Atlee Hunt: Public Servant, Spy Master, 1901–23
The Le Couteur mission was not the only intelligence activity the Australian government launched against Britain and France in the New Hebrides. In fact, it formed part of a coordinated multi-source intelligence operation, which included the secret and confidential reporting from John Haggard, the British Consul on Noumea, and from the agents and contacts of Burns Philp and other trading firms in the region.1 Other Australian intelligence activity of the time included the formation of the Admiralty’s Reporting Officer network, which was controlled by the Australian Commonwealth Naval Board (ACNB). Australia’s military was also sending officers abroad to collect intelligence, including Major William Thorsby Bridges.2 Behind much of this activity, we find one man playing varying roles, most of them central to the operation of the early Australia intelligence system. This man was Atlee Hunt, Edmund Barton’s private secretary and, concurrently, Secretary of the Department of External Affairs. He was also Australia’s first and most successful spymaster.
Atlee Hunt was educated at Sydney Grammar School and from there took a position in the NSW Lands Department in 1879. While working within the department, Hunt studied for the bar, to which he gained admission on 21 March 1892.3
In his new career as a barrister, Hunt slowly began to build a reputation, acting on behalf of the creditors of August Richard Lichberg, a general storekeeper. Hunt won an injunction in this case, his first court victory.4 The win would have been nice for the new barrister, who was still supplementing his income by tutoring.5
As time went by, Hunt expanded his reputation and his circle of friends, among whom was Edmund Barton. Barton had sat as the arbitrator in the McSharry case, in which Hunt acted as junior counsel under Arthur Smith, representing the NSW government.6 Barton found for McSharry, but awarded only £13,408, a judgment that left McSharry £46,592 out of pocket.7
As a leading activist for Federation, Hunt worked closely with Barton, organising the NSW Federal Association and Federal League to promote the yes vote in the NSW referendum on Federation. In 1901, Hunt was appointed as Barton’s private secretary and Secretary and Permanent Head of the Department of External Affairs, later Home Affairs.8 Hunt won the External Affairs position over George Charles Stewart, who had left the Tasmanian civil service on being promised it. Hunt’s success was not simply due to his association with Barton. The deciding voice had been that of Alfred Deakin, who may have been swayed by Hunt’s capacity for getting along with people, something at which Stewart did not excel.9
Hunt’s tenure as private secretary to Australia’s prime ministers ended with the election of Andrew Fisher’s Australian Labour Party (ALP) government on 13 April 1910.10 His close association with the preceding conservative prime ministers could not be overlooked, and he was removed as head of the Prime Minister’s Department. He was, however, a professional public servant with an excellent reputation, particularly for managing and enforcing the Immigration Restriction Act 1901, and the Fisher Government kept him in the role of Secretary of the Home Affairs Department. From there, he continued to set up Australia’s nascent intelligence organisation. Hunt would serve as Secretary at Home Affairs until William (Billy) Hughes moved him to the position of Public Service Arbitrator in 1921.
As Barton and Hunt settled into the job of establishing Australia’s first government, the priorities were, as we have seen above, mixed and demanding. There was a war still being fought in South Africa, and there were demands from those who had sacrificed position in order to bring about the new Commonwealth. One of the most pressing priorities was the implementation and enforcement of the Immigration Restriction Act, the foundation of the White Australia policy.11
Effective enforcement of the immigration laws required good intelligence allowing Atlee Hunt and his department to identify individuals who were excluded under the provisions of the Act. Given the level of resources available to the Commonwealth at the time, Hunt embarked on establishing an extensive intelligence reporting system drawing on state government departments, including police forces, and harbour and various other officials. He also drew upon the services of customs officers and worthy people all over Australia. In short, he established an ad hoc intelligence system using the unpaid services of individuals and governments to provide information on immigration matters and suspicious individuals. He even extended this network overseas, using the good offices of state trade representatives in Asia and around the world.
One of the main reasons Hunt opened up channels to the state trade representatives in Asia was that they were the officials who put the arguments for the admission of Asian businessmen into Australia. This upset politicians intent on keeping Australia white, and it also upset the protectionist politicians led by Barton and Deakin. Hunt used his position to influence the decisions of the trade representatives and slowly began to expand their reporting into economic and commercial spheres until state governments began to close their trade offices.
Before 1901, the states of Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland appointed trade representatives to collect commercial intelligence in the United States, South Africa, Singapore, China (Shanghai) and Japan. The Victorian government, led at the time by Alfred Deakin, under pressure from the Victorian Chamber of Manufacturers, appointed its first trade representative, James McInnes Sinclair, during the economic slump of the mid-1890s. Sinclair, a close friend of Deakin, was based in North America, with responsibility for both the United States and Canada.12 In 1902, New South Wales decided to go three better, appointing trade representatives in Cape Town, San Francisco and, importantly for our story, Kobe, Japan, in 1902. The first appointee as NSW Commercial Commissioner in Kobe, A.P. Whitely, died shortly after arriving there and was replaced by the long-serving resident engineer of the NSW railways, John Bligh Suttor.13 It was an inspired choice. John Suttor went on to learn Japanese and became so well known and respected in Kobe that when he died, the local merchants commissioned a statue in his memory.14
John Suttor’s job was to observe and report to Sydney on the conduct of trade in what was then called the Far East (now South-East Asia), and particularly on Japanese trade.15 James M. Sinclair, the Victorian government’s agent in Singapore, also reported on trade matters in the Far East,16 as did the Victorian representative in Kobe and later Shanghai, R.B. Levien.17 Queensland appointed Frederick Jones as its trade commissioner in Hong Kong. By the end of 1906, there were four Australian trade commissioners or agents operating in Asia reporting commercial intelligence.
