Secret

by Brian Toohey

  Ball was much more enthusiastic about Pine Gap in his evidence to a parliamentary committee in 1981 than in his 1980 book. He said he had no doubt whatsoever that the Soviet Union would target Pine Gap, Nurrungar and North West Cape, and told the committee he didn’t like the idea of nuclear bombs falling on Australia, but that ‘I cannot imagine any scenarios involving nuclear bombs falling on Australian cities’.9 Ball didn’t mention that the Soviet warheads were far more powerful than the bombs the British had tested in Australia. Yet the radioactive fallout from the British tests spread across large areas of Australia. Unlike Ball, senior intelligence analyst Bob Mathams told the same committee that the JIO considered the Soviets able to target Sydney with a nuclear missile.10 A million people could lose their lives.

  Ball was more dogmatic in 1987 when he said, ‘It is simply not possible to seriously support arms control and disarmament and at the same time argue for the closure of the Pine Gap station.’11 On the contrary, it is entirely consistent to support the former and call for the latter. The reality was that Pine Gap had almost no role in arms control or disarmament, but a growing role in US mass surveillance programs and war fighting. Ball went even further in evidence to another parliamentary committee in 1999, when he scoffed at claims that Pine Gap would be used to pick up individual phone calls.12 This is an odd statement from someone who stressed the importance of understanding technology. In this case, the receiving antenna automatically intercepts everything in its frequency range that is transmitted within its very large coverage, including phone calls, texts and so on, as part of a vast US eavesdropping network. The network can and does identify and access huge numbers of phone calls. Echelon was an early program with this capability; British journalist Duncan Campbell had publicly revealed its existence before Ball gave evidence in 1999.13

  It is unclear why Ball became such a zealous supporter of Pine Gap that he thought hosting it was worth risking a nuclear attack—something he had dedicated a large part of his academic life to preventing. One possibility is he was misled by secret briefings in Australia and the US. Secrets can be seductive—and deceptive.

  Pine Gap did not suddenly switch to a new role of contributing to US mass surveillance programs and war-fighting capabilities—that was its core capability from the start. Ball himself said that soon after Pine Gap became operational in 1970, one of its satellites was tasked to ‘monitor signals coming from Vietnam … The war was still going during this period.’14 Continuing improvements in satellite sensors and data-processing power mean it can make a stronger contribution to these roles.

  Starting in 2013, Edward Snowden provided vast amounts of information on the NSA’s global activities for gradual release via sites such as The Intercept. In collaboration with The Intercept, ABC journalist Peter Cronau used unpublished Snowden documents in 2017 to make a Background Briefing radio program giving an authoritative account of Pine Gap’s role in war fighting and mass surveillance. One of the key revelations in the program and the associated documents is that Pine Gap and Menwith Hill jointly collect and often analyse SIGINT before it ends up with the NSA in the US. The program showed the bases’ core tasks, called Mission 7600 and Mission 8300, explicitly include ‘support to US military combat operations’.15 The combined coverage includes the former Soviet Union, China, South-East Asia, East Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe and the Atlantic landmass.

  The program showed that the two stations collected SIGINT on radars and weapons systems such as surface-to-air missiles, anti-aircraft artillery, fighter planes, drones and space vehicle activities, along with other military and civilian communications. When combined with photographic imagery from sources such as the Australian Geospatial-Intelligence Organisation, the SIGINT can have a decisive role in detecting military and terrorist targets. Background Briefing interviewed two ex-members of the US military who worked on the drone program, Cian Westmoreland and Lisa Ling. Westmorland explained that drones are ‘like the tip of the spear but the rest of the spear is actually the global communications surveillance system’.16 Ling said it was not like she went to work in the morning and pressed the ‘enter’ key on a keyboard and suddenly a child died in Yemen. She said such a death would be the result of a much more complex targeting system and the contributing nation-states are ‘complicit in what happens’.17

