by Mark Colvin
From conversations at the time, I know that Dad was also a contact of Jack Anderson, who wrote the ‘Washington Merry-Go-Round’ column, and who was revealed in a 2010 book to have bribed, blackmailed, extorted, bugged and lied in order to get stories. About this enormously influential newspaperman, Slate’s Jack Shafer wrote:
Anderson’s ethical compass pointed wherever he wanted it to, and in this regard he behaved more like a spy than a reporter during his long career. A spy does not mince ethics as he steals secrets, cracks safes, breaks into offices, taps phones and hacks computers, recruits and pays operatives in the field, and blackmails his foes. He lies frequently and brazenly. He swaps information with sources and does favors for them.
Knowing of these relationships left me forever sceptical of all stories involving defence, intelligence and national security that rely on anonymous sources. They’re too often tainted, and subsequent events, like The Spectator (while I was Europe correspondent during the Balkans war) running two articles by a pseudonymous MI6 agent in Bosnia, have done nothing to change my mind.
Another friend of my father’s was Allen Weinstein, then writing his massive and influential book Perjury, about the McCarthy-era case of the accused spy Alger Hiss. I’d read a little about the extraordinarily convoluted course of this case, and the way it pitted Hiss against a witness called Whittaker Chambers, but only enough to pigeonhole Hiss in my mind in the same category as others targeted by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Weinstein’s investigations of the case were even then causing huge ructions on the Left, because, in exemplary fashion, he had chipped away at the detailed factual foundations of Hiss’ defence, finding a host of contradictions which pointed more strongly than ever to the man’s probable guilt as a Soviet spy, a KGB ‘mole’ high in the US State Department.
Staying at the house when Allen came to dinner were two MI6 colleagues of my father’s from London. In retrospect, I see myself that night as callow and arrogant. I was foolish enough to regurgitate some half-remembered and thinly understood material I’d read or heard about the Petrov Affair of the early 1950s, and suggested that the evidence that ASIO produced about infiltration of the Labor Party was still regarded by some in Australia as a put-up job by the Prime Minister Robert Menzies. It wasn’t just the wrong thing to say, it prompted the ‘Friends’ from London to furious indiscretion. They told me, without equivocation, that the Petrov defection had been one of the most significant intelligence coups of the century, and that Mr and Mrs Petrov had given them and the CIA essential confirmation of a vast amount of material about KGB infiltration of Western governments. With Weinstein backing them up, I was not just outnumbered but outgunned, and what made it more humiliating was that they so clearly had the facts and I didn’t. Nobody mentioned the ‘Venona decrypts’ of highly secret KGB cables—it would be nearly two decades before their existence even became public—but those documents, and much other evidence that’s been released in the last couple of decades, make it clear that I’d made a complete fool of myself that night. Their attack was so ferocious and detailed, however, that my father clearly thought they’d told me too much. The next morning he took me aside to redouble his earlier message about secrecy. There was no real need: I’d been so comprehensively demolished that I had no intention of ever mentioning the incident again.
Perhaps fortunately, I didn’t know much at the time about the history of Iran, so I was in no position to repeat my indiscretion when we went to a children’s party at the home of a schoolfriend of my young half-brother David. The host was Kermit Roosevelt Jr, a ‘friend of my father’s in the US Foreign Service’, which by now I realised meant ‘probably CIA’. A tall, rangy man in horn-rimmed spectacles, grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, he was the picture of US east-coast establishment benevolence: Anglophile, civilised and charming. In those pre-Google days, I had no way of knowing that he was also the man who’d organised the 1953 coup that toppled Iranian Prime Minister Mossadeq and brought the Shah back.
When I left Washington, there was the usual air of melancholy between Dad and me. We always enjoyed each other’s company. For all our political differences we shared a huge amount in terms of artistic and literary interests, among other things, and his enormously wide knowledge of history and foreign affairs was an extraordinary resource to tap for a young man in my trade. But time and distance meant we both knew that the times we had together would always be rare.
