Ebony Nilsson, ‘It Will Be Classified’ The Remarkable Story of Bill Marshall and ASIO’s Operatives in Australia

The biographies of migrants – as individuals who move through countries, across borders and continents – can be difficult to piece together. There are often gaps in their backgrounds and stories which remain mysterious, or parts of their lives which are not explicable. This same is true of the biographies of spies, though for different reasons. Writing the biography of a Russian migrant who became an intelligence officer with the fledgling Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), was thus a challenging process. But figures like Vladimir Mischenko, also known as Bill Marshall, reveal the importance of those who work behind-the-scenes, shaping Australian history from the shadows. 

In this week’s episode of the Afternoon Light podcast, Robert Menzies Institute CEO Georgina Downer talks to Ebony Nilsson, a historian of Cold War surveillance, about one of ASIO’s most intriguing agents. 

Ebony Nilsson is a research fellow in the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at Australian Catholic University in Melbourne, and a visiting fellow in the Australia Studies Institute at the ANU. She is an historian of migration, surveillance, and the Cold War, particularly in Australia. Ebony completed her PhD at the University of Sydney, and recently authored the Australian Dictionary Biography entry for Bill Marshall/Vladimir Mischenko.