The cloud of American involvement in the events of November 1975 is unlikely to ever clear. Especially while US presidential libraries continue to block access to critical documents that might shed light on the shenanigans.

Consider how Australia was seen in Washington in 1975.

When US secretary of state Henry Kissinger and his senior advisers first discussed the Australian political crisis in early July 1975, Kissinger seemed more interested in the fact that a “good-looking woman” — he was referring to Junie Morosi, Jim Cairns’ principal private secretary — had been “thrown into it”. But the firing of Jim Cairns and the “financial skulduggery” involved in the loans affair played second fiddle to who might replace Gough Whitlam if an election were held.

Kissinger could not recall whether he had ever met Opposition leader Malcolm Fraser, but he had even more difficulty remembering the identity of the “last conservative prime minister” in Australia.

Nor could his advisers, until one of them suddenly recalled: it was “the guy with the wife – McMahon”. If that underlined what was really remembered about William McMahon’s time in office — Sonia McMahon’s eye-catching dress at a White House state dinner in 1971 — his successor as Liberal leader, Billy Snedden, was referred to in millinery terms: “Stetson”.

Yet Fraser and shadow foreign minister Andrew Peacock passed Kissinger’s test: the former described as ideologically “way over to the right side”, “smart” and “well disposed”; while the latter had “done a lot of travelling” and was “very vigorous”. Such was the American checklist of sound Cold War values. Kissinger’s final remark on the Australian situation at that point perhaps summarised — as only Kissinger could — nearly three years’ worth of US frustration with the Labor leader: “I don’t think Whitlam [would be] any loss."

In the lead-up to the 50th anniversary of the Dismissal, the publication of a new Whitlam biography has attempted to wipe the slate clean on tensions in the US-Australia alliance throughout 1972-1975. Based on an interview with Kissinger in 2022, we are now told that American concerns over Australian policy in this era were a mere trifle; that a long, confidential review of the relationship initiated by president Richard Nixon in mid-1974, which took the form of a “National Security Study Memorandum”, was simply “routine”.

Yet that document required American national security agencies to explore options for relocating US intelligence installations, including Pine Gap, outside Australia, and the risks of curtailing or ending intelligence sharing with Canberra. This was a world away from “routine”.

Such claims derive essentially from parochial presentism: the desperation to create mystical continuity between the alliance then and now. The result is history mopped up with Pine O Cleen: a janitor’s delight.

The problems in the relationship are set out definitively in my 2015 book, Unholy Fury. Based on a vast swath of archival evidence from a range of US national security agencies, it shows that American frustrations with the Whitlam government — over its public denunciation of the Christmas bombings of North Vietnam in December 1972, Whitlam’s desire for an Asia-Pacific free of great power rivalry and concern that Jim Cairns might topple Whitlam and force the expulsion of US intelligence facilities from Australian soil — reached boiling point: not once, but consistently.

In June 1974, for example, following a statement by Whitlam to Parliament which appeared to confirm there would be “no prolongations” of “existing” foreign installations in Australia, the Americans went into meltdown. The US undersecretary for political affairs, Joe Sisco, raised the question to Kissinger as to “should we, among other things, as we look at this situation, be considering how we, as a government, at the upper reaches, really get at Whitlam? Because he is the man that is calling the shots”.

A week later, senior figures in Washington were told of a “terrifying telegram” being sent to Canberra over the implications for the alliance should Jim Cairns become prime minister. Sisco said then that the Americans would have to be cautious in thinking through the situation, “so that we don’t tear down the relationships we have by arbitrary action on our part, so that we don’t engage in spooky fiddling with the situation, in which we might get caught – in some of the other proposals that have been made. They are logical to consider, but we think not logical to carry out”.

Whether that remained the position as ructions increased over the following 12 months remains at issue.

In early 1975, the US ambassador to Australia, Marshall Green, returned to the US for consultations, praising publicly a relationship with Canberra which he welcomed breaking free of the Cold War straitjacket, which held that the two countries should march in “lockstep”. Green also chatted privately with defence secretary James Schlesinger. And here the old Cold War statecraft was back in action. The two spoke of Whitlam and Australian politics more generally, in the way a puppeteer would talk of a marionette. “Hard-nosed” was how Green had initially been instructed to approach the task in Canberra, but now Whitlam was “on our side”. They agreed that where Cairns was concerned, Whitlam was certainly the lesser of two evils, and that even a conservative takeover would not solve all the problems in the alliance. But it was better for the US “if the two parties alternate in power at respectable intervals”.

Schlesinger, who had pushed harder than anyone in Washington to have the intelligence facilities removed from Australia during the course of the 1974 review, said he was happy to play the game as long as the Australians behaved. Green believed a “low profile”, for the moment, was best.

But as Green put it, “we could heat up the crucible at any time, either accidentally or intentionally”. And even though the US intelligence installations were safe for the time being, two factors could always intervene to throw their survival into question: Cairns’ elevation to the leadership of the Labor Party, and “if current investigations in the US became linked with Australia, the resulting storm might shorten our stay”. Although neither of the two mentioned precisely what these “investigations” were, much less their explosive nature, it is highly likely that Green was referring to a Senate select committee, formed in early 1975 and chaired by Democrat Frank Church, that was inquiring into the US’ intelligence activities abroad, and to look especially at covert US attempts to subvert foreign governments.

At the very least, the conversation suggests a distinct edginess at the highest levels about the possible revelation of some kind of CIA activity in Australia.

The cloud of American involvement in the events of November 1975 is unlikely to ever clear. Especially while US presidential libraries continue to block access to critical documents that might shed further light on the shenanigans going on.

Republished from Australian Financial Review, 9 November 2025

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