19 - Pressing the Issue

Summary

Sir Arthur Tange was a figure inspiring terror at the Department of Defence in his time as its secretary. As he set about incorporating three separate service ministries and sundry defence supply agencies into Defence, the leaks and outraged newspaper articles by newly retired military brass came in a steady stream. Tange's eye for backsliders and subverters of his authority roamed ceaseless over Russell Hill and its outposts. A group of bureaucrats who took their sandwiches out onto the central lawn, under the central memorial to American help in the Second World War, were stunned when a window flew up, and Tange leaned out to order them off.

At the same time, Tange was the chief keeper of secrets. Having been head of the External Affairs department as well, he knew them all. Through the Whitlam years he'd fought hard to persuade his Labor political masters not to blow the United States alliance before they fully understood all its ramifications.

But who to trust with that information? Parliament House, lit up like an ocean liner across Lake Burley Griffin, was a ship springing leaks. The raid by Attorney-General Lionel Murphy and his Commonwealth Police on the Australian Strategic Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) headquarters in Melbourne, the leak about the Australian Secret Intelligence Service

(ASIS) help for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in its subversion of Allende's left-wing government in Chile, the weaving of the Pine Gap joint intelligence base into the 1975 dismissal narrative — all had contributed to a sharp polarisation between believers and sceptics, between defenders and investigators.

In its brief life, from the beginning of the 1970s to the end of the 1980s, the weekly newspaper, The National Times, was a leader of the sceptics and investigators. Its journalists and contributors including Brian Toohey, Evan Whitton, Paul Kelly, Marian Wilkinson, Andrew Clark, Bill Pinwill and Deborah Snow set out to challenge conventional wisdoms in many fields. The secret workings of defence and intelligence were natural subjects.