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National Observer Home > No. 64 - Autumn 2005 > Articlesot of is public career, though, Cairns was also deeply involved h the World Peace Council (W.P.C.), which was controed by the International Department of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the viet Committee for State Security, the K.G.B.

Australia's Dr Jim Cairns and the Soviet KGB

by John Ballantyne

National Observer (Council for the National Interest, Melbourne),
No. 64, Autumn 2005, pages 52-63.
(Footnotes expanded and text slightly modified: 24 October 2005)

Australia's former Labor Deputy Prime Minister, the late Dr James Ford (Jim) Cairns, was a high-ranking member of a communist front organisation, co-ordinated and financed by Moscow, and was a long-standing Soviet agent of influence.

First elected to the House of Representatives in 1955, Cairns became a popular leader of Australia's Left and, in 1968, almost became Labor Party leader. In the late 1960s and early '70s, he worked ceaselessly to mobilise public opposition to Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War. He served as Deputy Prime Minister and Federal Treasurer in Gough Whitlam's Labor Government (1972-75). He died on 12 October 2003, aged 89, still a Labor icon to many.

During most of his public career, though, Cairns was also deeply involved with the World Peace Council (WPC), one of a number of front organisations controlled by the International Department of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Committee for State Security, the KGB.

The WPC was established in 1949 on the initiative of the brutal Soviet tyrant Joseph Stalin. It aimed to promote Soviet foreign policy objectives by infiltrating and controlling peace organisations in Western countries. Its first president was nuclear scientist, Professor Frédéric Joliot-Curie, a member of the Central Committee of the French Communist Party.

Moscow's "peace" offensive

In November 1950, the WPC attempted to launch a "peace" conference in Sheffield, England, but failed after the Attlee Labour Government barred Soviet and other communist delegates from entering Britain. The following year, the WPC was expelled by the French Government for what were described as "fifth column activities". In 1957, the Austrian Government banned the WPC for "activities directed against the interests of the Austrian state". In 1968, the WPC established its headquarters in Helsinki. Throughout its existence, the WPC unfailingly defended every act of Soviet military aggression, such as the invasions of Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968) and Afghanistan (1979), and the 1981 Soviet-backed imposition of martial law in Poland and the crushing of Poland's 10-million strong independent trade union, Solidarity.1

Cairns's long involvement with the WPC began in 1949, when he was co-founder and first chairman of an early WPC offshoot, the Australian Peace Council. The APC was publicly launched at Melbourne's Exhibition Hall on 16 April 1950 by the Dean of Canterbury, Hewlett Johnson, popularly known as the "Red Dean" on account of his fervent admiration of Stalin. The Dean proclaimed to his Melbourne audience, "The Soviet people want peace!"2 Only weeks after this statement, the Soviets supported communist North Korea's invasion of South Korea.

The WPC and APC were typical Soviet fronts of the sort originally devised by Lenin, and perfected by the celebrated inter-war communist propaganda genius and Comintern agent, talent-spotter and recruiter, Willi Münzenberg. The strategy Münzenberg used was to create a façade of respectability for communist initiatives by recruiting well-meaning celebrities and public figures to lend their support to seemingly worthy causes such as peace and disarmament -- causes which were used to further Soviet strategic objectives against the West.

Münzenberg called these fronts "innocents' clubs". Innocent some of the followers may have been, but not so the behind-the-scenes organisers. The leadership of the APC consisted heavily of communists and fellow travellers. Prominent among them were two left-wing clerics, Rev. Alf Dickie and Rev. Frank Hartley -- both senior office-bearers in the WPC.3

The Australian Labor Party in that era had few illusions about the hidden agenda of the WPC and APC. In March 1951, the ALP's Federal Executive accurately denounced the "so-called peace councils" as "instruments of Soviet imperialism" and forbade ALP members from associating with them.4 At this time Cairns took the precaution of severing his connections with these bodies, but resumed his involvement later.5

In July 1958, the WPC launched a renewed "peace" offensive at its World Congress for International Co-operation and Disarmament held in Stockholm. It got off to a shaky start, however, after the British philosopher and pacifist Bertrand Russell withdrew his sponsorship of the congress and denounced the WPC for its refusal to condemn the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and the kidnapping and murder of Hungarian prime minister, Imre Nagy.6

Despite its threadbare credentials, the WPC's Stockholm congress succeeded in spawning an offshoot: the Australian and New Zealand Congress for International Co-operation and Disarmament, which was held in Melbourne in November 1959.

