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The Australian labour movement has a long history of its ranks being infiltrated by the security services. Rarely, however, are we permitted inside undercover operations. To protect undercover agen...

Nguyen Cao Ky’s trip to Australia in January 1967 was politically contentious and morally ambiguous. It threw a sharp spotlight on the vast deployment of state resources by a democratic government to protect a representative of a military junta. This article analyses, for the first time, Ky’s visit. It will examine the circumstances, the preparations, and the reception, both officially and on the streets. It will also examine the elaborate security arrangements and their impact on the character and efficacy of the anti-Ky protest movement.

Between the two world wars, the conservative parties dominated federal politics but Labor governments often ruled in the states. Since most key issues concerning Anzac commemoration occurred at state level, the result was that the Australian Labor Party (ALP) had little choice but to grapple with the emergent culture of Anzac commemoration. This article explores two case studies in the 1920s, one from Victoria and the other from Western Australia. In particular, decisions by state Labor governments to regulate teaching about the Great War in primary schools, which need to be seen as part of a wider effort by the labour movement in the 1920s to counter 'jingoism,' led to howls of protest and, in the Victorian case, contributed to the fall of the government. This article examines these controversies as instances of the labour movement's interwar engagement with the Anzac tradition. While the Labor Party contested militaristic nationalism, it also invested in Anzac commemoration and incurred significant political costs through its effort to substitute an alternative understanding of Anzac that would promote international peace and arbitration.

In July 1951 the overseas British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) wrote to the internal British Security Service (MI5) seeking information about an American citizen living in London. The request was prefaced with a sentence that this essay seeks to explain: L. Adler cannot return to the United States with any hope of earning a living there, owing to the allegations against him that he is communist sympathiser. We have no trace of him, and should be grateful if you would let [us] know if you have any record ... or if anything is known about him in this country.

Professor Lyman Bradley was chairman of the German Department at New York University and an executive member of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, listed by the Attorney General as a subversive organization. In 1951 he was fired and his long academic career ended. His dismissal, the first by the New York University on political grounds, raises broader concerns about the character of university governance and the fragility of academic freedom in the modern age. In most accounts of academic McCarthyism there have been two historiographical tendencies. One emphasises the overwhelming power of institutions that were allied with McCarthyism; such political power rendered impotent any academic resistance. The other argues that academic McCarthyism was only effective because professors were too timid or frightened to act publicly or collectively in defence of academic freedom. This study will demonstrate that neither can solely explain Bradley’s political persecution. The denial of civil liberties and the violation of academic freedom required three interlocking factors: a powerful Congressional Committee, a determined University administration and a complicit academic staff.

The formation of the Cominform in 1947 was a decisive moment in the Cold War. Although many rank-and-file activists in the Labour and Communist parties in Great Britain and Australia continued to cooperate with each other, the formal relationship between the two parties sharply deteriorated. In Britain, the formation of the Cominform shattered the Communist Party's hopes of post-war class peace. Communists' critical attitude to the Labour Party became openly hostile. However, no fundamental change to Communist Party policy occurred. In industry, the Party became more militant but, generally, continued to pursue an approach that involved collaboration more than confrontation. In Australia, the situation was different. Cominform perspectives significantly altered the position of the Communist Party, which shifted from conciliation to intransigence, from a desire to cooperate with the Labour Party to an intention to 'liquidate' reformism. Enmity was mutual: influenced by both the Cold War environment and the increasingly powerful anti-communist Industrial Groups, the hostility of labour to communism became palpable. The article examines the post-war decline of both communist parties in the context of the interplay between Communist Party policy, Labour Party antagonism, and the international environment of the early Cold War.

A portrait of J.D.'Jack' Blake written by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) in early 1954 stated that the intensity of Blake's commitment to communism and the severity of his tuberculosis meant that he laboured 'under both the sickle of the Soviet and the scythe of Father Time'.1 The latter was obliged to wait another 46 years but the sickle of the Soviet, in the hands of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) leadership, was wielded with devastating effect in the 1950s. In his discerning obituary of Blake, Stuart Macintyre refers only briefly to the most traumatic moments in Blake's life long involvement in the communist movement: his removal from the Secretariat of the CPA in 1953 and from the Central Committee in 1956.2 That for Blake

In the voluminous records of the Information Research Department (IRD), there is one slim file that attracts immediate attention. The IRD was the top secret propaganda department of the British Foreign Office created in early 1948.1 It soon became a crucial instrument in Britain's covert ideological offensive against the Soviet Union during Cold War. The files of the IRD are currently being released by the Public Record Office in London, and their diversity exemplifies the wide front on which the Cold War was fought: bundles of documents cover Soviet labour camps, support for anti-communist activity behind the Iron Curtain', encouragement of Red Army defectors, the establishment of a Singapore office to counter communist activity in Malaya, the sponsorship of an anti-communist trade union paper, Freedom First, and the compilation of confidential lists of politicians and BBC employees to whom 'non-attributable' IRD propaganda could be sent for use in speeches and broadcasts. Although the IRD will not fully emerge from the shadows until the bulk of its files are released (as yet, only the first two years of its operations, 1948 and 1949, are open to the public), few of the aforementioned activities, which in part mirrored those of the Soviet-backed Cominform, should surprise historians of the Cold War. But one file, FO1110/189, has the capacity to surprise, even shock, those who open it, for it concerns the relationship between the IRD and, arguably, one of this century's most prolific political journalists and influential novelists, George Orwell. In March 1949, the sister-in-law of Arthur Koestler, Celia Kirwan, visited a sick friend in the Cotswold hills. She spent the day discussing communism with George Orwell, then terminally ill with tuberculosis in Cranham, a Gloucestershire sanatorium. Celia first met Orwell at Koestler's home in late 1945, and they had remained close friends until Orwell's death in January 1950.2 But her visit also had a political purpose. She informed Orwell that she worked for the Information Research Department. So their conversation turned to the IRD: T discussed some aspects of our work with him in great confidence, and he was delighted to learn of them, and expressed his wholehearted and enthusiastic approval of our aims'.3 Orwell was too ill to do any further writing himself he had just completed the final draft of Nineteen Eighty-Four but suggested various writers and one publisher, who could be 'trusted' and whom he thought would support the work of the IRD. The writers Orwell named included Darcy Gillie, the Paris correspondent for The Guardian, Franz Borkenau, who wrote for The Observer and the critic Gleb Struve.4 The publisher was Victor Gollancz who had rejected Orwell's Homage to Catalonia in 1937 and (along with 22 other publishers) Animal Farm in 1944. In 1949 Gollancz was, it appeared, still preoccupied with the question of Palestinian dispossession in the wake of the creation of the state of Israel, so Orwell suggested that 'it might be a good plan to allow him to get these Arab refugees out of his system before trying to interest him in our plan'. However, according to Orwell, because his books 'always