In May 1977 I received a call to come to the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) office in New York for an assignment with Australia’s top television documentary program, Four Corners. Ray Martin landed an interview with James Jesus Angleton who had been head of counter intelligence at the CIA for twenty-five years, . Angleton was ready to spill the beans on the CIA’s influence in sacking Australia’s Labor Party Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam. I’d heard speculation about CIA involvement in Australian politics but here it was from the horse’s mouth, from the man who knew the back-story.
Gough Whitlam was a charismatic, ambitious and intelligent politician, He was loved by the left and hated by the right. After twenty-three years of conservative government, in 1972 he became Prime Minister. In his first days in office Whitlam pulled Australian troops out of Vietnam and reinstated the passport of renegade Australian journalist Wilfred Burtchet. Burchett was demonized by the former conservative government and a pliant Australian media because of his left-wing leanings and highly critical reporting of the Vietnam War. It was a symbol of a new era. I was to meet Wilfred Burchett in Cuba some years later.
I was in Papua New Guinea in 1972 when Whitlam was elected and for the first time in my life felt an affinity toward the political process. At last Australia was showing backbone instead of knee-bending supplication to the American bully boys. It had been “all the way with LBJ”, as Australia followed America into Vietnam in the 1960’s and it sickened me. With Whitlam’s election it seemed Australia finally might stand up. The CIA quaked as Whitlam articulately outlined a new Australian independence particularly when it came to uncovering and expelling Pine Gap, the secret American communications node smack bang in the center of the nation and where no Australian was permitted.
Whitlam was brash and outspoken in his first years but gradually altruism turned sour and realpolitik kicked in. When the money supply was halted by a bickering parliament, government ground to a halt. The 1975 Australian constitutional crisis, commonly called The Dismissal, culminated with Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s dismissal by the Queen of England’s Governor-General Sir John Kerr. Australia was part of the British Commonwealth and the queen is more than symbolic head of empire.
The queen’s Governor General appointed the Leader of the Opposition, Malcolm Fraser, as caretaker Prime Minister. It was the greatest political and constitutional crisis in Australia's history. The nation was still under the boot of the British imperium and in the pocket of America. I was disgusted. During the ABC interview Angleton outlined the web of CIA’s control. The revelations about the undermining of the Australian Labor government confirmed my worst speculations as I came of age in America.
A common allegation was the CIA influenced Kerr's decision to dismiss Whitlam. In 1966 Kerr had worked in intelligence and had joined The Association for Cultural Freedom, a conservative group funded by the CIA. Christopher Boyce was a young American employee at TRW and a CIA civilian contractor. He analyzed data gathered by satellite. Like Edward Snowdon, Boyce made public documents that revealed the CIA wanted Whitlam removed because he threatened to close US military bases in Australia. Boyce said the CIA described Sir John Kerr as "our man Kerr". These allegations were made in Parliament in 1986.
Boyce’s story became a book and a movie, “The Falcon and the Snowman”, by Robert Lindsey, a New York Times reporter. Boyce was later convicted as a spy. He was an anti-hero. The Australian journalist John Pilger called the dismissal a "coup". He alleged the CIA used the Nugan Hand Bank as a front to "set up” the Whitlam Government. Pilger alleged the bank provided slush funds to opposition parties in Australia and, with the CIA, undermined the Australian government, subverted trade unions and liaised with Governor General Kerr during the crisis. The bank was later revealed to be a handmaiden for the CIA.
Angleston was a staunch right-wing conservative who believed in American exceptionalism. He said he loved Australia and had great respect for ASIO, Australian Security and Intelligence Organization, and believed Australia to be a frontier nation. America sixty years ago. He seemed bitter and broken still smarting from his own dismissal from the CIA. he was not holding back. Angleton confirmed the narrative and Ray Martin, our reporter who later went on to host a popular, daily, national television talk show, peppered Angelton with questions in the ABC bureau on the 19th floor in the center of Manhattan in Rockefeller Center that day.
