A thoroughly researched indictment of successive Australian governments and the senior bureaucrats and intelligence elite of Australia, for connivance in· the Indonesian invasion of East Timor and for a quarter century of cover up. -THE HON. JUSTICE JOHN DOWD AO, President, Australian Section, International Commission of Jurists
This is an account oj how the Australian secret intelligence community and pliant politicians conspired to suppress the truth about the murder of five TV journalists in Timor in 1975. Long overdue, convincing, restrained and truly, shocking, it is a (must read' for anyone concerned about the future of open government. -PHILLIP KNIGHTLEY, author of The First Casualty, a history of·war correspondents
DESMOND BALL is Australia's leading intelligence expert. A special professor at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, AND, Canberra, he is author of many books including A Suitable Piece of Real Estate: American Installations in Australia, Pine Gap and the highly acclaimed Breaking the Codes: Australia's KGB Network, written with David Horner. HAMISH McDoNALD, one of the leading Australian foreign correspondents of his generation, has been following the Balibo incident since 1975. He has worked in many parts of Asia for the Sydney Morning Herald, the National Times, the Far Eastern Economic Review and the Washington Post. As foreign editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, he led that paper's Walkely Award-winning coverage of the East Timor vote for independence and its aftermath. He is also author of Suharto's Indonesia and The Polyester Prince.
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DESMOND BALL +HAMISHMcDONALD
ALLEN & UNWIN
First published in 2000 Copyright © Desmond Ball and· Hamish McDonald 2000 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10% of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. Allen & Unwin 9 Atchison Street St Leonards NSW 2065 Australia Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100 Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218 Email:
[email protected] Web: http://www.allen~unwin.com.au National Library .of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Ball, Desmond, 1947- . Death in Balibo lies in Canberra. Includes index. ISBN 1 86508 369 O. 1. ]ournalists-Indonesia-Balibo-Death. 2. Journalists-Australia-Death. 3. Balibo (Indonesia). 4. Timor Timur (Indonesia)-Annexation to Indonesia. 5. Australia-Foreign relations-Indonesia. I. McDonald, Hamish, 1948- . II. Title.
959.86037 Set in 12/14 pt Bembo by DOCUPRO, Sydney Printed by Australian Print Group,Maryborbugh
10987654321
CONTEN:TS
LIST OF MAPS AND DIAGRAMS PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
VIII IX
1 THE NEWSMEN 31 OPERATION FLAMBOYANT 50 COMPROMISED DIPLOMACY 65 LISTENERS IN THE SOUTH 79 DEATH IN BALIBO 100 THE BALIBO INTERCEPTS 114 COVER-UP IN FOREIGN AFFAIRS 122 COVER-UP IN DEFENCE 146
A PUSH INTO WAR
ONE TWO THREE FOUR FIVE SIX SEVEN EIGHT NINE TEN
APPENDIX (
COMPLICITY, BLAME AND SECRECY
157
SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE AFTER BALIBO
166
NOTES ON SOURCES GLOSSARY INDEX
185 191 193
LIST OF MAPS AND DIAGRAMS
MAPS
The Indonesian Archipelago The East Timor border
XIII XV
DIAGRAMS
Indonesia's covert Timor campaign, October 1974-November 1975 DSD organisation concerning Indonesia, 1975 Organisation of the JIO, 1975 Joint Intelligence Organisation, Office of Current Intelligence Fatal attack on Balibo
viii
51 81 89 91 104
PREFAC,E AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
O
N 16 OCTOBER 1975, during a covert invasion of . . Portuguese Timor by Indonesia, five Australianbased journalists were killed at Balibo.This book tells how and why they died, what the Australian government knew about their deaths, and why it has covered up this knowledge for,Gl quarter of a century since. Well over 100 000 East· Tirp.oresealso,die~ dllring ,tpe Indonesian invasion an.d. o.c,cupation of their country. More recently, in 1999, the territory was devastated with perhaps 2000 more of its people killed and 250 00.0 others deported during Indonesia's exit. It may ·seem disproportionate, even racist, to devote a whole bO,ok to five Western newsmen who went to Timor of their own volition and placed themselves at risk for the sake of a story. But questions about the deaths of these journalists won't go away. The bereaved relatives still want to know what happened. The image of one of the newsmen, Gary ix
Shackleton, standing with a microphone in front of a crude drawing of the Australian flag in· Balibo still persists in the consciousness of, the Australian public. There is a nagging sense that the Australian government did not d.o all that was possible to save the newsmen, and that it has never told the whole truth about the matter. To be sure, this concern about the Balibo .incident was deliberately stirred by supporters of East Timor's independence during the long years of Indonesian occupation, as a way of penetrating the wall of secrecy thrown up by Canberra's close cultivation of the Suharto government in Jakarta. Nevertheless, this concern remains even after .East Timor has gained its freedom, and even after two government-commissioned inquiries (by Tom S,herman,former chairman of the National Crime Authority, in 1995-96 and 1998-99) claimed to have seen all government records and taken investigations as far as possible in the absence of full accounts by the Indonesian participants in the Balibo attack. One of the authors, Hamish McDonald, who was based in Jakarta in 1975, made extensive in.vestigations soon after the deaths, resulting in a lengthy article in The National Times newspaper in July 1979 and sections of the book Suharto Js Indonesia in 1980. After many years reporting from other countries, he returned to a position with ,The Sydney Morning Herald in 1997 to find that the Balibo incident was still a live issue. A further investigative report in the Herald in August 1998 outlined the cover-up in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade about Balibo since 1975. This report drew a wide response from readers, including some who had been with Australian intelligence services in 1975 and who provided new information about the official handling of the incident. The other author, Desmond Ball, has had a longstanding interest in Australian intelligence activities and had been compiling a collection of max
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
terials o·n Balibo based on discussions with members of the Australian intelligencecommunity,who .indicated that there was' much about'· the· Australian government's knowledge of the~deaths that remained' to be told. In early 1999, the two authors decided to collaborate in telling this story. The authors were intrigued by the evidence of official lies and cover-ups. This is a rare case where officials decided, in peacetime, to sacrifice some of their fellow citizens to protect security and intelligence interests, and where ministers and .officials knowingly conspired to mislead the public and parliament afterwards. With signs of official records being hidden in 'special repositories or being remov.ed from archives and destroyed, the authors felt it was essential to talk with as many of the participants in the 1975 events as were willing to speak. Already many have died and, in other cases, memories have become cloudy. The authors believe there is no excuse for further deferral of the full truth about Balibo and the "'official cover-ups. The' authors wish to ·thank the numerous people who assisted either .by providing their direct knowledge or suggesting contacts and sources. Many of these do not want to be identified. We are grateful to Paul McGeough, the editor of The Sydney Morning' Herald, for allowing us to draw on the newspaper's files and illustrations; to Paul Johnstonand Michelle Verghis, Herald graphic artists, for ·their preparation of maps and diagrams; and to Marian Wilkinson for some crucial information.
Desmond Ball and Hamish McDonald March 2000
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Xl
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The East Timor Border
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ONE
A PUSH INTO WAR
E
a colonial curiosity, virtually devoid of political interest even in Southeast Asia, until middle-ranking officers of the Portuguese army overthrew the doddery fascist regime in Lisbon on 25 April 1974. The efforts of the dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar and his successor (from 1968) Marcelo Caetano to hold onto Portugal's African colonies had beggared Portugal and bled its conscript army, whose members had no prospect in sight but endless wars· against liberation movements supported by the communist powers. The new Armed Forces Movement (MFA) set out to dismantle the 400-year-old empire. Its first leader, the conservative Gen. Antonio de Spinola, hoped to set up a Lusitanian federation or commonwealth. In September 1974 he .was replaced by younger, more radical officers supporting a complete and rapid withdrawal from Portugal's colonies. AST TIMOR WAS
Timor was the oddity of this empire. Goa and the other Indian territories had been lost when the Indian army invaded without significant armed resistence in 1961. In Macau, Chinese gunboats had cruised the inner harbours in the late 1960s, reminding the Portuguese they were tenants, not owners, under a treaty that was to expire at the end of 1999. Marxist liberation movements waged guerrilla campaigns in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau. But before April 1974 in Portuguese Timor, modern nationalism was barely emerging in the coffee-table discussions of the few educated young people and receiving only oblique references in the few and highly conservative local publications run by . the administration and .the Roman Catholic church. The most remote from Lisbon of the colonies, Timor's population had been quelled only in the early years of the 20th century; when Portuguese· warships bombarded rebellious regions along the south coast, and its border had been finally fixed in a 1913 treaty with the Netherlands. Some 250 years of rivalry with the Dutch led to the colony's quirky frontier. The Portuguese had arrived first, in about 1514, to take the island's famous sandalwood and set up Christian missions on nearby islands. Portuguese governors planted their flag at Lifau, on the north-western coast in 1701, and further east at Dili in 1769. The Dutch built a trading fort at the fine natural habour at Kupang, on the far western tip of the island. Using the warriors of the 62 Timorese kingdoms as mercenaries and proxies, the two European powers, one Roman Catholic and one Protestant, warred for dominance-their interest diminishing with the exhaustion of Timor's chief· exportable resource, sandalwood. The 1913 border roughly divided the island in half, with the historic enclave of Oecussi-Ambeno containing 2
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
the original Portuguese settlement of Lifau included in the Portuguese territory. For the Timorese population, a racial mixture of Malay and Melanesian types, it was always a ·porous border, with people crossing weekly or daily to local markets. By 1974, the'>Isl£nd's western halt~"had nearly'one million people and was the biggest component of the Indonesian province of East Nusatenggara, which was run by a Jakarta-appointed governor (then a'local man, Col. EI Tari) and a provincial assembly in Kupang. The eastern side was an 'overseas province' of Portugal, controlled by a 'Portuguese governor, invariably an army colonel. Senior officials, army officers and the magistrate-administrators 'who ran, the ·13 districts were mostly Portuguese, but the bureaucracy,medicalservice and judiciary included som-e ;Africans·· and Goan Indians at senior levels. The Portuguese garrison was small, having run down from a high poinf'·,of 'some 2500 European soldiers in the early 1960s to only 200 in 1974-75, alongside 3000 locally raised infantry and some 7000 partially trained auxiliaries. Some 12 000 Chinese and part-Chinese ran the import and export trades, warehouses and shops. Most Chinese had passports issued by Taiwan, which had a consulate in Dili. The total population, put at about 650 000 by the last Portuguese count in 1974, was rural, with just 30 000 people living in the tranquil capital Dili. In the early 1900s,political· debate was stirring among recent students ·of the Jesuit seminary near Dili and among the Timorese lieutenants and sergeants ·of the Portuguese Army, some of whom had seen service in Africa., But compared to the dangerous insurgencies Portuguese administrators an..d soldiers faced in the African colonies, Timor was a soft assignment and well-connected parents of conscripts often used influence to have their sons assigned' there. A·PUSH INTO'WAR
3
Despite the relative lack of clamour for attention, Timor was included in· the . immediate.decolonisation plans of the Armed Fotces Movement. By July 1974, an MFA delegate, Maj. Arnao Metelo, was installed in Timor to supervise disbandment ,of the fascist corporate state party, the secret police and the censorship commission.Lisbon talked of village elections in 1975 and some time later~ a plebiscite on the territory's future. Three main political parties emerged within a month of the Lisbon coup, reflecting the choices open to the territory. T'he small Portuguese~speaking middle class which numbered· perhaps 25 000, and whose members possess,ed some education and ran the construction and coffee-planting sectors, gravitated to the TimoreseDemocraticUnion (UDT) , which initially favoured continuing links with Lisbon but later shifted towards a policy of independence following several years of preparation. A small group of civil servants, high-school and seminary graduates, and junior army officers formed the Association of Timorese Social Democrats, which later in '·1974 took a more radical stance and named itself the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor (Fretilin). Its leaders, such as the journalist Jose RamosHortaand'Lt Roque Rodrigues, who had spent some time in Mozambique, adopted the socialist liberation ideology" then in vogue throughout the Third· World and sought early indepen'dence, but after eight to ten years preparation. ,Many of the leaders of both UDT and Fretilin were mestico-'' -ofmixed Portuguese and Timorese descent. In several cases they were children of Portuguese deportados, those sent into exile from Portugal because of their opposition to Salazar, and Timorese women..The father of the three·" Carrascalaobrothers active in the UDT (Manuel, Joao and Mario) had been a bomb-throwing 4
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
commu'nist exiled in 1935; ,the father of Fretilin's· Jose Ramos-Horta was a naval officer involved in -.afailed coup against Salazar in 1939. Others, such as: Fretilin's president Xavier do Amaral, were children of traditional chiefs, theliurai. Those whose parents could not afford to· send· them to--'Lisbon for college ,had. mostly been educated in the same school, the Jesuit seminary at Dare in the ,'.' hills outside Dili. Many worked alongside each other in '. theb-ureaucracy-.UDT's .presidentFrancisco Xavier Lopes da Cruz ,;andhis Fretilin counterpart' do Amaral in the customs shed at Dili Harbour. The leader of UDT and Fretilinwere connected.bymarriage too--Joao·.:Carrascalaowas married to a·. sister of-RamosHorta--which made the later conflict even more tragic. Rated as weakest ,In both popular and elite support was the Association for the Integration of Timor with Indonesia, which quickly changed its unpopular name to the Timorese Democratic People?s Association -(Apodeti)., Its leaders too had marriage ties with leaders "of the other parties~ However it ,always' had adi-stinctly native character,while' the mestico, character of many leaders. of the two larger-·parties was used to deride their ambitions. Ap_odeti'spillars were a -number.of th-e liuraiorraja in traditional' fiefdoms alo'ng the western border:, a valuable base close to support, from the Indonesian' town6f Atambua. Until 1974, Indonesian interest in Portuguese Timor had been' desultory. In 1945, Indonesia's founding constitutional committee had sympathised with .argu,ments put by the nationalist Mohammad Yamin, which included Portuguese Timor (and West New Guinea, North Borneo and; Malaya) as part of a Pan-Indonesian nation, based on ethnic grounds and on claims of an. earlier unity under the'.Majapahitdynasty.. Sukarno endorsed 'Yamin's idea and it was' adopted, over the objections of moderate nationalists including Mohammed Hatta and Sutan Sjahrir, A PUSH INTO , WAR
5
by 39 votes out of 66. But,. the greater Indonesia notion disappeared from sight during the independence struggle, and Portuguese Timor received only passing attention thereafter. During the 1961-63 West New Guinea crisis, Jak'arta based its claims solely on the former boundaries of the Dutch East Indies. For their part, the Portuguese themselves regarded Indonesia with disdain and suspicion, discouraging contact until the late 1960s. A small group of refugees from the North Sulawesi rebellion of 1958 gained 'asylum' in Portuguese Timor, but a year later mounted an antiPortuguese uprising at the south-eastern district of Viqueque. The Portuguese put down the agitation, killing over 150 local people and sending almost 60 Timorese into exile in Africa. The border itself was no barrier to informal contacts, and it intersected the island's largest language pool, Tetum, and the domains of several traditional rulers. Raiding cattle or going to market, Timorese ignored the border. The Indonesian response to Portugal's 'carnation revolution' ""as prompt, and involved President 'Suharto's closest intelligence advisers from the start. A vicechairman of parliament, John Naro, who was close to deputy chi~f of the State Intelligence Co-ordinating Body (Bakin), Lt-Gen. Ali Murtopo, expressed the hope to Jakarta newspapers that 'the Indonesian Government takes preliminary steps and finds a special policy on Portuguese Timor so that finally, that area will once again return to Indonesian control'. Murtopowas looking for just such an assignment. A Central Javanese, like President Suharto, he had become part of the president's inner circle as intelligenc~ officer in Suharto's military commands, first during the 1961-62 raids against the Dutch in West New Guinea and then in the military-political 'Confron6
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
tation' of British Commonwealth forces defending the newly', created federation of Malaysia ,in 1963-65. In the latter ,campaign, Murtopo'developed a second channel, of secret diplomacy that completely undercut the official policies set by the ageing and' erratic Sukarno. He opened contacts with the British command in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore" conveying Suharto'sunwillingness to undertake any more than token implementation of Sukarno's edict to 'crush Malaysia'. His intelligence group, called Qpsus ((rom the Indonesian for 'special operations'), turned increasingly to domestic political manoeuvres as well. It drew together operatives from the army and anti-communist elements of Indonesia's Roman Catholic community. Disinformation" provocation, dummy organisations, stacking of meetings, bribery and propaganda were stock in trade atOpsus.' ', These techniques came in~o play, on 30 September~ 1 October 1965 when a group of dissident officers under Lt-Col. Untung led Sukarno's palace guard and other units in a coup' again~t a pro-Western 'council of generals', which was allegedly about to depose the president. The then Maj.-Gen. Suharto, commanding the army's Strategic Reserve (Kostrad), was not included in UnttIng's hitlist of generals, and successfully put down th~ coup. Suharto then launched an all-out drive against the Indone'sian Communist Party (PKI) , which had been marshalling sympathisers' at Jakarta's air force base and had tentatively endorsed Untung's niove. Between 500000 and 1 million actual or suspected PKI' members were slaughtered by the army and Muslim militants in the following months. In Jakarta, student 'protests kept up constant pressure against Sukarno as he tried to preserve a Leftist political' ,force 'to' counterbalance the army and the Muslim parties. Murtopo was centralto the political planning behind Suharto's battle for ascendency. A PUSH INTOWAR
7
After coercing Sukarno into delegating executive powers in March 1966, Suharto formally took over ,the presidency in 1968. Murtopo'sOpsus group ·then shifted to consolidating Suharto's 'New Order' regime. An early step was securing Indonesian sovereignty over West New. Guinea, where the Dutch had been pressured into handing over to interim Indonesian administration by Washington. in 1963. The wishes of the population were to be ascertained in a United Nations-supervised ~ct of Free Choice' in 1969. Opsus was given charge of the Indonesian···campaignfor a decision that was to be· taken by some 1000 'popular representatives' rather than by plebiscite. In effect, Opsus took over the selection of those representatives, using bribery and threats to achieve a sweeping vote for joining Indonesia. Later, Murtopo and Opsus masterminded the creation ·of Golkar· as a corporatist political party for the Suharto regime, ·and the suborning ·of other parties into two tame conglomerates. By early 1974, however, the power plays and intrigue instigated by Murtopo and his other 'special presidential assistants' had rebounded on Suharto. In January 1974, they and their manipulations figured prominently among the grievances of rioters whose protests shook the regime. Suharto sacked waverers from senior military and government ranks, jailed many critics, and closed down some newspapers. Murtopo remained ·a deputy chief of Bakin and a serving general in the army. He ran two important and useful political (dapur) ('kitchens') in Opsus and in the recently founded Centre for Strategic and International ··Studies, which employed a number of like-minded intellectuals and activists, many of them ChineseIndonesians and Roman Catholics, and rapidly became a second channel in the government's foreign relations. But Murtopo himself was under a political cloud, and Suharto abolished the posts of special assistant. 8
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
A muscular figure with thick spectacles and. a gaptoothed smile under a balding pate, Murtopo concealed a sharp, laterally searching and ruthless mind behind a garrulous stream of words that listeners found hard to decipher. His energy fastened onto the new Timor issue, and within two rhonths of the Lisbon c'oup he had .sent Opsus agents into Dili to survey the scene, By that time, June 1974, Indonesia's intentions had become a major preoccupation for Timor's political parties and neighbouring countries. Australia's departments of foreign affairs and defence had begun briefing journalists that Indonesia had considerable strategic anxieties about Portuguese Timor. Fretilin's foreign spokesman, Jose Ramos-Horta, paid early attention to Indonesia by visiting Jakarta, where he obtained a letter from the foreign minister, Adam Malik, stating that independence was the right of every country 'with no exception for the people of Timor'. Indonesia had no ambitions in East Timor, Malik said, and sought good relations with 'whoever will govern in Timor in the future after independence'. Never unaware of what was happening on the ground, but always willing to push a bogus propaganda line if necessary, Malik continued to· put up similar diplomatic rhetoric throughout the Timor conflict and at that point in June 1974, before attitudes had set, may actually have believed what he was saying. Slightly built and mercurial, Malik was known sometimes as the kandt, after the mouse-deer that is .the hero of. many Indonesian folktales for outsmarting much fiercer animals. Malik was a political chameleon who had started in the tiny radical party Murba, won Sukarno's confidence and become ambassador to Moscow in the early 1960s, and then jumped across to the Right in 1965. His office supplied a hitlist of names of Indonesian communists and their sympathisers to. the US embassy, A PUSH INTO WAR
9
which passed· them to Suharto. Malik happily became the Suharto government's international voice. In Apodeti, Indonesia saw strengths that were largely missed by other observers. The party's leader was a self-willed, uncommunicative schoolteacher, Arnaldo dos Reis Araujo, then 61, who by his own account had spent the post-war years under restricted liberty for his assistance -to the Japanese, a record that bore fewer nationalist credentials in Timor than in Indonesia. Apodeti's ,following in the towns was soon revealed as considerably weaker than that of the other parties. But its support by certain liurai, notably Guilherme Maria Goncalves -of Atsabe, gave it an important foothold in the border region. Some priests, who had links to Roman Catholic communities in nearby Indonesian islands such as Flores and Alor, were also receptive to the idea of integration. In September 1974, Suharto gained a new advantage when the Australian prime minister, Gough Whitlam, met him for informal talks at Wonosobo, Central Java. According to the official Australian record, Whitlam said two things were basic to his own thinking on Portuguese Timor: First, he believed that Portuguese Timor should become part of Indonesia. Second, that this should happen in accordance with the properly expressed wishes of the people of Portuguese Timor. The Prime Minister emphasised that this was not -yet government policy but that it was likely to become that. The Prime Minister said that he felt very strongly that Australia should not seek, or appear to seek, any special interests in Portuguese Timor. They were people with a very -different ethnic background, language and culture. It would be unrealistic and improper if we were to seek some special relationship. 10
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
At the same time he believed that Portuguese Timor was too small to be independent. It was economically unviable. Independence would be unwel<:ome to Indonesia, to Australia and to other countries in the region, because, an independent Portuguese Timor would inevitably become the focus of attention of others'" outside the region. The Labor government, since coming to office, had been very anxious to ensure the right of self-government for all' remaining colonial territories [then naming Guinea, Bissau, Angola and Mozambique] . . . ,Since we support independence in these large territories, to be consistent we ought to apply the principle of self-determination to all territories, even the smallest ', colonial territories.
That was the two-fold principle of Whitlam's position, one that the then head of his own foreign affairs department, Alan Renouf, has since described as a sudden, unilateral rev:ersal of priorities: putting the goal of integration with Indonesia ahead, and clearly with, more enthusiasm than the official policy, self-determination. 'The policy had become two-pronged, and the two prongs might be irreconcilable.' Whitlam gave Suharto some indications Australia would not obstruct Jakarta's efforts to win support for integration. The Australian embassy in Lisbon would help put the case that 'Portuguese Timor was part of the Indonesian world'. Neither he nor his ministers had received Fretilin representative Ramos~H,orta on his recent visit to Canberra. The hospitality for Ramos-Horta from former Dili consulJames Dunn was disowned. But, Whitlam maintained, Suharto should keep in mind the need for Australian public support for integration, based on the democratic expression, of the wishes of the Timorese. A PUSH INTO WAR
11
Important in 'reassuring Suharto was not so much ,what Whitlam said, but the degree of tepo seliru Oavanese for 'mutual understanding')Suharto believed the two had reached. Within a few days of the meetings the Indollesian government, ··through Adam Malik· and the interior'minister, Gen. Amir Machmud, issued its first major statement on Timor. While Malik stressed that Indonesia'iVould accept the decision of the Timorese, Amir Machmud said integration would be accepted although Indonesia itself had 'no territorial ambitions' . Fretilin reacted to this a few days later with: a, large demonstration against 'expansionism' o.utside the ·Indonesian consulate in Dili. But two UDT leaders visiting Jakarta (Augusto Mousinho and Domingos Oliveira) were reported on 25 September 1974 as saying that their party would not oppose integration· if the people V\Tished it, thatUDT was anti..,.communist like theSuhartb government, and that Fretilin's choice of name showed its communist identity. By October 1974 Ali Murtopo had firmly taken control of the Timor 'project' for the Indonesian govern-ment, issuing press commentary and sending personal emissaries abroad to inform governments about Indonesia's· concerns. For the time being, a purely military solution had been ruled out; for diplomatic reasons, jf not for the fact that Portugal 'still kept enough well-armed and trained troops in Timor to deter the Indonesian army, whose, elite units had only just begun to receive comparable modern weaponry under the US military aid program. A conventional campaign of diplomacy and advocacy was also ruled out: the trend of Timor's politics, left. to itself, would have been against integration. The answer was a sp'ecial o,peration, which 'iVould immensely enhance. Ali Murtopo's problem-fixing image in. the process. The job suited him well. Timor w'as his kind of ,assignment: engineered consent. On 5 October 12
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
1974,Suharto authorised Ali Murtopo to take over negotiations with Portugal. When Murtopo arrived in Lisbon on 14 October, he found several senior leaders sympathetic to Indonesia's case and inclined to think integration the best outcome, if the Timorese could bepersuaded~ Possibly this was in. early bonus resulting from Whitlam's promise· to·· influence the Portuguese this way through Australia's embassy in Lisbon. On Murtopo'spart, this was taken· as a green ·light to begin 'directing'opinion within Timor, with the assumed tacit connivance of Portugal and Australia. The Portuguese decolonisation minister, Antonio de Almeida Santos, was one Portuguese leader soon swayed in another direction. A few days after the Murtopovisit to Lisbon, Almeida Santos visited Canberra, Jakarta and Timor. In Timor, in Dili and Maubisse, he spelled out the three options open to the Timorese and said: 'Timor will be what the majority of its-people want it to be.' Almeida Santos was moved by the sight of centuriesold Portuguese flags, displayed as lulik or sacred objects by mountain people flocking to see him. Back in Lisbon he said this was 'a phenomenon of which I was unaware, a mythology of love of Portugal'. Australia was concerned about threats to regional instability, he said, and Indonesia feared only premature independen.ce. On 3 December 1974, Almeida Santos told the UN General Assembly that· immediate independence was an·· 'impossible dream'. Portugal had rejected the original idea of a referendum as impracticable, and now proposed a choice to be made by a Timoreseconstituent assembly in 1976. Ali Murtopo, meanwhile, was proceeding on the basis of his understanding· from Lisbon. Opsus was on the case, building up Operation Komodo (Dragon),· as .the covert campaign to win Timor was called, after the large iguanatype lizards or 'dragons'-found in the island of that name between Bali and Timor. In charge was the -head of Opsus A PUSH INTO WAR
13
himself, CoL Aloysius Sugianto. A Roman Catholic from Java, Sugianto was a career intelligence operative, a handsome and urbane figure as Inuch at home in Jakarta drawing rooms as rough billets on the border between East and West Timor. In October 1974, while.Murtopo was in Lisbon, Sugianto had travelled to Australia and East Timor to further his contacts, though the detail of this trip is not known. Advising Murtopo on diplomatic strategy was a second back-room team in the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Jakarta. Two key figures in the CSIS were Chinese-Indonesian by ethnicity and Roman Catholic by religion, though both had adopted Indonesian names in whole or part. Its director, Harry Tjan Silalahi, a self-effacing former Catholic Party leader, became respectfully dubbed 'the foreign minister' by his military counterparts for his effective secret diplomacy with Portugal and Australia. Yusuf Wanandi (Liem Bian Kie) , a political strategist, paid particular attention to the U.nited States. Silalahi had already been to Canberra before the September 1974 meeting between Whitlamand Suharto at Wonosobo. The Opsus operation worked out of .the closely guarded AKA Building, Murtopo's business headquarters in a quiet Jakarta suburb. The newspaper Berita Yudha, which listed Sugianto as a publisher, took on another senior intelligence officer, Col. Yusack, under journalistic cover. The paper's cartoonist, Lt-Col. Alex Dinuth, who came from a Timorese family, was sent. to Kupang in Indonesian Timor, to direct a base for infiltration and psychological warfare under the cover of a ficticious trading enterprise, Arjuna Co. Ltd. Dinuth's job was to monitor radio transmissions, direct vernacular language broadcasts into East Timor, instruct. visiting Indonesianjournalists on what to write, and assist important visitors. Another Timorese operative, borrowed from 14
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
Bakin,·was Louis Taolin, the son ofa West Timorese raja with relatives across the border, whose thesis at the University of Indonesia had been on propaganda· and psychological warfare. By January 1975, Kupang radio was beaming menacing propaganda into East Timor, claiming that the 'communist' Fretilin and its Portuguese supporters were victimising the pro-Indonesian 'majority'. Refugees started appearing· across the border and were played up in the Indonesian press. The Indonesian consulate in Dili became blatant in its support of Apodeti. Towards the end of February, propaganda reached a crescendo, with· the national newsagency Antara carrying lurid reports from its 'special correspondent' in the border area, who was quite possibly Col. Dinuth, about massacres of Apodeti members and the appearance. of Chinese communists in the territory-all without any foundation· in fact. Coincidentally, the Indonesian armed forces held a large-scale air and sea landing exercise on the coast· of southern Sumatra. According to Jakarta press reports, this and previous exercises showed up the delapidated state of Indonesian equipment and the forces' weak training: amphibious vehicles sank, a propellor-driven Mustang fighter crashed on a simulated strafing run, and paratroops dropped in the wrong place. However,a report by The Sydney Morning Herald's foreign editor, Peter Hastings, on 21 February 1975 cited the latest exercise as among 'mounting and unwelcome indications . . . that the Indonesian Government is seriously considering taking out Portuguese Timor in a military operation in the not-too-distant future'. Hastings' widely known closeness to Gordon Jockel, director of the Joint Intelligence Organisation, the intel.. . ligence analysis body within the defence department, A PUSH INTO WAR
15
and other senior officials, gave added credence to the report. Gockel .was quizzed by the government and many years later still ·denied being the source.) Other newspapers, the opposition foreign affairs spokesman Andrew Peacock, veterans of Australia's wartime commando force in Timor and others raised an outcry. The scare led Whitlam to write a letter to Suharto on 28 February 1975, which was delivered by the new Australian ambassador Richard W oolcott when he presented his credentials a few days later. The reports of invasion plans had shown up the 'great 'sensitivity' of Australian parliamentary and public opinion to any suggestion of unilateral action. 'I am sure you will understand that no Australian Government could allow it to be thought, ·whether beforehand or afterwards, that it supported such action.' It was a message to 'cool it', commented Lance Joseph, Southeast Asia branch head in the foreign affairs department, in a later summary. The exercise was certainly a much-needed rehearsal for what actually took place eight months later. The Indonesian news hullaballoo may have been aimed at the new governor of Timor, Col. Mario Lemos Pires, who had arrived in November 1974 with a group of young officers from the Armed Forces Movement. These more ,··radical officers were seen .by the Indonesians as encouraging Fretilinand organising a revolutionary committee among Timorese non-commissioned officers. Two of them, the chief of political affairs, Maj. Francisco Mota, and the chief of social affairs, Maj. Costa Jonatas, were indeed described later by Fretilin-inclined observers as in touch with 'radical thinking" in Lisbon, and one detailed study does point to their sympathies with Fretilin. The Indonesians were also alarmed at· the formation of a coalition by Fretilin 'and ·UDT on 22 January 1975, which supported independence, repudiated Apodeti and the idea of integration, and sought a transitional govern16
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
mentby negotIatIon with Lisbon. This united front, hastily entered into in response to Indonesia's:gathering confidence and Australia's obvious unwillingness to back the independence option except in formal terms,' had immensely strengthened the case for independence. Both Fretilin and)"UDT emerged well from the. territory's first taste of electoral democracy-rudimentary ballots for village chiefs held in many districts in 197 5., Overall, the propaganda campaign resembled the confrontation technique . employed against West New Guinea and Malaysia, described by J.A.C. Mackie in his book Konfrontasi as: a c'ombination of threats, brinkmanship and play-acting which could be modulated at will to a pitch of fierce hostility at one extreme or, at the other, of patient acquiescence while waiting for favourable opportunities to resume the long-term struggle.
