BETWEEN
FOUR WORLDS: CHINA, RUSSIA, JAPAN AND AUSTRALIA;
BETWEEN FOUR CAREERS: DIPLOMAT, ECONOMIST, JOURNALIST AND
JAPANOLOGIST;
BETWEEN
FOUR LANGUAGES: ENGLISH, CHINESE, RUSSIAN AND JAPANESE
Chapter
3
INTO THE
USSR: Discovering Soviet ‘Reality,’ Jousting
with the KGB, A Change of Career.
1. En
Route to Moscow
2. The Bill Morrison affair
3. Soviet ‘Realities’
4. Communism in Russia
5. The KGB and I
6. A Moment of Decision
7. Out of the USSR
8. Bob Hawke
1. EN
ROUTE TO MOSCOW
Late 1962. I am due to
move again.
The Moscow embassy has finally reopened. Some people in
Canberra have remembered that I had learned some Russian a
few years earlier at the Canberra University College. Since
I cannot be sent to China, (it would be another decade
before Canberra could find the courage to open an Embassy
in the territory of the dreaded Chinese enemy) why not go
to Moscow instead?
Rob Laurie, then the junior officer at the Moscow embassy,
was due to come out early the following year (1963). I
could follow him in. I set out to learn more Russian - this
time by myself rather than in a classroom.
Learning the Language
Learning Chinese had taught me something about learning
languages. Instead of beginning with textbooks, then trying
to speak, and then finally trying to listen to and
understand the spoken language, I would do it largely in
reverse.
I would do the listening first. Then I would look at the
texts to help understand and remember what I was listening
to. Then I would try to get the conversation practice with
a native speaker needed to cement it all into the memory.
The textbooks I would use, but only in support as I went
along.
An old White Russian refugee lady living in Canberra, a
Mrs. Gapanovich, was a willing helper. Each week she would
tape record a text from a book of simple Russian stories
for me. I would then spend the rest of the week listening
to the recording repeatedly while checking vocabulary in
the text and grammar in a textbook. A week later I would go
back to her to make free conversation about the story on
the tape. She would then record the next story for me.
(Years later I would use the same technique when I had to
start learning Japanese.)
It was all rather haphazard. But it got me started on the
long road to Moscow. In April 1963 I finally set off, via
the USA.
Briefings had been arranged for me at the Rand Corporation
in San Francisco. Memories of the 1961 Berlin and Cuban
crises were still fresh and it was important for me to
discover US thinking about Soviet adventurism, I had been
told.
What I did discover was the depth of US ‘evil
empire’ hatreds and suspicions, both at the official
and other levels.
From the Rand offices I took the train to Chicago. That was
my first introduction to the size and diversity of the
United States, and the squalor.
I had checked into a hotel near the main station. It was
cheap and I soon discovered why: all the signs were in
Spanish and the locks on some doors were broken.
At a nearby bar I felt the clientele there also seemed
strange. When I handed over a $100 note to pay for a drink
the place froze. Everyone was looking at me for some
reason. A tense bar-tender gave me my change wrapped
tightly in his fist, together with a whispered warning:
“Show money like this in this place and you are dead.
Take this change and run.”
I had two choices. Either he was telling me the truth. Or
else he had discovered the ultimate short-changing scam.
Another look at the faces peering at me helped me decide. I
ran. I had not been short-changed.
The next day I headed for the airport with a ticket that
said I was going to Moscow via New York. In those early
days of flight travel, tickets were checked on the plane
after boarding. A nervous hostess immediately summoned the
pilot. "Is this your ticket, sir?" he asked menacingly as
he strode down the aisle.
I agreed that it was. "It says you are bound for Moscow,"
he said even more threateningly. Again I agreed, pointing
out that other people also traveled to Moscow occasionally.
"Yes, but this is a one-way ticket! " he said triumphantly.
Single-handedly he had unearthed a communist spy, and it
was on his plane.
It took some time to explain that I was a diplomat en route
to Moscow, and would not need a return ticket for some
years. I had not even reached Europe and already the Cold
War was upon me.
Across the Iron Curtain
Just three hours was all the flight time needed to get from
London to Moscow’s Vnukova airport. Ideologically,
the distance was much greater.
In London I had received the standard warnings and
briefings given to British and other Commonwealth officials
being posted to communist nations in those days - watch out
for KGB spy traps, do not befriend the natives, and so on.
And Vnukova with its cold, dismal, late winter skies, and
surly armed soldiers at the bottom of the gangway, did
little to dispel the image.
Flights were few in those days — only three a week.
Even so, the plane was half empty. We eyed each other
suspiciously.
It took only a few weeks for the suspicions to begin to
melt. The Moscow spring had arrived, and in those
pre-global warming, pre-industrial days the shift to spring
was dramatic, with large chunks of ice pouring down the
Moscow River.
The crowds in the streets began to brighten. Sitting in the
Embassy garden, chatting in basic Russian with one or other
of the two very pleasant and intelligent Russians ladies
working in the Embassy (supplied courtesy of that dreaded
KGB), and listening to allegedly banned Western jazz
pouring out of a neighbor’s window, I began to wonder
about that so-called Iron Curtain.
I had heard the horror stories about Communism in China,
before going to Hong-Kong and discovering something quite
different. Maybe the same would be true for Moscow. Maybe
the dreaded KGB was not so dreadful after all.
Or maybe it was.
Australian Embassy, Moscow
The Embassy was (and remains) in the solid, two-storey
luxury house of a rich, pre-revolution sugar merchant
located in the quiet Kropotkinskii Pereulok close to
central Moscow.
Diplomatic staff was small —a doddery ambassador, the
counselor, Bill Morrison, and myself as a very junior
second secretary. Morrison had been trained in Russian in
the early fifties, together with Richard Woolcott.
Both Morrison and Woolcott had strong, affable
personalities. Both had had the distinction of being
expelled from Moscow in 1954 during the Petrov affair when
both were there as Third Secretaries in training. And both
were to carve out good careers for themselves later —
Morrison ending up as Defense Minister in the Whitlam
government and then as ambassador to Indonesia; Woolcott as
ambassador to both Jakarta during the Whitlam years (where
he became an apologist for Indonesia’s East Timor
takeover) and Washington.
Morrison had had no trouble establishing himself as
effective head of our three man Embassy. He also seemed to
have had no trouble getting to know a range of important
Russians, including Nikolai Firyubin, Foreign
Vice-Minister, and the Minister of Culture, Yekateria
Furteseva. That, plus his friendship with the number two in
the Indonesian Embassy - an Embassy that was refusing
contacts with Westerners as part of Indonesia’s then
strongly anti-Western stance- made him a valuable and
respected person in Moscow’s Western diplomatic
circles.
But we were soon to discover a lot more about Morrison.
2. THE BILL MORRISON AFFAIR
It was, I recall, one of those beautifully warm, early
summer, Moscow mornings – on a weekend in early June
when all life and nature seemed at ease with itself and the
idea of dark plots and KGB conspiracies seemed as unreal as
the winter cold only a few months earlier.
For some reason I was at home when the doddery ambassador
phoned. Go to the Embassy immediately was the message. In
the Embassy safe room (all Western embassies had these
large, box-like contraptions with electronic defenses to
prevent Soviet eavesdropping) the ambassador was
confronting a badly-shaken Bill Morrison.
The KGB has pounced
Morrison said he had been visiting a Russian friend’s
house in Moscow when KGB officials had barged in and told
him that unless he cooperated with them the Soviet media
would announce the next day his expulsion for selling used
clothing to his maid - something that was supposed to be
illegal at the time. It was a retaliation for the Skripov
affair, he said.
True, ASIO had only a few months earlier carried out a
messy entrapment and expulsion of that fairly senior
diplomat in the USSR’s Canberra embassy. We had all
assumed that it was only a matter of time before Moscow
would retaliate by expelling someone from our Embassy, and
Morrison was the obvious target.
But why try to do it in such a crude way? And why had
Morrison, knowing that he was the likely target, not been
taking precautions, like making sure he was accompanied
when he went to meet Russians?
