Murdoch editors told to 'kill Whitlam' in 1975 - US document

[Magda Hassan]

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This is interesting. Of course it cannot just be Murdoch. And it wasn't just him. The US and UK intelligence services were having a apoplexy while the mildly social democratic Whitlam government in office. They were dedicated to removing him at any cost. Murdoch doing PR. The Murdoch propaganda was relentless. Even the staff on his papers went on strike because of what they were being asked to do.


For any one wanting to look further into these events I recommend this transcript of a 5 part Australian radio program on the CIA in Australia which broadcast in the mid 80's. It covers it well and has interviews with people close the events at the time.
http://www.serendipity.li/cia/cia_oz/cia_oz1.htm
http://www.serendipity.li/cia/cia_oz/cia_oz2.htm
http://www.serendipity.li/cia/cia_oz/cia_oz3.htm
http://www.serendipity.li/cia/cia_oz/cia_oz4.htm
http://www.serendipity.li/cia/cia_oz/cia_oz5.htm

Murdoch editors told to 'kill Whitlam' in 1975

Date June 28, 2014 - 6:32AM

Phillip Dorling

Exclusive
News Corporation chief Rupert Murdoch directed his editors to "kill Whitlam" some 10 months before the downfall of Gough Whitlam's Labor government, according to a newly released United States diplomatic report.
The US National Archives has just declassified a secret diplomatic telegram dated January 20, 1975 that sheds new light on Murdoch's involvement in the tumultuous events of Australia's 1975 constitutional crisis.
Illustration: Ron Tandberg

Entitled "Australian publisher privately turns on Prime Minister," the telegram from US Consul-General in Melbourne, Robert Brand, reported to the State Department that "Rupert Murdoch has issued [a] confidential instruction to editors of newspapers he controls to 'Kill Whitlam' ".
Describing Mr Murdoch as "the l'enfant terrible of Australian journalism," Mr Brand noted that Mr Murdoch had been "the principal publisher supporting the Whitlam election effort in 1972 Labor victory".
With a publishing empire that included The Australian as well as daily or Sunday newspapers in every Australian capital, Mr Murdoch's new editorial direction was seen as a critical political development.
"If Murdoch attack directed against Whitlam personally this could presage hard times for Prime Minister; but if against Labor government would be dire news for party," Mr Brand telegraphed.
The consul-general's urgent report was prompted by US Labour Attache Edward Labatt who drew upon a range of confidential union and business sources, including people working for News Limited newspapers, to report on industrial relations and political developments.
Mr Brand's telegram makes it clear the words "kill Whitlam" were a political direction to News Limited newspapers and not a physical threat to the prime minister.
The consul-general's January, 1975 telegram has only been declassified this week after Fairfax Media applied for access 10 months ago. The identity of Labor Attache Labatt's confidential source of information has been redacted.
Other diplomatic cables previously released by the US National Archives and published by WikiLeaks in mid-2013 revealed that Mr Murdoch foresaw the downfall of Whitlam's Labor government a year before its dismissal.
In November, 1974, US Ambassador Marshall Green reported to Washington that Murdoch privately predicted that "Australian elections are likely to take place in about one year, sparked by refusal of appropriations in the Senate".
One year later, on November 11, 1975 Governor-General Sir John Kerr dismissed Mr Whitlam as the prime minister after the Liberal-Country Party opposition blocked the budget in the Senate.
Although Murdoch believed he played "a substantial role" in Labor's 1972 election victory, his enthusiasm for Whitlam had quickly waned.
"He expects to support the opposition in the next election," Ambassador Green reported in November, 1974.
The newly released US cable reveals Mr Murdoch's political shift was quickly confirmed, at least 10 months before Kerr's dismissal of the government.
News Limited newspapers savaged Whitlam and strongly backed opposition leader Malcolm Fraser, so much so that journalists at The Australian took industrial action in protest.
The Labor Party was crushed at the polls and did not return to power until 1983.
Mr Fraser acknowledged Murdoch's support but said the newspaper proprietor's political role is easily overstated given the collapse in public support for the scandal-ridden Whitlam government.
"Rupert had influential newspapers, certainly, but I don't think it affected the election outcome,'' Mr Fraser said.
John Menadue, News Limited general manager in the early 1970s, expressed surprise that Murdoch might have given an editorial direction as "blatant" as "kill Whitlam".
Mr Menadue, who was head of the prime minister's department from 1974-76, said Mr Murdoch's "modus operandi was more cautious, more subtle in those days, but I wouldn't dismiss it ... he's certainly more blatant now … more extreme right wing."
News Corporation did not respond to questions about Mr Murdoch's role in the political events of 1975. But on Friday Mr Murdoch visited the headquarters of his British newspaper division in London after his protege Rebekah Brooks was cleared of phone hacking at the most high-profile trial and biggest police investigation of recent times.
The 83-year-old US-based media mogul flew in to hold discussions with staff after the trial of former News of the World journalists concluded with a former editor of the tabloid New of the World Andy Coulson being convicted of hacking.
News UK is the parent company of The Sun, The Times, The Sunday Times and the now-defunct News of the World.

