Australian Secrets Feared by MI5 and the CIA for Decades

By Neil Landers

How Australia and Japan coped differently with shocking spying revelations. A story about human frailties, Cold War politics and an anti-espionage chief spying for the Russians.

• Language: English
• Publisher: booksunleashed
• Release date: May 13, 2020

Book preview

CHAPTER TWO

Airport Violence

In the Sydney safe house at 3pm on April 3, with the help of a Russian interpreter, Ron Richards began to debrief Petrov and prepare a series of documents later identified by letters of the alphabet. At noon on April 13, after talks involving Prime Minister Robert Menzies and other government officials, the Soviet ambassador was told Petrov had asked for political asylum in Australia. That evening Menzies told the Australian Parliament and said Petrov had supplied important information about Soviet espionage that would require investigation by a royal commission. Names in documents Petrov brought, he said, contained surprises for Australian counter-intelligence.

The next morning this was given a big coverage in Australian newspapers and other news media. Probably one of the last people in Australia to learn about it was Petrov. His wife was still at the embassy and was scheduled to leave on a passenger liner in a few days. Because of his insistence that nothing be revealed while she was still at the embassy, which Richards had promised would not happen, the fact that he had been given no indication he might have to appear before an open inquiry, and his unstable state of mind, Richards had worried about his reaction and had moved him to a more isolated safe house. After lunch an official led him up a hill behind that and showed him morning newspapers. He took it much better than Richards had expected. After reading the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald, said Manne in The Petrov Affair, he began a game of chess with the official.

On April 15 Australian newspapers reported that the Soviet ambassador had claimed its third secretary had been kidnapped.

When Petrov left their embassy residence in Canberra for the last time he did not tell Evdokia what he was about to do. For 13 days she was kept locked in an embassy room and told nothing. Perhaps, she thought, he had been captured or even killed by Australians. Her only contact was with kitchen staff who brought her meals. Not allowed to read newspapers or listen to a radio, she had no knowledge of anything happening anywhere else. But a window looked out onto the street and she knew something was happening. Each day increasing numbers of people were gathering outside the embassy fence, staring at the building and sometimes taking photos of it. Then whole busloads of them began to arrive. Sometimes they caught glimpses of her staring out a window back at them. Later she said that, deeply frightened, she attempted suicide.

Two burly couriers were sent to escort her back towards Russia by air on the night of April 19. News of this was given wide press coverage and aroused many feelings. The Australian Parliament’s most outspoken anti-communist, W.C. Wentworth, a descendant of a leading Australian of the same name during Australia’s early years, strongly maintained that Evdokia should be helped to stay if she wished. This was a view probably nearly all Australians supported. But Wentworth’s party head, and Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, was worried about legal and diplomatic protocols. Senior government officials supported Menzies. Only if she clearly indicated a desire to stay could officials intervene. ASIO was instructed not to initiate an approach to her.

ASIO ignored this, said Manne, and planned for Richards and a Department of External Affairs protocol officer to wait in a room through which she would have to pass on her way to the international tarmac. Hiding under the awning of a nearby utility truck would be her husband, in case Evdokia asked to see him. He had written a short note for someone to pass to her when she was led into the room.

After lunch on April 19 a big black Cadillac owned by the embassy left Canberra with her, the couriers and an embassy official on its way to Sydney Airport. According to the Sydney Morning Herald the car reached the parking area outside the overseas terminal at 9.22pm, eight minutes before their aircraft was scheduled to leave. ‘Immediately the car stopped about 1,000 people tried to surround it and began struggling with officials,’ the SMH said. Most of them were former refugees from Soviet territories who hated the communist rulers in Moscow and who had broken through police cordons intended to keep them away.

