Dr Burton at the Royal Commission on Espionage

Dr John Burton, who served as Secretary to Australia’s Department of External Affairs between 1947 and 1950, appeared before the Royal Commission on Espionage in closed session on November 2, 1954. His in camera evidence, and the written submissions which he subsequently tendered to the Royal Commission, are the subject of this article. In sum, they reveal him to be dishonest, evasive and dissembling in almost every relevant particular. They can only serve to strengthen the case, advanced in these pages in November 2013, that Dr Burton was a conscious agent of the Soviet Union during the time he held high office in the Australian government, and subsequently. This essay might be read as a companion piece to the 2013 article.

In a wide-ranging interview he gave in 1995 with career diplomat Michael Wilson (who had served in External Affairs at the relevant time), Dr Burton claimed that he had been shocked to find he was to be heard in private. His intent, so he said, was to clear the air and set the record straight in public about allegations of Soviet espionage against Australia in the late 1940s, which the Petrov defections had caused to resurface. This claim was untrue. It was Burton himself, in a meeting with the Solicitor-General on July 22, 1954, who suggested a closed hearing. As it would be necessary to traverse the “old case”, he said, it might be most appropriate that he be heard in private. The Commission agreed, to the great relief of both ASIO and its British counterpart, MI5, which had been contemplating with some anxiety the prospect of the former Secretary giving evidence in open court. The reasons for this apprehension will become apparent later; but briefly, thanks largely to the indiscretions of MI5, Dr Burton knew a good deal more than he should have about the deeply secret matters about which he was prepared to speak.

Oral testimony

The full range of anomalies and inconsistencies reflected in Burton’s evidence is too extensive to catalogue here, so I will confine myself to the most notable examples. The most startling (and unambiguous) untruth advanced by Burton was his insistence that he knew nothing about the 1948 inquiry into the possible complicity of his former colleague Ian Milner, in leaking a top secret United Kingdom planning paper to the Soviet Union. In April 1948, Burton had been tasked by his minister, “Doc” Evatt, with investigating the matter. He did so, with apparent reluctance and in most perfunctory fashion, and concluded that “there was no reason to believe the papers held by him [Milner] would not be in safe custody”.

He admitted to none of these events in his sworn testimony. He avoided all mention of the visit to Australia in February 1948 by the head of MI5, Sir Percy Sillitoe, which had first alerted the Chifley government to the discovery of the leaks (a fact of which Burton had been informed by the Secretary of Defence), swearing instead that he had learned of the matter from a visit by MI5 officers later in 1948 or even in 1949—leaks which, on his account, were attributed not to Milner, but to James Frederick Hill, an officer of External Affairs. (Hill and Milner had been the MVD’s principal agents within External Affairs between 1945 and 1948.)

His answers (recorded in the transcript of proceedings) to direct questions from the Commissioners or Victor Windeyer QC, Counsel Assisting, on the matter of Milner’s involvement, are less than informative. Asked if he knew of information indicating that suspicion was directed towards Milner, he said:

No, I don’t know what the information was in relation to Milner. He had left the Department and, while I knew he was a security risk in any event, there was no discussion that I can recall of what information he may have given or what action.

Asked whether there had been communications with the Secretary of Defence concerning Milner, he responded, “Not specifically concerning Milner. I naturally had many communications with the head of Defence.” Asked whether he had been involved in any personal communications in relation to Milner, his answer was: “I cannot recall any—at the back of my mind there is a feeling there were some exchanges at a Ministerial level.”

After these repeated denials, one of the commissioners, Justice Philp, very pointedly asked: “Do I understand from you that the only information you remember having leaked was the content of some telegram from London, alleged to have been leaked by Hill?” To which Burton responded, “It is the only specific thing. There were, as you will understand, Your Honours, allegations of leaks from Departments when stuff appeared in the press.” He had forgotten, apparently, that in conversations with MI5 in August 1948 he conceded that Milner must have been responsible for the leakages.