The Melbourne congress was supposedly a broad-based spontaneous movement of peace-lovers, but was in fact effectively controlled by the WPC and the Communist Party. Behind the scenes, running the show, were familiar WPC identities Dickie and Hartley -- chairman and vice-chairman respectively -- and a brilliant full-time organising secretary, the late pro-Soviet activist Sam Goldbloom.7 Chairing many of its public sessions was Cairns.8 It was the same old clock with a new face.

Any resolutions that did not conform to the Communist Party line were soundly defeated. To the dismay of several invited guests -- including English writer J.B. Priestley -- resolutions voted down included ones calling for freedom of the press, the release of writers and others imprisoned for their political views, and freedom in all countries for the circulation of pacifist propaganda.9

Vietnam moratorium

The Melbourne congress subsequently evolved into a more permanent body called the Congress for International Co-operation and Disarmament. Under Cairns and Goldbloom's leadership, the CICD played a big part in mobilising the vast nationwide anti-war protest movement that became known as the Vietnam moratorium.10 It made history on 8 May 1970, when 75,000 protesters -- one of Australia's biggest public demonstrations -- occupied the streets of Melbourne, bringing the city to a standstill.

The bulk of the marchers, of course, had no pro-Moscow affiliations or sympathies. For the most part they were simply individuals who wanted an end to the Vietnam conflict, and most of what they knew of the war came from media reporting and also antiwar propaganda. The Australian demonstrations were also inspired by big protests in the United States from 1968.

However, even if many Vietnam moratorium members were probably innocent of the WPC/CICD's ulterior motives, the experienced organisers and wire-pullers behind the scenes were not.

Dr Cairns himself was no Gandhi-like pacifist, renouncing the use of armed force or seeking to be even-handed between the two sides in the conflict. Instead, he publicly and explicitly supported the Viet Cong's use of military force to impose communism on the people of South Vietnam. In a speech to Vietnam moratorium demonstrators in May 1970, he declared that, examined in the great historical pattern, the forces led by the Vietnam National Liberation Front (the Viet Cong) and Hanoi were "on the side of right".11

Cairns, in common with just about every WPC identity, presented an ostensibly benign view of communism. In November 1970, on his return from an overseas trip which included a brief stay in the Soviet Union, he declared he had found no more suppression of civil rights in Russia than in many aspects of Australian life.12 This was an extraordinary judgment, coming as it did from a man who aspired to be a Labor prime minister. In the Soviet Union, independent political parties and trade unions were outlawed, and workers' rights were inferior to those in 1830s Britain during the time of the Tolpuddle Martyrs.

Referring to a Stockholm WPC conference on Vietnam, which he had also attended during the same overseas trip, Cairns disingenuously claimed that the communists formed "only a small minority of the delegates and [had] little influence at these conferences".13

Soviet control

Contrary to Cairns's claim, the World Peace Council was in fact rigidly controlled by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU)'s International Department (the successor organisation to the Comintern and Cominform), which worked hand in glove with the Soviet spy agency, the KGB. A former British Labour Minister for Disarmament, Lord Chalfont, said in 1983: "The World Peace Council ... is the most important of the Soviet Union's front organisations ... It aims to attract non-communists to its meetings, so that they may be associated with resolutions laying the blame for the arms race entirely on the United States and the West."14 The highest ranking Soviet diplomat ever to defect to the West, Arkady N. Shevchenko -- a one-time personal adviser to the Soviet Union's long-standing foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, and later Under-Secretary General of the United Nations until his defection to the United States in 1978 -- recalled how "the Soviet-controlled World Peace Council ... swarmed with KGB officers".

Shevchenko added: 15

"Moscow wanted to boost the Council's prestige by creating high visibility via UN recognition of the Council's 'great role in the world movement for peace.' I never developed a skin thick enough not to cringe inwardly with embarrassment when I approached [the then UN Secretary-General] Waldheim's deputies with my next recommendation for UN participation in another World Peace Council activity. I never became immune to their patient, knowing smiles when I insistently proposed that the Secretary General's upcoming statement praise whatever latest peace initiative the USSR wanted to push no matter how transparent the initiative might be."

