7

Spy versus spy: part one

In late March 1958, a well-attended meeting of communist members of the Waterside Workers’ Federation (WWF) convened on the Sydney waterfront. The main report was delivered by veteran CPA union leader Ted Roach, who had spearheaded the campaign against shipments of pig iron to Japan in the late 1930s. The campaign resonated down the years; attorney-general and industry minister Bob Menzies had permitted the shipments and was caustically nicknamed ‘Pig Iron’ Bob, a label the left used to considerable effect all the way to his retirement in 1966 and beyond.

Nineteen fifty-eight was a crucial year in the WWF’s internal politics, marking another round in the titanic battle between the CPA and The Movement for control of the union’s federal office. By then, The Show was publicly known as the National Civic Council (NCC), but in common parlance was referred to as ‘The Groupers’. Under the ruthless direction of John Maynes, the NCC’s full-time vice-president in charge of industrial matters (while also holding the honorary position of Federated Clerks’ Union national president), another concerted campaign was secretly underway to unseat the communists. The CPA — despite temporary setbacks in some major branches, notably Melbourne, where the Groupers were strong — had repelled all challenges to their hold on the federal office.

Despite poor health, long-time communist leader ‘Big Jim’ Healy remained the popular choice of wharfies as union general secretary, with Roach as assistant secretary. Maynes thought he had the perfect plan to defeat them in the looming election and to pluck the CPA’s industrial jewel from its already tarnished crown. This involved splitting ALP supporters away from the CPA’s ‘unity ticket’, which had prevailed over the Groupers at previous elections. Maynes believed he had a well-honed tool to bring his plan to fruition: a senior defector from the CPA, a hardened WWF election campaigner who had the confidence of key ALP wharfies, previously members of the left’s unity ticket. He was no ordinary defector; this operative had been critical to past communist victories. Maynes firmly believed he had broken decisively from the CPA. However, by late March this plan was in tatters: the defector had proven to be a double agent, delivering Maynes’s secrets straight to Healy.

Ted Roach was in vintage form at the CPA meeting that March, speaking for a full hour, outlining one of the most spectacular, and successful, penetration and disruption operations communists had ever launched against the NCC. Even though the ballot was still three months away, Roach was already confident of victory, crediting Vic Campbell with successfully carrying out the operation, directed by ‘Big Jim’ and the CPA’s super secretive ‘Control Committee’ (known officially as the Central Disputes Committee, the CDC). The CDC was the body responsible for internal party security, vainly attempting to repel ASIO’s penetration agents, safeguarding against provocations of all kinds, prying into the private lives of members, and enforcing rigid ‘ideological purity’. Supervised by the CDC, Roach crowed, Campbell’s work had exposed ‘the Groupers as stooges of the Menzies Government, the ship owners, and big business interests’.1

At the conclusion of Roach’s report, Campbell took the floor, and — as reported to ASIO by one of its numerous agents among the CPA’s waterfront members — with obvious satisfaction reminded the assembled comrades that many of them ‘had been very critical of him for his association with the Groupers but that they would now understand why he had not been able to take them into his confidence sooner’. Having justified himself, Campbell warned of the negative consequences if news of the CPA’s role in directing his penetration leaked out.2

Roach and Campbell’s speeches launched a tidal wave that overwhelmed the Groupers; the CPA campaign was impregnable. Instead of Maynes’s expected victory, Healy’s team scored its biggest-ever win — 76 per cent of the vote in the July ballot, reducing their opponents to a rump.

IN MANY RESPECTS, Campbell was an extremely unlikely character to have earned Roach’s rich praise. Over the years, he had been the target of numerous CDC investigations; a comprehensive dossier had been assembled, among other things documenting his close relationships with gangsters and his alcohol-fuelled bashings that had left many — including several CPA comrades — badly injured, some disfigured.

