Before I Sleep (10 page)

Details of the hearing were circulated widely by the media and followed closely by the race-going public. Ted and I received high compliments from the crown prosecutor and from our inspector. But some months later there was an unexpected development. A South Australian judge, Sir Geoffrey Reed, had been appointed the first Director General of Security. At the same time, Adelaide lawyer Bernard Tuck, who was known to have worked in army intelligence during the war, had quietly sold up his practice and left town, perhaps to become one of Reed's deputies. These gentlemen also seem to have been impressed by our performance.

One evening, out of the blue, I received a telephone call.

“I don't suppose you know who I am. My name is Bernard Tuck.”

“I know who you are,” I said.

“How come?”

“Your father was the minister of the West End Mission when I used to go there.”

“Oh, that's right. Have you any idea why I'm ringing you?”

“Yes.”

“What am I ringing you about?”

“You want some good investigators.”

“How did you find that out?”

“I worked it out.”

“Well, you're the only one who's done so.”

I had no hesitation in joining the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation (ASIO). The organisation's work seemed to me to be of national importance. I received a small rise in salary and access to a motor car (I had been taught to drive by my Arab bearer on the airstrip in Mogadishu, though I never undertook a test). Mavis noted my enthusiasm and unselfishly agreed to the change even though the new job meant moving to Sydney where we had no friends or relatives. I had to leave quickly, so Mavis was left with the task of selling the house, packing the furniture and bringing the family to Sydney.

A senior officer of ASIO called recently to refresh my memory of the legal restrictions on publishing material concerning my service with that organisation, so I am forced to confine myself in this narrative to personal information.

I purchased an unsuitable house on a hill at Rockdale; it was infested with a plague of fleas. We called in the fumigators a few times, but we never completely got rid of them. The hours I had to work in Sydney were awesome: ten to twelve hours a day for six and often seven days each week, and sometimes overnight. For me it was exciting work — I was in charge of a team of field investigators. But Mavis had to locate a school for the boys and a kindergarten for Ruth. She had to find shops and walk there almost daily, supervise the homework of the boys who were now on a different school curriculum and handle my outlandish hours. On one occasion when she had been awake all night with Ruth who had the measles, I tried to get time off to give her a hand but met with no cooperation from the only other person authorised to handle my classified material. Much of my time was spent on surveillance duties. Because couples were less conspicuous than two men, our teams were mixed. I spent many long boring hours in close physical proximity to my attractive ex-WRANS teammate, keeping watch at night on various houses. Luckily Moya and I were good friends, equally dedicated to our job, and there was never any suggestion of a closer relationship. Mavis never exhibited any resentment about our pairing. Jealousy is unknown in her repertoire of emotions.

Despite my inability to help with the family responsibilities, Mavis managed to keep up with family traditions such as celebrating birthdays. She walked some miles each day to and from kindergarten with small Ruth. Mavis encouraged me late at night to build a dolls' house with scrap timber because Ruth wanted one for Christmas and there were none for sale in the shops. Ruth was delighted with what Father Christmas brought her.

ASIO's Sydney headquarters were in a disused wartime brothel, Agincourt. It was an ideal building, four stories high, built of solid sandstone and surrounded on three sides by a naval dockyard. I had been given a small team of experienced investigators, mainly ex-New South Wales police, and all former servicemen with good records. We were all about the same age. I had as my deputy Leo Carter, a former F/Lt RAAF pilot, one of the state's early police cadets and a champion boxer. There were several others of the same calibre. I was fortunate. They accepted me although my knowledge of New South Wales and its personalities was almost zero. This was my first experience as a manager of a team of adults and, in retrospect, they taught me much. They were all highly motivated, intelligent, physically fit and mature. Our task was to identify and locate the chief organiser of a wartime Russian espionage net. In the year I was in Sydney we did not succeed, but the team covered a great deal of territory exploring the limited leads we were given. I was impressed with my team's contribution, so much so that I have tended ever since to use them as a model of what can be achieved. As their leader, I had the opportunity to observe other leaders in a wide range of responsibilities. It seemed to me that I needed to discard my naive assumption that people were somehow automatically slotted into positions for which they were best suited. I had to distinguish between the position and the person.

I assessed some of the leaders as capable of carrying out the tasks assigned to them and producing valid results. In such cases, the person and the position were almost identical. But there were two other categories. These were some managers in positions for which they were incompetent and produced few if any results. Then there was one manager who was in a category all by himself: by deception, he produced invalid results. For a long while these went undetected because they were unquestioned.

