How a Web of Australian Secrets Worried US and British Spy Chiefs for Decades

By Neil Landers

Delayed tremors from an explosion at a local weekly newspaper threaten secrecy about US-British deciphering of messages to Moscow. An untold story about human frailties, Cold War politics and an anti-espionage chief spying for the Russians.

• Language: English
• Publisher: booksunleashed
• Release date: Jun 23, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463778258

Book preview

How a Web of Australian Secrets Worried US and British Spy Chiefs for Decades

Published by Books Unleashed at Smashwords

Copyright 2019 Neil Landers

My interest in some matters in this book went back to 1944. After turning five I was learning to read well. Each afternoon on the kitchen floor, while my mother prepared food for dinner, I would read stories to her in the afternoon Sun newspaper about Russian armies passing obstacle after obstacle on their way to Germany. After going to bed I would hear music from my father’s large collection of 78rpm records in the living room as he began his night’s drinking. Old British music hall tunes or Gilbert and Sullivan would give way to Viennese waltzes. Then would come stirring music from Russia: Tchaikovsky, Borodin or Mussorgsky. As rum or Scotch whisky continued to go down the music volume would go up. Finally would come World War I marching and concert songs, and he would join in loudly. His favourite was Mademoiselle from Armentieres.

During worried daytime conversations of my mother with visiting relatives I often heard two names, Ray Fitzpatrick and Charles Morgan, which occur frequently in this book. As I got older I learned that in late 1916 my teenage father, born near Manchester of English and German-Jewish descent, had been scarred for life over much of his body after being caught at the Somme by a German shell that was believed to contain experimental mustard gas, which was not used widely until 1917.

My father’s drunken night-time singing did at least distract me for a while from problems caused by sleeping each night in a room where in 1929 a man named Hess killed himself after almost decapitating his wife, whose ghost was claimed by neighbours to haunt our house. Other childhood problems involved a mentally retarded older brother who hated me and sometimes dangerously attacked me. At about age 10, if left at night alone in that house, or worse, alone only with my brother, I began raiding my father’s well-stocked drinks cabinet to calm fears.

In 1956, aged 17, I began studying English and Philosophy part-time at Sydney University. I also began working at the Daily Mirror as a cadet journalist. In early 1959, while working as a graded journalist at the Bendigo Daily Advertiser, I was almost killed in a car accident. My worst injuries, to the bottom of my stomach, caused life-long bowel and bladder problems. After recovering fairly well I began working as a casual at the Mirror’s rival, the Sun. My boss there was Richie Benaud, Australia’s cricket captain, who was between tours. Its stablemate, the Sydney Morning Herald, was about to open an office at Parramatta, not too far from my home in Bankstown. On Benaud’s recommendation it sent me there as its first regular western suburbs court and police roundsman, work I had done at the Mirror.

In late 1960 I left Australia, worked on newspapers in Hong Kong and Tokyo, a racehorse guide in London, and travelled widely, usually alone and sometimes through countries thought too dangerous for tourists. I could always calm fears with alcohol. And it helped make me happy.

By the time I was 30 I was fighting an addiction to alcohol. I had by then begun working as a sub-editor at the Australian Financial Review, which had staffing problems. It needed a sub-editor with layout, production and copy-selection skills, and was happy for anyone it could get with them. Even me with a drinking problem. During my early years there I sometimes went straight back to work from an alcohol rehab hospital to one of its most difficult and responsible jobs: producing its early edition pages while the editor was out all afternoon with a company credit card. Later I joined our other national daily, The Australian, which then had even worse staffing problems, and where I spent most of the rest of my working life.

To help me overcome my alcohol problem while at the Financial Review I began researching matters in my father’s life. My early attempts at writing a book about such matters were amateurish and needed much more research. Eventually they led in 2014 to an internet book, From the Somme to ‘Sydney’s Little Chicago’, about him and his long relationship with my mainly Scottish mother. It had a wider range of problems than most relationships. He being strongly pro-Labor most of his life and she strongly anti-Labor was one. In the final chapter I put details, involving a man codenamed ‘Ben’ in Moscow, which had connections with my father that would have astounded him even more than they astounded me.

