Unrevealing Secrets of the Self-Important

You can have fun with the spy game, as happened when, in his 1959 film of the same name, Carol Reed added to the comedy of Graham Greene’s 1958 novel Our Man in Havana. The same happened less cleverly and more violently with the various James Bond films. As well there was the Get Smart television series and the 1999 film The Spy Who Shagged Me and many, many more.

Then again, the spy game can be depicted as unendingly serious, as a thriller, as Joseph Conrad did in his 1907 novel The Secret Agent, which dealt with anarchists and a professor who was a constantly armed, walking suicide bomber, or in the works of John le Carré, the films deriving from them, and the 1967–1972 English television series Callan. The latter featured Edward Woodward as the eponymous reluctant, cynical spy-assassin and the supporting cast included the pathetic and aptly named Lonely, played brilliantly by Russell Hunter, ironically a former stage actor for the Scottish Young Communist League.

And Greene was there for the noir too: not too many laughs in the screenplay he and Carol Reed wrote (based on a Greene story) for the memorable 1949 film The Third Man. After the 1951 defection to the Soviet Union of Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean, British intelligence agents who infamously were part of what became known as the Cambridge Five spy ring, some saw the film’s title as pointing to Kim Philby. When Greene became a British spy, his mentor was Kim Philby, perhaps the most traitorous of the Cambridge Five. And Greene defended Philby’s commitment to his higher cause, communism, which he believed Philby truly believed. Le Carré regarded Philby as a shit. Is sincerity the sole touchstone for truth? Is Greene’s position a case of genuine respect for the freedom of conscience or simply an early instance of postmodernism, pre-postmodernism, moral relativism or moral equivalence? It may be that Greene, like many in the counter-culture movement, the habitually imitative protesters of the 1960s and afterwards, had only dreamy-romantic foundations for all their Antonio Gramsci-like passion, demonstrations and vehemence against and towards key institutions of the society in which they were nurtured.

In 1955, in the House of Commons, then Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Harold Macmillan, said Philby could not have been the infamous third man, and so he remained as a mole until his eventual flight to Moscow from Beirut in January 1963. Spy agencies and their masters may have made bigger bungles than this, but not many. (A notable, painful, lesser one involved the mathematician and science communicator Jacob Bronowski. Before the Second World War he was secretly denounced to British authorities as a Russian, a Jew and a communist, accusations which were to shadow him for years.) The incredible consequences of the failure to detect spies and disloyal personnel within the last administration (at least) of US President F.D. Roosevelt, people such as Alger Hiss, come to mind. Soviet commissar, patriot and enthusiastic slaughterer of his own people as well as those of other lands too (the Ukraine offers a continuing tragic example), Joseph Stalin, probably knew more about the atomic bomb than did Roosevelt’s vice-president, Harry Truman, until Roosevelt died in Warm Springs in 1945 with Lucy Mercer, once his wife’s social secretary and one of his mistresses, at his side. Truman was probably loyal to his woman, Bess, as he was to his country.

Whether comic or not, there are frequent elements in these explorations of the spy game including the cock-up or bungle and the manipulability of young idealists (or, as John Wayne called them in 1974 when speaking to students at Harvard University, dissenters “by rote”). The unintelligent and bloody-minded head of a spy agency is almost a stock character. The suspicion, founded or other­wise, of underlying, perhaps sinister, political agendas rather than the stated national security purpose is never far from the front page of the daily newspapers. In this bullying, suspicious, cynical (or comical) setting, the realities of loyalty, treason and sacrifice are easily overlooked. What might today’s intelligentsia think about, say, the disappearance in Portsmouth dockyard in 1956 of cigarette-smoking English Secret Intelligence Service frogman Lionel “Buster” Crabbe, who had been ordered to do underwater reconnaissance on a visiting Soviet Union cruiser? Patriotism has been out of fashion, gauche, for a number of seasons.

Many of those who were young and politically active in the democratic West during the tense Cold War 1960s, especially those with obvious leftist leanings, came to the attention of spy agencies. Those in the communist East who disagreed with power sometimes had to contend with the military as well as the less delicate methods employed by the spy and surveillance apparatchiks on duty there, including disappearance. And recently a few of those who feel they suffered from being spied upon unfairly by their own government in Australia, or who simply cannot bear the thought of being forgotten, have begun to record their uncontested version of their travails, real or imagined. Earlier this year SBS television ran a series, Persons of Interest, which dealt with ASIO and a handful of people including Gary Foley and Frank Hardy. Haydn Keenan, the writer and director, told Margaret Throsby, when plugging this series on her ABC Classic FM radio program, that ASIO’s files are “a little bit like the records of Auschwitz”.

Similar emotive demonising of ASIO is the red thread of kinship running through the old-Left’s memories as encountered in a large book edited by Meredith Burgmann, Dirty Secrets: Our ASIO Files (NewSouth, 2014, with taxpayer financial assistance via the Australia Council for the Arts). An exception, which shows balance, is that by Mark Aarons. The rest seem to need to study the history of Buster Crabbe, at least.

Burgmann persuaded a group of her “comrades” (as—Gough-like—she salutes them) to obtain their now available ASIO files and write about what they found there. Some deceased people, such as Frank Hardy and Clive Evatt, are reported on by surviving family members.