In my subsequent dealings with people of managerial status I gave first priority to their personality, with its individual strengths and weaknesses. In my experience there are a number of people in public life who are “square pegs in round holes”. They have usually gained office through nepotism, through the political advantage their appointment gives their selectors, or merely through that old bugbear, “seniority”. I suppose the other big lesson I learned in Sydney was that I must be more aware of, and responsive to, the emotional needs of staff. My South Australian Police Force and Air Force days did not prepare me for the circumstances of personal stress that one or two of my staff had to face. We believed we had very little time in which to complete our task. This placed considerable pressure on us all. And, of course, no senior member of the organisation came to my aid when the Whitrods were hard-pressed and without support in Sydney.

My performance in ASIO did not go unnoticed and, in mid-1951, I was promoted to a desk position at headquarters in Melbourne. This meant another shift to an unknown city. I went ahead and purchased another unsuitable house at Moorabbin, a new Melbourne suburb. Without demur, Mavis successfully sold our house in Sydney, packed up our furniture, and brought the family to Moorabbin without assistance from me. Luckily the new job only required usual office hours, so I came home for tea at 6.00 p.m. and was off duty most weekends. We set about normalising family life for our children. We joined the local Baptist church, which we found had no youth groups, so I formed and ran a scout troop and persuaded a workmate to form a cub pack. Andrew went to one and Ian to the other. Mavis formed and ran a guide company and I persuaded another female colleague to form a brownie pack for Ruth.

Mavis arranged for the boys to attend a secondary school and found a primary school for Ruth. With yet another new school curriculum, Mavis spent time helping the boys adjust to the different requirements of their homework. In the wintry Melbourne evenings, she knitted warm pullovers. This was a skill inherited from her thrifty mother. Our family was always well-equipped with woollen gear. We found we did not share the fundamental approach of the local Baptist fellowship and made few friends there. Mostly our friends were parents of scouts or guides, and their children often spent some time at our house.

On weekends, the Whitrods would tour Melbourne beaches, occasionally swimming or exploring the teatree fringes of the sand dunes. Mavis did her best to develop a flower garden on the swampy land I had bought, and I tried with dismal results to do the same with vegetables. With Mavis's encouragement, I built a fowlhouse for some chooks, which gave us enough fresh eggs for family breakfasts.

6
Canberra, first time

(1953-1969)

I
N 1953 I was invited to apply for the job of director for the Commonwealth Investigation Service (CIS) in Canberra by ASIO's new director, Brigadier Charles Spry. He thought I might be able to facilitate greater cooperation between the two organisations. At the time there was a lot of ill-feeling between them. The post offered me an opportunity to have my own command and gave me freedom to introduce modifications and new ideas into an organisation badly run down and widely regarded as incompetent. During the war, the CIS was Australia's equivalent of MI5 and regularly exchanged information with the British and Americans. But both these countries came to regard the CIS as inefficient and unreliable. When the British began planning to use the Australian desert for nuclear weapon and missile tests, it was thought that Australia should have an enhanced security organisation. Rather than attempting to upgrade the CIS, ASIO had been formed and given the CIS's intelligence role along with all its interesting subversive activity files.

This bypassing had left bitter feelings in the gutted remains of the CIS, especially since Robert Wake, one of the CIS seniors, had abandoned them to become a top dog at ASIO. For most of the senior officers left in the CIS, this was added injury for they did not trust him. They considered Wake to have been a disloyal supplier of information to Dr Evatt when he was shadow attorney-general in the federal Parliament. Many people wondered — and some no doubt still do — how Wake came to be selected for this very important appointment in ASIO, especially since the army top brass also regarded him as having a murky past.

When I was in ASIO, I read many of the old CIS files. I concluded that the American and British envoys had been right in urging the prime minister to create another counter-intelligence body (that is, if the rumours about CIS's unreliability were correct). Rumour had it that the creation of ASIO was insisted upon by the British and Americans as the price for remaining in “The Club” and continuing to share classified information. The CIS files I read contained information of doubtful veracity by ASIO standards. Most of it had been collected by untrained fourth division clerical assistants, who were supervised by office clerks. The officers in charge of each state office also came from this background of clerical experience and often clung to wartime honorary ranks. With their restricted work record, it is understandable that their knowledge of the legal system was minimal. If these state chiefs needed legal advice, their practice was to seek help from the state offices of the Commonwealth crown solicitor. Their better staff members — and some were very good — had been poached by ASIO. Whenever any really serious inquiry was necessary, the CIS called in two seconded detective sergeants from the New South Wales police. For a number of reasons, it suited many Commonwealth departments to have this investigative service of mediocre competency available to them.