In 1980, Ruth Tosek -- a former senior interpreter at several Soviet-controlled fronts, including the WPC -- revealed that "all the funds of these organisations, in local and in hard currency, were provided above all by the Soviet Union but also by other East European satellite countries on the basis of set contribution rates, paid by the governments of these countries through various channels".16

Former Romanian secret police chief, General Ion Pacepa -- one of the highest-ranking intelligence officers ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc -- used to run the Romanian side of the WPC. Pacepa has described how the WPC had a "$50 million annual budget" and that "the money was delivered by the KGB in the form of laundered [US] cash dollars, in order to hide its Soviet origin".17

Insufficient research has been done on the funding of the WPC's Australian operation; but there can be little doubt that, as in other countries, it too was funded by the CPSU via the KGB.

In early 1981, financial irregularities forced the WPC to withdraw its application to upgrade its consultative status with the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). The WPC had claimed in its application that it did not receive any contributions from any government. But, according to the ECOSOC Report (16 March 1981): "It is clear, however, that the World Peace Council has received large-scale financial support from government sources, and has gone to great lengths to conceal the fact from the committee."

In 1989, the WPC destroyed forever whatever credibility it might have had when it admitted that nine-tenths of its funding came from the Soviet Union.18

The nominal head of the WPC was Romesh Chandra. A leading figure in the Moscow-aligned Communist Party of India, Chandra was groomed as a Soviet agent of influence by a senior KGB operative, Colonel Radomir Bogdanov, who was stationed in New Delhi (1957-67). Chandra served first as WPC general secretary from 1966 to 1977, then as president from 1977 onwards. In June 1981, at a Kremlin ceremony, Chandra was personally decorated with the rare and prestigious Order of Lenin, by Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev himself. Chandra returned the compliment by bestowing on Brezhnev the WPC's highest award -- the Joliot-Curie Gold Medal for Peace.19

Other Australian World Peace Council supporters

Cairns was by no means alone in his membership of the World Peace Council in Australia. Other figures from the political Left, including from the Labor Party, played prominent roles too, and their outspoken pro-communist sentiments vividly illustrated the WPC's true agenda in promoting Soviet foreign policy aims under the guise of peace.

A decade after Australia's Vietnam moratorium, Cairns's erstwhile associate, Sam Goldbloom, publicly defended the December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Within a few years, the Red Army killed or drove into exile abroad more than one-quarter of the Afghan population. Goldbloom, however, maintained that the Soviet military presence there was designed to assist the Afghan people "in their struggle to consolidate their non-aligned revolution".20

Another high-ranking Australian WPC identity was George Georges,21 a militant communist-aligned ALP senator from Queensland who was proud to boast of his membership of the notorious Federated Ship Painters and Dockers Union,22 when it was the subject of criminal investigation by the Costigan Royal Commission in the early 1980s. Twice suspended -- and almost expelled -- from the ALP in 1986 for voting against the Hawke Government's legislation to deregister the communist Builders' Laborers' Federation (BLF),23 Georges liked to promote himself as a workers' champion.

His concern for workers' rights, however, stopped short of supporting Poland's 10 million-strong Solidarity trade union in the early '80s when it was engaged in its life-and-death struggle against communist one-party rule. In 1982, Tasmania's Brian Harradine moved a Senate resolution condemning the December 1981 Soviet-backed imposition of martial law in Poland; but Georges opposed the motion, blaming the Polish crisis on "Western influences and pressures", the Catholic Church and the failure of the Polish government to apply "the principles of socialism as they ought to have been applied".24

In 1983, Georges led a 72-strong Australian delegation to the WPC's World Assembly for Peace and Life, held in communist Prague. Among the leading delegates were Sam Goldbloom; communist trade union leaders Ernie Boatswain and Laurie Carmichael; and left-wing South Australian state Labor MP, Peter Duncan (former state Attorney-General and later a Federal Minister in the Hawke Government).25

At the WPC's opening ceremony, however, the proceedings did not go according to script. In Prague's historic Wenceslaus Square, 300 young people broke off from the WPC's officially-sanctioned rally, where delegates were chanting: "We want peace." The breakaway group changed this to: "We want peace and freedom." They also chanted: "Disarm the soldiers." Immediately, baton-wielding police attacked the young people, beating up several young men and making numerous arrests.26

No episode during the Cold War more vividly illustrated the double standard of the communist bloc "peace" movement -- ruthlessly suppressing political dissent at home while being at liberty in Western democracies to promote Soviet objectives under the guise of "peace".

