Secret
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Two other episodes illustrate the low level of Australia’s standing in Washington. In one instance, Casey wrote a secret cable to US military headquarters in Hawaii saying that a Geiger counter had gone ‘wild’ near Australia’s Antarctic base and he feared a uranium deposit there might attract the interest of the Russians. Casey didn’t know that the US joint chiefs of staff wanted to annex part of Australia’s territorial claim covering 42 per cent of the Antarctic. A document dated 3 April 1957 shows the joint chiefs had instructed their strategic planning group to draw up recommendations for the ‘establishment now of US claims to those portions of the Antarctic, including those claimed by our allies, to which we would have a basis for valid claims’.16 However, Eisenhower and Khrushchev demonstrated the advantages of international leaders talking to each other when they were instrumental in creating the 1961 Antarctic Treaty, which declared that no one owned any part of Antarctica and put all existing claims on hold indefinitely.
In case there was any further doubt about where ANZUS stood in US priorities in its early days, the archival documents clarified the issue in the conclusion of a 1957 US security report: ‘The US has adhered to a policy of not allowing … ANZUS to become a NATO-type organization with significant standing military forces. This has enabled the US to avoid the formulation of approved combined requirement plans and resulting force commitments. This policy is still highly desirable.’17
The US’s and Australia’s subsequent use of force in Vietnam and Iraq shows they are willing to violate their obligations under ANZUS’s Article 1 and the UN Charter regardless of the devastating human consequences. The current growing integration of Australian and US forces could generate a powerful expectation that Australia will be automatically involved in future US wars. This momentum is not unstoppable. The Menzies Government rejected numerous US demands in 1954–55 that it be prepared to back the US militarily after skirmishes broke out in the Taiwan Strait over the Quemoy and Matsu islands, situated just off the Chinese mainland.18 Menzies was not persuaded by the fact that the islands were controlled from Taiwan (Formosa) by US ally Chiang Kai-shek, who had fled to the island after losing the Chinese civil war in 1949.
24
FOREIGN BASES AND FOREIGN POLITICAL INTERFERENCE
‘Australia and the territories under its control have become increasingly important to the US defense and space establishments in recent years as a site for satellite tracking stations, nuclear test detection facilities, space research and related activities. With ample space, relatively advanced technology, political stability and conservative government, Australia has become a uniquely desirable base for both military and civilian programs involving operations in the Southern Hemisphere.’
White House position paper, 19621
Following the US refusal to include a security guarantee in ANZUS, Prime Minister Menzies was keen to win Washington’s favour by hosting American military and intelligence installations. As shown below, knowledge of what was happening on Australian soil was often kept secret from the Australian public and sometimes the government. From the American perspective, the use of Australian territory was usually more important than the contribution of a relatively small number of troops to add an extra flag to US military expeditions.
This focus remained in a high-level 1971 national security study that Queensland academic Stephen Stockwell discovered in the Nixon presidential archives. It stated: ‘Our most direct stakes in Australia and New Zealand are: maintenance of continuing access to the territory for purposes of locating defense and scientific installations of significance to our strategic capability and space program … [and] a support base area in case of general hostilities with a major power.’2 Again, there was no mention of contributing troops to US wars.
Some Australian commentators have trouble accepting that the US puts such a strong emphasis on Australia’s importance as a base for American military and intelligence facilities, preferring to see the relationship as based on a warm friendship between the two countries. Marshall Green stated the unsentimental reality when he told me that his first objective as US ambassador to Australia in the 1970s was to maintain the US naval communications facilities at North West Cape and the secretive satellite ground stations in Central Australia at Pine Gap and Nurrungar.3 His second objective was keeping Australia open to US investment, and his third was backing the US in international forums. He didn’t mention contributing troops to US wars.