Senior Commonwealth public servants could call on the CIS for help if there were any incidents of theft or fraud by their own staff or by their clients. When these senior bureaucrats eventually received a report, they could decide for themselves what they would do about it. If they had initially notified the police, they would have lost control over the result of the investigation. A decision to prosecute might have been taken even though the bureaucrats thought inaction to be a more appropriate response. The lack of skilled investigation by the CIS was held to be secondary to the possibility of downplaying a report if it reflected adversely on departmental management. As well as the CIS, many Commonwealth departments, such as Customs, the Postmaster General's Department and Supply, had their own internal inquiry units. These were again staffed by fourth division employees and supervised by untrained clerks. There was little coordination among them, and it was only if things proved difficult that they would seek assistance from the state police.

There were a number of factors operating against my being able to improve the efficiency and reputation of the CIS. I could not arrange the wholesale dismissal of permanent public servants merely because they did not measure up to my standards and I could not replace their supervisors for the same reason. The CIS had no independent mandate that would enable me to act on my own initiative; we had to wait until it suited another department to utilise our services. Life at the CIS proved to be challenging, exhausting and, too seldom, rewarding. In the postwar years, the Commonwealth was expanding into new fields and territories and I didn't relish the passive, waiting-to-be-called approach. I thought that there ought to be immediate opportunities for the CIS to develop as an independent investigative body.

It took me a little time to recognise the motivations and the power of those permanent heads of department known as the Seven Gnomes. These bureaucrats ruled their separate and independent Australia-wide fiefdoms from Canberra. They had become well-ensconced during the war, met regularly for lunch and knew far more about their departments than their parliamentary bosses ever did. They guarded their domains fiercely and resisted any other empire building, especially by a young branch head from outside the service.

I needed to do some thinking and there was a scarcity of sympathetic counsellors with whom to discuss my ideas. I was not a member of the Royal Canberra Golf Club, nor did I play bowls at the Forrest greens. I was not yet a member of the Commonwealth Club where interdepartmental matters were resolved over long lunches by the key players. I had no Melbourne or Sydney school ties with useful contacts. I had no tertiary qualifications. I attended a small non-conformist chapel and not St John's or the Manuka Catholic Cathedral. I was not even a Rotarian. My highest police rank had been detective constable. My RAAF experience was irrelevant because most senior Canberrans had spent the war in Essential Services far from danger, and clearly considered those who fought to have been naive.

Every Commonwealth public service officer was aware that the CIS had been rejected for its incompetency, and as a consequence they regarded me not as a saviour but as an undertaker. I was now a branch head in the Attorney-General's Department which was itself run by a long-time academic lawyer, Professor Ken Bailey. He and I got on well together but, like all lawyers, he preferred the status quo, always sought a precedent for any of his decisions and preferred caution to courage. He selected a financial support section which reflected just those attitudes. This meant that any proposals of mine for extending activities or increasing expenditure automatically faced a barrier of firm opposition. I had to base such proposals on specific ministerial or Cabinet directives and so relieve the department of any responsibility. I noted that branch heads in other departments operated in a much more financially relaxed climate, especially those who were able to offset costs by some form of revenue raising. I never once exceeded my budget allocation, a rare achievement in Canberra where some departments and branches deliberately exceed theirs to justify an increase in the following year.

We nicknamed the assistant secretary (Administration) “Negative Neil” because of his automatic rejections or long deferrals of approval. Bailey always insisted upon the assistant secretary's consent before he would himself sign as head of the department. Those of my recommendations which did survive this frustrating procedure had to wait many months before they could be implemented. This problem arose partly because I had no lobby group in the community to back me up by pressuring the federal government or individual members of it to endorse my moves. Nobody really cared what happened to the CIS or its uniformed section, the Peace Officer Guard (POG), and any proposals of mine were suspect if they were likely to intrude upon anyone else's territory.

The leadership of the POG Association was unable to share my vision of a national law enforcement organisation which included its members — they were so demoralised; such a future appeared to be a fantasy land to them. I understood their response. The POG was created by the then attorney-general, Billy Hughes, in 1917. Hughes had failed to persuade the Queensland police to arrest some demonstrators at Warwick Station. In frustration he formed a small Commonwealth police force to enforce federal laws, but had called them peace officers rather than police officers in an attempt to placate the states. The POG was given the same powers to arrest and detain as the ordinary police of whatever state they happened to be in. Towards the end of the war there were about five-thousand POG officers throughout Australia. They were almost completely untrained and were looked down upon by their state colleagues. The POG was also treated as second class by its own supervisors. And those supervisors were still in place in the CIS.

