Australia’s Unpunished Cold War Traitors

After the Second World War, the Americans and the British showed increasing reluctance to share their secret intelligence with Australia. Technical operations and Soviet defectors had revealed conclusively that high-level penetration agents, or “moles”, operating in Australia, were betraying classified intelligence to Soviet intelligence officers. Ben Chifley’s Labor government was persuaded by Australia’s allies to set up a security and counter-espionage service along the lines of Britain’s MI5. In 1949, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) was established, albeit with strong opposition from the Left.

The Venona Project was the name given to the secret decryption by US and British signals intelligence agencies of Soviet radio messages transmitted during the 1940s. This joint project intercepted and decoded some of Moscow’s encrypted radio communications with its intelligence officers around the world. It was one of the most remarkable code-breaking triumphs of the early Cold War.

The Venona decrypts revealed that Moscow had spies in almost every department of the US administration, and, most alarming of all, in the top-secret Manhattan Project with access to information on America’s development of nuclear weaponry. Venona in due course also identified two ace British spies: Donald Maclean in the British Foreign Office, and later Kim Philby in Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, MI6.

The Venona material also demonstrated beyond doubt that the Soviet Union was conducting major espionage operations in Australia, both during and after the war. According to Richard Aldrich, a professor of international security at the University of Warwick, “the KGB Moscow-Canberra cables proved to be the most successful part of the Venona operation”. Even so, according to a pioneering study by two Canberra academics, Desmond Ball and David Horner, Breaking the Codes: Australia’s KGB Network, 1944–1950, of the nearly 5000 encrypted messages sent between Moscow and Canberra from 1943 to 1948, only 5 per cent of them have been deciphered. Many Australians who were spying for the USSR were referred to in these messages, but remain unidentified to this day.

British author Nigel West has written: “During the first months of ASIO’s existence, inquiries prompted by the existence of Venona texts identified more than a dozen spies, and led ASIO to begin offensive operations.” The Australian suspects became known as the “Venona Twelve”. The nine principal spies were all members of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA). Professor Aldrich writes:

Thereafter, ASIO was almost entirely focused on what it called “The Case” …

The “Venona Twelve” kept ASIO’s staff of close to two hundred busy well into the 1950s. Each new suspect opened a world of further associates and contacts who required separate examination. The task was difficult, since the Communist Party of Australia had long expected to be banned, and had built up a substantial underground organisation.

 

One Australian government department that was well and truly penetrated by a Soviet spy ring was the Department of External Affairs.

Some of the suspected Australian spies identified by the Venona decrypts are as follows.

 

Walter Seddon Clayton

Wally Clayton, a member of the central committee of the Communist Party of Australia, was the controller of the spy ring. The KGB had recruited him in order to obtain classified documents received by the Australia government from its American and British allies. This Clayton managed to achieve by running a number of ace agents in the Department of External Affairs who supplied him and his Soviet masters with invaluable material. ASIO, under the then Colonel Spry’s direction, did a very professional job in uncovering this network.

The CPA boasted a membership of around 20,000 members in 1950. ASIO needed to identify those members who held positions in government service. Everything ASIO did, from its inception in 1949 to the collapse of the Soviet Union forty years later, must be seen in the context of the discovery of this KGB spy ring that had gravely compromised Australia’s security. This was why ASIO came into existence.

By June 1949, ASIO was satisfied it had identified Clayton as the KGB’s “principal spymaster”, concluding that he must be the mysterious “Klod” referred to in Moscow’s coded cables. In 1957, Clayton and his wife attempted to fly to the Philippines. ASIO, fearing that his ultimate destination was the Soviet Union, persuaded the Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, to cancel his passport. For decades Clayton denied he had ever been involved in espionage; but in 1993 he privately confessed the secret work he performed for the KGB to Laurie Aarons, national secretary of the CPA. His confession only came to light in 2010 after his death.

 

Ian Frank George Milner

Dr Ian Milner—the “Rhodes Scholar Spy”—was an academically gifted New Zealander who won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford before the war and graduated with first-class honours in philosophy, politics and economics. While at Oxford he became a communist. He migrated to Australia to take up an appointment in early 1940 as lecturer in political science at Melbourne University. He joined a branch of the CPA, even though it was illegal to do so at the time.

