THE BURGLARY: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI by BETTY MEDSGER

THE BURGLARY: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI
BETTY MEDSGER
Knopf, 2014, 596 pages, $46.95 (hb)

Review by Phil Shannon

As far as burglaries go, this one was pretty audacious.  On 8 March, 1971, nine anti-Vietnam-war activists in Pennsylvania burgled the FBI, stealing the secret files in the regional FBI office in the small town of Media.  With careful planning, a little luck and plenty of pluck, the amateur burglars exposed, for the first time, the FBI’s political spying and suppression of democratic dissent.

Uncaptured for four decades, and with an FBI not keen to revisit the scene of their acute embarrassment, the previously unidentified burglars have now identified themselves and told their story to Betty Medsger, the first journalist to be leaked the stolen files.

With immense daring, the burglars challenged the power of the FBI’s Director, J. Edgar Hoover, which came from his role as a “fiery narrator of tales of the communist perils that faced Americans”, his collection of dirt on politicians to use as blackmail against any threats of reform, and a glamorous reputation as a crime-fighting champion (a hollow one, however – only 1% of the Media files  concerned serious crime, which the FBI fought more on the large and small celluloid screen than in the actual criminal world).

With successive Presidents and Attorneys-General giving him license to operate outside the law with no regard to civil liberties, Hoover’s mission was to “harass and destroy” progressive movements which, as well as Marxists, housed mild liberals, intellectuals, religious pacifists, feminists, gays and African-Americans (“Black Americans fell into two categories – black people who should be spied on by the FBI and black people who should spy on other black people for the FBI”).

The stolen Media files, and subsequent revelations, documented this, in irrefutable black and white.  The FBI used illegal spying practices (with neither subpoena nor concern with privacy), infiltration, entrapment, provocateurs and informers to intimidate critics into silence and passivity - to, as one Hoover directive to agents put it, “enhance the paranoia … get the point across there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox”.

To disrupt, discredit and disable his targets, Hoover’s bag of dirty tricks, some lethal, ranged from lacing activists’ oranges with strong laxatives and spreading venereal disease to student leaders through infected prostitutes, to fabricated documents and false rumours to sow or exacerbate movement differences.

The FBI also maintained a Security Index of 26,000 activists for arrest and indefinite detention without trial during ‘national emergencies’.  Over one thousand ideologically ‘suspect’ professors at American universities were dismissed because of FBI information provided to campus authorities, whilst FBI material provided to Senator McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee condemned thousands more Americans to sackings and blacklists.

The burglary destroyed the mystique of the FBI, led to its oversight by Congress, and forced a formal apology to the American people for its lawless and anti-democratic behaviour.  With, as Medgers notes, the National Security Agency now putting a digital snooper behind every electronic mailbox, “such people” as the Media burglars, who “thought long and hard” about their dangerous act of resistance before deciding to risk all, “are going to be called upon again”.  Like Snowden and Manning, they will continue to answer that call.

DIARY OF A FOREIGN MINISTER Bob Carr

DIARY OF A FOREIGN MINISTER
BOB CARR
Newsouth, 2014, 502 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

 

Too often, Bob Carr’s diary sounds like an episode of Grumpy Old Ministers.  An eighteen-month Foreign Affairs Minister in the dying stanzas of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd federal Labor government, the globe-trotting Carr gripes about the “dead prose” of his departmental talking points, the lifeless food and draining jetlag of plane travel, the awfulness of hotels, Canberra (“the City of the Dead”) and contracting viruses from shaking unwashed hands all day on the campaign trail “without a hand sanitiser in the car – damn!”.

Carr is, however, smart, erudite, articulate and cultured.  If stuck next to a politician on a long plane flight (assuming you were upgraded to business class), you could do much worse than getting Bob Carr and some stimulating conversations on literature, opera and Shakespeare (once you got the gym bore off-topic, that is).

His Diary of a Foreign Minister entertains with such reflections - and needs to, to compensate for the boilerplate prose of diplomatic negotiations which draws on the foreign policy orthodoxy of Time and The Economist, and whose minutiae, and prose style, makes for a punishing read.

