Book Review

This is an important work and a major contribution to scholarship about the origins of the Cold War. At another level it reflects the transformation of its author from university radical and editor of Tribune, to a member of the august advisory board of the Oxford Companion to Espionage. As Ned Kelly said, 'Such is Life'.	1
The major thrust of Espionage and the Roots of the Cold War is that all the reactionary propaganda of the period was not entirely wrong. The Reds were not only under the bed, some of them were tapping away messages to Moscow. The pivotal chapter is the book's concluding one on Cold War espionage in Australia, but much of the book is concerned with providing introductory context. David McKnight shows how underground political work, originally referred to by its Russian name of konspiratsya, became a secret but integral part of the communist movement between 1917 and the late 1960s. There are chapters on the Comintern's infiltration of western armed forces in the interwar period, the Comintern underground in China during the 1930s, underground activities in the United States, Britain, as well the Communist Party of Australia's activities in this regard between 1931 and 1942. These included infiltrating the Australian Labor Party, in this respect Jack Hughes of the Clerks' Union evidently being the key figure. Some of the most tantalising material is in the footnotes. We learn, for instance, that as Member for Swan between 1943 and 1946 Donald Mountjoy more than likely was the principal dual member of the CPA and ALP to have sat in Commonwealth parliament.	2
It is important to make the point that McKnight is not some latter day Cecil Sharpley, denouncing his youthful enthusiasms. McKnight is at pains to point out that such new post Cold War history should not been seen as 'old anti-communist scholarship in new guise'. He writes: 'It would be a mistake, for example, to see communist parties as mere extensions of Soviet espionage or even as a purely pro-Soviet phenomenon. This would be to gravely underestimate their effect on domestic policy, on the labour movement and on cultural and intellectual life' (p. 199).	3
McKnight is also to be congratulated on the extent of research that informs Espionage and the Roots of the Cold War. The files of the Communist International in Moscow, the much vaunted Venona decrypt documents and the records of the Shanghai Municipal Police in the United States National Archives are among his key primary sources. He also seems to have experienced remarkable success in encouraging the likes of Jack Hughes and Wally Clayton to open up in respect of their covert activities. Clearly for such individuals what they did or did not do must be seen as 'politics' more than espionage.	4
My only difficulty with Espionage and the Roots of the Cold War lies occasionally with its interpretation of evidence. While McKnight provides a brief account of why the Venona documents can be trusted, and has written elsewhere on these sources, (see Intelligence and National Security, vol. 13, no. 2, 1998), there are times, particularly in the chapter on espionage in Australia, when I would have appreciated the author standing back from the evidence and commenting on its reliability. Instead McKnight provides a footnote to a Venona document. I do not doubt it, but still find it hard to get my head around the prospect of the knockabout Australian and professional fisherman, Walter Seddon Clayton, being Australia's Kim Philby, simply because I wonder about his ability to gain access to sensitive documents. I suppose if one accepts — as McKnight does — that Jim Hill and Ian Milner of External Affairs were spies, and that Clayton did visit them, as he evidently did, this might explain how sensitive documents ended up in Russian hands. But in terms of the Philby/Burgess/McLean model one might surmise that the Comintern underground would have needed to infiltrate the Australian security services to gain access to information of any great significance. Here, too, McKnight has some suggestions. Apart from the rogue Special Branch policeman, Alf Hughes, who was apparently won over to the leftist cause, McKnight includes a brief, speculative reference to Stanley Taylor. In 1942 Taylor was director of the Commonwealth security service before taking up his appointment as president of the New South Wales Industrial Commission. During the Petrov Royal Commission Stan Taylor spent his day in court, primarily inspired by the tid-bit of evidence in Petrov's documents that he was both 'a labour supporter' (which was true) and had given a document to the Communist Party that had exposed an agent provocateur.	5
Having read all of the available primary evidence on this subject in relation to Taylor, I would be reluctant to include him in any embryonic Russian espionage ring. (Clayton's underground work was related to local CPA issues until 1945. His activities stepped up a gear when he accepted payment from the KGB/Tass correspondent Nosov in March-April 1945, (p. 188)). In my view McKnight rather too confidently claims that Taylor or his underling Alf Hughes 'probably' unmasked Jimmy McPhee, the agent. McKnight may well be right but he needs stronger evidence to prove that Taylor, too, worked with the communists via Clayton simply because his brother, 'Fighting Billy' Taylor, was closely connected to the New South Wales Labor Party at a time when it was strongly in the orbit of the CPA. (Mr Justice Taylor's case is also discussed in McKnight's previous book, Australia's Spies and their Secrets, p. 82).	6
Debate about a passing remark in a stray paragraph should not dominate impressions of a 100,000 word monograph. Espionage and the Roots of the Cold War is a fine book, a courageous work in the non-Humphrey Appleby sense. It deserves a wider readership than the price of its hardback version and the weak Australian dollar is likely to generate.	7
University of Western Sydney ANDREW MOORE

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