"Well although the communist threat was pretty widely understood and reckoned with and how you treated it was another matter altogether and I personally looking back am glad that Menzies' attempt to declare the communist party illegal was defeated. I don't even remember what I voted myself at the time. He lost ...he won his referendum and both Houses supported him but it was declared, it was thrown out by the High Court and I'm, we've often felt that it helped us a great deal.

"The communists, our job was not to round them up or head them off so much as to know exactly what they were up to because they operated secretly. We had to have agents in the party. We had to know what communist policy was and they gave us an enormous amount of interest.

"They had a lot of able journalists and they used to publish the Tribune and other papers with their plans and of course they were out to win recruits."

MICHAEL THWAITES, HEAD OF ASIO COUNTER ESPIONAGE BRANCH