At Lisbon's request Ali Murtopo held a second secret meeting with the Portuguese, in London on 9. March 1975. It was agreed to set up a consultative group involving the three parties at a meeting in Macau in June. The integration cause could be promoted-but not through the Indonesian consulate. If thedecolonisation minister, Almeida Santos, had indeed changed his mind after seeing the Timorese veneration of Portugal, he was still not making himself clear. According to a later Op'sus publication, Murtopo took the latest restriction as giving Indonesia 'liberty to increase its support for Apodeti covertly and inconspicuously'. As a result of the Lo'ndon' agreements Col. Sugianto, Taolin and two other Opsus members, Sukamto and Col. Pitut Suharto, arrived soon afterwards in Dili, posing as an economic delegation and meeting administration and party officials. Apodeti, they reported later, sought help against victimisation and demanded an A PUSH INTO WAR
17
immediate referendum. In talks with three leaders of UDT (Francisco Xavier Lopes da Cruz, Augusto Cesar daCosta Mousinho and Domingos Oliveira), the Indonesiansplayed. on the dangers of communism. Both UDT and Fretilin accepted invitations to send missions to Jakarta at Sugianto's expense. Governor Pires asked S.ugianto that the Kupang broadcasts be toned down and that the position of the Indonesian consul, Elias Tomodok, be reconsidered since he was acting like an Apodeti leader. The mission reported some success with UDT. The conservative party was 'b,eginning to show under~ standing and appreciation' .of Indonesia's concerns, particularly about regional stability and communism, Opsusmembers later noted. Operasi Komodo's main aim now was to split the UDT-Fretilin coalition by working on such fears. The UDT president, Lopes da Cruz, then aged 33 and working as a customs officer at Dili's harbour, was particularly susceptible. Another graduate of the Jesuit seminary at Dare, he seems to have nursed ambition and a strong sense of his own dignity behind a grave and almost priestly' ·mien augmented by a carefully sculpted beard. He was already irked by Fretilin'sbehaviour.' In early April, he was upset by Fretilin's evident repudiation of one key plank of their joint platform, that of calling on Portugal to remain and help develop the territory during the transition to independence. There were out.. . breaks of violence as Fretilin tried to recruit party members in the countryside. Fretilin was seeking the replacement of district leaders identified with UDT. The Fretilin president, Xavier do Amaral, had sent· a note to .UDT secretary-general Domingos Oliveira threatening to break the coalition. (It was casually left with Oliveira's household servant.) Lopes da Cruz was also irked by the way Fretilin was co-opting foreignvisitors--,principally 18
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
Australian· journalists, trade unionists and members of parliament-'-and presenting them as its guests and supporters. Some of the Australian visitors, especially the trade unionists, had not minded this at all and had been quite dismissive of UDT. Sugianto also 'cultivated the liurai and was later to claim that as a result of this unprecedented attention about ten of the 13 districts were leaning towards Apodeti. Diplomats allowed to visit the border were shown 300 well-drilled young East ·Timorese in simple uniform who were said to be undergoing 'agricultural training'. These were Apodeti recruits, sent across by the liurai of Atsabe Guilherme Gonclaves. and his son Tomas Goncalves in early 1975, and being trained by soldiers of the Special Forces Regiment (known successively as the RPKAD, Kopassandha and Kopassus). The officer in charge was one Capt. MohammedYunus Yosfiah, who adopted the code~name'Major Andreas' and got about in hippy-style longhair and denims. On 27 May 1975, UDT finally did withdraw from the coalition, accusing Fretilin of 'outrageous' behaviour. UDT leaders Lopes da Cruz and Mousinho had taken up the invitation to visit Jakarta in mid-April, and had been given a high-level reception by Murtopo, Malik and Suharto himself. In each meeting, the Indonesians stressed Fretilin's communist leanings, a perception strengthened by Fretilin's newly announced plans for radical reform of education and agriculture. On 26-29 June, the-Macau talks convened,but Fretilin refused to attend because of the presence of Apodeti.Fretilin leaders travelled instead to the Frelimo movement's independence celebrations in Mozambique. The Portuguese soon showed they wanted a quick exit from Timor. On 17 July 1975, Lisbon passed a ilaw setting October 1976 as the time for general elections A PUSH INTO WAR
19
for 'a popular assembly, which would determine the future of the territory. Within 100 days (of 17 July) a transitional government would be formed of Portuguese administrators advised by a council of Timorese drawn from the 13 districts and the political parties. Portuguese sovereignty would end in October 1978. This plan represented a failure for Ali Murtopo's secret diplomacy, giving him little time or opportunity to push the integration option on a suspicious population, whose sympathies were shown in elections for district councils in July 1975. Fretilin gained about 55 per cent of the overall vote, UDT strong but lesser support, and Apodeti not much support at all. But other Indonesian contacts abroad had not failed. The Australian Government- remained sympathetic, if more defensive in the face of growing concern from an articulate opinion group based principally in the parliamentary backbench, the universities and the trade unions. On 3:.-5 April 1975, Suharto and Whitlam met again, this time in the Queensland city of Townsville.According to the official record, released in late 1999, Whitlam opened by mentioning the 'regrettable over-reaction from the Australian people' to the February reports of invasion plans. He also noted a 'further shift to the left' in Portugal and the call by both Fretilin and UDT for immediate independence. In Australia there were elements out to disturb good relations with Indonesia. On the Right, there were people who believed the Dutch, the Portuguese and the Australians should still be running the region and they exploited invasion rumours to suggest Australia was militarily unprepared to handle an expansionist Indonesia. On the Left were people who 'tended to be paternalistic, patronising and wholly convinced of their p'urity and of the soundness of their own views' and a small communist element still hostile since the 'events' 20
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
of September 1965. Whitlam said he was not worried by the extreme Right, but 'might on occasion have to take account of the people on the Left'. Whitlam said he 'still hoped that Portuguese Timor would be associat?d with or integratecI into Indonesia, but this result should be achieved in a way which should not upset the Australian people'. The possible UN debate on Timor and Indonesia's forthcoming turn in the chair of the UN Committee of 24 (on decolonisation) presented 'opportunities for co-operation between Australia and Indonesia in the formulation of measures for the ascertainment of the wishes of the people of Portuguese Timor'. This was the only recorded mention of the selfdetermination process in the three days of meetings, even though a later synopsis, written by officials from the Department of Foreigu Affairs in 1976 when Whitlam's two summits with Suharto had become subject of bitter controversy, put a different twist on the Townsville meeting. The synopsis claimed that Whitlam had 'reiterated Australia's position of support for self-determination in Portuguese Timor' and had 'made clear that if, after careful consideration of the various options open to them, the Timorese were to opt for independence, Australia would support that decision'. One 'problem' that Whitlam noted was that the educated East Timorese, those able to articulate themselves to the press, had Portuguese fathers and Timorese mothers, and were a group with economic interests to defend and a wish to retain a European lifestyle. He could not help feeling that the majority of people 'had no sense of politics and that in time they would come to recognise their ethnic kinship with their Indonesian neighbours' . Whitlam repeated that Australia wanted no responsibility for the outcome in Timor. But he explained he A PUSH INTO WAR
21
was under pressure from within the Labor Party to reopen the consulate in Dili. If the consulate did reopen, Whitlam said, it would not be allowed to become an instrument of Fretilin and UDT. Australia's actions on Portuguese Timor, Whitlam summed up, 'would always be guided by the principle that good relations with Indonesia were of paramount importance to Australia' . The government's most worrying critics were indeed within its own ranks. Members of the ALP Foreign Affairs Committee including senators Arthur Gietzelt and Gordon McIntosh and MPs Ken Fry and John Kerin had visited Portuguese Timor in March 1975 and become troubled by Australia's deliberate passivity. Since November 1974, the Portuguese had pressed Australia to reop<en the consulate in Dili and contribute to a better informed political scene there. The then parliamentary library researcher James Dunn, who had been the last consul in Dili, had also recommended reopening the mission in ·an August 1974 report based on a visit to Portuguese Timor two months earlier. Perhaps not all this backbench criticism arose from disinterested concern for Timor~ .Gietzelt, notably, had been a factional opponent of Whitlam with the New South Wales branch of the ALP on a range of issues for many years. Factionalising a foreign policy issue. was a common enough tactic within the party. But· the unease crossed factional lines. McIntosh and Fry in the parliament, and Dunn in the Legislative Research Branch, pursued a ··lonely minority campaign for many years. They became Canberra's most conspicuous holdouts to the policy consensus that Australia should accept the inevitability and finality of Indonesia's takeover of East Timor. Defenders of Whitlam's motives, such as his former private speechwriter Graham Freudenberg, have suggested the prime minister was concerned not to repeat 22
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
the 'hypocrisy' of the Menzies government's opposition to the Indonesian takeover ofWesternNew Guinea in the early 1960s, an opposition never backed by ,a willingness to shoulder any burden there and ultimately abandoned when the United States sided with the Indonesians. By contrast, the conservatives had intervened in South Vietnam,· and what a failure that had been. The Saigon regime was crumbling· as SuhartoandWhitlam met in Townsville. When Whitlam's restive .backbench and Leftish' ministerial colleagues such as Tom Uren (who asa young soldier had been captured by the Japanese on Timor in 1943) suggested standing up to Jakarta over East Timor, Whitlam threw Vietnam back in their faces. Did they want to see Australian troops back in Southeast Asia fighting another guerrilla war? If they did not, why raise false ,hopes? The· then US administration under President Gerald Ford seemed as likely to be as 'pragmatic' as 'JohnF. Kennedy had been /in 1962. It was indeed one of the Cold War's gloomiest periods for the West. Ford administration records show it was anxious not to buy. into the East Timor issue during a Washington visit by Suharto in July 1975. Talking to Indonesian journalists aboard .the Garuda airlines jet bringing his entourage back to Jakarta on 8 July 1975, Suharto made his first public statement ruling 'out the feasibility· of independence .for East· Timor. It must be said, however, that for a self-perceived statesman anxious to project Australia as an independent actor in its region, Whitlam 'showed a remarkably, pessimistic assessment of Canberra's ability to sway the Indonesians from their path, exert·· positive influence in East Timor itself or marshall support for a principled approach among friendly countries. Deriding the motives of all suggesting otherwise, he saw no way A PUSH INTO WAR
23
between the two stark alternatives of facilitating an Indonesian takeover--by any plausible means that could be sold., to the Australian public-or going to, war. A middle course of firmly opposing the use of force by the Indonesians, but involving Australia with Indonesia as active patrons of Timor's self-determination process and accepting the possibility of independence as an outcome,was never seriously considered by Whitlam's government. Although such a strategy was proposed in an internal paper bya branch head ',. in the defence department, Bill Pritchett, early in October 1975, this option was ignored. In Timor itself tensions were growing. UDT and Fretilin supporters had clashed at the end of June, around the time of the Macau talks. Governor Pires requested additional troops from Lisbon, his garrison by then having run down' to 200 Portuguese soldiers. At the end of July 1975; three UDT leaders (Lopes da Cruz, Oliveira and Joao Carrascatio) went quietly to Jakarta. Ostensibly the mission was to query Suharto's 8 July statement, but according to Carrascalao, UDT colleagues were also becoming suspicious of Lopes da Cruz and his mysterious access to sizable funds in recent weeks. They wanted to observe him in contact with the Indonesians. An' Opsus account says that in Jakarta the UDT group sought 'concrete help' should they be forced to attack the 'communists' in Portuguese Timor .and asked Indonesia's likely reaction to such a move. 'Indonesia would just close its eyes', Murtopo told them. Sugianto introduced the UDT leaders to a Malaysian official, understood to have been foreign ministry head·' Tan Sri Ghazalie Shafie, who had been close to Murtopo's group since opening secret channels during Confrontation. He told them regional cou'ntries would never allow a leftist movement in Timor. The Malaysian andSugianto both 24
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
repeated something that Ali Murtopo had said: Fretilin planned a coup on 15 August. On their return to Dili on 6 August, the UDT leaders found Fretilin was effectively in control of Remexio, Aileu and other small townships in. the mountains outside Dili. According to their later accounts, buses between Baucau and Dili were stopped and searched for weapons on 8 August by youths described as 'communists' by Timorese passengers. That night UDT decided to move. Well-attended demonstrations were held in Dili on 9 and 10 August to launch an 'anti-communist movement' and a pro-UDT strike closed most shops. At midnight on Sunday, 10 August several hundred UDT members led by Joao Carrascalao seized arms from the police headquarters and took control of most of Dili. Civil war;unfolded rapidly. Some UDT commanders in outlying . towns executed captured Fretilin activists. The Fretilin leadership regrouped in their strongholds around Aileu and on 15 August proclaimed a 'general armed insurrection' against all 'traitors of the fatherland'. Refugees began arriving in Darwin, in northern Australia, aboard a small freighter, the MacDili. Lemos Pires, the governor, attelnpted to calm the situ-ation. On 17 August, he sent the two alleged 'red majors' , Mota and Jonatas, back to Portugal,via Darwin-not, he maintained, at UDT's request, but to give. Lisbon a detailed report of events and to remove them from the danger. The move ·did little to allay suspicions on Fretilin's side. In a critical development, Fretilin members occupied the military training centre in the mountain town of Aileu on 18 August. The . Timorese soldiers there and in nearby Maubisse declared themselves for Fretilin,- as did most of the local troops in Dili at the urging of the most senior Timorese in the army, Lt Rogerio Lobato, A PUSH INTO WAR
25
whose brother Nicolau was a senior Fretilin leader. This gave'Fretilin the immediate, overwhelming advantage of, a ready-trained army of over 3000 soldiers, equipped with NATO--pattern semi-automatic rifles, mortars, bazookas and four-wheel-drive vehicles. Through the Lobato brothers, the army's leadership was closely tied to the political leadership of the Fretilin Central Committee. This force was proclaimed as the Armed Forces of National Liberation of East Timor or Falintil for short. Intense fighting started in Dili on 20 August. Even at this stage Governor Pires and his small but tough force of Portuguese paratroopers might have quelled the fighting in Dili by a determined use of authority. But he followed the Portuguese policy ofapartidarismo,of 'standing apart' from party conflicts in the colonies. The governor and the remaining Portuguese retreated to a small defended area around the port, where they were soon flooded with refugees and under sporadic fire. On 22 August Pires loaded his establishment onto landing barges and moved his 'seat of government' to Atauro, a small Portuguese island on the horizon from Dili. Fretilin walked into the Portuguese arsenal, which contained some 15 000 semi~automatic rifles, and pushed UDT out ofDili within four days. The main body of UDTfled to the west. By the end of the first week in September, UDT held only the. deserted village of Batugade and its ancient fortress, about 2- kilometres from the Indonesian border. UDT had about 200 fighting men, rifles with about 50 rounds of ammunition each, no mortar shells, and no radio-sets. Fretilin had de facto control of nearly all of East Timor. From 3 September, the Indonesians had 'sent two company-sized units of commandos into the western districts around Bobonaro to harass Fretilinand keep them off b·alance. These were probably the two companies of the Kopassandha 2nd Combat detachment, stationed at 26
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
Atambua since 1974 under majors Kuntara and Muhidin, with the company commanders lieutenants Marpaung and Slamat Kirbiantoro. But the forays met stiff resistance from Fretilin supporters, and the plan to leave behind local partisans to resist Fretilin failed when it became plain these recruits were-"hopelessly outmatched by Fretilin's armed wing Falintil in fighting skills. Indonesia sent a frigate into Dili Harbour on 26 August to take off the Indonesian consulate staff and had since kept a naval squadron close to Dili. It had developed plans for an invasion of the north coast by land and sea involving about 8000 troops. But it turned down the opportunity presented by the streetfighting in Dili and evident Portuguese incapacity, to move in to intervene and restore order. Lemos Pires had even made a general radio call for international assistance. Intervention did not lack supporters in Jakarta. Most of Suharto's generals urged the occupation of Dili. Suhartoheld back. His only supporter was Ali Murtopo, more closely attuned to the president's thinking and with a vested interest in events running along the elaborate course that Operasi Komodo was manipulating. Suharto was undoubtedly mindful of Whitlam's warning in Townsville about a hostile public reaction, even though a statement in parliament by Whitlam on 28 August said that 'the Indonesian Government, which over the past year has expressed repeatedly its intention not to intervene in Timor, may . . . be turned to as the only force capable of restoring calm in the territory'. Whitlam also sent 5uharto a private message saying that nothing he said earlier should be interpreted as a' veto on Indonesian action in the changed circumstances. But without an explicit and specific invitation from Lisbon, apart from Governor Pires' 50S, 5uharto felt he would be accused of aggression. A PUSH INTO WAR
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Jakarta also needed to retain. the confidence ofWest~ ern countries. The state oil company Pertamina was close to insolvency because of reckless borrowings and needed massive new overseas financing. Intervention would draw a protest, however dutiful, from the Portuguese and many non-aligned and socialist countries. Finally there was the factor of Suharto's own personality. Suharto's favoured approach to war and politics led him to lecture his generals at this crucial stage on what he saw as lessons of the Javanese and Hindu classics. His faith that events would throw up a less costly way to control Timor was said to be derived in part from the advice of his spiritual teacher and political counsellor Lt-Gen. Sujono Humardani-East Timor would inevitably 'fall' into Indonesia's hands. While selected units of the armed forces were put on alert, Indonesia began a complicated diplomatic campaign. On the formal level it attempted to win an invitation from Portugal to restore order. Portugal was trying to raise interest among other potential peacekeepers and make the Timorese factions talk-without success on either front. Indonesia used its powers to obstruct contact between anti-Fretilin groups and Lisbon. A Portuguese emissary, sent by President da Costa Gomez immediately after the UDT coup when air access from Darwin was still uncertain, attempted to get into East Timor via Bali and West Timor. He was blocked in Bali and abandoned the attempt. Later, a second Portuguese envoy, the exdecolonisation minister Almeida Santos, flew to Darwin, but his efforts to start talks with UDT and Fretilin met deliberate non-cooperation by both Indonesian and Australian authorities. He too was forced to give up. This gave Col. Sugianto total control over the UDT group clustered on·the border. In August, while UDT still controlled Dili, he had flown in with Taolin and others 28
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
to meet Lopes daCruz.. J oao Carrascalao" already deeply suspicious of the Indonesian contacts of Lopes daCruz, met him, saying that Lopes da Cruz could not come to the airport. Sugianto flew back to Kupang. Soon afterwards Lopes da Cruz' volunteered to lead a force to attack Fretilin at Aileu. tIe' used this opportunity to break away from the main .UDT group and travel to the Indon'esian border. When the remnants of UDT fell back to the border under Carra~calao, they found Lopes da Cruz had already signed a petition on their behalf calling for Timor's integration with Indonesia. Carrascalao and other UDT leaders were now completely dependent on Indonesian goodwill, and in no position to countermand Lopes da Cruz. Infiltrated by Sugianto's spies they sat sullenly in their border camp, while Indonesia made the most of a new 'anti-communist movement' of Apbdeti, UDT and two tiny parties included for added effect, the former monarchist KOTA (Sons of the Timor Warriors) and Trabalista (Labour). For several months Indonesian special forces under Col. Dading Kalbuadi had been training Apodeti members. In September 1975 they crossed'the border in the south to keep some pressure on Fretilin. Thousands of refugees fled across the border ahead of the fighting in August, and they were shown to foreign o·bservers as evidence of Fretilin's unpopularity. On 24 September, Fretilinpushed UDT out of the border fort of Batugade, their last foothold in East Timor. On 6 October, Ali Murtopo, beaming in a new cream-coloured safari suit, held open-house in Jakarta to celebrate Lebaran, the end of the Muslim fasting· month. He told guests that East Timor would be part of Indonesia 'by Christmas'. Indeed, the first step towards that aim was made the next morning. Dading's commando force, including his A PUSH INTO WAR
29
Apodeti partisans and CarrascaHlo's UDT remnants, counterattacked across the border from Motaain with naval gunfire support and strafing by two ancient aircraft, a B-26 and a DC-3 gunship, and seized back Batugade by the following day, 8 October. The phase of political subversion, codenamed Operation Komodo, had been replaced by covert war, under the codename Operation Flamboyant.
30
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
TWO
THE NEWSMEN
T
of 10 August 1975 and UDT's brief . occupation of Dili had set off a desperate scramble among Australian newspapers and broadcast networks to get .reporters into Dili. Despite the short distance by air from Dili to Darwin, only about 500 kilometres, this was not so easy. At the Dili end, UDT initially closed the airport. In Australia, officialdom acted out Whitlam's edict that Australia was not a principal party. The defence minister, Bill Morrison, secretly ordered navy and air force commanders in Darwin to do their best to block anyone leaving for Timor. In part, this was designed to keep Australians out of a genuinely uncertain and dangerous situation. Almost certainly it was also aimed at limiting the number of witnesses and Australian bystanders should Suharto take the numerous hints fromWhitlam that intervention would be forgivable. HE UDT coUP
31
Jakarta-based reporters who flew down to Kupang and tried to find overland transport into Portuguese Timor were likewise bottled up in the town and kept under tight surveillance by interior ministry security agents who warned local bus and car operators against providing transport. After a few frustrating days, they flew back to Jakarta. The news director of the Sydney-based Nine Network, Gerald Stone, and his boss Kerry Packer broke the bureaucratic barriers by chartering a fishing trawler to cross to Dili. Film taken by Nine cameraman Brian Peters in late August 1975 provided the first television images of the civil war. After Fretilin won control of Dili, the airport reopened and journalists were able to enter aboard charter flights. For over a month, from late August when Fretilin pushed UDT to the border, Fretilin controlled nearly all of East Timor, as, in the absence of effective Portuguese authority, the territory increasingly become known. With the civil war falling into a lull over September, the Australian commercial TV channels withdrew their news teams, though the Australian Broadcasting Commission kept TV and radio reporters in the territory and several newspaper and wire-service correspondents remained. On the Indonesian side, Jakarta-based reporters were allowed up to the border in early September to meet the UDT remnants at Motaain and Batugade. The thinking behind this permissive approach appears to have been to show that resistance to Fretilin was not extinguished, and that Indonesia was staying on its side of the border. As border skirmishes increased at the beginning of October, Fretilin encouraged foreign reporters to come. 'It was the only weapon we had in this fighting for influencing, for winning sympathy around the world', Jose Ramos-Horta has explained. 32
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
The new outbreak of fighting at, Batugade on 7 October revived interest by Australian commercial networks. Fretilin had reported a massive Indonesian assault across the border, saying it involved hundreds of troops, jet aircraft and warships. This was a greatly exaggerated claim\but true in one essential fact: a new phase in the integration campaign had begun, with direct Indonesian air, land and sea support. Although the pro-Indonesian forces claimed Batugade fell immediately, accounts from Fretilin said fighting continued around the village until 8 October before it was secured by the Indonesians. In 'Melbourne, Greg Shackleton, a 29-year-old reporter on the Seven Network station HSV 7, saw his chance to get away from routine stories about domestic politics, car sales and industrial disputes. Shackleton, snub-nosed and fervent-eyed with thick dark hair, was ambitious to make his name as a television journalist and ha~ been pressing to go up to East Timor. His management agreed and detailed a team to go with him: Gary Cunningham, 27, a, tall and heavily built New Zealander as cameraman and fair-bearded Tony ,Stewart, 21, as sound recordist. Shackleton's boss, HSV 7's director of news John' Maher, said it was not a case of a reporter being handed down an assignment, but rather of the employer finally giving way to the keenness of an able staffer. 'When you have a good reporter bursting to go and cover something, what do you do?' Maher said to The National Times newspaper in 1979. Maher said that of the three, only Cunningham had previous war experience, two spells of about a month each in Vietnam. Although Shackleton was an experienced journalist, he had spent no time in any war zone. 'I said, "Please be careful and don't let's have any foolhardiness". I told them it's no good being a dead journalist.' Maher said he aimed his THE NEWSMEN
33
remarks mostly to Shackleton. 'I did not have the same worry with Gary Cunningham. I felt he had enough experience for me not to have to worry about him.' Maher said all the groundwork in arranging the journey had been carried out by Shackleton himself. The.station itself gave no formal notification to the Australian government that it was sending a team into East Timor. However, Maher claimed the government would have been aware of the plans because Shackleton dealt with government departments to gain a flight clearance. Entries in Shackleton's notebooks indicate that in between finishing off a story on motorcar dealerships in Melbourne,he had background talks with local academics" about Timor. According to Whitlam, he., had also discussed his plans twice with the prime minister while Whitlam was being made up for interviews on the current affairs show This Week, which Shackleton produced. Whitlam says he warned Shackleton on both occasions he would be beyond the protection of the Australian government. Shackleton also contacted the Indonesian consulategeneral in Melbourne and the Indonesian embassy in Canberra. Jack Matsi, who worked at the Indonesian embassy between 1975 and 1998, recalls meeting. TV journalists at that time, and taking them to meet information counsellor 'Sam' Aleydroes. The journalists had asked fOT 'protection or a guarantee', which Aleydroes p'ointed out could hardly be given for a territory that did not belong to Indonesia. Aleydroes had passed the request on to the ambassador, Lt-Gen~ Her Tasning, but it is not known if it was then sent to Jakarta. Sparse notes by Shackleton suggest he sought information abo'ut the situation in Timor and the appropriate'departments to contact in Jakarta about Timor. Two isolated words in his notebook-,''safe conduct'-'-indicate ,he may 34
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
have asked questions about the status of journalists covering the war. In'Sydney at the rival Nine Network, Gerald Stone also thought it was .time for another look. Stone recalled in 1979 that the . . reports of the fall of Batugade to Indonesian forces had been the impetus. The fighting between rival Timorese forces did not appear 'too serious', but there were an increasing number of reports of Indonesian incursions, naval raids and overflights around the end of September. Stone selected Malcolm Rennie, 28, a reporter with the network in Melbourne. Rennie was Scottish-born and had migrated to Australia as a boy with his parents. He had been with the network for only a year but was a polished performer on television. Rennie had no war experience but was 'our sharpest reporter', Stone said. The cameraman chosen to go with him was also British: Brian Peters, who had been into Timor aboard the trawler with Stone and Packer. At 29, slim with thinning brown hair, Peters was a largely self-educated knockabout from England's West Country who had worked his way around the world to Sydney. The story, Stone said, was to obtain proof of Indonesian involvement in the border incursions. Stone briefed Rennie in Melbourne. 'Their instructions were firstly not in any sense to wear uniforms; and secondly under no circumstances to do anything to jeopardise the story by taking risks. The first job was to get the story back. The first responsibility is not to get the film, but to get the film back', Stone said. Like Maher, Stone said he made no attempt to inform Foreign Affairs or any Australian government department. 'I didn't see Australian Foreign Affairs as being very helpful in this instance' ,he said. Stone cited the difficulty Australian journalists had encountered In THE NEWSMEN
35
August in covering Timor when he had been forced to hire a trawler from Darwin to reach Dili. On Thursday, 9 October, the three-man Seven crew, Shackleton, Cunningham and Stewart, left. Melbourne on a 7 am flight for Darwin. When they arrived; the officials at the Department of Transport told them their prearranged charter flight into Timor would not be allowed. Although radio reports from the International Committee of the Red Cross in· Timor that day said the situation was calm, officials told Shackleton the ban was 'to protect the security of Australian citizens and .property' . In Melbourne HSV 7 reported on its 6.30 pm news bulletin that night that its team was on the way to Timor. The travel ban was lifted the next morning. At 8.30 am on Friday, 10 October, their chartered light aircraft took off for Dili. Before leaving, Shackleton recorded a brief news item, which he shipped back to Melbourne: With us we're taking the passport of Fretilin member Christopher Santos from the Portuguese consul in Darwin, with instructions to deliver it to him personally by hand. The passport is Santos' go-ahead to attend negotiations in Lisbon next week on the colony's future-talks the Indonesian government strongly opposes . . . We're also carrying a sealed envelope from the Portuguese consul to Fretilin leader Jose Ramos-Horta.
Under the flight plans approved by the Department of Transport the plane was ordered to approach Dili from the east, the side further away from Indonesia, and under no circumstances to go within 10 miles of the border with Indonesia. Shackleton and the Seven crew arrived in Dili at 11 am on Friday, 10 October. The Nine Network crew, Rennie and Peters, arrived 36
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
48 hours later. In Sydney, Rennie and Peters joined a light aircraft chartered by the Australian Society for Intercountry Aid (Timor) (ASIAT), a private group that was running a medical relief program in East Timor. They arrived in Dili on Sunday, 12 October. They all had four days to live. The Seven crew had set to work immediately after they landed in Dili on Friday so they could send some film back with their aircraft to Darwin that day. They interviewed Fretilin's foreign spokesman, Jose Ramos-Horta, who repeated the Fretilin account of a large-scale Indonesian attack on ·Batugade three days before. Later, Shackleton's team went to the Dili Museum, which had been turned into a prison for members of Apodeti, the pro-Indonesian party. They recorded an interview with Apodeti's secretary-general, Osorio Soares. At 4 pm the three set out for the border,-using a vehicle and driver supplied by Fretilin. Shackleton later noted: 'He [the driver] was the sixth Fretilin member approached in Dili to be our driver--the other five refused.' The team took the road that went westward along the north coast. Their film shows young Fretilin members along the way giving the party's clenched-fist salute. At 6 pm they reached the village of Maubara, about 50 km from the border, and stopped for the night. That evening th~y listened .to Fretilin radio from Dili and then their guides tuned in to the enemy station, Radio Ramelau, as the Opsus-run station broadcasting from. Kupang was now known. Shackleton recorded a brief item about this 'war of words'. The next morning, Saturday, 11 October, they headed out at 6 am on a rough road (unmarked on the official Portuguese map) that ran south-west across the wide, dried-up bed of the Loes River to the village of Atabae where- they had breakfast. Moving closer to the border THE NEWSMEN
37
towards noon they met some Australian journalists-'-Rick Collins, of Australian Associated Press (AAP) , and Tony Maniaty and Roger Doyle of the ABC-near where the road from Atabae met the Balibo-Maliana road at Nunura. The others were returning to Dili after' coming under artillery fire, apparently from an Indonesian frigate, earlier that day when they were filming a" 'standupper' (a report by the correspondent to camera) at the Balibo fort. The Fretilin information officer, Chris Santos,whose Portuguese passport the Seven team had carried from Darwin to Dili, was with the ABC-AAP group. He was concerned about the Seven crew going on to Balibo and made them sign a note absolving Fretilin of· responsibility for their safety. Shackleton filmed a short report to camera and gave the returning group his exposed film to be shipped back to Australia. The' returning newsmen had a rough trip back to Dili. Their Land Rover rolled over, injuring Collins. An Australian army doctor attached to a Red Cross team at Dili's hospital later recorded that the medicos there 'roundly, castigated' one of the newsmen for getting around in a jungle-green shirt. The doctor, Capt. C.G. Russell-Jones, also noted an assessment of the danger at the border expressed by one of the journalists. 'Doyle said that he had spent a lot of time in Vietnam, but the Timor situation, in his view, was a lot more risky because of the constantly changing scenario and lack of proper protective infrastructure. He considered the pos,;., ition to be dangerous and had wisely decided to take his team· home as soon as medically cleared.' The Seven team drove on, possibly visiting the district centre of Maliana first and then travelling on to Balibo. They were now at the most forward position held by Falintil, Fretilin's Portuguese-trained soldiers. From the battlements of Balibo's fort, the ground fell 38
DEATH INBALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
away ·down to the coast-a sloping terrain of light timber, tall grasses and shrubs and gullies, with a· dirt road winding up through· it. This was no-man's'land. An Indonesian frigate, probably theUS-supplied KRIMonginsidi arII,l,e,d .with a three-iI1ch gun, lay close to .the shore offtli~'-Illdonesian ·border post· of Motaain. Several fires were burning in the dry bush between Balibo and the coast· as a result of mortar and artillery fire. The Seven crew's car followed a Falintil truck full of troops ,past the town and down the road towards Batugade. But about 200 metres down the rb'ad the convoy stopped and turned around. It was considered not safe togo any further. Shackleton later wrote: Several kilometres back we had signed a letter absolving Fretilin of responsibility for our safety and well-being. This was additional to the same kind of letter we signed for the Portuguese Government to get into ·Dili. Fretilin has 'now declared all the border area insecure. Our driver did not., want to come this far~ he is very scared we will be cut off·to .the rear and encircled.
Shackleton noted signs of nervousness among Fretilin's troops. They watched an Indonesian helicopter flying high overhead and filmed Fretilin soldiers posing with a small Portuguese artillery piece. No one strayed too far, for fear of snipers. The newsmen spent the night of Saturday, 11 O~tober, in Balibo in the" abandoned house of a Chinese trader that was used as a rough mess by the Fretilin ggrrison. The house stood. on the ,corner of the road up from Batugade' where it ,joined the dusty central square of the village. The next morning, Sunday, 12 October, Fretilin decided to pullout of Balibo. The television crew THE NEWSMEN
39
recQrded a stand-upper by Shackleton giving an account of the situation: It was at this time yesterday that the> town was reported to have been hit by artillery and mortar fire. There's been riO' attack today, but the 60-man Fretilin garrison is pulling back to Maliana. They've been told that Indonesian soldiers are· heading that way. Of course when they say Indonesian soldiers they could well mean DDT. At any rate we look like being the last people left in the town, and we'll be making a decision very shortly on whether we too should pull back. In the meantime we've daubed our house with the word 'Australia' in red and the Australian flag on the house where we spent the night. We're hoping it will afford us some protection.
In. the end the newsmen decided to leave as .well, and started driving back through Nunura to Maliana at 11.50 am. The trip had some tense moments. An unidentifiedman was sighted in the bush and their car ran over a grenade left lying on the road. They passed Fretilin soldiers retreating on foot from Balibo to Maliana and arrived at Maliana after 45 minutes on the road. At Maliana, Shackleton continued his news report begun earlier that day at Balibo. It includes two remarks that become significant in the light of subsequent events: Shackleton said the Fretilin commander in Balibo told him a decision had been made by the Central Committee of Fretilin 'not to forcefully hold Balibo, Nunura to the south, or even this town Maliana and that the next attack was expected on Atabae which is much further to our rear'. He also reported: 1\.t Maliana we conveyed >a message that reinforcements be sent from Maliana to defend Balibo. We asked for 15 men, as we were told, in two cars. But they say here all they can send are five men to help the ten still at Balibo.' 40
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
In other words, the reporters knew that . Fretilin would not even try to hold the area they were later to be in. It also shows a degree of identification with Fretilin and a minor ·breach of the convention that war correspondents do not assist combatant forces. Shackleton had already carried a passport and a sealed package into Dili for Fretilin from the Portuguese. Here he was relaying military combat messages. These actions could be said to show a growing identification with the Fretilin side. That afternoon at Maliana the three newsmen met an elderly Portuguese. priest who had stayed behind to look after the Catholic school in the town, which was the centre of East Timor's best farming district. They took some film, then swam in the scho~l's swimming pool. At nightfall they were eating their meal in the village when suddenly a silence fell and they noticed a change of atmosphere. Shackleton noted: Maliana during the day is full of troops and there were quite a few when we arrived. But at the end of our meGl:l in deep darkness we became aware we were the only people there. Gary, my cameraman, casually asked in which house would we sleep. Our interpreter suddenly gushed forth the information he had bottled up for so long for fear of interrupting our meal: 'Oh, we not sleep here. Maliana very dangerous after sun goes down. All our troops hide themselves already.' It may have .been the beer, it may have been the absurd danger of the situation but we three doubled up with laughter and were driven away still laughing in a car with its headlights off for .safety.
As tlleywere eating their meal in Maliana on 12 October HSV 7 news ·in Melbourne carried Shackleton's report from Dili of the Indonesian capture of Batugade. That night was spent in a small village, the name of which THE NEWSMEN
41
Shackleton could not discover. The journalists huddled in an open-sided, thatch-roof hut and found themselves bombarded with questions from Fretilin soldiers about Australian policy on Timor. In the morning, on Monday,. 13 October, Shackleton recorded an emotionally worded news item, in which he said the night's conversation had made a deep impact on the newsmen. He said he had told the Timorese he believed Australia should be taking a more active stance, at the United Nations, to protect East Timor's right to self-determination. Later that day the Seven crew saw Fretilin bring in a prisoner, a youth they said was an Indonesian spy and whom they proposed to summarily execute. Shackleton intervened and persuaded the Fretilin troops to send the boy to Dili for investigation. The action was commendable,. but it may have had the psychological effect of instilling a trust among the newsmen, unwarranted as it turned out, that their Australian identity gave them the status of arbiters or neutral referees who would be deferred to. On the afternoon of the same day, Fretilin reinforcements arrived in Maliana to resume the defence of Balibo. Shackleton noted that the troops were prepared by 'morale-building speeches' and that morale among Fretilin members decreased with their distance from Dili. 'Then we set off-two trucks ahead of us filled with soldiers and us in the Land Rover behind-leaving 100 yards between each vehicle in case of ambush or mortar.· attack.' In other words, the journalists were accompanying what might have been an assault on an Indonesian position. Balibo had been evacuated once in the previous two days because it was insecure and now a cautious reoccupation was being undertaken. The reoccupation turned out to be an 'anti-climax', Shackleton 42
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
noted. Balibo was quiet. Lying in Indonesian waters was the same·warship and a small patrol boat. The newsmen settled down to stay the night in the same Chinese shop-house as before. Late on Monday, 13 October, the two Nine newsmen, Rennie and Peters, arrived in Balibo by road. They had landed in Dili the previous .day with the Cessna chartered by the aid group ASIAT. A doctor who flew in with them, John Whitehall, said the two had planned to fly with him along the north coast to the Portuguese territory of Oecussi, the enclave on the Indonesian side of Timor. But Fretilin foreign affairs spokesman Jose Ramos-Horta was setting off for the border by land and invited Rennie and Peters to accompany him. They accepted. Whitehall said in 1979 he distinctly remembered that before they left Dili the two had changed their clothing. He said both wore green-brown military-style fatigues, apparently acquired in the town. If so, later film shows Rennie and Peters were not wearing such clothes at the border. Whitehall also remembered the mood that affected them all at the time: ~ll of us had a feeling of levity. W eminimised the risks, believing in some way that we were immune.' That evening the five Australian journalists sat around in Balibo talking and drinking beer and wine, supplies carried with them as the village was otherwise deserted except for the Fretilin fighters. All turned in for the night in one of the abandon.ed houses. On the morning of Tuesday, 14 October, the five Australians went out on a patrol down the hill towards Batugade with Ramos-Horta and the Fretilin troops. Films taken by both crews reveal sudden changes in the Indonesian forces. Overnight, "four more ships ,had .arrived. They now lay in Indonesian waters right on the border. As well as the destroyer and patrol boat, THE NEWSMEN
43
there were now another patrol craft, two freighters and what must have been a tank landing ship. The film itself is not conclusive· proof of Indonesian intrusion, as some accounts have claimed. Both teams state the ships appeared to be in Indonesian waters. But it was clearly a sign of an Indonesian build-up. Greg Shackleton quotes Ramos-Horta as disagreeing with the notion that Fretilin should attempt to meet the Indonesians in conventional warfare. Ramos-Horta preferred "a 'gue"rrilla war of hit and run': Horta confirmed that the (Fretilin) Central Committee has decided not to strenuously defend Balibo, Nunura and Maliana and will withdraw to Atabae and Bobonaro if need be. The wet season will soon flood half-mile wide rivers parallel with the border, providing a natural defence for Fretilin.
