Alleged CIA involvement in the Whitlam dismissal

CIA involvement in the Whitlam dismissal is an allegation that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was involved in the 1975 Australian constitutional crisis, which culminated in the dismissal of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam.

The theory claims that the CIA encouraged Governor-General John Kerr to dismiss Whitlam, due to alleged U.S. government dissatisfaction with Whitlam's policies. Kerr denied any CIA involvement and Whitlam said Kerr did not need any encouragement from the CIA to sack him.

Background
There were a number of points of tension between Whitlam's government and the United States intelligence apparatus. Whitlam had close ties with the United States, in 1964 receiving a "Leader" travel grant from the U.S. Department of State to spend three months studying under U.S. government and military officials.

After coming to power, Whitlam quickly removed the last Australian troops from Vietnam. Whitlam government ministers, including Jim Cairns, Clyde Cameron and Tom Uren, criticised the US bombing of North Vietnam at the end of 1972. The US complained diplomatically about the criticism. In March 1973, US secretary of State William Rogers told Richard Nixon that "the leftists [within the Labor Party would] try to throw overboard all military alliances and eject our highly classified US defence space installations from Australia".

In 1973, Whitlam ordered the Australian security organisation ASIS to close its operation in Chile, where it was working as a proxy for the CIA in opposition to Chile's president Salvador Allende.

Whitlam's Attorney-General Lionel Murphy used the Australian Federal Police to conduct a raid on the headquarters of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) in March 1973. CIA Chief of Counter-Intelligence, James Angleton, later said Murphy had "barged in and tried to destroy the delicate mechanism of internal security". Australian journalist Brian Toohey said that Angleton considered then Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam a "serious threat" to the US and was concerned after the 1973 raid on ASIO headquarters. In 1974, Angleton sought to instigate the removal of Whitlam from office by having CIA station chief in Canberra, John Walker, ask the director general of ASIO, Peter Barbour, to make a declaration that Whitlam had lied to the Parliament about the raid. Barbour considered the statement to be false and refused to make it.

Journalist Ray Aitchison wrote in his 1974 book, Looking at the Liberals, that the CIA offered the opposition Liberal and National unlimited funding to help them defeat Whitlam's Labor Party in the 1974 elections.

In 1974, Whitlam ordered the head of ASIO, Peter Barbour, to sever all ties with the CIA. Barbour ignored Whitlam's order and contact between Australian and US security agencies was driven underground. Whitlam later established a royal commission into intelligence and security.

In a statement to parliament on 3 April, 1974, Whitlam said: "The Australian government takes the attitude that there should not be foreign military bases, stations, installations in Australia. We honour agreements covering existing stations. We do not favour the extension or prolongation of any of those existing ones." He also threatened not to renew the lease of the US spy base at Pine Gap, which was due to expire on 10 December 1975. The US was also concerned about Whitlam's intentions towards its spy base at Nurrungar. Whitlam also threatened to reveal the identities of CIA agents working in Australia.

Jim Cairns became Deputy Prime Minister after the 1974 election. According to a senior US embassy official, he was viewed by US secretary of state Henry Kissinger and defence secretary James Schlesinger as "a radical with strong anti-American and pro-Chinese sympathies". The US administration was concerned that he would have access to classified United States intelligence.

Whitlam instantly dismissed ASIS Director-General Bill Robertson in 1975 after discovering ASIS had assisted the Timorese Democratic Union in an attempted coup against the Portuguese administration in Timor-Leste, without informing Whitlam's government.

In the second half of 1975, Whitlam learned of rumours that Richard Stallings, a former CIA head of Pine Gap, knew that the CIA had some involvement in Australian politics. In October 1975, Whitlam asked the Department of Foreign Affairs for a list of all declared CIA officials in Australia for the past 10 years, information to which he was entitled. When he saw that Stallings' name was not on the list, Whitlam asked Arthur Tange, head of the Department of Defence, what Stallings' role was and Tange reluctantly admitted Stallings worked for the CIA. According to Victor Marchetti, a former CIA employee, Stallings worked for the CIA's covert action division.

