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Playing catch-up

When terrorism first struck Australia, ASIO was looking the other way. Tony Wright reports.

Terrorism came to Australia more than 35 years ago but ASIO took a long time to catch on. On New Years Day, 1967, a bomb blew open the Yugoslav consulate in Sydney. By 1970, the Melbourne consulate had been bombed and newspapers were agog at similar attacks on Yugoslav churches, businesses and clubs. But ASIO was busily looking the other way, tracking left-wing organisations and individuals in full Cold War fever. The bombs were being triggered by a right-wing Croatian secret society, the Ustasha, and they were aimed at a Communist Yugoslavia. ASIO seemed unconcerned.

In early 1973, the Whitlam Labor Government was preparing for a visit from the Yugoslav Prime Minister, Dzemal Bijedic (who had been invited by the former National Party leader and deputy Prime Minister “Black Jack” McEwen). Ustasha sources threatened to kill Bijedic. The level of hysteria can be judged from a report in a Melbourne newspaper, The Observer, on March 18, 1973.

Beneath a screaming headline declaring “How They’ll Murder The PM”, the newspaper reported that, “Highly trained elite assassination squads of three are leaving Melbourne for Canberra today. They will lie in wait for the Yugoslav Prime Minister, Mr Bijedic, who arrives on Tuesday. Their orders are to assassinate Mr Bijedic at any price.”

By then, Whitlam Government Attorney-General Lionel Murphy was apoplectic. He had been demanding intelligence information on the Ustasha and the level of threat, and ASIO was providing very little. Murphy pulled together a posse of Commonwealth police and raided ASIO' s then headquarters in Melbourne on March 15. To his great dismay, he discovered that ASIO had not been holding back information - it simply had no intelligence worthy of the moniker on the Ustasha.

Bijedic' s visit went on behind the biggest security cordon Australia had ever provided. His car screamed from the Canberra Airport to the Lakeside Hotel along a road cleared of all other vehicles and with armed police stationed every few hundred metres. Snipers were positioned on the hotel roof and a police helicopter whirred overhead. No assassination squads turned up. Neither Lionel Murphy nor ASIO were ever quite the same afterwards: both had lost credibility.

In 1974 the Whitlam government established an inquiry under Justice Hope which led to greater accountability within Australia’s intelligence services. ASIO has not stopped searching for terrorists since.