In 1944 he joined the Department of External Affairs and was appointed to the Post-Hostilities Division. From the end of the war until 1947, he stole, copied and passed on to Clayton important classified documents on British and American policies on Eastern Europe, the Middle East, trade with the Soviet Union and the surrender of Japan. From 1947 until 1949 he worked in the Australian contingent at the United Nations Security Council, where his espionage attracted the attention of the US. In 1950, Milner, upon learning that an Australian high-level inquiry was afoot to investigate how a top-secret defence document to which he had access had ended up in Soviet hands, planned his escape. He and his wife Margot, who shared his communist beliefs, fled to communist Czechoslovakia, where he remained until his death in 1991.

 

James Frederick Hill

Another post-war External Affairs officer identified from Venona was Jim Hill, a graduate of Melbourne University, with known communist sympathies. His lawyer brother, Ted Hill, had been identified by the Commonwealth Security Service in 1943 as a key member of the CPA’s “inner circle”, and in 1949 had became secretary of the party’s Victorian branch.

During his time in External Affairs, Jim Hill passed on to Clayton classified documents from Australia’s Department of External Affairs and Britain’s Foreign Office. In the late 1940s he was posted to London. In 1950 he was questioned about his activities by MI5 at Australia House. According to his interviewer, Hill was “very badly shaken” by the ordeal, but insisted he had never stolen classified documents. Hill faced three further interviews with MI5, each time refusing to admit anything. He returned to Australia, where he was transferred to the Attorney-General’s Department. Believing he was still under a cloud, he later resigned from the public service altogether.

 

Katharine Susannah Prichard

Born in Fiji in 1883, Katie Prichard grew up in Australia, became a journalist and established herself as a successful novelist. In 1921 she was a founding member of the CPA, a cause to which she devoted the rest of her life. In 1933, while she was touring the Soviet Union, her war-hero husband Hugo “Jim” Throssell, who had remained behind in Australia, committed suicide owing to the collapse of his business during the Depression.

In 1934, Prichard published a pamphlet, The Real Russia, in which she extolled what she thought were the heroic qualities of Stalin’s Soviet Union.

She performed a number of important roles for Soviet intelligence, among them working as an agent of influence, talent-spotter and courier. She provided vital operational support to the Clayton network. She died in 1969, survived by her and Hugo’s only son, Ric.

 

Richard Throssell

Ric Throssell became a diplomat, joining the Department of External Affairs in 1943. His first posting was to Moscow. In the late 1940s he became an adviser to the Minister of External Affairs, Dr H.V. Evatt, when Evatt held the position of President of the United Nations General Assembly. The KGB’s Moscow Centre valued Throssell as an agent, advising its KGB “residency” in 1953 that he had “transmitted valuable information to the Communists, and they to us”. After being identified by ASIO as one of the “Venona Twelve”, Throssell’s diplomatic career was impeded by the refusal of ASIO to grant him security clearance.

In 1989, he recounted some of his eventful life in his autobiography, My Father’s Son. A decade later, after the death of his second wife Dorothy, he took his own life, as his father had done.

So far we have looked at the activities of identified spies in the Department of External Affairs who stole secrets for Moscow. We have not yet examined two important individuals who may have inflicted even more lasting damage to Australian security: the department’s Secretary from 1947 to 1950, Dr John Burton, and the Labor Minister for External Affairs (and Attorney-General) from 1941 to 1949, Dr H.V. Evatt.

 

John Wear Burton

In introducing Dr Burton as a guest on Late Night Live in 2004, Phillip Adams said:

John Burton was probably the most controversial and visionary public servant of the twentieth century. Branded a “pink eminence” of the Labor Party by conservative critics, he was clearly one of the most important intellectuals and policy-makers associated with the Curtin Labor Government of the 1940s. As a close associate of “Doc” Evatt and head of the department of External Affairs (now Foreign Affairs) he did more to shape Australian foreign policy towards Asia and the Pacific than any other person before or since.

Two Australian diplomats who worked closely with Dr Burton in the 1940s developed a strong aversion towards him. One was Paul Hasluck, a future Liberal politician who himself served as Minister for External Affairs from 1964 to 1969. He was particularly trenchant about Dr Burton’s personal management style. From 1941 until 1947 Burton, as well as being a Department of External Affairs official, had been personal secretary to Dr Evatt. In March 1947, aged only thirty-two, he was promoted ahead of more senior diplomats to be the department’s Secretary, a position he held until June 1950. This was too much for Hasluck who, on March 25, 1947, wrote to a colleague, commenting:

I have lost confidence in the Administration itself when by Burton’s appointment Cabinet set its approval on a whole system of petty intrigue, tale-bearing, favouritism and personal attachment to the Minister which, as an Australian citizen, I consider contrary to public service principles.