Under Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of glasnost, freedom slowly emerged in the Iron Curtain countries after decades of police-state terror. With this freedom came some surprising revelations about the WPC. In October 1988 -- according to no less an authority than the Communist Party of Australia's paper Tribune -- former Soviet secretary of the WPC, Tair Tarov, publicly admitted that the WPC was a Stalinist body that had "ended up as a continuation and reflection of the Soviet Union's foreign policy".27

Jim Cairns's impact on public life

Dr Cairns's conspicuous role in Australia's peace movement during the Cold War has not yet undergone the historical scrutiny it deserves. To date, both he and other leading WPC identities have enjoyed uncritical public acclaim as peace-lovers and humanitarians.

Cairns had an extraordinary impact on Australian public life -- not just through organising street protests in favour of Soviet-backed expansion in Indo-China, but also in Parliament and the party-room. A detailed study of declassified archival material from Australian and Soviet sources is essential and long overdue in order to evaluate fully Cairns's consistent actions as a Soviet agent of influence.

It is well known that Cairns, during and after World War II, displayed strong communist sympathies. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, he came under surveillance by the Commonwealth Investigation Service and its successor, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO). Apparently, in 1946, Cairns applied to join the Communist Party, but was supposedly rejected because of his earlier career as a police officer.28 This account is all too often taken at face value in order to clear Cairns of any communist taint; but it is far more probable that he was advised by senior party colleagues that he could be more useful to the communist cause by joining the more mainstream Australian Labor Party, which he did the following year. Within a few years, he was embarked on a highly successful federal parliamentary career which saw him nearly become ALP leader.

On joining the ALP in 1947, Cairns retained his ties with known communist fronts.29 In the 1955 federal election, Cairns stood as Labor candidate for the House of Representatives seat of Yarra in Victoria. The Communist Party threw its considerable weight behind his campaign and helped him to win this seat by a narrow margin of 791 votes after the distribution of preferences. The defeated sitting member was Stan Keon, a leading figure in the anti-communist Industrial Groups which had recently been driven out of the Labor Party by its federal leader, Dr H.V. Evatt, and the party's left-wing.

It is strange that, in view of Cairns's later disingenuous claims to be a man of peace, many of his rank-and-file supporters in the 1955 campaign were prepared to resort to violence and intimidation. On election day, the local Labor Party headquarters had squads of cars on stand-by, ready to ferry union-supplied muscle-men to wherever they might be needed. Cairns's campaign director, the future federal minister John Button, later wondered whether these stand-over tactics might not have provoked as much violence as they quelled.30

Nonetheless, thanks to Communist Party muscle, Cairns was launched on a successful parliamentary career in the federal Labor Party. The ALP had at first supported sending troops to Vietnam. The party's subsequent about-turn was masterminded by Cairns and like-minded colleagues. In 1968, he came within a few votes of toppling Gough Whitlam for the party leadership.

Cairns was always careful to play down his radicalism. He rarely used the rhetoric of Marxism or class warfare or even of anti-Americanism. He liked to pose as a detached academic, a voice of quiet reason and a moderating influence on some of his more hot-headed supporters. But his career, if examined more carefully, was characterised by a pattern of deceptions and lies and provides further corroborating evidence that he was a Soviet agent of influence -- a matter which at the time was widely acknowledged within the Australian intelligence community.

One former senior Canberra public servant in the late 1960s and early 1970s took the trouble to study closely Cairns's published works on the Vietnam War, notably Living with Asia (1965) and The Eagle and the Lotus (1969). He combed through Cairns's footnotes and documentation and discovered numerous instances of sources having been misquoted, references falsified and crucial words and phrases deleted. This was, he concluded, not caused by mere intellectual slovenliness on the part of Cairns: it was something far more calculated. It was more than just propaganda: it was nothing less than premeditated and painstakingly executed intellectual fraud.31

Cairns's lack of honesty was apparent again during the time of the Whitlam Government (1972-75), when he served briefly (and disastrously) as Treasurer -- the only Federal Treasurer never to deliver a Budget. He was sacked for misleading Parliament.

