Like the letters page, obituaries can these days be the most stimulating, and the most surprising, reading in the daily papers. So it was earlier this year when the Sydney Morning Herald ran an obit headlined “Journalist Broke Story of Alleged Attempt on Life of Prince Philip.”
The deceased was Warner Russell, a newshound with the Herald’s long-defunct tabloid stablemate, the afternoon Sun, who had died aged eighty-five. In the days when Russell worked there, the Sun was waging a circulation war with Rupert Murdoch’s Daily Mirror using sensation and titillation. (The latter was slightly restrained on the Sun’s part by the lingering Methodism of its Fairfax owners.)
The obituarist, ex-Sun journalist David Jones, captured very well the ambience of the paper’s newsroom, with its “cigarette-scorched cork floors,” in Fairfax’s utilitarian tower on Sydney’s Broadway. The street was decidedly less hip than it is now, and the building so brutally stark that it was used as a stand-in for Stalin-era Moscow in the film Daughter of the Revolution.
“Warner Russell was a commanding presence in the Sun’s police rounds room where copy boys competed for a cadetship, the first stepping stone in a reporting career,” Jones recalled. “They hoped he would look favourably upon their efforts in monitoring and logging the activities of police, ambulance and fire brigade services via radio receivers mounted in a cubicle in a corner of the room.”
My generation of cadets on the Herald at the end of the 1960s stepped gingerly into this scene. Our training experience usually included a spell of court reporting — phoning in stories for the Sun up until early afternoon and then returning to our Herald desks to write up the same stories for a breed of subeditor whose mission seemed to involve toning everything down. Being university graduates, long-haired and part of the Vietnam generation, we tended to get scathing treatment at the Sun.
Intrigued by the obituary, I set about finding out more. Another of Russell’s old colleagues gave me a copy of the eulogy delivered by his son Mark. There I discovered that Russell was a son of racing car driver George Russell and Mabelle “Bubby” Cohen, a performer in J.C. Williamson musicals. When George was crippled in a car-race crash, Mabelle took off, leaving him to care for the kids.
Delivering telegrams around Bondi to help his struggling father, young Warner noticed a subsiding block of flats propped up by timber beams and sent in a story to the Sun about how its tenants had been left without gas and functioning toilets. He was offered a cadetship.
The obituary and Mark’s eulogy list the run of big stories Russell covered — the disappearance of Harold Holt, the mysterious deaths of Gilbert Bogle and Margaret Chandler at a Lane Cove picnic, the attempted hijacking of a Pan-Am jet at Sydney Airport — and the smaller human interest ones, like when Russell stopped a young women who was about to jump to her death from The Gap after her boyfriend left her pregnant.
Russell knew a big cast of shady characters — people usually described by journalists as “colourful Sydney identities” to avoid libel actions — including nightclub owner Abe Saffron, illegal casino operator George Freeman, corrupt chief magistrate Murray Farquhar, police officers Roger Rogerson and Frank “Bumper” Farrell, hitman Arthur Stanley “Neddy” Smith and lawyer Morgan Ryan (Lionel Murphy’s “little mate”).
Once, while covering courts for the Sun, Russell found Abe Saffron’s gunman Wayne sitting alongside him, threatening to kill him if he reported on a case involving Saffron. The nightclub owner had hosted a sex party at Chinaman’s Beach, near Balmoral, and was busted for “lewd conduct” by two young constables who were unaware that he was protected by their commissioner. Farquhar let him off.
Alongside his journalism, though, Russell had another career. Driven by an intense anti-communism, he was an intelligence officer in the Australian army reserve. Hence the story behind the obituary’s headline.
“In his role as the shipping reporter for the Sun, Dad would often meet Russian cruise ships arriving at the dock and step on board in the guise of interviewing holiday-makers returning to Sydney,” Mark Russell told mourners at his father’s funeral. “What he was in fact doing was secretly photographing different sections of the ship using a tiny spy camera. ASIO had been monitoring Russian ships for some time as it was suspected they were rendezvousing at sea with Russian submarines to supply fuel, food, and crew transfers.”
Mark recalls his father taking the family on a cruise on a Russian vessel, the Taras Shevchenko, for what they thought was nothing more than a week-long holiday at sea. The youngster played bingo on board, “unaware Dad was in the bowels of the ship taking covert photos.” It seems unlikely, though, that Soviet cruise ships would be replenishing submarines in the Pacific while Australian holiday-makers watched from the deck.
Whatever the truth of the holiday, Russell was “coming through with pretty hot stories that no one else could get,” says his former Sun colleague Christopher Holcroft. “He would basically say: it was a military tip-off.” The intelligence corps would have been in contact with ASIO and ASIS, and people like Russell would have been ideal conduits to get stories out — such as the revelation that a Soviet trawler refuelling in Sydney was bristling with aerials.