Justice Philp was right to be incredulous. Early in the course of the Commission’s proceedings, the commissioners had received a secret briefing from Brigadier Frederick Chilton, Defence’s Controller of Joint Intelligence, who had been charged by the Secretary, Sir Frederick Shedden, with investigating the leak of the UK planning paper to the Soviets. Chilton’s briefing was treated as so sensitive that no written record was made of it. It had shown that Ian Milner was the only person, other than trusted, highly senior figures in Defence, who had had access to the document. They knew that Burton had been advised of this finding.

They knew, too, that the document leaked had not been “some telegram from London”, as repeatedly asserted by Burton, but a formal top secret document prepared for the British War Cabinet by the post-hostilities planning staff in London, and provided in strictest confidence to their counterparts in Melbourne. They knew that Burton himself was fully aware of this, as he had been forwarded a copy of the paper by Shedden under cover of the letter of April 7, 1948, which advised of Milner’s involvement.

Yet Burton dissembled on oath when questioned if he knew anything of Chilton’s report or the investigation which had preceded it. Counsel asked him: “Do you know Mr Chilton made a report?” To which Burton replied:

Well, Your Honours, I am really puzzling to think of something. All this is vaguely at the back on my mind but these matters—I am interested in the positive side of foreign policy—once these things are off the desk I forget all about them.

A lunch break followed, after which Windeyer—presumably balancing a lawyerly instinct to attack such an obvious untruth with the need to observe the utmost discretion—asked Burton if he wanted to modify what he had just said. Burton did not. Asked again about an investigation into the leak of a document which went to Defence’s post-hostilities committee, Burton replied, “That does not recall anything to my mind.” He remembered, very vaguely, that there may have been some discussion at ministerial level about leaks at an early stage of his appointment to External Affairs, but “to be perfectly frank, I just don’t recall”. His final offering to the Royal Commission on the subject was, “I wish I could recall more of that kind of thing. It does not interest me much, it is all so negative.”

On its face, it seems odd that Burton should lie so egregiously about a crucial issue when a simple query to Defence would have easily shown his answers to be false. A likely explanation is that he was seeking to divert the Commission’s attention away from the leak itself, which had occurred in late 1945 or early 1946, which he himself had sought to cover up, and towards the more nebulous concept of a spy ring which, he said, was the focus of MI5’s inquiries. It is unlikely that Burton was personally involved in the running of the network, so there was little danger to himself in that line of questioning, whereas a focus on the leak might invite some unwelcome attention to his own role in the matter.

Burton also knew that the evidence he gave was not going to be made public. At the beginning of the hearing, the usual government court reporters were in attendance to record proceedings in shorthand. When he introduced the subject of MI5’s visit, however, the session had to be adjourned, and stenographers from ASIO with the requisite security clearances were called in to record the remainder of the hearing. He knew, therefore, that even if he were found to be misleading the Commission, or otherwise appeared in a poor light, there could be no references to it in the printed record which was made publicly available.

It is also the case—at least on my reading of the transcript—that Burton tended to panic when the line of questioning began to cut too close to the bone. It is noticeable that he hedges, fudges, obfuscates, pleads no recollection, or dissembles when details of the leak are threatening to surface during his examination, or when his personal associations with individuals under suspicion are raised. In particular, he denied knowing that Milner was his Department’s representative on Defence’s post-hostilities planning committee, even though the April 7, 1948, letter to him from Sir Frederick Shedden specifically advised that Milner had acquired the UK planning paper by virtue of his membership of that committee. “No, I don’t recall that at all,” he told the Commission. “I recall very hazily some communications which were virtually between the Minister and Sir Frederick Shedden.”