A colleague of Hasluck’s, Coral Bell, who served in the Department of External Affairs from 1945 until 1951, detected something altogether more sinister about Burton’s character. (Dr Bell would later go on to a distinguished career as a university academic, working with Arnold Toynbee at Chatham House, teaching at the London School of Economics and Sussex University, and later returning to Australia in 1977 as visiting fellow at the Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University.)

During her first three years in the Department of External Affairs she became acquainted with a number of members of the department who were spying for the Soviet Union, including Jim Hill and Ric Throssell. She was later amused to learn that the KGB’s codename for the department was “Nook”, a sheltered place. “But who was doing the sheltering?” she asked. “To my mind, [it was] Burton.”

Dr Bell recalled foreign diplomats roaming freely around the offices when staff officers were absent during their lunch hour. Security was non-existent, as the erratic Minister for Foreign Affairs, Dr Evatt, in her words, “despised security”. In 1946 Bell was transferred to the United Nations division of this department, headed by Burton. Here she became acquainted with Hill and Throssell. The pair used to be joined at lunch by Fred Rose, who worked in the Department of Territories and Post-War Reconstruction, but also clandestinely for Soviet intelligence.

At one of these lunches, some time in late 1947, Throssell turned to her and said: “Some of us think that the Soviet Union ought to see these documents.” The “documents” to which he was referring were confidential British Foreign Office dispatches and telegrams, which were circulated to British cabinet ministers and to the foreign affairs departments of trusted Commonwealth countries. Bell recalled: “I assumed he was joking, so I laughed merrily, and said something to the effect that it sounded like a splendid way to get oneself into jail.”

Bell was certain that Throssell must have told Burton of her response and that Burton “acted fast” to move her to another section of the department. She told Professor Desmond Ball, in the course of interviews he conducted with her in late 2010 and early 2011:

[A week or two] after that carefree mention of jail, I had found myself transferred out of Dr Burton’s UN division to the South-East Asia division, so I saw less of the others. And again, only a few months after that, in 1948, I was “posted” to the Australian office in New Zealand, so I never saw any of them again.

In 1951 Bell resigned from the Department of External Affairs and left for Britain. For the rest of her life she believed that Burton was deeply involved with Soviet intelligence. She speculated that Burton could well have been the principal agent reporting to Colonel Viktor Sergeivich Zaitsev, the GRU (Soviet military intelligence) rezident in Australia from March 1943 to April 1947. Before he was posted to Australia, Zaitsev had been posted to the Soviet embassy in Tokyo, where he had provided undercover operational assistance for the legendary Richard Sorge, one of the Soviet Union’s most famous spies. Recent reassessment of that period indicates that Zaitsev was a top-class intelligence officer, with many contacts in Canberra, and an active recruiter of agents.

In two Quadrant articles (November 2013 and October 2015), Rob Foot made a careful study of the career and person of Dr Burton. He concluded:

the strong likelihood is that Burton was an active agent for the Soviet Union at least during the time he held senior office in the Department of External Affairs, including the secretaryship, and a highly effective agent of influence thereafter. In the former role, his activities led directly to a breakdown in Australia’s relationship with the USA.

 

Herbert Vere Evatt

During the entire period from 1941 to 1949, when Labor was in government, first under John Curtin, then under Ben Chifley, the Minister of External Affairs and Attorney-General was the intellectually brilliant but volatile Bert Evatt. His life and career have been analysed in a path-breaking two-part article in National Observer by Dr Andrew Campbell, a former intelligence analyst with the Office of National Assessments.

Evatt counted a number of leading Australian communists among his closest friends and advisers and scarcely bothered to conceal his pro-communist sympathies. In 1934, Evatt, then a High Court judge, behaved in an extraordinarily partisan manner when he defended a visiting Czech Comintern operative, Egon Kisch, whom the Lyons government was trying to deport as an undesirable alien.

Evatt was particularly close to Katharine Susannah Prichard. In December 1941, he assured her that, in his capacity as Attorney-General, he had ordered Commonwealth security officers to halt their surveillance of her.

