Secret

by Brian Toohey

  It might have been different if Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell speech as US president on 7 January 1961 hadn’t fallen on deaf ears. In the widely quoted speech, Eisenhower voiced his deep concern about the military-industrial complex’s unwarranted influence and the danger to ‘our liberties or democratic processes’. His warning followed the 1960 presidential election campaign in which John Kennedy used false intelligence to claim there was a missile gap with the Soviet Union that required huge sums to be spent on the military. There was no gap: the US Air Force claimed the Soviets had hundreds of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), but in fact the Soviets had two and the US slightly more. After becoming president, Kennedy acknowledged there was no gap, but then committed troops to the war in Vietnam based on intelligence assessments that fatally ignored the importance of Vietnamese nationalism. Frank Snepp, for five years the CIA’s chief strategy analyst in Vietnam, later recounted how the agency’s station chief in Saigon, Ted Shackley, pushed his staff to recruit more and more paid informers, enabling him to send a record 500 intelligence reports a month to Washington. Snepp said it only became clear in 1974 what ‘havoc Shackley’s zeal had visited upon us: over 100 of his Viet Cong agents were discovered to be fabricators; clever Vietnamese entrepreneurs who knew nothing of Communist plans but supplied what looked like valid intelligence’.8

  After the US lost that war, another threat soon emerged. US Secretary of State Alexander Haig announced on 11 September 1981 that the Soviets were supplying toxic chemical agents to the Laotian and Vietnamese governments to use against resistance groups. Rod Barton, an Australian scientist at the JIO, wasn’t convinced.9 He concluded that the supposedly toxic ‘yellow rain’ was merely bees defecating in swarms after eating pollen that caused yellow droppings. Although Barton and others clearly demonstrated that the bizarre claims were false, a new secretary of state, George Shultz, presented what purported to be new evidence to Congress in 1982. He had no evidence. Nevertheless, US intelligence officials angrily denounced Barton to his bosses, and the US ambassador even complained to Prime Minister Fraser about Barton. Although the US had over 100 specialists working on the ‘threat’ compared to Australia’s two, Fraser backed his intelligence officers, whose work proved accurate.

  On other occasions, senior Australian officials ignored accurate intelligence that did not fit their own policy positions. A leaked transcript of talks in Washington on 22 February 1999 revealed that the Foreign Affairs head, Ashton Calvert, had strongly rejected the concerns of a senior State Department official, Stanley Roth, that there would be a bloodbath in Timor-Leste during the independence ballot in August that year. Roth wanted to send a peacekeeping force but Calvert saw no need, despite Australian intelligence warnings and media reports that the Indonesian military’s plans could result in carnage. Subsequent events proved Roth had been right, and the Australian public’s horrified reaction forced the Howard Government to organise an Australian-led international force to stop the killing, rape, torture and destruction.10

  The March 2003 invasion of Iraq stands out as the greatest intelligence failure in decades and provides a powerful reminder that intelligence, like other forms of information, can be used to deceive policy analysts and the public. In this context, a former Defence Department head, Bill Pritchett, said, ‘The great bulk of what we receive will already be processed, analysed, collated and presented: our ability to check it out is very limited. It means that our policy … can be, or is, already largely shaped.’11

  It shouldn’t be surprising that intelligence agencies have trouble predicting what will happen in the radically uncertain future often confronting human societies, but there was much less excuse for blunders when sensitive sensors could make detailed observations about Iraq’s supposed possession of WMDs in 2003. Following the Iraq debacle John Howard described the supply of US intelligence as ‘priceless’.12 Far from being priceless, the massive supply of phoney intelligence on WMDs caused enormous damage.

  Following a visit to Washington, the head of the British SIS, Sir Richard Dearlove, gave an honest account of the role of intelligence when he reported to a meeting held by British prime minister Tony Blair on 23 July 2002. Dearlove said, ‘Military action was now seen as inevitable … justified by the conjunction of terrorism and [WMDs]. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.’13 It’s now clear that George W. Bush, Blair and Howard, wittingly or not, relied on a propaganda campaign that used distortion, fabrication and lies to make the case for war. Secretary of State Colin Powell fell for the fraudulent intelligence in delivering a speech at the UN on 5 February 2003. He got off to a bad start by saying, ‘Every statement I make today is backed up by facts, solid facts. These are not assertions. These are facts corroborated by many sources.’ One ‘fact’ relied on satellite photos of trucks outside buildings in Iraq and later photos showing the trucks no longer there. This supposedly proved that they had taken away WMDs, but in fact all it proved was that trucks can move. It’s why they have wheels.