Russell kept himself ready for action. Tuesday nights would be training for intelligence officers, says Holcroft, who was also a member of the corps, and he also attended periodic camps. After the newspaper’s deadlines had passed, mid-afternoon, says Holcroft, Russell would sometimes go to his locker, put a brown harness under his jacket and put something “heavy” into it. It might have been a .357 Magnum pistol, Holcroft thinks, the kind favoured by the detective played by Clint Eastwood in the Dirty Harry movie series. When email arrived much later, he adopted the user name wgrussell357.
Russell would then go off to practise at a shooting range, Holcroft recalled, somewhere in or near the south pylons of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Perplexed by the location, I eventually asked for help in the Herald’s folksy Column 8 section. Several retired bank tellers responded with yarns about the pistol training they’d got in case of robberies; then Herald reader Bob McLeod came through with the information I was after.
“It was situated under the south end of the Cahill Expressway,” he told me. “It was reached by climbing up the stairs that led from Cumberland Street up to the walkway. There were two unused railway tunnels (side by side) that went down to Wynyard station and the one closest to the walkway was where the range was.”
The pistol club was part of the Australian Postal Institute, a large social group for employees of the old Postmaster General’s Department. “We used to meet there late on Friday afternoons for a shooting session of about two hours,” said McLeod. “The range was opened and run by a railway ‘detective’ (as I think the inspectors were sometimes called) who opened everything and collected a small amount of money from each of us.”
The range was four or five metres wide and blocked off about twenty-five metres from the firing line, McLeod told me. “The most exciting thing that would regularly happen while we were shooting was the starting and running of a very large exhaust fan that (tried) to pump out the stale, slightly poisonous air into the second empty tunnel adjacent… The air became foul because of burnt ‘gunpowder’ and also traces of lead from the projectiles we fired.”
McLeod did recall a shooter who carried his gun in a shoulder holster but didn’t recognise Russell’s picture in the obituary.
Russell professed to have picked up more controversial skills in the intelligence corps. “Dad once told me how he had completed an interrogation course and the most effective way to get someone to talk was to use a hose and pour water down the person’s throat,” Mark Russell said in his tribute. “When I asked him why he had to do an interrogation course, he looked at me, smiled and said: ‘That’s classified.’”
Water torture — pioneered by the Japanese imperial army’s military police, the Kempeitai — became a scandal in Canberra in 1966 when Australian army field interrogators were revealed to have used it on a captured female Viet Cong cadre. Later, of course, it was controversially practised at Guantanamo Bay.
Russell’s “most memorable coup,” according to obituarist David Jones, was “uncovering an alleged IRA plot to assassinate Prince Philip during a royal visit to Sydney in March 1973.” As Russell described it in his 2014 memoir, Shadows of a Spy, he was monitoring police radios and heard the police special branch and the royal team protecting Prince Philip’s motorcade take evasive action. Two explosive devices had been found along its route. It was at the height of an Irish Republican Army bombing campaign in response to the January 1972 “Bloody Sunday” massacre in Northern Ireland, added Russell.
But far from “breaking” the story, Russell willingly suppressed it, according to Jones. It was made the subject of a D-Notice, Jones says, a since-abandoned system under which editors agreed to suppress reporting of certain sensitive security-related matters. Russell said he was summoned years later, in 1992, to Admiralty House (the governor-general’s official Sydney residence) to receive Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip’s gratitude in person. He didn’t start talking about the incident for more than another two decades.
There’s only one problem with the story: intelligence experts say the IRA had no plans to attack Prince Philip in Sydney. “I have checked around and can confirm there was no IRA attempt on Prince Philip in Sydney in March 1973 — or any planning along those lines,” says former defence intelligence officer Clive Williams, a terrorism specialist attached to the Australian National University. Water torture — or any other torture — was never taught in the intelligence corps, he adds emphatically.
“I worked in MI-11 (counterintelligence) in 1968 and we were not focused on the IRA as a problem organisation in Australia,” Williams tells me. “In fact, Australia was neutral ground in the sense that the Brits used Australia to resettle informants and the IRA used Australia as a sanctuary — so there was no IRA inclination to do anything to attract adverse attention.”
In the second volume of the Official History of ASIO, John Blaxland, a former army intelligence officer who heads the ANU’s Defence and Strategic Studies Centre, records that the federal government’s special interdepartmental committee on political violence met in November 1973 and found the likelihood of IRA action in Australia very low — a surprising conclusion if the IRA had indeed attempted to blow up Prince Philip eight months earlier.
And as for the D-Notice, the D stands for defence and if one was to be issued then defence minister Lance Barnard would have known about it. Journalist Brian Toohey, who was on Barnard’s staff at the time, says no such notice was issued. The notices in effect at that time prohibited any reference to the existence of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, signals intelligence, the whereabouts of the Soviet defectors Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov, or defence force technical capabilities. This system of voluntary self-censorship lapsed in the early 1980s.