As usual, Dad wore his darkest glasses to the airport to say goodbye.
Chapter 22
The Pleasure of Collaboration
I ARRIVED AT THE Sydney Hilton some time between 1.15 and 1.30 on the morning of 13 February 1978. All I knew was that there’d been a massive explosion in George Street, outside the hotel where, earlier that night, I’d spent several hours covering the arrival of Commonwealth heads of government for their regional meeting known as CHOGM. When I’d left, I’d gone back to the Double J offices and filed a fairly lighthearted story for the morning, which focused heavily on the slurred speech and extremely unfriendly words New Zealand Prime Minister Robert ‘Piggy’ Muldoon had launched at Malcolm Fraser and Australia in general at a hastily convened press conference, after he’d been out on a well-lubricated harbour cruise. I was not to know it when I left the office, but that story would never get to air.
Coming towards the Town Hall, I could see police setting up roadblocks and lights on the corner of George Street directly outside the building. I could see them already turning people, including journalists, away. I went instead through the Pitt Street entrance of the Hilton, thinking security might be less stringent there and I could get to George Street by going down the escalators. I’d guessed right. The security was, at that moment, non-existent: everything had been diverted either down onto George St itself, or to the upper floors where the heads of government were staying. I had no need for the lifts, so whoever was guarding them left me alone. Within about a minute, I was walking down the stopped escalator with my Nagra over my shoulder, looking down at the white marble lobby floor. It was spattered with what looked like shrapnel and other unidentifiable objects, and stained bright scarlet with blood.
Meanwhile, AAP’s Peter Logue, who’d arrived from Northern Ireland three years before, was the only reporter allowed to remain on the scene inside the Town Hall cordon. He was on the spot two minutes after the blast. Peter remembers: ‘I was on my way to do the overnight shift at AAP. Knew immediately what it was when I heard that crrrruuuummmp! When the cops turned up I got talking to an inspector who found it amusing that I was from Northern Ireland. When they set up barricades and removed the journos he shouted, ‘Let him stay, he’s a crazy Irishman and he’s seen all this before.’
In the Hilton’s George Street lobby, with the Florsheim shoe shop on my right, I picked my way through the debris and out onto the pavement, looking left towards the Town Hall. The floodlights were fully up now, and almost blinding. The exploded garbage truck was a silhouette in their beams. Its metal rear had been blown out on each side. It remains as a photographic image burned into my brain, the torn metal of the exploded rear spread out like the wings of a devil in a horror film.
The police worked out fairly quickly that I’d slipped through the net, but I still had my conference accreditation and I persuaded them to let me back into the hotel. And so it was that a small group including Peter and me, along with the legendary tabloid journalist and ex-boxer Jack Darmody and The Mirror’s Jim Oram, were there when, at about 2 a.m., Superintendent Reg Douglas briefed us, having to admit that the police had failed in not allowing checks of the rubbish bin which contained the bomb that blew up in the truck’s garbage compactor.
I was told that Malcolm Fraser had come down in his dressing gown within minutes of the bomb going off, but my memory is hazy as to whether he also spoke to us. He was certainly holding meetings with police and security chiefs inside the hotel. We did know the damage the bomb had done, though. It had blown two garbage colle
ctors literally to pieces: it was probably the blood of William Favell or Alec Carter I’d seen splashed across the marble. Or it might have been that of policeman Paul Birmistriw, who would die of his injuries nine days later. He and three other policemen were then in critical condition a few blocks away, in Sydney Hospital.
By about 3 a.m., I had enough to head back to the office and put together a new, seven-minute report on everything I’d seen and heard for the morning bulletin. Nearly four decades on, though, despite multiple trials, appeals, retrials, conspiracy theories and reinvestigations, we still do not know definitively who was responsible for that bombing.
