Chapter 21

The alarm rang the Monday following the weekend gabfest and I trudged off to the JIO offices with alarm bells ringing in my ears. They were being caused by the confusion I felt when it came to Colonel Atkinson. Was he a saint or a very clever manipulator? It was so hard to tell. We had gone back to the office after the barbeque and he pulled out some of the transcripts I had written. I had labelled speakers with letters of the alphabet and he laid out a whole heap of Polaroid shots of people he had taken at the barbeque. He asked me to match the voices with the Polaroids and I did a couple and asked the names of the ones that I had matched. His response was almost instantaneous, “You don’t really want to know that do you. I thought that you wanted to stay at arm’s length.”

As I have explained I’m very good at picking up nuances when it comes to speech. I wish I had been good at body language as well but didn’t know much about it then. His answer was said with a smile but there was no smile in his eyes, but a wariness that was also there in his voice. He wanted me to help him but stay out of the loop. He expected me to trust him yet he showed no trust in me. In doing so he immediately lost my trust in him. His eyes displayed a shrewdness too. He was a man going places I figured and nothing, including me, was about to get in his way.

As it was, I knew some of the names anyway. I was seeking some confirmation myself but he gave nothing away. In the end I started to play with his mind and mismatched a few of the letters and photos. Let him assume what he liked based on poor information, I thought. I was surprised that he didn’t bother locking the photos away when we were done. He must know the names of each of the faces off pat. The photos were for my benefit only I realised and, as I left his office, I noticed that he casually threw them in the waste paper bin at the foot of his desk. I had earlier suggested that we catch up on Monday to confirm the matching but he had shaken his head saying that he and Captain Jenkins had a meeting to attend in Sydney but he did say that he had a couple more tapes for me to listen to on Monday and that he would leave them in the sound lounge for me before he left.

As I went to my office on Monday morning, I wondered just how good JIO’s own security was. The restricted areas of the dungeon and the sound lounge were properly guarded but were our offices? Nothing was ever touched in my office. I continually checked after my run in with the ASIO bloke. About 10:00 am I wandered up to the Colonel’s office. The anteroom where Captain Jenkins usually sat was open and the office was empty despite there being a lock on the closed door. If Jenkins had been there, I would have merely said that I was going straight in to see the colonel. He wasn’t and I looked at the colonel’s office. Its door too was locked. I looked around and knocked but there was no response. I knocked again and turned the handle. The door opened and I walked in. I closed the door behind me. If I had been seen, my entry would have gone uncommented because it was a common enough occurrence. Luckily the cleaning staff hadn’t been in and the Polaroids were still in the waste paper bin. I carefully took them out and using the Photostat machine in Captain Jenkins office, I made a copy of each photo before carefully placing the photos back in the bin. I took a manila folder and placed the Photostats in it and with it tucked under my arms. I closed each of the office doors before making my way down to the sound lounge. My desk was far more secure down there and I put the folder in a drawer.

The tapes were there for me to listen to and provide comments to Colonel Atkinson. In between tapes I pulled the Photostats out and began to write names and details on each picture of people I knew. On the others I put down only comments about the way they spoke and their possible position. These latter ones I would need to do further research on. During my lunch break I wandered across the lake and sought admittance into the foyer of Parliament House. My credentials gave me a broader access than most members of the public and I was able to walk reasonably freely about some of the corridors. I found the office of the Country Party Member for Kennedy which was the electorate our farm was in. There I was greeted effusively by the secretary there. Got a personal guided tour of the place despite me saying I was only on my lunch break. In the end I never did get lunch or even back to the office until nearly four-thirty. My obviously bored companion must have been grateful to have a fellow Queenslander to talk to, or should I say talk at because I hardly said a word as I was taken in to the inner sanctum of the coalition government offices. Names and faces flashed past but the ones I remembered matched the photos in the sound lounge. In the end my tour guide must have noticed my blatant checking of the time on my watch and reluctantly let me go. My thanks were as equally generous as her welcome had been.

Back in the sound lounge I quickly took out the photos and scribbled the names I remembered. Some only got a first name or office location. I also put in the folder a tourist guide of Parliament House which would help me give me some assistance when it came to identifying voices. Brain dead, I left the sound lounge with my manila folder securely locked away in my desk. The folder had been renamed. Its new title, similar to the others in the drawer was stamped with NAR (no action required) and its destination, like theirs, was the dungeon. I was slowly learning that you should not assume that people were not interested in anything anyone was doing. If we could tap phones how long would it be until we had video cameras everywhere?

Basketball training that night I was so full of energy and aggression that my team-mates asked later why I didn’t play like that in matches. Over beers after training I gave them the reply that if I did then I would show them up and I was not the sort of person to let the air out of their over-inflated egos. I only escaped alive by promising to lift my game on Thursday to prove my point.

The next few days were pretty mundane. Colonel Atkinson asked for the analysis of the tapes he had left, but was pretty curt and distant when he did so. I felt somehow on the outer almost as if I he had gained all he had thought I could give him and didn’t need me as much as before, or perhaps he had found my capabilities over-rated based on obvious mistakes. I didn’t get back to my own investigation into names and faces during that week. Other stuff got in the road. That annoyed me as did the colonel’s new attitude. I took my frustration out on the basketball court and, despite being fouled off, I was the driving force to an overwhelming win. My standing in the team went up a lot and my team-mates promised that they would annoy me every game if that was what it took me to play my best. Over the next few months they did exactly that. What had I created for myself, I thought.

   Eventually I got back to the series of wanted posters I was creating. The layout of Parliament House in the tourist brochure was extremely helpful and I was able to determine some of the roles of some of the people I had noticed or even been introduced to. Some were public servants and if I had seen them in or near a minister’s office, I merely had to look at the public service roll and I could ascertain a short list of names that those people could be. It amused me to use bureaucracy to identify bureaucrats. Many of the photos seemed to be of people involved with the PM and in ministries of Defence, Army, Navy, Air, Treasury, Labour and National Service, Foreign Affairs. These portfolios were held by very powerful politicians including, Billy Snedden, ex PM John Gorton, Phil Lynch, Jim Killen and Andrew Peacock.

The whole thing was taking on a huge conspiracy slant. Were those at the head of it, whoever they were, digging dirt to sway ministers by blackmailing them? Was Colonel Atkinson the actual head? There was no-one in Canberra I could trust with the knowledge that I had. Perhaps I should just stop now and walk away. The only alternative was to build my dossier of information on these people and try to somehow choose what information or disinformation I should pass on. Meanwhile in the background were the ongoing questions of, not only who was doing this but more importantly what were they after. However, in less than a month all these things went on the backburner.