I was in Papua New Guinea in 1972 when Whitlam was elected and for the first time in my life felt an affinity toward the political process. At last Australia was showing backbone instead of knee-bending supplication to the American bully boys.

It had been “all the way with LBJ”, as Australia followed America into Vietnam in the 1960’s and it sickened me. With Whitlam’s election it seemed Australia finally might stand up.

The CIA quaked as Whitlam articulately outlined a new Australian independence particularly when it came to uncovering and expelling Pine Gap, the secret American communications node smack bang in the centre of the nation and where no Australian was permitted.

Whitlam was brash and outspoken in his first years but gradually altruism turned sour and realpolitik kicked in. When the money supply was halted by a bickering parliament, government ground to a halt.

The 1975 Australian constitutional crisis, commonly called The Dismissal, culminated with prime minister Gough Whitlam’s dismissal by the Queen of England’s Governor-General Sir John Kerr. Australia was part of the British Commonwealth and the queen is more than symbolic head of empire….

A common allegation was the CIA influenced Kerr's decision to dismiss Whitlam. In 1966 Kerr had worked in intelligence and had joined The Association for Cultural Freedom, a conservative group funded by the CIA.

Before his dismissal, Prime Minister Whitlam charged publicly that American Intelligence organizations were secretly channelling funds to politicians who supported American secret bases in Australia. Whitlam demanded an investigation by the Australian Defence Department to identify, once and for all, the real purpose of the bases….

We concluded the first part of the interview with Angleton in the ABC’s Rockefeller Plaza bureau in New York and a few days later flew to Washington D.C to Angleton’s home in the leafy suburbs of Virginia….

When our interview was over we retired for a drink to review what just happened! We were in a state of mild shock. We knew we had a scoop and next day packed the film for air express, to send to the ABC in Australia. The film never made it. It disappeared without a trace.

Read the full article in Andrew Phillips’ Notebooks blog 

Andrew Phillips worked as a kiap and then as a broadcast journalist in Papua New Guinea. In the late 1970s he moved to the United States where he still lives