Russell saw plots in a lot of things, it seems. He suspected the deaths of Chandler and Bogle were the result of poisoning by Soviet agents because Bogle, a CSIRO scientist, was working on secretive “space weapons” (it was an early form of laser, in fact). He cultivated anti-communists, including Adriana Rivas, an alleged torturer during Chilean general Augusto Pinochet’s post-coup purge of leftists, who had fled to Australia in 1978 (and was recently extradited from her Sydney bolthole). Russell told his son he’d had Rivas to lunch several times in the officer’s mess at Sydney’s Victoria Barracks.
He was fascinated by spycraft. His favourite film was Orson Welles’s The Third Man, Mark recalls, and on a trip to Vienna stayed at the Hotel Sacher, a location in the film, then found the street where lead character Harry Lime first appeared in a doorway and the sewer where Lime had his last fight. He visited Berlin before the wall came down and persuaded British intelligence agents to show him around.
One part of the Russell legend does stack up. In late 1983 he joined a Returned Services League delegation to inspect Commonwealth war graves on the Libyan battlefields. The June 1984 edition of the RSL magazine Reveille records the visit, with a picture showing Russell standing behind its leader, Sir Colin Hines, with another man named as Paul Martin; both, according to the caption, were reporters for Reveille.
In his memoir Russell says the delegation was taken into a “heavily fortified compound” to be received by the Libyan despot Muammar Gaddafi, dressed in flowing robes and skull cap, protected by his female bodyguards. “Dad had to sit on a low chair, so he was forced to look up at Gaddafi who, through an interpreter, went on to rant about how he had brought peace to his people,” Mark Russell relates, adding: “Little did Gaddafi know the party he ended up meeting in Tripoli included three intelligence officers, one British, one American and Dad.”
Russell also played a part in exposing the clandestine relationship between the then Prince of Wales and Camilla Parker Bowles. A recording of an embarrassingly intimate phone call between the two in 1992 somehow got intercepted and made its way to the Australian women’s magazine New Idea, whose editor Bob Cameron asked Russell to see if the voices matched those of Charles and Camilla. His intelligence sources confirmed they did, and New Idea published a worldwide scoop in January 1993. Had they known this would be part of their annus horribilis, the Queen and Prince Philip might not have been so welcoming at Admiralty House (if indeed they were).
If Fairfax managers knew of Russell’s dual career, they appear not to have been disturbed, and might even have thought it was a good thing. In fact, the company’s approach to the intelligence world was sometimes closer than laissez-faire. In her 2004 book Watching the Sun Rise: Australian Reporting of Japan, 1931 to the Fall of Singapore, journalist Jacqui Murray tells how Warwick (later Sir Warwick) Fairfax accepted £36,000 from MI6 to post correspondents to Asia who would incorporate supplied information into their pieces (“The Japanese are in for a big surprise if they are thinking of attacking Singapore, informed sources said…”).
The postwar generation of editors were former servicemen and war correspondents who often accepted that certain things had to be kept hush-hush. Trusted Asia hands, having been “declared” safe to be apprised about ASIS, would be invited to a chat at Central Planning, the cover name for the agency’s headquarters in Melbourne’s St Kilda barracks, during their home leave.
When a Whitlam staffer leaked information about how ASIS had helped the CIA liaise with the Chilean army ahead of the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende, my boss in the Herald’s Canberra bureau, Brian Johns, asked me to try to track down the spook in question. When I got close, a call from Ian Kennison, the ASIS deputy director, to Graeme Wilkinson, Fairfax’s editorial manager, was enough to shut the story down.
It was a different era, and it changed after disclosures in Washington by senator Frank Church and others threw a spotlight on the role of intelligence agencies in international relations. Decades later, the curtains were drawn again with post-9/11 security laws criminalising any disclosure of intelligence personnel’s identities and operations.
Given what I uncovered, it was no surprise that the Herald’s Warner Russell obituary had raised eyebrows among journalists and intelligence veterans. The paper’s obituaries editor, Tim Barlass, tells me he had some doubts but believed that the “larger than life” descriptor “is the equivalent of saying: reader beware.”
The obituary’s writer, David Jones, who had a distinguished career with the Seven Network, also had reservations. “I referred to the alleged plot in relation to Prince Philip with some caution as it was Warner’s account and he spoke for it himself in his book and in the Sunday Telegraph,” he tells me. As for people holding twin roles of journalist and intelligence officer, “that might have been more commonplace in that period at the height of the cold war but unlikely to pass muster now.”
“My main purpose was to essentially acknowledge that Warner gave me, as a kid from Bankstown, a start in journalism,” Jones adds. Similar gratitude for Russell’s mentoring came from left field, as it were: John Pilger, who had grown up near Russell in Bondi, got his first job in journalism, as a copy boy on the Sun, thanks to Russell. •
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