But sure enough, the next day Izvestia did indeed carry a
small notice about how an Australian diplomat, Morrison,
had been declared persona non grata for selling used
clothes and other illegal activities, and had been given a
week to leave the country.
Canberra reacted quickly: Lodge the strongest possible
formal protest with the Soviet authorities, immediately.
Morrison’s alleged crime bore no comparison with
Skripov’s spy recruiting activities. Australia might
even consider breaking relations with Moscow.
But was Morrison’s story true? Knowing Morrison, I
had a gut feeling there was more to it all. There were also
a few contradictions about times and places. I persuaded
the ambassador to delay the formal protest. And gradually,
over several days of intense questioning in that cramped
safe room, we began to get the true story.
Morrison, it seems, had taken on the job of cracking
single-handedly the closed world of Soviet top society. His
Firyubin/Furteseva contacts had given him a circle of
seemingly well-connected people — writers, artists,
senior officials, who were in the habit of meeting for
happy drinking and discussion parties in a high-class dacha
hidden away in the forests well outside Moscow, and
presumably outside the areas where foreigners were allowed
to travel.
He had gone along with all this because he felt he had the
confidence of these people and that they wanted him to act
as some kind of intellectual courier to the West. He knew
the Skripov retaliation dangers. But these people seemed
well above grubby KGB plots. Or so he thought.
On this particular weekend, they had arranged a very
special party for him — vodka, caviar, charming
ladies, an overnight stay. But just as the party was
settling down for a two-day session, the KGB had burst in.
Morrison’s high-level Russian ‘friends’
quickly disappeared.
For the next 24 hours he was captive, grilled intensively
by people who had detailed knowledge of his activities and
even some of the reports that he had been sending to
Canberra (supplied presumably by a Soviet mole in the
Canberra establishment).
Finally they had given him a choice: either cooperate, or
the next day Izvestia would carry the news of his expulsion
for the squalid crime of selling used clothing to his maid
(something he had in fact done, but to help the maid rather
than himself, and which she had typically reported to her
KGB masters). He would be the laughing stock of Moscow. His
career as a diplomat, not to mention his career as a
Russian specialist, would be finished.
To his credit, Morrison had come straight back to the
Embassy to report the affair. To my discredit, perhaps, I
had persisted in trying to drag the true story out of him,
partly to make Canberra realise that maybe the Morrison
affair was indeed on a par with the Skripov affair (in both
cases women and entrapments were involved) and so make
Canberra think twice before getting too righteous about it
all.
Canberra had made a rather silly song and dance over the
hapless Skripov’s misdemeanors. Now it was
Moscow’s turn to sing and dance. Maybe it was time
for all of us to ease up on the entrapment business.
And maybe Morrison was involved in dangerous affairs after
all. He had very good US Embassy contacts (his wife was
American) and it was no secret that the Americans and the
Brits liked to use Commonwealth nationals in Moscow for
their various spy stunts, when using their own people would
attract attention. Morrison had also hinted to me several
times of being double-crossed by Firyubin, who also had a
strong Indonesian connection, though I never got the
details.
Morrison had had a deep interest in the details of the
recent Oleg Penkovsky spy affair. Penkovsky had been a top
level Soviet official whose inside reports on Soviet
military plans and thinking had been the intelligence coup
of the century (he had since been uncovered and executed).
Several senior US and UK officials in Moscow had been
expelled for their involvement in that affair; the Brits
for providing the people to check out Penkovsky’s
information drops. In the eyes of the Russians, Australia
too could well have been part of that tight Anglo-Saxon
nexus for spy activities against the USSR.
The Russian Expert’s Dilemma
But by the end of the week I was feeling sorry for
Morrison. Day after day we had been dragging from him the
sorry details of his entrapment (I was also feeling sorry
for myself; sitting in that cramped box for a week was not
doing any good for any of us).
Morrison had tried to keep a brave face on things. But the
more he talked, the more he was signing his own
death-warrant, not only as a Soviet expert but even as an
Australian diplomat. There was no way Soviet-hysterical
Canberra would forgive him for what had happened.
He had been caught in the dilemma that all of us
Russian-speaking Western diplomats had to face in Moscow.
There was no point learning the language and studying the
system unless one went out to meet and talk to Russians.
But if one did that, one was bound to become a target for
KGB attentions. Entrapment, followed by messy expulsion,
could easily be the end result.
For an English-speaking Russian diplomat to be expelled say
from US or Australia was no great personal tragedy. Back
home he would probably be regarded as a hero. He could then
go on to use his hard-won English language ability in some
other posting to some other English-speaking nation (there
are plenty of them).
But for a Russian-speaking Western diplomat, being expelled
from Moscow could be a devastating end of the road. There
was nowhere else he could go to and use his Russian. Years
of effort to learn the language and study the society would
go down the drain.
Worse, he would be branded forever as an enemy of the
nation he had tried so hard to get to know and may even in
some situations have come to like (Morrison was no rigid
anti-Soviet hawk).
Faced with this dilemma, I am sure a few succumbed and
cooperated with their KGB tormentors. To his credit,
Morrison had resisted the pressure.
At the time I used to wonder why the Soviet powers-that-be
allowed this seemingly self-defeating activity to continue.
By ruthless KGB harassment of people like Morrison (and
later myself, I was to discover), they were creating a
corps of resentful, anti-Moscow, Soviet watchers and
experts in foreign ministries around the globe. They were
leaving the field open to the many anti-Soviet hardliners
in Western officialdom whose proof of reliability in the
top levels of policy formation was the fact that they had
never made any effort to learn a word of Russian or to get
to know anyone from the USSR.
The Soviets complained constantly about Western distortions
of their ‘deisvitelnost’ (reality.) Yet they
were targeting for entrapment and expulsion the very people
who could help the world discover that
’reality.’
They were embittering the very people who, if treated
properly, could do so much to help improve relations.
Certainly that would have been the case with Morrison who
would have returned to a good position in Canberra and have
done much to break down Canberra’s anti-Soviet
hysteria.
And that had in fact been the case with Canberra’s
previous ambassador to Moscow - Keith (Spats) Waller, yet
another non-Russian speaker sent to represent Australia
(Canberra’s quaint belief that non- language speakers
made the best ambassadors was already in full swing).
Waller had arrived when Moscow was trying hard to break
away from its former Stalinist isolation. He had been
treated well and sensibly by the Soviet authorities, and
had moved much in Moscow’s very attractive artistic
circles. As ambassador, and to some extent as a non-Russian
speaker, he had been free from the grubby entrapment
attempts imposed on people like Morrison.
Arriving back in Canberra to a senior position, Waller had
called openly for reconsideration of Australia’s
rigid anti-Soviet policies. None of that would have
happened if he had received Morrison’s treatment.
(Ironically, his pro-Soviet sympathies were matched by
intensely anti-Beijing prejudices. He presided over a
marked increase in Canberra’s anti-China hysteria.)
But later I came to realise that for the KGB types this was
mere moralizing. Whether we Russian-speakers came to like
their country or not was irrelevant. They were operating at
a level where one single entrapment could lead to
incalculably valuable information breakthroughs. Penkovsky
had been one such success for our side. They too had had
their successes in the past, and were determined to
continue.
Besides, their propaganda had already told them that all
diplomats sent by the West to work in Moscow, the
Russian-speaking ones especially, had to be anti-Soviet and
latent spies to begin with. Otherwise we would not have
been sent. For them, we Russian-speakers were small and
very expendable fish.
Presumably the same thinking was going on in the tiny minds
of the ASIO types sent to harass and entrap Soviet
diplomats in Canberra. One ex-Canberra Soviet diplomat I
got to know claimed our spies were much cruder than theirs,
which is saying something.
3. SOVIET ‘REALITIES’
With Morrison gone and his replacement in place ( a nice
enough man called Pethybridge), the Embassy settled down to
its regular routine of basically doing nothing much more
than administer itself, fret constantly about continued KGB
efforts to penetrate its security, and then use much of its
large budget to hire an array of KGB-supplied staff trained
and briefed to penetrate that security.
