Tomorrow (Friday 20 May) in Sydney I will be chairing a session at the Sydney Writers’ Festival entitled Who’s afraid of WikLeaks.
The members of the panel will be
- Suelette Dreyfus, author (with Julian Assange) of Underground, William Heinemann, Sydney 2011 – the story of the 1980s-1990s hacker underground, an important segment of which was operating out of Melbourne.
- Andrew Fowler, author of The Most Dangerous Man in the World, Melbourne University Press, 2011
- Barbara Gunnell, author of Rebel, public nuisance and dreamer: Julian Assange standing alone, GriffithREVIEW 32, March 2011.
- Robert Manne, author of The Cypherpunk Revolutionary, The Monthly, March 2011.
- Guy Rundle, author of Open-eyed conspiracy his time doth take, Overland, Issue No. 202, Autumn 2011.
The session will take place at Sydney Town Hall, 6.00-7.30 pm. The SWF webpage for the session may be accessed here.
I have signed a release for the ABC to make audio or video recordings of the session, and will post links for anything that goes to air after the Festival.
At last someone in a position to know has told the Chilcot Inquiry in the United Kingdom something we all already knew: that the Blair Government’s so-called “dodgy dossier” on Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction was cooked up to make the case for war – a flagrant misuse of intelligence processes.
An article published in The Guardian on Thursday 12 May (Iraq document drawn up to make the case for war – intelligence officer by Richard Norton-Taylor) begins:
A top military intelligence official has said the discredited dossier on Iraq's weapons programme was drawn up "to make the case for war", flatly contradicting persistent claims to the contrary by the Blair government, and in particular by Alastair Campbell, the former prime minister's chief spin doctor.
In hitherto secret evidence to the Chilcot inquiry, Major General Michael Laurie said: "We knew at the time that the purpose of the dossier was precisely to make a case for war, rather than setting out the available intelligence, and that to make the best out of sparse and inconclusive intelligence the wording was developed with care."
His evidence is devastating, as it is the first time such a senior intelligence officer has directly contradicted the then government's claims about the dossier – and, perhaps more significantly, what Tony Blair and Campbell said when it was released seven months before the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Laurie, who was director general in the Defence Intelligence Staff, responsible for commanding and delivering raw and analysed intelligence, said: "I am writing to comment on the position taken by Alastair Campbell during his evidence to you … when he stated that the purpose of the dossier was not to make a case for war; I and those involved in its production saw it exactly as that, and that was the direction we were given."
He continued: "Alastair Campbell said to the inquiry that the purpose of the dossier was not 'to make a case for war'. I had no doubt at that time this was exactly its purpose and these very words were used."
The article concludes that:
Laurie's memo raises questions about the role of Sir John Scarlett, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, who later became head of MI6.
Indeed it does. When I first heard that Sir John Scarlett was in the habit of meeting Campbell regularly over lunch I wondered to myself under what circumstances the Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee could possibly have a valid reason for ever meeting the Prime Minister’s spin doctor, even on a single occasion.
In an article in the 30 April – 1 May 2011 edition of The Weekend Australian, John Burton’s daughter Pamela Burton writes to defend her father, a former private secretary to Labor Party leader H.V. Evatt and Secretary to the Department of External Affairs during the post-war Labor Government, against charges by ANU academic Des Ball thather father (and indeed Evatt) were “probably” agents of Soviet intelligence (see her Burton was a patriotic public servant, not a traitor here).
In an article in The Weekend Australian the previous week (see The moles at the very heart of government here), Ball had written:
IN the mid-1990s, in the course of researching and writing a book on Soviet intelligence operations in Australia in the 1940s, entitled Breaking the Codes, I became persuaded that H. V. Evatt, the attorney-general and minister for external affairs in the Curtin and Chifley Labor governments, and John W. Burton, the secretary of the department of external affairs, were probably agents of Soviet intelligence.
Ball goes on to outline a highly circumstantial case for this remarkable conclusion, a conclusion which sparked two or three letters to the editor and other rebuttals (see for example former Western Australian Premier Peter Dowding’s ‘Red Evatt’ claims don’t stand up here, also published in this weekend’s Weekend Australian).
In her piece, Pamela Burton outlines her reasons for finding that Ball’s conclusions are “wrong, self-serving and ill-founded”.
I have a distant social connection to John Burton and met him on just one occasion. Pamela Burton’s mother Cecily was the eldest of three sisters, of whom the second, Eleanor, a Sydney medical practitioner, was the wife of my godfather, Frank Hughes, also a GP. Frank and Eleanor were very close to me, like a second family – throughout my school and university days I would have spent some part of one of the holiday periods with them in most years, and they encouraged my interest in history, politics, art, archaeology, music and a range of other things.
