Claudio Villegas hasn’t been allowed to see much of the information gathered on him by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation.
Three of his ASIO files have been declassified, but about half of the pages remain secret, and of those that have been opened, many are at least partially blacked out.
The secret Immigration Department file of Villegas, a migrant from Spain, remains closed to this day.
His are among the more heavily-redacted files dating back to the 1960s, when considerable attention was given by Australian government agencies to individuals identified as having Communist or left-wing interests.
Villegas, who’d settled in the NSW town of Queanbeyan, near Canberra, fell into that category.
The potential reasons for the pages that remain secret include ASIO’s unwillingness to reveal “operational procedures and techniques”, or “information sharing relationships” with foreign organisations.
Or it could be that ASIO is trying to protect someone in Villegas’ inner circle, in the small Spanish community in Canberra, who became a confidential source of information.
Villegas was born in December 1930 in Canete de las Torres, in Cordoba province of Andalusia, in southern Spain.
Though he’s now aged in his mid-80s, he still remembers as an infant seeing some of the brutality of the Spanish civil war that brought the military dictator Francisco Franco to power.
“When I was five years old, I saw the first big outrage in this world - that was seeing people killing each other in their own town,” he told SBS.
After leaving school, Villegas worked as a farmer, and then moved to the capital, Madrid, where he worked as a tram driver.
Then in 1961, he and his new wife, Antonia, decided to take advantage of a new migration agreement that had been negotiated between the Spanish and Australian governments, despite the absence of diplomatic relations.
One of his brothers had already gone to Queensland, where the sugar industry was trying to attract Spanish men as cane cutters, and his reports of the prospects in Australia had been positive.
On board the ship to Australia, he began twiddling the dials on a newly-acquired short-wave radio that had been illegal to own in fascist Franco’s Spain, and began realising just how much he’d been sheltered.
For the first time, he felt safe to be listening to La Pirenaica,believed to be broadcast from somewhere in the Pyreenes by exiled members of the banned Communist Party of Spain, the PCE.
Tens-of-thousands of PCE members had died during the civil war, and many more had been executed since, as part of a general crackdown against anyone regarded as left-wing.
A whole new world of information was opening up from elsewhere as well, in Spanish-language broadcasts from Radio Beijing, the BBC, the Voice of America, and from Radio Habana in Cuba.
A spark for more knowledge had been lit, that would continue as soon as he and Antonia began their lives in Australia, and long before they learned to speak English.
From the Bonegilla migrant camp in northern Victoria, while waiting to be given some work, Villegas wrote to broadcasters across the world - in Cuba, Uruguay, Mexico, and France.
The first job allocated to Villegas was on the Scrivener Dam project in Canberra, and the closest place the couple could find accommodation was in Queanbeyan.
One day late in 1961, after trying in vain to find any Spanish-language material in local bookshops, newsagents or libraries, Villegas and Antonia took a taxi to the Soviet embassy in Canberra, to ask if it had any printed material in Spanish.
Villegas says both the taxi driver and the embassy staff were surprised by the visit – which would become the first of many.
To his delight, he walked out with a magazine in Spanish, along with some photos of Yuri Gagarin, the Russian cosmonaut who a few months earlier had become the first man in space when he orbited the Earth.
Around the same time, he accepted an invitation from the owner of one of the bookshops where he’d been asking for Spanish material to attend meetings of the Australia-Soviet Friendship Society in Canberra.
“I went along with a good feeling towards the USSR because even during the civil war in Spain the USSR was helping the republic, like Mexico and Czechoslovakia,” he says.
As far as can be ascertained from what ASIO is prepared to release of Villegas’ files, he only came to the attention of the agency when he joined the Canberra branch of the Communist Party of Australia in 1963.
Later, tapped telephone conversations have him arranging to borrow films and a projector from the Soviet embassy to show to friends.
There’s nothing surreptitious about what he’s doing: he turns up at the embassy to collect the films in Alfonso’s or his own vehicle during business hours, and uses the carpark, so it’s easy for ASIO to spot him.
Many reports have him receiving mainly Spanish-language Communist material from Europe or Cuba, and getting copies made for friends elsewhere in Australia.
In 1966, Villegas made the first of several unsuccessful applications for Australian citizenship, with ASIO recommending that it be withheld because he was allegedly an “exceedingly active and fervent member of the Canberra branch of the CPA”.
In 1967, Spain established diplomatic relations with Australia and set up its first embassy in Canberra, providing him with a new focus for future anti-Franco protests.
By September 1970, Villegas had been rejected for a third time for citizenship.
Under the Labor government that came to power in December 1972, being a Communist was no longer regarded as grounds for refusing citizenship, and in 1974 he finally joined his wife and their four children in being an Australian.
Despite all the claims to the contrary in his ASIO files, in an interview with SBS, Villegas maintained his oft-repeated denial of ever being a member of any Communist party.
“But even if I had been, so what?” he said with a smile.
