By Philip Dorling
ASIO was on the trail of a federal Labor MP recently exposed as a KGB informant, a new official history reveals.
The former Labor member for the NSW electorate of Hunter, Albert "Bert" James, was listed as Soviet intelligence informant in the papers of KGB archivist and defector Vasili Mitrokhin, which were recently released in the United Kingdom.
ANU Professor and author David Horner who has written a book on the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation.Credit: Glen McCurtayne
Now, the first volume of The Spy Catchers, The Official History of ASIOt least 1962, with security officers concerned the left-wing MP was "an attractive target for cultivation by the RIS [Russian Intelligence Service]."
Professor Horner's history, which is being released on Tuesday, records that James came to ASIO's attention because of his association with Ivan Skripov, a Soviet diplomat who was in fact the KGB "resident" – the most senior Soviet intelligence officer operating from the Soviet embassy in Canberra.
Albert 'Bert' James circa 1970s.
Around this time ASIO opened a "special top secret closely controlled file" on Soviet embassy contacts with members of Parliament.
ASIO intercepted telephone conversations between Skripov and James about overseas travel that prompted then Attorney-General Sir Garfield Barwick to observe: "They would appear to be very very friendly and the association would appear to be of a close and longstanding nature."
The Spy Catchers
The history says ASIO monitored James's Soviet contacts for at least a decade.
Mitrokhin's notes from the KGB's archive do not reveal what information James may have passed to the Soviet Union, but they do confirm his status as a KGB informant in contact with another KGB Resident, Geronty Lazovik, who served in Australia from 1971 to 1976. Mitrokhin's notes record that the KGB listed James under the insecure codename of "Albert".
A former senior ASIO counter-espionage officer has claimed that in the late 1960s and early 1970s another KGB officer, Vladimir Aleysyev was
A former NSW policeman who served in the Australian Parliament from 1960 to 1980, James was highly critical of "USA imperialism" and opposed Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War.
Members of James's family defended him after his listing as a KGB informant was revealed by Fairfax Media in August.
"My dad was a loyal Australian, his commitment was to the people of the Hunter electorate," his son Rowley James told The Newcastle Herald
Two volumes of Albert James's ASIO file, containing material up to at least 1987, are held by the National Archives of Australia but have not yet been declassified.
Professor Horner told Fairfax Media he had been given comprehensive access to ASIO's records as an independent historian to produce "an official history … not the organisation's view of its history and its assessment of its own achievements". Two further volumes will cover ASIO's history from 1963 to 1989, the end of the Cold War.