Tag Archive for: ASIS

Technology can make Team Australia fit for strategic competition

In the late 1970s Australian sport underwent institutional innovation propelling it to new heights. Today, Australia must urgently adapt to a contested and confronting strategic environment.

Contributing to this, a new ASPI research project will examine technology’s role in fostering national security innovation, particularly in transcending business as usual.

Australians love sport, especially the Olympics. They particularly love winning—even if they only beat New Zealand. Between 1956 and 1972 Australia won at least five golds (and 17 medals) at each summer games. This seemingly confirmed how effortless national success, prosperity and development were for the post-war ‘lucky country’.

And then the world changed.

Australia returned from Montreal 1976 with zero golds and just five medals. Humiliation was exacerbated by it being the first games broadcast in colour on Australian television. Worse, the Kiwis won two golds—even beating the Kookaburras at hockey.

Australia had missed the global shift in sports to professionalism and (sometimes questionable) sports science. Post-Montreal disquiet motivated Malcolm Fraser to reverse planned cuts and to establish the Australian Institute of Sport in 1981. Beyond the dollars, Australian sport underwent a profound cultural and psychological shift and continued to evolve: in May 2024 the Albanese government invested almost $250 million in the sport institute’s modernisation.

The result? Since 1981 Australia has won at least 20 medals at each summer games except 1988’s. We’ve even become regular winter medallists. Adaptation, innovation and commitment paid off.

Today much more consequential shockwaves are bearing upon Australian prosperity and sovereignty: the prospect of Chinese hegemony in our hemisphere; convulsions in US policy and relationships; and the metastasising threat environment described in the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation’s 2025 Annual Threat Assessment.

Since the late 2010s, governments of both persuasions have rhetorically recognised the magnitude of the challenge. In 2020, the then prime minister said Australia was facing ‘one of the most challenging times we have known since the 1930s and the early 1940s’. According to a press release from Defence Minister Richard Marles, ‘Australia faces the most complex and challenging strategic environment since the Second World War.’ Prime Minister Anthony Albanese describes ‘a time of profound geopolitical uncertainty’. Foreign Minister Penny Wong says it’s ‘nothing less than a contest over the way our region and our world work’.

So, where’s the imperative to address this ‘new world disorder’? We’re still not organising like a nation under this sort of challenge—despite warnings in ASIO’s threat assessments, the Defence Strategic Review and the National Defence Strategy. How do we create traction? How do we overcome the capacity gap of a nation of 26 million in a region of 4.3 billion?

Like after the 1976 Olympics, this isn’t just about budgets. It’s about creating cultural shift and encouraging and implementing novel, innovative ways of working—particularly through opportunities presented by technology.

A new research project by ASPI’s Statecraft & Intelligence Centre, in collaboration with Australian technologists Penten, is exploring the application of Australian sovereign technologies (including secure mobility) to business-as-usual work practices inside national security agencies. This aims to show how technology may foster innovation, bridge the capacity gap and sustain capabilities.

The project also explores how agencies and staff can access effective, secure tools so that ‘working better’ doesn’t become ‘working around’—which would introduce security and governance risks highlighted in a recent report by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner and shown by the Signalgate debacle in the United States.

Agency-level focus recognises that national adaptation will need to be comprehensive, including not just big-picture government and societal changes but organisational and workplace-level reforms. What’s more, it comes as historically significant investments are creating opportunities to transform default ways of working. This is also happening as the recently released Independent Intelligence Review finds that ‘the business model for meeting the intelligence needs of executive government is no longer keeping up with demand and needs re-imagining’ and, separately, that the National Intelligence Community must ‘work hard at recruitment and retention’.

Using internationally tested secure mobility options inside and outside high security spaces doesn’t simply promise convenience and speed. They offer possibilities for better bridging the interface between intelligence producers and consumers—moving beyond pieces of paper (and electronic versions of pieces of paper) to meet actual information preferences of a new generation of ministers, officials and war fighters. This in turn will transform how intelligence is generated, presented and evaluated.

Making IT use and IT-linked work practices inside national security facilities look more like 2025 and less like 1995 isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s an important shift towards meeting expectations of current and future workforce talent. Meeting their needs would improve retention and thereby addresses a key national security vulnerability.

These are just two examples of possibilities being explored as part of the ASPI-Penten project, which will report later this year and provide practical, implementable advice to the broader national security community – while building on the IIR’s findings and recommendations.

