Australian Secret Intelligence Service

13 May

Advertisement for an *Australian Financial Review* expose which revealed details of ASIS’s operations in 1972.

On this day, 13 May 1952, Robert Menzies establishes the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS), originally dubbed the Australian Secret Service, via an executive order. Formed in a Cold War environment, ASIS’s aim was to collect foreign intelligence and potentially to engage in acts of covert action, primarily targeted within the Asia-Pacific region. For over 20 years the agency’s existence would be a closely guarded secret, first referred to in Parliament in 1975 and not officially acknowledged until 1977.

Australia’s history of spying dates back prior to Federation, when Australian colonial governments had engaged in espionage overseas, primarily through commissioning officials and expatriates already operating in the South Pacific to collect commercial secrets and other intelligence about the non-British European powers operating in the region. In the early federal period the New Hebrides – now Vanuatu – was of particular concern for the government of Alfred Deakin which leveraged the Commonwealth’s commercial agents in the region to share insights about French settlers and military positions in the islands to help argue for a greater British military presence in the Pacific.

Australia’s approach to secret statecraft became more sophisticated during the Second World War, particularly in the Pacific Theatre in areas occupied by Japan. An Allied Intelligence Bureau (AIB) was set up as a joint organisation to pool Australian, British, Dutch, and American intelligence resources operating in the region. Much of the AIB’s activities were targeted against Japanese forces operating in modern day Indonesia, Malaysia, Timor, and Papua New Guinea. It comprised sections focused on special military operations, sabotage, human intelligence, rescuing POWs, and propaganda. Alfred Deakin Brookes, the grandson of Alfred Deakin who would go on to be the first Director General of ASIS, served with the AIB in the sections focused on propaganda and sabotage behind enemy lines.

After the war, Brookes worked on the staff of H.V. Evatt, Attorney General and Minister for External Affairs, including during UN efforts to establish Indonesia as a separate state. During this time Brookes proposed the idea of an Australian Secret Service direct to Evatt, but the proposal was rebuffed. This was perhaps unsurprising, as Evatt and his Prime Minister Ben Chifley where suspicious of the drawbacks that strong intelligence agencies might have for a democracy, and they had a difficult relationship with the British and American intelligence communities, particularly over the revelation in 1948 that the departments of External Affairs and Defence had been thoroughly infiltrated by Soviet agents.

In 1947, the decryption of intercepted Soviet diplomatic cables by the CIA suggested that the Australian government had been infiltrated, as these Soviet communications referenced the acquisition of top secret allied material that indicated it had been acquired by Australian sources. An MI5 delegation, headed by Director General Sir Percy Sillitoe, visited Australia to address the issue, but the origins of their investigations was hidden from Australian officials. The delegation met with Prime Minister Chifley and Evatt, explaining the urgent need for reform of Australia’s counter-espionage capability that MI5, MI6 and the CIA believed was required.

Chifley and Evatt expressed initial scepticism that the leak had arisen from Australia. Evatt felt that the British were exaggerating the seriousness of the situation and Chifley expressed reluctance to undertake the institutional reform requested, which would require a more rigorous vetting of public servants. Indeed, Chifley only agreed to reforms, which would create the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), after it was threatened that without the changes, Australia would be cut-off entirely from the exchange of top secret information. In essence the difference between ASIO and ASIS was that the former was primarily defensive, in trying to block the operations of foreign powers, while the latter would be proactive, in trying to probe into those powers themselves.

Having failed to persuade the Labor Government to set up an intelligence service, Brookes found a new role working for the Liberal Party of Australia as ‘a specialist officer on the staff of the Federal Secretariat, to deal with foreign affairs, imperial defence and subversive activities’. Brookes found a natural supporter in the Party’s Federal Director Richard Casey, who had spent some time embedded in the UK Cabinet and Foreign Office as Australia’s representative in London, during which he became enamoured of the operations of MI6 intelligence. Brookes’s role for the party was a strange one, but it fit well with Menzies’s emphasis on national security in a climate in which he was planning to ban the Communist Party.

When Menzies won office, plans to establish an intelligence service began in earnest. In 1950 Menzies wrote to UK Prime Minister, Clement Atlee, saying ‘I have decided to establish a Secret Intelligence Service which, when organised, will operate in South East Asia and in Pacific areas adjacent to Australia. Recent developments in Asia and our ‘near north’ make this a prudent and urgent measure. Knowledge regarding this scheme has been restricted to the fewest possible here and for added security, I have chosen to write than cable. I trust that the establishment of an Australian Service may in some small measure reduce the onerous world-wide commitments of the United Kingdom’.

The plan was thus for Australia to take up a localised role in its region, which would fit into a wider Commonwealth network of intelligence sharing. Behind this was Australia’s larger aspiration to lead in the formulation of Commonwealth strategic decision-making as it related to the region - adding more to the intelligence picture would lend valuable decision-making leverage.

Because of the perceived need for secrecy and high level security concerns, Menzies created ASIS without legislation and would even hide its expenditure within the defence budget. Alongside the executive order creating ASIS, Menzies issued an accompanying top secret directive or charter, explaining in more detail the agency’s functions. The purpose of ASIS would be the collection of ‘secret intelligence’ - espionage, on overseas targets - and the carrying out of ‘special operations’ that ‘afford no proof of the instigation of the government’, what is now referred to as covert action.

The context in which ASIS was created was one in which the government felt the strong possibility of the looming emergence of a third world war. While that never eventuated, ASIS has nevertheless taken up a central role in informing and strengthening Australia’s strategic decision making for seventy years. Circumstances have changed, ASIS is now a matter of public knowledge and since 2001 its operations have been given the legitimacy of the Intelligence Services Act. But the specifics of ASIS’s operations remain guarded in secrecy, and with a deteriorating geopolitical landscape, the agency is perhaps more vital in ensuring our national security than ever.

Australian Secret Intelligence Service

Menzies’s Death

The National Library of Australia