3

An intelligence agency

The Movement’s extraordinary success in defeating communists in trade union elections and effectively limiting their influence in the labour movement has been well documented in numerous books and scholarly journals.1 This success was made much easier by the formation of the ALP Industrial Groups in 1945–46, providing political cover for Show members to collaborate with Protestants (and others) in the ALP to oust communist leaders from many major unions.2 The best-known campaigns were those waged to dislodge the CPA from the Federated Ironworkers’ Association and the Federated Clerks’ Union, but there were numerous other successes between 1945 and October 1954, when Labor’s federal leader, Bert Evatt, denounced The Movement, precipitating the Labor Split.

These campaigns were successful largely because of the high level of commitment and close attention to detail of Show members and their allies in the Industrial Groups. Nothing was left to chance, with the preparation of well-constructed, hard-hitting propaganda and meticulous organisational effort, including the canvassing of often apathetic union members in their workplaces and, especially, at their homes.

These operations would not have been anywhere near as effective, however, without the vision, inspirational rhetoric, driving force, and authoritarian leadership displayed by Santamaria. His clarion call to arms to Catholics heightened both their opposition to and deep-seated fear of communism. As Santamaria had observed to the bishops in 1945, it was only the well-organised cadre of Catholics who had transformed the ALP’s factory groups into a reliable and cohesive anti-communist force. This was due largely to his understanding that, with the imprimatur of the bishops behind him, Catholics could be organised into an effective fighting force.

Santamaria was an early success story of non-Anglo immigration. Despite — or perhaps because of — his modest lower-middle-class roots and his ‘dago’ background (a term used then, and later, with barely disguised racism by many Anglo-Australians), he had excelled at school, entering university in the early 1930s when tertiary education was mostly the preserve of the sons (and a few daughters) of the wealthy. His staunch opposition to communism dated from this period. As a young law student at Melbourne University, however, he had been something of a fan of Mussolini’s brand of fascism, proposing in his thesis on Italian history that ‘there is no intrinsic virtue in political democracy which places it on a plane above more authoritarian forms of government’.3

But it was the Spanish civil war that had transformed Santamaria into an inspiring speaker and effective organiser of rank-and-file Catholics, drawing the attention of Melbourne’s Archbishop Mannix, who recruited him to a senior position within the church’s official Catholic Action organisation in early 1938.4 Twelve months earlier, Santamaria’s focus had turned firmly to Spain, where General Francisco Franco’s forces had launched a military putsch against the democratically elected Republican government in July 1936. This — by extension from his earlier critique of democracy — did not perturb the young Santamaria; nor did the mediaeval and exploitative policies of the Spanish church and its support for Franco’s brutal tactics, or Franco’s successful request for military assistance from Hitler and Mussolini.

Strongly influenced by Franco’s exaggerated propaganda about the murder of priests and nuns by the Republicans, Santamaria performed with consummate skill and flair in a public debate with Republican supporters in March 1937, inspiring the numerically superior Catholics in the audience with his passion, sharp intellect, and moving oratory, delivered in his unique, singsong melodious tones.5 Typical of the deep political divide of those years, he made no concessions to the opposition’s arguments, establishing a lasting pattern in his approach to politics: there could be no quarter shown to communists and their fellow travellers, who, as the church’s enemy, were to be ruthlessly defeated.

The only aspect of the CPA that he admired was its phenomenal organising capacity, which Santamaria skilfully duplicated and even extended by marshalling the rigid loyalty that Catholics owed their church by directing them — in an equally rigid and authoritarian structure — in campaigns to defeat his enemy in the battles for control of Australia’s unions.

In the context of the 1930s and 1940s, such fierce anti–communism would seem unexceptional, especially in light of Stalin’s bloody repression of religion in the Soviet Union. What was controversial was Santamaria’s approach — adopted as a young man in his early twenties — of seeking to impose his narrow interpretation of Catholic social doctrine in the political sphere. As his biographer has noted, ‘From his first entry into public debate outside the university, Santamaria made it clear that the Catholic Church should draw no distinction between those matters that belong to God and those that belong to Caesar. This was to become a contentious view in Australia, both within and outside the Catholic Church.’6

It was this controversial approach to religion and politics that significantly contributed to his bitter falling out with ‘Doc’ Evatt in the 1950s.