The CIS investigators didn't hold a much higher opinion of my vision of an efficient national police force. Their industrial representation was provided by a central union which covered all fourth division employees of the Commonwealth Public Service, a huge category which included everyone employed by the Commonwealth who hadn't matriculated. The union was reluctant to support moves which might be to the detriment of its other members in the various departments and agencies. I felt very much alone in seeking to introduce major changes in such a hostile environment — an environment strange to me politically and geographically. If I had been over forty years of age instead of under, I doubt that I would have persevered when I realised the odds against my success.

But things changed, and the first change was probably the result of the prime minister's wife's insistence that her husband be provided with adequate protection from cranks and other would-be assassins. Mr Menzies had already received death threats. The leader of the opposition, Arthur Calwell, had been shot at. Many of the postwar migrants to Australia came from cultures with a rich history of political assassination. When in England, Mrs Menzies had been impressed by the 24-hour-a-day escort provided by Scodand Yard. Unable to persuade the prime minister to ask for greater protection in Australia, Mrs Menzies went to the president of the Senate. The president instructed me to make the necessary arrangements despite the expected lack of cooperation from the prime minister. I really wasn't prepared for this assignment, but I accepted it and started to look for a suitable bodyguard.

I was not very impressed with the calibre of my outdoor CIS staff. I finally decided on a comparatively new member of the POG. This was Howard Farnsworth, a retired detective sergeant from an English county force who well understood the nuances and significance of such escort duties. Howard's authorised but discreet presence in the outer office of the prime minister at Parliament House, especially when the prime minister indulged in quiet whiskies late at night with his cronies, began our crawl back to respectability. Howard handled visitors to the prime minister with respect while at the same time thoroughly checking their credentials. He never stepped out of line and proved to be a useful adjunct to the prime minister's staff. Somehow he managed to remain on-side with the journalists. Slowly, Menzies began to accept the new level of cover.

A second step towards recovering the CIS reputation was the royal tour of 1954. Some preliminary Commonwealth planning occurred under the chairmanship of Alan Brown, one of the Gnomes and head of the Prime Minister's Department. In these early plans, the CIS was given a very minor role. Then I arranged to be appointed to the committee as security adviser. This was a new development in Canberra thinking and required some diplomatic approaches. I used the Farnsworth arrangement with the prime minister, and my police and ASIO qualifications to justify it. I ensured that, in the new handbook for circulation to all state governments, it was noted clearly that the Queen and the Duke were Commonwealth guests. This had not been made obvious in earlier documents. The direct implication was that the Australian government had the overriding responsibility for the success of the tour, and this included the physical well-being of our guests. In the preliminary plans it had been left largely to the states to make protective arrangements, but now I travelled with the Commonwealth committee members to all states “to coordinate arrangements between the Commonwealth authorities and the states”.

The state police forces were upset, but my plan had the backing of the Commonwealth. It was helpful that the Commonwealth, amongst other things, was providing all royal tour transport: the aircraft, cars, vessels and communication. Arrangements for the large party of overseas press travelling with the royals were also a Commonwealth task. Still, the states resisted this encroachment on their traditional responsibilities and it took some delicate balancing over a number of royal tours for me to be accepted as the principal adviser. I took a fair battering from the state officers in the meantime, for police are touchy about trespassers in their patch. One of my most profitable moves was to appoint one of my inspectors as a liaison officer with the overseas press. I noted that the palace kept a close eye on articles in the British and other overseas papers, and amongst themselves would mention any that were favourable or critical. I kept close company with the senior household staff, and got on well with them. I gained the impression that the royals, too, were interested in the home press.

This liaison arrangement had not occurred elsewhere. The inspector tactfully made access for the overseas journalists much easier, and speeded their movements through crowded venues. The tone of the articles in the British press became more favourable, both to the royals and to Australia generally. The household gave us credit for this and later the inspector and I were presented with pewter tankards by the overseas press “in recognition of our assistance”. This was apparently a reversal of their treatment by police elsewhere. The palace let it be known that they approved of my innovation.

I accepted personal responsibility for the safety of the royals and went everywhere with them. Prince Philip would frequently dash off on some unofficial activity if he had free time, often accompanied only by his private secretary, his personal detective and me. The Prince discovered that I shared his interest in wading birds, and whenever an opportunity presented itself, he would get me to drive him to some isolated spot to photograph Australian migratory waders. On one occasion his equerry rang me at a Perth hotel at midnight asking me to pick up Prince Philip at 5.00 a.m. for three hours' birdwatching. I did not know Perth. I rang the secretary of the state Ornithological Society, who was unknown to me and then in bed, and had trouble convincing him that I was not making a hoax call. I accepted his advice to go to Pelican Point some miles up the river, arranged for a car to call for me at 1.00 a.m., found my way to this destination, made a quick security check, returned to my hotel, had a shave, picked up the Prince and took him to Pelican Point where he had to wait for thirty minutes for the tide to turn.