Even so, why should the journalists go beyond the reputed stark confession of greed for money, office, and Moscow?

After all, Prime Minister Bob Hawke formed his view of the ultimate worth of his friend without bothering to read the revelation. The attorney positively retreated from a scrutiny of the text. None of the other members of the National and International Security Committee of the Cabinet sought to examine it. They were sufficiently repelled by the oral extracts read out by ASIO of what Combe had said. Combe was to be barred as a lobbyist even after Ivanov had gone, not because he was a security risk but because Combe was now known to be intolerably greedy and ambitious. ASIO had argued that these attributes made Combe vulnerable to Ivanov and that Ivanov’s discovery of Combe’s personal weaknesses warranted his immediate removal from our shores. No further inquiry into Combe’s distasteful inadequacies was called for, Siberia for Ivanov. King’s Hall, no nearer, for Combe.

In hindsight now, Combe looks very much like the rest of us. He wanted rich clients, big fees, swift success, and at the end a formal respectability. His chosen field was trade where the nation cries out for enterprise and drive, for innovation and new markets. We damned him for what we say will save us. We damned him for what we all want – ten fingers in the biscuit tin.

Combe was condemned in the Cabinet committee without a reading of his confession by anyone but ASIO. The protection of society would have been set at risk with more. If it was good enough to set our leaders’ minds on edge by the proffering of the prospect of Combe in Qantas, Combe in Moscow or Combe driving hard for wealth, it was certainly good enough for those who spoon history into the media to pass their resentment on. But it is not good enough for Combe to be persistently disparaged now that we have in our hands the report of Mr Justice Hope and the brilliant elaboration of the whole affair by David Marr.

Marr crushes the entitlement of ASIO and its director general to respect. The essence of ASIO’s tradecraft is not observation and evidence, not reasonable inference upon the balance of probabilities upon matters of low import and certainty beyond reasonable doubt upon issues that matter. The essence of their tradecraft is analysis – ‘the fine analysis of distant possibilities’ (p.16) – ‘the instinct for the faintest danger’ (p.146) – the conversion of ‘the dross of table talk into security gold’ (p.159). ASIO’s specialist in the analysis of the Combe–Ivanov transactions was the unmentionable Mr M, that ‘connoisseur of the finest, palest shades of risk’, who, in the situation as it stood when the Royal Commission was in full flight throughout the land, added his further assessment:

It is possible that what Mr Combe believes has been done to him by the Government and by ASIO will have made him more hostile towards ASIO, and hostile towards the Labor party in Government. It could be in time become a positive factor towards recruitment, but again, you’re looking a long way down the line. (p.341)

ASIO always looks a long way down the line. That is what analysis is about.

A month after the Hawke government entered office in 1983, the director general of ASIO went to the prime minister and told him that the Russian diplomat Ivanov was moving about Australia ‘using some of the modus operandi of the professional intelligence officer’. He was not merely a KGB agent but PR line KGB: ‘totally given to providing political intelligence whether gathered overtly from contacts or whether gathered covertly from recruited agents. I have what I regard as a difficult and delicate task. That is to explain that Mr David Combe is one of the contacts of Mr Ivanov and in fact has had a number of meetings with him’ (p.21).

Combe and his wife had had free travel on a Soviet cruise ship and free tickets and free travel to a recent conference in Moscow. He and Ivanov had had a meeting on 4 March 1983 which had been ‘penetrated’, which had begun to cause ASIO ‘considerable alarm because of the fear that Mr Combe was being assessed and cultivated perhaps with the view to recruitment’. He made reference to Combe wanting his ‘job for the boys, ambassadorship, Moscow will suit me thank you very much’. Combe was expecting to ‘enrich’ himself now that Labor was in office. He was going to charge ‘big money’ to the multinational companies that wanted his services. Combe was vulnerable on money matters, alleged the director general. He had fiddled his expenses and charged a very high fee for work done on behalf of a client in Moscow. He had shown himself ‘broadly sympathetic’ to the aims of the USSR. He had ‘displayed a bitter anti-American attitude’. A contractual arrangement had been or was about to be concluded for information to be passed to the Politburo in the Soviet Union. Ivanov was now conditioning Combe ‘to the need for an element of clandestinity in the relationship’ (p.24).

Marr says that ‘nothing so influenced the events that followed as Barnett’s choice of the word “clandestinity” ... Hawke and Barnett spent more time on the clandestinity point than any other’. Figuratively, the prime minister seized the director general unto his bosom. The arch seducer trained by ASIS for Asia, our lifetime bemuser of useful foreigners now had our leader in his embrace. Barnett had more to confide – the fear that ASIO could not cope with targets gone clandestine.

Words are the dramatist’s art. This was the final cry of the chorus. The curtains parted. The spectacle that followed was certainly as expensive as any Hollywood extravaganza we have seen about potentates and foreign devils. Barnett had snapped through the elemental caution of a Caesar serene at the pitch of a nation’s love, beyond assault:

But I am constant as the northern star
Of whose true-fixed and resting quality
There is no fellow in the firmament. The skies are painted with unnumbered sparks,
They are all fire and every one doth shine,
But there’s but one in all doth hold his place.
So in the world; ‘tis furnished well with men,
And men are flesh and blood and apprehensive;
Yet in the number I do know but one
That unassailable holds on his rank, Unshak’d of motion.

Caesar died in the instant under the hand of Brutus thrusting his clandestine dagger. ‘Et tu, Caesar.’ Ivanov had to go. No question. Combe had to be smothered. No question.

Neither the prime minister nor his committee colleagues was moved to check the matter further. They contented themselves with questioning the ASIO officers for their answers around the edge of the issue. They passed up an examination of their paper. Out of this elementary amateurishness and gross irresponsibility grew the tragedy of David Combe. Marr writes:

The great espionage scandals of history, of which the Dreyfus case is only the most dramatic, demonstrate the same two lessons to any government riding the tiger of its spy service. The first is to get at once to the primary sources, usually documents, and test them for authenticity and relevance. The second is more fundamental still: no trust can properly be placed in an intelligence service which keeps secrets from its own government. (p.34) ... The bureaucratic achievement of the night was superb ...

Barnett had virtually assured lvanov’s expulsion without the case being tested ... Hawke was locked in and the support of Ministers almost assured as a result. Barnett was astonished by the swiftness of Hawke’s response. . . His case was against Ivanov ... It took time for Barnett and ASIO to realise that the Combe story was, in fact, what really mattered. (p.35)

As was later said on their behalf, ‘we passed them the ball and they kicked it out of sight’. ASIO was always to insist that Combe was never a target, just its bait.

If they were astonished by the committee’s preoccupation with Combe, by the hostility to him which they had unintentionally engendered, so ought others to be. The levelling rhetoric of tolerance declaimed in past days in Opposition which makes up or made up an important part of the reputation of at least four of the six members of the sub-committee, tested by their handling of their duty on 21 April, brings one readily to the conclusion that they had never really understood what they had been accustomed to saying. I do not include the prime minister in this count of those who fell at the very opening of the battle. His career was never made in dissidence or in its protection. Even after Combe was scandalised before the world and the secret of the ban upon him was out, the prime minister’s own unfamiliarity with the framework of ideas that generated the protest continued to be marked. He kept asserting his innocence and liberal virtue by arguing his preoccupation at all times with the protection of Combe’s ‘civil liberties’ (plural). This is curious and significant phraseology.

Combe was the victim of appalling bad luck and betrayal. He did not deserve the misfortune of being consulted by Laurie Matheson, a complete stranger, on the eve of his departure to Moscow to represent the Australia-USSR Friendship Society at a Soviet anniversary celebration.

Matheson had long dealt with ASIO and had often put himself at its disposal but he came to Combe purely upon his private business affairs, so it would seem. He wanted help against a former partner who was cutting him out from standing with the NSW government, to which both of them wished to make sales of Soviet goods and services. He wanted Combe to re­establish his goodwill with politicians whom Combe had long known well. The conflict in the partnership seemed to be generating disaffection as well in Moscow and, lo and behold, Matheson found Combe in a position to deal promptly with both. Combe, now in business as a lobbyist, was enthralled himself by this fortuitous encounter, and accepted. His energetic pursuit of Matheson’s interests never abated in those few months from October till April, yet Matheson came to add an ingredient of persistent betrayal of their relationship. He took the retainer of Combe’s services to himself, and its product, to ASIO. It was gratuitous and unwarranted betrayal.

To this misfortune for Combe must be added the mistake of ASIO. The Russians did not pay for the Pacific cruise. They did not pay for the flight to Moscow in the manner represented by ASIO. Nor did Combe charge Matheson $5,000 (or anything like it) for the service he gave to Matheson in Moscow. These three errors were probably not born in malice, but they certainly generate acute disgust in those to whom they were carried.

They were corrected but the correction, given to the prime minister, was never carried to the other members of the Cabinet Committee in good time, or, perhaps, at all. The failure to do so was a second point at which Combe was betrayed. Who carries the guilt may be gathered from Marr’s account.

One may only hope that the ASIO budget runs to the purchase of copies of this book. Nothing better is at hand for the training of intelligent intelligence officers bent on defending more than the interests of Melbourne’s Leading Families and the values of the apostles of rectitude that appear so frequently amongst the city’s retired military officers. These citizens are entitled to their place in the sun, but not to the point that the rest of us must stand in the shadow ‘of their priority.

David Marr’s fascinating account of what he found along Ivanov’s trail is a formidable fountain of persuasion that ‘national security’ as conventionally presented is, in a word, bunkum. A little less loyalty to the intangible ‘‘nation’, a little more loyalty to a citizen, and above all to an erstwhile colleague, who had served the members of the Committee long and well, and who was acknowledged by them at the outset not to be a traitor, would have left the world bereft of the subsequent inanity. Loyalty to a colleague, natural justice for a citizen accused, either or both was called for and would have sufficed, but in Canberra if you want a little loyalty you had better buy yourself a dog.