Malcolm Rennie of Nine interviewed Ramos-Horta, who ." predicted that the Indonesians would launch a 'massive attack' because of their reinforcements. RamosHorta thought this attack would occur in about two weeks, but then said the pro-Indonesian side would be losing diplomatic ground if they waited that long, because Fretilin would gain increasing international recognition. Rennie noted that to defend Balibo, Fretilin had 60 soldiers plus some local 'support forces'. That Tuesday, 14 October, Ramos-Horta returned to Dill, taking with him film from both news teams for dispatch to A'ustralia. These were the last reports the five newsmen managed to get out. Before piecing together what happened next, it is worth looking at two points that may have become critical later. First, communications: the only way of getting a message out of Balibo was for someone to carry it by road. The Fretilin troops in Balibo had no radio. There was no telephone line. From Maliana a single phone 44
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
line ran to another town further into East .Timor, from where telephone calls were relayed by radio link to Dili. Maliana also had Fretilin's nearest radio. post.. A telephone service also linked Atabae, on the north coast, with Dili, but this town was several hours drive from Balibo. Second, whaf>"'Were the journalists' wearing? Film from both crews taken up to Tuesday, 14 October, shows all to be wearing clothes tp-at looked distinctly civilian in cut and colour-with the pos,sible exception of Greg Shackleton who in some of the earlier reports wore a khaki-coloured shirt with epaulettes and pocketflaps. One television executive later said: 'My heart sank when I saw the film. That shirt and Greg's dark looks meant he could have been mistaken fora Portuguese or anything . . . ' But in the later reports, Shackleton was not wearing this shirt, which in any case was quite different from the mottled-green Portuguese uniforms ,worn by many Fretilin fighters. And, this was not a regular war either. The Indonesian special forces wore civilian dress. Militarylooking. safari shirts were then in vogue across. Southeast Asia among diplomats, businessmen andjournalists as semiformal working gear. The Indonesians and th~ir allies had been conditioned by their own propaganda to IQok out for ~,ustralian communists' who presumably would not be wearing any uniforms. After Ramos-Horta left and their immediate work was over, the two crews relax~d. Shackleton noted a joke they created about the house they slept in,'dubbed the 'Australian embassy', then the 'Commonwealth secretariat' since Cunningham was aNew Zealander, and Peters and Rennie were British. Shackleton noted more Indonesian helicopte.r flighfs, then wrote 'sleep beautifully Balibo' in his journal. That night, 1 ~ October, HSV 7 and other Seven stati()ns carried Shackletqn's report from the road between Atabae aJ1d,Balibo. The THE NEWSMEN
45
reporter, the news item said, was 'on. his way to the border area'. On Wednesday, 15 October, the five appear to have stayed in and around Balibo. Shackleton's entry in his notebook includes only a few terse, unconnected words. At about 2 pm a team from the Portuguese government television service, comprising Adelino Gomes, Jorge Teofilo, M,anuel Patricio and Herlander Mendes, arrived in Balibo. Their film shows four of the five Australianbased newsmen sitting with their shirts off in the square at Balibo drinking beer. The Portuguese film shows the sign ~ustralia' painted on the house facing the square. But it also shows another sign on the same house: 'Falintil esta sempre com 0 povo Maubere' (Falintil is always with the Maubere people). Falintil was the name of Fretilin's armed wing; Maubere was the Fretilin term for the East Timorese 'common , man. That 'the word ~ustralia' may have been correctly interpreted by an attacking force of Indonesians and Timorese, assuming it was visible from accurate shooting range, was a doubtful proposition in the first place. PositiC?ned alongside a Fretilin slogan it was surely meaningless. Interviewed later by freelance journalist Jill Jolliffe Dili, the Portuguese said- the Australian TV crews had asked for any spare supplies of beer or wine as they intended to stay in Balibo for several days. The Australian teams hoped to 'film some action', including the 'anticipated recapture of Batugade'. Adelino Gomes is quoted as saying:
in
They asked me if I thought there would be any fighting there which they could film. I said I thought so .becauseUDT and Indonesian forces might move in there in the next few days because the rain was setting 46
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
In. They were happy at the prospect of getting some film and would not leave because this was what they had come for.
In 1996, Gomes recalled that he did not think an attack was imminent that night, and had decided to head to Bobonaro to· film other st()ries. He had urged the Australian-based newsmen to go with his crew to Maliana chiefly because of the prospect of a cooked meal and a swim at the Portuguese mission school there. However, another crew member, Patricio, recalled ill 1996 that they left Balibo because of a sense of danger. An Australian foreign affairs department officer, John Starey, who met the Portuguese team in Darwin on their way out of Timor in October 1975 reported ·that the Portuguese told him they had urged the Australian TV crews to leave. The Portuguese were the last independent witnesses to see the Australians before the attack on Balibo. Shackleton's diary, as handed over by Indonesian authorities, contains no further entries. However, the notebooks contain the beginning ofa letter written by Brian Peters, headed 'Balibo, East Timor, Wednesday 15 October'. It mentions the Indonesian warships off Batugade, and notes: If the Indonesians decide to get really involved and start shelling from a ship there will be no chance for this place. Our main worry if that happened (apart from being blasted apart)· is how to get out of Balibo (there are five Aussie persons here) because of the shortage of transport, if the Indonesians start shelling I'm sure that these Fretilin troops would panic and head straight back to Dili.
Since taking over the Batugade fort on 7-8 October, Colonel Dading Kalbuadi had been busy. Operation THE NEWSMEN
47
Flamboyant was blossoming into a sizable military operation. On Saturday, .11 .October, the same day the ·Seven crew arrived in Balibo for the first time, two medium landing craft entered the small Indonesian port of Atapupu, only about 15 kilometres from the border. The ships landed infantry Battalion 507 of the East Java (Brawijaya) Division, normally based at Malang in East Java. The soldiers were wearing their regular jungle-green combat uniforms. But there was one unusual feature: all unit flashes and identifying insignia had been removed. The troops were clearly destined for clandestine operations where Indonesia was· not supposed to have any forces. They headed east towards the border. The small foothold of the Indonesian forces inside East Timor at Batugade had been transformed by this time. The day after the 7-8 October attack, which ousted Fretilin, a jeep painted in civilian colours and flying Apodeti and UDT flags drove into Batugade from Indonesian Timor. Col. Dading, then 44, who favoured cowboy-style hats and a pistol in aside-holster, was escorting his chief, Maj.-Gen. Benny Murdani, on a quick inspection tour. The colonel's moment had come, after hovering at the East Timor border for some months, training local pro-Indonesian forces and readying his Indonesian Special Forces for the time when Indonesia's Timor manipulation turned to active fighting. His soldiers from the Special Forces Regiment had packed away their usual red berets and distinctive camouflage, and turned out in shorts and jeans. Cropped haircuts and cleanshaven faces had been abandoned in favour of the long hair and stubble typical of local guerillas. Over the next two or three days several hundred Indonesian troops crossed into the area by land from the West Timor side of the border. A heavy landing 48
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
ship, probably the same one sighted by the journalists from Balibo, arrived and offloaded several Soviet-made amphibious tanks with Marine Corps crews. These took up position in Batugade. Dading set up his headquarters in the .Batugade fort· with a Maj. Yusman, also from· the Special Forces, as'his chief of staff. The half~Timorese, half-Portuguese Jose Martins, leader of the KOTA, who later changed sides and gave evidence against' the Indonesians, was also at hand to' liaise with the Timorese partisans. Dading's 'limited combat intelligence operation' was no less than a steady covert· invasion of East Timor, employing some 3200 troops. While the spearhead forces wOllld be commandos in civilian dress taking along Apodeti and UDT .members as· auxiliaries and political cover, the shaft of the invasion would be regular infantry and marine units, in normal fatigues but with identiying badges removed to help maintain the fiction of Indonesia's non-involvement, supported by the Marine Corps' tanks, naval artillery and the two aircraft gunships. The two television crews ··had placed themselves right in the firing line.
THE NEWSMEN
49
THREE
OPERATION FLAMBOYANT
W
down at Batugade aware of the newsmen, only 8 kilometres above them on the hilltop at Balibo;? Indonesian planners had several sources and . · methods that should have given them this intelligence: Timorese scouts, informants working within Fretilin ranks and monitoring of Fretilin radio broadcasts from Dili. Almost certainly they would have picked up this information from their own signals intelligence, or sigint.Their interception capabilities were fairly rudimentary, generally involving interception of unencrypted voice-radio communications. But against the unsophisticated capabilities of Fretilin, who had no communications security equipment and practised poor security procedures, Indonesian military and intelligence units were able to use radio intercepts to significant effect. Most of the officers supervising Operation Komodo and Operation Flamboyant were familiar with the sigint ERE THE INDONESIANS
50
:::11111:1:
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OPERATION KOMODO
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I"rfs'·s·f.j'·t3?UI·...:'·W'.. 'r"S'II······..·..·•·..•
••·••..·•..•••·
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~;.iuil,iij,ii£lIi.I&..iii~ Col. Agus Hernoto:
'e
. :. . . ,
Radio Intercept Service
Louis Taolin Pitut Suharto Sukamto
Indonesia's covert Timor campaign, October 1974-November 1975
capabilities maintained by their own army and the intelligence agencies, and appreciated the value of such activities. Indeed, the largest and most capable Indonesian sigint organisations at this time were Bakin's. Communi.. . cations Division (Bagian. Komunikasi), responsible to Bakin director-general Lt-Gen.Yoga Sugama; t,heoffice of the assistant for communications and electronics .in the Ministry of Defence and Security, responsible for sigint activities. within the Indonesian defence establishment; and the ministry's Group 6/Communications and Electronics (G-6), responsible for the co-ordination of armed forces operations to collect sigint, which reported to Gen. Benny Murdani in his capacity as the military's intelligence chief. Murdani had responsibility in the defence ministry for Operation Flamboyant. Leonardus Benjamin Murdani was well suited to work with the Opsus group, being from a .Roman Catholic background in Central Java and having a long association with Suharto and Ali Murtopo. Strongly built and taciturn, Murdanihad a career specialising in the surprise application of welltargeted violence. In the Dutch New Guinea campaign he had led an Indonesian parachute raid near Merauke in 1962. Later he had run commando teams against British and Australian forces in Borneo, and had then headed an Indonesian liaison office in Kuala Lumpur when ·Confrontation was suspended by Suharto. He .had also long had a good appreciation of the operational utility of sigint. In March 1958,for example, when he commanded an army commando unit that seized control of the strategic Sumatran oil fields ahead of CIA-backed rebels, he used his knowledge of sigint to contrive a radio deception exercise that was ·instrumental in the success of the operation. The signals specialist attached to Dading's staff at Batugade,Col. Agus Hernoto, was likewise 'familiar with everything to do 52
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
with radio interception' ,according to a 1995 investigation by the journalist David Jenkins. Indonesia's ·first move towards Portuguese Timor had involved the establishment of the radio monitoring station, ·together with associated facilities for directing a psychological warfare campaign,· at Kupang towards the end of 1974. The broadcasting station, which began transmitting in January·1975, was initially called Radio Kupang. It became Radio. Ramelau for several weeks around September 1975 and' then called itself Radio Lora Sae. According to at?anonymous account of the operation in about September 1975 and recounted by Jill Jolliffe: What was simply called Radio Ramelau was . in fact quite a complex organisation. In a modern building situated on the heights of Kupang, there is a firm known as P. T. Arjuna which carries out various activities. Inside the building a powerful transceiver is installed, and there is a recording studio. There, the government agents from Jakarta operate a direct contact with the Atambua .centre. Radio Ramelau transmits on various wave-lengths, and is able to muffle the broadcasts from Radio Dili. Some young Timorese work at·· Arjuna. They were taken to Indonesia by Tomas Goncalves. The 'young Timorese' were employed to broadcast programs in vernacular dialects. One of the more well-known broadcasters was Francisco Lopes da Cruz, President of the conservative UDT . . .
The Kupang operation, run by Lt-Col. Alex Dinuth and masquerading as a trading company, was centred on its radio station, as recently confirmed by an Indonesian insider, the war correspondent Hendro Subroto, in his book on the Timor campaign: OPERATIONFLAMBOYANT
53
At the Arjuna Inc office, an integration fighters' radio station named Radio Ramelau was established, 10 kilowatts in strength, intended for psychological warfare purposes and monitoring radio traffic in Portuguese Timor and Radio Dili, by utilising the labour of Portuguese refugees who supported the integration, such as Fernando Oliveira and Fernando Cavatera. RRI (Radio Republik Indonesia) Kupang Station also created a broadcast for their listeners in Portuguese Timor by utilising the labour of youths in the colonised regency who had fled to East Nusatenggara, such as Salvador Januario Ximenes Soares, Lucio Goncalves, Jacob Soares and Vecente Henry da Costa. They made a direct broadcast- in the Tetum language, and -also the native dialect of indigenous Portuguese Timor people, for instance the Nawiti, Kemak, Galalen, Mumbai and Akasai dialects.
As well as the Opsus and Bakin personnel, the broadcasts were assisted by the powerful provincial branch of the interior ministry's Special Directorate (Ditsus), which functioned as one of the regime's internal political police agencies. An important function of the station, with its 'powerful transceiver', was to maintain a direct radio communications contact between Jakarta and the Komodo field command centre, which was initially run by Maj. Tony Sumardjo, cover-named Anton Papilayan, from a large ·bungalow in the border town Atambua. After hostilities between Fretilin and UDT began in August 1975, Col. Dading Kalbuadi and his communications officer, Col. Hernoto, set up a field headquarters based in Motaain village, on the -West Timor side of the border near the north coast. Here Dading assembled his forces for Operation Flamboyant. The two companies 54
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA.
of· Indonesian commandos that had been stationed at Atambua for several months came down to the border, along· with their selected Apodeti partisans under Tomas Goncalves. The youngest, fittest troops were picked out from the defeated UDT camp at Motaain. On the morning of 7 October, Dading sent this force across the small stream at the border near Motaain and into the thorny scrub of the narrow coastal plain towards Batugade. Directly in 'charge of the attack was special forces Capt. Sutiyoso, using the codename 'Manix' [sic] from a favourite TV program. The Special Forces troops made the final assault on the old stone fortress at Batugade, using Yugoslavian-origin rocket-propelled grenades, between 4 am and 5 am on 8 October, causing the Fretilin occupants to flee. Wearing a civilian safari suit, G,en. Murdani flew in by helicopter the day after the attack to inspect the scene. The Special Forces regimental commander Brig.-Gen~ Yogie SuwardiMemet also visited Batugade within the' next week, favouring a denim jacket. In his new headquarters in the Batugade fort, built in 1818, Dading shared a room with the partisan Jose Martins, who had an intelligence role as well as liaison duties with the Timorese auxiliaries from Apodeti and UDT. Colonel Hernoto's communications centre was located in one of the rooms set into the stone walls· of the fortress. Some seven Indonesians operated a link to the sectet station in Kupang, which relayed signals to Jakarta, and also maintained contact with Dading's forces using US army PRC-77 field sets. At anyone time, two Timorese also worked in the radio room. They used ex-Portuguese radios, slightly different from the Indonesian models; to monitor frequencies used by Fretilin. Martins referred to it as 'the monitoring post of the Intelligence Section' ,while another sollrce,a 'UDT volunteer', called it 'the secret OPERATION FLAMBOYANT
55
radio post' . There were probably five or six personnel who worked in the post, maintaining different shifts, one of which finished at 6 am. The Batugade station monitored virtually all Fretilin radio and radio telephone communications--including those of members of the Central Committee, the senior military commanders and field units, as well as public broadcasts, such as those of the Dili radio station (which Fretilin called Radio Maubere, or the voice of 'the common people'), and radio transmissions from Dili to Australia. The highest priority for monitoring was' the command elements of the radio communications network maintained by Falintil. The principal Falintil station was located at the Portuguese army garrison in Taibesse, a suburb on the south-eastern outskirts of Dili, which Fretilin captured on 19 August and used as its general headquarters. In September, the Central Committee (which Jill Jolliffe described as 'now an embryo civil admihistration') was located at Taibesse with the military command. The Indonesians were especially ·interested in· the communications of Francisco Xavier do Amaral, the president of Fretilin and commander-in-chief of Falintil; Jose Ramos-Horta, the Fretilin secretary and its most effective politicalorganiser; andRogerioLobato~ the overall military commander of Falintil. Radio communications between the central command and the border zone were maintained from the station in Taibesse. Other important Falintilradio stations in the northern part of the island were maintained at the garrisons at Aileu, in the mountains about 20 kilometres south of Dili, and at Baucau, some 90 kilometres east of Dili. The principal Falintil radio station in the border area was located at the garrison at Bobonaro, where a battalion 56
DEATH IN BALIBG; LIES IN CANBERRA
consisting of more than 60.0 personnel was, stationed,'and which was in regular radio contact with the general headquarters in Taibesse. (Rogerio Lobato first heard of the attack on Balibo on 16 October .byradio from Bobonaro.) Subordinate ,commands with radio ,facilities in the'border area were located at Maliana, where Falintil had a company of app~oximatelyl00-150guerillas, and at Atabae, the main Falintil base covering the northcoast approaches to Dili, commanded by Aquiles Soares, and which exercised command of"the soldiers, at' Balibo. An important logistics centre for the defence ·of Atabae was located in a b'ase camp across ,the-Loes River, from where the Falintil officers maintained radio contact with Aquiles Soares at Atabae. The command posts had codenames such as Eagle' Post (Atabae) and Rome'P'ost (Dili) , which were two of the' stations .monitored by Col. Dading's sigintcentre. In addition to the Falintil radio network, the Fretilin leaders and commanders also made extensive use of the civil telephone system, th.enodal point of which was the Marconi centre in the town square in the centre of Dili. For communications between Dili and the Balibo 'area, Rogerio Lobato stated that there was 'a military radio network controlled by Falintil and a civil telephone connection between Dili and Atabae' and that 'he knew that the Indonesians listened into Fretilin radio communications and he therefore ,tended to use the telephone for communications with Atabae' . There was also the phone service to Maliana. However, although there were some wire connections, the civil telephone system mainly used radio relay, and hence was also vulnerable to Indonesian interception. In a letter written in Portugal on 15 October 1997, Rogerio Lobato said he had radioed instructions to Falintil units in Bobonaro and Atabae to give protection to the Nine Network ,team travelling 'up to the border OPERATION FLAMBOYANT
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with Jose Ramos-Horta. ~t that time our radio operators were not familiar with exchanging messages by code,' he said. 'Due to lack of experience, our forces' normally conducted, all radio contacts in plain (clear) language, which was monitored by East Timorese radio operators on the Indonesian side. Therefore the Indonesian'military command knew that the newsmen were in Balibo.' On 13 or 14 October the radio monitors at Dading's headquarters picked up references in Fretilin radio traffic to journalists being at Balibo. Sources cited in the 1979 National Times report were 'self-contradictory on whether the journalists were distinguished as' Australian and whether the information was passed on to Col. Dading'. The same 1979 article cited an account from 'a source -among Timorese refugees', in ,Portugal that'·' on Saturday, '11 October two Timorese scouts had crossed from a' small place in Indonesia called Rai leu to observe Balibo. 'They noticed foreigners in the village, including one with fair hair. This was reported to Col. Dading. In October 1995, Benny Murdani acknowledged to the, 'journalist David Jenkins of The Sydney Morning Herald that Jakarta was well aware, from Col. Hernoto's intercepts; that there were journalists in Balibo, and had concluded that the journalists were not simply sending news reports to Dili but were 'helping Fretilin- by conveying information of a military nature' . According to Murdani: 'They had a radio and we had ,a monitoring system. They reported to their chief in Dili or Darwin. But intelligence had the impression that they reported back to [someone] in Australia, whether hebe a Timorese or an Australian. ' In fact, the journalists did not have a radio~ If they communicated with Dili or Darwin, and there is no indication they did, it would have had to have been from Maliana, about 20 kilometres east of Balibo (or 58
DEATH IN BALIBO; LIES IN CANBERRA
45 minutes away by road), where there was, a telephone that was connected to Dili by radio relay--and was vulnerable to interception. In addition to monitoring the telephone radio, relay betweenMaliana,~nd Dili, Col. He~noto's intercept team learned about the movements and activities of the Balibo Five from interception of the' radio traffic of the Fretilin units in Balibo, Atabae and Maliana--'with whom the ,Five were closely associated. The Seven team had been driven from Dili to Balibo by a Fretilin driver on 10-11 October, and messages were sent by Jose Ramos-Horta and Rogerio Lobato 'to the local command to protect them'. The Nine crew were met at the Dili airpo'rt by Jose Ramos-Horta on 12 October, and they had been driven to Balibo by an armed Fretilin driver on 12-13 October. When Ramos-Horta left Balibo to return to Dili on 14 October, he took films recorded by both teams to courier back to Australia for them. On 12 'October, Greg Shackleton carried a message to the Fretilin com... mandant at Maliana to send reinforcements 'back to defend Balibo'. These reinforcements (about15 soldiers) arrived at Maliana from Atabae on the afternoon of 13 October, and it was the two truck loads of reinforcements that the Seven team accompanied back to Balibo later that afternoon. It is likely that the journalists' role was mentioned in the Fretilin radio communications between Maliana and Atabae concerning the movement of these soldiers, and that these communications were the ones intercepted by Col. Hernoto's team in Batugade, to which Gen. Murdani must have been referring. So f~r, no transcripts of Falintil/Fretilinradio traffic around this time have been revealed. Nor does it appear that any recording exists of Fretilin's public broadcasts on Radio Maubere, which evidently did mention the OPERATION FLAMBOYANT
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five newsmen. Fretilin was given to boasting of the foreign visitors' it was showing around,' both to impress its followers and to get those followers to greet the visitors in large and enthusiastic numbers. More recently, new witnesses have come forward affirming that intercepts of Falintil communications by the monitoring post in Batugade around 13-15 October had included references' to· the· presence of the journalists in Balibo. In October 1998, a former UDT officer who worked in the. radio monitoring post in the intelligence section described in considerable' detail how ,he had been recruited 'to do special work for Dading Kalbuadi', which involved 'intercepting Fretilin communications', and how he had informed Col. Dading about the journalists: On Fretilin radio, speaking from Eagle Post [Atabae] to 'Rome Post [Dili] on the Fretilin radio, they said that the Australian journalists, maybe five, .maybe four, maybe three, were already in .Balibo . . . They said they ·were ·there. The reply [from Rome Post] was 'Message Received'. I wrote it down. I handed it. in writing,. when I left my shift, to Colonel Dading Kalbuadi.
This partisan was monitoring Fretilin radio communications as usual from Col. .Dading's:headquarters in Batugade over the night of Wednesday, 15 October, finishing his shift at 6am on the Thursday morning. He . has. said that 'during the night' he intercepted several radio communications between Fretilin units in Maliana, Bobonaro and Loes River, including a message on the morning of 16 October saying 'Indonesia has entered Balibo'. Another UDT commander, LorencoHornai,who was at Batugade under the command of an Indonesian 60
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
officer cover-named 'Major Leo', emerged as a witness in late 1998. He has also said that the Indonesian intelligence services were aware of the presence of eight journalists-·-five from Australia and three Portuguese-from interception of Fretilin military communications. Further evidence that the Indonesians in Batugade knew that Australian~based journalists were in Balibo came from another partisan, Fernando Mariz, who· commanded a platoon of Timorese 'anti-Communist' forces in Batugade, and whose Indonesian superior officer 'was also 'Major Leo'. At nights, Mariz and his colleagues listened to Radio Fretilin, which broadcast from Dili in . their own language. According to Mariz: [On 14 or 15 October] on the news they said five Australian journalists were in Balibo to film the movement of the war·. . . of the Indonesian troops. [So] we go to the compound where the general [that is Col. Dading] and his staff lived. We saw Major Leo and we talked to Major. Leo about the news we hear from the radio broadcast from Dili, Radio Fretilin. He said: 'Don't' worry. We know this a few days ago. Don't worry. We have proper medicine to give to them. Don't worry about this.'
Several other pro-Indonesian partisans have also testified· about their knowledge of the journalists being at Balibo prior to the attack on 16 October. For example; Jaoquim Estorninho, who was part ofa small dissident pro-Portuguese group within UDT, and was camped at Rai leo, just outside Batugade, said in. April 1996 that he was told on the afternon before the attack that there were 'white foreigners' in Balibo helping Fretilin. Domingos Oliveira, who was in Atambua before the attack, has recollected there. was 'information going around' about the journalists. Manuel dos Santos, who OPERATION FLAMBOYANT
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had been a policeman under the Portuguese,in ;-Balibo until retreating with the UDT in August, also precalled talk among the Indonesians at Batugade before the attack about eight foreigners and others known to be up at Balibo. He recalled that the Portuguese TV reporter Adelino Gomes was included by name, and that these eight were in fact a 'hitlist'of people to be killed. The presence of the journalists in Balibo may also have been known to Lt-Col. Dinuth's group in Kupang. According 'to Rogerio Lobato, for example: 'They [that is the Indonesians] knew that the Australians were there', as evinced- by broadcasts by Radio Loro Sae to -East Timor, which referred to 'the presence of the Communists, the Australian Communists, in Balibo helping the Fretilin soldiers'. Radio Loro Sae also broadcast one of the earliest accounts of the deaths of the Balibo Five. As Jill Jolliffe has recorded: On 20 October Timorese in Dili reported hearing a broadcast from Radio Kupang quoting Lopes da Cruz as saying the Australians were Communists who- were 'integrated' with Fretilin forces and deserved to be killed. As a result, on the night of 21 October Radio Kupang was monitored and a similar statement recorded. _In the garbled rhetoric of the Revolutionary Anti-Communist Movement it read: The forces who are fighting against the Communists are from DDT, Apodeti, KOTA and Trabalhista . . . We will do our best to reach Dili and then go to Tutuala to liberate this land from the hands of the Communists. W eonly want to remove their livers . . •. We attacked with mortars, machine-guns and various, kinds of guns and aircraft all the peaks of Balibo. The Australian Communists were supporting and aside Fretilin [sic] to fight against our forces showing their heroism to our traitors during the fights 62
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
at which they camped. How could they fight us, if as soon as our guns began crying, they all disappeared? Three Australians could run away so they want to tell the others we were anti-Communist forces. We are not afraid of Fr~tilin; hor the Australian Communists. You can send them to the border to play with us. We have also many friends in Asia.
It is not clear whether Radio Kupang made references to foreign journalists at Balibo before the 16 October attack, and again, no recordings .are known to be archived. Murdani's 1995 remarks verify that the Indonesians did know the journalists were there. But was this knowledge at commandlevel-Murdani in Jakarta, and Dading and his sigint staff in Batugade-·passed to the field units grouping for the Balibo attack? Prior knowledge of the presence of Australians at Balibo has long been denied in private conversation by soldiers from the Indonesian Special Forces who were involved in the attack. Yunus Yosfiah, the officer directly in charge, denies it, though he initially denied being at Balibo. He also still denies having seen or heard of the five journalists at all in two weeks he spent around Balibo after the attack-something specifically contradicted by Timorese who accompanied the attack and who claim he briefed them to keep quiet about the newsmen the evening after the attack. Probably the journalists were at risk even if there were not orders to target them. Feeling was strong among the Indonesian military and their local allies that Australians were supporting Fretilin. A month earlier, on 18 September, one of the authors, Hamish McDonald, then based in Jakarta, visited Batugade when it was still in UDT hands. He asked Jose Martins how he would treat any Australian journalists caught while working OPERATION FLAMBOYANT
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from Fretilin lines. Martins replied (in the presence of a Far Eastern Economic Review reporter, who recorded the reply): 'If we catch any Australians around here we will shoot them all.' This antipathy was even stronger towards the other Europeans most likely to be in Balibo, the Portuguese. Given the covert nature of the Indonesian attack, and this level of hostility, it would most probably have taken a specific order not to kill the newsmen for their lives. to have been spared. The other question is, if Murdani and Dading knew the newsmen wereatBalibo,was their knowledge mentioned.in any communications that could have been intercepted 'by other sigint agencies, particularly in Australia? If so, could some intervention have been started to extricate or otherwise save the newsmen? Were the Fretilin transmissions, from which the Indonesians obtained their knowledge, also picked up by Australian monitors? As we shall see, one of the most tightly guarded secrets· in the history of Australia's .intelligence community s,howsthat the Indonesians did inadvertantly,let on, befor~ the attack, that they knew Australian journalists were in Balibo.
64
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
.FOUR
COM,PROMISED DIPLOMACY
wo DAYS BEFORE Col. Dading's forces moved into position for the attack on Balibo, on Monday, 13 October, a white Holden bearing the CD-18 numberplates that marked it as an Australian embassy vehicle pulled off from the bustle of food and motor-tyre repair stalls on central Jakarta's Jalan Tanah Abang IV into the driveway of a discreetly modern three-storey building. After passing briefly through the city's steamy heat, two crisply dressed diplomats stepped from the airconditioned car to the coolness of the lobby, and after a smiling welcome from reception headed for the lift. The two men were the second- and third-ranking officials in the Australian embassy; both were rising ambassadorial talent in the diplomatic service and cleared for access to very high levels of intelligence. The embassy's minister, Malcolm Dan, had acted as chief of mission for three months over the end of 1974,
T
65
and with his keen instinct for human character had forged close ties with a range oft senior Indonesian political figures. The political counsellor, Allan Taylor, was a coolly efficient manager of a political section that included some junior officials deeply unhappy with the trend of Australian policy on Timor. Upstairs in an office decorated with carved teak and elaborate Balinese paintings, Dan and Taylor sat in armchairs facing a bespectacled Chinese-Indonesian in a short-sleeved batik shirt, Harry'Tjan Silalahi. The two Australians were to be given inside information of detail, importance and timeliness that, had it come from a spy or decoded signal, would have been regarded as the intelligence coup of a lifetime. But it was a gift, and like a lot of gifts it came with strings. The building in which these three men met housed the academic-style institution, the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Harry Tjan Silalahi held no official position with the Indonesian government or military. But as we have seen, the outfit known as CSIS or 'Tanah Abang' had much more clout than it pretended to have. With its chairman, Lt-Gen. Ali Murtopo, then the deputy head of the civilian intelligence body Bakin and controller of Opsus, and with another associate, Maj.-Gen. Benny Murdani, then head of military intelligence, the CSIS had direct lines into the covert side of Jakarta's ambivalent Timor p'olicy. The institute's directors, especially Sililahi and Yusuf Wanandi, pursued a critical second" track of diplomacy connecting this covert policy with' interested foreign countries. As the three men sat around the coffee table in Sililahi's office, Dan and Taylor were told that three days later, on the morning of 16 October 1975, some 3200 Indonesian soldiers, including commandos of the elite Special Forces (then known as Kopassandha, 66
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
now Kopassus) , would attack in three places across the land border of East Timor, then legally a Portuguese territory. The aim would be to roll ,back the proindependence Fretilin forces that had predominated in the short civil war that had started two months earlier. This would be
67
command of the territory's north coast near the border and the road south to the rice-growing valley of Maliana. Seizing Balibo and Maliana would open the best approach to Dili, along the road down through the coffee plantations of Ermera. The connection that resulted in the Australian embassy's astonishingly detailed advance reportage of Indonesian moves in Timor had been built up in the latter months of 1974, following Whitlam's talks with Suharto at W onosobo and Yogyakarta, Central Java in September that year. As we have seen, Suharto left the talks thinking that tepo seliru(mutual understanding) had been reached, that the territory's integration with Indonesia \Vas Canberra's preferred option, and that, subject to a formal adherence to notions of self-determination and avoidance of force, Australian policies would support that outcome. Canberra's professed ignorance of thegd;thering Indonesian campaign-which included promotion, of local supporters, intelligence surveys, p~opa,ganda through the radio station in Kupang and the newspapers run by Murtopo's people, exploratory, contacts with key Portuguese and Timorese figures, and pr~parations for .military invasion-would have done nothing to disabuse Suharto of this understanding. It encouraged it. By mid-December 1974, the Australian embassy had been reporting a distinct change in Jakarta's mood. According to former colleagues, ambassador Bob Furlonger had, been, 'jubilant' on his return from Yogyakarta about the outcome of the, Whitlam-Suharto talks, which he clearly savyas the crowning achievement of. his ambassadorship, then about to end. Malcolm Dan, charge d'affaires for some three months between Furlonger's departure and new ambassador Richard W oolcott's arrival, telegrammed Canberra on 18 February 1975 about a hardening in the Indonesian government's foreign policy approach. On 68
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
13 February 1975, Dan referred in a telegram to a discussion with Harry Tjan Silalahi in which an invasion was clearly suggested. Silalahi asked Dan who he thought was the toughest 'hawk' about Timor on the Indonesian side. The surprising al}~")V.~,r supplied by Sil~lahi was: Adam Malik, the civilian 'foreign minister. Malik had told a recent meeting of generals that if they carried out an invasion, he could handle the diplomatic fallout. Within the Australian embassy, Dan and Taylor took up the contacts with CSIS, which increased from every few days to every day once conflict broke out in August 1975. Ambassador Woolcott usually conducted the toplevel meetings, including those with Gen. Murdani. As 1975 wore on, the closeness of the contacts and the astonishing insights they brought caused unease in some quarters of Canberra. Whitlam saw foreign policy as his forte and had made unassertive West Australian senator Don Willesee his foreign' minister. Whitlatn was constantly springing unilateral foreign policy decisions on his unprepared minister. Willesee's departmental secretary, Alan Renouf, had been chosen by Whitlam largely on the strength of his work while ambassador in Paris in setting up Whitlam's groundbreaking trip to China in 1971. But aside from that, Whitlam had known little about Renouf and became irked to find that, as secretary in Foreign Affairs, Renouf stuck to the proper lines of authority-and his' minister. Renouf and his department had also prepared a policy brief for Whitlam's September 1974 talks with Suharto that was far'more balanced towards the right 'of 'selfdetermination for the East Timorese than the' message Whitlam gave Suharto. Both Willesee and Renouf found themselves 'out of the loop'on Indonesia and Timor. Whitlam made Timor policy unilaterally, without reference to 'Cabinet or its subcommittee on Foreign Affairs and Defence, as COMPROMISED DIPLOMACY
69
far as Renoufis aware. W oolcott had been promoted to deputy,' ,secretary rankin Foreign Affairs early during Whitlam's term of office, and to Renoufs mind tended to exceed his authority in putting 'the department's views to the public. The gregarious and energetic W oolcbtt, 'who worked press and other contacts from pre-breakfast tennis games to discussions over nightcaps, was certainly a more visible spokesman of the government's foreign policy. When he was assigned to Jakarta in March 1975, he went with an unusual aura as an envoy with special links to the prime minister. Willesee, too,was angered by' Woolcott's practice of promoting polities and perceptions directly to editors and other media figu'res. 'I complained bitterly to Renouf, who rebuked W oolcott for doing that', Geoff Briot, then Willesee's press secretary, recalled in 1998. As well as Whitlam's office, the inner loop on Timor included Woolcott and his senior embassy staff, Graham Feakes, the department's first assistant secretary in charge of Southeast Asia, branch head Lance Joseph, and several other department officers such as Geoffrey Forrester, the Javanese and Indonesian linguist who acted as Whitlam's interpreter in his Suharto meetings and who wrote the official" records of them. A,'file in the department of Foreign Affairs' records shows that Willesee expressed deep concern to senior officials about the nature of the information being obtained from Silatihi at the CSIS and from Murdani. With so much detail, apparently accurate, Australia could be compromised, Willesee pointed out. Australia would be' seen as a party to an invasion of Timor. 'CSIS was seen as an easy window into Indonesian thinking', Briot has confirmed. 'What worried me was it was too easy. They were only telling us what they wanted us to know.' In a written reply to his minister, Graham Feakes, the Southeast Asia branch head" argued that the department 70
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
was conscious of dangers, but that it was a two-way street. The contacts gave the Australian embassy the· opportunity to put views opposing the use of force and backing the East Timorese people's right to self-determination, to influence Indonesi~rpolicy-makers all.cl to learn what the .Indonesians «fe'~e,' planning. It was· often the .main source of information, Feakes said. The channel did indeed give all those opportunities. It clearly did provide valuable information,possibly unobtainable from other sources except in fragm~ntary form. But it was not used to press the Indonesians to avoid the use of force and to encourage them to carry out or permit a valid act of self-determination. Instead, Canberra used the channel to advise the Indonesians on how much, they could getaway with in the eyes. of the Australian public and world opinion. In effect, a group of Australia's representatives, without any observable constraint from their political masters,were covertly aiding and abetting one country to invade and conquer another. This group was 'signing off on the invasion plans of· another country. Advance notice about the launching of theBalibo~ Maliana attack was cabled by Ambassador Richard W oolcott to the department of Foreign Affairs later on 13 October. Canberra had almost three days to prepare fOT what would inevitably be a controversial development for Australian public opinion to accept. It had two clear days to make all efforts to get Australian citizens out of the path of danger. By Wednesday, 15 October, the day before the attack, who among the parties watching East Timor knew that five Australian-based newsmen ·were at the Indonesian border, and who knew that they were in Balibo? Fretilin certainly knew. Ramos-Horta had left them all there when he returned to Dili on Tuesday, COMPROMISED DIPLOMACY
71
14 October, taking their film with him. The comInanders of the Indonesian forces at Batugade knew that foreign journalists were at Balibo, and probably knew some were from Australia. The Indonesian embassy in Canberra had been told of the Seven team's plans by Greg Shackleton and had been asked to pass this in~ formation on to the pro-Indonesian forces in Timor. It is not known whether the embassy did pass this information back to the foreign ministry in Jakarta and, if so, whether the ministry-out of the Indonesian loop itself-sent it to anyone directly involved. The Seven Network knew its team was heading for the border, as it had already broadcast Shackleton's ·report from Atabae saying exactly that. The Nine Network knew its two men were inside East Timor hoping to get to the border. The Department of Foreign Affairs and the Department of Defence knew the two news teams had gone into Dili. Department of Transport officials and presumably Federal Police and Australian Security.Intelligence Organisation officers in Darwin also knew they had gone in~o Timor. The television stations had not formally notified the government of their plans, partly because the details of the teams'day-to-day movements were decided on the ground by the correspondents themselves. T,he Australian embassy. in Jakarta had no idea the journalists were near Balibo, Ambassador W oolcott and his . cleputy Malcolm Dan continue to affirm. Neither their Indonesian contacts nor Canberra gave the embassy the smallest hint that any Australians were in the path of danger. It was, asserts an official who was in a senior position at the time, one of the most serious breakdowns ever to have taken place in Australian diplomacy. 'The whole operation collapsed from there', the official says, referring to the policy of staying closely engaged with 72
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
the Indonesians. 'Everything collapsed, because of the failure to pick up that one bit of information.' The full distribution list in Canberra of the embassy's 13 October cable is not yet revealed, and it may never be known conclusively who read it closely. Certainly, critical· cables on the Timor crisis such as this were routinely sent to the senior ministers and officials directly involved in setting and adjusting policy. W oolcott's cable notifying the cross-border invasion landed, by the morning of Tuesday, 14 October, on the desks of the following politicians and public servants: Prime Minister Gough Whitlam; Foreign Minister Don Willesee; Defence Minister Bill Morrison; the secretary of the Foreign Affairs department, Alan Renouf; the head of the department of Foreign Affairs' Southeast Asia division, Graham Feakes; branch head Lance Joseph; the head of Foreign Affairs' Indonesia desk, Michael Curtin; the secretary of the Defence department, Sir Arthur Tange; the director of the Joint Intelligence Organisation 010), Gordon J ockel; the director of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS), Bill Robertson. On 14 October, the same day the cable was distributed, the Seven Network broadcast on its main evening news bulletins the report Shackleton had filmed in Atabae the previous Saturday, stating clearly that the Seven team were on their way to the border. This and previous reports from Shackleton's Seven crew in Timor were shown on CTC 7, the only commercial--TVstation in Canberra, and on HSV 7 in Melbourne, where three Australian intelligence organisations (ASIO, ASIS and DSD) then had their headquarters. Transcripts of national television news reports were also distributed to the reI.;.. evant desks in Foreign Affairs and the JIO. It beggars belief that Shackleton's report was not seen by some of the recipients of the cable from Jakarta, and --that the two pieces of information were not put together. COMPROMISED DIPLOMACY
73
Woolcott even recalled in 1995 that his 13 October cable, which was still unreleased in early 2000, included a general reminder to see that Australians were kept away from the border. Previous intelligence and diplomatic cables had already primed Canberra's defence and intelligence community for the details W oolcott haq now cabled. The intelligence agencies were all on the lookout-·-corroborated by a tip-off given to the Australian Associated Press office in Darwin early on 16 October about 'something big' about to happen that day. For the politicians in Canberra, however, Timor was well down the list of priorities. On Tuesday, 14 October, R.F.X. Connor resigned as Whitlam's minister for minerals and energy after it was revealed· that, despite assuring Whitlamand the parliament to the cQntrary five months earlier, he had continued to keep open contacts with a controversial Pakistani financial broker, TirathKhemlani, in the hope of obtaining a multibillion 'petro-dollar' loan from Arab· countries for his propos~d large-scale development of Australia's natural gas grid. On the morning of Wednesday, 15 October, the opposition leader, Malcolm Fraser, met the caucus of his conservative coalition and decided to block passage of the government's money supply bills in the Senate to force an early election. Fraser announced the decision that afternoon. Whitlam then met Labor's caucus in the evening and immediately afterwards made a nationally televised address to declare he would not call an election to break the impasse. Renoufs department also had other, more mundane, matters grabbing its attention and time. The Malaysian prime minister, Tun Abdul Razak, had arrived in Canberra on Tuesday, 14 October and his visit was dogged by Malaysian students protesting at crackdowns on dissent at home. 74
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What could have been done in the two clear days or more between receipt of the Jakarta embassy's 13 October cable and the 16 October attack? Might Canberra have got a message to the journalists warning them of the danger? <,.",' This was possible, assuming there had been animmediate decision to see if any Australians were in the danger zone. Canberra had no official representation in Dili, and we have seen how tenuous were communications to the border area. But the Defence department was in daily contact with a team of Australian army doctors and male nurses who had been in Dili since mid-September running Dili's hospital on secondment to the International Committee of the Red Cross. Although continuing on the Australian army's payroll, carrying army identity cards and keeping u.niforms in their baggage, the team wore civilian clothes and did not reveal their military links. Their assignment to Timor, meeting a request from the Red Cross for help, had caused lengthy debate between the departments of Defence and Foreign Affairs. The defence minister, Bill Morrison, continued to be 'a little uneasy' about the use of RAAF aircraft and the army medicos in East Timor, according to a diary kept by a team member, Captain C.G. Russell-Jones. Under command of Maj. John Alwyn, a regular army doctor, they had their own radio communications to Darwin run by a civilian Red Cross operator, Peter' Smith-using the call-sign~lwyn's Chipmunks'-and received regular reports about security conditions based on'DSD intelligence. The team were supplied by RAAF Caribou and DC-3 flights out of Darwin. On many of these flights an RAAF intelligence officer and Indonesian linguist, Sqd. Ldr Stan Harding, travelled into Dili to supervise the team's logistics backup. Harding was to be made a Member of the British Empire in COMPROMISED DIPLOMACY
75
1976 for his work in East Timor, the only one to re'ceivea decoration or service medal among the more than a dozen army and air force personnel who had entered the crisis zone. Two of the army team, Maj. Paul Dineen and Lt Neville 'How~-Smith, had made a' four-day trip to Baucau, Batugade and Balibo, returning to Dili on 10 October. Russell-Jones says in his diary that 'Dineen was extremely quiet and said that "the sharp end didn't grab him' " particularly as some of the gunfire and exploding grenades were too close for comfort'. This suggests' the two officers had been' close to the Indonesian attack on Batugade on 7-8 October. On Sunday, 12 October, the army team in Dili treated the ABC team led by Roger Doyle· and theAAP journalist Rick Collins, after a car accident. They had just returned from the western border, bringing with them Shackleton's report filmed at Atabae.Russell-Jones recorded concerns about the risks being taken by journalists, given what one of his patients called 'the constantly' changing 'scenario' and the lack of a 'protec~ tive military infrastructure'. The returning journalists would surely ,have mentioned the Seven crew had gone on towards this dangerous border. Even in ·Dili itself, the army medicos themselves felt in increasing danger, both from accidental discharges by Fretilin troops and frequent shootings at 'real or imagined incursions by Apodeti supporters. The team was in regular contact with Fretilin and Falintil, 'treating the w'ounded, checking the security situation, and monitoring the condition of prisoners. Conceivably, Alwyn's, do'ctors could have been used to pass on a message to Fretilin to be sent by radio-telephone to Maliana, and thence hand-carried to Balibo. Would Fretilin have agreed 'to pass it on, given that Jose Ramos-Horta 'had left the newsmen in Balibo ,on 14 October, apparently 76
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
without making any forceful argument that they should withdraw? Would the journalists ·have taken heed, even if it had been a direct order from the managements of their television stations to pullout? An invasion was what they were ho.ping to see. , Alternatively, it> Would have been pbssible to send a message to the Indonesians. The RAAF intelligence officer,Sqd. Ldr Harding, was in Dili at the tim·e and was in a position to supply authorities in Australia with a list of Australians in Portuguese Timor together with their known whereabouts. Harding seems to have been well aware of intensifying military action: he notified the medical team on 16 October that RAAF flights had been stopped and that all further. air support for them would be carried out by the charter company SAARTAS. If they had been supplied with a list of Australians in Portuguese Timor, the embassy in Jakarta could then have been ordered to spare no efforts in warning. the Indonesians concerned that, however irked they might be by the Australian media, the. death or disappearance of Australians would rebound horribly against their campaign. W oolcott and his senior staff such as Dan and Taylor had almost instant access to Murtopo, Murdani and others directing operations Komodo and Flamboyant. It was even a matter worth taking to Suharto himself, if necessary. Did no one in official circles in Canberra or Melbourne make the necessary mental connections between all available pieces of information to head off a tragedy that rebounded on Australian diplomacy? If so, it was a glaring failure of 'staff work', particularly by the department of Foreign Affairs. However, it was not such a simple case of inefficiency or negligence. Key officials decided to leave their political leaders in ignorance until it was too late to act. COMPROMISED DIPLOMACY
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So, on Thursday, 16 October, Canberra went about its business, focused on the game of bluff between Whitlam and opposition leader Fraser, as the newsmen met their deaths in far-off Balibo and their bodies were burnt. Some key ministers and officials received preliminary reports about the killing of the journalists in Balibo that night. They went off, holding this terrible secret, to a cocktail party at the Lakeside Hotel followed by a dinner at Government House for .Malaysia's Tun Razak.
