Tag Archive for: Australian intelligence community

Australian intelligence needs a better strategy to meet its recruiting challenge

Australia relies on the professional workforce of its national intelligence agencies to collect, assess and disseminate the intelligence critical to Australia’s interests. They need the right professionals—and enough of them—to run the intelligence effort effectively.

But imagine having the most interesting job in the world, yet when you applied you didn’t know what you were applying for. And then once you were hired, you couldn’t tell anyone what you did for a living.

That’s what working in intelligence demands, but it poses a problem for the community’s recruiters. Amid global challenges and with a serious staffing and diversity deficit, agencies are struggling to attract the specialist skills and diverse thinking they need.

The national intelligence community is at a turning point. The Australian Signals Directorate plans to double its workforce under the REDSPICE initiative, the Office of National Intelligence needs top talent for its new Cyber and Critical Technology Intelligence Centre, and other agencies regularly advertise for new recruits.

With a shortfall of 30,000 cybersecurity professionals expected over the next four years and fierce competition for skilled workers across the labour market, Australia’s intelligence agencies face a tough recruitment and retention road ahead. The challenge is only compounded by the requirement for security clearances, a process that, even at its best, is time-consuming and complex.

With foreign and domestic spy chiefs speaking openly about this, it’s time to ask what role the Australian intelligence ‘brand’ plays in recruitment efforts. What can the intelligence community learn from the corporate world’s approach to branding? Is there a ‘dynamic ribbon’ for espionage? Or a ‘proprietary purple’?

Centralisation in Canberra, lack of candidate diversity and unique skill requirements are all part of the problem, but branding matters too. That’s because it’s not just about selling; it’s about how an organisation is perceived by and distinguished relative to its competitors, including potential employees. In the battle for talent, branding is essential, but it’s often overlooked.

Recruitment marketing involves creating awareness of and interest in an employer among potential recruits to attract the best candidates. Branding has become an important part of recruiting and of gaining an advantage. Brand equity—an organisation’s value based on public perception—drives job applications much like it propels purchases.

But can brand equity be created without brand awareness? After all, the work of Australia’s secret organisations is typically, well, secret.

Without perfect information, consumers of soft drinks, chocolate and, yes, future careers, face ‘decision difficulty’. To overcome that, they seek information, including signals such as an organisation’s brand, to judge quality. Brand associations can therefore heavily influence job application decisions.

So, what is the national intelligence community signalling?

The rebranded NIC jobs website paints a picture of a contemporary environment with happy, modern intelligence officers who are diverse and ordinary. It depicts a kaleidoscope of creativity and collaboration, where desks in open-plan offices are launchpads for innovation and individuality, and where tradespeople and graphic designers work alongside technologists and intelligence collectors.

This may well be true. But a century of spy filmmaking has reinforced an image of danger, intrigue, glamour and excitement that’s hard to counter. Words like ‘espionage’ and ‘spy’ conjure images of a hypermasculine James Bond, equipped with guns and gadgets, or any number of formidable female agents. So, clearly, there’s a mismatch between this stereotype and the proclaimed reality.

Consumers need the opportunity and tools for optimal decision-making. In the case of what it really means to spy, the disconnection between popular fantasy and lesser-known reality may be causing value uncertainty and increasing prospective employees’ confusion, leading them to question whether intelligence work is for them.

And who, exactly, are agencies targeting? While claiming that there’s no one ‘type’ of intelligence officer, recent campaigns typically focus on three demographic parameters: age (youth), sex (women) and ethnicity (non-Anglo). A past campaign didn’t bother with consumer classification: it simply invited the whole country to apply.

But targeting prospective candidates using demographics is inadequate compared to segmentation, which focuses on values, beliefs and influences, and psychographics, which considers the nuances of personality.

Research indicates that knowledge workers, the main target audience for intelligence work, are largely motivated by career growth, challenging work, and training and development.

The same study looked at the most used communication channels people use to find meaningful work. Current employees, word of mouth, media and direct experience ranked higher than brand and internet-based information. A number of studies suggest this is because direct experience or independent third-party endorsements tend to be seen as more reliable than brand reputation. But if an intelligence employee can’t discuss where they work, how can they be a brand ambassador for the community?

Director-General of Security Mike Burgess has described Australia’s intelligence agencies as unabashedly meticulous in all they do. To be seen as an employer of choice—moving beyond movie-star spies and outdated perceptions and towards intelligence as an inclusive profession—this meticulous approach must be applied to all facets of the intelligence brand, including for recruitment.

But a career portal facelift alone is likely to be ineffective. The independent intelligence review that’s now underway offers an opportunity for agencies to look outside the traditional national security sphere. There’s much to learn from the corporate experience about what makes for a memorable brand that weaves the threads of mission and loyalty. It’s about more than a colour scheme, a logo or a catchy tagline. It is about telling a compelling story and offering a differentiated narrative that helps potential talent feel like they could be part of something larger.

The Australian intelligence brand is distinctive and superior. It should be playing a significant role in drawing top talent. When done right, branding becomes the foundation upon which lasting relationships are built. Because, after all, without the right, and enough, professionals to run our intelligence effort, can Australia really be prepared to deal with the threats to come?

The Flood report and the building of Australia’s intelligence community

As I noted on the recent 20th anniversary, the Iraq war, and more particularly the intelligence failure in relation to Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, initiated an inquiry the following year, conducted for the Australian government by Philip Flood, a former director-general of the Office of National Assessments (ONA).

Research from ASPI’s statecraft and intelligence program, released today, finds that Flood’s 2004 report was an inflection point between the Australian intelligence community of the past—that is, in the immediate post–Cold War period—and today’s national intelligence community (NIC).

