ABSTRACT
ASIO and its predecessor, the Commonwealth Investigation Service (CIS), were worried about both left-wing and right-wing infiltration via the postwar immigration program. But within a few years after the end of the Second World War, it was obvious that fear of communists (possible Soviet spies) was much greater than fear of Nazi or Japanese collaborators. This of course made sense in a Cold War context: the communist Soviet Union was the new enemy, while the old enemies – Nazi Germany and Japan – had been defeated, making collaboration with them a historical rather than contemporary issue. Russian fascists and Japanese collaborators from China could have been included in the Index, in terms of Spry’s definition, but it does not appear that they were. Australian security services had been worried during the war about fascists in the Russian community in Australia, and in the immediate aftermath of the war, some residual memory of this as a potential security threat remained.