* * *
The Hilton atrocity was the last big story I covered for the station. ABC News had decided that I’d been at Double J too long and needed to be brought back into the fold. I’d known it was inevitable, but I’d have liked to make the decision on timing myself. Still, new challenges awaited. I was to be sent to Canberra to be the TV producer for the ABC’s federal political coverage, responsible for making sure that the work of the chief correspondent Duncan Fairweather and his deputy Paul Lockyer was properly edited and packaged for distribution down the coaxial cable to Sydney and Melbourne.
After a month of on-the-job training at the ABC’s TV studios at Sydney’s Gore Hill, I arrived at the Old Parliament House press gallery, which was largely unchanged from my cadetship days of 1974. The lack of technological change in particular was irksome. I’d spend the morning at parliament, but there were no TV editing facilities there, so much of the time after lunch was spent 6 kilometres away at the ABC’s Northbourne Avenue office, either supervising the cutting of film with veteran editor Frank Reid, or editing tape upstairs on the huge 2-inch reel-to-reel Ampex machines. Those machines were unwieldy, but so was the system. Shuttling TV material back and forth across Canberra seemed if anything more anachronistic than the run up Cardiac Hill I’d got inured to at Double J. The ABC was trying to introduce smaller, lighter videotape cameras and editing machines, but there was union opposition from film cameramen (they were all men then)—artists—who didn’t want to see engineers, who understood the inner workings of the new cameras, allowed to take pictures.
It was frustrating, and with Whitlam gone after the election loss of December 1977, politics that year was fairly featureless. New Labor leader Bill Hayden was only finding his feet, so Malcolm Fraser had the field very much to himself, and the ALP was still only beginning the long process of re-examination and restructuring that would eventually end with Bob Hawke claiming the party leadership in 1983. Hawke was always in and out of Canberra, though, and I was in the pack that interviewed him several times. I thought he always treated my questions with a particular curl of the lip, something that never changed over time. Years later, when he was prime minister and on a trip to Brussels, I asked one of his staffers why he still seemed to single me out as an especially loathsome specimen of a media pack he generally treated with lofty contempt. ‘He just hates Poms, mate,’ came the reply. Hard, with my accent then, to protest ‘But I’m half-Australian by birth.’
Almost every weekend I got a lift to Sydney and back with Duncan Fairweather, so I never truly put down roots in Canberra. I felt I was largely marking time. But I was in luck, because the Canberra political editor that year was John Penlington, a man whose careful and slightly cerebral exterior concealed a history of great and pioneering TV reporting. As part of the team that founded Four Corners, he had broken major stories around Australia, covered the Vietnam War, and presented and produced the program: a journalist with a huge reputation inside and outside the ABC. Towards the end of 1978, the organisation decided that This Day Tonight, the nightly TV current affairs program which seemed well beyond its swashbuckling peak, should end. It was to be replaced by a new, late-evening program of current affairs and interviews. It was to be called Nationwide, it would air at 9.30 every evening, and John Penlington had been chosen as its executive producer. He’d taken a liking to me, understood that I found my current job limiting, and decided to take a gamble by appointing me as one of his small team of national reporters.
So, back in Sydney, I started 1979 working alongside some of the most impressive journalists in TV, notably Paul Murphy, whose talents as a reporter were augmented by a power of vocal imitation that rivalled that of Peter Sellers. The formidable Richard Carleton was back in the ABC’s fold as the program’s Canberra correspondent and chief interrogator of politicians, and Andrew Olle, battle-hardened by years of on- and offair skirmishes with the corrupt Queensland Police and the inimitable Joh Bjelke-Petersen, had come down with his family from Brisbane. I was easily the most inexperienced member of the team, and far down the pecking order, but I set about learning how to work with crews and editors to make film segments of up to ten minutes for the program.
It was hugely enjoyable being on the road with crews like the very clever and experienced John Hagin and Chris Fileman, whose usually blue double-act dialogue could often have you creased up with laughter in the back seat of the ABC station wagon. And I learned how a quick, creative editor like Davey Moore (still, as I write, editing news for the ABC in Sydney) could add to the work you brought in from the road. I’d loved radio all my life, first as a listener, then a practitioner, but at Nationwide I began learning one of the great pleasures of television: collaboration. Many of my most rewarding experiences in journalism have come from the ideas of others, either in planning before a shoot or during filming. Working with creative, cooperative crews can be the ultimate demonstration as a reporter of how, with an open mind, you can make a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.
