Gough Whitlam and the CIA
Mullumbimby, 29 May 2020
The story of The Dismissal continues. Monash Uni historian Jenny Hocking has published a definitive bio of PM Gough Whitlam, and today won her High Court case to push the Australian National Archives to release letters from 1975 on the drama exchanged between then-Governor General John Kerr and the office of the British Queen aka The Palace. It is expected that these letters will further confirm that the ruling “elites” of the UK were very much involved in the plot that overthrew the Whitlam government, just as the spy agencies of the UK and USA were.
Whitlam’s antagonism toward the establishments of the UK, USA, and his own country, was to do with who should control Australia’s minerals and energy resources, what was being done behind the Australian government’s back at the US NSA-controlled Pine Gap spy satellite base near Alice Springs — and ultimately, who should control Australia. In recent years the former conservative PM Malcolm Fraser (who was the parliamentary agent of the Dismissal) reversed his pro-American position and recommended an independent Australia, as did Paul Keating, a Labor PM in the 1980s.
All three of those key issues from the 1970s are hot battlegrounds in contemporary Australian and global politics.
-PF
Coorabell, November 2014
Over the four decades since the sacking of Whitlam’s government, most commentators have dismissed the roles played by the intelligence agencies of the US and Australia. The prevailing line has been that spooks and spies were not important, not players at all really. Now we know better, now that Julian Assange and wikileaks, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and their many collaborators have pulled the green curtain away from the scheming of spies and administrations of all political stripes.
Now we know that of course the boys in the Anglo intelligence club spied on the Whitlam government, and of course they conspired amongst themselves, and as usual they employed any and all means to stop a foreign government from messing with their sponsors’ money and power.
Gough Whitlam took years to publicly acknowledge that these guys were spying on him and undermining his government. Initially, he was shocked to learn that the US NSA listened to and read the private correspondence of his ministers, and illegally withheld information downloaded at their Pine Gap base located on Australian soil. He was outraged that his tenure was terminated by the queen’s representative, and he leapt into public debate about the constitutionality of that issue. But he never directly addressed the role played in his dismissal by American spies and spymasters, men who truly believed then, as they still do, that they are the best managers the world could and should ever have.
In 1976, after Whitlam was overthrown, I went to New York and Washington in search of some of the weird characters and corporations named in the leaked documents that had undone the Labor government. I found shady operators unwilling to talk, and CIA veterans proud to declare their delight at the demise of Whitlam the “socialist”.
Gough Whitlam died last month, aged 98. The question of who or what brought him down is back on the table for Australians who care.
Here is the story I wrote in 1984 about how I saw the events of 1976 and what I learned subsequently in the USA about America’s involvement. This article was published in Mother Jones, a multiple award-winning investigative magazine based in San Francisco.