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August 30, 2001
From the Bloodbaths
In East Timor to a Suicide in Arlington
Sandra Jenkins woke up about 6 am on
a muggy June morning outside Washington, DC in 1999 to find a
note from on her husband on the night-table beside the bed. "Spread
my ashes at our house in Fadden." She called a friend and
told her, "I think Merv has done something to himself".
The friend told Sandra that she had to go find him before the
kids did.
"I went downstairs".
recalled Sandra to the Australian news program Four Corners,
earlier this year. "I was hoping to find him asleep on the
sofa. Maybe he'd taken some sleeping pills. But he wasn't there.
I opened the Venetian blinds and I saw him standing outside.
I thought he was standing. But something wasn't right. I followed
his body down and he washe was hanging."
The man at the end of the rope
was Merv Jenkins, a top intelligence officer with the Australian
security forces. He had killed himself on his birthday at his
home on Spy Hill, in Arlington, Virginia.
His wife, Sandra, believes
that Merv was driven to suicide by the CIA. The story, which
has received no press attention in the US, involves the complex
and bloody relationship between US and Australian intelligence
agencies, the Indonesia military and East Timor.
Jenkins was one of Australia's
top covert operatives. He had led the Australian special forces
group, known as the 660 Signal Troop, which coordinated communications
for numerous operations inside East Timor, when Australian forces
were essentially working has hired guns for Suharto and the CIA.
Later Jenkins became the commanding officer for Australia's electronic
warfare department.
Then in 1996 Jenkins got what
he thought was his dream job: top liaison between Australia's
Defense Intelligence Organization and the CIA and Defense Intelligence
Agency. In this position, Jenkins was supposed to pass on satellite
imagery and intercepted communications from Indonesia to the
Americans.
Jenkins arrived in Washington
at a fraught moment. Despite the best efforts of the CIA and
the Australian military, the Suharto regime was beginning to
crumble and the independence movement inside East Timor was once
again gaining momentum and being countered with increasingly
vicious reprisals by Indonesian troops, acting on intelligence
provided by US and Australian sources.
The CIA repeatedly carped that
the intelligence coming from Australia on Indonesia matters,
including East Timor, was "insufficiently detailed"
and "too anodyne" in nature. The Agency threatened
Jenkins that if things didn't improve they were going to cut
the Aussies off from the intelligence gathered at Pine Gap, the
satellite control complex outside Alice Springs, which eavesdrops
on Iraq, Indonesia, Afghanistan, India and China.
"Merv was angry because
the CIA was upset that he wasn't passing over more information
that they really required, and that they, the CIA, expected a
lot more out of Australia. They expected a lot more information",
Peter Czeti, a former intelligence officer at the Australian
embassy in DC, told the Canberra Times, " We would be requested
for intelligence material by our allies on numerous occasionsWe
would make those requests and send them back to Australia and
they would sit there. And I mean for months, years. And they
were never fulfilled. And these were areas that we were experts
in, so there's no reason why we couldn't have provided the material.
It's just that it never happened."
In fact, there were plenty
of reasons why the Australian intelligence agencies may have
been reluctant to turn over detailed intelligence reports on
the operations of the Aussie military in East Timor. During Clintontime,
the Australians had largely become a surrogate for US operatives
in the region, even as Clinton moved to distance the administration
from the collapsing Suharto regime and the rampages of the Indonesian
military.
For example, in May Captain
Andrew Plunkett, an intelligence office for the 3rd Battalion
of the Royal Australian Regiment, who served in East Timor said
that the Australian intelligence agencies instructed his and
other units to conceal evidence of war crimes by the Indonesia
army and militias.
Plunkett, who now faces prosecution
for violating government secrecy laws, charges that the Australian
military ignored intelligence reports about the impending massacre
of 50 people at a police station in the East Timor border town
of Maliana in September, 1999. "Australian intelligence
sources had accurately reported on Indonesian plans to kill independence
supporters in Maliana, but those reports were pushed up the chain
of command, hosed down and politically wordsmithed by the Asia
Division of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade",
Plunkett told the Australian TV show Dateline on May 9 of this
year. "None of this information was passed on to the UN
troops on the ground."
When Indonesian militias attacked
independence demonstrators in and around Maliana, the UN told
the people to go to the local police station where they would
be protected by Indonesian police. Instead, the police and Indonesian
soldiers trapped several thousand people on the police grounds
and allowed militiamen to hack at least 47 people to death with
machetes.
Plunkett, who was assigned
the task of examining mass graves, also said that Australian
soldiers were instructed to undercount the death toll. The official
death count at Maliana was 12. But Plunkett says that the Australians
and the UN knew that many of the bodies had been put in mass
graves or dumped in rivers or the ocean. Plunkett says that he
examined more than 60 bodies himself in the Maliana area.
It was precisely this kind
of information on the situation in East Timor prior to the independence
referendum that the CIA was pressuring Merv Jenkins to pass along.
In May of 1999, Jenkins came across an AUSTEO (Australian Eyes
Only Document) cable from the Department of Foreign Affairs describing
the activities of the Indonesian militias and troops in East
Timor. Jenkins, under extreme pressure, slipped the information
to his contacts in the CIA. He was soon reprimanded by his superiors.
An email from his superiors at the Defense Intelligence Security
Office warned: "Issues are becoming extremely sensitive
as there are foreign policy implications. It is imperative that
extra care is taken with the passing of material to the US and
Canada."
The CIA was equally upset.
When the agents saw what Jenkins handed over, they realized that
the Australians had been holding back key information on the
movements of Indonesian troops in East Timor. They demanded more
documents from Jenkins. He tried to comply, telling his superiors
that "the pressure from CIA has been intense and building".
But Jenkins didn't know that he was being spied on by his own
employees, two uniformed officers who were supposed to be couriers
between his office and the CIA.
The two men began opening Jenkins'
packets and soon discovered that he was sending AUSTEO documents
on East Timor to the CIA. They informed the Australian Department
of Foreign Affairs, the very same office that suppressed the
intelligence reports from Maliana. One of the men, Dennis Magennis,
wrote a letter to the Department of Foreign Affairs denouncing
Jenkins' ties to the CIA "as barely one step removed from
treachery". He said that he could not rule out the use of
violence against Jenkins and warned that unless the Department
stopped the liaisons "external means must be found."
In any event, an investigation
of Jenkins' ties to the CIA was soon launched and, at the end
of May 1999, he was hauled in for an interrogation. He came out
of the meeting shaken.
"When I first saw him,
he was clearly under enormous stress", said Noel Adams,
a former Aussie intelligence officer and colleague of Jenkins.
"You could see it in his face. His eyes were red-rimmed.
It shocked me. I was dismayed to see how he was."
After the session, Jenkins
sent an email to his superiors in Canberra saying that he felt
he had been abused. He said that he was "angry and frustrated"
and wanted to discuss the matter with top agency officials when
he returned to Australia in August. He never made it back. Two
days after sending this note, he was dead, hanging from a rope
in his garage. It was his 48th birthday.
"There's a culture there
that excludes people," said Jenkins' mother, Enid. "People
who are honest and have integrity. And being accountable for
what they've done. And it's the old boy stuff again. You know?
Here's the bottle of whiskey. Here's the gun. You know what to
do."
CounterPunchers should not
conclude from that the CIA was somehow wearing the white hat
in this dark affair. The Agency wanted more information on the
rampages of the Indonesian militias in East Timor, but not in
order to stimulate preventative action, but as a quid pro for
the electronic intercepts the US was furnishing Australia. CP
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