Landers - Australias Most Embarrassing Spy Secret

Australia's Most Embarrassing Spy Secret

Published by Books Unleashed at Smashwords

Copyright 2014 Neil Landers

The author, above, retired in 2013 after 57 years in journalism. More than 30 of the last of those were spent as a sub-editor at a national daily, The Australian.

He has been intermittently researching details in this story for much of his life. Some matters in this are dealt with much more fully in From the Somme to 'Sydney's Little Chicago', a biography of his father, an accountant who had connections with some key people in this book. The biography is available for free on the internet.

On the front cover is Australia's Parliament House from 1927 to 1988, where much of the story took place, and where secrets were stored.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

The fact that this book is published online does not mean that any part of it can be reproduced without first obtaining written permission: copyright laws do still apply. Inquiries should be directed to the author.
The author asserts his/her moral right to be identified as the author of this book.

Table of Contents

CHAPTER ONE

Mysterious Explosion

Just after nightfall on Easter Monday, 1955, two boys returning home from a Sydney newspaper delivery round reached the scene of an event that led to an extraordinary chain of only slightly connected events in the Australian Parliament. Those events included the only ever jailings by the parliament. They ended in September 1955 with a high-level veil of bipartisan secrecy, which was lifted partly at the start of this century.

Street lights were shining in Fetherstone Street, just north of Bankstown railway station, but commercial buildings were closed. At the silent and dark office of a local weekly newspaper, the Torch, the boys noticed what one thought was smoke and the other fog. They also smelled what seemed like burning rubber.

Reports in the Torch for several years had been alleging wrongdoing in the administration of the municipality, which had a troubled history going back much further. The claims had been attacked, but not always denied, in an opposition weekly newspaper, the Bankstown Observer. A year earlier the claims had led to the Labor state government sacking the Labor-dominated local council. However, despite a detailed government report that had supported the claims, very little legal action had followed them.

Sydneys daily newspapers, after brief headlines, had lost interest in the affairs of the fast-growing municipality on the citys south-west outskirts. In the rest of Australia there had been no interest. There, as in Sydney, the biggest story remained a savage war about espionage allegations between the conservative government led by Robert Menzies, who was in the sixth year of a reign that was to last a decade more, and supporters of opposition Labor leader Dr H.V. Evatt.

The war had begun a year earlier when Russias spy chief in Australia, Vladimir Petrov, had defected to officials of the national security organisation, ASIO. Concurrent with that war was an internal one about espionage allegations, even more savage, that was tearing apart the Labor Party. The rest of the world, like Australia, was still in the grip of a Cold War that had reached a nadir just before the death of Russian leader Joseph Stalin in 1953.

The shopping centre was almost deserted. Just south of the station an 11-year-old named Paul Keating, a school friend of one of the boys, was about to leave a newsagency, probably the only shop still open. But among the buildings on the edge of the shopping centre there were still bungalows where people lived. The evening was mild and windows of these were open. From some came sounds of people starting dinner. From others drifted aromas of cooking. From most came sounds of radios. The early evening serials were ending and the stations were entering a lull with advertisements before the 7pm news broadcasts.

The Torch premises had been closed since lunch-time on Thursday as workers hurried to get away ahead of Easter holiday traffic already starting to pour out of Sydney. In the police station across the road, a converted bungalow, there was desultory activity. Outside that a constable sat in a police van waiting for a sergeant to go with him on a job.

After discussing what they smelled, the two boys, the only pedestrians in the street, continued on and a short distance ahead turned a corner. Suddenly there was an explosion in the Torch premises so loud it was heard in neighbouring suburbs. Nearby houses reportedly shook and windows even blocks away rattled. Debris flew upwards and flames shot above the building.

The constable in the van shouted to the sergeant emerging from the station to call the fire brigade. Then he ran across the road and pulled a motor cycle away from a loading ramp at the side of the office. When he looked through an intact window he saw flames appearing to run along a passageway connecting the front office with the main printing section further back, where the fire was spreading. Other police ran up to join him as he tried to force open a door.

Mr A. Watson, who lived next to the police station, said he had been having his evening meal when the blast almost knocked him to the floor. Crockery flew off the table and the whole house shook under my feet, the Sydney Daily Telegraph quoted him the next morning as saying. I thought a bomb had exploded under the house. I rushed into the street with my wife and we saw flames leaping 30 feet from the newspaper office. Debris was falling from the air back into the blazing building. I was showered with dust falling from the sky. The police were very brave because they rushed right up to the flames. Suddenly, a wall of flames shot through the front of the building and the police dived back, just in time.

Paul Keatings friend remained near the building while the other boy rode his bicycle to the nearby home of Torch editor Phil Engisch, who lived in the same street as him. There he shouted out that the Torch was on fire.

Meanwhile, a train had arrived from the city and was disgorging passengers returning from the Royal Easter Show or sporting events. As many hurried towards the flames a man running from the street almost knocked some of them over as he shouted excitedly that the Torch had been bombed. Five minutes later the first of more than 50 firemen from four stations arrived. However it was already too late.

Engisch drove there quickly. But by the time he arrived the front office and much of the main printing section were fully alight. The flames were spreading to a section at the side that contained an expensive new rotary press that had been recently installed with the help of a large bank overdraft. Desperately he told the firemen to direct their hoses towards that. A few minutes later he hurried off to make a phone call.

As the blaze lit up the evening sky the news spread quickly by telephone or across fences. People headed there in carloads from all over Bankstown. They included more than a few sacked aldermen and officials of the former Bankstown Council.