ABSTRACT
The early 1950s witnessed an extensive growth in the size and power of ASIO. The new Menzies government contained many men who had perceived the CPA and its forebear, Bolshevism, as the most serious threat to the world in those post-war years. These were men whose political values and ideas had been formed after the First World War when middle-class attitudes towards Socialism and Communism were firmly equated with the horrors of mob rule and the devastations of the Bolshevik revolution. The minds of Menzies and his ministers were firmly set in the direction of suppressing the CPA, jailing its continuing adherents and expanding and strengthening ASIO as a measure against possible subversion or espionage. Two other reasons prevailed. One was that the US administration (as the previous chapter demonstrated) looked unfavourably on those countries where the local Communist Party was not assaulted with all the armoury of the state. The second was that attacking the CPA was popular with the Australian news media and thereby the public. There were definitely votes in it. As large as ASIO’s staff then was, with 114 people, and as large as its financial resources were, none of its leaders could have predicted how quickly and extensively it was to grow in the succeeding Cold War years. It is the study of this administrative phenomenon (a study which has attracted the attention of historians in other Western countries where similar extensive expansions in their intelligence organizations have occurred) that this chapter sets out to undertake.