Dr Burton’s response to questions about Milner probably represented the largest untruth he presented to the Royal Commission, but it was not the only one. He also misled the Commission when asked why the Australian Labor Party had cancelled his pre-selection for the New South Wales federal seat of Lowe for the 1954 election. He claimed this had been due to his authoring of a pamphlet titled “Labor in Search of a Policy”. This was not so. He was disendorsed because of his visit to Peking in June 1952, in company with a number of peace activists, to attend a Communist Chinese conference on peace in the Pacific. Recognition of the People’s Republic of China was contrary to ALP policy at that time, and, as a result, Burton was de-selected. This was a rather pointless lie, as the matter had been covered heavily in the Australian press at the time. If he ever did write a pamphlet of that title, the records made publicly available by ASIO show no trace of it.

Further, he misled the Commission when he was asked about a report which had appeared in the Communist newspaper Tribune, about his having been appointed to Dr Evatt’s staff in October 1951. Burton said that he had been made aware of the story as a result of questions put to him by the press, and that it was untrue. This conflicts with information available to ASIO that he was, indeed, appointed to a public relations position in the office of the Leader of the Opposition, that his actual duties were “obscure”, and that the public relations functions was carried out by Miss Hazel Bell, a colleague from his External Affairs days. Burton’s appointment was apparently terminated by Evatt after his intention to visit China, in defiance of ALP policy, became public.

Far more significant was Burton’s repeated assertion that during his secretaryship Australia had pursued a policy of “open diplomacy”, particularly with respect to the Soviet Union, and, to that end, the Department’s practice was to open files rather than close them. Soviet diplomats were given weekly briefings on Australia’s policies, and those of other nations. There were, so he said, no “real secrets” in External Affairs at that time, other than material temporarily regarded as confidential if it treated ongoing negotiations in the international arena.

This position is starkly contradicted by his own vehement assertion to Sir Frederick Shedden, in a letter of April 22, 1948, that secret information was held very tightly within the Department. Summarily dismissing the allegations against Milner, Burton wrote, somewhat imperiously:

No suggestion should be made that any present officer of this Department is a person to whom secret information cannot be entrusted. On the contrary, any report made should contain a firm assurance regarding the safe-custody of any secret information in the Department.

His statements to the Commission are also sharply at odds with the fact that he himself both wrote and received documents at the highest level of classification, which was Top Secret and Personal, and that diplomatic reports from Australian missions abroad were routinely (and permanently) classified as Secret or Top Secret. In his 1995 interview with Michael Wilson, Burton claimed that classifications were assigned arbitrarily by clerks who wanted to advance their promotion prospects merely by virtue of having handled supposedly Secret information. This was untrue. Classifications were pre-printed in red on departmental stationery, and Australian diplomats and officials would select the classification appropriate to the content of their correspondence before having them typed up and dispatched.

The explanation for this transparent falsehood, I suspect, is that Dr Burton was quietly opening an escape hatch against the possibility that he might himself one day be accused of leaking material to the Soviets, or had colluded in such leakages by others. In such a case he could claim that what he did was no more than what was required of him by contemporaneous policy. But the “open diplomacy” and “no secrets” policy claimed by Burton was a complete fiction. Following the imposition of the embargo by the US in June 1948, the security of classified material was a high-level concern of the Chifley government for the remainder of its term. John Dedman, the Minister for Defence, launched a whole-of-government initiative to secure secret Defence information in August. As acting Minister for External Affairs, Chifley agreed to a stricter security regime; he noted, however—presumably as advised by Burton himself—that “by far the greater part of secret or top secret information held in my Department is of a political character”. Later, in his capacity as Prime Minister, on December 23, 1948, Chifley directed relevant ministers that all officials handling material classified secret or above (whether Defence-related or otherwise) should be subject to security checks, and foreshadowed the issue by his department of detailed security instructions concerning the security of official documents and information.

