National Observer Home > No. 67 -Summer 2006 > Articles

A view from an ASIO Director-General’s desk

by John Miller

National Observer
(Council for the National Interest, Melbourne),
No. 67, Summer 2006,
pages 26-39.

 

Intelligence expert John Miller discusses the recently published memoirs of a former Director-General of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, Justice Sir Edward Woodward.

 

October last year saw the publication of the memoirs of a former Director-General of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), Justice Sir (Albert) Edward Woodward, who prefers to be known as Judge Edward Woodward. 1  Unfortunately, this is the only known work by a former Director-General, apart from the late Harvey Barnett’s Tale of the Scorpion; 2  and it is a very different work, in that Judge Woodward’s book only deals in part with his time as Director-General of ASIO.

Ted Woodward was appointed head of ASIO by the Whitlam Government, but only took up his position after the 1975 Whitlam dismissal and the election of Malcolm Fraser. Peter Barbour, ASIO’s third Director-General, had been dismissed by PM Whitlam on grounds of inefficiency, coloured by a great deal of unsavory rumour, which are best left unmentioned for the sake of the late Mr. Barbour’s family.

The interim Director-General, Frank Mahony, detached from the Prime Minister’s Department, was probably the best head the organisation never had, although he thoroughly deserves to be on the roll of ASIO’s chiefs. He was a decent, honest man with a keen nose for bull-dust and flattery, both of which he appeared to despise. In personal dealings, he was amiable and courteous. His presence raised morale from a very low ebb, emanating from the 1973 Murphy raid and exacerbated by the demise of Peter Barbour. And so we come to Judge Woodward.

Standing back from the fray, the question must be asked whether it is possible to deliver an impartial assessment of the man and his actions as Director-General. The answer probably depends upon one’s distance from the locus of power.

Judge Woodward entered ASIO, with the former head of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS), Harvey Barnett, as his Deputy Director-General. Despite mutterings about accepting the “poisoned chalice”, on paper and inside the organisation it appeared to be a very safe choice. Judge Woodward was the Director-General in whom executive power resided, while Barnett was very much in charge of operational matters.

This was very much the first reforming regime after Brigadier Sir Charles Spry and Peter Barbour who, respectively, had run ASIO virtually as personal fiefdoms, although Barbour had made some fumbling attempts at reform. In sociological terms, using Max Weber’s organisational theories, Sir Charles Spry was very much the dynamic and charismatic military-style leader. There were few rules set down on paper and quite frequent arbitrary decision-making at the top; precedent counted f0r little. It was probably a style of leadership that was relevant to the first generation of ASIO officers, most of whom had served in the armed forces during World War II, and many of whom were genuine but unpublicised heroes. Sir Charles had a set-piece lecture to newcomers: ASIO was the “fourth arm of defence” and, if hostilities broke out, all officers would be in army uniform the next day. The rank system was based on an armed forces comparator.

Barbour tried to follow, but as usual there was a classic Weberian second-generation crisis. Never had a Director-General taken over with such human capital of goodwill, but it evaporated in record time — about three months — owing to a variety of factors not discussed here. Frank Mahony held the ship basically as a steady hand on the wheel, and the new team was the first to attempt what Weber refers to as legal-rational principles. Bearing in mind that, for Weber, bureaucracy was the most efficient and effective type of organisation, the Woodward-Barnett régime made a demonstrable amount of progress.

This can be contrasted with Harvey Barnett’s successor, Alan K. Wrigley, a former Secretary of the Defence Department, who instituted draconian reforms that tried to reduce specialisation and increased generalisation, continuing a trend that had begun under Judge Woodward. The latter, at least, recognised that ASIO officers were not run-of-the-mill public servants and that specialisation had a great deal of merit, provided it was not carried to excess. Wrigley’s excesses and ASIO’s move from Melbourne to Canberra in 1986 cost the Organisation dearly in terms of experience and knowledge, as the best officers left once he reneged on reasonably favourable transfer conditions negotiated with the Hawke Government by Harvey Barnett.

