Rethinking Cold War History

Author(s): David McKnight

Source: Labour History , Nov., 2008, No. 95 (Nov., 2008), pp. 185-196
Published by: Liverpool University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27516316

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 Rethinking Cold War History

David McKnight*
Historians have rethought some of the prevailing assumptions employed in writing about
the Cold War in Australia. Until recently, the history of the Cold War in Australia was
often written with too little detachment and skepticism toward the Left, and with a failure
of scholarly empathy toward the claims of the anti-Communist Right. The opening of new
archival and intelligence sources (such as the 'Venona' papers) is one reason for the shift in
the field. Another is a reassessment of the link between the USSR and the Communist Party
of Australia (CPA), that leads to questions about the CPA's dogmatic pro-Soviet stance, and
to what degree this was partly responsible for its defeats, rather than simply victimisation.
New archival sources establish that some clandestine political activity was undertaken,
including espionage and that Soviet funds were given to the CPA over a long period. Not
every historian, however, has embraced this new evidence. The present article critiques recent
contributions by Cain and Hocking, suggesting that discussion of political fundamentalism
on the Left and the security response to it is vital if Cold War history is to be understood and
made relevant to discussions of contemporary terrorism.

The field of Cold War history in Australia has undergone a major shift in
interpretation. This has led to less partisan accounts of several events which had
previously been the site of significant differences between historians of the Left
and Right. This shift confirms Deery's earlier view of the susceptibility of the
field to shifting interpretations and his argument that 'the history of communism
and anti-communism [in Australia] is being rewritten'.1 Deery also predicted that
some controversies from this period would continue for many years. This article
discusses one such area whereby the link between the Communist Party of Australia
(CPA) and the Soviet Union is subject to differing interpretation. These continuing
differences now mainly occur among historians sympathetic to the Left and the
labour movement, rather than the older binary between this group and those more
sympathetic to the anti-Communist cause.
In part, this shift is a consequence of the opening of new archival sources
following the collapse of the Soviet Union and its East European satellites. This
initially meant the opening of the Communist International records at the Russian
State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI) which in turn prompted the
opening of the archives of the US National Security Agency including the results
of the US-UK decoding operation of Soviet foreign activities (the 'Venona' files).2
Combined with the increasingly liberal release policy of security archives by the
National Archives of Australia (NAA), these resources have created the basis for a
rethinking of the interpretative frameworks of Cold War history. Among the notable
works indicating this interpretative shift are those by Lowe, Ball and Horner, along
with other contributions from Deery and McKnight.3
This shift began in the early 1980s when historians gained access to security
archives under the new Archives Act 1983. The first substantial study was Marine's
detailed 1987 account of the Petrov Royal Commission.4 Manne concluded that
the Petrovs as well as intelligence officers were truthful witnesses; that Vladimir

185

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 Labour History Number 95 November 2008

Petrov's defection had not been deliberately timed by the Menzies government
for electoral benefit and that the Royal Commission was right in naming a leading
CPA member, Walter Clayton, as a conduit for documents from the Department of
External Affairs to Soviet intelligence. Manne's account was assessed in terms of the
partisanship which saturated the writing of Cold War history in 1987. One of the
reviews of his revisionist account described it as 'a quality hatchet job' which was
'seriously flawed'.5 The reviewer charged that Manne had trusted sources which he
should not have, including the newly released archives of the Australian Security
Intelligence Organization (ASIO). There was 'abundant historical evidence that
shows security services to be great deceivers'. In arguing this, the reviewer expressed
a strong belief in an overarching interpretive truth which could not be contradicted
by mere empirical evidence.
Since then there has been something of a paradigm shift in the historiography of
the Cold War. Today, Manne's general findings are not seriously challenged by most
historians of the Cold War, indicating the distance of the shift. For example, Lowe
situates the Venona decoding as one of the keys to the creation of ASIO and to fuelling
Menzies' anti-communism, while acknowledging that the Petrov Royal Commission
was politically useful for Menzies.6 In the second volume of his biography of Menzies,
Martin acknowledges the usefulness of the Petrov inquiry to Menzies' election
prospects while not regarding it as decisive and acknowledging the substantial
espionage matters before the inquiry.7 In Crusade or Conspiracy Duncan argues that
communists were willing agents of 'the most demonic apparatus in history' yet most
were driven by 'a desire for a more just social order'. Duncan adds that the 'threat
from communism was real' but 'at times absurdly exaggerated' by Santamaria.8
The recent release of much of the private correspondence of B.A. Santamaria will
provide resources for further less partisan accounts of the clash between the CPA
and the anti-communist Catholic forces around Santamaria.9
In this article I will examine three areas of continuing debate, all of which centre
on the CPA which formed the hub of the Australian Left during the Cold War in
a way that today is hard to imagine. All relate in one way or another to the close
relationship between the CPA and the Soviet Union. The first concerns the degree
to which the CPA was the victim of anti-Communist political forces as opposed to
being the author of its own misfortunes. The second concerns the debate over the
whether CPA members spied for the Soviet Union and, if so, the historiographical
consequences of this. The third concerns particular questions of financial subsidies
during the Cold War and the implications of the use of secret members in politics.