Business as usual didn’t cut it in sport 50 years ago. It definitely won’t cut it in the unforgiving international arena today—or tomorrow.

Stepping out of the shadows: ASIS asks publicly, ‘Do you want in on the secret?’

It’s not often that the Australian government’s most secretive agency steps out of the shadows. But that’s what happened on Tuesday night when Kerri Hartland, director-general of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS), gave a speech in Canberra exploring the psychology and mechanics of Australian human-intelligence (humint) operations.

That Hartland, who became ASIS’s first female director-general early last year, gave a public speech is itself novel. ASIS (and its ministers) have traditionally been allergic to publicity, even by the standards of such national intelligence community stablemates as the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation and Australian Signals Directorate. This is, after all, an agency that existed for a quarter of a century without being publicly acknowledged, and that only came under an act of Parliament in 2001. It’s also an agency for which secrecy, albeit suitably purposeful secrecy, is a critical enabler.

Public remarks by an ASIS director-general are not wholly unprecedented. The public address in 2012 by Nick Warner, director-general at the time, was a first. His immediate successor, Paul Symon, addressed a variety of forums in the lead-up to his retirement at the end of 2022 and in earlier interviews to ASPI. While Bill Burns and Richard Moore, chiefs of the CIA and MI6 respectively (agencies credited by Hartland as ‘two of our closest partners’), appeared together publicly last month to talk about how they’re handling threats posed by Russia and China.

Hartland’s speech on 30 October was unusual for being unconnected to anniversaries or valedictories. It’s also the first time there’s been a public articulation of the fundamentals of how ASIS spies for Australia, namely the identification, recruitment and running of foreigners with access to secrets Australia wants and cannot otherwise obtain.

It’s worth noting that ASIS is itself unusual. Everyone spies but not everyone has a dedicated foreign humint service. Within the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, for example, ASIS’s existence makes Australia more similar to its US and UK partners than to New Zealand and Canada (which have security services like ASIO and signals intelligence agencies like ASD but have not taken this step).

ASIS has existed for 72 years and governments—from that of Menzies to Hawke and, yes, Keating to Albanese—have found it a valuable tool. This says something about Australia’s national intelligence culture and gives a realistic sense of the country’s interests and place in the world. And it belies some more rose-tinted historical accounts of Australian foreign policy.

Hartland’s speech was framed around the themes of mythology, technology and psychology. She also generally emphasised collaboration: intelligence as a team sport; the importance of back room capabilities; and the variety of perspectives, skills and other aspects required to undertake successful espionage in the 21st century.

This collaborative dimension is itself a clue to why ASIS is making this public pitch now. It is increasingly evident that there is a need for collaboration to enable future intelligence work—whether it’s collection, analysis or other functions—and that this includes collaboration inside and outside of government. This is a development that should be highlighted when the government finally gets around to releasing the public version of the 2024 Independent Intelligence Review.

Hartland’s remarks underscore how collaboration is particularly important to the humint business. That collaboration encompasses people (the recruits and skills ASIS needs, hence the speech’s subtitle: ‘Do you want in on the secret?’), technological solutions to defeat operational threats in this digital age (through partnerships with sovereign industry and research) or society (in terms of the social licence underpinning the necessary risk that accompanies intelligence operations). It also means different forms of intelligence working together and a whole-of-government effort for national effect.

Hartland also made a clear attempt at myth-busting about how ASIS works and what its officers look like, embraced ethics and clearly rejected use of coercion towards ASIS’s sources and prospective sources. Nature abhors a vacuum, and the absence of official commentary has at times opened up all manner of myth-making about ASIS (and about Australian intelligence more broadly) in the public square—most notoriously in the 1970s.

The speech also offered insights into the purpose and use of the ‘secret intelligence’ that is ASIS’s ultimate contribution—including Hartland highlighting its value in the context of Australia’s challenging strategic circumstances. On her account, the secrets obtained ‘give Australia and our allies an advantage and help disrupt threats’. What’s more, she set out her case for the continuing value of humint: ‘To get to the true actions and intentions of people and groups overseas, it still takes a human sitting down with another human’.

The Australian public hearing directly from those officials who act covertly in their name is a very welcome development and should be encouraged. Secrecy might remain essential in the field but collaboration (including with the public and with the private sector) is increasingly key to winning the 21st century intelligence contest.

