Was John Burton Australia’s Alger Hiss?

In this, the third of three articles about Dr John Burton, Australia’s Secretary of External Affairs between 1947 and 1950, my purpose is to draw together some threads and implications from the November 2013 and October 2015 articles, and offer some conclusions. Burton’s complicity in espionage, to put it at its lowest, has, even today, gone largely unremarked and unacknowledged, despite important work done by intelligence specialists Professor Desmond Ball (2011-12), Angus Chapple (2011) and Andrew Campbell (2007-08), and, more latterly (in Quadrant, January-February 2016) by Molly Sasson, formerly of ASIO.

The full picture is still emerging, but the trend of cumulative discoveries seems clear. It points to Burton having been by some distance the most successful agent the Soviets ever operated against Australia. He was no mere purloiner of petty secrets. At the least a fellow traveller, if not, indeed, a lifelong—though carefully undeclared—communist, Burton used his official position to engineer Australia’s withdrawal from the Western democracies’ alliance against the USSR and its satellites in early 1948—a Cold War policy shift from whose baneful consequences Australia (and the West) was rescued only by the defeat of the Chifley government in December 1949.

Again, these are large claims, and again, the information gaps have to be acknowledged. Neither ASIO nor MI5 has released all the records they compiled in the 1950s and subsequently concerning the enigmatic figure of Dr John Burton, though what has been made available tilts strongly in the direction of his guilt. If anything, MI5’s releases have been more revealing—and occasionally entertaining—than those of its Australian counterpart. In April 1955, for example, when Burton was the private secretary to Dr Evatt, the Leader of the Opposition, MI5 warned the Commonwealth Relations Office (CRO) in London that, while Burton’s case remained open “from the espionage angle”, despite manifest suspicions, any dealings with him should be conducted with “the very greatest reserve”. The CRO responded rather tartly that HMG’s representatives in Canberra were well aware of the risk posed by Burton, and hardly needed any reminder from the security service.

ASIO came late to the case of Dr Burton, and they cannot be faulted for that. All the significant sequences—the leaks to the Soviets, their disclosure to the Chifley government by MI5, the subsequent investigations by Defence and the first identification of the suspects—had occurred before ASIO was established in 1949. Initial counter-espionage inquiries were conducted by MI5 officers on posting to Canberra, inadequately assisted by the Commonwealth Investigation Service. Burton was not then even on the security radar—although, as I have suggested previously, he might well have been had MI5 taken seriously the exceedingly poor reputation he had with all the Australian officials with whom they were dealing. Burton came to ASIO’s attention only after he attended a “peace conference” in Peking in June 1952 at the height of the Korean War, when the security service was confronted with the disconcerting spectacle of a former Secretary of External Affairs broadcasting unvarnished communist propaganda for publication in the Australian media.

Although the records reflecting the initial investigation of Burton have been only partially released, and show substantial redactions, it appears ASIO played effective catch-up and was able to fill in at least a significant portion of the back story. They assembled both personal and professional profiles of the former Secretary, who seemed now to be closely following in the footsteps of Wilfred Burchett—of whom ASIO (and its precursor security organisations) had long been well aware, and who, by 1952, presented unambiguously as a traitor.

Relying, of necessity, on rumours and gossip as well as hard facts recalled by their various informants, ASIO soon built up a disturbing picture. Burton, they discovered, had been instrumental in introducing Ian Milner and James Frederick Hill—both by then positively identified as Soviet agents—into the Department, Milner possibly through family connections (the fathers of both Milner and Burton were prominent churchmen). Of great interest was Burton’s ten-day sojourn in Moscow, just before the outbreak of war, for which, as far as they were able to determine, he had never given an account or explanation. Associates remembered that Burton boasted of his influence over the Minister, Dr Evatt, stating that his task was to ensure that Evatt stuck firmly to the political Left, and did not yield to any temptation to lean to the Right.

One informant, Dr Cumpston, an officer of External Affairs, recalled that Burton had for months stalled the establishment of the Defence intelligence machinery previously agreed by Cabinet, and had improperly sought to gain access to classified information to which he was not entitled. The ASIO handwritten summary added:

Dr Cumpston later spoke to Fleming of the JIC [Joint Intelligence Committee] (in October 1948) and he agreed that there was something unusual in the way Burton was acting and said that he had wondered whether Burton could be a communist.

