Gough Whitlam's former assistant speaks out on US involvement in the dismissal

A former executive assistant who worked with Prime Minister Gough Whitlam has made a revelation about the CIA’s suspected involvement in his shock dismissal.

Fifty years on from Australia’s most dramatic constitutional crisis, Dr Elizabeth Cham has spoken for the first time about being recalled from holidays to type and deliver a mystery letter to an American official on the day before the dismissal.

“He [Whitlam] did dictate it to me. I walked down Collins Street and I handed it to a CIA agent up on the steps of the Hotel Australia,” said Dr Cham on the Australia Institute’s After America podcast.

“I remember that very clearly. It was about whether he would resign the lease on Pine Gap.”

Pine Gap is a highly secretive, joint Australian-US surveillance base located near Alice Springs.

During the 1972 election campaign, Gough Whitlam had promised to “lift the lid” on the defence facility and share its secrets.

“Since the dismissal, there have been lots of allegations about CIA involvement in Whitlam’s downfall,” noted Dr Emma Shortis, the Australia Institute’s Director of International & Security Affairs.

“Christopher Boyce, the US defence contractor, who was jailed for selling secrets to the Russians, claims to have decoded CIA cables showing the spy agency wanted Whitlam gone.”

While they’re still only allegations, Dr Shortis pointed out it’s “not really surprising given what we know about the CIA’s involved in regime change and attempted regime change all over the world”.

Dr Cham recalled being at her mother’s house on the day before Mr Whitlam was sacked in 1975 when she received a phone call from then-Secretary of the Defence Department Sir Arthur Tange.

“Arthur Tange said to me, ‘Elizabeth, the Prime Minister is on his way to Melbourne from Canberra. He needs you in the office, so you must leave for the Melbourne office now.

“I have not thought about why Sir Arthur Tange would ring such a junior person in the Prime Minister’s office ever.

“It was a time when bureaucrats were very powerful. […] They couldn’t be dismissed by a prime minister. They had permanency.

“He did say to me the Prime Minister needs you in the Melbourne office because he needs to dictate a letter.”

That night, Gough Whitlam attended a Lord Mayor’s banquet in Melbourne and Dr Cham met him afterwards to fly back to Canberra on the PM’s plane.

The Prime Minister had invited Opposition Leader Malcolm Fraser and several of his Liberal colleagues to join them on the flight.

“The Prime Minister usually tries to go to sleep while they’re on the flight,” she said.

“They were talking … I thought they were being very considerate of the Prime Minister because they were being very quiet. I now realise they’re being conspiratorial.

“It seems to me very Shakespearean. He generously offers them a ride home. On the way home they’re stabbing him in the back.”

Dr Cham said, “after the execution” the following day she walked into the office and it was “just pandemonium”.

She was told “we’ve been sacked”.

“I couldn’t comprehend it in that pandemonium.”

Dr Cham said she has spent “many months trying to find that letter” in the Australian archives and while she’s had “the most extraordinary level of help and support”, she’s had no luck tracking it down.

“When it comes to Australia, these allegations have never met an adequate standard of proof. And they still don’t. We don’t have evidence of involvement,” said Dr Emma Shortis. “That doesn’t necessarily mean that that information does not exist.”

“It is on the public record that Whitlam had a very testy relationship with the US President at the time, Richard Nixon. A lot of that tension swirled around the Whitlam Government’s immediate withdrawal of Australian forces from America’s war in Vietnam.

“There was also significant tension over the renewal of the agreement around Pine Gap.”

However, she pointed out that “Whitlam himself said publicly at the time and after that he felt the only collusion was national.”

Dr Cham only remembers the letter was about Pine Gap.

“I just wish I could remember what he said, but I can’t.

“I have wracked my brain and I cannot remember whether he was saying in that letter that he would resign the lease or whether he was saying something else. I certainly remember that it was about Pine Gap.”

However, she does remember the man who changed the trajectory of modern Australia.

“He was an extraordinary human being. He was a colossus, and I don’t think we’re going to see anyone like him again for a long time.”