  The official post-invasion inquiries clearly established that the CIA had relied heavily on a transparent con man codenamed Curveball to ‘prove’ the existence of Iraqi WMDs. His ‘intelligence’ appeared in Powell’s UN speech even though the CIA had never spoken to Curveball. As has been widely reported, Curveball, whose actual name was Rafid Ahmed Alwan, had been jailed for embezzlement in Iraq before going to Germany, where he claimed to have first-hand knowledge of Iraq’s alleged mobile biological-weapons laboratories. The CIA took his word over that of UN weapons inspectors in Iraq who had investigated his claims and found them false.14 Before Powell spoke, the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) had repeatedly interviewed Curveball and concluded he was lying.

  Others still behave as though the intelligence agencies’ devastating self-deception never occurred. An ANU professor of national security studies, Michael Wesley, even asserted: ‘There is only one genuine source of trust in our world and that is intelligence.’15 Wesley, who was deputy director-general of the Office of National Assessments (ONA) during 2003–04, didn’t explain how trusting the phoney intelligence on Iraqi WMDs made the world safer.

  Undeterred by the Iraq lesson, governments relied on intelligence to justify attacks on Syria. In July 2018 the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) reported on its investigation into an alleged Syrian government chemical weapons attack in Douma in April—the incident that had led the US, France and the UK to launch air strikes on Syria. Contrary to US claims that the nerve agent sarin had been used in the Douma attack, the OPCW fact-finding mission found that ‘no organophosphorous nerve agents or their degradation products were detected in the environmental samples or in the plasma samples taken from alleged casualties’.16 Freelance journalist Paul Malone also investigated the US targets in Barzah and Jamrayah, which were said to be chemical weapons facilities. When he asked if the OPCW had investigated these sites, the organisation referred him to publicly available documents on its inspections of the facilities in 2017 and 2018. The inspectors had reported that they ‘did not observe any activities inconsistent with the obligations under the [Prohibition of Chemical Weapons] Convention’.17 Malone says, ‘On the evidence we have, there was no Syrian government sarin attack on Douma in March 2013 and no justification for the airstrikes.’ Nor, he says, was there evidence that the facilities the US attacked in Damascus were producing chemical weapons.

  The mainstream media’s failure to scrutinise Western government claims about Syrian sarin attacks and Iraqi WMDs is a major shift from the 1970s, when many journalists became sceptical of secret intelligence, especially after US congressional committees found that the CIA had severely abused its powers. Today, many politicians and commentators in the US and Australia behave as if unproven allegations leaked by intelligence agencies about Russia or China must be true. Writing in Salon, political commentator Danielle Ryan saw another possibility. After WikiLeaks released the Vault 7 documents, she noted
that they revealed that the CIA ‘can cover its tracks by leaving electronic trails suggesting the hacking is being done in different places—notably, in Russia’. She said that according to WikiLeaks, there was an entire department ‘[whose] job was to “misdirect attribution” by leaving false fingerprints’.18 In these circumstances, Ryan said evidence of wrongdoing ‘becomes flimsier’.

  Nevertheless, many senior journalists seemed to be in league with the intelligence agencies in trying to portray President Donald Trump as a Russian dupe. Much of the reporting presumed that anyone who has spoken to a Russian should be suspect.19 Had such beliefs been held in the past, Robert Kennedy would not have played a key role in 1962 in resolving the Cuban missile crisis by speaking to the Soviet ambassador, and President Richard Nixon and President Leonid Brezhnev would not have achieved the landmark treaties in the 1970s to slow the nuclear arms race.

