As for Whitlam's implied threats regarding Pine Gap, to say such utterances ruffled a few feathers in Washington would be an understatement, and it's probably safe to say [that] from that day onwards, Whitlam's political career -- and Australia's short-lived independence -- entered its fateful downward trajectory. According to Pilger, Victor Marchetti, the legendary CIA officer who later went 'rogue' (at least by Langley's definition of such) by writing a 'kiss 'n tell' expose on The Company and who was actually involved in setting up the facility, told him that, 'This threat to close Pine Gap caused apoplexy in the White House...[after which] a kind of Chilean [coup] was set in motion.'
-- The Wicked Witch is Dead --
It's worth noting that the highly classified intelligence that Pine Gap gathered was deciphered and later revealed publicly by Christopher Boyce (a la Snowden), who worked for a company called TRW, at the time a CIA contractor. Boyce was troubled by the 'deception and betrayal of an ally' and this was apparently what motivated him to do what he did. This espionage narrative was later turned into a film called The Falcon and the Snowman (from a book by Robert Lindsay of the same name), and amongst other revelations Boyce disclosed that the CIA had infiltrated Australia's political and trade union elite and they actually referred to the Governor-General of Australia, Sir John Kerr, as "our man Kerr".
Boyce, who eventually did twenty-five years in prison for treason for selling secrets to the Soviets, in a wide-ranging 2014 interview, again confirmed his belief that the CIA was behind Kerr's decision to oust Whitlam, by urging him to use a little known Constitutional provision that enabled the head of state (Kerr) to revoke Whitlam's commission, and appoint a caretaker government. In CIA circles at the time he noted, 'you couldn't say Whitlam's name without the spooks looking nauseated. He was viewed as a threat to the [Pine Gap] project'. On the day of Whitlam's dismissal Boyce recalled the reaction of the CIA spooks whom he liaised with:
'....[There] was a party, it was jubilation. The wicked witch was dead, you know. He was gone, nothing more to worry about. And it was just a sense of relief because they really did think he was going to close [Pine Gap] down. He was going to turn off our eyes, and they were worried, you know.'
At this point also we require an appreciation how we morphed from being at the beck and call of the British Empire to playing a similar role vis a vis the U.S. imperium. Again the man who provides us a most illuminating insight into the events of 1975 is our own John Pilger. In seeking to break free from the confines of U.S. imperial power, Whitlam was up against as much opposition internally as he came up against externally, a not uncommon scenario where a new ruling party in an ostensible independent nation decides to take it up to Washington. And although his removal from office in such an unprecedented, unceremonious manner doubtless never figured into his trail-blazing reform calculus, in Pilger's summation, Whitlam had few illusions about what might lie ahead of him, in either the domestic or foreign policy front.
In the post-World War Two era, having by then weaned ourselves off the attachments to imperial Britain that attended our former colonial status, the legacy of which remained intact despite the country becoming an independent Federation in 1901, Australia's political establishment was nonetheless wedded to the notion of dependence on a Great Power alliance for its national security. After all, to this end we'd dutifully served perfidious Albion from the Boer War to the Boxer Rebellion, from the Great War on up to the "Good War" (WWII), with interestingly little or nothing to show for such fealty to an empire which by then had morphed into the 'ancien regime'. If this sounds like Britain got the better part of the deal then so be it, and it also begs another question as to whether anything has changed, a theme to which we shall return.
After WWII, that new Great Imperial Power of course, was the U.S., although admittedly in the immediate post-war years this incipient status was not immediately apparent. Less than five years after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ending the war in the Pacific, Australia once again found itself sucking up to empire in Korea, and fifteen years after that, in Vietnam, a war in which, as befitting our vassal status, we virtually begged to become involved. It was 'same horse, different cowboy!'
For his part investigative journalist Jonathan Kwitny, in his seminal 1987 expose The Crimes of Patriots: A True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money, and the CIA noted that Kerr was a fully paid up subscriber to the long-since defunct Australian Association for Cultural Freedom (AACF), the Antipodean 'franchise' of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The CCF was a U.S. based entity established by the CIA in 1950 whose mission ostensibly was to combat Soviet propaganda and Communism in general, and by extrapolation, to promote global democratic principles, at least as they were defined (then as now in a moving feast kinda way) by Uncle Sam. If this sounds awfully familiar for some, it is meant to be. Which is to say, clearly the Washington regime change playbook has been around so long the copyright has all but expired!
Founding secretary of the AACF was a man called Richard Krygier, who also founded, and became the first editor of, Quadrant, a conservative Aussie periodical (still 'Johnnie Walker'), also originally funded by AACF and the CIA . Put another way, the AACF was an early forerunner to the types of front organisations such as Freedom House and the infamous, democracy-defying National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
These NGOs as we now know are much favored by the Langley crowd and their neoconservative confreres the Beltway Bedlamites, their titular nomenclature in true Orwellian practice masking a raison d'etre somewhat at odds with their real mission. Indeed, it was organizations such as these to which the CIA outsourced its regime renovation activities in 1983 under then CIA director William Casey . As noted geopolitical analyst William Engdahl has said,
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