Perhaps most significantly, the same note recorded:

It has been said that Burton has a megalomania for power, and loves to exercise it [but] the reason for “packing” the Dept. appears to be far more deep-seated than that. The answer can only lie in the fact that the ACP has been successful in capturing the Dept. of EA, and, until recently, complete control of its foreign policy. It is only in this way that many inconsistencies in Aust[tralia’s] foreign policy can be explained.

I think that succinct statement, by a security officer whose name is still withheld—ASIO always redacts the names of its officers, other than the most senior, from released records—gets to the real heart of the matter.

External Affairs, then still a relatively small department, had, indeed, been “packed” with communists. All the MVD’s principal agents in External Affairs were communists. Ian Milner, James Hill and Dorothy Jordan had been chosen from a communist cell in Melbourne by Wally Clayton, the security chief of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA), and drafted into Canberra towards the end of the war. Elfrida Newbegin, also a communist, joined the Department to run its registry (including its Top Secret repository) in late 1945. She was a member of a CPA cell in Sydney, and a close friend of Doris Beeby, a communist journalist who ran the courier line between External Affairs in Canberra and Party HQ in Sydney. Ric Throssell, whose mother, Katharine Susannah Prichard, was a member of the CPA and its Central Committee and a friend of Clayton, had been recruited either in Canberra or Moscow, where he served as Third Secretary in 1946. And these were only the principals. Scattered around the Department were numerous “former” Party members who claimed to ASIO to have just lost interest years earlier.

At the top of the pyramid was Dr John Wear Burton, Permanent Head and chief adviser to Herbert Vere Evatt, the erratic and unpredictable (and quite likely psychotic) Minister for External Affairs. Close to most of the MVD’s agents and facilitators, Burton was seen in Washington and London as at least a fellow traveller. Locally, according to legend, Burton was known as the “pink eminence”, recalling the Capuchin friar who secretly pulled the strings of Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister in the court of Louis XIII in the second quarter of the seventeenth century (for whom in this connection read Dr Evatt). Father Joseph was known as the “grey eminence”.

The watchful Americans were more than a little worried about the climate in Canberra. Declassified Defence records attest to a stiffness, a distancing—short of outright hostility, but nonetheless uncomfortable—on the part of the US representatives. Things were implied, even in official exchanges, which indicated an element of distrust; there were calculated indiscretions within the hearing of senior Australian officials, and the gossip at ground level was hurtful. Maybe the Americans were a touch paranoid, as some historians have claimed; but, on the other hand, maybe they knew something the Australians didn’t. They knew, at least, that something was badly wrong in Canberra. Even though the Venona secret, which disclosed the extent of Soviet penetration, was very tightly held, rumour gets around even in the most tightly guarded security environments.

For whatever reason, the US had been observing Canberra with suspicion since at least 1946, and what they saw concerned them sufficiently to progressively close off access to US secrets until a full embargo was imposed in mid-1948. Following that baleful event, in difficult negotiations with MI5 (which interceded for Australia), the US intelligence authorities, over and again, voiced deep concern at the influence of communists in official circles in Canberra, and the unwillingness of the government to do anything about it. Whether this arose from close diplomatic scrutiny or a focused security operation in Canberra is difficult to say. At any event, on the basis of the Venona decrypts, the US intelligence agencies at the time knew an awful lot—names, places of employment, personal details—about individuals targeted or recruited by Soviets whom no one in Australia had ever suspected.

