Was the CIA involved in Whitlam's dismissal?

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Speaker 1 G'day, Matt Bevan here. This is If You're Listening.
Today marks the 50th anniversary of the Whitlam dismissal.

Speaker 1 When on the 11th of November 1975, just after one o'clock in the afternoon, Governor-General Sir John Kerr sacked Gough Whitlam, the Prime Minister of Australia.

Speaker 1 Later that day, Whitlam stood on the steps of Old Parliament House and delivered this famous zinger to an astonished crowd.

Speaker 10 Well may we say, God save the Queen.

Speaker 10 Because nothing will save the Governor-General.

Speaker 1 Over the past 50 years, there's been a lot of speculation about the Governor-General's motives for sacking Whitlam.

Speaker 1 One of of our listeners, Mary Blair, wrote to us with a question about this in our recent Q ⁇ A call-out.

Speaker 12 Hi, Matt. With the 50th anniversary of the Whitlam dismissal coming up this November 11th, can you conclusively tell me if the US and the CIA were involved?

Speaker 9 Now, we love a good CIA conspiracy on this show. And lucky for us, some of our ABC colleagues have already spent a large amount of time looking into this one.

Speaker 9 In fact, they've produced an entire podcast series on the Whitlam dismissal.

Speaker 8 It's called the 11th. You should have a listen.

Speaker 14 Today, I'm joined by one of the podcast's producers, award-winning journalist Nina Kopel, to chat about possible American meddling in this most infamous of Australian incidents.

Speaker 15 G'day, Nina.

Speaker 16 G'day. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 9 I'm so excited you're here. I'm so excited we get to to talk about this.

Speaker 14 Before we get into the conspiracy stuff, what is the standard explanation for why Whitlam had to be dismissed that day?

Speaker 16 Well, as we both know, historians have dedicated their entire lives to trying to answer this big question.

Speaker 16 It's a perfect storm of conflicting personal and political interests, and Whitlam and his government were at the centre of the collision zone. Whitlam was the first Labour Prime Minister since 1949.

Speaker 16 So it had been over two decades since the last Labour government. And he came in with a really strong agenda for reform.
He was introducing ideas like universal health care, free university education.

Speaker 16 He made really big steps on First Nations land rights.

Speaker 17 Colour TV, FM radio.

Speaker 6 There was a lot of reform that got done in that period.

Speaker 16 In a very short space of time as well. Then introduce a new character on the scene, Malcolm Fraser, who becomes the opposition leader later on in Whitlam's time as Prime Minister.

Speaker 16 And he positions himself as a kind of defender of the old order. We know that he was putting a bit of pressure on the Governor General towards the end of Whitlam's time as Prime Minister.

Speaker 16 He was encouraging him to take action. And so that brings us to the Governor General himself, Sir John Kerr.

Speaker 16 He was appointed by Whitlam, but he had a very inflated sense of the Governor General's position.

Speaker 16 And he was set on the Governor General being a political figure, not just a ceremonial figure, you know, cutting ribbons.

Speaker 16 So we have these key figures, these men who are all very ambitious in their positions. And in the meantime, you have scandals that are plaguing the Whitlam government.

Speaker 16 So it really was just the perfect storm.

Speaker 2 And there was a government shutdown, which in Australia is uncommon.

Speaker 14 Was this basically an attempt effectively to remedy the impasse in the parliament, to get the government running again and to get to an election?

Speaker 16 Exactly. The opposition held the power in the Senate.

Speaker 16 So when they saw what they believed to be a fair amount of chaos happening under the Whitlam government, they saw it as an opportunity to step in and say, well, we have control here.

Speaker 16 And if you don't take actions, we can control the budget and we can stop you from governing.

Speaker 14 The key thing about this is, is there a way to tell this story that is purely an Australian story and doesn't involve any involvement from the rest of the world before we get into the CIA?

Speaker 16 There was an element of this that's very important, which is the influence of the palace.

Speaker 16 You can't look at this in isolation because it was Kerr's relationship with the palace that influenced the way he acted and the way he interpreted his role.

Speaker 16 But the US is a really important part of this as well.

Speaker 16 Whether or not you believe or we can prove that the CIA or the United States had any actual role in the dismissal of Gough Whitlam, the relationship between the United States and Australia at this time was pivotal in shaping the policies that were coming through Whitlam and their entire government stance.

Speaker 16 And so I don't think you can separate that from everything everything that happened.

Speaker 13 Let's jump down the rabbit hole.

Speaker 11 Let's look into this relationship between the Labour Party, the Whitlam government and the United States.

Speaker 19 Why would the Americans want to interfere?