There is little to salvage, however, from Carr’s politics.  A member of the New South Wales ALP Right and former state Premier, Carr ended his political career as a comfortable member of the international foreign policy club.  The powerful are his milieu, the elite of “glittering careerists” (“nothing wrong with that”) who head the “international architecture” of the UN, G20, IMF, EU and NATO.  He is on first name terms with Hillary (Clinton - “any time with Hillary is pure champagne”, he gushes) and Henry (Kissinger - “my favourite world-historical figure”, he writes, without a word about Kissinger’s leading role in the 1973 US-supported military coup against Salvador Allende’s Socialist government in Chile).

Carr is in his element “speed-dating” UN diplomats to garner votes for Australia’s bid for a seat on the UN Security Council.  This vote-coaxing motive is specifically on display in Carr’s wooing of the Arab bloc when he advocates not isolating Australia in the UN on Arab-Israeli issues.  We “would blow our support from all those Arab states, and that would cost us the Security Council election”, he argues forcefully with Gillard, who is receptive to the “Israel lobby”, the Jewish, Melbourne-based, Labor-funding business interests that prompts Carr to complain that “we are subcontracting our foreign policy to party donors”.

Although there is an element of rank political calculation in Carr’s Middle East position (he is concerned about losing Labor votes in the Arab-flavoured, western Sydney electorates) there is also genuine conviction in his opposition to an “apartheid” Israeli state expanding its settlements on Palestinian land.

Such a display of principle is, however, rare.  Far more often we find Carr defending Australia’s “national interests” and if this means selling Tibet down the river (don’t antagonise our region’s strongest power, biggest economy and most important trading partner - China), or Sri Lanka’s Tamils or Indonesia’s West Papuans (we need their help on refugees), so be it, according to Carr’s diplomacy  logic – “I’m running a foreign policy for Australia, not for Human Rights Watch or the Tamil National Alliance”, he declares petulantly.

More generally, the world’s peoples don’t get much of a look in in Carr’s diary, except as disaster victims needing aid, certainly not as political actors.  Nor are dissidents like Wikileak’s Julian Assange  suffered willingly - the transparency rebel earns an enmity from Carr that is both personal and political, no doubt because Assange has violated the precious secrecy of the diplomatic cables to which Carr is addicted.

On domestic politics, Carr is uninspiring.  If he was Prime Minister, he would “neutralise” the business sector – no mining taxes or “class war” rhetoric.  He would have proudly been a “Liberal in Labor clothing”.  Although he shares the belated insight with a chastened Rudd that Murdoch and the heads of Rio-Tinto, BHP and the banks “run the country”, the ALP that Carr documents in his diary, from the moribund grass roots branch to its squabbling and timid leading lights, are unlikely to be the ones to do something about it.

Dirty Secrets: Our ASIO Files by MEREDITH BURGMANN (ed)

DIRTY SECRETS: Our ASIO Files
MEREDITH BURGMANN (ed)
Newsouth, 2014, 464 pages, $32.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

The only thing worse, notes Meredith Burgmann in Dirty Secrets, than discovering that your personal file held by Australia’s domestic political police, ASIO, is disappointingly thin is to find out that your official subversion rating hasn’t warranted a file at all.

Flippancy aside, two dozen of ASIO’s many thousands of targets (from High Court judges to gardening identities) take a serious look at their watcher which has doggedly spied on, and imperilled the jobs and personal relationships of generations of left wing and progressive activists engaged in traditional, and entirely legal, political dissent. 

The official justification for all this was combating communism but the miniscule ring of those Australian communists actually involved in Soviet espionage was but a pretext for the establishment in 1949 of ASIO whose riding instructions specified countering ‘subversion’, a hugely elastic term which covered all opposition to the conservative political and corporate status quo.

None of the political activity on the Vietnam war, apartheid, feminism, gay rights, nuclear disarmament or trade unionism was remotely concerned with ‘national security’, that magic incantation which chloroforms any concerns about the infringement of civil liberties and democratic rights by political spying.

A protected bureaucratic species, ASIO’s files inexorably mounted, devoid of any understanding of left wing politics and padded out with mind-numbing minutiae, innocuous trivia, cavalier mistakes, malicious gossip, third-hand tittle-tattle from paid informers and worthless ‘intelligence’ from agents reporting what their superiors wanted to hear.