In 1977 and 1982, in two costly defamation cases, Cairns lied under oath when he denied that he had had sexual relations with his ministerial assistant Junie Morosi. Cairns and Morosi were awarded substantial damages. But in September 2002, both admitted that they had lied in court.32

But these serious blemishes of Cairns -- a man whom Whitlam has extravagantly described as having "brought a nobility to the Labor cause which has never been surpassed"33 -- pale beside his prominent role in the World Peace Council.

Allegiance to a foreign power

When he was a senior Cabinet minister in the Whitlam Government, Cairns set out to use his high office to promote Soviet foreign policy aims. In 1973, when he was Minister for Overseas Trade and Secondary Industry, he sponsored a visit to Australia of representatives of communist North Vietnam. On April 26 -- the day after Anzac Day -- Cairns was photographed with his guests in the Sydney Town Hall, surrounded by Viet Cong flags and a huge picture of dictator Ho Chi Minh. [N.B: In the original text version of this article, the year of this visit was incorrectly given as 1975.]

In 1974, official letterhead stationery of the Australian WPC described Cairns both as President of the Committee of World Peace Councillors in Australia and as Deputy Prime Minister. One such letter, dated 2 September 1974, advertised a visit to Australia later that month of a WPC delegation, headed by long-time KGB agent and WPC leader, Romesh Chandra.

It is worth remembering that Australia's Constitution (section 44) clearly states: "Any person who ... is under any acknowledgement of allegiance, obedience, or adherence to a foreign power ... shall be incapable of being chosen or of sitting as a senator or member of the House of Representatives." Cairns's loyalties to a foreign power -- and an enemy foreign power at that -- should have automatically disqualified him from sitting as a member of parliament, let alone from becoming Deputy Prime Minister.

It is little wonder, then, that when Cairns became Deputy PM on 10 June 1974, the then US Ambassador to Australia, Marshall Green, warned Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam of Washington's alarm that Cairns might have access to classified information on US bases in Australia. Whitlam assured Green that Cairns had not asked about the functions of the US bases and would not be briefed on the matter.34

A former Australian intelligence officer, who declined to be named, has told the present writer that, at about this time, ASIO took a series of photographs, from a Canberra observation post, of Cairns falling down dead drunk in the gutter after a night's carousing in the Soviet embassy with several parliamentary colleagues.

Victory of communism in Indo-China

The 1975 victory of communism in South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos was an unparalleled disaster for the people of those countries.

North Vietnam's long-feared conquest of the country's south -- symbolised by the image of a Soviet-built T-54 tank battering the gate of the Presidential Palace in Saigon -- ushered in a cruel régime of police-state terror, prison camps and mass persecution. More than a million inhabitants fled Vietnam, many of them making perilous voyages in flotillas of tiny vessels across the shark-infested South China Sea in search of friendlier shores. Hundreds of thousands of them subsequently drowned. (When the "boat-people", as they came to be known, started arriving in Australia, they were given a hostile reception by significant sections of the ALP who described these unfortunates as criminals and capitalists on the run.)

In neighbouring Cambodia, Pol Pot's fanatical Khmer Rouge exterminated between a fifth and a third of the population.

The communist victory also profoundly altered the strategic balance of power in the Asia-Pacific region for years to come -- and greatly to Australia's detriment. In the spring of 1979, the Soviet fleet established one of its largest naval bases outside the USSR at Vietnam's Cam Ranh Bay, one of the finest deep-water ports in Southeast Asia. At Da Nang, the Soviet air force established an important air-base. From there its long-range bombers and fighters had the capacity to overfly every Australian capital city and return to base without refuelling.35

