Pod Insights ABC Rewind Great Aussie Cons | My Mother the Spy About this episode Mercia Masson is one of Australia’s longest serving undercover spies in Cold War era Australia. But her double life remains a secret to those closest to her, including her family, for nearly 50 years
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more.
0:08 Speaker 01 Economics is about more than money. It's about how we navigate money and navigate life. Hello, I'm Peter Martin from The Economy Stupid. My promise, and the promise of my whoopsmart guests who join me each week, is to let you know what you need to know without the jargon. And questions are welcome. No economic question is stupid. Search for The Economy Stupid and hear it now on the ABC Listen app.
0:37 Speaker 02 I have lost everything in coming here. Everything that I had till Monday.
0:43 Speaker 01 Mercia Masson paid a high price for her daring double life.
0:49 Speaker 02 I do not think there is anything else I could possibly lose.
0:52 Speaker 01 It's the 1950s, the time of the Cold War, communist paranoia and the atomic bomb.
1:09 Speaker 01 Hi, I'm Richard Roxburgh. This is Great Aussie Cons on ABC Rewind.
1:16 Speaker 01 Is there any greater con than the life of a spy? To consistently, convincingly lie to those you love? This is what Mercia Masson did for over a decade. And her only child, Cindy, had absolutely no idea. Until one day when she was 67.
1:39 Speaker 03 After reading the files at ASIO, it hurt me so deeply that I thought, my mother didn't want me as a daughter. She only wanted me as an alibi.
1:51 Speaker 03 My name is Cindy Dobbin and my mother was Mercia Masson.
1:57 Speaker 01 It's August 2011 and Cindy's in Canberra. She's been invited into ASIO to read her mother's files. Apparently ASIO is publishing an official history with Mercia's story in it and they need permission from Cindy to publish it. Cindy's pretty sure they've got the wrong person.
2:16 Speaker 03 One of the heads of ASIO gave a little talk at the beginning, telling me how important my mother was to ASIO. And halfway through the conversation, I said, "Look, I'm finding it very interesting, but I don't think we're talking about the same person." And he continued on, then I started reading the files.
2:37 Speaker 02 I think the first thing you have to do is set out quite clearly what you want in life and what you believe in. And once you have that, and if it is strong enough, then you take the course.
2:50 Speaker 01 That's Mercia Masson at the 1955 Royal Commission on Espionage, or as most people know it, the Petrov Royal Commission. When Cindy reads this, it blows her mind.
3:04 Speaker 03 She never gave any indication that she had a second life. I just thought that she was a journalist, working for newspapers and also the ABC.
3:16 Speaker 01 Well, well, an ABC journalist, huh? Weird to think of a spy walking the halls. But back to Cindy at ASIO's head office. As she's reading the files, officers start asking her questions too. What does she remember about her mum's life?
3:35 Speaker 03 I'd noticed little names that I'd recognised vaguely. And they'd asked me, "Did I know this person and that person?" I said, "No." And they said, "Oh, yes, you did know them because your mother would take you to visit them in their home in Melbourne." And all this was so new to be being told, I knew these people.
3:59 Speaker 01 Historian Rhys Crawley is sitting next to Cindy at ASIO that day.
4:03 Speaker 04 I'm Rhys Crawley. I'm a senior lecturer in history at UNSW Canberra. And I was one of the three authors of the official history of ASIO, going back about 10 years now.
4:15 Speaker 01 It's the first time they've met, but it's life changing for them both.
4:20 Speaker 04 I just casually mentioned that the man who Cindy thought was her father was not her father. And I had just picked that up from the records without any sort of thought as to, did she already know this? Or what would this mean for her and her identity? And I could see instantly there was sort of this shock that I had just told her something about herself unwittingly.
4:43 Speaker 03 Her married name to him was Greaves. And I never found that out until after I read all that on the files at ASIO. And it made me realise also how his family treated me. Because in those days, a child born out of wedlock was really looked down on. And I just couldn't believe that she couldn't have confided in me and told me those personal things.
5:11 Speaker 04 And I could see instantly there was sort of this shock that I had just told her something about herself. That changed her life in an instant. And yeah, which has made me sort of think twice about how I engage in those situations since then, perhaps with a bit more sensitivity.
5:29 Speaker 01 For most of her early childhood, Cindy lived with her dad's largely unfriendly family, which Cindy found strange, until, that is, she reads her mother's ASIO files.
5:42 Speaker 03 That's right. She was never married to my father. She was still married to someone else when I was conceived.