Washington had seen the nations of Eastern Europe succumb to the Soviet Union through the subversive activities of determined, well-positioned cabals directed from Moscow, the disastrous consequences of which were well described by Britain’s recently deposed Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, in his famous “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri, in March 1946. The Americans feared they were observing a similar sequence in Australia. A former Director-General of ASIO, Harvey Barnett, flagged that possibility in his memoir, Tale of the Scorpion (1988), and wondered why post-war Australia should have assumed it could never happen here. In 1988, this statement might have seemed a Cold War echo, but forty years earlier the world was a very different place, teetering on the brink of a third catastrophic conflict. Stalin’s ambitions for world domination had not been blunted, but rather sharpened, by the end of the war. Australia was the West’s gateway to Asia, which was Stalin’s prime target after Europe, against which he was preparing his first thrust through Korea. The local communist party could be counted on to facilitate subversion or even armed incursion by the Soviets, much as its East European counterparts had done. The CPA’s general secretary, Lance Sharkey, was convicted of sedition and jailed for proclaiming as much in 1949.

With that in mind, we might return to our unknown friend in ASIO, compiling by patient hand a record of what was known or rumoured about Dr John Burton at the time he came to security notice in 1952. He writes of “many inconsistencies” in Australia’s foreign policy during the late 1940s. If anything, he understates the case. Decades later, in October 1991, Colin Moodie, a former Departmental official, wrote a private letter to Peter Crockett (author of Evatt: A Life, 1993, probably the definitive biography), in which he stated: “The fact is that External Affairs … under Evatt and Burton defies any logic.”

Back in the 1940s, Colin Moodie had been Burton’s point man on intelligence. Burton refused to be indoctrinated into SIGINT, and so could not be privy to the deliberations of Defence’s Joint Intelligence Committee, whose remit encompassed such material. He later confabulated the indoctrination process and the workings of the JIC into the now hoary myth of the “gnomes of Melbourne”—Burton claimed that a secret cabal of military intelligence officers fabricated evidence of the 1940s leaks and even engineered the Petrov defection—a claim amplified by Nicholas Whitlam and John Stubbs in Nest of Traitors (1974).

Moodie attended the JIC meetings as Burton’s delegate. It was Moodie who told Burton that one of the Soviet delegates to the Lapstone Conference in late 1948 was a potential intelligence operative, and Moodie whom Burton told to drop the matter. It was Moodie, on Burton’s instructions, who asked ASIO for its surveillance records on Ian Milner, by then known to be an agent, when Milner returned to Canberra from the UN in 1949 (ASIO declined the request). It was Moodie who, in December 1954, was asked to account for Burton’s exoneration of Milner in the inquiries which followed Defence’s discovery that he had twice been in possession of the fateful document leaked to the Soviets. It was Moodie’s uncertain and nervous response which showed how woefully inadequate the Department’s investigation had been. Moodie, in other words, was uniquely placed to understand just why the Department’s policies, to use his own description, defied all logic, but shrank from drawing the unpalatable conclusion. As the anonymous ASIO officer implies, however, those policies did not defy the logic of the CPA. They were fully consonant with the Party’s published positions.

There is no better authority for the seeming incoherence of Australia’s foreign policy in the late 1940s than Dr John Burton himself. In June 1995, at the age of eighty, having gained a reputation as a leading figure in the discipline of conflict resolution, Burton was interviewed at length by career diplomat Michael Wilson about the Evatt years at External Affairs. A full exegesis of this extraordinary interview would consume an entire issue of Quadrant, so it must suffice to say that, on Burton’s account, Australia’s foreign policy during the first few years of the Cold War appears to have been run out of a madhouse. As an aside, it might be said that virtually everything Burton had to say about the leakages and the Petrov affair was demonstrably untrue—and known by him to be untrue—but that is perhaps a matter for another day.

From the transcript, it is clear that at times the bemused Wilson could hardly believe his ears. In the main, though, he kept his incredulity in check. He refrained from challenging Burton when he claimed (as he had decades earlier) that South Korea had been the aggressor in the Korean War, and that records attesting to the fact—known, he claimed, to the Australian government of the day—had mysteriously disappeared from the US and Australian archives. (A PhD student was undertaking a secret project to uncover them, according to Burton.) Wilson let pass without comment a Burton assertion that it was the economic policies of Britain and America which had led to the outbreak of war in 1939 (a standard communist trope at the time). He listened as Burton explained that it was much more important for Australia to have good relations with the West’s communist enemies—the Soviets and the PRC—than with its allies. Covert intelligence was no use to him, he said, when asked about the US embargo. Secret information from Defence that China had tested an atomic weapon, for example, would have only served to undermine the more urgent work of building an amicable relationship with Peking.