Other facilities were also important to the US in the 1950s and early 1960s. The Menzies Government didn’t have the remotest clue about the purpose of some of the facilities established during its term; nor did it care. Its goal was to appear much closer to the US than Labor. In 1961, Menzies agreed to let the US establish TRANET Station 112 at Smithfield in South Australia as part of a network of ground stations for TRANET navigational satellites. The satellites’ main task was to provide highly accurate navigational data for US submarines equipped with nuclear-armed ballistic missiles.4 Defence academic Des Ball said, ‘The government itself remained in blissful ignorance of the station’s operations and its strategic implications.’5 This was confirmed when the AFR published details of a cable Defence head Arthur Tange sent to Washington in May 1973 in an effort to find out what the TRANET station did—twelve years after it had been established.
In 1955, the Menzies Government signed a secret agreement to allow the US to establish what it publicly described as a meteorological station at Alice Springs, called the Oak Tree Project. The fact that it was really a seismic station for detecting nuclear explosions was not revealed until Labor’s defence minister, Lance Barnard, said so in parliament on 28 February 1973. In 1960, Menzies agreed to let the US secretly operate U-2 spy planes from Australian airfields under projects called Clear Sky and Crow Flight. The historian Philip Dorling later discovered that the project was probably about trying to estimate the size of the Soviets’ nuclear arsenal.6
Menzies was fully aware that ANZUS did not contain a security guarantee, but he pretended it did. He told the New South Wales Liberal Party’s annual convention on 2 November 1962 that ANZUS meant that ‘If someone attacks us we know America will come to our aid. Under Labor, the US could come to the aid of Australia in the event of a Chinese Communist attack, but only with conventional weapons. What nonsense is this?’ His purpose did not escape a US diplomat in Canberra who reported to Washington on 9 November, ‘Menzies undoubtedly thought the moment was politically right, in the midst of public interest concern over the Cuban crisis, to attack Labor.’7
Menzies’ speech did not reflect the key conclusion of the Joint Intelligence Committee about the likelihood of a Chinese or Russian attack on Australia. JIC’s assessment in September 1961 was that ‘In the event of global war or overt aggression in Southeast Asia involving Australian forces, no military attack on Australia or the island territories would be likely … The only foreseeable circumstance that might alter this assessment would be the establishment in Australia of a base or staging area for the West’s nuclear forces, in which case there would be a threat of direct attacks against Australia.’8 In other words, Australia was fairly safe from attack so long as it didn’t host bases such as the US naval station at NWC.
As Labor slowly gained more traction for its initially unpopular stand against Menzies’ 1965 decision to send a battalion of troops to Vietnam, the US financed sympathetic Australians to counter opposition to the Vietnam War. Lincoln White, the US consul-general in Melbourne in the mid-1960s, told the National Times in 1980 that the CIA station chief, Bill Caldwell, had funded Australian supporters of the war. White said, ‘The main thing we funded was counter stuff through our friends out there … We also had people in the newspaper business who put our side.’9 He said Caldwell had someone at the Melbourne Age that the US didn’t have to fund, but White couldn’t remember his name. A report in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library in Austin, Texas shows that in July 1965 White recommended to Washington that ‘an increase in effo
rt and resources should be devoted by the US in preserving and further promoting Australian policy and effort on this key issue … Unless strongly countered, trends might well develop which could defeat or at least modify federal policy for containing the spread of communism in South East Asia.’10
Declassified American documents also show that the US argued in the Supreme Court that allowing publication of the Pentagon Papers (Daniel Ellsberg’s leaked report on how badly the Vietnam War was going) would damage the US goal of keeping Billy McMahon’s Coalition government in power. The NT reported that in 1971 a State Department deputy secretary, William Macomber, gave a top-secret court deposition in which he claimed that publication would weaken the McMahon Government’s tenure. He said, ‘Anything that weakens the government in Australia … must be regarded as a serious setback for the security interests of the US.’11 Macomber said McMahon had been appalled by the publication in June 1971 of a highly classified cable from General Maxwell Taylor in Saigon, the text of which ‘can lead to the inference that the dispatch of Australian combat troops to Vietnam was not done at the genuine request of the South Vietnamese government but rather was facilitated through the South Vietnamese government by the US’.12 The inference was true. The Supreme Court refused to stop publication of the Pentagon Papers—a victory for transparency that would be impossible under recent new laws in Australia that rule out the ‘public interest’ defence used in the Pentagon Papers case. Nor does Australia have anything similar to the protection of free speech contained in the first amendment to the US Constitution.