Flood set the institutional direction for what would become the NIC, most notably the future role for ONA—now the Office of National Intelligence (ONI). His recommendations also expanded resourcing for Australian intelligence, hitherto a niche (or, less politely, marginally relevant) contributor to statecraft, and drew what would become sustained government support for developing sovereign Australian intelligence capabilities.

Rereading Flood’s report in 2023, one is struck by his insightfulness and the enduring relevance of his observations on the business of intelligence. Flood was plain about the need for Australia to be a ‘global leader’ on intelligence in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, ‘exceptionally good’ on intelligence in Northeast Asia, and ‘very good’ on South Asia. He didn’t, however, foresee the degree to which agencies would need to trim their approaches to those core missions to meet imperatives in countering terrorism, combating people smuggling and providing support to military operations.

At the level of first principles, Flood’s candid description of the functionality of intelligence to Australian governments deserves full quotation, and is equally applicable to the conduct of statecraft today:

The ways in which intelligence can serve government are wide-ranging and fluid. Some enduring features, however, are clear. Intelligence can, in conjunction with other sources, provide:

– warning, notably of terrorist plans, but also of potential conflicts, uprisings and coups

– understanding of the regional and international environment, with which Australian decision-makers will need to grapple

– knowledge of the military capabilities and intentions of potential adversaries, a vital ingredient in defence procurement and preparedness

– support for military operations, minimising casualties and improving the environment for operational success

– support for an active and ambitious foreign, trade and defence policy. Intelligence can provide vital clues about the intentions of others (e.g. military plans) and the ambitions of adversaries (e.g. negotiating positions in political or trade disputes)

– and beyond these vital roles of intelligence in providing information, modern intelligence can be a more active tool of government—disrupting the plans of adversaries, influencing the policies of key foreign actors and contributing to modern electronic warfare.

Flood laid out an ambitious vision for Australian intelligence. He engaged with the (for some, discomfiting) reality of the need for Australia to have its own robust intelligence capabilities above and beyond the access provided by allies, despite the more typically low profile of intelligence in Australian governments—and a past temptation to lean on those same allies.

The scope of his review extended beyond ‘recent intelligence lessons’—Iraq’s WMD, the 2002 Bali bombings and the unrest that led to 2003’s Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands—to the effectiveness of oversight and accountability of the intelligence community (including priority-setting), ‘division of labour’ between agencies and their communications with each other, maintenance of contestability in intelligence assessments, and adequacy of resourcing (especially for ONA).

It was in addressing these matters that Flood laid the foundation for the future NIC, upon which would be constructed the reforms instituted by the recommendations of the later L’Estrange–Merchant review.

Importantly, Flood’s recommendations significantly enhanced ONA’s capabilities—not just analytical resources but also the resources (and tasking) needed to address the more effective coordination and evaluation of foreign intelligence across agencies. This was a critical step towards the more structured and institutionalised (if sometimes bureaucratic) NIC of today and an enhanced community leadership role for, ultimately, ONI.

It was also Flood’s very important innovation to recommend that there be regularised five- to seven-year intelligence reviews, rather than ad hoc responses to public or political disquiet about intelligence agencies (as in 1974, 1983, 1994 and 2004).

In addition, the Flood report identified issues that remain pertinent and challenging today.

Notably, Flood argued for more investment in diplomatic reporting (with its positive impact on intelligence for both producers and consumers). He highlighted a 38% decline in diplomatic staff overseas—and thus their reporting—between 1990 and 2003. Turns out it wasn’t just intelligence that was a victim of Australia’s post–Cold War holiday from history. Efforts are ongoing to rebuild this diplomatic deficit.

There’s similar contemporary resonance in Flood’s engagement with the long-vexed issue of the public presentation of intelligence—a matter that had been at the heart of the Iraq WMD intelligence failure. This remains a highly relevant question for governments today, as reflected in the attempts by Western governments to deter last year’s Russian invasion of Ukraine by publicly releasing intelligence indicating knowledge of Russian intentions.

There’s also continued relevance in Flood’s treatment of cross-community issues, such as:

  • the central importance of the intelligence community’s people—including training, career management, the perennial issue of where the people are going to come from, and language proficiency
  • the challenge of intelligence distribution—including avoiding overloading time-poor customers
  • maximising collaborative opportunities between agencies
  • leveraging intelligence relationships—including the broadening of relations beyond traditional allied partners.

Those themes remain familiar today and will be pertinent to a future intelligence review.

Revisiting the Flood report on the anniversary of the Iraq War

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. The subsequent failure by the forces sent into Iraq to find weapons of mass destruction commensurate with publicised Western assessments ensured that the basis for the attack was viewed as an intelligence failure equivalent to Pearl Harbor or 9/11. This was compounded when the startling coalition military success of March–April 2003 turned into a grinding counterinsurgency campaign.

In Australia, this begat a parliamentary committee inquiry, and in response to its recommendation Prime Minister John Howard commissioned a separate, broad-ranging inquiry into Australia’s intelligence agencies undertaken by Philip Flood, a former director-general of the Office of National Assessments (ONA) and Australian ambassador to Indonesia. The Flood report was released in July 2004 and would ultimately serve as a hinge between the Australian intelligence community of the immediate post–Cold War period and today’s national intelligence community.

Of course, what readers in 2004 wanted to know was what Flood had uncovered about the ‘intelligence failures’ that instigated the inquiry—not only Iraqi WMD but also alleged failures in relation to the unrest in Solomon Islands and the 2002 Bali bombings—or what Flood termed ‘recent intelligence lessons’. Each would be examined through the particular lens of the related analysis undertaken by ONA and the Defence Intelligence Organisation (DIO).