5:49 Speaker 01 They were in Newcastle, her and her dad, but her mum, Mercia, was in Melbourne. Then, when she's almost 10, Cindy's told she's going on a holiday. But turns out, she's being sent to live permanently with her mum.
6:07 Speaker 01 It's a wildly different life to what she's been used to back in Newcastle.
6:13 Speaker 01 Mercia hosts film works, showing terrible black and white war movies. All sorts of people drifting in and out of the house. It's all very bohemian. And then there's the soundtrack of her childhood. Mercia banging away on her typewriter late into the night. Fifty-six years later, when she sits in Azio's Canberra office, she sees some of her mum's papers and immediately recognises the font.
6:42 Speaker 03 Because she had a very old-fashioned typewriter, and quite often it didn't print things properly. And that really brought back a hurtful memory.
6:54 Speaker 04 Yeah, that was remarkable. I probably just assumed that most of the contact reports were written up by Azio. I have no doubt that Mercia was doing that, but I only learned of it through Cindy's memories of what her mother had been doing. And I think Cindy, she had these memories that really bring the story of the person and the complexities of that relationship to the fore in a way that we would never have been able to do in the official history of Azio.
7:23 Speaker 03 Having something like the old typewriter that you used to bang away all these letters and everything at home, I felt a little bit sorry for her then.
7:34 Speaker 05 Met Rex, told him, "I hate going back to Melbourne because of the loneliness." He said, "If you can get anything about the Yanks and uranium, let's have it pronto." Discussed British plans for atomic testing.
7:50 Speaker 01 The early 1950s, the pinnacle of Mercia's spying life. Naturally, we knew or suspected that our telephones were always...
7:58 Speaker 06 ...so that they had bugs in our meeting rooms to hand our home. Menzies was again prime minister. MI5 is still seeing Soviet agents. About nineteen years of age. Behind every oleander. About five foot four. And under every rosebush in Canberra. Nobody but a child, he said, can doubt that we are looking at a communist conspiracy in this world.
8:22 Speaker 01 Mercia's target is a man called Rex Chiplin.
8:26 Speaker 06 Rex Chiplin was an important journalist for the Communist Party paper called The Tribune.
8:32 Speaker 01 Cold War historian Phil Deary.
8:34 Speaker 06 He also became the press correspondent in Canberra, so he's quite prominent in the Communist Party.
8:42 Speaker 01 Rex was interesting and charismatic, so you can't help but wonder, were any lines crossed between the spy and her subject?
8:52 Speaker 06 That's an interesting question. Some have said that they were in a, how will we put it, a relationship that involved sex.
9:04 Speaker 06 But I think the evidence of that is shaky. Mercia knew Chiplin's wife. She denied that there was anything more than a very close friendship, but so we could say that at the very least, they had a very close friendship spanning a number of years.
9:20 Speaker 01 Living as a communist in the 1950s promised, at some level, to be exciting. These friends that you made, they were saving the world. But then came the raids and a referendum that almost saw the party banned.
9:36 Speaker 06 If you were a rank and file communist and involved in a number of the front organisations, such as the Youth Carnival for Peace and Friendship and the Peace Movement and so on, yes, there would have been a real sense of camaraderie, a sense of belonging, very closely formed friendships and bonds. But if you were a sort of a cadet, an apparatchik for the party at that time, you'd be very concerned about the political climate.
10:06 Speaker 01 Mercia isn't allowed to become an official member of the party. The communists want her to infiltrate the government and they reckon that'll work better if she's not an official party member. Which makes you wonder, is Mercia playing a double game here? Batting for ASIO and the Party? Because she wants so badly to be in.
10:26 Speaker 06 There's one report, I think it's Ray Whitrodd, who became her handler, that he wished he'd done more to provide her with a network of like-minded, in other words, anti-communist people. And because he didn't, he maintains that she was locked into her relationship, much more than otherwise would have been, with Rex Jiplin.
10:50 Speaker 01 Mercia and Rex are affectionate in their communications. It's all honey this and love that.
10:56 Speaker 06 And it was reciprocated. He would have taken comfort in his relationship with Mercia and in her being a confidant, as well as the source of important information.
11:11 Speaker 01 And so, it's no surprise, when it all goes belly up, that it is a catastrophe.
11:17 Speaker 06 This dual loyalty became conflicting. To be a member of the Party was to have an all-encompassing, but all-en closing worldview. So to leave the Party was to leave a world in which all your thinking, all your contacts, all your social activities was there, was provided, or you participated actively in that. So, huge wrench.
