Tag Archive for: Espionage

Not so risky after all: bilateral consequences of compromised intelligence operations

It’s a staple of screenwriters and novelists, stock news footage and a spectre haunting ambassadors’ dreams: a spy unmasked; riots outside embassies, flags and effigies alight; newspaper headlines blaring outrage; and the chilling words persona non grata. Another intelligence operation compromised, another delicate diplomatic relationship ruined. To what extent, however, are such fears borne out?

For all the nervousness about diplomatic risks of espionage, offensive counterintelligence and covert action, it turns out that exposure rarely creates much of a significant mess in relations between countries.

Where consequences have been significant they have correlated to particular features of those operations. That’s the conclusion of my research, recently published by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science & International Affairs.

When foreign intelligence activities are compromised and exposed, it’s easy to assume there will be profound negative impacts on the bilateral relationship. Foreign intelligence professionals—and the policy-makers and envoys they serve—are, indeed, preoccupied by possible consequences of compromised operations, which may include sanctions, expulsions or other adverse actions directed at the perpetrating state. Anticipating these consequences informs intelligence planning and risk assessment in capitals across the world.

I systematically analysed 174 historical cases of compromised intelligence operations from 1985 to 2020 (supported by an updated sample of cases in the following four years) and their real-world impact on bilateral relations. The study reveals not only how common espionage is but that the bilateral consequences for states caught have actually been much less serious than might have been expected.

Catastrophic consequences, where a bilateral diplomatic relationship drastically changed, were simply not evident in the results. Critical consequences, involving major damage and pervasive deterioration of a relationship, appeared in only 10 cases. Significant consequences, with moderate but recoverable impacts, occurred in only 16. All other cases demonstrated minor or negligible consequences.

It should be noted that the study focussed on bilateral consequences and not on other costs the exposed party might face, including loss of intelligence capabilities and insights, actual danger to people involved, and negative impacts on broader international policy objectives.

The research also identifies the factors that best explain outcomes. Most significantly, the nature of the compromised operation—namely, its egregiousness—correlated strongly with negative bilateral outcomes. These include operations involving: violence, intentional or unintentional, such as the French sinking of the Rainbow Warrior in 1985 or Russia’s attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal in 2018; material damage, including cyber effects; covert influence or interference, such as Russian interference in the 2016 US election; or personal effects on national leaders, such as several instances exposed by Edward Snowden.

Less closely correlating but still noteworthy was where the target country of the operations was historically or culturally predisposed to be unusually sensitive to actions by the perpetrator or to intelligence activities more generally.

Pre-existing relations also influenced outcomes. Spying on allies was risky, although not as risky as might be supposed, while, surprisingly, transgressing on adversaries proved less damaging than doing so to neutrals.

Perpetrators’ responses played an important and counter-intuitive role in the consequence: a strategy of unrepentance often proved safer than vociferous denial.

The effect of timing was more ambiguous. Compromise at politically or diplomatically inopportune moments could prove problematic. But on some occasions inopportunity also generated mutual incentives to downplay incidents. On other occasions it was difficult to separate the influence of timing from the circumstances of timing precipitating the activity itself: for example heightened tensions might exacerbate fall-out, but those tensions may have also precipitated the intelligence operation.

Interestingly, the power dynamic between perpetrator and target had significantly less explanatory power. Stronger consequences correlated closely with the degree of publicity, but publicity was almost always a function of consequence, rather than vice versa.

This analysis suggests risk assessments used in intelligence operational planning should consider the egregiousness of the operation, with particular sensitivity to prospects for violence and loss, effects on national leaders, and international norms.

Even though timing is a somewhat ambiguous factor, prudent consideration should be given to prospective events which might worsen possible consequences. This reinforces the need for continuous risk assessment. Efforts should be made to regularly review risk assessments to consider prospective developments.

Finally, the research reinforces that the fundamentally dynamic nature of intelligence should not be ignored, including in academic study. Intelligence activities are a covert contest of capabilities and wills—and risk calculations and appetites—between states carried out for decision and action advantage, and as an expression of contest in itself.

This detailed and comprehensive study reflects how states actually interact when the lights are off, with consequences that are not always what one would expect.

Last of the ‘true believers’ or harbinger? Ana Montes and the future of espionage against the West

Ana Montes was US Intelligence’s ‘Queen of Cuba’. The Defence Intelligence Agency’s leading Central America analyst; go-to voice on Cuban intentions and capabilities; eldest daughter of a family dedicated to US Government service. She was also a Cuban spy her entire professional life, until arrested 10 days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Now, after almost 21 years in prison, Montes resides in Puerto Rico, an unrepentant critic of US policy towards Cuba.

Montes represents an apparently extraordinary case of espionage. She is a Hispanic woman, recruited at university, while most spies have been white, middle-aged, middle-career men. As an agent, she not only stole secrets but shaped assessments and influenced policy in an adversary’s interests—and then there’s the sheer audacity of penetrating the heart of US military intelligence. But she was also a ’True Believer’ –motivated not by material rewards but by commitment to Castro’s revolution and opposition to US policy in Latin America. In her words:

‘I felt morally obligated to help [Cuba] defend itself from our efforts to impose our values and our political system on it.’

She was the ‘I’ in the traditional schema of espionage motivations: MICE (Money, Ideology, Coercion/Compromise, Ego). Acknowledging that espionage cases are rarely singular in character and Montes’ ideology was buttressed by psychological issues around her early (and on her account, abusive) family life.

Montes might therefore be regarded as a throwback to ideologically-motivated spies of the interwar years and early Cold War—the ‘Cambridge Five’, George Blake, Karl Fuchs, the Goldbergs, etc. This espionage threat was meant to have been killed off by the atrocities and contradictions of communist reality; swept away by purges and by 1956 in Budapest (and Krushchev’s repudiation of Stalinism), 1968 in Prague and finally in 1989. Isn’t spying now a function only of the venal and disturbed? By grubby malcontents like Hanssen, Ames, Walker and Nicholson? Surely by the 1990s neoliberalism and the dollar’s pursuit had triumphed in the treason market as much as in attitudes to state ownership or to international financial transactions and currency conversion?

