Episode 3: Foreign interference, Pine Gap and the CIA

In this third episode of Pearlcast from John Menadue’s Pearls and Irritations, we ask a confronting question: What role did foreign powers play in the dismissal of the Whitlam government in 1975?

To help unpack this extraordinary dimension of the story, Pearls and Irritations Editor Catriona Jackson speaks to two guests:

• Brian Toohey, veteran journalist and former Australian Financial Review columnist and National Times editor who has reported on intelligence and national security for over 50 years
• John Menadue, former head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet under Whitlam, and Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Pearls and Irritations
  
  

Together, they explore the CIA’s long-standing hostility to the Whitlam government, the strategic significance of the Pine Gap facility, and the role of key figures within Australia’s own public service in facilitating foreign interference.

Toohey sets out evidence that US intelligence agencies drew up plans to remove the Whitlam government as early as 1974, viewing its election as a major crisis. He argues that senior Australian bureaucrats – including Defence Secretary Sir Arthur Tange – prioritised US intelligence interests over democratic accountability, withholding critical information from Whitlam while briefing the Governor-General.

Menadue, who was present at many of the key moments, recalls direct communications from the CIA to Australian intelligence and discusses the long arc of international interference in our political system.

This episode traces a disturbing theme: the vulnerability of democratic institutions when secrecy, strategic alliances and unelected power collide.

In this episode:

• The CIA’s premeditated plan to remove the Whitlam government
• Pine Gap’s secret role in the crisis
• Arthur Tange’s alleged deception of Whitlam, and briefing of Kerr
• Why Brian Toohey believes espionage charges should have been laid
• CIA involvement and a later apology from the Carter administration
  
  

Key quotes:

“The then head of the CIA wrote that the election of the Whitlam government was one of four crises he had inherited.”  Brian Toohey

“We’ve got a senior public servant misleading the prime minister of the country.”  John Menadue

“He should have been charged with espionage... he was doing it on behalf of the Americans.”  Brian Toohey

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Hosted by Catriona Jackson
Produced by Martyn Pearce

Transcript

Catriona Jackson (00:00):
Welcome back to Pearlcast for our third and final episode on the dismissal of the Whitlam government. Today Brian Toohey joins us to dig into the CIA connection just in case the story didn't have enough intrigue already. Brian's been a columnist with the Australian Financial Review, has also written for the Nikkei Asia Review, the West Australian, the Sunday Age, and others. He was editor of the National Times and a Canberra and Washington correspondent for the Australian Financial Review. He's the author and or co-author of four books and has focused on national security since 1973. Welcome Brian.

Brian Toohey (00:32):
Hi.

Catriona Jackson (00:34):
Thank you so much for joining us. The first thing I want to ask is a question I ask both Jenny Hawking and John Menadue at the start of their episodes, give us an idea of the temper of the time. 1972, the election of the Whitlam government. There was an enormous sweep of change. Rushing across Australia wasn't there?

Brian Toohey (00:51):
There definitely was and the public servants were very much to the fore in trying to make it happen and that's why Whitlam could do those extraordinary number of new policies and get them in place.

Catriona Jackson (01:05):
So conscription out at all sorts of things in day one, day two,

Brian Toohey (01:10):
Yes, I was there when Tang insisted you couldn't legally get rid of conscription, he lost that battle. But Tang by the way, is the head of the defense department at that stage. So when you look through the achievements as just extraordinary and the idea that many, many Labor people said, oh, we was in so much of a rush or didn't work, or it worked wonderfully until what really wrecked the first, sorry, it's the second Whitlam government was Rex Connor and some people idolized Rex Connor, including Gough, but he did had a terrible impact on the Labor Party. So

Catriona Jackson (01:49):
Rex Connor was the minister responsible for the Khemlani loans affair.

Brian Toohey (01:53):
That's right. It's energy and energy and minerals. And he'd never met before this guy. And he came from somehow or other from a ball where of all things, you can't imagine him dancing around or anything like that. But the idea came that there's someone who knew how you could get all these petro dollars. They didn't even name who it was, but Rex hooked onto it and suddenly Khemlani who was a small time crook and he ended up as a very big time crook because he made a lot of money and he got arrested in, luckily enough, I was working, sorry, in the US then through Washington, and I noticed a little clipping somewhere about him being arrested. He had stolen 2 million bonds from the mafia, which I didn't think was a very good idea. But he went through a court case where he didn't even get anything against him. Now even you'd think normally theft of $2 million worth of bonds would get you something else, but he was still blackmailing the CIA over to get him out of jail.

