Before the Beach...

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When most people think about the Somerton Man case, they picture a mystery beginning and ending on a Adelaide beach in December 1948. An unknown man. A secret code. An untraceable belongings in a suitcase. The story of a single death.

But the story is so much more than that.

What if that beach was just the location where two worlds collided? We have the visible world of post-war Adelaide, and a dark, shadowy world that most Australians never even knew existed?

On The Surface...

In December 1948, Adelaide had all the appearance of a provincial capital still in recovery from six years of war. Families were reunited, some were still grieving. Most soldiers had returned home by 1947 except those who had volunteered to stay on for just a few more years. Port Adelaide hummed with peacetime commerce. On the surface at least, 'normality' had returned.

On Scratching That Surface...

The city in 1948 was something quite different.

Multiple intelligence services; naval, military, civilian and some foreign, were conducting operations that would remain classified for decades. In fact some still are. South Australia's ports weren't just commercial; they were the routes by which top secret weapons, electronics and, more importantly, people made their way to places like the Weapons Research Establishment at Salisbury which had been operational since 1947. Then there was Woomera and the rocket and experimental aircraft Range still under development. British long-range weapons testing programs were bringing new security concerns and new security personnel. According to Intelligence files, there were 4 Soviet agents active in South Australia that year. Two of whom were engaged in the WRE at Salisbury whilst two more were monitoring happenings at Woomera. But were there more? What other Soviet activities were taking place in South Australia? The shortt answer is 'plenty'.

It was a city of networks. Defensive networks at that. Some of these networks had evolved from the turbulent 1930s, when right wing organizations like the New Guard and the Old Guard before them had mobilized tens of thousands of Australians. Some say that up to 50,000 men were ready to fight in New South Wales alone. It would sound reasonable to say that those numbers were not representative of South Australia, but was that true? To answer that we need to first turn back the clock and revisit those turbulent years of the early 1930s and then, as the world lurched forward into WW2, look for any traces of the remnants of thos right wing movements. And they were most certainly there.

The Association

Rarely openly discussed is the fact that some of Australia's most senior military figures were involved in organizations that most Australians never heard about. Field Marshal Thomas Blamey - Australia's most senior soldier during WWII - was among them.

So was Brigadier General Raymond Leane, a decorated Great War commander and a one time Commissioner of the South Australian Police Force. The Commissioner had actually retired from that position in June 1944. He was a busy man in those War years, he simmultaneously held the rank of Commissioner of Police and Commander of the Volunteer Defence Corps. Leane was a leader of the highest quality and a distiguished WW1 hero. His story is to be found here..

As it happens, Leane's son was Detective Sergeant Lionel Leane - the officer who took charge of the Somerton Man investigation in its critical early phase.

Does that mean that the course of the Somerton Man investigation could somehow have been influenced by the powers that be? No, there is no evidence to support that.

What the Files Reveal

While South Australia's Special Branch files were destroyed on the orders of Premier Don Dunstan, some files survived the purge, transferred to other agencies, preserved in different archives, 'overlooked' in the systematic destruction.

Of the files that survived 1948 Adelaide, many challenged the thinking surrounding what we thought we knew about the context in which an unknown man died on Somerton Beach.

From what I have been able to access, these files reveal:

• Intelligence operations that were never made public
• Networks connecting across military, political and civil fields
• Security issues that far greater concern and well beyond what newspapers reported
• A city where multiple intelligence services from the Soviets, to the OSS and later CIA and our own Australian organisations, (some of which were locked in competitive struggles) were watching, waiting, operating and, believe it or not, infiltrating.

An International Dimension

Organisations on the right and left that operated in 1930s Australia had documented connections to similar movements overseas. The Comintern in Russia, the White Russian Emigre movement, and as for the New Guard, Eric Campbell, its one time leader had, in the late 1930s met personally with Oswald Mosley in London and Benito Mussolini in Rome. These weren't casual encounters,  they were part of an international network of right-wing organizations sharing ideology, tactics, and in some cases, intelligence.