In 2014 I published on the internet another book, Australia’s Most Embarrassing Spy Secret, with details about ‘Ben’, and many others, behind the founding of Australia’s Security Intelligence Organisation. Many are in this book. I did not know ASIO was about to start publishing a taxpayer-funded three-volume official history. The first volume involved a blatant cover-up of the real reasons behind the founding of that organisation. Some of those reasons were not only in my book but in a few published earlier, from which I had got much information and acknowledged. I also had important details from the National Archives that no other book to my knowledge has still ever mentioned.

But my book and those others raised more questions than they answered. The third volume of ASIO’s history, which commendably tackled secrecy about the extent of possible Russian penetration of ASIO, and related problems, helped answer them.

In 2016 I published on the internet Lingering Ghosts of War and Peace. It concerned problems of war survivors during my father’s life and some during my life and research. Mine included a prime minister who, for reasons beyond me, appeared upset about facts I wrote about him and widely-publicised events in the place where both of us were born and grew up, events with which both our fathers had connections, his praiseworthy and mine possibly less so. They also included ASIO. After I began researching matters involving my father that I did not even know then had connections with Russian spying, and were embarrassing for ASIO, it apparently targeted me as a possible threat to national security who was spying for Russians.

Other problems involved nonsense about me and an imagined sex life which began after that car accident when I was 20. When I returned to work I still had to walk slowly and slightly doubled over as everything healed. Apparently the accident never happened and, I learned years later, I was at the time allegedly 30-something. Some journalists would imitate my walk near me and imply in remarks it was being caused by sodomy. The nonsense was later used by ASIO in Sydney’s large Centennial Park, where I often on Sunday stopped for lunch while driving to work, in a way that no writer of ridiculous comedy could ever have imagined. It involved a pink Cadillac! The most preposterous problems it caused stemmed from the simple fact that like anyone, let alone someone with the bottom of his stomach externally and internally scarred, and later also a developing prostate problem, I sometimes had to enter toilets to empty my bladder.

But that book was also about many people with problems often much worse than mine.

Partly because of matters in my childhood I had social difficulties with women and never married. I did though have one lengthy and other brief relationships with some. I loved travel and for most of my time at The Australian was able to do so on paid leave for more than five weeks each year. The day before I left I would leave belongings in storage or with relatives. The next morning I would vacate my residence. Since retiring I have settled down in a relationship.

Neil Landers

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE - Mysterious Explosion

CHAPTER TWO - Lurid Newspaper Stories

CHAPTER THREE - Scourge of Politicians

CHAPTER FOUR - Browne Starts Punching

CHAPTER FIVE - History of Troubles

CHAPTER SIX - Federal Police Act

CHAPTER SEVEN - Wartime Allegations and Parliamentary Privilege

CHAPTER EIGHT - Drama in Parliament

CHAPTER NINE - Jailings Condemned

CHAPTER TEN - Rum and Law Lords

CHAPTER ELEVEN - Denials, Surprises and Vapour

CHAPTER TWELVE - Clouds over Labor

CHAPTER THIRTEEN - Jubilation at Jail Departures

CHAPTER FOURTEEN - Menzies Breaks Promise

CHAPTER FIFTEEN - Mixed Fortunes

CHAPTER SIXTEEN - Explosion Theories

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - What Probably Happened

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - Parliament Releases Documents

CHAPTER NINETEEN - Justice Taylor’s Evidence

CHAPTER TWENTY - A Russian Spy Codenamed Ben

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE - Extreme Venona Secrecy

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO - Dangers in an Open Court

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE - The Good Name of Ben Chifley

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR - Remaining Mysteries

CHAPTER ONE

Mysterious Explosion

On Easter Monday 1955 an explosion in the closed premises of a weekly newspaper in south-west Sydney blew part of its roof into the sky. Later that year, through an incredible chain of partly-related consequences, its reverberations reached the top of Russian counter-espionage headquarters in the US and Britain.

The first consequence included misleading headlines in city newspapers about ‘Sydney’s Little Chicago’. On June 10 that year they included the only-ever jailings by the Australian Parliament or indeed, some newspapers claimed, the only in modern times beyond the sitting of a parliament by the national parliament of any nation following British traditions. That event went to a preliminary hearing of the Privy Council in London.

