Reflections on the Lance Collins affair

• commentary by Tony Kevin, 17 April 2004

So here we go again – another exposure of serious government systemic policy failure, but being framed and spun as failure of intelligence agencies, of military justice procedures, and perhaps of personal failures of the whistleblower in the case as well. As usual, context ignored or forgotten. And as usual, sleazy tactics of official white-anting of brave outspoken individuals.

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Take one of Collins’ most important examples, East Timor in 1999 - where Collins is alleged to have warned in 1998 of what was to come - organisation by Indonesian military (TNI) through their sponsored anti-independence militia forces of massive organised violence against pro-independence supporters in East Timor - which all came to pass, we are now reminded, after the September 1999 UN-supervised election. We are told that Collins’ intelligence forecast in 1998 was "right".

It was right, but actually the mass killings and village burnings had all started much earlier. Large-scale militia intimidation and reprisal deaths were already happening in 1998, in the Maliana killings. The Liquica and Dili massacres were in March-April 1999. Have we forgotten Bishop Belo’s solemn warnings on Australian television in early 1999 of terrible reprisals to come? Or the Indonesian Governor of Dili warning on Australian television (Channel Nine, Sunday) on 7 March that Dili would be destroyed if the people voted for independence?

As to intelligence reporting, we know that in March 1999 there were DIO classified intelligence briefs, which Laurie Brereton later made public, warning Australian ministers that TNI were arming and organising militia intimidation. A DIO report dated 4 March 1999 predicted that further violence was certain, and that Dili would be a focus.

And have we forgotten how Alexander Downer said on Sunday on 7 March 1999, only three days after that DIO Report:

"If it’s happening at all it certainly isn’t official Indonesian Government policy. It certainly isn’t something that’s being condoned by General Wiranto ... But there may be some rogue elements within the armed forces who are providing arms of one kind or another ..."

As Laurie Oakes and other commentators understood well in September, 1999, when the major violence erupted, Australia had been driving the UN referendum process forward since February 1999:

"Australian Foreign Minister Downer made it clear to his department that he wanted the process driven forward. This was to be for Downer the kind of diplomatic triumph that the political settlement in Cambodia had been for Gareth Evans. Maintaining momentum was the all-important aim".

(Laurie Oakes, ‘Canberra’s Massacre We Had to Have’, Bulletin, 21 September 1999)

Even as late as June 1999, I remember Downer upbraiding an ADF officer, who had asked him in June 1999 at a public meeting in my hearing why he was disregarding the news coming in of TNI-organised atrocities in East Timor. Downer’s reply was: "You don’t understand the finer points of diplomacy".

The truth about East Timor is much worse than our commentators are now recalling. It was actually not an intelligence failure, not a case of senior intelligence agency officials censoring out bad news they thought the government did not want to hear. We know from Brereton’s 1999 disclosures that all this intelligence about atrocities went up to government, either through DIO or ONA. That was their job. I do not see that Lewincamp can be blamed here.

The problem was that the "big political picture" policy people – our national security ministers and their senior official policy advisers – chose to ignore that intelligence. They knew that large-scale militia killings were happening; they turned a blind eye to them, in the interests of not disrupting the larger Australian government plan to make sure the UN referendum took place.

I wrote several newspaper articles about this in late 1999- 2000, and I testified before the Senate FADC on 10 April 2000, Hansard pages 1031-1053.

I alleged that the Australian government pursued between February 1999 and voting day 30 August 1999, a policy that it knew carried a high risk of major loss of life for the Timorese people.

It was not accidental. Downer in his press conference on 4 September 1999 told journalists, "We have played an enormous role in making what has happened over the last few weeks possible, an enormous role ... I think we have calibrated this pretty much right all along."

And the Prime Minister on 12 September 1999 said, "We saw it as being the right thing for us to argue strongly and to take the lead in relation to East Timor and I have no regrets."

There is some evidence that Australia withheld DIO intelligence about what TNI was doing in East Timor during 1999 (of the kind that Brereton later made public) from the US and the UN.

Kofi Annan said on 10 September, "I can assure you that if those of us who were putting together this deal - and you must remember the agreement was signed by Portugal and Indonesia, with the support of the leaders, unanimously endorsed by the [Security] Council - if any of us had an inkling that it was going to be this chaotic, I don’t think anyone would have gone forward. We are not fools."

Ian Martin, the UNAMET administrator in Timor, in the months leading up to the vote, said similar things. The extent of the reprisal violence after the vote on 30 August seems to have taken the UN by surprise. Why had Australia not told the UN? What intelligence was Australia holding back from them? What intelligence was Australia holding back from the United States?

This is where the story hooks into Merv Jenkins’ tragic suicide in the Australian Embassy, Washington.

All the public signs - which are all I know, I have no insider sources - are that the real story is one of Australian government misuse of intelligence at the ministerial office and PM&C/DFAT senior policy level – not of suppression of intelligence by or within DIO.