78
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
FIVE
LISTENERS IN THE SOUTH
A
in Albert Park, a Victorian-era inner suburb of Melbourne, the occupants of a sprawling army barracks thrown up as temporary offices in World War II were monitoring what was happening in Timor very closely. This was the headquarters of the Defence Signals Directorate (DSD), Australia's largest, most important and most secret intel~igence organisation. The DSD had grown out of Australia's wartime collaboration with the British and the Americans to intercept foreign radio transmissions and break codes and ciphers. Australia had three signals intelligence (or sigint) agencies during World War II: a naval sigint unit; the army's D Special Section, which broke Japanese diplomatic cables; and Central Bureau in Brisbane, working on Japanese army and air force ciphers and providing sigint directly for the Allied supreme command under Gen. Douglas MacArthur. Their successes in CONTINENT AWAY,
79
helping MacArthur outwit the Japanese are considered to have shortened the war by as much as two years. This wartime co-operation was institutionalised in the highly secret UKUSA Agreement signed in 1947-48 by the directors of the sigint organisations of Britain, the United States, Australia and Canada-with the Australians signing for New Zealand. The existence of this agreement was known only to the prime minister and two other ministers. It governed co-operation in the interception of signals around the globe, as well as the exchange of sigint products. As the Cold War intensified, this activity gave a window into the efforts of the Soviet KGB's espionage operations around the world. Of critical importance in domestic politics, this information, code-named Venona, was carefully guarded from politicians by self-appointed custodians of the sigint community anxious to hide their arcane skills from their intelligence targets. By the time of the Timor crisis, three decades after the Pacific war, the Australian sigint establishment was still dominated by a small group of individuals who had been instrumental in building up the UKUSA relationship. Under a British sigint officer, the Australian sigint operations were merged into a new Defence Signals Branch in 1947 (later renamed the Defence Signals Directorate). Ralph Thompson, who became the first Australian director in April 1950, was still the DSD's director in 1975. Thompson was an army sigint officer who had served in the Middle East in 1941-42, and then returned to set up two of the largest Allied sigint intercept stations in Australia (at Mornington, near Melbourne, and at Darwin). He was supported by a special assistant, who was also the senior British officer, and a special US liaison officer. By 1975, Thompson was close to retirement and leaving much of the running of DSD to his two most 80
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
(SIGINT Operations & Production) M.A. Wiliams
eN Branch (South & Southeast Asia)
J.G. Murdoch
CN1Sectlon Indonesia - services
DHI Section Indonesia
CN2Sectlon Indonesia - Diplomatic and Non-service
DSDorganisation concerning Indonesia, 1975
senior officers. Mostyn ('Mos') Williams, as the assistant director heading C Group, was in charge of sigint operations and production. A gifted analyst of signals intelligence, he had worked in the Central Bureau during W orId War II and moved to Melbourne in late 1945 to help establish the postwar sigint organisation. He soon took charge of its intercept stations and became the organisation's senior communications traffic analyst. Ralph Thompson described him as 'the most outstanding member of DSD' during his tenure, in terms of both devotion and brilliance. Thompson believed that Williams should have succeeded him as DSD director when he retired in 1977. The other senior official was R.D. (Bob) Botterill, who was the head of D Group, which included the cryptanalysis or code-breaking section. (This group was said to have more mathematicians with first-class honours degrees than the mathematics departments in all the Australian universities combined.) Botterill was another army officer from Central Bureau who had ended the war in MacArthur's sigint staff ill LISTENERS IN THE SOUTH
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the Philippines. During the 1950s, Botterill had broken the top Indonesian military and diplomatic cip.hers, produced by.Hegelin machines .·acquired. from Switzerland. The Hegelins, which were very' similar to the Enigma electro-mechanical cipher machines used by Germany in World War II and famously broken by the British code-breakers at Bletchley Park, were used by the Indonesians until the early 1990s. As it turned out, Batterill was Thompson's successor, serving as DSD director from 1977 to 1982, but in 1975 Williams was generally regarded as heir apparent. By the mid-1970s, the interception 'and decryption of Indonesian signals had become one of the two highest priority activities in terms of staff and .budgetary resources for DSD. (DSD's other principal commitment concerned Chinese signals, the primary interception site for which was the joint DSD-British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) station at Little Sai Wan in Hong Kong, where there were some 150 Australian sigint personnel stationed.) DSD's activities against Indonesia had grown rapidly in the early 1960s, as the Sukarno regime built up diplomatic and military links with the Soviet Union and communist China-, took over West New Guinea from th'e Dutch and pursued its Confrontation against the newly formed Malaysia, when Australian and Indonesian forces were engaged in a secret war in Borneo. They continued to expand through the next 15 years following Suharto's takeover of effective power from Sukarno in 1966. Despite the enormous relief in the Australian government at the crushing of Indonesia's communist party, Australian policy-makers remained anxious about Indonesia's internal political stability and its attitudes to Papua New Guinea. As new technical capabilities became available-DSD's computers were always a generation ahead of those available com82
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
mercially-·-DSDwas able to intercept a much wider range of signals and· decrypt them· more rapidly. In fact, DSD was able to monitor essentially all Indonesian radio communications reckoned to be of political, diplomaticormilitary significance, including Jakarta's diplomatic traffica·nd messages between its higher military commands, which used the Hegelin encryption machines. Until February 1974, DSD's largest site for interception of Indonesian signals was··in Singapore, where some 160 Australian sigintpersonnel were stationed in 1973, although the station intercepted signals from several other countries in Southeast Asia in addition to Indonesian traffic. It had been the main source of intelligence to the British and Australian governments about Indonesia's conduct of the Confrontation of Malaysia' in 1963-65. Small field detachments were placed in the north Borneo states of Sabah and Sarawak to follow.the radio signals of Indonesiall raiding parties and to direct British and Australian Special Forces to attack them. In one celebrated instance, DSD intercepts enabled the Australian army's Special Air Service (SAS) to ambush an Indonesian infiltration group that included the young .Benny Murdani. Some two decades later, when Gen. Murdani visited the . SAS barracks in. Perth, his .hosts showed him records of the clash, which he had been very lucky to survive. During the Indonesian army's seizure of power in 1965.,..-66, the Singapore station also provided Canberra with vital intelligence. At the same time, a DSDstation. at Coonawarra, on the southern outskirts of Darwin, which . had been established by the navy in 1939 and was one of the most -importantsigint stations in Australia during World War II, monitored signals in the eastern part of the Indonesian archipelago. By 1975, Australia's largest and most important sigint LISTENERS IN THE SOUTH
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station was located at Shoal Bay, about 20 kilometres north-east of Darwin. Constructed in 1973, it was principally concerned with the interception of Indonesian radio communications (although it also intercepted signals from other countries in Southeast Asia) ~ It was built to replace both the DSD station at Coonawarra, which by the mid-1960s was suffering from electrical interference caused by the growth of Darwin, and the DSD station in Singapore,which, it had been recognised in 1966-67, might not be available after the early seventies and was in fact closed in February 1974. The Shoal Bay station was staffed by about 200 personnel, of whom more than 150 were engaged in sigint activities--about 70 from the navy, about 70 from the army (detached from 7 Signals Regiment at Cabarlah, near Toowoomba, where DSD -ha'd another listening post), and about a dozen from the air force (detached from No. 3 Telecommunications Unit at a DSD station at Pearce, Western Australia). The principal sigint system at Shoal Bay comprised two concentric rings of steel poles linked by cables. Called a Circularly-disposed Antenna Array by communications specialists, it was produced by Plessey Radio Systems in Britain and code-named Pusher. The system was highly sensitive to the whole spectrum of high-frequency (HF) radio signals, which included most medium- to long-range transmissions. It was also able to determine the direction of intercepted signals by measuring the minute time differences between reception of the radio waves at each pole. Shoal Bay was also equipped with a very large 'spiderweb' antenna-strung from a single lattice-steel mast over 100 metres high--which monitored HF and very high-frequency signals, such as those produced by low-powered walkie-talkie and field radio sets. The interception range of this 'system depended very much 84
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
on the power of the transmIttIng radio. Sometimes it could .pick up VHF signals from hundreds of kilometres away. To extend DSD's reach in the VHF spectrum, specialist personnel. 'of the navy's Electronic Systems Unit were put aboard destroyers and Oberon-class submarines, which were deployed close to the target area. They reported back to Melbourne, independently of the host vessel's own commander. Shoal Bay had achieved an 'initial operational capability' in February 1974. The station was severely damaged by Cyclone Tracy on 25 December that yearits staff had to scour the surrounding bushland for days to recover working papers containing evidence of interception and decryption of Indonesian signals--but the station'wasquicklyreconstructed. Though not as well placed as the Singapore station had been for the interception .of some transmissions in Sumatra or Borneo, Shoal Bay provided better coverage of the eastern part of Indonesia, and of signals in Timor. In October 1975, the Shoal Bay station intercepted radio communications between Col. Dading's headquarters at Batugade and his operational units elsewhere in Timor, the radio communications between Batugade and Jakarta via Radio Loro Sae in Kupang, and the radio communications between Dading and the U dayana Regional Military Command in Bali. The 150 sigint staff at Shoal Bay performed three main tasks. The radio intercept operators maintained the receiving equipment. Most receivers were tuned to the .frequencies known to be used regularly by Indonesian commands and field units. Some other receivers were operated by 'search' teams who scanned the radio spectrum. to detect new transmissions. The second group consisted of 'traffic analysts' whose job was to study the pattern of transmissions, especially the call-signs, and work out· the communications heirarchy and the LISTENERS IN THE SOUTH
85
command, relationships: in other words, who directs whom, .what levels of encryption are used, who is not included and the tempo of. activity. Defined as the 'analysis of externals', traffic analysis is like looking through someone's letterbox -and noting the origins of letters, handwriting of senders, dates and frequency of mail-without opening the envelopes and reading the letters themselves. The third group consisted of linguists, most of whom sat with earphones listening to and transcribing voice communications, coping with accents and frequent static. Others translated morse teletype, which had.beeh encrypted in ciphers routinely broken by DSD--doing .what was called 'first echelon analysis'-'-' before sending the intercepts down to Melbourne~ TheDSD staff at Shoal Bay included a high proportion.of women, and overall they were very y·oung, with high-school educations, picked out from junior recruit intakes for their natural. linguistic abilities and se.nt to the RAAF Language School at Point Cook, near Melbourne,for intensive training. With their sensitive ears for language .and sound, these young -. specialists would often develop an instant recognition of particular circuits and voices-and of any changes. The Shoal Bay station was assisted in monitoring Indonesian signals by two other DSD intercept stations. TheDSD station at HMAS Harman, on the southeastern outskirts of Canberra, devoted special attention to the interception of diplomatic radio traffic to and from foreign embassies in Canberra (with the Indonesian.embassy traffic ,orie of the highest priorities). It cooperated, closely with the Darwin station, often being able to intercept transmissions from Southeast'· Asia that 'skip Qver' northern Australia. The station at Cabarlah, operated by the army's 7 Signals Regiment, was also equipped with a 'Pusher' Circular Antenna Array. The primary mission of this 86
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
station was to monitor radio transmISSIons through Papua New Guinea and the southwest 'Pacific. But it frequently monitored Indonesian signals as welL This mostly involved radio traffic in Irian Jaya (western New Guinea)-, b'ut in 1974-75 it also included traffic in Timor. The intercepted material was' sent down to DSD headquarters in Melbourne by encrypted teletype. The material still requiring 'deciphering was sent to . . the Indonesian section of the cryptanalysis branch within Botterill's D Group. The clear-Ianguage'or easily broken material went immediately to the South and Southeast Asia Branch headed by J.G. Murdoch in Mos"Williams' C Group. This branch included a section working on the signals .of the Indonesian armed .forces and a section responsible for diplomatic and other civilian signals. This group would also analyse the products cracked by D Group's cryptanalysts. The linguists and analysts·in C group .often' differed with the translations and interpretations made in the first-echelon analysis at the forward intercept stations~ It was the C Group's renditions that were forwarded to the 'customers' of DSD in the government and foreign allied intelligence agencies. The distribution point for these customers· was '. the DSD Liaison Office in Canberra, located on the western end of the 3rd floor of Building L, which housed the Joint Intelligence Organisation 010) in' the defence department complex at, Russell Hill. In 1975 the liaison office had 14 staff, who worked in three shifts, and it was headed through the 1970s by J .A. Oock) MacDonald. One of the key DSD officers responsible for distributing Southeast Asian material to· other analysts throughout the organisation was Peter Trewartha. JIO had been established in 1969 to provide the Department of Defence and the service chiefs with LISTENERS IN THE SOUTH
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intelligence assessments prepared by analysts drawn from all three uniformed services and civilians of bureaucratic, academic andotheibackgrounds. Its first t~o directors were from the Department of Foreign Affairs, beginning with Robert Furlqnger who left ~obeco'me ambassador to Jakarta in 1972. His successor was Gordon Jockel, the previous ambassador in Indonesia. As JIO director, Jockel was also chairman of the National Intelligence Committee, formed in 1973 to improve·· the co~oTdination of the Australian •. intelligence agencies by setting ·priorities for intelligence gath'ering and assigning tasks among the agencies. He found his second responsibility hard going. In November 1974 he reported that only the JIO came under the committee's 'direct jurisdiction' .by virtue of his own two hats. The two foreign intelligence collection agencies, DSD and the Australian Secret ·Intelligence Service, reported to the heads of Defence and Foreign Affairs respectively. In addition, Jockel's, appointment to JIG was opposed by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) ~.. the internal security service, because of his marriage to an Indonesian·· during his Jakarta· posting. The then ASIO director-general,Peter Barbour, went to the prime minister, William McMahon, to object, but the defence department head, Sir Arthur·· Tange, who had known Jockel throughout his career in foreign affairs, insisted on the appointment. Thereafter ASIO's suspicions continued to grow, fostered by Jockel's outside contacts, such as his friendship with the journalist Peter Hastings, the recruitment of independently minded academic specialists toJIO, and the epidemic of leaks that infected the organisation in the mid-1970s. Jockel was supported by one civilian deputy director, Arthur McMichael, and one military deputy, CdreKen Gray. The organisation had four directorates, of which the Directorate of Joint Service Intelligence (DJSI) was 88
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
Office of Current Intelligence
R.F. Osborn
Organisation of the JIO, 1975
responsible for the analysis of military developments in the region. JIO's principal analytical arm was the National Assessments Staff (NAS) , which also worked directly to the National Intelligence Committee and produced longer term assessments. JIO also included the Office of Current Intelligence (OCI), which was located on the 3rd floor of Building L with the DSD Liaison Office. It was a fairly small office, with a head and some two dozen staff including both analysts and support personnel. Its function was described officially as a 'watch office' designed 'to bring rapidly to the attention of senior policy advisers and relevent agencies, external events of probable interest to them'. Its clientele included the prime minister, the foreign minister, the minister for defence and their respective departmental secretaries. OCI was headed by Rowan Osborn, a career Foreign Affairs officer with a South Australian establishment background and upper-class English mannerisms of speech. Osborn had a forceful deputy, formally called the OCI co-ordinator, in John Bennetts, who had had 30 years experience as a journalist with leading Melbourne newsLISTENERS IN THE SOUTH
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papers and a brief stint as a lecturer in political science at the Australian National University before joining JIO in 1971. But he had been exposed to the world of intelligence much earlier, as a young soldier in World War II when' he was attached to the Allied Intelligence Bureau and served in Borneo. In 1976 he went on from OCI to become the JIO's liaison officer in Washington. He returned to Canberra in 1978 to be the head of current intelligence in the new Office of National Assessments (ONA) , at which time JIO's Office of Current, Intelligence was disbanded. The office had a staff of 12 analysts in four geographic sections. The largest of these was the Southeast Asian section with four analysts, including Alistair Morrison, son of George 'Chinese' Morrison, who had spent much of his life involved in 'political affairs in Asia and who by 1975 was a legendary 'father figure' in JIO. Another was a brilliant Indonesian scholar, Jenny Herridge, who covered .Indonesian events. At the desk level, the OCI's analysts worked' closely with other specialists within the building, especially their counterpart desk officers in the National Assessments Staff on the 2nd floor and in the Directorate of Joint Service Intelligence on the 5th and 6th floors. The DJSl was the largest directorate in JIO, staffed with 62 service and 24 civilian analysts. It was responsible for providing assessments of military issues to the service chiefs, as well as providing military inputs to the OCI and NAS reports. At higher' levels, there was considerable tension between some of the military officers and civilian officials. In particular, according to a former analyst in DJSI, there was a 'turf war' between Col. Alf Garland, the head of Foreign Forces Intelligence in DJSI, and Rowan Osborn, in OCI. Garland believed that most of the issues dealt with in JIO were military matters that could be appreciated only byprofes'sional 90
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
Directorate of Scientific and Technical·lntelligence (DSTI) (21) L- 3 - 12 to [- 3 - 24 South Asia
OCI
Support Office
and the
[ .. 3-10
Rest of the World (4) L-3-26
PNG and the
--------------
South Pacific
East Asia
(2)
(2)
L-3-08
[-3-26
Editorial Vault
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I---
Weekly Report Office
Southeast
L-3-07
Asia (4) [-3-27
Coordinator L-3-06 Secretary
Conference
L-3-05
Room
Head OCI Teleprinter
[-"3-04
[-3-02 DSD Liaison Office (14) [-3-03 West (Lake Burley Griffin)
Joint Intelligence Organisation, Office of Current Intelligence (3rd floor, Building L, Russell Hill, Canberra)
military officers. Garland and Osborn had constant argumentsover. the wording of assessments, but the real dispute between them was 'control of information. As the former. DJSI analyst noted: 'In an intelligence organisation, information is power.' According to an ocr analyst from that period, it all resulted in an unpleasant working environment. 'It was a horror show', he said. In the case of Indonesian or Timorese developments, theOCI's Southeast Asia section worked closely with Lt-Col.Geoff Cameron, co-ordinator of DJSI's Southeast Asian section, and his desk officers Capt. Alan Dupont and Capt. Peter Gibson. Installation of a secure telephone link in 1974 with the IntelligenceCoordination Branch of the Department of Foreign Affairs, allowed OCI speedier access to secret diplomatic and ASIS. ,'material. OCI produced a range of current intelligence reports, principally the Daily Bulletin and the ,Weekly Report. The OCI's working day began with the production by the early morning duty officer of an information s,heet"called the. Highlights. This was a digest of important intelligence 'received during the previous night, based mainly on DSD 'flimsies', as copies of the teletype material from DSD headquarters to the liaison office were called. Normally arriving for work at 6 am each day, the duty officer·would walk down the corridor to the DSD office and" collect the, flimsies waiting in a tray. It needs to be emphasised that these were selected for distributionbyDSD's C Group as appropriate fot GCI's purposes. The: officer would then draft the Highlights, usually only a page and on some days only a paragraph or two, and hand it to the Support Office by 8.00 am for typing and copying for distribution by 8.30 am. The recipients, numbering, no more than a dozen 92
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
and located only within the JIO building, included the office ofJIO director Jockel,. theOClhead Osborn, the OCI co~ordinator Bennetts, the fourOCI section heads, and the li.aison officers from Britain's MI6 (Brian Easey) ·and the AJEericanCIA (Dunning Idle IV). The Highlights;·s~t·theagenda for a meeting at 9.00 am each morning on what should go into the OCI's Daily Bulletin, intended as an authoritative and current briefing fOf the government on political and military developments overseas. Production of the Bulletin was the responsibilityof John Bennetts. A meeting was held to review the draft in Bennetts' office at .·2.00 pm. At 3.00 pm it went by courier from the OCI support office to the prime minister, the foreign minister, the defence minister, their departmental heads, the intelligence representatives in the British, US and New Zealand' missions in Canberra, and to the directors of the other Australian intelligence agencIes. The OCI's Weekly Report was 'the vehicle for publishing items·on developments that warranted more detailed reporting', the JIOsaid in its 1974 annual report. In addition, OCI staff· also produced' 'situation reports' that were photocopied 'in .the interests of speed' and were 'accordingly of somewhat lower physical quality'. At the beginning of 1974, DSD began to extend and speedup its collection and breaking of Indonesian signals. In January, the directorate had provided the intelligence community and selected government officials in Canberra with' especially useful' intelligence about directives by Hankam (the Indonesian defence ministry) and Kopkamtib (the military's internal security command), related to the 'internal-security disturbances in Jakarta' that month, according to JIO's top secret annual report for that year. Following these 'disturbances', Jockel as chairman of LISTENERS IN THE SOUTH
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theNIC. and JIO director requested that DSD improve its collection efforts on the 'respective power-bases of Indonesian generals', the 'organisation and operations of Indonesian intelligence services' and 'Indonesian attitudes and activities in respect of Portuguese Timor'. As Portuguese rule in Timor collapsed in the aftermath of the overthrow of the fascist regime in Lisbon ··in April 1974, DSD was very attentive. It also monitored the governmental and military signals, traffic between Dili and Lisbon. During the course of 1974, according to the director of ,the JIO, 'sigintmade a substantial contribution to our total information' on such matters as 'Indonesian order of battle ·in Irian Jaya and Timor' , 'Indonesian Hankam/Kopkamtib directives', 'Indonesian views on the activities against dissident groups on the Papua New' Guinea/Irian Jaya border' ,and 'Indonesian attitudes to the future status of Portuguese Timor'. As Operation Komodo, the Opsus political campaign to bring about the annexation of East Timor, unfolded in 1975, it was monitored closely by the Australian intelligence community. On 20 February, Jockel sent ASIS and .DSDa list,of 48 questions about East Timor for them to answer. On 16 May, the JIO updated its intelligence requirements, and 36 broad questions were passed to ASIS. Foreign Affairs and DSDwere also given new rep,orting tasks 'in accordance with their functions'. On 14 July 1975, the NI C issued a 'Secret-Australian Eyes Only' catalogue of intelligence requirements of 74 closely typed pages. The list of queries ab,out Timor included the 'capacity of Timorese to organise resistance to a takeover by Indonesia, including strength, weapons and equipment; indications of Indonesian infiltration into and subversion in Portuguese Timor; order of battle of Indonesian forces in Indonesian Timor and Indonesia's capabilities to mount military operations against Portuguese Timor. . ' 94
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ASIS had a strong presence in Jakarta, with two officers in the Australian embassy running a wellestablished network of informants. But it had had no station in Dili since 1962. The Darwin office of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation,. responsible for domestic .security, had maintained' a 'cooperative contact' with an Australian hotelier in Dili, Frank Favaro, and in March 19.75 introduced him to ASIS. But Favaro provided material of only marginal value, and was too talkative. After the unsuccessful UDT coup in· Dili in August 1975, the senior military intelligence specialist on Indonesia in Darwin, Sqd-Ldr Stan Harding, began on his own initiative 'assembling int~lligence 'briefs to cover likely exigencies' in East Timor. According to the citation to theMBE he received ·in June 1976, Harding's·· 'efforts were to prove invaluable to military as well as Government agencies during the ensuing events· in Timor'. After August, in addition to all key Indonesian military communications in the East Timor region,'DSD also intercepted most Fretilin and UDT radio traffic. DSD had Tetum-Ianguagespeakers for monitoring the vernacular Timorese communications that were not in Portuguese. But as a backup, DSD· was also able to get the substance of Fretilin communications 'by listening to the Indonesian reports of their intercepts (an exercise known as 'piggy-backing'). DSD was also able to intercept Portuguese communications, including the transmission of intelligence from Dili back to Lisbon. For many years, the Portuguese navy' had run···a .radio station just north of the Diliairport. It provided communications with Portugal via Macau, the nearest Portuguese territory, but its receivers were often used to monitor transmissions in the area, including those of the Indonesian armed forces. The journalist]ill· Jolliffe noted that on about 25 August, when fierce fighting LISTENERS IN THE SOUTH
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was being waged between UDT and Fretilinforces for control of Dili, the station intercepted an Indonesian radio message 'suggesting that the Indonesian destroyer Mon Icidi [Monginsidi] is on its way to Dili to "rescue" the Portuguese governor and his staff in order to take them to "a safe place'" .On 27 August, the governor, Col. Lemos Pires, pre-empted the Indonesian move and evacuated his administration to the island of Atauro, about 30 kilometres north of Dili. They were joined by two Portuguese corvettes, the Joao Roby and the Alfonso Cerquiera, which anchored ·off the island. Governor Pires and his ento'urage used the radio facilities aboard the Joao Roby to maintain regular radio contact with Lisbon (via Macau) and with the administration in Oecussi, the Portuguese enclave in Indonesian Timor. In addition, the Australian army sent in communications specialists and equipment aboard an air force Caribou transport aircraft to set up a radio post for Governor Pires on the island. This operation, supervised by Sqd. Ldr Harding, took several days. According to JillJolliffe, 'a radio room near the officers' mess' was used for monitoring local radio communications until the Portuguese abandoned Atauro and sailed to Darwin on 8 December. In February 1976, Maj. Peter Young, a former army intelligence officer in Vietnam and JIO analyst, said he knew of 'sigint evidence pointing to at least a brigadelevel force in operation in East Timor in support of the UDT well before the announced "invasion" '--a clear reference to the 3200-strong force in Dading'sOperation Flamboyant. However, the most authoritative account 'of the monitoring of Indonesian communications by Australian and US sigint authorities during the period from August 1975 to February 1976 was published in The National Times in May-June 1982, in the form of extracts from 96
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a wide range of classified US documents, including the Central Intelligence Agency's National Intelligence Daily and other CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) intelligence reports dated between August 1975 and February 1976. These documents were based primarily on slglnt collected at the Shoal Bay station and passed to the special US liaison officer with DSD in Melbourne. In return, copies of the· CIA and D IA reports were made available to JIG in Canberra by the accredited CIA and DIA 'liaison officers. Possibly, these reports also included American-origin sigint, which may not have been shared in its entirety with Australian intelligence agencies. In 1975-76 the CIA controlled two Rhyolite geostationary sigint satellites from a ground station at Pine Gap, in central Australia. One was used to intercept radio communications in ·East Timor and it is highly likely that its intercepts included signals concerning the deaths of the journalists at Balibo. The Rhyolite satellites were developed in the late 1960s to collect a wide range of foreig11 signals, including the telemetry associated with Soviet strategic missile tests, radar emissions, and VHF a11d microwave communications. The first Rhyolite satellite (designated 1970-46A) was launched on 19 June 1970, and placed in geostationary orbit above the equator over the Indian Ocean, where it was primarily used to monitor the telemetry and other signals associated with Soviet strategic systems developments. When the second Rhyolite (1973-13A) was launched on 6 March 1973, it took over the primary (Soviet) duty, and Bird 1 (as 1970-46A was known colloquially by Pine Gap personnel) was redirected towards· China and Vietnam, but also other crisis areas in the region according to scheduling priorities. From August 1975 to February 1976, Bird 1 was often used to intercept Indonesian radio communications LISTENERS IN ·THE SOUTH
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in Timor.. It is not known whether the Rhyolite satellite intercepted any signals concerning the' killing of the journalists, though it is very likely that it did. However, Australian access to sigint collected at Pine Gap was very restricted in the 1970s, and this was especially the case in the Signals Analysis Section at Pine Gap'where the voice ,intercepts were analysed. Instead, intelligence of interest to Australia was passed to the JIO liaison officer' at the CIA headquarters· in Langley, Virginia, but this was typically a day or so after the event. The American intelligence briefs published in 1982 showed that the Australian and US authorities had been aware .of the Indonesian invasion plans for many months, and were cognisant of the full dimensions of the Indonesian determination to take over East Timor and its subsequent efforts to cover up the behaviour of its occupation forces. Among the reports in the US briefs were the following: 20 ·August: 'Indonesian military contingency preparfltions are continuing, as are clandestine operations into Portuguese Timor. According to an intercepted message, a local Timorese leader is ready to ,call publ~cly for integration with Indonesia.' , 4, September: 'Communications intelligence indicates that two Indonesian special forces groups, consisting of about 100 men each, may have entered Portuguese Timor",on the evening of September 3-4.' 18 September: 'Indonesian special forces units operating covertly in Portuguese Timor are meeting unexpected resistance in several areas, according to intercepted communications.' 22 September: Referred, to 'a September 22 intercepted message [to Jakarta from] the Indonesian 98
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Ambassador in Canberra' concerning . conciliatory messages from the Fretilin leadership. 8 October: 'Previous communications intelligence indicated that Jakarta was .preparing to "confront" Portuguese Tim.or on the 7th or 8th.' 11 October: A CIA brief said the Indonesian president had .approved 'a plan of action that will increase military pressure on Fretilin forces operating near the border' by setting up e.nclaves,. 'The first of these enclaves is to be established on October 14· when Indonesian' units are to attack the town of Maliana. The troops participating in the, operation will wear uniforms without insignia and are to carry' 'older, Soviet-made weapons so as not. to be identified as' Indonesian regulars.' 17 October: 'An intercepted Indonesian message said that a seventh town was captured . . . along the Portuguese Timor border. yesterday.'