I once wrote a report querying the need to waste large
amounts of money simply to park a dozen or so unhappy,
run-of-the-mill, non-Russian speaking Australians in the
middle of Moscow to do no more than type up reports and
issue visas, while surrounded by this army of KGB-briefed
operatives seeking to facilitate entrapment stunts against
the Embassy that employed them.
Instead, I suggested, it would be much cheaper, safer and
more effective to close the whole operation down and have a
couple of competent officials based in Vienna fly in every
week or so to stay at a hotel, handle whatever consular,
diplomatic or reporting work that was needed, and then fly
out.
Meanwhile we would invite the Soviets to do the same with
their Canberra Embassy (they could fly in from Djakarta).
In the process a large army of KGB spies and ASIO sleuths
would be put out of business.
Footloose in the USSR
For some reason I never got a reply to my brilliant
proposal (too many ASIO types having to seek new employment
was the problem no doubt). But no matter. By this time I
had realised that as the only Russian-speaking diplomat in
the Embassy, and with an ambassador mainly concerned with
his own retirement plans, I could basically write my own
ticket.
I would work hard on the language, follow the media, try to
meet as many of the local inhabitants as possible (both for
language and information purposes), and travel as widely as
I could using the Embassy’s generous travel allowance
to get out into the provinces. I had two years to educate
myself and broaden my experience, largely at the expense of
the Australian Government.
(I would also try to track down D., then living in a
forest-bound house near Bonn’s hush-hush rocket
development site outside Munich. I found her. Her husband
was in Egypt handling the secret rocket tests that were to
create such fuss later. )
(She had had no children, and had created a fairly
independent life for herself traveling around Germany as a
buyer for a large department store. She invited me to go
with her for a week. Traveling across Germany in her small
Volkswagen in the middle of winter we got to know each
other again, and well. She had matured into a very
attractive and strong-minded woman.)
(She also suggested we should get back together. But for
all the emotional nostalgia, I could not say yes. I was too
involved in a very different life back in Moscow. )
(I often wonder what would have happened if I had agreed.)
Meeting Russians
A key part of my self-imposed Moscow education was getting
out and meeting people. This was not has hard as most
assumed in those Cold War days. Nor, at first, did I have
any reason to think it would be as dangerous as most
assumed.
I lived in the Dom 45, Leninskyii Prospect compound, not
too far from Moscow University (MGU). The compound housed
both foreigners and Soviets in what by Moscow standards was
fairly reasonable comfort. Evenings, when there was no
diplomatic event to attend, I would often go out to dine in
one of the several student cafes nearby.
In those communist days to sit by oneself at an empty table
was regarded as ‘unsociable’ (it also created
more work for the staff, I guess). Almost always I would be
directed to a table where others were sitting –
students, or some local citizens also determined to have a
night out.
Russians are friendly people and within minutes a
conversation would be underway. They would want to know who
I was and what I did. No one seemed greatly bothered when I
said I was a diplomat. Drinks would be ordered (vodka and
beer were the drinks of choice, with the beer as a chaser
after the vodka toasts). Food would be shared — a
favorite was fatty Kiev chicken to soak up the alcohol.
A few hours later I would wander off into the often
freezing Moscow night, filled with food and vodka, and yet
another chance to practice the language and gain another
insight into the society.
When my table partners were students I would soon be deep
into political debate, with me being pressured to admit to
poverty and discrimination against blacks in the West, in
exchange for them making a few complaints about their own
system. I was told repeatedly how their aim was to get rid
of the system’s faults and establish
‘true’ Communism.
Most were convinced that even with its faults their system
was superior to ours. And that was not because they lacked
information about the outside world. Western propaganda at
the time used to make big play about the regime denying
information to its citizens. That was simply not true.
Objective information was at hand, and studied, unlike in
the West where information overflow worked to dull serious
interest.
Occasionally I would see the KGB types snooping impatiently
through the windows. But as far as I was concerned they
could cause no harm. They could hardly barge in arrest us
for have dinner and talking together. Nor was there much
point their trying to follow up on my dinner companions and
use them against me. We had met by chance and would not be
meeting again.
Years later when Mikhail Gorbachev emerged with his
perestroika and glasnost reforms I knew exactly where he
was coming from. He and his wife had been students at the
same MGU only a few years before I arrived. They too had
almost certainly visited the same student restaurants as I
did. They too had probably had the same debates and
discussions amongst themselves. And like the students I had
met, they too were impatient for reforms, with
‘genuine’ Communism as their ideal.
A Night At The Theatre
Student restaurants were not the only stamping ground. One
of my favorite gambits was to order two tickets for one or
other of the several mildly regime- critical plays allowed
by the Khruschev liberalization then underway and being
shown at the very popular Sovremyenniyi
(CОВРЕМЕННЫЙ
or
contemporary) theatre. As a diplomat I could easily get
tickets. Ordinary Russians had a much harder time.
At the theatre entrance I would soon be surrounded by young
people, mainly students, seeking tickets. I would walk
through the crowd, pick out one of the more
interesting-looking of the lady students, and tell her that
I had a spare ticket. Usually she would be so grateful that
after the play she would happily join me for coffee or
cognac.
I would end up with a nice evening at the theatre - the
chance to meet someone attractive, to see a controversial
play, and then to get a good discussion of the play, its
politics especially, all for the price of one ticket. And
once again the KGB types would have a bad evening. They
would have wasted all that time trailing me, for no result
(though having to watch the play might have done something
for their political education).
A Day In The Countryside
Yet another good way to meet Russians naturally was the
‘social hike’ (ОБЩЕСТВЕННЫ
ПОХОД or obschestvenniyi pohod
). Come Fridays and the Moscow evening newspaper would run
a small column listing weekend excursions to various places
of interest around Moscow, and giving the railway station
where we should all meet. I would show up with a small
rucksack at the appointed time. Waiting there would be a
motley crowd of old men, fat women, young teachers and
other nature-minded citizens. Our leader —usually a
public-spirited volunteer with time to spare — would
then march us off to the appointed platform.
As we wandered through the forests and fields on the Moscow
periphery I tried to act as if I too was just an ordinary
citizen out for a weekend stroll. That way I would avoid
the inevitable fuss and bother if people thought a
Westerner had infiltrated their ranks. I could also
discover what Russians really thought about their life and
the regime.
The ruse worked. People spoke frankly. Occasionally,
someone would say that my looks and accent suggested I came
from Estonia. I did nothing to disabuse them.
After a day of sunshine, fresh air and conversation we
would head off to the nearest station to catch another
train back to Moscow. I assumed the KGB were around, but I
never saw them.
Many years later I got to see an NHK television replay of a
1972 documentary showing very similar excursions by young
people into the summer countryside around Moscow (that was
back in the Japanese national broadcaster’s more
progressive days when it felt it should try hard to show
the realities of societies, including even the communist
ones).
Watching the documentary was a throwback to a time when the
faces of young Russians showed a natural enjoyment of
life’s simplicities, long before the surly, depressed
faces of the Moscow crowds I saw in the mid-nineties -
people trying to cope with poverty, competition and other
capitalistic innovations to post-communist society
More Soviet ‘Realities’
Another NHK Soviet-era documentary replay showed the first
voyage of the summer for a large vessel bringing goods and
passengers down the still frozen Lena river in Siberia to
the scattered settlements of the native peoples living near
the Arctic Ocean.
It was a hazardous journey. Watching the replay it was hard
not to be impressed by the dedication of the captain and
the seeming efficiency of the crew. During my Moscow stay I
had seen many such documentaries and took these kinds of
attitudes for granted. Even if they were mainly for regime
propaganda purposes they showed a certain kind of reality.
But as I watched the NHK documentary I realised just how
unlikely it would be to find the same attitudes in
today’s Russia, where making money now seems to be a
lot more important than service to the society. The river
transports have long since stopped. Most of those Arctic
settlements, and the rare cultures they preserved, have
been abandoned. Such is the logic of free markets and
private enterprise.
True, the gulags that dotted the same area have also been
abandoned. That is a plus, a big plus. On a trip to Siberia
I once ran into a line of prisoners being transported by
KGB thugs to one of those camps. Just a glance at faces,
some quite young, was enough to tell me who were the more
evil - the thugs, not the prisoners.
