Take two: Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History, Antonio Mendez and Matt Baglio (2012)

This was bought at a bookstore in Leichhardt, a suburb of Sydney. It was bought new but I’ve had it in my collection for a decade without reading it. The confusing publication data says the book was published first in 1862 but a website contains more reliable information. I can’t account for the neglect of this excellent book other than by saying that the Oscar it won for the movie probably put me off: I like to browse in the shadows.

For the background I chose a flag in my collection. I’ve actually got two flags, one of which at the time of reading the book was at the framers’ waiting to be mounted. For a full review, read my Patreon. 

Book review: Harlot’s Ghost, Norman Mailer (1991)

I had a look at the New York Times review of this book that has a link to it on the Wikipedia page. The review is extremely negative. The reviewer didn’t get any of the references in this fascinating historical thriller, and it has languished virtually unknown since its publication.

I bought this book second-hand a long time ago. It has an “Ariel” sticker on the back cover. It had been bought, sometime in or soon after 1999, at that Sydney bookstore, which used to exist on the margin between tony Paddington and Bohemian Darlinghurst. The bookshop has since moved further down the street toward the city. Near where it used to reside there is now a Berkelouw’s, but Berkelouw’s is on the other side of Oxford Street from Ariel’s former abode.

Mailer’s novel also sits astride the demotic and the lofty, both in tone and according to the level determined by the subject matter. At times the novel, which is mostly narrated by a man named Herrick Hubbard (he goes by the name “Harry”), uses a voice that derives from pulp fiction – there are numerous references to early crime fiction – and at times it owes more to the high diction of Nabokov whose novel ‘Ada’ provides the model for several of the characters used, and themes developed, in ‘Harlot’s Ghost’. The drama ties together the eminent and the base and at the core of it sits John F Kennedy. At its dramatic apex rests the assassination, in November 1963, of JFK.

Mailer is a master ventriloquist. Much of the narrative is in the form of letters between Harry and Kittredge Montague – wife of Hugh Montague, the “Harlot” of the book’s title, and Harry’s godfather – but there are numerous additions from “Cal” Hubbard, Harry’s father who is, like the other main characters, in the Central Intelligence Agency.

I was bitterly disappointed on reading the NYT review. The guy who wrote it was a complete nincompoop and totally misunderstood this novel if, that is, he even read the whole thing. I somehow doubt that he did. The beauties herein are various and many. It deserves to be read and rediscovered now, after 9/11, when its messages seem to be so on-point.

Book review: The Exphoria Code, Antony Johnston (2017)

Like a lot of spy procedurals, this book’s plot is complex but there is plenty of good characterisation that gives the narrative the kind of depth you need to feel involved in the story. The book also examines some different themes, themes divorced from national security in the digital age, such as mental illness.

Brigitte Sharpe is an MI6 operative specialising in computers and hacking and she becomes involved in a security breach involving a secret drone software project when a friend of hers, who she only knows online as Ten, is killed in suspicious circumstances. Giles Finlay, Bridge’s superior at the SIS, sends her to France to uncover the mole they suspect has infiltrated the software development facility that is located there, and she takes time out of her schedule to drop in on her sister, Izzy, and her niece Stephanie and brother-in-law Frederic.

Having grown up in France, Bridge has an advantage onsite, and she soon discovers who has been sending details of the programming code for the Department of Defence’s drones to the buyer. But the suspicions SIS has about the source of the plot start to fray and Bridge is soon back in London trying to neutralise the threat.

This competent fiction has many layers and not everything that you suspect is true, or even relevant to the greater plan that the author has dreamed up. In the first phase of the denouement, traditional means are privileged and there is plenty of hand-to-hand fighting and wielding of guns. But once the narrative comes closer to its true ending it recovers some of its IT bona fides and Bridge’s roots as a university hacker return to the fore.

There is something about this author, who made his name initially in comics, that reminds me of Stieg Larsson, who wrote ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’. There’s an authenticity of vision and a dedication to the technological potential of this kind of fiction that makes me remember Lisbet Salander and her devious ways.

Bridge has a similar vulnerability, for a start. In Johnston’s novel there are many deviations from the main storyline, often delivered at a point of high drama, that give you information about the main character so that you can identify with her more. You feel the author’s commitment to a larger cause, a broader palette, a wider set of colours, as he constructs his narrative with an eye to finding a home for Bridge within the labyrinthine corridors of power in the national capital. And secondary characters such as Stephanie are given a fullness and completeness that help you to form emotional connections to the people featured in the story.