The first—and, from the perspective of the review, foremost—of those failures had been the mis-assessment of Iraq’s WMD capabilities.

Flood was unsparing in his assessment of this as an Australian intelligence failure: ‘Intelligence was thin, ambiguous and incomplete.’ This was particularly the case in assessment of Iraq WMD stockpiles, though DIO had been more cautious on the subject than ONA. Nonetheless, and overall, ‘assessments produced by ONA and DIO on Iraq WMD … reflected reasonably the limited available information and used intelligence sources with appropriate caution’. A comprehensive national assessment might have aided this process, but none had been produced.

And despite a heavy reliance on ‘foreign-sourced intelligence collection’, both ONA and DIO had formed assessments independent of the US and UK—‘in several notable cases choosing not to endorse allied judgments’. Disappointingly for critics of the government, Flood concluded that there was ‘no evidence to suggest policy or political influence’ on either agency.

For many Australians, of even greater importance was finding out whether the appalling terrorist atrocity committed by Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) in Bali on the evening of 12 October 2002 could have been prevented.

Here, too, Flood didn’t hesitate to call out what was ‘fundamentally a regional intelligence failure’. ‘Australian agencies should have known more’ about JI, he wrote, but the ‘failure to appreciate the serious nature of the threat posed by JI was widespread outside Australia’s intelligence agencies, and in Indonesia itself’.

However, Flood disappointed conspiracy mongers. He had seen ‘nothing to indicate that any Australian agency … had any specific warning of the attack in Bali’.

A third failure was that attributed to the strategic surprise (at least to the Australian public) of the collapse in law and order in Solomon Islands, and the subsequent need to deploy the Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands (RAMSI) in 2003 including a considerable Australian military and policing presence.

Flood found that ONA’s and DIO’s assessments on the Solomons stood ‘in a positive light’. ‘Particularly in the reporting from mid-2001, assessments clearly showed the ability of [ONA and DIO] to make robust, independent assessments on issues in Australia’s near region’.

Flood addressed claims concerning DIO, and more specifically its analysis of Indonesia and East Timor. The report found no evidence of ‘pro-Jakarta or pro-Indonesia’ assessments by DIO (or by ONA) and no evidence of any pressure having been exerted on either agency (externally or internally) to produce such assessments.

Flood had not only been tasked with examining these ‘recent intelligence issues’. His terms of reference extended to the effectiveness of oversight and accountability mechanisms within the intelligence agencies (including priority-setting), the ‘division of labour’ among the agencies and their communications with each other, the maintenance of contestability in intelligence assessments, and the adequacy of resourcing (especially for ONA). In forthrightly addressing these matters, Flood laid the foundations for the national intelligence community that would be assembled under the structural and other reforms instituted by the 2017 independent intelligence review by Michael L’Estrange and Stephen Merchant.

Upon receipt of the Flood report, the Howard government hastily accepted all recommendations except ONA’s renaming (as the Australian Foreign Intelligence Assessments Agency).

The response of the Australian press to the report was mixed. The Age said it was ‘diplomatic in its criticism’, and the ABC noted the ‘clearing’ of the Howard government. The Financial Review suggested that the Australian intelligence community had been ‘lashed’ by the report’s findings.

What was absent from most commentary was the suggestion that the Flood report had itself been ‘thin’ or ‘ambiguous’. And for good reason. On reflection, the unclassified version of the report remains one of the most detailed and unsparing public accounts of Australia’s foreign intelligence agencies and their functioning.

ASPI’s decades: Terrorism

ASPI celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. This series looks at ASPI’s work since its creation in August 2001.

Terrorism changed Canberra in ways big and small.

The 9/11 era and the Bali bombings caused a mushrooming of concrete barriers and bollards around Canberra’s government buildings, pushing out perimeters in a suddenly bomb-conscious city.

A fence went up around Parliament House. No longer could Australians freely stroll up the grass hill to the giant flagpole to stand above their elected representatives.

Australia’s security fears were galvanised. Australians broadly accepted that the risk was real—terrorism loomed as the great and immediate threat.

Government demanded more of the intelligence services and policing, and money and resources followed. That meant Liberal and Labor governments would have little tolerance for counterterrorism failures.

Cash tells part of the story. In 2000, the combined budget of the Australian intelligence community (AIC) was $325 million; in 2010, the figure was $1,070 million.

In 2004, Peter Jennings wrote that the AIC had received ‘a massive injection of new funding’ and had ‘doubled in size over a period of three to four years’. Intelligence agencies, Jennings wrote, had assumed ‘an even more central and high-profile role in Australian national security’.

The AIC, with six agencies, grew to become the gang of 10 in the national intelligence community (NIC).

By 2017, the independent intelligence review by Michael L’Estrange and Stephen Merchant said of the NIC: ‘With an annual budget approaching $2 billion and about 7,000 staff spread across 10 agencies, it is clear to us that on size alone the Australian Government’s intelligence activities supporting national security are now a major enterprise. They would benefit from being managed as such.’

And that was written before the creation of the new super-ministry, Home Affairs.

As buildings express policy choices and bureaucratic growth, come for a walk around Canberra’s parliamentary triangle to see the national security effects. The buildings tell how the intelligence agencies and the federal police were thrust into the centre of government.

Leaving from ASPI’s office in Barton, follow Macquarie Street to the corner with Kings Avenue, and the headquarters of the Australian Federal Police, occupying the Edmund Barton building, previously home to agencies such as trade, agriculture and environment. The AFP shifted from Canberra’s city centre, Civic, in 2009, crossing the lake to the political and policy centre arrayed around parliament.

