Published: 4 January 2021
Last updated: 4 March 2024
DR JOHN FAHEY’S prejudicial picture of my late father, Hirsch Munz, as a Soviet spy is based on breaking some of the cardinal rules of historical inquiry. The most obvious of the errors that flow from this have been drawn to the attention of Fahey and his publisher, Allen & Unwin.
Ethical historical research requires, amongst other things, that a historian acknowledge their own biases; biases in their sources; that evidence be scrutinised; that contradictory evidence not be ignored and that records be accurately quoted.
Fahey’s treatment of a bugged conversation by ASIO in 1949 and the 1939 denunciation of Hirsch Munz to the Australian authorities by the Polish Consul General strays from these fundamental tenets of historical research.
Fahey’s defence of his method is that he is a former security intelligence officer and his analysis does not adhere to conventional standards of historical method. If that contention is accepted, objective standards of proof, the basis of the rule of law, science, liberal democracy and personal freedom are impugned.
In arguing that his past career in military intelligence provides him with unique insight, Fahey is unable to examine his own biases and those of the records he claims to have read.
The 1949 ASIO report of the bugged conversation of the Soviet agents Nosov in their Kings Cross, Sydney flat, is not a transcript of the original wire recording, but a subsequent report interpolated with opinion as to its meaning. However, Fahey accepts it at face value, and wants us to accept it, too, without question as his whole story hangs on it.
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READ: Did these Melbourne Jewish traders operate a Soviet spy ring?
Fahey gives no consideration of the possible biases of that source; ASIO officers investing long hours monitoring and transcribing recordings, mis-characterising a bugged conversation that in their own words is hard to hear and in which the English words that Fahey has seized upon are interpolated with Russian.
Fahey accepts ASIO’s characterisation of the bugged conversation as “appeared to be decoding messages,” notwithstanding that elsewhere in his book he says that coding and decoding messages by Soviet agents was undertaken in the Canberra Embassy.
Nor does he ask why English words would be vocalised by a Russian agent when decoding a message from a Russian source in a Russian code intended for Russian eyes and ears only.
The allegation by the Polish Consul-General in 1939 that Hirsch Munz is intensely pro-German and that he should be interned was not treated by Fahey as a scurrilous, false allegation by an official representative of a European nation that at the time was second only to Nazi Germany in its anti-Semitic policies.
Rather, Fahey, either not knowing nor caring, and relying on Australian security reports littered with anti-Semitic statements and sentiment (that he doesn’t report), explains away the allegation as an understandable ruse. In Fahey’s account the Consul-General “knew Munz was a communist and perhaps even that he was a GRU officer”. However, the authority Fahey cites for this statement doesn’t corroborate it.
In his account of this sordid episode, Fahey doesn’t reflect on the evidentiary value, nor the potential bias, of an official of an openly anti-Semitic foreign nation making a false confidential accusation against an Australian citizen (Hirsch Munz was naturalised in 1933).
The Consul-General’s request that he be imprisoned on his uncorroborated allegation, was found to be unsustainable after an investigation and the matter was dropped. However, Fahey, selectively quoting and mis-quoting the record, uses it 80 years later to support another false allegation.
Photo: Hirsch Munz working as a wool trader
