The Australian Signals Directorate cancelled a $2.2 million contract with Australian National University professor John Blaxland to write the history of the agency, over concerns the manuscript focused too heavily on Greek and Roman history.
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Australian Signals Directorate director-general Rachel Noble told Senate estimates on Tuesday night an "amicable agreement" had been reached with the university to release the first seven draft chapters of the history, after the contract was abruptly cancelled last month.
Ms Noble said she was committed to making the agency - whose motto is "reveal their secrets, protect our own" - as "transparent and open as possible, while also protecting the very sensitive capabilities that enable ASD to do its job".
Professor Blaxland, who wrote the official history of ASIO, was contracted last July to write the history of the agency over two volumes, covering the period from around the end of the Second World War to the 1970s.
The volumes were intended to be around 250,000 words.
However Ms Noble said most of the early chapters covered world history which had nothing to do with ASD or its predecessor organisations.
"It was a matter of a difference of views," Ms Noble said.
"We reached a point with ANU where about 65,000 of the 75,000 words that were produced ... [were] focused on the antecedents of cryptology and signals intelligence in the world, including Greek and Roman times and we had a difference of opinion with ANU about whether that would be the best balance of content.
"We really preferred that the content focused on the history of ASD itself, so we had a different sort of view about that. And we came to an amicable agreement that it probably wasn't, we probably weren't able to continue.
"We thoroughly respected ANU's view that to amend the content they felt might be an infraction of their academic freedoms, which we respected."
ASD had already paid ANU around $500,000 for the book and was finalising the last payments now.
It had put a tender out for a new historian to complete the story of the organisation.
Ms Noble said the agency was also setting up a program to proactively declassify archived documents "to make publicly available as many of our important historical documents as we can".
"The combination of these two initiatives will ensure that during my tenure as director-general, more information will be released about ASD and its activities than ever before," Ms Noble said.