At one point Michael Wilson’s disbelief broke through. Burton was expounding on the pet theory of his latter-day career in conflict resolution—that of “provention”. This was the idea that any conflict could be best resolved by pre-emptively preventing the conflict from occurring in the first place by addressing the source of it. (Even some of Burton’s admirers thought there was a touch of “Captain Obvious” about this proposition.) If only the concept had been available in the 1940s, Burton said regretfully, it would have been easier, even for him, to understand the policies which he and Evatt were pursuing at that time. But it was not to emerge for another twenty years.

Struggling to re-connect his interview subject with the historical realities, Wilson objected:

Michael Wilson: [T]he situation at the time was that China had changed its political colour. It was now a communist country. It was a huge country. The Nationalist government had been exiled. The Russians by permission of Yalta had acquired, absorbed, taken over a good deal of central and eastern Europe. They did seem to be wanting to test the will of the western powers at the Berlin blockade of 1948. So your philosophy, your attitudes, must have been, you know, damned hard work to get that sort of uphill at the time, because the mood of the world was … in some ways was …

John Burton: To build more bombs.

Michael Wilson: Well, not only build more bombs, but I mean the emphasis on security was very high on international agendas and the sort of things which you’re talking about … would have seemed to have had a snowball’s chance in hell.

John Burton: Yes, it challenged all traditional thinking.

The problem, he said, lay in the adversarial approach to conflict resolution, which dominated the power politics of that time (where it entailed the “dysfunctional” use of force), and, more broadly, in psychology and sociology and the law.

John Burton: A small nation can defeat a great power. The police can’t control crime and street violence, and one thing and another. We just have to get to the source of problems. And we were struggling to get to that point in these days but without being articulate about it. That’s why I’m saying there’s—there’s no understanding to what I was trying to get at in these days without looking at my second career, and I didn’t understand it myself until I got into my second career …

Michael Wilson: But it’s hard to imagine that in 1949 there’d have been much sympathy, let alone understanding, for that point of view.

John Burton: That’s right, I agree.

Michael Wilson: Because the whole world was adversarial, post the Second World War.

John Burton: I think this is what intrigued me about discussions I used to have with Evatt on planes and so on, hours on end. We’d be throwing out ideas along these lines.

That is the explanation of Australia’s foreign policy in 1948-49 in the words of its architect. By his own admission, the approach to international relations that he and Evatt favoured had not the slightest chance of succeeding.

But of course this was all just a smokescreen applied in retrospect. The cold reality is that Burton consciously ruptured Australia’s relationship with the Western alliance with an eye to allowing the Soviets free rein in Asia. In this he was successful until Australia’s foreign policy was reversed with the election of the Menzies government at the end of 1949. Few agents in the KGB’s storied hall of fame can have served their masters so well.

The parallels between the career progression and political impact of John Burton and the infamous American spy Alger Hiss, while not exact, are striking. Hiss, like Burton, was a bright young man attracted to communism in the 1930s. Hiss, like Burton, had been recruited as an agent and was subsequently run by the Soviets’ military intelligence organisation, the GRU. Both men were carefully emplaced within their nations’ foreign affairs departments. Both rose rapidly to positions of prominence.

The two men almost certainly met, though it is unlikely that either knew the other was an agent. Australia attended the United Nations Conference on International Organisation, held in San Francisco in April to June 1945, which laid the institutional foundations of the United Nations. Burton was there, along with a strong External Affairs delegation. There was a terrible contretemps early in the conference, when Evatt, on some strange whim, shared with Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister, a secret cablegram from the British delegation to London, which had been copied in confidence to the heads of the other Commonwealth delegations. This was an almost unthinkable breach of security, and by some means London found out. The British delegates, Anthony Eden and Lord Cranborne, rounded furiously on Evatt at the following meeting of the Commonwealth delegations. He sat mute under their withering fire and did not deny the charge. Paul Hasluck, who was an embarrassed bystander, wrote in Diplomatic Witness (1980) that he had never witnessed such a savage dressing-down in his entire life.