Protestors claimed they heard her shouting in Russian that she did not want to go back and began screaming at the couriers to let her go. During a melee she lost a shoe. But when she turned to pick it up the couriers kept forcing her forwards. In the confusion, said Robert Manne, she was led towards the domestic terminal instead of the international terminal, where the now delayed BOAC Constellation was waiting to take her to Darwin to refuel and then on to Singapore. As a result, she was not taken through the room where Richards and others were waiting with a note from her husband.

Weeping and dazed, Evdokia was dragged through crowds for 200 metres along the runway towards the plane. To facilitate her entrance to it, ground staff ran a gangway up to the pilots’ cabin. When the mob surged around that she and the couriers were turned towards the main gangway, which they reached with difficulty. Police, security officers and airport officials fought to get her onto that. ‘Every inch of the progress up the gangway was bitterly contested by the crowd,’ the SMH said. ‘Men and women jumped up and clung to the gangway on either side, using their free hands to drag Mrs. Petrov and officials down and swinging punches.’ Other reports said that during her progress towards or up into the aircraft her belt was almost torn off and some buttons on her jacket were.

The plane left at 9.38.

According to Manne, Richards told ASIO chief Spry in Canberra that she had not called to anyone for help and had been terrified by actions of the crowd. At 10.30 Spry told Menzies this. Now worried about serious political implications, Menzies told him to arrange for contact on the aircraft with her to ascertain her condition and for Reginald Leydin, the Acting Administrator of the Northern Territory, to personally ask her in Darwin if she wished to seek political asylum. He also told Spry he had full operational control.

On the aircraft the couriers had fallen asleep. A hostess, Joyce Bull, had comforted Evdokia, said Manne, and a flight steward named Muir had managed to speak to her several times. Muir said she did not say she wanted to stay in Australia. But she did ask him for help and said she was frightened of the couriers, who were armed. She later confirmed this. At 3.15am Spry called Leydin and told him to have armed police ready on the tarmac to help protect Evdokia. Then he learned that carrying firearms on an aircraft flying over Australian territory was illegal. There was a legal basis to disarm the couriers without affecting diplomatic protocol.

When the plane stopped at the Darwin runway just after 5am officials and ten armed police approached the gangway. As soon as the couriers and Evdokia were on the runway Leydin drew her to one side. The most senior legal official asked a courier if he had been carrying firearms on the aircraft. The courier tried to brush him aside. Violence erupted between them with two police joining in. When one of the police shouted to the others that the courier was going for his gun two more police joined them. One put a headlock on him and he was disarmed. The other was disarmed with little resistance.

While that was going on Leydin asked Evdokia if she wished to seek political asylum in Australia. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t know.’ After saying her family would be killed if she did not go back, she suggested Leydin solve her dilemma by kidnapping her. She also asked to see her husband, who she still believed might be dead.

The couriers and Soviet officials with her retired together to the international lounge. An official called Spry. He said Evdokia could not make up her mind and wished to be kidnapped, something both knew was the last thing Australia could pretend to do. He then said she wanted to see her husband and suggested a phone call from him. After that was arranged Evdokia refused to be separated from her guards and took the call from Vladimir in the Customs office surrounded by the couriers and Soviet officials. He told her he was being well look after and implored her to seek Australian protection. ‘I know you are not my husband,’ she said, ‘I know he is dead,’ and hung up.

As she emerged from the Customs office with the Soviet party, according to Robert Manne, she winked at Leydin and told everyone present the person she had spoken to was not her husband. Leydin suggested a private chat with her but she refused. Crestfallen, he told her goodbye and good luck. ‘Perhaps,’ Manne wrote, ‘the wink drew him back for one last try.’ (Many years later, after getting to know her, he decided it was probably just a nervous tic.) He again suggested a chat with her. This time she accepted. In his office she said she now wished to stay in Australia but would not sign any papers until she had seen her husband. Spry was contacted and said no paper work was essential, only two witnesses to her request for asylum.

Police and nearby air force men were formed into a group who blocked the view of the Soviet party as Leydin and Evdokia walked towards a waiting car, which drove them to Darwin’s Government House. Calls began to go around Australia.