Another bad memory involved a young Balt. I had met him at
the Institute of Foreign Languages near our Embassy (I
often lunched there in the student cafeteria). He liked to
talk about life in general, including the problems of the
Baltic peoples. He was much more open than the Russian
students there.
One day driving through Moscow he jumped out from the
footpath and waved me down, begging to be allowed to get
into the car. The KGB were chasing him, he said. Could I
please take him to the Embassy so he could seek asylum.
Clearly we could not be in the business of providing asylum
to dissidents, and I told him that. Worse, I was, as usual,
being followed by the KGB too. We drove around for an hour
or so wondering what to do. Eventually I decided to drop
him off at a subway entrance in the hope that the KGB types
would not catch him as he disappeared into the tunnels. I
often wondered what happened to him.
Or maybe the whole thing had been a plant. But if so, to
what purpose. The ways of the KGB can be mysterious.
Sometimes in talking with students I would hear reference
to so-and-so – usually one of the brighter graduates
- being sent to a
ПОЧТОВЫЙ
ЯЩИК (pochtoviyi yaschik or
post box). This was the codeword for a secret military
installation where the address was known only by its postal
number. The loss to Soviet industrial progress from this
brain drain must have been enormous.
4. SOVIET COMMUNISM
But for all its faults and problems, the society, as I saw
it, functioned. The economy was in reasonable shape. Shops
were fairly well stocked, though quality was often poor.
Most seemed satisfied with the regime. It had produced a
generation whose lives were stable, and whose employment,
if arbitrary, was guaranteed. Thanks in part to war
memories, the patriotism also seemed genuine.
There was a genuine public spiritedness, and not just in
the way people were expected to sit with others in the
restaurants. On weekends, apartment block residents would
get together in working bees to keep premises clean.
Communism seemed to match the inherent communalism and
conservatism of the Russian people, even if it was much
less liked by some other peoples under Soviet control.
The buses did not use conductors to collect fares; they
relied solely on honesty boxes. (The only other country I
have seen similar honesty systems is Japan, another
communalistic society.) Often a grand-motherly type would
sit herself by the box during her journey, and upbraid any
young toughs who tried to cheat the system.
Few of these important details found their way into the
biased reports of Western media, or Western diplomats, in
those Cold War days.
Merits and Faults
The system had other merits, often side by side with the
faults.
The education system was good. Thanks to Soviet
egalitarianism perhaps, Russia was one of the few places in
the world where women would look you directly in the eye,
without the complexes one sensed in Western women in those
pre female-liberation days.
The bookstores were usually excellent; the Russians are, or
were, very literate people. Instead of today’s TV
trivia and sex shows, a standard fare was quiz programs
demanding wide general knowledge, and run purely for
intellectual enjoyment, without prizes. Prostitution was
rare and pornography non-existent. That allegedly amoral
Soviet society of Christian, anti-communist condemnation
was in fact a lot more moral than most Western societies.
Minority peoples were allowed newspapers and literature in
their native languages – one reason why they were
able to break away so easily once the Soviet system
weakened. And many of the younger and better-educated of
the minority peoples I met seemed generally ready, with
reservations, to accept their status as Soviet citizens. As
ever, Western propaganda about oppressed minorities was
just that (though the few anti-Soviet nationalists who
emerged were quickly put away).
The social equality preached by the regime also seemed
reasonably in place, even if it meant that most were kept
at the same level of relative poverty. The debasing
nomenklatura system existed, but it had yet to cast its
corrupting Brezhnev-era pall on the society.
Obviously I would not have enjoyed being a Soviet citizen;
I could not have stood the various restrictions. But I
often tell people with sincerity that my two years in
Moscow were the some of the best and most interesting years
of my life. I learned a lot about the role of ideology in
shaping a society. Every day brought some new experience or
challenge. Even just walking down the street and checking
the price of potatoes had meaning.
KGB attentions aside, there was something curiously
comforting about living in a collectivist society where you
did not have to be constantly on your guard against the
pressures, scams and shallow advertising of our capitalist
world.
Even in the Stalinist years there must have been glimmers
of what some liked to call communist morality. Many of
Stalin’s heirs - Khruschev and Kosygin for example -
seemed genuine in their efforts to improve society. I even
got to like Gromyko, for whom I once had to make a labored
dinner speech interpretation. He is often written off as a
hardliner. But to understand the mind, and integrity, of a
very conservative Soviet leader I strongly recommend
reading his biography.
Gromyko’s notorious hard-line was due partly to
personality. But much of it was also a reaction to the bad
behavior of our own hardliners - things like the
Western/Japanese intervention in Russia’s 1918 civil
war, US willingness to embrace former Nazis, US excesses in
the Korean and Vietnam wars, the Bay of Pigs, US/UK
hard-line Cold War policies. Even people of conscience in
the West tend to write these things off as mere aberrations
since they know (or think they know), the distorted
background that created them. They do not want to see them
as reflecting fundamental flaws in our societies .
But to many people of conscience on the other side of the
Curtain they did prove the fundamental flaws and basic
corruption of our system. In the eyes of ultra-cautious and
conservative Soviets like Gromyko they proved our ultimate
evil.
Conversely, the Stalinist purges and interventions in East
Europe which many in the West saw as proving the ultimate
corruption and evil of the Soviet system were, for Soviet
hard-liners like Gromyko, merely aberrations of the system
at worst and maybe even justified at times.
(One of my more futile arguments against the Vietnam War
was that we were assisting communist regimes by undermining
the credibility of the progressives there who wanted to use
the West as a model for reforms. As far as our hard-liners
were concerned, there were no progressives to begin with,
and those regimes were beyond any possibility of reform
anyway.)
(For a very personally moving account of this mirror-image
Cold War inversion of prejudices in action, I invite
readers to look at my account of the elderly
post-revolutionary Russian I met on a train from Odessa
– see Quadrant magazine letter on my website entitled
former Western brutality in Russia.)
I also developed a deep sympathy for the wartime sufferings
of the Russian people, and disgust for the way we in the
West had managed almost completely to ignore not just those
sufferings but also Moscow’s desire for a foreign
policy that made sure they never happened again. The
raucous attacks on the very mild Soviet discrimination
against Jews at the time (few complained about
Malaysia’s much greater discrimination against
overseas Chinese) stuck in the craw when one considered but
for the immense Soviet wartime sacrifices there would not
have been a single person of Jewish origins left alive west
of the Urals, and probably east as well.
Equally biased were the complaints of our Western
ideologues about the sufferings of a dozen of so prominent
Soviet dissenters thrown into jail, exile or psychiatric
wards. At precisely the same moment hundreds of thousands
of dissenters and liberals being rounded up and killed in
Latin America, mostly with US approval and backing. Did we
hear a word of complain from our ideologues? Of course not.
Being an ideologue means never having to say sorry.
The Soviet regime at least allowed its dissenters to
survive and be brought to some kind of trial. In Chile,
Argentina and a few other places they would have been
brutally tortured, often to death, with their broken bodies
thrown out of planes far into the ocean. For them,
psychiatric homes would have seemed like a palace.
In Guatemala and El Salvador it was even worse. A good
income source for the killer squads and others employed to
wipe out dissident villages came when they finally realized
they did not have to kill the smaller children. They could
sell them profitably for adoption into US families.
(CNN once ran a documentary on the ‘tragedy’ of
one of these children having to be torn away from her
all-American ‘family’ at age twelve and
returned to El Salvador. It turned out that the
child’s mother had been in nearby hills with guerilla
forces when the village was being razed. When hostilities
ended years later she had tracked down her child and
demanded her return.)
(CNN had little to say about the real tragedy – the
massacre in the village by US-trained and equipped troops,
and many other villages like it.)
Meanwhile our anti-communists were insisting on the
superior democratic morality of the West. Our liberals were
not much better. Is there some kink in that democratic
morality that allows us unlimited scope for this kind of
bias? Even at their worst, the Soviets and their henchmen
never sunk to this level of barbarity.