At some stage early in my career my wife and I were staying with them, and John Burton, who happened to be in Sydney, came to dinner. Given his background and my interest in matters international we conversed long into the evening about what was going on in the world. I found him very thoughtful and interesting, and there was nothing about that conversation that gave me either at the time or in retrospect at any period since a moment of doubt that he was other than a very senior practitioner reflecting on his time in government, senior international figures he had met, and the work in which he was involved at the time.
Those who wish to believe ill of Burton will insist that a former Soviet agent would of course present himself in that light to an impressionable young man, but for what it is worth, on the basis of that extended encounter, and the odd references made to him within that family on other occasions, I find that Pamela Burton’s account of her father is vastly more convincing than the circumstantial case put forward by Des Ball.
I would take a lot of convincing, supported by hard evidence, that John Burton was other than a loyal servant of the Australian Government and public.
In an opinion piece in The Guardian published on Monday 6 December under the headline Live with the WikiLeakable world or shut down the net. It’s your choice, columnist John Naughton writes that Western political elites obfuscate, lie and bluster, and when the veil of secrecy is lifted, they try to kill the messenger:
The intolerance of the old order is emerging from the rosy mist in which it has hitherto been obscured. The response has been vicious, co-ordinated and potentially comprehensive, and it contains hard lessons for everyone who cares about democracy and about the future of the net.
There is a delicious irony in the fact that it is now the so-called liberal democracies that are clamouring to shut WikiLeaks down.
This is an excellent piece which highlights the hypocrisy of governments that extol the virtues of openness, and the timidity of the internet service providers who have so easily fallen into line with the US Government and suddenly discovered that WikiLeaks and/or Julian Assange are in violation of the terms of their agreement. These admirable companies seem to have made no such discovery so far in relation to the major newspapers that have published the material to a far larger audience than would ever access the WikiLeaks website, and in a far more accessible form.
One recurrent theme in the ongoing drama about the WIkiLeaks publication of US cable traffic is the proposition that the revelation of the contents of these cables puts the lives of informants at risk.
Our own Attorney-General fell for this one. According to James Massola in today’s edition of The Australian (see here):
Attorney-General Robert McClelland today condemned the release of confidential cables by whistleblower website WikiLeaks as “grossly irresponsible”, and which would put the safety and even the lives of people helping western governments at risk.
If lives are indeed put at risk the primary responsibility would lie with the originator of the cable, because it would be an act of lunacy to name someone who was giving information at risk of life and limb in a cable that was destined to be posted on a diplomatic network to which about 3 million people have access.
In my experience knowledge of the precise individual involved in providing human-source intelligence is restricted in any given case to an extraordinarily small number of people – probably no more than the agent receiving the information and perhaps (but not necessarily) that person’s supervisor.
The intelligence reports received by the analysts whose job it is to make sense of the stream of incoming raw intelligence (eg me in a couple of past lives) simply come with a descriptor of the source – for example, “A reliable source with good access”. To me as analyst that descriptor is far more useful than the source’s name: it tells me that the person is probably in a position to know what we are being told, that we have used him/her before, and that he/she has proved to be reliable.
In the days when all of this material was delivered in hard copy, it would be sent by the originating agency to a specific officer who was cleared to receive it, who was required to sign for it, and was thereafter responsible for its secure handling and storage. Such material is no doubt distributed electronically these days, but you can be sure that anything really sensitive – the kind of information that if released would put lives at risk – would be handled with an equivalent level of security. Access would be limited to those with a need to know, and it would not be posted on a general network to which millions of people have access.
One of the principal reactions to the publication of material from the 250,000 US diplomatic cables handed over to WikiLeaks by an unknown employee of the US Government is that this is all old hat, there is nothing new here.
Do not fall for this line. Of course there is much in this vast volume of raw data that was known already, and much that was assumed by informed observers of the various areas of US foreign policy. But there is a big difference between making an informed judgement and actually knowing because the evidence is there in black and white. Australian Governments from both sides of politics make many statements that I do not believe, but I rarely have the documentary evidence that makes my scepticism a matter of established fact.
And in all the chaff of routine diplomatic reporting there is material that is new. In a thoughtful piece by columnist Richard Adams published in The Guardian on Friday 3 December, he enumerates seven of them:
This list is by no means comprehensive. Adams might have added, for example, that American officials warned Germany in 2007 not to enforce arrest warrants for CIA officers involved in a bungled operation in which Khalid El-Masri, an innocent German citizen with the same name as a suspected militant, was kidnapped, tortured and held for months in Afghanistan – and the German Government complied.
For further detail click on the links above, or read Richard Adams’ article here.
Why Intelligence Fails: Lessons from the Iranian Revolution and the Iraq War is the title of a book by Robert Jervis, Adlai E. Stevenson Professor of International Affairs at Columbia University, published by Cornell University Press, 2010.