The 1959 Peace Congress: Victims or Agents?

The first area of debate concerns the degree to which government-inspired
McCarthyism was to blame for the decline and isolation of the CPA and the causes
it supported. One important account by McLaren of a key event in the Cold War
in Australia is a good example of the interpretive shift which is underway.10 The
article discusses the 1959 Peace Congress and in many ways it is a model for the new
appreciation of the clash between communism and anti-communism.
The Congress for Peace and Disarmament held in Melbourne in 1959 was a
significant political event of its time and aimed to unite the Left and broader forces
around a campaign against nuclear weapons. In the eyes of its participants and of

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McKnight Rethinking Cold War History
1

the historians who follow them, the tough political attack launched on the Peace
Congress was the quintessence of the Right's Cold War. The attack came from the
Liberal-Country Party government, which denounced the Congress as a communist
front and from the anti-Communist Australian Congress for Cultural Freedom
whose members attended the Congress to criticize the actions of the Soviet Union.
Unusually, ASIO Director General, Charles Spry, personally approached one of the
Congress's more respectable sponsors, Professor Alan Stout, and convinced him
to withdraw his sponsorship.11 More covertly, ASIO launched a major 'exposure
operation' using its contacts in the press, in the RSL and overseas to expose the
Congress as a 'communist front'.12
Put this way, the events around the Congress fit an interpretation which dominates
historical writing on the Cold War. This interpretation is exemplified by an account
of the Congress by Saunders and Summy which is subject to criticism by McLaren.13
The strength of McLaren's account of the Peace Congress is that it demonstrates that
the Communist Party and the people and organisations which it strongly influenced,
were both authors of their own fate, as well as victims of a campaign sponsored
by the Government and its security agency. The Congress was held three years
after the brutal repression of the 1956 revolt in Hungary. This repression included
the execution of seven writers and the jailing of 25 others. The Congress itself had
a session in which artists and writers were expected to express their support for
peace. At this session a broad group of critics, which included centre figures from the
Australian Labor Party (ALP) such as Barry Jones and anti-Communists like Richard
Krygier of the Congress of Cultural Freedom, proposed what amounted to a test of
legitimacy of the Congress in the form of resolutions condemning the suppression
of free speech anywhere it occurred (a clear reference to Hungary). In the event,
the CPA stymied criticism of the Soviet Union at the Peace Congress. Though the
Congress argued that it aimed to build a broad consensus around peace 'its refusal
to accept any criticism of the Soviet Union led only to the emergence of new lines
of division on the left', argued McLaren.14 The CPA was able to do this through its
direct and indirect preponderance over the role played by the Left of the ALP and
over a group of peace-oriented clergy. The CPA's unbending pro-Soviet stance thus
helped establish the very point their opponents wished to make.
Was the CPA obliged to accept this test of legitimacy? Given its vaunted aim of
building a broad movement for peace, I believe it was. But given its deeper ideological
framework in which the USA was always the enemy of peace and the USSR was
always the bulwark of peace, it was a test the CPA could only fail. This was because
the CPA placed its rosy estimation of the USSR above the needs of building the peace
movement in partnership with those who did not share this estimation. The partial
and immediate political goals of broadening the peace movement were subordinated
to its revolutionary strategy built on a world-vision of Soviet-oriented Marxism.
The CPA's intransigence at the Peace Congress on the question of the USSR
was self-defeating. As McLaren says: 'In their anxiety to preserve unity, and their
consequent refusal to face awkward truths about the nature of the Soviet bloc's
purported commitment to peace and freedom, the Congress majority failed to
build a new alliance on the left'.15 McLaren argues that the consequences of such
intransigence contributed both to the isolation of left forces within the Victorian
Labor Party and to keeping Labor out of office locally and nationally. In terms of

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 Labour History Number 95 November 2008

the CPA it provided evidence to its critics that the peace movement was indeed a
'communist front'.
Interpreting the CPA's actions at that Congress touches on one of the central
problems which face historians of the Cold War in Australia and elsewhere. While
the CPA was subject to a gamut of overt and covert repression by the government,
its decline and isolation was also due to its dogmatic allegiance to the Soviet Union
and its refusal (until 1968) to act independently of Soviet interests.

