Over the past 40 years, Australian governments have periodically commissioned reviews of the Australian intelligence community (AIC). The first such inquiry—the Hope Royal Commission of 1974—was commissioned by the Whitlam government as a way of shedding light on what had hitherto been a shadowy group of little-known and little-understood government agencies. It was also the beginning of a journey that would eventually bring the AIC more into public view and onto a firm legislative footing. The second Hope Royal Commission, in 1983, was partly a response to some dramatic external events, in the forms of the Coomb–Ivanov affair and a poorly judged Australian Secret Intelligence Service training exercise that went badly wrong. But it was also a continuation of the process begun by the previous commission.