Espionage

Richard Kerbaj is the latest in a long line of journalists and other writers to write a book on the intelligence agencies of the Five Eyes countries (the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). His major claim is that he has conducted interviews with more than a hundred current and former intelligence officers, as well as four former prime ministers, Britain’s Theresa May and David Cameron, and Australia’s Julia Gillard and Malcolm Turnbull. The willingness of so many intelligence officers to speak openly to a journalist, and in some cases to be identified by name, is a mark of how far the relationship between the agencies and external writers has come.

Harold Adrian Russell (Kim) Philby was the Third Man of the notorious Cambridge spy network set up in the 1930s and partially unmasked in the early 1950s, when Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean fled to Moscow. He had been in British intelligence (MI6) since the beginning of the war, but had been working for Soviet intelligence for some years before that. A high-flyer, charming and sociable, he rose rapidly as an officer in the British service and was even tipped to be the next head of MI6. After narrowly surviving the Burgess–Maclean fallout, he ended up in Beirut in the early 1960s, working as a freelance journalist for the Observer and the Economist and an agent for MI6 on the side. Son of a famous and eccentric Arabist, St John Philby, his Middle East coverage struck an old friend, Flora Solomon, as anti-Israel, and in criticising it to her old friend Victor Rothschild she mentioned that back in their youth in the 1930s he had tried to recruit her as a communist spy. Lord Rothschild passed that on to MI5, which had had it in for Philby for years, and in the new round of investigation, Philby’s own bosses in MI6 were convinced. An old friend, MI6’s Nicholas Elliott, confronted him in 1963 and obtained a partial confession, but then inexplicably left Beirut and allowed Philby to flee, courtesy of his Soviet handlers.

Reports about the Mossad often have the unfortunate trait of reading like a John le Carré novel. We hear of spies assuming false identities and injecting poison into the ears of Israel’s enemies, or of a Mossad director beginning his weekly meetings with the question, ‘Who are we going to assassinate today?’ Unfortunately, most of these stories are true. As well as enhancing the agency’s notoriety, the Mossad’s outlandish methods serve to distract from their less exciting but more consequential activities. They also obscure the more worrying truth about intelligence agencies: they are run by ordinary people, and ordinary people make mistakes.

A number of such mistakes are evident in the story of Ben Zygier, the Australian–Israeli man who recently died in an Israeli jail under mysterious circumstances. Zygier grew up in Melbourne, found Zionism, and moved to Israel to work for the Mossad. A few years into his career, however, he was arrested on unknown charges and secretly held in isolation in an Israeli prison, where he committed suicide on 15 December 2010.

Timely and accurate intelligence remains crucial to providing early warning of preparations for a terrorist attack. In this sense, high-grade intelligence represents the ‘front end’ of counter-terrorist strategy. This has certainly been reflected in the streamlining of Australia’s intelligence agencies since 9/11 and in the unprecedented resources that have been diverted to those agencies, particularly ASIO. The latter remains the agency responsible for preparing and distributing threat assessments and specific warnings on terrorist threats to Australia. This decade it has been granted substantially increased legislative powers to monitor, detain and question terrorist suspects. Due to the changes to Australia’s anti-terror laws since 9/11, ASIO’s internal security profile has become more prominent along with its increasingly close cooperation with state and federal police agencies.

Antarctica feeds the Australian imagination. The two continents are mirror images of each other: dry and largely barren, both managed to elude European description for longer than just about anywhere else. They are yin and yang; hot and cold.