“Australia and the territories under its control have become increasingly important to the US defence and space establishments in recent years as a site for satellite tracking stations, nuclear test detection facilities, space research and related activities. With ample space, relatively advanced technology, political stability and conservative government, Australia has become a uniquely desirable base for both military and civilian programs involving operations in the Southern Hemisphere.” – White House position paper, 1962, quoted in Brian Toohey, Secret.

Gough Whitlam’s letter to president Nixon on the 1972 Christmas bombings was mild compared to some of his ministers’ public statements. Unused to being in government and not understanding the protocols of speaking only on topics within their ministerial portfolios, Tom Uren described Nixon and Kissinger as having a “mentality of thuggery” while Clyde Cameron called them “maniacs”. Jenny Hocking quotes Jim Cairns as describing the bombing as “the most brutal, indiscriminating slaughter of defenceless men, women and children in living memory”.

Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, were outraged at this behaviour. Even six months later, in a private meeting with Whitlam’s chief of staff where he began by saying “I am delighted to see you”, Kissinger was still speaking in strong language in the present tense. “Our relation with your government has started inauspiciously. We take great umbrage, even to keep it private, to be put on the same level as Hanoi. It seemed gratuitous and unreal and therefore, we never answered. The public comments of your ministers compounded the problem.”

This episode is often portrayed as an example of the amateurish behaviour of the new Australian Government and the recklessness of ministers in endangering the ANZUS alliance. While some of that is true, the government’s response to the bombings reflected a fundamental disagreement with the US over foreign policy, based on bitter opposition to the Vietnam war and to the basis for America’s strategy in Asia more generally.

While Whitlam understood the US Cold War focus on the Soviet threat, he didn’t consider the USSR to be a globally imperialistic power, and he certainly didn’t subscribe to the domino theory. Labor believed Ho Chi Minh was engaged in a post-colonial struggle aimed at uniting the country on the basis of Vietnamese nationalism; the fact he was a Marxist was a secondary issue. Whitlam’s overriding objective was to pursue a foreign policy focused on Australia’s region, more independent of the US with its Cold War focus. This was encapsulated in his speech in January 1973 when he said that “Australia’s Southeast Asian policy will place primary emphasis on Indonesia and will discard the earlier policy of forward defence".

By “forward defence”, Whitlam meant military commitments in coalition with the US and, to a lesser extent the UK, under the South-East Asia Treaty Organisation and the Four Power Agreement in Malaysia. Australia would not participate in future crusades against alleged communist imperialism as it had in Vietnam. Decades ahead of his time, rather than seeking Australia’s security from Asia, Whitlam would instead seek it in Asia.

This would have been anathema to Kissinger. Battle lines were drawn. As James Curran says, “the anger, bitterness, exasperation and barely concealed fury that enveloped the Australian-American alliance at this time represents something of a point of departure in the history of the relationship”.

In May 1972, more than six months before Labor won office, secretary of state William Rogers told Whitlam that if he abandoned SEATO, Australia’s alliance with the US, ANZUS, would be at risk. The threat was repeated to Australia’s ambassador in Washington in January 1973 after Whitlam sent his letter to Nixon, and was to be repeated again in 1974 and 1975.

As Professor John Blaxland proposed in 2025, ANZUS has always been inadequate as a guarantee of Australia’s security. “It doesn’t include an HQ, a commander, forces assigned or a mutual defence guarantee,” he said. “It’s an 800-word essay.” Whitlam would have understood this. He also had little reason to believe Australia faced a significant great power threat. His problem was an electoral one. Australians had been fearful of two things since federation – attack by a major power and abandonment by our Anglophone ally. They cleaved to ANZUS as a child to a security blanket. If Whitlam lost ANZUS, Labor might be out of office for another generation.

As Toohey shows in Secret, Menzies had been aware of the inadequacies of ANZUS all along. On a visit to Washington in 1963, Menzies asked president Kennedy for military support to counter Indonesian Konfrontasi, Kennedy barely even considered the request. The American people, he told the prime minister, had forgotten all about ANZUS.

