Review

Cold Warriors' Secrets Exposed

NSW Attorney General Jeff Shaw looks at two books that lift the lid on Cold War espionage.

	Jeff Shaw

Desmond Ball and David Horner, Breaking the Codes, (Allen & Unwin, 1998)

Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes and Kyrill M. Anderson, The Soviet World of American Communism, (Yale University Press, 1998)

Ball and Horner's book on Australian espionage is based upon the so called Venona signals intercepted by American and British intelligence and the decrypts of those material from Australian sources directed to the Soviet Union.

Assuming accuracy of analysis and context, the material presented demonstrates that a tiny number of members of the Communist Party of Australia engaged in active espionage for the Soviet Union, providing highly sensitive material against the national interests of Australia. The book also adds to the now significant refutation of the argument that the 1954 Petrov defection was a conspiracy or that the material that Petrov provided showing Soviet espionage in Australia was either worthless of concocted.

Ball and Horner make out a plausible case that there were significant sources in the Department of Foreign Affairs post World War II in Canberra which meant that the Soviet Union had access to Australian, and other non-Soviet countries' intelligence. The author's link these difficulties of leakage with the origin of the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) and provide a detailed history of the early development of that and other security forces in Australia.

However, a serious question arises as to whether the most sensational theory propounded by the author is really sustainable. The book suggests that Communists or other subversive forces in Australia during the Second World War provided detailed strategic information about the Australian war effort in the Pacific and hence the military and strategic position of Australia in relation to Japan to the Soviet Union, and that this information was passed on to Japan to the detriment of the Australian defence and indeed to the jeopardy of Australian lives. Whilst It is unlikely that the Soviet Union would have wanted to see Japanese imperialism prevail in the South Pacific it is nonetheless suggested that it was in the Soviet interest to delay the Allied victory and hence that the USSR had an objective motive for passing on useful intelligent data to Japan.

It is fair to say that any Australian Communists may have provided information to the Soviet Union during the Second World War would have been horrified at the though that such material would have found its way into the hands of the Japanese. Nevertheless, it is possible that such a Machiavellian manoeuvre did occur. But it is not shown by evidence.

Certainly the letter written by General Blamey on 6 January 1945 provided prima face evidence of security leaks in late 1944 from Australia to the Japanese. There was speculation about leaks from ministerial offices during the war, but also question marks about whether the information given to the Japanese was genuine and about whether, if the information was provided from the Soviet Embassy in Canberra, how it could have got to Tokyo.

The key operatives named by the authors as sources from the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs were only in these positions after the cessation of hostilities. No one is named who is likely to have had access to secret information affecting the Australian position in the Pacific during the war. Hence, it must be said that the view propounded remains a hypothesis. The appalling prospect that Australian material was used against Australian citizens remains unproved. Perhaps it was, although obviously this would be a conclusion that one would reach with great reluctance.

The authors provide a thoroughly researched and readable book. But the most dramatic of their theses falls in the anomalous, middle category of Scottish verdicts "not proven".

Another volume in the Annals of Communism series published by Yale University Press and based upon Soviet archives demonstrates, beyond dispute, the powerful and oppressive influence of the Soviet apparatus upon the American Communist Party. The document set out in this volume show financial support by the Soviet Union, a phenomenon long reasonably suspected. More importantly they show directions from Moscow on fundamental policy matters and also questions of which individual should take leadership positions in the American Party.

The archival documents demonstrate an almost entirely subservient structure in the USA which was able to be whipped up against the fascist menace, and with very little time intervening in favour of the pact between USSR and Hitler. The Soviet controllers were able to induce in the American leadership a murderous hatred of Soviet dissidents back at Trotskyists (despite the fact that they posed no realistic threat to the revolutionary regime and often consisted of the comrades of V.I. Lenin who achieved the revolutionary overthrow of 1917).

A graphic illustration of the intrusiveness of Soviet direction to its American allies is to be found in the strategies of Communists within the labour movement in the 1930s. The dips and swerves of Soviet policy must have caused embarrassment for those American leftists working in the Union movement. In 1928 an ultra leftist, third period shift demanded that Communists move out of hte mainstream unions and form their own revolutionary organisations. But by 1935, the Soviets were insisting that the allies should not support the breakaway movement towards industrial unionism (the Congress of Industrial Organisations) and should stick with the conservative American Federation of Labour. It was not long before this tactic changed and the American Communists went all out for the CIO movement. Despite the more astute analysis that local militants were able to make about these matters, by and large the Soviet view prevailed.

The ultimate position was one where the USA Communist Party came in alliance with the CIO leadership had an extremely productive period building workers organisations and enhancing the influence of Communist operatives. However, that result was despite rather than because of the doctrinea shifts in Soviet policy, overlooking the better informed perspective's of the American party members.

Communists worldwide had, of course, taken correctly the high moral ground against fascism. But the Soviet leadership had, brutally, to pull its American troops in line to support the Nazi-Soviet pact. It had to override local resistance and bludgeon an aquiesance in the proposition that the Western battle against fascism was no longer worth fighting for.

The bleakest parts of these documents are those which show that the American Communist Party was not prepared to do anything to help American citizens in acute difficulties within the USSR. Loyal American communists who had travelled to the Soviet Union were simply left in jeopardy. One black American communist was accused of Trotskyism and died in a gulag amidst a murderous campaign of hatred towards the Trotskyist dissidents. Not a finger was lifted in the United States to support such people.

These documents do not reflect upon the idealism of those who thought that Communism represented a better world for working people and who sincerely believed that the soviet Union represented the vanguard of that era. But the documents do reflect substantially on the moral values of the leadership of that party who must have known what bizarre shifts of ideology were required, and who certainly knew that the party was the subject of detailed foreign direction.

There can be no doubt that our scholarship and our thinking about the history of communism in the twentieth century is greatly illuminated by the opening up of the archives in what was the USSR. And whatever be the motivation of the scholars who have pored through these documents and had them translated, it must be said that they have contributed to the quest for historical truth.

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  Issue 12 contents

»	Push for Decent Call Centres
»	Shaw Unveils Second Wave
»	Union Raises the Roof for Beryl
»	Cotter Withdraws Currawong Standover Claims
»	Reith Second Wave Will Prolong Industrial Disputes
»	It�s Rio Telstra -- Union Braces for Attack
»	Fears of AWA Push in State Rail
»	Age Tele-Centre Seeks Pay Equity
»	Advocate Ads to be Referred to Auditor-General, ACCC
»	Labor Council to Stage Pre-Drug Summit

»	Guest Report
»	Sport
»	Trades Hall
»	Piers Watch

»	Wran Wrong on Wrepublic
»	Digging the Dirt-Digging

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