These intelligence briefs gave Washington's policymakers a close view of events in Timor b·utPresident Gerald Ford was not, informed by the CIA or ·the DIA about what happened to any journalists at Balibo on 16 October 1975. In Australia, however, their fate 'was the most sensitive aspect of the Indonesian interventio'n in Portuguese Timor. DSD's remarkable demonstration of expertise presented an enormous politically charged conundrum for the Australian listeners in the south. It threatened to blow apart the Whitlam: government's policy towards Indonesia, and' even to incapacitate AU$tralia's most valuable..foreign intelligence asset.
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SIX
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of East Timor began towards midnight on Wednesday, 15 October. In Maliana, the Portuguese television journalist Adelino Gomes was startled by the noise of mortar bombs .falling on the town at 11 pm. From the Catholic mission on high ground about 1.5 kilometres outside the town, he and his three crew members watched the attack. As it developed, ,the priest at the mission, Father Bruno, became worried and told his guests: 'I think it's better you go.' The Portuguese journalists left in their vehicle, beginning a journey to Dili that was to take 40 hours. Some 20 kilometres away in Balibo, the five newsmen and the 40 or so Falintil soldiers and ·auxiliaries commanded by AntonioPina heard the distant explosions, and went out to scan the countryside from. high points. At 3.00 am, in darkness, the watchers in Balibo saw flashes from the Indonesian ships off the coast to the north and from the shore· itself at Batugade, followed HE COVERT INVASION
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by the shriek of artillery rounds over Balibo, exploding in the bush behind. Some fell short, starting fires in the scrub down the hill. Accurate mortar fire also began falling on the village from the direction of the Indonesian borde~, to the west. Three Falintil soldiers-Lucas Jeronimo, Rosito Ximenes and Manuel Silva-had been nervously patrolling the deserted village through the night. ·They were terrified by the artillery fire, a new experience. They fled to the old Portuguese fort. The Australians were already there, trying to film. From the front parapet of the fort, the Falintil soldiers saw headlights moving around the Indonesian stronghold of Batugade 8 kilometres away on the coast and heard the heavy diesel engines of Marine Corps tanks heading towards them on the road. First light began to creep over the mountainous landscape from about 4.45 am, preceding the sunrise at 5.17 am local time. Towards 5.00 am·thebombardment from the coast suddenly halted. From the south~western side ·of the village, across hillside slopes studded with sparse trees, came rifle and automatic fire, and rocketpropelled grenades. Dozens of armed attackers came into view. The Falintil troops opened up with their G3 rifles from the height of the fort, and>a Falintil machine-gunner fired bursts from the battlement over the fort's gateway back, into the village. The gunfire and tank manoeuvres from the north coast had been a ruse planned by Col. Dading. The previous evening, several groups of Indonesian army Special Forces and Timorese auxiliaries had moved across the border far inland, frama forward base-camp in the tiny village of Haekesak in the salient of Indonesian territory that bulged the east Timor border in the central hills. Some of the groups were codenamed with popular Indonesian female names,such as Tuty, DEATH IN BALIBO
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Umi and Susie One group had crossed the border close to Maliana, and taken up positions for the early attack planned to tie up the town's defenders. A .group codenamed TeamUmi and commanded by Maj. SofyanEffendi (who used the personal codename Agus) , moved down to the road junction at Nunura, blocking motorised reinforcement to or retreat lines from Balibo. Another group, named Team Susi, was commanded by Special Forces captain Mohammed Yunus Yosfiah (codenamed Maj. Andreas). Other officers with him were Maj. Tony Sumardjo (codenamed Anton Papilayan), Capt. Sutiyoso (codenamed Manix), and Lts Marpaung and Slamat Kirbiantoro, each in charge of a Special Forces company. Also with the attack group was a party of the Apodeti partisans who had been trained·atAtambuaunder Tomas Goncalves. All of them carried rifles, but were forbidden to shoot without specific orders. After reaching a village called Leohitu at about 10 pm, Team Susi had rested, and then had moved across to a position put by different accounts at 1.5 kilometres to 500 metres west of Balibo before the attack, carrying 80 millimetre mortars captured at Batugade from Fretilin as well as the Yugoslavian-made rocket-propelled grenade launchers used by the Indonesian army. Just as they were moving to attack, Team Susi radioed to Batugade for the bombardment to cease. As the Indonesian force approached the village, Fretilin soldiers say they saw the Australians run down from the fort towards the house on which they had painted the sign ~ustralia'. Fretilin medical orderly Guido dos Santos, who said he escaped from Balibo during the attack and was interviewed by journalists in Dili on 27 October, caught a glimpse of the five newsmen. When the attack began, the Australians had gone out into the open in the village and begun filming. The last time Guido dos Santos saw 102
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them, they were standing in front of the ~ustralia' sign gesturing towards it. 'They [the attacking soldiers] fired on the building where the Australians were and I saw one fall. The others pointed their hands at the sign on the wall and were shouting ''Australians! Australians!'" As Santos ran away he heard the Australians calling out as shooting continued. The voices then stopped. While he was still close to Balibo, he saw a helicopter landing in the village. Some other Fretilin soldiers also gave their accounts in Dili in ·later weeks. ·Lucas Jeronimo·· said: The Australians ran towards their house about 200 metres away. One kept stopping, looking back and pointing his camera. He was a big man but I didn't know his name. [This description fits Cunningham.] We ran into the vegetation and called out 'Come on, come on' but they di9n't listen. The Indonesians kept firing. The man with the bald head [Peters] was still filming, then he cried out and fell down. The other Austraiialls were screaming 'Australians, Australians' with their hands up. The soldiers circled them and made them turn their backs and face the wall of the house. The firing died down and we crawled away through the undergrowth. We heard the Australians screaming and then there was a burst of automatic fire.
Another witness who said he was among the Fretilin defenders came forward to a British journalist, Richard Lloyd Parry of The Independent, in Dili in 1998. Named as 'Terrado' he said he was 16 at the time, and was with a·· small group at the Balibo fort as the Indonesians attacked. The two cameramen ·had come up to the fort to film when the attack started, then moved down to the village where he saw them setting up camera gear at one point, then lost sight of them. When the Indonesians, who included troops in camouflage DEATH IN BALIBO
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Fatal attack on Salibo
uniforms, entered the village, he saw them drag three of the newsmen out of a house. Two of the newsmen were holding hands. When they were outside .. we heard them yelling 'Australia, AustJ;'~ha.No Fretilin, No Fretilin' . . . They weren't resisting when they were dragged out. They had completely surrendered to the soldiers.
When the three were out in the street, Terrado said he saw the Indonesians stabbing at the newsmen, though he was too far away to see the knives, and the three fell down. Terrado and his companions were shocked, realising that if independent journalists were being killed, they themseves would have no chance if captured. Abandoning their personal gear stored in the Portuguese bungalow within the fort, they scrambled down the 2 metre high external wall on the northeastern side, away from the village, and ran towards distant Atabae. By the account of several participants among. the Timorese on the Indonesian side, as well as the Indonesian war correspondent Hendro Subroto who covered Operation Flamboyant, the attack was virtually over 45 minutes after it started, though sporadic firing on the outskirts of the village continued for some time. Tomas Goncalves, the leader of the Timorese auxiliaries who deserted the Indonesian cause in April 1999, has recently said that when the Indonesians advanced into the town square, four of the Australian journalists came out into the open with their hands up 'seeking protection'. An Indonesian soldier had been shot in the wrist about five minutes earlier from the direction of the fort--one of only two casualties that day on the Indonesian side, tfle other being a Timorese who was wounded-but resistance was virtually over and no firing had come from the house in which the journalists had been. DEATH IN BALIBO
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Goncalves ,said that 'without 'hesitation' Yun,us and others"jncludingLt Kirbiantoro, a Capt. Ali Mussa and Special Forces soldiers named as Kris, Marcos and Yusuf had opened fire on the jo'urnalists frama range of about 10 metres with AK-47 automatic rifles. Olandino Maia Guterres, then aged only 16, was another Titp.orese among the 300 or so attackers in Team Susiunder Capt. Yunus. In the half-light before dawn, Guterres advanced into Balibo. From less than 20 metres he saw, four' or five Indonesian soldiers--among' them he named 'Marcos', 'Kris' and 'Simon'- firing'through the windows of a Chinese house on the corner where the Maliana road enters 'Balibo's square. Guter~es 'says he heard'the voice of Yunus: (Tembak saja! Tembak saja!J Uust shoot! Just shoot!] Guterres was ordered round the" side of the house to watch the back. The soldier Kris, described a~ a native of Flores in East t;Jusatenggar3;, shouted at the closed door of the bathroom" threatening to throw'in a grenade. One of the journalists came out, the soldier Kris motioned him to walk, back into .the house, then killed him with a,single thrust of a commando knife, in the back. Other Timorese fighters dragged the body inside., Guterres later looked, inside the front, room of the house. He saw the bodies o~three other Europeans ,slurp.ped in chairs where they had been sitting, round a table with cups of coffee and peanuts on it. The body of a fourth Westerner lay against a wall. A third Timorese eyewitness among the attackers, who spoke to. The National Times in 1979 but still refuses to be identified:, said the only real resistance encountered by the Indonesians came fro;m a Fretilin outpost. After this was silenced, they entered Balibo from the south. The witness said he had an unobstructed view from about 50 metres away of the house the neWSlnen were in. This was not the house with the flag and ~ustralia' i
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painted on it, but the other Chinese house across the dirt square of the village on the corner of the Maliana road. 'I saw one Australian come out of the door with his hands up saying something like ''Australian! Journalist!",' this witness said. He was struck down instantly by a knife blow from an Indonesian soldier. I then saw Indonesian soldiers fire through the window of the house on others inside, as well as the one who had fallen from the knife blow. I then saw a wounded man run out the back of the house trailing blood, up the hill to a house, formerly a Portuguese security post, behind the other. I saw him try frantically to open the door but couldn't, turn, run a short distance, then drop dead. This witness said he did not enter the house. But some Timorese troops who went in with the Indonesians later told him one of the journalists was still alive. He was killed with a knife by an Indonesian. Another source told the The National Times that he was told by one of the Timorese who went in that the wounded Australian was propped against a wall with two bodies beside him. He had earphones on and was talking into a 'radio' , presumably a tape-recorder. The Indonesians talked to the man, then ordered the Timorese to leave. The Timorese later saw the man dead. The eyewitness later moved behind the house. The body on the hill had been taken back into the house, he said. Hearsay evidence from another Timorese, who was working with the Indonesians at Batugade, suggests a sequence that might bridge the differences in these accounts. Fernando Mariz said: They come outside and put their hands up, 'Weare Australian journalists, we don't have guns', all this stuff, they said, the captain said, 'No, go inside'. DEATH IN BALIBG
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When they [were] inside the captain shoot, shoot all of them.
Other hearsay accounts. give partial backing to some of the claimed eyewitness accounts described here. Jose Martins, the KOTA leader, said that when he was in Balibo after the attack, at about 10 am on 16 October, the Apodeti commander Tomas Goncalves told him two of the newsmen had been shot in the Maliana road corner house along with some Fretilin personnel, two had been gunned down in the open as they emerged trying to surrender and the fifth was shot trying to run out the back of the house. A Timorese who spoke t.o Goncalves in 1980 in Dili claims Goncalves boasted of having knifed two of the newsmen himself. As well as discrepancies in the details of the killings--though James Dunn has pointed out a broad convergence that two or three were killed in the open, two or three in a house, and one seeking to escape,there are obvious differences in the various accounts about the time the attack started and ended. Many talk of it beginning at 3.00 am with the artillery barrage, and of the infantry assault starting just before dawn, that is, from about 4.45 when the first dim light would have appeared. Some of the retreating Fretilin soldiers say they were within earshot of Balibo towards 7.00 am, while Terrado puts this ,as late as 9.00 am. The Indonesian journalist Hendro Subroto, who was waiting with Col. Dading at Batugade, states the attack began at 6.00 and was over by 6.45 am. It is possible that the participants felt the time pass more quickly than it did. Few would have been wearing watches (photographs taken that morning show neither Tomas Goncalves nor Jose Martins wearing a watch). There may be conflicting definitions about when the attack as such started-·-with the naval barrage or with 108
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the first mortar shells fired at Balibo, when the footsoldiers started moving from their halting point up to 1.5 kilometres away,or when they actually entered Balibo. In April 1976, Tomas Goncalves gave Australian officials two different times. In both cases he said the attack started at 5.00 am but on one occasion he said it lasted about two hours and another exactly '57 minutes. Dading himself said in 1995 that he had begun the ruse oftevving up the tanks at·Batugade at 3.00 am and that the attack on Balibo took place at 6.00 am. This seems to refer to the point at which the attackers were on the fringes of the village, engaging the defenders with rifle fire. KOTA's Jose Martins, who was in Batugade, recalled a message being received by Col. Dading at 6.45 am-·presumably a radio-voice message-stating that 'some Australians were at Balibo'. The UDT leader Joao Carrascalao, who was also at Batugade, said he was talking to Col. Dading at about 7.00 am. 'He told me they had recaptured Balib·owith· no problems, without much fighting, but they have some problem there that he had to solve, to go there and solve and he left soon after.' Dading had then left by helicopter. Dading himself says he went to Balibo at about 6.30 am. Several other accounts affirm that Dading, accompanied by the Bakin agent Louis Taolin, flew into Balibo when the fighting was barely over. The fleeing Fretilin orderly Guido dos Santos also recalled seeing a helicopter land at about 7.00 am. Most of the eyewitness accounts outlined here indicate that all the five newsmen were dead by that time, four either shot down in the open or by shots fired through the windows into the house and the fifth while running out the back. However, it is possible that perhaps three of the newsmen were captured and held in the corner house while the troops sought orders DEATH IN BALIBO
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about what to do with them. Olandino Guterres' account has the odd detail that three of the newsmen were sitting around a table when they were shot. It is inconceivable that they would not have' been trying to look ,out at· the action or· desperately sheltering in corners of the room at, that moment-unless they ·had been ordered to sit quietly and wait. Other hearsay evidence is that some of, the newsmen were brought into;ahouse .alive and later killed. The wording of the 6.45 am radio signal from Capt. ¥unus. to Col.· Dading and . his reply, . as we shall see" was cryptic. By the time Dading and Taolinleft Balibo and flew back to Batugade after a quick. inspection,all five were certainly dead. Most probably on the :recommendation of Bakin agent Taolin-the postgraduate in propaganda-Dading gave orders for the newsmen's bodies to ·be dressed in. Portuguese uniforms and posed behind a· captured machine gun and other. weap.ons for photographs.' JoaoCarrascalao recalled Dading bringing back with him in the helicopter some cameras and other equipment. Dading told him 'they kill[ed] some Australianpeople who [were] fighting with Fretilin'.Only later didCarrascalao find out the dead. were j0urnalists. Later· that morning, at about 11.00 am, Carrascalao· saw the UDT president Lopes da Cruz also return by helicopter from Balibo, bringing with him larger, movie-type cameras. From about 8.00 .am reinforcements and support personnel were· moving up by road from Batugade to Balibo. A former UDTfighter now living in Perth says he accompanied Col. Dadingin a four-wheel-drive vehicle back to Balibo at about 9.00 am. When he arrived he saw three bodies of Europeans, dressed in Portuguese military uniforms, slumped over three machine guns. The uniforms were intact. Some 50 Indonesian soldiers.stood 110
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around watching as the bodies were turned over for Dading to see. Another UDT fighter, now living in Lisbon, claims to have travelled up to Balibo by truck at some time around 9.00 or 9~}O am and to have seen four or five bodies of Europeans lying in the house with the 'Aus-tralia' sign on it. The bodies of Timorese with weapons nearby were in another part of the house. Unlike other witnesses, this witness said that shooting was still going on around the village at that time, and he himself had been hit by a piece of grenade shrapnel, though the witness later qualified this observation, saying that firing was only sporadic. Other Timorese auxiliaries who went to Balibo that day say they saw the bodies around the middle of the day. At some time in the afternoon, if not before, all the bodies-or at least four, possibly excluding that of the man shot trying to runaway-·-were placed in the Chinese corner house, covered with mattresses soaked in petrol and set ablaze. The fire was relit several times over the next two days. UDT's Joao Carrascalao says he was shown the photographs of the newsmen's bodies posed with the weapons two or three days later by the Indonesian photographer Djumaryo, of the Opsus-run newspaper Berita Yudha. Another UDT leader, Domingos Oliveira, says he was shown the pictures two or three weeks later by Djumaryo. Djumaryo was certainly in Balibo soon after the village was seized, as his own photographs and a snapshot of him posing with Team Susi leader Capt. Yunus attest. Djumaryo took a series of photographs designed to portray the Balibo victory according to Indonesia's propaganda line, including line-ups of the Timorese leaders alleged to have .led the attack (Tomas Goncalves, Joao Tavares and Francisco Lopes da Cruz) and the armed Timorese partisans who took part. DEATH IN BALIBO
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If there were to be 'propaganda pictures taken of communists' Djumaryowould have'been assigned to take them. Timorese interviewed •., by The National Times in 1979 variously recalled a 'large' or 'fat' Indonesian, taking pictures, of the bodies, a description· that fitted the chubby Djumaryo. (However, "the alleged eyewitness' OlandinoGuterres says Yunus himself took the photographs.) Djumaryohimself denied having ta~en such pictures. In 1999 his widow insisted such. photographs were not part of the photographic archive he left and·.that to her knowledge they never existed. Eventually, use of the faked images was overruled or decided against by Dading, once it became obvious that the notion of the newsmen taking up arms was hot at all credible ·and that pictures of the intact bodies would immediately raise questions about why they had been burnt and not kept for identification. With the burning of the bodies, Dading's forces applied a strict cover-up. Various pieces of the camera equipment and personal effects of the newsmen had been looted, and these were now recalled and held centrally, though the UDT leader Joao Tavares was said to have 'kept a still camera taken from the bodies. Capt. Yunus spoke to members of his Team Susi on the night of 16 October, telling them the reason for the killing of the newsm~n was to maintain the security of the covert operation, and that the incident was not to be talked about. Apodeti's Tomas Goncalves and UDT's Lopes da Cruz were told they were to take responsibility for the attack if any questions were asked. Some of the pro-Indonesian partisan leaders took a more· bizarre step to lay the ghosts of Balibo to. rest. Jose Martins said in May 1976 that he returned to the village about three days after the attack and picked up three fragments of bone from the ashes and the rubble In the Chinese trader's house where the bodies of the ~ustralian
112
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newsmen had been burnt. Goncalves and other Timorese also took splinters of bone, Martins said, taking care that the Indonesians did not see them picking them up. Martins concealed his fragments in his boot. Martins said Timorese such as himself, though belonging to the Catholic church, 'still retained some ancient animistic beliefs. He and his colleagues had gathered the bits of bone because of the Timorese custom of collecting such relics to put in their uma lulik (sacred houses) in order to placate the spirits of the dead.
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SEVEN
THE BALIB 0
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INTERCEPTS
collected by the DSD monitors at Shoal Bay and Cabarlah and by the DSD detachment aboard the navy destroyer cruising close to the island of Timor, the Australian intelligence community had closely followed Col. Dading's preparations for the attack on Balibo. The signals DSD detected included commnications by encrypted teletype and scrambled voice-radio between Dading's advance headquarters- at Batugade and Gen. Benny Murdani at Hankam(the defence ministry) in Jakarta, relayed by the radio station in Kupang. They included details of troop arrivals and other reinforcements at the Batugade fort, and details of the. planned attack along the border. Finally, on Wednesday, 15 October, the Indonesian colonel was told on the radio that his 'monkeys' were assembled at Haekesak, the little village high in the salient of hills behind Balibo. On the3rd floor of the JIO building in Canberra, the Indonesian moves were notified to the Southeast SING THE INTERCEPTS
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Asia analysts in the Office of Current Intelligence by Peter Trewartha, who walked down the corridor from the DSD Liaison Office and dropped flimsies of the latest intercepts on their desks. The OCI analysts would almost certainly have seen already the same intelligence material that had resulted in the CIA brief the previous Saturday, 11 October, noting President Suharto's approval of the plan to set up pro-Indonesian enclaves around Maliana. They had seen Ambassador Woolcott's cable of Monday, 13 October to the Department of Foreign Affairs in Canberra, reporting the detailed briefing about the forthcoming attack given to his diplomats Malcolm Dan and Allan Taylor by Harry Tjan Silalahi at CSIS. Together with their uniformed colleagues upstairs in the Directorate of Joint Service Intelligence and downstairs in the National Assessments Staff, they had been constantly updating their picture of the Indonesian forces in the border area, and the strength of the Fretilin resistance. But there was one vital intercept that was withheld from OCl's analysts by DSD in Melbourne. Some hours before the attack on Balibo, the Shoal Bay and Cabarlah DSD stations intercepted signals being exchanged between Batugade and Jakarta about the final preparations. Col. Dading reminded Gen. Murdani of the presence of foreign journalists in the Maliana-Balibo area. There was some discussion of what should be done about them, given the covert nature of the Indonesian involvement. According to a former Australian intelligence analyst, who saw the intercept some years later, Murdani said: 'We can't have any witnesses.' Dading replied in words to the effect of: 'Don't worry, we already have them under control.' The existence of this intercept has been confirmed by several members of the intelligence community. It appears to have been alluded to by an intelligence THE BALIBO INTERCEPTS
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officer who told ALP Senator Arthur Gietzelt that 'the Indonesian order to shoot the Australian newsmen' was intercepted at Shoal Bay-·as Gietzelt revealed in the Senate on7 April and 3 June 1976. This intercept was also shown by a young DSD officer at Shoal' Bay to visiting staff of Justice Robert Hope's Royal Commission on Intelligence and Security on 4 March 1977. The intercept-·in the form of a working draft translation during 'first echelon processing'--led one of the officials, the Hope Commission's legal officer Ian Cunliffe, to believe that the killings had been premeditated. Cunliffe has not disclosed the contents of the intetcept, but said in .December 1998 that 'my recollection is that the nature of the report made it clear that the circumstances of their deaths was not crossfire in the heat of battle but rather they were taken and executed'. Another member of the Royal Commission staff, George'Brownbill, has a more precise recollection of the interc;ept shown to them in March 1977. According to his account, a 'young person' approached the two visiting officials when they. entered a room at Shoal Bay and showed them a working paper with the original message in Indonesian and the English tran,slation printed in pencil in block capitals. Mo,.s Williams,head of DSD's Group C, accompanied the Royal Commission staff to Shoal Bay. In 1998 he said he had no recollection of this event. But he said that at the time 'there was some tension between processors at the facility and at the Head Office, but in his view the Head Office processors (particularly.translators) were more experienced and competent'. Williams agreed' with the suggestion that the document shown to the commission staff might have been the work of an analyst at Shoal Bay who took a different view of the 116
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translation and resented the fact they had been overruled by Head Office in Melbourne. However, recollections also differ about the precise timing of this signal. According to the former analyst who read the intercept, it was processed by DSD in Melbourne five hours before the attack. It is not clear how much time had elapsed between the signal's inter,.. ception at Shoal Bay and completion of processing at Albert Park. Nor is it clear when the attack was judged to have started. If it was the moment when Capt. Yunus and his force entered Balibo, it was about 6.00 am local time-meaning the signals would have been processed by about 1.00 am Timor time, or about 3.00 am in Melbourne. If it was when the naval artillery barrage began, it was at 3.00 am local time-meaning the signals were processed by midnight in Melbourne. If it was when the mortar barrage began against Maliana and Yunus crossed to his attack position at Leohitu, it was around 11.00 pm Wednesday night Timor time, meaning the intercept was processed by 8.00 pm in Melbourne the night before the attack. In the latter case, this would have allowed DSD to notifY Canberra in the middle of the evening, when with parliament still sitting, ministers and senior officials were still easily contactable. And it was about 5.00 pm in Jakarta, allowing sufficient time for the Australian government to have made an effort to save the newsmen. It allowed 12 hours, half a day, before the final Indonesian advance into Balibo during which the news~ men were killed. However, this intercept does not appear to have left DSD headquarters. None of the senior JIO officials or the relevent desk officers in the OCI or DJSI recall anything like it coming through the DSD Liaison Office that night. A decision to withhold it was evidently taken THE BALIBO INTERCEPTS
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at the', highest levels of DSD" by officials who were not prepared to take the risk that politicians or other government . departments might act on the knowledge in a' way that would expose to the Indonesians . . the extent of Australia's sigint capability. This decision almost certainly involved ,both the DSDdirector, Ralph Thompson, and his most senior operations officer, Mos Williams. The ,.next intercept mentioning the journalists was the field. Tadiocommunication at 6.45 am Timor time from C'apt. Yunus at Balibo to· Col. Dading.at Batugade, which said:~mong the dead are four [sic] white men. What are we going to do with the bodies?' This intercept;· tagged AUM-364 by DSD and given the classification 'Secret Spoke' (indicating it was transmit-· ted in clear language or with a low grade of encryption) , mentioned., neither Australians. nor journalists. However it horrified the analysts at Shoal Bay, .who had assumed that steps would have. been taken, based on the earlier intercept, to protect the journalists. This -intercepted signal was undoubtedly ·the saine one that the 'KOTA leader Jose Martins said he heard mentioned.at Batugade later that morning, and which he subsequently transcribed in Portuguese in a notebook. The two-line entry states: '0645: Balibo esta tornado. Tudo passada arnetralhadora. Veio un radio a falarem de uns Australia-nos qui foram abatidos.' [Balibo is taken. Everything is machine-gunned. A radio message came speaking of some Australians who· were slain.] The actual message had not mentioned Australians, but by' the time Martins heard about or wrote down the 6.45 am message it is evident that . the 'white men' had been identified by the' Indonesians in Batugade as Australians. According to Martins, when Col. Dading heard the casualty repQrtby Yunus, the commander told Yunus to 118
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wait until he could get to Balibo before doing. anything further. Joao CarrascaHio's account corroborates this. As we have seen, Dading went by helicopter to Balibo about 15 minutes later. The report by Yunus was translated at Shoal Bay and sent immediately/to Melbourne. Evidently, C Group decided this could be forwarded to Canberra as it was now too late for any compromising action to be taken. The flimsy arrived after that morning's Highlights were prepared by OCI, and it was passed straight to the Indonesian desk officer, Jenny Herridge. It also went immediately to Capt. Peter Gibson in DJSI, who showed it to his direct superiors, Col. Alf Garland and Lt-Col. Geoff Cameron. The director of DJSI, AirCdre D.F. Gilson, was also told. Jockel and his two deputies, Arthur McMichael and Cdre Ken Gray, were informed soon afterwards. Later that morning, Jockel went over to Parliament House on his own to tell the defence minister, Bill Morrison, that it appeared some Australian journalists had been killed during the Indonesian attack they had been expecting. Morrison's reaction was simply to exclaim, 'Oh, shit!' There was no need for J ockel to advise Morrison that this information could not be disclosed until there was an attributable source. Morrison, who had been a career diplomat with postings in Moscow and Kuala Lumpur before entering parliament, has said he was the only Labor minister who had known about DSD before the Whitlam government took office. He was quite aware of the extreme sensitivity of sigint. Throughout the day, the analysts in OCI and DJSI received further sigint from the DSD liaison office about progress of the attacks on Balibo, Maliana and other border towns. This material was discussed with Osborn and Bennetts in OCI, who supervised the preparation of a special intelligence summary about the Indonesian THE BALIBO INTERCEPTS
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actions and the killing of foreign journalists who almost certainly included Australians. The Defence department head, Sir Arthur Tange, took· the intelligence report over to Morrison at Parliament House early that evening. Tange was accompanied by one or two other officials, one of whom said in the hearing of Morrison's press secretary, Bill Pinwill:'I'm afraid we've lost some of the press chappies.' This was about 10 hours after the killings. Tange took no chances with Morrison's understanding about the sensitivity of DSD material. He emphasised strongly that the government could not yet reveal what had been learned about Balibo, not even to the·n~wsmen's next-of..;"kin.To do so would reveal to the Indonesians what signals could be intercepted· and invite them to take countermeasures, such as using more sophisticated encryption techniques or maintaining radio silence. Morrison agreed that Tange's report should be immediately circulated to the prime minister, Gough Whitlam, and the minister for Foreign Affairs, Don Willesee, with this clear understanding about the need for secrecy. According to the former Whitlam staffer Richard Hall, in an account published in 1978: That night a debate took place at a high political level. The defence establishment was unbending-the secrecy of DSD operations had to be preserved at all costs . . . . The politicians wished to inform the relatives but the defence side claimed that this would destroy the future effectiveness of the listening operation against Indonesia. There is no doubt that Prime Minister Whitlam and his two Ministers [Defence Minister Morrison and Foreign Minister Willesee] were personally very distressed by the affair.
But none of the ALP ministers were in a mood to look closely at the report. That day Opposition leader 120
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Malcolm Fraser had announced that, because of the Khemlani loans affair, the Opposition would block supply in the Senate. With the long day drawing to a close, Whitlam and Willesee had to leave almost immediately for the dinner hosted by the governor-general, Sir John Kerr, at Government House for the visiting Malaysian prime minister. According to Geoff Briot, then Willesee's press secretary: 'He [Willesee] really was aggrieved by the fact that we knew through the DSD intercepts that they had been killed.' And Pinwill, Morrison's press secretary, has said that his minister was also sorrowful but that he was obliged to accept the advice of his departmental head where DSD was involved. Morrison has recently reiterated that: 'It was important that these matters [DSD operations] should not be compromised to any extent.' There was another intercept about the newsmen delivered to Canberra later that day. Some time in the afternoon in Timor, Col. Dading had reported to Jakarta that among the dead in Balibo were white men--he put the number at four-and that their bodies had been burnt. Their remains, he said, had 'menjadi abu'-turned into ashes.
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EIGHT
COVER-UP IN ·FOREIGN AFFAIRS
O
N THE EVENING of 16 October, an Australian aid . .•mission, which included former consul]ames Dunn, was in Dili. It was requested to go to the Marconi centre, where Fretilin vice-president Nicolau Lobato told them ofa 'massive attack' by Indonesians on a wide front from Lebos to Balibo, which had included naval and artillery fire. Lobato could say nothing about the fate of five Australian-based journalists and four Portuguese newsmen known to be in the. vicinity of Balibo. Dunn went to dinner with the Australian army medical team" where the border attack and· fate of the missing TV ~rews was discussed, along with rumours of impending air and sea attacks on Dili itself. On Friday, 17 October, Australian morning newspapers carried reports to the same effect, quoting Fretilin statements that a big Indonesian attack had been made in the north-coast border area. They also mentioned a 122
report on the previous day in the Jakarta newspaper Berita Yudha, which as we have seen was controlled by Murtopo's Opsus special operations group, that the local pro-Indonesian forces were ready to move against Fretilin. Later that day Fretilin announced· in Dili that the five Australian-based newsmen were missing and were last seen in Balibo as the Indonesians advanced. The four members of the Portuguese TV crew arrived back in Dili after their flight from Maliana, which had been made in part on foot and had taken 40 hours. They reported that they had left the five from Australia in Balibo. According to some accounts at the time, the Portuguese had 'begged' the Australian crews to return with them, though the leader of the group has since insisted they did not. Both of the Australian television networks with crew members involved contacted the foreign affairs department. Nine news director Gerald Stone rang the Australian embassy in Jakarta. Because Ambassador Richard W oolcott was away he spoke to the acting head of the mission, Malcolm Dan, who said to Stone he was unaware that journalists were at the border. Dan made inquiries later that day to the Indonesian foreign ministry and other authorities. In Canberra the department of Foreign Affairs was still not aware of the situation, even at high levels, until later in the day. On that Friday morning, the depart. ment's secretary, Alan Renouf, sent a submission to Foreign Minister Willesee: the department was aware of Australian journalists in Dili 'and some outside Dili', as well as several Australian aid workers in Timor. The department would 'have to consider next week whether evacuation plans need to be implemented'. By that stage, the five journalists had been dead for more than 24 hours. COVER-UP IN FOREIGN AFFAIRS
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It ·was.· not until·late morning or early afternoon that Friday, 17 October, that a report from the. defence department- based. on ·the intercepted Indonesian .signals was ,circulat~d to· senior Foreign ·Affairs officials in Canberra. It was also sent to the Jakarta embassy, reaching the embassy in the evening. W oolcott's 'heart sank'. While the' first reaction in the embassy. was one of dismay, the next reaction was to pass blame. The diplomatic cables exchanged between Jakarta and Canberra were widely copied and· passed around the department; and one official recalls them in some detail. He remembers an 18 October cable in which the Jakarta embassy commented on the' following lines: The news :,o[ the death of the five Australian journalists in Balibo came as. a great shock to us all in the missiqn.. But it has to be said that they took their lives in their own hands in exposing the~selves in the frontline of the attack. It .was foolhardy and, unnecessary, and the blame must rest with them and their employers .. .' The mi~sion has reported over a long period, the plans of Indonesia to take East Timor by force:, and more recently, the specific plans of the invasion. It .must be assumed that Australian nationals were warned by. Canberra presumably of the dange~s of tr~vel in Timor at this time, and in particular that special briefings were given to the management of the media organisations.
Renollf'exploded: 'I wish to know by return telegram who in the mission sent this telegram~' he cabled back. W oolcott is recalled replying: You know that we have all been under considerable pressure, over an extensive period of time. I had to leave for a tour of the Java provinces the day after news of the tragic deaths of the journalists. In my 124
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absence Malcolm Dan sent the telegram that· was intended only to make the point that reports on the impending· Indonesian attack on· Timor had been known well before the invasion··and that the journalists would clearly have been forewarned of the dangers.