THEIR RELATIONSHIP had initially been positive. Indeed, Evatt had enjoyed a tactical working relationship with The Show after assuming Labor’s leadership in mid-1951. During the early months of 1954, he drew even closer to Santamaria, but, as events unfolded later that year, he found himself under sustained attack from The Movement, and felt he was losing control of the numbers and might be replaced as leader by a Santamaria supporter.7

Soon after the publication of Alan Reid’s September 1954 exposé of the secret role that Santamaria was playing in Australian politics as the virtually anonymous leader of The Movement, Evatt went on the attack. The essence of his allegation was that it was an outside force, bent on subverting the ALP by adopting ‘methods which strikingly resemble both Communist and Fascist infiltration of larger groups’ so as to gain control of the party’s political and industrial wings, solely on the basis of what he charged was its ‘extreme anti-communism’.8 Santamaria disputed Evatt’s assertion that he aimed to control the ALP,9 but the evidence supports the basic thrust of Evatt’s claim: he was correct in asserting that Santamaria secretly wanted to control the ALP; he was wrong, though, about the motive.

There is considerable evidence indicating that Santamaria had been thinking along these lines for many years prior to Evatt’s statement. For example, Santamaria’s ‘Memorandum on the Movement’ (written around 1947) spelled out that its aims included extending ‘the fight from the trade unions into every organ of public and civic life — political parties, ex-servicemen’s organisations, community centre movements, cultural and educational bodies etc.’10 Catholic historian Father Bruce Duncan quotes from a September 1950 memorandum, written ‘presumably’ by Santamaria, which ‘predicted that, if the Movement continued, “it can be confidently stated” that “soon the programme of the A.L.P. will be in harmony with Christian Social teaching”.’ In May 1952, The Movement’s national conference was so confident of its power within the ALP that it ‘determined “to secure control of the [ALP] Federal Executive and Conference by men with a satisfactory policy by July 1952 at latest”. Movement members were to try to influence pre-selection for state and federal candidates, and to promote its economic policy.’11

In December 1952, Santamaria wrote an extraordinary ‘personal and confidential’ letter to his closest supporter among the bishops, Melbourne’s Daniel Mannix. Santamaria clearly believed that The Movement had achieved much of its original goal of winding back the CPA’s position in major trade unions, nationally in the ACTU and in state and regional labour councils. ‘The result … is roughly that the Communist Party, at the present moment, cannot hope to seize control of Australia by revolutionary means’, he declared, ‘and … the Communist grip on the political Labor movement has been checked … In one sense, therefore, the … Movement has fulfilled its immediate task.’12

Santamaria had no intention of disbanding The Show, however. Indeed, he had another, even more breathtaking, task in mind: transforming the Labor Party into a Catholic-dominated political machine, based on the church’s social teachings. He informed Mannix that the previous three years had opened up possibilities that were ‘far wider than those of the defensive battle against communism’, outlining how control of trade unions affiliated to the ALP made it ‘inevitable that as our people obtained prominence in the unions, they would rise also in the political field’.13 He predicted that:

The … Movement should within a period of five or six years be able to completely transform the leadership of the Labor movement, and to introduce into Federal and State spheres large numbers of members who … should be able to implement a Christian social program in both the State and Federal spheres … This is the first time that such a work has become possible in Australia and, as far as I can see, in the Anglo-Saxon world since the advent of Protestantism.14