Another new addition to the team was Philip McBride, who had been one of Justice Robert M. Hope’s assistants in the first Royal Commission into Intelligence and Security, conducted over about 18 months during 1975-6. McBride’s role was to turn around what amounted to an administration lacking consistency and wracked by nepotism, favouritism and probable unethical behaviour. His efforts were to drag ASIO into line with the Australian Public Service general rules and to establish a logical structure, to ensure promotion by merit and generally to keep the distance between ASIO and the APS, as it should be. ASIO is an intelligence organisation which requires a high degree of secrecy and a minimum of bureaucracy and probably, above all, it should be leak-proof. It is not intended to pass judgment on McBride’s performance in this paper, except to say that promotions and appointments were certainly fairer but not without manipulation. He also presided over the formation of a Staff Association for airing grievances. It was a pretty tame trade union, but according to some had its uses, while others cynically regarded it as a tool of management.

From the outset, Woodward and Barnett made it abundantly clear that serving ASIO officers were essentially a pack of outlaws or criminals who had previously operated outside the law. The effect such a statement had on serving staff was demoralising and often resulted in angry statements in general office chit-chat. However, at a Headquarters meeting attended by all staff, and at subsequent mini-meetings in Regional (State) offices, officers were told that a line had been drawn underneath their personal history and performance: they were recommencing at a new Year One. The staff were told that, in discussions with government, abolition of ASIO and its replacement by a new organisation had been a concrete proposition; and that, after lengthy consideration with government, it had been decided to crack down on ASIO and bring it into line. There was never any way of corroborating these statements. In retrospect, disbanding the Organisation and commencing again with selected, re-vetted staff may have been a better option.

It was also noticeable that, at times of stress for the upper echelon, the rank and file were regularly reminded of their previous indiscretions and the potential for their redeployment elsewhere. Those who joined the Organisation after the commencement of the new régime tended to be regarded as the “chosen” or the pure — an analogue of the KGB’s so-called “golden youth”. Mostly graduates, they were given intensive training and placed on a merry-go-round of postings designed to smash specialisation in favour of generalisation. The author of that idea is not known, but whoever it was should have known that intelligence is a craft, not a science or art, and that it depends not only on the body of accumulated written or taped material, but on analysis by staff with a good knowledge of the various fields — counter-espionage, counter-subversion, counter-intelligence and counterterrorism. Expertise is needed in these sub-disciplines at field or operational level as well as a sound body of analysis, usually undertaken at headquarters. Whatever its champions may argue, generalisation just does not work in intelligence organisations.

As usual, ASIO fell for the trap of popular management trends — generalisation and open-plan offices — a sure recipe for disaster. Popular folklore has it that ASIO recruited a PhD in chemical engineering and promoted him very quickly in order to retain his services. The old sweats claimed that the necessary qualifications for advancement were a Diploma in tasting boot polish, a Bachelor’s degree in buck-passing, a Master’s degree in writing the new government-speak and a PhD in sycophancy, mismanagement and dress sense. While this type of comment was manifestly absurd, there were elements of truth in what was required to get on under the new régime. As an example, when the Director-General visited Sydney on one occasion and talked with staff, he found one who had kissed the blarney stone. That officer said that, unless he was promoted, he would resign. To the distress of his peers, the opportunity to get rid of a perennial nuisance was missed and he went on to be an “18-month man”, that is, he would apply for a new position every 18 months and get out of his old position before his mistakes exposed his inefficiency. As a demonstration of newly-acquired reliance on hard work and discipline, a very junior officer with little experience was dismissed for being lazy. This was held out as an example to one and all. However, as one long-serving, middle-ranking officer said, somewhat pointedly: “It’s a bloody pity they didn’t start at the top!”

And so we come to an assessment of what Judge Woodward has written as part of his book. At the outset, it should be noted that probably the majority of staff regarded the Judge, as he was generally known internally, as a very fair and decent man. He had a tendency, on many occasions, to be rather aloof and judicial, as one might expect; but he also possessed a good sense of humour and a moderate temper. One former ASIO officer, who had considerable dealings with him, said he only saw Judge Woodward turn purple with rage on one occasion — which, all things considered, is a reasonable commendation. Whether there were any spectacular displays of bad temper behind closed doors, with senior officers, is a matter of conjecture. Another officer considered that the Director-General was a man who was extremely conscious of his high position as a judge and who had a hallway in his house, dominated by a portrait of himself in full legal regalia but many times larger than life. That officer asked another with psychological training about this phenomenon, but in the end it was put down to egocentricity.