Out on the conference floor, meanwhile, Evatt introduced and gained acceptance for a series of amendments to the outcomes of the Dumbarton Oaks Conference of the previous year. These re-shaped the United Nations Charter to give the General Assembly of minor states greater influence vis-à-vis the heavy hitters of the Security Council, and won Evatt—and Australia—acclaim as the champion of the smaller powers. The San Francisco conference was presided over by none other than Alger Hiss, one of whose trickier tasks, according to Hasluck, was to keep the volatile Evatt under some kind of control. Earlier that year, in February, Hiss had been a senior US delegate at the Yalta Conference, and played a key role in drafting the agreement which ceded so much of Europe to Stalin.

I think that Burton worked for the Soviets to comparable (though lesser) effect in Australia. The most telling indicator of his success is Australia’s refusal, in the first months of 1948, to join the West’s common front against the Soviet Union, which was threatening post-war Europe with a new continent-wide conflagration. The downstream implication was that, should communist invasions or insurrections similarly threaten to inflame Asia (Stalin’s next objective), Australia would be free to deny Western forces access to the continental platform which had served as the key geographic and logistical base for the Allies during the war in the Pacific.

As I have suggested previously, it seems to have been Burton’s ultimate objective to get Australia to join the neutral grouping of newly independent states which eventually formed the Non-Aligned Movement. On January 8, 1949, in a letter to the Solicitor-General, Burton foreshadowed changes to Australia’s policy positions which, as he himself put it, were so radical that planning for them had to be shrouded in the strictest possible secrecy, with not the slightest hint escaping to alert the British before they were publicly announced (no “open diplomacy” there, apparently). Burton envisaged a “holding strategy” formulated jointly by Australia and India to oppose the “beat Russia first” policy prevailing in the West. This suggests that Australia intended to join the “non-aligned” group in the UN along with India and Indonesia—reason enough, one would think, for such stringent secrecy. Had this policy been implemented, and the Chifley government returned in the December election, Canberra would have been able to remain formally neutral when, in June 1950, Stalin launched the overt war against Asia through his North Korean surrogates.

These are not merely matters of conjecture. The shift in Australia’s international alliances was unambiguously evidenced by an exchange of letters between Clement Attlee, the British Prime Minister, and Ben Chifley, his Australian counterpart, between January 14 and February 10, 1948. Although Australia’s cables were dispatched in Chifley’s name, their tenor and content mark them unmistakably as the work of John Burton. Attlee’s tone was courteous, persuasive, and at times passionate. Chifley’s, or rather Burton’s, was surly, argumentative, and even impertinent (an awkward word in the circumstances).

Attlee opened with a sombre yet heartfelt message to Australia. The time had come, he said, for the Western democracies to take a concerted stand against the Soviets. Echoing Churchill’s high rhetoric in Fulton eighteen months earlier, Attlee wrote that the Soviet Union had formed a solid block behind a hard line from the Baltic through Trieste to the Black Sea, and was moving west to establish a similar presence and influence in Germany, France, Italy and Greece. The West must mobilise its spiritual and material forces to counteract these moves, and deny the Soviets the opportunity afforded by post-war economic chaos in Europe to seize the entire continent, as was their clear intent.

The threatened nations needed hope for their salvation, said Attlee, and would welcome a lead from Britain and the Commonwealth, backed by the great military power of the United States. Failing that, the Soviets would assume the West was acquiescent, and the European states would fall one by one. Of course, the Soviets would charge that the alliance was intended as an offensive one directed against them; but its real purpose was to inspire confidence in the West’s friends, and respect and caution in all others. At issue was nothing less than the defence of Western civilisation itself. In this endeavour Attlee earnestly sought the support of the Commonwealth—and Australia.

Attlee’s eloquent and affecting plea fell on flinty ground in Canberra. On January 22, he received a reply which must have raised eyebrows in London. Almost rudely, Chifley chastised Attlee for asking for Australia’s support against the Soviet Union after having failed to consult Australia on the direction and nature of UK policies on Greece and the Middle East. Chifley rejected the idea of Western spiritual values backed by force, especially if the latter involved America, whose behaviour Australia regarded as “discouraging” (for reasons not specified). Australia would not support an offensive alliance against the Soviet Union when the problems of Europe lay, not with communist aggression, but with the failure of its governments to supply their people with stability and the necessities of life. Such an alliance would prove the Soviets right in their suspicions about the West, and validate their post-war policies.