Besides, as early as the sixties it was clear that Moscow
was trying to move away from former evils. In the West much
was being made of the Soviet”s Hungarian and Czech
interventions. But those decisions were touch and go, and
the killing limited - unlike the gungho and much crueler
Western interventions at the time in places like Greece,
Malaysia, Vietnam, Laos, Guatemala, etc.
If the Khruschev liberalisations had been allowed to
continue, it is very likely Russia would have evolved
within a generation into a reasonably free society
practicing Scandinavian-style socialism.
But as we know, the hawks on both sides were determined to
make sure that it did not happen. We had to wait until
Gorbachev emerged, by which time it was too late.
Communist Thoughts
Here let me divert somewhat.
Today, when examples of Communism are restricted to the
opposites found in China and North Korea, with Vietnam,
Laos and Cuba in between, it is hard to talk sensibly about
that 80 year attempt to create a different social system.
Maybe this is not the time or place to do so either.
But what all the anti-Communist propaganda, criticism and
hysteria over the years have ignored is that this was
essentially an attempt to impose a Utopian ideology. It
asked people voluntarily to give up some freedoms and
wealth today to create a better society for the future. In
theory at least, it tried to appeal to people’s
better and more altruistic instincts. If there is something
wrong with that then we in the West should close down our
monasteries, hippy colonies, the Red Cross, Salvation Army,
Boy Scouts and a host of other volunteer organizations
tomorrow.
But as in all Utopian societies dissenters cause problems.
They can be tolerated to a point. But if they threaten the
working of the system they have to be either expelled or
somehow silenced (the same happens in any self-respecting
monastery or hippy colony by the way, and the Boy Scouts do
not tolerate gays). But does that prove the worthlessness
of the Utopian ideology? Hardly.
But when it came to Communism, none of this made much
impression on our anti-Communist ideologues. Attempts by
the regime to create its version of Utopia were for some
reason supposed to be evil, and this was confirmed by the
treatment of dissidents. Efforts by our ideologues to
subvert or oppose the regime and its ideology made things
even worse for the dissidents, who came to be seen as
agents for the anti-communist enemy, which then provided
more fodder for our ideologues.
True, the Soviet version of Communism suffered a few
problems of its own. Its ideologues caused great economic
damage by blaming capitalism for society’s original
fall from the Utopian grace they sought. Today’s
China goes too far perhaps, but certainly some capitalism
could have been allowed without doing too much damage to
the original Utopian ideals. Khruschev was moving gradually
in that direction before he was overthrown.
But the main problem was an evil called bureaucracy. We
find it any society. But when it is backed up by ideology,
the evil and the corrupt find it wasy become entrenched.
Parasitically, it can easily destroy the very society that
creates it. Talk to any thinking Russian today and they
will tell you that the Soviet Union collapsed far more from
the bureaucratic corruption of the Brezhnev years than from
any Cold War pressure from outside.
Another problem the way tyrants and hard-liners take
control, at least in the early stages of the regime. As in
all societies born from intense ideological and
revolutionary struggle (Iran was another example), the
cruel and the tough-minded find it easy to come to the top.
They can use the ideology and sufferings of the revolution
to justify their abuse of power. Rivals drop their guard,
assuming that the purity of their struggle rules out such
abuse (a problem not unlike what I would suffer later from
the mini-Stalins in Australia’s China/Soviet/Japan
academic and political mafia).
Worse is to come. Our own hard-liners are than able to use
the use abuses and mistakes of the revolutionary regime to
consolidate their own power, claiming a need to confront
the evil of the other side. The way our Western
anti-communists used the crimes off Stalin, Mao and some
other communist revolutionary leaders to justify not just
their own anti-communist policies but also the large-scale
killing of utopian Communist idealists around the globe,
all the way from Vietnam to Latin America, should have been
seen as an atrocity against every shred of logic,
commonsense and humanity – particularly since it was
our own ideologues and manipulators who had done so much to
cause the original revolutionary sufferings that had
allowed the communist hardliners to gain power in the first
place.
Effects usually have causes. Our ideologues never seem to
realize that.
But in the hysterical anti-communist days of the sixties
and seventies, it was futile to expect that kind of
argument to make any impression, even on our Western
so-called moderates. Only after the senseless brutality of
the Vietnam War did we begin to get some glimmerings of
conscience.
There is something in the Western, mainly Anglo-saxon, mind
that prevents logical analysis in foreign affairs. It was
to find the same thing years later in the Japanese mind,
and it exists for much the same reasons I suspect.
5. THE KGB AND I
I had long suffered KGB attentions — something
inevitable for an unmarried, Russian-speaking diplomat
determined to go out and meet Russian people. On my first
week in Moscow an attractive blonde lady had come to the
door of my apartment in an otherwise heavily KGB guarded
apartment block, claiming to be looking for my predecessor.
I was followed constantly by KGB operatives in various
disguises, particularly on visits to the provinces. My
phone was monitored; sometimes the KGB types would be
lolling suspiciously at a rendezvous I had agreed on with
friends by phone only a hour or so earlier. Strange people
would be planted on me in strange places. And like everyone
else, I had to assume there were listening bugs in my
walls.
I once tried to suggest to my diplomatic colleagues that if
they all behaved as I did – going out frequently and
talking to a range of Soviets – the KGB would be too
over-worked to be able to concentrate on the one or two of
us who tried to live normal lives in Moscow.
That idea got quick shrift. The colleagues much preferred
to remain in their sheltered diplomatic cocoons, saving
both their skins and their generous allowances for the good
life back in their home countries.
In Baku I was once able to double back on my tracks and
confront one of these KGB operatives, an Azerbaijani. I
asked him why he wanted to behave in such an ugly way,
following me constantly. He came back quickly asking why we
Westerners behaved so ugly too. As an explanation for
senseless Cold War confrontation it was about as good as
any other I had come across.
The Pressure Rises
Towards the end of 1964 I was nearing the end of the normal
two year posting. The KGB attentions were getting to be
even more intense than usual. Attitudes of the Russians
working in the Embassy began to turn stiff and unnatural;
they seemed to have had a brief to focus especially on me.
Up to four different cars, each with three to four
operatives on board, would follow me every time I set out
to drive across and around Moscow, with cars and operatives
taking turns to replace themselves when they knew I had
spotted them.
Few outsiders can appreciate the strain involved once the
KGB decides to turn the screws on you. It is as if the 200
million people in tightly-controlled society have all
conspired to trap you and harm you. You cannot run or hide.
You have no escape. Everything you do is monitored.
Meanwhile you have to carry on as if everything around you
was normal.
Finally, it all came to a head. On a freezingly dark night
of December 1964, in the grubby industrial town of Podolsk
on the outskirts of Moscow, the trap had been set. My good
friend, Volodya Nikitin, was the bait.
The Trap Almost Closes
I had met Volodya a year or so earlier, on one of my
student restaurant forays. He and his charming wife,
Yelena, were at one of the tables I had been made to share.
From the start it was obvious he could not be a KGB plant.
Apart from anything else the KGB had no idea that I was
even dining out that night, let alone the restaurant I
would visit.
Volodya had an attractively direct and proletarian kind of
openness. Yelena was classy but warm. We took an immediate
liking to each other..
Like most of the students I met, they were reasonably
patriotic. But they were happy also to talk about faults in
the system, and their hopes that things would get better.
They impressed me especially with their frankness in
describing the wretched living conditions of most students.
Normally at the student cafes I would finish my dinner and
say goodbye. But with these people I could feel some kind
of sympatico. After the usual rounds of vodka toasts, we
agreed to meet again. He was studying metallurgy. She was
studying politics.
At the next dinner party, I followed Embassy regulations
and made sure I was accompanied. I took J, a rather demure
English girl working as a nanny at the Embassy and who had
come to Moscow to improve her Russian. She shared my
interest in the language and society, and we had already
had become close friends. For well over a year the four of
us would meet every month or so for dinner and
conversation. We liked each other.
(I once quizzed him on 1956 Hungarian events. "Those swine
(svolochii),’ he said. It turned out that a friend of
his had had his eyes gouged out by Hungarian
revolutionaries. I suggested that maybe the revolutionaries
had a reason for behaving so badly.)