Speaker 13 What was it that Australia was doing that they maybe didn't like?

Speaker 16 Well, if you start right at the beginning of Whitlam's time in power, it's the Cold War. And we've just seen this period of time where Australia has been sending troops to fight in this war.

Speaker 11 Yes, well, we'd sent troops to fight in the Vietnam War, which was wrapping up at the time.

Speaker 16 Exactly. And a big part of Whitlam's campaign and his platform was saying enough is enough.
We're going to abolish conscription.

Speaker 16 We're going to free all the draft dodgers who have been locked up in Australian prisons for refusing to go fight in Vietnam.

Speaker 21 We will abolish conscription forthwith

Speaker 21 because it's intolerable that the free nation at peace and not under threat should cull by lottery the best of its youth to provide defence on the cheap.

Speaker 14 So Whitlam's not going along with the status quo.

Speaker 19 What's the response from Washington to this significant change in attitude from the Australian government?

Speaker 16 I think they would have been watching the appointment of the Whitlam government with some caution, but things really escalated in December of 1972.

Speaker 16 And the United States is actually negotiating peace talks with North Vietnam. So things feel like they're coming to a close, but talks had broken down.

Speaker 16 And to leverage their position, the United States decides to unleash a round of carpet bombing, the so-called Christmas bombings, which thousands of homes are destroyed, over a thousand people died.

Speaker 16 It's a really massive campaign.

Speaker 16 Instead of staying quiet, there was a lot of noise coming from the government, some of the new MPs, but also Whitlam himself expressing some concern about this action from the United States in the final stages of this war.

Speaker 16 So Whitlam actually sends Nixon, the then president, a letter urging for peace. And that doesn't sound really controversial, but the United States takes a great deal of offense to this.

Speaker 16 In particular, Kissinger, who's the national security advisor, is infuriated because the letter puts the North Vietnamese and the United States on the same level.

Speaker 16 And this is the supposed communist enemy that the US is now being put alongside with. So Kissinger calls up the Australian Embassy and he lays down the law.

Speaker 16 He says, you know, this is not a good way to start a relationship with us. And there will be grave consequences if this letter is made public.

Speaker 20 So they're very annoyed. They're very, very annoyed.

Speaker 16 They're very annoyed. And we know, you know, in one of these phone calls, Nixon says to Kissinger, you know, Whitlam is taking Australia down a very dangerous path here.

Speaker 16 And Kissinger says, well, you know, they need us a lot more than we need them. Why don't we just freeze them out?

Speaker 16 You know, Australia can get the cold diplomatic shoulder from us and see how they like it.

Speaker 16 And so that's really how the relationship starts between two countries that have been historically allies, who've just fought a war together, and suddenly the United States doesn't want to talk to us.

Speaker 15 It's very interesting to be talking about this in the context of today.

Speaker 11 When you've got the Australian government doing quite a lot of things to try and make sure that this kind of animosity between the two governments doesn't start up.

Speaker 19 You mentioned that they were saying that Australia needs us more than we need them.

Speaker 14 They did need us, though.

Speaker 11 They did rely on the relationship a little bit.

Speaker 8 Can you talk about what they needed us for?

Speaker 16 There was a reason the United States had to fear a potentially indifferent government or a critical government in Australia, because Australia and the United States had an intelligence sharing arrangement.

Speaker 16 So that means that ASIO doesn't just hold Australian secrets. They also are the keeper of potentially secrets from the United States, secrets gathered by the CIA.

Speaker 16 And that leads us to a very important moment in the dynamic between these two nations. And that's in March 1973.
So the Whitlam government's been in power for just three months.

Speaker 16 And Whitlam's Attorney General, Lionel Murphy, commands police to raid ASIO. which is just an unprecedented event in international security.

Speaker 16 Like this is just not something that the US ever would have expected from an Australian government.

Speaker 11 We kind of think of ASIO as a thing that we understand, that, you know, there's a building that you can drive past in Canberra that's got the ASIO logo on it, that kind of thing.

Speaker 6 But in the 70s, ASIO was a very secret organisation.

Speaker 11 The government didn't even really acknowledge that ASIO existed at the time.

Speaker 15 It wasn't until 1979 that they kind of was made an official thing.

Speaker 13 So the government raiding ASIO is a very, very, very big deal.

Speaker 14 Why were they raiding ASIO?

Speaker 16 Part of this is Whitlam had run on this transparency campaign.

Speaker 16 Just like you said, you know, the government didn't really necessarily have that much info on ASIO, but Whitlam came into power and was really keen to find out what they were doing.

