A Secret Country by John Pilger

Author:John Pilger [John Pilger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2013-01-16T05:00:00+00:00

One year after Frank Nugan’s death, the Deputy Director of the CIA, Admiral Bobby Inman, was asked about the collapse of the Nugan Hand empire. He expressed deep concern that investigation of Nugan Hand would lead to disclosure of a range of ‘dirty tricks’ calculated to undermine the Whitlam Government.62

As the Watergate scandal spread during 1974, so did news of the part played by the Nixon administration and the CIA in the destruction of the Allende Government in Chile the previous year. On the first anniversary of Allende’s murder, Gough Whitlam addressed the United Nations General Assembly. He warned against moves by states to bring about political or economic change in other countries by ‘unconstitutional, clandestine, corrupt methods, by assassination or terrorism’.

Three months after Whitlam’s speech, Christopher Boyce, the twenty-one-year-old son of a former FBI officer, was given a special job by TRW Incorporated, a Californian aerospace company where he worked as a cipher clerk. TRW is an important CIA contractor, and Boyce was to work in the black vault, the code room where top-secret messages were received and deciphered from American bases and satellites all over the world, including Pine Gap. Only eight people had clearance to enter the specially built vault, ‘cocooned on three sides by special penetration-proof layers of concrete and on the fourth by a thick Mosler Safe door’. Here they received the CIA’s ‘deepest’ background briefing, a process actually called ‘indoctrination’.63

Shortly afterwards Boyce and a close friend, Andrew Daulton Lee, were discussing Watergate and the military coup in Chile. When Lee deplored the CIA role in Chile, he was told by Boyce, ‘You think that’s bad? You should hear what the CIA is doing to the Australians.’64 This and a great deal more emerged in 1977 at the trial of Christopher Boyce who, with Lee, was convicted of passing secrets to the Soviet Union. Boyce’s defence was that he opposed American foreign policy not only in Chile, but also in Australia, and that he had been blackmailed by Lee, a heroin addict and pusher.

Boyce was a young Christian idealist who almost certainly would not have got his sensitive job had his FBI father not vouched for him. In agreeing, as he said in his evidence, simply to circulate ‘a statement concerning what I believed to be violations of law perpetuated [sic] against the Australians’, Boyce had cast himself in the role of a dissident hero who would serve his country by exposing the illegalities of the CIA’s Australian campaign, just as the Pentagon Papers had exposed the corruption of the United States’ role in Vietnam.

Boyce maintained he had never intended the information about Australia to go to the Russians, that Lee had agreed to make it public through one of his father’s influential friends in a way that would not immediately implicate Boyce. Whatever the truth of that, Lee flew to Mexico City, went to the Soviet Embassy and sold the document to the Russians, naming Boyce as the source. The market value of national

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