Bridge is a fitting successor to Salander for her native guile and cleverness. She is a brilliant and idiosyncratic performer who has a heart that you can sense beating in her chest. In the end, you are transfixed by her intricate mind and by her generous heart, which is still recovering from the death of a former operational partner. But even more than that: you are transported to another place and to another world of realities, a place that seems so close to our own but that ends up being just out of reach.

Book review: Transcription, Kate Atkinson (2018)

This engrossing spy novel is set in England during the war and in the period immediately after it. But it is also a timely novel of ideas because of the way it discusses the political movements that animated that era. In the scenes set in the 1940s the fight is against Nazism and in the period immediately after the war the fight is against Communism. In the midst of the confusing and sometimes paradoxical deployment of national energies that were unleashed by numerous countries in those years stands Juliet Armstrong, who works for MI5 as a typist and then as an operative in her own right.

The real story is how Juliet changed in her relationship with the organisation over the years. There are deep secrets which are only revealed when you think that every possible drama has finally played itself out. This book keeps you turning the pages. I ripped through the book in just two lazy sessions spent on the couch.

While she is infiltrating a ring of Nazi sympathisers in London during the period leading up to WWII Juliet is intrigued by the shadowy, unsentimental figure of Godfrey Toby, who in the light of day is a colleague who has been tasked with extracting information from Englishmen and -women who hope for victory for Hitler. But Godfrey appears to have other allegiances that Juliet doesn’t at first comprehend. And 10 years after she is relinquished from her duties Godfrey mysteriously reappears; by this time Juliet is working for the BBC making children’s programs. There is a Czech scientist MI5 are extracting from Europe to send to America and he needs a place to sleep and Hartley, another spook, liaises with Juliet to set the poor man up on her couch.

When someone starts sending her threatening notes Juliet goes off in a quest to scare up the ghosts, which she assumes stem from her own past. But the ghosts she is chasing and the ones that seem to be chasing her are somewhat like the fog that envelops London one day that passes in this supremely confident and charming drama: murky and hiding real horrors. The punchline comes late and when it does several confusing matters are finally resolved.

The challenge for us today, of course, is to prevent a repeat of the disastrous mobilisation of forces that brought the world to the brink of disaster in the middle of last century. Maybe we don’t need Tom Cruise. Maybe, instead, we need more people who can see the similarities between now and then. to remind us of what might have been if things had turned out differently. In a note at the end of the story the author describes how her fiction was inspired by historical records.

I have to admit that at first I was a bit puzzled by the voice of the narrator, which reminded me of that of my aunt, Christine, who is English. The beginning is a bit slow and fusty, reminding the reader of a world before the appearance of Thai or Greek restaurants, a time when talking about sex was taboo and homosexuality was a crime. A time of oppressive class barriers and domestic servants, of gross inequality and the stiff upper lip. King and Country, that sort of thing. All very proper. In Atkinson’s hands, however, the personalities of people who might have lived at the time are fleshed out and you see them for who they actually might have been. This book is an antidote to the oblivion that often surrounds historical figures and it is a delight to read.

Book review: Red Sparrow, Jason Matthews (2013)

This page-turner quickly proved its value and drew me into a world of pursuit and flight, deception and loyalty, love and hate. At the core of the novel sits Dominika Egorova, a thwarted ballet dancer who was forced to quit dance school because of the unethical and criminal conduct of two other students. This plot device sets the tone for much of the novel, where life in Russia is characterised by forces that operate in the shadows, a place where the vectors of crime and money intersect with disturbing frequency.

Dominika enters Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR, after she is involved in an assassination of an enemy of the president, Vladimir Putin, who will henceforth take a special interest in her career. It helps also that her uncle, Vanya, is a senior bureaucrat in the organisation. She is sent to “Sparrow School”, where both male and female operatives are taught the arts of seduction and coercion so that they can be more effective spies.

Her first posting is to Helsinki, where she is ordered to recruit Nate Nash, a young CIA operative who the SVR thinks is running a high-ranking agent, codenamed Marble, in Moscow. To do this, she starts swimming at the municipal pool where Nash swims. There is a lovely passage in this part of the book where the focalisation swaps from one of them to the other as they are both swimming lengths side by side along the pool. The transition is masterfully done and demonstrates that Matthews is in full control of his material.