Australian-born Murdoch was photographed being driven away from a property in Mayfair in central London on Thursday, reading a copy of The Sun, and then went to the offices in Wapping, east London. He has yet to comment on the outcome of the eight-month hacking trial.

http://www.smh.com.au/national/murdoch-e...zson7.html


An article from John Pilger about the events:

John Pilger: CIA role in Australia's forgotten coup

Saturday, March 22, 2014


By John Pilger



Sir John Kerr (left) and Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in the King's Hall, Parliament House, Canberra, for the swearing-in of Kerr as Governor General, July 11, 1974.


Washington's role in the fascist putsch against an elected government in Ukraine will surprise only those who watch the news and ignore the historical record. Since 1945, dozens of governments, many of them democracies, have met a similar fate, usually with bloodshed.
Nicaragua is one of the poorest countries on earth with fewer people than Wales, yet under the reformist Sandinistas in the 1980s it was regarded in Washington as a "strategic threat". The logic was simple; if the weakest slipped the leash, setting an example, who else would try their luck?
The great game of dominance offers no immunity for even the most loyal US "ally". This is demonstrated by perhaps the least known of Washington's coups in Australia. The story of this forgotten coup is a salutary lesson for those governments that believe a "Ukraine" or a "Chile" could never happen to them.
Australia's deference to the United States makes Britain, by comparison, seem a renegade. During the American invasion of Vietnam which Australia had pleaded to join an official in Canberra voiced a rare complaint to Washington that the British knew more about US objectives in that war than its antipodean comrade-in-arms. The response was swift: "We have to keep the Brits informed to keep them happy. You are with us come what may."
This dictum was rudely set aside in 1972 with the election of the reformist Labor government of Gough Whitlam. Although not regarded as of the left, Whitlam now in his 98th year was a maverick social democrat of principle, pride, propriety and extraordinary political imagination. He believed that a foreign power should not control his country's resources and dictate its economic and foreign policies. He proposed to "buy back the farm" and speak as a voice independent of London and Washington.
On the day after his election, Whitlam ordered that his staff should not be "vetted or harassed" by the Australian security organisation, ASIO then, as now, beholden to Anglo-American intelligence.
When his ministers publicly condemned the Nixon/Kissinger administration as "corrupt and barbaric", Frank Snepp, a CIA officer stationed in Saigon at the time, said later: "We were told the Australians might as well be regarded as North Vietnamese collaborators."
Whitlam demanded to know if and why the CIA was running a spy base at Pine Gap near Alice Springs, ostensibly a joint Australian/US "facility". Pine Gap is a giant vacuum cleaner which, as the whistleblower Edward Snowden recently revealed, allows the US to spy on everyone. In the 1970s, most Australians had no idea that this secretive foreign enclave placed their country on the front line of a potential nuclear war with the Soviet Union.
Whitlam clearly knew the personal risk he was taking - as the minutes of a meeting with the US ambassador demonstrate. "Try to screw us or bounce us," he warned, "[and Pine Gap] will become a matter of contention".
Victor Marchetti, the CIA officer who had helped set up Pine Gap, later told me, "This threat to close Pine Gap caused apoplexy in the White House. Consequences were inevitable ... a kind of Chile was set in motion."
The CIA had just helped General [Augusto] Pinochet to crush the democratic government of another reformer, Salvador Allende, in Chile.
In 1974, the White House sent Marshall Green to Canberra as ambassador. Green was an imperious, very senior and sinister figure in the State Department who worked in the shadows of America's "deep state". Known as the "coupmaster", he had played a central role in the 1965 coup against President Sukarno in Indonesia which cost up to a million lives.