The evolution of Australian intelligence: revisiting Harvey Barnett’s ‘Tale of the Scorpion’

Scorpions are fascinating. Found on every continent except Antarctica, their fossil records span 420 million years. Indeed, they might be the oldest land animals still in existence. With astonishing resilience, they withstand heat and cold extremes, tempering their metabolism to thwart starvation. Calculating and precise animals, scorpions can even consciously adjust their sting’s venom level.

SCORPION was also the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation’s (ASIO’s) long-standing, publicly registered telegraphic address—and inspired the title of a most unusual and candid memoir of Australian intelligence, 1988’s Tale of the Scorpion by Harvey Barnett.

It’s level of venom: measured, subtle but stinging.

Barnett was ASIO Director-General 1981-1985, having served two decades with ASIO’s sister agency, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS). By 1984, and owing to the second Hope Royal Commission, Barnett would be thrust into the public spotlight.

Similarly, his unusual memoir was a first of its kind, opening the door to Australian intelligence’s historically closed shop. While Sir Edward Woodward’s One Brief Interval (2005) included some chapters on ASIO, Tale of the Scorpion is not autobiography. Rather it’s a meditation on the Australian way of espionage and counterespionage.

Despite the passing decades, the book’s themes resonate in the 21st century and deserve re-consideration—regardless of its limited contemporary impact (my copy is from a Canberra school fete bookstall).

Unusually, we know much about Barnett’s life in intelligence, most particularly due to public release of his extensive testimony to the second Hope Royal Commission (including on his background and professional expertise). Barnett appeared for 50 hours, resulting in 700 transcript pages.

Western Australian by birth, navy war veteran, and teacher by profession, by his own account Barnett joined the nascent ASIS in 1957, serving overseas before rising to director of operations. In 1976 new DG ASIO Woodward picked Barnett, a fellow outsider, to be his deputy.

When Woodward resigned and returned to the judiciary in 1981, Barnett wanted to succeed Ian Kennison as head of ASIS. Instead, he was successfully lobbied to accept the ASIO promotion.

The next four years saw Barnett lead ASIO through sometimes wrenching changes begun under Woodward. In 1975 ASIO had still been traumatised by the Murphy Raid, untrusted by government, organisationally amateurish, and still resident in Melbourne (characterisations shared with other intelligence agencies). By 1986 ASIO was subject to modern legislation, in Canberra, professional, and finally accepted on a bipartisan basis.

But what made Barnett momentarily a public figure was not organisational reform of ASIO. It was the Combe-Ivanov affair, and much of the book is a defence of himself and ASIO following earlier accounts by Combe partisans and critics.

In short, ASIO determined in early 1982 that Soviet diplomat Valeriy Ivanov was actually a KGB case officer. This prompted Operation BUSHFOWL, ASIO’s technical surveillance of Ivanov’s phone and home in the Canberra suburb of Curtin.

Some months later Ivanov began actively cultivating prominent Labor Party figure and fledgling lobbyist David Combe, in what Justice Hope concluded was an attempt to recruit Combe as a KGB asset. A month after the March 1983 election, Barnett briefed Prime Minister Bob Hawke on the relationship.

The initial result was cut and dry—Ivanov’s expulsion. But this initiated escalating political crises, including the resignation of a Cabinet minister, Mick Young, a Royal Commission at which the government and its security service would be represented by different (and eventually opposing) counsel, the remarkable witness appearance of a sitting prime minister, an internal Labor Party war, and a concerted media campaign on Combe’s behalf.

ASIO, claimed Barnett, was the government’s ‘sacrificial lamb’.

Of course, the caravan eventually moved on and the dogs stopped barking. Almost all key figures are deceased: Hope, Barnett (died 1995), Combe, Young, Hawke, Bill Hayden, Laurie Matheson (excepting then Attorney General Gareth Evans.) Ivanov disappeared behind the Iron Curtain and did not re-emerge after its collapse.

But Barnett’s musings on Australian innocence in espionage matters remain relevant.

‘With the simple self-confidence which living in an island state breeds, Australians are sometimes doubtful that their country might be of interest to foreign intelligence services. “It can’t really happen here” is a stock attitude. It has, it does, it will.’