One question to which Burton gave a truthful answer was this (from Windeyer): “You yourself are not a member of the Communist Party, I take it?” No, replied Burton, nor had he ever been. This is borne out by records released by ASIO. Its agents consistently reported that, while the CPA regarded Burton as a kindred spirit, and useful politically (particularly on the Korea issue), he was not a member of the Party. Burton told the Commission that he had many friends who were communists, and he held them in high regard. He agreed that his political position was accurately reflected in articles he had written and a book, The Alternative, which he had recently had published. This book was assessed by ASIO analysts, and by reviewers in the press, to be standard communist boilerplate, largely indistinguishable from the Party’s publicly-announced positions. The Commission was probably aware that Soviet intelligence preferred where possible to work through people who, though committed or at least sympathetic to the USSR’s cause, were not formal members of their local Party, as Party members could be assumed to be under suspicion, if not active surveillance, by their nations’ counter-intelligence organisations.

What Burton failed to tell the Commission is that he had been a member of the Anglo-Soviet Friendship Society probably from 1938 until at least late 1948. These societies were set up in the West on the instructions of the Comintern to act as cats-paws for fomentation of revolution in their host countries. Few other than committed communists would have joined such an organisation—in Australia’s case, a leading light in the equivalent organisation was none other than Ian Milner. Burton, according to a sympathetic profile in the Canberra Times of August 17, 1991, was heavily influenced during his time at the London School of Economics (at which he studied for his PhD from 1938 to 1940) by Harold Laski, Britain’s leading theoretician of revolutionary Marxism.

On August 31, 1948—fully seven years after Burton joined the Department, and more than a year into his secretaryship—Evatt sharply instructed Burton to resign from the “Anglo-Soviet Society” without further delay:

Importance of body is negligible, but attitude of executive makes your position clear and from every point of view you should act quickly. Your letter should be merely one of resignation and no arguments or reasons should be made public. Only political enemies would be pleased if you acted otherwise.

The cable in question was classified Secret, and marked as “Special E.10 for Burton alone from Minister”. Perhaps there were secrets in External Affairs after all.

There was a notable change of tone in Burton’s presentation towards the conclusion of the hearing. Up to that point he had seemed a most unsatisfactory witness: continually vague and hesitant, frequently referring the commissioners to Departmental files rather than his own knowledge of events, claiming to have no memory of the incidents at issue, and, as we have seen, not infrequently dishonest. But when asked by Windeyer if he had anything further to add which might assist the inquiry, he availed himself of the opportunity to disclose—perhaps unwittingly—his real purpose in seeking to appear before the Royal Commission. Suddenly articulate and fluent, he took fierce issue with the conduct of the Commission and its entertainment of what he said was unreliable or misleading evidence.

In particular, he attacked the evidence taken from Vladimir Petrov. In clunky argument reminiscent of classic Soviet propaganda, he said that Petrov’s claim to be an officer of the MVD was false; he was no more than a lowly cipher clerk whose status was equivalent to that of the typists in Australia’s embassy in Moscow. A comparison of the relevant salary scales demonstrated this, according to Burton. Petrov had exaggerated both the extent of his knowledge and his status within the Soviet embassy. His evidence of MVD operations in general and its espionage against Australia in particular were grossly exaggerated. At this point one of the commissioners, Justice Ligertwood, interjected impatiently to ask if Burton realised that what Petrov had said in evidence was backed up in material form by the documents he had brought out with him. Dr Burton brushed the objection aside.

Burton said that individuals who were guilty of nothing more than a friendly disposition towards the USSR and sought to assist it in its time of trouble were being tarred with the brush of espionage. The workings of the Commission were eroding Australia’s commitment to a unified community and were sowing the seeds of distrust and disharmony. Communists, in particular, were being singled out for mistrust simply because they were Communists, despite their having no intention to damage or prejudice their country. Well-meaning people were being treated with hostility and suspicion, thanks to proceedings before the Commission, and might be dissuaded from further dealings with the Soviets.

The commissioners heard him out patiently and politely, as they were bound to do. However, Justice Owen, the chairman, remarked that the problem with Burton’s argument was that dealings with the Soviets by various individuals in an “ordinary friendly fashion” had the disconcerting habit of coming back to Australia in the form of instructions from MVD headquarters to obtain more information from them. That was the crux of the matter, of course, and the very reason for the Commission’s investigations. Dr Burton had nothing to say to this pertinent observation.

