The New Left and Suharto

The CPA was founded in 1920, and for most of its history, it parroted the Soviet Union’s foreign policy line. However, Nikita Khruschev’s “secret speech” estranged many CPA members from the USSR, creating an ideological vacuum. One wing of the CPA looked to the New Left and, later, to Eurocommunism for a new political framework to guide the movement.

Laurie Aarons was a key figure in this shift. Elected in 1965 as CPA national secretary, Aarons led the party away from the Soviet Union, especially after Moscow crushed the 1968 Prague Spring. Aarons condemned the Soviet invasion on the front page of the CPA’s official newspaper, Tribune, writing, “We support socialist democracy and national liberation.” In most modern socialist organizations, Aarons’s statement would be uncontroversial. But not so in the CPA — indeed, in 1968, the CPA was the only Western Communist party to repudiate the Soviet invasion.

Aarons’s insubordination outraged the CPA’s Stalinist old-guard faction, and especially Pat Clancy, the secretary of the powerful Building Workers’ Industrial Union. So in 1971, after years of bruising internal conflict between pro-Soviet and broadly New Left–aligned party members, Clancy and his supporters led a split to form the Socialist Party of Australia (SPA).

Although the SPA remained loyal to Soviet foreign policy, to its credit, it played an important role in building international solidarity with the campaign against apartheid in South Africa. And despite the acrimony of the 1971 split, SPA-aligned unionists took action in solidarity with FRETLIN’s struggle. For example, Pat Geraghty, a SPA member and secretary of the Seamen’s Union of Australia, coordinated pro-FRETILIN bans on Indonesian shipping.

However, it was mostly CPA members leading the East Timor solidarity campaign. This was in large part thanks to Aarons’s personal links with the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), which he developed attending the PKI’s 1954 and 1964 congresses. Indeed, Aarons personally knew many of the PKI members murdered by Suharto during the CIA-backed coup that brought him to power in 1965.

Ideological affinities between the CPA and FRETILIN also encouraged solidarity between the two organizations. For its part, FRETLIN mostly modeled itself on African anti-colonial liberation movements. However, it also drew on the CPA’s history of clandestine organizing — especially the practices it developed to subvert anti-communist laws during the 1920s and 1940s. And just as the shared struggle against Portuguese colonialism bonded Timor-Leste with African liberation movements, FRETILIN and the CPA united around a shared hatred of Suharto’s “New Order” regime.

The 1971 SPA split meant CPA members determined the party’s foreign policies, not Moscow. So when the 1974 Carnation Revolution toppled Portuguese dictator Marcelo Caetano, ending his regime’s failed colonial wars in Africa, Aarons exercised the CPA’s newfound independence and supported FRETILIN. In Tribune, the party celebrated its comrades’ founding manifesto, which called for “the total abolition of the Portuguese colonialist structure and the active rejection of neocolonialism.”

After Portugal’s left-wing government repealed bans on colonial political parties, FRETILIN formed a brief coalition government with the moderate Timorese Democratic Union (UDT). Both groups supported independence; however, the UDT favored the interests of wealthy plantation owners and senior colonial administrators. Meanwhile FRETILIN adopted a radical socialist agenda, including land reforms and an anti-colonial literacy program.

Eventually the contradictions in the FRETLIN-UDT coalition proved untenable, leading to a brief civil war that FRETILIN won. Fearing that Timor-Leste would become “a Cuba in Southeast Asia,” Suharto prepared to invade. In Australia, the CPA sensed that an Indonesian invasion was imminent and prepared to support the resistance by forming Radio Maubere.

Radio Maubere and ASIO

On December 7, 1975, Indonesia invaded East Timor on nominally anti-communist grounds, severing resistance fighters from formal diplomatic channels. Consequently, between 1975 and 1978, Radio Maubere was the only link between FRETILIN fighters and the outside world, and without it, news of Indonesian war crimes would never have reached Australia. The clandestine operation was also strategically crucial, as it established lines of communication, via CPA members, between exiled FRETILIN leaders in Mozambique and guerilla fighters in Timor-Leste.

It also cast a light on Suharto’s bloody occupation, feeding information to the press via two CPA front groups, the Campaign for Independent East Timor (CIET) and the East Timor News Agency (ETNA).

Denis Freney was the key figure behind the CIET, coordinating solidarity organizations across Australia. He led a colorful political life and was, at various times, a member of the Australian Labor Party (ALP), the CPA, and the Pabloist wing of the Fourth International. He also worked with revolutionary movements in South Africa, Algeria, and France. In October 1974, Freney was working for Tribune when he visited Timor, where he met with FRETILIN leaders Nicolau Lobato and José Ramos Horta.