(Volodya for all his other virtues was part of the same
worldwide syndrome that says the abuses by one’s own
side are acceptable but not those of the other side.)
I realised the KGB would be watching our dinner parties. I
even discussed it with Volodya. But since it was obvious we
were simply people who liked to eat, drink and chat with
each other occasionally, and since neither he or his wife
as students had any access to anything that even looked
like a secret, we assumed we would all be safe.
True, with the fall of Khruschev in October 1964 we knew
that the hawks and their KGB friends were back in control
(courtesy of the US hawks who had done everything —
Bay of Pigs, Cuban crises, U 2 flights etc - to derail
Khruschev’s honest efforts to gain détente with the
West and to end the Cold War). But by this time I had also
discovered that Yelena was the daughter of a highly placed
general in the Ukraine. That would be a kind of insurance
against arbitrary KGB stunts, or so I thought.
Some time around the end of 1964 Volodya began acting
strangely. He rang, wanting urgently to meet me over
dinner. He knew that J. had gone back to England. We met,
and this time Yelena was not with him.
But I had gone out of my way to take a woman I knew at the
British Embassy with me so that I would be covered. Volodya
was rather thrown out by the unexpected presence of the
woman, and after some talk about the problems he was having
finding a job after graduating from university, we parted.
There was something very unnatural about the meeting. I
suspected already that the KGB had put him up to it.
Later the British woman pestered me with demands from her
Embassy to find out who Volodya was. I knew the Brits were
highly security conscious; they were up to their necks in a
host of other anti-Soviet stunts a-la Penkovsky. But I did
not like the implication that I might be trying to lead the
woman into a trap. I decided I should not involve her in
any future meeting.
Soon after I had another call from Volodya. This time he
wanted to meet me in Podolsk where some friends were having
a party. And this time his voice sounded even more
unnatural than usual. I was certain that something was
afoot.
A Night in Podolsk
I had a problem. If I went to the rendezvous I would be
leaving myself open to KGB attentions. But if Volodya was
acting under KGB pressure and I did not go, he would be in
trouble.
His future career already seemed under some kind of threat;
he had already graduated but had not been given a job. It
could well get worse, and it would be through my fault
rather than his since it was I who initially had put him in
this situation of danger.
I decided I would go to the station, hear what he had to
say, and return promptly to Moscow, taking every anti-KGB
precaution. That way he would be covered, since he would
have delivered the goods even if they had not been seized.
Maybe I too would see an end to KGB attentions.
The moment I met Volodya at the station it was clear that
something was indeed afoot. With unnatural enthusiasm and
in a high voice he urged me to go with him to the party.
But first, he said, we should go to the station toilet.
There, and in a low voice, he suddenly turned on me —
tyi moi vrag, you are my enemy.
It took me some seconds to realise: He was trying to warn
me of a KGB trap.
What to do? I had assumed that the KGB plan was to wait
till we got to the party before moving in on us. But
already I had sensed we were being closely watched by
operatives planted around the station premises. If I
about-turned and tried to catch a train back to Moscow as I
had initially planned, it was very possible the thugs would
move in on both of us. They would push secret documents
into his hands and then claim I had come to this unlikely
place to receive the documents - a favorite KGB trick.
As well, they would suspect that Volodya had done something
to warn me, and he would still be in trouble. So I decided
to pretend to accept an invitation to leave the station
with him, and at some point en-route to the alleged party
find an excuse to do a sudden about-turn, allowing Volodya
to walk off into the darkness without giving the thugs time
to move in on both of us.
The strategy worked. But on the train back to Moscow I was
shaking badly.
Self-Reflectioon
Safe back in my Moscow apartment I began to stock of myself
(the Japanese call it hansei - self-reflection – but
it means more like reflecting on past mistakes and
stupidities.). I did not like what I saw.
Life in the diplomatic cocoon had made me soft and sloppy.
Only a few hours earlier I had found myself close to KGB
entrapment at a grubby station toilet. I had done great
damage to the lives of two people I liked very much.
I was guilty of the same over-confidence that had trapped
Morrison. I should have realised the risks of the Podolsk
excursion from the start. Why had I gone? My aim had been
to help Volodya, I had told myself. But maybe there had
also been a moth to the candle element – a silly
willingness to flirt with KGB danger.
For what could they do against me, I had thought? I was not
part of any anti-Soviet plot, and they knew that. They had
no compromising photos. There was no point them trying to
expel me since that would simply have invited a Canberra
retaliation. The only thing they could pin on me was the
friendship with Volodya.
True, they could try to recruit me as some kind of agent.
But I already knew the answer to that proposition. I would
simply sit down with them and discuss the political
situation, the war in Vietnam, the problems of their jobs
and so on. In the process I might even do something to
educate them out of their Cold War mentalities. I would
also get to know something of how the KGB operated.
Podolosk put an end to that kind of fantasising. There is
not much interesting or educative about a close friend
having to call me an enemy in a remote station toilet and
then having to flee into the winter darkness of a grubby
industrial town. Not just over-confidence was my crime. I
was guilty of severe immaturity.
I had thought of myself as an up-and-coming diplomat well
on top of the Moscow scene, the language, the society, and
headed for a good diplomatic career. But for the hard men
in the KGB I was just another piece of Western diplomatic
raw meat, to be attacked and devoured whenever the chance
arose, just as the hard men in the CIA, ASIO etc. saw my
Soviet counter-parts as juicy raw meat too. Did I really
want to stay part of that senseless dog eat dog game
forever?
6. A MOMENT OF DECISION
A New Career?
My career was at a crossroads.
At the very young age of 28 I had already been promoted
ahead of some others in my cohort to First Secretary.
Canberra had already asked me to accept a posting directly
from Moscow to replace Michael Cook as Australian
representative on the UN Disarmament Commission in New
York.
It was a prestige posting, especially for someone as young
as myself (Cook was already a rising star and later went on
to be one of Canberra’s top diplomatic bureaucrats
and ambassador to the US). But if I took the post, I would
have to spend another two to three more years in the
artificial cocoon of diplomatic protocol, meaningless
cocktail parties and a cramped personal life.
I would probably also have had to put up with more KGB
stunts. Like their mirror-image opposites in the CIA, once
those people think they have had you in their sights they
never give up.
As well the Vietnam War was heating up and I would have to
represent and defend Canberra’s increasingly ugly
foreign policies. Did I really want to be part of that kind
of nonsense for the rest of my life? Maybe I should forget
about the prestige of the New York posting. Maybe it was
time for me to make a fresh start, to go off and do
something quite different. I was still young enough for
that.
I could finish out my two years in Moscow, head back to
Australia and begin a new life there — a life that
had nothing to do with bureaucracy or diplomacy.
The Vietnam Factor
More than anything else it was the escalating horror of
Vietnam that helped decide me. The Americans were running
regular bombing raids into North Vietnam under the pretext
of the phony Tonkin Gulf ‘incident’. Canberra
was giving full- throated support.
The rationale for Australia’s Vietnam policies? That
the war in Vietnam had been instigated by China, as the
‘first stage in China’s southward thrust
between the Pacific and Indian oceans.’ Only a few
months earlier we had been instructed by Canberra to visit
MID (the Soviet Foreign Ministry) to express
Australia’s regret at Moscow’s inability to
realise the vicious nature of the Vietcong bandits and the
need for global condemnation. Yet already it was obvious
that Moscow, not Beijing, was Hanoi’s main supporter.
And the North Vietnamese students one met in Moscow were
clearly pro-Soviet rather than pro-China.
True, I did not know much about Vietnam myself , apart from
the fact that my bus from Phonm Penh to Saigon a few years
earlier had been the last to cross an allegedly pacified
Mekong Delta. But I could be fairly sure that our
Asian-ignorant bureaucrats knew even less; not one of them
spoke even a word of Vietnamese at the time.
I could see the close similarity with the pre-1949
situation in China. There the West had thrown its
unthinking support behind a corrupt and incompetent
government facing strong domestic opposition, and in so
doing had guaranteed the victory of a motivated,
well-organised guerrilla army backed up by strong
nationalism and a seemingly coherent ideology.
