Freame lasted five months at Gallipoli until 14 August, when he was badly wounded in a Turkish attack and evacuated from the peninsula. He was repatriated to Australia 10 months later. In his time at Gallipoli, Freame won Australia's first Distinguished Conduct Medal (DCM) and earned a mention in dispatches. These were serious and significant awards for a sergeant.

The importance of Bean's account is that it shows that Freame served alongside Lloyd, who was also repatriated to Australia in 1916. Lloyd was posted to the Intelligence Section of the General Staff in Sydney, where he worked for Edmund Piesse. Lloyd would go on to serve in the Commonwealth Investigations Branch from 1921 and to fill senior roles in Australia's security intelligence system, including the Director of the Security Service, until his retirement following the establishment of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) in 1949.

Freame arrived back in Australia after Lloyd, but it is likely that the two maintained their relationship of officer and soldier. It is also likely that, given the emphasis of Military Intelligence on Japan and the Japanese, Lloyd introduced Freame to Military Intelligence. We can be sure Freame was working for someone, as he was able to set himself up at 2 Bondi Road, Bondi, where he was living on 20 November 1916, the day he was officially discharged from the army.

Declared bankrupt

Freame's next move occurred on 6 January 1920, when he took up an orchard block at Kentucky, on the New England Tablelands, which he acquired in a grant from the NSW Soldier Settlement Loan Scheme. Like many returned soldiers who, despite having no experience or training, were set up as farmers on relatively poor land, the Freames found the going hard. They had it harder because Freame's first wife, Edith, became ill and was in and out of hospital for 12 years until her death in 1939. Freame was declared bankrupt and his 40 acres at Kentucky stripped from him. According to Harriett, it was at this time that he was employed as an agent by Military Intelligence. Her claim is corroborated in a minute dated 9 October 1940 confirming that Freame had been employed in defence work of a "highly secret nature" since 4 December 1939.

War Minister Lieutenant-General Hideki Tojo, clad in a uniform, speaking to 300 chiefs of National Schools at the Education Hall, Kanda ward on June 06, 1941. The Domei News Photos Service

Freame was a rare commodity in 1939. He was a returned soldier who was not an officer and he could speak fluent Japanese. It is no surprise that Military Intelligence snapped him up and began using him as a field agent spying on the Japanese community in NSW. Given the small size of this community and the abysmal tradecraft employed by Military Intelligence agents, it is likely Freame was quickly identified as a spy.

From the documentary evidence it appears that Freame's handler was a Major Scott, a militia officer who had served in France in 1916 and 1917 and suffered severe shell shock.


Scott's management of Freame as an agent was poor. Despite Freame's work being described as "highly secret" and known only to Scott, Lieutenant Colonel Hodgson, the Secretary of the External Affairs Department, was aware of Freame by 30 August 1940. Scott impressed on Hodgson the need for absolute secrecy in relation to Freame and his work but, stunningly, passed Freame's private telephone number and address to Hodgson. Nothing in the file suggests that Freame was asked about this, or that any effort was made to ascertain why Hodgson wanted to talk to an agent whose existence was supposedly a closely guarded secret.

By this time Freame was not just working for Scott as a secret agent, but had begun working for the Military Censor as a Japanese linguist, a post he took up at the end of August 1940 without Major Scott's knowledge. Hodgson most likely found out about Freame through his connection with the Military Censor. This suggests that Freame's name was being bandied around government without any concern for his safety and that his putative handler was completely unaware of his holding at least two different positions, one in counterintelligence and one with the censor. Now a third was in the offing, with Hodgson offering Freame the position of translator on the staff of Australia's first mission to Japan, led by Sir John Latham as first minister.