11:49 Speaker 05 Met Rex, he was to meet Petrov at the embassy. Told me I am highly regarded and more valuable than I realise.
11:59 Speaker 01 As well as writing reports, Mercia regularly meets her ASIO handler, Ray Whitrodd, inside Melbourne's Central Cathedral. They sit together surreptitiously on the back pew. It's all very cloak and dagger. Many people, including Prime Minister Robert Menzies, seriously believe World War III is imminent. So Mercia, like many others, thinks she's being loyal to her country by spying on her friends. Which seems okay, until a certain Russian spy triggers a royal commission. That'd be Petrov, by the way.
12:39 Speaker 04 So if we remember our history lessons, a man called Vladimir Petrov and his wife Evdokya, who were officers, and they were both intelligence officers, at the Soviet Embassy in Canberra, defected. They decided to stay in Australia. And this was in, Petrov defected on the 3rd of April 1954, without telling his wife. And so she, later that month, was being whisked off back to Russia. And there's these fantastic photographs of these scenes of her being dragged onto aircraft to be flown home.
13:13 Speaker 06 She looks very harassed, as the bulbs flash all around her. The Russian couriers have taken her by the arm.
13:22 Speaker 04 And it was during those, one of those flights, that she decided that she would defect as well, and so she applied for political asylum and defected on the 20th of April. By the 17th of May, so this is just weeks, the government had agreed to Charles Sprouse, so Charles Sprouse was the Director General of ASIO at the time, to his suggestion that there be a royal commission into espionage. And so it gets known as the Petrov Royal Commission, because it follows the Petrov defection.
13:48 Speaker 01 The Petrov Royal Commission gives the Liberal Party an anti-communist platform. Here's Robert Menzies campaigning in front of an angry mob. ...who don't believe in Australia, and who therefore belong to the Australian Communist Party. He's capitalising on the communist threat, but the mood is volatile. But of course, the communists in Australia were always yellow, they've always...
14:20 Speaker 01 It's a tense moment for the country and a very bad time for a spy to have her cover blown, which is exactly what's about to happen to Mercia.
14:32 Speaker 04 So the first sitting of the Royal Commission on Espionage was on the 17th of May, and then there was a federal election on the 29th of May, and Robert Menzies won that election. And so there's all this intrigue and politics caught up in the whole thing.
14:49 Speaker 01 At first, Azio doesn't want to put Mercia on the stand, but in the end, it has no choice. Remember Mercia's special friend, journalist Rex Chiplin? Well, Azio thinks Chiplin's a Russian agent, so the Royal Commission targets him, and Mercia's testimony is critical.
15:13 Speaker 04 And so Mercia is caught up in all this intrigue, and Spry wants the Royal Commission on Espionage to ask all those sorts of questions about how involved the Communist Party is in espionage, how involved the Soviet Embassy is in espionage, and Mercy Masson gets called as a witness to testify against the evidence of Rex Chiplin.
15:38 Speaker 01 Here's Rex, a pipe smoker with a thick mop of untidy, black, pushed-back hair. He's wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a close-cropped moustache. He's in the stand because of a secret government document he received and then published in the Communist rag, The Tribune. For over a decade now, Mercia's been posing as a Communist sympathizer, feeding Rex "chicken feed" documents, unimportant intelligence authorized by Azio, just to test what he'll do. But this time, Rex has obtained real intelligence, and this is very, very serious.
16:23 Speaker 01 The question is, was it Mercia who gave it to him?
16:32 Speaker 06 You say in your article, "A highly-placed government official showed this document to you." Do you remember writing that? I do.
16:38 Speaker 01 Rex knows he's going to be asked to reveal his source. Exactly who gave him this secret document. He's almost enjoying the attention.
16:47 Speaker 06 Who is he? This official? The information was given to me in confidence. As a journalist, I'll not reveal my source.
16:54 Speaker 01 Rex is asked to look at three small pieces of thin, blue-gray notepaper. There's a name on each one.
17:03 Speaker 06 Look at the name on the paper, Mr. Chiplin. Is that the man? No.
17:08 Speaker 01 Rex is getting rattled. By this time, he's revealed that the secret document was given to him in Canberra, in the Parliament House library.
17:17 Speaker 06 Mr. Chiplin, do you see the name on the paper? I do. Is that the man? I'm not answering any more questions on names.
17:25 Speaker 01 Rex has shown a third name. No one else in the court can see it.