The head of the CIA's East Asia division, Ted Shackley, sent a telex message to ASIO on 8 November 1975, in which he threatened to cut off the intelligence relationship between Australia and the US unless ASIO provided a satisfactory explanation for Whitlam's comments on CIA activities in Australia.

Allegations of CIA involvement
Prior to the Dismissal, Kerr requested and received a briefing from senior defence officials on a CIA threat to end intelligence co-operation with Australia. During the crisis, Whitlam alleged that Country Party leader Doug Anthony had close links to the CIA. In early November 1975, the Australian Financial Review wrote that Richard Lee Stallings, a former CIA officer, had been channelling money to Anthony, who was a close friend. Later it was alleged that Kerr had acted for the United States government in dismissing Whitlam. The most common allegation is that the CIA influenced Kerr's decision. In 1966 Kerr had joined the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a conservative group that had secretly received CIA funding. Christopher Boyce, a CIA contractor who decoded Pine Gap’s top-secret messages, said that the CIA wanted Whitlam removed because he threatened to close US military bases in Australia, including the CIA's own Pine Gap spy station. Boyce said the CIA had infiltrated the Australian political and trade union movements and that Kerr was described by the CIA as "our man Kerr". Victor Marchetti, a CIA officer turned critic of the US intelligence community who had helped set up the Pine Gap facility, said that the threatened closure of US bases in Australia "caused apoplexy in the White House, [and] a kind of Chile [coup] was set in motion", with the CIA and MI6 working together to get rid of the Prime Minister. Jonathan Kwitny wrote in his book The Crimes of Patriots that the CIA "paid for Kerr's travel, built his prestige ... Kerr continued to go to the CIA for money". In 1974, the White House sent as ambassador to Australia Marshall Green, who was known as "the coupmaster" for his central role in the 1965 coup against Indonesian President Sukarno.

Supportive of the allegations
In 1977, United States Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher made a special trip to Sydney to meet with Whitlam and told him, on behalf of US President Jimmy Carter, of his willingness to work with whatever government Australians elected, and that the US would never again interfere with Australia's democratic processes. The use of the word "again" has been interpreted by some as evidence that the US encouraged, or actively intervened, in Whitlam's dismissal. Richard Butler, who was present at the meeting as Whitlam’s principal private secretary, believed at the time, and remained convinced, that Christopher's wording was an admission that the US had intervened in Whitlam's dismissal.

William Blum wrote that the Nugan Hand Bank, which allegedly had connections to the CIA, allegedly transferred $2.4 million to the opposition Liberal Party of Australia. The CIA responded to these allegations with an emphatic denial: "The CIA has not engaged in operations against the Australian Government, has no ties with Nugan Hand and does not involve itself in drug trafficking."

Several journalists, historians and political commentators have endorsed the theory that the CIA was involved in Whitlam's dismissal, including John Pilger, William Blum, Joan Coxsedge Jonathan Kwitny and Jordan Shanks.

Critical of the allegations
Kerr denied being involved with the CIA and there is no evidence for it in his private writings. Confidential correspondence between Kerr and the Queen's Private Secretary, Sir Martin Charteris, released in July 2020 indicates that Kerr said that his alleged involvement with the CIA was "nonsense" and that he consistently reaffirmed his "continued loyalty" to the Crown. Whitlam himself later wrote that Kerr, "fascinated as he had long been with intelligence matters", did not need any encouragement from the CIA.

Edward Woodward, who was ASIO chief from 1976 and 1981, dismissed the notion of CIA involvement.

In 2015, Australian diplomatic and military historian Peter Edwards dismissed the claim that Kerr’s action was instigated by US and UK intelligence agencies, which he called an "enduring conspiracy theory".