Harry Freame and his daughter Grace on Anzac Day, 1937. He was sent to Tokyo in October 1940. (Goodyear Family Collection, courtesy of Sheila Spence)

This extraordinary situation was made enormously worse on Friday, 13 September 1940, when Freame's details, including his "special defence work" and his appointment as the interpreter to the Australian Legation in Tokyo, were published in the press. Someone somewhere had background briefed the press, and the Daily Telegraph in Sydney, The Sun and The Argus in Melbourne, The Mercury in Hobart, the West Australian in Perth and The Advertiser in Adelaide published all of the details. Only three newspapers, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Examiner in Launceston and The Cootamundra Herald, omitted the reference to special defence work.

On 17 September, Major Scott responded to the breach of security by asking Section 1C of Military Intelligence to ask The Sun "what the special defence work is and who supplied this information". The whole affair spiralled out of control as the Minister for the Army, P A McBride, wrote to the Minister for External Affairs, John (Black Jack) McEwen, raising the army's "considerable embarrassment" and stating that "the possibility cannot be overlooked that this appointment may now be viewed with suspicion in Tokyo". McBride clearly laid the blame for this on Hodgson and, in a remarkable example of shutting a stable door too late, asked for McEwen's "assurance that suitable action" was taken "to ensure that no breach of security is possible in future".

Enter Black Jack McEwen

McEwen was not called "Black Jack" for nothing. His reply of 2 October 1940 firmly put McBride in his place. McEwen accepted Hodgson's assurances that there had been "no disclosure of any confidential information to the press about the activities of Mr Freame". Having defended Hodgson and the department, McEwen went on the offensive, pointing out to McBride that Freame's activities were "well known to the Japanese authorities here, including the Consul-General". Rubbing it in, McEwen tells McBride that Freame's controller, Major Scott, had only become aware of Freame's employment by the Military Censor on 1 October.

As if this were not bad enough, McEwen also told McBride that Hodgson had "specially raised the question of his [Freame's] appointment to the staff of the Tokyo [Australian] Legation with the Consul-General of Japan, with a view to ascertaining his attitude towards the appointment". The response of the Consul-General was that the appointment "was an excellent one, as Mr Freame had created a very favourable impression".


Harry Freame around 1920, when he was a Japanese language teacher working in Sydney.

The naivety on display here stuns, even today. The idea that Japanese diplomats could provide any assurance of Freame's safety in Japan, where he would fall under the authority of the Japanese military police, the Kempeitai, was something that, even in 1940, anyone able to read the press reports from Japan knew could not be relied upon. Australian government ministers, military officers and officials had openly disclosed Freame was a secret agent being sent to Tokyo at the same time Japan's Minister for War, Lieutenant General Tojo Hideki, had just publicly announced that the Imperial Japanese Army would "not hesitate to take drastic measures against Japanese who assisted foreign secret agents and those who were pro-British". Harry Freame was half Japanese, and no one in Australia seemed to understand what this entailed.

The country that Harry Freame was going to in 1941 was not a democracy or even a well-run monarchy or autocracy. In 1941, Japan was a nation in chaos as military factions struggled to impose their policy on the country via the Emperor. Assassination of opponents was frequent and, as General Tojo made perfectly clear, murdering Japanese or foreigners, with the exception of Americans, was seen as perfectly acceptable.

Gloves come off

In 1940, the Japanese authorities were cracking down on anyone thought to be a spy, particularly a British spy. British spies were targeted because Foreign Minister Matsuoka Yosuke had stopped the Kempeitai chasing American spies, and the Soviet spies were too hard to catch.

James Melville Cox, the Reuters correspondent in Tokyo and a Secret Intelligence Service agent, had initially been compromised in 1936 when he posted classified information on the refitting of HIJMS Nagato in a letter signed "Jimmy" from a favourite haunt, the Teikoku Hotel in Tokyo. The Kempeitai had intercepted the letter but could not identify "Jimmy". The importance of Jimmy lay in the loss of face it caused the Imperial Japanese Navy to have the Kempeitai discover a British spy operating successfully against its dockyards. The matter was important enough that the Kempeitai employed the most important tool in intelligence work: they recorded everything and began a systematic investigation of the matter.