In the years which followed the 1975 communist victory, Cairns never expressed the slightest dismay or misgivings about the reign of terror inflicted on the newly enslaved populations. On the contrary, in 1980, he lavishly praised Hanoi's one-party dictatorship, telling the Australian communist paper Tribune that, "with all its difficulties and faults, the Vietnamese national revolutionary movement is still the most progressive thing in Asia, and there's no need for anyone to be ashamed of it."36 Five years later, he reiterated: "There is no better alternative in Vietnam than the government that is there now."37

The misguided obituaries written on Cairns's death in October 2003, for the most part never referred to his unswerving support for communism from Stalin's time onwards. Yet his treasonous allegiance to an enemy foreign power cannot be explained away as some minor aberration of an otherwise well-intentioned idealist: it was the one conspicuous, consistent and defining feature of his public career. Dr Cairns was not an innocent dupe, but a gifted and articulate Soviet agent of influence who nearly ended up leading the Labor Party.

Today, of course, global communist power has diminished since the collapse of the former Soviet Union. But communists are still very much in power in Vietnam -- thanks partly to Dr Cairns and his World Peace Council colleagues, who for years worked so assiduously for their victory.

Notes and references

1. "World Peace Council: Instrument of Soviet Foreign Policy", Foreign Affairs Note (US Department of State, Washington, DC), April 1982; Vladimir Bukovsky, "The Peace Movement and the Soviet Union", Commentary (New York), Vol. 73, May 1982, pages 25-41; J.A. Emerson Vermaat, "Moscow Fronts and the European Peace Movement", Problems of Communism (Washington, DC), November-December 1982, pages 43-56; Richard H. Shultz and Roy Godson, Dezinformatsia: Active Measures in Soviet Strategy (Washington, DC: Pergamon-Brassey's International Defense Publishers, 1984), pages 4, 20-25, 111-32, 159 (note 28), 181-2, 196.

2. "Thousands cheer Red Dean's speech", Sydney Morning Herald, 17 April 1950, page 4.

3. J.P. Forrester, Fifteen Years of Peace Fronts (Sydney: private publication, 1964), page 54. Forrester was a member of the central committee of the NSW ALP. See also Rev. Frank Hartley, "Best World Peace Council session I've seen in years", Tribune (Communist Party of Australia), 18 December 1968.

4. Official Report of Proceedings of the 19th Commonwealth Triennial Conference of the Australian Labor Party, Canberra, 1 March 1951, Federal Executive Report, clause 4, Korea, section (4), page 10, and clause 9, Australian Peace Council, page 11, quoted in: House of Representatives: Hansard, Vol. 25, 10 November 1959, pages 2525-6.

5. Cairns admitted that he was founding chairman of the APC, but claimed he later resigned. See Cairns, House of Representatives: Hansard, Vol. 44, 28 October 1964, page 2454.

6. "Russell Scores Reds: Briton cuts Peace Council tie because of Nagy execution", New York Times, 10 July 1958, page 12; Ronald W. Clark, The Life of Bertrand Russell (London: Jonathan Cape / Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975), pages 564-5.

7. Goldbloom described himself as a member of the Presidential Committee of the World Peace Council and spoke of "my 30 years as a member of the World Peace Council" in The Australian, 23 February 1981, page 6. In 1951, Goldbloom was expelled from the Labor Party for standing against an endorsed ALP candidate. In 1958 six ex-Communists (two of whom were ALP members) testified that, while they were in the Communist Party between 1952 and 1956, Goldbloom was regarded as a key Communist Party official. Nevertheless, Goldbloom was readmitted to the ALP. See Harold Crouch, Peter Samuel, Leon Glezer and Jim Jupp, "The Peace Movement", a Dissent pamphlet (Melbourne) [1963], 2nd rev. edn., October 1964, page 5.

8. Paul Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man: A Biography of Jim Cairns (Melbourne: Penguin Books Australia, 1981), pages 59-60.

9. The Herald (Melbourne), 13 November 1959, quoted in Crouch et al., op. cit., page 8.

10. Ormonde, op. cit., pages 122-123.

11. Cairns quoted in "Moratorium ends quietly after national protests", The Australian, 11 May 1970, page 3.

12. "Russia no worse than us -- Cairns", The Age (Melbourne), 5 December 1970, page 4. For similar comments of Cairns, see Maurice Carr's report of his visit to the USSR the following year, "Jim Cairns: How he found the Soviet Union -- where dissent is non-existent and the people are contented", Observer (Melbourne), December 7, 1971.