To be fair to Judge Woodward, he is best viewed on the basis of the published record. At the outset, it should be noted that he shared one great weakness with another judge, the former head of the FBI (from February 1973 to May 1987), Justice William H. Webster. Both in their ways were over-legalistic and, while Judge Woodward showed flexibility in some matters, there are others in which he remained rigid and dogmatic, as will be mentioned below. In May 1987, Justice Webster went on to become Director of the CIA and left the Agency in August 1991. Perhaps a reasonable judgment of both men would be that they failed to understand fully the true nature of intelligence work.

 

Judge Woodward and Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser

Every officer who has spoken out on the matter has confirmed that Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser ordered that an assessment of terrorist threats to oil-drilling platforms should be “sexed up”. This was a somewhat confusing directive to a staff prepared to err on the side of caution in predicting such threats. It was anathema to former Australian Defence Force (ADF) officers who knew that the odds against an attack at that time were long, to put it mildly. There was also some backlash in that, as most Australian oil was owned by overseas companies and sold back to Australia at horrendous prices following world parity-pricing (introduced by the current Prime Minister when Treasurer), then where did the responsibility for defence of those installations lie? Armed forces defending such places as Pine Gap and Nurrungar were one thing; defending the interests of Shell quite another.

Apart from the inevitable mirth of being told to “sex up” assessments of any description, there was a backlash against exaggeration and embroidery of all types of cases, terrorist or otherwise. The Prime Minister, of course, had been ill-advised in visiting Monash University while the heat of the dismissal of the Whitlam Government was still being felt, especially among students. While there, Mr. Fraser was faced by angry demonstrators and, at one point, was hit by an egg. Thereafter, Mr. Fraser was accorded more bodyguards and ASIO given the job of preparing threat assessments for the PM and his ministers.

Shortly after the Monash University incident, a fairly large committee of section heads was called to examine preparedness for this new task. The legendary “Blind Freddy” could have seen what was coming as these nice young men in their three-piece suits, armed with clipboards and a row of pens in jacket pockets descended on a conference room. There is an organisational myth that, at the first coffee-break, all that had really been discussed was continuation of the working group. A relatively junior member of the Director-General’s staff had a backlog of work and left uttering what has become a much-used phrase: “Remember, you lot, where an egg can go, so can a grenade!” It was later said that the effect of this statement was akin to leaving a grenade in the room, with the pin pulled.

The result was a mighty empire built on scare-mongering and fear, dressed up as threat assessments, ranging from acts of terrorism to politically motivated violence (PMV), which became a separate section and sucked up resources like a vacuum cleaner. It also led to the formation in Canberra of a Special Inter-Departmental Committee for Protection against Politically-motivated Violence, or SIDC (PMV). This work should have been allocated to the then Commonwealth Police Force, for it was essentially protective security work. As one cynical observer and part-time shooter said: “It would have been easy to take out the PM.” Just as well, perhaps, that times have changed. However, as journalist Cameron Stewart noted in his article on Woodward in The Australian (1 October 2005), the ASIO threat assessment was reasonably reassuring — for which one can readily substitute the term “bland” — which became the hallmark of many an assessment.

 

The Terrorist Threat

ASIO’s early forays into the terrorist threat turned on the Arabic community in Sydney, as Cameron Stewart mentions in his Woodward article. The Arabic newspaper El Telegraph appeared to be of considerable interest, as did the arrival of representatives of the Palestinian organisation, Al Fatah, especially its spokesman Ali Kazak. Recruitments among new migrants was difficult, and this is where basic intelligence is gathered — on the ground, using agents rather than, as Admiral Bobby Ray Inman had tried at the CIA, just the use of technological means.

