With thanks to Pete Davo from the Big Footy forum, an intriguing story of the communist party in Australia, spies and an Adelaide connection. Pete has put a lot into this case for some years and there's no doubting his commitment. This post uncovers some long lost detail, overlooked by many including me. good work Pete!
(Extract SMH)
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.
SOME ADDITIONAL WORDS FROM PETEDAVO:
The post mortem has many details. One thing I can deduce is that he's probably right-handed as the nicotine stains are on the fingers of his right hand. This would suggest that he is unlikely to be whoever wrote the HC Reynolds ID card, however the prospect of him being a merchant seaman lead me to discover other mysteries such as the woman allegedly trying to fence one of the lost crates of Peking Man fossils at the top of the empire state building in the 70's who alleges that 2 people had been murdered in relation to the smuggling of these artifacts.
Keeping an open mind is probably the hardest thing to do in any process of investigation as impatience encourages our minds to want to cut to the quickest path of resolution, and thus we will discount the improbable and categorize the too hard as far fetched or deluded, until we're forced back to those paths once the easy path hits the dead end.
Just as I originally discounted Thomas Ambrose Keane of Williamstown, because he was still alive well after 1948. But something kept nagging me about that old army cadet record. It was the handwriting of whoever filled out his details. The T Keane written upon that form is nearly the same as the T Keane written upon that tie in the suitcase found at Adelaide railway station! So an intriguing possibility is that SM had items gifted or bought from this T Keane.
Will searching T Keane's associates yield results? Too early to tell, and hampered by the lack of digitised records and photographs, it will be laborious but is probably the easiest lead, considering that if this mystery does have something to do with espionage then T Keane of Williamstown Victoria also was involved in the same communist party apparatuses as Horace Pile who was sent to Adelaide 2 years after SM's death to spy at Woomera.
Why might Pile be Important to this story? He is related via marriage to Harkness.
More to follow.