CHAPTER 12

Harry Freame’s Japanese Mission, 1941

On 30 December 1963, Mrs Harriett E. Freame sent a letter to the prime minister of Australia, Sir Robert Menzies.¹ Mrs Freame was looking to Menzies to assist her in some way in erecting a gravestone for her husband, Wykeham Henry (Harry) Freame,² one of the original heroes of Gallipoli and, Mrs Freame claimed, an Australian spy who died from injuries he sustained while spying for Australia in Tokyo.³

Mrs Freame also sought compensation for Harry Freame’s death, and supported her claim that he had died in the service of his country by detailing what he had reported on his deathbed in front of her and other witnesses. The truth of her assertions could easily be rejected, and they were. The government had a death certificate discounting Harry Freame’s claims, and they had paid her some small compensation. Yet the Australian government’s rejection of Harriet Freame’s requests seems too rushed to be complacent. This leads to a conclusion that perhaps there is substance to Harriett Freame’s story, as Harry Freame’s history takes us back to the Japanese-language program of James Murdoch and Edmund Piesse, and to the machinations of the peacetime Military Intelligence Branch at Eastern Command and the Commonwealth Investigative Branch. Harry Freame’s career seems to link to many of the players in Australia’s interwar intelligence.

Wykeham Henry (Harry) Freame was born in Osaka, Japan, in about 1880, to William Henry Freame, an English sailor, and Kitagawa Sei, the daughter of Kitagawa Yasuaki, a local samurai [shizoku] from Shiga Prefecture. This marriage was a historical event in its own right, because Kitagawa Yasuaki was the first Japanese head of a family to officially initiate a marriage to a foreigner in Japan. On 29 April 1873, when he petitioned the Shiga Prefectural Office for permission for Sei to marry William Freame, it led to a great deal of documentation, as prefecture and Ministry of Finance officials tried to deal with the unique event. Finally, on 7 June 1873, the Main Office of the Great Council of State approved the marriage.4

What the Japanese authorities did not know was that William Freame had married Ellen Coker on 20 June 1867 in Melbourne, and had a six-year-old son, William Henry George Freame.⁵ Ellen Freame finally addressed William’s bigamy in 1877 when she sought and was granted a divorce in New South Wales with no co-respondent mentioned.⁶

In Japan, William Freame appears to have made a living teaching English at a kyoritsu gakko (a common school) and working for a steamship company in Nagasaki.⁷ In the Japanese sources, William is described as ‘anything but a refined gentleman’, as he had the manners of a sailor.⁸ He did not impress Miyake Setsurei, a journalist, who rudely described him as looking like he had kuronbo (black) blood in his veins, and rated Freame’s grammar and pronunciation as poor. Miyake also mentions that Freame called his wife ‘Misesu’ [Missus].⁹ The marriage produced two children, Harry and his sister Grace. In marrying Freame, Sei lost her Japanese nationality and William Freame did not have her made a British citizen, most likely because this would have uncovered his bigamy.¹⁰

It is difficult to work out when Harry Freame was born because he consistently lied about his date of birth. This started in August 1914, when he enlisted in the Australian Army claiming to be 29 when it was more likely he was 32.¹¹ From here, his age slid downwards as he sought to win or keep government positions. We do know he was born before the end of 1881, the year his father died.¹² He also persistently lied about who his father was, possibly because of the challenges of navigating the world as a ‘half-caste’. Harriett Freame, Harry’s second wife, was just as bamboozled as everyone else, and she still believed in 1963 that her husband’s father had been dean of Oxford University, a position that has never existed.

Although the record is hazy, it appears that Harry was educated at Osaka until the age of fifteen or sixteen, when he left for England and entered the merchant marine, most likely as a ship’s boy. We can discount the early newspaper accounts that he served in the IJN. Navies of the early twentieth century did not enlist boy sailors and then just let them go at the age of fifteen or sixteen to further their education.