Vietnam would see the same dynamic at work. But Vietnam was
a lot smaller than China. This time the guerrillas, and
much of the rural population, could well be wiped out by
the might and viciousness of the US intervention. The
obligation to do something quickly was far greater.
The Hasluck Farce
Compounding my angst over Vietnam had been the the farcical
October pilgrimage to Moscow by Australian Foreign
Minister, Paul Hasluck. He had come, urgently he said, to
persuade the Russians to join with the West in trying to
stop China’s alleged expansionist ambitions via
Vietnam. At very short notice we were instructed to arrange
a meeting the premier Kosygin and foreign minister Gromyko
(For the extraordinary details I urge readers to see my
website for "Amazing Scenes : How Australia Influences the
World" in the National Times of March 1979, and my chapter
in the book "Vietnam, China and the Foreign Affairs Debate
in Australia").
Sitting alongside Hasluck in the middle of the Kremlin
looking across the standard green baize table, and
listening to an Australian ignoramus taking up the valuable
time of Moscow’s two top leaders, simply to make a
fool of himself and Australia while not being able even to
get his geographical facts right, I began to reflect: Did I
really want to remain part of this kind of circus for ever?
(Many years later, however, I discovered via Malcolm Fraser
that this bizarre event might not have been quite as
foolishly and egotistically Hasluckian as I had thought -
that it had probably been at US instigation.
((Washington shared Canberra’s quixotic belief that
the Vietnam War had been inspired by and was being
controlled by Beijing. Washington also went along with the
conventional wisdom that said the Sino-Soviet polemics,
then well into their fourth year, were clear proof that
Moscow was bent on communist moderation but was having to
confront an inherently militaristic Beijing in the process.
(In short, Washington had decided there was a real chance
of Moscow being unhappy about Beijing’s alleged
adventurism in Vietnam, and of being able to swing Moscow
into an anti-Beijing alliance with the West. But rather
than themselves directly approach their Cold War enemy in
Moscow with the proposal, the Americans had asked the
hapless Hasluck to test these waters.
(The US involvement does help explain the puzzling
immediacy with which we had been asked to arrange the
visit. It was out of Canberra’s nature to want to
arrange this sort of grand venture on its own.
(But neither Moscow or ourselves knew any of this
background. Both Kosygin and Gromyko - the latter
especially - were thoroughly confused by Hasluck`s
seemingly absurd attempt single-handedly to change the
course of global politics.
( Kosygin ended the performance abruptly saying there was
no way Moscow would abandon its commitment to the brave
Vietnamese people facing brutal US attack.
(He added sarcastically that even Beijing had felt obliged
to come to the help of the suffering Vietnamese people.
(Looking back, it was yet another example how the mistaken
Western view of Sino-Soviet polemics had distorted Western
foreign policies, to the tragic disadvantage of the
Indochinese peoples as it was to turn out.
(At the time I could only look on helplessly while
academics and commentators, mainly Anglosaxon, used the
polemics to create their doomsday scenarios of a mad
Beijing already on the move in Indochina and the rest of
Asia.
(But deep in Canberra’s archives there lies the one
dispatch I sent from Moscow that made it into the roundup
of dispatches sent to all foreign posts – an analysis
questioning the standard ‘Soviet moderate versus
Chinese extremist’ interpretation of the polemics. I
pointed out that both were basically saying the same things
about war, revolution etc..
(Needless to say, it made little impression on
Canberra’s myopic view of the world.
(Later after I got out of the diplomatic service I finally
puzzled out the key to it all –Khruschev`s withdrawal
of his nuclear promise to Beijing following the 1958 Taiwan
Straits crisis when the US had threatened nuclear attack.
(I wrote up that piece of detective work in my “In
Fear Of China” book, but that too made little
impression on the conventional wisdom.
The Burchett Factor
Another key part of my Vietnam education was my meeting
with the Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett in Moscow
at around the same time.
Burchett had just returned from a visit to Indochina. He
wanted to meet me and I got permission from the Embassy to
go to his apartment. There he gave me the conclusive proof
that the Vietcong forces in South Vietnam were far stronger
and better organized than anyone in the West seemed to
realize.
I passed all this on to Canberra, as Burchett wanted
anyway. (For details, see the reference to Book Chapter
above. I should add that Australia’s persecution of
Burchett, an outstanding international journalist and
likeable human being, says volumes about Australia’s
intellectual pettiness and shallowness).
That Canberra could so blithely dismiss not just the
reports but also the photographic evidence from the one
Westerner to actually get into Vietcong controlled
territory in South Vietnam showed a level of blindness even
worse than what I had come normally to expect from our
bureaucrats. Was I supposed to live with that kind of
attitude forever?
The coup de grace so to speak was Canberra later sending me
reprovingly a US appraisal of Burchett’s claim to
have visited a Vietcong village on the fringes of Ton San
Nuit airport. The US experts had said Burchett’s
claim was clearly false since the area was totally under US
and Saigon control and it would have been impossible for
him even to get to the village let alone claim it was under
Vietcong control.
A few months later rockets from that village began to land
on Ton San Nuit airport. Did I hear any admission of
mistake or apology from Canberra? Of course not. Being an
ideologue, or a Canberra bureaucrat, really does mean not
having to say sorry, ever.
In my report on the meeting, I had said the dreaded
Burchett did not seem to be quite the communist monster
most in Australia assumed he was - that he seemed to be a
quite reasonable and sane sort of person. All I got for
that effort was Canberra passing on to me a rebuke from a
junior diplomat in Saigon, Kim Jones, pointing out
Burchett`s monstrous behavior in praising the bravery of a
Vietcong bomb thrower in Saigon who had caused some
casualties.
Jones had been a good friend and colleague back in
Canberra. Clearly I was out of touch with my fellow
Australians. I had to get out.
7. OUT OF THE USSR
A New Career, but What Career?
My first and rather impetuous move was to write to Canberra
formally declining the New York posting. But did I really
want immediately to leave for ever the organisation that
had looked after me and trained me for so many of my
formative years?
I began to realise that there were few jobs in the outside
world for ex- diplomats, even those who spoke both Chinese
and Russian.
A tentative approach via a good Canberra friend, Gerry
Gutman, to Heine Brothers, the large and very Jewish,
Melbourne-based trader with the communist bloc had not gone
very far. Those very hard-nosed people had told him bluntly
that speaking Chinese and Russian was irrelevant.
They only employed people who knew something about
business. If there was a language problem they hired
interpreters.
Clearly I had to find some stepping stone more solid that
language ability to help me get back into the real world.
What to do? Japan was rapidly becoming the economic flavor
of the month. Maybe some Japanese expertise might give me
the stepping stone needed. My Chinese would be of some use
there I thought (I still did not realize the extent to
which the languages differed.)
Japan was also a still attractively pacifist nation. Even
as a diplomat there I would not have to defend
Canberra’s monstrous Vietnam activities, or so I
thought. There was also an emotional factor. The Japan
interest first kindled by my nostalgic 1961 train ride
through the countryside had been rekindled by getting to
know some of the people at the Japanese Embassy in Moscow,
in particular the wife of one of their officials there who
had shown me the very human and attractive side of the
Japanese personality.
So in the process of rejecting New York, I decided I would
ask for a posting to Japan after a spell in Australia.
But before any of this could happen, I had first to get out
of Moscow. The KGB attentions – the constant
following and phone bugging - had become even more intense
than before. I still had some months to run on my two year
Moscow posting.
Having rejected the UN posting, it was quite likely
Canberra would punish me by keeping me in Moscow. And as
the Embassy’s only Russian speaker that was quite
likely to happen anyway. Meanwhile, the KGB attentions
would continue.
Emotionally too I was burned out, with J. back to London
after a brief affair with a Russian writer. I had tried
hard to get onto her psychological wavelength . But we were
different people. Moscow had thrown us together in a rather
unnatural way.
On a visit to London that winter we had had a warm reunion.