Catriona Jackson (03:04):
So just to give the listeners some context, very early on in the Whitlam administration there was an extraordinary program of reform, but at the same time, there was an extraordinary series of stuff up, let's put it that way. And the Khemlani loans affair was Rex Connor's attempt to raise the very large sums of money. He wanted to really make sure that the minerals and resources of the country went back to the Australian people. So he got himself hooked up with a real dodgy dealer.

Brian Toohey (03:33):
Well, it was no need for it to happen. It was in the Middle East, it was the petro dollars it was called. The Americans of course, didn't like it because it might undermine the whole of Wall Street and so forth. But what Rex was told by the Australian ambassador in that area, look, they will give you the money, but you must not have any intermediaries there. They will not give it to you. And Rex went ahead and had Khemlani there, he couldn't get the loan while Khemlanini was hanging around. I mean, Rex is appalling person. He doesn't know what he was doing. He'd say, look, I don't want any, I've got to move where you are. This is the ambassador. You've got to shift. You're in the Middle East. I don't want any Arabs there. He moves to an Arab country.

Catriona Jackson (04:20):
So it's a mess basically. It's a mess. Let's move to a mess of a different kind Brian. So very early on there was a series of American bombings just after Whitlam came into power in 72 and Whitlam and the whole government was outspoken about those. The Americans weren't best pleased were they?

Brian Toohey (04:39):
No, but other countries were even more outspoken. Gough was trying to be sort of moderate about it, but it was a polling. There was actual carpet bombing of Hanoi and that was at the end of the war. They knew they were going to lose, but it was just sort of sour grapes. We'll do a bit more killing if we don't mind, but I still can't work out that from the beginning they had the Americans that is had decided that ham was some sort of threat. And what happened was that the then head of the CIA wrote that's William Colby wrote that the election of the Whitlam government was one of four crises he had inherited. Well, there was no crisis other than the one that they made. And Whitlam I thought was pretty modest, pretty moderate about all of these things. And I dunno why they took it so badly. At one stage in a speech in New York, Marshall Green who has the ambassador said, look, really this government's no different to lots of social governments in Europe. So we don't know what the problem is.

Catriona Jackson (05:49):
So isn't the answer there perhaps that the Americans had just seen us as an obedient ally and people like Kissinger and Nixon were absolutely horrified when a new broom swept in and just wasn't a compliant little servant anymore.

Brian Toohey (06:05):
I think that's a large part of the explanation. And there's a very good book Fighting With America by a very, very good journalist and historian. And there a lot of people like to sneer at the idea that the CIA was doing anything about Whitlam in this case in 1974, this is the CIA plus others drew up plans to get rid of the Whitlam government and they didn't implement them at the time. They decided then the reason they didn't implement it at the time is that with them could have closed Pine Gap before they could find Pine Gap is not the stations, there's the ground stations. They don't matter very much. What matters is the satellites above them and you can still access all the data coming out of those satellites from another base in the area. And they had actually decided to go to Guam.

Catriona Jackson (07:01):
So again, just to make it clear to the listeners who might not be as with this stuff, Pine Gap was the great big defense installation owned by the Americans. It was a really big asset and a really big deal for them. They were nervous about losing it, but there is direct evidence, you are telling me that there was a plot against the Whitlam government, but they didn't carry it out. They were afraid they'd lose Pine Gap somehow.

Brian Toohey (07:22):
Well, they didn't have time to shift or build a new ground station. I mean it wasn't, Pine Gap wasn't that big at that stage, but it was growing all the time. And what happened there is I've got in this book and in the talk of had time is that Tang said he wanted to concentrate who was in charge or who knew about the bases in the hands of two people. On the other was the chief defense scientist. And he talked to me at a little morning tea or something was and said to me, you'd have been very interested in what happened on this date, November eight, about when Tang told him to tell the Governor General what the basis were doing and sorry, what the Americans concerns about the basis were and what Tangs were. And he said to me, looking back, it was only three years or two years, I can't understand what it was all about.

(08:22):
It was just trivial. He just didn't think pine gap mattered, all that matter. It mattered yes to the Americans wanted to have somewhere to put the satellites and all this sort of thing and Tang because he couldn't understand it. And he loved the idea of being keeper of the secrets. He thought it was fantastic and he was willing to tell the Americans that they had to tell him everything that happened there and Whitlam nothing. And he should have been charged as an espionage charges refuse to tell the Prime Minister these sort of things. But you're doing it on behalf of the Americans. He was doing it on the behalf of the science and technology side of the CIA.

Catriona Jackson (09:03):
We've got two important points there. The Prime Minister of the nation doesn't know who runs Pine Gap, is that what you're saying?

Brian Toohey (09:10):
He didn't, but I think it's his own fault. He should have just told Tang that. You've got to tell

Catriona Jackson (09:15):
Me. Okay. But he wasn't told by his chief public servant in that area and he then have a circumstance where Kerr does know who's running Pine Gap. Is that right?

