No check was made to see if any Australians were in the area before Indonesia's attack, Foreign Affairs documents show. Hamish McDonald reports.
As Indonesian covert soldiers moved into position for the October 1975 attack on Balibo that was to kill five Australian-based newsmen, Australia's ambassador in Jakarta, Mr Richard Woolcott, was having a "long and very frank discussion" with the Indonesian general in charge of the operation, Benny Murdani.
The account of this meeting, on the evening of October 15 and following General Murdani's return the previous day from a week in the Indonesian-held village of Batugade preparing the attack, makes disturbing reading.
Apart from reinforcing the case that Canberra's diplomacy had become thoroughly compromised, it shows that had Mr Woolcott been aware the journalists were in the line of attack, he could have intervened with General Murdani at the 11th hour to seek their protection.
But there is no evidence in the documents released yesterday that Mr Woolcott and his embassy, or the Department of Foreign Affairs back in Canberra thought Australians might be in the border region of Timor near Balibo.
The Jakarta embassy told Canberra on October 13 that the attack would start on October 15 [it was launched about 11pm local time with long distance mortar fire], and that Balibo would be the first target. This was brought to Foreign Minister Don Willesee's attention on October 14.
But Foreign Affairs did not appear to make any effort to find out the location of Australian journalists and aid workers in Portuguese Timor, and warn them to stay out of the danger zone. The head of Foreign Affairs, Alan Renouf, reacted angrily when Mr Woolcott cabled on October 18 that he assumed the department had "firmly discouraged" Australians from visiting East Timor "including the border area".
He pointed out that the embassy had reported the hostility in anti-Fretilin circles towards Australians, and that on October 13 the embassy had reported a warning that the UDT party would "probably kill [the Australian aid activist Michael] Darby if he fell into their hands". (The cable with this warning is not included in the volume of selected documents, Australia and the Indonesian Incorporation of Portuguese Timor, 1974-1976.)
The embassy had advised much earlier, on September 30, that key intelligence sources said President Soeharto had authorised increased assistance to the anti-Fretilin forces in Timor, and that up to 3,800 soldiers from Java would be gradually inserted into Portuguese Timor.
As the volume does not include intelligence material, we still do not know whether other agencies had put this advance notice together with the reports from the border by Greg Shackleton that were appearing on Channel 7 in Canberra and Melbourne (where all the intelligence agencies were then based).
The volume sheds no light on the question of Defence Signals Directorate interceptions of Indonesian radio messages before the attack that might show the Indonesians were aware of foreign journalists being in Balibo and that they were targeted to eliminate witnesses.
However, it does inferentially show that soon after the attack on October 16, DSD heard the Indonesians say that the bodies of four white men had been found in Balibo.
Officials said yesterday the Foreign Affairs historians who compiled the volume were shown this intercept, and the only other Balibo intercept DSD claims to have in its records, reporting that the bodies had been burned later the same day.
(In our book, Death in Balibo, Lies in Canberra, the Australian National University intelligence expert Desmond Ball and I report several former officials as saying that DSD did make an intercept several hours before the attack showing the newsmen would be targeted. We concluded this intercept had been withheld from normal distribution in Canberra).
That the October 16 intercept referred to only four bodies provides some excuse for the reluctance of Canberra to use it to confirm the deaths to the bereaved families: it was possible that one journalist, not known who, was still alive.
Even on November 6, the embassy official sent to investigate in Kupang, West Timor, Richard Johnson, reported information that the fifth journalist was being held captive in the Oecussi enclave. Mr Johnson said yesterday this came from an Indonesian journalist in Kupang, and was never corroborated.
The volume confirms that the Foreign Affairs mission to East Timor in April-May 1976 to investigate the Balibo deaths, led by the then political counsellor in the Jakarta embassy (and present head of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service), Allan Taylor, was a stage-managed affair. The Taylor team sent two reports to Canberra, one for public consumption, the other a backgrounder for the department.
The public document, presented by then foreign minister Andrew Peacock to Parliament, included accounts by Timorese anti-Fretilin leaders that only UDT and Apodeti partisans had been involved in the attack, and that the journalists had died in a hail of gunfire and their remains identified only much later.
The report said this account had "a certain plausibility" although Mr Taylor would have known from all his contacts with Indonesian operatives and access to intelligence material that in many respects the accounts were fictitious.
The second report includes the Indonesian Army's choreography of the visit, and mentions that Mr Taylor had lunch in Dili with General Murdani and Colonel Dading Kalbuadi, who had been the operational commander of the Balibo attacking forces and had gone into Balibo within an hour of the journalists' deaths.
There is no record that Mr Taylor asked Colonel Dading any embarrassing questions. He does report General Murdani as saying the presence of Indonesian troops was being concealed from the Australian mission (Jakarta then insisted there were only "volunteers" in East Timor). General Murdani told Mr Taylor: "You have seen the official side, this is the unofficial side."