  Although the US National Reconnaissance Office has a general supervisory role at Pine Gap and Menwith Hill, the documents used by the ABC program showed that an NSA official is firmly in charge of SIGINT collection under the direction of its Washington headquarters. An official from the the Australian Signals Directorate is called the deputy chief of facility and ‘advises and assists on [the base’s] overall management and administration’.18

  In September 2016, Ryan Gallagher, using Snowden’s documents, reported in The Intercept on the magnitude of Menwith Hill’s ability to locate individual targets around the globe for ‘capture kill’ operations in collaboration with Pine Gap.19 Gallagher reported that as well as links to geostationary satellites, Menwith Hill, the NSA’s biggest overseas base, has ground antennas that in 2009 could eavesdrop on communications sent via 163 foreign satellites. The numbers have since grown. He said the NSA documents show that during a twelve-hour period in May 2011 its surveillance systems logged more than 300 million phone calls and emails. Since then, he said, a new collection posture had been introduced at the base, the aim being to ‘collect it all, process it all, exploit it all’.20 While figures for Pine Gap are not available, it should be able to generate similar volumes of material.

  One of Snowden’s documents showed that a more powerful version of the target-locating program called Ghosthunter would be installed at twenty-seven NSA-CIA Special Collection Service sites around the globe by 2010 to achieve more wide-ranging capture-kill operations. The global coverage requires the use of Pine Gap’s geo-synchronous satellites as well as Menwith Hill’s. Gallagher reported that Jemima Stratford QC, a leading British human rights lawyer, warned that if British officials facilitated covert US drone strikes outside of declared war zones, they could be implicated in murder. British MP Fabian Hamilton told The Intercept: ‘I don’t buy this idea that you say the word “security” and nobody can know anything. We need to know what is being done in our name.’

  To his credit, Ball joined colleagues in publishing well-researched reports on Pine Gap that countered his earlier claims. A 2015 report set out how thoroughly militarised the base had become through its close involvement in operations of the US military worldwide, including in Iraq and Afghanistan.21 A 2016 report said Pine Gap hosted a distinctively shaped torus antenna system that could intercept transmissions from thirty-five or more commercial satellites simultaneously, adding to the US’s ability to collect, analyse and store enormous volumes of communications that have nothing to do with verifying arms control agreements.22

  Faced with the evidence that Pine Gap had become fully integrated with the US military’s kill chain, Ball told the ABC’s 7.30 program on 13 August 2014: ‘I’ve reached the point now where I can no longer stand up and provide the verbal, conceptual justification for the facility … We’re now linked in to this global network where intelligence and operations have become essentially fused and Pine Gap is a key node in that whole network, that war machine … which is doing things which are very, very difficult, I think, as an Australian, to justify … It’s now using data directly from … satellites up above, down to Pine Gap, directly to the shooters.’ Ball said, ‘I don’t know how many terrorists have been killed by drones, but I would not be surprised if the total number of children exceeds the total number of terrorists.’

  He was even blunter in an interview just before his death with a journalist friend, Hamish MacDonald, in the Saturday Paper on 1 October 2016, saying, ‘The base now has nothing much to do with our requirements … it’s about finding individuals and targeting them for killing by drone and air strikes … in places that are not designated war zones.’ In Ball’s o
bituary in Fairfax Media on 19 October 2016, MacDonald said that in his last email to him Ball had said, ‘It’s not my PG [Pine Gap] anymore. That means that if it is the strategic essence of the alliance, I now have to question my overall support for that too!’

  It was never Ball’s Pine Gap. It always belonged to those who controlled the US military-industrial-intelligence complex, to do with as they wished.

  Beazley was confronted with the same evidence as Ball, but has become even more enamoured with the base following his posting as Australian ambassador to Washington in 2010 and his subsequent appointment to the Australian board of Lockheed Martin, the giant US weapons manufacturer whose space division makes the satellites used at Pine Gap, the rockets to launch them into orbit, and systems for the new era of space warfare. (He resigned from the board after becoming governor of Western Australia in May 2018.)

  In 2016, Beazley said our ‘interest is best served by expanding the joint facilities’, i.e. Pine Gap and five other US intercept assets in Australia.23 The man who once extolled these bases for their supposed contribution to arms control and peace has now embraced their use for war fighting in distant parts of the globe that pose no threat to Australia.