I may even have proposed to her. But by this time she was
living in a very different world from myself. We parted and
I never got to see her again.
Back in Moscow I went through the usual routine of Embassy
work and diplomatic cocktail parties. But at heart it had
become meaningless. I was moving into a vortex.
The KGB Strikes, Again
The climax came a month or so later with another call from
Volodya. He and Yelena had just come from Siberia. They
could only stay in Moscow briefly. In that forced voice I
had come to know well, he said he had to see me, urgently.
I agreed to meet, but briefly. And this time it had to be
somewhere public in central Moscow. And this time he would
have to be with Yelena.
We met, and he told me how the KGB had been working on him
for months in advance of the Podolsk operation. And because
of his ‘failure’ there, he and Yelena had been
banished to Siberia..
But they had been told they could come back to Moscow if he
could persuade me to meet their KGB handler. The handler,
he said, respected me. He only wanted to talk to me about
things in general.
This was just the shock I needed to force me to a final
decision. I had to get out of Moscow, and quickly.
Siberian Truths
As it happened, I too had just come back from a Siberian
visit. There both I and my traveling companion — a
rather sensible man from the US Embassy who handled
cultural matters — had bumped into even more than the
usual quota of KGB spies and stunts.
The crunch-point for me had been a courtesy visit to the
head of Yakutsk University. Unlike most of the bland,
elderly bureaucrats running most Soviet universities at the
time, he turned out to be a young, intelligent Yakutian
with very Oriental features.
He wasted no time on courtesies. Instead he had asked us
angrily whether we were both aware of the bombing and other
atrocities being committed by our governments in a small
Oriental country just a few thousand miles away to the
south.
The American made a few stumbling excuses. I stayed silent.
Even more than before I was being forced to realise just
what it meant to be an Australian diplomat justifying
Australia` barbaric policies. If I was to remain as a
diplomat I would be just as guilty as those murderers to
the south.
Forget about the Japan posting, I told myself. I had to get
out of the diplomatic life completely, and quickly. But
first I had to get out of Moscow. And to do that I had to
make a fuss – a big one.
How To Get Out Of Moscow?
Canberra still had no replacement for me in Moscow. So I
set out deliberately to create the image of someone who had
been in there too long and needed to be sent home quickly .
I had earlier asked the Department to be allowed to return
to Australia via China and the trans-Siberian railway. That
request had been refused; it was still Australian policy to
prohibit any Australian official to set foot on Chinese
soil.
So I decided to write to the Department’s
administration chief (my former Taiwan colleague, Keith
Brennan) making an artificial fuss over the refusal to let
me travel via China, saying I saw this as proof Canberra`s
anti-China policies had gone too far.
I wanted to persuade them that I was starting to get a bit
emotional.
As an extra move I went to our new ambassador, the
sensitive and intelligent John Rowlands (whose premature
death from cancer a few years later deprived the Department
of one of its very few sensible moderates), and hinted that
a lovesick maid was pestering me.
The strategy worked. Among Western embassies in Moscow, any
hint of maid trouble is a flashing red signal (someone
should tell them that they would not have this problem if,
like the Soviets in their overseas embassies, they supplied
their own maids rather than accept locally KGB appointed
women). My request to head back to Australia was quickly
granted.
More KGB Tricks?
But first I had to get a Soviet exit visa. Normally they
are granted automatically. But in my case there was a very
strange delay. Was the KGB reluctant to see its prey slip
away? Was it planning yet another trick?
I had to assume so since in theory at least it is most
abnormal for any nation to deny a diplomat the right to
leave its territory.
I insisted we try to get a formal explanation from the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the delay. To my great
relief the exit visa eventually arrived, and I have reason
to believe that it was only granted after some dispute
between the Ministry, which wanted to adhere to diplomatic
norms, and the KGB, which wanted to keep me around a bit
longer.
Maybe it still felt that it could use Volodya to lure me
into another trap.
(I owe some of this information to Svetlana, the highly
intelligent assistant provided to our embassy by the
Soviets. She made no secret of her brief to report on us to
the authorities. But she claimed to have been planted by
the Foreign Ministry, not by the KGB.).
Eventually I got the exit visa. Finally, on a cold March
morning, very like the day on which I had arrived just two
years earlier, Rowlands went with me to the airport to say
goodbye.
I was glad he did; we could see some KGB types hovering
around the exit passage. Did they have another trick up the
sleeves of their shiny black suits?
Fortunately Rowlands also sensed something unusual. He
agreed to stay with me all the way to the exit gate. A hour
or so later, at several thousand feet, I could feel the
same overwhelming relief that many others have written
about when they finally leave the pressures of a
totalitarian regime.
I was finally out of the KGB morass I had partly created
for myself. I was a free person.
Back To Canberra
From Moscow it was direct to the standard de-briefing in
London. There it was made fairly clear to me that my
superiors had not been very impressed by my pre- departure
antics. But to me that did not matter; I was determined to
get away from them anyway.
From London it was back to Canberra via Israel where, by
coincidence, my friend from Korea in 1961, Richard Gates,
was Charge d’Affaires.
As I toured the Israeli countryside, I could not help but
wonder why the original Palestinian population, most of
which Israel said voluntarily fled the country in 1948, had
somehow decided to hand over the fertile valleys to the
Jews while the remnants had chosen to remain on the arid
hillside land .
Years later I was also to wonder if Bob Hawke ever let his
obsessively pro-Israel prejudices, fed by backdoor funds
from the Melbourne Jewish lobby and special favors provided
on frequent visits to Tel Aviv, be challenged by such
details.
8. BOB HAWKE
My relationship with Hawke had begun in 1956 when I was
about to leave Oxford. He had just arrived, and as a Rhodes
scholar had initially been handed over to my father’s
care, ostensibly to study labor-employer relationships.
I remember little about him at the time, except that he was
obsessed with cricket and had once borrowed the family
utility truck to seduce some woman, who later complained.
We were to meet up again a few years later just after my
return to Canberra from Moscow. On his return from Oxford
he had decided to further a trade union career by
post-graduate studies into labor-employer relations at the
Australian National University. Whether he did anything
useful or not, I do not know.
Future Australian Prime Minister
At the time Hawke was telling everyone that he would be
Australia’s future Prime Minister. I mentioned this
in a letter to my father, and his reply deserves repeating
(I have since had it preserved in The Oxford Book of
Australian Letters). It reads :
"I must say I think Hawke is showing some effrontery. He
turned up in Oxford with an-I-know-it-all-already attitude,
and thought that if we just showed him one or two more
tricks of the trade he could be the complete authority on
wage fixing.
"We found, not only that he did not know any economics at
all, but that he was far too stubborn to learn any. So we
got him to drop his thesis and transferred him to Wheare
(professor of government and public administration in
Oxford), to write a thesis in the sub- faculty of politics,
which we thought would be easier.
"Hawke’s principal interest was cricket. If he
succeeds, I shall regard it as proof that Australian labor
leaders, like the British, are now beginning to produce a
hereditary governing class – and I shall regret it.
“
In Canberra I got to see another side of Hawke.
Some time in late 1962 he arrived at a party I gave,
carrying twelve bottles of beer, half of which he drank,
and the other half he left behind. The party over, we set
off to drive to somewhere on the other side of Canberra.
As we approached a distant intersection on the far side of
the large sheep paddock bordering Civic Center, that crummy
apology for a shopping center whose main highlight was a
few cheap Italian-owned restaurants and which served as
Canberra’s main entertainment focus at the time, we
could see the lights of a car coming towards us from the
right-hand side of the T- junction we were approaching at
some speed.
Canberra at the time had one strict road rule —
always give way to the vehicle from the right, regardless.
Our relative speeds made it clear we would probably arrive
at the intersection at the same time. I told Hawke he would
have to give way. Instead, he accelerated, to make it clear
he would not give way.
The other car accelerated too. ‘F..k them’ ,
said Bob as he swerved around the T-junction just a few
seconds ahead of the other car.
There was only problem: ‘Them’ happened to be
the Canberra police. And they were not in a good mood.
Next
Please join the
Online Forum for Discussion
about this
Chapter