Compere: We begin by going back almost exactly a quarter of a century to the momentous spring of 1975, the time leading up to the two most contentious and divisive issues of recent Australian political history. In domestic affairs the dismissal, and in foreign policy the Indonesian invasion of East Timor. Both centred on the commanding figure of one man, Gough Whitlam, and while most of the ashes have been well and truly raked over when it comes to his sacking by Sir John Kerr, it's only now that we can hear more of the inside story of what happened between Gough Whitlam and Indonesia's President Suharto.

The facts emerge from 484 secret papers that the Federal Government released this afternoon. They are the documents that built an Australian foreign policy disaster. Before we hear the details, lets cast our minds back to 1975.

Unidentified: At this moment there are over 30,000 [indistinct] and paratroops and marines in East Timor. This information has been independently confirmed by Australian intelligence officials. It is totally untrue that the [indistinct] forces have been withdrawn from the territory of the democratic republic of East Timor.

Reporter: There's been no attack today, but the 60-man Fretilin garrison is pulling back to Maliana. They've been told that Indonesian soldiers are heading this way up the road from Batugade.

Reporter: And on 2 December 1975, Indonesian invaded East Timor, 24 hours after President Ford and Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, had left Jakarta.

Greg Shackleton: Something happened here last night that moved us very deeply. We were brought to this tiny native village from Maliana because we were told that Maliana was not safe at night. We were the target of a barrage of questioning from men who know they may die tomorrow and cannot understand why the rest of the world does not care. 'Why,' they ask, 'are the Indonesians invading us?' 'Why,' they ask, "are the Australians not helping us? When the Japanese did invade us, they did help us.' That's all they want, for the United Nations to care about what is happening here. The emotion here last night was so strong that we, all three of us, felt we should be able to reach out into the warm night air and touch it. Greg Shackleton at an unnamed village which we'll remember forever in Portuguese Timor.

Compere: That poignant question, why about Australia's role, has haunted our foreign policy ever since, and the papers Alexander Downer released today show how Australia's policies and actions evolved on East Timor from 1974 to 1976. They're a record of how Australia became so enmeshed in Jakarta's thinking that Canberra could say nothing about it's intimate knowledge of the secret invasion of East Timor in 1975. And they show how Australia had three days advance notice of the time and place of the attack which killed five Australian journalists at Balibo, including Greg Shackleton, whose voice that was a moment ago.

From Canberra, Graeme Dobell reports on the 885 page book called Australia and the Indonesian Incorporation of Portuguese Timor, 1974 to 1976.

Graeme Dobell: Here is the detailed official script of how Australia marched into a foreign policy trauma that lasted 25 years. The documents show an Australia so close to Jakarta's thinking that it's unable to protest even privately on the eve of the secret invasion of Timor. One key moment is in September 1974 when the prime minister, Gough Whitlam, meets Indonesia's president Suharto in Jog, Jakarta.

The official record of the leader's conversation shows Mr Whitlam's priorities, first that East Timor should become part of Indonesia, second, that this should happen in accordance with the expressed wishes of the Timorese.

But the actual import of that message to Jakarta was put more bluntly a few weeks later in a minute sent to the head of Australia's Foreign Affairs Department. Gough Whitlam says that the act of Timorese self-determination is to be little more than a gesture to Australian public opinion. Here is the passage directly quoting Mr Whitlam's words.

"I am in favour of incorporation, but obeisance has to be made to self-determination. I want it incorporated, but I do not want this done in a way which will create argument in Australia, which would make people more critical of Indonesia." And Jakarta understood what it had been told by the prime minister. In October 1974, one of Suharto's top generals, Ali Matopo, tells an Australian diplomat that until Mr Whitlam's visit the month before, Jakarta had been undecided about Timor. But he says Mr Whitlam's support for the idea of incorporation into Indonesia had helped them crystallise their own thinking and they were now firmly convinced.

Later that month Australia's Ambassador in Jakarta reports the view that Indonesian policy has hardened, and the determination to take over East Timor has developed an almost irresistible momentum. Senior Indonesian officials start talking to Australia's diplomats in Jakarta about taking military action, and in the months that follow, Australia's diplomats are given all the details. By September 1975, the embassy is cabling Canberra with the details of Suharto's approval of a significant escalation.