Renouf was already taking steps to check on that aspect, ordering the assistant secretary in charge of the department's executive branch (a secretariat to the department head), Geoffrey Miller, to see what warnings had been given. In a submission to the Foreign Minister on Monday, 20 October, Miller reported that the Department of Civil Aviation issued an instruction that all personnel boarding civilian flights from Darwin to Timor had to be warned of the dangers. It turned out that neither group of journalists had been given the official warning, though each of their pilots had been· cautioned. For two or three days Willesee had been agonising over the knowledge that, barring the remote chance of mistaken identity, the journalists were in all probability dead, while family and colleagues of the five were pressing the government with inquiries and being told that Canberra was still seeking hard information. ~fter all, most of his own kids had gone into journalism', said his former press secretary, Geoff Briot. Defence officials wanted to keep their intelligence methods secret. ~t that time he [Willesee] was under intense pressure from the department not to reveal that knowledge', says another Willesee staffer, Alan Oxley. 'The argument at that time was that if he did, he would have revealed the existence of intelligence gathering. Since then that convention has gone by the board. About three years later Malcolm Fraser broke that convention and we've been much less coy about it.' Despite these security concerns at a high level, the television station managements were discreetly and COVER-UP IN FOREIGN AFFAIRS
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without authorisation notified over the weekend by outraged intelligence personnel that their staff were dead. The managers in. turn notified some familymembers. But they could not be sure that what they were told was true. Keeping secrets is difficult and, in any case, within two or three days about 50 people-'-including ministers, ministerial staff, key Defence and Foreign Affairs department officials and the top Australian embassy people in Jakarta-were told of signals intelligence suggesting that the newsmen were ·dead. ALP backbencher J ohn- Kerin was known as an outspoken opponent of the Whitlam policy. on Timor since he visited Dili with the party's foreign affairs and defence committee in March 1975. As the committee's secretary, he had posited some awkward questions about the Timor policy to the government and to· the Department of Foreign Affairs. Kerin had a running feud with the head' of the Foreign Affairs department's Southeast Asia branch, Graham Feakes, whom' Kerin regarded as a leading member of an 'Indonesia lobby' within the Australian bureaucracy. In Canberra on Friday, 17 October, Kerin received a phone call from a man who did not give a name. By that stage, Kerin says, he was a regular recipient of such anonymous tip-offs. The caller told Kerin details of the Balibo attack, including the name and unit of the Indonesian officer in charge. Kerin says he is now hazy on these details. Shortly afterwards, Kerin says, he met Feakes at a cocktail party, and, referring to Balibo, asked if 'everything was going as expected or according to plan'. A 'heated altercation' then took place. ALP Senator Arthur Gietzelt, who had just returned from a visit to Fretilin-controlled Timor was also an opponent of the Whitlam policy. He received a letter through the mail about DSD intercepts, about which he spoke in the Senate a few months later. 126
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The Nine Network in Sydney was also making inquiries. On Friday 17 October, it sent an executive, John Foell, to Darwin to see what information could be gleaned. Foell booked into the Darwin Travelodge and started asking around. Towards lunchtime the next day, Saturday, 18 October, Foell was paged to the lobby of the Travelodge. The visitor was a stranger who did not give a name but who clearly knew why Foell was there. The stranger suggested a quick beer in the hotel bar. Foell said the conversation lasted about 15 minutes. The stranger told him: 'You can stop trying to find them. It will all become official in 48 hours. They were machine-gunned and their bodies burnt.' The man gulped his beer and left. The Seven Network had its Adelaide-based producer Bernard Keenan in Darwin. He recalls being contacted by a 'Carlton-Brown of the FO' type diplomat who told him the team was dead. By the Monday, 20 October, reports of the deaths came out in the Jakarta press and were passed on by the Australian embassy, which allowed Canberra to cite an open source for what it already knew. By then officials in Canberra and Jakarta had fallen into the pattern of two parallel cover-ups of the Balibo affair. Each of the governments had something to hide. Jakarta wanted to conceal any involvement by its forces in the East Timor fighting. It also wanted to deny any culpability on the part of its Timorese allies who, the Indonesians claimed, carried out the Balibo attack unaided. Canberra was trying to avoid any public acknowledgment that it had been told by the Indonesians what was going on. It also had to conceal from the Indonesians that it could follow what was happening through signals intelligence. At the same time it had to satisfy calls for an inquiry into the fate of the five Australians. COVER-UP IN FOREIGN AFFAIRS
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Political turmoil in Canberra, resulting from the dismissal of the Whitlam government on 11 November 1975 by the governor-general, Sir John Kerr, freed the department 'of Foreign Affairs from close political supervisi0rJ.fora •.•. significant period. This .freedom from scruti~ywas :abetted by the fact that although Brian Peters and Malcolm Rennie were British citizens and Gary Cunningham was aNew Zealander, neither the British nor the New Zealand governments became involved in the inquiries in more than token· ways. They had little direct concern with Timor, but had trade and other interests in Indonesia. The five journalists had died ,under the Australian flag daubed on the house at Balibo and were identified as Australians by Indonesians.London and;Wellington were content to leave it this way. At avery early, stage the 'Australian government's inquiries had. a genuine note of doubt. The radio intercepts about" the bodies had only mentioned 'white men' and the number of dead was unclear, four or five. It was just possible that this reference might include members of the Portuguese TV crew in Timor. This possibility vanished when the Portuguese arrived back in Dili late on 17 October. On Friday, 17 October, a Foreign Affairs official, Jphn;Starey, was sent into Dili on a Red Cross flight. Former consul James Dunn, then in Dili with an aid mission, recalled that Starey was anxious that his official status not be known to local people. He spent only a few hours on the ground, establishing that the journalists were indeed missing at Balibo, before flying back to Darwin. He later interviewed the Portuguese TV crew on their way home through Darwin. The Australian government's first formal approach to the Indonesian government was on the morning, of Saturday, 18 October, when the ambassador in Jakarta, 128
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RichardWoo1cott, called on the Indonesian foreign minister, Adam Malik, while other embassy officers contacted Indonesian military and intelligence officiak At the official level, Woo1cott met a wall. Neither W oo1cott nor Malik, if he knew as much as W oo1cott, felt able to refer to their background knowledge about Operation Flamboyant. Malik promised help in getting information, through the pro-Indonesian Timorese. He was also querulous with W oo1cott over a wave of anti-Indonesian demonstrations in Canberra. Woo1cott had already been summoned to the foreign ministry a week before to hear a complaint about demonstrators occupying the·· Indonesian embassy in Canberra and daubing slogans on embassy homes. The demonstrations provided· a convenient· red herring for Malik. Malik had promised Woo1cott there would be no reprisals over the Australian demonstrations, but when he emerged from the meeting with W oolcott and faced questions from Indonesian journalists about the missing newsmen he quipped angrily· that he was 'not a grave-digger'. Malik and his department had little involvement with the operation in Timor itself, and off-the-cuff statements like this were not always taken at face value in Jakarta. But this reaction typified the response given to Australian inquiries for some three weeks: defensive, un-cooperative and contemptuous. But equally, the whole series of Australian inquiries at this level were ritualistic. On Monday, 20 October, the Jakarta morning daily Kompas, one of the most respected newspapers in Southeast Asia, published a report of an interview by staff correspondent Valens· Doy in Batugade the previous Friday, 17 October, with UDT leader Lopes da Cruz. Lopes da Cruz was quoted as saying the bodies of four Europeans had been discovered in a house in Balibo. It could not be determined what nationality the dead men COVER-UP IN FOREIGN AFFAIRS
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were, but nearby was a sign, 'Australia' . The UDT leader was later to deny giving this interview, and the Kompas journalist Doy felt so ·threatened by Operation Flamboyant's commanders he returned to his home district in Flores island to hide out for several months. But Day's report was later confirmed by the published Opsus account in 1976. Kompas also quoted Apodeti leader Tomas Goncalves, who, according to the subsequent Indonesian account, led the attack on Balibo, as making an explanatory broadcast over the Opsus-run Radio Ramelau based in Kupang. Goncalves said that in a war anything could be destroyed, deliberately' or not. There was no guarantee of safety. The pro-Indonesian troops did not know of the journalists' presence and could not be held responsible for them. The Apodeti leader said the attack on Balibo had taken Fretilin by surprise from the rear. It had lasted only 45-, minutes. After the attack the badly burnt bodies of white men were discovered in the house, ofa Chinese trader. As we have seen, listeners in. Dili recall broadcasts by· Radio Ramelau in KU'pang over '20-21 October saying that 'Australian' communists' helping Fretilin in combat had been killed at Balibo. The Kompas article deepened fears in Australia when it was reported in morning newspapers on Tuesday, 21 October, five days after the killings. Foreign Minister Don Willesee said in the Senate that 'the Australian government is gravely concerned about the fate of the missing journalists. The Australian embassy in Jakarta has been able to enlist the assistance of the Indonesian authoritiesan'd an officer of the embassy will proceed to the border area shortly, perhaps today, to make on-the-spot. investigation.' This was at least four days after. Willesee knew the newsmen were dead. The best qualified Indonesian linguist in the embassy's political section at that time was its most junior member, 130
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
Third Secretary Richard Johnson, who had just transferred over from the consular section. He flew to Kupang, Indonesian Timor, the next day, Wednesday, 22 October. During his stay of 19 'days in Kupang, Johnson sought in vain for permission from local authorities to travel to the b~ rder, only:"one 'hour's flight in aircraft available for charter from local missionaries, or one day's journey byroad. Ina roundabout fashion, the 1976 Opsus account, Integrasi, tells why: Even though the Australian Foreign Affairs Department also intervened over Johnson's plans to visit the border area, because anti-Indonesian demonstrations in Australia increased around that time, and because the ~ Australian Government did not display a firm enough approach to them, it turned out that . . . Mr Johnson stayed bottled up in Kupang and could not carry out his journey to Atambua (the main border town) .because there was no transport.
In other words, as a punishment to Australia for not banning demonstrations against Indonesia, the Indonesian authorities presented endless excuses to Johnson to prevent him from .pursuing inquiries. In Jakarta,. Ambassador Richayd W oolcott became increasingly disturbed· at the- lack of co-operation and puzzled that the Indonesians did not supply even the minimum information the embassy needed ·to confirm the deaths if not the circumstances. This would have also taken some, of the heat off the Indonesians themselves. Indonesian officials, principally the head of the foreign ministry's Asia-Pacific directorate, Maj .-Gen. Adenan, and BakinChief Maj .-Gen. YogaSugama, insistedpedantically and disingenuously that Balibo was under Portuguese'jurisdiction, that the border: was 'closed' and that Indonesia had only influence, not control, over COVER-UP IN FOREIGN AFFAIRS
131
Apodeti and UDT. In earlier private conversations, Indonesian officials. such asSugama had not bothered with this pretence. On Friday, 24 October, Johnson received in Kupang letters from the pro-Indonesian Timorese parties stating that 'several white men' had been found among the dead at Balibo. The letters suggested that inquiries be pursued with Fretilin, Portuguese and Australian auth~ orities. A second letter, from ··Lopesda .Cruz dated 27 October, pointed out a Fretilin flag as well as the slogan 'Falintil is always with the Manbere people' on the Chinese house in Balibo and said he questioned whether the people in the village were journalists or not. '. . . We are now expecting that the Australian government [will] tak"e the necessary steps to stop Australian citizens to come and fight side by side with Fretilin and fight and press the Timorese people', Lopes da Cruz wrote. On 29 October, The Canberra Times and other newspapers carried a report based on the account by Guido dos Santos, who claimed to have been a Fretilin auxiliary who had fled Balibo as the Indonesians attacked, and said he heard the newsmen attempting. to s-urrender. The Nine Network's news director, Gerald Stone, had given the department of Foreign Affairs the full text of the Guido dosSantos interview, as well as a tape recording of one of the 20~210ctober broadcasts by UDT's Lopes da Cruz over Radio Ramelau in Kupang in which he talked of"~ustralian communists' having been at Balibo. The other broadcast, on 21 October, in which Lopes da Cruz was reported. to have -said the ·-Australian communists had been captured-· and that 'they got· a lesson'was not taped. The tape-recording supplied by Stone has not been included in any list given so far of the department's holdings of material on Balibo. 132
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Still, on Thursday, 30 October, a fortnight after the killings, and after a week of what was clearly a runaround, with newspapers editorialising that Australia was being treated in a humiliating fashion, Canberra maintained its studied position of ignorance. After being talked out of expressing direct knowledge of Indonesian involvement by Ambassador Dick W oolcott, in a series of cables later leaked to Canberra Times journalist Bruce Juddery, Foreign Minister Willesee made his controversial Senate statement: The Government has viewed with concern widespread reports that Indonesia is involved in military intervention in Portuguese Timor . . . Were there substance in these reports, the Australian Government would be extremely disappointed and we have so informed the Indonesian authorities. The Australian Government has urged that Indonesia pursue her interests through diplomatic means. We have told the Indonesians that we remain opposed to the use of armed force.
In Canberra, some time before the Whitlam government was dismissed on 11 November, ALP backbencher John Kerin had approached Foreign Minister Willesee about the gulf between what was known and what was disclosed by the Australian government. Willesee replied: 'All right John, if you want to be known as the man who brought down the Labor government . . .' Senator Arthur Gietzelt said in 1979 that he and Labor MP Ken Fry approached Whitlam about the Indonesian involvement. He said Whitlam commented: 'What do you want us to do? Send troops in?' As Gietzelt explained: 'At that time we were so besieged and beleaguered as a government . . .' On about 5 November, the Indonesian foreign minister, Malik, finally told President Suharto that the case COVER-UP IN FOREIGN AFFAIRS
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of the missing journalists was damaging relations with Australia and that something had to be done. On 7 November, Whitlam wrote Suharto a personal note appealing for greater co-operation in confirming the fate of the newsmen: The issues involved are very' difficult ones for us. We have been assuming that the men, or at least four of them, have been killed. But we have so far been unable to obtain positive confirmation of this fact or indeed to establish precisely the circumstances in which the men were killed.We need to do what we can to establish the facts, .to obtain positive identification, and to carry out the wishes of the next-of-kin in regard to the disposal' of the remains and the return of personal effects. In the absence of information about', the fate of the missing men, varIOUS legal problems arise and will continue. I recognise" that Indonesia might not feel well-placed to provide information on an incident which occurred in Portuguese Timor. But Indonesia is the only country in direct touch with UDT, and Apodeti forces and we have, therefore, been enlisting the good offices of your Government in trying to bring this matter toa satisfactory 'conclusion. Our officials have been in touch these last few weeks and I appreciate, the help which Indonesian officials have been able to provide, in particular in arranging for an exchange of letters between the Australian Embassy in Jakarta and the UDT leader, M'f Lopes da Cruz., Weare still lacking, however, final ,and positive confirmation that the bodies located at Balibo are in fact those of the missing newsmen. My concern, Your Excellency, is that the longer the, issue is not settled the greater will be the speculation, in our newspapers and elsewhere about the 134
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circumstances in which the five died. It is for this reason that I have felt that I should write to you personally to seek your help in overcoming the problem which has arisen for us. May I suggest, too, that it is in the interests of others concerned, including the UDT and Apodeti parties themselves, that the matter be cleared up as quickly as possible . . .
Whitlam gave the letter to the returning Indonesian ambassador, Maj.-Gen. Her Tasning, whose term had expired, to be taken to Jakarta. On the same day, 7 November, a first secretary from the Australian embassy's political section, Peter Rodgers, flew from Jakarta to Kupang to reinforce Third Secretary Johnson's efforts to break through the obstructiveness. On 12 November, nearly a month after the killings, the Bakin chief Yoga Sugama handed Ambassador W oolcott a box containing charred human bone fragments, some camera gear, notebooks and papers belonging to Shackleton, Rennie, Peters and Stewart. An accompanying letter from an Apodeti leader, Guilherme Goncalves, said four white men had been among 15 people burnt in a house used as a Fretilin strongpoint in Balibo, about 100 metres from the house with 'Amtralia' daubed on it. A later search of the site found 'some documents'. Goncalves said that on 27 October soldiers had found two bodies in the bush outside Balibo, one a European, with a camera and documents beside him. The two bodies had been burnt. No attempt was made to explain the contradiction that the four bodies in the house had been almost completely burnt, yet papers found nearby the bodies inside the house showed only mild water damage. By then the two Fretilin accounts had appeared, one from Guido dos Santos and the other from three soldiers interviewed by the Australian Associated Press COVER-UP IN FOREIGN AFFAIRS
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correspondent' in Dili, Roger East. W oolcott is understood to have raised these accounts with Gen. Yoga S,ugama, who became angry and said words to the effect that he 'had no intention of reacting to every example of Fretilin propaganda'. It was not until 13 November that the letter from Gough Whitlam, who had by then been dismissed by John Kerr, was hand-delivered toSuharto by the returning Indonesian ambassador. No reply was ever received. The d'epartment's handling of the funeral arrangements for the" five journalists showed diplomacy at its shabbiest. In a submission late in November to Andrew Peacock, the foreign minister in the acting· LiberalCountry Party government, Graham Feakes, the department's Southeast Asia branch head, warned of public support for the bones to be returned to Australia for lab,oratory testing.. (The Jakarta embassy's doctor, Henry Will, had ,been able to state only that the remains 'appeared to be human'.) The department 'must notfavour this' because it could lead to an 'anti-Indonesian campaign' and cause 'public outrage', Feakes urged. Feakes attached a draft of a letter for Peacock to send to the next-of-kin, advising them of the deaths and extending the government's condolences. One government official at the ·time recalls Peacock returning the draft, demanding it be rewritten in less bureaucratic language and with more compassion. The letters from the department of Foreign Affairs reached the next-of-kin around 5 December, the day the remains of the journalists were buried in a Jakarta cemetery, in a single coffin, in a ceremony attended by several embassy staff and their spouses, resident Australian journalists and the secretary of the· Indonesian Journalists' Association. Some' of the relatives had agreed with the Jakarta burial. 'When I heard the bodies had been burned I.said 136
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I didn't want the remains brought back to Australia, and made that known to Foreign Affairs,' said Gary Cunningham's father, Jim. 'It would have been too harrowing.' But others say they were pressured and misled into agreeing. Greg Shackleton's widow, Shirley, remembered the 'call from the department: 'I was told "If you want to bring the remains back it would cost a lot and you would have to pay." I didn't think they were the remains anyway, and said do what you like.' Brian Peters' sister, Maureen Tolfree, had been in Australia making inquiries and was on her way back to Britain just before the funeral, on a flight that stopped in Jakarta. She made an impromptu decision to get off the plane in Jakarta to see if she could collect her brother's remains to take back to Britain for burial. On her arrival in Jakarta, she was taken to a small office at the airport until a British embassy officer arrived. He advised her to get back on the plane, which she did. A former fiancee of Brian Peters, who has asked not to be named, remembered the person who rang from the department of Foreign Affairs as 'quite cold'. 'Foreign Affairs conned each family by saying the other families did not want the remains brought back', she said. To add to her anger, she learned only in 1994 that two letters written by Peters were in the personal effects handed back by the Indonesians. At the funeral service in Jakarta, the wreath from the Australian embassy carried an epitaph written by one of the bereaved relatives: 'They stayed because they saw the search for truth and the need to report at first hand as a necessary task.' At the funeral Ambassador W oo1cott said: 'These five Australian newsmen were regrettably and tragically killed. No one could have expected it. We do not even now have legal proof or complete evidence of their deaths but all available evidence points to their being COVER-UP IN FOREIGN AFFAIRS
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killed on October 15 or 16. Journalists are like soldiers. They take risks in the pursuit of their profession, in: the pursuit of truth.' Australia's ambassador, it must be recalled, was .·at the very moment he was giving a graveside homily on truth, party to the efforts by the Department of Foreign Affairs .to conceal the truth from the next·· of kin. That same department had effectively endorsed the invasion plans which led directly to these deaths. The Balibo affair rested until early in 1976 when the leader of the KOTA party, Jose, Martins, defected from the· Indonesian cause. In April 1976, Martins gave his inside version of the· Indonesian campaign in Timor in a· .sworn declaration to the department of Foreign Affairs and in accounts to the Australian press. As we have seen, Martins gave a sketchy description of the command centre at Batugade. He identified the commander as a colonel 'Dadin' [meaning Col. Dading Kalbuadi] and the attack leader as a 'Major Andreas' [the cover name of Capt. Yunus Yosfiah]. He said he had been at Balibo at about 10 am on 16 October, and recounted Tomas Goncalves' telling him that two· of the. newsmen had been killed in the Chinese shop-house, two were shot down by Indonesian soldiers as they came into the open and tried to surrender,. and the fifth was shot down as he ran out the back. The first four bodies were stripped of valuables, then burnt. Martins' account brought more calls from the press, the Australian Journalists' Association, jurists and b;lckbench MPs for a proper inquiry-.-just ahead of a visit to Jakarta by the Fraser government's foreign minister, Andrew Peacock. With the agreement of the Indonesians, a three--man team from the Australian embassy in Jakarta, led by the third most senior ·political officer, Counsellor Allan Taylor, went to Timor on 28 April. The other members were the embassy's consul, David 138
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Rutter, and Third Secretary Johnson. Basing themselves in Kupang, over 12 days they made two trips of less than a day each time by helicopter into Balibo. The investigation was a model of its kind. The team meticulously inspected. Balibo, studied damage to buildings, looked at fields of vision, took photographs from the air and ground, and quizzed the Timorese alleged to have been present in the attack. They even asked pro-Indonesian Timorese leaders for help locating the Fretilin witnesses interviewed by Australian reporters . the previous November. Tomas Goncalves was hazy about how it was decided that four bodies were among the ashes in the Chinese house, and could not clear up contradictions in his earlier account of where the belongings had been found. While noting certain such unsatisfactory aspects, the embassy team said the account they received from Goncalves and other Timorese had 'a certain plausibility'. Circumstantial evidence suggested that the remains of the five were found in Balibo but beyond that few conclusions could be drawn. By this time, of course, Dili and the region around Balibo had been occupied by the Indonesian army, and the entire territory sealed off from out~ide access. What the team saw had been thoroughly filtered, rehearsed and directed by senior Indonesian military officers who stayed offstage 30 kilometres away in Indonesian Timor, at Atambua. DSD listeners at Shoal Bay heard the military radio traffic as Indonesian military officials sorted out their stories and shuffled military units around the landscape to avoid being seen by the Australians. Not a word of what Taylor himself already knewfrom his detailed briefings by CSIS and other sources in Jakarta during October 1975-was contained in his mission's report, which was notified to parliament on 2 June 1976 in a verbal statement by Foreign Minister COVER-UP IN FOREIGN AFFAIRS
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Peacock and .placed in the Parliamentary Library soon after, rather than tabled in parliament itself. The escape clause for the department of Foreign Affairs was contained in the mission's terms of reference, set· out in the report's preamble, that 'the team based, its findings on. the information obtained during its two visits to 'Balibo', meaning it would be an extremely limited exercise, barring a major mistake by the Indonesians orchestrating the witnesses interviewed by" the Australians. Unsurprisingly, Peacock was only able to tell parliament: 'I regret that it is still not possible to come to firm and' final conclusions as" to the circumstances and manner of the deaths of the newsmen.' The Department of Foreign Affairs 'claimed to The National 'Times in 1979 that it did follow up'statements by Jose Martins that contained the names of Indonesian personnel. The Indonesians had 'stated that they" believed they, had cooperated as fully as possible and could not agree to pursue the matter further'. Another line of inquiry was among Timorese refugees in Portugal, most of whom left Timor from the border area in mid-1976. Some had participated in the, '. campaign against Fretilin late in 1975. From 1976, these refugees had been contacted by John Dowd, then a NSW state Liberal MP (later state Opposition leader and NSW Supreme Court justice) who headed the Australian chapter of the International Commission of Jqrists, a lawyers' hu~an rights organisation. Another to contact them was the former Australian consul in Dill, James Dunn, then a researcher in the federal Parliamentary Library. However no attempt was made to interview refugees by the Australian .government, which at that time ·maintained an embassy in Lisbon. The attitude of Australian . officials was summed "uP in the ,words of one senior Defen·ce department official140
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at the time: 'We do not know exactly how they died, and I'm glad we don't know.' It was not until the 20th anniversary of the Balibo killings, in 1995, that sufficient pressure for a new inquiry to be opened came on the then ALP government under Prime Minister Paul Keating. More detail of the Indonesian military operation was available, several Timorese exiles had come forward with pieces of information-and more were said. to be ready to testify to a truly independent inquiry. The pressure came from the Australian media, the bereaved families, interested bodies such as the International Commission of Jurists and some government backbenchers including the Labor MP Chris Haviland. In November 1995, Foreign Minister Gareth Evans commissioned a career federal government lawyer and former chairman of the National Crime ComJ11ission, Tom Sherman, to conduct an inquiry i~to the circumstances of the Balibo deaths, and of the disappearance of Roger East, the AAP journalist who had stayed on in Dili during the 7 December 1975 Indonesian attack and was reported to have been captured and executed the next day. Sherman did not have the powers to compel witnesses to testify or give legal protection to the identity of witnesses, as would a judicial inquiry. Because of his background in the legal bureaucracy, he was seen in some Timorese quarters as too much part of a government that was compromised by its closeness to the Suharto Government in Indonesia. While there was no question of Sherman's integrity and there is no evidence that at any time he was blocked from pursuing any line of inquiry in his first report,his appointment allowed a perception that the inquiry was not completely independent of the government. Sherman's inquiry did not take him into Timor itself, or Indonesia, and he took his terms of reference COVER-UP IN FOREIGN AFFAIRS
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to exclude any scrutiny around the conduct of the Balibo affair by the department of Foreign Affairs itself He was given six months to report. His first report, presented in June 1996 after a change in government and tabled in parliament by Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, was ground-breaking in that it declared Indonesian forces to have been involved at Balibo, named Yunus Yosfiah and Dading Kalbuadi as officers in charge, and judged that the bodies had been dressed in uniforms and posed for propaganda photographs, then burnt as part of a cover-up. Sherman's report was criticised for adopting the judgment·· that the five had been killed quickly in the heat of battle, ev'en though some might have been trying to surrender. By that stage, with witnesses testifying about the monitoring ·of Fretilin radio by Dading's forces and the weakness of Fretilin resistance and quickness of the fight at Balibo, and Murdani's admission of prior knowledge of the journalists' ptesence, this seemed to many analysts· unduly· soft on Indonesia's responsibility. The government's handling of Sherman's report was also criticised by many familiar with the Balibo controversy. It showed the inclination to shrink from confronting the Indonesian government remained embedded in the·· Foreign Affairs psyche. Although Sherman said his work was 'preliminary', Foreign Minister Alexander Downer soon after ruled out the value 'of any further inquiry outside· Indonesia, and on a visit ,to Jakarta soon after its release made only a formal effort to persuade his counterpart, Ali Alatas, to follow up the report's findings. Most puzzling of all about Sherman's research was the lack of virtually any attempt to contact the department of Foreign Affairs ·officers who had been working on Timor in 1974-76. Former ambassador W oolcott made a written submission to the inquiry on his own 142
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initiative. Former consul David Rutter, who was working in Foreign Minister Downer's Adelaide office, supplied some topographical material about Balibo to Sherman. Some of the other officers were dead (Graham Feakes and Michael Curtin) but the others-including Allan Taylor (appointed to head the Australian Secret Intelligence Service in 1998), Malcolm Dan and Alan Renouf--were accessible. The department of Foreign Affairs denied any instruction to clam up. 'Mr Sherman was free to contact any individual, either in Australia or abroad, whom he considered to have relevant information on the deaths of the journalists', it said in a written reply to questions from The Sydney Morning Herald in 1998. 'The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade did not, at any stage, instruct any individual not to come forward to Mr Sherman. Nor did the department attempt to exert any influence over individuals with whom Mr Sherman initiated contact in order to obtain evidence.' Nor did Sherman appear to have tapped the voluminous cable traffic between the Jakarta embassy and Canberra around the time of the Balibo attack, though the department says he had 'unfettered access' to all its records and files, and routinely requested information from them. Sherman did say that shortly before closing his inquiry, he asked for and was given access to intelligence material relating to Balibo, which he perused in one day. He reported that this information did not contain any material 'of sufficient evidentiary value' to warrant inclusion in the report or cast doubt on any of its conclusions. Clearly he did not see the full body of intelligence material and it seems not the vital DSD intercepts. Canberra's knowledge about Indonesia's Timor campaign in 1975 was not only the result of military intelligence work, but also the tainted fruit of the COVER-UP IN FOREIGN AFFAIRS
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connection built up by - the]akarta' embassy with the Indonesians running that campaign. It was inside knowl~ edge, and the department of Foreign Affairs studiously avoided presenting Sherman with evidence about this aspect. A report in The Sydney Morning Herald in August 1998 cast doubt on whether all the department's Timor records would be revealed at the end of ·2005, when the 1975 files were due to be opened under the 30-year rule. It pointed out that the department had already withheld hundreds of pages of documents relating to Indonesia from records up to 1967, covering the 1965 Jakarta coup attempt, in the files already opened. It also said that Timor records, occupying some 9 metres of shelf space, were not secure and were open to interference. Documents were being lost, and it was not unknown for fabricated notes and advice to be slipped into files .to enhance reputations. In particular, the copy of the record of Whitlam's meeting with Suharto in Se'ptember. 1974 was missing from the archives' for long periods of time. In response to questions from the newspaper, the department said it 'was not aware of the precise location of the docu-ment to which you refer. There are a number of historical documents that are currently being examined by this department with a view to their archiving and long-term storage. The document to which you referred may well be amongst them.' The department of Foreign Affairs was also unable to locate immediately the 13 October cable from Woolcott warning of the imminent attack on the border between West and East Timor, though it had found a reference to this cable in a subsequent cable. Bruce Haigh, who ran the department's Indonesia desk in 1984-86, recalled that two files of key documents on Timor and Indonesia, including photographs of 144
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Balibo, were withheld from the department's registry and kept in a safe in his section. 'I said 1 didn't want to hang onto it any more, that no files should be kept like that', said Haigh. 'It was illegal, 1 thought, to hold files like that. They sh?ll~~
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NINE
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N CANBERRA AT 6.00 am on Friday, 17 October, the . day after the Balibo attack, the ]IO's duty officer arrived .to begin his work in the Office of C,urrent Intelligence.. The task of duty' officer, rotated among the OCI's 12 analysts, was to remain contactable through the night to handle any sudden, important· event and to come in early to get the daily Highlights ready by 8.30 am, when most of JIO'sstaff began work. The .'·duty officer that Friday was Gary Klintworth, a: young China specialist in the East Asia section of OCI.,!Following routine, he collected the night's DSD flimsies and, Foreign Affairs cables from .trays in the DSD Liaison Office, then looked throqgh the teletype printouts from Reuters and other news services. The pressing news of the night was glaringly obvious~ The DSD's overnight crew, many drawn from. a group of experienced non-commissioned officers in the three services, were keenly aware of the significance of the 146
intercepts about Balibo. They gave Klintworth the two intercepts referring to the newsmen-one reporting the discovery of dead 'white men' in Balibo, the other reporting their bodies had been burnt-that had reached Canberra. Klintworth collated these with the newswire reports of Fretilin's announcement the previous evening in Dili of the large-scale Indonesian attack on the western border, and Fretilin's loss of contact with the five Australian-based and four Portuguese television newsmen. He drafted a short text, which was the only item in that morning's Highlights, under the headline 'Australian journalists killed'. He took his draft down to the support office to be typed up, photocopied, and put in pigeon-holes for the OCI heads and the US and British liaison officers. Bennetts, who tended to arrive at work before everyone else at 7.45 am, was waiting eagerly to read the Highlights. When he saw what Klintworth had done this particular morning, Bennetts raised a storm. He snatched all remaining copies of the Highlights from the pigeon-holes, and asked those section heads,. who had taken a copy to return them immediately. 'We're not having that spread all over Canberra', .he said. The collected Highlights were then placed in a 'burn-bag' for destruction. Klintworth had innocently stumbled into the middle of a cover-up that had begun in the Australian intelligence community even bef<Jre the first shots were fired at Balibo. DSD's headquarters in Melbourne had already decided to hold back the intercept of the DadingMurdani exchange on the night of15. October.· This was to avoid any attempt to rescue the newsmen,and hence expose DSD's capabilities and perhaps compromise its ability to read Indonesian signals. Over the next few days, DSD was anxious that politicians or officials might be moved to end the agonising uncertainty of the COvER-UP IN DEFENCE
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newmen's families and colleagues about their fate. Once this period of extraordinary pressure on the government to reveal the facts had passed, DSD hoped its operations would shift back into total obscurity. This course of action seems callous to those outside the core of the UKUSA sigint community. The chiefs of the Australian DSD were included in this secret society, whose ·'tough-minded approach was established in World War II when cities, convoys, warships and army divisions were sacrificed to protect their codebreaking achievements such as 'Ultra' and 'Magic'. Bennetts was the natural figure in JIO to keep the lid on the Balibo intercepts. He had not carried over any regard for informed public debate from his 30 years asa journalist and academic. He was very security conscious and had clashed with Whitlam'sstaff over their resistance .to undergoing security clearances in December 1972. Several of the young personal staff brought in by new Labor ministers had been involved in anti-Vietnam War protests, and were suspicious of ASIO's clearance process. Those who refused to cooperate were denied access to defence facilities ·and classified' material. Unlike many ·of his civilian· colleagues in JIO, Bennetts had a strong rapport with its military officers. One of his JIO colleagues has said that 'Bennetts was the trusted person in the civilian crew'. He moved quickly to circumscribe access to intelligence material about Timor. Subsequent events in Timor were covered ina special intelligence bulletin produced by Lt-Col., Geoff Cameron in the JI 0' s Directorate ofJoint Service Intelligence, which had a far more limited distribution than the other OCI publications. The concern about protecting the Timor intercepts contributed to an appearance at JIO a few weeks later that has gone down in the folklore of the Australian' intelligence community. Sir Arthur Tange made a very 148
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rare visit to Bllilding L and addressed a gathering in the conference room on the 6th floor of selected JIO personnel who had handled Timor material. He told them that, although he understood that people could be very, upset by the killings, it was imperative that they did not become,:e.ri15tional. The critical point was the need to preserve the integrity of the signals intelligence source--which by then was providing the only detailed intelligence about the In.donesian operations in East Timor. Jockel has since described this as a 'moralebooster'. Another who was in the audience likened· it to a ship's captain 'bringing out the cat o'nine tails' in a situation at JIO that was 'almost a mutiny'. Tange had just been steering the defence and intelligence establishment through particularly stormy times in its relationship with the elected government. In 1973, its first year in office, Whitlam's ALP government had upset US president .Richard Nixon and his intelligence chiefs with some of its diplomatic overtures to the communist countries, and its attitudes to the Western intelligence connection. In March 1973, Whitlam's attorney-general, Lionel Murphy, had led federal police in a raid on ASIO headquarters in Melbourne because he suspected the security -body was withholding information about anti-communist Croatian terrorists ahead of a visit. by a Yugoslav leader. The ASIO headquarters held an enormous volume of sensitive intelligence materialshared by the Americans (including copies of the Venona decrypts .·of KGB signals about its agents and activities). A senior CIA official, James Jesus Angleton, later likened the raid to 'a bull in a China shop' that jeopardised 'the jewels of counterintelligence'. The frictions between the government and Australia's intelligence agencies grew in 1975 with the looming constitutional crisis. In September 1975, Whitlam had sacked the director-gen'eral of ASIO,Peter Barbour, for COVER-UP IN DEFENCE
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reasons that remain unclear. On 21 October, he called in the director of ASIS, Bill Robertson, and told him in a tirade that could be heard in the corridors outside, 'You're fired. And you ca'n forget about. youI-super [superannuation] too!' Robertson's offence had been not to tell Foreign Minister Willesee that ASIS had used the Australian hotelier Frank Favaro as an informant in Dili, leading Willesee to deny in parliament that ASIS had any 'agents' in Portuguese Timor. Even after the Balibo killings, Whitlam's chief concern was to keep his undertakings to Suharto about Australia's noninvolvement. Then, on 2 November, Whitlam accusedthe'Country Party leader, Doug Anthony, of CIA connections. Anthony 'had rented a house in Canberra to a CIA officer, Richard Stallings, who had just been appointed the first chief of the new CIA 'facility' at Pine Gap, near· Alice Springs. Whitlam's barb disclosed the link between the CIA and Pine Gap, potentially exposing the super-secret, multi-billion dollar Rhyolite satellitebased sigint program. On 10 November, the CIA threatened to sever links with Australian counterparts. In a top secret cable to the acting ASIa director-general; the ASIa liaison officer in Washington reported that the· CIA was 'perplexed' by the public discussion of Pine Gap and CIA activities in Australia, and that 'if this problem cannot be solved, they [the CIA] do not see how our mutually beneficial relations are going to continue'. The CIA had stressed that it 'does not lightly adopt this attitude'. Tange was reported to have said, perhaps with some hyperbole, that this near-b'reak in the US intelligence relationship was 'the gravest. risk to the nation's security there has ever been'. The intelligence community was relieved. when Kerr dismissed Whitlam' on 11 November and put in' Malcolm Fraser as caretaker prime minister· until elections on 150
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13 December, when Fraser's conservative coalition won decisively. Indeed, it is widely believed that Sir John Kerr had intelligence concerns as much in mind as the constitutional deadlock over the government's financial bills when he took his unprecedented decision. When the pressures had eased, in 1977, JIO director and National Intelligence Committee chairman Gordon Jockel decided it would be useful to review the performance of Australia's foreign intelligence services during the prolonged and intricate crisis over Indonesia's takeover of Portuguese Timor. The key question was: how much forewarning of events had intelligence given the government? The task was given to Geoff Cameron, who by then had retired from the army and moved down from DJSI to the Southeast Asia section of OCI. Cameron compiled a dossier of the raw intelligence, mainly sigint, at pivotal moments through the crisis. Cameron also wrote his own, brief analysis or overview of this material in a separate paper. The dossier, of which there was only one copy, contained about 200 pages and was 'bound' in a loose-leaf folder with a blue cover. Subsequently it was often referred to as the 'Blue Book' and was kept for two or three years initially in the vault adjacent to the Southeast Asia section of OCI, and then moved to the vault outside the JIO director's office on the 2nd floor; A succession of JIO (later DIO, Defence Intelligence Organisation) officers were appointed as special custodians to control access to the Blue Book and its contents. Not only was a register kept of the very few officials allowed to see the dossier, but readers had to register which particular documents they were studying. Cameron evidently obtained a copy of the intercept of the night of 15 October, which had never been distributed in OCI or DJSl. This intercept was read by a COVER-UP IN DEFENCE
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number ,of JIO ,staff in following years, and became a subject of guarded discussion within the organisation. It was still in the file in the early 1980s. However, the intercept appears to have been withdrawn from the file by late 1986 when the new ALP defence minister, Kim Beazley, Tesponded toa letter from one of the authors, Hami.sh McDonald, asking whether there had been any prior. knowledge of the newsmen's dangerous situation at Balibo and, if so, whether any rescue moves had been consiqered. The inquiry was passed to Allan Thompson, a senior civilian official in Defence with a particularly strong background in unconventional warfare and intelligence. He was a member of the Australian Army Training Team in South Vietnam in the early 1960s, w:here he was attached to" the CIA on special operations. He joined the JIO in 1970, and became coordinator of GCI in 1976 when John Bennetts went to Washington as JIO liaisop.officer.Thompson said in 1999 that the files. ,had, been in 'chaos', but that he was 'reasonably certain' he had been shown everything about the incident, and .that the material included nothing,'to suggest there had been any prior knowledge. If the 'Blue Book' had been censored before ThompsolJsaw it in 1986, so too had other government archives and departmental holdings. A. purge of Balibo records hadtaken place in about 1978. Capt. John ('Pepe') Florent had become the DJSI's: Indonesia desk officer after Capt. Peter Gibson in 1976, and when the Office of ,National Assessments was established in 1977-78, he became its Indonesia desk officer. Florent told close colleagues that soon after he took up his new ONA job, s.ome officials had scoured the archives of all intelligenceagencies, including ONA, to remove records of the most sensitive intercepts, relating to the Balibo attack. Florent, who died in 1993, did not know what happened to these record's. At this time, John Bennetts 152
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had returned from the JIO liaison post in Washington to set up and head ONA's new current intelligence unit., As part of this, he oversaw the transfer of material from the disbanded Office of Current Intelligence in JI0. Ben·netts, who died suddenly inJuly 1978, aged 53, would almost certainly have been involved in such a purge. In 1996, ten years after Thompson's search, Tom Sherman asked to see all secret intelligence files on Balibo during his first inquiry. As we have seen, he said he was given ·'full . access to the relevant intelligence holdings' and had read all the material in the course of one day towards the end of six months of inquiry. He had seen 'no material of sufficient evidentiary value to warrant inclusion in this report'. However, in 1997, Gough Whitlam intimated that he had been told of secret intelligence about Balibo that was available before the attack but was not passed to his government. In his book Abiding··lnterests, the former prime minister noted: 'lam advised that I should not , yet reveal·why we did. not ·know of the incursion across the border to Balibo and why we.were able immediately afterwards to learn that five men had been killed. ' In March .1999, in a letter to The Sydney Morning Herald, Whitlam noted that Sherman had also been advised to this effect. He also elaborated that the 'we', referred to himself, defence minister Bill Morrison and foreign minister Don Willesee-not, he implied, the whole government apparatus. The former prime minister appeared to be signalling, in the most cryptic terms, that vital intelligence had been withheld until it was too late to do anything, and that the politicians had been left ,with the blame. He also begs the question: who is instructing a former prime· 'minister on what can safely be revealed about intelligence issues? Whitlam was commenting in this letter on the outcome of the second inquiry by Sherman, which had COVER-UP IN DEFENCE
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been commissioned by the Foreign. Minister, Alexander Downer, in October 1998. As we have seen, his first inquiry.waswidely criticised for omissions and its failure to fully explore Australian government records and to quiz former officials. The collapse of Suharto's regime a,nd the reopening of the question of East Timor's' independence encouraged some' of those familiar with the ,1975 events to come forward. Among those who approached Sherman to testify to his second inquiry were two individuals who each provided Sherman with new vistas for 'investigation. Their evidence also showed that Sherman had been wrong when he' claimed in his first report that he had seen all the relevant intelligence material. Ted Howes, a retired JIO staff member, had been head of the support group in OCI from October 1974 to April. 1976. Although he had not been an .analyst, he read all of the reports 'produced by OCI, which his support staff typed and published and he himself distributed to the designated recipients in Canberra. Howes remembered the activity in oel around 16 4nd 17 October 1975, and gave Sherman the names of the ,relevant, oel staff. However his recollection of the contents of the .intelligence material coming into OCI, including the intercepts,;" was hazy and fragmentary. It was on this aspect that Sherman ,assessedHowes'value as a witness, rather than as a source of leads for further interviews. Sherman did later talk with three former OCI·officers-···-.,Rowan Osborn, Geoff Cameron and Allan Thompson-"of whom only Osborn had been ·in the office jn October 1975, and did not contact the Indonesian desk officer OennyHerridge) or others who would have . recollected the intercepts· in· some detail. The other vista was offered by .Ian Cunliffe, the former legal officer of the· Hope Royal Commission, who recalled the intercept he was shown at Sh'oal Bay in 154
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March 1977 suggesting the journalists 'were taken and executed', and which the other Hope Commission staff member George Brownbill confirmed to Sherman with 'a more precise recollection of the contents'. Sherman asked the Foreign Affairs officer assigned to assist his inquiry, Nick Warner, to ask all agencies likely to have classified documents relating to· the Balibo incident to search for any document that might contain the phrases recalled by Brownbill. Warner reported no such document could be found. Nor could Martin Brady, the head of DSD, when asked by Sherman, find the intercept or any document containing the phrases in it. Brady's search included the records still held at the Shoal Bay station. Later, when Sherman visited Brady at DSD headquarters (by then moved to Building M, next to the Defence Intelligence Organisation (DIO) building at the Russell Hill complex in Canberra), Brady said that a number of searches had been made over the years and no other relevent files remained. Brady could only offer the lame explanation that 'much of the raw intelligence material is not kept for archival and privacy reasons and only the product reports from the agency are retained'. But in this case, not even a 'product report' could be found. Sherman also spoke by telephone with Mos Williams, whom he incorrectly understood to have been director of DSD in 1977. Williams had accompanied Cunliffe and Brownbill to Shoal Bay in March that year, and of course had been the central figure at DSD headquarters in Melbourne who had handled the Balibo intercepts. Living in retirement on the south coast of New South Wales and described as being in poor health, Williams said he had no recollection of the visit to Shoal Bay. He mentioned the 'tension' between the translators and processors at Shoal Bay and those at DSD headquarters. Sherman suggested to him that the translation COVER-UP IN DEFENCE
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of the intercept shown to. Cunliffe and Brownbill might have been changed by the 'more experienced· and competent' analysts in Melbourne. ·Williams said this was 'a reasonable hypothesis'. Sherman evidently did not ask Williams what detail he did. recall of intercepts "about the deaths of the journalists. And if he had, it is hard to imagine the legendary keeper of the secrets of the Western sigint community, who had done so much to hide DSD's achievements, suddenly confessing over a telephone.