What is certain is Harry Freame served as a British merchant seaman on 22 voyages between May 1902 and November 1909, which are all recorded on his seaman’s discharge book. During this period, in 1906 Harry met and married Edith May Soppitt of Middlesbrough, but remained at sea, undertaking nine voyages between 1909 and 1912. One thing about Harry Freame is that he would prove a better husband and father than William had ever been.13 His wages as a sailor and, later on, as a soldier, were paid to his wife, and when he decided to return to Australia, he brought his family with him. He would later nurse an ailing Edith, who may have been suffering from psychiatric problems, on the family farm at Kentucky, New South Wales.

After his arrival in Australia, Freame seems to have worked as a horse breaker at Glen Innes in New South Wales before he joined the Australian Army in 1914, receiving the regimental number 764 and being posted to the 1st Infantry Battalion. In late October 1914, Freame and the other men of the 1st Infantry Battalion departed Australia for the Middle East and eventually Gallipoli, where he found fame if not fortune.

At Gallipoli, Freame served as a scout. Why is unclear, but maybe it was because of the tall stories that circulated about his previous adventures as a scout in the Mexican Army and in German East Africa. These stories, many of which appeared in newspapers and other popular publications of the time, appear fanciful and it has been impossible to substantiate Freame’s service in the Mexican Army of Porfirio Diaz or identify a Major Ziegler with whom Freame claimed to have served under in Mexico and German East Africa. No Major Ziegler is listed as part of Diaz’s small 25,000-man Mexican Army, and the two gaps in Freame’s seaman’s papers, 1906–07 and 1912–14, do not coincide with the Maji Maji Rebellion in German East Africa in 1905 or the presidency of President Diaz, which ended on 31 May 1911.¹⁴ It is likely that Freame simply jumped ship on both occasions.

At Gallipoli, Harry Freame displayed initiative and courage and, if he was a fantasist, he was either brave or reckless. The evidence suggests he was most likely reckless. The fact Freame dressed up as a Wild West scout wearing a bandana and two pistols (one on each hip), sporting a shoulder holster and carrying a Bowie knife, betrays a ‘look at me’ element in his character that would make him a dangerous man to be around on a battlefield.

Still, it has to be said, Harry Freame was not your average soldier.15 He was half Japanese in an all-white army who landed at Gallipoli already a lance corporal and, a few months later, was a sergeant. It tells us he was both good at what he did and at impressing senior officers, including E.E. Longfield Lloyd, a man who would later play a significant role in Freame’s life. Freame’s antics even impressed Charles Bean, who would later describe Freame as ‘probably the most trusted scout at Anzac’.¹⁶ This description needs to be taken with a pinch of salt as Charles Bean and the AIF that landed at Gallipoli in 1915 were barely trained and had no experience of warfighting.

A good example of the amateurism of the AIF is provided by Bean’s own reporting of a failed trench raid carried out by Australian troops, led by Lieutenant G.A. Street on the night of 4 June 1915. Freame apparently reconnoitred the route the party took.¹⁷ This raid, which was intended to knock out a machine gun post, failed when Street’s party unexpectedly ran into Turkish troops in a trench. The alarmed Turks began machine gunning the Australian trenches and it was decided that the 1st Battalion would mount another raid on the same target at 0255 hours on 5 June. This second raid was undertaken by 50 men led by Captain Lloyd. It was a debacle. The Turkish line was at full alert and waiting to repel any further attacks. No experienced troops would have even considered crossing the ground. As if this was not bad enough, even if they reached the Turkish machine gun they could not destroy it, as the engineers previously assigned to destroy it had gone to bed following the failure of Street’s raid. As Bean tells it, Lloyd’s party crossed no-man’s-land under heavy Turkish fire and attempted to disable the gun by shooting it with a rifle.¹⁸ The gun survived unscathed while five Australians died and 28 were wounded.¹⁹

Freame lasted five months at Gallipoli until 14 August, when he was badly wounded in a Turkish attack and evacuated from the peninsula. He was repatriated to Australia ten months later, which gives some indication of the seriousness of his wounds.²⁰ In his time at Gallipoli, Harry Freame won Australia’s first Distinguished Conduct Medal (DCM) and earned a mention in despatches.21 These were serious awards and, putting aside the inexperience of the AIF and its commanders, they were very significant awards for a sergeant.