Ignoring the Evidence

McLaren's account of the Peace Congress illustrates the kind of detached, non
partisan history which is needed to make better sense of the Cold War. McLaren's
account however, did not involve access to any new evidence but rather involved a
re-interpretation of widely known facts about the peace movement and the CPA.
A different kind of history of the Cold War is reflected in Hocking's book Terror
Laws, which reflects the second area of continuing debate.16 Hocking is concerned
to establish continuity between the counter subversion organisations of the state
established in the first half of the twentieth century with the modern ASIO. The latter
is one of Hocking's main targets in this book, which attacks the current legal response
to Islamic terrorism. What is remarkable about this account is that it entirely and
systematically avoids the vast body of new evidence about ASIO and the Cold War
which has emerged since the opening of Australian security archives in the 1980s,
the Soviet archives in 1990s and the release of the 'Venona decrypts' in 1995-97.
All of these sources provide evidence that a consistent part of the Soviet espionage
effort against the US, UK and Australia was carried out through the medium of the
local Communist parties. From the late 1940s, and to varying degrees, the US, British
and Australian governments were aware of, and alarmed about, Soviet espionage.
This formed one of their key justifications for repressive measures and 'spy scares'
in Western democracies. To acknowledge this does not settle all questions around
the Cold War, nor does it justify anti-communism, but it provides vital information
which no account of the period can now ignore.
Rather than attempting to deal with this material and the debate it has engendered,
Hocking simply does not discuss it. It is as if this information does not exist. Instead
she uses accounts such as Whitlam and Stubbs' 1974 book Nest of Traitors, and the
statements of Evatt's secretary of External Affairs, Dr John Burton, both of which
reflect various conspiracy theories developed and published long before access
to archives of any sort, overseas or local, became possible.17 These accounts were
understandable in their time and in the absence of such sources. Hocking reproduces
Whitlam and Stubbs' suggestion that no information was passed to the Russians and
that documents presented to the Royal Commission on Espionage were probably
forged by ASIO and/or Petrov. Elsewhere, Soviet espionage in Australia is referred
to as a 'persistent accusation' and 'allegations' with the inference that these were
fanciful.18 Yet it turns out that the allegations of forgery were fanciful and those
of espionage were well founded. Hocking's conclusion that 'Petrov's defection ...
was an archetypal case of the political use of the domestic security organisation'
reduces the defection and the subsequent Royal Commission on Espionage to
mere politics. Both were politically useful to the Menzies government but to say
that these consequences somehow explain the causes of the events is to reverse

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McKnight Rethinking Cold War History 189

cause and effect. It is hard to see how Hocking could have concluded this given the
secondary literature available for many years before her book was published.19 The
explanation appears to be that she sees ASIO as predominantly a counter-subversion
organisation in order to make points about contemporary security and terrorism
issues. But the weight of the evidence shows that its original purpose and one of
its main preoccupations for the first 20 years was to counter espionage. Given that
this was originally connected to some members of the CPA, it is hardly surprising
that surveillance of CPA members was re-doubled, quite apart from the pre-existing
tradition of surveillance before World War II.

The CPA and Espionage

In order to make sense of the key events of the Cold War - the foundation of ASIO
in 1949, the attempt to ban the CPA in 1950-51, the Petrov Royal Commission in
1954-55, and the ill-fated leadership of the Labor Party by Dr Evatt - it is necessary
to understand what was revealed by the Venona decoding operation carried out by
American and British intelligence from 1943 to 1980. The Venona material includes
more than 200 Moscow-Canberra cables which demonstrate that Soviet intelligence
had a sustained presence in Australia from the opening of diplomatic relations in 1943;
that it obtained British defence documents shared with the Australian government;
and that it targeted left-wing Australians and members of the Communist Party of
Australia as potential agents with a particular interest in scientists. The Moscow
Canberra cables also go a long way to establishing the reliability of the testimony
from two Soviet defectors, Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov, who were at the centre of
the Royal Commission on Espionage.20
Briefly, the Venona cables revealed that in September 1945 the local Soviet
intelligence chief, Makarov, found that a leading CPA member, Walter Clayton, was
in contact with two officers of the Department of External Affairs, Dr Ian Milner
and James Hill.21 In a long cable of 29 September Makarov reported to Moscow that
Clayton had visited Canberra and had discussions with Milner and Hill and that Hill
gave him copies of cables from the British Foreign Office and an Australian report
on Europe which contained further secret British material.
The most valuable material which Clayton later obtained for Makarov were two
documents prepared for the British War Cabinet by the Post-Hostilities Planning
staff.22 The decoded cables describe how the Russians photographed these and
returned them.23 Prior to this, Clayton's contacts passed on British cables and secret
information on the Argentine government, on Poland and events in Bulgaria.24 As
well, the Russians seem to have been given a number of Australian and British
communications on the course of diplomatic negotiations over the Netherlands East
Indies (Indonesia).25 Given that the decoded Soviet cables represent only a smattering
of the intelligence communications between the Canberra residency and Moscow, it
is likely that far more material was given to the Russians by Australian contacts.
The decoded cables lend weight to the theory that Milner and Hill knew that the
material was meant for the Russians and not just the CPA- and that what they were
doing was dangerous. At one point in 1946 Clayton discussed the events in Canada
where a Royal Commission was being held into Soviet espionage following the
defection of Igor Gouzenko. In relation to this, Clayton reported 'that his friends in
the 'Nook' [Department of External Affairs] are also in good spirits and are behaving