Speaker 16 One of the reasons they had a sense of urgency in discovering what ASIO was up to is that there had been a series of terrorist attacks in Australia by right-wing Croatian extremists.

Speaker 16 So this was related to another international conflict that was now playing out on our home shores.

Speaker 16 But because this threat was coming from the right instead of from the left side of politics, from the communist side of politics, the Whitlam government was worried that ASIO wasn't doing enough to really keep an eye on this threat.

Speaker 16 They were worried they were so focused on this supposedly communist threat from the left that they had completely dropped the ball on what was happening with these extremists from the right.

Speaker 16 And they were about to have a visit from the Yugoslav prime minister.

Speaker 16 And the government was worried that ASIO knew that potentially there was a threat against this prime minister in Australia, but they weren't informing the government about it.

Speaker 16 So they said, okay, we'll send the police in. They'll go and they'll find out exactly what kind of threat we're looking looking at and then we'll know.

Speaker 11 How did the CIA feel about this, about the Australian government sending people in to raid their allied agency that carried a lot of their most important secrets?

Speaker 16 Well, the CIA is not exactly known for making their thoughts hugely public.

Speaker 11 They didn't have a Twitter account at the time.

Speaker 4 No.

Speaker 16 But we actually do know what was going on because A few years later, an Australian journalist by the name of Fray Martin, at this point young at the start of his career, he snags an interview with a man called James Jesus Engleton.

Speaker 16 He had just ended his tenure as head of counterintelligence of the CIA. So this was someone who was at the top.
He knew exactly what was going down.

Speaker 16 And he revealed in his interview with Fray Martin that there was in fact a crisis in the US-Australian relationship.

Speaker 16 Some of the major secrets of the deal with the world I was once in were given to the Australian security services.

Speaker 16 And these dealt with penetrations.

Speaker 16 These dealt with

Speaker 16 the internal security of Australia and their well-being.

Speaker 16 And we saw this Whitlam government come into power and this Attorney General moving in, barging in,

Speaker 16 we were deeply concerned. as to the sanctity of the information.
Now, Engleton did deny that this threat warranted interference with the Whitlam government.

Speaker 16 You know, he says, yes, sure, the CIA was angry. It doesn't mean we removed the government and the Prime Minister.
But I mean, whether or not you believe him, I'll leave that with people to decide.

Speaker 16 This is a man who deals in secrets, after all.

Speaker 11 It wasn't just that AZO and CIA shared info. There was also American intelligence infrastructure on Australian soil, which was quite controversial at the time.

Speaker 15 Can you tell me about how the new government felt about Pine Gap?

Speaker 16 Yeah, Australia was home to this highly prized U.S. intelligence facility called Pine Gap.
It's just outside Alice Springs. It's still there today.

Speaker 22 Rising out of the dry red sand of central Australia is Pine Gap, an American military base designed to detect and warn of an attack by intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Speaker 16 The problem for Whitlam, again, is that the Australian government also didn't really have a full picture on what was going on there.

Speaker 16 And he had promised in his 1972 election campaign to lift the lid on Pine Gap and reveal its secrets. People close to Whitlam say he wasn't actually fully informed.

Speaker 16 He, even after becoming Prime Minister, was under the impression that Pine Gap was run by the Pentagon, not the CIA.

Speaker 14 Oh, that's interesting, because there's obviously a very key difference between it being a defence facility

Speaker 2 and it being a spying facility.

Speaker 16 Exactly. This again just goes to Whitlam's desire to know what was going on and resistance coming from security agencies who are saying there are things you don't need to know.

Speaker 16 The government does have some control over this facility because it's leased by the Australian government. Pine Gap is leased to the United States and the lease was actually coming to an end in 1975.

Speaker 16 So there was a sense of uncertainty in the US about whether or not they were going to be able to retain the facilities.

Speaker 16 Whitlam had at one point said, you know, unless there's any attempt to, quote, to screw or bounce us in other areas, you can keep having, you know, Pine Gap.

Speaker 16 But later on, he would start to indicate that he was considering not renewing the Pine Gap Agreement. However, he was dismissed before he could really take action on that.

Speaker 7 Now, it being 1975, the CIA was a lot more involved in coups than I think they are now.

Speaker 15 They'd carried out a very, very, very controversial coup in Iran in 1953 in order to maintain the power of the Shah.

Speaker 2 They were supporting coup efforts in lots of South and Central American countries.

Speaker 14 They were certainly heavily involved in the politics of a lot of their allies.

Speaker 14 I guess we're getting to the stage though where you've got to consider the likelihood of were these things that Whitlam was doing big enough justification

Speaker 11 for getting involved in Australian politics given that Australia was such an important and long-standing ally.