This letter was potentially dynamite. If it became widely known inside the church and the ALP, it would have sparked bitter differences among Catholics as to the wisdom of its course, and released bitter sectarian feelings among the Protestant majority. How did Mannix respond? As one former Movement priest observed, ‘There is no evidence that Archbishop Mannix sent this letter on to the other bishops in 1952 or later; or that the bishops discussed this plan and gave the Movement this extended new mandate to actively influence the political sphere. It seems that it just gradually expanded into this new field.’15

Had the issue been referred to the bishops as a whole, such an audacious, strictly party-political venture would certainly have caused considerable controversy and would probably have been rejected if considered at the bishops’ regular national conference. This is demonstrated by the motion carried by nineteen votes to six at the January 1956 conference that ‘the Movement as an organisation is not a political party nor should it attempt to dominate any political party’.16 Furthermore, while it is only possible to speculate on this, if the bishops had been apprised of Santamaria’s assessment that the ‘Movement has fulfilled its immediate task’, a majority may well have considered it appropriate to disband The Show — not endorse its expansion into party politics. If Mannix had formally referred this letter to the bishops’ conference, it is likely that the course of Australian politics in the second half of the 20th century could thereby have been dramatically different.

In pursuing his strictly political — as opposed to industrial — goals, Santamaria was extremely loose with the truth, even within the ultra-secret confines of inner-Movement forums. For example, in January 1953, a meeting of senior lay and clerical members met to discuss ‘pressing problems which their strategy had given rise to’. The central issue concerned whether the bishops’ 1945 mandate for The Show included extending its activities into party politics. Santamaria’s version of what the bishops had discussed and resolved was at best a revisionist history, and at worst a conscious lie to convince his colleagues of the legitimacy of his ventures into party politics. He claimed that the bishops had agreed to his proposition that The Movement should fight communist activities beyond the unions — that it was given a mandate to extend its remit outside the industrial arena. In a further sleight of hand, he claimed that the organisation’s constitution was never submitted to the bishops’ 1945 meeting. Neither assertion was true, as the minutes of that meeting make clear: the bishops specifically approved the ‘Industrial Movement’ [emphasis added] and nothing further, and the constitution was definitely before them, as it was twice amended, most significantly, to specify that The Movement was to be controlled by a committee of bishops in as far as policy and finance were concerned.17

Santamaria’s dissembling on these issues had substantial political repercussions. For example, the former Movement priest quoted above was an eyewitness to the consequences of Mannix’s decision to slyly give his personal imprimatur to Santamaria’s plan without consulting his colleagues. In mid-1954, Father Harold Lalor — the priest who had revealed The Movement’s plans to the Security Service a decade earlier and had then become one of Santamaria’s close circle in Melbourne — visited his old home base of Perth. A gathering of priests was convened to hear Lalor’s analysis of the current state of the struggle, which this ex-Movement priest attended. He remembered, ‘quite distinctly’, Lalor’s words: ‘We now have the numbers to replace Dr Evatt, Stan Keon will be the new leader and the next Prime Minister of Australia.’18

This was three months before Evatt made his claims about the Movement’s intentions towards the ALP. Keon was a staunch anti-communist and, although not officially a member, was a strong Show supporter, who had been promoted by Santamaria as his favoured candidate to replace Evatt as ALP leader. Understandably, he was one of those subsequently accused by Evatt of disloyalty to Labor and of being under Santamaria’s control.19

Evatt’s claim that The Movement’s aim was to control the ALP has been shown — with the benefit of access to several key internal Movement documents and, especially, Santamaria’s letter to Mannix — to be correct.20 He was wrong, though, that this strategy was based exclusively on the negative motive of anti-communism. Santamaria’s secret plan to gain control of the party was in order to implement his positive agenda — to transform it into one based on Catholic social doctrines. That he could foreshadow such a far-reaching project stemmed directly from The Show’s organisational model — based, as Santamaria had designed it, on the CPA.