The defection of her husband had been big news not only in Australia but around the world. The dramatic events of her defection were bigger news. One shot of Evdokia, distressed and minus a shoe, being roughly helped by the couriers towards the aircraft in Sydney, became an iconic photo of the Cold War that dominated world affairs for much of the second half of that century.

CHAPTER THREE

Mysterious Explosion

On 17 May 1954 the espionage royal commission began its hearings and on May 29 Australia went to the polls. The election, which many had expected Evatt to win, was won by Menzies. Evatt and his supporters blamed the loss on a conspiracy involving Menzies and ASIO, intensifying a bitter war between the two leaders. The Labor Party began tearing apart over allegations of communist influence. And the royal commission turned from being an investigation of espionage into primarily an investigation of whether there had been an anti-Evatt conspiracy involving Menzies and ASIO. Debates and accusations about this seemed to go on interminably.

On 28 January 1955 the royal commission held a hearing so secret that almost nobody, even at the top of the Australian government or in ASIO, knew about it. Key parts at least of the evidence were sent to the headquarters of MI5 in Britain and the CIA in the United States.

On 11 April 1955 an event on the south-western outskirts of Sydney, apparently unconnected in any possible way with any of those matters, was to transform the background to them in unique ways and have repercussions not only in Australia but in Britain and the US.

When two newspaper delivery boys on their way home entered Fetherstone Street, just north of Bankstown railway station, the shopping centre was almost deserted. After a hot, sunny day the evening was pleasantly mild. Just south of the station an 11-year-old named Paul Keating, a school friend of one of the boys, was about to leave a newsagency they had left, probably the only shop still open. But street lights everywhere were shining brightly.

In Fetherstone Street there were still old brick bungalows, built early in the century as part of a planned garden suburb, where people lived. From windows of some drifted aromas of steak or sausages grilling and vegetables steaming. There were sounds of radios. The early evening serials were ending as radio stations entered a lull with advertisements and station announcements before 7pm news broadcasts.

Half-way along the street, at the silent and dark premises of the Torch weekly newspaper, the boys noticed what one thought was smoke and the other fog. They also smelled what seemed like burning rubber. The building had been closed since lunch-time on Thursday as workers hurried to get away ahead of Easter holiday traffic already starting to pour out of Sydney. Slightly ahead, on the left-hand other side, lights were on in the police station, a converted bungalow. Further down the street a constable sat in a police van waiting for a sergeant to go with him on a job.

After discussing what they smelled, the two boys, the only pedestrians in the street, continued ahead, turned a corner and began to talk with a woman. Suddenly there was an explosion in the Torch premises so loud it was heard in neighbouring suburbs. Nearby houses reportedly shook and windows blocks away rattled. Debris flew upwards and flames shot above the building.

The constable who had been in the van shouted to the sergeant emerging from the station to call the fire brigade. Then he ran diagonally across the road and pulled a motor cycle away from a loading ramp at the side of its office section. When he looked through an intact window he saw flames appearing to run along a passageway connecting the offices with the printing section behind, where the fire was spreading. Other police ran up to join him as he tried to force open a door.

Mr A. Watson, who lived next to the police station, said he had been having his evening meal when the blast almost knocked him to the floor. ‘Crockery flew off the table and the whole house shook under my feet,’ Sydney’s Daily Telegraph quoted him the next morning as saying. ‘I thought a bomb had exploded under the house. I rushed into the street with my wife and we saw flames leaping 30 feet from the newspaper office. Debris was falling from the air back into the blazing building. I was showered with dust falling from the sky. The police were very brave because they rushed right up to the flames. Suddenly, a wall of flames shot through the front of the building and the police dived back, just in time.’

Paul Keating’s friend remained near the building while the other boy rode his bicycle to the nearby home of Torch editor Phil Engisch, who lived in the same street as him. There he shouted out that the Torch was on fire.