By 1948 of course, those old fascist connections had been buried, denied, or transformed. But the people remained and importantly, so did details of their organistional structures. New Leaders emerged, the networks adapted to meet what they percieved, correctly, to be the looming communist threat. Australia's overstretched intelligence services, transitioning from wartime operations to Cold War concerns, were deeply interested in who knew what, who had done what, and who might do what in the future.

Naval Intelligence In South Australia

One dimension rarely discussed in Somerton Man research is the role of naval intelligence in Australian port cities. Throughout the 1940s, naval intelligence officers maintained operations focused on waterfront security, monitoring of maritime unions, and counter-intelligence against foreign operations.

Adelaide and Port Augusta to the North, were port cities with new weapons research facilities, would have been of particular interest.

Who staffed the Naval Intelligence Office in Poart Adelaide in December 1948? What and who were they monitoring? Apart from the Somerton Man Code page handed to them by Detective Sergeant Leane, what other reports did they file about an unidentified man found dead on the beach?

When it comes to the CIS, we can ask the same questions, what did they know about the case, why are so many files from that era still under lok and key despite numerous requests under FOI? Why, for example, have only part of the files related to the Glenelg Communist party been released?

These aren't rhetorical questions. The answers exist in archives, some accessible, and some including those mentioned are still classified.

Before ASIO

Most Australians know that ASIO, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, was established in 1949. What's less well known is that December 1948 was a chaotic transition period for Australian intelligence services.

The Commonwealth Investigation Branch was operating but overwhelmed. Naval Intelligence was active in port and other security matters, no doubt much as they were in the 1930s. During the war, Military Intlligence maintained domestic monitoring and infiltrations as and when they could. On more than one occaision they made use of oter branches of the defence forces to ease the load. State police Special Branches conducted surveillance of political organizations. British MI5 officers had been active in Australia for some time and more arrived to provide advice on reorganization ready for ASIO

Into this complex, overlapping world of intelligence operations walked, or was carried in and out, an unknown man with no identification, untraceable personal effects, and circumstances that remain unexplained 77 years later. Well, perhaps not for much longer.

What 'Somerton Secrets' Reveals

Somerton Secrets, due for release in March 2025, places the Somerton Man case in its full historical context for the first time. I won't be saying too much right now but suffice to say that there are files and people about which, and whom, a good deal more is known now.

The book demonstrates that the Somerton Man case cannot be understood in isolation. It was not simply a mysterious death on a beach. It occurred at a specific moment, in a specific place, within a specific web of intelligence operations and organizational networks that have remained hidden from public view.

The Questions That Remain

What intelligence assessments were made at the time that were never made public?

Why do some files from 1948 remain classified 77 years later?

What did the various intelligence services operating in Adelaide know that the police investigation never revealed?

Coming in March 2025

Somerton Secrets provides answers to some of these questions and more. More to the point, where answers remain elusive I will acknowledge them. The reveals a hidden world that existed beneath the surface of post-war Australia, a world of intelligence operations, organizational networks, and security concerns and a whole lot more that made Adelaide in December 1948 far more complex than most people ever imagined.

The Somerton Man didn't die in isolation. He died in one of the most intelligence-rich environments in Australian history.

That changes everything.

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More details on Somerton Secrets will be posted here in the coming weeks. For those following this research, the book will reveal connections and contexts that fifteen years of investigation on this blog have been building toward.

The story is bigger than we knew. Much bigger.

The Tamam Shud blog is dedicated to uncovering the forensic realities of the Somerton Man case. Our mission is not to speculate, but to reconstruct the events of 1948 using primary documents, scientific modelling, and expert analysis. While the man's true identity may remain a mystery, our focus is on the evidence that reveals how he died and the networks involved. To ensure the integrity of this research, we rely solely on verifiable sources and citations, strictly excluding anonymous blog comments and forum speculation from our data.