As already noted, Atlee Hunt was well aware of the activities of these trade commissioners, particularly their efforts in assisting Asian businessmen to meet the requirement of the Commonwealth’s Immigration Restriction Act. Although today we see the Act as particularly racist, it was not as racist as many Australians of the period wanted it to be. The less racist version of the Act that Barton and Deakin had got through Parliament enabled the Commonwealth to ease the bureaucratic restrictions on Asian visitors by authorising state trade commissioners to provide a simple letter of introduction for Chinese and Japanese business travellers.18
The reality was, however, that after Federation the states had little real interest in keeping their trade representatives abroad. In April 1906, Queensland closed its Hong Kong office,19 while Victoria closed its Shanghai office in 1909 and the Singapore office in 1912.20 The Victorian representative in Singapore, James Sinclair, did not return to Australia but remained in Asia. He had been a long-term friend of the Australian Dr George Ernest Morrison, now a senior political advisor to the Chinese government and the Beijing correspondent for The Times of London.21 It seems that in addition to his duties for the Victorian government, Sinclair worked for the Department of External Affairs in a capacity he would not reveal.22 By 1912, there was only John Suttor in Kobe.23
Suttor was a strong advocate of Australia developing its trade with Asia, and specifically with Japan. He reflected the NSW government’s more open approach towards Japan, and it is no surprise that New South Wales was almost alone in providing Japanese-language classes in selected high schools and at the University of Sydney. This attitude of the NSW government had grown from the influence of free traders such as Sir Henry Parkes and William Henry Suttor, John Suttor’s uncle.24
Atlee Hunt saw John Suttor as a useful source of low-cost independent information on Japan and the Far East. Suttor’s reports arrived untouched by the Imperial Government in London and provided a crosscheck against other intelligence coming out of London.25 By June 1916, with World War I increasing in intensity and Edmund Piesse in Military Intelligence raising the focus on Japan’s ambitions in the Pacific, John Suttor found himself being given clandestine tasks for the first time.
Suttor was instructed to obtain intelligence on Japanese shipbuilding and the organisation of Japan’s merchant marine for the ACNB. For the first time, he was instructed to keep his work strictly secret.26 With this, Suttor crossed the threshold that divides the trade representative and diplomat from the spy.
John Suttor carried out these tasks, but the NSW government noted that his mission had crept from supplying open-source information and reporting political perspectives to obtaining sensitive military intelligence.27 In late 1916, the NSW government raised concerns Suttor was being put at risk.28 The Japanese treatment of suspect spies could be savagely brutal, and the NSW government was right in raising its concerns. After all, he was the representative of New South Wales and not Australia. Suttor’s military reporting seems to have tapered off after New South Wales made its views clear.
Dr George Ernest Morrison (popularly known as ‘Morrison of Peking’) was an Australian expat known to the Australian government. Morrison had gained entrée to the highest levels of the Chinese government by virtue of being the Times correspondent, and had become a senior policy advisor. The question was whether Morrison was working for the Chinese government, The Times or the British government. Anything he found out would have to be reported to his editors and to the British government. Although there is little evidence in the files of Morrison playing a double or triple game, his motivation would always be in question. He was not a safe bet, and Australia does not seem to have placed much faith in him as a prospective secret agent.
Following his arrival in Beijing in 1911, Morrison provided advice to various Chinese officials and political leaders, and in 1912 was appointed political advisor to the Chinese Government of President Yuan Shi Kai.29 In this role, Morrison worked to promote China’s interests. Although he was seen by some as being in favour of Japanese influence in China, his support of Japan seems to have been an attempt to counter Russian influence in China. This reflected official British policy of the time, which further suggests that Morrison was working for the Foreign Office in London.30
Morrison’s early views on Japanese involvement in China changed as the aggressive nature of Japan’s ambitions became more apparent. In January 1915, Japan’s attempt to impose its Twenty-One Demands severely damaged its standing in China, and Morrison came to see Japan as just another predatory imperial power seeking to tear off its own piece of China. His 1916 correspondence with his friend, the Victorian Trade Commissioner James Sinclair, shows Morrison starting to describe the Japanese as just another colonial power, and developing a growing sensitivity towards Japan’s ambitions.31
Whatever the case with Morrison, there is no doubt Suttor and Sinclair collected secret intelligence for the Australian government. Government archives contain secret reports provided by Suttor to the Commonwealth via the NSW Government, and J.M. Sinclair later admitted in a letter to Senator George Pearce that he had worked for the Commonwealth Department of External Affairs when he had been the trade delegate for Victoria.32 These men were not, however, intelligence officers, and this reduced their usefulness as there was no way government officials or commercial agents could involve themselves in darker intelligence activities such as blackmail, bribery, seduction and theft.
The intelligence model created by Atlee Hunt in the early years of the Commonwealth relied on the coopting of patriotic Australians who filled official and business posts into an informal intelligence network. Commonwealth customs officers, military officers, state police officers and trade commissioners all fitted the bill. They were already engaged on official duties, and Hunt’s requirements simply added a few additional tasks to their daily work. It was a cheap and easy way to build an intelligence system quickly, and, as we have seen, it generated a reasonable level of intelligence. What it did not do was allow penetration of foreign governments and the theft of their deeper secrets. This was a job for a secret intelligence service, not for a network of informal sources.