The importance of Bean’s account is that it shows that Harry Freame served alongside Lloyd, who was also repatriated to Australia in 1916. Lloyd was posted to the Intelligence Section of the General Staff in Sydney, where he worked for Edmund Piesse. Given his close association with Harry Freame, it is no surprise that he was soon a student in Professor Murdoch’s Japanese-language program.²² From here, Lloyd would go on to serve in the Commonwealth Investigations Branch from 1921 and to fill senior roles in Australia’s security intelligence system, including the Director of the Security Service, until his retirement following the establishment of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) in 1949.²³

The first mention of Harry Freame’s heroism at Gallipoli was in the pages of the Farmer and Settler of 26 May 1916, almost two months before he disembarked back in Sydney on 22 July 1916.²⁴ The story was picked up by papers throughout New South Wales, and differing versions would appear at regular intervals in 1916, 1922 and 1931.²⁵ Harry Freame’s colourful exploits at Gallipoli would make him a hero long before Bean’s The Story of Anzac was published in 1924.²⁶

Freame arrived back in Australia after Lloyd, but it is likely that the two maintained their relationship of officer and soldier. It is also likely that, given the emphasis of Military Intelligence on Japan and the Japanese, Lloyd introduced Freame to Military Intelligence. We can be sure Harry Freame was working for someone, as he was able to set himself up at 2 Bondi Road, Bondi, where he was living on 20 November 1916, the day he was officially discharged from the army.²⁷ Harry Freame is most likely the Japanese-speaking returned soldier working under James Murdoch at Fort Street School.²⁸ Given his connections with Lloyd and Military Intelligence, however, there is every possibility that he worked as a translator and an agent, keeping tabs on Japanese consular staff, visitors and members of the Japanese business community in Sydney and New South Wales.

Harry Freame’s next move occurred on 6 January 1920, when he took up an orchard block at Kentucky, on the New England Tablelands, which he acquired in a grant from the NSW Soldier Settlement Loan Scheme.²⁹ His presence in Kentucky is corroborated by newspaper reports, including one about a short conversation Freame had with General Birdwood during the latter’s visit to the Kentucky settlement on 29 April 1920.30 There is no evidence of Freame having a continuing relationship with Military Intelligence and Lloyd and it is likely the association ceased.

Like many returned soldiers who, despite having no experience or training, were set up as farmers on relatively poor land, the Freames found the going hard. The Freames had it harder because Edith Freame became ill and was in and out of hospital for twelve years until her death in 1939. Harry Freame was declared bankrupt and his 40 acres at Kentucky stripped from him.³¹ According to his second wife, Harriett, it was at this time that he was employed as an agent by Military Intelligence.³² Her claim is corroborated in a minute dated 9 October 1940 confirming that Harry Freame had been employed in defence work of a ‘highly secret nature’ since 4 December 1939.³³ It seems he had left intelligence work only to find himself back in it after the outbreak of World War II.

Harry Freame was a rare commodity in 1939. He was a returned soldier who was not an officer and he could speak fluent Japanese. It is no surprise that Military Intelligence snapped him up and began using him as a field agent spying on the Japanese community in New South Wales. Given the small size of this community and the abysmal tradecraft employed by Military Intelligence agents, it is likely Freame was quickly identified as a spy. The level of Australian tradecraft at this time was so bad that the Japanese diplomats at the Consulate-General in Sydney publicly teased Longfield Lloyd about the surveillance operation mounted against Major Hashida in 1941.

From the documentary evidence it appears that Freame’s handler was a Major Scott, a militia officer who had served in France in 1916 and 1917 and suffered severe shell shock.³⁴ Between the wars, he served as a militia officer and owned an insurance brokerage, and was heavily involved in right-wing politics throughout the interwar period, though not with the mythical Old Guard.³⁵ Major Scott was also involved in the Australia–Japan Society, either as an agent provocateur, or because he really supported its objective of closer relations.

