to the official story.

It is noteworthy that she pays a special tribute to Sir Charles Spry, the director-general of ASIO from 1950 to 1970, who recruited her in 1967 to help him in dealing with suspected moles in the intelligence services—“a task I was, sadly, prevented from completing due to lack of support, deliberate or otherwise, displayed by my colleagues and others in the organisation at that time”. Referring to an ABC documentary of 2010 that smeared Spry’s good name and character, she writes:

What greatly surprises me is that the government of the day never intervened to refute the unfair attacks on this great man who had put the security of his country uppermost against the heavy odds he had to face … May he always be remembered as a great Australian.

In the Report of the Royal Commission into ASIO (1986) Justice Robert Hope judiciously concluded: “ASIO may be, or may have been, penetrated by a hostile intelligence service.” Spry had, and Sasson has, no doubt about it. More Cloak than Dagger gives much of the evidence. It is now surely time that a biography of Brigadier Sir Charles Spry was written to complement the official history of ASIO. Sasson dedicates her book to him.

(The above is the Introduction to Molly Sasson’s book, published by Connor Court.)

THE RECENT gathering in Paris to launch the poetry of Les Murray in French was a first. He has already been translated into several foreign languages (including Hindi) but only now has a collection of his work become available in French. Published by L’Iconoclaste, its title is C’est une chose sérieuse que d’être parmi les hommes. Daniel Tammet selected and translated forty poems which have influenced him in his personal life and as a writer (of such acclaimed works as Born on a Blue Day, Embracing the Wide Sky and Thinking in Numbers). An Englishman and autistic savant now resident in France, Tammet stumbled on Murray’s Poems the Size of Photographs some years ago and immediately knew he had made one of the great discoveries of his life: J’en avait la chair de poule. It gave him goose pimples.

The occasion of the launching of the new book was the Paris Festival of World Writers, sponsored by Columbia University and the National Library of France. They named the session in La Maison de la Poésie “Conscious and Verbal”—the words used in the press when Murray recovered from a liver infection in 1996, and which he later adopted for his collection in 1999.

Murray and Tammet each read a number of poems to enthusiastic applause from the French audience. Tammet knows how almost impossible it is to translate poetry faithfully, let alone poems of the subtlety of Murray’s. But if he cannot capture the magic, he sensitively conveys mood and idea. How can you translate Murray’s “Vietnam” poem “On Removing Spiderweb”? Murray begins:

Like summer silk its denier
But stickily, and ickilier,
Miffed bunny blinder, silver tar,
Gesticuli-gesticular …

which Tammet bravely renders as:

Telle la soie estivale, son denier,
Mais poisseuse, ointe,
Glu argentée qui aveugle les lièvres,
Colle qui fait gesticuler …

 Or take “The Last Hellos”, about the death of Murray’s father, with its echoes of Bunyah patois. It ends:

Snobs mind us off religion
nowadays, if they can.
Fuck thém. I wish you God.

With Tammet it becomes:

De nos jours, les snobs nous mettent en garde
Contre la religion, quand ils le peuvent.
On les emmerde. Je te souhaite Dieu.

After the readings someone asked Murray what writers had influenced him. In a practised way he promptly listed three. The first is Ken Slessor and the second Hesiod, both well-known influences on him. But the third is less well known. It is the medieval Welsh poet Dafydd ap Gwilym. Then Murray suddenly added a fourth: Molière.

Tammet told his audience that Murray is the poet laureate of the English-speaking world. His genius shows that autism can be a source of creativity, of alternative thinking that enriches our understanding of the world. He quoted Joseph Brodsky that Les Murray is “celui en qui ‘la langue anglaise respire’”—the one in whom the English language breathes again. But Murray added: “I can still write a rotten poem.”