Turn up Kings Avenue towards parliament and within moments come to the Office of National Intelligence in the refurbished building named after Robert Marsden Hope, the judge whose royal commissions designed the AIC. The peak intelligence assessment agency moved into the Hope building in 2011; previously it’d been housed in Defence Department facilities and the old Australian Security Intelligence Organisation building at Russell.

Next to ONI are the executive offices of the Home Affairs Department and also the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission.

Continue up to parliament to the side garden opposite the House of Representatives entrance, where a granite stone memorial bears the names of the 91 Australian citizens and residents who died in the Bali bombings on 12 October 2002.

To see the biggest marker of the terrorism era, go back down the avenue across Kings Avenue Bridge to walk around Lake Burley Griffin to Blundells Cottage (built in 1860). Raise your eyes from the tiny stone dwelling to see the Ben Chifley building (the most expensive construction in Canberra since the new parliament building) occupied by ASIO in 2015.

The policy in the architecture of this stroll is what national security built.

The first ASPI occasional paper, in July 2002, three months before the Bali bombings, was Recovering from terror attacks: a proposal for regional cooperation, based on a conference of Asia–Pacific defence ministers convened by the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Singapore (the Shangri-La Dialogue). The paper by Ross Babbage argued that few countries in the Asia–Pacific were well prepared for a terrorist attack and sketched a regional agreement to respond to terrorist incidents.

Following the US invasion of Afghanistan, terrorist groups viewed Southeast Asia as a potential safe haven and even a ‘second front’, Babbage wrote:

Some parts of Southeast Asia do appear to be potentially attractive to terrorist groups, largely because of their extant armed extremist groups, the anti-US attitudes of many younger people, large pools of urban and disaffected poor, porous national borders, exceptionally large air/sea/land transport hubs from which people can disperse with little trace, and sometimes weak national security and law enforcement capacities.

In 2004, Aldo Borgu set out some fundamental thoughts: agreeing on a definition of terrorism was as hard as agreeing on the best strategies to combat it; root causes needed to be addressed but doing so wouldn’t stop all acts of terrorism; terrorism does sometimes work; the war on terror was not a war and it wasn’t against terrorism—you can’t wage a war against a tactic; and intelligence was the frontline defence and offence against terrorism.

Carl Ungerer wrote in 2008 that a non-traditional security risk only becomes a national security priority when it meets the benchmarks of scale, proximity and urgency. Thus, Australian statements on national security had come to be dominated by counterterrorism.

As director of ASPI’s national security project, Ungerer called for a single national security budget and an annual risk assessment. An integrated strategy should assess national capabilities and vulnerabilities, as well as the resilience of government and civil society: ‘Beyond contingency planning, national resilience requires the inculcation of an understanding of what membership of a diverse, complex, modern state entails not only in terms of individual rights but also of obligations to both governments and fellow citizens.’

The institute studied healthcare preparedness for a mass-casualty attack; what terrorism meant for Australian universities, both as targets and as recruiting grounds; the media’s role in covering a terrorist attack; and the impact of terrorism on tourism—the need for the industry to review physical security and evacuation procedures, evaluate staff vettin, and consider security investments.

The threat of maritime terrorism had led to fundamental changes in the international maritime security environment, Sam Bateman and Anthony Bergin wrote. They described the gaps in Australia’s maritime thinking:

Aviation and maritime security pose very different challenges. There’s a relatively high level of aviation awareness in Australia, but this isn’t so with maritime awareness. While airports are basically similar, every seaport is different. The security of ports and ships must consider all environments: land, air, sea surface and subsurface. Most importantly, however, their security involves a fundamental division of responsibility between the Commonwealth, the states and territories.

ASPI did a joint research project with Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) on countering internet radicalisation in Southeast Asia. Terrorist groups in the region were increasingly using the internet to radicalise people and to recruit and train supporters, and the average age of terrorists seemed to be declining:

Most extremist activity on the internet aims to communicate a narrative, to draw in support and to incite action. The operational aspect is certainly there, but it’s much smaller than the communications and propaganda side. To put this bluntly: security agencies may detect the bomb manuals, but miss the process of radicalisation that produces the bombers.

A further ASPI–RSIS effort was to understand how individuals became terrorists. Based on face-to-face interviews inside the Indonesian prison system with more than 30 men convicted of terrorism, the report detailed how and why the men first became involved in terrorist operations; why some of them, despite having served time in prison, later chose to re-engage in violence; and why others decided to disengage from violent activities altogether.

When the Australian government’s inaugural national security statement was released in 2008, Ungerer and Bergin wrote that ‘the concept of national security has shifted from its traditional moorings in the defence and intelligence establishment’. National security was no longer a synonym for terrorism, and terrorism was relocated ‘within a broader spectrum of transnational security risks’.

In its first years in office, the Rudd Labor government commissioned two dozen policy reviews on all aspects of national security, from terrorism to transnational crime. The problem of all those reviews was ‘connecting the docs’, in Ungerer’s apt headline. He identified the tensions in integrating the strands of security policy into an ‘all hazards’ concept:

  • The internal–external divide—the assertion ‘there is no longer a sensible distinction to be made between internal and external security and between domestic and foreign policy’ was not matched by government processes.
  • Cops versus spies—the culture of mistrust and lack of communication between intelligence and police was a serious weakness.
  • The diplomatic drought—the lines separating war, peace, diplomacy and development had blurred. Yet Australia’s diplomats had suffered two decades of ‘chronic underfunding’. Australia should take note of US debates about the creeping militarisation of foreign policy.