At the same time, however, the US had come to recognise that by dint of its geography, Australia was a “uniquely desirable base” for locating vital military facilities to support America’s warfighting capability. Menzies believed if the government co-operated with the US in accommodating these bases, they would lock America into defending Australia. The US ambassador in Canberra, Bill Battle, negotiated very favourable terms with the Australian Government to establish two surveillance facilities at Pine Gap and Nurrungar in central Australia and a submarine communications base at North-West Cape.

Under Whitlam, these bases, now considered critical to America’s national security, became the focus of Australia’s relationship with the US. The Nixon administration’s concerns were reflected in the appointment of Marshall Green, an assistant secretary of state, as ambassador to Australia. Green was a highly accomplished career foreign service officer, still regarded as the heaviest hitter among all US ambassadors to Australia. Green went to Canberra with a clear agenda. In a meeting with Kissinger in July 1973, he stated that his first priority was “preserving our defence installations” while his second, which also became significant as we will see, was to protect US investments in Australia.

It is impossible to overstate the significance of these defence installations to the US-Australia relationship. It was not Whitlam’s fault that he never understood the extent to which they were regarded as being indispensable for America’s national security. As soon as he took office, Whitlam was briefed on the US facilities by Sir Arthur Tange, secretary of the Defence department. While Tange emphasised the need for complete secrecy over the facilities, he was extremely careless with the truth as to their true purpose. Most importantly, he neglected to tell Whitlam that the Pine Gap facility supported a massive CIA espionage operation over which Australia neither had any control nor access to the intelligence the facility produced. For nearly three years, Whitlam continued to believe that Pine Gap was a communications facility operated by the Pentagon in liaison with Australia’s Defence department, and that it monitored compliance with the strategic arms limitation agreements.

Richard Kerbaj suggests that of all the CIA’s facilities, Pine Gap played the most important role in its Echelon global intelligence network, capable of hoovering up the world’s electronic communications, including, as we shall see, telexes from Australian ministers’ offices. In addition, because of its remote location far away from Soviet detection facilities, it was the only ground station serving the four satellites in the Rhyolite system. This program provided critical intelligence on the performance and characteristics of Soviet missiles.

In a top secret US document prepared in 1974, Nurrungar is described as “the only ground station link to missile warning and nuclear event detection satellites observing Soviet launch sites and nuclear test areas”. The Northwest Cape installation served “as a strategic command and control relay station to SSBNs on patrol … in the Western Pacific, South China Seas and the Indian Ocean”. Details of the Pine Gap facility (which later incorporated Nurrungar) were evidently so sensitive that, over half a century later, they remain redacted from the US document.

In not letting Whitlam into the secret of what the facilities did, it is difficult to overstate the degree to which Tange’s behaviour was grossly improper. It was outrageous to exclude the prime minister from access to critical information that could have played a major role in shaping the government’s strategic policy and keeping the nation safe.

Specifically, if Whitlam had been advised that Pine Gap was one of three sister facilities, the others being at Buckley in the US and Menwith Hill in the UK, each an essential element in a network delivering a superior nuclear warfighting against the Soviet Union, he might have reflected that Australia was the odd one out. Unlike the US and Britain, Australia was not under constant threat of a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. Unlike the US and Britain, Australia did not have a nuclear deterrent to make the USSR think twice about attacking targets in our homeland with nuclear weapons. Unlike the US and UK with Article V of NATO, the ANZUS alliance with the US did not include a security guarantee. Having ratified the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty a month after winning office, Whitlam would have found it very difficult to understand why playing host to the US facilities was in Australia’s national interests.

The other point is that if Whitlam had understood the importance of the facilities, they would have provided Australia with significant agency in negotiations with the US for a more independent foreign policy.

Nevertheless, after Tange’s briefing, Whitlam said publicly that he would break one election promise by not exposing in detail the purpose of the US installations. In January 1973, he told US ambassador Walter Rice, in characteristic style, that the US could retain the facilities unless there was any attempt “to screw us or bounce us” in other areas. No doubt he would have felt royally bounced during 1973 as Nixon postponed the traditional meeting with an Australian for so long that even Andrew Peacock, from the opposition, entreated the White House to reconsider.