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 Labour History Number 95 November 2008

with great caution. They have recently learnt that a certain Captain Mitchell is
working in the Department as a representative of counter intelligence'.26
This kind of activity is a far cry from most historical accounts of the Communist
Party and the Cold War in which the CPA appears only as the victim of legal
repression and political hysteria. It is no doubt embarrassing to those who have held
a simple binary view in which the Left's actions are justified and the anti-Communist
Right has no legitimate basis for their beliefs.

Absurd and Outlandish Claims

One attempt to integrate knowledge from the Venona decoding operation is contained
in a 2000 article by Cain.27 Cain is associated with the interpretation of the Cold War
which sees the Royal Commission on Espionage as an elaborate political stunt to
destroy the Labor Party and Dr Evatt. Petrov, he suggested in 1994, was 'planted'
by the KGB on ASIO. The documents which Petrov brought when he defected, Cain
says, are 'absurd' and 'outlandish' and it was 'quite impossible to take the contents
and their instructions seriously'.28
Cain's suggestion of forgery on a grand scale allied with a KGB plot to destroy
Dr Evatt was made before the release of the Venona material in the mid-1990s. Yet,
in his 2000 article which sets out to discuss the ramifications of Venona, Cain's
interpretation has changed little. Cain appears to accept that the local link man
between Soviet intelligence and the External Affairs officers was Walter Clayton.
Yet for reasons that are unexplained Cain accepts Clayton's explanations for his
activities, arguing that:

Clayton collected information giving insights into public policy issues

that might be passed on by those engaged in scientific research, foreign
affairs, architecture or journalism. Much was of a general nature and
Clayton passed it to the Soviets, although those providing it may not
have known that it would be put to this use.29

The people who were described innocuously 'engaged in' foreign affairs were
Ian Milner and Jim Hill. What they passed to Clayton were highly classified post
war planning documents. Moreover, they did so in conditions of strictest secrecy,
taking 'great caution' when allegations of espionage arose in Canada and being
watchful of counter-espionage measures, as Clayton reported. None of this detail
is mentioned or discussed by Cain. Indeed he asserts one of the most contentious
claims of the Cold War: that Menzies planned the defection 'to coincide with the
general election to ensure his return to office' and that the defection and Royal
Commission Ted to Menzies's [sic] government being re-elected'.30 But no evidence
is advanced to support this.
The curious aspect of the Cain assessment of these Cold War espionage allegations
is that he simply avoids discussing any empirical evidence which does not suit this
interpretation. At one point Cain accepts that 'a spying operation' was detected
by the Venona operation yet this is precisely what Petrov said and what the Royal
Commission into his defection concluded.
One of the most striking things about the new material from the Venona decoding
is that it reinforced the testimony of the Petrovs and of the authenticity of their
documents. For example, their documents mentioned several individual Australians

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McKnight Rethinking Cold War History 191

by code name (for example 'Sestra', 'Ben', 'Podruga') and in the decoded Soviet
cables, released 40 years later from an entirely different source, these names also
appear.31 But rather than confirmation, this duplication is disregarded and Cain
repeats, without any evidence, that 'serious questions hang over the authenticity of
these [Petrov's] documents'.32 Strangely, Cain is prepared to accept that Hill passed
documents to the Soviets but not Milner. Yet both are shown by the Venona material
to have met Clayton clandestinely and given information to him. Clayton was then
tasked by a Soviet intelligence officer to keep in touch with them.
Like Hocking, Cain does not engage with the key literature on Venona and
Australia and simply ignores, rather than debates, accounts that disagree with his
interpretation.33 Like Hocking, he reverses cause and effect: the anti-communists
benefited from the Petrov Affair, therefore its purpose and meaning was as, Hocking
says 'an archetypal case of the political use of the domestic security organization'. Or,
as Cain asserts in a further recent contribution to the debate: 'Although the Venona
operation was designed as an anti-Soviet intelligence operation it gradually took on
the characteristics of an anti-Australian and anti-Evatt operation'.34 This operation,
he said, was because of Evatt's preference for an independent foreign policy. Spy
scares and the rise of anti-communism certainly did damage the possibility of a more
independent foreign policy, but this was not 'designed'. To claim this is to enter the
realms of conspiracy. Evatt's own response to the defection was bizarre. As Maher
points out it included his acceptance that one of Petrov's documents was authentic
and written by a member of his own staff, while claiming other documents were
forgeries.35 All of this was part of the self-inflicted disaster that engulfed Labor
during and after the Royal Commission.