13. "Russia no worse than us -- Cairns", The Age (Melbourne), 5 December 1970, page 4.

14. Lord Chalfont letter, "CND aims and Soviet propaganda", The Times (London), 26 April 1983, page 13.

15. Arkady N. Shevchenko, Breaking with Moscow (London: Jonathan Cape, 1985), page 225.

16. Ruth Tosek, "WPC finances", New Statesman (London), Vol. 100, 17 October 1980, page 22.

17. Ion M. Pacepa, "Seeing Red", National Review (New York), 18 March 2003.

18. WPC, Peace Courier, 1989, no.4, quoted in Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story of its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1990), page 528. See also Andrew Campbell, "Moscow's gold: Soviet financing of global subversion", National Observer (Melbourne), No. 40, Autumn 1999, pages 19-38.

19. John Barron, KGB Today: The Hidden Hand (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1984), pages 43 and 286; "World Peace Council: Instrument of Soviet Foreign Policy", Foreign Affairs Note (US Department of State, Washington DC), April 1982.

20. Sam Goldbloom, Afghanistan: Eyewitness Report (Australian Peace Committee, April 1980), page 6; Sam Goldbloom, "Afghanistan: another view", Tribune, 7 May 1980, page 13.

21. In 1983, Senator Georges was listed as a WPC Vice President and "Chairman, Committee of World Peace Councillors in Australia". See: World Peace Council: List of Members 1983-1986 (Helsinki: World Peace Council, 1983), pages 7-8.

22. Senator George Georges, Senate: Hansard, Vol. 95, 26 August 1982, page 534.

23. Ian McLean, "Senator put issues above party line: George Georges obituary", The Australian, 30 September 2002, page 10.

24. Senator George Georges, Senate: Hansard, Vol. 95, 19 August 1982, page 363.

25. "Members of the Australian delegation to the World Assembly for Peace and Life", Peace Courier (Australian Peace Committee), June 1983, page 2.

26. "Prague police clash with youths chanting 'freedom'", The Times (London), 23 June 1983, page 8.

27. "Glasnost needed in Peace Council", Tribune, 5 October 1988, Magazine, page 8.

28. Ormonde, op. cit., pages 32-33; Paul Strangio, Keeper of the Faith: a Biography of Jim Cairns (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002), pages 52, 86-87.

29. Strangio, op. cit., page 87.

30. Ormonde, op. cit., pages 48-50.

31. Dr Cairns, Mr. Whitlam and Vietnam: an analysis of the background (Canberra, ACT: May, 1975), a privately printed, 107-page monograph written by an informed commentator from Canberra. (Available on request from National Observer).

32. "Cairns's tell-all could be costly", Weekend Australian, 21-22 September 2002, page 5.

33. "Cairns, man of many passions, dies", The Australian, 13 October 2003. Whitlam's role in advancing radical-left causes has yet to be examined fully.

34. Paul Ormonde, op. cit., pages 172-4; Gough Whitlam, The Whitlam Government, 1972-1975 (Melbourne: Viking /Penguin, 1985), page 50.

35. B.A. Santamaria, "East-West Tension: An Australian Viewpoint", Facts (Melbourne: National Civic Council), No. 44, December 1982, page 17.

36. "Vietnam Moratorium Campaign tenth anniversary: interview with Jim Cairns", Tribune, 7 May 1980, page 13.

37. Jim Cairns, "No tears, but anger, fear and despair", The Age (Melbourne), 1 May 1985.

About the author

John Ballantyne, BA Hons, graduated in history with first class honours from the University of New England, New South Wales. In the 1980s he was co-ordinator of the Captive Nations Council of South Australia, and is currently editor of News Weekly (published in Melbourne).

Additional keywords

AICD, alliance, ANZCICD, ANZUS, Athens, betrayal, Campaign for International Co-operation and Disarmament, Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, clandestine, clandestinity, counter-intelligence, disinformation, espionage, front organization, James Ford Cairns, Marxist, mole, Muenzenberg, NKVD, penetrate, penetration, Quisling, socialist, spies, subvert, traitor, treason, World Peace Congress.

 

National Observer No. 64 - Autumn 2005