Santamaria was well informed about the communists’ successful penetration of the ALP over many years. Indeed, in the late 1930s the CPA’s clandestine influence in the New South Wales ALP had been so powerful that it effectively controlled the numbers on the floor of the 1939 state conference, and was able to elect the key officials and control the state executive. This was achieved by numerous ‘double card carriers’ whose loyalty secretly lay with the CPA, while publicly they appeared to be staunch ALP members. Communists had also built a powerful machine in the Victorian ALP, and played influential roles in other states.21

By 1952, Santamaria had accumulated a decade of practice in clandestine operations, copied straight from the communists’ manual. His experience was significantly enhanced by The Show’s active collaboration with Australian intelligence services. Much has been written about Santamaria’s outstanding intellect and organising abilities that saw the dramatic turnaround in the CPA’s fortunes in the unions. Far less, however, has been recorded of the methods used to achieve this.

FROM ITS INCEPTION, The Movement was an intelligence-gathering operation. As seen earlier, its first port of call for this purpose was Australian intelligence. Father Lalor had made contact with the wartime Security Service in Perth in mid-1944, seeking assistance in the fight against communism. He was not the only Movement priest operating in this murky, but fruitful, arena.

Lalor’s counterpart in The Show’s Sydney branch was Reverend Dr Patrick (Paddy) Ryan, who operated from the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart in Kensington, which, like Belloc House in Melbourne, was something of a second Movement headquarters. Like Lalor, Ryan was a ‘militant Roman Catholic priest’, an anti-communist crusader, and skilled propagandist. Like Lalor, he had studied for the priesthood in Rome, where he was ordained in 1929. The two priests shared a love of the melodramatic; Ryan’s powerful lectures on the dangers that communism posed to the church invariably roused the already fearful faithful. He was also courageous, taking the enemy head-on in legendary debates with prominent CPA leaders, most notably in a famous stoush in 1948 with lifelong Stalinist Edgar Ross in front of a capacity crowd of 30,000 at Sydney’s Rushcutters Bay stadium.22

Ryan had previously been in charge of Sydney’s Catholic Social Bureau, which was a centre of anti-communist activism. The bureau morphed into The Movement’s Sydney branch following the bishops’ 1945 decision to officially sponsor and finance it. He was appointed as chaplain to The Show’s Sydney branch, a post he held until 1953, when he was unceremoniously dumped by Bishop Patrick Lyons (formerly of Melbourne, where he had been Mannix’s secretary), causing deep bitterness among the Sydney membership. Ironically, his replacement was Father Lalor, also seen by Sydney as a ‘Melbourne loyalist’. A bitter seed had been planted in the fertile ground of the traditional Sydney–Melbourne rivalry.23

In effect, Ryan was the key figure in The Movement’s Sydney operation, with a seat at the national conference, where at times he pursued a somewhat provincial, Sydney-centric line. Sydney Archbishop (Cardinal after 1946) Norman Gilroy effectively abdicated his responsibilities for the local organisation to Ryan (and for the national body, too, despite his membership of the bishops’ committee overseeing The Show’s work, which he did not attend).24 After his sacking in 1953, Ryan emerged as a bitter internal critic of Santamaria, and played a major role in convincing most Sydney Catholics to follow Gilroy’s edict to remain loyal to the ALP at the time of the Labor Split, while Santamaria advocated in favour of the breakaway ‘anti-communist’ party, later the Democratic Labor Party.25

While he ran the Sydney branch, however, Ryan was a champion of Santamaria’s model for The Movement, justifying the use of strict secrecy and underhanded tactics on the basis that if the communists used unsavoury methods, so could they. In Ryan’s world, the CPA’s operational model was a mirror of his own. Santamaria’s decision to base The Show — lock, stock, and barrel — upon the CPA was his guiding principle. For example, Ryan approved of the distribution of fake ballot papers in union elections — a tactic used by the CPA on occasions, most notoriously in the ironworkers’ union — and the stacking of ALP branches, as well as sending bogus members to get the numbers at hotly contested union and university faculty meetings. Anything the communists were doing to impose their control, Ryan argued, The Show was morally justified in copying.26

