Source behind Holt-to-China theory discredited

By Michelle Grattan
August 5, 2005

As the Victorian coroner prepares to deliver a finding on Harold Holt's 1967 disappearance, the identity of the ex-naval officer who claimed the prime minister was taken from the sea by a Chinese submarine has been revealed.

The bizarre allegation that Holt was a Chinese spy was made to British writer Anthony Grey in 1983 by former Lieutenant Commander Ronald Titcombe, MBE.

The previous year Titcombe had been forced to resign as secretary of the Melbourne Club because he had not revealed his questionable financial history.

Titcombe, who left the navy under duress in 1968, contacted Grey, claiming to know what happened to Holt after he disappeared into the surf off Cheviot Beach on December 17, 1967.

At a meeting in London, Titcombe handed over a manuscript containing the story on which Grey based his book The Prime Minister was a Spy, a purported expose of how Holt had been in thrall to the Chinese for decades. Grey sourced the claim to a former RAN officer, but did not use his name, because Titcombe wanted anonymity.

Tom Frame, Anglican bishop to the Australian Defence Force, interviewed both Titcombe (who has since died) and Grey for The Life and Death of Harold Holt, published today, which would have been Holt's 97th birthday.

Dr Frame said last night that Titcombe had not previously been named in Australia as the source. Grey told Dr Frame in 1999 by email that he remained "as convinced as ever" the story was true. The next year Grey claimed Holt's grave was in Beijing.

Titcombe's original claim was that he had been on duty in naval headquarters in Canberra on the day Holt disappeared, became suspicious of the official account and later, after picking up a hint in Baghdad, pieced together his story through extensive inquiries. But Dr Frame demolishes Titcombe's credibility.

Titcombe, a navy diver, was forced to resign because of personal indiscretions.

"A former naval colleague who worked with him briefly in 1982 said simply: 'he was a friend but also a professional con man'. Having spoken to Titcombe myself, I believe the story is a complete fabrication," writes Dr Frame.

"There could never realistically be much doubt that Harold Holt drowned," he concludes.

The Victorian coroner's office said yesterday the coroner on August 22 would begin inquests into more than 80 cases of presumed drowning between 1960 and the mid-1980s, including Holt's, to "clear the books".

Source behind Holt-to-China theory discredited - National - theage.com.au

The life and death of Harold Holt

The life and death of Harold Holt
By Tom Frame
Allen & Unwin, $35

Tom Frame observes at the end of his biography of Harold Holt that "sadly", the death of the nation's 17th prime minister now overshadows his life.

It was inevitable. The drama of Holt's disappearance riveted the nation; his prime ministership had been contrastingly ordinary. Holt is not the worst of our modern PMs (most observers would give that reverse honour to Bill McMahon), but he doesn't come within cooee of the best.

Even Holt's drowning in December 1967 off Cheviot Beach had a touch of the typical about it - Holt was "hot and went for a swim to cool down". What was atypical was that this casual swimmer who made a bad decision about the waves was Prime Minister, and that reminds us how vastly life at the top has changed in much less than a lifetime. No contemporary PM would be allowed to venture into the sea by himself.

The failure to find Holt's body would always give his end a certain mystery; even so, the bizarre claim advanced in a book published in the 1980s that he had been a Chinese spy taken away in a submarine would be hard to sell as fiction. Apparently its author, Anthony Grey (appropriately, a novelist), still "sincerely believes" the story, which he got from a dodgy former navy man, Ronald Titcombe.

Frame, who is Anglican bishop to the Australian Defence Force, painstakingly examines a theory that many would dismiss as verging on leg pulling, and not surprisingly concludes it is a "complete fabrication".

Holt was a transitional prime minister: in office 692 days, coming between the Liberals' glory days and their worst years, presiding over a nation starting to change.

Though he came from the older Australia, he had much of the modern about him. He took the first and most important steps to breaking down White Australia; he promoted Australia's positive (not just military) engagement in Asia.

But it was Holt who declared Australia "all the way with LBJ" and, pressed by the US, escalated our military commitment to Vietnam. Anyone contemplating the relationship between Holt and Lyndon Johnson can't help but be struck by the modern parallels with that between John Howard and George Bush.

Vietnam gave Holt a tremendous election victory in 1966 but that commitment, like much else in his political life, was starting to sour by the summer of '67.

