None of this got out in the media. It's something I will be forever ashamed of. The only justification I heard was that East Timor was on the verge of being accepted as a new member of the United Nations and there was a chance that the country might be leftist or neutralist and not vote with the US in the General Assembly. The intelligence was shared. After all, it came from an Australian facility.
Independence seems so near, and yet so far.
And Australia's role has never been more crucial. By reviewing the Australian record we can interpret the present actions of the Howard government in their proper context. The terrible events of the mid-'60s in Indonesia were a precursor to the genocide in East Timor, the scale of which was not reported in Australia for more than a dozen years, with the honourable exception of journalists like Brian Toohey, Marian Wilkinson, the late Bill Pinwill and others. The silence has been broken in recent years, but East Timor has been a shameful chapter in the history of Australian media, with journalists like Greg Sheridan and Paul Kelly of the Australian behaving in a way reminiscent of the famous appeasers in the British press during the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s. They supplied the verbiage for books that former ALP foreign affairs minister Gareth Evans thought would help him become the next secretary-general of the United Nations.