It is extremely doubtful whether ASIO has been any more successful in penetrating terrorist groups and their supporters in Australia, even with an enormous extra amount of funding and more staff. One can conjecture that many of the new staff are university graduates, which in most cases is fine for analysis; but, unless an intelligence-gathering organisation has people on the street gaining information, befriending people in target organisations, a lot of time and money can be wasted. As one of a number of elderly and experienced officers said, the organisation needed the “street-wise” — con-men, used-car salesman and real-estate agents and even, if necessary, petty criminals, all of whom had the types of people skills which were once valued under the leadership of Sir Charles Spry. However, coinciding with the arrival of the Woodward/Barnett team, much more emphasis was placed on the recruitment of graduates and, despite fairly stringent recruiting requirements, many appeared unaware of the basics of grammar and writing reports, let alone assessing and synthesising information.

The Sydney Hilton bombing of February 1978 occurred during Judge Woodward’s time, and he took a considerable interest in the matter, considering he was engaged in other tasks. One person was imprisoned and subsequently released on appeal, and has since gone on to become a senior legal person. However, scuttlebutt at the time emanating from the counter-terrorist section alleged that the New South Wales Police had a great deal of illegally-taped material, inadmissible at trial, but which could have ensured that a convicted person would probably never have been released from jail before the turn of the century. The amount of resources thrown at the Ananda Marga sect was grossly disproportionate to the threat it posed to this country. It was the Indian Government that was the main target and, essentially, like most terrorist organisations, monitoring of Ananda Marga should probably have been the responsibility of the then Commonwealth Police Force.

The point is that this unnecessary development — the siphoning-off of resources from other areas for somewhat dubious ventures connected with politically-motivated violence — happened on Judge Woodward’s watch; and those resources were certainly needed much more in other areas. Given Judge Woodward’s description of Malcolm Fraser’s ongoing concern about his own personal security, it would be reasonable to assume that a request from the Prime Minister of the day should not be denied, especially if he felt his family was at risk. This period arguably stands as an example of political requirements taking precedent over ASIO’s responsibilities.

The Australian’s journalist Cameron Stewart alludes to the fact that Judge Woodward knew that, under the ASIO Act, the spy agencies could not be told what advice to give the Government. This is very true, but it led to fearless advice being sanitised on more than one occasion, and virtually across the board — a dangerous trend. However, there were careers to be made in being sensitive to the needs of government. By their very nature, threat assessments on terrorist matters had to be presented in carefully-couched terms. They probably were bland, especially with the perceived threat to Australia’s offshore oil platforms, which were quite safe in the 1980s but, not surprisingly, those in the Timor Sea were made the subject of the first large counter-terrorist operation in the aftermath of 9/11.

 

Judge Woodward and the Vietnam War

One of Judge Woodward’s greatest achievements in his early days was to sort through files held on politicians of all stripes and destroy the vast majority. Arguments for retention of some were accepted, but the case had to be argued as though it took place in court. Subsequently, the manual name-index was purged of the names of people who had taken part in the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations. Recording them had been an instruction from Prime Minister Sir William McMahon. Despite the fact that conventional wisdom, and ASIO’s own research, showed that there were only a very few dangerous people involved in the peace movement — usually those holding office or organising demonstrations — the indices of recorded names blew out to nearly half a million entries. It was perceived by some to be quite amusing that a number of ASIO staff were regularly seen in the building wearing anti-Vietnam War badges.

The Australian Labor Party had a long-held, cherished belief that ASIO was a seething den of right-wing fanatics, fascists, lunatics and tools of government. Nothing could have been further from the truth: by far the majority of ASIO officers were Labor voters — old-timers and newcomers alike. Opposition to the Vietnam War even manifested itself among some who normally would support the Liberal Party. There is little doubt that Judge Woodward did the right thing in removing the names of people who were engaged in democratic process, and equally correct in his assessment that the Hilton bombing and any other atrocity would be blamed on ASIO.

As history has shown, the ALP Socialist Left faction is basically hostile to the police and ASIO. For a while, members were involved with the Campaign Against Political Police (CAPP), in league with the communist-aligned (pro-Peking) Builder’s Laborer’s Federation. Their activities, which included attempts to identify and publicise the names of ASIO staff (and to harrass their families) presented a demonstrable threat to ASIO’s capacity for covert action and maintaining the anonymity of staff. There were recriminations about the destruction of some of the records mentioned above, as later evidence was to show that the anti-Vietnam War movement received orders from Moscow and, in some instances, these were carried out. However, as a number of defectors from the Soviet secret intelligence agency, the KGB, were later to reveal, their reports to Moscow were doctored to make it appear that they completely controlled the peace movement, and indeed some Soviets were promoted for their efficiency. 3  A United States Senate hearing into the peace movement certainly showed that the KGB and, to a lesser extent, Soviet military intelligence (GRU), put a great deal of time and effort into mobilising the citizenry in America and the UK, in particular, as part of their worldwide “active measures” campaign against the West. 4 