Much more serious was a problem that arose during the Yom Kippur War in October 1973 when the Soviet Union considered intervention as Israel drove back the attack by Arab nations and began to defeat the Egyptian and Syrian forces. As Kissinger wrote in his memoirs, “we were determined to resist, by force if necessary, the introduction of Soviet forces into the Middle East”. The US raised the threat level to DEFCON 3 (it reached DEFCON 2 during the Cuba crisis) and, without notifying the host countries, used facilities in the UK and North-West Cape in Australia to put its forces on alert.

Britain, in particular, had been laid low by the first oil shock and prime minister Heath was angry at being unknowingly involved in Washington’s pro-Israel activities. Whitlam was also highly displeased and resolved the Australia must have some control over how the facilities were used. He despatched Lance Barnard, his deputy and Defence minister, on a mission to Washington to negotiate more appropriate new arrangements. In this, for once, the government had much of the Australian media behind it.

The State Department was conscious of the importance of this visit and, reading between the lines of a lengthy note from acting secretary Rush, in Kissinger’s absence, to the secretary of Defence, Schlesinger, appeared anxious to ensure Barnard did not return home empty-handed. After expressing a concern that the present tensions could lead to “grave damage” to the relationship, Rush said, “Barnard’s visit provides an excellent opportunity to attempt to at least restrain present trends which could ultimately threaten the viability of our Australian installations”.

Interestingly, Rush cited Opposition members of Australia’s parliament suggesting Barnard was the most reasonable member of Whitam’s Cabinet. Certain Australian Government officials had also provided advice on how the US might respond constructively to Barnard’s mission. It seems Green had been a busy man, although he also strongly made the point in Canberra that joint control of North-West Cape was not practical.

Yet Kissinger was not gone for long and, as Curran shows, on the day before Barnard’s arrival in Washington, spoke to Schlesinger by phone. Kissinger’s views were consistently less compromising than those of his department. Schlesinger was still angry at Whitlam’s reaction to the North-West Cape imbroglio and would not attend a dinner at the Australian embassy for Barnard. Apart from some cosmetic changes, Barnard returned to Canberra virtually empty-handed. Whitlam was not impressed. There were two fateful consequences.

First, in Parliament in April 1974, almost casually, Whitlam announced a new position on the US facilities. He said, “there should not be foreign military bases, stations, installations in Australia. We honour agreements covering existing stations. We do not favour extensions or prolongation of any of those existing ones". With the Pine Gap lease due to expire in December 1975 and no prior warning to the Americans, Whitlam’s statement landed like a bombshell in Washington. Green told Alan Renouf, secretary of Foreign Affairs, that it “represented a grave threat to the global Western balance against the Soviet Union, and ANZUS would be called into question”.

Secondly, following the May 1974 election, Whitlam seemed to take little interest when Barnard, his loyal deputy, was successfully challenged by the left-wing’s Jim Cairns, who became deputy prime minister. Shortly after his elevation, Cairns reiterated his “firm and explicit opposition to the continuation of US defence facilities” and his wish “to get Australia out of the big power military system”.

In a State Department staff meeting in June, convened by acting secretary Joseph Sisco in Kissinger’s absence overseas, a discussion of the situation in Australia focused on two main issues – retention of the facilities and the ascendancy of Cairns, their bête noire, who was now only a heartbeat away from becoming prime minister. The meeting was briefed, clearly by Green, on the views of Tange, who had told the ambassador that the prime minister had acted against official advice in his statement on the facilities. Quite untruthfully, Tange had also undermined his new Defence minister, Bill Morrison, as an unreliable “leftist”. Tange resented having to report to Morrison, a former diplomat who had once been his subordinate in External Affairs where they had not always seen eye to eye.

In Kissinger’s absence, the meeting adopted a principled approach. Sisco concluded that “in order not to tear down the relationships we have by arbitrary action” a policy of non-intervention would constitute a “proper and mature approach”. He opposed engaging “in spooky fiddling with the situation in which we might get caught”. This suggests covert operations against the Whitlam Government had been considered and ruled out.

On his return from overseas, however, Kissinger characteristically took a more robust approach. In July, president Nixon directed that a top-secret National Security Study Memorandum be prepared reviewing the whole US relationship with Australia.