FRETILIN’s plans to overcome illiteracy and poor health impressed Freney, and he reportedly returned to Australia “full of enthusiastic optimism.” In December 1974, he organized a speaking tour of Australia for FRETILIN leaders under the banner of the CIET, which he founded with Aarons’s support. The tour inspired CPA activists to start local CIET chapters across Australia.

In Darwin, the Northern Territory’s capital city, CPA members Brian Manning and Warwick Neilley founded a CIET branch that published regular pro-FRETILIN bulletins and later East Timor News. Manning was a veteran Communist who cut his teeth as a member of the militant Waterside Workers’ Federation before joining the CPA-aligned campaigns for Aboriginal land rights and equal wages. Manning is best known for supporting the Gurindji Walk-Off, a historic strike of Aboriginal stockmen and domestic workers against slavelike conditions that blossomed into the first successful land rights claim.

Freney and Manning orchestrated Radio Maubere with Joe Palmada, the CPA’s gruff but effective security advisor, who helped recruit and train radio operators. Palmada was tasked with evading Australian police and intelligence agencies, and he devised a system of rules that helped radio operators avoid arrest. In his memoir, Manning recalled that “the cardinal rule was to never return from a successful contact carrying the transmitter.” On one occasion, that rule saved Manning and a television journalist from arrest after police pinpointed their illegal broadcast.

“They surrounded the vehicles looking for the transmitter,” Manning recalled, “but I could see they were not able to lay charges because we didn’t have it. I said, ‘Come on, let’s go upstairs and have a coffee.’ We just walked away.”

But not all radio operators escaped authorities. In one case, police arrested the CPA’s radio technician and Estanislau da Silva, a young FRETILIN activist who later became a minister in East Timor’s first government. The CPA operator received a $100 fine, while authorities deported Da Silva to Mozambique, where he joined FRETILIN’s exiled leadership.

After the arrests, Palmada gave operators fake identities and sent them to live in isolated locations posing as tourists. Meanwhile, Harry Hatfield — a member of the CPA-aligned Metal Workers’ union — modified a Toyota 4WD into a mobile radio unit, fabricating a false fuel tank that secretly contained transmitting equipment. These efforts kept Radio Maubere operational, meaning it was able to expose Indonesia’s use of chemical weapons, sexual violence, and starvation against East Timorese civilians.

But Palmada’s security measures were far from foolproof, and eventually intelligence agencies infiltrated the network. Declassified Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) files show that the government implanted a mole in Radio Maubere, who identified members of the radio network and their activities. Authorities also uncovered that Frelimo, a Marxist liberation movement in Mozambique, was funding the CPA operation.

“Kissingerian Realism”

The Australian government wanted to disrupt Radio Maubere because senior diplomats, including Richard Woolcott, a veteran Cold War operative and Australia’s ambassador to Indonesia, believed that Suharto better served the national interest. Woolcott celebrated the “pragmatic rather than principled” philosophy of Henry Kissinger, the architect of the United States’ illegal activities in Vietnam, Chile, and the Middle East. And on his advice, ALP PM Gough Whitlam and his conservative successor, Malcolm Fraser, secretly supported Indonesia’s invasion.

Woolcott hoped that pleasing Suharto would help Australia secure favorable terms during negotiations over the so-called Timor Gap, a contested area along Australia’s northern maritime border containing lucrative oil and gas reserves. As he surmised, the “sea border could be much more readily negotiated with Indonesia than with Portugal or an independent Portuguese Timor.” In a nod to his US counterpart, Woolcott described this cynical calculation as “Kissingerian realism.”

Similarly ALP prime minister Gough Whitlam favored integration between East Timor and Indonesia, believing that an independent Timor-Leste would be economically unviable and potentially destabilizing. Records of Whitlam’s private meetings with Suharto show that the PM saw the CPA and pro-FRETILIN trade unionists as a foreign policy obstacle. In a private conversation with Suharto, the PM lamented that Australian Communists were still upset about the 1965 coup that swept Suharto to power.

In April 1975, the PM told Suharto:

Ever since the events of September 1965, Communist elements in Australia had been hostile towards Indonesia and had sought to create a rift between the two countries. Their support for independence for Portuguese Timor was another move in this play.

The PM’s remarks are jarring given Suharto’s coup unleashed a “paroxysm of violence” that killed up to one million innocent people, including academics, trade unionists, and other suspected communist sympathizers.