Some targets have sympathy for the working lives of, for example, ASIO’s telephone bugging transcribers which must have comprised “utter tedium punctuated by short bursts of not very interesting activity”.  Forgiveness is also shown by David Stratton, film critic, who says “no real harm was done”, an ‘I’m alright, Jack’ attitude shared by an equally complacent Jack in the book - “I am not greatly concerned”, writes Jack Waterford, a Canberra Times editor and now occasional ASIO ‘consultant’.

Whilst ASIO’s often bumbling incompetence earns it the deliciously mocking humour of ABC broadcaster Phillip Adams, such irreverence is complemented by more solid reflection on ASIO’s highly effective reality as a conservative political force.  As Burgmann notes, ASIO’s history of error and political bias casts serious doubt on whether it can be trusted today.  “Do we simply ignore the history and cross our fingers about the future?”, she asks sceptically.

The Cold War may have ended but ASIO’s budget and powers have been hugely expanded over the last decade.  The rise of terrorism is the official rationale for ASIO’s growth but, as some contributors show, public oversight and legal processes are lacking from ASIO’s response whilst the organisation’s track record for poor quality information must compromise its non-reviewable ‘adverse findings’ against asylum-seekers.  ASIO may dress itself up as a ‘security service’ or an ‘intelligence agency’ but it should be called after its real function - a political police.  Political police belong in a police state not a democracy.

ASIO also continues its political mission by spying on coal protesters but these files remain exempt from public access under the ‘thirty year rule’.  So, only if you were causing political disorder more than three decades ago can you check to see if ASIO has a file on you (start by checking series A611 http://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/DetailsReports/SeriesDetail.aspx?series_no=A6119  at the National Archives of Australia website, www.naa.gov.au).  But beware - by requesting access to a file that may not exist you “may well be able to start one by demanding to see [your] file”.

ANZAC’S LONG SHADOW: The Cost of Our National Obsession by JAMES BROWN

ANZAC’S LONG SHADOW: The Cost of Our National Obsession
JAMES BROWN
Black Inc. Books, 2014, 184 pages, $19.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon 

A former army officer criticising the Anzac cult – this attack from an unexpected quarter, not from the usual Marxist and Quaker suspects but from James Brown, a military insider and analyst from the conservative think-tank, the Lowy Institute, has grabbed much attention in the lead up to Anzac Day 2015, the centenary of the disastrous Allied invasion of Turkey. 

Brown’s muscular assault on Anzac squares off against the “enormous commercial enterprise” of the Anzac industry, taxpayers being stung $325 million in government funding for the centenary and the cultural obsession with the dead of Gallipoli and its noble lies of ‘heroic sacrifice’ that glamourise war.

It is no surprise, therefore, that the militarist right’s response to Brown’s book has been one of fury for querying their patriotic foundation stone.  More unexpected has been the benign response by the more thoughtful, centrist, commentariat.  Pleased at Brown’s sacrilegious critique against the key icon of Anzac Day, they have taken on board the aim of this critique – to direct social attention and government dollars from the military diversion of Anzac to the “parlous state of our defence sources”.

Unlike progressive critics of Anzac, Brown wants more, not less, spending on the “magnificent institution” of the Australian Defence Force.  Brown wants a de-mythologised, more modernised and professional Australian military.  Contemporary wars and serving soldiers are poorly understood, he argues, because the Anzac myth hogs the limelight.

There is some special pleading here by a true-believing veteran of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, “deeply unpopular” exercises whose soldiers he fears being “crowded out” by the Gallipoli legend, the Anzac gloss apparently not working for these, or for future, Australian wars.  This thesis, however, defies the cultural reality that the very point, and a highly successful one, of Anzac is that its celebration legitimises all of Australia’s khaki adventures.

Brown also substitutes one myth (Anzac’s romantic aura of mateship, egalitarianism and national bonding) with another – the ‘clean’, almost bloodless, modernised wars of today.  The human cost to those on the receiving end of Australia’s military deployments is strikingly absent from Brown’s book.  His more modernised and efficient military would simply deliver a more modernised and efficient killing machine.

If Anzac’s Long Shadow is as good as dissent gets in the Australian military intelligentsia, then those who value human life, peace and true internationalism will need to look elsewhere, starting with the “shrill anti-war activists” that Brown recoils from, than to those who, whether old-school Anzac fetishists or latter-day military renovators, assist the worship of armed force at the shrine of patriotism.