Mystery needs resolving

Peter Coleman: 

One of ‘the great mysteries’, as Paul Monk calls it, of Soviet espionage in Australia remains to be cleared up. In 1992 the KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin defected to the UK and brought the massive archive with him. It was soon published with details of KGB operations in almost every country in the world — except Australia. Monk is a former officer of the Defence Intelligence Organisation. Writing in a recent Quadrant, he says that ‘to the best of my knowledge’ the Australian files were ‘suppressed in 1992 at the request of the Keating government’. It shows, he says, a dubious self-protectiveness on the part of the Labor party and ASIO. ‘The very least that should be done is now to insist on a declassification, without redaction, of the Mitrokhin documents in Australia, going all the way back to the 1930s.’ 

Source: Spectator