Of course, this is too narrow a perspective. Ideologically motivated spies continued to operate in Western Europe late into the Cold War. Norwegian diplomat and rising star of left-wing politics Arne Treholt was arrested in 1984 and convicted of spying for the Soviets and Iraqis. Furthermore, while appropriate categorisation of self-directed insider threats like Edward Snowden is problematic in a traditional counter-espionage context, their motivations are often (including in Snowden’s case) at least partially ideological.

Alternatively, might the Cuba-US dynamic be too unique a circumstance, stuck in Cold War aspic? Cuban recruited spies inside the US have typically been ideologically committed: eg Carlos Alvarez, Walter and Gwendolyn Myers, plus former US Ambassador to Bolivia Manuel Rocha, currently awaiting trial. After all, Cuba has always existed simultaneously within and without the Cold War paradigm—as much about more 21st century notions of power, privilege, race and hegemony, than about control of the means of production.

More provocatively, the Montes case is a reminder of a challenge we’d rather not contemplate—given its implications. Western liberalism’s triumph at the ‘end of history’ is looking threadbare in 2024 but it’s the CIA and MI6 who are appealing to men and women of principle inside Russia to work clandestinely against Putin. It’s a former ASIS Director-General who stated publicly and optimistically that ‘… closed societies run the risk of a greater number of individuals willing to betray the secrets of their country, because they are not happy, they don’t get a voice’. The idea of the reverse: an American, a Briton, an Australian betraying their country on principle seems discordant.

We should not be so complacent. Yes, psychological disturbance, ego and money characterise those few instances of espionage against Australia in the last 45 years (ie Peacock, Wispelaare and Lappas). But ideology’s not alien. In the 1940s and 1950s some Australians were indeed motivated to do just this in assistance to the Soviet Union, a brutal dictatorship and obviously bloody ideology. Now, think about the weird realignments of ideology occurring today. The melding together of domestic and international politics. The ‘horseshoe theory’ of convergence between left and right extremes. Circumstances in which the aforementioned Treholt was an advocate for Putin’s Russia before he died.

Furthermore, the question as to what degree Australia should be concerned about insider threat motivations is now pertinent. We’re currently seeing wide-ranging reforms in how the Australian Government manages personnel security and combats insider threats—including through a more central role for ASIO. National security agencies are needing to transform to meet operational requirements and industrial realities: contemplating and implementing multiclassification workspaces and workforces; rapidly growing staff numbers; embracing greater openness and leveraging relationships beyond traditional security frameworks. All this is happening amidst accelerating strategic circumstances faced by Australia—and our resulting attraction as an espionage target—and changes amongst some younger people in attitudes to traditionally intrusive security clearance processes and maintenance regimes.

The implications can be profound. Leaving aside direct effects, ideological spying invariably causes—contrary often to naïve intentions—collateral damage. Montes spied for Cuba for reasons specific to US policy in Latin America. She still ended up likely betraying sensitive (and expensive) US intelligence sources and methods to the Soviets (and latter-day Russians), via her Cuban handlers.

It’s for these reasons that further research on evolving motivations for espionage, associated insider threat consequences for Australia, and effective mitigations is a future priority for ASPI’s Statecraft & Intelligence Centre.

Questions that such research will seek to answer include:

  • What ‘principles’ might motivate Aussies to betray their country in 2024 (or the future)? What’s the political analogue now to motivating ideologies of the past? Might it be found in extreme right-wing alignment with authoritarian regimes and models? Conflicted national identifications? A sense of the ‘future’? Environmental anxiety? Pervasive leftist narratives about power and justice (exhibited in relation to Gaza)?
  • How should related security thinking categorise and accommodate self-directed leakers motivated by ideology, eg Snowden?
  • What do concepts like treason and nation actually mean in 2024, amidst public trust deficits and disputed notions of national identity?
  • What’s Australia’s equivalent of Cuba, in this context?

A future grasp of this might help us prevent our own Ana Montes—before they do the same thing…

Espionage and foreign interference threaten Australian sovereignty

Literature and movies heavily feature themes of espionage and foreign interference. They focus on a dangerous, fast-moving world that provides people with an escape from their everyday lives. However, many in our community would not appreciate the extent of espionage and foreign interference occurring in Australia today. Nor would they realise that they have a role in combating it. It’s just what we see in the movies, right?

The history of espionage and foreign interference in Australia is well documented. It dates back to the lead-up to World War I and had an initial focus on signals intelligence. Over the decades since, Australia’s focus on foreign interference has peaked and waned, but according to the ASIO Director-General Mike Burgess, we are experiencing another peak in activity. Burgess’s 2023 threat assessment highlights that insiders are increasingly becoming insider threats when they ‘disclose sensitive information without authorisation, conduct espionage, foreign interference or sabotage, or help a third party conduct these activities’.

The key message this year from Burgess is, ‘If you are conducting espionage in this country, we will find you and we will deal with you.’ Or to quote from the title character in the spy film Jason Bourne, ‘I know what you did. I know everything.’

Disturbingly, there appears to be a laissez-faire attitude towards espionage and foreign interference in Australia. The commentary about Australia needing to enhance its sovereign capability has intensified during the Covid-19 years. However, the link between foreign interference and sovereignty appears to elude many.

Our sovereignty is threatened when our ‘strategic alliances and defence relationships are undermined’. It’s threatened when others gain insight into ‘our strategic interests and positions on international diplomatic, economic and military issues’ or gain ‘commercial advantage on matters including our energy and mineral resources’. It’s threatened when our ‘innovations in science and technology’ are accessed by an adversary, and when ‘the actions of Australian decision-makers and public opinion’ are influenced in the adversary’s favour.

