my secrets continue to be exposed

A spy like Horrie
National
DateOctober 14, 2013 (0)
Read laterPhilip DorlingASIO has declassified secret files that shed new light on one of the most dramatic cases of Cold War espionage in Australia's history.
Horace Pile joined the Communist Party in 1943.

On a scorching hot afternoon in late December 1962, an attractive, well-dressed woman arrived outside the Maid and Magpie Hotel in Stepney, an inner eastern suburb of Adelaide.

The Cuban missile crisis had recently brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. To Australia's north, the Vietnam War was escalating. Under prime minister Robert Menzies, Australia still maintained close defence ties with the United Kingdom, including testing British missiles at the Woomera range in northern South Australia - a major target for Soviet intelligence.

Ten days earlier, Kay Marshall had met a Soviet diplomat in Sydney. A gregarious figure on Canberra's small diplomatic circuit, Ivan Skripov was a KGB officer who had spent 15 months grooming Marshall to work as a Soviet intelligence operative. He briefed her to fly to Adelaide and meet a man outside the Maid and Magpie. Her contact, he told her, would be about 45 years old, wearing brown horn-rimmed spectacles, and carrying a black brief case and a folded copy of The Age.


A Bloodhound missile at Woomera Range.
Marshall was a double agent. She had been working in the British high commission in Wellington, New Zealand, when she had been first approached by another Soviet diplomat KGB officer four years earlier. She told the high commission's security officer, and the NZ Security Intelligence Service had run her as a double agent against her KGB contacts.

Advertisement Codenamed ''Sylvia'', ASIO took over Marshall's handling when she moved to Sydney in December 1960, and was contacted by Skripov, who trained her in clandestine communication techniques.

This was classic espionage tradecraft pointing to the existence of a Soviet ''illegal'' network - secret agents operating outside the protection of diplomatic cover.

ASIO was even more intrigued when it examined a package Skripov had given Marshall to hand to her contact in Adelaide. Inside was a metal box that contained a tape recorder-like device that, when used with a radio transmitter, was capable of condensing a long message into a ''burst'' transmission lasting only a few seconds.

Using such a device, an agent could communicate with the Soviet embassy in Canberra or a listening post overseas with virtually undetectable flashes of radio signals. An identical message sender had been seized by British intelligence from a Soviet spy ring in the UK a year earlier.

The obvious Soviet intelligence target in South Australia was the Weapons Research Establishment (WRE), at Salisbury, north of Adelaide. WRE supported operations at Woomera and was home to dozens of British and Australian weapons contractors.

ASIO had high hopes of uncovering a Soviet spy ring when Marshall arrived outside the Maid and Magpie at 5pm on December 29, 1962. She waited in the heat of the summer afternoon. And waited. After an hour she left without any contact being made.

Next day, following Skripov's instructions, Marshall returned at 1pm and waited another hour. But again no one came. ASIO eventually concluded that ''saturation'' surveillance coverage may have tipped off the target.

Skripov was surprised when Marshall told him what had happened and the KGB officer sent her a series of messages written in invisible ink urgently seeking the return of the package. ASIO didn't want to hand the message sender back to the Russian.

In early February 1963, the Australian government declared Skripov persona non grata and demanded he leave Australia within seven days. Amid intense media interest, Skripov grumpily boarded an overseas flight, bound for Moscow, never to return.

Prime minister Menzies congratulated ASIO director-general Sir Charles Spry on ''the outstanding work of high national importance which [ASIO] has performed in this matter''.

However, the reality was that a major counter-espionage operation had been aborted. There were lingering questions that engaged ASIO officers for many years. Who was Marshall's mysterious contact and why had he failed to show up? Who was leaking information of such value that the KGB would supply sophisticated communications equipment?

There have been no answers, at least publicly, to these questions in more than five decades. However, declassified ASIO files now reveal that ASIO did have a prime suspect - Horace Allan Pile, an electronics components salesman who was a frequent visitor to WRE.

Born in Colac in Victoria in 1923, Pile served as a Royal Australian Air Force radar technician during the Second World War, rising to the rank of sergeant. Against the backdrop of the Western wartime alliance with the Soviet Union, he also joined the Communist Party while training at the Tocumwal RAAF base in NSW in 1943.

After he was demobbed in 1945, Pile became a Communist Party organiser in Victoria. His devotion to the cause, described by ASIO informants as ''fanatical'' and ''intense'', was such that he left his first wife, Kathleen, after she refused to join the party.

Pile moved to Adelaide in what ASIO thought were ''unusual circumstances'' in 1951. He was immediately elected to the Communist Party's state executive committee. A year later he became a full-time party organiser before becoming state secretary of the Ships Painters and Dockers Union.

Significantly, Pile was also involved with the party's ''illegal apparatus'', a network of members who avoided open political activity so that the party could operate clandestinely if the government moved to make its activities illegal. Prominent South Australian communist lawyer Elliott Johnston recalled more than four decades later that ''Horrie was sent to us by the Central Committee … to help set things up to keep the party going [in South Australia] if Menzies had succeeded in bringing in a ban.''

Johnston said Walter Seddon Clayton, a member of the party's central control commission responsible for internal discipline and security, was responsible for Pile's transfer to South Australia. Codenamed ''Klod'', Clayton was the spymaster who ran a network of Australian communist spies who passed secret government information to Soviet intelligence from 1944 to 1950.

Clayton would effectively disappear for several years in the early 1950s to avoid ASIO surveillance. Little is known of his activities in this period, but he may not have entirely ceased his espionage role.

From about 1956 Pile began to withdraw from overt party activity. In early 1959 he resigned from the Painters and Dockers and took up employment with an electrical goods company, Gerard and Goodman. Two years later he became the Adelaide sales representative for a major electronic equipment and components supplier, Jacoby Mitchell.

This was a significant development because Jacoby Mitchell was a leading supplier of electronic test equipment and instruments to the Weapons Research Establishment. As the firm's South Australian salesman and technical adviser, Pile began to visit WRE on a regular basis in early 1961.

Pile did not tell Jacoby Mitchell of his involvement with the Communist Party. Nor did he apply for a security pass and submit to a security clearance process which would have almost certainly rejected him. Instead he visited WRE under escort, and was soon passing through the main security checkpoint at least two or three times a week.

Pile was good at his job. A WRE security officer observed that ''Pile is assessed by technical personnel, with whom he deals, as being a very good technical man … Mr Pile is a very good salesman.''

Pile's work brought him into contact with technical personnel with ''wide access to very sensitive information'' including warhead fusing systems, telemetry systems and other aspects of the Bloodhound and Thunderbird surface-to-air missile projects, the Blue Steel nuclear tipped bomb, and the Australian Ikara anti-submarine missile. WRE security officers feared ''the possibility of him obtaining classified information is very real''.

By mid-December 1962, ASIO's Adelaide office somewhat belatedly concluded that Pile was a ''subject worthy of concentrated attention''. He was designated a ''suspect illegal'' - that is a spy - and placed under close surveillance.

Pile wasn't the agent who failed to meet Marshall outside the Maid and Magpie hotel. He didn't fit the description and was on holiday in Victoria at the time, returning to Adelaide two weeks later. But he was alarmed when the news of Skripov's expulsion hit the airwaves on February 7, 1963. Anticipating a raid on his home, Pile told another Communist Party member ''I'm destroying everything at home in case there is a search … they can't get much on me.''

Pile's ASIO file was given a new designation by ASIO's counter-espionage branch as a ''suspect illegal'' and he was placed under close surveillance.

Pile's employers were worried. Jacoby Mitchell's chief executive flew in from Sydney and questioned Pile about why he hadn't applied for a security pass at WRE. Pile confessed he had a communist past but falsely claimed he'd severed all connections with the party at least four years earlier. He insisted he was just ''trying to lead a normal family life''. Pile's boss was sympathetic, but disconcerted by Pile's disclosure of past communist activity.

ASIO surveillance yielded little information so it was decided to end Pile's visits to WRE. Jacoby Mitchell was asked to transfer him to another position interstate. Pile's boss agreed to move him to Melbourne ''with as much discretion as possible'' because he ''realised the possibility of political embarrassment'' to the government and ''even greater embarrassment to his firm''.

ASIO's concerns were reinforced when examination of an order book Pile used revealed he had been in contact with at least 70 personnel engaged in secret work. Interviews with WRE staff revealed Pile had been afforded ''liberal opportunities'' to see equipment and instruments and highlighted his propensity to ask for ''background information, which in the field of wave band, frequencies, etc, has considerable security value''.

