Gough Whitlam speaking after the dissolution of Parliament in 1975 (Wikimedia Commons)
November 11 may not be remembered or noticed as such, but it is a date of significance in political history. On November 11, 1918, Germany signed an armistice with the Allied powers in a railway carriage in Compiègne, France – silencing the guns at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month to end the First World War. On the eleventh day of November in 1831, Nat Turner was executed in Jerusalem, Virginia, after leading a historic slave rebellion. It was on November 11, 1975, that Angola threw off centuries of colonial subjugation to gain full independence from Portugal. On November 11, 1992, the Church of England voted to permit the ordination of women as priests. And on the same fateful November day in 2004, Palestinian leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Yasser Arafat died in Paris at the age of 75. Each of these events was, and remains, pivotal in shaping today’s world.
Yet November 11 also marked another lesser-known but consequential historical event: the day, in 1975, when the United States intelligence apparatus successfully orchestrated the overthrow of Gough Whitlam, Australia’s Prime Minister. It marked the first time Washington oversaw the covert removal of a leader within a core Western alliance, signalling an unprecedented tightening of the US-led Cold War order – a hegemonic order in which anything short of unconditional vassalage to North American geopolitical interests would be intolerable.
It also proved, contrary to popular belief, that the US empire does not spare even its Anglo-Alliance partners when they dare to exercise genuine democratic sovereignty. On the 51st anniversary of this day, it’s worth digging into the events surrounding Gough Whitlam’s removal from office.
Gough Whitlam’s Democratic Sovereignty
In December 1972, following 23 unbroken years of conservative Liberal-Country Party rule, the Australian Labor Party won a landmark election. Soon after, Gough Whitlam, a towering, charismatic progressive intellectual and jurist, took office as Prime Minister. Whitlam immediately sought to pivot Australia from a US client state into an independent, non-aligned state. However, in doing so, he committed what Washington viewed as unpardonable transgressions.
Whitlam withdrew all remaining Australian troops from Vietnam and ended compulsory military conscription. Three of his senior cabinet ministers even publicly condemned the US carpet-bombing of Hanoi as “corrupt” and “barbaric.” He went even further, however. He formally recognised the People’s Republic of China, North Vietnam, and broke with the US’ blockade by allowing Cuba to open a consulate in Sydney. Domestically, Whitlam’s Minister for Minerals and Energy, Rex Connor, launched an initiative to “buy back the farm” – seeking to increase state control and Australian ownership over the country’s massive, lucrative oil, gas, and uranium deposits, in turn stopping them from being looted by US oil companies. These were accompanied by a broad legislative agenda that sought to limit the interests of capital, for the betterment of the Australian working class.
Those who learn of this today, decades after the fact, who now have even a basic understanding of US imperialism and hegemony; who have seen how it has ravaged countries and deposed leaders in recent months and years, can already take a pretty good guess about what the Washington elite did in retaliation. Of course, they intervened, in this case, utilising a monarchical framework from a bygone era to remove Whitlam from office in 1975. I’ll get into it shortly. Before that, however, it is important to further establish the mechanisms of espionage and events leading up to November 11, 1975.
The primary driver for the incoming US intervention ultimately became Pine Gap, a top-secret, high-security satellite tracking station deep in the Australian outback. Nominally a joint facility, Pine Gap was actually run entirely by the CIA and served as the nerve centre for US global electronic espionage, monitoring Soviet missile launches and intercepting communications across Asia. It still remains one of the US’s most important clandestine intelligence bases to this day. Australian citizens still cannot enter the facility, or even know of the nature of the activities carried out there – a reality brilliantly satirised in an investigative video by YouTuber-journalists Boy Boy and friendlyjordies.
In 1975, after Whitlam discovered that the CIA had been channelling funds to conservative opposition figures and infiltrating domestic affairs under the façade of “subverting communist influences” within Australian trade unions, he publicly threatened to refuse to renew the lease on Pine Gap when it expired in December 1975. To an already agitated Washington, frustrated that Whitlam refused to sit back and let the US make a mockery of Australian sovereignty, this became the final straw. Indeed, much later, Victor Marchetti, the CIA officer who helped set up Pine Gap, revealed more to veteran journalist John Pilger. “The threat to close Pine Gap caused apoplexy in the White House,” he said. “A kind of Chilean coup was set in motion.” Separately, Pilger also revealed that Frank Nepp, a CIA officer in Saigon, said: “We were told that the Australians might as well be regarded as North Vietnam collaborators.”
Constitutional Decapitation
Throughout late 1975, Wall Street and major international banks executed a coordinated credit squeeze on Australia, artificially drying up loans to manufacture an illusion of economic incompetence around the Whitlam government – not functionally different from similar US-government-backed efforts to destabilise Salvador Allende’s government in Chile following his victory in 1970. At the same time, the Australian conservative opposition, led by Malcolm Fraser, used its numbers in the Senate to block the government’s supply bills, effectively threatening to starve the executive of operational funding unless Whitlam called an election. This trap would be seized upon soon after.