Speaker 7 All right.

Speaker 14 I won't necessarily get you to answer that question just yet.

Speaker 15 It's just important to put it in the context of 1975 because, you know.

Speaker 16 It was happening. It wasn't unprecedented.

Speaker 13 No, it wasn't unprecedented.

Speaker 15 But it probably was unprecedented that they would be involved in a coup in a country as heavily allied with them and as important to them as Australia was.

Speaker 16 But I think it's important, you know, especially for younger audiences who weren't around at the time, I think it's easy to lose sight of how left-leaning this government was compared to what Australia was familiar with.

Speaker 16 You know, we had been in a strong alliance with the United States, but we also hadn't had a government come in and criticise the US or speak openly against what was happening in Vietnam.

Speaker 16 And so that put them much too close to the side of the left-leaning communist enemies of the United States for them to be happy with at that time.

Speaker 19 Australia had been a conservative country for a really, really long time.

Speaker 19 The only brief period of Labour Party rule was in the midst of World War II when obviously there wasn't all that much room for reform.

Speaker 15 Before then there was a tiny little window of Labour Party rule in the late 1920s.

Speaker 11 But really this was a conservative-run country really almost from its establishment right up to the 70s.

Speaker 7 And so this was a really significant shift that was going on in American ally.

Speaker 14 So Whitlam was stuck in this stalemate.

Speaker 18 The government is trying to spend money.

Speaker 14 The Senate isn't letting it spend that money.

Speaker 15 And at this point, some extraordinary allegations start to be made by the government against the Conservative opposition.

Speaker 16 What's this about? It's the midst of that supply crisis. And you can imagine every day on the news, you have Malcolm Fraser saying that the government's being irresponsible and they should just cave.

Speaker 16 And the government's saying, no, you should just let our supply through the Senate. You're the one being irresponsible.

Speaker 16 And the nation's kind of in between the two, just waiting to see who's going to fold first. So in the midst of that, the Prime Minister is due to make a speech.

Speaker 16 It's November 2nd, so it's just days before the dismissal. And he's in Port Augusta in South Australia.
And he's doing his normal thing, berating the opposition.

Speaker 23 Every weekend, he gets more and more desperate in his abuse of me

Speaker 23 and the country party leaders too.

Speaker 16 But then he does something that comes a little bit out of the blue. He accuses Doug Anthony, the leader of the country party.

Speaker 16 And at that point, the coalition opposition is, you know, made up of the country party. So he accuses Doug Anthony of being funded by the CIA.

Speaker 23 But I've had no associations with CIA money in Australia, as Anthony has.

Speaker 16 And all hell broke loose.

Speaker 13 I imagine it did.

Speaker 16 So Anthony told the press he has no idea what this is about. He's completely confused.
And in his defense, there has never been any evidence that he actually was associated with the CIA.

Speaker 16 What the accusation actually came down to is that Anthony had rented a property he owned through a real estate agent to a former CIA agent. That was true.
The renter was a former CIA agent.

Speaker 16 But Anthony said he had no knowledge of this. He definitely denied being funded by him.

Speaker 11 You rented an apartment through an agent to a former CIA agent.

Speaker 16 Exactly. Yeah, it's pretty tenuous.
Yeah, it was loose.

Speaker 17 Okay, but Whitlam didn't back down.

Speaker 16 No, he actually threatened to go public with this and name the CIA agent. Oh, oh, which the United States, as you can imagine, were not thrilled about.

Speaker 17 They wouldn't like that at all.

Speaker 7 No. No.

Speaker 16 So now there's chaos in the US as well. They're threatening to sever intelligence connections with us, the CIA.

Speaker 16 But, and this is where, you know, you get your tantalizing little whiff of what they're thinking at the time, Whitlam never got a chance to deliver his speech because he was due to deliver it on the 11th of November, the day that he was dismissed.

Speaker 4 Ah,

Speaker 8 interesting.

Speaker 11 I mean, he could still have delivered it.

Speaker 16 He had a few other things on his mind that day.

Speaker 17 Yeah that's true. But I mean Whitlam was still in parliament for years after this.

Speaker 15 He still could have used parliamentary privilege to reveal that information if he really wanted to.

Speaker 9 But I suppose he probably thought what's the point.

Speaker 15 Is there any evidence beyond what we've described in terms of circumstantial evidence and the CIA was angry and annoyed and the American government didn't like the situation?

Speaker 15 Is there any actual evidence that the CIA ever did anything to try and get Whitlam out of government?

Speaker 16 There was never any smoking gun. There were always just these little tidbits, these little moments of intrigue, but no conclusive evidence.

