Chapter 25

Was it just my charming manner or my beguiling country countenance? But somehow, here I was, less than a year into my National Service, privy to some pretty powerful secrets. Sure I was confident and could talk and think my way through almost any situation, but what had put me in this place at this time? I looked around at the others as I walked through the JIO and wondered whether they too were aware of some pretty heavy stuff. If they were, they didn’t show it. They didn’t seem burdened by it and merely went on their way shuffling papers along the rainforest destroying process that the army has for rules, regulations and accountability. Yes sir. No sir. Three bags full, sir. It was an unreal world that dealt in some real-world stuff.

I scurried to my office and hoped Captain Kirk would come in and say, “Beam us up Scotty.” Instead I was alone with my thoughts and alone trying to deal with a very difficult situation. I couldn’t just hand it all over to someone and say this is what I suspect. Imagine if I did that. I could say that I had listened to some suspicious tapes and the answer would have been, “Isn’t that your job?” I could say that the colonel was meeting with a major and a colonel and the answer would have been, “Isn’t that his job?” I could say that he was very interested in what politicians were thinking about defence expenditure and the future of the defence forces and the answer would have been, “And you think that is suspicious?” I would be demoted and put in a platoon somewhere and forgotten. There was no option really except to gain more evidence.

Who was this Donaldson? I didn’t think that Allbright should be forgotten at all. The fact that he was in Signals gave him access to all sorts of technical equipment. Being quite senior he could ‘borrow’ the latest of it unnoticed. He had to be important for that aspect alone. So, who was this Donaldson and why the praise from the ASIO officer? I grabbed some blank paper and a folder and headed to the dungeon. There was a lot of stuff archived there and the army was a stickler for documentation. I had spent so much time delivering stuff to be filed that I might as well have had my own coffee mug in the small kitchen. Basic information was able to be sent down there. The more highly important papers had to be filed by the delivering officer personally and signed as they hit the storage unit. Similarly, any item taken from the facility had to be signed out and countersigned by one of the ‘moles’. In this case the moles weren’t double agents as in Ian Fleming and John Le Carre stories but was the name I had given to the pasty-faced individuals who worked down in the dungeon.

You had to be a special type of person to be a mole. Being a stickler for neatness and order certainly helped. Having no social life wasn’t important but probably an outcome. I had befriended one as I had been there so often and he had been so helpful when I came down for the first time. He had taken the wide-eyed new recruit to JIO, me, under his wing and showed me his domain and how it worked. As I gained confidence, he soon allowed me to find my own way around. Moles didn’t talk to each other much, nor did they get many visitors down there and so perhaps I was seized upon. I found that I could make him laugh and appeared willing to learn about his world. In reality I was just being polite as my mother had taught me to be.

I managed to catch up with him that afternoon and in casual conversation I asked how difficult it was to trace a soldier’s history through the archives. He rambled on about the intricacies of the filing system, but said it could be done. He suspiciously asked why. I mentioned that my father had been in the Second World War and stayed in the army for a short period after but didn’t talk much about it. Was it possible to find out details about him? A puzzled look came across his face and he said that most of the files in Canberra at present were of current serving members and not all of those who were in the defence forces now were in the dungeon. He explained that the Airforce and Navy liked to retain their information and viewed the JIO as an extension of army intelligence. He laughed when he said army intelligence and then explained why those two words in the one sentence sounded so wrong. Apparently, it was his view that the army promoted you based on your inability to do the job. They had followed the British model in that regard and he said the prime example the British had was their organisation of the Gallipoli landing. The Australian army hadn’t learnt from that and still promoted people based on their parents’ social standing the same as the British did back then. The next half hour was an explanation as he saw it, being a Gallipoli aficionado, of the levels of incompetence of those officers in the First World War and Australia’s unwillingness to believe that the British were not their superiors. I waited and listened patiently as he spoke. I needed something from him and I was prepared to wait.