Was it Really Espionage?

An area of continuing debate within the broad acceptance that several CPA members
provided highly classified documents to the Russians concerns whether such
behaviour actually constituted espionage. For instance, in contrast to Cain's view of
the Venona material, Louis accepts that Venona 'dispels any lingering notion that the
spy hunt and the Petrov Royal Commission were baseless frame ups' but then adds
the rider 'but Venona provides no real proof of a spy ring in any ordinary sense of the
word'.36 A close study of the decoded cables shows that what emerged in Australia
was indeed not a spy ring in the tradition of Philby, Burgess and Maclean, nor even
an elaborate network like that established to convey information on the atomic bomb
from Los Alamos. Rather, we have a network originally set up for domestic political
purposes by the CPA. At the time he first made contact with a Soviet intelligence
agent, Clayton had been the principal organiser of the illegal apparatus which the
CPA operated during its banning from June 1940 to December 1942. His contacts
among middle-class CPA members whose sensitive positions precluded open party
membership occurred during this experience. The cables show these contacts were
discovered by Makarov in an almost haphazard way and over a period of time. This
network of contacts for the domestic purposes of the CPA was then turned to ends
set by KGB headquarters in Moscow.
In the decoded cables Clayton appears initially as a subject of interest because
he has mentioned the CPA's contact with a sympathetic officer of the Security
Service to Tass correspondent Nosov, a 'collaborator' or agent for Makarov.37 At a

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 Labour History Number 95 November 2008

regular meeting with Nosov, Clayton agreed to introduce Nosov to this 'worker of
the counter-intelligence'. The counter-intelligence worker was Alfred Hughes, a
police officer who had joined the wartime Security Service. Hughes specialised in
surveillance of left-wing organisations, a subject with which he was quite familiar
given that he himself was either a member or supporter of the CPA. In 1943, it
emerged later, he had arranged for Clayton to see his own security file, which
led to the unmasking of a security agent within the CPA.38 Prior to this arousal of
interest, Clayton's name was given in plain text in the cables and he was evidently
not regarded as someone to whom it was worth allocating a codename. Sometime
between March and April 1945, Russian intelligence assigned him a codename,
'Klod' (Claude). In May 1945, Makarov offered Clayton ?15

on the plausible pretext of compensating him for his personal efforts and
the expenditure which he incurs when he meets people on assignment of
ours. At first CLAUDE was somewhat taken aback and he declared that
he didn't know how to proceed in such a situation, for he had always
considered it his duty to help our country ... The money was handed over
at the end of the conversation, C [Klod] was also told that the money was
intended for him personally and [that] no one should know of it.39

At this point a loose set of contacts for obtaining political information for local
purposes started to gather classified government documents to pass on to another
country. Together with their reaction (mentioned above) to the Canadian Royal
Commission into espionage, these events make it clear that the CPA's sources had
become an espionage network.

'Moscow Gold'

The third area for continuing historiographical discussion on Cold War history
concerns some elements which emerged from the Petrov Affair and associated
matters. The first of these relates to the persistent claim during the Cold War that both
anti-communists and communists accepted money from their overseas supporters
and worked with intelligence agencies. One instance of this was revealed in 1967
when the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was shown to have provided large sums
for the Congress for Cultural Freedom.40 Other links between anti-communists in
the Labor Party and ASIO have also been demonstrated.41
Another instance was when Soviet financial support was given to communist
parties in various parts of the world up until the 1980s. In the Petrov Royal
Commission, Petrov claimed that he handed over US$25,000 to the general secretary
of the CPA, Lance Sharkey. But Petrov's evidence was discredited since he claimed
that the money was in denominations of US$25 bills, when no such note had ever
been printed. Moreover, he claimed the transaction had occurred on a date which
was quite impossible. These errors were seized on to discredit not just his evidence
of 'Moscow Gold' but all his other evidence.
Based on Comintern archives and Australian security sources, Macintyre
acknowledged that the CPA received Soviet funding before World War II.42 Other
Soviet archives show this funding continued after World War II. In 1998 the Courier
Mail newspaper unearthed Soviet documents which suggest that US$25,000 was given
to the CPA in 1953 and about US$168,000 in 1961. Later inquiries by the newspaper