17:30 Speaker 06 The third piece of paper, Mr. Chiplin.
17:32 Speaker 01 And then... he cracks.
17:35 Speaker 06 Yes. I know that person.
17:39 Speaker 01 It's Mercia Masson's name on that last piece of paper. Meanwhile, Mercia's daughter Cindy is oblivious to the courtroom drama. She goes to school, a babysitter picks her up, she does her homework, she still thinks her mum's a journalist.
17:57 Speaker 03 Every time she'd go away when I was at school in Melbourne, a babysitter would come in and look after me. And I'd never questioned it, I just assumed, um, she was the one. But, reading the files, it was Azio who actually organised the babysitters to come and look after me. There are times when her life was in danger, my life was in danger as well.
18:23 Speaker 01 So, was this Azio babysitter a bodyguard? Or a spy?
18:28 Speaker 03 It made me think... What was she trying to find out? Coming to babysit me, was I supposed to tell her things that my mother had told me? I don't know.
18:40 Speaker 06 The person who revealed that Azio and I set up to us was Vladimir Mahalovitch Petrov. There's going to be continuing speculation about Petrov and his part in Australian politics, while politics is studied in this country.
18:55 Speaker 01 The whole thing sticks, we've got the Petrov Blues. The Petrov Blues go on and on. And when Mercy is called to the stand to clear it all up, she's a mess. She's well dressed and stylish as always, but emotionally wrecked. She knows her cover is blown with Rex. Here's Reese Crawley again.
19:19 Speaker 04 She appeared in camera, so her identity was to be protected in publications. And she was given a pseudonym for the Royal Commission of Mrs. A. But she walked into that room and in that instant, Chiplin knew that Mercy Amasson was not his friend, but actually an Azeo agent. And she proceeded to give evidence and break down and cry. And the proceedings had to be postponed and stretched over a few days.
19:50 Speaker 02 Mr. Chiplin has always been a most sympathetic person and a very honest person to deal with. I have no wish to do Mr. Chiplin any harm. I think I've told you that. This is not easy for me, none of it. You have to have something very much bigger and stronger to see what actually will come out of it ultimately. Not only for yourself, but the people you like. And this is the only way I can look at this. I have not done anything to hurt anybody individually.
20:24 Speaker 04 And in that moment, her life undoubtedly changed. He knew that she was a security agent. She thought that they were friends. She lost a friend. And it just blew up, and I think it ruined her life. And it's really hard to not feel sorry for her and not to conclude that she was let down.
20:45 Speaker 01 So Azeo's thrown Mercy under the bus. It's outed her to her dear friend. In return, Rex instructs his barrister Ted Hill to expose Mercy as a double agent.
21:01 Speaker 06 I suggest to you that you, Mrs. A., you in fact gave that document to my client, Mr. Chiplin.
21:08 Speaker 02 I did not give it to him.
21:11 Speaker 06 Your Honour, my instructions are that this lady, whose identity Mr. Chiplin... No longer wishes to protect handed him the document in the parliamentary library.
21:20 Speaker 02 I have never been in the Canberra library.
21:22 Speaker 06 And I believe the reason she is so upset is that she's covering up her lie.
21:27 Speaker 02 My upset is what I have told you over and over again.
21:32 Speaker 02 I have been pretty gentle about this too. But I can stop being gentle at any moment. And if I start talking, I just will not stop talking about what has been going on for the last twelve and a half years.
21:46 Speaker 06 What?
21:47 Speaker 02 I did not give it to him.
21:51 Speaker 01 In the end, the Royal Commission finds nothing to charge Rex with. But Mercia is identified and shamed. A scathing article in The Guardian publishes her name and her address. Mercia has lost everything.
22:10 Speaker 04 There's this great quote. It comes from the Royal Commission transcripts. And I just think it sums up perfectly. The dilemma that Mercia Masson was in.
22:22 Speaker 02 Mr. Chiplin has been a very honest person to deal with. I have no wish to do Mr. Chiplin any harm.
22:28 Speaker 04 I think I told you that yesterday.
22:30 Speaker 02 This is not easy for me, Mr. Hill, none of it. I have lost everything in coming here.
22:35 Speaker 04 Everything that I had up till Monday.
22:37 Speaker 02 I have lost my friends, my close friends over the years and my associates with the left wing.
22:43 Speaker 04 I've probably lost my position. I should probably have to remove my child from the school and my mother from the house in which she lives.
22:49 Speaker 02 I do not think there is anything else I could possibly lose.