When he had finished his discourse, I politely thanked him as he apologised for rabbiting on about his favourite subject. I suggested he write a book about it and he said that he had begun one but wasn’t sure if his views were in keeping with the ‘powers that be’. I advised him to consider continuing to write it in secret and get it published after he left the army. I certainly wasn’t going to tell anyone. That was the truth. If I had a social life, I was not going to ruin it by telling anyone I knew a mole who was going to spill the beans on the British army’s incompetent hand in Australia’s celebrated wartime battle. That was certainly not a chat up line for any girl I met.

Finally, I explained my reason for being down there. I said that I had been given some extra information on a Major Donaldson that had to be added to his files. It was for certain eyes only and I had to put it in personally. He looked at me blankly and then with a conspiratorial wink of understanding, which I at first thought was a tic, he said that according to his records there were twenty-seven Donaldsons in the army and two of which were majors. I was surprised he knew these figures off the top of his head and told him so.

“That’s why I am irreplaceable. One day they will invent a machine that can do what I can do but I’ll be dead and buried by then,” he boldly predicted.

He consulted a rolodex on his desk and said that he could find the drawers where the majors were and let me decide which one the extra papers had to be placed in. He escorted me into the vast corridors that were his library. Surprisingly or rather not, the drawers were next to each other. He turned his back as I opened the first drawer. The Major Donaldson located in here was in his late fifties and certainly didn’t match the person I had seen and drawn. I opened up the second drawer and found the folder for the other Major Donaldson. I looked at his service record and currently he was located in Perth and again didn’t fit the description of the man I was looking for.

I discreetly coughed as I shut the drawer and explained that both these people were not the Major Donaldson I was after. He shrugged his shoulders and asked if the major had been newly promoted. I said I wasn’t given those details but that could be the case. He went back to his desk and scanned through his sorting system asking me for a little more detail. None of the other Donaldsons on his list could have matched as the vast majority of them were enlisted men and not officers and the others didn’t meet the criteria I had outlined. He asked whether someone was pulling my leg and I opened my folder and stared at the blank pages and lied straight faced to him, “Not based on what I have to file, definitely not.”

“There are a couple of possibilities, perhaps Donaldson isn’t his real name, but that wouldn’t make sense as you were given things by your superiors to file. The other is that his file isn’t in the general section. Come with me.”

I had no idea what he meant by that, but followed him to a door that was marked ‘Cleaners’. This was getting weirder and I began to wonder about the sexual preferences of my companion. Warily I kept my distance. He pulled out his keys and stepped into the storeroom. He shifted some brooms out of the way and pushed a lever. To the left a hidden door opened. Inside the room beyond was a series of filing cabinets.

“Your major is probably in here. These are the unlisted enlisted men,” he laughed at his own joke. “Let’s just say that the army has some people that the JIO now control that the general public and most members of the defence force don’t know about. I have a special key for each drawer. I will open the drawer. You can check to see if your major is there. If he is, deposit the papers you have and then I will lock it. I am not allowed to see the contents of the file and even record the name of anyone who has been in this room. I must say that I am surprised that your boss didn’t tell you to use the special code word when you came in. Typical incompetence. Nothing changes. It would have saved us a lot of time.”

He turned his back and I opened the drawer and indeed found the Donaldson I was looking for. I quickly scanned the few pages that were there and pretended to place some papers in the file before closing the drawer. The drawer was locked and we exited through the cleaner’s store and back to his office. I again thanked him and reminded him that his book had merit and was well worth doing.

Instead of going back to my office I went to the sound lounge and mechanically transcribed the latest tape. All the while I was thinking about what I had just learned. The JIO ran its own spy network. Major Donaldson’s expertise in so many fields particularly in infiltrating groups was second to none. I thought about the blandness of the face I had drawn. He could easily change those features with a few subtle modifications. Throw on some different clothing and he could be anyone. Allbright supplied the equipment, Donaldson put it in place and retrieved it and Atkinson with my unwitting assistance analysed it. The questions still remained, for whom and what for?