The Hollis Dossier, The Making Of ASIO, Includes Podcast

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Part 1. The Warning That Was Ignored: General Blamey, the Soviet Leak and the Secrets of 1945

Published: 2026-02-27 by Gordon Cramer

There's a thread running through the Somerton Man case that most researchers have never pulled on. It doesn't begin in December 1948 on a beach in Adelaide. It begins three years earlier, in January 1945, towards the end of a war that was still being fought — and it begins with a letter from Australia's most powerful soldier to the Prime Minister.

That letter, and what it contained, set in motion a chain of events that would eventually bring a senior MI5 officer to Australia three times in a single year, force the creation of a new intelligence service, trigger an American intelligence embargo, and if my research is right create exactly the kind of covert operational environment in which a man like the Somerton Man could die without anyone officially knowing who he was.

Let me walk you through it.

The General's Alarm

By January 1945, General Thomas Blamey had been running Australia's military war effort for three years. He'd fought MacArthur for Australian operational independence, commanded the Kokoda campaign, and was now dealing with the final Pacific pushes. He was not a man given to panic.

But something had been building for over two years that caused him genuine alarm. Australian military intelligence, working alongside the Allied Intelligence Bureau, had been tracking a consistent and disturbing pattern: Allied military intelligence was leaking. Not dribbling out through careless talk or lost documents, it was being systematically passed to the Japanese through a specific and consistent route.

The trail was disturbing. In 1942, Japanese forces in the Guadalcanal and Port Moresby theatres had detailed, accurate data on Allied troop numbers numbers that should have been inaccessible. By late 1944, the same route was active again: Japanese forces received intelligence about planned Allied operations in New Britain, the Solomon Islands and New Guinea. Australian intelligence analysis pointed, each time, to the Soviet diplomatic presence in Canberra specifically described as "the Soviet ambassador in Australia" and "the Soviet resident in Australia." This at a time when the Soviets were suppose to be Australia’s allies.

The mechanism was now understood. Material was passing from Soviet diplomatic personnel in Canberra through Harbin in Manchuria to the Japanese. And in January 1945, Blamey formalized the alarm. He wrote formally to the government at this point, with Curtin gravely ill, the acting Prime Minister receiving that communication was Ben Chifley. He stated his belief that classified Allied military information, including operation plans for the Philippines campaign and assessments of Japanese defensive capabilities, was being leaked through the Soviet Minister in Canberra.

What Was Actually Leaking

Before we go further, it's worth pausing on ‘what’ was being compromised, because it matters enormously to everything that follows.

Blamey's warning in 1945 was about operational military intelligence — live battlefield information, troop dispositions, operation plans. This was the most dangerous category imaginable: information that, in Japanese hands, could cost Australian and Allied lives.

But that was only one stream. Running parallel to it, a separate and more sophisticated operation was also underway — one that Australian intelligence would not fully grasp until the VENONA programme began yielding results from 1946 onward. VENONA revealed a fully operational Soviet spy ring embedded in Australia's Department of External Affairs, code-named KLOD after its organiser, Communist Party official Walter Clayton.

The KLOD network was different from the Blamey leak. Where the Blamey warning pointed to Soviet diplomatic personnel actively harvesting military intelligence, KLOD was a human network of ideological recruits: External Affairs officers, typists, security personnel — all passing material to Clayton, who passed it to Soviet contacts in the Embassy. Their material was primarily diplomatic and political: Foreign Office telegrams, Allied post-war planning documents, details of Australia's strategic relationships with Britain and America.

Two different streams, two different methods, but one conclusion: by 1945, Soviet intelligence had penetrated Australia at multiple levels simultaneously, and one of the conduits, Alfred Hughes, codename BEN in VENONA, was himself a detective-sergeant in the NSW Special Branch, the very organisation tasked with counterespionage. Hughes knew every file, every surveillance target, every weakness in the system. When Clayton recruited him in early 1945, the ring effectively became self-immunising.

*That's* what Chifley inherited when he became Prime Minister in July 1945. And that's why, when MI5 came knocking three years later, his response was skeptical to the point of stonewalling.

Why Chifley Didn't Believe Them, At First

This is the part that's often misread as Labor naivety or political sympathy for the Soviet Union. The reality is more textured.

When MI5 Director-General Sir Percy Sillitoe and his deputy Roger Hollis arrived in Australia in February 1948, they came with a cover story, they couldn't reveal the VENONA source, so they claimed the intelligence came from a defector. They told Chifley there was a Soviet spy ring in his Department of External Affairs and that he needed to create a new security service to deal with it.

Chifley's response? He'd heard something like this before. He ordered internal inquiries. Files were checked. Nothing incriminating was found. And he sent the British visitors away.

But, of course, nothing was found. The man who would have been running the investigation the kind of detective who knew exactly what to look for and where was Alfred Hughes, who had been on the Soviet payroll since early 1945.

Trove note: For Chifley's public position on Communist infiltration claims in 1948, search Trove for `Chifley "security" "Communist"` with date range 1948-01-01 to 1948-06-30. His parliamentary denials are a matter of record, and The Canberra Times coverage is particularly useful.

Part Two: Roger Hollis MI5

That first Hollis visit failed. But he came back, twice more in 1948 alone. By the time he left Australia for the last time in early 1949, Ben Chifley had agreed to create ASIO, the Americans had cut off intelligence sharing, and a web of Cold War operational activity was running through Adelaide, Sydney and Canberra simultaneously.

In this part of the post we'll follow Hollis's three missions, examine the US embargo and what it meant for the Woomera rocket range, and ask the question that sits at the heart of all of this: what was actually happening in Australia in the second half of 1948, and how does it connect to what happened on Somerton Beach on the first of December?