Scott’s management of Freame as an agent was poor. Despite Freame’s work being described as ‘highly secret’ and known only to Scott, Lieutenant Colonel Hodgson, the Secretary of the External Affairs Department, was aware of Freame by 30 August 1940.³⁶ Scott impressed on Hodgson the need for absolute secrecy in relation to Freame and his work but, stunningly, passed Freame’s private telephone number and address to Hodgson.37 Nothing in the file suggests that Freame was asked about this, or that any effort was made to ascertain why Hodgson wanted to talk to an agent whose existence was supposedly a closely guarded secret.

By this time Freame was not just working for Scott as a secret agent, but had begun working for the Military Censor as a Japanese linguist, a post he took up at the end of August 1940 without Major Scott’s knowledge. Hodgson most likely found out about Freame through his connection with the Military Censor.³⁸ This suggests that Freame’s name was being bandied around government without any concern for his safety and that his putative handler was completely unaware of his holding at least two different positions, one in counterintelligence and one with the Censor. Now a third was in the offing, with Hodgson offering Freame the position of translator on the staff of Australia’s first mission to Japan, led by Sir John Latham as first minister.

This extraordinary situation was now made enormously worse on Friday, 13 September 1940, when Freame’s details, including his ‘special defence work’ and his appointment as the interpreter to the Australian Legation in Tokyo, were published in the press.³⁹ Someone somewhere had background briefed the press, and the Daily Telegraph in Sydney, The Sun and The Argus in Melbourne, The Mercury in Hobart, the West Australian in Perth and The Advertiser in Adelaide published all of the details. Only three newspapers, the Sydney Morning Herald, The Examiner in Launceston and the Cootamundra Herald, omitted the reference to special defence work.⁴⁰

On 17 September, Major Scott responded to the breach of security by asking Section 1C of Military Intelligence to ask The Sun ‘what the special defence work is and who supplied this information’.⁴¹ The whole affair now spiralled out of control as the Minister for the Army, P.A. McBride, wrote to the Minister for External Affairs, John (Black Jack) McEwen, raising the army’s ‘considerable embarrassment’ and stating that ‘the possibility cannot be overlooked that this appointment may now be viewed with suspicion in Tokyo’.⁴² McBride clearly laid the blame for this on Hodgson and, in a remarkable example of shutting a stable door too late, asked for McEwen’s ‘assurance that suitable action’ was taken ‘to ensure that no breach of security is possible in future’.⁴³

McEwen was not called ‘Black Jack’ for nothing. His reply of 2 October 1940 firmly put McBride in his place. McEwen accepted Hodgson’s assurances that there had been ‘no disclosure of any confidential information to the press about the activities of Mr Freame’.44 Having defended Hodgson and the department, McEwen went on the offensive, pointing out to McBride that Freame’s activities were ‘well known to the Japanese authorities here, including the Consul-General’.⁴⁵ Rubbing it in, McEwen tells McBride that Freame’s controller, Major Scott, had only become aware of Freame’s employment by the Military Censor on 1 October.⁴⁶

As if this were not bad enough, McEwen also told McBride that Hodgson had ‘specially raised the question of his [Freame’s] appointment to the staff of the Tokyo [Australian] Legation with the Consul-General of Japan, with a view to ascertaining his attitude towards the appointment’.⁴⁷ The response of the Consul-General was that the appointment ‘was an excellent one, as Mr Freame had created a very favourable impression’.⁴⁸

The naivety on display here stuns, even today. The idea that Japanese diplomats could provide any assurance of Freame’s safety in Japan, where he would fall under the authority of the Kempeitai, was something that, even in 1940, anyone able to read the press reports from Japan knew could not be relied upon. Australian government ministers, military officers and officials had openly disclosed Freame was a secret agent being sent to Tokyo at the same time Japan’s Minister for War, Lieutenant General Tojo Hideki, had just publicly announced that the IJA would ‘not hesitate to take drastic measures against Japanese who assisted foreign secret agents and those who were pro-British’.⁴⁹ Harry Freame was half Japanese, and no one in Australia seemed to understand what this entailed.

