Traitors and Spies by John Fahey

Author:John Fahey [Fahey, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2020-06-18T00:00:00+00:00

Forde then tells MacKay that he has personally and carefully gone through MacKay’s intended structure for the service and amended it. The deputy directors of security in each state were to be Commonwealth officers, not state commissioners of police. Forde explicitly rejects MacKay’s attempt, first mooted by Alexander Duncan, to integrate police commissioners into the system thereby effectively passing it over to state police forces to do with as they wished while the Commonwealth picked up the bill. Forde advises MacKay that he, as the relevant minister, will nominate and appoint the eight principals, the names of whom Forde was sending in a separate letter.93

Forde then goes on to direct that all files and records taken over or created by the Security Service are to be the property of the Security Service and that, as Minister of the Army, he will direct that Military Intelligence hand over all relevant files to the service. He then orders MacKay to establish links between the Security Service, the FBI and MI5 and that MacKay exchange liaison officers with these organisations.

In the penultimate paragraph, Forde tells MacKay that he wishes to discuss further minor matters with him, one of which is the ‘scope of the powers to be delegated to you and the position of the state police in regard to summary prosecutions under certain National Security Regulations’. This is a clear reference to the summary arrests of the individuals associated with the AFM.

This letter to MacKay shows very clearly that Forde was not going to allow him to control the Security Service and that he was centralising it under the direct authority of the Attorney-General. Forde’s handling of this matter was excellent. His clearness and determination to bring MacKay and the competing interests to heel, to subordinate them to serving the government of the day as was their duty is something he should be praised for. It was one of the few instances when a Commonwealth minister showed any gumption in dealing with the band of hysterics leading Australia’s wartime security intelligence establishment. It also contained the plan for the running of the Security Service that would finally be implemented when ASIO was properly formed. All of it suggests that someone with an excellent grasp of Australia’s security intelligence system had briefed Forde. That someone was most likely George Knowles.

All of this culminated on 31 March, when Knowles advised the War Cabinet that while the four individuals arrested in Perth on 9 March should be prosecuted on an ex officio indictment before the High Court, no action should be taken against any of the AFM members in Sydney or Victoria because, ‘up to the present no evidence had been received by him implicating the 16 members of the Movement interned in Sydney’ in any illegality.94

Knowles had struck a major blow against his bureaucratic enemies in the war over who should control the function of collecting intelligence on Australian citizens. Military Intelligence and its supporters had excluded the Attorney-General’s Department from any involvement in the AFM affair in an attempt to damage the new Director-General of the new Security Service.

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