Confessions of an Australian spy
Anonymous
26 March 1994 issue New Idea magazine
Subtitled:
‘I killed more than 10 people’
ASIS assassin Wendi Holland is setting the record straight… before time runs out
Story: Jayne Newling
Australian-trained assassin and spy Wendi Holland pulls a thin-bladed knife out from its wooden scabbard and slices the air in front of her jugular vein. “This,” she announces with a cold edge to her voice, “is how I slitted his throat. He died very quickly.”
She is describing her brutal execution of an Indonesian soldier. At least 10 others were killed in what Wendi says were her orders as a ‘sleeper’ – an ASIS (Australian Secret Intelligence Service) agent trained to do all the “dirty work”.
There were other dirty deeds:
- Four secret intelligence agents – sympathisers of dictator Salvador Allende – were murdered in Chile in the late Seventies in a joint operation with the CIA.
- Two Soviet spies were shot in Afghanistan by Wendi in 1979. She also used a garrotte – a thin-wired weapon with handles at each end to tighten around a throat – to kill three double agents, one in Manila and two in South Africa.
- She forced a Chinese double agent working in Hong Kong to overdose on a lethal dose of morphine. The agent was passing information back to China on CIA activities in Asia.
- She was an accessory and a witness to the murder of an East Timorese man who was stabbed by her fiancé Jose Ramos-Horta, a founding leader and a power behind Fretilin, which was one of the two major political powers formed to fight for independence – first from Portuguese colonialists and later against Indonesia.
Today Wendi is haunted by the assassinations. Each one is graphically relived in her dreams – especially the killing in Timor.
Last year the former ASIS agent became the first spy to go public about her undercover life. Since then several disgruntled agents have followed her lead. But this is the first time she is speaking so candidly about her years as an assassin with an ASIS unit so secret it didn’t even have a name.
No one but her trainer knew about her violent missions, and if ASIS ever acknowledges her existence, she risks imprisonment for breach of the Crimes Act for revealing highly sensitive material about the organization.
Wendi’s amazing life as a ‘spook’ began in 1969, when she was recruited at a Canberra cocktail party. She was just 19 but she was tough.
It had been as a country girl in Dubbo, NSW, that she learned about firearms, stalking, listening and detection from her ranger father. She was also extremely intuitive, a major asset for a spy.
Part of Wendi’s training was in the U.S. through the CIA, and in London, with MI6. She learned how to kill in Australia, on a large rural hideaway somewhere outside Canberra. “I didn’t know where it was because each time I went there I was blindfolded,” she recalls.
“My trainer, who always wore a mask, never spoke to me unless it was job-related. I went there at least six times for a month’s duration. I was taught secret codes, how to bug and how to use guns, silencers, syringes and knives.”
Wendi, who claims she penetrated drug rings, secretly copied sensitive government documents and infiltrated government departments, became adept at using high-tech ASIS equipment. Her deadly arsenal included lipstick which had a hole at the end to emit a poisonous gas; watches with hidden compartments for cyanide pills; large buttons concealing bugging equipment; and cameras, some as small as fountain pens, to photograph secretly. There were also wallets concealing syringes, high-heel shoes which hid knives, and hat pins called stilettos, first introduced by the KGB.
“I learned how to use a garrotte while I trained in Europe under MI6,” she says. “We used dummies or large fruits for practice. On this secret property I was also taught where to inflict wounds so the victims would die quickly. Then I learned how to maim.”
Wendi says there were at least six people whom she maimed, and one whom she knee-capped (a shot fired at the knee-cap, splintering it into fragments).
“At the end of my training, the assassination expert was very pleased and confident with my abilities,” she says. “ I was manipulated and brainwashed into believing killing certain people was necessary to defend myself. I was fit, running for kilometres every day. I was a crack shot and specialised in unarmed combat.”
Twenty-five years later Wendi, the girl who couldn’t kill animals on family hunting expeditions and cried at sad movies, says her training has made her hard, weary and cold.
Sitting in a comfortable chair at a secret location away from her bugged apartment, she reveals with unfaltering precision the macabre details of her clandestine missions. Her eyes are cool blue and her gaze steady and intelligence, which is at times unsettling.
She never knew her next assignment upon leaving Australia. But on arrival, couriers would give her the orders. When she was ordered to exterminate someone, she invariably worked with a CIA agent, watching the subject – most often for weeks at a time – before moving in for the kill.
Wendi is willing to talk about 10 ASIS-ordered assassinations that she was responsible for (she says there have been more). In four of those cases, she also acted as “cleaner”, the body-disposing duty, usually performed by an agent other than the assassin. One way to dispose of dead bodies was to incinerate them in a portable crematorium, all the while dispersing the ashes onto the roadway below the getaway van so that absolutely no trace of the victim would remain.
“I didn’t know who the four were in Chile or why they had to die,” Wendi recalls. “It was always suspected that ASIS and the CIA were involved in the downfall of (the Marxist leader) Allende, but it was unknown at the time that the CIA had poured $8 million into Chile, causing that government’s destabilisation. I was sent in with the CIA. My brief was to assassinate the four agents who were a threat to this effort.
“The CIA agent bundled two of the hooded agents into a truck and we took them to a warehouse. I shot both of them. A CIA cleaner then disposed of them. I do not remember feeling anything because I saw them as a violent enemy who had inflicted terrible torture on the women and children of men who were anti-Allende.”