Holt was a decent man with decent values (the latter come through in his administration of the immigration portfolio, and his attitude to Aboriginal affairs, where he carried the 1967 referendum to give the federal government legislative power). But his strength - his consensus style, which earlier enabled him as labour minister to have good relations with the union movement and ACTU president Albert Monk even while in bitter conflict with its militant, communist-dominated wing - was his weakness as leader. He had "an inability to manage power" and his party ran riot. Frame wonders: "Is it possible for a decent, honest and kind man to lead a nation?"

Well, perhaps difficult. Holt may well have been too "nice" for the job. His was a nature that craved approval and affection, in politics as well as in his personal life, where he had various extra-marital affairs, most famously (in retrospect) with Marjorie Gillespie, the woman who witnessed him swept away in the surf. Frame rather quaintly describes Holt's relationships with various women as "largely therapeutic. He explained to one cabinet colleague that he had someone to whom he was very close in Canberra because it made parliamentary sittings easier to endure".

While Holt's soft personality and lack of vision made for flawed leadership, almost any leader would have had his work cut out at that time. Inevitably, the end of the Menzies reign would have a destabilising effect (though it took a few more years and another couple of leaders before it all ended in the Liberals' tears of 1972), and that was reinforced by the changing nature of society at home and abroad. Holt's performance might well, if he had lived, declined further. But it is also fair to put his short time in context: how would John Howard be regarded, if his term had ended about December 1997, after what had been a poor year?

Frame's book, packed with detail, has been a decade in the making. It is a sympathetic picture - not surprisingly, because his decision to write it was "ultimately, provoked by what I considered unfair personal and professional denigration of the late prime minister". Still, Frame does not shy away from laying out Holt's flaws. The book's limitation is that it does not manage to get the reader sufficiently into the skins of Holt and his colleagues, or to convey dramatically enough the feel of Australian society in these years when the baby boomers were becoming adults.

Peter Costello, who launches the biography next week, recalls in his foreword that the day Holt vanished was "my first clear memory of an Australian political event". Now Costello occupies the seat, the deputy Liberal leadership and the portfolio once held by the man who, Frame judges, would never have challenged for the Liberal leadership even if Menzies "had stayed in power until he was 80".

The life and death of Harold Holt - Reviews - Books - Entertainment

Case of missing PM to be reopened

Bernard O'Riordan in Sydney
Wednesday August 24, 2005
The Guardian

New inquest on Harold Holt fires speculation

_____________________________

THE GUARDIAN , SYDNEY
Thursday, Aug 25, 2005, Page 4

It remains greatest mystery in Australian political history: Did the then prime minister Harold Holt drown while swimming at his favourite beach or was he spirited away in a Chinese submarine?

Almost four decades after Holt vanished at Cheviot Beach, south-east of Melbourne, an inquest is trying to solve one of the country's oldest political whodunits.

The decision by Victoria's coroner's office to re-open the 38- year-old case was not motivated by fresh doubts about the conservative prime minister's presumed death at 59, but by a law change requiring investigations into more than 100 drownings in which the bodies were not found.

The police file on Holt's disappearance has remained technically open, but because no body was found, no inquest could be conducted.

That law changed in 1985.

Holt, who loved the image of flamboyant outdoors man -- posing for press photos James Bond-style in flippers and snorkel with bikini-clad women -- was officially declared to have drowned while swimming in the ocean on December 17 1967.

A police investigation a year later found that Holt may have drowned in rough seas, or had been taken by sharks.

The sea claims dozens of lives every year in Australia, but many people were reluctant to accept that something as mundane as drowning had claimed their leader.

A copy of the police report, now housed at the National Archives of Australia, made no mention of how Holt may have died or the whereabouts of his body.

In the fevered cold war climate this simply fuelled the conspiracy theories and provided Australians with their own home-grown version of the John F. Kennedy assassination intrigue.

Holt had been prime minister for 22 months when he disappeared, prompting claims that he may have committed suicide because of political pressures, or had run off with a mistress.

In 1983, a former Australian naval officer, Ronald Titcombe, persuaded the British novelist Anthony Grey that Holt had been a Chinese spy since the early 1930s.

He claimed that Holt, fearing detection by Australian intelligence officers, had sought political asylum in a Chinese midget submarine waiting off Portsea, near Melbourne.

Holt's widow, the fashion designer Zara Holt, dismissed this conspiracy theory several years later when she said: "Harry? Chinese submarine? He didn't even like Chinese cooking."

