âItâs just a little familyâ: the perfect cover for ASIO spies
By Sandra Hogan
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In late-1950, Joan and Dudley Doherty started to spend a little more time with each other when they began taking part in Operation Smile, ASIOâs first bugging operation.
ASIOâs work on the case began with collecting information on Australians who were passing information to Russia, but agents soon began looking at Russians based in Australia as well. One such person was Fedor Nosov, who represented Soviet news agency TASS in Australia, but who was thought to be a person identified in intelligence documents operating under the cover name of âTEKHNIKâ.
News by Leisa Scott
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Subscriber only Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to believe that tucked away in the perfectly ordinary Brisbane suburb of The Gap, lived a family of spies. Mum, Dad and the three kids. They went on holidays to the Gold Coast with Soviet defectors, the Petrovs. Dad did the books for Abe Saffron, one of Australia s most notorious underworld figures. They d pop into the city looking like an everyday family posing for happy snaps but that was a ruse; they were busy collecting intelligence on could-be Communists. If it s a mission too outlandish, too impossible for you, that s understandable. Even the woman who lived this story finds big chunks of her childhood hard to believe.
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Growing up in the 1950s, the three Doherty children were trained by their parents to memorise car number plates, to spot unusual behaviour on the street and, most important of all, to avoid drawing attention to themselves.
The children became unwitting foot soldiers in Australia’s battle against Soviet infiltration in the Cold War. They attended political rallies, stood watch on houses owned by communist sympathisers, and insinuated themselves into the UFO Society. In 1956, the Doherty family went on a beach holiday with Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov, the famous Soviet defectors, who were hiding from Soviet assassins.Dudley and Joan Doherty swore their children to secrecy, and for decades, they didn’t even discuss among themselves the work they did for ASIO.