156
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
TEN
COMPLICITY, BLAME AND SECRECY
T
HERE IS STILL much to be told, much for Canberra • . to disclose and much for Jakarta to explain, before the concerns about Balibo can be satisfied. The evidence amassed here points to some very disturbing conclusions that the Sherman inquiries and the Australian government's response have glossed over. Capt. Yunus Yosfiah and members of his Team Susi, drawn from the Indonesian army's Kopassandha (Special Forces) Regiment, killed the journalists. This was not an accident: the presence of the journalists in Balibo had been discussed at Batugade the day before and a decision taken, in consultation with Gen. Benny Murdani's military intelligence command in Jakarta, to eliminate them and any other witnesses. The Defence Signals Directorate monitored the discussions between Batugade and Jakarta, but withheld its knowledge of the Indonesian intentions from the rest of the government until it was too late to do anything about the peril facing the journalists. 157
Canberra's professed lack of foreknowledge about the 16 October attack on Balibo and other towns along the Portuguese Timor border was a lie. Not only had DSD p·rovided detailed information about the Indones.. . ian plans and preparations for this covert invasion, but Australia's embassy in Jakarta was told directly about it, in great d~tail, three days beforehand~By .not raising any objection, the Whitlam government implicitly gave its approval for this attack on the territory of another state. This approval of Indonesia's annexation of East Timor by force and deception trapped the Whitlam government in a growing web of lies. It could not condemn the Indonesian actions or pursue questions about any particular deeds without risking revelation of its foreknowledge. The Australian governfuent's refusal to admit it knew that the journalists had been, killed a~ Balibo by Indonesian soldiers flowed directly from this complicity in the military i~vasion of one country by another. The: intelligence community had concluded very quickly from intercepted signals that five Australian·based journalists had be,en killed in the attack on Balibo early in the~orning .of 16 October. This conclusion was delivered in person ,by the JIO director, Gordon Jockel, to the defence minister, Bill Morrison, later that morning. A, fuller account, including the report th~t the bodies had been burnt, ,wa~ given that evening by the Defence departme~t head, Sir A17thur Tange" to the prime minister, Gough Whit,lam, Morrison and the foreign minster, .Don Willesee. But faced with media reports about the deaths coming out ,of Timor over the following days th,e government only professed ignorance and concern. Even two weeks later, the Government was still dissembling. On 29 October, Willesee was asked in the Senate .whether it was 'not now apparent that these 158
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
men, in pursuit of the truth about the current war in Portuguese Timor, have lost their lives', and whether there was 'any truth in the consistent reports ,that the Australians were, shot by either Indonesian troops or Indonesian-backed, troops and then 'their bodies burnt' . Willesee replied tHit: I had hoped by ",now to have defInitive infor,mC\tion on the fate of,the five missing newsmen but I tegret thC\t this information is not yet to hand. I recognise that this is a tragic situation for the next-of-kin . . . The Qovernrp.ent will continue, of course, its most strenuouseffort~ to obtain final and authoritative information on tIle missing newsmen.
In his ministerial statement to parliament the next day, 30 October, Willesee said that 'the 'Government has viewed with concern widespread reports that Indonesia is involved' in military intervention in' Portuguese Timor . . .' Were there substance to these reports, the Australian Government would be, extre'mely disappointed, and we have so informed the Indonesian authorities.' The Indonesian authorities must have been amused by this information. Exactly two weeks earlier Willesee had been 'given unequivocal evidence that the newsmen had died during the ,Indonesian invasion. As we know from the cable leaked to The Canberra Times some 'months later, the Australian ambassador in Jakarta, Richard W oolcott, had advised Willeseeto amend an earlier draft of his statement, that 'cited reports suggesting a" degree of Indonesian involvement in the cross-border attacks.Woolcott said that telling the truth about Indonesian intervention in, East Timor would: stir up a hornets' nest in Australia itself as well as , [produce] a cold reaction here . . . Although we know it is not ,true, the formal position of the Indonesian COMPLICITY, BLAME'AND SECRECY
159
Government is still that ther~ is no Indon,esian military intervention in East Timor. If the Minister said or implied in public the Indonesian. Govern1?ent' was lying we would invite a hurt and angry reaction.
This was not merely a tactical move, but flowed from the unqualified 'realism' that pervaded the government'spolicy towards Indonesia and the region, and governed the actions and advice of its top' defence, foreign affairs and intelligence officials. As Ambassador W oolcott argued in a cable from Jakarta to the secretary of the department of foreign affairs on 17 August 1975: Weare dealing with a ,. settled' In'donesian policy to incorporate Timor .. . Indonesia is simply not prepared .to accept the, .risks they see· to them in an independent Timor . . . What Indonesia now looks to from Australia in the present situation is some understanding of their attitude and po~sible action to assist public understanding in Australia' rather than . action on our part which could contribute to criticism of Indonesia . .. 1 know I am recommending a pragmatic rather than' a principled stand but that is what' national interest and foreign policy is all about.
This flawed approach was only a short step from lying to . the Australian public. Moreov.er, as long as goverp.ments adhered to this philosophy, they continued to deny themselves any possibility to criticise Indonesian actions. Ultimately, this policy line was discredited when the Jndonesian people overthrew theSuharto regime that Canberra had so slavishly cultivated. While this policy lasted, two sorts of arguments were used to divert attention from Canberra's duplicity. The first involved the· apportionment of blame for the deaths of the newsmen. It· was suggested that the newsmen themselves had been foolhardy, that they had identified 160
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
too closely with- the Fretilin cause and -even that their clothing had been inappropriate. It was a'lsosuggested that -the managements- of channels Seven and Nine were derelict in their 'instructions to the newsmen 'and failed to make sufficient efforts to keep track o,f them. In a le~ter to The Sydney Morning Herald in March 1999 . Whitlam threw the blame on Fretilin's Jose RamosHorta, for guiding the newsmen to B.alibo and leaving' them there with little protection and ,no easy means of escape. For over 20 years, Canberra did its best to suppress information about any Indonesian culpability for the killings. For many years, it kept up the ,fiction that pro-Indonesian Timorese_partisanshad carried out the Balibo attack. Even after Gen. Benny Mu(dani admitted in 1993 that he had been centrally involved in. the planning and direction of the covert campaign" and' in 1995 that 'Jakarta_was well- aware [before the attack] that there were journalists. in Balibo', this was _downplayed. The first Sherman, report in June 1996 acknowledged that 'Indonesian soldiers and anti-Fretilin East Timorese led by Indonesian officers'killed, the journalists, but concluded that the Indonesians had· been ·unaware of the presence of the journalists, who were unfortunate victims of the battle. Two of the key Indonesian ,o'fficers involved" in the Balibo attack ,have recently been in Australia as guests of the Australian Defence Forces. Gen. 'Benny Murdani, who directed Operation Flamboyant, has visited Australia on many occasions, and as we have seen was' once hosted by the SAS at their barracks in Perth. Yunus Yosfiah, who carried out'Murdani's orders and directed the killing of- the five newsmen and who subsequently rose ,to become a lieutenant-general, ,visited Australia in 1995 to participate in' ajoint exercise with the Australian army. Ytinus became information minister in the transitional COMPLICITY, BLAME AND SECRECY
161
government under President B.J. Habibie in 1998~99. At no point was the question of the Balibo killings ever broached directly with them by Australian officials. Furthermore~ the failure· of the d~partment of Foreign Affairs to carry out its prime responsibility of protecting Australian lives, given its forewarning of the attack, has not been properly scrutinised or explained. Indeed, the failure of· the intelligence c;ommunity to tell the government on 15 October that the journalists were. in danger has not even been admitted. The second ·set of arguments used to deny answers to the Australian public concern intelligence and ·security issues, especially 'the need to protect the secrecy of DSD and its signals intelligence operations~ Signals intercepts provide by far the most valuable intelligence available to the Australian .govert?-ment,but the operations are most successful when the. target maintains inadequate communications security systems and practices. Allowing the target to know which of its 'communicationschannels and modes are being monitored invites counteraction, such as the adoption of different radio frequencies, more sophisticated encryption techniques or the acquisition of more secure voice communications systems. This was the basis of Sir Arthur Tange's insistence to the ministers on the evening of 16 October that the government should pretend igno.rance of the events at Balibo-andnot even inform the next-of-kin that reliable information suggested that the five journalists were dead. In fact, the need to protect signals intelligence and methods is never absolute, and the injunction against actions that might compromise such operations is really not so compelling. The existence ·of DSD, the establishment of its Shoal Bay intercept station and its foeus on Indonesian signals were well-known in 1975. In February 1973, the .Indonesian foreign minister, Adam Malik, 162
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
reportedly stated that DSD's monitoring of Indonesian communications was 'no great secret', and Indonesian officials in Canberra said that 'they [have] known about the Australian DSD opera~ion for some time'. It was well known that unscrambled or unencrypted· voice commu~ nications could be .monitored by anyone with an appropriate radio receiver. For many years, through the 1980s, Indonesian signals personnel used to transmit an end-of-year message: 'Merry Christmas to all our friends at Shoal Bay.' Secrecy is strictly necessary mainly with respect to cryptanalytical matters, and especially DSD's ability to penetrate cryptographic systems thought to be impregnable. In any case, Indonesian countermeasures against foreign signals intelligence operations have generally depended on the availability of modern encryption systems, rather than a reaction to particular compromises of its military and diplomatic secrecy. This was evinced when Indonesia eventually acquired much more sophisticated communications security and cryptographic capabilities in 1992. There is certainly no reason, from the point of view of protecting cryptanalytical capability a quarter of a century after the affair, for not admitting that DSD closely monitored the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975, and that on 15 and 16 October it intercepted Indonesian signals concerning the killing of the journalists. The Indonesian government has long been aware of reports to this effect. Over the past two decades, investigative journalists have obtained and published numerous official documents revealing in great detail the nature of Australian signals intelligence activities with respect to Indonesia. The American CIA and DIA intelligence reports from August 1975 to February 1976 published in The National Times in May-June 1982 provided an extraordinary picture of the extent to which Indonesian diplomatic and military communications COMPLICITY, BLAME AND SECRECY
163
were being intercepted and the rapidity with which they were being read by US and. Australian agencies. The cryptographic systems that th~ ·Indonesians. were using then, and which they have long known that DSD was breaking, are now history. Neither is there ·-any reason .now in terms of the sensitivities of the Australian-indonesian political r~latiori ship for the Australian .government's continuing cover-up of the affair. The S.uharto regime· is itself now history. In any· case, the Indonesian· attitude on these matters is that such revelations are 'decidedly more of an embarrassment for Canberra than Jakarta', and that they are 'Australia's problem,not Indonesia's', according to statements over the .years by Jakarta officials. "Indeed, the Australian-Indonesian relationship 'has been more 'damaged by the widespread· feeling among the general public that the official relations are enmeshed in lies and deceit. This can only be rectified by the release to 'public .... scrutiny of all official records, including signals intelligence material, relating ·to the tragedy. The original transcripts of the DSD i~tercepts and decrypts of· 15 and 1,6 October may no longer exist. Many of the working papers and 'briefs' produced by the Shoal Bay station are stored in Building M, the headquarters of DSD .in the Russell Hill complex in Canberra. ··However the director of DSD, Martin ·Brady, has' said that some material can no longer be found. This .includes the crucial intercept of the DadingMurdani communication the night before the attack. The Defence Intelligence Organisation (successor to the JIO) also. hasrelevent records. The flimsiesfrom the DSDLiaison Office .were for .many· years held in a special box in the vault on the 2nd' floor of BuildingL. The most. authoritative account of Australian intelligence concerning the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, 164
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
including the killing of the journalists at Balibo, is the report (known as the 'Blue Book') compiled in 1977 by Geoff Cameron, who had been in charge of the Southeast Asian section in the Directorate of]oint Service Intelllgence in 09~ober 1975. This report was also held in the same vault. It was evidently made available to Tom Sherman during his second inquiry and Shermap discussed it with Cameron on 23 December 1998. An exhaustive search for all material bearing on the Balibo incident would also include intelligence held by other governments. In particular, it is likely that the Rhyolite signals intelligence satellites operated by the CIA and controlled from Pine Gap would have inter,.. cepted signals out of East Timor including those referring to the newsmen. It is also possible that the Portuguese army and navy radio stations at Atauro Island monitored the Indonesian and Fretilin signals during the Balibo attack. Only journalists have pursued this approach, but they have so far been rebuffed by the Portuguese military in Lisbon. Given that full records may no longer exist, all of those surviving officials who participated in the events connected with the Balibo killings should be cleared-and encouraged--to come forward with their recollections. Only then can the public and bereaved families be satisfied that no cover-up whatsoever remains. And only then can the right lessons be drawn, not just in the homelands of the five dead newsmen, but in Indonesia and East Timor where the events of 16 October 1975 presaged a much greater tragedy.
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APPENDIX
,.
SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE AFTER BALIBO
I
from DSD had not been used to protect Australian-based newsmen at Balibo, it was certainly applied to protect others in following weeks. The Australian army medical team seconded to the Red Cross at Dili's hospital were kept advised of security conditions based on DSD information. At one point, the team are said to have been ordered to head by land to Baucaufor immediate evacuation by RAAF aircraft, though this did not happen. Dili itself became jumpier after the BaIibo attack, even though Fretilin resistance seems to have kept Operation Flamboyant confined to the Maliana region on the western border. Shootings by nervous sentries became more common, and Apodeti prisoners were more tightly confined. Indonesian navy vessels patrolled close to the shore, and on the night of 27 October one came close enough for all of Dili's lights to be turned off and Fretilin field guns and mortars to open up. Some F SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE
166
shells, apparently from an Indonesian warship, fell around the city, some close to the hospital. One of the doctors, Capt. C. Russell-Jones, was in the shower at the time: he responded by appearing stark naked on the balcony of his quarters, blowing a bugle defiantly intb the night, a colleague recalls. On 30 October, as a result of a warning b,aseQ. on DSl( intercepts, the army medical team was withdrawn by· air to Atauro, and thence to Darwin. Other private aid groups also withdrew workers. Fretilinsuddenly felt mbre isolated. Indonesia meanwhile accepted a Portuguese invitation for talks . Indonesia's foreign minister, Adam Malik and Portugal's foreign minister, Maj. Melo Antunes, agreed in Rome on 1-2 November that Portugal should seek simultaneous talks with all Timorese parties, and that it should still safeguard Indonesia's interests. Predictably, a meeting between Portugal and the Timorese political parties proved impossible to organise. Jakarta was reassured that Lisbon would not transfer sovereignty to Fretilin, an idea Maj. Mota and other radical officers had floated. The progress of Operation Flamboyant was followed closely by Australian and allied signals intelligence agencies. The initial success of the 16 October attacks on Balibo and Maliana was followed by. setbacks, .as Fretilin fighters harried the Indonesian forces, early rains bogged down vehicles, supplies became erratic and ammunition failed to explode. A CIA summary reported on 18 October: Fretilin forces are putting up stiff resistance in places, according to intercepted messages, and some Indonesian units may be~ulling back to their side of the border. One Indonesian unit is apparently surrounded and taking casualties. The commander of the force has asked for reinforcements and a helicopter SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE AFTER BALIBO
167
gunship to ,provide air support and to evacuate wounded. Other units are reporting extreme shortages of ammunition and supplies. In'donesian field commanders have apparently underestimated Fretlin [sic] strength and their own logistical problems.
On 20 October another CIA report said: Indonesian commanders are continuing to 'complain about the poor quality of their supporting fire. An intecepted message, for example, revealed that 70 percent of the Indonesian mortar rounds were duds.'
The town, of Atabae, where a key road into Dili began, came under Indonesian naval bombardment and air attack by the B-26 and C-47 gunships from midNovember. The same aircraft also harassed Bobonaro. Fretilin felt the pressure and appealed for international help on 24 November. Its leaders were also influenced by the success of the MPLA nationalist movement in Angola in gaining. international recognition after it unilaterally declared independence on 11 November. Perhaps they read too. much into the reception of Fretiliri envoys abroad., Atabae fell on 28 Nov.ember to the Operation Flamboyant forces, and later that day Fretilin proclaimed the 'Democratic Republic of East Timor'. Indonesia's reaction was prompt. On 29 November Col. Sugianto of Opsusassembled the UDT~Apodeti alliance at Balibofor a counterdeclaration that East Timor was 'integrated' with Indonesia. On 1 December Malik flew to the border where he told a Timorese crowd that the time for diplomacy was over, what was now called for was the 'spirit of the fighting cock'. Friendly governments were informed that Indonesia now felt it had no option but to intervene. Australian and US intelligence agencies confirmed this from the 168
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
flurry· ·of military movements and'signals that followed. A. CIA brief on2December noted: ~ccording to interceptedcommunications, IndonesIan air and naval units have been ordered to stop any ship or aircraft entering or leavingPortugu'ese. Timor 'except Australian craft.' By that stage, Suharto. was confident that the caretaker government of the conservative 'Liberal-Country Party coalition.led by Malcolm Fraser, appointed after Whitlam's dismissal by the governor-general on 11 November, would'not .disturb his plans. Suharto had been informed enough to know as far back. as September how precarious .Wh.itlam'spolitical position was. When the Coalition, foreign spokesman, Andrew Peacock, travelled through, Bali in mid-September 1975, Harry Tjan Silalahi and Yusuf Wanandi of Murtopo's Centre for Strategic and International Studies had met him to sound out his views on .·Timor., Their report quoted Peacock (wrongly, he has insisted) as saying a conservative government would express pro-forma regrets against Indonesian intervention by force,but say Jakarta had'been left with no alternative. The same report, publishe'd by The National Times in May 1977, alsoc'ontained a remarkably prescient forecast about 'how . the Whitlam government's dismissal would unfold nearly two months later. The report was shown to Suharto. Despite the apparent sympathetic view of Peacock, Stiharto would have 'been ,less happy .if he had 'the same insightinto th'e thinking .of Malcolm Fraser. According to the'mem9irsof John Menadue, then secretary of the Department of thePt-ime Minister and Cabinet, Fraser so.ught to rev~ew policy options on Timor: Fraser asked me to prepare a paper on the' possibility of Australian military intervention in 'Timor against the Indonesians. He outlined two possibilities: either that Australian would' intervene under a DnitedNations SIGNALS' INTELLIGENCE AFTER BALIBO
169
flag; or that Australia would do it unilaterally. He wanted information about the physical ,'capabilities of the A·ustralian defence, forces to mount such a military' operation ,against the, Indonesians. Fortunately Tony Eggleton [federal secretary of the Liberal Partyl was also opposed. He didn't describe it as a madhatter idea but, I think that is ,basically what he' thought. I suggested! it would be wise for Fraser to sleep on it'before we did anything further. No further action was requested.-
Fraser has recently confirmed that he would have canvassed options" including military action', as' a matter of course. He had' been 'uneasy'about Australian policy for some ,time, and inclined then and since to .the view that the' United Nations should have been drawn in as so,o,n as the Portuguese had 'cut and run' . From 11 November, Fraser' said in a recent telephone interview, ·he,had ,been under intensepressur.e from the Canberra bureaucracy and AmbassadorWoolcott, to writeSuharto a ,personal letter declaring that he ,would continue Whitla~'spolicy on Timor. He' had baulked at this, but" pointed 'out to officials that a' caretaker government could"'not ma~e new 'policy. This remark was cabled to' Jakarta and apparently conveyed to Suharto. 'The whole weight of official advice' was that we s'hould do nothing and keep out of it' ,~raser recalled. Had ,he tried to push the case for opposing an "Indonesian-,' takeover, the 'bureaucracy 'would have rushed to. oppose it, and would have tried to .get the Americans to "oppose it so it 'would have ended'. Had Canberra decided ,to 'switch policy and had diploIllacynot 'made the point beforehand, the military means were riot out' of 'reach. In late'November, the two most heavily~armed ships'in the Australian navy at the time, the destroyers Vampire and' Vendetta, were 170
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
suddenly called in from exercises off Fremantle, given a complete war outfit of ammunition, and sent at their fastest transit speed up to Darwin. Special landing parties and boarding parties were formed. For three weeks from early December, .the two destroyers hovered just over the horizon from Timor in case they were needed, former crew members recall. In the event, there was no order to go into Timor. Well ahead of the Indonesian attack on Dili, Foreign Minister Peacock gave express orders that Australian nationals were to be advised of the danger and airlifted out. On 2 December, a message was passed . by radio to the remaining Red Cross mission in Dili, which included Australian surgeon James Ellis, a reserve lieutenant-colonel in the Army's Medical Corps. Guided by the RAAF intelligence officer Sqd-Ldr Stan Harding, all but one of the ten Australians still in Dili flew out that afternoon on a civilian charter aircraft to· Atauro island, from where they were later flown to. Darwin by RAAF Caribou. The freelance journalist Roger East elected to stay .on in Dili reporting for Australian Associated Press. Control of the combined air, land and sea assault to capture Dili and then the rest of East Timor-an oper:ation code-named Seroja (Lotus), which superceded Flamboyant-was taken over by the defence ministry in Jakarta from Gen. Murdani's intelligence command. The formal go-ahead was. relayed from Suharto by the minister of defence and commander in chief of the armed forces, Gen. Maraden Panggabean, who had moved to Kupang in West Timor on Thursday, 4 December. This second full-scale invasion had been planned for Friday, 5 December. But there was a complication. The US president, .. Gerald Ford, and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, were due in Jakarta that day from China for a 24...:hour stopover. American intelligence SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE AFTER BALIBO
171
learned of this highly comprom'lslng timetable, and successfu~ly demanded that the operation be postponed until after ..Ford left Indonesia on 6 December. The US ambassador in Jakarta, David Newsome, raised no objec~ tion to the intervention itself, stipulating' only that the Ipdonesians did it 'quickly, efficiently and don't use our equipment'. (He was to be disappointed o,n all three counts.) On "the afternoon of Saturday, 6, December,nine Indonesian air force C-130 transports flew'fromJakarta to Iswahy,udi Air·Force Base at Madiun ineastern,Java. Three of them carried a unit of the 'red beret' Special Forces led by Lt-CoL Soegito. Milling on the airfield were hundreds of paratroops in green berets from the east Javabased Battalion 501 , commanded by Lt-Col. Matrodji. ,Off. the coast of East Timor near Tailaco, west of Dili, the tank--Ianding ship KRI Teluk Bone landed a central·. Java-based ip.fantryunit, Battalion 403, to take over security in the western coastal area. The ship then embarked the. seasoned. 5th .landing group of the Marine Corps, which had been fighting with the Operation Flamboyant forces from Batugade since early October. Delays meant, that the landing ship could not take on board any of Dading's covert warfare troops or their local partisans, as originally. planned, meaning that. the invasion of Dili was carried out entirely by regular Indonesian troops. Overnight,the Teluk Bone moved to its attack position with a fleet of other transports and warships, controlled from the elderly submarine tenderKRISam Ratulangi, where the Operation Seroja commander, Brig~-Gen.!ChamidSuweno,was stationed. At ten minutes before midnight, the. nine C-130s took off from Iswahyudi with .' the special forces and paratroops packed aboard, and headed eastwards across Java in three arrow-head formations at 22 000 feet. 172
DEATH IN BALIBG, LIES IN CANBERRA
The crews maintained strict radio silence, broken· only by position reports in morse code from the lead aircraft at way-points between Denpasar and Kupang; identifying itself as Rajawali (Eagle) Flight. After more than four hours of flight, the nine aircraft passed to the east of Flores, and began descending. Above ·Alor island, red lights ·started flashing· inside the aircraft and the troops began to ready themselves, attaching the release cords of their parachutes to the static line running the length of the hold. With Atauroisland just to the left, the pilots were shocked to see two Portuguese frigates at anchor, their radars turned on. By then, however, the planes were in a turn towards the Timorese mainland and were opening their doors. Neither of the warships attempted to intervene, though the brand new ships fitted with the latest radar-controlled weapons systems could have· caused havoc among the invaders. The three arrow-heads tightened their formation, cut speed to a bare 110 knots and dropped still lower for the 4-minute run to DilL At 5.45 am the C-130s spilled hundreds of paratroops, who floated below olive-green parachutes over the town. On the seafront west of the town, the marine landing force was m.oving ashore from small landing boats, supported by gunfire which had begun hours earlier from nearly half-a-dozen ships, Much of the population of Dili had already fled to the hills, Roger East had reported. For the fourth night in a row Dili was blacked out. According to a CIA brief on 6 December: 'Intercepted communications show that Fretilin is expecting the invasion. Fretilin leaders in Dili are building up defences near the capital am.d moving supplies and weapons to the interior to wage guerrilla war against an Indonesian occupation.' Possibly alerted by the Portuguese warships, the Fretilin forces greeted the parachutists with tracer-fire SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE AFTER BALIBO
173
from mounted machine guns. Several of the C-130s were hit, . though none brought down. They flew back to Kupang, to pick upa second wave of paratroops, from tl~.e east Java~based Battalion 502, commanded by Maj. Warsito, which· had been ferried down to the West Timorese capital on a fleet of civilian planes commandeered from Garuda, the state-owned airline. Only five of the C~130s were serviceable because of gunfire damage, and only half of Battalion 502 were· dropped ove'r Dili, at 7.45 ~m. As they landed, they mistook advancing marines for Fretilin and began to shoot at them. As a result of this confusion, a planned third wave of parachute landings was called off Roger East, who was staying at the waterfront Turismo Hotel, had refused pleas by the Fretilin information minister, Alarica Fernandes, to retreat to· the back of the town, close to escape routes to the mountains. East went to the Marconi centre at about 7.00 am and raised· Darwin. '[He reported] that Indonesian troops were in the city, that the a.irport had been taken and that [he] expected the Marconi communications ceritre to be taken soon. 'The sending of this bulletin from the Marconi centre may have cost Roger East his life. A rescue mission sent by Fernandes encountered a party of Indonesian troops and was shot up, with the vice-minister of information, Fernando Carmo, killed. About the same time as East got through to Darwin, Alarico Fernandes himself was using the Red Cross radio at the hospital on the south side of the town, to send a d'esperate call, picked up b.y the Overseas Telecommunications Commission station in Darwin: Indonesian forces have been landed in Dili by sea, by sea . . . they are flying over Dili dropping out paratroopers . . . Aircraft are dropping out more and more paratroopers . . . A lot of people have .been 174
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
killed indiscriminately ~ W omen and· children are going to be killed by Indonesian forces 'we are going to be killed! SOS, we call for your help, this is an· urgent 'call 0
0
00
0
•
•
.'
:Confused and vicious fighting raged for hours. The Taiwanese consulate was hit by gunfire, despite specific orders/for its protection by the Indonesian command, a,nd. th~ consul himself wQunded. Special Forces. teams had specific government inst~llations to seize and lists of Fretilin l~aders .to arrest. But rank-and-file soldiers of the two east Javanese battalions lost discipline and began, looting shops and houses, and massacring civilians., particularly Chinese. By ·rnidday, the. Fretilin defenders had withdrawn t() the hills to the south of the city. Intercepts verified that most Fretilin leaders and troops had withdrawn according .to plan. ,They als9 marched. o,ff sO.me 140 mostly Apodeti" prisoners who were forced to work. as porters, and were then executed en masse at Aileu in late December. or Janu~ry. Roger East appears to have been hiding in the town for most of ,the day and night of Sunday, 7 December. Sometime overnight or early.,on Monday, 8 December h~ .was captured" and brought to the Dili wharf. At around 8.00 am, his, hanC,ls tied behind ···himwith wire, East 'Y~s marched to the side of the pier and exec,uted by ritle '£ire by Battalion 501 or 502 soldiers. His body. tloated in the water with those of dozens of other men, women and children ~ssociated with the Fretilin side, or just picked out because they were Chinese. The Indonesians lost 35 soldiers'from' the green beret paratroops, mostly from Battalion 502, including two majors and two captains, and 19 from the Special Forces plus three others believed drowned when dropped over the Dili harbour. At least half died from loss of blood SIGNALS,INTELLIGENCE AFTER BALI130
175
from light wounds, as medical evacuation had been left out of the planning and the first casualties·· were not taken out to the nearest shipboard operating station ·until midday. The Indonesians .claimed ··that 122 Fretilin fighters were . killed and 365 captured. Another marine and paratroop landing three days later was also a shambles. The marines launched amphibi~ ous vehicles from tank' landing ships standing . several kilometres out to sea,·. and 20 .kilometres down the coast from Baucau, where there was rio armed resistance to cause such caution. Eight marinesdrqwned when two vehicles sank. The two operations, grabbing the two developed airstrips, effectively sealed·()ffEast Timor from any easy access· except as the Indonesians allowed.. Australian and US intercepts of Indonesian signals revealed' plans to s~epup the·military operation across ·the island, 'and by 11 December. Indonesia had about .15000 troops deployed in East . Timor. Thereafter, .. signals intelligence was critical for ·the Indones~ans in blocking un\Vanted attempts-·· to get into the territory, either to resupply· Fretilin or· insert. independent observers or mediators. It .alsohelped them maintain a fiction that·:the only Indonesians fighting in East Timor were 'volunteers' supporting the s6-called Anti-Commnist Movement based on Apodeti, UDT and allied gr04ps. :.The.Indonesian sigint capabilities were enhanced in a substantial way after the capture .0fBalibo. Indeed, by early November, the Indonesians. had installed '~ quantity of electronic equipment', presumably including radio monitoring equipment, in Balibo itself. CoL Dading had been appointed intelligence chief within the Operation .Seroja ;command,and moved his headquarters, together with the Intelligence Section and . radio monitoring post, to Dili late on 7 December. Some months 176
DEATH IN BALIBO,. LIES IN CANBERRA
-later, he was rromotedto brigadier-general and put in command of·thenew East Timor military area. Dading was able to maintain fairly comprehensive monitoring of Fretilin radio communicati,ons, in~lu~ing both radio traffic.; "within·· East Timor· and .the radio commu·nications links with Australia. It was not difficult, especially as Fretilin increasingly lost access to radio systems. ·Key facilities were destroyed or captured .by Indonesian forces. Portable systems could not be properly maintained by the Fretilin troops, who could riot recharge the batteries. The Marconi communications centre was destroyed by the Indonesi~n forces when they entered Dili on 7 December 1975. According to Jill Jolliffe: 'One of the first targets was the Marconi centre. Equipment was smashed and torn from its installations. The' Indonesians were· in a·· city where the population spoke a different language and no· communication could be trusted.' At the same time, the Indonesians also captured the Dili radio station, which had been operating since late August as Radio Fretilin.or Radid Maubere.On the evening of 8 December,· the radio broadcast the announcement: 'Fretilin is no more. Radio Maubere is dead. Brothe~s of East Timor, the republic that Fretilin declared is·· dead ... Long live the people of East Timor with the Republic of Indonesia!' On 8 December, Alarica Fernandes, the Fretilin minister for information and internal security, took the radio· from the hospital and headed for the hills, as Jill Jolliffe records: In the days before the invasion ·Fretilin had· prepared a mobile radio unit to take to the· mountains. They had at their di,sposal a number of radios capable of reaching Australia. At the .time of the .Portuguese departure each company of the Portuguese Army had a SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE AFTER BALIBO
177
US-manufactured World War II AN/GRC-9 transceiver. These units were portable, had the power to reach Australia and cO'uld"range all ,frequencies. Usually :poweredby a car battery, the AN/GRC-9 also had a manual generator for use 'ihthe field~ There were, t.oo, 'a number of later model TR-28 pack' radios also capable of reaching Australia.