  An experienced American journalist, Glenn Greenwald, commented in 2017 that the Trump presidency was extremely dangerous, but so was the CIA. Unlike the CIA, he said, ‘Trump was democratically elected … To urge that the CIA and the intelligence community undermine the elected branches of government is insanity.’20 Greenwald cited many serious mistakes that had been caused by relying on intelligence sources: for example, the Washington Post had to retract a report that the Russians had hacked into the US electricity grid; and three leading CNN journalists resigned after the news agency retracted a report falsely linking a Trump ally to a Russian investment fund.21 The US Homeland Security Department received widespread media coverage for claiming Russia had hacked into the voting systems of twenty-one states, but that claim quickly fell apart.22

  Greenwald says the vast majority of reporting about Russia has come from anonymous intelligence officials, many of whom had concealed agendas: ‘The importance of this journalistic malfeasance when it comes to Russia, a nuclear-armed power, cannot be overstated. Ratcheting up tensions between these two historically hostile powers is incredibly inflammatory and dangerous.’23 Many journalists and Democratic politicians pushed the line that Trump had colluded with the Russians. After an exhaustive investigation, Robert Mueller found that the evidence ‘did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities’. Mueller found that Trump may have attempted to obstruct justice during the investigation, but said a decision to charge a serving president was a matter for Congress.24

  Concern about the uses of intelligence and other information is not confined to the international stage. In Australia, security ‘expert’ Peter Jennings claimed that Russia or China was likely to be responsible for hacking and crashing the 2016 Australian census computer, but there was no hack—only a failure of the IBM-developed system.25

  Meanwhile, there has been a rapid growth in governments’ creation and use of vast databases on Australians, including their telecommunications ‘fingerprints’ and facial recognition characteristics. Amid a bewildering array of examples, new powers initially confined to preventing terrorism have been extended to unrelated offences. Simultaneously, the ability of whistleblowers and the media to expose abuses of these new powers has been severely curtailed by the threat of ten-year jail sentences for performing what used to be considered their proper role in a democracy.

  Not everyone faces such harsh penalties. After former CIA director General David Petraeus gave highly classified information to Paula Broadwell, the uncleared biographer with whom he was romantically entangled, he initially faced potential felony charges of lying to the FBI and leaking classified information under the US Espionage Act. Instead, he faced a lesser charge in 2015 and was sentenced to two years’ probation and fined US$100,000.26

  On 23 June 2017, Petraeus addressed a Liberal Party gala dinner in Sydney. How did Australian politicians, who want to crack down hard on leaks, react? One attendee, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, described Petraeus as a ‘friend and valued sounding board’.27 The Coalition’s fiercest national security hawk, Peter Dutton, also attended, apparently unperturbed by the party’s choice of a notorious leaker as its honoured speaker.

  PART 2

  AN IDEAL PLACE FOR DANGEROUS TESTS AND DANGEROUS BASES

  7

  MEDICAL SUPPORT FOR TRIALS TO KEEP THE ASIAN HORDES AT BAY

  ‘The most effective counter-offensive … [would be] the destruction by biological or chemical means of tropical food crops and the dissemination of infectious disease’

  Sir Macfarlane Burnet1

  Winston Churchill was an ardent supporter of chemical and biological weapons, as were many US generals and, more covertly, some Australian medical scientists.2 In a famous memo to his military chief of staff, General Hastings Ismay, on 6 July 1944, Churchill said he would ignore ‘the psalm-singing uniformed defeatists’ when he asked his generals to ‘drench Germany with poison gas’.3 The generals successfully argued that the attacks would not be as effective as the existing bombing campaigns and would invite German retaliation. Unknown to Churchill, the Germans had developed a new category of chemical weapons involving lethal nerve agents, such as one now called sarin, that could have delayed the Allied cross-channel invasion.