Action scenes where people are killing each other or making love in the novel however tend to fray a bit around the edges, showing disconcerting gaps in the narrative material and to a degree the reader’s interest lapses at these points, but for the most part Matthews’ technique is adequate for the tasks at hand. There is another nice passage, near the end of the book when Nash contravenes orders and travels from Athens to Estonia, that shows how fine Matthews’ technique can be at times. In this passage, the sentences run together all in a rush, as though the author is struggling to keep up with the drama in Nash’s mind as he negotiates all the obstacles in his path on his quest to reach his destination, and to see Dominika – with whom, by this time, he las fallen in love – once again before she goes back behind the curtain.

Dominika is recruited at the outset by Nash and his colleagues Marty Gable (deputy chief of station) and Tom Forsyth (chief of station), rather than her recruiting him. She is motivated to switch loyalties because of something that had happens to Marta Yelenova, who also worked in the Helsinki SVR office under rezident Volontov. When she appears in the novel, Marta is aged around 50 but used to be a “sparrow” herself, and she and Dominika share stories and build a friendship in the SVR office’s otherwise alienating environment. But an operation the SVR was conducting goes awry and Marta is slated for liquidation and is killed by the SVR using the shadowy assassin Sergey Matorin, who we come across again later in the book. Dominika is wretched in the face of such cruelty and Nash is able to recruit her to work for the CIA, however she is whisked back to Moscow and tortured in an effort to extract the truth about the aborted operation.

The drama follows the unfaltering pace of the novel as it negotiates such plot twists in its onward rush to an anticipated conclusion. But one weakness in the novel is the different ways that the operatives on the two sides are drawn by the author. On the Russian side the higher-ranking officers in the SVR tend to be clumsy, venal and ambitious, keen most of all to please their masters and not very bright when it comes to running agents. This is surprising because it is suggested that it is in Russia that you find in the broader society the kinds of shadowy subterfuges that typify spying operations. On the American side however, the characterisation is richer and each of the operatives takes on a unique identity, one that is carefully drawn to create a varied tapestry where individual enterprise is seen to be valued, although Matthews makes passing reference to careerists in the agency on his side of the Atlantic as well.

Gable, for example, is an engaging character with plenty of experience under his belt that serves to enrich his conversation, and he is especially charming when it comes to talking about the different kinds of food he has eaten in his wide travels. On the subject of food, by the way, each chapter in the book comes with a recipe at the end for one of the dishes served up for the characters in the chapter just finished. I didn’t read these little vignettes after the first few as they don’t add to the plot, but they illustrate the kind of detail that spies work with in their daily work. Knowing how to make something as simple as a cheese fondue, such as Gable makes for Nate and Dominika one night in Helsinki, underscores the kind of curiosity the service values in its operatives.

Like Gable, Simon Benford, a senior operative who is chief of counterintelligence based in Virginia, is richly drawn. Matthews develops Benford’s character slowly and deliberately so that he can be trusted by the reader. Trust is essential for credibility in the spy’s universe of lies and deceit, and is one of the things that motivates Dominika, who the CIA is trying to make sure of. At the end of the book it is still not certain whether she will remain active as an agent for the agency or if she will hang up her boots. The book thus ends up in the air, preparing the ground for a sequel.

Like the little recipes, another authorial device Matthews relies on, this time to furnish material for character development, is Dominika’s synaesthesia. She sees coloured haloes, or mantles, behind the heads of the people she meets that give her information about the person she is talking with. Yellow means the person cannot be trusted, and purple means they can be, and there are different intensities of colour as well. Unfortunately, the device isn’t ever used actively to advance the plot, so it is not intimately worked into the novel’s fabric and remains a kind of tic that does more to distract the reader than anything else.

Central to the plot is the love affair that develops between Nate and Dominika. Given the context within which this happens, it was difficult to do, but the author is successful in delineating a relationship based on trust and a real physical attraction. Nate is a dedicated officer whose first priority is always the safety of his agents. Ensuring that they can continue to operate, provide intelligence, and stay safe, is his sole focus, and it is on the integrity of such relationships that the agency relies as it goes about its business.