The NSSM concluded the relationship was under pressure “because of Australia’s desire for greater independence in foreign affairs and because of prime minister Whitlam’s style. The problems deepened two months ago when the ALP elected left-wing leader Dr Jim Cairns as its deputy party chief and thus, automatically, deputy prime minister". The central focus of NSSM 204, however, was how to assure the continued presence of the US facilities in Australia.

A multi-agency meeting was held in late August 1974, chaired by Kissinger. The purpose of the meeting was to “discuss whether we should modify our policy towards Australia because of Canberra’s continuing turn to the left and whether we should plan to shift some of our installations elsewhere”.

Several options were considered, of which the proposal by the Defence Department was the most aggressive. It proposed moving the facilities out of Australia, significantly reducing intelligence sharing and winding down the relationship to a much lower level. Clearly, Australia would no longer be a member of Five Eyes and the US might withdraw from ANZUS.

The most conciliatory approach came from the State Department, proposed by Green. The view from Foggy Bottom was that Australia was an important ally and the US needed to take a longer-term perspective on the relationship. There would likely be no return to the previous long period of compliant conservative governments. The US had to get used to working with Labor administrations. Green proposed to negotiate with Whitlam an extension of the Pine Gap lease to 1978. This would allow sufficient time for a transfer of the facility elsewhere, probably to Guam.

Reflecting the fact that the CIA was heavily invested both in Pine Gap and its close relationship with Australia’s security agencies, its view was somewhere in the middle. It appears to have proposed making no concessions at all to Australia. The facilities should be retained and the intelligence sharing relationship continued.

We still remain in the dark as to the policy approach that was eventually adopted. Nearly 50 years after the event, all the relevant pages remain redacted. For this reason alone, we can infer that the option selected was highly sensitive and could have had substantial implications for the US-Australia relationship. Nevertheless, on the basis of what eventuated, it is clear that neither of the approaches recommended by the Defence or State departments found favour with Kissinger. That left the CIA option. It seems likely a “watch and wait” approach for the remainder of 1974 was decided on, while further action could be taken as necessary.

Clearly Kissinger would decide on the way forward, but which version of Kissinger would make the decision? Kissinger, after all, wore two hats, as secretary of state and national security adviser. The first of these provided scope for his “better angels” to prevail, in playing the role described by Hugh White as “the most effective and important American statesman” since the early post-war era, who “did more than anyone else at the fulcrum of the Cold War to stabilise the global order”.

Yet there was another Kissinger, one who disdained the ‘limp wristed’ approach of State, the one who had overseen the CIA’s role in undermining the democratically elected Allende Government in Chile. This Kissinger was on full display at a meeting held at the State Department in September 1975 with a delegation from Chile, led by the foreign minister. Since the overthrow of Allende two years earlier, the Pinochet Government had been responsible for deplorable human rights abuses.

Kissinger opened the meeting by virtually disowning his department. “I read the briefing paper for this meeting,” he told the foreign minister, “and it was nothing but human rights. The State Department is made up of people who have a vocation for the ministry. Because there were not enough churches for them, they went into the Department of State." Kissinger went on to make light of the human rights issues. With reference to a country that had recently moved in the opposite direction to Chile, that is from a dictatorship to democracy, Kissinger said “It is not in the interest of the US to turn Chile into another Portugal”.

This was the other Kissinger, described by White as “not just brutal but unnecessarily so”. In playing this role, he would have felt much more comfortable in his position of national security adviser, which gave him the authority over the CIA. So from which agency would he choose to address the crisis in Australia?

Based on research in the Ford Library, Professor Stephen Stockwell has proposed that following the meeting to discuss NSSM 204, the National Security Council took over from the State Department as having de facto primary responsibility for the US relationship with Australia. One indication of this major change is that the number of State Department documents in US records relating to Australia is far fewer after August 1974 relative to the preceding period.

In examining whether US covert activities played any role in destabilising the Whitlam Government in 1975, we need to consider carefully both the likely approach by Kissinger as national security adviser and the example of the destabilisation of Chile under the Allende Government.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.