The name Campbell was Vic’s alias. His father was a Cobb & Co driver whose surname was Gore, and his mother had worked as a cook in a Catholic convent. In 1925, after his father was killed, he was placed at the age of eight in an orphanage at Kincumber on the central coast, north of Sydney, but he ran away, was caught and sent to Gosford Boys’ Home, but again absconded. His life in the criminal milieu began in 1933 in the tough inner-city working-class suburbs of Woolloomooloo and Surry Hills, where Campbell mixed with wild street boys — apprentice gangsters — and soon came to police notice. Around 1937–38, he was charged with shooting with intent, and was sentenced to twelve months’ gaol for possessing a gun, which, he claimed, had been planted on him by the coppers. In 1940, he was again gaoled, this time for six months under the consorting laws, which made it a criminal offence to associate with known criminals.3

Campbell was called up into the army in 1943, but maintained he went absent without leave four times, was court-martialled and sentenced to twelve months in a military prison, and was then dishonourably discharged in 1944. Soon after, he went to work on the wharves, and in 1947 joined the CPA at the invitation of veteran communist and Sydney WWF branch secretary Tom Nelson. Nelson admired his courage and brawling skills, and was especially grateful after Campbell came to the aid of party members who had been ‘attacked by reaction’ (CPA shorthand for right-wing thugs). He rapidly rose through the CPA and union ranks, first as secretary of one of several CPA wharf branches, then in 1950 as a vice-president on the union’s Sydney branch executive, and by the early 1950s as secretary of the CPA’s powerful Sydney section committee, a communist inner-city stronghold covering the waterfront, seamen, and large factory and working-class suburban branches. Although lacking in formal education, by this time Campbell had already attended two extended CPA ideological and organisational training schools, later — somewhat implausibly — assuming responsibility for education among the section’s members.4

One prominent CPA wharfie painted a vivid pen-picture of him:

Vic Campbell was one of the rough-and-tumble, colourful characters on the waterfront. Those years threw up a lot of roughies like Campbell, and he was a bit rougher and tougher than even the normal rough and toughie — and an uncouth sort of a bloke.5

He recounted an occasion when he and several other CPA members spent time at Campbell’s home:

We were all drunk, blind as bats. We’d been at the pub till fairly late, and we were still drinking and fooling around, and he produced a bloody gun, and we asked him why he carried it, and he said, ‘Protection, brother. You’ve got to have protection.’6

Waterfront politics had always been a tough game. It was often said that whoever wanted to control the WWF had to do a deal with the gangster elements that had infiltrated the workforce decades earlier, especially in Sydney and Melbourne. At one time or another, each of the factions vying for control — the ALP, the CPA, and the Groupers — had to accommodate organised crime, which had the numbers to swing elections to the ticket that promised to look the other way so the criminal elements could get on with their illicit activities. Vic Campbell was a perfect point man for the CPA to liaise with the gangsters. Maynes was equally impressed with his talents. It was little wonder, however, that he was under almost constant investigation by the CDC.

But Campbell’s talents stretched beyond his gangster connections. His abilities in industrial campaigns, and especially his successful organising skills in union elections, were duly noted by senior CPA members. For example, in October 1951, the Federated Ironworkers’ Association (FIA) elections were in full swing. The CPA was in retreat in the FIA, which it had controlled for the previous fifteen years. The 1949 election had been ‘won’ through the massive forgery of ballot papers, organised by long-time communist FIA official and Stalinist apparatchik Jack McPhillips. The anti-communist candidate for national secretary, Laurie Short, challenged that result, and his long-running court case was about to end in unequivocal victory after his lawyers proved that forgery had determined the election in the CPA’s favour.

McPhillips was deeply worried that the CPA would lose the looming 1951 election, and turned to trusted comrades to keep Short’s team at bay. In October, he called a meeting of communist FIA activists in Melbourne. ASIO had an agent present, who reported that McPhillips ‘informed them that it had been decided by the C.P. of A. that it was necessary to strengthen the “militant” vote in Port Kembla for the F.I.A. elections, and Vic. CAMPBELL, a Party organiser, from the W.W.F. in Sydney had been sent as an F.I.A. organiser to Port Kembla’.7 Campbell made no difference; the CPA was defeated, not only in Port Kembla but in its Sydney stronghold, and the recently installed national secretary, Laurie Short, found himself with a majority of delegates to national conference. It was the end of communist power in the ironworkers’ union.8