The book is going to be turned into a movie, so readers will have another opportunity to contemplate its subterranean world when it hits the screen. There are also sequels available to purchase if this one gave you the satisfying experience you expect when you buy a book. It’s topical furthermore in light of the attempted assassination in the UK with a nerve agent of ex-Russian spy Sergei Skripal that caught up also his daughter Yulia.

More broadly, the nature of the intelligence services is something that everyone should bring themselves to contemplate. In times of peace these organisations continue to operate in almost total obscurity under the banner of democracy and the freedoms that it embodies, but the lengths that their officers go to to accomplish their tasks are anything but honest and open. And they are operating in our names, but we know almost nothing about them. Books like this one pull back the veil momentarily, allowing us to scrutinise the kinds of activities that are carried out for our sakes, day in and day out, in the communities we live in.

In this regard, one aspect of the book that rang false for me is when an agent, a Californian senator, uses a device given to her by the SVR to suicide when she is unmasked. The newspapers in the story report that she died from a heart attack. I’m not sure that this kind of subterfuge could reliably be carried out by the CIA on American soil. It might have happened, but I have serious doubts about it. It should not happen, however, and this is one reason why we should know more about how our intelligence agencies work. More transparency is needed. Matthews is a former CIA operative, and is almost as good as a novelist – though not quite – as John le Carre, who notably had worked for MI5 and MI6.

ASIO central to China money expose

An ABC-Fairfax investigation has revealed that Chinese businessmen making donations to Australian political parties are trying to exert influence over the political process in Australia. The five-month-long investigation culminated in a 4 Corners program on Monday night in Australia. Two businessmen in particular - Chau Chak Wing and Huang Xiangmo - warrant attention by the journalists in developing the story. Both have close ties to the Communist Party in China, but since most big business in China is party-affiliated that is hardly surprising.

What is more interesting is that ASIO - Australia's internal security service - cooperated with investigators to such an extent that much of the information that goes to the heart of the issue is sourced from them. Without ASIO there would have been no story. As a result of the broadcast the prime minister has announced an investigation into political funding regulations. And perhaps this is what ASIO had needed and which pressed them to pursuing such a transparent result in the story's production. Perhaps they had for some time tried to get the government to pay attention to their concerns about Australia's sovereignty and, frustrated, had found that their appeals fell on deaf ears.

The resultant investigation has given us a fascinating view into the business of politics here and we can only hope that other journalists in this country continue to explore avenues opened up as a result of the broadcast. But it should be remembered that without ASIO's cooperation there would have been no story.

Book review: Close Call, Stella Rimington (2014)

For a number of reasons this is one of the most sombre of Rimington's novels, not the least of which is a notable death that impacts heavily on Liz Carlyle, the author's regular heroine. For me, the dark tone of this novel took hold when a second member of the forces that are ranged against criminals turned out to be a crook. The first bad apple to appear in the book is Antoine Milraud, a former member of the French security service who turned gun trader. We have met Milraud in earlier Rimington novels. But it is the second - a senior member of the British police's Special Branch - whose betrayal of the principles of justice seems to weigh most heavily on Rimington. It can't be easy to admit that some serving officers fall off the straight and narrow way, especially for someone like Rimington who, as head of Britain's domestic spy service, must have been privy to many such cases during her tenure in that post.

In the novel the terror plot which Carlyle is drawn to disrupt has an inexorable logic to it, too, and this mechanical advance of the terrorists' plans also serves to demonstrate that Rimington has reached a higher level of maturity, in this novel, compared to earlier ones. There is one moment of chaos when the author's hand appears a bit too prominently in the drama, toward the end of the book, but in general the action has a consistency and rationale to it that shows the author is firmly in control of her subject. You are able to concentrate on the details, confident that it is among them that the clues to the characters' destinies lies, and Rimington provides plenty of suspenseful pursuit - of villains in the streets of Berlin and London - and of the truth more broadly. This is a highly readable novel and one that represents a new level of composure for the author, one of today's spy fiction giants.