On 8 November 1975, the CIA sent an unusual, threatening cable directly to the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation. The cable explicitly warned that if the Whitlam government did not fall, the US would cut off all intelligence sharing with Australia – a move designed to trigger a mutiny within the Australian military establishment. It was also later revealed that CIA Counterintelligence Chief James Jesus Angleton privately characterised the Australian Prime Minister as a critical security threat to the Western alliance.
Three days later, on November 11, 1975, John Kerr, the Governor-General of Australia acting as the British Monarch’s representative, bypassed parliamentary precedent and unilaterally dismissed Whitlam using reserve powers that had never before been deployed to remove a Prime Minister with a majority in the House of Representatives. So ridiculous and gobsmacking was this act that it warrants a deeper look into the mechanisms behind it.
Sections 61 and 64 of the Australian Constitution vest discretionary “reserve powers” in the Governor-General. Section 61 reads: “The executive power of the Commonwealth is vested in the Queen and is exercisable by the Governor-General as the Queen’s representative, and extends to the execution and maintenance of this Constitution, and of the laws of the Commonwealth,” and Section 64 reads: “The Governor-General may appoint officers to administer such departments of State of the Commonwealth as the Governor-General in Council may establish.”
So, while parliamentary convention dictates that executive authority rests with the Prime Minister, when the conservative-dominated Senate blocked the Whitlam government’s budget supply bills – as mentioned earlier – the Prime Minister sought to resolve the deadlock by calling a half-Senate election. Instead, John Kerr acted unilaterally, exercising his powers under the aforementioned constitutional levers to ambush Whitlam, terminating his commission, and installing Fraser as caretaker Prime Minister on the condition that he immediately pass supply and call a general election.
This was unprecedented. Worse, Kerr was far from a neutral constitutional referee; he had deep, documented links with CIA front organisations. He was an active member of the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom, an organisation heavily subsidised by the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom. He maintained close operational ties with Christopher Boyce – a CIA contractor who later blew the whistle on how the Agency had deeply infiltrated Kerr’s staff and routinely referred to the Governor-General as “our man Kerr”.
Indeed, Kerr, through obscure reserve powers never previously utilised, carried out a constitutional coup for the US, so that the empire itself would not need to get its hands dirty. The fact that this so-called transfer of power was clean and ostensibly “constitutional” is used as an argument, to this day, by US officials and historians to claim the US was not involved in the removal of Whitlam – which is ironic, not least because many of those who claim this are the same people who also justify and celebrate other instances of direct US imperial action abroad. The simple fact is that Whitlam was removed because the US wanted him gone. If there were no “reserve powers”, the coup wouldn’t have been as clean.
That was it; an elected Prime Minister remained no longer. Indeed, the removal of a democratically elected leader through imperial reserve powers permanently altered the trajectory of Australian political history, exposing the fragility of unwritten parliamentary conventions when confronted with vice-regal authority. Stepping onto the Parliament House steps immediately after his dismissal was publicly announced, Whitlam famously addressed the gathered crowd. “Well, may we say ‘God save the Queen’, because nothing will save the Governor-General,” he said. Little has changed. Sections 61 and 64 of Australia’s Constitution remain intact.
The Illusion of Sovereignty
This coup in Australia destroyed the notion that US interventionism is exclusively reserved for so-called despots or Marxist insurgencies in the Global South, or even for racial minorities. Whitlam was an elected constitutional lawyer and World War II veteran, not an armed guerrilla. None of it mattered.
Sovereignty is a total illusion for everyone. The US does not have “allies” but partners – vassals – with varying levels of luxury. These luxuries certainly exceeded their limits when the people of Australia voted to elect a leader who wanted to opt out of the CIA’s global surveillance grid. In response, the national security cabal in Washington set “a kind of Chilean coup” in motion and had “their man Kerr” pull a constitutional lever and remove that leader. The American empire is a borderless, totalising project that decapitates any democracy that steps out of line – it has done so many times, and will continue to do so until it unravels under the weight of its own imperial contradictions.
Principled historians of US imperialism have meticulously documented these patterns of intervention. Notably, William Blum documents the many, many, many brutal instances of US covert and overt intervention abroad in his excellent and instructive book Killing Hope. And Whitlam’s was not the only instance of the US attempting to depose the leader of a “Western ally”. It tried to do the same, unsuccessfully, to Charles de Gaulle in France, as Blum also documents in Killing Hope. Even today, the US routinely intervenes in the domestic affairs of even its NATO allies, as seen with the Trump administration’s attempts to destabilise Pedro Sánchez’s government in Spain for refusing to bend over and help the US in its war of aggression against Iran. It won’t stop until the wheels are off.
