by Mark Colvin
Much more was to come in 1977. It was the year Don Chipp split from the Liberal Party and founded the Australian Democrats, while Kerry Packer drove a massive wedge through the sclerotic cricket establishment by setting up the breakaway World Series Cricket. It was also one of my favourite years in pop: the year punk started morphing into New Wave, the year of Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, Blondie, Brian Eno, David Bowie’s Low and Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life. In Australian pubs and concert venues there were bands like Dragon and Mental As Anything (who played that year’s Double J Christmas party). Punk had exploded into our world, but it was not the dominant force so much as the dam-breaker which allowed a tide of new talent to write concise, sharp, often witty songs of musical and verbal originality. Lyrics, in particular, had evolved: from the in-your-face aggression of ‘Oh Bondage! Up Yours’ to the delicate, tragic sensibility of Elvis Costello’s ‘Alison’; from ‘God Save the Queen and Her Fascist Regime’ to the elliptical irony of Talking Heads’ ‘Don’t Worry about the Government’. In Melbourne I saw The Sports singing ‘Who Listens to the Radio?’, to which the answer, for our generation, in that city, was: no-one, because you don’t have Double J.
Sydney itself was, physically and socially, very different then: a much-lower-slung, less-skyscraper-dotted city with a far busier harbour. Parts of it could feel provincial, with the emphasis on mowing the nature strip and using the incinerator for the weekly backyard burn-off—a social backwater almost unchanged from the 1950s. But because property prices were so low, there was also a Bohemian side to Sydney, a side which is gone now. Before Paul Keating floated the dollar, Sydney was one of the world’s cheapest major cities in which to rent or buy. What are now millionaire suburbs like Paddington and Balmain were the haunts of painters, writers and musicians, often paying $30 or $40 a week for a room in a shared house, and using the then-generous social welfare system to prop up their fledgling careers.
My own life revolved around bookshops, cinemas, the beach in summer, and the radio station. It was a time before today’s celebrity culture and still, for a journalist, an era where you could often get through to a chief executive or a politician without running the gamut of a whole entourage of PR people. On the other hand, it was also a time when people in general—from public figures to the people you encountered doing vox pops—were far less used to the idea of speaking to a camera or microphone. You had to do much more cajoling just to get people on air, and when you did, they could be monosyllabic. You also had very few research resources: Who’s Who, encyclopaedias, the phone book (remember them?). When you went anywhere as a journalist, you very definitely took a notebook and pen as well as your recorder, and you very definitely used them to take copious notes: it wasn’t possible to wait till you got back to the office to check the spelling of someone’s name, or their title, or their CV, on the internet. And your contact book was your most precious possession—direct-line office phones and people’s home numbers were just journalistic gold.
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By the Christmas and New Year holidays of 1976–77, my stepfather, Tony Synnot, had been promoted to vice-admiral, and into his new job as head of the Royal Australian Navy (chief of naval staff). He and my mother were living on an old-established property in the NSW countryside, just over the ACT border but only twenty minutes’ drive from Defence headquarters in Russell Hill. It was in the kitchen of that house that my mother first admitted to my sister Zoë and me that my father was a spy, and told us a little about how the stresses and strains of intelligence work had contributed to the breakdown of their marriage a decade and a half before.
Mum’s account was sketchy, and she emphasised repeatedly that she shouldn’t really be telling us anyway: MI6 wives, just like the men they married, were bound to an informal vow of lifelong silence, even though they weren’t actually made to sign the Official Secrets Act. Zoë and I were used to a degree of secrecy: Tony’s rise through the senior ranks had forced him to be more and more careful about what he said, and us to be more circumspect about what we asked him. But we’d also long joked about Dad maybe being a spy.