While we may become enthralled by such concepts in the (many) Jason Bourne movies, we have difficulty connecting them with our day-to-day actions. And our voracious appetite for social media is adding fuel to the fire by actively facilitating opportunities for espionage and foreign interference. While those in the national security community are obvious targets, foreign actors have learned that targeting the wider community delivers results.

Burgess highlighted that foreign intelligence services are actively seeking information about ‘our defence capabilities, government decision-making, political parties, foreign policy, critical infrastructure, space technologies, academic and think tank research, medical advances, key export industries and personal information, especially bulk data’. These foreign operators are targeting politicians, businesspeople, public servants, the judiciary and journalists through individuals who are ‘well connected and well regarded in business and political circles, Australian-born and not publicly associated with the overseas government but all too willing to put its interests ahead of Australia’s’.

In the 2023 threat assessment, Burgess referred to journalists who were invited to participate in all-expenses paid overseas study tours. It reminded me of the old saying, ‘If something looks too good to be true, it probably is.’ This example highlights that we are yet to tap into the healthy scepticism for which Australians are well recognised.

The impact of foreign interference goes beyond exposing a national secret or crippling a business. The Department of Home Affairs warns that ‘it impacts our social cohesion, our trusted democracy, and our freedoms’ and weakens ‘our free and open system of government, our social cohesion and our economic prosperity’. Foreign interference seeks to ‘shape Australia’s sovereign decision-making and alter outcomes’ as a means ‘to gain an improper advantage’, limit freedom of expression and manipulate the media ‘to spread propaganda’, and apply ‘pressure and manipulation to sow discord, silence dissent or damage the cohesion of our society’. In practical terms, the outcomes are social upheaval and economic damage resulting from business and job losses.

The potential impacts of foreign interference are wide ranging and can affect all areas of society. They translate into practical effects that go beyond the principles of cohesion, democracy and freedoms to negatively impact our economy, our welfare system, our national identity and even how we treat each other.

So, if some people who work in sensitive fields struggle to recognise when they’re being targeted, what hope is there for the average person? And why should we worry?

Our level of engagement with social media is both a strength and a weakness. Engaging with strangers for social reform or as a way of connecting with others with similar interests is a positive use. However, I’m amazed by the willingness of people to share information with strangers on social media. I’m sure we’d be much more suspicious if a stranger knocked on our door to grill us for the same information.

I’m also sure that many people would argue they have nothing to hide, or they don’t have any information of significance, but that overlooks the well-honed tradecraft that underpins espionage and interference. At the core of this tradecraft is a process of meticulous information-gathering that pieces together seemingly unrelated bits of information to build a picture of opportunity supported by interconnections and interrelationships. There aren’t many degrees of separation in most communities—particularly in a place like Canberra.

The Australian experience with cybersecurity attacks provides some guidance on what’s needed. We were slow to the mark in raising the awareness of individuals, familiess and small businesses about the impacts of cybersecurity and what they needed to do to protect themselves. We shouldn’t make the same mistake with foreign interference. We need to invest in raising the community’s understanding of foreign interference and providing practical guidance on what people can do at the local level.

Our social cohesion, sovereignty and freedoms are at risk, and they are too important to compromise.

Security clearance overhaul needed to build Australia’s high-tech workforce

The Australian government recently published its updated guidelines to counter foreign interference  in the university sector, declaring that ‘All universities are subject to foreign interference risks’. And last month, at ASPI’s inaugural Sydney Dialogue, Prime Minister Scott Morrison released the government’s Blueprint for critical technologies, which identified a number of technology categories deemed essential to Australia’s long-term prosperity and security, including biotechnology, artificial intelligence, robotics and quantum computing.

Taken together, these documents tell us that Australia’s technology-driven future will be heavily reliant on a specialist research workforce that our national security leaders believe is being aggressively targeted by foreign powers.

Rapid and transformative technological innovation generated by non-government institutions is now at the core of Australia’s domestic economic vision and is also central to how Western nations intend to remain the dominant grouping in world affairs, as the tech-centric AUKUS and Quad partnerships show.

However, Australia’s ability to realise its technological potential and contribute to Western tech dominance relies on having a research and corporate sector resilient to foreign interference—with intellectual property theft and coercion by the Chinese Communist Party the most pressing threats. To achieve this resilience, more needs to be done to help non-government organisations become self-reliant in their security with trusted workforces that are resistant to interference.

In line with this, the government should consider taking two measures to improve the capacity of universities, businesses and other non-government organisations to build trusted workforces and work environments in which exposure to foreign interference is made transparent and can be mitigated.

The first measure is to establish a national security vetting framework for the non-government sector under which nationally significant research institutions and businesses pay to have staff appropriately vetted. The aim would be not just to protect sensitive work with government, as is currently the case, but to provide assurance to the institution or business that its intellectual property and corporate integrity are being protected.

At the moment, businesses looking to work on sensitive government projects often have to obtain standardised security clearances for their staff. But the need for security vetting now arguably extends well beyond government contracts. Even if they’re not working on government projects, more and more businesses and their investors want to be assured that they have hardened themselves to the risk of foreign interference and corporate espionage. Yet the options available to Australian organisations to conduct background checks on their staff in an effective, ethical way are limited and inconsistent.

Establishing such a clearance capability alongside the public service’s existing security vetting system would be an enormous task for already strained government vetting agencies. Currently, processing high-level security clearances can take months or years and can cost tens of thousands of dollars.

That brings us to the second measure, which will support the establishment of this new security vetting capability for the non-government sector.

The government should establish a scheme to allow relevant students to apply for security clearances at the beginning of their degrees and to transfer the costs onto the low-interest HECS-style loans most Australians use to cover their university or vocational education fees.

This will mean essential technology specialists won’t have to wait for lengthy clearance processes before they can start their jobs.

As the Blueprint for critical technologies indicates, there’s an obvious range of tertiary and vocational programs that will be vital to achieving the national uplift required for Australia to meet its economic potential and security needs.

Australia’s burgeoning digital businesses demand new technology workforces to seize the opportunities of AI and new quantum information processing. So too will the AUKUS pact and Australia’s technology partnerships with the Quad countries demand an influx of new high-tech specialists into Australia’s growing national security community.

Allowing vocational, undergraduate and postgraduate students in these key areas to commence security vetting while studying will mean they can be cleared and job ready at the conclusion of their degrees. Importantly, such a scheme should involve agencies reimbursing students for their clearance upon commencing employment, since it’s a cost these agencies already cover.

A new HECS-funded vetting capability would also allow private businesses and universities themselves to provide security clearance scholarships and create their own pipeline of vetted research and professional staff.

Importantly, the influx of cash from HECS-funded vetting applications could be used to fund desperately needed innovation in Australia’s approach to security vetting; the adoption of new open-source intelligence methodologies is an obvious area for improvement. An even healthier innovation fund could be generated if universities and relevant businesses can opt to pay more for faster clearances.

Establishing a new security vetting capability for the non-government sector is also urgently required to address a perverse shadow employment market that has arisen out of the current model. Currently, Australians with top secret clearances can command rapid promotions or high salaries for jobs that they’re not strictly the most qualified candidate for but which they get because of the prohibitively long time it takes to clear a new employee from scratch. An additional avenue for building security-cleared workforces within universities and businesses will help alleviate this problem and mobilise Australia’s world-class researchers to the most pressing economic and security challenges we will face.

The Australian Secret Intelligence Service: 007 blessing and curse

When intelligence folk smell roses, they look for the funeral. That bit of spy lore is about finding the opportunity in the threats (or vice versa).

The lore hints at the mystique of the trade: the allure of secrets.

As a former head of Oz spies (the Australian Secret Intelligence Service) and spy-catchers (the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation), David Irvine takes a droll view of the forbidden-fruit fascination of both secrets and sex. Irvine cites this wonderful bit of fruitiness from a top British diplomat, Rodric Braithwaite:

‘The subject of intelligence attracts attention out of proportion to its real importance. My theory is that this is because secrets are like sex. Most of us think that others get more than we do. Some of us cannot have enough of either. Both encourage fantasy. Both send the press into a feeding frenzy. All this distorts sensible discussion.’

For journalists, sex and secrets must lead to James Bond (‘racy without careening into the red zone of camp’). And so it was in the final episode of the ASPI interviews with the director-general of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, Paul Symon, the question was posed: Is James Bond a blessing or a curse? Both, replied Symon:

A blessing because on holidays it’s a darn good read or darn good movie. Curse, because there’s so much wrong—there’s so much wrong with the way he performs his function. He’s licensed to kill. We don’t give people a licence to kill. He has, one would suggest, an ego, aspects of narcissism that wouldn’t fit comfortably with my people. So, he’s a blessing and a curse.

Dealing with the mythology of the mystique is one reason that Australia’s top spy has gone before the camera for four ASPI interviews.

Symon says ASIS has a good story to tell the Australian people. And as the only ASIS officer who can be named, he sees the need for more public conversations. Lots of media attention is a problem, he says, ‘but no media attention is a problem as well’.

Spies, Symon says, can go to places denied diplomats, where the internet search engines can’t reach. The job is to ‘pick the eyes out of the most sensitive secrets overseas that bear in on our national interest and help inform a judgement that our government needs to make—whether it’s in relation to our military, our economic or security outlook. We’re trying to help inform that debate and we are looking for that piece of gold that is not obtainable by any other means.’

Finding gold is always tough, as is searching for those intelligence nuggets. ASPI senior fellow Andrew Davies, in the ‘new age of espionage’ issue of Australian Foreign Affairs, writes of the complications of darkening geopolitics, surging technology, and a continuing terrorist threat. Yet many ‘dirty tricks’ of the past have transitioned to digital, Davies says, showing ‘the enduring value of old-school espionage’.

Danielle Cave, deputy director of ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre, writes that data mountains and cyberspace loom over spycraft. Spooks must fear algorithms and facial recognition technologies, Cave says, because everyone leaves a trace online: ‘Spies can’t always teleconference like the rest of us.’

Following those themes, I asked Symon about the viability of gathering human intelligence amid the ‘digital cornucopia and cyber cacophony’. The cornucopia–cacophony line drew the most amused raised eyebrow from Australia’s chief spy in our interviews. But my follow-on line (‘There’s a lot of noise out there.’) worked because, apparently, that touches concepts ASIS is using, as Symon explains:

There are jewels there, and that’s what drives us—to find those jewels. The other aspect of that very complex array of cornucopias and cacophonies that you’ve talked about is that … there’s an opportunity for us to ‘swim’ in that noise—as the term that we use inside the organisation—and to be pretty invisible in that noise. There’s a lot happening, a lot of bandwidth, there is a lot of noise. How can we perform our function in the middle of that without it being clear that we are part of a foreign espionage service? How do we use that cacophony? How do we swim in all of that noise to quietly go about our business? We’re turning our mind to that, because we think that’s where the future of the Service lies.

Reaction to the ASIS interviews varies. The Australian’s Ben Packham thought getting the top spy in front of a camera for the first time made for ‘a landmark series of video interviews’. By contrast, Hamish McDonald (one of the finest Oz foreign correspondents of my generation) felt it went ‘softly, softly’ in the ‘carefully controlled setting’ of ASPI.

The historian Peter Edwards sees the interviews responding to the need to make ‘secret agencies as transparent as possible about their past, current and likely future activities’. A comment I valued was from a Canberra wise owl who said the series works because it’s ‘reporting on ASIS as an organisation rather than a fantasy’.

The effort to clarify purposes and principles is where Symon starts and finishes the final ASPI interview: ‘We are not some maverick organisation sitting outside. We are the Australian people, we are comprised of them.’

For 68 years, ASIS has dwelt in the most secret spaces of the spook universe. In lifting the cloak a little, Symon concludes with these words to Australians on what they should understand about ASIS:

We are you—we serve you, we serve the government, we serve the prosperity and security agenda that we all aspire to for our nation now and into the future. We’re a component. We proudly serve Australians. We think we do it well, we do it legally, we do it with propriety, we do it conscientiously.

And so really my message is, while there is a certain mystique around a secret intelligence service, we know our bearings, we have our bearings. We care deeply about what we do. We’re here for Australia. We’re for Australians. We serve with pride. That’s the message I want to send.

The Australian Secret Intelligence Service: spying for Australia

Spies are prey to principle, pride, passion and payment. Betrayal is driven by everything from cause to cash.

In a history of espionage, The anatomy of a spy, Michael Smith writes that spies spy for sex, money, patriotism, revenge or because it’s ‘the right thing to do’; spies can be ‘unconscious agents’ or ‘adventurers, fantasists and psychopaths’.

Behold the world of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service and its director-general, Paul Symon.

In the ASIS interviews with ASPI, Australia’s chief spy has covered the formation of the service and its purposes and principles. In the third interview, Symon talks about spies and espionage, discussing:

  • how ASIS recruits foreigners to spy for Australia, emphasising the safety and security of those agents
  • the qualities ASIS looks for in recruiting its Australian officers
  • the tradecraft and ethics of spying
  • the growth of ASIS from a small firm to a mid-sized corporation.

Symon says some spies just walk in and volunteer: ‘History is replete with spies both good and bad who have literally been a walk-in and wanted to have that relationship.’

Seeking agents, ASIS considers datasets as it ponders people, ‘looking at profiles, thinking about the intelligence questions that we’re trying to answer, who might assist us and might be interested in assisting us answer those questions’. Then the careful work of ‘cultivation, potentially recruitment, and validation’.

The process, Symon remarks, isn’t that different to the way journalists cultivate sources. My response is that journos, like spies, want to get at the secrets, to understand what’s going on and who’s making it happen.

Yet while hacks and spies track across the same terrain, their purposes are different. What matters to hacks is what they can publish and make public; what matters to spies is what they can keep secret. Symon responds:

That’s very true. But at its very heart, your contacts are relying on your skills and your tradecraft, in some cases to project their voice if that’s what they want, or in some cases to protect their voice. In our case it’s not to project a voice but, if you like, the sanctity of the relationship, the trust, the care that we put into securing that relationship and making sure that their personal safety and security is uppermost in our mind. It’s a very key component of what we do.

A foreign correspondent axiom is that you can usually pick the spies masquerading as journalists: they never have deadline fever, rushing off to file; and spies are more willing to pay for all the booze, unlike hacks who must align thirst with expense account (the anatomy of a spy needs a category devoted to alcohol).

Note a nomenclature point in Oz spying: the usage of officers or agents; both are spies, but different.

ASIS recruits and trains Australian officers to send overseas, where their job is to cultivate and run agents. Agents can be those adventurers, fantasists and psychopaths—as long as they produce the goods. Being a narcissist with a giant ego might make you the perfect agent; the same traits in an Australian officer would set off alarm bells in Canberra.

In hiring Australians to serve as its officers, Symon says, ASIS wants a diversity of profiles because there’s no such thing as a typical spy:

We used to have a banner for ASIS which was ‘IQ + EQ = ASIS’. It’s not a bad banner. There are some parts of the intelligence organisation where you can accommodate a higher IQ [intelligence quotient] and a lower EQ [emotional intelligence quotient]. In ASIS, it has got to be pretty balanced, so ultimately they’re the qualities that we’re after. Someone, individuals who are intelligent but also have a very good emotional quotient and can read a situation, can read relationships. I need people with a really good antenna, because at the end of the day a lot of judgements are pushed down to the individual—they’ve got to make some very fine judgements.

The ASIS officer serving overseas must work to a strict set of rules of tradecraft, Symon observes, and ‘a strong internal discipline to the way we do the work that we do’. But that disciplined, rule-obeying Australian officer must find foreign citizens ready to break the rules. To a question about the tension and the dissonance of that officer–agent relationship, Symon responds:

The agents that they are dealing with, they are breaking the laws of their country, that is true. There is no tension in the eyes of our officers as to what is being asked of in that relationship—there’s a lot of work goes into making sure that both sides are comfortable and that there’s an understanding. We would never ask an agent to do something that is improper or illegal in the sense of undertaking violent activities or anything like that. We are acquiring intelligence. So, I don’t see that there is a contradiction or a problem there.

Symon says ASIS has strengthened its ethical framework, especially when it comes to seeking to penetrate terrorist groups or recruit people inside terrorist organisations. An officer has avenues to ‘opt out’ or to have a discussion ‘about that relationship between ethics, morals and what they’re being asked to do with an agent’.

The total resourcing for ASIS in the 2020–21 budget is $630 million. Approaching its 70th anniversary in 2022, Symon says the service has grown from a small entity to a mid-sized corporation.

In its early decades, he says, ASIS was ‘a small family unit in many ways. There was a kinship, there was a size that went with the organisation, [and] there was a budget that went with the organisation that meant it had all of the hallmarks of just being a big family. A small family and then a big family.’

The Hope royal commissions in the 1970s and 1980s brought the intelligence community into the public spotlight and confirmed officially that ASIS existed.

Since then, Symon says:

ASIS has stepped from being a big family to being a mid-sized corporation, quite frankly. And we’re not a big corporation; we’re a mid-sized corporation. We like to ensure that we have very flat structures, and we don’t admire bureaucracy; we don’t admire processes for processes’ sake. We do the minimum necessary to do our job efficiently and effectively, knowing that processes and bureaucracy support rather than hinder good organisations. So, that’s how we’ve changed. And the path forward, given, I think, the successes we’ve achieved, looks very promising to me.

The Australian Secret Intelligence Service: purposes and principles

‘Spies cannot be usefully employed without a certain intuitive sagacity. They cannot be properly managed without benevolence and straightforwardness. Without subtle ingenuity of mind, one cannot make certain of the truth of their reports. Be subtle! Be subtle! And use your spies for every kind of business.’

— Sun Tzu, The art of war, circa 500 BC

Spies go in and out of fashion, but they never go out of business. And in the second of our interviews, Australia’s top spy discusses how that business is conducted today.

The director-general of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, Paul Symon, talks about the purposes of ASIS:

  • spying to collect human intelligence overseas
  • engaging in intelligence diplomacy through partnerships and exchanges with foreign intelligence services around the world
  • conducting disruption and counterintelligence activities as directed by the Australian government.

The ASIS ambit runs from terrorists to people smugglers, from the nature of foreign leaders to the operational needs of the Australian Defence Force.

The jargon for what the service seeks is HUMINT (human intelligence), still searching for the ‘foreknowledge’ Sun Tzu so prized 2,500 years ago—to understand the nature of individuals and the thinking of governments, as Symon observes:

Humans will develop trusting relationships and share secrets—they are willing to build a relationship with a service like ours that cultivates, recruits and validates them. There is a relationship that builds. So when you’re trying to understand senior leaders around the region, or further afield, you’re trying to understand the way they’re thinking, their vision for their country, the risks that they see, and the opportunities they see. Those sorts of conversations are normally held in inner circles, and are between humans, and will always be that way.

The job of ASIS officers deployed overseas is to develop agents willing to share secrets. Why are people willing to betray their country’s secrets? Symon’s response:

I would argue that if you’re in a closed society then there is a stronger possibility that you will be concerned about the direction of the country. If people become leaders of everything in their country, if power is concentrated and centralised, then ultimately you become responsible for everything. And you actually become responsible for the way in which your citizens perceive leadership.

So there is an interesting medium- to long-term dimension to this; as a general rule, closed societies run the risk of a greater number of individuals willing to betray the secrets of their country, because they are not happy, they don’t get a voice. We get a voice every three years, we go down to the local school and we vote. But there are a lot of people that don’t. That is one motivation.

ASIS is ‘playing attack’ overseas, Symon says, and while the margins between attack and defence are close, ‘we believe that we still have a marginal advantage’ in getting secrets.

Technology shifts the tradecraft, in an era of great-power competition driving a multipolar contest. Much is happening in the ‘grey zone’ (an area of focus of Australia’s 2020 strategic update). Symon explains:

The grey zone really is increasingly being used in the lexicon to reflect the fact that we are in this environment of coercion short of conflict. And that is keenly felt inside the intelligence community, whether it is on the defence or the offence. The other comment I would make is that it’s often a term that the military is using, and I think our military and the other militaries around the world are thinking very, very carefully around coercion short of conflict and the role of the military.

The legal framework for Australia’s spies is the Intelligence Services Act 2001, which gives ASIS these functions:

  • obtain and communicate intelligence about the capabilities, intentions or activities of people or organisations outside Australia
  • assist the ADF in support of military operations and cooperate with the ADF on intelligence                   
  • conduct counterintelligence activities               
  • liaise with intelligence or security services of other countries
  • undertake such other activities as the foreign minister directs relating to the capabilities, intentions or activities of people or organisations outside Australia.

ASIS is accountable to the foreign minister, the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security and the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security. Symon says the inspector-general has the powers of a standing royal commission with constant access to ASIS computer systems.

Symon says ASIS officers must understand the law and the purpose of the service, and provide a detailed written record of everything they do:

If you looked at our internal correspondence, literally all of our activities are written up in great detail—and when I say great detail, I am not only talking about the nature of the meeting with an agent and the conversation or intelligence or information which is passed, but considerable detail about body language, personal life, all of that is recorded. Because we always want to validate, to check, that all the information we are getting is accurate. That the agents themselves are at a point in their life where they are not getting distracted or not being coerced—there is a lot of things that we are checking on as we build a relationship with our agents. Everything is very well written down inside the service.

The Australian Secret Intelligence Service speaks

Australia’s overseas spies shelter in the most silent spaces of the spook universe.

The 68-year-old ethos of the spies of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service is never to speak publicly, just as they aim never to be seen or known.

The chief spy, the director-general of ASIS, has only ever given one public speech—back in 2012. Now, today’s top spy, Paul Symon, scores another first, with a series of video interviews with ASPI.

As the only member of ASIS whose name can be publicly revealed, Symon isn’t so much coming from the shadows as turning up the lights. In the ASPI interviews, he talks about the purposes and principles of ASIS, and spying in the 21st century.

The first interview traces how ASIS was formed and grew to become a spy service with distinct Australian characteristics.

ASIS resides within the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and reports to the foreign minister. Established in 1952, its early decades were marked by culture clash: diplomats feared the trouble that’d be caused by spies. ASIS officers in the field, working under diplomatic cover, were often at odds with the Australian ambassador. Diplomatic mandarins in Canberra doubted the value the spies could produce and wanted to abolish the service.

In its early decades, ASIS HQ wasn’t in Canberra, but at Melbourne’s Victoria Barracks. ASIS had close ties with its model, the British Secret Intelligence Service. For the Melbourne spy service, the SIS in London was seen as ‘head office’.

Symon observes:

For those in the diplomatic service in the early years, I can read into the history a very real anxiety about having the overt and covert elements of government working in parallel. With ASIS having cover departments like Defence and like External Affairs, it brings to the fore concerns about ‘Well, if mistakes are made, who carries the can?’ And probably in the early days when the service hadn’t built up the centre of gravity that you need to be a foreign espionage service, I think there was probably very real concern that the risks outweighed the benefits and that any gems of intelligence that we provided for the Australian government were going to be very few and far between.

The two royal commissions on intelligence by Justice Robert Hope (launched in 1974 and 1983) were seminal. The first royal commission secured ASIS’s existence and structured its relationship with the Australian intelligence community. The second royal commission killed off ASIS’s special operations or ‘attack’ function, meaning that for a couple of decades Australia’s spies couldn’t carry guns. The spies sought facts but were barred from using force.

