by Brian Toohey
Whitlam’s refusal to take Tange’s advice threatened to undermine much of the power and control Tange had built as the undisputed keeper of the CIA’s secrets in Canberra. Other Defence heads and senior officials have not let an addiction to secrecy distract them from the many other important aspects of their jobs.
After the dismissal, former Labor defence minister Bill Morrison told me that Tange had claimed to him that the CIA’s role at Pine Gap had to be kept secret because it was part of an intense political battle in Washington over whether the CIA or the NSA should run the facility in future. Morrison, who never told me anything about Pine Gap while he was minister, said he couldn’t understand what Tange was on about. The key players in Washington knew who ran it, and Tange had no business taking the CIA’s side.
The NSA claimed a compromise victory in 1977 when the US government gave it ‘review and approval authority’ over the CIA’s signals intelligence programs.7 The NSA is now clearly in charge of this program, as the ABC reported in 2017.8 Moreover, US spy Christopher Boyce had already told the Soviets the answer to the minor puzzle of who ran the station.9 Nothing Whitlam proposed to say could have compared with what Boyce did as an employee of a CIA contractor deeply involved with Pine Gap. The US deputy secretary of defence at the time, William Clements, said, ‘Our intelligence community is in disarray. A major satellite intelligence system developed and deployed over the past decade without Soviet knowledge has been compromised by intelligence procedures as porous as Swiss cheese.’10
Tange later refused to answer my written questions about what communications he had with the US about Whitlam’s behaviour during this period, including the purported Pentagon announcement on 10 November that Stallings worked for it. Tange’s biographer, Peter Edwards, who had access to the Defence Department’s classified archival records, told me he did not recall seeing any of this material.11
There was a further twist to Tange’s attempts to downplay his overbearing behaviour in the lead-up to 11 November 1975. In his memoir, he dismissed Shackley’s telex as unimportant. Others called it ‘one of the most dramatic cables in Australia’s political history’.12 Tange described Shackley as a ‘ham-fisted’ American intelligence official who ‘fired off’ a telex to ASIO ‘extravagantly predicting serious consequences for Australia’s relations which could follow the Prime Minister’s disclosures’,13 but Shackley’s language was not as extravagant as Tange’s claim that Whitlam had committed the ‘gravest breach of security ever’. Shackley was relaxed about Tange. When we later met in Washington, the first thing he asked was ‘How’s the old crocodile?’
What can the NAA tell us about these historic events in November 1975? None of the communications between Defence and the Pentagon and the CIA leading up to 11 November are available in the archives. This is not the NAA’s fault—Defence often ignores its legal obligation to provide records to the archives. The Attorney-General’s Department is little better. The NAA replied on 16 February 2016 to a request from me that it had identified a relevant document in records held in the Attorney-General’s Department, which the department had destroyed. The only message of interest from the US in the archives is the Shackley telex to ASIO, but its content was still totally redacted in 2016. I published the full text in the AFR on 29 April 1977—almost forty years earlier—and Whitlam read it into Hansard on 4 May 1977.
21
THE MEN WHO SPREAD THE FAIRYTALE ABOUT ARMS CONTROL
‘The US does not need telemetry from Russian missile flights to verify Russian compliance with the New START treaty.’
US Defense Secretary Robert Gates1
The biggest secret about Pine Gap is that it is essentially irrelevant to verifying compliance with arms control agreements. This has not stopped politicians from asserting that it is vital to arms control—a cover story concocted when Australian opposition to Pine Gap and the Nurrungar base was much stronger than it is today.
No one disputes that Pine Gap’s satellites can intercept the ‘telemetry’ data sent to and from missiles during tests, but this is only a minute proportion of what is collected and has nothing to do with verifying whether the Russians have cheated on strategic arms control agreements. Pine Gap’s satellites only provide information about a particular missile tested—the total number deployed is the central figure for arms control. The primary goal of the initial SALT I treaty, which applied from 1972 to 1979, was to limit the number of US and Soviet ICBM silos and the number of launch tubes on submarines carrying nuclear weapons on ballistic missiles. Later agreements included the number of nuclear-capable bombers, shorter-range missiles, warheads, production facilities, and so on.
