ASIO BUGGED EMBASSIES, NOT MPS: EX-CHIEF
By Paul Osborne
AAP, Australia
Sept 18 2005
A former head of ASIO says a few foreign embassies were routinely
monitored by the spy agency, but MPs’ claims of being bugged themselves
were wrong.
Sir Edward Woodward, chief of the Australian Security Intelligence
Organisation from 1976 to 1981, has made the assertion in his
autobiography, One Brief Interval, to be published next month.
The 77-year-old former royal commissioner says in the memoir that
ASIO, armed with new powers to tap phones, took a keen interest in
foreign embassies on Australian soil.
“The telephones of a few foreign embassies were routinely monitored,
not so much for the contents of their conversations, which would
always be guarded, but in order to help identify the officers of
foreign intelligence services,” he said.
“For example, it was instructive to see or hear which embassy employees
were called in when an apparently urgent coded message was received
in the middle of the night.”
But he said some former members of parliament, including Labor’s Ken
Fry and Tom Uren, had wrongly claimed their phones were tapped.
“There was no possible reason to do so and it would have been a
ridiculous waste of resources,” Sir Edward writes.
Sir Edward said that he also knew of one occasion when a journalist’s
phone was tapped.
“We did once obtain a warrant to intercept the telephone of a
journalist who we knew had taken a number of documents from the office
of a minister for whom he had worked briefly,” he said.
“He had become the recipient of later stolen documents, which he was
using in his publications, and we hoped to identify the thieves.”
But the month-long bugging operation failed to find anything on the
journalist or nab the thieves.
Sir Edward rejected repeated claims that ASIO in the 70s had been
infiltrated by the Russian spy agency, the KGB.
“I could not find any experienced security intelligence officer
in Australia or overseas who was prepared to support such a simple
deduction,” he said.
The former spy chief says ASIO’s main focus in the late 1970s was on
espionage, mainly by agents of the Soviet Union and Eastern European
nations.
However, there were growing concerns about terrorism, most notably
involving supporters of the Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine, or Al-Fatah groups.
He said when the Iraqi consulate-general opened in Sydney in July
1978 the first consul-general was a career officer of the Iraqi
Directorate-General of Intelligence and he immediately became involved
with pro-Palestinian groups and individuals.
“The most likely targets for an attack were the premises of other
countries, especially Israel, Egypt and the United States,” the former
judge writes.
ASIO assessed about 40 pro-Palestinians in Australia who were willing
to support terrorist action and helped kick two Al-Fatah activists
out of the country, he said.
But ASIO had been caught by surprise by the assassination of Turkish
consul-general Sarik Ariyak in December 1980 – a crime which has
never been solved.
Sir Edward said he believed it have been the work of an Armenian
terrorist group, Justice Commandos for the Armenian Genocide.
One Brief Interval will be published on October 4 by Miegunyah Press,
an imprint of Melbourne University Publishing.