Previously released secret British spy reports revealed the Australian government was trying to charge a controversial Australian journalist with treason for almost three decades.
Reports from British intelligence agencies shows controversial journalist Wilfred Burchett was under intense surveillance of British spies for years.
The Australian government was working with British spy agencies to try and charge Burchett under the Treason and Disaffection Acts but failed to gather enough evidence.
Burchett rose to fame as the first to report from Hiroshima after the atomic bomb dropped and spent many years covering conflicts in Asia and eastern Europe.
MI5 agents wrote there was insufficient evidence, even though "some of Burchett's actions fell very near to being an offence."
"He was regarded as someone who needed to be kept tabs on but they were unsure if he was actually treasonous because at the time obviously Britain wasn't at war with any of these countries," British National Archives curator Stephen Twigge told SBS.
"But there was also a suspicion which appears to have been right in the end that he was writing under a pseudonym for the Moscow Times. He was receiving money from Moscow. The question was how much influence did he have and what was that money designed to achieve?"
In later years, Soviet defectors claimed Burchett was a KGB agent but these files reveal Australia couldn't prove the allegations despite three decades of surveillance.
Burchett was a friend of the Vietnamese Communist revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh and was labelled a communist and traitor for his dispatches from behind enemy lines during the Vietnam and Korean wars.
He was refused an Australian passport for 17 years and triggered a storm of controversy when he arrived in Brisbane on a private plane for his brother's funeral without a passport.
In 1972, his passport was finally restored to him by the incoming Whitlam government.
He later moved to Bulgaria, where he died from cancer in 1983.
While the security services spent more than three decades collating seven volumes of evidence against Wilfred Burchett, he didn't lose his sense of humour.
One dossier details an exchange he had with a fellow correspondent who warned him that his communications were being monitored.
He joked with his fellow journalist, he “hoped the security services were learning something”.