Bergin and Ungerer wrote in 2010 that the Howard government’s counterterrorism strategy had focused almost exclusively on preventing terrorist threats from reaching the Australian homeland: there was a strong emphasis on the US alliance, the Bush administration’s ‘war on terror’ and border security. Although the Rudd government acknowledged the need for international action, the new emphasis was tackling violent extremism at home.

The post-9/11 era was arriving.

Australia’s director-general of national intelligence needs budget power

In November 2016, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced an independent review of Australia’s national intelligence community (NIC) to evaluate its operations and determine if it was effectively serving our national interests. A central aim of the review was to ‘provide a pathway to take those areas of individual agency excellence to an even higher level of collective performance through strengthening integration across Australia’s national intelligence enterprise’.

Two and a half years later, in May 2018, the government commissioned former defence secretary Dennis Richardson to undertake a comprehensive review of the legal framework of the NIC. An unclassified version of the review and the government’s response were released in December 2020. Richardson’s assessment has been characterised as the most substantial review into the legislation governing the NIC since the royal commissions led by Justice Robert Hope in the 1970s and 1980s.

In both reviews, the findings substantiated the heart of the NIC’s mission—to provide intelligence that informs strategic decision-making by eliminating or reducing uncertainty in support of the national strategy. The intelligence process, which supports the national strategy, is different but not separate from the national strategy’s policy process. Intelligence is achieved through collection and analysis; policy, through debate and implementation. The relationship between the two processes is dynamic, not necessarily sequential and often fractious. However, intelligence and policy are absolutely dependent on each other for their outcomes in support of the national strategy.

It’s clear from these two reviews that the government has put a great deal of effort into examining and assessing the NIC. As a result, recommendations, such as establishing the Office of National Intelligence headed by a director-general for national intelligence (DGNI), have ‘provided a pathway’ for improving the governance of intelligence in Australia and strengthening integration across Australia’s national intelligence enterprise.

Unfortunately, what the government has failed to do is conduct a similar review of the policy processes of Australia’s national strategy, so the DGNI can ‘appropriately integrate [intelligence] strategies across the suite of agency capabilities’. The lack of a comprehensive policy review of our national strategy, similar to the intelligence reviews, makes it rather vexing for the DGNI to integrate and coordinate NIC capabilities to support national strategic priorities.

A grand national strategy review is important not only to the NIC, but also for the nation. Why? Because a nation’s national strategy serves as its roadmap. It defines for the nation, regardless of which party is in power, what the nation’s priorities are while reconciling the means and ends with a purpose of action. A national strategy is enduring; it is adjusted slightly based on events—not changes in government. It is tempered against budget realities, is politically agnostic and is imbued with the cultural mores of its people.

Often, the security policy pillar is the emphasis of a national strategy because it’s the simplest to develop and sustain. However, a comprehensive national strategy places equal emphasis on all the crucial strategic policy pillars—information and technology, economics, diplomacy and security. To be clear, a national security policy is not a national strategy; it’s simply a component of the national strategy.

Indeed, the last time Australia had anything akin to a national strategy review was Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s national security review in 2013. Comparable to what we’ve seen from recent Liberal Party initiatives, the Gillard Labor government’s review was, predominantly, focused on Australia’s national security apparatus, as opposed to the totality of national strategy.

However, Australia should not feel lacking in this endeavour. The US, which is considered our closest strategic ally, hasn’t had a national strategy since Dwight Eisenhower was president in 1956. Beginning with the Kennedy administration in 1961, the US has lived off an approach driven almost exclusively by national security concerns and five-year budget cycles. As such, economic investments, diplomatic relations, and technological research and development initiatives in the US have a shelf life of four to five years at best (or, as seen with the Trump administration, the latest tweet).

In addition to a comprehensive national strategy review to assist the NIC in focusing its activities, the NIC would also benefit from the DGNI having some degree of budget authority. As our colleagues in the US discovered when they established the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) after the 9/11 attacks, the ability of the ODNI to ‘integrate’ the activities of the US national intelligence community was more vision than reality when it came to getting agencies to accept its guidance.

Initially, the ODNI had little to no authority to get the intelligence community to do much of anything that was not specifically directed in legislation or presidential executive order. And even then, some agencies just ignored the direction and guidance. Fortunately, over time, and with the assistance of congressional legislation, the ODNI gained authorities, including over the budget, which permitted it to loosely manage this federation of the willing.

There’s nothing in either Australian review that leads one to believe the intelligence agencies will embrace anything the DGNI ‘integrates’ if it’s not in their best interest. The review’s recommendations that keep the DGNI out of the day-to-day business of intelligence operations is spot-on. That’s the job of agency leaders. However, to ensure that NIC’s activities are tethered to the policies that support the national strategy, that there’s interagency coordination on requirements, and that operational missions are not duplicated across similar domains, the DGNI needs to be given some budget authority over the NIC.

Individual agencies would still be in charge of their budgets, but the DGNI, working with the NIC and parliament, would be the focal point for the planning, programming and budgeting of Australian resources to conduct intelligence activities—be it operational support, analysis, research and development, education or intelligence architectural improvements. Budget authority, more than any other authority, will permit the DGNI to ensure that the NIC’s national strategy responsibilities are aligned, resourced and properly executed while strengthening integration across Australia’s national intelligence enterprise.

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill lamented after World War II at ‘how the malice of the wicked was reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous; how counsels of prudence and restraint became the prime agents of mortal danger; and how the middle road was adopted from a desire for safety, which, in turn, was a direct roadmap to disaster’.