Rather than relying on the West’s ethical and moral forces, Australia urged recourse to the principles of the United Nations, which were based not on strategy but on justice. This should imply a rejection of the “reactionary and dishonest” policies of the Chinese Nationalist government, and the “undemocratic” governments in Greece and Spain. In a clear repudiation of the Marshall Plan (conceived by the US the previous year as a bulwark against further communist expansion in Europe), and echoing the Soviets’ rejection of it, Chifley asserted that “we would not use economic power and relief to determine forms of government”. The international trade in armaments should be halted. Australia refused to sell arms to anyone, and the US and the USSR should be encouraged to follow its example; by that means, troubled regions such as Greece, the Middle East and China would no longer threaten world peace.

Finally, it was stressed to Attlee that in the event of conflict, Australia’s whole concern must be protection of its own interests in the Pacific; it would not get involved in any European fracas. In a last flourish, Chifley wrote: “We do not wish our position to be prejudiced by association direct or indirect with any anti-Soviet alliance. A last chance to preserve peace might in that way be destroyed.”

The Burton/Chifley response to Attlee was both immature and unprofessional, and its meandering logic must have confused the old hands in Whitehall. But anyone familiar with the policies of the CPA at the time would have recognised it as coming straight out of the Party’s playbook. Indeed, at times it seems simply to rehearse the Kremlin’s own talking points. In slightly more diplomatic language, Australia (or rather Burton) was saying that the surviving “fascist” regimes should be crushed, the Chinese Nationalists abandoned, anti-communist forces in Europe disarmed, and, above all, nothing should be done to impede or discommode the Soviet Union—and all in the name of “peace”, which served as the communists’ false flag for decades. The point of our unidentified ASIO friend could hardly have been better made.

About a week later, on February 2, 1948, a puzzled Attlee patiently took Chifley over the ground again. Canberra had misunderstood him. He was not proposing an “offensive alliance” against the Soviets; he had said that that was how the Soviets, for propaganda purposes, would characterise the West’s project. He re-emphasised that he did not envisage a military option against the USSR, but, rather, a spiritual and ethical effort designed to counteract the malign but superficially attractive tenets of communism.

Attlee refuted Canberra’s position on Spain and Greece, having already said, in his earlier cable, that the time was not yet right for Franco’s Spain to join morally with the West. Greece, meanwhile, could hardly be called “undemocratic”; the communists’ boycott of the recent Greek elections had withdrawn only 9 per cent of voters from the ballot, which had not invalidated its outcome. Additionally, if the West were to cease supplying anti-communist militia with arms, there was no chance the Soviets would reciprocate by withholding armaments from their own proxies. An embargo would thus play into the Soviets’ hands, and facilitate communist expansion into Western Europe and the Mediterranean. “This would be repeating the mistake of appeasement,” Attlee cautioned.

Once again, Attlee’s measured courtesy availed him little. Chifley responded on February 10 by ignoring all the substantive issues. Australia could not agree with the strategic basis of Attlee’s proposal. He repeated the canard that Australia had been insufficiently consulted on the policy—which Attlee had already more than adequately refuted. He suggested that the support which Britain sought from the US would come at a price—an acceptance that war with the Soviets was inevitable, with which policy Australia refused to join. In other words, it was the US, not the Soviet Union, which was bent on war. Chifley hinted darkly that this anti-Soviet belligerence arose from the machinations of sinister elements within the US, of which he had had “private advice” (unnamed, but one suspects the same phantasm known in later decades as the “military-industrial complex”). Australia was constrained to attend only to problems which had to be addressed locally. The cable unctuously concluded, “I hope you will accept our assurance of our great feeling of friendship and sympathy in your difficulties.”

It was as if, having attempted to contest the moral and strategic high ground with Attlee, and having been politely but convincingly bested, the Australian Prime Minister signed his country off from the real world with a petulant shrug of his shoulders. But that would do Ben Chifley an injustice. It was Burton’s signature that was on display here, and it represented the sum of his contribution to Australia’s foreign policy.