Other consequences included problems for many important Australians. Allegations or suggestions ranged from illicit sex and corruption to treason. Associated matters led to mysterious veils of secrecy concerning some people in Australia that were not lifted until this century and then only partly. In a murky international background were other mysteries.

At least one veil was kept tightly closed. It involved a long and close friendship of a businessman with a high-ranking legal person who during World II was also a close friend of Ben Chifley, one of Australia’s most esteemed leaders. Chifley as Treasurer was in charge of the home front for most of the war and in 1945 became Prime Minister. In 1942, as Japanese troops neared Australia, he made the businessman’s legal friend the nation’s deputy head of national security. It also involved a top secret American program of intercepting radio messages to and from Moscow that began in 1940. Some interesting messages successfully deciphered were from Australia.

The explosion in 1955 occurred at the edge of the shopping centre of Bankstown, named after Sir Joseph Banks, the botanist who in 1770 sailed with Captain James Cook into Botany Bay and later recommended that bay to the British government as a good place for a penal colony. It was one of the first districts in Australia settled by Europeans, most of them convicts on the First Fleet, which arrived in 1788. To its south and west it was bounded by the Georges River, named after the long-reigning but later mad King George III, which flows into Botany Bay.

When a railway line arrived from the city in 1909 Bankstown station became the centre of a planned English-style garden suburb, where respectable middle-class citizens could breathe fresh country air, away from the smells, and sometimes depravity, of inner Sydney. In 1917, as ships kept arriving with wounded victims of the war to end all wars, a farming settlement was started near the river for men who had not been too badly disabled. But most did not have farming skills, the plots were too small, and the settlement quickly collapsed. Many became a frequent sight in Bankstown looking for work or hand-outs.

The Great Depression hit Bankstown even harder than most parts of Australia and led to violence. In February 1932, at a park alongside the station, local supporters of Labor Party NSW Premier Jack Lang, including my then unemployed father, fiercely battled members of a right-wing semi-military organisation, the New Guard. Angered by Lang’s controversial plans to combat unemployment, the New Guard members had entered Bankstown in a line of cars during a campaign to foment rebellion against him.

At the end of 1941, after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Americans began landing at a rapidly expanding air base alongside the Georges River. So many arrived that for a while Bankstown became known as Yankstown. Most Bankstown people got on well with the Americans and more than a few women later married one.

The top of a high hill between the shopping centre and the air base was sealed off and work began on a secret underground air control centre. Three stories deep, it was built to survive the largest bombs then known and was modelled on one which had controlled Spitfires and Hurricanes during the Battle of Britain in 1940. Some men said to have learned how to fly at Bankstown had during that helped the Royal Air Force defeat the Luftwaffe. Residents recalled moments as they pulled out of dives after heading towards red-tiled roofs of brick bungalows.

Later in the war it became an air command headquarters for a large region near Australia and the secrecy about it was partly lifted.

In local newspapers it was said to have been intended as a possible emergency Sydney headquarters for Far East commander General Douglas MacArthur, who had reached Australia in March 1942 after leaving the Philippines. If Japanese forces had landed nearby, as some people in authority had feared, and the battle for Sydney appeared lost, MacArthur and his officers could have descended the far side to the airfield and flown off to Melbourne. Gun positions at the top had sweeping views of routes from the city. Australian troops manning those would have held off approaching Japanese while Australian officers and officials followed the Americans in remaining transport aircraft. All this was officially denied.

In March 1944, after most US and Australian airmen had moved to air bases far to the north to combat retreating Japanese, Bankstown became known for two weeks of allegations in the Australian Parliament of corruption involving infrastructure for the air base, many war factories built nearby, and other wartime projects. The businessman named mainly in the allegations, Ray Fitzpatrick, during the war became very rich.

In 1943 a senior government investigator, at the behest of the parliament’s Joint War Expenditure Committee, had begun examining Fitzpatrick’s activities. On 28 June 1944, after a motion at a war expenditure committee meeting chaired by later prime minister Harold Holt, its investigator led raids by federal police and tax department officials on Fitzpatrick’s offices and that of his city auditor. But they found little of use to them.