As a nation, Australia is standing at a crossroads on that roadmap, and the road to divert disaster is clear. The more challenging road is to conduct a comprehensive national strategy review and to consider giving the DGNI more authority over the NIC in order to strengthen integration across Australia’s national intelligence enterprise. Or we can continue, in our desire for safety, to travel a middle road of bifurcated policies, thus ceding the opportunity to hungrier and more assured powers that don’t share our values, our interests or our multiculturalism.

Did the Richardson intelligence review get it right?

The 1,300-page unclassified version of the review of the legal framework of Australia’s national intelligence community (NIC), delivered to the government in December 2019 and released a year later, offered 203 recommendations for reform. Thirteen of them were classified. The government’s response, also released in December 2020, indicated agreement—in whole, in part or in principle—with 86 of the 90 unclassified recommendations.

Not since Robert Hope’s transformative royal commissions in the 1970s and 1980s has there been such a wide-ranging review of Australia’s laws governing intelligence and security. However, there’s much to lament in what the latest review says, and doesn’t say, about the oversight arrangements for and transparency of the NIC, especially regarding parliamentary scrutiny.

One of the review’s main tasks was to consider whether improvements were needed to ensure that the legislative framework provides for accountability and oversight that is transparent and as consistent across the agencies as is practicably feasible.

The review, undertaken by former Australian Security Intelligence Organisation chief Dennis Richardson and supported by a secretariat in the Attorney-General’s Department, found that the oversight of the NIC is ‘strong, effective and working well’.

However, in our submission to the review, we highlighted a number of areas for reform, especially to the Office of the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security (IGIS), the Independent National Security Legislation Monitor (INSLM) and the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security (PJCIS). The issues we raised—some of which were also raised by others—haven’t been substantively addressed in the unclassified version of the report. The reasons for this are not clear, at least not in the public version of the report.

One of the most striking judgements in the review is its rejection of the recommendation of the 2017 independent intelligence review to extend the IGIS’s jurisdiction to cover all 10 NIC agencies. The IGIS currently has jurisdiction over the six agencies that make up the Australian intelligence community (AIC), which does not include the Department of Home Affairs and the Australian Federal Police. The review concluded that ‘[t]he IGIS should not have oversight of the Department of Home Affairs or the AFP as recommended in the 2017 IIR’. According to the review:

The NIC is significantly more disparate than the AIC. Unlike the AIC, the NIC does not have a common philosophical base at the heart of its legislation. Equally, all NIC agencies cannot and should not be treated the same in legislation. This holds true for oversight. A ‘one size fits all’ approach is not appropriate.

Disparate or not, some overlap of oversight bodies’ responsibilities is useful to ensure that no gaps arise in coverage as noted elsewhere in the review. The intelligence functions of the 10 agencies in the NIC may not be equivalent, but Australia’s intelligence and security architecture should require consistent oversight treatment by the IGIS. And given that it is a national intelligence community, perhaps there should be a common philosophical base at the heart of the legislation—a missed opportunity by the review?

The review also noted that the demands on the IGIS are growing, and its rigorous oversight can only continue to provide assurance if it is adequately resourced. The office’s resources are already stretched and, given the many findings and recommendations in the review related to the IGIS, its responsibilities are likely to be stretched even further unless additional resourcing is provided.

Encouragingly, the review noted that several submissions (including ours) raised concerns about the timeliness of government responses to the INSLM’s recommendations and suggested that the government be legislatively required to table timely responses. Accordingly, the review recommended, ‘As a matter of good practice, the Government should provide a publicly available response to the INSLM’s recommendations within 12 months of the INSLM’s report being tabled in Parliament.’

Regrettably, though, our calls to remove barriers to more effective parliamentary scrutiny so that the PJCIS can be appropriately equipped for its future work seem to have fallen on deaf ears.

Most notable among our suggestions for reform was that the PJCIS’s legislative power be widened to include the ability to analyse the NIC’s operations and conduct its own motion inquiries. The review recommended, ‘The remit of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security should not be expanded to include direct oversight of operational activities, whether past or current.’ This is a blow to the elected representatives of the people and the integrity of Australia’s intelligence and security architecture.

As highlighted in a recent report from the Australia Institute, ‘Australia’s parliamentary oversight of its intelligence community is weak compared to that of other countries in the Five Eyes. Most significantly, parliamentarians in the UK, USA and Canada have oversight over the operations and activities of intelligence agencies, which Australia and New Zealand lack.’

Alarmingly, in direct contradiction to the recommendations of the 2017 review and the Richardson review, the government rejected changes to allow the PJCIS to request the IGIS to conduct an inquiry into the legality and propriety of particular operational activities, and report to the PJCIS, the prime minister and responsible minister.

The review found that the approach recommended by the 2017 IIR could enhance already strong oversight arrangements while preserving the complementary but distinct roles for executive and parliamentary oversight. It would also provide a mechanism for the PJCIS to bring matters of public concern to the IGIS’s attention and increase its visibility over the IGIS’s review of such matters.

However, according to the government:

Even if the IGIS is not obliged to conduct an inquiry, the remit of the PJCIS should not be expanded to include oversight of agencies’ operational activities by requesting the IGIS to inquire into and report on particular operations. It remains appropriate for ministers to primarily oversee operations and be accountable to Parliament … These existing arrangements appropriately balance accountability with the need to protect sensitive operations and capabilities, and further oversight by the PJCIS is not necessary.

In rejecting the recommendations of both the IIR and the Richardson review, the government is further eroding the NIC’s accountability and oversight mechanisms.

While Richardson and the secretariat should be lauded for their efforts, did the review ‘get it right’, to quote Justice Hope, on intelligence oversight and transparency? As far as the PJCIS is concerned, the review is a missed opportunity—neither an evolution nor a revolution.