The country that Harry Freame was going to in 1941 was not a democracy or even a well-run monarchy or autocracy. In 1941, Japan was a nation in chaos as military factions struggled to impose their policy on the country via the Emperor. Assassination of opponents was frequent and, as General Tojo made perfectly clear, murdering Japanese or foreigners, with the exception of Americans, was seen as perfectly acceptable.

All of this was known in Australia. In 1935, British diplomatic reporting made available to Australia described the travails of a 75-year-old Australian citizen, the Reverend J.N. Mackenzie, at the hands of the Japanese military police, the Kempeitai.⁵⁰ Mackenzie had worked for 25 years as a missionary caring for lepers in Korea. His work was highly regarded by both the Japanese government and the Government-General of Korea. All of this was meaningless when the Kempeitai arrested Mackenzie for taking photographs of some children. Mackenzie’s crime was not photographing children, it was having a camera.

Mackenzie was interrogated for more than two days and it was not gentle. G.H. Phipps, the British Consul-General in Korea reported that the interrogation only stopped at actual physical injury, behaviour that Mr Phipps reported ‘reflects little credit on the force’.51

Mackenzie was lucky his arrest embarrassed the Japanese government enough for a face-saving plan to be implemented where he agreed to the charge of being an ‘international spy’. This meant he could be brought before the civil authorities, who treated him with courtesy, while convicting him and fining him a petty 25 yen. Mr Phipps’ warned both the British and Australian governments that the ‘gendarmerie [the other title of the Kempeitai] is unfortunately independent of the civil government and is…very much a law unto itself’.⁵² Anyone willing to read the file on Mackenzie should have realised that it did not matter what Japan’s Consul-General said—the Kempeitai would do as it pleased.

The Mackenzie affair was not even the worst. In 1940, the Japanese authorities cracked down on anyone thought to be a spy, particularly a British spy. British spies were now targeted because Foreign Minister Matsuoka Yosuke had stopped the Kempeitai chasing American spies, and the Soviet spies were too hard to catch. The Kempeitai immediately arrested eleven British citizens who had attracted their attention. One of those arrested was James Melville Cox, the Reuters correspondent in Tokyo and an SIS agent. Cox had initially been compromised in 1936 when he posted classified information on the refitting of HIJMS Nagato in a letter signed ‘Jimmy’ from a favourite haunt, the Teikoku Hotel in Tokyo.⁵³ The Kempeitai had intercepted the letter but could not identify ‘Jimmy’. The importance of Jimmy lay in the loss of face it caused the IJN to have the Kempeitai discover a British spy operating successfully against its dockyards. The matter was important enough that the Kempeitai now employed the most important tool in intelligence work: they recorded everything and began a systematic investigation of the matter.

Cox’s letter provided the Kempeitai with three major insights. First, the name ‘Jimmy’ indicated a European, as did posting it from the Teikoku Hotel. Secondly, they knew the spy was interested in shipbuilding and the IJN. Thirdly, and most importantly, they knew the spy existed.

As the investigation proceeded, suspicion fell on Cox. The Kempeitai knew the name ‘Jimmy’ was the diminutive of James, and Cox did frequent the Teikoku Hotel. More incriminatingly, Cox’s handwriting was similar to that on the original letter and he used similar stationery. Despite this, there was little the Kempeitai could do until 1937 when the Military Secrets Act was revised to cover civilians and foreigners. In 1940, with the Americans out of bounds and amid growing tension, the Military Service Bureau ordered the Kempeitai to clamp down on foreign suspects and the gloves came off.54 James Cox was immediately picked up and taken to Kempeitai HQ in Tokyo.

