{"id":17913,"date":"2015-01-22T06:00:50","date_gmt":"2015-01-21T19:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=17913"},"modified":"2015-01-23T12:58:49","modified_gmt":"2015-01-23T01:58:49","slug":"asio-2-the-spooks-and-oz-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/asio-2-the-spooks-and-oz-politics\/","title":{"rendered":"ASIO (2): the spooks and Oz politics"},"content":{"rendered":"

For decades, the Australian Labor Party hated the spooks with a passion. Indeed, many Australians still maintain that deep distrust of their domestic security service.<\/p>\n

For Labor, though, the hatred of ASIO\u2014the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation\u2014coincided with the barren years of opposition. In his official history<\/a> of ASIO, David Horner writes that Labor\u2019s approach to ASIO was poisoned:<\/p>\n

In Australian political history, it\u2019s unlikely that any other Commonwealth department has had to endure such concerted, vociferous and bitter criticism from the Opposition\u2014over the two decades from 1951.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The legacy of scorn and scepticism is reflected in the words of the former Labor Leader, Kim Beazley, now ambassador to the US, who writes that ASIO<\/p>\n

exercised its task in a democratic environment where many would challenge its relevance, its techniques and whether, in principle, it should exist. It has been impossible to view its role objectively in the public debate or see the organisation in its complete and complex history.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So, questions of relevance, technique and even whether ASIO should exist. The angst and the anger have several layers. Deepest secrecy surrounded the signals intelligence that had revealed the work of Soviet spies in Canberra in the 1940s (leading to ASIO\u2019s creation) and that veil was not cast off until the 1990s.<\/p>\n

The long anger-burn and many of the questions flowed from ASIO\u2019s great public coup\u2014\u2018the most important episode in ASIO\u2019s first two decades,\u2019 Horner writes\u2014the defection of the Soviet diplomat and intelligence agent, Vladimir Petrov.<\/p>\n

The Petrov Royal Commission that followed was a political disaster for the Labor Leader, H.V. Evatt, and fed the Labor belief that ASIO connived with the Menzies Government to commit political sabotage. Horner comments that Labor ran a \u2018misguided campaign\u2019 against the service, \u2018based on completely false assumptions that were impossible to disprove without divulging highly sensitive intelligence sources on the Soviet Union\u2019.<\/p>\n

In a fine review<\/a> of Horner\u2019s book, The Canberra Times<\/em>\u2019 editor-at-large, Jack Waterford, notes that Evatt\u2019s charges were \u2018fantastic and silly\u2019 but, stung by Labor slurs, ASIO officers \u2018began to do some of the partisan things Labor critics were alleging they had always done\u2019.<\/p>\n

Horner\u2019s official history shows that ASIO didn\u2019t just gather intelligence, but conducted spoiling operations that were an \u2018extravagant interpretation\u2019 of its remit. And he comments: \u2018The major consequence of the Cold War was that ASIO pursued its campaign against communists with an almost religious fervour\u2019. Fervour saw ASIO become overzealous: \u2018ASIO officers came to believe that any political movement or societal group that challenged a conservative view of society was potentially subversive\u2019.<\/p>\n

Here is David Horner in the second of his four ASPI interviews:<\/p>\n