 

The Cold War

Several years later, after Judge Woodward had left ASIO, a very strong (but unfounded) rumour swept the Organisation that he had provided a lobbyist and former Labor Party official, David Combe, with access to his personal file, which was literally crammed with reports of contacts with Soviet officials, most of whom were KGB officers. Despite frantic searches and inquiries in 1982-3, the file was never found and a new one had to be constructed owing to Combe’s increasingly interesting relationship with the KGB officer, Valery Nikolayevich Ivanov. The head of the counter-espionage section at the time was increasingly harried and frustrated that such a thing could have happened and that Combe actually bragged about it. Adding fuel to the flames was the discovery that a number of files containing reports on Combe’s relationships with the Soviet Embassy and its staff had been filleted to remove the incriminating information.

Despite extensive inquiries, both inside and outside the Organisation, the locus of blame for the missing data was never clearly determined. Counterintelligence officers found, to their frustration, that many other files had also been filleted and potentially damaging intelligence about certain public figures disposed of by persons unknown. The veracity of this information has a certain amount of the weight of evidence behind it, but proof is another matter, as staff were constantly reminded.

Judge Woodward asserts that it was ridiculous to think that the CIA had anything to do with the 1975 dismissal of the Whitlam Government, which is of course, part of left-wing folklore. Two junior ASIO officers, who sighted an incoming cable from ASIO’s Liaison Officer in Washington, which contained a fairly strongly-worded warning about cutting the intelligence ties if the Australian Government swung too far to the left, can vouch that that was the only threat made. However, through a strange and untold story, the cable was leaked to the press by a Department of Foreign Affairs officer, who had received a transcribed copy of the cable, double encrypted, from Canberra and then passed it to the press. ASIO’s suspicions that the Department of Foreign Affairs leaked like a sieve received further confirmation some years later through a highly secret operation.

One minor phenomenon, which caused some concern within the counter-espionage section, was that the Soviet Ambassador of the day had served in a number of countries where Marxist coups had occurred and was the Ambassador to Chile during the time of the left-wing Allende Government. For conspiracy theorists, it was a dream; but those with both feet on the ground noted that he was more of an amiable drunk than the likely mastermind of a coup d’état.

Of more pressing concern to the counter-espionage section was a ruling made by Judge Woodward on where mobile surveillance units should break off when following Soviet intelligence officers. In one fell swoop, this meant that Soviet intelligence officers and their East European counterparts had the run of Parliament House and the National Press Club, both of which were now barred from surveillance.

It is not known whether there was any tension between Judge Woodward and his deputy Harvey Barnett on this matter, but Barnett kept this rule in place until nearly the end of his tour of duty as Director-General. It is difficult to convey the constraints placed on ASIO by this rule, but it meant open slather for hostile intelligence officers, in contrast to the Houses of Parliament in London and the Houses of Congress in Washington DC where tougher measures were enforced. There is little doubt that under this ruling, ASIO was in fact in breach of a section is of its own Act relating to espionage.

Needless to say, this hardly endeared Judge Woodward to a lot of counter-espionage officers and it brought about a near-crisis in surveillance teams. Popular legend has it that, on occasions, the rule went by the wayside; but, if it did, nothing was reported. It was certainly known that one ASIO officer drank regularly at the Press Club and passed on some useful intelligence. There ought to be several very red faces among journalists of that era. One former officer has said that it was a “stone-cold certainty” that certain government departments leaked information to journalists who not only published some material but passed it on to Soviet “friends”.

Not many officers were privy to any discussions on the matter, but Judge Woodward’s zealous legal approach, which was never tested by appeal, caused a significant breach in ASIO’s knowledge and understanding of the activities of Soviet and Eastern bloc intelligence services. According to the Woodward book, ASIO maintained a close watch on these services and their officers. This was only partly the case, as other competing interests for coverage, especially in the counter-terrorist area, meant more reliance on static surveillance and reduced mobile coverage.

