Political supervision of ASIO has not succeeded in creating public confidence

The events of Tuesday, when a young man called to a police station drew a knife and stabbed two policemen before being shot by one of them, could perfectly illustrate the point. To be sure, the police were police, not clandestine agents pretending to be someone or something they were not . But it showed that some people mean business.

ASIO, as an organisation, is 65 years old. An authorised history of the first 15 or so years is soon to emerge. Appropriately, given its role as the Government Gazette, The Australian will publish excerpts from a few days before the official publication date, whilst journalists from other newspapers will be required to respect an embargo which (the publisher claims) was insisted on by ASIO itself. It could hardly have been on national security grounds.

I should surprised if it were claimed in the history that any ASIO agent has died in the line of duty. Many early ASIO men – they were mostly men then, though now 45 per cent are women, and women make up a majority of the non-executive levels – faced danger as soldiers in the war, or as colonial service officers in the Malayan Emergency and the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya. But in Australia, however, the infiltration and surveillance of the Communist Party, and the monitoring of Iron Curtain diplomats, and the monitoring of some excitable emigre groups did not usually draw danger money.

A good deal of the activity of Communist Party figures and Iron Curtain diplomats was focused on their own counter-intelligence, and paranoia about who might be reporting or spying on them. But not many bullets flew, and not many knives were waved.

Some (but not all) of the notoriously furtive and clandestine manner of Walter Seddon Clayton came from his primary role running the party's internal security to ferret out security agents. Then he doubled as the effective spymaster and manager of a number of party-oriented public servants, some in the Department of External Affairs, during the mid to late 1940s. These gave him information and documents he passed on to outright Soviet spies. The Petrov Royal Commission, five to 10 years later, was one of the consequences. Although it breaks the hearts of many Labor folk to admit it, this showed that the young ASIO had done a quite competent job over its first five years. The very existence of ASIO was a result of tip-offs from overseas that Russian spies were operating here.

Had Clayton, or his Victorian counterpart, Ted Hill, found any security informants, I should not be surprised if they received a good kicking. But the mortality and morbidity rates for direct engagement on either side of the struggle were not high. While there were Soviet spies, (as well as Soviet-bloc, Yugoslav, American, British, French, Japanese and Indonesian ones), counter-espionage work did not involve any expenditure of ammunition, even though it occasionally involved the placement of people in places where they could have been in danger had their real work been exposed. Police special branches did most of the grunt work in dealing with ethnic groups and fringe formations, and although this often involved hot talk, bombing, counter-bombing and own-goal bombing between factions, and sometimes paramilitary practice, the number of people actually hurt in action in this country was small. A few idiots invaded Croatia and were summarily shot by Yugoslav security people, widely thought to have penetrated their group and organised the whole affair from the start.

I expect that David Horner will think that ASIO did a half-way decent job on Russian spies. I expect, too, that he will think that a good deal of Labor animosity to, and distrust of the organisation, came from an almost clinical paranoia of Bert Evatt. But I do hope that he will be critical of the way that ASIO adjusted to this distrust by becoming, in some respects, just the sort of partisan attack force its mainstream critics feared it to be. For 20 years, ASIO effectiveness was very handicapped by this mistrust.

Terrorism arrived in the mid-1970s. But if it produced local casualties, the targets were international. The Hilton bombing occurred during a meeting of Commonwealth prime ministers and was probably focused at India's. Earlier an Indian diplomat was kidnapped in Canberra, and, later, a Turkish diplomat was assassinated in Sydney. Some new people in the game, if not inside ASIO, had been in actually very dangerous environments, including Northern Ireland. About the same time, ASIO was substantially reorganised, not least as a result of a number of inquiries, new legislation, and close questioning of an old axiom of early ASIO work – that the mere identification of a communist proved them to be a security risk.

Alas (from the point of view of old Bolsheviks anyway) the CPA had become a somewhat middle-class leftie advocacy group, representing no threat to capitalism or the state, and insufficient as an ASIO raison d'etre. Some think this was a process slowed, not hastened by continuous ASIO scrutiny. It was once said that about 60 per cent of the membership of the American Communist Party were actually FBI, state police, or military intelligence officers whose energy and (pretend) enthusiasm kept the party afloat. One could generally tell the infiltrators because they were so conscientious in performing party duties, such as sale at street corners of the party newspaper, so as to show their zeal, and to get better access to, and promotion within the organisation.

By 1989, 25 years ago, the Cold War was over. ASIO today has few, if any warriors remaining from those times. Whatever ASIO is today it does not have the problem of a Cold war culture. Even the terror threat of the 1970s through to 2000 has had little in common with the terror threat of today, and radical Islam then hardly rated a mention. After 2001, ASIO has had to double its size –at some risk to its professionalism – to cope with the new realities. It has also been given executive powers, which old hands suspect will, down the track, prove to have been a mistake that undermines its professional detachment.

