Secret
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Although Pine Gap did no research, its name remained the Joint Defence Space Research Facility until 1988. Nor was it ‘joint’:2 the CIA ran it, and the handful of professional Australian staff had no say. Likewise, the name of the Joint Defence Space Communications Station at Nurrungar gave no hint of its role of detecting Soviet missile launches, although this was widely reported in the US media. Nor did the Labor ministers challenge the continuing official description that the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency operated Pine Gap. In an inexcusable lapse, Tange failed to tell the prime minister and the defence minister that Pine Gap was operated by the CIA’s science and technology division, plus private US contractors, as part of a vast US intercept program that captured a wide range of communications and other electronic emissions across a large part of the globe, including Australia. Nor did Tange show them the secret 1966 Pine Gap agreement that explicitly stated that the CIA and the Australian Defence Department were the parties to the agreement.
Meanwhile, eight young daiquiri-swilling code clerks in TRW’s Redondo centre, along with many other Americans in the CIA, the Pentagon, the NSA and the White House, and various contractors, were briefed in much greater detail than Australia’s two most senior leaders.
When Tange, with chief Defence scientist John Farrands in tow, briefed the Australian ministers he adopted the obfuscatory technique of calling Pine Gap the ‘twin’ of the Nurrungar base. The stations were not remotely twins. They did not have the same parents, used very different technologies and had dissimilar purposes. Nurrungar, run by the US Air Force, was linked to a satellite that used an infra-red telescope to detect heat from missile launches. Whitlam later complained to staff that the way Tange had conflated the two left him so confused that he was often unsure which one did what.
Pine Gap did acquire a twin when the NSA began operating similar signals-intercept satellites a few years later at Menwith Hill in England. These twins use big antennas (now well over 100 metres in diameter) to intercept a huge quantity of electronic signals. The satellites are positioned 36,000 kilometres above any chosen spot on the equator in a direct line of sight to their ground stations. Geo-synchronous orbits let Pine Gap’s satellites receive all electronic signals on any chosen frequency within the antennas’ capabilities, including those involving phones, radars, missiles, fighter planes and so on, within a vast area covered by the antennas. Today, the satellites do not have to be precisely geo-synchronous and are part of a US global surveillance system run by the NSA. Whistleblower Edward Snowden explained in 2013 that the system has an extraordinary capability to intrude on the privacy of almost every individual and corporation around the globe, as well as supporting most US war-fighting operations.3
Given Tange’s contemptuous briefing of ministers who were fully entitled to know as much as he did, it was no surprise that a disillusioned Whitlam complained in a parliamentary speech on 4 May 1977 that he had not been told core information about the bases. After the initial briefing, he had left it to Barnard to handle Labor’s 28 February 1973 parliamentary statement that was supposed to fulfil the party’s commitment to greater disclosure about the bases. At that time, the commitment reflected widespread public disquiet about being kept in the dark, particularly when the bases made Australia a potential nuclear target. Barnard, in turn, left it to Tange to decide what was to be in the statement, despite efforts by his highly qualified staff to keep at least part of the election promise. Barnard’s principal adviser, Darcy McGuarr, was a former Pentagon-trained analyst who had worked in the Department of Defence. Another adviser, Derek Woolner, was a defence specialist from the parliamentary library’s research service. Woolner later told me that the day before Barnard was due to deliver his statement in parliament, Tange ordered the recall of all copies of a more informative statement and replaced it with a gutted version that restricted Barnard to saying that everything had to be kept secret.