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McKnight Rethinking Cold War History
1

showed a receipt for $25,000 signed by Lance Sharkey for the 'purchase of wool' in
1953. This was probably the money about which Petrov gave his garbled account.43
Soviet subsidies to some communist parties continued into the 1980s. The Italian
Communist Party, thought to be quite independent from Moscow, received around
five million dollars from the 'International Assistance Fund' of the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1973 while the Communist Party of the USA
(CPUSA) received $1.5 million that same year.44 As late as 1988, $3 million was paid
to the CPUSA. In 1991 the former treasurer of the British Communist Party said that
after Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) membership collapsed in 1956, the
Russians provided between one and two million pounds over the next 20 years.45 A
recent scholarly history of the British Communist Party shows how early subsidies
to the CPGB were destructive and makes the additional point that many unpaid
Labour Members of Parliament were also dependent on wealthy British backers.46
In 1992 when I asked former CPA leader Laurie Aarons whether he thought
that Petrov had actually given money to the CPA, he replied: 'It could have been
possible. It wouldn't upset me greatly'.47 He also told his brother and fellow CPA
leader Eric Aarons, of an incident in 1970 when he (Laurie Aarons) was preparing
a critical speech toward the Soviet Union. At a private meeting in Rome, one of
the leaders of the Italian Communist Party, Giancarlo Pajetta, suggested he should
tone down his speech. Laurie Aarons rejected this to which Pajetta responded by
rubbing his thumb and forefingers together while asking 'But what about this?'
In the event, the critical speech was delivered.48 In a response to the Courier Mail's
revelations, Eric Aarons noted that the CPA had left the Soviet orbit in the late 1960s
and argued that 'we believed our leaders' denials about Soviet financial aid at the
time because we knew how hard we worked to raise money from supporters'.49 He
added that the Soviets had 'done their dough' because their subsidy did not stop
the CPA abandoning Soviet-style communism.

Secret Members

Another element which emerged from the Petrov Affair but has received little
attention was the existence of CPA members who did not publicly disclose their
attachment to the party. This was one of a range of clandestine techniques developed
by member parties of the Communist International.50 Along with the widespread use
of pseudonyms by leading communists, the use of false passports and the existence
of an underground apparatus, this originally made sense as a defensive shield
against repression. But this defensive shield developed an offensive aspect when
the Soviet intelligence service recruited undercover members to gather diplomatic,
military and technological knowledge of Western governments. After World War II
this practice, which had long been suspected by Western authorities, was confirmed
by the Venona decrypts.51
Leaving aside the exotic world of espionage, this clandestine element of CPA
history was also in evidence in the more prosaic world of the Australian labour
movement. At several points, one of the main strategic goals of the CPA was to
influence the Australian Labor Party (ALP). While much of this was overt such as
peace campaigns and co-operation within the trade unions, some of it was not. The
New South Wales branch of the ALP elected an executive and officers in 1939 in which
were a number of undercover members of the CPA along with the indigenous Labor

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 Labour History Number 95 November 2008

forces bitterly opposed to right wing leader Jack Lang.52 There are also suggestions
in various memoirs that this practice continued in the 1950s and presumably into
the 1960s.53 Certainly ASIO closely watched a number of people whom they believed
to have both CPA and ALP membership.54
Left histories are highly critical of secret government and security agencies and
they often deploy the notion of hidden motives, but the clandestine element of left
history is hardly acknowledged. We need to recognise what Phillip Deery has called
historians' 'anachronistic failure of empathy' in discussing the apparently irrational
fears of governments about the CPA.55 In the case which Deery examines (the Chifley
Government and the 1949 coal strike) Chifley's views were based primarily on the
actual words and actions of the CPA and not on a nebulous notion of McCarthyism.
The post-war communist threat to Labor was not groundless, nor the product of
paranoia. It is certainly arguable that the CPA's adventurism contributed to the
election of the Menzies government, another example of the CPA being, in part, the
author of its own misfortunes and not simply a victim in the Cold War.

Conclusion

Central to historical interpretations of the Cold War in Australia is an assessment of

the CPA and the threat, real or alleged which it posed. Until the current interpretive
shift in this debate, to use a magnetic metaphor, one interpretive pole of attraction
saw the CPA acting with untrammeled altruism. The communists lead militant
unions and helped win many tangible gains for ordinary people. They took up issues
of justice and traditional liberal freedoms. The communists, along with Christians,
were among the few who championed indigenous rights. Communist intellectuals
and artists enriched Australia in many fields.
The opposite interpretive pole of attraction argued that all of these political actions
were subordinated to a larger plan to seize power through revolution and impose a
Soviet style dictatorship in Australia. Its adherents believed the communists' public
defence of Stalin and their denial of the monstrous crimes of Stalinism warranted
unreserved condemnation. On the first view, the CPA is simply a continuation of
native Australian working-class radicalism, with roots in convictism, in the early
unions and bodies like the Industrial Workers of the World. On the second view,
the CPA is nothing but a domestic extension of Soviet foreign policy armed with an
alien ideology within the body politic of Australia.
The shift in the field is slowly weakening the polarity of these compass points
and less partisan histories of the Cold War are emerging. Given the dominance of
the 'heroic' interpretation of the Left during the Cold War, a rebalancing involves a
more detached and critical attitude to the nature of the CPA while not dismissing
its idealism and its legitimate achievements. In the introduction to his history of
the CPA, Stuart Macintyre points to triumphal anti-communism, which allows
communism to have no other meaning than tyranny:

There is no indication that communism was also a popular phenomenon

that people in all countries grasped as a spar of hope against other forms
of oppression; that it gave meaning and purpose to idealists in a wide
range of circumstances; and that it was not a simple divination of evil but
a complex body of thought and action that altered over its life course.56

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McKnight Rethinking Cold War History 195

Macintyre is right, however, the prerequisite in dealing with triumphal anti- p

Communism, in my view, is for left-leaning historians to offer more balanced (vj
interpretations of the Cold War. These would recognise more fully that the D
CPA's world view, especially at the leadership levels, was a form of political N
fundamentalism which, until the mid-1960s, saw itself as part of a worldwide Soviet- O
aligned revolutionary movement to which it owed primary allegiance. Nor is it good
enough to keep alive heroic interpretations of the Australian Left particularly when *
drawing 'lessons' from this flawed Cold War history to shed light on contemporary
questions of security and terrorism. Cold War history needs further rethinking
and this must be done, as Oliver Cromwell allegedly instructed the painter of his
portrait, 'warts and all'.

David McKnight is Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the University of
New South Wales. He is the author of Australia's Spies and their Secrets (1994) which
won the non-fiction prize in the NSW Literary awards and of Espionage and the Roots
of the Cold War (2002). He recently completed a three-year research project on the cold
war which was supported by the Australian Research Council. His other research interests
cover contemporary politics and issues in journalism.
<d.mcknight@unsw.edu.au>

Endnotes
* This article is the result of an Australia Research Council Discovery Project on 'Subversion and
National Security' in which the author was the Chief Investigator. It has been peer-reviewed for
Labour History by two anonymous referees.
1. Phillip Deery, 'Decoding the Cold War: Venona, espionage and "the communist threat"' in Peter
Love and Paul Strangio (eds), Arguing the Cold War, Red Rag Publications, Carlton North, 2001, p.
115.
2. John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, Yale University
Press, New Haven, 1999.
3. David Lowe, Menzies and the 'great world struggle': Australia's Cold War, 1948-1954, UNSW Press,
Sydney, 1999; Desmond Ball and David Horner, Breaking the Codes: Australia's KGB Network, 1944
1950, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, 1998; Phillip Deery, 'Decoding the Cold War'; David McKnight,
'The Moscow-Canberra cables: how Soviet intelligence obtained British secrets through the back
door,' Intelligence and National Security, vol. 13, no. 2,1998, pp. 159-170.
4. Robert Manne, The Petrov Affair: Politics and Espionage, Pergamon Press, Sydney, 1987.
5. Mark Jackson, 'Once More on Vladimir Petrov', Arena, no. 81,1987, pp. 177-184.
6. Lowe, Menzies, pp.120,124.
7. A.W. Martin, Robert Menzies: A Life, Vol 2.1944-1978, Melbourne University Press, Carlton South,
1999, pp. 273-285; pp. 576-77.
8. Bruce Duncan, Crusade or Conspiracy: Catholics and the Anti-Communist Struggle in Australia, UNSW
Press, Sydney, 2001, p. 397.
9. Patrick Morgan (ed.) Your Most Obedient Servant: B.A. Santamar?a Selected Letters, 1938-1996,
Melbourne University Press, Carlton South, 2007.
10. John McLaren, 'Peace Wars: the 1959 ANZ Peace Congress', Labour History, no. 82, May 2002, pp.
97-108.
11. David McKnight, Australia's Spies and Their Secrets, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, 1994, p. 116.
12. Untitled memo, 18 Sept 1959, 'Spoiling Operations; Media P, Vol. 2' A6122, item 2013, pp. 25-26,
National Archives of Australia (NAA).
13. Ralph Summy and Malcolm Saunders, 'The 1959 Melbourne Peace Congress: culmination of anti
communism in Australia in the 1950s' in Ann Curthoys and John Merritt (eds), Australia's First Cold
War 1945-59: Better Red than Dead, Vol 2, Allen and Unwin, North Sydney, 1986.
14. McLaren, 'Peace Wars', p. 98.
15. Ibid., p. 106.
16. Jenny Hocking, Terror Laws: ASIO, Counter-Terrorism and the Threat to Democracy, UNSW Press,
Sydney, 2004.
17. For two detailed accounts which explain the mistaken impressions of Dr Burton and Evatt, see
McKnight, Australia's Spies, ch. 2, 5 and Ball and Horner, Breaking the Codes, ch. 9,15.
18. Hocking, Terror Laws, p. 21, p. 24.

