by Ganesh Sahathevan
Openly gay Penny Wong's presence in Malaysia is incongruos with
Malaysia's oppsoition to LGBTIQ lifestyles
A story published in 2020 in the Australian Financial Review about former ABC correspondent Peter Barnett has gained relevance given the elevation of Anwar Ibrahim to the position of Prime Minister, Malaysia.
Barnett had become a Muslim. lived in Melbourne, and unknown to many, played an active role, together with Anwar confidante Rahim Ghouse , in managing the Anwar campaign out of Melbourne. That work involved protection of the Anwar linked USD 8 Billion Commercial IBT.
According to the AFR Barnett may have also been a spy.
In September 2006 ABC Radio 's Background Briefing programme aired details of the links between a convicted Melbourne businessman Adrian Ong , the company he managed named Commercial IBT's Anwar, Ghouse and others.
Raja Petra Kamaruddin, the then mouth-piece of the former International Free Anwar Campaign , admitted in 2005 that any investigation into Commercial IBT would have adverse consequences for Anwar.
Ghouse moved to Melbourne in 2003, where Anwar 's son was being schooled at the Werribee Islamic College. In early 2002 , Werribee Islamic college provided employment to the wife of another Anwar man who had sought refuge in Melbourne, Zulfikar Shariff. Without that employment Shariff and his family would not have survived the initial period of their now 6 year stay in Melbourne. In 2004 and 2005, Zulfikar joined with Ong to discourage investigations into Commercial IBT. His family and he were granted permanent residence in Australia despite adverse reports concerning him in the Australian and Singapore media. In 2016 Zulfikar was detained under the ISA in Singapore for supporting ISIS. He was released in 2022 and has returned to Melbourne.
The Werribee Islamic College is regularly used by the Department of Foreign Affairs as a model for demonstration to visiting Islamic groups of how Islamic education prospers in Australia
Ghouse led the International Campaign to Free Anwar Ibrahim out of Melbourne with the assistance of the former ABC correspondent and Radio Australia director, Peter Barnett. Peter Barnett's brother Harvey Barnett , was the former director-general of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation , who had begun his career in intelligence at ASIS.
While at ASIS , Harvey Barnett ran stations in Singapore, Cambodia and South Vietnam , and eventually rose to become deputy director.
Brother Peter also served in that region , but for the ABC,during roughly the same period of time. Both men would later in life convert to Islam.
During the investigation into CIBT's operations in Melbourne by this writer it became apparent that a number of persons assisted Zulfikar and Ong in deflecting queries about CIBT. One of them was believed to have been Barnett. It is beleievd that Barnett played the role of a Western or white front to lend CIBT credibility. It is believd that Barnett had gone so far as to take calls on CIBT's behalf, disgusing his voice wiht a British accent.
In September 2020 the Australian Financial Review published. a story by Aaron Patrick which said:
For almost two decades, Peter Barnett covered international affairs with an effortless authority and access to power that made him a role model for a generation of broadcast journalists who followed.
Barnett died four weeks ago in Melbourne, aged 90. His death was marked with a condolence note from the ABC's director of news, Gaven Morris, and mourned by the small group of journalists still alive who worked with him, including Ray Martin, Tim Bowden and Helene Chung, the ABC's first female foreign correspondent.
Among some long-standing ABC journalists, Barnett's death rekindled long-dormant questions about a period when intelligence agencies were rumoured to use the national broadcaster as cover to spy on our allies and enemies.
Barnett was a fixture in south-east Asia. The president of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, offered Barnett unrestricted access to the country. He met Indonesia's first woman president, Megawati Sukarnoputri, when she was a 15-year-old performing Javanese dances in her father's presidential palace for US Attorney-General Robert Kennedy in 1962.
He was introduced to a global anti-Communist movement, Moral Re-Armament, by Kim Beazley snr, father of the former Labor Party leader of the same name, and taken to New York's best bars by Charles Buttrose, who ran the ABC in North America and whose daughter, Ita, is now chairman of the organisation.
Barnett, born to a shop-keeping family, loved to be seen mixing with what would today be known as the Davos set.
But he played down one of the most important relationships in his long and colourful life: the one with his brother, Harvey Barnett, a leading Australian intelligence agent of his generation.
In 1961, Barnett was jobless, single and broke. He had just quit his job as an organiser for Moral Re-Armament, which had close links to conservative politicians, businessmen and union leaders.
His older brother, Harvey, had given him ??100 (about $3000 today) to live off while he looked for a job on a newspaper in Victoria or NSW. Barnett had trained as a journalist on the West Australian. He was part of a team that broke news of the first British atomic bomb detonation, and became a political writer in Canberra. There, he had been recruited into Moral Re-Armament, which operated as a kind of cult for its American founder, Frank Buchman, who required acolytes to abstain from cigarettes, alcohol and sex.
The family-owned Ararat Advertiser in country Victoria offered to make Barnett editor. Instead, he moved to Singapore, a British protectorate where he knew one person: his brother Harvey, an undercover agent for the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, Australia's foreign spying service.
Harvey's job was to recruit spies to gather information about the plans and behaviour of foreign governments. In intelligence jargon, he was an "agent-running case officer". Barnett moved in with him, and would sometimes be asked to leave when contacts came by, he wrote in his memoir.
Harvey, a former Navy reserve officer, became the ASIS station chief in Singapore, Cambodia and South Vietnam, according to Economist journalist Robert Milliken, who interviewed him.
A typical ASIS station operated 35 to 40 spies, of whom half a dozen would be prize assets, according to an intelligence source. As ASIS agents were rotated through, they would spend two weeks handing over the spies. New ones would have to be recruited to replace those who retired, died or lost access to useful information.
Whether he was in charge of ASIS operations in Singapore when his brother arrived is unclear. Harvey worked for the service from around 1957 to 1976, when he swapped to the Australia Security Intelligence Organisation.
In a short time, Barnett was posted to Malaysia and Indonesia, where President Sukarno was flirting with the Soviet bloc, creating great angst in Canberra.
In 1979, having held just one management position in his career, Barnett was appointed managing director of Radio Australia by the Fraser Liberal government, which used the broadcaster to project Australian influence into the Asia-Pacific region.
Before Barnett and his Indonesian wife, Siti Nuraini Jatim, left for Melbourne, President Jimmy Carter asked them to visit the White House. The president presented Barnett's eight-year-old-son with a book about the White House with a hand-written note inside: "To Adam Barnett, American Citizen, From Your Friend, Jimmy Carter."
Barnett converted to Islam, and became an active member of the Muslim community in Melbourne. On Australia Day, 1991, he was made a member of the Order of Australia. Harvey had got his four years earlier.
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