The main reason the US wanted to intercept Soviet telemetry was to find out how Soviet missiles were performing. This is why the CIA began intercepting Soviet ICBM telemetry in the 1950s using planes and ground stations in Iran, Norway and Turkey. Iran’s permission to establish bases overlooking the Soviet launch sites was one of the benefits of the US-British coup in 1953 to replace the democratically elected secular prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, with a brutal, corrupt dictator, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. When the despised Shah fled to America in the February 1979 Iranian Revolution, fundamentalist Islamist ayatollahs were left in charge.
A few months later a former deputy director of the CIA, Herbert Scoville, gave an authoritative explanation about why the subsequent loss of the telemetry from the Iranian listening posts (called Tacksman I and II) didn’t matter for arms control. Scoville, who was in charge of analysing the telemetry data from Iran, said intelligence gathering was not synonymous with treaty verification. He said photographic images from low-orbiting satellites were the crucial verification tool: ‘They have little difficulty recognising all the weapons covered by the arms control agreements, such as land and sea-based launchers and heavy bombers. Satellites can now locate, count, and measure modern weapons from 100 miles [160 km] away.’2 His article also explained that the US had extensive facilities to observe tests of all multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles (MIRVs) carrying warheads as they moved towards their target zone in the Soviet Far East or the Pacific Ocean: ‘Radar receivers and infra-red sensors on ships [and] planes and on land can determine the characteristics and the number of warheads they carry.’ Advances in long-range optical sensors and other devices have since reinforced this capability. Later arms-control agreements required the destruction of some weapons and counted the actual number of MIRVs as well the number of missiles produced. Onsite sensors and official inspections of production facilities, launch and test sites and other measures reinforced earlier methods of verification. US officials claimed that even in the case of Russia’s mobile missiles, they had ‘cradle to grave’ monitoring.3
Against this backdrop, US defence secretary Robert Gates told a press conference in 2010 that the US didn’t need telemetry from Russian missile flights to verify compliance with New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty). It seems the Soviets/Russia never had any geosynchronous satellites capable of intercepting telemetry.4 If Australian ministers were concerned about arms control, they should have pushed to internationalise the verification processes so all parties were subject to the same independent compliance procedures, as occurs with most other arms control agreements.
As well as SALT I, the US and the Soviets ratified the 1972 ABM Treaty, which put strict limits on the number of specialised radars and missiles needed to destroy incoming ballistic missiles. The treaty helped maintain deterrence by ensuring each side retained enough missiles to be able to retaliate after a first strike. Because it only allowed one missile field and one capital city on each side to be defended, satellite photography could easily verify the numbers. Space-based signals intelligence could contribute marginally to other means of verifying the treaty’s condition that phased array radars could not be used.
This didn’t matter much. Once the ABM Treaty was in place, the Soviets deployed their missile shield near Moscow. However, it was basic
ally useless as it could only destroy a maximum of eight incoming US ICBMs. An authority on nuclear war, Eric Schlosser, has pointed out that US war planning envisaged hitting Moscow with 400 nuclear warheads during the Cold War—far more than needed to reduce the city to radioactive rubble.5 The US didn’t bother to defend Washington in the way the ABM Treaty allowed: it preferred to try to develop ‘Star Wars’ weaponry under its Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) to destroy Soviet missiles with laser or particle beams fired from space.
Labor governments’ statements on arms control have often been ill-informed. Prime Minister Bob Hawke’s statement to parliament on 6 June 1984 said that the Central Australian bases provided information about nuclear explosions ‘which assists in nuclear test ban monitoring and supports nuclear non-proliferation measures’. This was an implicit reference to Nurrungar. But its satellites’ infra-red sensors had no role in monitoring nuclear test ban treaties or non-proliferation.6 By the time Hawke spoke in 1984, all countries had already ceased atmospheric tests. Some underground tests continued, but they could and can be detected by the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty’s international monitoring system, which has a large network of sites to detect the seismological, radionuclide, hydro-acoustic and infra-sound indicators of a test, backed by onsite inspections.7 Russia, the UK and France are the only nuclear weapons states to have ratified the treaty; the US, China and Israel signed but didn’t ratify, while India, Pakistan and North Korea refuse to sign.