In late 1945, after being told by its legal advisers that criminal charges might not succeed because of the required high onus of proof, Chifley’s Labor government prosecuted Fitzpatrick in the High Court of Australia on civil charges of conspiracy to defraud the government during the war. He fought the charges with top lawyers. Soon after Robert Menzies, the conservative prime minister at the start of the war, returned to power in late 1949 his government settled the matter out of court.

Fitzpatrick, born in 1909, was a big, heavily-built man who grew up on a dairy farm near the river. In 1926, 1930 and 1931 his father was mayor of Bankstown. In 1933 the state government sacked the council for corruption and appointed an administrator for two years. Fitzpatrick senior allegedly was the main culprit but escaped without much censure. At 13 Ray left school and began carting dirt from new railway cuttings with an old draught horse named Dolly. That led to business, such as sand-mining at the river and trucking, connected with government-funded road-building and other projects to reduce unemployment during the Depression, then to more types of work during the war.

Most of Sydney’s land that was fairly flat and undeveloped, but had good rail links and was therefore suitable for rapid industrial development, lay to the south-west, beyond Bankstown station. After the war, women who had been helping to assemble tanks and bombers prepared to help assemble, at least for a while, refrigerators and washing machines. Returning soldiers joined them. Then migrants started to pour in from devastated Europe. Most at first were from Baltic countries that had suffered under occupation by Russians, then Germans and again by Russians. They were hardy and diligent workers.

Before long the district became for a while the largest centre of light and medium industry in Australia. The air force base became the largest commercial airport in the southern hemisphere for light aircraft.

Street after street, filled with small timber-framed homes with sides of fibro, thin sheets of compressed cement and asbestos which could be mass-produced cheaply, stretched into the distance to house workers for the factories. Sometimes clouds of dust hung over Bankstown for days from all the trucks and other heavy vehicles moving along still often unpaved roads.

Fitzpatrick kept making lots of money from trucking, earthmoving, sand and blue metal (basalt) mining, and other activities. As most Australians began experiencing an economic boom, after years of hardship which began in 1929, almost everyone, even many who had lived in Bankstown during the war, seemed to forget about the wartime allegations.

A ruthless businessman, Fitzpatrick could be quick with his fists if anyone physically opposed him. His fights with an opposition sand contractor, Charles Skevington, were famous among long-time residents. After fights early in the war they began to co-operate, dividing contracts between them to keep prices high. That quickly ended.

One fight in 1940 put Skevington into Liverpool Hospital, near Bankstown, for four weeks. Skevington claimed Fitzpatrick knocked him to the ground and kicked him in the head until he was unconscious. Fitzpatrick denied kicking him. Skevington was treated for skull fractures, a broken jaw and broken nose. Police who interviewed him in hospital took no action.

With his ready smile and open, boyish manner, Fitzpatrick usually got on well with most people he met and had many friends. They included many in local police stations. He also had some at their headquarters in the city.

After the war he began having Christmas parties each year in a large former aircraft hangar on the outskirts of Bankstown’s shopping centre. At those the police would mix with his many workers, local and state officials, state and sometimes federal politicians, and perhaps a few judges. Inside, or outside weather permitting, surrounded by trucks, bulldozers and earthmovers, all mingled with their drinks.

Fitzpatrick was particularly proud of his ability to mix with his workers. At lunchtime he would often buy bags of fish and chips and share those with any nearby. He boasted that he had never robbed a worker.

During the early 1950s the district’s leading newspaper, the Torch, began printing allegations of corruption involving Fitzpatrick, his brother Jack, who was in charge of the council’s electricity department, and other council officials. The allegations were supported by a minority on the Labor-dominated council.

Council meetings became boisterous as supporters and opponents of the Fitzpatrick brothers in public galleries sometimes shouted interjections and exchanged insults or even punches. Sometimes council members almost came to blows. The person most often in charge of the meetings was an independent, deputy mayor and later mayor Blanche Barkl. With her hair parted down the middle and brushed back tightly, she looked like a schoolmistress trying to manage unruly children as she struggled to maintain control with impartiality.

After the anti-Labor Sydney Morning