Cox's letter provided the Kempeitai with three major insights. First, the name "Jimmy" indicated a European, as did posting it from the Teikoku Hotel. Secondly, they knew the spy was interested in shipbuilding and the IJN.

Thirdly, and most importantly, they knew the spy existed.


As the investigation proceeded, suspicion fell on Cox. The Kempeitai knew the name "Jimmy" was the diminutive of James, and Cox did frequent the Teikoku Hotel. More incriminatingly, Cox's handwriting was similar to that on the original letter and he used similar stationery. Despite this, there was little the Kempeitai could do until 1937 when the Military Secrets Act was revised to cover civilians and foreigners. In 1940, with the Americans out of bounds and amid growing tension, the Military Service Bureau ordered the Kempeitai to clamp down on foreign suspects and the gloves came off.

James Cox was immediately picked up and taken to Kempeitai HQ in Tokyo.

Cox was interrogated, supposedly in an attempt to get him to incriminate the British Ambassador, Sir Robert Craigie, in espionage activities. How it happened no one really knows, but Cox ended up dead in the courtyard of Kempeitai HQ. The explanation provided was that he had thrown himself from the fourth-floor window.

While the British government officially accepted suicide as the cause of Cox's death, the subsequent British investigation by Patrick Dean of the Foreign Office strongly suggested Cox had been tortured and murdered. The difficulties with the Japanese version were that the window in question "was a yard [90 centimetres] square" and was protected by a large sill 90 centimetres above the floor, from which an already weakened and injured Cox would have had to launch himself. He would have had to negotiate this while eluding the two guards who always escorted prisoners. Dean also found Cox's body had travelled six metres out from the wall of the building. The British investigation, while publicly accepting the suicide claim, privately thought Cox was either thrown through the window or that his body was placed in the courtyard after he had died in another place.

Further evidence that Cox had been murdered was provided by a British resident of Nagasaki, and probable SIS agent, Vanya Ringer, who was arrested at the same time as Cox. On 29 July, the day Cox died, Ringer reported that he was told of Cox's death and threatened with the same if he did not tell the truth. Ringer had no doubt Cox had been murdered, as throughout his own detention he was always accompanied by at least two Kempeitai guards.

Ringer's unpublished memoirs are the source of much of the information available on Cox's death, and he obtained a large part of his information from Cox's widow, who sailed home with him on the SS Nankin. She told Ringer she saw more than 20 needle marks on her husband's body.

Attacked and garrotted

The British responded with a carefully choreographed rounding-up of suspected Japanese spies in India and Singapore, which included Shinozaki Mamoru, the press attaché at the Japanese Consulate-General in Singapore. The way this was done suggests Cox was indeed an SIS officer.


More substantive, though, is the fact that James Cox's widow was paid £5000 by the British government, a significant sum of money in 1940. This strongly suggests that James Cox was either an SIS agent or an SIS officer working under the cover of journalism in Japan.

The details of Cox's death had been reported in the Australian press, and it is impossible that the Australian authorities planning to send Freame to Tokyo did not know about the crackdown in Japan. Yet despite all of this, Freame boarded the SS Tanda on 11 October 1940 and set sail for Tokyo, where suspected spies were thrown out of fourth-floor windows.

The outcome was entirely predictable. Freame arrived in Japan and started his duties as an interpreter and odd job man around the legation. Sometime during this period it would appear that the Kempeitai decided to take action against him. In their eyes, Freame was more than a British spy; he was a traitor working from the legation of a British colony. Given the evidence of the Kempeitai's aggressive and violent response to British spying, the claims of the Freame family that Harry was attacked and garrotted on a Tokyo street on 27 January 1941 are most likely true.