In 1945, Evatt, Burton, Hasluck and other officials of the Department of External Affairs travelled to San Francisco to attend the inaugural conference of the United Nations. During the conference, Evatt leaked a secret British government document to the Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov. The British quickly identified Evatt as the culprit, and the following morning he was very publicly reproved by the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, and the Dominions Secretary, Lord Cranbourne.

During and after the war, when Evatt was Minister for External Affairs, not only was his department penetrated by Soviet agents, but so was his private office. Among his personal staff were at least four operatives reporting to the KGB: Frances Bernie, his personal secretary Allan Dalziel and two other staffers, Fergan O’Sullivan and Albert Grundeman.

In the 1949 election, the Chifley Labor government was defeated and replaced by a Liberal-led government under Robert Menzies. In 1951, Dr Evatt replaced Chifley as leader of the opposition. During the early 1950s, as Dr Campbell has shown, ASIO repeatedly briefed Evatt on the grave security risk posed by some of his key staffers, who had been discovered to have had clandestine links with Soviet intelligence officers.

In 1953 a prominent official of the New South Wales branch of the Labor Party, Frank Rooney, presented Evatt with evidence that every evening his press secretary Fergan O’Sullivan was phoning the Sydney headquarters of the CPA. Rooney recalled Evatt’s “extraordinary” reaction to the news and observed how Evatt’s hands trembled as he gave Evatt a cigarette. Evatt refused to discuss the matter any further, and on the next day “conducted himself as if nothing had happened”.

In April 1954 came the dramatic defections to Australia of Vladimir Petrov and his wife Evdokia, both of them officers of the Soviet KGB. First, Petrov defected on his own on April 3, probably sooner than he had planned. He had discovered, to his alarm, that the contents of his safe at the Soviet embassy had been tampered with, and feared that the KGB had somehow learned of his intentions.

Moscow then dispatched two thuggish “couriers”, named Zharkov and Karpinsky, to Australia to seize Evdokia and bring her back to Russia and doubtless a terrible fate. On April 19, Sydney’s Mascot Airport was the scene of rowdy anti-communist demonstrations by Australian migrants from the “captive nations” of Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe as the two armed KGB heavies dragged the visibly distressed Mrs Petrov across the tarmac to a waiting aircraft.

Robert Manne has vividly described how the brutal abduction and manhandling of Mrs Petrov on Australian soil “was itself startling enough to awaken the tranquil democracy of mid-1950s Australia”:

The nation saw an attractive young blonde woman, weeping and vulnerable, one foot bare, being dragged across the tarmac by two formidable, scowling Slavic gorillas. A durable visual image of what most Australians still believed the Cold War to be about—the struggle between the forces of Evil and Good—penetrated the national consciousness.

It was only when the aircraft landed at Darwin to refuel that the acting administrator of the Northern Territory, Reginald Leydin, and a squad of armed policemen were able to confront the Soviet guards on the grounds that they were illegally carrying firearms aboard a civilian flight, and to offer Mrs Petrov asylum in Australia with her husband, which she accepted.

Prime Minister Menzies announced the setting up of a royal commission to investigate Vladimir Petrov’s testimony about Soviet espionage in Australia and overseas. Evatt reacted by accusing Menzies and ASIO of conspiring to time the defection to help damage Labor’s prospects of winning the election that year. He appeared before the Petrov royal commission as counsel to defend two of his staff, Dalziel and Grundeman, from what he claimed was ASIO-fabricated evidence, and also to repeat his accusations that the Petrov defection had been manipulated by Menzies for political ends.

In October 1954, Evatt launched a sensational attack on the anti-communist Industrial Groups within his own party. He accused them of disloyalty to Labor ideals. In March the following year, at a Labor Party conference in Hobart, Evatt, with the help of left-wingers such as Clyde Cameron, expelled from the party countless moderate members of long standing, many of whom would later form the Democratic Labor Party. The political turmoil that ensued, which kept Labor out of office federally until 1972, became known as the Great Labor Split.

On October 21, 1955, after the final report of the Petrov royal commission had been presented to parliament, Evatt rose to deliver an extraordinary speech, which further damaged his credibility. He announced to the House of Representatives that he had personally written to Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov, inquiring whether the Soviet Union had stationed any spies in Australia, and that he wished to table the reply he had received in which Molotov had (not surprisingly) reassured him that there were none! This naive statement was greeted by parliament, first with stunned silence, then with derisive laughter.

Many later senior Labor figures, such as former New South Wales Premier and Foreign Minister Bob Carr, have come to regard Evatt’s public career as having greatly harmed the party. Bill Hayden, who was leader of the Labor Party from 1977 to 1983, commented in his autobiography on “Evatt’s enormous capacity for crafty self-serving conduct, the flaws in his political judgment, and the general problems of a perhaps faltering personality”. He concluded that Evatt “was the cause of Labor’s greatest and longest running disasters, and he should be held accountable”.

Evatt’s actions led to the expulsion of a whole generation of democratically-minded, anti-communist members of the Labor Party. As a result, many communists and other militant leftists were able to rise to prominent positions in the party.

 

James Ford Cairns

Australia’s one-time Labor Deputy Prime Minister, Dr Jim Cairns, was a top-ranking office-bearer of a Moscow-funded front organisation and a long-standing Soviet agent of influence over a period of twenty-five years.

First elected to the House of Representatives in 1955, Cairns became a popular leader of Australia’s pro-communist Left, and in 1968 came within a handful of votes of toppling Gough Whitlam as leader of the Australian Labor Party. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he succeeded in mobilising huge public protests against Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War. He served as Deputy Prime Minister and Treasurer in the Whitlam government. He died in 2003, aged eighty-nine, still revered by many on the Left.

During much of his career, Cairns was prominent in the World Peace Council, a Soviet front organisation set up by Joseph Stalin in 1949 to urge Western democracies unilaterally to disarm. In the 1950s the governments of the United Kingdom, Austria and France barred WPC delegates from holding conferences in their respective countries. The WPC unswervingly defended Soviet military aggression in Eastern Europe and elsewhere as somehow serving the cause of “peace”.

Cairns was co-founder and first chairman of an early WPC offshoot, the Australian Peace Council, which he helped launch in Melbourne’s Town Hall in April 1950. He continued to play a leading role in the APC’s post-1959 incarnation, the Australian and New Zealand Congress for International Co-operation and Disarmament. On May 8, 1970, he made history when he led a huge Australia-wide anti-war protest, which became known as the Vietnam Moratorium. On that day, 75,000 protesters occupied the streets of Melbourne, bringing the city to a standstill.

Cairns’s political agenda, however, was not a pacifist one, but solely directed against the foreign policy of the United States. He repeatedly spoke in favour of the eventual victory of communist forces in Indo-China—which eventually occurred in April 1975, with tragic consequences for the people of Cambodia and Vietnam.

In 1973, when he was a senior cabinet minister in the Whitlam government, Cairns sponsored a visit to Australia by representatives of communist North Vietnam. On April 26—the day after Anzac Day—Cairns was photographed with his guests in the Sydney Town Hall, surrounded by Viet Cong flags and a huge picture of communist dictator Ho Chi Minh.

In 1974, official letterhead stationery of the Australian WPC described Cairns both as President of the Committee of World Peace Councillors in Australia and as Deputy Prime Minister.

On April 8, 1975, Cairns told the Australian Parliament: “It now seems inevitable that the Saigon [South Vietnamese] and Phnom Penh [Cambodian] governments would fall. That is the best solution …” Hal G.P. Colebatch has commented:

In an interview published in the Age on May 2, following the fall of Saigon and Phnom Penh, Dr Cairns said he greeted the end of the war with relief. He commented on the likely fate of anti-communist Vietnamese along the lines that they would be dealt with as “collaborators” and that many people believed that reprisals against them would be justified.

Terrible reprisals indeed followed for millions of South Vietnamese, who for decades had fought to prevent their country falling victim to the communist North. Over a million of them fled their country. In neighbouring Cambodia, communist repression was even more ferocious. Between April 1975, when the communist Khmer Rouge came to power, and 1979, when they were ousted, between a fifth and a third of the Cambodian population was either murdered or starved to death.

Cairns viewed these unfolding tragedies with equanimity and never once expressed any misgivings about the cruel nature of communism or about the Soviet Union’s responsibility for promoting its spread throughout the world.

In 2010, a prominent anti-communist Labor figure, Bob Carr, remarked of Cairns:

In acres of speeches and writings on foreign policy by Cairns, a single criticism of the Soviet bloc would be a discovery of gem-like value. Perhaps not a dual ticketholder, he wore the appellation “fellow traveller” like a second skin.

 

Albert James

Bert James served as a federal Labor parliamentarian for two decades, during which time he was also a KGB informant, according to information that first came to light in 2014.

