The story of the incompetence, lack of focus, and bureaucratic infighting among a variety of state and military intelligence services before the war is told with vigour and a wealth of detail. It is here that Fahey finds the ‘corruption’ of his title, though it is not financial corruption he has in mind but rather the misuse of intelligence services by politicians to further their own political ends. Prime Minister Billy Hughes is the prime example, following his bitter battles over conscription of World War I, but ALP leader H.V. Evatt is portrayed as cut from the same cloth, although in this case no specific examples are adduced.

One of the myths Fahey is keen to contradict is that Australian intelligence services always went after the left. He shows, on the contrary, that the initial impulse to set up intelligence services in the various states after Federation was connected with the White Australia policy and the need to keep an eye on resident Asians and other non-whites. Offbeat organisations like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, unpopular with the intelligence agencies as well as the Australian public, were also harassed without due grounds.

One of the myths Fahey is keen to contradict is that Australian intelligence services always went after the left

Pre-war security surveillance may not have focused exclusively on the left, but the implication of Fahey’s story is that it should have, because since the time of the 1917 Revolution, the Russian/communist threat had been a real and present danger to Australian security. He credits Alexander Zuzenko – a Russian radical in Queensland who welcomed the Russian Revolution of 1917, helped to found an Australian communist party, and was deported to the Soviet Union in the early 1920s – with laying the foundations of a sleeper network that, in Fahey’s view, was only waiting to be revived with the arrival of the Soviet Legation in Australia in the 1940s. Party member Walter Clayton, named in the Royal Commission on Espionage in 1954, would be a key figure in the revived network.

There was solid evidence against Clayton and sometime DEA staffer Ian Milner, but Fahey goes further. Figures 16.5, ‘The CSIRO network, 1948’ and 17.1, ‘The Melbourne illegal cell, 1927–50’ deserve particular scrutiny. These network diagrams are Fahey’s own creation, based on ASIO surveillance files and the presumed real identities hidden behind code names in Venona intercepts (the Allies’ successful decoding of Soviet radio transmissions during the war). The alleged CSIRO network consisted of Professor Sergey Paramonov, a distinguished entomologist who was a keen member of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church; Wilbur Norman Christiansen, a pioneer in radio astronomy who had been a member of the left-wing Labour Club at the University of Melbourne as a student; and two other ‘Christiansens’ who must in fact be Clem Christesen, editor of Meanjin, and his Russian wife, Nina, head of the Russian Department at the University of Melbourne. All of them were named by someone at some time as likely Soviet agents, but as no evidence is given that any of them were aware of being recruited or passed on any information, it seems to be a network that existed in the eye of the beholder.

The ‘Melbourne illegal cell’ is touted by Fahey’s publishers as his big discovery, but it could also be viewed as his speculation or even fantasy. The alleged Melbourne cell was a largely Jewish one consisting of Jack Skolnik, proprietor of a wine business in Richmond and a major patron of the Jewish sporting club Hakoah, and the furrier Solomon Kosky, with engineer David Morris and (surprisingly) academic Hirsch Munz, author of well-regarded monographs on the Australian wool industry and Jews in South Australia, thrown in for good measure. As Fahey notes, ‘what intelligence work Kosky actually did is unknown’), and there is ‘not one mention of the Melbourne cell or any of its activities’ in Venona transcripts, meaning either that its members shunned radio transmission or, as he concedes, that there was in fact no activity and presumably no cell. Fahey is nevertheless persuaded that they constituted a cell set up by the GRU, which ‘in the course of time was drawn into the growing control of the NKGB’. This last twist seems particularly odd, given that, as Petrov attested and Fahey knows, the two Soviet intelligence services, military (GRU) and civilian (NKGB), were at daggers drawn, with explicit instructions not to share information in Australia.

ASIO was extremely interested in Kosky, in line with its general predisposition to be suspicious of Jews born overseas, and Fahey’s suspicions are heightened by Kosky’s connection with the fur trade, which the GRU sometimes used as a cover in its international operations. Kosky, born in Russia, was interested in doing business with the Soviet Union and knew the commercial attaché and others in the Embassy. He also probably gave discounts on furs to friends and potential business prospects, including Soviet diplomats and their wives (my interpretation of ASIO’s Kosky files, not Fahey’s). But it seems harsh to interpret this as treason. Sometimes, to paraphrase Freud, a fur is just a fur.