25
ENDURING FAITH IN A GUARANTEE THAT DOESN’T EXIST
‘In practice, each of the parties to the ANZUS Treaty is going to decide whether or not to take action under the treaty according to its own judgement of the situation … The government is of the opinion that discussion of [the treaty’s] meaning is almost certain to narrow its meaning.’
Foreign Minister Garfield Barwick, in a top-secret department memo1
In the late 1950s and early 1960s the Menzies Government kept pushing for US military backing in any conflict with President Sukarno’s government in Indonesia, and the US kept refusing. Although Sukarno never showed any inclination to invade Australia, he certainly frightened our leaders as he tried to maintain a balancing act between the US-backed Indonesian military and a strong Communist Party (the PKI). The US National Archives show that at the ANZUS military representatives’ meeting in Melbourne on 23 January 1956, Australia wanted treaty members to prepare for an invasion of Indonesia. But at a meeting on 26 May that year, the US military’s joint chiefs of staff made it clear that they opposed ‘overt military intervention in Indonesia’.2 The joint chiefs said they would not ‘authorize any US military representative to develop combined plans, allocate US forces to specific contingencies, commit the US to specific courses of action or place undue emphasis on ANZUS military planning’.3
However, the US fostered a rebellion in Sumatra and Sulawesi by giving covert military support to Islamist parties.4 Former CIA official Fletcher Prouty, who was directly involved in what happened, told an interviewer that the agency managed to arm a rebel force of 42,000 and Australia was expected to supply administrative and medical help if the rebels succeeded.5 He said the program collapsed after the Indonesians captured Allen Pope, the CIA pilot of a B-26 that crashed after bombing a hospital on Ambon. The US attorney-general, Robert Kennedy, negotiated Pope’s release.
The Australian external affairs minister, Dick Casey, recorded in his diaries that he suggested to the Americans that covert action be used to undermine the Indonesian economy by sabotaging oil production. He sent a cable to his department conceding that ‘The danger of such action could be nationalisation by the Jakarta government.’6 The Americans saw no merit in risking the nationalisation of their oil interests. Casey’s judgement of regional politicians was no better: he wrote in his diary that Singapore’s prospective leader, the politically moderate, administratively competent Lee Kuan Yew, was ‘a clever, impractical, left-wing theoretician’.7
After the rebellion failed, the US switched to trying to win Sukarno’s favour with soft aid and political support in international forums. As a result, Australia was caught wrong-footed when Sukarno stepped up his attempts to incorporate the Dutch colony of West Irian into Indonesia. The US and the UK both supported him, with a US National Security Council paper in 1959 noting, ‘The Australians are, if anything, more determined than the Dutch that West New Guinea [West Irian] should not come under Indonesian control.’8 Cabinet noted that if Indonesia attacked West Irian the US would see its best interest ‘as not antagonising the Asian nations, rather than supporting its allies’.9
Although a proposal to put West Irian under UN trusteeship gained wide approval, the UN agreed to transfer it to Indonesian control on 1 May 1963, to be followed by an act of self-determination in 1969. Historian James Curran, who researched the National Archives in Washington and Canberra, says the Australian government was only told of the deals, which effectively guaranteed the Indonesian takeover of the territory, after they had been done. Curran said one of Kennedy’s advisers, Bob ‘Blowtorch’ Komer, explained, ‘It was worth sacrificing a few thousand square miles of cannibal land to keep Indonesia out of the communist camp.’10
The act of self-determination was a travesty. Indonesia selected 1022 West Irians to vote from a population of about 800,000, and the entire 1022 voted unanimously to become part of Indonesia. Because of the secrecy surrounding the policy shifts, the Australian public were surprised and angered by an outcome they believed Menzies would successfully oppose. Despite some recent improvements, Indonesia has treated the locals badly. Likewise, the US corporation Freeport-McMoRan, which operates a vast copper and gold mine in the province, could have done much better.