It examines in detail two major intelligence failures: the inability of CIA and the wider intelligence community to understand the turmoil in Iran leading up to the overthrow of the Shah in 1979, and the misjudgement of Iraq’s programs of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the period preceding the 2003 war.
Jervis had had a twelve month assignment as a scholar in residence with the CIA in 1977, and in November 1978, when the CIA realised that the Shah was in much more trouble than the intelligence community had appreciated, he was invited to return and appraise the intelligence effort – in particular, to examine the quality of the work in the light of the information that the analysts had available. The first part of the book is largely a version of his report, with necessary deletions (“redactions”) which he assures us do not change the story, and with contemporary commentary.
Then follows his analysis of the extent to which there was intelligence failure in relation to Iraqi WMD, and why it happened.
In his final chapter Jervis discusses broader issues of the contested relationship between policymakers and intelligence, in relation to which he makes the insightful comment that:
...despite the fact that decision makers always say they want better intelligence, for good political and psychological reasons often they do not, which is part of the explanation for why intelligence reforms are rarely fully implemented.
He concludes with a discussion of various reforms, “both those that are overrated and those that involve greater training and greater infusion of social science and are worthy of more attention”.
This book is no light read, but it well repays the effort for anyone who has a serious interest in the craft of intelligence, and how it can best support policymaking.
Diplomatic editor Daniel Flitton had a very worthwhile opinion piece on the strains in the relationship with Israel in the Friday 11 June edition of The Age – see Sparing Israel the rod spoils the friendship.
After noting that the interests of the two countries are not automatically in sync (something one could wish that the two major political parties had recognised many years ago) and discussing the case of the stolen/forged passports, he observes in relation to the intelligence sharing relationship that Australia has many sources of intelligence about the Middle East, notably the long-standing intelligence sharing arrangements with the United States and the United Kingdom, and observes:
Israel may well have a better idea of what is going on in its region than does Australia - precisely because it is Israel's region. Australia's interests in the Middle East are rightly more limited. Having a good understanding of what is going on in the world should not be confused with wasting time on problems that have little direct impact on our interests. Bureaucratic resources are not infinite and hard decisions must be made about where our priorities lie.
Besides, with few exceptions, when countries share intelligence it is received with a big question mark over why the information is being passed along. Is the material intended to inform, or to influence? Australia might be a friend of Israel but, as the passport episode has shown, there is good reason to carefully assess the motives of its spy agencies.
The question about whether intelligence is passed on to inform or to influence is of fundamental importance and applies to all our intelligence relationships. We should not always assume that what we are being told by our great and powerful friends can be taken at face value.
In War Powers Bill crushed by major parties I commented on the release of the report (downloadable from here) of the Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee on its inquiry into the Defence Amendment (Parliamentary Approval of Overseas Service) Bill 2008 [No. 2]. I made a submission to the inquiry jointly with my colleagues Andrew Farran and Garry Woodard (submission downloadable from here).
The majority report's argumentation in support of the preservation of the status quo was flimsy, and in one case bordering on a wilful misunderstanding of a point made in our submission.
The relevant paragraphs of the report state:
2.35 In a submission to the inquiry, Paul Barratt AO, Andrew Farran and Garry Woodard rejected the contention that sensitive information which is known to the Government could not be disclosed to the Parliament. They argued:
...there has been a long tradition in this country, and other countries governed under a Westminster system, of briefing the Leader of the Opposition at times of national peril. If the Prime Minister were unable to convince the Leader of the Opposition of the merits of a proposed deployment, then we would submit that the need for the proposed deployment would be by definition less than compelling.
2.36 They did not mention how classified information would then be conveyed to all parliamentarians including independents and members of minor parties and then discussed publicly without increasing the risk of some form of disclosure of security sensitive material.
The words quoted in paragraph 2.35 refer only to briefing the Leader of the Opposition; there is no reference to disclosure to all parliamentarians. One would expect the Leader of the Opposition to have appropriate security clearances, and the purpose of briefing him/her would be to obviate the necessity to disclose sensitive information to people who have not been security cleared to the appropriate level. The concept is that the Leader of the Opposition would serve, on a matter of profound national importance, as a trusted intermediary between the Government and the Opposition. This has ample precedent in Westminster systems.
The extent to which the Leader of the Opposition was willing to serve in that role would depend upon the circumstances at the time and what passed between the Prime Minister and/or Defence Minister and the Opposition Leader, and as we said in our submission, if the Prime Minister were unable to convince the Opposition Leader of the merits of the proposed deployment, then the need for it would be by definition less than compelling.
As for what the Opposition Leader could disclose to the Opposition party room, that could be a matter for discussion and agreement between the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition. Often there would not be much need for disclosure. The Government’s claims about the reasons for a proposed deployment would be in the public domain; the question to be addressed would usually be, how convincing is the evidence?