The fact is that there were never enough mobile surveillance groups to cover the number of Soviet and East European intelligence officers in Australia, to say nothing of the Chinese and other Asian powers. Furthermore, a number of former ASIO officers consider that the KGB and GRU were well aware of the situation facing the Organisation in counter-espionage operations and exploited it to the full.

One retired officer took exception with the view expressed in the book that ASIO had erred in extrapolating the number of hostile intelligence officers in the country from overseas figures. Nothing could be further from the truth. A rigorous system of analysing the activities of officials from these countries had been introduced during the Woodward years and was toughened under his successor. If anything, ASIO figures were usually pitched on the conservative side, and defector sources are believed to have provided information that concludes that Australia was indeed an extremely important part of the Western alliance and, for that reason, there was little numerical discrepancy. Visiting defectors often remarked that the numbers appeared too low and appeared to doubt ASIO’s capacity to identify them.

Woodward’s rules of engagement mentioned above also extended to the use of warrants. It is a matter of record that telephonic interception of quite a number of Soviet and allied target premises was lost. This is a clear case of evidence of absence being totally different from absence of evidence.

The numbers of Soviet intelligence officers in Australia were kept down, especially after the December 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, by a deliberate policy of refusing to grant security clearance to identified and suspected intelligence officers replacing those on station in this country.

It is known that, following the Afghanistan invasion, the Soviets, in particular, were frustrated greatly by the tougher line taken in Canberra and by Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser’s crackdown on exchanges, visits and, of course, participation in the Moscow Olympics. For a short while, there was also a sea-change in the Department of Foreign Affairs, as a number of officers returning from Moscow took over desks in the East European section. Quite a number had been subjected to harassment and surveillance and, in a couple of cases, been drugged and interrogated. They were hell-bent on revenge and readily accepted ASIO’s recommendations to refuse visas.

However, Judge Woodward appears not to have noted this point. The calibre of Soviet intelligence officers in this country was extremely high. 5  They were clever operators, but when the crackdown on visas occurred, both the KGB and GRU were forced to send less experienced officers to this country. The activities of some of these “cleanskins” produced some mirth, but, as information was gathered about them, they were duly entered into what was known as the Soviet “order of battle” or, in more conventional parlance, their organisational chart. Bearing in mind that Judge Woodward left in 1981, at a time when the Australian authorities had a fairly good grip on what Soviet intelligence officers were doing, he is wrong in asserting that this country was less important than other U.S. allies and especially about Australia’s global role.

Had he been briefed by certain other government organisations, he would have learnt that the Soviets were running communications interception operations from several of their premises, especially in Canberra, where, as Dr Desmond Ball has pointed out, the incoming “footprints” of microwave transmissions to Black Mountain Tower were accessible from Soviet premises. 6  ASIO took this as a given and was well aware that its own transmissions were monitored by both the KGB and the GRU and the results passed on to the operatives of other intelligence services. A considerable fuss was made when a CIA-made film about microwave interception was shown throughout Australian Government departments. Telephones were marked as insecure, but whether that had any effect on the information that passed over them can never be assessed. A warning label only lasts so long.

According to Judge Woodward, Prime Minister Fraser had told him that ASIO was penetrated by the KGB. It is a sad and unfortunate fact that every Director-General of ASIO — with the exception of Justice Reed and Frank Mahony, who were brief holders of the position — was supremely confident that ASIO had not been penetrated. This was apart from the episode of an errant would-be defector to the Polish Embassy, who was promptly handed over to the Department of Foreign Affairs. However, in the Hope Royal Commissions into Security and Intelligence of 1976 and 1983, Justice Robert Hope was far from convinced that ASIO had not been penetrated. He asked many staff of all ranks whether ASIO was incompetent or penetrated. The stock standard reply from counter-espionage and counter-terrorism officers was to the effect that there was certainly some incompetence, but penetration could never be dismissed. Judge Woodward is considered by some to be extremely naïve on this matter.

