Tag Archive for: National Intelligence Community

Culture matters in the Independent Intelligence Review 2024

Workplace culture is important. It’s time to examine it in the National Intelligence Community (NIC).

Research shows that people surrounded by behaviour contrary to organisational values are 47 per cent more likely to engage in unethical behaviour. Another finding is that average teams outperform those dominated by unpleasant superstars. We also know that high-level executive thinking is impaired under stress—not exactly ideal for human brains that rely on snap judgements, bias and decision-making shortcuts, and much less so in high-stakes intelligence analysis and reporting.

In contrast, a consciously designed high-performing team environment can set the right conditions. This may be a culture that challenges cognitive biases, fosters candour, increases accountability and drives diversity of thought. The right team culture can also help retain and grow personnel and drive shared purpose and understanding of workers’ roles, cultivating agency reputations as employers of choice.

But, working environments in the NIC can lack transparency. They are often hidden away in agency basements and secure zones. Notwithstanding formal oversight from the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security, some NIC workplaces can be isolated from public view, and therefore be more susceptible to developing internal cultural practices that would not be accepted elsewhere. The 2024 Independent Intelligence Review, whose report has not yet been published, presents the perfect opportunity to evaluate the NIC’s cultural positioning in the evolving security environment, paying due attention to employees, their working conditions and psychological well-being.

It comes as no surprise that NIC agency internal cultures have been hidden from scrutiny for decades. The NIC is a black box, where culture has been understood in the context of legislative compliance, workforce attraction, and the post-9/11 mantra of ‘interagency cooperation’. The 2017 Independent Intelligence Review implied that recruitment and retention were a key focus area for the NIC, but it failed to fully consider how culturally astute leaders and supportive team cultures support this outcome.

First and foremost, intelligence analysts and other NIC workers are people, humans under sustained pressure. Intelligence work is demanding, unglamorous and at times emotionally draining. The work routinely exposes analysts to the worst humanity has to offer. This sets the conditions for highly capable, but increasingly desensitised teams. We can’t change our high expectations of the NIC workforce, but we can embed supportive cultures that enable our people to perform at their best. In short, culture should be considered a fundamental input to capability for supporting the NIC in their missions.

The report of the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide released this year highlighted the tension between ‘as-designed’ and ‘in-practice’ cultures. As a complex and fluid human system, culture requires deliberate nurturing. NIC agencies must be held to account by meaningful workforce culture reporting obligations, and teams should be empowered to develop mentoring, recognition of performance, and practical examples of good behaviour.

To be fair, the NIC and Defence are getting better at this, and their maturity around diagnosing issues related to culture has been improving. Also, from the outside we can see some culture-improving initiatives, including the NIC careers website addressing myths among potential recruits and the Office of National Intelligence’s initiative to bring therapy dogs into the office. But we hope more has been done in the 2024 review to recognise productive working cultures as an enabler of performance. The importance of culture in the NIC should be expressed at the top, through the 2024 review.

We cannot afford not to get NIC cultures right. Their workers need to be empowered in psychologically comfortable, high-performing teams to drive informed, defensible, resilient and scalable intelligence outcomes.

Ongoing staff shortages handicap Australia’s peak intelligence oversight body

Staffing levels at Australia’s peak intelligence oversight body are regressing, impeding its ability to ensure that national security agencies operate as intended within our democratic framework of institutions and laws.

Without enough people, the organisation, the Office of the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security, cannot monitor the agencies and assure ministers, Parliament and the public of their effective and legal operation.

Its 2023–24 annual report, released in September, revealed that staffing was below target and falling.

The office has extensive powers of investigation and access, including conducting inquiries, undertaking inspections and investigating complaints and public interest disclosures. Its powers are legislated under the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security Act 1986 and are critical to oversight of Australia’s National Intelligence Community.

The office employs people with a wide range of skills, including legal, investigative, financial and technical capabilities.

Its understaffing was already evident two years ago. Things have got worse since then.

In the opening review of the Annual Report 2023-24, the current inspector-general, Christopher Jessup KC, reveals the office’s oversight teams had completed 77 inspections, fewer than planned and down from 91 in 2022–23.

Worryingly, the report also reveals that the planned expansion of the office from an average staffing level of 57 to 60 was not achieved. On 30 June 2024, it had only 39 permanent staff members.

Shockingly, the ongoing staffing level has in fact fallen for two years: it was 49 at the end of 2021–22 and 41 at the end of 2022–23. This is despite additional funding in 2018–19, 2023–24 and 2024–25 to expand its oversight and supporting capabilities, commensurate with extra spending in the intelligence community.

The report attributes the staffing deficit to factors including external labour market shortages, ongoing challenges with the Top-Secret vetting pipeline and increasing resignations. The resulting shortages affect operations and corporate functions.

These problems are not new and have been previously identified in successive annual reports. However, staffing deficits are not confined to the Office of the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security. Recruitment and retention of staff across a range of skillsets is an ongoing challenge for other public sector agencies, including the National Intelligence Community.

While the inspector-general’s office is exploring new approaches to recruitment and retainment, the current understaffing damages the core institutional integrity and functioning of the office. The problem is even more acute because its jurisdiction has expanded in response to the 2017 Independent Intelligence Review  and recommendations of the 2019 Comprehensive Review of the Legal Framework of the National Intelligence Community.

Hopefully, the overdue release of the unclassified 2024 independent review of Australia’s NIC will address these findings and provide further recommendations to ensure the inspector-general’s office has enough people and funding to perform effective oversight functions of the National Intelligence Community.

One helpful move could be limited expansion of the role of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security to help alleviate some of the burden on the inspector-general’s office.

If transparency and oversight remain important features of Australia’s intelligence community, the government needs to act decisively and urgently to ensure the office is in the best possible position to perform its function.

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.