Mission Two: July–August 1948, The Breakthrough

Between the first and second visits, something significant shifted. In June 1948, Sillitoe obtained American permission to reveal — partially — the VENONA source to Chifley. Not the full picture, not the codenames, not the methodology, but enough to establish that the intelligence wasn't coming from a defector with an axe to grind. It was coming from intercepted Soviet communications.

Hollis returned in late July 1948, this time accompanied by Robert Hemblys-Scales. They carried with them the crucial piece of evidence that had been held back: a VENONA decrypt identifying Frances Bernie, a typist who had worked in Evatt's External Affairs office from 1944 to 1946, as the person who had given classified material to Clayton (KLOD), who had passed it to the Soviet Embassy.

Bernie, codename SISTER in VENONA, was the only member of the KLOD network who would eventually confess. She was not a sophisticated ideological operative; she was a junior staff member who had been used and discarded. But she was proof. Concrete, named, documented proof that the ring had existed and had operated from inside the most sensitive department in the Australian government.

In August, the breakthrough came. Chifley was persuaded. On 20 September 1948, he agreed to establish an Australian security organisation modelled on MI5. The formal establishment papers were signed on 16 March 1949, and ASIO came into existence under its first Director-General, Justice Geoffrey Reed.

The Woomera Dimension

There's another thread in this story that is often treated separately but belongs with it, the Woomera rocket range.

The Anglo-Australian Joint Project, the Long Range Weapons Research Establishment at Woomera, South Australia, had been established in 1947. It was Chifley's initiative as much as Britain's. The facility was Australia's most significant post-war defence project, and it required a constant flow of classified technical data from both British and American sources.

On 17 February 1948, five days after the first Hollis mission arrived — Australia formally requested US guided missile data. The request was refused.

On 20 May 1948, the US Defence Department imposed a formal embargo on all classified information transfers to Australia. The message was unmistakable: Washington had no confidence in Australian security, and until that changed, the crown jewels of post-war missile technology would stay out of Australian hands.

For Menzies, sitting in Opposition and watching all of this unfold, it was political gold. He began a sustained parliamentary campaign from April 1948 onward, accusing the Chifley government of Communist infiltration, of recklessly allowing security to lapse around the very facilities that defined Australia's strategic future. Menzies knew about the US embargo, he had British sources keeping him informed. Chifley could not fully defend himself without revealing VENONA, so he stonewalled, which only made him look more culpable.

The embargo was never fully lifted under Chifley. It became one of several pressure points — alongside the coal strike and the failed bank nationalisation — that contributed to the Labor government's defeat in December 1949.

Mission Three: Early 1949, Building the Institution

Hollis's third visit, in early 1949, was the builder's visit rather than the persuader's visit. ASIO was being constructed, and MI5 had agreed to provide the architectural blueprints. The two organisations were to be modelled on the same principles, with the same internal divisions, the same reporting lines, the same relationship to the executive government.

This visit was less dramatic than the first two, but in many ways more consequential. The institution that Hollis helped design in those early months of 1949 would shape Australian domestic intelligence for generations. The same institution would, within five years, land Vladimir Petrov and through his defection, finally allow the Australian public to be told, in outline, something of what had been happening in Canberra since 1943. The VENONA source was still protected, but Petrov's evidence provided a parallel route to the same destination.

Menzies, by then Prime Minister again, used the Petrov Affair to devastating political effect in 1954–55. The ALP split in 1955 was, in no small part, a consequence of the espionage that Blamey had first formally flagged a decade earlier.

The Pattern, and What It Means for This Research

Here is what I think matters most for our purposes.

The period 1945–1949 was not simply a time of post-war normalisation in Australia. It was a period of extraordinary covert activity: a Soviet intelligence network operating from Canberra, a compromised security service, three MI5 missions within a single year, an American intelligence embargo, a contested rocket range, a suppressed parliamentary debate, and the rushed construction of a new domestic intelligence organisation.

All of this was centred on, or passed through, the same geography, Canberra, Sydney, Melbourne, and critically, Adelaide and its surrounds, where Woomera sat and where, in December 1948, a man with no identification died on a beach in circumstances that have never been explained.

The Blamey warning of 1945 and the Hollis missions of 1948 don't solve that mystery. But they define the world in which it happened. They establish that the machinery of covert intelligence operation was running hard in Australia throughout 1948, that the stakes were high, and that there were people in positions of authority who had every reason to ensure certain things remained unresolved.

Ancora Imparo.

Key sources for further reading:

- Desmond Ball & David Horner, *Breaking the Codes: Australia's KGB Network 1944–1950* (Allen & Unwin, 1998) — the essential text
- Christopher Andrew, *The Defence of the Realm: The Authorised History of MI5* (Allen Lane, 2009)
- Chapman Pincher, *Treachery: Betrayals, Blunders and Cover-ups* (Mainstream, 2011)
- Calder Walton, *Empire of Secrets* (Harper Press, 2013)
- PM Transcripts records: pmtranscripts.pmc.gov.au — Hansard record of Menzies's April 1948 motion (No. 14) and his 1955 retrospective statement (No. 32)

Archival pointers:
- UK National Archives: KV 4/451 (final brief for PM re Chifley conversation, July 1948); KV 4/458 (Hollis to Sillitoe letter, February 1949)
- National Archives Australia: A5954/848/1 (Security of secret defence documents — MI5 visit 1948); A6122/2714 (ASIO's only internal reference to VENONA by name)

  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.