THE latest release of WikiLeaks cables raise a question: at what point does a person become a spy?

Bob Hawke was by far the US Embassy in Canberra's most highly placed and reliable informant, over the years 1973 to 1976, the most riotous period in Australian political history.

It is not suggested Hawke betrayed Australia; but he routinely dished the dirt to the Americans, especially on the failings of his Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam.

The Americans found Hawke's language on Whitlam too blue to relate even in secret cables.

''Direct quotations in this report will be difficult as Hawke used short words of emphasis not suitable for family newspaper,'' an embassy cable joked in late 1973, noting Hawke's disgust that Whitlam had ''begged'' campaign money from Jewish business figures in 1972 but then betrayed them with pro-Arab policies.

By 1974, as Whitlam's unpopular government began to suffer from chronic mismanagement, Hawke complained to the Americans of Whitlam's ''stupidity'' and advised the PM could not be trusted to run the economy ''any place but down''.

The Americans did not assess Hawke as a disloyal Australian.

The exchanges were mutually beneficial, with cables noting the Americans routinely assisted Hawke, then president of both the ALP and the ACTU, with his travel plans to the US and by facilitating high-level meetings.

Unaccustomed to such brutal Aussie straight talk, they delighted in Hawke, whom they clearly assessed as a future Prime Minister.

The Americans, perhaps surprisingly, held strong beliefs in the legitimacy of unions; though had less belief in Labor, especially after Whitlam pulled Australia out of the Vietnam War in 1972 upon taking power.

A detailed scan of the cables (the declassified ones, at least) lend no support to long-held notions that America attempted to destabilize Whitlam's Labor, or played a role in his dismissal, as many commentators have argued.

Hawke was not trading information for hostile purposes, as might a spy; he was, instead, giving brutally frank assessments of his party and, at times, himself.



Hawke said yesterday his US Embassy conversations about Whitlam, which have made news this week, were not the full picture.



“What has been reported is a totally unbalanced picture of the judgment I made about Gough Whitlam and the unparalleled positive contributions he made to our country,” he said.

The Americans considered Whitlam capable of magisterial grandness, and possessor a massive, self-destroying ego.

They also considered Hawke a major egocentric with a drinking problem, because on both counts Hawke confessed to them his issues with the ''grog'' and admitted his ego was a match for Whitlam's.

On a visit to the US in July 1974, Hawke confided to Americans that Whitlam would only serve one term and had anointed him his successor.

But he needed to make some personal changes if he were to lead Australia.

''On the question of drinking, Hawke made it clear he likes 'grog' and that it would be difficult for him to turn off the tap completely,'' said a cable.

On one occasion, when Hawke signed a public petition questioning the ANZUS alliance, the Americans listened but did not believe him when he said he had been ''misreported''.

''His reasons for signing it were not persuasive,'' said a cable.

''We believe it was a tactical move on his part to gain left-wing support for Parliamentary pre-selection.''

Hawke, who would delay his move to Parliament, didn't seem bothered that the US president, during 1973 and most of 1974, was a Republican, Richard Nixon; Hawke's view, reading between the thousands of cables that passed between Canberra and Washington, was that America was better apprised of internal political issues than kept in the dark.

The cables overall reveal America's respect for Australia's emergence as a genuine international middle power.

Whitlam, having unburdened Australia of its sycophancy to the US, forced America to assess Australia as a nation that would, within reason, make its own choices.

That meant, as the cables reveal, their embassy needed to work harder to gather information that had once been coughed up so easily under the previous Coalition governments.

The key issue for the Americans at the time, in the atmosphere of political strife, was its need for assurances that joint intelligence facilities at Pine Gap and North West Cape were not under threat from Whitlam's government.

On this point, Whitlam himself gave satisfactory guarantees.

The other key issue was the emerging problems in Timor, as Portugal, in chaos at home, lost grip on its colony allowing it to descend in civil strife.

For the Americans, an Indonesian takeover of Portuguese Timor made sense; especially if there was any danger that the leftists of Fretilin would take control.

The Indonesia archipelago was the point in South-East Asia where the communist obsession sweeping the region most assuredly stopped.

The Indonesians had murderously suppressed communism in Indonesia in the 60s, which did not displease the US at a political level.

Now, the Americans were closely monitoring to see whether Australia would support a small leftist regime in a dying colony, that could potentially destabilise the region.

On this point, the Americans formed the view that Whitlam was no problem: he wanted no part in another Asian land war and did not believe Australia should engage in colonial matters.

Whitlam refused to even countenance an Indonesian proposal, which came three months before the invasion, for a joint multinational peacekeeping force to bring order to Timor.

US cables noted Whitlam saw East Timor as ''in many ways part of (the) Indonesian world'' and made it clear he would not stand in the way of Indonesia, which seized the colony in December 1975 and ruled it for 24 deeply troubled years.

The cables suggest America played no active role in Timor at all, despite theories that its agents may have physically assisted the Indonesian invasion.

Instead, it appears the US acted in the same manner as Whitlam: standing back, doing nothing.

By neither condemning nor interfering, as many Timorese will argue to this day, it had the same effect as supporting the Indonesian invasion.

Before even the Khemlani Loans or Junie Morosi scandals erupted, the Americans on occasion observed Australia with deep private frustration.

A sanctimonious cable sent on August 29, 1974, analysed Australia's economic ''drift'', with ''unmanageable inflation'' and ''severe domestic troubles''.

''More broadly,'' it stated, ''there is in Australia an aura of selfishness and structural animosity, with the states against Canberra, the ALP caucus against Whitlam, the Opposition after narrow political advantage, individual unions elbowing for material gain, corporations passing the cost of excessive wage settlements on to the consumer, rural interests claiming discrimination and none of the players motivated by concern for national wellbeing.''

Amusingly, this was sent only 20 days after America's greatest modern domestic political crisis, with Nixon, outed as the chief Watergate burglar, resigning as President.

Whitlam would go the following year in the double dissolution, an event, once again, which conspiracy theorists have linked to CIA activities in Australia.

The trove of cables offers no support for this view.

Rather, the cables suggest that while they were interested in deeply infiltrating the Australian political mindset, they didn't need to act: they had Whitlam who, as Hawke rightly predicted to them, would destroy Labor all by himself.

The cables only cover the start of Malcolm Fraser's rule from late 1975 through part of 1976.

Hawke would eventually beat Fraser in 1983.

It will be interesting to note, should cables from that time period become available, what views or role, if any, the Americans had about their trusted confidant taking power.

paul.toohey@news.com.au