As the review states, ‘The world, Australia and the NIC have plainly changed in the 40 years since the Hope Royal Commissions’. The government’s decision not to accept the recommendation to change the powers of the PJCIS is therefore surprising. Without effective parliamentary scrutiny, the confidence and trust of the Australian people in the work of the NIC will corrode.

Clearly what’s required, as Justice Hope’s biographer Peter Edwards has previously called for, is that the next independent intelligence review, expected in 2022–23, be upgraded to a royal commission. Perhaps then the role, powers and resources of the PJCIS will be considered and it will be appropriately equipped to safeguard the democratic values, rights and liberties of all Australians.

‘Serving government as a whole’: Justice Hope and the remit of Australia’s intelligence agencies

On 4 June, the Australian Federal Police executed a search warrant on the home of a News Corp journalist, apparently seeking the source of a story in April 2018 that indicated that the secretaries of the departments of Defence and Home Affairs had sought new powers for the Australian Signals Directorate. To understand why this proposal has caused considerable concern, in the national security community as well as in the media, we need to go back more than four decades.

The Royal Commission on Intelligence and Security, conducted by Justice Robert Marsden Hope at the instigation of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, was a far-reaching review of Australia’s entire intelligence system. Hope prescribed in detail not only what each agency should do, and what it should not do, but also how they all should operate as an intelligence community. One means to this end was the creation of the Office of National Assessments, an assessment-only organisation with a coordinating role over the entire network of agencies.

ONA’s assessments were to be guaranteed, by legislation, freedom from interference from policymakers, including departments as well as ministers. Hope stressed that one of his fundamental aims was to make ‘the agencies less the creatures of their parent departments and more the servants of government as a whole’.

It was obvious which departments he had in mind. Of the four agencies in existence when he started his work, two were controlled by Defence and one by Foreign Affairs. The signals intelligence agency, the Defence Signals Division, was as its name indicated a division of the Defence Department. Although located in Melbourne, DSD was firmly under the policy and administrative direction of that department and its formidable head, Arthur Tange.

Hope was greatly impressed by DSD’s performance and potential, but wanted it to serve the needs of ‘government as a whole’, not just those of the department and the defence force. Hope recommended that DSD be publicly acknowledged, given a legislative charter, brought to Canberra, significantly upgraded in status and resources, and given much greater autonomy, remaining within the defence portfolio but responsible to the ‘higher intelligence machinery’ of cabinet ministers and senior officials, rather than to the secretary of defence.

Tange opposed the thrust of these and other recommendations from Hope, as did some of his successors, so that implementation took decades. DSD was upgraded to a directorate and publicly acknowledged in 1977, but it didn’t move to Canberra until the early 1990s, still firmly within the defence structure. It only gained legislative recognition in 2001. It was renamed the Australian Signals Directorate, as a gesture towards its whole-of-government role, in 2013, but it only became a statutory authority in 2018.

This last change followed the 2017 Independent Intelligence Review, conducted by Michael L’Estrange and Stephen Merchant. Another outcome of the review was the elevation of ONA to become the Office of National Intelligence, with its head to be designated the director of national intelligence, a reinforcement of the position’s leadership role in the whole intelligence community. Like the upgrading and autonomy of ASD, this was entirely consistent with the tenets of Hope’s recommendations in the 1970s.

The intelligence review and its outcomes were overshadowed by another announcement made on the same day that Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said the government had accepted the review’s recommendations. This was that the immigration and border protection portfolio would be expanded into a large and powerful portfolio of home affairs, led by Peter Dutton, that would incorporate a new Department of Home Affairs plus a number of intelligence and security agencies, including the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation and the Australian Federal Police, transferred from the attorney-general’s portfolio.

The final report of the intelligence review was based on considerable experience, wide consultation and a deep knowledge of both the details and the principles of Hope’s two royal commissions. The home affairs decision, by contrast, emanated from no comparable, independent study. Most commentators claimed it was based on Michael Pezzullo’s well-known ambition to head such a department, combined with Turnbull’s need for support from the conservative wing of the Liberal Party, of which Dutton was emerging as the leader.

L’Estrange and Merchant had no forewarning of the home affairs decision when preparing their report, although both were made public at the same media conference. In the report, they addressed the question of the relationship between policymaking and intelligence assessment, arguing that the strict separation prescribed by Hope might no longer be possible in current strategic circumstances. They said (paragraph 2.30) that intelligence assessments would be irrelevant if not connected to the choices and timing involved in policymaking; but they also warned that assessments would lose credibility if they were influenced by ‘pre-ordained policy priorities and preferences’.

At that time, the government established the national intelligence community, comprising 10 bodies. To the six agencies of the former Australian intelligence community were added not only the agencies responsible for criminal intelligence and financial intelligence, but also the AFP and ASIO. Hope had always insisted on a clear separation not only between departments and intelligence agencies, but also between intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Of the 10 agencies, five are in the home affairs portfolio, three are in defence, one is in foreign affairs and one, supposedly the central coordinating agency, is in the prime minister’s portfolio.

The elevation of the head of ONA to become the director of national intelligence and the full statutory autonomy of ASD were entirely consistent with the directions recommended by Hope in the 1970s and implemented by governments over the next four decades. On the other hand, he would have raised both eyebrows at the inclusion, by name, of the nation’s premier law enforcement agency and a powerful policymaking department in the intelligence community.

These structural changes, introduced without independent analysis or wide consultation, raise a serious question. Will Australia’s intelligence agencies, acting in accordance with their respective charters and coordinated by the director of national intelligence, serve ‘government as a whole’, or will the ‘pre-ordained policy preferences and priorities’ of a single department be allowed to dominate their assessments?

