cold war
Peter Edwards
Desmond Ball & David Horner
Breaking the Codes: Australia's KGB Network 1944-1950
Allen & Unwin $29.95pb, 468pp
1 86448 578 7
BREAKING THE CODES was published last August. The time that has
subsequently elapsed makes it possible to comment not only on the
book itself but also on some aspects of its reception.
For most Australians interested in current affairs and recent
history, Desmond Ball and David Horner are familiar names but at
first sight unlikely joint authors. Both have published
extensively and authoritatively. Ball is best known for his books
on intelligence matters, including the joint Australian-American
facilities at Pine Gap and Nurrungar and other aspects of the
world of signals intelligence. Horner is similarly well known for
a number of major books on Australian strategy and military
politics, especially during the 1939-1945 war. They have in
common reputations for enormously detailed knowledge, based on
extensive and thorough research. What makes them seem unlikely
collaborators, despite their being colleagues in the Strategic
and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University,
is the difference in their political associations. During the
Vietnam Ear, Ball was a prominent protester whose position was
not far from that of the Communist Party, while Horner commanded
an Australian army platoon in Vietnam. Ball's publications on
intelligence matters have often revealed what the defence
establishment wanted to keep secret, while Horner remains closely
associated with the Australian Army.
These differences are in fact a source of strength and
credibility for the book, which touches on some of the most
contentious political aspects of Australia's involvement in the
Cold War. Ever since the 1954 election, fought in the shadow of
the Petrov Affair, one school of opinion has refused to accept
the legitimacy of its result. According to this school, the
Petrov Affair was a fraud; the allegations of a pro-Soviet spy
ring in Australia were manufactured or highly exaggerated; and
the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) was from
the start an unnecessary form of political police, operating in
the interests of the conservative parties and Australia's great
power allies.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Ball and Horner, working in their
respective fields, became aware of allegations of Soviet
espionage in Australia in the 1940s and of the British and
American efforts to intercept and decrypt the KGB's signals
traffic at the time. This book is the result of a decision to
pool their efforts. At its heart is the product of Operation
Venona, the Anglo-American signals intelligence operation which
partially succeeded in breaking the Soviet codes from 1943
onwards, as it concerned Australia. It shows unequivocally that
there was indeed a spy ring in Australia, mostly comprising
Australian communists or their close associates, who were
supplying sensitive information to the Soviet Union. The book provides, in massive and relentless detail, the evidence provided
by the Venona operation, placed in the context of the operations
of the intelligence and counter-intelligence organisations. By
sheer weight of information, it overwhelmingly gives the lie to
the 'Petrov fraud' school of thought. (To say this, of course,
is not to say that everything said by that school's opponents is
accurate or justified.)
Some reviewers have criticised the book's style. It is certainly
no light read, nor do the authors show a novelist's touch in
revealing the mind of the protagonists, whether spy or counter-spy. That misses the point. The book is written in a
dispassionate, fact-laden style for good reason. Like the report
of an official enquiry into a controversial question, it plays
down the interpretation and emphasises the evidence, making clear
where that evidence is incomplete or inconclusive.