  US historian Barton Bernstein wrote in 1985 that the US Army wanted to conduct gas warfare against Japan in 1945—the Washington Times-Herald agreed, with the headline: ‘You Can Cook ’Em Better with Gas’.4 Mark Weber reported that American military plans included a massive pre-invasion attack against Japanese cities with phosgene gas, which a declassified June 1945 report said ‘might easily kill 5 million people and injure many more’.5 If German military leaders had approved a similar plan to gas London, Weber said, ‘Doubtless it would have been cited endlessly as a striking example of Nazi evil, and those responsible for drafting it would have been vilified.’6 Presidents Roosevelt and Truman rejected this plan. But the US Air Force mounted massive incendiary attacks on sixty-six Japanese cities in the last months of the war, and 300 B-29 heavy bombers burnt most of Tokyo to the ground on 9 March 1945, killing over 100,000 civilians and destroying 250,000 buildings.7

  The Japanese made little, if any, use of poison gas against the US in the Pacific War, but used chemical and biological weapons during their 1937 invasion and occupation of eastern China. In the Sino-Japanese conflict, between 10 million and 25 million civilians, along with four million troops, are estimated to have died by 1945—more than the total casualties elsewhere in the Pacific War.8

  There are now several well-regarded accounts of the harrowing Japanese program to develop biological weapons at a complex of extensive laboratories and production facilities outside Harbin in Japanese-controlled Manchuria in 1932.9 Among other atrocities, the Japanese scientists and medical specialists conducted biological-toxin experiments on live prisoners, including women and children. Prisoners at the laboratories known as Unit 731 were injected with bubonic plague, anthrax, cholera, gangrene, typhoid, tuberculosis, syphilis, gonorrhoea, dysentery, smallpox and botulism. Some were subjected to live vivisection and women were raped as part of a program to conduct tests on those who became pregnant. Multiple limbs were amputated without anaesthetic. Prisoners were attacked with hand grenades, flamethrowers and bombs to obtain data on the resulting injuries.10 Although there was little outside media reporting of what was happening, many Chinese knew. President Chiang Kai-shek’s government released a report in 1942 on the use of fleas to spread bubonic plague.11 Journalists in the Allied countries ignored this widely disseminated document until Franklin D. Roosevelt referred to it in mid-June 1943.

  The lesson from Unit 731 is not that the Japanese were uniquely cruel—they also suffered the cruelty of the firebombing of Tokyo and the first nuclear attacks on cities. The lesson is that secrecy allows zealots to go beyond normal human boundaries, especially when the media fails to keep the world informed. Although Roosevelt warned the Japanese on 5 June 1943 to stop using both chemical and biological weapons against the Chinese in what he called ‘th
is inhuman form of warfare’, he approved large increases in US spending to develop similar weapons.12

  In 1945, the Allied media failed to uncover the deliberate refusal by the US to put the Unit 731 perpetrators on trial for the most heinous crimes committed during the Pacific War. This failure made it much easier in 1945 for the US government to grant immunity to the unit’s head, Dr Shiro Ishii, and many other members of his team. In return for this immunity, the US gained a huge amount of information for its own biological weapons programs.13 Unsurprisingly, extreme secrecy surrounded the deal. Meanwhile, those responsible for the conventional military attack on the US base at Pearl Harbor were prosecuted and executed.

  Unit 731’s members returned to civilian life, with many taking high-level jobs in universities and industry. Ryoichi Naito, a military physician at Unit 731, became the founder of the Japan Blood Bank.14 Subsequently, the US was accused of using germ warfare in the conflict with North Korea. This issue is unresolved.15

  Australia also experimented with chemical agents, importing large quantities of mustard gas and other chemical weapons during World War II. Their only use was on Australian soldiers, who suffered severe burns after volunteering to participate in trials.16 Secure disposal of onshore stocks was not completed until many decades after the Japanese surrender.

  Following the war, the head of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, Macfarlane Burnet, advocated the use of chemical and biological weapons yet won the Nobel prize for medicine in 1960. His role was publicly disclosed only after the historian Philip Dorling found documentary evidence in the NAA. Brendan Nicholson reported in 2002 that Burnet wrote a top-secret report in 1947 for the Defence Department’s Chemical and Biological Warfare (CBW) Subcommittee, in which he said. ‘The most effective counter-offensive to threatened invasion by over-populated Asiatic countries would be directed towards the destruction by biological or chemical means of tropical food crops and the dissemination of infectious disease capable of spreading in tropical but not under Australian conditions.’17