Towards the end of 1979, I was lent to Four Corners for a couple of stories: one on computer learning in schools, another on the economics of the pop music industry. The program at that time was staffed by very senior journalists like Jim Downes and Peter Ross, both of whom were still doing fine work: I remember a vivid piece by Jim about eucalyptus dieback, for instance, and a fine film about racism against Asian immigrants by Peter. But there was also a sense that the program was getting old and tired, not helped by the fact that another reporter, John Temple, a lovely man with an excellent record, had an illness which could make him fall asleep at his desk. Charles Woolley (later to become a Sixty Minutes stalwart) and I tended to feel like the token youth reporters.
Looking back, I certainly do not see myself at that age and with that track record as being ready as a film-maker or a journalist to do the kind of really hard-hitting reporting that Paul Lyneham, for instance, was practising at the time at Four Corners. But I did just well enough to survive. And when I heard that London correspondent Richard Palfreyman was returning after his three-year stint was up, I applied for the job, though with absolutely no expectation of getting it.
My prior journalism experience seems remarkably limited to me in retrospect, but on paper I had packed quite a lot in, going from cadet to Four Corners in six years. And at the interview, I had the great advantage of having no big expectations. I’ve always found that ‘not really caring’ is one of the best ways to approach a job interview. Not having your whole future invested in the interviewers’ decision gives you the freedom to relax and talk articulately about what the job is and what it could be. I had a broad range of British, African and Middle East stories to suggest: I had some ability with languages, and I was able to talk reasonably knowledgeably about international strategic and other policy areas. At any rate, a week or so later I was told that I’d been appointed.
Chapter 23
The Rule of Revolutions
ON 2 APRIL 1980, cameraman Les Seymour and I drove at high speed down the M4 from London to Bristol in Britain’s West Country. Parts of a city which had built much of its prosperity on the trade in slaves and fortified wine were on fire, after a police raid on a café in the district of St Paul’s. We arrived to find parts of the area still in flames, others charred and in ruins, and the police still facing off with groups of black and white youths. W
e filmed the action, talked to young people, found local black community leaders, attended a 3 a.m. police press conference, and I did a piece to camera on the scene. We decided we had enough for a really comprehensive story for that night’s 7 p.m. ABC news. We headed back to London, to the headquarters of the international TV newsagency Visnews, later to become known as Reuters TV. At that time, Visnews was the only satellite outlet available: the only way we had to get our footage to air within the time window before it would become ‘yesterday’s story’.
Driving back up the M4 as the sun came up, we were both so tired that I remember opening all the windows to keep awake, and that we started singing, loudly, songs like ‘Yellow Submarine’ at each other to keep from dozing off. Exhaustion was quickly replaced by fury when we arrived at the satellite station. Visnews, we were told, was having its ‘annual strike’ today, apparently a ritual event which both management and staff had just grown accustomed to as part of yearly pay and conditions negotiations. It was bitterly disappointing. We’d shot a really graphic, comprehensive and professional story, which would certainly have run prominently in the bulletin, but there was simply no way to get it back to Australia in time. That was what it was like in those pre-internet days: total dependence on an expensive, monopoly supplier of satellite communication.
But the whole experience, looking back, also functions for me as a parable of what was happening in Britain at that time. Yes, there was growing unemployment, the immigrant community faced disgraceful discrimination by often-racist police forces, and Margaret Thatcher’s government, elected under a year before, was just beginning to exert the full force of what would become known as ‘Thatcherism’. But here, too, was the reason why Thatcher had been elected in the first place: the accumulated results of two decades of alternating Conservative and Labour governments that had all been too weak to take on the excesses of the unions, preferring instead to do deals with them at what came to be known as ‘beer-and-sandwiches’ sessions with the prime minister at Number 10 Downing Street.