Speaker 16 There are, though, two more anecdotal pieces of the puzzle that people pull out when having this conversation about CIA interference. The one came from a man named Christopher Boyce.

Speaker 16 He was an ex-private security contractor in the United States, and his job had been actually deciphering intelligence messages sent via satellite from locations around the world, including Pine Gap.

Speaker 16 His job was literally to take the messages from Pine Gap, decode them, and then pass them along. He ended up in prison for selling secrets.
That's a completely separate story.

Speaker 16 But when he was in prison, Ray Martin again landed an interview with him. And he just revealed some explosive moments, including the fact that the US had withheld information from Australia.

Speaker 16 So Boyce took some offense to the fact that the United States was actually not living up to their intelligence agreement and they were withholding things from their Australian counterparts.

Speaker 16 But one of the things that troubled Boyce in particular was a comment that he had come across by a CIA staff member about Kerr, the Governor General, referring to him as our man Kerr.

Speaker 11 There were references to

Speaker 22 your Governor General by

Speaker 24 the

Speaker 24 Central Intelligence resident. He called Mr.
Kerr our man man Kerr.

Speaker 16 Now that's, again, not a smoking gun. There's no evidence connecting Kerr and the CIA, but intriguing nonetheless.
Sure.

Speaker 16 And then the other little anecdotal tidbit that we have comes from a man named Richard Butler, who was Whitlam's chief of staff after he was dismissed.

Speaker 16 So in 1977, Whitlam was summoned to a Qantas lounge at Sydney Airport. Butler, his chief of staff, was with him.
And they're there to receive a message from the then U.S. President, Jimmy Carter.

Speaker 16 It was coming through his Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher and it was a friendly message from the president saying, you know, we come from the same side of politics.

Speaker 16 We respect the democratic rights of our allies. We respect the decisions of the Australian people.
But then he made this final point, which really stuck with Richard Butler.

Speaker 22 The final point was he wishes to assure you that there will never again

Speaker 22 be interference in the Australian political process.

Speaker 11 What a very strange and interesting thing to say.

Speaker 16 Exactly. So Butler took this very seriously and was like, the president's admitting that something happened, but, you know, that's not how Whitlam interpreted the message.

Speaker 16 He never interpreted that as an admission. Also, later on, when Carter was specifically asked about this in an interview in 2015, he admitted that, yes, U.S.

Speaker 16 administrations had been involved in other countries, but there's no reason, you know, he didn't know about Australia specifically. So he kind of walked that back a little bit.

Speaker 9 Why do you think people still like to talk about this and wonder about this?

Speaker 11 What makes it something that people want to latch onto?

Speaker 16 It's just such a good story to tell that there was this foreign entity that stepped in and intervened at this crucial moment. But maybe

Speaker 16 we just are looking for an explanation when really this was just a crisis in our democracy and a moment in time where a few key political players were pursuing power and maybe not guarding our democratic systems as well as they could have been.

Speaker 7 And I can also see why that would be something that people would become more attached to as time went on, as certain failings of the Whitlam government are gradually forgotten and people think more and more and more of Gough Whitlam as a hero and as a champion of the working class.

Speaker 14 The thing that's so often forgotten about the dismissal is that there was an election election very soon afterwards, a month later, in which Gough Whitlam was the Labour Party leader and the candidate, and he was trounced in that election.

Speaker 11 The Australian people really, really did reject Gough Whitlam very soon after the dismissal.

Speaker 16 But I think it's also important to remember the anger with which people responded to the dismissal because it was that betrayal in the process.

Speaker 16 You know, people elected that government and they felt like they had a right to elect the next government.

Speaker 16 And so perhaps there were issues with Whitlam's government, but Australians really showed up and demonstrated that they cared about their democratic processes and their democratic rights.

Speaker 16 And they wanted to be the ones to make the choice to elect that new government. They didn't want that to be the choice of an official elected by the Crown.

Speaker 14 I mean, to me, the strongest piece of evidence that they had nothing to do with it is that it's the 50th anniversary and we still don't really have anything.

Speaker 16 And I think the fact that all of the clues we do have are so anecdotal, so based on the way something was phrased in a Qantas lounge.

Speaker 9 I just love how much of our politics takes place in the Qantas Lounge.

Speaker 1 If you're interested in learning more about the Whitlam Dismissal, definitely listen to the 11th. There's a lot more to the story, obviously, than what we covered here.

Speaker 1 On Thursday, we've got an episode about the Louvre break-in and why we so rarely see heists like this anymore.

Speaker 9 I'll catch you then.