Meanwhile, a train had arrived from the city and was disgorging passengers returning from the agricultural Royal Easter Show or sporting events. As many hurried towards the flames a man running from them almost knocked some of them over as he shouted excitedly that the Torch had been bombed. Five minutes later the first of more than 50 firemen from four stations arrived.

Engisch drove there quickly. When he arrived the office section and much of the printing section were fully alight and the flames were spreading towards a section at the side that contained an expensive new rotary press, recently installed with the help of a large bank overdraft. Desperately he asked firemen to direct their hoses towards that. Then he hurried off to make a phone call.

As the blaze lit up the evening sky the news spread quickly by telephones or across fences. People headed there in carloads from all over Bankstown. They included more than a few aldermen and officials of the former Bankstown Council, which had been sacked in March 1954 by the NSW Labor government for corruption and replaced with an administrator. Not long after Engisch, whose campaigning for years against local corruption had led to the sacking of the council, returned to the scene the roof of the main section of the building collapsed in a shower of sparks. By now the street was crowded with hundreds of people being kept at a distance by police. As firemen struggled without success to stop the fire taking over the section that contained the new press the flames were reflected in their faces.

Engisch, clearly agitated, turned and looked at the crowd. In one group stood a well-known local businessman, Ray Fitzpatrick, who featured prominently in allegations that led to the sacking of the council. Alongside him was Blanche Barkl, the mayor then of the council.

The first woman to head any Australian government body with a constituency of more than 100,000 people, Barkl had to fight her way into local politics. Many of her strongest supporters were women raising children, something she was doing. Years later she told me how, standing in 1948 as an independent during a by-election in her local ward, she and women supporters followed her male opponents and their supporters around the ward, ripping down their posters or defacing them, while accusing them of doing that to her posters. Rumours about her were spread. Some were about her work helping servicemen during the war. But her only known vice was dancing, something she and her husband did with flair most Saturday nights.

A good public speaker, she won the seat. At the first regular council elections she increased her majority and stood successfully for deputy mayor. During periods in the chair her leadership skills impressed her opponents. In 1950 Barkl became, she believed, the third-ever female mayor in NSW. At first she was a strong opponent of Ray Fitzpatrick and even had talks about him with state government officials in the city. But she soon began to change. In 1952, after serious industrial unrest among council workers, she resigned as mayor because of resulting aggravation but remained on the council.

In 1953 Barkl became mayor again, now with the support of Fitzpatrick and of Labor Party aldermen who had earlier opposed her. Women who had crowded into the chamber cheered as she was declared elected. From some men who had previously supported her came shouts such as ‘traitor’.

When she was 80 I mentioned this to her and asked what she thought about Fitzpatrick. ‘Oh,’ she said with a shrug, ‘he was a crook.’ She told me how, soon after that election, he gave her an envelope and told her to ‘let me know if you want any more’. When she saw the envelope contained a fairly large sum of money, she claimed, she handed it back and told him he was never to dare do such a thing again. He protested that she was taking it the wrong way, she claimed, and the money was only for the Girl Guides, her special interest. Barkl then began talking about all the good things he did do for many people.

That showed a grey area Fitzpatrick obviously exploited. People in local public affairs were often officials of organisations that welcomed donations. Fitzpatrick’s generosity, without fanfare or bias, extended beyond public social or charitable organisations. Barkl said it was years before she realised just how extensive it really was. Often, at a time of limited government health-care aid, he paid large hospital bills for people needing help. He was nominally Church of England. But the only god he worshiped was money. If local Catholic nuns wanted money for a school building or playing field, he was the first person they approached.

Many people Fitzpatrick aided financially had problems that began with service in the first and second world wars. One person affected by war service was his brother Jack. Just before the second war he was an opening batsman for NSW’s cricket team. After serving with a radar unit in New Guinea and Borneo, sometimes on jungle