Dr Burton’s written submissions

Two months after his appearance before the Royal Commission, on January 5, 1955, Dr Burton forwarded nine written submissions in an “earnest desire”, as he said, to assist the commissioners in their consideration of the matters before them. He had made an offer to do so during the November 2 hearings, and after some discussion as to whether taking them would be consistent with their terms of reference, they agreed to entertain his submissions whether they fell within the scope of their inquiry or not.

Much of the material presented by Burton was unsurprising, and amounted to little more than an amplification of arguments he had already presented orally, but there were some unexpected twists. For example, he contended that Soviet espionage against Australia was no more sinister or baleful that than directed by Western powers against the USSR; in fact it was less so, as the Soviets were only trying to protect themselves against intrusions by Western intelligence. Hence, he claimed, the MVD’s interest in gaining the names of Australian intelligence officers, which was inspired by the attempted placement of an ASIO officer in the Australian mission in Moscow. The attempt proved abortive; but it led to such an impasse with Soviet officials and their Australian counterparts, both in Moscow and in Canberra, that Burton felt compelled to recommend the withdrawal of Australia’s mission from Moscow. No subsequent investigation has managed to find any basis for this allegation, and it appears to have been an elaborate red herring calculated to demonstrate the damage to Australia’s foreign relations wrought (purportedly) by reckless intelligence operations.

Predictably, Burton devoted considerable space to an attempt to discredit Petrov, who he claimed was not an MVD officer at all, but an official of the lowest level who had become disgruntled and disloyal over his lack of status and promotion, and had used his passing and incomplete knowledge of Soviet intelligence—gained coincidentally from his position as a cipher clerk—to masquerade as an intelligence professional. Rather strangely, though much in the same vein, Burton asserted that, in consequence, Counsel Assisting, in his opening address treating the nature and extent of Soviet espionage, should have drawn on widely available textbooks and articles on the subject rather than Petrov’s statements to ASIO if he wanted to make any relevant point.

Perhaps most curiously, Burton did not even attempt to deny that various Australian individuals had passed information to the Soviets. His purpose was to demonstrate that their actions, even if unwise, in no way constituted espionage. There had been, he said, “a deliberate attempt to build up a spectre of dramatic espionage out of inconsequential and frequently very normal happenings”. No evidence had been adduced “that any Communist or any other person had acted against the interests of his country”. Dishonest dealings were common in every aspect of social life, but “it is a wrong thing to endeavour to equate these human failings with treason”. Many people had differing views of what was in the best interests of Australia or its Queen, said Burton, but these represented not treasonous activity, but simply differences of opinion.

Finally, Burton averred that the Commission sought to “unjustly exaggerate whatever seeming indiscretions might have been committed by some Australians in a world situation quite different from that of today”. Even if he were possibly acting indiscreetly, Burton seemed to be saying, so long as the heart of a person passing information to the Soviets was in the right place—given that Russia was at the time Australia’s great friend—then everything was perfectly all right.

Dr Burton was almost as generous in his feather-light critique of a government official who might have been detected acting in similar fashion. Referring obliquely to the leaks which had caused the US to impose a total embargo on sharing sensitive information with Australia, he offered this (in his fourth submission):

Even if it were shown that a person had given some information of an unimportant nature, it should not follow that that same person could be prevailed upon to disclose any important or vital information. Nor should the person concerned, who has not acted treasonably in giving unimportant information, be accused of treason merely because other foreign governments decide to give the leakage of unimportant information as the reason for not communicating secret information to the Government. If a responsible official, who would naturally be aware of the indirect effects on other governments, were to give information of any kind to any country, and if this resulted in other governments withholding information, he should be punished or demoted because it would show his judgment was in error. But to regard his action as necessarily treasonable, or an action deliberately designed to harm the country, is absurd.