In recent years, KGB defectors have alluded to a stringent but manageable operational environment in Australia and, indeed, one KGB counter-intelligence officer was told that many “good things” were going on in the country and at least one senior KGB officer was given a medal for operational success in Canberra. While many Soviet medals are little more than baubles, this particular one was hard-earned and believed to have involved the penetration of ASIO.

 

Conclusion

Judge Woodward’s book will no doubt be read by many intelligence officers and interpreted in different ways, as the material in this article shows only too well. While he can be given credit for fairness and putting ASIO on a more systematic and legal basis, he was in fact out of touch with what might be called the necessary minutiae of operational intelligence work. He failed totally to appreciate the magnitude of Soviet and East European intelligence in this country and appears not to have commented on newspaper reports of a few years ago that the Australian Federal Police had investigated a spy ring in ASIO and Government. 7  The evidence gained was allegedly so alarming that it was buried, subject to a bipartisan agreement with the Federal Opposition.

There was one bungled prosecution of a very minor cog in a rather large wheel and he walked away into the sunset with full financial benefits restored and in the eyes of some, his honour intact. Counter-intelligence in ASIO was always very weak, lacked numerical strength and operational resources, and was concerned mostly with the vetting of new recruits.

One other stark point remains: since Vladimir Petrov’s defection in 1954, no Soviet official has ever defected to Australia; and most counter-espionage officers believe that the warning was there that, should anybody decide to defect, the KGB would know more quickly than the Australian Government. Most mysterious of all, though, is the fact that the former Soviet KGB archivist, Vasili Mitrokhin, who died recently, brought out a considerable amount of information on cases being run in many countries across the world. In Mitrokhin’s two volumes of published archives, Australia is never mentioned, and most ASIO officers interviewed believe that the information has been suppressed.

Before the history of the Cold War is totally whitewashed, this matter must be settled by nothing less than a full inquiry at the highest level and a public report.

 

 

ENDNOTES:

1. Sir Edward Woodward, One Brief Interval: A Memoir (Melbourne University Publishing, 2005).

2. Harvey Barnett, Tale of the Scorpion, (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1988).

3. The most notable instance was that of Lev Sergeyevich Koshlyakov, the KGB resident (head of station) in Australia during 1977-84. He was a highly skilled agent-running officer who went on to serve in Oslo in 1987. ASIO provided a full report to the Norwegian authorities and he was subsequently expelled for activities inconsistent with his diplomatic position — a euphemism for espionage. Koshlyakov’s presence in Australia and his activities shatter the myth that second-rate KGB officers were posted to this country. ASIO attempted to have him expelled, but this was opposed by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and Attorney-General Gareth Evans.

4. There is a considerable debate about the efficacy of KGB “active measures.” Stanislav A. Levchenko, a KGB Major and Line PR officer posted to Japan, defected to the U.S. in 1979. He was a specialist in active measures, especially disinformation, and provided considerable insight into those operations, subsequently publicised in a book On the Wrong Side: My Life in the KGB (Washington DC: Pergamon-Brassey, 1988). Another KGB officer who defected to the West, Oleg Gordievskiy, also a Line P.R. officer, tends to play down the efficacy of active measures in his book KGB: The Inside Story (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1990), co-authored with Dr Christopher Andrew of Cambridge University. Probably the most definitive account of active measures and disinformation in particular are contained in Hearings before the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, U.S. House of Representatives, 97th Congress, 13-14 July 1982.

5. See endnote 2 above.

6. Dr. Desmond Ball, of the Australian National University, is Australia’s foremost expert on Soviet electronic signals intelligence (SIGINT) and has also been involved in the decryption of the VENONA material — NKVD/MVD and GRU encoded messages to and from Moscow during the 1940s and early 1950s. His monograph, Soviet Signals Intelligence (SIGINT), published by the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Research School of Pacific Studies ANU (1989), is considered to be the definitive account.

7. KGB penetration of ASIO has received little publicity apart from a rather sketchy account in the ABC’s Four Corners programme, “Trust and Betrayal” (2 November 2004). One of the most senior defectors from the KGB, Maj. Gen Oleg Kalugin, was reported at the time of the Four Corners programme as providing information on penetration at the highest level.

 

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Mr John Miller is a former senior intelligence officer.

 

 

 

 

National Observer No. 67 - Summer 2006