Philip Dorling – Declassified ASIO files on East Timorese President Jose Ramos-Horta shed new light on the complex diplomatic and intelligence games before and after Indonesia's invasion of East Timor in December 1975. The files also provide a rare insight into ASIO's highly sensitive foreign intelligence collection role.
Although much of ASIO's work is devoted to internal security, a key role for the top-secret security agency has always been to collect intelligence in Australia that supports the international interests and objectives of Government. ASIO's targeting of Ramos-Horta began in October 1974. Six months earlier a revolution in Portugal had put a question mark over the future of that country's impoverished and neglected territory of East Timor. Then 24, Ramos-Horta quickly emerged as the leading international representative of the East Timorese nationalist movement and he undertook early quasi- diplomatic missions, first to Jakarta and then to Canberra in July 1974.
Anxious to avoid jeopardising Australia's relations with Indonesia, the Foreign Affairs Department advised Prime Minister Gough Whitlam and Foreign Minister Don Willesee not to meet Ramos-Horta and his discussions in Canberra were confined to official levels only. As Foreign Affairs put it in a briefing to Willesee, "In the formulation of policy on Portuguese Timor, we need to try to avoid courses likely to irritate Indonesia without good reason. Indeed one of our overriding concerns must be to pay careful attention to Indonesian susceptibilities over Portuguese Timor."
In Canberra, Ramos-Horta stayed with the former Australian Consul in Dili and then-director of the Foreign Affairs research group in the Commonwealth Parliamentary Library, Jim Dunn. Over the following three decades Dunn would be one of the staunchest Australian supporters of the East Timorese cause and he remains a close associate of the East Timorese President to this day.
Whitlam met Indonesian President Suharto in September 1974. East Timor was at the top of the agenda. Whitlam told Suharto his personal view was that East Timor should become part of Indonesia, and that should preferably happen in accordance with the will of the East Timorese people. According to Whitlam, East Timor was too small to be independent; it was not economically viable and would be a focus of attention for powers outside the region, that was to say the Soviet Union and communist China. Suharto left little doubt that he regarded the possibility of an independent East Timor as an unacceptable source of instability "a thorn in the eye of Australia and a thorn in Indonesia's back" as he put it.
ASIO's file on Ramos-Horta begins a month after the Whitlam-Suharto meeting with a report that Dunn had telephoned ASIO to pass on some intelligence concerning East Timor. Dunn had already contacted Foreign Affairs and the Joint Intelligence Organisation to provide an account of a discussion with a young Australian woman, Wendy Holland, who had been Ramos-Horta's fiance and had recently returned from a visit to East Timor. Dunn told ASIO that Holland had said Ramos-Horta and the leadership of Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor, Fretilin, feared that Whitlam and Suharto had reached an accord to turn Portuguese Timor over to Indonesia and Fretilin was preparing to take up arms to fight in the event of an Indonesian invasion. Ramos-Horta was seeking support from Australian communists and Holland was also carrying a letter from him to the Chinese Ambassador in Canberra seeking Chinese support for East Timor. She also carried a letter from Ramos-Horta to Dunn saying, amongst other things, "Mr Whitlam will regret one day the dirty business he has made with Suharto."
From this point on ASIO's file on Ramos-Horta grew rapidly. ASIO's primary interest was to expose and analyse emerging links between Ramos-Horta and ASIO's long-standing intelligence target, the Communist Party of Australia. The Communist Party was strongly supportive of the East Timorese cause. Political sensitivities on the part of Labor attorney-general Kep Enderby resulted in ASIO being forbidden from undertaking physical surveillance of Ramos-Horta during his visits to Australia, but a range of other techniques was employed to obtain intelligence on the East Timorese representative. The primary source of ASIO's intelligence was telephone interception of Communist Party member and secretary of the campaign for an independent East Timor, Denis Freney. Reports by ASIO agents, including at least one well-placed source in the Portuguese Consulate in Darwin, together with postal interception also contributed significant intelligence.
At various times Ramos-Horta is described as "very depressed" and "very disillusioned" with Australian politicians. Much of ASIO's reporting on Ramos-Horta was summarised and forwarded to the Joint Intelligence Organisation for incorporation into reports by JIO's Office of Current Intelligence that were sent daily and weekly to Whitlam, other ministers and senior bureaucrats.
