Australia: Many Questions, Few Answers

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Did the CIA help topple a Labor government?

The deed was done so swiftly and so unexpectedly that rumors still linger in Australia about what really happened. From the day in November 1975 when Governor-General Sir John Kerr sacked Prime Minister Gough Whitlam of the leftist Labor Party and replaced him with Opposition Leader Malcolm Fraser of the Liberal Party, allegations have surfaced that the CIA had a hand in Whitlam's fall. In an article entitled "Dateline Australia: America's Foreign Watergate?" published this week in the quarterly magazine Foreign Policy, University of Delaware Political Scientist James A. Nathan retraces those accusations and other charges of U.S. interference in Australian affairs. Given the fact that Whitlam's policies were straining the traditionally warm relationship between the U.S. and Australia, it is not unimaginable that the U.S. might have wanted Whitlam ousted, and that the CIA might have played a role. But the evidence is circumstantial and, as recounted by Nathan, not totally convincing.

Nathan's premise is that "a plausible case is being developed that CIA officials may have also done in Australia what they managed to achieve in Iran, Guatemala and Chile: destroy an elected government." Nathan recounts the rise of Whitlam, from his 1972 victory to the distrust that quickly developed between Washington and Canberra. Whitlam gave the U.S. State Department good reason to be nervous: his government recognized North Viet Nam and North Korea, removed a ban on the sale of strategic materials to the Soviet Union, and sent its Deputy Prime Minister on a tour of North Viet Nam.

U.S. intelligence officials, according to Nathan, were concerned about the future of the half a dozen U.S. electronic monitoring faculties in Australia that maintained watch over the Soviet Union, and especially its missile testing. The most important of these installations, by far, is at Pine Gap, a desolate sprawling base in central Australia, twelve miles from fabled Alice Springs, that employs some 250 Americans. The supersecret station helps pinpoint potential Soviet military targets and collects information from U.S. spy satellites orbiting overhead.

By 1975 the Whitlam government had so badly mishandled the economy that Opposition Leader Fraser succeeded in blocking passage of a budget bill in the Australian Senate. With the government about to run out of money, Kerr called Whitlam to his office on Nov. 11. As the duly appointed representative of the Queen of England, Kerr took the unprecedented but legal step of firing Whitlam.

Nathan offers other motives for Kerr's action. The lease for the base at Pine Gap was scheduled to expire on Dec. 10, Nathan says, and Whitlam had hinted that he might not renew the lease agreement with the U.S. In response, the CIA sent the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) a blistering cable. It said, in substance, that the U.S. agency might be forced to cut its ties to ASIO. The next day Kerr sacked Whitlam. Nathan notes that Kerr, an Australian-born lawyer, had been active in cultural front organizations funded by the CIA.