Gough Whitlam and the CIA’s forgotten coup

By John Pilger | 24 October 2014, 8:30pm

The political demise of Gough Whitlam man is one of America's dirtiest secrets — but don’t expect to hear that from Australia’s political and media elite, writes John Pilger.

ACROSS THE POLITICAL AND MEDIA ELITE in Australia, a silence has descended on the memory of the great, reforming Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, who died this week. His achievements are recognised, if grudgingly, his mistakes noted in false sorrow. But a critical reason for his extraordinary political demise will, they hope, be buried with him.

Australia briefly became an independent state during the Whitlam years, 1972-75.

An American commentator wrote that no country had

‘… reversed its posture in international affairs so totally without going through a domestic revolution.’

Whitlam ended his nation’s colonial servility. He abolished royal patronage, moved Australia towards the Non-Aligned Movement, supported “zones of peace” and opposed nuclear weapons testing.

Although not regarded as on the left of the Labor Party, Whitlam was a maverick social democrat of principle, pride and propriety. 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".

In drafting the first Aboriginal lands rights legislation, his government raised the ghost of the greatest land grab in human history ‒ Britain’s colonisation of Australia ‒ and the question of who owned the island-continent’s vast natural wealth.

Latin Americans will recognise the audacity and danger of this “breaking free” in a country whose establishment was welded to great, external power.

Australians had served every British imperial adventure since the Boxer Rebellion was crushed in China.

In the 1960s, Australia pleaded to join the U.S. in its invasion of Vietnam, then provided “black teams” to be run by the CIA. U.S. diplomatic cables published last year by WikiLeaks disclose the names of leading figures in both main parties, including a future prime minister and foreign minister, as Washington’s informants during the Whitlam years.

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https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/gough-whitlam-and-the-cias-forgotten-coup,7029

The Secret History of CIA Women

It was “Mad Men” with security clearances, but some skilled female spies rose high in the ranks.

A few years ago, four veteran CIA officers, with more than a 100 years of collective experience over four decades, were asked to speak frankly about serving in the agency as women. The taped conversations, used for internal review by the CIA, reveal encounters with male attitudes from the officers’ early years that aren’t surprising—it was indeed a Mad Men world, albeit with security clearances. The transcripts, part of a trove of recently declassified CIA documents, also contain wry, Peggy Olson-esque recollections in which being a woman proved an asset—and hardly in the “femme fatale” vein of intelligence gathering.

“You could always tell them by their socks,” said Meredith, then-deputy chief of the CIA’s European Division, about spotting foreign agents. (All last names in the document are redacted.) She joined the agency with her husband in 1979 as a “contract wife,” a spouse sent abroad by the CIA with her agent-husband to provide secretarial-type support work for low pay. When dressing to blend in with the crowd, Meredith recalled, undercover agents—on all sides—tended to overlook shoes and socks. “That would never occur to my husband to look at.”

“Women…were much better at detecting surveillants on foot,” agreed Patricia, who joined the agency in 1973 and was awarded the CIA’s Distinguished Career Intelligence Medal when she retired in 2004. “I always put that down to women [being] more sensitive [to] who’s near or in their space, for physical protection.” That included in stores, she said, “because surveillants don’t shop well; they just can’t fake it.”

Carla, who joined the agency in 1965 and was Deputy Chief of the Africa Division by the time she retired in 2004, recalled a time when male higher-ups in the agency warned that women would be ineffective for recruiting agents and gathering intel abroad. She recounted a successful assignment debunking that notion:

I never actually had to pitch the guy. I [played] sort of the “Dumb Dora” personality, and “Golly” “Gee!” and “Wow!” He would tell me, “I just love talking to you because you’re not very bright.” And I would just sit like this [makes an innocent expression]. The recruitment ended because he told me about a plot to go bomb the embassy in [redacted] and we arrested him and his gang of merry men as they crossed the border. He just told me everything and I got tons of intel out of him because I was just a woman who wasn’t very bright.

An internal survey from 1953 dubbed “The Petticoat Panel” shows that while women accounted for 40 percent of the agency’s employees at the time—better than the overall US workforce then, which was 30 percent female—only one-fifth of those women were above the midlevel GS-7 on the government’s salary grade, which went to GS-18. Meanwhile, 70 percent of men in the CIA were higher than G-7, and 10 percent topped GS-14, a grade no women had reached at the time. That was despite the fact that women had proven essential to American intelligence just years prior as high-ranking operations officers and data analysts with the WWII-era Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the CIA.

more:

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/11/women-cia-history-sexism/