Bulletin from Abroad
When Australia needs an advantage in talks, its spies have been known to bug the other side.
Bernard Lagan in Sydney
New Zealanders startled that their spooks are spying on small Pacific states need only look across the Tasman to see how a bigger power tramples all over its neighbours and those that dare to challenge them.
Cheryl Gwyn, New Zealand’s inspector-general of intelligence and security, reporting this month that Wellington routinely hoovers up satellite communications from around the Pacific at its Waihopai interception station, gave plausible assurances that the spies aren’t deliberately flouting the law. By contrast, Australia last month charged a former senior government spy with a troubled conscience and his prominent Canberra lawyer with conspiring to disclose the dirty secrets of the spy’s former employer – the clamlike Australian Security Intelligence Service (Asis). The overseas spying agency has an annual budget of much more than half a billion dollars and probably employs about 2000 staff.
They are cloak-and-dagger boys (and girls) whose existence was not even officially admitted until 1977. In 1983, they found themselves splashed across the front pages when they spectacularly botched a training session inside Melbourne’s Sheraton hotel. Masked Asis officers brandishing silenced pistols and submachine guns bashed the hotel’s manager and charged through the hotel lobby to the kitchen and outside to where two getaway cars were waiting.
After a thorough excoriation, the agency managed to stay out of trouble until 2004, when a bunch of Australians dressed in stubby shorts and ragged workers’ shirts turned up in the East Timorese capital, Dili, with a Queensland construction firm contracted by the Australian Government’s overseas aid agency to “renovate” the prime minister’s office and Government Palace. In fact they were Asis agents and they secreted electronic listening devices in the walls of the ministers’ offices.
Australia and East Timor were locked in a heated negotiation over who would get the lion’s share of revenues from the A$50 billion Greater Sunrise oil and gas field in the Timor Sea, which lies between East Timor and Darwin, and Australia wanted inside intelligence on East Timor’s negotiating position.
The following year, the two countries reached a deal after East Timor caved into Australia’s demand that the crucial question of agreeing a new maritime boundary between the two nations be put off indefinitely. Timor, its economy in a parlous state and with a pressing need for oil revenues, signed a lopsided deal, unaware that Australia’s bugging had given its opponent a critical but hugely unfair advantage.
Two years later, Alexander Downer, the foreign minister and the minister responsible for Asis at the time of the bugging, obtained a highly paid consultancy with Perth-based Woodside Petroleum, the company responsible for exploiting the oil and gas reserves beneath the Timor Sea.
This was too much for one of the senior Asis agents who had been in on the Dili job, especially as he believed the diversion of resources to Timor had compromised the more pressing task of monitoring Indonesia’s radical Islamists. The agent – known only as Witness K – didn’t blow a public whistle, but went to the Australian Cheryl Gwyn equivalent, reporting his concerns to Australia’s intelligence watchdog. And he got himself a lawyer, Canberra barrister Bernard Collaery.
Once Timor got word of the bugging, it dragged Australia, kicking and screaming, to the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague. In March this year, the Australian Government, acutely embarrassed internationally, agreed to a more generous deal with East Timor.
But it had one piece of unfinished business; laying espionage charges against the spy with a conscience and his lawyer. They now face two years in jail. New Zealanders may well wonder what commercial secrets Asis has obtained from their country.
New Zealander Bernard Lagan is the Australian correspondent for the Times, London.
Australians in stubby shorts came to “renovate” the PM’s office and Government Palace.