Tange was not particularly anti-Labor at that stage, just obsessively secretive. He acknowledged in his memoirs that the only comment he allowed Barnard to make was that ‘neither station is part of a weapons system and neither station can be used to attack any country’.4 This was untrue. A wide range of authoritative accounts have demonstrated that from the start Pine Gap’s satellites collected a vast array of military communications, radar signals and other data that could be used in an attack on another country by locating targets and intercepting battlefield military signals. In 1972, a Pine Gap Rhyolite satellite was explicitly tasked to collect signals from within Vietnam while the war was still underway.5
In 1973, US Ambassador Marshall Green had no doubt about the bases’ importance. Referring to the US’s priorities, he later told me, ‘The biggest issue was [securing] our facilities [i.e. bases]’, followed by access for US investment, then Australian support in international forums.6 A departmental minute written in August 1973 said Washington had agreed that Barnard’s statement on 28 February could include four points about improving Australian involvement in the operation of the Central Australian facilities.7 Barnard included none of these points in his statement, even though they would have added a little substance to his threadbare attempt to honour Labor’s election promise. The additional points sank without a trace.
Tange’s insistence on giving oral briefings didn’t always assist ministerial understanding. Barnard suffered hearing difficulties from having served at Tobruk in World War II. He once told staff, for example, that he had just been briefed on one intelligence agency when the briefing had been on an entirely separate agency.8
Claims by successive governments that Pine Gap doesn’t intercept Australians’ phone calls, emails, faxes and so on have all been false. The technology dictates that these messages automatically include information about Australians within the footprints of Pine Gap’s own satellites. Australians’ communications are also routinely intercepted by ground stations at Pine Gap and those near Geraldton and Darwin that collect a huge number of transmissions to and from communication satellites. Once the data is transmitted to US intelligence agencies and military forces, they can do whatever they like with it. When he was defence minister in the 1980s, Kim Beazley told me that this outcome is unavoidable, ‘unless you believe knowledge is divisible’. He later said he’d discovered there was an extraordinary lack of departmental documentation about the bases, prompting him to insist on a monthly report about their activities.9 Apparently, there was no record of what Tange had or had not told earlier ministers.
Tange, perhaps through a misunderstanding, was on firm ground over Pine Gap’s supposed role in monitoring the SALT I agreement to control ICBM numbers. Stephen Stockwell, a Griffith University professor, discovered documents in the US National Archives showing that President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, sent a message to the US embassy in Canberra in January 1975 prior to an impending Labor conference where the bases would be an issue. Kissinger claimed Whitlam knew Pine Gap ‘played a vital role in détente and strategic arms limitations agreements’.10 Although Kissinger wanted Whitlam to tell the conference that the bases had a benign role in arms control, Tange hadn’t told Whitlam this. Contrary to Kissinger’s assertion, Pine Gap had almost no role in monitoring arms control agreements.11 Tange’s classified briefing for Whitlam before the 1975 Labor conference said, ‘Care will need to be taken to neither confirm, nor deny, the supposition … that the facilities have a capacity to police arms control and disarmament agreements’.12
Tange acknowledged in his memoir that he didn’t tell Whitlam about Pine Gap’s supposed monitoring role,13 but muddied the waters by wrongly claiming that these agreements ‘were not in place’ at that time.14 In fact, Nixon and his Soviet counterpart, Leonid Brezhnev, had signed SALT I in Moscow on 26 May 1972. The treaty was the culmination of the strategic arms limitation talks between the two countries. The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM Treaty), which bolstered deterrence by greatly restricting each side’s ability to destroy t
he other’s ICBMs, was also in place. Both treaties came into force on 3 October 1972, but Whitlam was not elected until 2 December that year. Peter Edwards, who edited Tange’s memoir, did not pick up this basic error.15
Secrecy surrounding Pine Gap survived until mid-1975. Before then the common assumption, peddled by some academics, was that it was involved in satellite photo-reconnaissance. In July 1975, I reported that the NSA ran bases in Turkey that gave a pointer to what Pine Gap did. My article said that the most important base, at Sinop in Turkey, intercepted signals on Soviet missile tests and strategic and tactical operations.16 It also said Pine Gap was engaged in collecting signals intelligence from satellites. The Turkish government had closed the US intelligence bases following a congressional arms embargo on Turkey, and my article reported that the White House wanted Congress to reconsider the embargo because 24 per cent of the US intelligence on the Soviet Union came via the NSA bases in Turkey. Consequently, the US would not want Australia to lose Pine Gap’s significant source of intelligence on the Soviet Union. Chapter 20 shows that only a few months later, however, Tange warned Whitlam that the US would cut off its intelligence relationship with Australia if the PM revealed any more information about Pine Gap.