22:53 Speaker 04 And then that's the end of her ASIO story essentially.
22:57 Speaker 01 And so Mercia Masson picks up the pieces of her broken life and rallies. She reinvents herself as Mrs. Herbert, a lady of conservative politics interested in the arts. She moves herself and Cindy interstate, tells people she was born in Scotland, not Sydney. And that she's several years younger than she actually is. None of which helps her stomach ulcers.
23:33 Speaker 06 But then alas, they went too far and got an awful shock. Some Petrov spying packs leaked out, but then instead of a dog. Oh, we are three judges, three sad, sorry judges, we're in a Petrov stew. The public thinks, the whole thing thinks we've got the Petrov clue.
23:51 Speaker 01 She never gets over what happened. Mercia continues to mull over the Royal Commission transcripts for years, underlining, highlighting, obsessing.
24:02 Speaker 02 Did you discuss the treaty document with Mr. Chiplin? I do not think so. Did you tell him this is secret? I never said that. Did you say you'd leave it with him and come back in half an hour? I did not. That is an absolute lie. I have never been to the Parliamentary Library.
24:22 Speaker 02 Except the once...
24:24 Speaker 01 After nearly a year of deliberations, the Royal Commission concludes there are spies in Australia and that those spies are members of the Communist Party. But no prosecutions are recommended and no charges are laid.
24:44 Speaker 01 Meanwhile, Mercia's daughter Cindy finishes school, winds up the fencing, elocution, deportment and piano lessons. She says she only ever did those things to try and please her mother. She still doesn't know her mum was an ASIO spy. When she's almost twenty-four, she decides to move to Canada with no plans to ever return. But when she's thirty, she does.
25:12 Speaker 03 I returned to Australia about seventy-three, seventy-four and only returning because my mother had contacted me telling me that she had cancer. So she was in and out of hospital then. And things started to go downhill with her health. But we still couldn't be close to each other.
25:34 Speaker 01 Mercia dies in nineteen seventy-five.
25:38 Speaker 04 The story of Cindy in all of this is just as tragic as the story of her mother in that she really didn't know her mother and all of this harmed their relationship as mother and daughter as well.
25:52 Speaker 03 I think because I never knew what it's like to have a happy childhood, to do things as a family. I found I had a very difficult marriage. And my first child, Kyle, died when he was quite young. Then I had Kieran, then I had Shaun, and my daughter. We don't even speak to each other. And in some ways, I think that all goes all the way back to my relationship with my mother and myself.
26:27 Speaker 01 Decades later, when Cindy visits ASIO, when she thinks there's been a mix-up, she finds her mother's death certificate. ASIO has kept it, and she discovers ASIO paid for her mother's funeral. And as Cindy continues to read through the files, she notices they're full of contradictions.
26:51 Speaker 04 Well, to be good at her job, which she was as an ASIO agent, she had to be a good liar. She had to be able to lie to her family. She had to be able to lie to the people that she was spying against. And I'm sure at times probably lied to herself.
27:07 Speaker 03 When I read that at the Royal Commission, she told them that she was a widow, not a divorcee, I did wonder what other lies that she told them.
27:20 Speaker 04 Whether or not she passed that document to Chipland, I still never really figured out. The answer certainly wasn't in ASIO's files. But my suspicion was always that she had.
27:35 Speaker 03 I still wonder what side she was on.
27:39 Speaker 04 She wanted to be wanted. And yes, she was doing it for her country. She was doing what she thought was right. But I could never help shake the feeling that she wanted to please Rex Chipland. She wanted to please her case officers. And those things were often at odds with each other.
28:01 Speaker 01 Now, every year Cindy travels to the Rose Garden where Mercia's ashes are placed. She brings flowers from her Christmas bush and a small bottle of cleaning fluid, along with some steel wool.
28:16 Speaker 03 Every year I make the long trip by two trains and two buses out to Botany Cemetery to clean her little headstone and I say a prayer to her every day. So I suppose a mother's always a mother, but I'll never have any love for her.
28:37 Speaker 01 You've been listening to My Mother the Spy, the last episode in our series about great Aussie cons. I'm Richard Roxburgh and it's been my great pleasure to bring you these stories of charming rogues and beautiful liars.
28:53 Speaker 02 You've been listening to an ABC Podcast. Discover more great ABC podcasts, live radio and exclusives on the ABC Listen app.
Previous Great Aussie Cons | The Lady Imposter Next INTRODUCING — Skase: Fall of a Tycoon Page updated November 1, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated