Anne Neill as ASIO spy in Adelaide for seven years in 1950s infiltrates Communist Party as far as Moscow and Petrov
Anne Neill featured in an Adelaide's Sunday Mail newspaper in December 1961, revealing her seven years working for the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation as a spy within the Communist Party. At right: Neill leaving the Peoples Bookshop, run by the Communist Party, in Hindley Street, Adelaide city, in the early 1950s. The image is from constant surveillance of the bookshop by ASIO.
Anne Neill outed herself through Adelaide’s Sunday Mail newspaper in 1961 as being a spy for seven years for the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) within the Communist Party and its strong base in South Australia.
A neatly dressed, white-haired and softly spoken Adelaide eastern suburbs housewife in her early fifties, Neill was regarded by some as "a fluttery old lady” while she penetrated the Communist Party as an ASIO sparrow between 1951 and 1958. Neill’s husband Roy had been gassed while serving in in World War I (a parallel to the father of Peter Symon, a national communist leader in Adelaide). When the gassing brought on her husband’s early death, Anne Neill became interested in efforts to bring harmony between nations.
In 1949, Neill joined a peace organisation but she received information that bore what she saw as resembling to communist propaganda. Communism was the greatest threat to what Neill regarded most highly: Christianity, the British empire and the monarchy. She took the peace conference material to the South Australian government attorney general and asked what she could do about it.
Soon after, ASIO officer Rod Allanson called at Neill's home in Adelaide's Glenunga. He asked if she would go to the South Australian people conference “just to test the water". That sparked Neill's enthusiasm for on her new role. She joined – and spied on – as many communist front organisations as she could: the New Theatre, the Eureka Youth League and the Union of Australian Women. In 1951, Neill joined the Communist Party, gathering material from regular meetings and impressing ASIO with the value and volume of her “product”. Neill was paid £5 and 10 shillings a week by ASIO, plus £2 for expenses, but Neill was motivated by what she saw as a higher cause.
South Australia's Communist Party leaders found Neill charming and dedicated. A party member for almost 70 years, Beryl Miller recalled Neill as “very motherly. She spoke very softly” and "seemed to have a finger in every pie" – sewing costumes for the New Theatre, typing notes and making marmalade for fundraising fetes by day. By night, Neill wrote up hundreds of security reports about the comrades and their activities. ASIO tried to rein in her passion for the job, after she experienced illnesses, but she replied: “No, communists don’t take holidays.”
In 1952, Neill flew as a Communist Party delegate to the world peace congress in Vienna and then to Moscow, on a ticket secretly covered by an enthusiastic ASIO. She was the first ASIO agent to go into enemy territory. Her visit to the Soviet Union impressed her Australian comrades, too. Neill was invited to attend the Soviet National Day celebrations at the Russian embassy in Canberra in November 1953. There she met the KGB spy Vladimir Petrov, who, after defecting in 1954, became one of the most famous Russians in Australian history.
Petrov's defection, just months after his private meetings with Neill, raised suspicion within the Communist Party. Neill was interrogated for hours by senior party officials who accepted her assurances of loyalty and she continued her double life of good communist and ASIO agent for several years. In 1958, another committee member raised her suspicions that Neill was working undercover. The confidant was a secret ASIO agent herself. This was when ASIO told Neill to pull out of her role.
Neill concocted a story for the Communist party about needing to devote more time to her religion. But, in 1961, she went public to the Sunday Mail about her time as an ASIO sparrow, wanting Adelaide and the world to know she’d helped protect Australia from what she perceived as the communism menace. Neill died in 1986.
