Jill Jolliffe – A former defence minister in the Whitlam government, Bill Morrison, has left open the possibility of an SAS operation to evacuate the Balibo Five from the border area of East Timor in October, 1975.
Morrison said that although he was unaware of such a mission, his approval would not have been strictly necessary. "One would like to think so, but I think certain defence force ministers aren't always fully informed of the movement of units," he said when asked if he knew of such a mission.
He told The Age that there was often a gap between principle and reality when it came to ministerial approval.
In a carefully-worded response about reports that an SAS mission may have been initiated in an attempt to extricate the journalists, Morrison said: "It is extraordinary that a unit would be there and I certainly wasn't aware of their presence. No request was made of me and no decision came from me. I had no information ... if there were any major SAS groups there I didn't know about it and I didn't authorise a taskforce."
Intelligence experts have argued that any covert SAS operation into East Timor would normally have been authorised by then prime minister Gough Whitlam, or by Morrison.
Whitlam, 85, responded to questions submitted to him about the existence of such a mission with one sentence: "I never heard that such a mission was proposed or had occurred." He declined to comment further.
Recent research on the deaths of Greg Shackleton, Gary Cunningham, Tony Stewart, Brian Peters and Malcolm Rennie has revealed that on October 13, 1975, three days before Indonesian forces attacked Balibo, Australian diplomats in Jakarta had been given detailed advance plans for the Indonesian attack.
This knowledge was withheld from the public as well as from Australia's closest Western allies – the United States, Britain and New Zealand – as is indicated on relevant cables by the code AUSTEO: "Australian eyes only."
The journalists were killed in Balibo at dawn on October 16 as they filmed Indonesian forces attacking with warships, artillery, helicopter gunships and regular infantry troops. Morrison said that at the time he had no knowledge that the journalists were in the remote border town waiting to film the Indonesian invasion.
"I certainly wasn't aware that the Balibo Five were in East Timor," he said. "You might recall that before this we [the Whitlam government] had taken out quite a lot of Australians. Some journalists then entered illegally."
He said he was unaware that Australian diplomat John Starey had informed the government on October 9 that Greg Shackleton of Channel 7 and his crew were on their way to East Timor, after he met them in Darwin's Travelodge hotel before their departure.
Documents released recently (October 15) under the Freedom of Information Act contain evidence to the 1999 Sherman inquiry by Edward Howes, a former clerk of the secret Office Of Current Intelligence. He testified that records of radio intercepts from East Timor had been hand-delivered to Whitlam and other senior government officials in October, 1975.
He said the intercepts reported when the five journalists arrived in East Timor from Australia and when they reached Balibo, described the house they camped in and gave details of their deaths, all within hours of those events.