There was a great deal of public disquiet in September 1999 about Australian policy failure at the time. Not only the Oakes article I have already noted, but also

"A holocaust of Canberra’s making", Greg Sheridan, The Australian;

"No regrets? Really, Mr Howard", Michael Gordon, The Age;

"Timor, a debt dishonoured", Alan Ramsay, Sydney Morning Herald;

"A great deal to feel uneasy about", editorial, Canberra Times;

"Shattered myths", Paul Kelly, The Australian.

From February to August 1999, the Australian government was receiving large amounts of overt and covert intelligence about the bloodbath being set in train for the people of East Timor. It did not want to hear, because it had a policy to ensure that Indonesia would be irrevocably locked into the UN referendum, and then if necessary to obtain UN Security Council support for a UN peacekeeping force as a result of the massive Indonesian reprisals expected after the election : ‘the massacre Canberra had to have".

It is not that the policymakers were not getting good intelligence from DIO and others: reports were coming in from people as diverse as Lance Collins, Andrew Plunkett, Jon Martinkus, and Catholic priests and nuns. It was that the policymakers did not care about what they were reading.

Alexander Downer has called such an allegation "bizarre", but opening up the official files will sooner or later show that it is the truth. Meanwhile, spin and whitewash has tried to lock in a bland official version. The DFAT official history reports the story very selectively, but the truth is there between the lines if one reads carefully enough. The best road to the truth is Martinkus’ brilliant "A Dirty Little War". (He is covering another dirty little war now, in Iraq – but this time, Australia is part of the occupying force).

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I also note with sadness the way the official system is starting to cut up Collins. On the same day that Howard unctuously praises his qualities as a soldier and promises his complaints will be dealt with properly, an ADF report is released that counters the initial Toohey report that supported Collins as "inadmissible evidence". So Captain Toohey’s name gets blackened too. A third report, that supports the Toohey findings, is only released late on Friday evening, too late for the weekend print media news commentaries.

So what the public will remember from last week are the various damning-by-faint-praise personality characterisations of Collins from mostly un-sourced ADF colleagues. It is sad how brave men and women prepared to stand up for truth in Australian public life are so often alleged to have sociopathic tendencies in their personalities: they are said to be prickly, not to suffer fools gladly, to be unduly sensitive, to lack a sense of humour, not to be good team players, to take themselves too seriously, and so on.

And we are being persuaded to see this as really some sort of clash of personalities between Collins and DIO head Frank Lewincamp. If it was about that, and I have no idea if it was, it was certainly about a lot more than that.

Systems defend themselves against whistleblowers - individuals who speak out for truth - by manufacturing plausible scenarios of interpersonal differences, of personal grievances or grudges against being passed over for promotion, etc. Anything to take attention away from the real issue of whether an honest person within the system has produced evidence that the system is failing to produce the results it should.

I wish we had more "square pegs in round holes" like Lance Collins in our defence and security and foreign services , instead of the grey, mediocre and risk-averse "team players" who dominate upper ranks now. We used to have more people like Collins in the upper echelons of government service, and our quality of governance benefited from them. Government-pressed managerialism is breaking and wasting precious human leadership resources that Australia needs.

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Finally, I think also about how the system is pretending that it will "look after" Collins now. Of course it will – the way it looked after Captain Robertson from 1964 to 1968 after the HMAS Voyager disaster in 1964, the way it looked after Wayne Sievers of AFP and Captain Mark Plunkett of ADF after Timor, the way it has looked after Andrew Wilkie and Jane Errey.

And Commander Norman Banks, captain of the RAN frigate HMAS Adelaide in October 2001. Let us see how he has fared since the 2002 Senate "children overboard" enquiry; in which government senator Brandis suggested that Banks was a frigate commander so confused by "the fog of war" during the SIEV 4 interception, that he would not have known whether asylum-seeker children were being thrown overboard by their parents or not. Banks, who was assured by a senior Navy Admiral, "Don’t worry, Norm, we’ll look after you - we’ll make sure that you don’t become a scapegoat over this". Banks, who went off in October 2001 to captain HMAS Adelaide in active combat in the Persian Gulf during the Afghanistan war, yet three years later is still at the rank of captain, now serving (as of 15 July 2003) in a shore-based position in Darwin as Deputy Commander of Operations, HQNORCOM [Northern Command]. I am not an expert in how ADF careers normally move, but to me that does not sound like too brilliant a rate of promotion or command responsibility since 2001. Maybe I am wrong on this ?

Captain Banks’ name has not to my knowledge appeared in any Queen’s Birthday or Australia Day military honours list. Yet he saved the lives of 220-odd people on 8 October 2001 when their boat SIEV 4 foundered under them while in HMAS Adelaide’s tow. Doesn’t that deserve some recognition?

This officer carried out his military command responsibilities honourably and well in October 2001, in unusually difficult circumstances. Has he been "looked after" since then? Will Lance Collins be looked after any better now?

What happens to the careers of decent people in our national security public service agencies, when they fall foul of government politics, is not pretty.

Tony Kevin, Canberra, 17 April 2004