The “unimportant information” in this case was—as Burton well knew, for he had read it—a top secret British planning paper which laid out the West’s security concerns in relation to the western Mediterranean and the eastern Atlantic. The question is whether in this passage Burton was defending Ian Milner’s action in leaking the document, or his own in covering it up—or both. I think the latter. In any case, in Burton’s view, such a transgression merited no more than a token slap on the wrist. It is noteworthy, too, that in Burton’s view, the only vice attending such a disclosure was the failure of the relevant official to anticipate the response of “other governments”—that is, Australia’s allies—not the disclosure itself.

Dr Burton, throughout his submissions, took the view that accusations of espionage or treason could not arise in the absence of a clear desire to do material damage to Australia. In fact, he considered that the lack of evidence of the latter served to negate hard facts of the former. He took the same position, decades later, in his discussion of the case of Ric Prichard Throssell, whom Petrov had implicated in espionage after his defection. Hill, Milner and Throssell, Burton told Michael Wilson in August 1995, were all “terribly dedicated Australians” who had been wilfully destroyed by ASIO. “Imagine a person like Throssell doing anything which would prejudice Australia in any sense. It’s just absurd.”

Perhaps “prejudice”, in this context, is in the eye of the beholder. Brigadier Spry, the head of ASIO, had little doubt that the son of famed Australian author Katharine Susannah Prichard was a Soviet spy. This was despite his having been largely exonerated by the Royal Commission—a finding that was greeted with consternation within ASIO, and which still seems inexplicable today—and it is difficult to fault Spry’s logic. Writing in May 1956 to Arthur Tange, then the Secretary of External Affairs, who tried to intercede on his behalf, Spry refused to give Throssell a security clearance. He pointed out that two successive MVD Residents, Petrov and his successor, Kovalenok, had brought with them specific instructions to re-activate Throssell. It was inconceivable, Spry averred, that the Soviets, always so careful in such matters, should have been so inept and incompetent as to attempt to revive an agent who had not previously acted for them in that same capacity. It is very difficult to prefer Burton’s reasoning over that of Spry.

The indiscretions of MI5

On August 19, 1955, after the Royal Commission on Espionage had completed its hearings, and just days before the delivery of its final report to the Governor-General, Brigadier Spry penned a sombre letter to Prime Minister Menzies. It was his “uncomfortable belief”, he wrote, that either Evatt or Burton would use their knowledge of information provided by the British government in the course of the leak investigation in 1948-49 for political advantage. He was unsure of the exact extent of their knowledge, but he was sure it was sufficient to make the connection with the material brought across by Petrov. The “unyielding” condition placed by the UK on Australia’s access to this information was that it could never be used in a way which could compromise the source—that is, the West’s exploitation of encrypted cables between the MVD Residence in Canberra and the Moscow Centre.

Spry found himself in a nightmare situation.  He had pulled off an incredible coup. After a meticulous, copy-book cultivation, Australia’s fledgling counter-intelligence agency (still viewed rather condescendingly by MI5 as a novice in the business) had induced the most senior Soviet intelligence officer in decades to defect. As a result, the West was acquiring a flood of information of inestimable value about Soviet espionage. ASIO’s stocks within the alliance soared. But at the same time Spry had to fear the compromise of the West’s most deeply-guarded secret in evidence given before the Royal Commission, to whose proceedings he was a largely helpless observer.

As word about the nature and import of Burton’s in camera testimony reached them, ASIO and MI5 reacted in shock and dismay. They regarded Windeyer’s tactics in leading evidence as highly cavalier, and were acutely worried about the US response, memories of the 1948–51 embargo still being fresh. It became clear that Burton was well aware of the Venona program, including certain of its most sensitive aspects. This alarming state of affairs appears to have been due to the extraordinary indiscretions of MI5 itself, and, in particular, its lead actor, Roger Hollis. Consistent with the rather limp cover story presented to Chifley in 1948, the Australian authorities had never told Burton any more than that the information about the leaks had come from a Soviet defector.