Ryan shared another thing in common with his eventual replacement as chaplain to the Sydney Movement: like Lalor in Perth, he was the initial point man for relations with the intelligence services in NSW. ASIO’s highly censored files on ‘Catholic Action’ (synonymous with The Movement in this context) clearly establish that, from the early 1940s, Ryan had maintained regular high-level contacts with numerous intelligence agencies. These included ASIO’s predecessors, the Commonwealth Investigation Service (CIS, which continued to operate for a few years after ASIO’s creation in 1949), and the Commonwealth Security Service (which was active during World War II), as well as the NSW Police Special Branch, Naval Intelligence, and, of course, ASIO itself. This was an impressive array of open doors for a simple Sacred Heart priest to be free to walk through.27

One report by the senior section officer of ASIO’s B1 (counter-subversion) section in Sydney provides revealing insights into the high-level contacts Ryan had with intelligence agencies. This officer had been recruited to ASIO from the CIS, where his duties during the second half of the 1940s included regular visits to Movement headquarters. His ‘dealings were with Dr. Ryan’, he reported, and two others ‘whose names I do not now recall’. Brigadier Frederick ‘Black Jack’ Galleghan who, as deputy director-general of security for NSW, ran the Sydney CIS office, and William Barnwell (who later joined ASIO) ‘were in contact with Catholic Action in that period also’, as were at least three other CIS officers. On some occasions, he recalled, Ryan visited CIS headquarters for meetings with his contacts, who also regularly communicated with Ryan by telephone.28

That a civilian leader of a private outfit had such regular high-level contacts demonstrated that the two organisations worked closely on anti-communist operations. Ryan clearly had intelligence of significance to offer the CIS, which, in turn, provided Ryan with information of assistance to The Movement’s anti-communist operations. For example, ASIO collected intelligence from its agents indicating that Ryan’s CIS contacts — especially with a number of Catholics — were very fruitful. One agent reported that Ryan frequently quoted directly from documents seized in security raids on communists conducted in the early years of World War II (during the CPA’s period of illegality under Robert Menzies’ federal government).29

The files indicate that ASIO, however, sometimes had a somewhat ambivalent attitude towards The Show. The officers with the closest overview of this relationship were delighted with the often-detailed information about the activities of communists supplied by several officially registered agents (who received regular payments for their work, although these were deducted from their Movement salaries). This included obtaining some intelligence gems that were highly regarded at ASIO headquarters in Melbourne.

On the other hand, ASIO was worried by several aspects of The Movement’s modus operandi. At least one Movement liaison agent with ASIO was viewed as being unscrupulous, and some of his information was classified as unreliable and biased, sometimes deliberately so. It was also quickly established that other wings of the intelligence community had been unprofessional in their relationship — for example, sharing intelligence on a two-way basis by providing official information instead of simply receiving The Movement’s. Having established this precedent, Ryan wanted to continue on the same basis with ASIO. Of even greater concern, however, was that the bad habits of these agencies had been imported into ASIO, which had recruited some of their officers.

As troubling as this background was, the early 1950s was a critical period for ASIO in its elaborate operations to penetrate the CPA. By 1953, the first wave of ASIO’s agents recruited for this purpose were showing tell-tale signs of exhaustion from the arduous, nerve-racking tasks they were required to undertake. There was an urgent need to replenish this pool. The Show offered good prospects, which ASIO was keen to exploit. There were, however, fears that The Movement might utilise the relationship to penetrate ASIO.

The three ASIO officers most concerned with this relationship were the director-general, Charles Spry; the controller of the Special Services Section (S section, which recruited, trained, and ran ASIO’s registered agents); and the NSW regional director, Ron Richards. Having established the first officially recorded contact between the intelligence community and The Movement in Perth in 1944, Richards had been recruited to ASIO and rapidly promoted by Spry to head the critical NSW operation in Sydney, which was also the CPA’s national headquarters as well as the base of its largest and most effective state branch.