If domestic terrorism is now more likely, police and security personnel are at greater risk than members of the public. But most western terrorism from radical Islamicists has been directed at civilians. (Though, if overseas, and perhaps NSW, experience is any guide, completely innocent people of "foreign" appearance, including Brazilians, may be more at risk from over-zealous policemen than are counter-terrorism people from fanatics.)

Those charged with protecting Australia and Australians from people who wish, for political reasons, to do them harm, deserve support and all of the tools that will help keep Australians and their guardians safe. They also deserve some understanding if they make mistakes in circumstances where their lives are at risk, and quick judgments must be made.

But it is no disservice to them to wonder whether they are as good as they think. Or if they learn from their mistakes, whether they over-generalise from overseas experiences, and whether they have in place the systems and the judgment to be able to make best use of the powers they have, or which they are now demanding and getting.

The AFP and state forces were strongly criticised for the numbers of men and women it brought to bear in the round-ups early this month. Some have said that Tuesday's incident shows the need for overwhelming force in potential confrontations. That is nonsense; indeed the possibility of a fatal mistake "by one of us" or "on one of us by our own" is usually exponentially increased by the number of people involved. Typically too, the more involved the less command and control, and the lower the ultimate level of accountability there will be if something goes drastically wrong. Generally, the less drama, the fewer waved weapons and paramilitary tactics, the more easily situations are to control and the safer everyone, including security people are.

The AFP still bears the scars of serious misjudgment, mismanagement, poor leadership and lack of checks and balances demonstrated in the Haneef affair. Nothing much the AFP did afterwards, by way of self-criticism, review of doctrine and complacent ideas, or by reorganisation and discipline of those who made bad decisions; nothing that occurred publicly gives any grounds for confidence that its senior management had learnt much from the affair, or the disasters caused by their politically responsive second guessing of officers on the ground. The bigger state police forces are generally more professional, but have their own problems, including, these days, with a gung ho paramilitary culture.

The Haneef affair produced a number of inquiries, during which the judgment of the new Director General of ASIO, Duncan Lewis, was also criticised, in my opinion insufficiently. He was at the time national security adviser to Prime Minister John Howard, and his lack of proper understanding of how ASIO and the AFP security systems worked let the government down, with adverse political consequences. His confidence in his own judgment and abilities did not seem to suffer as a result.

ASIO itself, then under the charge of Paul O'Sullivan, who is now chief of staff to Attorney-General Brandis, emerged with credit from the Haneef affair. It showed itself an institution of calm judgment, not inclined to panic or to temper advice to suit politicians of the day. Had its advice been followed – perhaps communicated effectively to the PMO – there would have not been such a debacle.

O'Sullivan was followed by David Irvine, a diplomat with a background in intelligence gathering, if not in security operations. Lewis, who follows him is a former SAS officer who made Major General before becoming first national security adviser, then, less successfully, Secretary of Defence before being shunted off to a diplomatic post in Brussels. Since ASIO's access to government normally comes through Brandis, O'Sullivan will have some opportunity to review the new ASIO product and approach.

I doubt Lewis will much appreciate it, but, probably, the process will make some players, and the media, more comfortable. One thing politicians are inclined to forget is that public consent to the giving of powers to security services is confidence in those in charge, not in ministers. The reputation of ASIO among politicians, senior public servants and the media is generally fairly high, at least since the last dozen or so leaders. It probably reached its peak under Dennis Richardson, now Secretary of Defence and not known for timidity in saying what he damn well thinks. Ministers should take great care that they do not use up any credit that individuals, as opposed to institutions, have built up.

It is in such times that those who want effective security work insist that there be stringent checks and balances, carried out by known professionals with existing reputations and whose opinions can be publicly expressed.

Political supervision, through a secretive parliamentary committee, has not succeeded in creating public confidence. Politicians inducted into the system, generally giving every indication of awe or fear of being accused of being unsound, and show every sign of becoming house-trained. (So do former Attorneys-General.)

Successive governments have pretty much squandered the credibility of Inspectors-General of Security or the Ombudsman. Indeed, the present incumbents should be a missing persons list.

The ideal spotlight should comprise no more than about three staff and an eminent (retired) persons committee of the professor, archbishop, governor, judge and former departmental head class. I expect such people would not be a nuisance, standing in the way of protecting the community. Rather they might make that job easier for resolving perfectly reasonable scepticism about the self-confident assertions of politicians, police and protections.