Phillip Deery The National Library supplies copies of this article under licence from the Copyright Agency Limited (CAL). Further reproductions of this article can only be made under licence. 971111823 Cold War Victim or Rhodes Scholar Spy? Revisiting the Case of Ian Milner A MONGST THOSE PEOPLE on the left who llved through the Cold War years and managed to survive with scraps of idealism intact, some will be saddened by the following account. It concerns the long-standing and controversial allegations ofes- pionage against Ian FranClS Milner. A Rhodes scholar at Oxford in the 1930S, Milner was -like so many ide- alists of that generation - fired by the social injus- tices of capitalist economies and inspired by the republican cause In the Spanish Civil War. Dunng the Second World War, Milner resigned his lectureship at the University ofMelbourne and, encouraged by Paul Hasluck and supported by Professor Max Crawford, was appointed to a senior position (Special Investi- gation Officer in the Post-Hostilities Planning Divi- sion) in the then External Affairs Department. In January 1947, he was elevated to the Political Office in the Security Council Secretariat of the United Na- tions in New York. Thereafter, he was posted to Korea and in 1950 he joined the staff of Charles University, Czechoslovakia. The low point in his public life was in 1954, when Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov testified to the Royal Commission on Espionage (RCE) that Ian Mllner, code named 'BUR', was a Soviet spy. In the Autumn 1994 issue of Overland, the histo- nan Frank Cain mounted a detailed defence of Milner against his accusers and detractors.' Cain argued that had Milner accepted hIS wife's adVice and travelled from Prague to defend himself before the Petrov Royal CommisslOn, "the large Milner spy-industry would never have emerged". The accusations against Milner were based on "extremely scanty information" and represented, Cain concluded,"a very un-Australian at- teQpt to justify the politicalwitch-hunts that marked much of the Menzies years". This spirited support for Milner echoed an earlier article by Greg Pemberton which accepted Milner's denial of guilt:"When I had dinner in Prague with Ian Milner a few weeks ago he vehemently maintained, as he had in all our previous talks, hIS complete inno- cence".' Both Cain and Pemberton affirm Milner's ver- sion of events first outlined in a written statement he forwarded to the Australian government in early 1956: that he settled in Czechoslovakia due to his wife's need for specialist medical treatment; that he was pro-Labor but not a member of the Communist Party; that he did not pass secret documents to a Syd- ney communist Waiter Clayton; and that, in essence, the charges against him were "entirely untrue, de- famatory and very shocking". However, recent archIval documentation from Washington and Prague points clearly to a different conclusion. Indeed, it proVides that elusive 'smoking gun' that writers such as Robert Manne, RIchard Hall and David McKnight previously lacked when they accepted the concluslOns of the 1954 RCE that impli- cated Milner in espionage actiVity.) First, the Venona documents, This material, re- leased on 4 October 1996 by the National Security Agency, comprises intercepted and decrypted intel- ligence cables sent by the Canberra KGB Residency to Moscow between 1943 and 1948. (Kim Philby, sta- tioned in Washington as the MI6 liaison officer in 1949, learnt of the 'Venona Operation' and informed the Soviets who immediately changed their codes.) Because the Venona traffic was in cipher - and the Soviets obviously did not intend ciphered cables to be decoded - it is a rational assumption that it was not misinformation. The evidence must therefore be regarded as authentic. It most certainly is damning. Although Vladimir Petrov did not link Milner to 'Klod' or 'Claude' (the KGB codename for Clayton, ac- cused by the RCE of regularly supplying sensitive in- formation to the Soviets), Venona does. In a cable 1997·147·0verland 9