Tange’s pivotal role in managing and shaping the Australian end of the US alliance derived in large measure from his decision that briefings on Pine Gap would be confined to the ‘very top’.17 This meant that he and Farrands would have the primary responsibility for Pine Gap and Nurrungar. Tange bypassed his deputy secretary, Gordon Blakers, who had been briefed before Tange headed the department. Blakers was a gentle soul who after retiring joined protests in Tasmania against damming lakes. Because his responsibilities included strategic policy and defence intelligence, he, not the chief scientist, should have had the task of oversighting Australia’s interests at Pine Gap. This anomaly was only corrected after Tange retired in 1979.
Being at the ‘very top’ didn’t mean you necessarily understood what was going on, as Tange inadvertently made clear in his memoir when he referred to Nurrungar’s techniques for using ‘space phenomena to study terrestrial objects in detail’.18 His secrecy-induced habits of obfuscation seemed to leave him just as befuddled as the prime ministers he briefed. Nurrungar’s satellites used infra-red sensors—human-made objects, not space phenomena—to capture images of what was happening on or near the earth.
20
THE MAN WHO THOUGHT HE OWNED A PRIME MINISTER
‘This is the gravest risk to the nation’s security there has ever been.’
Sir Arthur Tange, 6 November 19751
Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, the son of a former solicitor-general, was initially attracted to the notion that Arthur Tange was a dedicated public servant. He later discovered that this public servant presumed he was entitled to withhold crucial information from prime ministers.
Tange was an abrasive personality who headed the Foreign Affairs and Defence departments for twenty years, broken only by a demotion to high commissioner to India after he fell out of favour with Prime Minister Robert Menzies. After he returned to head Defence in 1970, he quickly demonstrated that he hadn’t lost his love of wielding power. He embraced Labor’s proposal to incorporate five separate departments into a vastly enlarged Defence Department—a process that increased his own power without generating the anticipated efficiency gains—but he never fitted the stereotype of a ‘hawk’ eager to use military force.
His preoccupation with rigid secrecy and the control it gave him came to a head in November 1975, a month after the Opposition leader, Malcolm Fraser, announced that the Coalition would, in effect, block the budget supply bills in the Senate to bring Whitlam down. Tange became deeply alarmed at what he saw as Whitlam’s willingness, in the heat of a political battle, to challenge his control over what ministers could say about the US’s prize asset in Australia, Pine Gap.
Tange’s alarm stemmed from information I received in mid-1975 about the role of Richard Stallings, who was Pine Gap’s first head when it was established in the mid-1960s. Because Tange had not told Whitlam that the CIA ran Pine Gap, he was desperate to hide the fact that Stallings had worked for the agency when he was running Pine Gap.2 After Labor staff independently found out from Adelaide sources where Stallings had worked, Whitlam asked Foreign Affairs on 20 October 1975 for a list of all CIA officials in Australia for the past ten years—information he was fully entitled to have and that the US was supposed to give Foreign Affairs. Stallings’ name was not on the list, and ASIO also said it had not heard of him. Whitlam then told his department head, John Menadue, to ask Tange about Stallings. Tange told the PM’s staff that he had informed the CIA of Whitlam’s request.3 Whitlam told parliament on 4 May 1977 that ‘after some pressure’ Tange had confirmed that the CIA had employed Stallings at Pine Gap during 1966–69 and that he had spent part of his time from 1971 to 1974 in South Australia, where he performed ‘CIA service at Willunga’, outside Adelaide.
A former highly placed CIA official, Victor Marchetti, was a friend of Stallings who had helped him draft the secret version of the Pine Gap agreement, which stated that it would be run by the CIA and the Australian Defence Department. On retiring, Marchetti co-authored The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, a powerful analysis of the damaging mystique surrounding clandestine intelligence. He told me and other journalists in November 1975 that Stallings’ service at Willunga had been for the CIA’s covert action division, despite Stallings’ earlier qualms about its activities. Marchetti also said Stallings told him that he was concerned in the 1960s that the then CIA station chief Ray Villemarette’s interference against Labor in Australian politics could jeopardise the continued presence of Pine Gap.
Based on US sources, I reported on 3 November 1975 that Stallings had worked for the CIA as head of Pine Gap, and gave more details the next day.4 The National Country Party leader, Doug Anthony, then told journalists that Stallings was a friend who had rented his Canberra house, and that his family and Stallings’ family had subsequently holidayed together. On 4 November, Anthony denied in parliament that he knew that Stallings worked for the CIA. Later that day, at Tange’s urging, Labor’s defence minister, Bill Morrison, tried to get Anthony to stop talking about Stallings. Refusing to be silenced, Anthony put a question on the parliament notice paper on 6 November challenging Whitlam to provide evidence when parliament resumed on 11 November that Stallings worked for the CIA. Anthony referred to The Australian’s report earlier that day that the State Department said Stallings ‘had never worked for any US intelligence agency’.
Given that Whitlam knew this was a lie—because Tange had belatedly told him the truth—he refused to mislead parliament by saying Stallings had not been a CIA employee. Shortly after Anthony put his question on the notice paper, Whitlam prepared a reply making it clear that Defence (i.e. Tange) had recently told him that Stallings had worked for the CIA. Later the same day, he read it over the phone to a horrified Tange, who then told Whitlam’s staff: ‘This is the gravest risk to the nation’s security there has ever been.’5 Others might nominate the early days of the Pacific War as a more serious threat than confirmation of the public knowledge that someone worked for the CIA.
Under the agreement between Australia and the US, notice to terminate Pine Gap’s activities could have been given from 10 December 1975. Ted Shackley, the head of the CIA’s East Asia division, gave ASIO’s Washington representative a tough message on 8 November to send to ASIO headquarters. His telex to ASIO raised the possibility of cutting off the intelligence relationship unless ASIO gave him a satisfactory explanation of Whitlam’s comments on CIA activities in Australia, which could ‘blow the lid off’ Pine Gap. ASIO passed the message on to Tange on 9 November and to Whitlam on 10 November.
On the morning of 10 November, Tange and Farrands sent Whitlam a note claiming that later that day the Pentagon would ‘announce Stallings was employed by the US Department of Defense … This direct confrontation [with what Whi
tlam planned to say] must be avoided at all costs. Proposed formula for the answer to Anthony’s question is overtaken by the intention of the US.’ Tange should never have presumed he had the right to give the elected PM such a blunt order. The Pentagon made no announcement.
There was no reason for Whitlam to abandon his accurate answer based on what Tange had told Menadue earlier in the month. Shackley’s telex removed any residual doubt about where Stallings worked by bluntly stating: ‘Stallings is a retired CIA employee.’ This demonstrated that the State Department’s 6 November public denial was a straight-out lie, while the proposed Pentagon statement, if it ever existed, was little better. Even if Stallings had worked for the US Defense Department earlier in his career, Whitlam was correct to say that he was working for the CIA at Pine Gap.
In the event, Kerr sacked Whitlam at 1 p.m. on 11 November 1975 and installed Fraser as caretaker prime minister, although Labor still had a majority in the House of Representatives. There was no urgency—supply would not have run out for another nineteen days. Although information about the CIA’s role in Pine Gap may have played no part in Kerr’s decision, it meant that Whitlam could not give his proposed answer to Anthony’s question. Much to Tange’s and Shackley’s annoyance, I reported the gist of the telex message eight days before the election on 13 December 1975.6
Tange’s behaviour was reprehensible. A responsible public servant would not have behaved towards a prime minister in such an arrogant, unprofessional and bullying manner as he did about who ran Pine Gap. He should have replied immediately to the Pentagon urging it not to make any statement that clashed with Whitlam’s intention to give an accurate parliamentary answer stating the already publicly known fact that the CIA ran Pine Gap.