THIS SPY RING WAS ON OUR SIDE

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 29046, 7 November 1959, Page 10

THIS SPY RING WAS ON OUR SIDE

A Now-It-Can-Be-Told Story IBy JACK PERCIVAL, for Associated Newspapers Feature Services]

SYDNEY, November 2. A MAN who presided at the Australian nerve centre of a huge Pacific spy ring has written a book in which he reveals for the first time some of the secrets of Allied intelligence and counter-intelligence against Japan.

He is Colonel Allison Ind, who was evacuated with the MacArthur party from the Philippines to Australia.

For 10 years after the war he mained in the Far East in a special intelligence capacity, returning to the United States in 1955,

He says that the United States Government for years refused security clearance to his book “Spy .Ring Pacific.” In it he pays remarkable tributes to Australian spies, saboteurs and commandos, who suffered almost unendurable hardships and perils in lonely outposts in the jungles of New Guinea, New Britain, and the Philippines. In these posts, he says, a few brave, dedicated men with a radio could turn the scales of battle, as at Guadalcanal Ind controlled the pursestrings of the spy organisation in addition to being its co-director. He smuggled millions of pounds worth of bank notes into occupied areas in cases marked “finance' forms" Publication of the book, “Spy Ring Pacific,” 14 years after Japan’s surrender, coincides with the first open meetings in Sydney of dozens of the former cloak-and-dagger men. At the inaugural meeting few of the men knew each other — the wartime organisation was so hush-hush. Ind says that MacArthur had control of the spy and sabotage ring because he financed it — “With an American finance officer, G.H.Q. still had indirect but vital control: without his approval any proposed operation would die stillborn of financial anaemia.” The decision to make an Australian (Colonel C. G. Roberts, the Australian Army’s Director of Military Intelligence) the officer-in-charge of 'the A. 1.8. was

based on “both diplomacy and foresight.” “Temperamental, unconventional tools of warfare—saboteurs, secret agents, the coast watches, commandos and so on—had been sources of worry and embarrassment to the Australian Com-mander-in-Chief, General Thomas Blarney,” he write*, “MacArthur agreed ta take them all over, Australian, British, Dutch and a few others, and Blarney breathed a sigh of relief.” MacArthur, through his G-2 director, General Charles Willoughby, decided to weld them all into one organisation—the Allied Intelligence Bureau. The “tools” which embarrassed General Blarney included an outfit that specialised in every phase of sabotage and silent killing. Special Operations Australia was its classified name. It was a branch of the world organisation finely culled and sharpened in England and called Special Operations England, or S.O.E. Factories, ships, power plants, arsenals —anything and anyone valuable to the enemy any place were S.O.E. targets. In Melbourne, S.O.E.’s headquarters were at Airlie, a cold grey house behind a cold grey stone wall in Toorak. Airlie was security tight and was staffed by British, Dutch and Australian specialists. Its chief was Lieutenant-Colonel G. S. Mott of the British forces.

Moody, dark, saturnine, quick to' anger and quick to act Mott seemed to burn with deep inward resentment because the Japanese had routed him out of Burma and Java in turn. Another British organisation’s organisations. Clare thought of .tenth century. The communication channel of this unit was from its. own radio towers in Australia to No. 10 Downing Street. When all other A. 1.8. efforts foundered in a prolonged welter of agent casualties in the Netherlands East Indies, this organisation’s monitors were copying highly revealing cryptograms from spy operators under the very noses of the Japanese in Java. Ind calls Captain C. J. Clare, of the Australian Navy, the father of the Australian coast watcher organisations. Clare though of the idea, he says, back in 1919 at a time when to seek funds for military preparations was nothing short of heretical.

It was therefore no accident that at the moment in history when their services would be most critically needed, a priceless handful of men under newer leaders were in the right places at the right times. When the war got into its stride several thousand individuals were performing thejr unpaid assignments. Of these, 164 agents are known to have lost their lives, and the fate of 178 still remains a mystery. Seventy-five were listed as captured. Operations of the bureau accounted for more than 7000 enemy killed and 150 captured. More than 1000 individuals of all services were rescued by A. 1.8. units throughout the area of operations.

King Ibn Saud, of Saudi Arabia, co-operated with the A. 1.8. He sent out from Jeddah a troop of Hadjis (Moslems who had been to Mecca, to infiltrate into Moslem areas in South-east Asia to start religious trouble. Some of the Hadjis lived to bring back information. Most did not. Bombers were assigned to the A. 1.8. for probing missions, to drop agents, and to bring them back to Australia.

Ind says that 200 Flight -made more than 150 penetration sorties in 1945 when the Ninth Division was depending on the AJ.B. for most of its advance intelligence before making the Borneo strike for taking back the rich oil fields.