The CIA has a history of underhanded involvement in destabilizing freely elected governments and Angleton was instrumental in destabilizing socialist President Salvador Allende in a CIA sponsored coup in Chile, September 1973. His stories were mesmerizing and I pushed my Sennheiser shotgun microphone closer to gather every syllable and speech mannerism and made sure the recording levels were perfect.
Before his dismissal, Prime Minister Whitlam charged publicly that American Intelligence organizations were secretly channeling funds to politicians who supported American secret bases in Australia. Whitlam demanded an investigation by the Australian Defense Department to identify, once and for all, the real purpose of the bases.
Pine Gap was located deep in central Australia collecting data from spy satellites. The base was an essential component of the America’s spy matrix. If shut down, American surveillance would be blind. Pine Gap in central Australia near Alice Springs was off limits to Australians. The base was considered American territory. Few Australians knew it even existed until Whitlam blew the whistle.
On November 11, 1975, a few days before I was to leave Australia for America, Prime Minister Whitlam scheduled a speech in which he was to discuss the CIA and the mysterious installations in the Outback. But he never had the chance to deliver it. On that day, Governor General Sir John Kerr removed him from office. Like others in Australia, I was outraged and depressed at his dismissal. It was one reason I decided to leave Australia. I felt the bitter taste of cowardice and shame, frustration and disappointment.
We concluded the first part of the interview with Angleton in the ABC’s Rockefeller Plaza bureau in New York and a few days later flew to Washington D.C to his home in the leafy suburbs of Virginia. When we arrived he was in his garden. Angleton could easily have stepped out of the pages of a John le Carré thriller and in fact subsequent films and television series used him as their model. He was tall and thin with a pronounced stoop. His face was angular and his thick gray hair was combed backward from his broad forehead. He wore heavy black-framed eye- glasses and a cigarette held delicately between two long fingers traced the air.
As a young man he studied at Yale and as an undergraduate edited the literary magazine, Furioso, which published many of the best-known poets of the inter-war period, including William Carlos Williams, e.e. cummings and Ezra Pound. He carried on an extensive correspondence with Pound, cummings and Eliot. We sat while his wife poured tea in fine china cups. There were orchids in pots near a window.The investigative journalist, Jay Edward Epstein met Angleton and wrote of the spymaster’s fascination with orchids in a detailed diary entry. They sat together in the dining room at the Madison Hotel in Washington soon after Angleton had been fired by Director, William Colby.
“And then Angleton talked about his love of orchids explaining that it was most deceptive orchid that survived. The perpetuation of most orchids depended on them misrepresening themselves. Having no food to offer, they deceived insects to land and carry pollen to other orchids in the tribe.
“To accomplish this deception, orchids use color, shape and odor to attract insects to their pollen. Some orchids capitalize on the sexual instincts of insects. The tricocerus orchid so perfectly mimics, in three-dimensions, the underside of a female fly including the hairs and smell, that they trigger mating response from passing male flies. Seeing what it thinks is a female, the male swoops down on the orchid and attempts to have sex - a process called pseudo-copulation. The motion causes the insect to collect pollen and thus it becomes an unwitting carrier. When the fly passes another tricocerus orchid, they repeat the process, and pollinate another orchid.
“It gradually became clear that Angleton was not just talking about insects being manipulated through deception but an intelligence service being similarly duped, seduced, provoked, blinded, lured down false trails and used by an enemy.”
The term Angletonian entered the parlance as an adjective used to describe something conspiratorial, overly paranoid, bizarre, eerie or arcane.
When our interview was over we retired for a drink to review what just happened! We were in a state of mild shock. We knew we had a scoop and next day we packed the film for air express to Australia. It didn't make it.
It disappeared without a trace!
this is a test, this is a test. Looking forward to your comments. Andrew.
ReplyDeleteJames W. Douglass, author of "JFK and the Unspeakable--Why He Died And Why It Matters," accuses Angleton of masterminding and orchestrating the murder of the President. He makes a case that the government killed John Kennedy because it perceived him as "soft on communism," due to the fact that he had bypassed the State Dept. to open a back channel comm with Nikita Kruschev, and another with Fidel. In fact, Fidel Castro was meeting with JFK's envoy on the day Kennedy was shot. It's a good book, Andrew.
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