Provided that the Leader of the Opposition can be convinced to persuade the Opposition to support the Government when the proposed deployment comes to a vote in the Parliament, what the independents and minor parties think becomes irrelevant.
It will be argued by parliamentary purists that this is not an ideal way in which to bring the Parliament into the question of whether to deploy the Australian Defence Force, and of course it is not – there is no ideal way to reconcile the conflicting interests of having a fully informed Parliament, and the requirement to protect sensitive information and the means by which it is gathered. What we are proposing is a practical reconciliation of the conflict to enable the decision making power to be transferred from the Executive to the Parliament, and enable the Parliament to make its decision on an adequately informed basis.
The alternative is to leave the power in the hands of the Executive, limit Parliament’s role to the ritual of a debate about a decision already taken, and leave the Australian community with continuing exposure to the risk of being deceived about the basis for a deployment.
Today’s Australian Financial Review reports that Australia’s highly capable Ambassador to China, Dr Geoff Raby
...has launched a staunch defence of the Rudd Government’s defence white paper, saying Canberra did not consider China an emerging military threat.
The article goes on to say that [Dr] Raby’s comments follow uproar in China at an academic level over the government’s decision to predicate its long-term defence strategy around the unlikely prospect of a conflict involving China.
Dr Raby is entirely correct. As I commented back in April in Is China really the enemy?, the growth of China is a benign development which poses little threat to Australia’s security, and there are many other and better reasons for Australia to be spending more on defence.
This whole matter has been clumsily handled. I do not think that the White Paper is nearly as predicated on a China threat as much of the public commentary would have us believe, but the “In Fear of China” genie has been allowed to escape from the bottle, and the Government seems to have been unable to put it back in its place. More troublingly, it appears to have been uninclined to even attempt to do so, in which case it presents itself as much more thin-skinned than it ought to be about the Opposition Leader’s preposterous taunts about the Prime Minister being an apologist for China. Now that the issue is out there, the Government itself should be robust and forthright about its view of the implications for us of China’s rosy prospects. That message needs to be heard loud and clear in Australia, not just in Beijing.
Even more troublingly, there may be some influential people in defence and foreign policy circles who actually believe that China is a threat. I have heard a few cries and whispers that suggest that there is more substance to the front page story in the Weekend Australian for 11-12 April 2009 than I was giving credence to in Is China really the enemy?That story proclaimed that Defence strategists had “ignored the advice of Australia's most senior intelligence chiefs and rejected the view that China's military expansion poses little threat to the nation's long-term security”.
That is their prerogative, of course, but one version of the story I have heard is that the analysts came under a lot of pressure to change their assessments, to the point of the behaviour of the demandeur becoming quite intimidatory.
If there is one lesson to be learned from the Iraq debacle it is that we don’t need governments or senior policy officers telling the intelligence agencies how their assessments should come out. We need intelligence agencies that call it as they see it, and governments that take the trouble to listen.What government then decides to do, having listened, is entirely a matter for the government of the day, and entirely the responsibility of the government decision makers.
Intelligence can be a funny game sometimes. The first line of defence in protecting a nation’s secrets is to avoid drawing attention to their existence. If people do not know that a secret exists, then they will not spend time, energy and creativity figuring out how to get hold of it.
Unfortunately, what is not said can sometimes be just as problematic.
We now know that as early as 1941 the Soviet physicist Georgy Flerov noticed that the United States and Britain had stopped publishing anything to do with nuclear fission.Nuclear physics had moved pretty rapidly during the 1930s and in spring 1939, on the eve of war, the world press had briefly taken up the possibilities opened up by the nuclear chain reaction: unlimited electricity at low cost, a superbomb, and a submarine whose engine would not require oxygen.
Seeing that all had gone quiet on this particular front, Flerov realised that something was up and warned Stalin that to him this signified that the United States and Britain were engaged in research on atomic weapons. Stalin ordered the commencement of a Soviet program, which was derailed for a time by the German invasion, but by 1944 the Russians were engaged in the preparation of pure uranium and graphite, essential elements of their chosen route to a plutonium-based bomb. Information from Klaus Fuchs and Alan Nunn May helped to accelerate the program, which was given top priority following the first U.S. weapons test in the summer of 1945. In 1949 the Soviet Union conducted its first test of a nuclear weapon.
Source: Bertrand Goldschmidt, Atomic Rivals: a candid memoir of rivalries between among the Allies over the bomb, trans. George M. Temmer, Rutgers University Press, 1990.
Goldschmidt was a French Jewish chemist who had been Marie Curie’s laboratory assistant, escaped from Vichy France in April 1941, made his way to the United States, worked briefly on the United States program, and for the rest of the war worked on plutonium chemistry in Montreal. On his return to France he became director of chemistry at the new French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) , and was subsequently for many years the French delegate to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