  PART 3

  ANZUS: THE TREATY WITHOUT A SECURITY GUARANTEE

  23

  THE DIFFICULT BIRTH AND EARLY YEARS OF A TREATY

  ‘A superstructure on a foundation of jelly’

  Robert Menzies1

  Following victory over Japan in 1945, many Australians didn’t know that General Douglas MacArthur had told Prime Minister John Curtin in June 1942 that America had been fighting to protect its own interests, not Australia’s.2 Most took it for granted that the US would always protect Australia, regardless of the circumstances. It took several frustrating years to convince the US to sign a treaty, and even then it lacked the desired security guarantee, unlike the NATO treaty.

  Initially, the US didn’t want a local treaty. This worried many Australians, who feared what would happen as the momentum for decolonisation gathered pace in Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Ceylon and Vietnam. Two influential Melbourne Herald journalists, Robert Gilmore and Denis Warner, reflected this fear when they wrote in 1948, ‘A new chaos has spread through the Jap-pillaged lands of East Asia; the lust for independence has quickened.’3 In China, the communists led by Mao Zedong defeated Chiang Kai-shek’s government in 1949. Foreign Minister Bert Evatt and his department head, John Burton, wanted Australia to do more to make its own way in Asia, but Labor lost power in 1949. Most Australians expected the US to take over from Britain as the nation’s protector.

  Roger Holdich, Vivianne Johnson and Pamela Andre’s official study of the ANZUS Treaty reveals a distinct US lack of interest in stepping up to the plate. It begins with a top-secret cable from the Australian embassy in Washington to Canberra in March 1949 reporting to the Labor PM, Ben Chifley, that a journalist had just told the ambassador, Norman Makin, that his State Department contacts were ‘most frigid’ towards the idea of any formal US commitment in the Pacific and were preoccupied with NATO.4 According to the study, in January 1950 the US narrowly defined its security perimeter in the Pacific as encompassing the Aleutians, Japan, the Ryukyu Islands and the Philippines, but not Australia, New Zealand or Korea.5

  After becoming Coalition prime minister in 1949, Bob Menzies didn’t see an urgent need for a treaty. He sent a cable to the external affairs minister, Percy Spender, in February 1951 saying, ‘I would earnestly advise you that we should not push the US too hard for a formal obligation. We have their goodwill and may tend to lessen it by insisting too much upon formula.’6 Journalist Graeme Dobell noted that Spender quoted Menzies as privately stating that the formal alliance would be ‘a superstructure on a foundation of jelly’.7

  The US softened its stand on a treaty, but suggested it include Japan and the Philippines. This was definitely not what Australia wanted. In February 1951 the head of the External Affairs Department, Alan Watt, wrote a minute to Minister Spender endorsing the view of senior diplomat Arthur Tange that Australia ‘wants a guarantee against attack from Japan itself’—not an obligation to defend it.8 Tange also opposed backing a Filipino government that was against reform movements. In the same minute, Watt strongly favoured the proposed treaty’s intention to include only offshore areas, arguing that if mainland areas were included and attacked, the US would have to enter into land warfare, which would ‘probably be disastrous’. This observation may be more pertinent today, but it doesn’t stop senior politicians and commentators wanting Australia to back the US in a war with China.

  In a Cabinet submission later that month, Spender identified another problem: the US and the UK opposed a peace treaty restricting Japanese rearmament. Spender said this conflicted with the Australian government’s consistent view that there ‘is no evidence the Japanese [have] undergone any fundamental change of heart and the danger from a revived and militant Japan, even in collaboration with Russia and Communist China, must not be ignored’.9 This is a strange assessment. Rather than embracing rearmament, the Japanese people strongly endorsed the pacifist clause in their 1947 constitution. Partly in response to US wishes, the September 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty allowed Japan to develop ‘self-defence forces’. Nevertheless, Japan stayed within a relatively modest military budget of about 1 per cent of GDP for many decades. Even after a more militaristic prime minister, Shinzo Abe, relaxed the constitution’s pacifist clause in 2015, public opinion remained in favour of the original version.10

  The US signed separate security treaties with Japan and the Philippines, smoothing the way for Australian, New Zealand and US representatives to sign the ANZUS Treaty in September 1951 in San Francisco.