Various aspects of his career had always seemed incongruous: he was definitely nothing like other straitlaced, carefully spoken British diplomats I’d met along the way. And things he’d said to both Zoë and me, for instance about the inadvisability of either of us visiting the Soviet Union, for reasons he wasn’t fully in a position to explain, had raised more questions than they’d answered. On the other hand, more than one intelligence expert had told me that if Dad had held ambassadorial rank, it was extremely unlikely he was in intelligence, because the mandarins at the Foreign Office were extremely selective about the positions they allowed to be used as ‘diplomatic cover’, and ambassador rank was definitely out of bounds. (As discussed in previous chapters, it’s only recently publicly been revealed that the Mongolia embassy was the exception that proved the rule.)
It was liberating in its way to know the truth about Dad, but for me it was also constricting. Paranoia about intelligence agencies was rife among journalists then. Ever since the Dismissal there’d been conspiracy theories involving the US embassy, the CIA and ASIO. They were given new impetus by the arrest in January 1977, and the conviction that May, of Christopher Boyce, a young American who’d been caught selling top-secret material to the Soviet embassy in Mexico. That material, Boyce claimed, included among other things the CIA describing the Australian governor-general as ‘our man Kerr’. Boyce’s story was soon to become even better known in the form of a book and a film, The Falcon and the Snowman. Debate was so intense that in May, Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser told parliament that US President Jimmy Carter had given him a personal assurance that US agencies had not been involved in the events of 11 November 1975.
The arguments over this issue have continued to this day, but what was relevant to me at the time was simply that, as a journalist, the last thing I wanted was to be pigeonholed as ‘the son of an MI6 officer’; it was very much in my interest, as well as Dad’s, to hold to my promise to my mother and keep the whole thing secret. I can honestly say that I never received or even asked for a story or an inside-track from my father or my stepfather—let alone got ‘fed’ one—but in those rumour-driven days, there were plenty who might have made assumptions. Especially as my father, whom I hadn’t seen since we parted in Ulan Bator, was now living and working in a very senior job in Washington, DC, and I had plans to visit him later in the year.
Apart from Christmas breaks, I hadn’t taken a lot of leave since I’d joined the ABC in 1974: I had enough backed up to take eight weeks off. I’d also saved enough to buy a round-the-world ticket, and a two-week Eurail pass, which gave you unlimited train travel anywhere on the Continent west of the Iron Curtain. I would begin with my first visit to the USA, starting on the west coast, moving on to New York, then spending some time with Dad in Washington.
I set off at the beginning of the Sydney winter, headed for San Francisco to visit my friend Roger Allebone. He’d been freelancing for Double J from there for a year or so, covering all kinds of stories the mainstream media largely ignored: the rise of gay politicians like Harvey Milk, the environmental movement and the growth of the porn industry, among others. I walked the trails in Yosemite National Park and explored the Californian seaport, hanging out in City Lights bookshop and buying stacks of volumes to post home. With the Australian book industry then still so locked into British publishing, there was a vast array of books that never normally got to our shores, so along with the latest novels I bought a lot of tomes about American politics, as well as books about the media, such as Jerry Mander’s Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, and about cybercrime, like Thomas Whiteside’s Computer Capers. These were subjects and discussions that had hardly got a toehold in Australia in that pre-globalised world. Books were cheaper in San Francisco than Sydney, but they were too heavy to add to my luggage—I paid so much in postage home that there was little in the way of savings.
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bsp; Then it was New York, where I stayed a couple of nights in the YMCA before running into an old English friend, Jamie McDonald, now working in finance, who let me stay in his flat for a couple of weeks. You never forget your first time in New York: wherever you were from back then, it turned you into a gawping out-of-towner. A while ago I came across a roll of film I took at the time which mostly consisted of banal shots of the sky, framed by gigantic skyscraper canyons. My memories, though, are all at ground-level: Reuben’s delicatessen, with its gigantic heapings of salt beef; jogging round the reservoir in Central Park before walking home on winding paths and under little bridges so bucolic you almost forgot you were in the world’s most pulsing city; visiting MoMA and the Met, the Frick Gallery and the JP Morgan Library; more bookshops, of course; having a drink at the Algonquin Hotel, just because Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, George Kaufman and Harold Ross used to meet there. I also tried for an interview with one of my great journalistic heroes, John McPhee of The New Yorker, only to be knocked back, but I did get in to see Jann Wenner, founder of Rolling Stone.