Cox was interrogated, supposedly in an attempt to get him to incriminate the British Ambassador, Sir Robert Craigie, in espionage activities. How it happened no one really knows, but Cox ended up dead in the courtyard of Kempeitai HQ. The explanation provided was that he had thrown himself from the fourth-floor window.⁵⁵

While the British government officially accepted suicide as the cause of Cox’s death, the subsequent British investigation by Patrick Dean of the Foreign Office strongly suggested Cox had been tortured and murdered. The difficulties with the Japanese version were that the window in question ‘was a yard [90 centimetres] square’ and was protected by a large sill 90 centimetres above the floor, from which an already weakened and injured Cox would have had to launch himself. He would have had to negotiate this while eluding the two guards who always escorted prisoners.⁵⁶ Dean also found Cox’s body had travelled 6 metres out from the wall of the building. The British investigation, while publicly accepting the suicide claim, privately thought Cox was either thrown through the window or that his body was placed in the courtyard after he had died in another place.⁵⁷

Further evidence that Cox had been murdered was provided by a British resident of Nagasaki, and probable SIS agent, Vanya Ringer, who was arrested at the same time as Cox. On 29 July, the day Cox died, Ringer reported that he was told of Cox’s death and threatened with the same if he did not tell the truth. Ringer had no doubt Cox had been murdered, as throughout his own detention he was always accompanied by at least two Kempeitai guards.⁵⁸ Ringer’s unpublished memoirs are the source of much of the information available on Cox’s death, and he obtained a large part of his information from Cox’s widow, who sailed home with him on the SS Nankin. She told Ringer she saw more than twenty needle marks on her husband’s body.⁵⁹

The British responded with a carefully choreographed rounding-up of suspected Japanese spies in India and Singapore, which included Shinozaki Mamoru, the press attaché at the Japanese Consulate-General in Singapore. The way this was done suggests Cox was indeed an SIS officer. The evidence used in court against Shinozaki included his assistance to Colonel Tanikawa Kazuo and Captain Kunitake Teruhito of the IJA’s Imperial General Staff, and his running of two agents, Gunner Frank Gardener of the Royal Artillery and Corporal Compton of the RAF, who had passed him information on troop movements in and out of Malaya.60

More substantive, though, is the fact that James Cox’s widow was paid £5000 by the British government, a significant sum of money in 1940. This strongly suggests that James Cox was either an SIS agent or an SIS officer working under the cover of journalism in Japan.⁶¹

The details of Cox’s death had been reported in the Australian press, and it is impossible that the Australian authorities planning to send Harry Freame to Tokyo did not know about the crackdown in Japan.⁶² Yet despite all the press reporting of July 1940, Harry Freame boarded the SS Tanda on 11 October 1940 and set sail for Tokyo, where suspected spies were thrown out of fourth-floor windows.⁶³

The outcome was entirely predictable. Freame arrived in Japan and started his duties as an interpreter and odd job man around the legation. Sometime during this period it would appear that the Kempeitai decided to take action against him. In their eyes, Freame was more than a British spy; he was a traitor working from the legation of a British colony. Given the evidence of the Kempeitai’s aggressive and violent response to British spying, the claims of the Freame family that Harry was attacked and garrotted on a Tokyo street on 27 January 1941 are most likely true.⁶⁴

The first formal claim that Harry Freame had died as a result of being garrotted by the Japanese security forces was raised in a letter written by Harriett Freame to Harry’s old comrade, now Colonel Lloyd, the Director of the new Commonwealth Security Service, on 16 June 1941. In this letter, Harriett detailed how worried Harry and she had been by the press reporting of his posting to Tokyo and that Harry had told her he was being ‘shadowed here and there after those silly people of the Sun Office’ printed their story.⁶⁵ If Freame was being clandestinely shadowed around Sydney prior to his departure for Tokyo, he should have never been sent. The fact that he was allowed to proceed is an indictment of the amateurism surrounding Australia’s security intelligence establishment of the time. It also explains why Lloyd took such a deep interest in the subsequent investigations and why, despite all of her efforts, Harriett Freame failed to get any support from subsequent Australian governments.