One of his first speeches in Australia was to the Australian Institute of Directors described by an alarmed member of the audience as "an incitement to the country's business leaders to rise against the government".
Pine Gap's top-secret messages were de-coded in California by a CIA contractor, TRW. One of the de-coders was a young Christopher Boyce, an idealist who, troubled by the "deception and betrayal of an ally", became a whistleblower. Boyce revealed that the CIA had infiltrated the Australian political and trade union elite and referred to the Governor-General of Australia, Sir John Kerr, as "our man Kerr".
In his black top hat and medal-laden mourning suit, Kerr was the embodiment of imperium. He was the Queen of England's Australian viceroy in a country that still recognised her as head of state. His duties were ceremonial; yet Whitlam - who appointed him - was unaware of or chose to ignore Kerr's long-standing ties to Anglo-American intelligence.
The Governor-General was an enthusiastic member of the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom, described by Jonathan Kwitny of the Wall Street Journal in his book, The Crimes of Patriots, as, "an elite, invitation-only group ... exposed in Congress as being founded, funded and generally run by the CIA".
The CIA "paid for Kerr's travel, built his prestige ... Kerr continued to go to the CIA for money".
In 1975, Whitlam discovered that Britain's MI6 had long been operating against his government. "The Brits were actually de-coding secret messages coming into my foreign affairs office," he said later. One of his ministers, Clyde Cameron, told me, "We knew MI6 was bugging Cabinet meetings for the Americans."
In interviews in the 1980s with the American investigative journalist Joseph Trento, executive officers of the CIA disclosed that the "Whitlam problem" had been discussed "with urgency" by the CIA's director, William Colby, and the head of MI6, Sir Maurice Oldfield, and that "arrangements" were made. A deputy director of the CIA told Trento: "Kerr did what he was told to do."
In 1975, Whitlam learned of a secret list of CIA personnel in Australia held by the Permanent Head of the Australian Defence Department, Sir Arthur Tange a deeply conservative mandarin with unprecedented territorial power in Canberra. Whitlam demanded to see the list. On it was the name Richard Stallings who, under cover, had set up Pine Gap as a provocative CIA installation. Whitlam now had the proof he was looking for.
On November 10, 1975, he was shown a top secret telex message sent by ASIO in Washington. This was later sourced to Theodore Shackley, head of the CIA's East Asia Division and one of the most notorious figures spawned by the agency. Shackley had been head of the CIA's Miami-based operation to assassinate Fidel Castro and Station Chief in Laos and Vietnam. He had recently worked on the "Allende problem".
Shackley's message was read to Whitlam. Incredibly, it said that the prime minister of Australia was a security risk in his own country.
The day before, Kerr had visited the headquarters of the Defence Signals Directorate, Australia's NSA whose ties to Washington were, and remain binding. He was briefed on the "security crisis". He had then asked for a secure line and spent 20 minutes in hushed conversation.
On November 11 the day Whitlam was to inform Parliament about the secret CIA presence in Australia - he was summoned by Kerr. Invoking archaic vice-regal "reserve powers", Kerr sacked the democratically elected prime minister. The problem was solved.
[This article was first published at johnpilger.com.]

[David Guyatt]

According to a privately published book "The Obedience of Australia" by Peter Jones, that was circulated on the subject, the Knights of St. John played a significant part in Whitlam's take down, and looking at the above photo of Kerr wearing his various gongs, I wiki'd him. He was made a Knight of the Venerable Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem in 1974, only months before he ushered Whitlam out of office in November 1975.