Yes: it may not have been espionage-related, it may have been garden-variety corruption

then again, Aunt Millicent was a very generous old miser!

Nabs: White-anting ASIS and NCA??? You mean, “office politics”? Selfish empire-building? oh noes.

I’m shocked! Surely you are not suggesting that anyone in our thoroughly respectable defence procurement or defence research establishment could have come by a whopping big palace at the beach by means other than thrifty saving of one’s loose change at the end of each day or by inheriting it from Great-Aunt Millicent. That’s a terrible slur. Naturally, you do have in your own possession infra-red photographs, unalterable videotapes and reams of affidavits of wrong-doing by such distinguished people …. sorry, I can’t go on …. there’s a limit even to my mock-horror and if I laugh any more I’ll fall off this chair.

Seriously though, had ASIO followed through on whiffs of corruption in Defence - they might have saved the Commonwealth Treasury enough money to fund the running of their own organization twice over.

From what she told me, cheerfully ignoring every provision of whatever version of the Defence of Realm Act she signed off on, it sounded like a pretty dysfunctional organisation, less interested in hunting aging commies, strident peace activists and hard core greenies, DSTO staff with surprisingly large holiday homes, BHP coking coal mine planners with a second wife in Seoul and other threats to the Australian way of the life than in white-anting truly dangerous operations like ASIS and the NCA.

Anyway here’s a cheery thought for anyone that’s ever been screwed by ASIO. I’ve personally returned the favour.

Thank you for letting us know you had left your fingerprints and DNA on the keyboard. The data has now been added to your file.

Off topic and into Aussie slang for a moment:

“Hand-raper’ is a synonym for masturbator, Onanist onanist, wanker, gripper-of-the-dick and hence a foolish and easily befuddled person, one given running off on wild goose chases, a gullible follower of an off-beat political, artistic or religious cult; i.e., one who could be readily persuaded to buy, at a bargain price in hard cash, several thousand tonnes of scrap iron currently located between Milson’s Point and The Rocks. [FDB at 23 was right on the money ]

Ambigulous [26]:

” …. sometimes they must have to follow strange persons down strange alleys, just to be sure by “ruling them off the list”. So the retrospective critique of following false leads may in part be a little unfair, if there were SOME grounds for concern ….”

Fair enough. That’s what we pay them for. I suppose that would be a bit like a salesman [M or F ] following up leads after a trade show: most will lead nowhere but the more they follow up, the better chance they have of closing a worthwhile sale. It just comes with the territory.

Tyro Rex [27]:

Food for thought in that.

let’s hope they still manage to recruit plenty of persons with those qualities…. I reckon you could summarise that list as
“persons of high and active intelligence, open-minded”.

We need an intelligence service and I’d prefer it not waste it’s time.

But I reckon sometimes they must have to follow strange persons down strange alleys, just to be sure by “ruling them off the list”. So the retrospective critique of following false leads may in part be a little unfair, if there were SOME grounds for concern, e.g. wasn’t the only genuine passer-of-documents-to-the-Soviets-in-Canberra associated with the Petrov hearings in fact a high CPA official? I don’t imply that every CPA member at that time was a spy or even a potential spy, mind.

During the Whitlam govt, “The Bulletin” ran a story claing senior Ministers (ALP) had been asking ASIO to keep an eye on groups to their left, and report back. Presumably to supplement standard sources such as union gossip, general gossip, tiny publications, student politics etc.

I thought, “ah, it’s not just Menzies and Liberal Govts who misuse ASIO…” At that time, “The Bulletin” occasionally ran stories seemingly sourced from intelligence organisations. Peter Samuels was a journalist with that kind of interest. Whether the sources or the magazine ever revealed the full story in such a case, is another matter of course.

A rumour from Lionel Murphy’s “ASIO raid”: some of the boys in Melbourne were tipped off that he was on his way, so the files on Murphy & Cairns were put into a large envelope and taken outside and posted into the letterbox on the wall of the building [I have no idea if such a letterbox existed]. The rumour said that the files therefore lay safely, out of the way of Lionel’s prying eyes, during the raid. Or perhaps they were posted to the Tassie office?

It’s a lovely story. Deserves to be true. A sign of intelligence (cunning) at Intelligence: egad!

Methinks what is being wrung isn’t the hand.

IMHO, the most valuable intelligence is always right out there in the open just waiting to be processed by the astute, the clever, the experienced, the observant, the open-minded and the well-trained. And yes, I’m sure that spying and other forms of covert intelligence has a place - a very small but useful place - in the scheme of things.

So who then are the political hand-rapers who assign extraordinarily high value to gossip that comes from covert sources and yet who despise and ignore rock-solid intelligence that comes from quite open sources?

The bulk of the blame for the ridiculous waste of intelligence resources must be laid on the political ratbags who ordered such waste.

Oh, they might look very innocent in those cable sweaters and those birkenstocks, but it’s all a front you know…

And, yes, there’s almost certainly a tale to be told there, given that the only economic activity Australia had in Iraq was selling wheat. There’s an excellent chance the intelligence agencies knew exactly what was going on.

Can hardly wait for 2010 to find out exactly how the Vietnam Veterans’ Action Association had a direct telephone line to the Kremlin and how they imperiled daylight saving, decimal currency, our flag, the koala, HMAS Invincible, pumpkin scones, Magna Carta and Jessie the Elephant. Wonder what nefarious plans they had to wear suits in colours other than navy-blue or charcoal or to wear T-shirts with naughty things written on them.

At a time when the Soviet Union did have real secret operators creating real mischief in The West and when real Middle-Eastern hijackers were active, it makes you wonder just what was being smoked by those who ordered the priorities of Australia’s security and counter-intelligence effort in those days.

Tyro Rex [13]:

Very good point about the inefficiencies of melding AFP and ASIO. Still, if such melding proved successful then maybe we could extend that concept to relieve the shortage - in remote and rural communities - of plumbers, teachers, electricians, doctors and builders. Gee, it’s worth a try, isn’t it? L=O=L!

I raise this point because you can well imagine the extent to which Howard and co would seek to politicise intelligence collection and analysis.

Additionally, the requirements of intelligence-gathering and police work are frequently at odds, and the move by Howard to merge and align the two organisations (AFP and ASIO) could well end up in the compromise of both. For example, with police work you generally want to measure its success by successful court operations, which requires you to reveal your methods and sources in court. It is rarely in the interests of an intelligence agency to give up their sources where ever possible, court prosecutions are not the aim, but information gathering and reporting is, and ongoing operations require that your sources are protected - usually forever.

E.g. consider the case of Valery Plame. After Rove/Rumsfeld/Cheney exposed her as a CIA agent, you can image that foreign agencies started to review every report they had involving her and her contacts, and I’d bet quite a few networks were blown wide open but Cheney’s politically motivated breach of security. Consider also the case of counter-survelliance operations. All you want to do is foil the target surveillance, or expose the target’s methods and contacts, find out the target’s target if that’s unknown to you, feed the target false information, disrupt the target’s network, disable completely their capability to either gather information and/or trust and/or ability to act upon it, and all the while hopefully keeping even the fact of your own counter-surveillance operation completely unknown to the target, and usually not, for example, prosecute the target diplomats or other assets in an open court. You might even leave their operation running, to give them the false sense of security. All of which requires politicians grand-standing on TV, or gun-waving AFP officers, to stay the hell away.