Privacy lost? Not really

The tricks used by journalists to get you reading are numerous. One of them is to use contrast and by debunking a myth demonstrate the shortcomings of received wisdom. This is supposed to bring enlightenment, and thus engender a kind of satisfying resolution that the reader is wise to: burnish your own reputation and flatter the reader all at once. Sometimes the trick works and is justified because there really is a lack of awareness about a certain issue. But sometimes the trick is spurious, and I came across one today in the New York Times that fairly screams "overreach" in its bid the hook the reader. It's a story about family secrets and, by extension, about privacy more generally in our ever-more highly-mediated world. Here's the thesis.

One truism about contemporary life is that there are no more secrets. In the age of selfies, sexting, Twitter and Facebook, people are constantly spilling every intimate detail of their lives. Video cameras trace our every move; our cellphones know where we are at all times; Google tracks our innermost thoughts; the N.S.A. listens in when we dream. Everything is knowable, if you just know where to look.

Leaving aside for the moment that those family secrets probably belong most of all to the previous one or two generations, generations peopled by relatives who lived in the era prior to Twitter and Facebook, this paragraph begs you to pick holes in it.

For a start, data collected by the secret state is not broadcast publicly. Spy agencies make a point of keeping records under wraps - for generations sometimes. Read a book about a spy agency that covers the relevant period even as far back as WWI when a lot of these organisations were first established and operational matters are completely absent from the public record. This goes for authorised biographies of said agencies as much as it does for those that have been written by people outside the boundaries of trust. I once read the ASIO file of a little-known Australian writer who had been active in the labour movement after WWII and though I could read the agency's assessment of him the names of sources for the information relied on were blacked out. Read the biography of someone like "Wild Bill" Donovan - the man who set up the OSS, the precursor to today's CIA - and see how little operational material is allowed to pass through the agency's barrier of trust into the public sphere, even for the early days immediately post-WWII. It's depressing in a way. It's also a fact that the author of the NY Times article seems to be unaware of.

What about CCTV cameras? I'm guessing that most of the information they capture is lost through administrative routines. Images will only be kept and stored when there's a compelling and immediate operational reason to do so. Mobile phones? Noone is tracking my mobile phone as far as I'm aware and, if they are, they're not going to braodcast that information to anyone who might give a damn. Google might be tracking my search terms but they're probably just aggregating that information and selling the resulting data in a sanitised form. Even if they do keep the IP address attached to those searches along with the other parts of that record, my name won't be linked to it in any way.

Everything is not knowable. Far from it. Even in social media different people use different ways of disclosing things about themselves so that they feel comfortable about their privacy. Tweets do not give away the whole story. Not everyone uploads the morning-after shots from last weekend to their Facebook profile. People display an approximation of the reality in the matrix - the news feed and the tweetstream - that only barely suggests who they are, what they are doing, what they plan to do this year, what their true dreams are, and more. Or less. Children's names are not mentioned; you'll see a regular tweeter talk about 'Ms 4' and 'Mr 8'. Even the names of husbands and wives are absent most of the time; we might see 'partner' or 'batter half' but not the first name even. Many people on social media do not even reveal their real name; anonymous accounts are legion.

We project a sanitised version of ourselves in social media and that's they way we like it. There is noone joining the dots in a Big Brother scenario of total exposure. Even as big data develops we're not seeing publication of unaccountable versions of our public personas on the web. It's just not happening. Governments and private companies take privacy seriously.

As for family secrets ... well, there are many. In my family we recently learned that it's more than likely that my paternal grandmother had her first child out of wedlock: something that was never discussed when she was alive. And if my very-proper, church-going granny could do something like that then anything's possible. But just because granny led us all astray for most of a century it does not mean that my privacy has disappeared forever and a day. To a very large degree people are very much in control of how they appear online, and that's the way it should remain. Of course the amount of information about you that exists in the matrix is probably larger than it was, say, for your mother's generation, so it's also a fact that broadcasting more, rather than less, is most likely the wiser alternative because it allows you to be in control of what's easily accessible to others looking online.

Australia spies on its neighbours from diplomatic posts

From places like this, the embassy in Jakarta, Australia spies on local internet, radio and phone traffic, we're told by the Sydney Morning Herald's Philip Dorling.

Fairfax Media has been told that signals intelligence collection takes place from embassies in Jakarta, Bangkok, Hanoi, Beijing and Dili, and High Commissions in Kuala Lumpur and Port Moresby, as well as other diplomatic posts.