A former policeman, James was Labor member for the House of Representatives electorate of Hunter in New South Wales from 1960 until 1980—a seat previously held by Dr Evatt. The revelation of his activities as a Soviet agent of influence and KGB informant came from a high-ranking KGB intelligence officer and senior archivist, Vasili Mitrokhin, who defected to the United Kingdom in 1992. His testimony about James was released by the Churchill College archives centre at Cambridge University in July 2014.

During his two decades in federal parliament, James expressed strong public opposition to the foreign policy of the United States and admiration for Fidel Castro’s communist dictatorship in Cuba.

According to Sydney Morning Herald reporter Philip Dorling:

Australian Security Intelligence Organisation records, mainly phone intercept transcripts, reveal James was in regular contact with the Soviet embassy in Canberra in the early 1970s, dealing with third secretary Alexander Ekimenko who was suspected by ASIO as being a Russian intelligence officer, and was a regular recipient of Soviet hospitality.

 

Bert James died in 2006.

 

Arthur Gietzelt

For decades Arthur Gietzelt was a leading figure of the Australian Labor Party’s left wing and of the Federated Clerks Union. From 1941 to 1945 he had served in the Australian army in New Guinea. After the war his communist affiliations came to the notice of the RSL, which promptly expelled him. In 1956 he was elected to the Sutherland Shire Council in southern Sydney, serving as a councillor for fifteen years, during nine of which he was mayor. In 1971 he was elected Labor senator for New South Wales, a position he held for twenty years. He was Minister for Veterans’ Affairs from 1983 until 1987 in the Hawke government.

A former Labor senator for New South Wales—later a national president of the ALP, Stephen Loosley—has recorded in his recently-published memoirs:

Gietzelt was what was known as a double ticket holder. Put simply, he was a senior member of the Communist Party of Australia and also had a ticket in the ALP, all while occupying senior public office.

When you were admitted to the inner councils of the Labor machine, you were quietly advised of communist influence in the senior reaches of the Left [faction]. There was no doubt about this. The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation guaranteed the accuracy of the assessment.

Loosley recalls how Paul Keating, Labor Prime Minister from 1991 to 1996, used to describe Gietzelt as a “black widow spider” who was “seemingly not a menace, but poisonous all the same”.

Hitherto classified ASIO files revealed a few years ago that for four decades after the war Gietzelt had been a “full-time paid member” and secret operative of the Communist Party of Australia and in regular touch with the Soviet embassy. According to records of ASIO and its predecessor, the Commonwealth Investigation Service, Gietzelt received substantial financial subsidies from the CPA and participated in CPA conferences.

During the years of the Whitlam Labor government US diplomats based in Canberra sent secret cables to Washington warning that Gietzelt’s communist activism posed a national security risk. Gietzelt did little to allay these concerns when he penned an extraordinary article denouncing the United States and calling upon the Australian government to expropriate all land owned by American corporations, close down all US intelligence-gathering facilities on Australian soil, lobby to have the US expelled from the United Nations and bar entry to Australia of any American citizen who did not support the aims of the left-wing “peace” movement.

During the 1983 election, in which Labor’s Bob Hawke defeated Malcolm Fraser’s Liberal-National coalition government, ASIO compiled a dossier on Gietzelt, alleging that he “has been, and possibly remains, a secret member of the Communist Party”, and speculating that he could be “under some form of control by the Soviets”.

Gietzelt retired from parliament in 1989. In 1992 was made an Officer of the Order of Australia “in recognition of service to the Australian Parliament and to local government”. He died in 2014.

Bob Carr has praised ASIO’s professionalism in never succumbing to the temptation to use its files on Gietzelt for political ends. He writes: “I’m struck by ASIO’s restraint. After all, a leaked copy of Gietzelt’s ASIO file could have killed Labor’s chances at any number of elections.”

Known pro-Soviet activists and agents of influence, such as Bert James, Jim Cairns and Arthur Gietzelt, should never have been allowed to sit in parliament, let alone serve as government ministers. Australia’s Constitution (section 44) clearly states:

Any person who … is under any acknowledgement of allegiance, obedience, or adherence to a foreign power … shall be incapable of being chosen or of sitting as a senator or member of the House of Representatives.

The above parliamentarians, had the public been aware of their allegiance to a hostile foreign power while they were holding elected office, should have been stripped of office, expelled from parliament and had their pension rights revoked.

For too many people in and out of government,  espionage on behalf of Soviet communism was a crime without penalties. It was very far from being a crime without victims.