Insurgent Intellectual: Essays in Honour of Professor Desmond Ball

19. Pressing the issue

19 PRESSING THE ISSUE Hamish McDonald Sir Arthur Tange was a figure inspiring terror at the Department of Defence in his time as its secretary. As he set about incorporating three separate service ministries and sundry defence supply agencies into Defence, the leaks and outraged newspaper articles by newly retired military brass came in a steady stream. Tange’s eye for backsliders and subverters of his authority roamed ceaseless over Russell Hill and its outposts. A group of bureaucrats who took their sandwiches out onto the central lawn, under the central memorial to American help in the Second World War, were stunned when a window flew up, and Tange leaned out to order them off.1 At the same time, Tange was the chief keeper of secrets. Having been head of the External Affairs department as well, he knew them all. Through the Whitlam years he’d fought hard to persuade his Labor political masters not to blow the United States alliance before they fully understood all its ramifications. But who to trust with that information? Parliament House, lit up like an ocean liner across Lake Burley Griffin, was a ship springing leaks. The raid by Attorney-General Lionel Murphy and his Commonwealth Police on the Australian Strategic Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) headquarters in Melbourne, the leak about the Australian Secret Intelligence Service Pressing the Issue 223 (ASIS) help for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in its subversion of Allende’s left-wing government in Chile, the weaving of the Pine Gap joint intelligence base into the 1975 dismissal narrative — all had contributed to a sharp polarisation between believers and sceptics, between defenders and investigators. In its brief life, from the beginning of the 1970s to the end of the 1980s, the weekly newspaper, The National Times, was a leader of the sceptics and investigators. Its journalists and contributors including Brian Toohey, Evan Whitton, Paul Kelly, Marian Wilkinson, Andrew Clark, Bill Pinwill and Deborah Snow set out to challenge conventional wisdoms in many fields. The secret workings of defence and intelligence were natural subjects. Over the 1970s came the opening-up of the wartime Ultra/Enigma signals intelligence (SIGINT) activity, the revelations that Australia possessed its own SIGINT agency in the Defence Signals Directorate (DSD), its own external intelligence outfit inASIS, the exposure of murky CIAoperations in Southeast Asia by Alfred McCoy and others, the hardening of the Suharto regime in Indonesia, and more attention to the background of the Vietnam involvement and the changing nuclear weapons balance. As we learned on the job about these areas, desperately trying to find new and startling local angles, an academic career was starting in parallel at the Australian National University. The name Desmond Ball became increasingly quoted in stories about the above subjects. For a year, between assignments as correspondent in Jakarta and Tokyo, I worked in Sydney for the paper, and one of my first assignments was to write a profile of Tange. When I eventually walked into Tange’s office, late one Friday afternoon as the 5pm rush of bureaucrats to their weekenders got under way, it was with a great deal of nervousness. I was 30 years old. As well as being physically and psychologically imposing, Tange was surrounded with the aura of having mingled with the great and powerful for decades. He waited for the impudent presence of The National Times like a lion in its lair. As we settled down to the interview, Tange threw up a few barbs before the meeting turned into an enthralling two-hour talk about episodes of his career. One of them was a shot at Ball. “You look at an article by someone like Desmond Ball and check the footnotes, and they’re full of references to newspaper articles by Paul Kelly or Evan Whitton,” Tange grumbled. If there was sometimes a circular quality to the relationship between Des Ball and journalists, remember the context of the information flow 224 Hamish McDonald of the times. No Internet, no mobile phones, no Twitter, no blogs. There might have been the occasional thud of a manila envelope of photocopies landing on the front lawn of a Brian Toohey or Laurie Oakes, the occasional call from a nervous, anonymous person, feeding coins into a public phone booth. But generally journalists and academics working in defence and international relations worked on the outside of high walls around the most interesting and sensitive areas of...