Our understanding has improved in four decades, amidst globalisation and a new-found place on the frontier of Indo-Pacific power politics. We are no longer such ‘happy-go-lucky innocents’.

In 1983 the idea of an ‘agent of influence’ was controversial, and ASIO strove to show why the KGB might be so interested in a private citizen without official access to classified material. That is a stark contrast to today’s informed acceptance of the reality of foreign interference and information operations.

The bureaucracy has also grown up. Barnett notes how reluctant the then Department of Foreign Affairs was to countenance expelling foreign intelligence officers uncovered by ASIO—unless they were proven to be engaging in ‘illegal activity’. That was despite other Western governments doing just that, across the 1970s and 1980s. Compare this with the Australian Government’s latter-day actions.

Whilst Barnett’s part in Combe-Ivanov earned him public attention, he also had a behind-closed-doors legacy for ASIO and the National Intelligence Community (NIC). The Woodward-Barnett modernisation efforts had a profound impact.

In Tale of the Scorpion Barnett canvassed a still ongoing discussion about the merits of internal (or indeed other intelligence professional) versus external appointees to agency leadership positions, most particularly DG ASIO. A debate still ongoing today.

Barnett himself notably recommended against appointing his successor from within ASIO. Today’s approach typically prioritises some intelligence background but also cross-agency appointments—just like Barnett himself (nb Kerri Hartland’s ASIO experience before becoming DG ASIS, Mike Burgess going from DG ASD to DG ASIO, Kathryn McMullan’s Office of National Intelligence experience before heading the Australian Geospatial-Intelligence Organisation [AGO] and so on).

But this tendency is not uniform. Whilst it certainly holds true for ASIO and ASIS (where the last, strictly internal appointments to leadership were, respectively, Peter Barbour in 1970 and Rex Stevenson in 1992) it is considerably less the case at the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD).

Tale of the Scorpion has much on the post-1975 introduction of modern management: advertised positions, formal promotion processes, general encouragement of tertiary education.

It is interesting to consider these sometimes-challenging reforms in light of recent media speculation that alleged KGB penetration of ASIO in the late 1970s was partially enabled by alienation occasioned by such modernisation.

Sparked by the seminal Scientology v ASIO case before the High Court, Barnett’s contemplation of what should be the right level of transparency on behalf of intelligence agencies and leaders reflects a similar debate today. And his pride in being assailed from both the extreme right and left fringes of politics doesn’t seem that far away from the social media-scarred landscape of 2024.

He was also prescient about challenges and incongruity faced by ASIO in carrying out foreign intelligence collection (that is, collection on foreigners) inside Australia on behalf of other Australian agencies. That view was not shared by later DG ASIO Dennis Richardson’s recent review of national security legislation which upheld the status quo.

Barnett might have been relatively visionary, but he remained a prisoner of his time and experience. This is most apparent in his reflections on oversight—by ministers, the Inspector-General of Intelligence & Security (IGIS being created a year after his retirement) and Parliament. His scepticism about IGIS’s value has been thoroughly disproved. His vehement opposition to a Parliamentary Joint Committee on ASIO (now the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence & Security) a clear misjudgement.

Sometime even scorpions miss their target.

When Gough didn’t ‘crash through or crash’

The Robert Marsden Hope Building, home of the Office of National Assessments.

Here’s a question for readers of The Strategist who’ve been fascinated by the last fortnight of reflections on Gough Whitlam’s legacy. What’s the major area of policy, front and centre in today’s political debate, where Whitlam initiated a major and enduring reform that has been totally overlooked in all the column inches and megabytes on Gough?

Some clues may help to explain the omission. This is a story that doesn’t fit into his supporters’ narrative of Whitlam-as-heroic-visionary, expressing magnificent visions that swept away the outdated dogmas of his conservative predecessors. Nor does it fit neatly into his critics’ portrayal of Whitlam-as-disaster, or even Whitlam-as-flawed-hero, the arrogant ‘prima donna assoluta’ who disregarded wise advice from ministerial colleagues and official advisers.

Instead, it’s a case of Whitlam acting responsibly and prudently to defuse a contentious political issue and to open the way to policies and structures that have been broadly supported by subsequent governments of all persuasions. The Hawke government, which so often distanced itself from Whitlam’s ‘crash through or crash’ style, exactly repeated what Whitlam had done in order to consolidate the reforms he initiated. Read more