Brian Toohey (09:25):
Well, he did. Did after he got the briefings. But no Tang was, Tang knew, but he would not tell Whitlam what Pine Gap did. And everything that he said it did was false and he couldn't understand most of it. It's quite bizarre that he couldn't, but he insisted that he should be in charge of all of the secrets.

Catriona Jackson (09:45):
So we've got a senior public servant misleading the prime minister of the country.

Brian Toohey (09:48):
Definitely.

Catriona Jackson (09:49):
So at this point we enter a tangled web of us and Australian spies, aided and abetted by senior Australian public servants all expressing various views about the Whitlam government. What's critical here is that some of those views were filtering through to John Kerr views about Whitlam and his ministers being a so-called threat to the Alliance and international security. But how much weight should we put on the CIA and their role? Is it just a durable conspiracy theory as some believe order of the CIA really have an influence on the events of November 11, after more than 50 years of digging into the story, Brian Toohey says, the Australian Defense Department Chief Arthur Tang and the CIA were key players in the events that led to a dismissal. What do others think? Let's ask John Menadue, the man on the ground who was in so many of the critical meetings leading up to the sacking Menadue was originally a skeptic about CIA involvement that as more and more new evidence has emerged, he's changed his mind.

John Menadue (10:51):
Yes, I have. I believe that the CIA and other intelligence agencies were in the background putting pressure on Kerr and he discussed that many times with me and expressed his concern about security and intelligence matters. But I was not one who believed there was direct CIA involvement. I do believe now that there was a lot of factors that I could mention, but a few days before the dismissal, the CIA in US Ted Shackley who had helped Kissinger in the coup in Chile, sent a him Marsh a demand, if you like, to the counterparts in Australia, ASIO and the Defense Department, that the comments that Gough Whitlam had made, I think at Port Augusta about the role of CIA in Australia. And some members of the opposition, but particularly Gough Whitlam was outraged to find that he'd been deceived, he'd been deceived and believed that the Pentagon ran pine gap.

(12:13):
He found out a few days before the dismissal that it was run by the CIA. And I think that very disturbed greatly that he'd been deceived. And we know that DeMar three days from the CIA came to Australia and it was made available to the Governor General by John Farron from the Defense Department, the senior scientist from the department who was more familiar with Pine Gap than any other Australians. And he told John Kerr about this DeMar, which said that Whitlam's comments about the CIA and their role was very disturbing. It could cause enormous damage to the relationship between Australia and the United States. I have no doubt that that was very influential towards the end in the dismissal of the Whitlam government, the CIA was directly involved in the dismissal.

Catriona Jackson (13:19):
Some years later, Jimmy Carter sent a direct message to Gough Whitlam, which adds a bit more color to the fixture, doesn't it?

John Menadue (13:27):
Yes, he did. I wasn't aware of this till much later myself, that in 1967, the new president Jimmy Carter, sent his Deputy Secretary of State, Warren Christopher to Australia to, in effect, to apologize to Gough Whitlam for what America and the CIA had done, and Gough recorded in his own memoirs the following. And these were the words of Warren Christopher speaking on behalf of Jimmy Carter. The Democratic Party and the A LP are fraternal parties. We respect deeply the democratic rights of the allies of the United States. The United States administration would never again interfere in the domestic political processes of Australia. And that he, Jimmy Carter would work with whatever government the people of Australia elected. Clearly it was an apology for the role of America and the CIA in the dismissal of the Whitlam government.

Catriona Jackson (14:30):
So those critical words in that 1977 communication, never again implying that they had interfered in Australian politics.

John Menadue (14:38):
That's right. That's the first public indication sign that had happened. There was a lot of other things behind the scenes, but that's a longer story for another day.

Catriona Jackson (14:49):
When I started researching this series, I thought I had a pretty good handle on the events of November 11 and everything that led up to it. What I hadn't understood was how careful and planned the event actually was. How many powerful members of the establishment were deeply involved, quite how vain, so John Kerr was. There was a corset involved at one point, and most of all, what a gross interference in Australia's national sovereignty, the whole sorry affair was. So that brings us to an end, our series on the dismissal. Thanks to our guests, Jenny Hawking, John ue and Brian Toohey, and to producer Martin Pierce. In some ways it feels as though we've just scratched the surface. If you're thirsting for more and everyone surely is, you're in luck, pearls and Irritations will run a comprehensive series of articles in the lead up to November 11, marking 50 years since an unelected representative of the Queen Sacked Australia's Prime Minister. We'd love to hear your thoughts on this series. Please send your feedback to Pearlcast@pni.com. I'm Catriona Jackson. Until next time on Pearlcast.