Others believed the CIA killed Holt because they thought he was about to take Australia out of Vietnam, given the strong opposition to the war by many Australians.

The CIA theory was equally fanciful, given that Holt had pledged during a visit to the White House in 1966 to go "all the way with LBJ", referring to the then American president, Lyndon Johnson.

Yet another theory was that he had faked his drowning -- as the British MP John Stonehouse did seven years later -- to join a lover in the south of France. Holt supposedly died of a heart attack 10 years later.

Most Australians now accept the conventional version of events: that Holt was swept out to sea and drowned. But with a full public inquest now under way, many cannot resist dusting off the old wild yarns.

Lawrence Newell, the retired police inspector who investigated the case at the time, yesterday dismissed the conspiracy theories.

He said the only culprits were Mr Holt's over-confidence in his swimming ability and the treacherous seas.

"I thought about them (conspiracy theories) carefully and none of them seemed to me to be at all credible," the 85-year-old told the Melbourne coroner's court.

Guardian Unlimited Special reports Case of missing PM to be reopened

Case of missing PM to be re-opened  

By Guardian Newspapers, 
8/23/2005

It remains the greatest mystery in Australian political history: did the then prime minister Harold Holt drown while swimming at his favourite beach or was he spirited away in a Chinese submarine?

Almost four decades after Holt vanished at Cheviot Beach, south-east of Melbourne, an inquest is trying to solve one of the country's oldest political whodunits.

The decision by Victoria's coroner's office to reopen the 38-year-old case was not motivated by fresh doubts about the conservative prime minister's presumed death at 59, but by a law change requiring investigations into more than 100 drownings in which the bodies were not found.

The police file on Holt's disappearance has remained technically open, but because no body was found, no inquest could be conducted. That law changed in 1985.

Holt, who loved the image of a flamboyant outdoors man - posing for press photos James Bond-style in flippers and snorkel with bikini-clad women - was officially declared to have drowned while swimming in the ocean on December 17 1967.

A police investigation a year later found that Holt may have drowned in rough seas, or been taken by sharks.

The sea claims dozens of lives every year in Australia, but many people were reluctant to accept that something as mundane as drowning had claimed their leader.

A copy of the police report, now housed at the National Archives of Australia, made no mention of how Holt may have died or the whereabouts of his body.

In the fevered cold war climate this simply fuelled the conspiracy theories and provided Australians with their own home-grown version of the John F Kennedy assassination intrigue.

Holt had been prime minister for 22 months when he disappeared, prompting claims that he may have committed suicide because of political pressures, or run off with a mistress.

In 1983, a former Australian naval officer, Ronald Titcombe, persuaded the British novelist Anthony Grey that Holt had been a Chinese spy since the early 1930s.

He claimed that Holt, fearing detection by Australian intelligence officers, had sought political asylum in a Chinese midget submarine waiting off Portsea, near Melbourne.

Holt's widow, the fashion designer Zara Holt, dismissed this conspiracy theory several years later when she said: "Harry? Chinese submarine? He didn't even like Chinese cooking."

Others believed the CIA killed Holt because they thought he was about to take Australia out of Vietnam, given the strong opposition to the war by many Australians.

The CIA theory was equally fanciful, given that Holt had pledged during a visit to the White House in 1966 to go "all the way with LBJ", referring to the then American president, Lyndon Johnson.

Yet another theory was that he had faked his drowning - as the British MP John Stonehouse did seven years later - to join a lover in the south of France. Holt supposedly died of a heart attack 10 years later.

Most Australians now accept the conventional version of events: that Holt was swept out to sea and drowned. But with a full public inquest now under way, many cannot resist dusting off the old wild yarns.

Lawrence Newell, the retired police inspector who investigated the case at the time, yesterday dismissed the conspiracy theories surrounding the fate of Australia's 18th prime minister.

He said the only culprits were Mr Holt's over-confidence in his swimming ability and the treacherous seas.

"I thought about them [conspiracy theories] carefully and none of them seemed to me to be at all credible," the 85-year-old told the Melbourne coroner's court. "I think he went for a swim under conditions where he was most unwise and that's it, and he got swept out to Bass Strait."

The Victoria coroner is expected to close the book on one of Australia's most enduring mysteries on September 2, when he hands down his findings on Holt's death.