THE PRESS THURSDAY, DECEMBER 15, 1983. Spy fiasco in Australia

Press, 15 December 1983, Page 12

THE PRESS THURSDAY, DECEMBER 15, 1983. Spy fiasco in Australia

The fiasco of a training exercise by an official intelligence agency in Australia has been given plenty of national attention and may yet have international repercussions. The exercise was a mock raid in the Sheraton Hotel, Melbourne, on the last day of November. The agency, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, told neither the management of the hotel nor the Victorian police that it would be breaking down a door with a sledgehammer and that five masked men would be around the hotel holding sub-machine-guns. The action came to the notice of the hotel management when a guest reported that men were breaking down the door of room 004 on the tenth floor. The raid having been discovered, the armed men bailed up some staff and made their escape in two cars. One of the cars was stopped seven blocks away from the hotel by the Victorian police. The men told the police that they were from the Defence Department. The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr Hayden, appeared to be as astounded by the incident as the management and staff of the Sheraton, who had no way of knowing that the guns did not have live ammunition in them. Mr Hayden sought an explanation from the director-general of the A. 5.1.5., who advised him neither to confirm nor to deny that the A.S.I.S. had been involved in the raid — a piece of advice that Mr Hayden found bizarre and rejected. The management of the hotel wants action taken against those who organised and conducted the raid. The Victorian Premier is pressing the Federal Government to allow those responsible to be prosecuted. Their names have not been given to the Victorian police. The Australian Government has done as it usually does when there is a question about spying, and has reached for Mr Justice Hope. His report on the incident is expected soon. Probably no action will be taken until the report comes out. Whatever the content of the report, however, it is possible that Mr John Ryan, the directorgeneral of the A. 5.1.5., will lose his job. In state-Federal terms, the whole incident can be seen as a high-handed action by a Federal Government agency, conducted without consideration for the rights of Victoria. The Australian Government is embarrassed enough as it is. The matter would have been much worse for Canberra had the incident occurred in Queensland rather than Victoria. The Queensland Premier would have hammered the subject mercilessly. As it is, Mr Cain, the Victorian Premier, is determined to prevent such an incident occurring again and wants to see those responsible punished. As a Labour Premier, he is not interested in seeing the Government of Mr Hawke humiliated. He has also to uphold the rights of the Victorian police to prosecute those who broke the law. This, in itself, is a complex problem. Members of the A.S.I.S. are not immune from prosecution, which tends to be characteristic of the legal twilight zone in which intelligence agencies function. Yet, if the men who took part in the raid had their identities made known, their usefulness as spies would be at an end. The most likely explanation of the whole affair

is that someone was supposed to have told the hotel management and the Victorian police, and failed to do so. The Hope report may settle this point. If this is the explanation, it would seem that those who took part in the mock raid were acting in good faith. It will be hard, under such circumstances, to prosecute the agents who were in the hotel. They would be actors, under direction, entitled to assume that the rest of the cast knew of the show and were aware of the script. Even so, the exercise was a wild charade to play, fraught with the likelihood that it would attract unfavourable attention. Had the hotel management been consulted, the chances are that the Sheraton would have wanted no part of the affair. There are broader questions. One is that the Australian Government was astounded that the A.S.I.S. employed what amounted to a paramilitary component and that training was undertaken without the Government’s knowledge. The Minister of Defence, Mr Scholes, was not aware for some time that two military men had taken part in the raid and did not know that the Defence Department helped train the A.S.I.S. staff. Within the Australian intelligence establishment, the A.S.I.S. is supposed to have no domestic role. The Australian equivalent of the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service is the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, A. 5.1.0. The A.S.I.S. is Australia’s external spy service. Mostly, the A.S.I.S. has functioned merely by having an occasional representative in certain diplomatic missions who had a special responsibility for intelligence. A 1977 report recommended that the A.S.I.S. should have a paramilitary group. The author of the report was Mr Justice Hope, one of whose conclusions on the Sheraton incident might well be that this was not the sort of thing he had in mind. The Central Intelligence Agency and the British intelligence services, which presumably co-operate with the A. 5.1.5., may not care so much about the embarrassment of the Australian Government, but they might take the view that the cardinal rule of intelligence work is not to draw attention to oneself. The Labour Party in Australia has been uneasy about the intelligence establishment. The more radical idea, that the intelligence agencies should be abolished, is not likely to be accepted by the Hawke Government. The Sheraton incident has demonstrated that the A.S.I.S. does not always perform well. More particularly, it shows that a Government agency must act on behalf of the Government, and with Ministerial knowledge, if the mutual confidence implied in Ministerial responsibility is to be sustained. Failing this, the agency can be seen to be working outside the public interest to which, in its necessarily veiled way, it is meant to be committed. The affair has shown all this in a bright and embarrassing light. It has also shown, in its only commendable aspect, the useful alertness of a citizen and the efficiency of the Victorian police.