Three-thousand-eight-hundred Indonesian soldiers are to be sent into East Timor, and by October 13, 1975 the embassy reports that the invasion will start on the night of October 15. The main thrust would be through Balibo, and Indonesia wanted to take the capital, Dili, by mid-November. The invasion does go as secretly promised, and the five Australian journalists in Balibo are killed on the morning of October 16, three days after Canberra was given the details.

Launching the documents, the Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer.

Alexander Downer: During these hostilities in October 1975, five Australia-based journalists tragically lost their lives. Theories abound about how the journalists were killed and whether their deaths could have been prevented. There's a full selection of documents on this matter published in this volume, including some suggested earlier to be missing. The selection here is full enough to allow readers to judge for themselves the worth of different theories.

This selection can also act as a guide to the departmental files to be released later by the National Archives. I myself pass no judgments on the documents, other than to state that the Department of Foreign Affairs had no information beforehand of any intention to kill the journalists, although it did have prior knowledge of the planned invasion.

Graeme Dobell: One of the long-time critics of Australia's Timor policy, Jim Dunn, a former consul in Dili, says the documents show how Australia was deeply compromised by the information it was being given by Jakarta.

Jim Dunn: We were in a position of some complicity. We were getting these quite confidential briefings, but it seemed to be on the basis that we wouldn't pass – do anything much about this information, so really it meant that the government of the time, or at least its officials, were being well briefed on what was happening and indeed what was about to happen. But we were placed in a position where they couldn't really do anything about it.

Graeme Dobell: And did that policy mean that Canberra wasn't mentally ready to do anything about the invasion going through Balibo and making that connection about the danger to any Australians that might be there?

Jim Dunn: I think it did, because I think if we look at the reports about that time, there is no recognition in the cable, in the cables that are available in that book, of the extent of the military operation conducted by the Indonesians against Balibo on 16 October, 1975, because that was really a major – it was actually a major invasion of East Timor.

Graeme Dobell: One of the journalists who's written about Timor over three decades is the foreign editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, Hamish McDonald, co-author of the new book Death in Balibo, Lies in Canberra. And he says Australia's diplomats were so well briefed, they became almost helpless.

Hamish McDonald: I think Australia made it very plain that they would be happy if Timor was incorporated with Indonesia and that they were not expecting it to be played by the best of rules in any case. Whether they stepped over the line, I don't know. They certainly did what an embassy should do, which is get the best possible access and the best possible information...

Graeme Dobell: Absolutely rolled gold information, in fact.

Hamish Mcdonald: It was unprecedented inside information for a country that – from a country that was planning a covert intervention. It's hard to think of a case where a non-ally has divulged as much as this to Canberra or to any other major western country, but it compromised us, and the Indonesians knew it would compromise us. And the cables point out the Foreign Affairs Department realised we were being compromised, and yet the lure of this inside information was too much, and we kept ourselves in that loop, knowing how inhibiting it would be for us on – in any protest later on.

Graeme Dobell: Australia's ambassador in Jakarta in 1975 was Richard Woolcott. He says the release of the documents will help kill off conspiracy theories and give a firmer basis to debate about Timor. Mr Woolcott told the 7.30 Report that his embassy was not too close to the Jakarta regime but was doing its professional duty.

Richard Woolcott: One of the principal objectives of an embassy is to report to the Australian Government as accurately and as fully as it can on the evolution of policies of that government to which it's accredited, so that the Australian Government is then in a position to make policy decisions. Now, I think that the Australian Embassy team in 1975-76 was highly professional. Even some books have recently referred to the 'astonishing insights' was the phrase, I think, of our reporting. So I think the Embassy did a very professional job in what it was supposed to do. It provided the government with the information it needed on which to base its policy decisions.

And the idea that because we did our job so well that we might have been in some way complicit I think is nonsense. I mean, the Australian Government continuously reminded the Indonesians at all levels, from the president down, of the desirability of an act of self-determination and what would happen if force was used.

Compere: Richard Woolcott was Australia's ambassador to Jakarta in 1975. Our reporter on the Timor papers was Graeme Dobell in Canberra.