Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2022. x, 270 pp. (B&W photos.) US$35.00, paper; US$23.00, ebook. ISBN 9780522878301.
Phillip Deery’s Spies and Sparrows relates the story of Australia’s struggle to come to grips with the threat of communism during the Cold War, and the effects this struggle had on a number of lives. American code-breaking had revealed that Australia was a security risk. Decrypted Soviet cables had revealed that Australian agents had passed British secrets to Moscow’s spies. As a result, Australia was placed under an intelligence embargo by the United States, the chief guarantor of its security and principal provider of extremely valuable technical information Australia needed to develop its weapons systems.
Prime Minister Ben Chifley (in office 1945–1949) was the first head of government to confront this problem. Under British pressure, Chifley reorganized the country’s domestic security and counterespionage functions into a new organization modeled on Britain’s MI5. The new agency, the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO), regarded the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) as its chief adversary and set out on an ambitious program to penetrate every chapter of the party and to fully eliminate the influence of party members and sympathizers from every level of government. Under the Liberal Party government of Robert Menzies (in office 1949–1966), the gloves really came off. Anticommunist zealotry reached such a fevered pitch that, before these actions were struck down by courts, the CPA was banned and “plans for internment camps moved from the logistical to the operational” (4).
ASIO’s activities set the stage for Deery’s narrative, which unfolds through short biographies of people caught up in this struggle, either as accused (or actual) spies or as “sparrows”—ASIO’s agents of infiltration. Deery’s sympathies clearly lie with the victims of government overreach, but one wonders if he has not overstated the case when he asserts that after the exposure of a spy ring of ten CPA members who passed secrets to the Soviets, not a single other member of the party was guilty of the same (7). To the present writer, such a blanket assertion would seem to be foolhardy even about Menzies’ own Liberal Party.
This largely understandable sympathy for the victims of counterespionage sometimes results in mini-biographies that are just a bit too generous to their subjects. Nowhere is this truer than in Deery’s treatment of the reluctant defector Evdokia Petrova. Certainly, she suffered her share of misfortune, but it seems a bit cold to mention that her first husband was whisked away in the night never (at least in Deery’s telling) to be heard from again, while Petrova remarried an NKVD agent during the height of Stalin’s terrors and lived to not simply tell the tale, but to enjoy relative prosperity. Moreover, are we really to feel more for her in her struggle to fit into the alien society of Australia than we do for “Maria” and “Klara,” two Swedish women whose recruitment into Soviet intelligence she oversaw while in Stockholm (114)? Soviet intel was not generally known for gig work and ruthless though ASIO may have been, one imagines that their mercies were considerably more tender than those of the NKVD. Was Evdokia really more sinned against than sinning? Could we not have gotten a simple and factually chilling “and her first husband was never heard from again while she found herself stationed in sunny Australia?” This episode also contains one fairly egregious blunder of fact in which Deery refers to Cold-War era Sweden a “member of NATO,” which at the time of this writing is still aspirational.
Criticisms such as these notwithstanding, it would be remiss to not mention two of Deery’s greatest strengths: his readability and his research, both of which do his narrative great credit. Part of this no doubt comes down to the thoroughness and accessibility of ASIO’s files and Deery’s obviously rigorous sleuthing through them. One also gets the impression that some of Deery’s sources were quite willing to share their stories. A good deal of it though comes from Deery himself. He has chosen inherently interesting stories and tells them very well. His account of the ne’er-do-well William Dobson and Dobson’s various misadventures is alone worth the price of admission. The double life of Anne Neill as she descends from an apparently fairly well-adjusted woman of extraordinary patriotic sensibilities into a frankly despicable conspiracist bigot of the worst kind, is heart-wrenching tale of descent into madness. The conscience also stirs with the tale of Dr. Paul Reubens James. Though James, as a public servant, was in the view of the present reader clearly in violation of transgressions of both judgment and professionalism, the result should have been nothing more than a stern talking-to. As it was, his community lost a dedicated specialist which it sorely needed. Many lives that had given so much for their country could have benefited immensely from a more enlightened judgment of James’s case. It is hard to square that outcome with patriotic motives of any sort.
On the whole, the greatest contribution of Deery’s book is that it does much to humanize the victims of the Cold War and show how the struggle proceeded in an oft-overlooked theater. Though it would run the risk of seeming redundant to his core audience, some more background for outlanders would be a welcome addition to future editions. On the whole Phillip Deery’s Spies and Sparrows, is as engrossing as it is informative. Recommended for the general reader and specialist alike, Spies and Sparrows is a good read.
Brian Walsh
Kwansei Gakuin University, Nishinomiya