And I had lunch with my dad. We’d arranged for me to stay with him in Washington for a fortnight before I headed across the Atlantic to Britain, France and Italy. But, he told me on the phone ahead of my arrival, we needed to talk. Thanks to the conversation with my mother earlier in the year, I had a fair idea what we’d be talking about.
His venue, characteristically, was an old-fashioned London-style ‘gentlemen’s club’. I had not known such things existed in New York—my idea of a New York club was CBGB, where I’d seen Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers the previous evening—but fortunately I’d packed a suit and tie in my round-the-world travel case, so I was duly admitted to the stately premises of the Knickerbocker Club. There we ascended to a high-ceilinged dining room with tall windows looking directly across 62nd Street to Central Park. The tables, covered in thick white linen and set with heavy silver cutlery, were widely spaced, and the tone hushed. My father liked these places anyway, but you could see why he frequented them professionally, not just socially: discretion was guaranteed and our conversation could not be overheard.
It was a strange reunion. It was the first time I’d seen my father since we’d parted at the Ulan Bator railway station five years before, but the personal pleasure of seeing each other again was a little overshadowed by what we had to talk about. Over lamb cutlets and claret, he told me that I had to be clear that what he was about to say was secret, not to be revealed to anyone, and that if I could not agree to this condition, I wouldn’t be able to come and stay with him. There would be colleagues from the London office staying with him at the same time, and people coming for dinner, about whom and around whom I would have to be very discreet. Of course I agreed: there wasn’t much of a choice involved. So then he explained to me that his title, councillor (political) at the British embassy in Washington, was just ‘cover’. He was in fact the head of station for what I would know as MI6, but what the organisation itself preferred to call the SIS—the Secret Intelligence Service.
Dad outlined the differences between the SIS and the domestic intelligence service MI5. The SIS had an ‘intelligence-gathering’ remit, with no powers to work inside the UK, while MI5 had the job of ‘counter-intelligence’, defending the country on its own soil from the depredations of foreign spies, mainly of their mutual enemy, the Soviet KGB. He also explained that British intelligence agencies and their members were known as ‘The Friends’ and the CIA as ‘The Cousins’, and that his job in Washington was to liaise between ‘Friends’ and ‘Cousins’: between the SIS’ home at Century House in London and CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia. His position was an extremely senior one. Did I know the name Kim Philby? Of course. Well, Philby had been his predecessor in the job during the 1950s, before he was unmasked, and his betrayal had come close to destroying the relationship between the two agencies. My father’s was therefore now an extremely senior, delicate and closely watched job. It had taken two decades to rebuild after the damage done to US trust by the defection of the Cambridge spies.
I had read enough John le Carré to have an idea of some of this already, but hearing it from the horse’s mouth was the end of a long process of guesswork and confirmation. We parted after lunch with a promise that he’d pick me up at Washington National Airport (since renamed after Ronald Reagan).
My father was a man of great enthusiasms, and in the year or so he’d been there, he’d already fallen in love with a lot about America. His car, he told me with delight on my arrival in the capital, was a Dodge Dart Swinger: a long, low two-door he’d bought second-hand. A friend had told him that its paint job was what American car dealers (accurately enough) called ‘babyshit brown’. The thing handled, as many American cars did in those days, like a tugboat, but having driven a series of ancient Minis in Britain, he loved its size and the rumble from under the bonnet. He also took a gleeful pleasure in demonstrating what was then the novelty of a remote control to open your garage door as you approached. And he enthused endlessly about the hamburgers at a bar called Nicky’s, where he and my stepmother had become regulars. When we went there a few days later, it was just an American bar, and the burgers, while good, were just burgers, but his fervour was infectious. Another of his favourite places was one just outside the Beltway where they only served crabs. You sat at a table spread with butcher paper, they brought a pile of steamed crabs accompanied by mallets, crackers and long-stemmed forks, you put on a bib and hoed in. I think the place was named Mike’s, but there was a notice at the door that said ‘The owner of this place is not called Mike. The new owner’s name is Bob. DON’T CALL HIM MIKE.’