In 1951, ASIO had the first inklings of problems with the relationship. In late November, Richards addressed a memo to Spry, marked to the attention of Q section (the predecessor of S Section, which ran ASIO’s paid agents). Attached to this memo were two reports concerning an agent recruited from The Movement who had worked for the NSW office during 1950. One was written by Richards’ senior section officer in charge of running agents (a former CIS officer), and the other by the senior field officer responsible for day-to-day liaison with agents (an ex-Police Special Branch officer).

Their judgement of The Movement liaison agent was not complimentary: not only had his intelligence proved to be unreliable on occasions, but in one instance he had proposed a joint operation with ASIO to commit burglary to obtain supposedly important information. He had also suggested that if ASIO raided a prominent communist’s house, he would arrange to have firearms planted there. ‘In view of this statement’, commented the ASIO officer, ‘I considered him to be unscrupulous.’ In his favour, when secretly tested by being asked to gather intelligence on a specified individual, his work had been found ‘totally correct’. This was established because Special Branch simultaneously subjected the target to ‘special surveillance’ that corroborated the Movement agent’s own information supplied to his ASIO handler.

In response to Richards’ memo, in early December 1951, Spry warned ASIO’s Papua New Guinea office of the agent’s shortcomings (as he had relocated there and was offering his services to the local office).30 The man was deemed unsuitable for ASIO’s methodical and more professional approach towards the invasive surveillance and dirty tricks it regularly used against communists. But even greater difficulties were just around the corner.

In September 1952, Spry and Richards were diverted from their highest priority — investigating the Soviet spy ring that had operated in Australia in the 1940s with the assistance of several CPA members. Instead they were consumed by a ‘special investigation … into irregularities and improper agent control’ at ASIO’s Edgecliff office in Sydney, centred on the agents employed by ASIO as official conduits to The Movement.31

Spry and Richards were deeply worried by the implications of several reports submitted by senior ASIO staff indicating that official intelligence had been obtained by The Show over the previous several years, due to unprofessional methods adopted by officers of both ASIO and its predecessors. This investigation stretched over several years and caused continuing doubts. The intelligence supplied by The Movement — and its potential to provide agents capable of penetrating the CPA — eventually overrode such concerns.

The nub of the quandary was set out in a closely typed five-page memo to Richards from the officer in charge of New South Wales’s S section:

It will be evident that Catholic Action [The Movement], which is itself an intelligence agency, by liaison with Organizations, can effect a penetration, especially in the circumstances as set out in paragraph 2 where there is an unorganized liaison and when the degree of information supplied to it would vary according to the discretion of each of the several Officers in contact with it. [Emphasis added.]32

The danger identified in ‘paragraph 2’ concerned the ‘unorganised fashion’ in which officers of the CIS, Naval Intelligence, and Special Branch conducted their liaison with The Show. For example, this officer knew that The Movement’s liaison agent with the CIS had improperly obtained CIS intelligence from other agencies to which it had been sent officially. He established this because on at least one occasion The Movement agent had subsequently reproduced the exact same intelligence for the CIS, more or less word for word, that had been supplied by the CIS to other agencies. Furthermore, he had established that The Show had disseminated CIS information to other intelligence agencies, which, in turn, channelled it back to CIS as if it were fresh intelligence. ‘While at C.I.S., in about 1948,’ he wrote, ‘I made a test by supplying [The Movement agent] with some imaginary information and I later found that identical information was received back at C.I.S., having been channelled to it by Naval Intelligence who obviously had obtained it from Catholic Action.’33

This was a deeply worrying aspect of the relationship; it meant that The Movement’s sometimes amateurish, bull-at-the-gate, methods could allow misleading, even completely incorrect, information to be circulated throughout the Australian intelligence community.

On the other side of the balance sheet, on many occasions The Show supplied priceless intelligence. A recent example cited in this report concerned three shorthand notebooks ‘which contained a record of high level [CPA] meetings’ taken by a leading party stenographer.34 Such a windfall would have provided an eagle’s-eye view of the inner workings, current thinking, and strategies of ASIO’s principal target.