The editor’s sister, Verity Burgmann, former Trotskyite and granddaughter of a radical Anglican bishop, winced when she opened her file and saw that she was always in a bikini in the ASIO surveillance photographs. The picture on page 348, taken in New South Wales on April 24, 1978, during the International Socialists’ Beach Camp, and obviously posed, displays a shapely Verity, despite the poor quality of the reproduction. Verity did not write her piece. Instead the reader is offered a transcript of an interview she gave to the editor.

Each of the entries by the book’s twenty-seven subjects is preceded by a biographical sketch. This format yields the predictable results: repetition, lack of serious analysis, and plain boredom. Alan Hardy wrote of the contents of the many pages in his father, Frank’s, file as being mostly “banal and irrelevant”. Journalist Tony Reeves, one of a number of the “So what or who?” characters in the book, was offended by the “disappointingly” small size of his ASIO dossier. (Some of the other members of the so-what brigade are hero-judge Michael Kirby, gardener Peter Cundall, film critic David Stratton, communist-born and later political gadfly Penny Lockwood, and self-described “opinion leader”, journalist Anne Summers.) One subject, a journalist, Frances Letters, who was arrested along with the editor at an anti-apartheid demo, is included despite feeling mightily wronged when she discovered she had no ASIO file: “I protest! What about all my writing, arguing, cajoling about the Vietnam War, apartheid, racism and Aboriginal rights during those notoriously paranoid years?”

Perhaps the Burgmann book might help bring about Letters’s apotheosis, and that of all the other would-be Moses figures it includes? Putative saviours all, or for the most part, but they display scarcely any humour or sense of fun, rather like existing accounts of the life of Jesus—or the Prophet, for that matter. Clive James wisely wrote that humour is common sense dancing. No trace of jive, waltz, foxtrot or even tango (strange omission, given the libertine professions and practices of some contributors) is to be found in the book, no laughter. Phillip Adams’s self-deprecation is the notable exception: he grins at the reader, himself and the silliness of the task he has nevertheless performed.

The uncontested recollections of the contributors, taken together, raise some suggestions for further study, if anyone is interested in any of the hydra-heads of decaying socialism. It raises the question of history and what may be called the Agincourt memory. According to Shakespeare’s King Henry V, those who battle with him on the feast day of the patron saint of cobblers, Saint Crispin’s Day, and survive, will on each anniversary of the fight remember their deeds “with advantages”.

As with all glorious memoirs, these need to be considered carefully. Yet Dirty Secrets is almost entirely context-free. There is no sense of time or place. What role did commercial teenage culture play in the lives of our rapporteurs? Or the accompaniments to that culture: rock music, flower power, LSD and other funny substances, or grog, or sex? Was going to a demo a good way to get a good lay?

Apart from the fact that they were the editor’s comrades, no justification is provided for the selection of the memorialists. Were there any called who did not follow? What of those who may not have been called at all—Barry Humphries, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Virginia Bell, Clive James, Michael Mansell, James Spigelman, Germaine Greer and Robert Hughes may all have had ASIO files, as amongst the dead might Allan Ashbolt and Ted Wheelwright: did they or their kin receive invitations? No sustained, cogent assessment of ASIO’s likely motives is offered, apart from the repeated claim that their work was politically motivated and directed. What motivated those who contributed here? Are their memoirs little more than anticipations of the obituary and the gravestone?

What these loose and flimsy memoirs do show is something of a pattern: radicalisation at university during the 1960s, but mainly if not exclusively of arts and social science students. There is no one in the book like the communist sympathiser and professor of pharmaceutical chemistry at Sydney University, Sydney Edward Wright, whose address ASIO surely knew. Mark Aarons is probably as close to a blue-collar trade unionist as one gets: Jack Mundey appears twice in the index. Many of the university enthusiasts, in my view unfortunately for tertiary education, acquired academic positions in political and other social “sciences”, or arts faculties, or journalism, or positions with government, particularly after the Whitlam gravy-train arrived at the end of 1972. How has academic journalism profited from the dour and seemingly bitter, humourless influence of, say, Wendy Bacon or David McKnight, and from proselytism or propaganda based around leftist stereotypes, reading lists and bitter memories? A number of the contributors abandoned student radicalism for more prosperous careers with the Australian Labor Party, or associated law firms.

While Germaine Greer can speak a good Marxist line, books don’t make events, events make books, and her presence in the book might have made a difference. The contributors to this book follow a different historiographical line. They tend to write like sociologists, using words like meaningful, supportive, innovative and progressive. And progressive they are, adherents to a form of Whig history. And not just the impersonal gradualism of classical Whig history, every day in every way things everywhere getting a little better. No, they are personal exemplars, effective agents, of those changes. Frances Letters’s complaint about not having been noticed by ASIO exemplifies this “me” component: “What about all my writing, arguing, cajoling about the Vietnam War, apartheid, racism and Aboriginal rights during those notoriously paranoid years?” What about ME!

This book shows no sense of the sacred, the numinous, the tragic, the thrilling, the comical, no sense of beauty and art and mystery. It is all reduced to bully politics and violence and narcissism, and this from those who became academics, judges, teachers and politicians, and a few too many nondescripts. Better read a sports report on a game of some form of football than this book.