ASIO's vault shows its odd choice of surveillance targets Snapped: David Stratton enters the Soviet Embassy. A young and suave David Stratton visits the Soviet embassy in Canberra. Little does he know, but the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation is watching and records the occasion with this photograph. Stratton is not and never has been an enemy of the state, nor a member of the Communist Party. He is the acclaimed film critic who, at 74 hosts the ABC's At The Movies with Margaret Pomeranz. But on May 7, 1969, when ASIO took its surveillance picture, he was 29 and he went to the embassy to get a visa so he could attend the Moscow Film Festival. He was also the director of the Sydney Film Festival, and this was reason enough for ASIO to open a file on him. The festival, before and during Stratton's directorship, ran movies from the USSR and other exotic sources. "But then, we also showed films from capitalist countries - from America and France and England and Japan," Stratton recalls. ASIO's interest in him, he suggests, "was a complete and staggering waste of time and money." He is one of many Australians who have risen to prominence who were "persons of interest" to ASIO in the 1950s, '60s and '70s. Michael Kirby, future High Court judge, and Jim Bacon, future premier of Tasmania, were in its sights. So were Reverend Ted Noffs, Dr Fred Hollows, writers Christina Stead and Christopher Koch, actors Peter Finch and Leonard Teale, poet Kenneth Slessor and painter Lloyd Rees. Filmmaker Haydn Keenan has collected more than 100 hours of formerly secret ASIO surveillance footage, hundreds of its photographs and thousands of documents during the production of a four-part documentary, Persons of Interest, which begins screening on SBS on Tuesday night. So rich is this "treasure chest," he says, the Stratton image is among many that did not make the final cut for the series, which focuses on four ASIO targets: novelist and outspoken communist Frank Hardy (a camera hidden in a briefcase snaps him greeting a Soviet poet at Sydney Airport); journalist Roger Milliss (whose father, Bruce, was secretly a member of the Communist Party while election manager for Labor prime minister Ben Chifley); the 1960s Monash University activist Michael Hyde (who confirms the students' violent plots); and the Aboriginal activist Gary Foley (who is upset to discover he might have been suspected of plotting the assassination of a federal minister at the Channel Seven recording of Frost Over Australia). The Stratton image will feature instead in an exhibition Keenan has assembled of the ASIO gems at the Damien Minton Gallery in Redfern. So will a surveillance shot, in Elliott Street, Balmain, of a young intellectual called Paddy McGuinness. When he applied for a job with a federal Labor minister, ASIO became interested in his previous work for the London branch of the Moscow Narodny Bank. Padraic McGuinness will be better remembered for his later head-kicking, right-wing columns that derided chardonnay socialists and Balmain basket weavers. A more fruitful ASIO operation, retold in the documentary, includes 1962 surveillance images of Ivan Skripov, first secretary of the Soviet embassy, trying to recruit a "Sylvia" as an agent. But Sylvia had contacted ASIO and was acting as a double agent. Her meetings with Skripov are captured on The Corso in Manly, at Taronga Zoo, in Chatswood and Kings Cross. Skripov would be declared persona non grata and expelled. But he encountered a "strange silence" about their existence. He was horrified to discover ASIO sold some of the films - deemed to have no further security value - for their silver content. Stratton remembers watching 2001: A Space Odyssey at the Moscow Film Festival. He had no idea at the time of ASIO's interest in him. "I was raised a very good Conservative in England," he says. The last thing I did before leaving for Australia was attend a fund-raiser for Harold Macmillan, the Conservative prime minister at the time. Persons of Interest starts at 8.30pm, Tuesday, on SBS One. ASIO, Through the Looking Glass is at the Damien Minton Gallery, Redfern, from January 21 to February 1.