This officer also reported that the chaotic methods used by ASIO’s predecessors were reproduced in ASIO’s early days, with a number of officers acting ‘independently and on their own initiative’ before ‘organised liaison’ was arranged by Bob Wake, Richards’ predecessor as head of ASIO in NSW. Wake had visited The Movement’s headquarters and arranged for a ‘liaison officer to provide ASIO with information’.35 ASIO also arranged to regularly pay the liaison agent £2 a week [$100] — a tidy sum in the early 1950s, when the average wage was £10 a week — which was deducted from his Movement salary.36 Father Ryan approved the arrangement, establishing a formal relationship that lasted for over two decades.

Ryan, however, was not satisfied with a key element of this link. It was not reciprocal— The Show was handing over truckloads of information, but ASIO provided nothing in return. As instructed (presumably by Ryan or Kevin Davis, the lay official in charge of the Sydney office), the liaison agent requested that this be rectified and that ASIO adopt the precedent set by other agencies and provide The Movement with intelligence — strictly on an ‘unofficial’ basis. In making this request, the agent stated that his predecessor ‘had much better access to Government Departments than he himself has at present’, including ‘open slather with the Navy files and all the usual Departments like Immigration’.

The officer, knowing that ASIO’s policy differed from such agencies, cautiously undertook to pass on this request to his superiors. But he also probed as to why The Show might need such assistance, and ‘the nature of the enquiries for which he would require information from this Organization’. The Movement agent’s response was revealing:

He was reluctant to answer this particular enquiry, but, after some hesitation, stated that from time to time enquiries were received from Rome and from the Archbishop and ‘other higher ups’. He said that he would tell me in strict confidence that recently Dr. BURTON had approached the Archbishop and requested him to arrange for the cessation of adverse propaganda emanating from Catholic sources. As a result of this, the Archbishop had enquired from [Movement] headquarters as to BURTON’s background, and the Archbishop was, in turn, informed that BURTON’s associations were such that his wishes should not be acceded to. The source had asked me a few weeks previously as to whether or not BURTON was known as a Communist, but had of course not informed me of the reason for his enquiry.

This was an extraordinary conversation at several levels. John Burton had been the head of the department of external affairs when Bert Evatt was the minister during and after World War II. The principal reason for ASIO’s existence was to investigate the spy ring that had operated in the department during Burton’s tenure, funnelling top-secret information to the Soviets. At another level, the direct line of communication between the archbishop (Sydney’s Norman Gilroy) and The Movement’s intelligence apparatus was indicative of the church’s knowledge (and presumably approval) of spying as a means to a political end. The mention of inquiries from Rome implied that at some level, at least, the Vatican knew and approved of The Show’s activities, although it is probable that the agent was deliberately exaggerating in order to elicit ASIO’s co-operation. And the Vatican would have been more focussed on problems nearer to home, especially as the Italian Communist Party was a powerful force in domestic politics.

Despite the sorry picture that emerged from this long and detailed report, the author was sufficiently impressed with this particular Movement liaison agent to conclude that his intelligence was ‘productive and worthwhile’.37 At headquarters, Spry agreed that ‘considerable worthwhile information’ had been provided by The Show’s liaison agent, but was emphatic that ‘no two-way information can be considered’, even suggesting that ‘it would be acceptable to drop the Source should demands become embarrassing’.38

Show headquarters was not impressed with this ruling, throwing a monumental tantrum and even threatening to terminate ‘the remuneration so that relations between ASIO and Catholic Action would be less formal’, although ‘this did not mean they would be severed altogether’. The Movement liaison agent expressed the view that he could understand ASIO’s reluctance to ‘exchange information with every contact, but he felt his employer would believe he would be an exception’.39 After all, his employer was the Catholic Church, which conveyed God’s wishes, at least in the minds of Movement adherents.

Relations became decidedly frosty. They would get a lot worse, but realpolitik considerations would sustain it through several crises.