Labor’s defence minister, Kim Beazley, even asserted in 1986 that the Pine Gap and Nurrungar bases ‘provide the only presently workable method of verifying arms control agreements. If it were not for the existence of Pine Gap and Nurrungar it is highly unlikely that the SALT and START agreements could have been reached.’8 This is rubbish, as Scoville explained above.
In 1986, Beazley offered me a lengthy briefing on Pine Gap from two knowledgeable officials (who didn’t share my conclusions). Although unclassified, the briefing helped convince me to write that Pine Gap produced a vast array of intelligence that ‘backed the global military and political ambitions of the US, however noble, bellicose or repugnant. Hosting Pine Gap meant we played a crucial part in collecting this intelligence, no matter what purposes it finally serves.’9
On 22 November 1988, Hawke made a further parliamentary statement in which he described Nurrungar as playing a ‘fundamental role in preventing nuclear war’ because its US Defense Support Program’s satellites provide early warning of ballistic-missile launches. Because the DSP gave longer warning of an attack than other systems, Hawke said, it ‘reduces the chances that US forces could be destroyed in a surprise attack, and that makes it extremely unlikely that anyone would ever try such an attack’. However, a serious effort to prevent war also required the Soviets to have sufficient warning to avoid being destroyed in a surprise attack, accidental or intentional. Moscow was right to be apprehensive: declassified documents show that US planning included nuclear first strikes;10 the US still refuses to renounce a first-strike option. The Soviets did not have any infra-red early-warning satellites until several years after the US. As Schlosser pointed out in his article, this capability began to decline in 1996 and Russia now has none, leaving it with only a few minutes’ warning from radars to decide whether to retaliate—a dangerous situation that exacerbates the chances of a launch by mistake.
Despite their righteous pronouncements about disarmament, Hawke’s inner Cabinet secretly approved a US request to use Australian facilities to help test a heavy new ICBM called the MX that would have greatly strengthened its nuclear weapons capabilities and probably spurred a renewed arms race. After the National Times revealed this decision in February 1985, a party revolt forced Hawke to back off.11 Hawke also approved a US request to shift one of Pine Gap’s satellites to a better position to eavesdrop on Andreas Papandreou’s government in Greece. This had nothing to do with verifying arms control treaties and everything to do with gathering intelligence on a government that favoured a more neutral foreign policy and reduced support for hosting US nuclear bases.12 The NT then reported in May 1985 that the US had asked Australia to assist its Star Wars (SDI) research even after Hawke had told the White House earlier in the year that it wouldn’t do so. The article revealed that Australia was cooperating with a key SDI program called Teal Ruby, but Beazley claimed the Australian component did not involve the SDI. However, a US official said on the record that the data collected from the Australian component would be ‘of interest and value’ to the SDI program.13 The US satellite ground stations were also ideally situated for communicating with the SDI’s proposed space-based beam weapons.14 Although the SDI was put on hold, the US has deployed land- and ship-based anti-ballistic missiles.
The US took advantage of the planned closure of Nurrungar in 1999 to introduce much more advanced satellites linked to Pine Gap. These detect heat using other parts of the light spectrum as well as infra-red. Both low- and high-orbiting satellites can now detect heat from engines in fighter jets, bombers and small missiles. This information is integrated into US war-fighting machinery that defies claims about Pine Gap’s contributions to peace.
A Howard Government Cabinet submission on 3 September 1997 explained that a new relay ground station would be installed between Pine Gap and the US to transfer data from a new Space-Based Infrared System. The submission acknowledged that the changes were open to the criticism and would lead ‘to the withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and to the deployment of weapons in space’.15 No one in Cabinet seemed bothered, although Australia had signed a treaty prohibiting space warfare and the ABM Treaty was essential to guaranteeing nuclear deterrence. Instead, Pine Gap became part of the US Space Tracking and Surveillance System designed to help destroy ICBMs, in contravention of the ABM Treaty.
In 2001 George W. Bush unilaterally announced that the US would abandon the ABM Treaty. Nevertheless, Australian journalist Peter Hartcher said in 2015 that Vladimir Putin’s Russia ‘has become a rogue state [that] is now threatening to no longer observe the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty’.16 Given that the US withdrew from the treaty fourteen years earlier, presumably Hartcher also considers it a rogue state.
In a parliamentary statement on Pine Gap on 20 September 2007, the Coalition’s defence minister, Brendan Nelson, dropped the pretense that Pine Gap isn’t part of a weapons system, saying it provided ‘priority intelligence on targets such as terrorism’. Labor’s defence minister, Stephen Smith, then used a parliamentary statement on 26 June 2013 to trot out the tired line that Pine Gap helps monitor compliance with arms control and disarmament agreements. The US defence secretary, Bob Gates, had already clearly stated in 2010 that intercepted telemetry—supposedly Pine Gap’s speciality—had no role in verification. However, Smith broke new ground by revealing that Pine Gap hadn’t operated with the ‘full knowledge and concurrence’ of governments before Hawke’s, and added the crucial caveat: ‘Concurrence does not mean that Australia approves every activity or tasking undertaken … [It only means] Australia approves the presence of a capability or function in support of its mutually agreed goals.’
This revelation followed adverse publicity about Pine Gap’s role in extrajudicial killings. The base cooperates with its UK counterpart at Menwith Hill to produce targeting data for drones or special forces to kill suspected terrorists, but they often kill innocent bystanders. In November 2014, The Guardian reported that attempts to kill forty-one men using US drones had resulted in the deaths of an estimated 1147 people.17
22
THE MEN SEDUCED BY THE SECRETS
‘I do not like the idea of nuclear bombs falling on Australia, but the vision that some people have of what it would involve seems to be quite exaggerated.’
Des Ball1
More than any other minister, Kim Beazley was fascinated by the Pine Gap and Nurrungar bases. Despite the strong pressure in Labor circles in the 1980s to kick them out, Beazley as defence minister was determined to keep them.
He later enthused about how an ANU strategic specialist, Des Ball, had been crucial to converting Labor to this cause, calling Ball a ‘man of the left, not only intellectually but in lifestyle and demeanour’ whom he had arranged for the ANU to appoint as a ‘special professor’.2
After Ball’s death in October 2016, Beazley and former Labor foreign minister Gareth Evans told a remembrance service that he had been enormously influential in gaining support for the bases. Each failed to mention that Ball later switched to vehement opposition.3 Beazley said that Ball’s 1980 book, A Suitable Piece of Real Estate, changed Labor’s attitudes by showing that Pine Gap had a role in supporting arms control. The book contained a single sentence asserting that the ability of the base’s satellites to intercept telemetry data was one of the principal means the US used to monitor ‘Soviet compliance with the SALT agreements’. Ball opposed the base’s continued presence on other grounds.4 In 1979, Herbert Scoville had explained that the focus of international arms-control agreements was on reversing the nuclear arms race by cutting missile numbers and warheads. Because telemetry couldn’t count total missile numbers, Pine Gap contributed next to nothing.5
A quick glance at a map rebuts Ball’s claim that Pine Gap’s isolation in the middle of Australia was essential to preventing adversaries getting close enough to eavesdrop on its satellite downlinks:6 the US–UK signals intelligence base at Menwith Hill has links to geo-synchronous satellites similar to Pine Gap’s, yet it is in North Yorkshire in a particularly narrow part of British Isles that is readily accessible to hostile eavesdroppers onshore and offshore. The CIA deceived the Defence head, Arthur Tange, who repeated its claim that ground stations had to be isolated geographically,7 and in 1975, US government sources told National Times journalist Andrew Clark that it had considered shifting the ground station to its Pacific Island territory of Guam.8