Opening his seventh submission to the Royal Commission, Burton wrote:

The secret British information already referred to was communicated in 1948 under strict conditions in order to safeguard its source which was at the time being tapped continually and constantly, and indeed day by day. No use could be made of this information which would in any way reveal that the Government was in possession of it.

There are two particularly disturbing aspects to this statement. The first is that it was completely true, and reflects the very same security constraints which Spry outlined to the Prime Minister. It also disclosed that access to the secret source was immediate—“day by day”, as Burton put it. From material published by the US National Security Agency in the 1990s, when the Venona program was declassified, we know that the Canberra–Moscow lane was the only MVD communications channel which was decrypted in near-real time. Yet Burton knew the fact in 1954. The second aspect is that this information should not have been available to anyone who was not (in the uncomfortable term used at the time) indoctrinated into SIGINT, and specially briefed into the Venona secret with the approval of Washington. Burton had the benefit of neither dispensation.

Furthermore, Burton’s submission indicates that he was aware of the agonising discussions which took place in London and Melbourne in counter-intelligence circles about the wisdom of holding a Royal Commission before ASIO’s investigations into the detail of Petrov’s statements was complete. Petrov’s revelations, he wrote, could easily have been kept secret for several weeks or months to enable Security to complete its inquiries, without compromise to the personal reputations of many Australians, and the work of ASIO itself. These comments were an accurate reflection of the debate which was occurring contemporaneously in the Allied intelligence community, and Burton could only have known of these matters if he had been informed of them by someone on the inside.

It is not only this submission which points to MI5’s indiscretions. Throughout the transcript of the hearing of November 2, 1954, are sprinkled references to information shared with Burton by MI5: he was given lists of code-names, and their English translations, descriptions of people, snippets of information about their personal lives (all from Venona), details about Sudovnikov, Petrov’s predecessor as Resident in Canberra. For a reader paging through these references, the thought that unavoidably intrudes is—was it really possible that MI5 shared this profoundly secret information, withheld from every other Australian official, with a man without any security clearances or briefings; whom they knew, on their own accounts, to be profoundly distrusted in Washington; who was regarded as a “rogue” and “dishonest” by influential players at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office; and, not least, was believed by every single one of their Australian interlocutors to be “crooked”?

Unfortunately, it was so, and Hollis himself confirms as much. In a file note of June 6, 1952, he recorded:

BURTON was never told the actual source of our information. He was, however, asked to help us in the identification of documents and the people who handled them, and in this connection was given information about the contents of the documents, their dates of origin, and, on occasion, the particular periods in which we were interested. Similar details were given to him about various people. I should not be surprised if BURTON guessed from this the actual source of our information and I do not think that the fact that neither he nor any members of External Affairs had been indoctrinated should lead us to hope that he knew nothing about Sigint. He did in fact discuss the question of indoctrination with me on at least one occasion, and it was clear from his conversation that he was reasonably well informed on the subject.

Yet Hollis insisted, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, and in the teeth of roiling suspicions in Washington, Whitehall and Melbourne, that Burton was not a Soviet spy.

Speculation had long percolated that Roger Hollis, who went on to become the Director-General of MI5, was a long-time Soviet mole. Paul Monk advanced this argument persuasively in the April 2010 edition of Quadrant. Perhaps Hollis’s indiscretions should be seen in that light. But I would only say, going by the records I have examined myself, that Dr Burton did a job on Britain’s visiting counter-terrorism experts which would have done his controllers proud.

Burton hoodwinked his MI5 interlocutors completely. He pulled the wool so firmly over their eyes that they could not even see the garden path he was leading them down. There is no better example than the farce at the Lapstone Conference in late 1948. Burton tricked Robert Hemblys-Scales, the MI5 representative in Australia, not to mention his own government, into running a surveillance operation against a visiting Soviet delegation, ostensibly to detect any communication between the delegates and the spy ring in Australia. Its real purpose was to sabotage the Chifley government’s decision to establish a security service in Australia by demonstrating there was no need for one. Burton unblushingly told the Royal Commission as much. An External Affairs file (classified Top Secret, needless to say) shows that Burton knew that one of the delegates, the First Secretary at the Soviet embassy in New Delhi, was suspected of being “engaged in activities beyond the scope of the Conference”.  The Secretary of External Affairs made sure this information—which would have given the haphazard Lapstone operation at least one definite target—never reached Security. This skein of deception, as much as anything else (and there is much else), persuades me that Burton was a calculating, well-schooled and highly effective agent of the Soviet intelligence service.