  Today, many Australian politicians and commentators choose to ignore how the treaty imposes severe constraints on the use of military force. Article 1 states: ‘The parties undertake, as set out in the UN Charter, to settle any international disputes in which they may be involved by peaceful means … and to refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the UN.’ This is the core of the treaty. If any of the parties are threatened in the Pacific, ANZUS states only that they should consult each other. If one is actually attacked, each would act ‘in accordance with its constitutional processes’—which leaves them free to do nothing other than consult.

  During the first few years of the treaty’s existence, the US repeatedly showed just how little ANZUS meant to it. Australia’s clout was not helped by what Menzies called the ‘dead hand of Fred Shedden’.11 Sir Frederick Shedden had risen from a pay clerk’s job in World War I to become head of the Defence Department in 1937. A zealous advocate of secrecy, he had almost no interest in strategic issues but an obsession with protracted administrative processes.12 The National Times published US archival documents in 1980 showing that Shedden sent a stream of pointless letters marked ‘Personal’ to the perplexed chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, Admiral Arthur Radford.13 In March 1956, Radford’s handwritten annotation on Shedden’s latest missive said, ‘I am a little puzzled as to why Sir F keeps sending me this sort of info.’ Shedden’s relentless correspondence developed into a pass-the-parcel game in the American hierarchy. ‘Dear Raddy’, ‘Dear Livie’ and ‘Dear Walter’ letters flowed backwards and forwards as Radford and two senior State Department officials, Livingston Merchant and Walter Robinson, wrestled with new ways to write thank-you notes to him. Merchant told Radford, ‘Apparently he does not realise that our representatives in Australia keep us fully and promptly informed on matters such as these.’ Still the letters came. A weary Radford wrote to Merchant that he had returned from an extensive trip and ‘there was another one lying on my desk … now here is another one’. Menzies and his ministers preferred to rely on External Affairs or themselves for advice on substantive issues.

  Although Radford treated Shedden courteously, the NT’s report on the US archives shows he didn’t hold b
ack when dismissing proposals from Australian ministers or other officials that didn’t fit the US agenda. Tight secrecy ensured that the Australian public had no inkling that the Menzies Government had almost no influence with the US. Radford brusquely explained what he thought of an Australian and New Zealand proposal to invite Britain to attend ANZUS council meetings after they had agreed it shouldn’t be a member. He said in an August 1956 top-secret memo to other American officials, ‘There is absolutely no reason for the British to be in [the meeting] except to exert pressure on the Australians and New Zealand.’

  Although Menzies’ visit to Washington in March 1955 was publicly acclaimed as a great success, the archival records show he failed to get American support for his proposal that US forces participate in naval exercises off Malaya’s coast with Australia and New Zealand. A top-secret message from the US commander-in-chief in the Pacific, Admiral Felix Stump, on 20 December 1955 demanded the recall of significant parts of a report by staff planners to the ANZUS council because they disclosed information ‘which is not permitted by current US policy and bilateral agreement’.14

  The NT’s report shows that the external affairs minister, Dick Casey, got an unambiguous knockback after he asked Stump in Honolulu in September 1955 to base a high-ranking American military officer in Melbourne. Casey said he wanted a four-star general or admiral ‘to look over our shoulder and take part in our military planning’. Today, such a request would be welcomed as enhancing interoperability between the forces. Back then, the US correctly assessed that Casey wanted the arrangement for domestic political reasons. Casey soon had another go: this time Stump reported to Radford that Casey wanted to be told the size and type of military forces the US desired Australia to have, and explained that the Labor Party strongly opposed the Coalition’s military appropriation. Radford refused to accept this level of politicisation and replied to Stump that he ‘held out no hope that military planning could go as far as the Australians desire’.15