Intelligence, warrants, and the need for legislative change

Top Secret

Australian police agencies’ capacity to proactively disrupt terrorist threats will continue to be eroded without new legislation to protect classified intelligence used in warrants—potentially putting us all at risk.

And some of our senior police officers are starting to get nervous.

There has always been a simmering tension between intelligence collection agencies and police over the use of classified intelligence in the justice system. While police are eager to use classified intelligence, where possible, to prosecute offenders our intelligence agencies are focussed on preventing their capabilities from being compromised.

The problem now in safeguarding the community from terrorism, is the startling speed at which Australian ‘clean skin’ wannabe jihadis are radicalising and beginning to plan their attacks.

This feature of home grown terrorism is now undermining the effectiveness of traditional police investigations.

The joint Australian Federal Police (AFP) and Victorian Police counter-terrorism raids on family homes across Melbourne’s southeast suburbs on 18 April illustrate the point.

While the matter is still to go before the courts, the allegations serves to clearly illustrate the seriousness of the terror threat.

Behind the scenes the police were faced with some big challenges. The investigation was initiated by classified intelligence. The alleged offenders were for the most part clean skins.

At the time of the initial reporting, there was intelligence to suggest that an attack was only days away. Police investigators had little time to initiate additional investigations or evidence collection.

Faced with these limitations the search warrant affidavits used to undertake the raids were heavily reliant on classified intelligence.

Over the last ten years, police have had to increasingly rely on secret intelligence to disrupt and investigate terrorism cases.

Until recently police often used secret intelligence to kick start or direct their investigations; as opposed to being used directly to obtain warrants.

Intelligence gathering involves the collection of information, from a variety of sources with varying degrees of reliability.

Often this information is classified to protect the source or capability that was used to collect the intelligence.

This protection is specifically important in protecting the nation’s core intelligence capabilities; human intelligence (HUMINT)—the collection of intelligence from human sources—and signals intelligence (SIGINT)—the technical means to intercept communications between two or more parties.

The information collected by intelligence agencies is collated and analysed. Analysts will develop assessments of what’s likely to be true and judge the significance of this information.

With this intelligence police were able to undertake other enquiries to obtain additional unclassified information to justify access to search, surveillance or telephone intercept warrants, without the requirement to reveal the classified intelligence.

The processes of identifying what’s more likely to be the truth than not separates intelligence from evidence. To be admissible in a court, information must be the truth, relevant to a fact in issue and lawfully obtained.

With the shortened warning time for clean-skin terror attack planning, classified intelligence may be the only information available to police.

With insufficient time, police are increasingly having to include classified intelligence in search warrant applications to justify the application of police powers.

The disclosure of classified intelligence in police warrants risks exposing Australia’s intelligence collection capabilities to the public and in doing so could degrade their future effectiveness.

This is particularly the case when human intelligence is involved. If an undercover agent’s details are made public, they won’t be able to continue to collect intelligence on future threats.

The provisions of the Commonwealth’s National Security Information Act for protecting classified intelligence in courts doesn’t extend to affidavits and warrants.

It’s now time to consider the protection of nationally classified intelligence used by our police to obtain search, telephone and surveillance warrants. What we need is legislative provisions that ensure classified affidavits used to obtain search warrants are physically secured in accordance with commonwealth security requirements. This legislation also needs to preclude classified affidavits and warrants containing classified material from disclosure in future court proceedings.

Without this change, we’re asking police to achieve an impossible equilibrium between protecting classified intelligence, preventing terrorist attacks and successfully prosecuting alleged offenders.

Australia also runs the risk of running the intelligence well dry over time, which could leave our nation open to future terrorist attacks.

 

ASIO (4): terrorism, transparency and traitors

The age of Jihadists coincides with the blizzard of Snowden. For Australia’s security services, that means the time of terrorism collides with the time of transparency. Completely different sets of questions mingle and clash. Stir in the China epoch of the Asian Century. Add, as always, the traditional, vital interests in the US alliance. The customary challenges of counter-espionage look equally fresh and new.

The story of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation offers some thoughts but no big answers to the mingling of these eras—same techniques, different targets, new debates. ASIO’s official historian, Professor David Horner, comments that governments and agencies have responded to the age of transparency by clamping down harder. The impact of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden has been to make governments even more paranoid and secretive.

All those elements create what Frank Moorhouse calls the ‘Dark Conundrum’—the secret methods a democracy uses to protect itself. In his book Australia Under Surveillance, Moorhouse starts with a reluctant reconciliation, an acceptance of the paradox of the secret organisation protecting the open society: Read more

ASIO (3): Giving up the secrets

‘The whole idea of publishing a detailed history of an intelligence organisation based on its classified files seems counterintuitive. Intelligence organisations trade in secrecy. If they reveal their sources, the sources will dry up. If they reveal their techniques their opponents will counter them. If the identities of officers are revealed they will no longer be able to operate with the freedom necessary to achieve their tasks.’

With that opening paragraph, David Horner launches his official history, using the secret files to tell the secrets of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation in its fight against spies, terrorists, sabotage and subversion.

Horner writes that the book is based on ‘full and unfettered’ access to ASIO’s records. Part of the aim, he says, is to deal with myths or half-truths about ASIO that have survived for half a century:

These myths damaged the Organisation’s standing in the Australian community, and this is unfortunate because ASIO does not exist for itself. Rather, ASIO exists to serve the nation; as a government instrumentality it ultimately needs to justify its existence to the people of Australia and both sides of Parliament, and to retain their confidence.

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