The first formal claim that Freame had died as a result of being garrotted by the Japanese security forces was raised in a letter written by Harriett Freame to Harry's old comrade, now Colonel Lloyd, the Director of the new Commonwealth Security Service, on 16 June 1941. In this letter, Harriett detailed how worried Harry and she had been by the press reporting of his posting to Tokyo and that Harry had told her he was being "shadowed here and there after those silly people of the Sun Office" printed their story. If Freame was being clandestinely shadowed around Sydney prior to his departure for Tokyo, he should have never been sent. The fact that he was allowed to proceed is an indictment of the amateurism surrounding Australia's security intelligence establishment of the time. It also explains why Lloyd took such a deep interest in the subsequent investigations and why, despite all of her efforts, Harriett Freame failed to get any support from subsequent Australian governments.

The tone of Harriett Freame's letters indicates that she was well aware of a security angle to Harry's work in Tokyo. In her letter, Harriett thanks Lloyd for his "lovely letter and tribute to Harry" while adding "I cannot write it but I would welcome an interview at any time" and "I would love to tell you about it. I know it was as you say, but I don't know if Sir John Latham is even aware ..." It is a strong indication that Freame had been involved in something more than providing his services as an interpreter to the Australian Legation and that Lloyd was directly involved.

Despite the insistence of Freame's family that he died of injuries some four months after his garrotting in Tokyo, the official position was he died of cancer of the gall bladder, and his death certificate, which lists carcinoma of the gall bladder, supports this. Cancer of the gall bladder is, however, uncommon and it does not accord with the clinical findings of Dr Ikeda, the Japanese doctor who examined Freame at St Luke's International Medical Centre in Tokyo shortly after the attack. Dr Ikeda found that Freame had suddenly lost his voice and suffered difficulty in swallowing. A laryngoscopy was conducted, and a complete paralysis of the left nervus laryngeus recurrens diagnosed, a finding consistent with a failed garrotting, not gall bladder cancer.

Ex gratia payment of £50

A further complication is that the medical practitioner who issued the death certificate, Dr M. Stormon, was found by Military Intelligence to have been in close contact with the "Secretary to the Minister for External Affairs", Fredrick Stewart. At face value this suggests that two Commonwealth ministers, the Minister for External Affairs and the Minister for Health, were taking a direct interest in the medical condition of a temporary clerk. Further evidence of governmental concern is seen in the telegram sent to Sir John Latham in Tokyo telling him that the department was "confronted with question as to whether contributing factor in death was his service in Japan" and, if this was so, then there was a "moral obligation to offer some compensation" to his destitute widow. Latham abruptly dismissed the department's concerns.


In 1947, Latham would again reject compensation for Harriett Freame. Apparently, the ex gratia payment of £50 paid in October 1941, reduced by Treasury from the £100 recommended by the minister, was good enough. Freame's grateful nation had provided his widow with approximately six weeks' worth of his annual £400 salary.

The payout left his family destitute and Harriett was forced to bury Harry in an unmarked grave in the Church of England section of the Northern Suburbs Cemetery in Sydney. The grave is still there and still unmarked.

There is no doubt that Freame's death caused a great deal of interest in official circles, but most of officialdom was keen to bury him and move on. Even his old comrade Lloyd did little for him or his family other than advising the Department of External Affairs that the "possibility of Mr Freame having received [his] injury in Japan is not a remote one". All of this strongly suggests that Harry Freame, who was a security intelligence agent working clandestinely against the Japanese in Australia, was sent on an intelligence mission to Japan where he was attacked by the Kempeitai and subsequently died of his injuries after returning to Australia. If this is so, then Wykeham Henry Freame was the first Australian clandestine intelligence operative to be killed while serving his country. If so, as an ex-soldier, decorated war hero and Australian spy, it is wrong that he should be lying in an unmarked grave in Sydney, unacknowledged and unwanted by his country. Still, this is the fate of many a good spy.

This is an edited extract from Australia's First Spies, by John Fahey, to be published August 1 by Allen & Unwin.