Codenamed 'Stateroom', the program is linked to Australia's legacy status as a member of the Five Eyes group of countries: the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The leak that reveals the extent of Australia's spying on neighbours is contained in a document produced by Edward Snowden.

The National Security Agency document also observed the facilities were carefully concealed: "For example antennas are sometimes hidden in false architectural features or roof maintenance sheds."

The Department of Foreign Affairs would neither confirm nor deny the charge of spying but last month I reflected on the likelihood of Australian involvement in mass surveillance. Whether the Australian signals intelligence agency is also spying on its own citizens is yet to be revealed.

Authorities wait for Zygier story to die

Spies can be anywhere.

New information on the Prisoner X case and Ben Zygier's death seems to have dried up. In a long and informative wrap-up, Fairfax Media's Ruth Pollard discusses what's known so far in the Zygier case, but there's no new facts to leaven the material. Over at Rupert Murdoch's Australian, it's reported via quotes from "a senior Israeli official" that fresh inquiries from Australian authorities would not be likely because the Gillard government "already had detailed knowledge of the case".

"Every day that goes by you see how deeply involved they were," the official told The Weekend Australian.

"They interrogated him, they suspected him, they knew many things.

"It is clear they were in the know long before he died.

"Then when the coffin was returned to Australia, they knew he was not some backpacker who got lost trekking."

But apart from these details, which come from an anonymous source and are, in any case, mostly speculation, no new information enters the story. Both Australian authorities and Israeli authorities are keeping tight-lipped and are just waiting for public interest to wane, which will see media attention falter and cease. In addition, members of Zygier's family are not talking to the press. News Ltd tried additionally to talk with family members of other Australians whose passports were used by Mossad, but came away with nothing.

What seems clear is that attention from Australia's domestic spy agency, ASIO, and an approach by a Fairfax journalist brought Zygier to the attention of Shin Bet, Israel's domestic spy agency. After this it appears that he was incarcerated in Ayalon prison where he would die 10 months later, in December 2010. ASIO was alerted to Zygier because he kept on changing his legal name in Australia, resulting in the issuing to him of multiple passports, a red flag for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Most people watching the case will assume that the use of passports like Zygier's by Mossad in the Dubai assassination of a senior Palestinian figure would have been enough to make Israel imprison Zygier if he was suspected of passing such information to people outside the agency. The question of whether in fact, and for how long, Zygier worked for Mossad remains uncertain.

What is certain is that both governments are keen to maintain the thick blanket of secrecy that surrounds their intelligence agencies, and so they are stying mum. It's a waiting game for them. I don't expect much new material to be released in the near future, unless a journalist is able to make another anonymous connection with someone with inside knowledge.

Was Zygier involved in a toxic operation?

Zygier's gravestone.

A new participant in the global discussion about the death of Ben Zygier is Warren Reed, a former operative in Australia's overseas spy agency, ASIS. Reed writes today on the ABC's The Drum website about the use of passports by spy agencies in a technologically advanced world and it's an interesting piece that seems to suggest that Zygier, if he was involved in Mossad activities, was probably a small cog in a much larger machine. Supplying Mossad with passports is not exactly the same as spying, but of course if he were just doing this then how could he have come to possess information of such importance that we had to be jailed in a high-security prison? Possibly just knowing the name on the passport, and threatening to leak it to the media, would have been reason enough for the Israeli authorities to turn on him.

But Reed also points to another aspect of the case that makes it stand out: the publicity that has resulted from at least one leak. Reed writes:

The case also raises questions about possible dissatisfaction within Mossad.

An overwhelming majority of men and women who work in spy services like Mossad are just like people in the street. They're paying off mortgages, educating their kids and they all have their own ethical and moral standards like we do.

The fact that someone seemingly in the heart of the agency was moved to leak details of such a hyper-sensitive case like Prisoner X is highly significant.

Almost certainly that person's act (which was very dangerous for him or her) would be fairly reflective of a broader sentiment inside the agency: that corners may have been cut and things haven't been handled the way they should have been.

Some people will recall that Jason Koutsoukis, a Fairfax reporter at the time based in the Middle East, received information from "an anonymous source with connections to the intelligence world" about Zygier and some other people who were involved with Mossad. There is also the question of who informed the Israeli media that Zygier was being kept in Ayalon Prison. So there are two leaks associated with the same individual, which certainly does suggest that someone inside the agency, Mossad, was not happy with how things were being conducted.

