Project RAINFALL by Tom Gilling

Author:Tom Gilling
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2019-07-16T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

Drop that hamburger!

In July 1976 Malcolm Fraser and his foreign affairs minister, Andrew Peacock, were sitting in the White House with President Ford and Kissinger. The future of Pine Gap was one of the first items on the agenda.

A declassified memorandum of the conversation suggests a convivial meeting, with Fraser quick to distance himself from his predecessor. Australia’s new prime minister told Ford that he had been ‘particularly’ keen to visit in order to ‘wash away a few vestiges of difference between our countries’. Ford responded, ‘I very much appreciate the change.’

A sign of improved US–Australian relations was that US nuclear-powered warships, which had been barred from Australian ports since 1971, were again allowed to visit. After cutbacks under Labor, the Fraser government was also committed to lifting defence spending, a policy that was always calculated to win favour in Washington.

Noting that the renewal of the Pine Gap lease had previously been considered on an annual basis, Fraser proposed that in future renewal should be done on a ten-year basis ‘if you would find that useful’.

‘That would be very helpful,’ Ford told him.

What neither Ford nor Fraser knew as they exchanged diplomatic niceties in the White House was that the future of Pine Gap—and of the whole US–Australian intelligence program—were about to be put in jeopardy by events taking place 2500 kilometres away in Mexico City.

On 5 January 1977, six months after the White House meeting between the US president and the prime minister of Australia, Andrew Daulton Lee, the adopted son of a wealthy Californian pathologist, went to an intersection near the Miguel Aleman Freeway in Mexico City and marked a lamp post with a letter ‘x’ made from adhesive tape. It was Lee’s regular sign that he had another delivery for a man he knew as ‘John’ but who was really a KGB agent named Boris Grishin, who masqueraded as a science attaché at the Soviet Embassy.

After leaving his marker, the usual routine was for Lee to meet Grishin that evening at a pizza restaurant. When Grishin failed to show up, Lee followed a pre-arranged procedure and returned to the restaurant the next morning. Again, there was no sign of Grishin. Defying strict instructions never to visit the embassy, Lee then did exactly that.

The Soviet Embassy in Mexico City had long been a magnet for would-be spies and other disaffected souls wanting to make contact with Russians. Lee Harvey Oswald visited both the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City in the weeks before he assassinated President Kennedy. Both the CIA and the Mexican police kept the Soviet Embassy under close watch. It was the Mexicans who noticed Lee toss a pink envelope into the embassy grounds and saw it being collected by an embassy official.

The Mexican police promptly arrested Lee, who tried to hide the joint he was carrying. Refusing a bribe of $500 to let him go, the police searched Lee and found microfilm negatives of documents marked ‘Top Secret’. They did not believe his

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