ASIO did not see Ramos-Horta as a revolutionary. Analysts quickly concluded that Ramos-Horta was a nationalist of relatively moderate political views. In June 1975 one ASIO analyst commented, "That Horta should avail himself of the [Communist Party's] hospitality in no way reflects his concurrence with the political aims of that party."
Notwithstanding observations such as these, the extensive and detailed ASIO intelligence reporting of Ramos-Horta's association with Australian communists, especially Freney, and with the leftist journalist Jill Joliffe, reinforced the general hostility of Australian diplomats and policy-makers towards the East Timorese nationalist leadership.
Ramos-Horta's broader political contacts and involvement with a wider range of student, union and humanitarian groups were not well reported by ASIO. Instead Ramos-Horta's activism was often presented though the narrow lens of recorded telephone conversations between Australian communist activists with a result that JIO, Foreign Affairs and Government ministers received a distinctly slanted picture of the Fretilin leadership.
In an important disclosure, the declassified ASIO files reveal that in May 1975 ASIO briefed BAKIN, the Indonesian State Intelligence Coordination Agency, on Ramos-Horta's connections with Freney, the Committee for an Independent East Timor and the Communist Party. Although ASIO emphasised that Australian communists had little capacity to assist East Timorese nationalist groups such as Fretilin, the detailed confirmation of Ramos-Horta's international communist links would have reinforced the determination of the Indonesian military to prevent the emergence of an independent East Timor.
Australia's Ambassador in Jakarta, Richard Woolcott, would later describe the Australian diplomacy at this time as involving "a pragmatic rather than a principled stand", adding "that is what national interest and foreign policy is all about". ASIO's intelligence collection on Ramos-Horta could have suffered a severe blow when in July 1975 Canberra Times journalist Jack Waterford (now Editor-at-Large) reported that attorney-general Enderby had authorised "one [telephone] tap on a person associated with the Australian movement to secure an independent East Timor". Freney continued to use his phone for sensitive discussions about East Timor issues.
Thus on November 25, 1975, ASIO recorded a conversation between Ramos-Horta and Freney in which Ramos-Horta revealed that Fretilin intended to declare independence unilaterally within a few days. (The independence declaration took place on November 28.)
ASIO's surveillance of Ramos-Horta continued after the Indonesian invasion of East Timor began on December 7, 1975, three weeks after Whitlam was dismissed as prime minister and a week before the consequent Australian federal election. Fretilin's foreign affairs representative had left Dili and flown to Darwin a few days before the Indonesian attack. JIO made an urgent request to ASIO for intelligence, specifically "seeking any information which throws light upon possible developments in Timor including [Communist Party] support for the group Horta represents". This opportunity for intelligence collection was brief, however, because Ramos-Horta flew on to Lisbon for discussions with the Portuguese Government and then to the United Nations in New York.
When Ramos-Horta returned to Australia for a week-long visit at the end of January 1976 ASIO organised a discrete search of his baggage. By this time Foreign Affairs was already working to encourage prime minister Malcolm Fraser's government to exclude Ramos-Horta and other East Timorese leaders from further visits to Australia.
In February 1976, the then-acting head of the Department's South-East Asia Division, Lance Joseph, told foreign minister Andrew Peacock that, "it would probably be best not to admit Horta and other members of the Fretilin central committee to Australia under any circumstances". Peacock agreed, but hoping to avoid a public backlash, the Fraser government allowed Ramos-Horta to pay a further visit to Australia in May 1976. On his arrival however, he was subjected to the indignity of a comprehensive baggage and body search by Customs.
After discussions with Fraser, immigration minister MacKellar agreed that Ramos-Horta should not be allowed to build up a group of supporters in Australia or possibly encourage a flow of refugees from Timor. When Ramos-Horta next applied for a visa at the Australian Consulate in New York in late 1977, he was curtly told that a visa would not be issued and that the decision had been made in Canberra. Members of the Fraser government frequently referred to Ramos-Horta as a "leftist" and a "communist".
The visa ban would remain in place until 1984 when years of lobbying by pro-East Timor activists paid off and Prime Minister Bob Hawke's Labor government allowed Ramos-Horta a six-week visit "in a personal capacity". In 1987 he applied for and received permanent residency on the basis of sponsorship by his sister who lived in Australia. According to analysts within the Australian intelligence community, Ramos-Horta remains an important target of Australia's intelligence collection agencies. "He's still very much of interest to us," one analyst told The Canberra Times. The Ramos-Horta files have certainly not been closed.