This did not take the shine off Campbell’s reputation. The following year, ASIO reported that he was a member of the CPA’s powerful WWF National Bureau. Effectively, this was the national executive for communist strategy on the waterfront, directing the successful 1952 WWF national campaign, for which Campbell was the ‘full-time organiser’.9 Illustrating his good standing, on 9 September 1952, Campbell attended a high-level CPA ‘Political Meeting’, chaired by CPA national president Dick Dixon. Campbell had provided Dixon with security protection during the tumultuous months culminating in the narrow defeat of Menzies’ 1951 referendum to ban the CPA, and they frequently drank together at waterfront pubs, often in ‘Big Jim’s’ company.10

Jack Hughes, the recently defeated communist federal secretary of the clerks’ union, who, as a senior member of the CDC, had investigated many allegations concerning Campbell, also attended this meeting. Despite his intimate knowledge of Campbell’s unsavoury history, Hughes understood that he possessed street-level political acumen and credibility with the tough waterfront workforce. The agenda was especially sensitive, involving ‘work in A.L.P. around 11 citations from A.L.P. Executive on W.W.F. officials’. The ALP had recently charged and later expelled members who had broken its rules by standing on unity tickets with communists in the 1952 union elections. When the full CPA WWF national fraction convened in November, Campbell declared, ‘The results of the W.W.F. elections on a National basis were a triumph of United Front tactics.’ Those expelled from the ALP were, apparently, necessary collateral damage to shore up the CPA’s powerbase.11

Not all of Campbell’s talents, however, were strictly political. In August 1954, the CPA was working frantically to minimise damaging evidence tabled at the royal commission on espionage, following the defection of Soviet intelligence operatives Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov. One of the CPA lawyers working on the case was prominent Brisbane barrister Max Julius. On 24 August, Julius was in Sydney working on ‘Document J’, a sensational report written in the Soviet embassy by CPA journalist Rupert Lockwood that was causing considerable embarrassment at the royal commission. The CPA’s strategy was to cast doubt on the document’s authenticity, insinuating it was a forgery. Campbell’s underworld connections had been drawn to Julius’s attention, as one of ASIO’s well-placed agents reported:

[JULIUS] wanted to see Vic CAMPBELL and made an appointment to see him at the Waterside Workers’ Federation waterfront office, 66 Sussex Street …

JULIUS wants the services of an expert forger to forge LOCKWOOD’s signature and the initials which appear on the side of Document “J” …

JULIUS wants the man produced … at 1 p.m. at 66 Sussex Street, on Wednesday, 25 August, 1954.12

Throughout these years, as ASIO compiled its large dossier on Campbell, the CDC accumulated an even more massive, parallel file. They gathered evidence of his numerous bashings and violence with various weapons, and also investigated allegations of his collaboration with ‘security coppers’, with one informant ‘pretty certain that he is now a security man’. They collected eyewitness statements of his often-vicious verbal attacks on sections of the WWF leadership (especially on his old friend Tom Nelson), and of the police having ‘found a gun in Campbell’s place’.

One thread running through the CDC’s conclusions was that ‘we know from experience that … Campbell does not always handle the truth in the very straightest manner’. His repeated violent assaults were of particular concern — for example, in one case, ‘it appears he acted in a most irrational and provocative manner, indeed a most brutal way, likely to get the Party into serious trouble. … DID V.C. ENGINEER INCIDENTS?’

A recurring investigation concerned the persistent claim that he had been a provost in the army (a much-hated military policeman). The CDC had accumulated convincing evidence confirming this, but Campbell routinely deflected the charge — for example, by claiming ‘that always when he was doing special jobs for the Party, this rumour about him being a provost came up and this always upsets him’.13 The CDC concluded that Campbell was lying and, as the 1958 WWF elections loomed, this was among the factors that eventually ensured his ‘loyalty’ to the CPA ticket.

Several CDC investigations, however, were especially intriguing in light of events during those elections: his alleged clandestine co-operation with the Groupers. For example, in July 1955, by-elections were held for casual vacancies for several WWF Sydney branch office-holders. ‘There was considerable scramble for the jobs,’ according to CPA waterfront organiser, Don Morcom. Bill Brooks, a vice-president elected in 1954 on the CPA’s unity ticket, resigned and went into opposition to stand for a full-time position.

