Despite Horner’s ‘unfettered’ and unprecedented access to sealed ASIO records, and the wealth of new information about the modus operandi of ASIO, the book’s major revelations are few. Here are two. First, ASIO’s formation. Contrary to received wisdom, John Burton, secretary of the Department of External Affairs, played a crucial role in persuading a sceptical Chifley in 1948 to establish ASIO; this contradicts the US chargé d’affaires’ erroneous belief then, and ASIO’s later, that Burton was a communist sympathiser. Also surprising was Dr H.V. Evatt’s defence, in 1949, of ASIO’s establishment against the Opposition allegations about ‘snooping and prying’. This was despite the fact that the attorney-general, unlike Chifley, was never ‘indoctrinated’ into Venona. Nor did we know that, as Opposition leader, Evatt met regularly and amicably with Charles Spry (‘a remarkable man … in whom I have every confidence’), usually at Evatt’s home.

The Director General of MI5, Sir Percy Sillitoe (photograph from title)

Second, ASIO’s charter. During the 1951 referendum campaign to outlaw the Communist Party, Spry provided R.G. Menzies with intelligence on the CPA with the explicit purpose of assisting the government to win the referendum. This violated the charter, prepared by MI5 officers, which deemed information collection legitimate but political interference improper. Horner cites numerous other instances where ASIO defied that charter by cooperating or sharing intelligence with anti-communist non-government groups (the Returned Soldiers’ League, the Sane Democracy League, The Movement, and a White Russian organisation); by spoiling operations such as planting articles in the press and advertising semi-secret CPA meetings (to the extent of erecting road signs to a ‘Communist Training School’ in Minto, New South Wales); by at least one case of entrapment; and by conducting negative propaganda campaigns. All of these measures were to meet the communist menace, and all of these echoed, even if faintly, the disinformation, provocations, and illegalities of the FBI’s clandestine COINTELPRO, which also commenced in the 1950s. Horner judges these activities, alongside the unlawful entering and searching of CPA premises, as ‘overzealous’ and ‘extravagant’ interpretations of the 1949 charter and the 1956 ASIO Act. Euphemism notwithstanding, this highlights Horner’s refusal to provide the reader with a sanitised, uncritical version of ASIO’s history.

On the other hand, Horner is determined to rescue from the shadows those necessarily secret stories of dedication and sacrifice by ASIO field officers, ‘honourable, everyday Australians’, so that they can finally receive their ‘proper recognition’. One example was Len Heilig, assigned to watch Wally Clayton (or ‘Klod’, the spymaster). His five-week surveillance in Mosman in the winter of 1949 was arduous: he slept in a bus shelter, was accosted by police, was never relieved, was short of money, ate poorly, lost weight, and caught pleurisy. Heilig’s devotion to the job was not matched by all ASIO staff. In 1952, ASIO discovered a rat within its ranks: a disaffected secretary in ASIO’s Canberra office had passed information, concerning ASIO’s interest in certain personnel at the Soviet Embassy, to a member of the CPA.

Predictably, the Petrovs’ defection and the subsequent royal commission on espionage receive generous attention. Building on Robert Manne’s definitive 1987 study and supplemented by access to still-classified ASIO records, Horner provides an authoritative account of what he terms ‘ASIO’s triumph’. Indeed, the defection of such high-ranking MVD officers carrying such sensitive intelligence (including operational details of Soviet espionage overseas and the whereabouts of British diplomats Burgess and Maclean) propelled ASIO, much to Spry’s delight, from its shadowy existence into the international limelight. Horner provides fresh information about how Dr Bialoguski was handled by ASIO (the Polish-born Bialoguski cultivated Petrov’s defection but, according to Spry, was ‘too bloody smart by half’); MI5 involvement in the operation; the mixture of patience, prudence, and sheer luck in ensuring a successful outcome (even on the day of the defection, 3 April 1954, Petrov failed to rendezvous with ASIO officers because he instead visited a hotel for a drink); and the revelation that, because of the royal commission, several leading communists began cooperating with ASIO against other party members. Horner draws on closed ASIO files for assessments of the Petrovs. A former ASIO officer with whom the Petrovs holidayed in Queensland in 1956 thought Vladimir was ‘a peasant … not a nice man’, while Evdokia, whose continuing value to the intelligence services Horner underestimates, was ‘a wonderful person; she was a character, very intelligent’. By then Spry thought them both ‘psychopathic cases’.

Prime Minister Ben Chifley consults his deputy, Dr. H.V. (Doc) Evatt, just days before the December 1949 federal election (photograph from title).

Although Horner refers to Spry’s ‘arrogance’ by 1963, his assessment of the director-general is profoundly different from the negative portraits in I, Spry (2010) and, implicitly, Persons of Interest (2013). Horner concentrates on Spry’s military-like discipline and sure-footed leadership, which oversaw the evolution and maturation of ASIO into an internationally-respected security apparatus.

What I take issue with is Spry’s stridency, and Horner’s ambivalence, about the character and extent of the internal communist threat to national security. This is a central, but unresolved, issue of the book. ASIO’s counter-subversion role (as distinct from its counter-espionage brief of catching spies) assumed that the CPA constituted a sufficiently serious menace to justify a significant deployment of human and financial resources. One example: in 1960, four years after the catastrophic effect on the CPA of Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’ and the invasion of Hungary, and two years after the CPA embraced the moderate line of ‘unity tickets’ with the ALP, Spry judged the 6,000 remaining party members to be active agents of subversion and a threat ‘of tremendous concern’ to democracy. Accordingly, ASIO employed its vast arsenal (agents, photographic, cinematic and physical surveillance, planting of listening devices, telephone interception) against the CPA during its 1961 Congress. In short, as the CPA’s influence receded, ASIO’s attack intensified. Horner makes the rather bland comment that ‘senior ASIO officers did not appear to stop to reconsider whether the counter-subversion effort should be maintained at a high level’. He does not question or address the underlying, contestable premise that the CPA then constituted a threat to national security; it is simply ‘a matter of judgement’.

An ASIO photographer almost missed capturing the most significant event in ASIO’s early years when his film jammed. Here, ASIO’s Regional Director in New South Wales, Ron Richards, holds the car door open for a defecting Vladimir Petrov at Sydney Airport on 3 April 1954. (ASIO)

Judgements aside, factual errors are rare. One occurs on page 180: Joe McCarthy did not chair the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1949, but the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in 1952–54, and Alger Hiss was not prosecuted for espionage but for perjury. But there is one point missing. Punctuating Spy Catchers is, justifiably, the centrality of the Venona intelligence and ASIO’s ongoing obsession, right until the end of the book, with preserving its secrecy. Again and again we read how subjects could not be interrogated, suspects could not be prosecuted, details could not be used for fear of compromising the source. That was why Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov’s post-defection disclosures were so important: they confirmed the veracity of Venona. But in one of the many ironies of the Cold War, all the strict precautions and the elaborate safeguards were completely unnecessary. The Russians knew all along that their ‘unbreakable’ codes had been cracked, thanks to information provided from 1947 by William Weisband, an American signals intelligence analyst; and they changed their cipher systems. The question Horner neither asks nor addresses is this: given that Weisband was exposed as a Soviet agent in 1950, why did the FBI fail to inform ASIO that Venona was compromised? If it had, some key elements in ASIO’s history for the next decade could well have been different.

The Spy Catchers concludes with an appendix: a poignant portrait of a long-term ASIO informant, Mercia Masson. It illuminates the human costs of being a ‘human source’, of living a double life that, once exposed, incurred the disdain for the dobber. Throughout, Horner mixes official history with individual stories. Achieving this balance between the institutional and the personal is perhaps the book’s major accomplishment.