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 196 Labour History Number 95 November 2008

19. Robert Manne, Petrov Affair, McKnight, Australia's Spies; Ball and Horner, Breaking the Codes.
20. McKnight, 'The Moscow-Canberra cables'; the most detailed account is in Ball and Horner,
Breaking the Codes.
21. The decoded cables can be found through the home page of the National Security Agency, http: / /
www.nsa.gov/venona/ A date-based search engine for individual cables is found at http:/ /www.
nsa.gov/venona/venon00017.cfm (accessed 17 May 2008) hereafter designated as Venona.
22. Ibid., Canberra-Moscow, 19 March 1946.
23. Ibid.
24. The material on Bulgaria covers reports from the 'British political representative' on dissension
between the Communist and Agrarian Parties and other maneuvers, Canberra-Moscow, 11
October 1945. The material on Argentina seems largely innocuous, with the British cable stating at
one point that 'the Argentine export of meat is a vital factor for Great Britain', Canberra-Moscow, 8
November 1945.
25. Venona, Canberra-Moscow, 16 November 1945; 8 May 1946.
26. Venona, Canberra- Moscow, 8 March 1946. The National Security Agency could not identify
'Captain Mitchell' although this comment from Milner and Hill suggests they were aware that
their activity could be classed as espionage.
27. Frank Cain, 'Venona in Australia and its long term ramifications', Journal of Contemporary History,
vol. 35, no. 2, 2000, pp. 231-248.
28. Frank Cain, ASIO: An Unofficial History, Spectrum Publications, Richmond, 1994, pp. 180-181.
29. Cain, 'Venona in Australia', p. 238.
30. Ibid., p.240.
31. See for example, Moscow to Canberra, 5 June 1948 compared with the Petrov's document titled
'Contacts K' detailed in McKnight, Australia's Spies, p. 78.
32. Cain, 'Venona in Australia', p. 240.
33. Manne noted this in 1994 in regard to Cain's response to his book The Petrov Affair: 'Cain does
not challenge or refute the arguments and evidence I advanced. He simply ignores them. This is
certainly a novel approach to scholarship', Age, 13 July 1994.
34. Frank Cain, 'Dr Evatt and the Petrov affair: a reassessment in the light of new evidence' in Julie
Kimber, Peter Love, Phillip Deery (eds), Labour Traditions: Proceedings of the Tenth national Labour
History Conference, Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, Melbourne, 2007, pp. 52-55.
35. A clear tracing of Evatt's erratic responses is in Laurence W. Maher, 'H.V. Evatt and the Petrov
defection: a lawyer's interpretation' in Kimber, Love, Deery, Labour Traditions, pp. 138-144.
36. L.J. Louis, Menzies Cold War: A Reinterpretation, Red Rag Publications, Carlton North, 2001, p. 40.
37. Venona, Canberra-Moscow, 17 March 1945.
38. McKnight, Australia's Spies, p. 50, p. 82.
39. Moscow-Canberra, 5 May 1945. Years later when speaking guardedly about his experiences
Clayton said to me with some emotion that he 'never intended to hurt the party'. The strong
implication being that he now recognised that his actions had indeed hurt the CPA.
40. Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, Granta Books,
London, 1999.
41. McKnight, Australia's Spies, ch. 17.
42. Stuart Macintyre, The Reds: The Communist Party of Australia, From Origins to Illegality, Allen &
Unwin, St Leonards, 1998, pp. 356-57.
43. Courier Mail, 10 January 1998; the 'purchase of wool' story was in the Weekend Australian, 3-4 April
2004.
44. John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage, Encounter
Books, San Francisco, 2003, pp. 68-70.
45. Reuben Falber, the former assistant general secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain
(CPGB) explained these details in a CPGB journal just before the party dissolved. Martin Linton,
'Moscow gold bankrolled communists', The Guardian, 15 Nov 1991.
46. Kevin Morgan, Bolshevism and the British Left: Labour Legends and Russian Gold, Lawrence and
Wishart, London, 2006.
47. Interview, Laurie Aarons, 10 June 1992.
48. Eric Aarons, undated letter and email dated 20 May 2005 in author's possession.
49. Eric Aarons, 'Soviets did their dough', Courier Mail, 24 January 1998.
50. The origin and practice of these techniques is outlined in David McKnight, Espionage and the Roots
of the Cold War: the Conspiratorial Heritage, Frank Cass Publishers, London, 2002.
51. Haynes and Klehr, In Denial.
52. McKnight, Espionage and the Roots of the Cold War, ch. 6.
53. Denis Freney describes his continuing active membership of the Labor Party after he joined the CPA
in 1954. Denis Freney, Map of Days: Life on the Left, William Heinemann, Melbourne, 1991, ch. 4.
54. See for instance, 'CPA Interest in Political Parties, Australian Labor Party', vols 1-14,, A6122 series,
NAA.
55. Phillip Deery, 'Communism, security and the Cold War', Journal of Australian Studies, no. 54/55,
1997, pp. 162-175.
56. Macintyre, The Reds, pp. 2-3.

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