ABSTRACT
Historians of the Petrov affair describe it as unexpectedly bursting like a bombshell on the political landscape of April 1954 just after Menzies had announced the holding of general elections in which the predictions were that the government might not be returned. The excitement of a revelation about Soviet spying helped to reverse this expectation and while the Menzies’ government went on to enjoy another twelve years of office, the political fortunes of the ALP and its leader Dr Evatt suffered a severe reverse, leading to the wrecking of his political career and the splitting of the ALP that ensured its exclusion from office for the next 16 years. The release of Petrov Royal Commission papers and some ASIO documents by the Hawke ALP government in 1984 allows us to view the affair in a new light showing that it was not the spontaneous affair it was initially believed to be. The archival evidence is that ASIO was documenting the activities of Communists and radicals who were to be the future participants in the Royal Commission that was to be held into the ‘unexpected’ defection. The seeming coincidence of these people’s names afterwards appearing in the documents that Petrov produced and of their being called before the Royal Commission on Espionage is analysed in this chapter, in which a study is made of how ASIO positioned itself on the road that led directly to the Petrov affair.