Wendi says the other two Chileans were killed separately – one by a blow to the back of the head with a gun butt followed by a fatal chop to the back of the neck by a CIA agent. For one week they staked out the house of the other Chilean, watching and waiting for the moment he was alone. The CIA agent broke in and held him from behind while Wendi injected him with a syringe filled with either digitalis, a heart stimulant causing an instant heart attack or ‘cyano’, a drug from the cyanide family.
“He died within 30 seconds,” Wendi says. “The operation took less than five minutes. My head was buzzing because I was so frightened. I knew there was a lot of noise and I was so scared that we’d get caught. As a sleeper I didn’t exist on paper, and if I was caught I was on my own – ASIS wouldn’t help.”
Wendi then reveals – reluctantly – her first assassination in East Timor. She had gone there in 1974 and became very involved with the locals and with Jose Ramos-Horta. He fell madly in love with her and she admits to being infatuated with him. ASIS knew Wendi was there and was not, says Wendi, happy about it.
“Jose went to Indonesia to purportedly gain support for independence. An East Timorese man had discovered that Indonesia was going to expose Jose for trying to deliver Timor to Indonesia. The Timorese only ever wanted total independence. Jose told me this man was trying to destroy him and that he had to be killed. We were engaged at the time and he told me that if I loved him I would help him. We met this man in a place called Maubisse. Jose stabbed him several times in the heart and I helped to bury him. I felt awful but I believed at the time that he was evil.
“People had told me Jose was leading Timor to independence. In hindsight I realise the Timorese man was telling the truth – and that Jose lied.”
It was a bloody murder. “There was so much blood because he did not die instantly. I felt repulsed,” Wendi says.
In Afghanistan in 1979, Wendi worked with the CIA. A German man and a French woman were planted by the Soviets to gather information on the Afghan rebels. Wendi and a male CIA agent, posing as journalists, trailed the Europeans for three weeks before cornering them and getting a confession. “I then shot both of them,” Wendi says.
In 1984, in Manila, she executed a double agent. Two years later, using a garrotte, she killed two double agents in South Africa – the CIA agents were feeding information to their homeland.
She says the garrotte is so sharp it is capable of beheading the victim and she knows some sadistic agents who enjoy using it.
In 1974 Wendi killed an Indonesian soldier assigned to drag her, dead or alive, across the Timorese border. It was well-known Wendi sat in on Fretilin independence meetings. Another agent tipped her off.
“I got him in the mountains,” Wendi says coolly. “We went for a walk in the jungle because I had previously shown him that I was curious about Apodeti, a group backed by the Indonesians. I slit his throat with a knife and then I dragged him into the bush.”
Her final assassination was in Hong Kong in 1989. Holding a gun to the head of a double agent, a drug addict, she forced him to inject himself with a lethal dose of morphine.
After 20 years of clandestine operations, Wendi resigned from ASIS. But the organization never officially released or debriefed her. She says ASIS wanted to keep her “dangling on a string” in case it needed her again. In fact, she claims the spy organization contacted her last year to spy on two ASIS agents it believed – correctly – were about to squeal. She is angry with the way the service “used” her and at its “increasing ineptitude”.
“It is important to have an intelligence service,” says Wendi. “Without it many people would cause instability.”
Wendi says that when she quit she was offered no counselling to help her adapt to civilian life. “I didn’t fit – I couldn’t adapt,” she says. “No one but a psychopath could say they come out unscarred. It’s like Vietnam. How many come back normal? It took me a long time to learn to sleep and not be afraid of the dark. I have nightmares. I see visions of the placed to where I was sent. I relive the murders in my dreams.”
She says she has nothing to lose by exposing ASIS. She has no fear of retribution as she has so much more to reveal, which she is doing through a book she is co-writing. But just before publication of this article she went into hiding.
Wendi, now 43, is suffering from the crippling disease multiple sclerosis. She describes her illness as a death sentence. “I’m getting close,” she says without emotion. “My body is deteriorating and I’ve lost control of many of its functions like my bladder and bowel. I believe everyone is put here for a purpose and I served mine. But I want to the die with dignity… I don’t want to be taken care of. There’s nothing left in my life for which I want to live.”
When asked what was the worst thing she ever witnessed, she answers: “There is nothing worse than witnessing a wasted body, no matter if they are enemies. After each assassination I wondered if they had left children behind and the grief they would now have to suffer. It must be the worst thing for any family member to wonder what happened to their loved one.”
Postscript: ‘Pressure’ from Gareth Evans
Wendi says the Australian Government will never admit assassinations take place.
But she says: “I have proof. Last year I gave the government information which was passed on to another country. People are still being killed. I know because I am part of the spy line. Intelligence is like a club. I keep in touch.”
Wendi doesn’t regret what she did, except for the innocent Timor man she helped kill.
She believes it was fear of exposure of sensitive ASIS operations that pressured Foreign Affairs Minister Gareth Evans into announcing a judicial inquiry into Australia’s overseas intelligence service. Despite warnings from Senator Evans that agents cease all public comment or face “firm and prompt action”, Wendi says she has nothing to lose by revealing its operations.
“Evans doesn’t frighten me. Many decent agents put their lives on the line for their country and when it was over they were dumped. I know, I was one of them.”
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