Whitlam’s Kissingerian legacy in East Timor also cast a shadow over his mostly positive record of challenging US imperialism. For example, after winning the 1972 election, Whitlam withdrew Australia from the Vietnam War and established diplomatic relations with China. His government also challenged rogue intelligence agencies and ordered a raid on ASIO’s headquarters after the organization refused to hand over files on domestic right-wing nationalists. And when Washington enlisted the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS, Australia’s version of the CIA) in a planned coup of Chile’s social democratic leader, Salvador Allende, Whitlam ordered Australian agents to cease all “clandestine activities.”

These decisions made Whitlam a CIA target, regardless of his efforts to help Suharto and Kissinger conceal atrocities in East Timor. In November 1975, a US-orchestrated soft coup ousted the PM, proving that neither Washington’s friends nor its enemies were above the realpolitik worldview of “Kissingerian realism.”

Despite the Australian government’s nominal policy of noninvolvement in East Timor, there is strong evidence that ASIO, presumably with Whitlam’s support, shared intelligence about the CIET with Indonesia. And it’s likely this intelligence helped Suharto carry out “Operation Skylight,” a decisive military victory that destroyed FRETILIN’s radio equipment and killed several key party leaders, including Nicolau Lobato.

FRETILIN Underground

In December 1978, Operation Skylight silenced Radio Maubere, muffling Timor-Leste’s independence struggle. While some lines of communication between FRETILIN and the outside world persisted, the party lost its direct link with the Australian press. As a result, the operation drastically curtailed international scrutiny of Indonesian Army activities, allowing Suharto to bomb FRETILIN bases and civilian targets with impunity. Meanwhile, the Indonesian Army stepped up its genocide of East Timorese civilians, massacring hundreds of villages and burning civilians alive in Suharto’s “final solution.”

Indonesia used napalm and chemical weapons to drive FRETILIN underground. While in hiding, some leaders deprioritized revolutionary warfare in favor of political pressure and diplomacy. For example, Commander Xanana Gusmão, a former FRETILIN guerilla, built a clandestine network of political front groups to recruit and train new activists. Organizations like the National Students Resistance and the Organization of Timorese Women maintained links with armed guerrillas but mostly disseminated political and human rights information to journalists and overseas governments.

José Ramos Horta, FRETILIN’s foreign affairs spokesperson, also replaced armed struggle with international diplomacy, initiating peace talks with Indonesia under the auspices of the United Nations. Like Gusmão, Horta built coalitions with East Timorese moderates, including Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo, a high-ranking member of the Catholic Church. These efforts by Horta and Gusmão rekindled international interest in East Timor, especially after US journalists smuggled out footage of the 1991 Santa Cruz massacre, in which the Indonesian Army murdered over 250 peaceful protesters. When Western journalists broadcast footage of the bloodbath, overseas support for Timor’s independence struggle grew rapidly.

The new, moderate strategy pursued by East Timor’s independence movement paralleled ideological shifts in the CPA. In the 1980s, after the collapse of the New Left, the party pursued a more moderate, reformist agenda and aligned itself with the ALP and center-left trade unions. During this period, the party stagnated and dissolved itself in 1991, forming the SEARCH Foundation, which maintained links with East Timor’s independence movement. For example, in 1993, some former CPA members helped establish the Horta-aligned East Timor Relief Association (ETRA). Meanwhile, other communists followed Estanislau da Silva, FRETILIN’s national coordinator and former Radio Maubere operator, who returned to Australia in 1985.

Australia’s Kissingerian Legacy

After the fall of Suharto in 1998, Indonesia bowed to international pressure and withdrew from East Timor. Once again, FRETILIN leaders transformed the party, this time from a clandestine resistance movement into a democratic political force. In 2001, Mari Alkatiri — a founding member of FRETILIN — lead the party to victory in Timor-Leste’s first free election.

Conventional histories of East Timor tend to chalk Alkatiri’s victory up to the moderation of the independence campaign, especially crediting Horta’s human rights approach. That perspective ignores the revolutionary aims of FRETILIN during the 1970s and minimizes the role of the CPA, Radio Maubere, and the revolutionary origins of the international solidarity campaign.

Peter Job, a former Radio Maubere operator, argues that the Australian government has manufactured a “narrative of denial” to paper over its role in Suharto’s occupation of East Timor. There’s every reason to suspect that this narrative of denial is still obscuring the truth about Australia’s actions. As recently as 2012, a senior ASIS agent, known only as Witness K, revealed that Australia bugged government offices in Timor-Leste during negotiations concerning the Greater Sunrise oil and gas field. The subsequent trial of Witness K and his lawyer, Bernard Collaery, exposed the empty sophistry of Australian foreign policy.

Despite publicly backing Timor-Leste’s sovereignty, Australia’s covert activities show that it has never strayed far from the “Kissingerian realism” that Woolcott espoused in the mid-1970s.