ASIO had other indicators of Soviet intelligence interest in WRE and Woomera. Australian Naval Intelligence had warned there was ''evidence of a Soviet submarine operating in South Australian waters'' at the time of major missile firings at Woomera.

There is also now evidence that Soviet bloc intelligence services did indeed obtain British missile secrets from Australia.

The Soviet and Czechoslovakian intelligence services worked closely together from the mid-1950s with a particular focus on collecting intelligence on American and British weapons technology.

Some years ago the Czech-Australian historian Peter Hubry accessed state security archives in Prague that indicated the Czechoslovakian consulate-general in Sydney reported intelligence on ''the most modern weapons''.

More recently declassified Czech military archives indicate that Czechoslovakian intelligence obtained secret information from Australia in 1961-62 relating to the Bloodhound missile, an air-to-air missile codenamed Fireflash, and electronic test equipment used by British firms EMI and AVRO, both contractors at WRE. The Australian source is not identified, but the nature of the information is consistent with Pile's contacts at WRE and the period of his visits.

Pile was under considerable stress at the time of his move to Melbourne. He was aware he was under surveillance. His marriage to his second wife Rivka was breaking down and a bitter dispute over the custody of their two children was beginning. Eight years later, in 1971, he died of a heart attack at just 48. ASIO quietly closed his file. Rivka was active in the anti-nuclear, peace and feminist movements in the 1970s and 1980s. She died in 2002.

Was Pile the spy? Regrettably he didn't respond. However, there is a strong circumstantial case. Pile did have access, technical knowledge and motivation.

A small number of Australian Communist Party members did actively assist Soviet and Czechoslovakian intelligence from the 1940s through to at least the 1970s. Walter Clayton's role in Pile's relocation to Adelaide certainly appears significant, and consistent with what is known of the overlap between the Communist Party's illegal apparatus and Soviet bloc espionage in Australia, and sensitive missile information did leak during the period of Pile's access to WRE.

Pile's daughter Judy, a Melbourne composer, describes her late father as a ''really intelligent person'' who could be charming but was also single minded, driven and ''something of a fundamentalist'' . He was ''very capable of compartmentalising his life''.

''If it were the case [that he was involved in espionage], I would be really angry with him for lots of reasons … not least for doing something quite at odds with communist ideals that supported peace and disarmament,'' she said.

Marshall's missing contact, still unidentified, was probably an illegal operative who was to provide a communications link in a Soviet-Czechoslovakian intelligence operation. ASIO's forthcoming official history may shed further light on the case, though the full story probably remains out of reach, tucked away in still classified KGB files in Moscow.

Perhaps the enduring significance of the case is that it highlights the fact that the business of espionage is far from romantic or exciting and often involves people in low-profile, often mundane jobs.

An inconspicuous technical expert like Horrie Pile is often a more likely spy than the more glamorous portrayals of Hollywood movies, and the business of counter-espionage is often a tedious, frustrating business that ends up with as many questions as answers - even after half a century.

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Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/national/a-spy-like-horrie-20131013-2vgbd.html#ixzz2hpofRudL

Hmmmmmmph.

"His marriage to his second wife Rivka was breaking down and a bitter dispute over the custody of their two children was beginning. Eight years later, in 1971, he died of a heart attack at just 48. ASIO quietly closed his file. Rivka was active in the anti-nuclear, peace and feminist movements in the 1970s and 1980s. She died in 2002."

...oddly enough I met and became friends with The remarkable Rivka...

of course any resembance between me and the unforch late Horrie are purely coincindental...that Horrie was clearly a pile of untrustworthy Merlin

Hmmm....'Horace Pile'??

I have a recollection that certain people (poss even myself) may have called you 'Horrie the Haemmeroid' on the odd occasion....is there a connection?

what an astute young character you are...you always get to the bottom of the problem quickly

Sorry h. TL:DR.  

huh....what is TL:DR?

am certain I will regret asking this

"Too late: Done 'Ready"

geebers....did I commit a NTR?

horace wrote:huh....what is TL:DR?

am certain I will regret asking this

That Petey's a wag.

TL:DR is standard InterWeb shorthand for "Too Long : Didn't Read".

I usually give everything you post a quick glance but took one look at your opening post and thought "fark that!!" It is Karti- / Vikas-esque.

it is an interesting story tho...I am ignoring the karti/vikas jibe as I did not attempt bizarre maths