The tone of Harriett Freame’s letters indicates that she was well aware of a security angle to Harry’s work in Tokyo. In her letter, Harriett thanks Lloyd for his ‘lovely letter and tribute to Harry’ while adding ‘I cannot write it but I would welcome an interview at anytime’ and ‘I would love to tell you about it. I know it was as you say, but I don’t know if Sir John Latham is even aware…’ It is a strong indication that Freame had been involved in something more than providing his services as an interpreter to the Australian Legation and that Lloyd was directly involved.

Despite the insistence of Freame’s family that he died of injuries some four months after his garrotting in Tokyo, the official position was he died of cancer of the gall bladder, and his death certificate, which lists carcinoma of the gall bladder, supports this. Cancer of the gall bladder is, however, uncommon and it does not accord with the clinical findings of Dr Ikeda, the Japanese doctor who examined Freame at St Luke’s International Medical Centre in Tokyo shortly after the attack.66 Dr Ikeda found that Freame had suddenly lost his voice and suffered difficulty in swallowing. A laryngoscopy was conducted, and a complete paralysis of the left nervus laryngeus recurrens diagnosed, a finding consistent with a failed garrotting, not gall bladder cancer. Freame’s blood count was normal, as were his stools and urine, and the X-rays of his lungs and lower oesophagus showed no abnormality, although Dr Ikeda lists ‘a certain pathology in the mediastinum [the area between the lungs]’.⁶⁷

To the lay reader, much of the medical information above is meaningless. The test results, however, showing normal stools and blood count and that there was no evidence of pancreatic, liver or stomach cancer on X-ray, is close to being impossible in gall bladder cancer. Freame’s signs and symptoms were not those of a man with terminal cancer in his liver, pancreas or gall bladder.⁶⁸ The cause of death given in the official death certificate is not sustainable on the clinical evidence.

Freame returned to Australia after the attack and then died. A further complication is that the medical practitioner who issued the death certificate, Dr M.O. Stormon, was found by Military Intelligence to have been in close contact with the ‘Secretary to the Minister for External Affairs’, Fredrick Stewart.69 At face value this suggests that two Commonwealth ministers, the Minister for External Affairs and the Minister for Health, were taking a direct interest in the medical condition of a temporary clerk.⁷⁰ This is not easily explained unless there was significant sensitivity about Freame’s death in government circles.

Further evidence of governmental concern is seen in the telegram sent to Sir John Latham in Tokyo telling him that the department was ‘confronted with question as to whether contributing factor in death was his service in Japan’ and, if this was so, then there was a ‘moral obligation to offer some compensation’ to his destitute widow. Latham abruptly dismissed the department’s concerns.⁷¹

In 1947, Latham would again reject compensation for Harriett Freame, writing, ‘I can see no reason which would afford a sufficient ground for an application for further payment to Mr Freame’s widow upon any other than compassionate grounds’.⁷² Apparently, the ex gratia payment of £50 paid in October 1941, reduced by Treasury from the £100 recommended by the minister, was good enough.⁷³ Harry Freame’s grateful nation had provided his widow with approximately six weeks’ worth of his annual £400 salary.⁷⁴ The payout left his family destitute and Harriett was forced to bury Harry in an unmarked grave in the Church of England section of the Northern Suburbs Cemetery in Sydney. The grave is still there and still unmarked.

There is no doubt that Harry Freame’s death caused a great deal of interest in official circles, but most of officialdom was keen to bury him and move on. Even his old comrade Lloyd did little for him or his family other than advising the Department of External Affairs that the ‘possibility of Mr Freame having received [his] injury in Japan is not a remote one’.⁷⁵ All of this strongly suggests that Harry Freame, who was a security intelligence agent working clandestinely against the Japanese in Australia, was sent on an intelligence mission to Japan where he was attacked by the Kempeitai and subsequently died of his injuries after returning to Australia. If this is so, then Wykeham Henry Freame was the first Australian clandestine intelligence operative to be killed while serving his country. If so, as an ex-soldier, decorated war hero and Australian spy, it is wrong that he should be lying in an unmarked grave in Sydney, unacknowledged and unwanted by his country. Still, this is the fate of many a good spy.