Postscript

The fallout from the release of the Royal Commission’s final report to Parliament on September 14, 1955—the impact on the Labor Party, its contribution to the Great Split and the long years the ALP spent in the wilderness in consequence—will be well known to Quadrant readers and needs no rehearsal here. But I do want to refer to one little-known aspect of the most dramatic and schismatic event of them all—Dr Evatt’s address to Parliament of October 19, 1955. By this time, Dr Burton had been reappointed Evatt’s private secretary. Months earlier, aware that the appointment was in prospect, and in view of the fact that he sometimes was required to discuss classified matters with the Leader of the Opposition, Spry had formally designated Burton a security risk to the Commonwealth. This was because ASIO, External Affairs and the Solicitor-General all judged that Burton, in his book The Alternative, had included material obtained in the course of his official duties which he was legally obligated to protect.

As Evatt’s private secretary, Burton was witness to one of the most spectacular instances of self-immolation in Australian political history—Evatt’s disclosure, in his October 19 speech, that he had written to the Soviet Foreign Minister to ask if Petrov’s allegations were true, and that Molotov had obligingly confirmed that they were not. The government benches rang with derisive laughter, and members of Evatt’s own side held their heads despairingly in their hands, wondering what on earth could have impelled their leader to commit such an act of political suicide in broad daylight.

The man behind this extraordinary debacle was Dr John Wear Burton. Arthur Calwell, Evatt’s deputy, tells the story in his 1972 memoir, Be Just and Fear Not:

Before Evatt’s speech, when the House was assembling amid great excitement, I chanced to see his private secretary, Dr John Burton, taking roneoed copies of the speech to the press gallery. I noticed that an extra page had been inserted at an angle in each copy. The page had been inserted at the last moment, and only Evatt, Burton and Evatt’s secretary, Miss Hazel Bell, knew its contents.

That page dealt with what became known as the Molotov letter. Evatt did not trust anyone except Dr Burton and Miss Bell to see it before he was ready to speak.

Calwell adds a disconsolate coda: “He thought the Molotov letter would clinch his victory. Instead, it was the cause of his undoing.”

Why would Evatt, a highly accomplished political actor for many decades, have thought that the Molotov letter would “clinch his victory”, when anyone with the slightest acquaintance with the hurly-burly of Australian politics would have known that it would surely destroy him? Certainly Burton, and probably Hazel Bell—and most likely even Evatt, though he was by then showing clear signs of paranoia—would have known that, had his ALP colleagues realised he was going to drop that bombshell, they would have barricaded him in his office and probably nailed his boots to the floor rather than allow him to walk into the House and make such a statement. This accounts for the secrecy attending its last-minute addition to Evatt’s speech.

Perhaps it would not be drawing altogether too long a bow to suggest that the most likely explanation for this tragi-comic scenario is that the statement about Molotov was included on orders from Moscow. Only the Soviets could have thought that a pronouncement by their Foreign Minister would be the hammer-blow to nail the embarrassing disclosures of the wretchedly disloyal Petrovs, and silence all opposing voices. After all, it worked well enough in the Soviet system, where the state was the arbiter of truth, and any challenge could result in a police raid in the early morning hours, or swift exile to the gulag. To them, it would have made complete sense to invoke the authority of Molotov.  And to deliver that confident coup de grâce (as they thought)—through the mouth of Australia’s Leader of the Opposition, no less—they had the perfect instrument to hand in the person of Dr John Burton, their man in Canberra since 1941.