Symon says that what Hope established with his first royal commission ‘means everything in the way that we go about doing our business and in the way we train our people. Hope made sure that there was a legal basis and a proper basis for us to undertake our functions. He articulated the legality and propriety of the work that we did.’

Hope’s model imposed a clear division between ASIS as an intelligence collection agency and the intelligence assessment to be conducted by other agencies, as Symon reflects:

[Hope] didn’t merge the two into a hybrid, the way the Americans have with the Central Intelligence Agency. He delineated between … the intelligence function and the law-enforcement function. He specifically addressed the privacy of Australians and the special requirements that intelligence agencies have to do to protect the privacy of Australians. And the other thing that Hope did very well, for which the legacy continues to this day, is the delineation between intelligence assessment and policy.

Symon sees a dynamic but positive tension between assessment and collection:

There is a risk if collection and assessment are merged, that one can contaminate the other. ‘Contaminate’ may be perhaps too harsh a word to use. But there can be a tendency that one leads the other in ways that are unhealthy. We, as a collection agency, are working to the intelligence requirements of the assessment agencies.

Hope’s second royal commission looked at a bungled ASIS training exercise in 1983 at Melbourne’s Sheraton Hotel. Hope called the exercise ‘poorly planned, poorly supervised and poorly run’.

Symon said ASIS had ‘set ourselves up for disaster’ by the way it had created a covert operation function. The covert directorate was abolished and ASIS officers were banned from carrying weapons. In 2004, officers were given permission to carry weapons for self-defence and, in 2018, legislation broadened the right to employ force, as Symon explains:

Officers can use reasonable force. They cannot use violence. There’s a series of definitions in the way the law has defined what we can do. So, really, we’re talking about the low end of the spectrum of using self-defence techniques where lethal force is inappropriate, but there might be scenarios where using proportionate low-level techniques to achieve an outcome is appropriate.

Symon had a 35-year career in the Australian Army, culminating in his achieving the rank of major general and serving as deputy chief of the army and as director of the Defence Intelligence Organisation. In 2015, he left the military to join the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and was appointed director-general of ASIS in December 2017.

Spies and the military share ‘an operational disposition’, he says, and an understanding of risk as ‘the heart and soul of what they’re trained to do’. From there, the public culture and purpose of the military and the secret culture of spies go different ways.

As Symon concludes in the first of the ASPI interviews, ASIS is in the people business, operating in the intelligence market for ‘the cultivation, the recruitment and the validation of agents who are betraying the secrets of their nation’.

From the bookshelf: Why spy?

Between the diplomatic dance and the infernal destruction of war is to be found the opaque art of espionage.

Two recent novels dissect the art of espionage with a knowing eye and a clinical precision. The great John Le Carré, now 88, offers his 25th novel devoted to the shadowy lives of spies. In Agent running in the field, Le Carré succeeds brilliantly in creating a contemporary work that reflects the challenges of a post–Cold War world in which Russia and the West continue a very real contest while newer developments such as Brexit destabilise the landscape.

A more recent entrant into first-class espionage fiction is Mick Herron, whose Slough House series started with Slow horses. It now numbers six, with the latest novel, Joe Country, adding to a world in which the rejects of the main spying game (the ‘slow horses’) are obliged to confront foes who are considerably above their pay grade. This is the essential element in Herron’s success. His spymaster, Jackson Lamb, the overlord of Slough House, is about as far removed from George Smiley or M as it is possible to imagine, in a physical sense.

In Agent running in the field, Le Carré also embraces the concept of agents removed from the core business. The ultimate in motley crews are installed in digs well away from headquarters. When our central character from MI6, Nat, anticipating enforced retirement from the service, confronts his new post in a back street of Camden, astonishment ensues:

How any substation came to finish up in this neck of the woods was a mystery in itself. How it had acquired the ironic sobriquet of the Haven was another. There was a theory the place had been used as a safe house for captured German spies in the ’39–’45 war; another that a former Chief had kept his mistress here; and yet another that Head Office, in one of its endless policy lurches, had decreed that security was best served by scattering its substations across London, and the Haven by its sheer insignificance had got overlooked when the policy was scrapped.

Slough House in Mick Herron’s universe is where British secret service agents who have failed spectacularly, either in the field or in training, are sent to disappear. In our litigious age, the service fears lawsuits arguing unfair dismissal from disgruntled agents who have been shown the door. So Slough House, with its meaningless and numbing routines, is designed to encourage voluntary decisions to depart.

Herron describes Slough House in appallingly vivid terms:

The building is a bad tooth set in a failing mouth. Here is where nothing happens: nothing to see here. Move along.

Which is how it’s supposed to be, for this is Slough House, and Slough House deserves no attention. Should a historian attempt to penetrate its mysteries, she’d first have to negotiate a back door which sticks in all weathers, then a staircase whose creaking suggests imminent collapse, but having done so, she’d find little to exercise her notebook: just a succession of offices equipped to face the 1990s, crumbling plasterwork, and rotting splinters in the window frames.

Ian Fleming always had his leading character, James Bond, maintain that he played two games only— cards and golf. Goldfinger showed Bond at his best on the links. A sporting connection in Agent running in the field is badminton, played at Nat’s club, the Athleticus in Battersea. Nat is a champion, as was his father, in the British Army. The new arrival, a much younger man named Ed, wants to challenge Nat’s status as first with the racquet. As with all Le Carré novels, there are more dimensions to both Nat and Ed than are first apparent.

More dimensions are manifest as well in Nat’s family, with his wife, the able human rights lawyer Prue, and his feisty daughter, Steff, as the critical milieu for a spook’s life.

