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[The second episode of the documentary Persons of Interest screens tonight (January 14, 2014) on SBS at 8.30. It’s prompted me to publish the following …]

Phillip Deery (2007), ‘ASIO and the Communist Party: New Light on an Old Tradition’, in Julie Kimber, Peter Love and Phillip Deery (eds) (2007), Labour Traditions: Proceedings of the 10th National Labour History Conference, Melbourne: Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, pp. 67-74.

Archival records concerning ASIO undercover operations are rare. Consequently the literature on ASIO’s infiltration of the Left is almost non-existent. This paper uses, for the first time, recently released ASIO files on one of its own agents. It thereby attempts to contribute to our understanding of undercover operations by the security services within the Australian labour movement. It will concentrate only on this agent’s infiltration of his first ‘target’, the Communist Party of Australia. The paper will also provide an insight into the manner in which intelligence was collected and into the largely unknown operational culture of ASIO in the early 1970s.

At one point in Melissa Reeves’ play, ‘The Spook’, performed at Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre in 2007, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) controller, Alex, commented on the work of his organisation: ‘It’s so fucking necessary it’s frightening. We could tip either way’.[1] This was in 1965 when the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) was a shrunken shadow of its former self. However, Alex’s comment to his young operative illuminates ASIO’s continuing concerns about the threat of communism to national security. It also points to its readiness to employ agents to infiltrate organisations on the Left.

The fictional ‘spook’ in this play, Martin Porter, was drawn from the actual experiences of Phil Geri, a Bendigo hospital orderly who was recruited by ASIO at the age of nineteen. He was a Catholic, a member of the Citizens Military Force and highly patriotic. ‘I didn’t know what ASIO was. I was keen on the CMF and thought it was another arm of the army’.[2] In 1963 he joined the Bendigo branch of the CPA, which was ‘very small, mainly elderly people who met in private homes and talked about the workers’ cause’. He soon became a delegate to the state conference of the CPA. This enabled him to memorise faces and match them to the hundreds of photographs taken surreptitiously by ASIO: ‘Everyone in the vicinity was photographed. Car licence plates were taken; they did the job well. But it was a hard time for me because the debriefing went on for hours, sometimes days, and I would just get sick of it’. Yet Geri’s distaste was temporary, since he remained an agent for twenty-three years. After the membership of the Bendigo branch dwindled to three, ASIO re-deployed him to infiltrate the apparently more dangerous and certainly more secretive Maoist-aligned Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist). His coup was procuring and passing on inner-party documents circulated at the CPA (M-L) national conference. But such ‘successes’ carried a personal price:

It was a very lonely time. My whole life changed. I had played a lot of sport and enjoyed the army, but now I was regarded as a radical left-winger. Bendigo people just didn’t know what had happened to me. It was extremely difficult to live with, and still is. Sometimes I thought of giving it away.

Finally, it was ASIO, not Geri himself, who terminated his services. His seventh case officer, ‘Pat’, met him in Bendigo’s Shamrock Hotel, produced a letter of thanks from ASIO’s director-general, and drove away, along with ‘a bit of my past’.

The subject of this paper, another ASIO undercover agent, underwent similar experiences. He was also young, zealous, naïve, successful — in terms of relatively high-level penetration — and was redeployed, like Geri, from the CPA to a seemingly more insidious communist organisation. However, his disillusionment was quicker: he worked for ASIO for two years not two decades. The profound strength of will it took to maintain a double life, with all its dissembling and mendacity, proved too much for this less resilient other ‘spook’. The reason he gave to his case officer for his resignation was ‘nervousness and deteriorating health arising from his role’.[3] Notwithstanding Geri coming in from the cold, the literature on ASIO’s infiltration of the Left is, apart from McKnight,[4] non-existent. Indeed, the most illuminating study emanates from New Zealand where George Fraser was recruited by the Special Branch and worked undercover within the Communist Party of New Zealand for nine years.[5] This paper, therefore, attempts to contribute to our understanding of the murky world that is a long-standing tradition: undercover operations by the security services within the Australian labour movement.

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