Please wait. Contacting image service... loading

Article text

G G BLOWS SPOOK'S COVER
The Governor-General, Sir Zelman Cowen, made a
blue when he named one of his visitors, a Mr J
Kennison, as director-general of the Australian
Security Intelligence Service (ASIS) in a vice-regal
notice last Wednesday.
Ex-prime minister McMahon
made a bigger blue in June 1974
when he blurted out on national
TV that ASIS (under its cover
name M09) existed. Menzies,
when he set up ASIS in the
1950s, gave strict instructions
that no one was to even know it
existed.
ASIS was set up by major-general
(later Sir) Walter Cawthorn who had
been a military spook for decades,
including in the British Indian
army. He fought the Pathans on the
North-West Frontier from 1930 to
1935, and from 1948 to 1951 was
deputy chief of staff of the Pakistani
army.
From 1954 to 1959 he was
Australian High Commissioner to
Pakistan, after serving as director of
the Joint Intelligence Bureau in
Melbourne from 1952 to 1954. It was
during this time that he set up ASIS
ASIS operatives generally work
under Foreign Affairs cover as
diplomats with Australian
embassies abroad. ASIS helped the
CIA in Cambodia in 1970 and was
important in bringing Lon Nol to
power, after Prince Sihanouk
reduced ties with the United States.
In Chile
ASIS was active in Chile, at least
from 1971, where it did some of the
CIA's dirty work in preparing the
overthrow of Allende. Prime
minister Whitlam learned that ASIS
was in Chile in March 1973 and
ordered them out.
And ASIS today? According to the
National Times (week ending
October 6, 1979), ASIS is or was in
all ASEAN nations, Japan, Viet
Nam, Chile and China. In fact,
ASIS is present in all important
Australian embassies abroad.
And are ASIS spooks picking
their way around Pakistan's North-
West Frontier with Afghanistan
following in the steps of their
intrepid founder, major-general
Cawthorn, fifty years ago?
$