This exchange of cables advertised the effective withdrawal of Australia from the Western alliance against the Soviet Union at a time when Europe was in grave peril of being overrun. No military or political assistance would be forthcoming from Canberra, even in the event of armed conflict. Among the Burton clique in External Affairs, there was a strong feeling—articulated most clearly, perhaps, by Ric Throssell (as described in his curious autobiography, My Father’s Son, 1989)—that Europe’s problems were its own fault, and should be sorted out strictly between the Europeans themselves. Australia should never again become involved in intra-European wars, but confine itself to its own backyard. Such an attitude dovetailed neatly with the position of the CPA.

In practice, again reflecting CPA policy, and in line with trade union agitation, this policy appeared principally to involve enthusiastic support for the anti-colonial movement in the Netherlands East Indies (which was shortly to achieve independence as the Republic of Indonesia), under the leadership of the Marxist-oriented Sukarno, who had led a collaborationist administration during the Japanese occupation. Burton thought highly of Sukarno. He told Michael Wilson that he considered Sukarno a “communist” only inasmuch as he wanted a more egalitarian society than had been possible under the Dutch, and that he would have sought help “elsewhere”—that is, from the Soviet Union—if he could not achieve independence for Indonesia with his own resources.

It appears that the dialogue between Britain and Australia on this matter was not pursued, and this should not be surprising. Three days before Chifley’s second response to his British counterpart, Sir Percy Sillitoe, the head of MI5, had arrived in Canberra bearing the unhappy news that a highly classified document of UK origin, shared with Australia in strictest confidence, had by some means come into the hands of the Soviet foreign intelligence service. From that point, understandably, all focus was on how and through whom the leakage had occurred, and what could be done about the lamentable state of security in Australia. In time, Attlee’s proposal for a Western alliance against the Soviet Union gave birth to NATO, but the kind of Commonwealth participation originally envisaged was not followed through.

As for Burton, if we were to take the evidence of these cables alone, he might be judged less harshly than otherwise. They are, to put it mildly, very foolish. They betray, at best, an undergraduate understanding of the world as it was in 1948, and Australia’s place within it. They suggest an arrogant, opinionated young man of the 1930s Left, with no experience in real diplomacy—for Burton had never served in any Australian mission abroad before his elevation to the Secretaryship—rashly essaying in the real world the political theories he had studied at the London School of Economics under the influence of the communist Harold Laski. Chifley was largely uninterested in foreign policy, and Burton’s own minister, to whom it devolved, was seemingly incapable of executing it—at least in any rational sense. So Burton was able to step into the gap, and do things more or less his own way, to the consternation of Australia’s allies, and the dismay of his more talented and experienced colleagues.

But it wasn’t only the cables. If you add Burton’s political manoeuvrings to the security aspects, the parallel with the more notorious agent Alger Hiss is stark. There were the betrayals, the cover-ups, the evasions, the obfuscations and the lies. There was the serial concealment of the treachery of Ian Milner, and the shielding of his confederates. There was the attempted sabotage of the Defence Signals Bureau (Australia’s post-war SIGINT organisation), and, even more seriously, of the security service. There was the disclosure of the Venona project, the West’s most closely guarded secret, to the Soviets.

There was the hoodwinking of MI5 and the later disclosure of its secret confidences in statements to the press and to Parliament. There was the suppression of evidence of Soviet espionage at Lapstone. There was the undermining of the war effort against North Korea and China, and the open proselytising for the Chinese communists. There was the determined effort to discredit Petrov, and the insertion of crude Soviet propaganda into Dr Evatt’s speech to Parliament on the Royal Commission on Espionage. There was the persistence for decades with the absurd anti-ASIO conspiracy theory of the “gnomes of Melbourne”—a myth which, as pointed out in 1977 by Jacqueline Templeton, the historian assisting the Royal Commission on Intelligence and Security, Burton knew from the very first to be false, and purely of his own invention.

And that, believe it or not, is only scratching the surface. There is no telling what the archives, in particular those of the UK and the US, may yet reveal.