Senator-elect Pauline Hanson makes an audacious claim that we are in the midst of a terrorist threat manifesting in the type of politically motivated violence Australia has not previously experienced.



She is pointing the finger not just at radical jihadis but, far more broadly, at Muslims who, she says on this basis, should now be banned from migrating to Australia.



Indeed, speaking on the ABC’s Q&A last week, Hanson said: “We have terrorism on the streets that we’ve never had before. We’ve had murders committed under the name of Islam, as we have the Lindt cafe, Curtis Cheng and the two police officers in Melbourne, right? So this has happened. You have radicalisation.”



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Tony Jones, the program’s host, said in reply: “When you say we’ve never had terrorism in this country before, that’s simply not the case ... In the 1970s there were multiple bombings by Croatian Catholic extremists. This has happened in Australia before. It’s not the first time. We should at least get that straight.”



While Jones is correct that Australia was the stage for acts of violence by apparent Croatian extremists (some of whom were Catholics), there now seems to be little doubt that some terrorist activity blamed on the Croats was actually orchestrated by undercover Yugloslav agents provocateur.



In October the third volume of the official history of Asio will be published. Written by historian and the former army intelligence officer John Blaxland, the book will cover the case of what became known as the “Croatian Six” – a case that not only reiterates the extent of appalling New South Wales police corruption during the 1970s, but an apparent failure in both Asio’s counter-terrorism and counter-espionage operations regarding Croatia and Yugoslavia, and one of the more disconcerting miscarriages of justices in late 20th century Australia.



Croatians were stigmatised as Nazis Hamish McDonald

In 2012 Hamish McDonald’s book, Framed, succinctly contextualised the circumstances under which the six young Australian citizens of Croatian birth (all Croat nationalists) came to be charged and convicted of a conspiracy to bomb the Elizabethan Theatre in Sydney’s Newtown, the city’s water supply and several city businesses.



The six were Max Bebic, Vic Brajkovic, Tony Zvirotic, Joe Kokotovic, Ilija Kokotovic and Mile Nekic. Each spent up to a decade in prison after apparently being framed by an agent of the Yugoslav foreign intelligence service, working operationally in Australia.

Most of the 160,000 Yugoslavs who came to Australia after the second world war as assisted migrants were Croatian. Nationalistic and predominantly Catholic, they used their freedom in Australia to protest vociferously – and sometimes with extreme violence – against Josip Tito’s communist Yugoslav federation.

Croatian activism was politically polarising in Australia.



As McDonald points out in Framed: “It was a convenient cudgel for Australia’s left to turn against the Coalition government and Canberra’s security apparatus. Croatians were stigmatised as Nazis by the wartime collaboration of a nationalist organisation, the Ustache, with the German occupation.”



After Labor’s 1972 election, among the first actions of the new attorney general, Lionel Murphy, was to raid Asio’s then Melbourne headquarters in search of files about Croatian extremism he believed the agency was withholding from the Whitlam government.



But there was genuine cause for Asio, police and government concern about the more extreme elements of the Croatian nationalist movement in Australia. Violence and smoke bombs at football matches involving teams with Croat and Serb sympathies was common. So too, were threats against Yugoslav diplomats (a good many of whom were actually intelligence officials) in Australia, and local branches of the federation’s state businesses.



Asio was actively involved in small-scale surveillance operations against violent Croatian extremist organisations in the 1960s and 70s as Blaxland explains in the second volume of the official Asio history, The Protest Years. But counter-terrorism operations took on greater urgency after the bombing in November 1977 of the Melbourne office of the Yugoslav state airline, Jat, on a weekend of violent protest outside the federation’s consulate in Sydney.



The next year a Croatian extremist group was discovered training on the south-east coast of Australia.



Asio, meanwhile, was also acutely aware that local Yugoslav agents were trying to infiltrate the more extreme Croat groups. McDonald’s book highlights credible suggestions that Yugoslav agents provocateur had infiltrated some of the groups, including the one conducting military training.



Yugoslavia had already complained through diplomatic channels about the danger to its representatives and property in Australia from extremists.



The situation was clearly vexed for Asio: on one hand it had to conduct counter-terrorism measures against the Croatian extremists, on the other, counter-intelligence against Yugoslav spies in Australia.



It was in this environment, on 8 February 1979, that Vico Virkez walked into Lithgow police station west of Sydney and “confessed” to his supposed role in a planned bombing of the theatre in Newtown (where a Yugoslav production was to be staged before 1,600 patrons), as well as an attack on the Sydney water supply and various Yugoslavian businesses.



Asio was aware of Virkez’s earlier contact with the Yugoslav consulate in Sydney and should have doubted his story. He had phoned the consulate to say that he was going to confess some hours before he actually did. Asio is believed to have intercepted that phone call between Virkez and the consulate.



New South Wales police arrested the six Croatian nationalists on the basis of the Virkez information.



Virkez, who testified against the six, was sentenced to 26 months’ prison. But he was released after 10 months and allowed to return to Yugoslavia. The other members of the Croatian Six were sentenced to 15 years’ prison each.



Despite explosives having been found in the homes of the accused (all tradesmen), the prosecution case seemed flawed from inception. One of the accused was beaten during questioning by the infamous Sydney criminal investigation branch. All of the accused later withdrew the “confessions” they’d initially given, five in unsigned verbal accounts – “verbals”. Forty police continued to insist the confessions were voluntary and that they had, indeed, found explosives and detonators in the homes of accused.



But in 1991 the ABC journalist Chris Masters found Virkez in Yugoslavia. Virkez volunteered that he was actually a Serb, Vitomir Misimovic. He admitted that he had worked on behalf of the Yugoslav government to infiltrate and spy on the Australian Croatian community.



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An appeal was rejected. To the lingering anger of the Croatian community, the six men served their sentences. The defence was denied access to Asio documents salient to the evidence of Virkez.

McDonald writes: “In court he kept to a script written by police. None of the six were guilty of the bombing conspiracy. By that time many of the police were under a cloud. Roger Rogerson (who led one of the raids against three of the six Croatians, and was convicted last month of an unrelated murder) was about to go to jail ... The CIB and its squads had been disbanded as a ‘hotbed of corruption’.”



There is a line in McDonald’s account of the surveillance operations – by both Australian law enforcement and intelligence and, indeed, Yugoslav agents – that seems chilling in light of the overheated political rhetoric about Muslims and national security here today.



“We were the Muslims of that time,” he quotes Branko Miletic, a Croatian-Australian journalist, as saying.



It will be intriguing to see how, in October, the latest volume of the official history of Asio deals with this curious, embarrassing and terrible episode in Australian intelligence failure, law enforcement and miscarried justice.



Hanson is wrong to say Australia has never before seen politically and perhaps religiously motivated terrorism. But it is clear that the terrorism associated with Croatian extremism in the 1960s and 70s Australia was not always as it might have initially appeared.