SOMERTON MAN: 'V', PART 1.

'V' PART 1.

Wally Clayton

BACKGROUND

During and after WW2, this man was the somewhat 'public' face of the Communist threat to Australia. The photo was taken by Australian Intelligence services, specifically ASIO.

There is no doubt that it was a major threat, to the extent that there were organisations poised and ready to defend our nation against communism

Many of the members of these organisations came from the intelligence community, the armed services and the ranks of the Police force from each State with some leading public figures heading the lists for each State. They were particularly active during the years 1947 to 1949. That is the period when the threat of a communist-inspired takeover was seen as being imminent.

INTELLIGENCE ORGANISATIONS

During and after the war, it's estimated that some 20 and possibly more intelligence agencies were active in Australia, a brief lull in the immediate aftermath of the ending of open hostilities was replaced by a lift in tempo by 1946 when the threat posed by Russia and its Allies was perceived as being too great to ignore.

What follows is important and I would like you to consider this carefully, with all of these agencies actively working in the field in Australia, how on earth were those activities co-ordinated? Did they communicate with each other? Did they communicate with the Australian Government? Who or which agency oversaw all of the traffic that was indeed generated and who made the assessments? We have a name, a fairly short name for a person that fits the bill.

The answer to the question about communications with the Government is mostly 'Yes' but 'fully' is another matter. Amongst those agencies involved, you will find the Central Intelligence Bureau, Military Intelligence, NIB, CIS, CSS, Police, SOE, MI6, OSS, CIA and more. Most were of Australian origin and as you can see, some were not.

There was a fair bit of rivalry and infighting that occurred between these outfits with one amusing example of a convicted and imprisoned burglar being employed by one unit to crack open a safe belonging to another with the documents obtained providing rather damaging and embarrassing information.

The purpose of this series of posts is to elaborate on those agencies and the people involved as well as some of the codes and cyphers they used in the execution of their work.

CLANDESTINE COMMUNICATIONS

The communication methods included clandestine communications especially amongst the 'deep black' units, those men and women who worked, shall we say, outside the acceptable norms of standards and behaviours expected of professionals in this field. the matters they were dealing with and the methods they employed were, to some accounts, so secret that normal communications protocols were not used. Instead, the messages were handwritten notes which were mostly delivered by the 'safe-hand' method.

THE PEOPLE

Within the following posts, we will be naming people some of whom will come as no surprise but others will be quite new and who may well have a bearing on the Somerton Man case.

A last thought: Just when you think you have a handle on much of it, a new source of information turns up and one that is both rich in detail and very much on point.