Joe Country takes the misfits of Slough House and places them in operational mortal danger. River Cartwright’s estranged father, Frank Harkness, has returned to the UK intent on destruction. Not only do the slow horses see a challenge in this malign reality, but all of them secretly hope to be redeemed and recalled to ‘The Park’, the colloquial reference to HQ. Why anyone, including the formidable Emma Flyte, would want to serve under ‘Lady Di Taverner’ is problematic. The first desk or lead spy would be just as comfortable working for Lavrentii Beria in 1939 in Moscow as for the British Secret Intelligence Service in London in 2019.

Spies are very much in the news these days, from defectors to the deadly—be they in Berlin, Sydney or Salisbury. Le Carré offers a window into the test for a genuine defector as against a plant.

Yuri Andropov may be long dead, but his spiritual heir, Vladimir Putin, continues in the tradition of the KGB. The Russian defector in Agent running in the field is named Sergei Borisovich Kusnetsev. Debriefed, Sergei appears to be the real item:

And everything tallied, right down to his pen portraits of his pseudonymous trainers and fellow trainees, the tricks of the trade he has been taught, the training gigs he has undertaken and his holy mission as a loyal Russian sleeper agent, which he reeled off like a mantra … The only point of curiosity—and for his debriefers something more than curiosity—was that there was not one grain of new or marketable intelligence in any of it.

Both these books offer convincing experiences with murky worlds that few of us ever experience. Le Carré and Herron are highly skilled craftsmen whose narratives are simultaneously persuasive yet perplexing. Do Western security services really behave as badly as these novels suggest? Not always, perhaps, but the reasons for checks and balances in democratic systems are validated by both these authors, in works as creative as they are confounding.

From the exhibit halls and the bookshelf: Spies out in the Cold

At first thought, the Whitlam Institute on the campus of Western Sydney University is an odd place to have an exhibition supported by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation and dedicated to espionage in Australia. After all, it was Gough Whitlam’s attorney-general, Lionel Murphy, who staged the infamous ‘raid’ on ASIO’s Melbourne headquarters early in the life of that Labor government. Murphy was convinced that ASIO was withholding material from him.

Now ASIO’s headquarters are in Canberra by Lake Burley Griffin and named after Labor prime minister Ben Chifley. It was Chifley who acted to form the nascent spying agency in 1949 in response to pressure from both the British and the Americans at the outset of the Cold War.

But as this interesting exhibition makes clear, Australian espionage dated from well before then. It continued through both world wars, and on into the confrontation between the West and the Soviet empire, crystalising in 1954 with the defection of the third secretary at the Soviet embassy in Canberra, Vladimir Petrov. Petrov’s defection laid bare the extent of attempted Soviet penetration of Australian institutions. The clumsy attempt to return his wife to Moscow underlined the brutality of the Soviet system.

Domestically, the Petrov affair was skilfully exploited by Prime Minister Robert Menzies with unfortunate assistance from an inept leader of the Labor opposition, H.V. ‘Doc’ Evatt. Thus, the exhibition sketches the domestic realities of the day that drove counterespionage from May Day marches to the Moratorium demonstrations against the Vietnam War. Several of the photographs are fascinating, and some of the tools of the trade on display, such as Soviet communication devices, are intriguing. This may be entry level only for people interested in counterespionage, but it is well worth the effort to visit. (The exhibition closes on 24 May, though, so you’ll need to be quick.)

It is a healthy sign in any democracy when its primary security agency is prepared to discuss its history openly. Various directors-general of ASIO, including the incumbent, Duncan Lewis, have often been prepared to speak as frankly as possible before the parliament and to the public and community organisations. As Thomas Jefferson mused, the strongest democracy is one based on an informed citizenry.

Ben Macintyre’s The spy and the traitor also represents an opening up of the archives from the Cold War. The agency is Britain’s MI6 and Macintyre details graphically and compellingly the story of the exfiltration of MI6’s most highly placed Soviet agent, the KGB’s London rezident, Oleg Gordievsky.

Gordievsky had grown disillusioned with the Soviet system, especially after postings in the West in civilised cities such as Copenhagen. He was from the Soviet elite, and his father had been a KGB officer before him. But as with certain members of the ‘Cambridge Apostles’, privilege bred a deep scepticism of, and ultimately hostility towards, the prevailing economic and social system. In this, Gordievsky was the other side of the coin to Kim Philby, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess.

Gordievsky served his British masters brilliantly. He was an impeccable source whose knowledge led to arrests of Soviet spies within the NATO countries and to a comprehensive understanding of the driving imperatives of the KGB. (By the way, certain figures within the KGB hierarchy were so appalling that it’s possible to conclude that Ian Fleming’s classic, From Russia with love, may be fiction, but it is surely based on fact.)

On the other side of the Atlantic, within the confines of Langley, Virginia, is another spy in the form of the CIA’s Aldrich (Rick) Ames. Ames is arguably the most disgusting traitor ever to disfigure the agency. He sold out his country for money. Greed was his sole motivator which served a personality characterised by disaffection and dissatisfaction.

Ames’s treachery cost dozens of American agents their lives. He was as injurious to American espionage as Kim Philby was in his destruction of Britain’s post-war efforts in the Baltic states. Deservedly, Ames is serving a life sentence for treason.

This brings us to the core of Macintyre’s outstanding effort. Ames’s treachery results in the KGB identifying Gordievsky as a traitor and he is recalled to Moscow from London.

By a predetermined plan, MI6 exfiltrates Gordievsky out of the Soviet Union to Finland and then on to Norway and the UK. It is a magnificently efficient operation.

Although all of this happened more than 30 years ago, one wonders why MI6 would now be so open about its tradecraft. Perhaps Gordievsky did escape this way, or perhaps MI6 is still concealing the real methods by which their invaluable agent was rescued.

Ben Macintyre has written another wonderful account of espionage at its most dangerous. It ranks with his incisive A spy among friends, which exposed in detail the failure of Britain’s secret services to appreciate that Kim Philby was a dedicated traitor. That book was truly revealing, and The spy and the traitor is in the same class in the history of recent espionage.