The next shock occurred in 1963, when Indonesia introduced its policy of ‘Confrontation’ to oppose what it branded a British imperialist policy of encirclement through the creation of a new neighbouring state, Malaysia. Under the 1963 proposal, Malaya was to form a federation with Singapore and the two non-Indonesian parts of Borneo, Sarawak and Sabah. ‘Confrontation’ mostly amounted to strident Indonesian propaganda and small-scale military harassment and incursions, rather than a full-scale war against Malaysia, but Menzies and his foreign minister, Garfield Barwick, wanted to back the UK’s call for a military response by sending troops to Borneo. This eventually occurred in January 1965. The problem disappeared when General Suharto ousted Sukarno amid horrific military and communal violence that is generally estimated to have killed between 500,000 and one million people in 1965–66.
Meanwhile, the Americans gave Barwick and Menzies, both lawyers, a painful rebuttal of any notion that the ANZUS Treaty was an enforceable contract. The same applied to the belief that Australia had paid the necessary ‘insurance premiums’ by sending 17,000 troops to the Korean War at the cost of 340 Australian lives and by making an initial contribution to the escalating war in Vietnam.
When Menzies met Kennedy in the White House in July 1963, the president explained that the American people ‘have forgotten ANZUS and are not at the moment prepared for a situation which would involve the US’.11 After another rejection, Barwick wrote the top-secret memo to his department quoted at the start of this chapter, which acknowledged that ANZUS left the US free to decide whether to take action when requested, and came to the abject conclusion that discussing the treaty’s meaning ‘is almost certain to narrow its meaning’. While in Washington, Barwick was given a secret record of understanding on 17 October that stated that the treaty ‘related only to overt attacks and not to subversion, guerilla warfare or indirect aggression’.12 It also said that any American assistance, if sent, would not include ground troops.
Kennedy could not have spoken more plainly, but Barwick lied when he subsequently told parliament in April 1964 that there was ‘no question of doubt’ about the US obligation to intervene if Australian forces in Borneo we
re attacked.13 Lying to parliament is supposedly a sackable offence, but secrecy shielded parliamentarians and the public from knowing that Barwick had done so. His successor as external affairs minister, Paul Hasluck, acknowledged the truth in early 1965 when he publicly conceded, ‘We have been put on notice by a former president that the American understanding of its obligations was such as to exclude help from them to Australia in certain circumstances.’14
Curran said that Kennedy’s comment about the Americans forgetting about ANZUS ‘punctured not only much of the rhetoric about an alliance forged in the crucible of the Pacific but questioned the foundational principle of Australia’s Cold War policy. Kennedy had shown that the idea of common cause with an old wartime ally cut no ice in US domestic politics. The US, as all great powers do, had quite properly followed its own interests. Australia simply had to make do.’15 He concluded, ‘The lesson is clear. The warming rhetoric of the “Anglosphere” ought to recall that in the past Australian and US interests in Asia have collided as much as they have coincided.’16
Most Australian politicians, commentators and journalists still prefer to believe that the alliance provides a security guarantee like an insurance policy, in which Australia pays premiums by sending troops to support the US in overseas wars. The payout, they believe, is that the US will always honour the policy by coming to Australia’s rescue, no matter where or how far in the future. However, most experienced politicians understand that a US president will act in his or her political interest, bolstered by a plausible interpretation of America’s national interest. If a deeply unpopular intervention on behalf of Australia serves no core strategic interest, a future president won’t send troops to support Australia, regardless of the cost in blood, treasure and votes.