·When Fernandes re-established radio 'contact with Darwin later on 8 December, he had' .switched to the frequencies of the Overseas .Telecommu:p.ications CommissioD:, (aTe) Northern Territqry Outpost Radio Network. ;Ac~ording to Jill Jolliffe: This system is designed to pick updis,tress messages from isolated station properties in remote areas of the Territory. Users trans~it voice messages on the radios which are 'handled as' normal te~egram commu.nications. According to 'Telecom officials in Darwin 011, . 8 December' they intercepted a radio call from. East Timor on one of the Outpost frequencies, accepted' it as'a distress "call and passed it, on to Austra~ian addressees a's a telegram, prefaced by the phrase 'This is an unauthenticated message'. From 8 'I?ecember ,1975 and for'most 6f 1976 Fretilin used this system to pass information to the oU:tside world.
Radio Maubere, as the Fretilin station was again called, broadcast regular news reports to Australia' for three years. It reported information about Indonesian operations, movements, casualties and atrocities. For example, in April 1976 it reported that 845 Indonesian soldiers were killed in the period from 20 January to 3 ApriL On' 14 October 1976, three days after'Prime Minister' Fraser stated in Jakarta that ~ustralia now acknowledged the merger [of East Timor into Indonesia], for purely humanitarian reasons', Fernandes 178
DEATH; IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
reported in a . radio message that Indonesian troops had burnt alive six: people ina camp near Ermera. The Fraser government was determined to sever all radio communications connections, between East Timor and Australia. Inc:],?e,.cember< 1975"the,.Campaign for an Independent East Tinior (CIET) established two-way communications with Fretilin leaders, using a transceiver made for use with the Outpost Radio Network, located in a temporary station in thebushso'uth of Darwin. This transceiver was confiscated by the Posts and Telecommunications "Department 'on 25 ,January 1976, reportedly on the direct 'instructions of Prime Minister Fraser, on the grounds that it was 'unlicensed'. (OTC and Telecom Australia officials in Da~win had evidently known of the transmitter's existence 'since' December and allowed' it to broadcast 'unimpeded until then~) Two-way communications with East Timor were restored in February 1976, employing a, Wagner 50-watt single sideband (SSB) transceiver ,which operated on frequencies 'in t~e 4-6 megahertz land-mobile band. The station was initially located just south of Darwin and communicated with East Timor on almost a daily basis for the next four months. It 'was moved in July 1976 to the west coast of the Co~ Peninsula, about 40 kilometres south-west of Darwin, from where it operated every day. until 27 September, when it was found by government officials. On 18 November 1976, OTC and Telecom officials in Darwin were ordered by the. Fraser government to cease taking radiotelegrams from Radio Maubere and passing: them to the addressees. In January 1977, contact was re-established using another 50-watt single sideband transceiyer in the 4-6 megahertz band. The station wasn,early 'found a few months later ,in a joint operation by DSD and the, Postal arid Telecommunications Department. Three SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE AFTER BALIBO
179
direction-finding (DF) stations, using' equipment from the DSD stationmaintaihed by the army's 7 Signals Regiment at Cabarlah, Queensland, were set up near Darwin in an attempt to locate the sites of the clandestine transceiver. (One of the DF systems was' found accidentally by the CIET radio operators.) In December 1978, Alarico' Fernandes surrend.ered to' Indonesian intelligence authorities, taking Fretilin's radio equipment with him and thus severing Fretilin's radio link with the outside world. ' A good demonstration of Indonesia's sigiilt capabilities concerning East Timor took place in'January 1976, when signals intelligence was used to frustrate the attempts by Winspeare Guicciardi, special representative of the secretary general of the'United:N'ations,' to visit East Timor and make contact with Fretilin leaders. Guicciardihad ~already been given a strictly controlled visit to. the Indonesian-occupie'd sectors" of the north coast of East Timor. A US State Department summary of 17 January reported on the set~up: According to an intercepted message, IJJ.donesia is , making an all-out effort to camouflage its military presence in Timor in, preparation for the 19 January visit of the UN special envoy to the island~ The 'cov~r-up'., reportedly ordered by area, commander General'Murdani, will include restricting Portuguese frigates from entering Timor waters; l~miting the . envoy's survey to fou,r 'cleared' town~; coaching the provision~l Government personnel; on exp~~cit replies to questions; ~nd prohibiting Indonesian air force personnel from entering airports during, the; e,nvoy's visit.
This is exactly how' the visit proceeded. 'Afterwards, Guicciardi went to Darwin in an effort to reach the Fretilin" side. He hoped to use the CIET transceiver 180
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
located south of Darwin, which used the aTe Outpost Radio Network frequencies, to establish the initial communications, but this attempt was thwarted by the seizure of the transceiver by the Postal and Telecommunications Department on 25 January. He then made contact with Fretilin representatives using the radio of the Portuguese corvette Joao Roby in Darwin harbour. Guicciardi considered flying into East Timor, and through radio communications with Fretilin leaders was informed of four possible airstrips where he could land in a light plane. These communications between Guicciardi and Fretilin were intercepted by Indonesian radio units and the airstrips were immediately bombed. When press reports suggested the Portuguese warship would carry him to the south coast of Timor, Indonesian troops moved into the main landing point on the south coast, at Betano, and ships were put in blocking positions, intercepts showed. Guicciardi aborted his mission and returned to New York. He could note only a 'slender common assumption' that the Timorese should be consulted on their future. Until 1979, there were a few areas in which organised resistance was managed by Fretilin and resistance groups had obtained plentiful supplies of radios. According to the commander of a group of some 85 armed guerrillas in the [ado area: 'We were in radio contact. The Indonesians picked up the signals but didn't know the code. We had radios everywhere, small ones troops carry on their backs from the Portuguese Army.' This commander was over-confident. In 1979, 'all our people . . . were caught by the Indonesians'. While the Indonesian command was able to use signals intelligence to deadly effect against Fretilin, it was confident that other powers in the region with significant interception capabilities-Australia with the SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE AFTER BALIBO
181
DSD. statio,n at Shoal Bay and theUnited,Stateswith facilities in the Philippines and Guam-would not expose what- they were doing inside' East Timor. For ,three years, such signals intelligence .would have provide,d' the .hardest independent verification of developme.nts in the territory. As we have seen with the intetc~pts.showing the 'deliberate deception of the Allan .Taylor.. mission in April-May 1976 . ·to investigate the J3alibo ,deaths, the Indo,J;lesian ,military kept quite loose tadio security.. And what hor,-rific years those .were. Jakarta formed a token.'provi~ional government' under· Ap?deti's Arnaldo dos Reis Araujo' and ,UDT's Francisco Xavier Lopes da Gruz op. 17D~cember1975,and stage-managed a unani~ mous '\Tote by' a. press-ganged representative assembly on 31 ,May 1976, to ap'prove integration with Indonesia. On. 17]uly 1976, Suharto issued a decree making East Timor the 27th province of Indonesia. Meanwp.ile,. up to 30 900 I,ndonesian troo,ps tried to w:ear down Fretilin,bru~alising the civilian population while. ·their s~enior officers set' up a lucrative monopoly over the, t,erritory's coffee .trade. Even Dili remained a dangerous place for Indonesians for months after the invasion. Fretilin, nearly two years later,was managing to engage the Indonesians at company strength and ra,nged .quite freely outside the towns. Lack of training 'i\1?-d' equipment failur~s caused morale to' drop in the Indonesian forces. Casualties were high: over 1800 }(illed.and probably four times that. many seriously wounded over four ·years.. In September 1977 Indonesia switch,.ed to harsher tactics. Troops destroyed crops and razed villages, while newly supplied OV-10 and Nomad aircraft harassed with machin~-g·unsand napalm any. groups of people .s~en moving. Fretilin was no longer:able to feed the hundreds of thousands of people; sheltering with its 182
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
forces in the mountains, and starvation forced this refu~ gee population to accept an amnesty offered by Suharto: Late in 1977 the Fretilin leadership split.· Its president, Xavier do Amaral, who had favoured letting refugees accept tille Indonesian amnesty, came under suspicion of seeking negotiations with Indonesia and was placed under arrest by Nicolau Lobato, who took over as leader and vowed to fight on. The first of two Timorese battalions joined the Indonesian army reg\lHt structure early in 1978, one commanded by YunU$ Yosfiah. The main· Fretilin radio was surrendered along with information minister Alarico Fernandes, who was then induced to make broadcasts calling for his colleagues to follow his example. The capture of Xavier do Amaral soon followed. In December 1978 Indonesian intelligence agents heard of contact between Nicolau Lobato and a relative in the mountains south of Dili. A patrol found an abandoned machine-gun and a rolled--up field mattress, correctly interpreted as the baggage of an important man in Fretilin. The army's newly acquired helicopters ferried 2500 soldiers from point to point in a three-week chase. On 31 December 1978, Nicolau Lobato· was cornered and shot dead. Around the same time, East Timor was opened to the first detailed inspection by foreign diplomatsiwho reported the crowds of emaciated Timorese mountain people gathered around food-relief centres in the towns; A year later the situation had not improved. A Red Cross official was quoted as saying in October 1979 that East Timor's situation was 'as bad as Biafra and potentially as serious as Kampuchea'. Some 300000 people required basic food relief. At the time, foreign aid agencies and Indonesian officials estimated that 100 000 East Timorese had died since the start of civil war in August 1975. The first SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE AFTER BALIBO
183
Indonesian census, in 1980, showed a population of 550 OOO-down sharply from the 650 000-688 000 estimated by Portuguese government and church authorities in 1974, even allowing for some emigration. It was down even more sharply from the population of about 750 000 that might have been extrapolated by 1980 from the 1974 figur.es . • The use of Australian and other foreign signals intelligence to assist the manoeuvres that caused this holocaust may one day emerge from the archives to blacken the historical retord of the Fraser government, as the earlier diplomatic complicity did the Whitlam government.
184
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
NOTES ON SOURCES
T
is so far available to the . Australian public is very incomplete. The authors have talked with more than two dozen former members of the Australian intelligence community and other officials who were involved in events connected with the Balibo killings. The recollections of people who worked in DSD and JIO were particularly valuable. Unfortunately they cannot be cited because they are still covered by official constraints. The published material used in this book is as· follows: HE MATERIAL WHICH
Chapter 1: Jill Jolliffe, East Timor: Nationalism and Colonialism, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Queensland, 1978; Soekanto, Integrasi, Yayasan Parikesit, Jakarta, 1976; James Dunn, Timor: A People Betrayed, Jacaranda Press, Milton, Queensland, 1983; Gough Whitlam, Abiding Interests, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Queensland, 1997; Hamish McDonald, 185
Suharto's Indonesia, Fontana/Collins, Melbourne, 1980; Bill Nicol, Timor: The Stillborn Nation, Visa, Melbourne, 1978; J.A.C. Mackie, Konfrontasi: The Indonesia-Malaysia Dispute 1963-1966, Oxford University Press, Kual;l Lumpur, 1974; W.B. Pritchett, 'Relations with Indonesia', Minute from Strategic and Internation.al Policy \ Division, Department of Defence" ~ October 1975, in J.R. Walsh and GJ. Munster (eds) , Documents, on Australian Defence and Foreign Policy 1968-1975, selfpublished, Sydney, 1980. The texts of the official records of the Whitlam-Suharto meetings in Yogyakarta (September 1974) and Townsville (Apri11975) are carried on the website www.smh.com.
Jill Jolliffe, East Timor: Nationalism and Colonialism, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia,
Chapter 2:
Queensland, 1978; Hamish McDcmald, 'Death in Balibo', The National Times, 7 July 1979; Tom Sherman, Report on the Deaths of Australian-based Journalists in East Timor, Australian Government, Canberra, June 1996.
Chapter 3: Jill Jolliffe, East Timor: Nationalism and Colonialism, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Queensland, 1978; Hamish McDonald, 'Death in Balibo', The National Times, 7 July 1979; David Jenkins, 'The Five Ghosts of Balibo Rise Once More' to Haunt Indonesia-and Us', The Sydney Morning Herald, 14 October 1995; Hendro Subroto, Perjalanan Seorang Wartawan Perang [A War Correspondent's Journey], and Eyewitness to Integration of East Timor, Pustaka Sinar-Harapan, Jakarta; 1998; Tom Sherman, Report on the Deaths of Australian-based Journalists in East Timor, Australian Government, Canberra, June 1996; and Tom Sherman, Second Repor/on the Deaths of Australian-based Journalists in East Timor, Australian Government, Canberra, January 1999. Dan Coggin, 'Timor: The W ai ting Game', Far Eastern Economic Review, 186
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
17 October 1975; 'Balibo Five', Foreign Correspondent, ABC Television, 20 October 1998.
Chapter 4: James Dunn, Timor: A People Betrayed, Jacaranda Press, Milton, Queensland, 1983; Alan Renouf, The Frightened Country, Macmillan, Sydney, 1980; Hamish McDonald, 'Revealed: How the Balibo Murders Were Covered up', The Sydney Morning Herald, 24 August 1998; Lt-CoL C.G. Russell-Jones, RAAMC, letter to Defence Minister D.J. Killen, 17 March 1982 (in possession of authors). Chapter 5: Jeffrey T. Riche1son and Desll10nd Ball, The Ties That Bind: Intelligence Cooperation Between the UKUSACountries-United Kingdom, the United. States of America, Canada,. Australia and New Zealand, Allen· &
Unwin, Sydney, 1985; Desmond Ball and David Horner, Breaking the Codes: Australia's KGB Network, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1998; Desmond Ball, 'The Defence Presence in the Northern Territory', in Desmond Ball and ].0. Langtry (eds) , The Northern Territory in the Defence of Australia: Geography, History, Economy, Infrastructure and Defence Presence, Canberra Papers on Strategy
and Defence No. 63, Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University, Canberra, 1990; R.N. Thompson, Director of DSD, 'SIGINT Presence in Singapore and New Station at Darwin', Memorandum to the Secretary, Department of Defence, 23 February 1973; Joint Intelligence Organisation 010), Fourth Annual Report: 1974, Canberra, November 1974, Parts 1 and 2; National Intelligence Committee (NIC), Australia's InteUigen.ce Requirements, NIC 401 (75), National Intelligence Committee, Canberra, 14 July 1975; Brian Toohey and Marian Wilkinson, The Book of Leaks: Exposes in Defence cif the Public's Right to Know, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1987; Peter Young, 'TimorEveryone A Loser', Pacific Difence Reporter, February, 1976. NOTES ON SOURCES
187
Chapter 6:Soekanto, In tegrasi, Yayasan Parikesit, Jakarta, 1976; Ji1lJolliffe, East Timor: Nationalism and Colonialism, University of Queensla,nd Press, StLucia, Queensland, 1978; Hamish McDonald, 'Death in Balibo', The National Times, 7 July 1979; James Dunn, Timor: A People Betrayed, Jacaranda, Press, Milton, Queensland, 1983; and 'The Balibo . Incident in Perspective' (pamphlet), Australian Centre for Independent Journalism, University of Technology, Sydney, 1995; David Jenkins, 'The Five Ghosts ofBalibo Rise Once More to Haunt Indonesia-and Us', The Sydney Morning Herald, 14 October 1995; Hendro Subroto, Perjalanan Seorang Wartawan Perang [A War Correspondent's Journey], an,dEyewitness. to Integration of East Timor, Pustaka Sinar-Harapan, Jakarta, 1998; Tom Sherman, Report on the Deaths
Chapter 8:. Hamish McDonald, 'Revealed: How the Balibo Murders Were Covered up', The Sydney Morning Herald, 24 August 1998; Hamish McDonald, 'Death in Balibo', The National Times, 7 July 1979; Soekanto, Integrasi, Yayasan Parikesit, Jakarta, 1976; Bruce Juddery, 'Do Not Accuse Jakarta: Ambassador', The Canberra 188
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
Times, 31 May 1976; Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Report on Visits to Balibo April/May 1976 [the Allan Taylor mission], held in the Parliamentary Library, Canberra; Tom Sherman, Report on the Deaths of Australian-basedJournalists in East Timor, Australian Government,Carib~rra, June 1996; 'Balibo and Beyond', colloquium of International Commission ofJurists, Australian Branch, 17 October 1997, record carried on website www.smh.com; 'Balibo Five', Foreign Correspondent; ABC Television, 20 October 1998; Gough Whitlam, Submission .to Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade References Committee, Canberra, 30 November 1999; Senator Willesee, Hansard (Senate), 21 October 1975). Chapter 9: Gough Whitlam, Abiding Interests, University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, Queensland, 1997; Gough Whitlam, letter to the editor, The Sydney Morning Herald, 15 March 1999; Tom Sherman, Second Report .()n the Deaths of Australian-based Journalists 411, East Timor, Australian Government, Canberra, January 1999; Jeffrey T. Richelson and Desmond Ball, The Ties that Bind; Intelligence Cooperation Between the UKUSA Countrie~-Unite4 Kingdom, the United States of America, Canada, Aus(ralia and New Zealand, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1985. Chapter 10: 'B~libo Five', Foreign Com:spondent, ABC Television, 20 October 1998; SenatorWillesee, Hansard (Senate), 21, 29 and 30 October 1?75; Bruce Jl.lddery, 'Do Not Accuse Jakar~a: AlJlbassador', The Canberra Times, 31 May 1976; Tom Sherman, Report on the Deaths of Australian-based Journalists in East Timor, Australian Government, Canberra, June 1996; Tom Sherman, Second Report on the Deaths of Australian-based Journalists in East Timor, Australian Government, Canberra,january 1999; Julius Pour, Benny Moerdani: Profile of a Soldier Statesman, Yayasan Kejuangan Panglima Besar Sudirman, Jakarta, 1993; David Jenkins, 'The Five Ghosts of Balibo Rise NOTES ON SOURCES
189
Once More to Haunt Indonesia-and Us', The Sydney Morning Herald, 14 O<;tober 1995; Brian Toohey and Marian Wilkinson, The Book of Leaks :Expo~es in Defence of the Public's Right to Know, Angus & 'Robertson, Sydney, 1987, chapterS; Alan Ramsay, 'Suharto Rejects Whitlam's Plan to Widen Regional Ties: But He Wants Diggers Kept in ·Singapore~' The Australian, 22 February 1973; Fred Brenchley, '. . . ~nd the Trouble Labor Is Having in Coming to Terms with It', The National Times, 19 February 1973.
Appendix: Brian Toohey and Marian Wilkinson, The Book of Leaks: Exposes in Defence of the Public's Right to Know, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1987, chapter 5; Jill Jolliffe, East Timor: Nationalism and Colonialism,University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Queensland, 1978; James . Dunn, Timor: A People Betrayed, The Jacaranda Press, Milton, Queensland,. 198:3; John G.Taylor, Indonesia s Forgotten War: The Hidden History.of Eflst Timor, Zed Books, London, 1991; Hendro Subroto, Eyewitness to .Integration of East Timor, .Pustaka Sinal' Harapan, Jakarta, 1997; 'Sky Assault op. Dili', Angkasa, No.5, February 1999, Year IX; 'Fretilin Radio Base Exposed'" CBAustralia, Vol. 2, No.3, December 1997; 'They Steal and~hootEach Other Like Mad Dogs', in Michele Turner (ed.)',-'Telling East Timor: Personal Testimonies 1942-1992, University of New . SouthWal~s Press, Sydney, 1992; John Menadue, Things You Learn Along the . ·Way, David Lovell Publishing, Melbourne, 1999. J
190
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
GLOSSARY
AAP Australian Associated Press ABC Australian Broadcasting Commission ABR Armed Forces of the Republic of Indonesia (Angkatan .Bersenjata. Republik . Indonesia), ALP Australian Labor Party APODETIPopular Democratic Association of Timorese (Associa~ao Popular Demociitica Timorense) ASIAT Australian Society for International Aid (Timor) ASIO Australian Security Intelligence Organisation ASIS Australian Secret Intelligence·· Service Bakin State Intellingence Coordinating Agency, Indonesia (Badan Koordinasi Intelijens Negara) CIA Central Intelligence Agency (US) CIET Campaign for an Independent East Timor CSIS Centre for Strategic and International Studies, Jakarta DF direction funding DJSI Directorate of Joint Service Intelligence, JIO 191
DSD Defence Signals Directorate, Australia Falintil Armed Forces for the National Liberation of East Timor (Forc;:es Amadas de Libertac;:ao Nacional de Timor-Leste) Fretilin Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor (Frente Revolucionaria de Timor Leste Independente) Hankam Department of Defence and Security, Indonesia (Departmen Pertahanan dan Keamanan) HF high frequency JIO Joint Intelligence Organisation, Australia Kopassandha Army Special Forces Command, Indonesia (Komando Pasukan, Sandi Yudha) KOTA Sons of the Mountain Warriors (Klibur Oan Timur Aswain) NAS National Assessments Staff, JIO NIC National Intelligence Committee, Australia OCI Office of Current Intelligence, JIO ONA Office of National Assessments RAAF Royal Australian Air Force RAN Royal Australian Navy sigint signals intelligence UDT Democratic Union of Timorese (Uniao Democratica Tirnorense) UKUSA secret agreement for sigint cooperation between the US, UK, Canada and Australia, 1947-48 UN United Nations US United States VHF very high frequency
192
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
INDEX
Alatas, Ali, 142 Aleydroes, 'Sam', 34-5 Alwyn, ~~.John, 75-6 Amaral, Xavier do, 5, 56, 183 :Andreas, ~aj.', see Yosfiah, Capt. ~ohammed Yunus Anthony, Douglas, 150 Apodeti, 5, 10, 15, 19, 20, 37, 167, 182 AJjuna Co. Ltd, 14, 53-4; see. also Kupang Radio ASIAT, see Australian Society for International Aid (Timor) Atambua, 5, 19, 53-4 Australia Air Force, 75-7, 171 Army, 38, 52, 161 Army medical team, 75-7, 122, 166-7, 171
embassy in Jakarta, 65-9, 72, 130-1 Foreign Affairs, Dept. of (later Foreign Affairs & Trade), 21, 35-6, 69-72, 77, 123-5, 136-8, 140-5, 155, 162, Navy, 85, 114, 170-1 Overseas Telecommunications Commission, 178-9, 181 Australian Associated Press (AAP) , 38, 74, 76, 136, 171 Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC), 32, 76 Australian Labor Party (ALP), 21-2 Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) , 73, 88, 94-5, 150 193
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, 72, 88, 95, 149-50 Australian Society for International Aid (Timor), 37, 43 Bakin, 14-15, 52; see also Yoga. Sugama Lt-Gen. Balibo, }840, 42-3,67-8 attack on, 101-13, 114 Barbour, Peter, 88 B,atugade, 29-30, 32-3, 37, 47-9, 55-6, 64, 72, 85, 114, 157, Beazley, Kim, 152 Bennetts, John, 89-90, 93, 119, 147, 152-3 'Blue Book', see Cameron, Lt-Col. Geoff Botterill, Robert, 81-2, 87 Brady, Martin, 155, 164 Briot, Geoffrey, 70, 121, 125 British Govt., 128 Brownbill, George, 116, 155-6 Cameron, Lt.-Col. Geoff, 92, 119, 148, 154, 165 Campaign for.an Independent East Timor (CIET) , 179-80 Carrascalao, Joao, 4-.5, 24, 28-30, 109-11, 119 Carrascalao, Mario, 4 194
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 93, 96-9, 149~5Q, 163~5, 167, 169, 173 Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), 8, 14, 65-71,169 CIET, see Campaign for an Independent East Timor Collins, Rick, 38, 76 Connor, R.F.X., 74 Cunliffe, Ian, 116, 154-6 Cunningham, Gary, 33-4, 36, 45, 103, 137 Curtin, Michael, 73 Dading, Col. Kalbuadi, 29, 47-9, 54-5, 57, 58, 60, 61, 63-4, 85, 101, 108-12, 114-15, 118, 121, 142, 147, 176-7 Dan, Malcolm, 65-9, 72, 77, 123 Defence Intelligence Organisation, see Joint Intelligence Organisation Defence Signals Directorate (DSD), 73, 79-87, 94, 95-6, 99, 114-21, 139, 146-7, 155-6, 157, 162-6, 180 Democratic Union of Timorese, see UDT Dili radio, 53-4, 59-60, 177 Dinuth, Lt.-Col. Alex, 14-15, 53, 62 Directorate of Joint Service
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
Intelligence (DJSI), 90-2, 148, 152 Djumaryo, 111-12 Dowd, John, 140 Downer, Alexander., 142, 145, 154 . Doy, Valens, 129--30 Doyle, Roger, 38,76 Dunn, James, 11, 22, 108, 122, 128, 140 Dupont, Capt. Alan, 92 East, Roger, 136, 141, 171, 173-5 Estorninho, Jaoquim, 61 Evans, Gareth,141 Falintil, 25-6, 27, 38, 56-8, 76, 101 Favaro, Frank, 95,150 Feakes, Graham, 70-1, 73, 126, 136 Fernandes, Alarico, 174-5, 177, 180, 183 Flamboyant, Operation, 30, 47-9, 50-1, 66-7, 72, 166-9, 171 Florent, Capt. John,152 Foell, John, 127 Ford, Gerald, 23, 99, 171-2 Forrester, Geoffrey, 70 Fraser, Malcolm, 74,78, 121, 125, 150, 169-70, 178-9 Fretilin, 4, 15, 16, 18, 19, INDEX
20, 25-6, 29, 36-7, 38-9, 40, 44,59-60, 76, 122, 166-9, 174-5, 177-83 Fry, Ken, 22, 133 Furlonger, Robert, 68, 88 Garland, Col. Alf, 90-1, 119 Gibson,Capt. Peter, 92, 119, 152 Gietzelt, Sen. Arthur, 22, 116, 125, 133 Gomes, Adelino, 46-7, 62, 100-1 Goncalves, Guilhenlle Maria, 10, 19, 135 Goncalves, Tomas, 10, 19, 53, 55, 102, 105-6, 108-9, 111-13, 130, 139 Guicciardi, Winspeare, 180-1 Guterres, Olandino Maia; 106, 110, 112 Haigh, Bruce, 144 Hall, Richard,120 Harding, Sqd.-Ldr Stan, 75-7, 95-6, 171 Hastings, Peter, 15-16, 88 Haviland, Chris, 141 Her Tasning, Lt-Gen., 34, 135 Hernoto, Lt-Cdl. Agus, 52, 54, 55, 59 Herridge, Jenny, 90,119 Hope, Justice Robert & 195
Royal Commission on Intelligence and Security, 116-17, 154-5 Hornai, Lorenco, 60-1 Howes, Ted, 154 Indonesia air force, 168, 172~4 army, 48, 172-84 embassy in Canberra, 34, 72, 86 navy, 43-4, 47, 48-9, 100, 166, 172, 176 Special Forces, see Kopassandha Intelligence crisis, 149-51 Jenkins, David, 58 Jeronimo, Lucas, 101, 103 Jockel, Gordon, 15, 73, 88, 93, 119, 149, 151, 158 Johnson, Richard, 130-2, 135, 139 J oint Intelligence Organisation (JIO), 73, 87-93, 115, 117-21, 146-9, 151-3, 158, 164-5 Jolliffe, Jill,. 46, 56, 62, 95, 96 Joseph, Lance, 16, 70, 73 Juddery, Bruce, 133 Keenan, Bernard, 127 Kerin, John, 22,125,133 Kerr, Sir John, 128, 150-1 Khemlani, Tirath, 74, 121 196
Kirbiantoro, Lt Slamet, 27, 102, 106 Kissinger, Henry, 171-2 Klintworth, Gary, 146-7 Komodo, Operation, 13, 52 Kompas, 129-30 Kopassandha, 19, 26-7, 48, 55, 63, 66-7, 101-2, 106, 157 KOTA (Sons of the Timor Warriors), 28, 49 Kuntara, Maj., 27 Kupang Radio, 14-15, 18, 37, 52, 54, 62-3, 85, 114, 130, 132 'Leo', Maj., 61 Lobato, Lt Rogerio, 25, 57, 59, 62 Lobato, Nicolau, 183 Lopes da Cruz, Francisco Xavier,S, 18-19, 24, 28-9, 53, 110-12, 129-30, 132, 182 Loro Sae Radio, see Kupang Radio MI6, 93 MacDonald, Jock, 87 McIntosh, Sen. Gordon, 22 McMahon, Sir William, 88 Maher, John, 33-4 Malaysia, 7, 24, 52, 74-5, 78, 83 Maliana, 40-1, 47, 49, 100
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
Malik, Adam, 9-10, 12, 19, 69, 129, 133, 162, 167-8 Maniaty, Tony, 38 'Manix', see Sutiyoso, Capt. Mariz, Fernando, 61, 107-8 Marpaung, Lt, 27, 102 . Martins, Jose, 49, 55-6, 63-4, 108, 109, 112-13, 118-19, 138, 140 Maubere Radio, see Dill Radio Menadue, John, 169-70 Miller, Geoffrey, 125 Morrison, Alistair, 90 Morrison, William, 31, 73, 119-20, 153, 158 Muhidin, Maj., 27 Murdani, Maj.-Gen. Benny, 48, 52, 55, 58, 6:?-4, 66, 70, 77, 83, 114-15, 142, 147, 157, 161, 171, 180 Murdoch, ].G., 87 Murphy, Sen. Lionel, 149 Murtopo, Lt-Gen. Ali, 6-9, 12-13, 17, 24-5, 27, 29, 66, 68, 77 National Assessments Staff (NAS) , 89, 90 National Intelligence Committee (NIC), 88, 89, 94, 151 Newsome, David, 172 New Zealand Govt., 128 Nine Network, 32, 35-7, 43-5, 47, 123, 127, 132, 135, 137 INDEX
Office of Current Intelligence (OCI), 89-93, 146-9, 151-2, 154 Office of National Assessments (ONA) , 90, 152-3 Oliveira, Domingos, 18, 24, 61 Opsus, 7-8, 12-14, 17-19, 24-5, 37, 52, 66, 94, 111, 123, 131, 168 Osborn, Rowan, 89-92, 119, 54 Oxley, Alan, 125 Packer, Kerry, 32 Panggabean, Gen. Maraden, 171 'Papilayan, Anton', see Sumardjo, Maj. Tony Parry, Richard Lloyd, 103 Peacock, Andrew, 16, 136, 138-40, 169 Peters, Brian, 32, 35-6, 43, 45, 47, 135, 137 Pine Gap, see Central Intelligence Agency Pinwill, William, 120 Pires, Col. Mario Lemos, 16, 24-7, 96 Portugal Armed Forces Movement (MFA) 1, 4, 16, 25, 28 decolonisation 13, 17, 19-20, 26, 28, 36, 167, 181 197
television crew, 46-7, 62", 123, 128 Pritchett, Bill, 24 Ramelau Radio, see Kupang Radio Ramos...Horta, Jose, 4-5, 9, 11, 32-3, 36, 43""-5, 58-9, 71, 76, 161 Red Cross, International Committee of, 36,38, 183; see·· also· Australia, army medical team Rennie, Malcolm, 35, 36-7, 43-5, 135 Renouf, Alan, 11, 69-70, 73, 74, 123-4 Robertson, Bill, 73, 150 Rodgers, Peter, 135 Rodrigues, Roque, 4 Russell-Jones, Capt. C.G., 38, 75-6, 167 Rutter, David, 139, 143 SAARTAS, 77 Salazar, Antonio de Oliveira, 1, 5 Santos, Antonio de Almeida, 13, 17, 28 Santos, Chris, 36, 38 Santos, Guido dos, 102-3, 109, 132, 135 Santos, Manuel dos, 61-2 Seroja, Operation, 171-6 Seven Network, 127; see also . Shackleton, Greg 198
Shackleton, Greg, 33-7, 39-40, 41-2, 45, 47, 59, 72, 73, 76" Shackleton, Shirley, 137 Sherman, Tom, viii, 141-5, 153-6, 161, 165 Signals intelligence Australian, see Defence Signals Directorate Indonesian, 14-15, 50-2, 55-64,163, 176-83 Portugu"ese, 95-6, 165 Silalahi, Harry Tjan, 14, 66, 69,169 SofyanEffendi, Maj., 102 Starey, John, 47, 128 Stewart, Tony, 33, 36, 135 Stone, Gerald, 32, 35, 123, 132 Subroto, Hendro~ 53-4, 105, 108 Sugianto, Col. Aloysius, 14, 17-19,24-5,28-9, 168 Suharto, 6-8, 10-12, 19, 20-1, 23, 27-'-8, 68-9, 133-5, 145, 153, 169-70, 182 Sukarno, 5-7, 9 Sumardjo, Maj. Tony, 54, 102 Sutiyoso, Capt., 55, 102 Suweno, Brig.-Gen. Chamid, 172 Tange, Sir Arthur, 73, 88, 120, 148-50, 158, 162
DEATH IN BALIBO, LIES IN CANBERRA
Taolin, Louis, 14-15, 17, 28, 109-10 Tavares, ]oao, 111 Taylor, Allan, 66-9, 77, 138-40, 182 'Terrado', 103-5, 108 Thompson, Allan, 152, 154 Thompson" Ralph, 80-1, 118 Timor early history, 2-3 Indonesian attitudes to,S, 15, 21, 27, 32 Portuguese army in, 3 telephones, '44-5" 57-9 Trewartha, Peter, 87, 115 UDT, 4, 12, 16-20, 24, 26, 3.0, 32, 48-9 UKUSA Agreement, 80, 148 United. Nations, 21, 180-1 Uren, To:m, 23 Wanandi, Yusuf, 14, 169 West New Guinea, 5-6, 8, 22-3,52~ 87
INDEX
Whitlam, Gough, 10-12, 20-4, 27, 34, 68-70, 73-4, 78, 120-1, 148, 150, 153, 158, 161, 169-70 Will, Henry, 136 Willesee, Sen. Donald, 69-70,73, 120-1, 123, 125, 130, 150, 153, 158~9
Williams, Mostyn, .80~1, 87, 116-:-17, 118, 155-6 Woolcott, Richard, 16, 68-71, 72,74, 77, 124-5, 129, 133, 137-8, 143,159-60, 170 Yoga Sugama, Lt-Gen., 52, 131-2, 135--6 Young, Maj. Peter, 96 Yosfiah; Capt. Mohammed Yunus, 19,63,102, 106, 110-11,118, 142, 157., 161-2 Yusman, Maj., 49
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