Brooks and Campbell were close, having been on the union’s Sydney branch executive together since 1950. He thought ‘Campbell had plenty of go-ahead and ability and he was a real go-getter … He drank at the pub next door to the union rooms … and hung around with tough men, stand over men’. But, as he said, ‘I got on well with him.’14 At the time of the by-elections, Campbell was in Western Australia, but, as Morcom reported to the CDC:

[I]n the middle of the problem, Campbell suddenly reappeared from the West, and it was obvious only to have a hand in the matter. (It is suggested that he had meetings with the opposition.) We had produced a special How to Vote ticket — yellow card board with green printing, to make it distinctive. One of the samples usually put on the outside of the bundles went off, and the opposition produced an identical How to Vote card. Campbell is strongly suspected. Also too Campbell approached me and said he was picking up Brooks’ written propaganda to be used on election day. He put the proposition that he knock it off; I agreed. He suggested it be burnt at 93 [Sussex Street — CPA waterfront headquarters]. I made an appointment to see him, but told him if I didn’t turn up, he knew what to do with it and I suggested it be dumped in the Harbour. I did not turn up; he claimed he dumped it in the Harbour, but it was noticeable that they had more stuff than they could give out on election day.15

Despite this suspected treachery, Campbell retained his CPA membership. An ugly incident at Easter 1956 threatened his position when, after yet another heavy drinking session, he severely bashed a prominent — and much smaller — CPA member. This time there was serious talk of expelling him from the CPA. A CDC inquiry was launched by Jack Hughes, who, in the end, again let him escape the ultimate punishment, noting that it was his ‘last chance’; that he would be barred from holding any party or union executive positions for twelve months; and that he had to ‘actively prove himself’.16

Despite the damning evidence, Campbell successfully appealed ‘against the harshness of the penalty’. In mid-June 1956, the Sydney district executive endorsed ‘the decision … that Comrade Campbell was guilty of uncommunist conduct that could have had most serious consequences for the Party’. Strangely, in light of the vehement censure thus far expressed by everyone involved in the investigation, the executive waived the actual punishment, expressing confidence that Campbell would, miraculously, transform into ‘a diligent Branch member’, and suspended the decision barring him from holding official positions.17 He had, however, already been removed from the unity ticket for the 1956 WWF Sydney branch election, which must have stung, as he had been a vice-president since 1950.

But he had survived this further self-inflicted crisis. A week later, a CPA central trade union committee meeting was held to discuss waterfront tactics. This was an official sub-committee of the party’s highest body, the powerful central committee. It brought together the most senior communist unionists (dealing with issues across the entire trade union movement). Present were the CPA’s industrial supremo, former ironworkers’ union official Jack McPhillips, along with many senior unionists, including Ted Rowe (engineering union), Tom Wright (sheet metal union), Pat Clancy (building union), Matt Munro (Sydney WWF), Ted Roach (national WWF), and Vic Campbell who, apparently, was still treated as a loyal, if misguided, comrade.18

Throughout 1957, however, Campbell’s performance continuously perplexed the CPA’s leadership. His skills as an election campaign manager continued to be held in high regard, but more and more his loyalty to the party came under close scrutiny. His hostile attitude towards Tom Nelson, in particular, caused widespread consternation. In the winter of that year, his relations with the party were at their lowest ebb in his decade of membership.

By December 1957, things had crystallised. Don Morcom, the CPA waterfront organiser, had assembled a concrete case, reporting that he had come ‘to the conclusion that Campbell is an agent’. Morcom believed that Campbell was working for Security. He reviewed many of the previously recounted incidents. Tellingly, he reported to the CDC that Campbell had refused to even speak to him since August 1957, although he had tried to talk to him several times: ‘We are still considering what should be done about it — whether he should be brought in for a discussion, or whether he is trying to manoeuvre some provocation.’19

This was especially worrying, as preparations for the July 1958 union elections were well underway, and all the signs were pointing to a hotly contested campaign. Even more concerning were growing suspicions that Campbell was surreptitiously working against the CPA and had, in fact, defected to the opposition.