Two weeks passed quickly in Washington for me. There was so much to see: the National Gallery of Art alone took up two days. I went to see the radical new IM Pei building but stayed to browse through Vermeers and Botticellis, Rembrandts and Goyas, Degas and Matisses. I went to the Freer Gallery, an offshoot of the Smithsonian across the National Mall from the main building, on my father’s recommendation, to look at Chinese porcelain. The Freer, like the Frick in New York, is smaller and less well-known than some other great galleries of the world, but they remain two of my favourites anywhere: the Frick because of its presentation of great pictures hung just as they were when their multi-millionaire owner lived there, above and among his furniture; the Freer because as well as Asian art, it houses no fewer than 1300 works by the great James McNeill Whistler.
At the Freer you could see Whistler’s extraordinarily prolific originality, and understand how, like late Turner or the French Impressionists, his artistic vision as well as his abrasive nature and sheer arrogance (‘I can’t tell you if genius is hereditary, because heaven has granted me no offspring’) had roiled and defied every tenet of ‘respectable’ nineteenth-century art. And you could see his Peacock Room, an entire dining room painted and decorated to display the collection of a wealthy London connoisseur of Chinese porcelain, dismantled and reassembled in its entirety: an astonishing thing.
This was also, less than a decade after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had landed on the moon, a great time to visit the National Air and Space Museum, not least because it was still such a thrill to touch a mounted piece of moon rock with your own hand. And the huge planes, hanging overhead in that gigantic space, reminded me of the Airfix models I’d painstakingly assembled as a boy and hung above my bed.
As in San Francisco and New York, I spent a lot of time in bookshops, and what sometimes seemed even longer wrestling with the notoriously slow and bureaucratic US Postal Service to send them home. I hadn’t then heard the expression ‘going postal’, meaning ‘to fly into a violent rage, especially when provoked by workplace stress’, but when I did, I recognised it from those queues and that attitude. (To be fair, unlike postcards and letters I sent later in the trip from Italy, everything I sent from San Francisco, New York and Washington did eventually arrive in Sydney.)
One night I went to see The Kinks, a band
I loved but had managed to miss seeing live at their peak in London in the 1960s. I think they opened with ‘Tired of Waiting’, I’m sure they played ‘Lola’, but surprisingly, in retrospect, there was no ‘Waterloo Sunset’ or ‘Days’. The sibling rivalry between the Davies brothers, Ray and Dave, was already notorious, but that night there was no on-stage fistfight between them, despite some fairly obvious tension. Instead, it was Dave and drummer Mick Avory who got into a shouting match during the encore, with Dave kicking down one of Mick’s cymbals, and both storming off stage, in opposite directions. All in all, despite the foreshortened encore, the crowd felt they’d had value for money.
Dad took me to lunch a couple of times at one of his clubs. I forget its name, but it was another of those gentlemen-only, buttoned-leather-sofa and obsequious-waiter establishments done up to look like the interior of an English stately home. There I got a glimpse into another aspect of his job: making connections with the media. We were having a drink before lunch when a man called Rowland (Rowley) Evans came over. For decades, Evans and his writing partner Robert Novak put out a hugely influential, widely syndicated column called ‘Inside Politics’. They were both fierce Cold Warriors with strong Republican connections, and their usually anonymous sources gave them a lot of scoops. The familiarity and warmth of Rowley Evans’ conversation with my father that day left me in little doubt that Dad was one of those sources. It was also clear enough that it was a two-way street: Evans was not just a conduit for planted stories (part of what are known in MI6 as I/Ops), but also, in the opposite direction, a source of gossip and political intelligence for Dad. Clearly, Evans usually knew a lot more gossip and information about Washington political and strategic matters than he could actually print.