There have been suggestions that passports sourced from people such as Zygier may have been used for operations involving the assassination of enemies of Israel in foreign countries. The case of the Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, killed in Dubai by Mossad agents, has been brought up by others. If people in Mossad were not happy with this way of dealing with national defense problems then it may be that Zygier was involved in some sort of attempt to make contact with someone outside the agency about the practices that made them possible. It's all very murky and I think many people are waiting for more information from the authorities, as Reed mentions, that will shine a light on the truth.

What militates against such a hope is the overarching mentality of secrecy, imposed also through legislation, that constrains people working in spy agencies from having active recourse to what Reed calls "their own ethical and moral standards". Just how strong those standards are is a cogent question. Noone forces these people to work where they do, but they function under a thick blanket of secrecy that denies the electorate access to information that can be critical when it comes to judging the performance of the government that serves them. Lack of information is bad enough even where secrecy provisions by law do not operate. In a real sense, considering Bob Carr's lack of awareness of relevant details at the beginning of this expose, we are dealing with an extra-legal organisation, one that prioritises situations and performs its essential functions independently of the elected government. Or so it appears.

Zygier "suicide" now being reported as fact

Still shadowy: Zygier.

As the stories attached to "Prisoner X" - named as Ben Zygier, an Australian allegedly working for Israel's spy agency Mossad - continue to surface throughout the global media certain things become "fact", such as the suspicion that Zygier suicided while being detained in Ayalon Prison. In early stories doubt was cast over the way Zygier died but today suicide is being stated as a fact, although no comment has been received from Mossad or any other Israeli government agency. Some facts are beginning to surface, other things remain debatable.

One newspaper has stated as fact that Zygier was, as the time he died, under investigation by Australia's spy agency, ASIO. When confronted with such a suspicion by a Fairfax journalist, Zygier is reported to have been incredulous. It appears that ASIO was interested in Zygier because of suspicions that passports he held were being used by Israel in covert operations. Use of Australian passports in this manner is a crime in Australia.

In another story published this morning, Zygier is alleged to have been detained due to suspicion of treason. This story is paywalled.

After a heavy media blackout on the case, Army Radio, the official radio service of the Israeli Defence Forces, broadcast bulletins yesterday naming Zygier as the deceased prisoner and putting treason as a possible motive for his incarceration in solitary confinement.

Surprising amid all of this media scrutiny is the silence of Zygier's Melbourne family, which is prominent in the Jewish community. No media organisation has so far been able to extract new information from any of its members.

You wonder how Zygier's mother or father reacted, in 2010 when the death occurred, when they were informed of the death. Having secured assistance from the Australian government to repatriate Zygier's body, the family held a ceremony, one suspects, and buried the story along with the son. Did anyone in the family know that Zygier was involved with Mossad? Didn't they ask why he had been imprisoned? What did the Israeli government tell them about Zygier's death? What questions did they ask? How did they feel about their son dying in an Israeli prison?

As for the nature of the death, in early stories about Zygier attention was paid to the secure design of the cell in Ayalon Prison where Zygier had been incarcerated. A prison cell designed especially to house people accused of grave crimes would surely have presented a prisoner with a challenge if he or she wanted to commit suicide. But such questions are now being glossed over amid speculation about other things. Which is a shame because it appears to me essential to the case to ascertain beyond a doubt the truth about how Zygier died.

Surveillance state Australia?

There's that clicking sound on the line again as you're talking on the phone. It kicks in a few seconds after you make the connection and there are other audible clicks that occur during the phone call. When did it start happening? You can't remember, but it has been going on for months. It could be something quite innocent, of course, but the fact remains that there are thousands of telephone intercept warrants issued to police under federal law in Australia each year. According to the Age there were 3755 telephone intercepts authorised in 2011-12. In total, NSW police have 103,824 telephone intercepts operating now. There are tens of thousands more being managed by police in other states.

A judicial warrant is required to open an intercept but the figures show that once it's on, it stays on. Only nine applications were refused or withdrawn nationally in 2011-12. All renewal applications from police were approved in the same period of time.

Beyond telephone intercepts there are other items of data that you generate all the time and which can be monitored without invoking a judicial warrant, but merely on the command of "senior police or officials". Officials?

The data available to government agencies under federal law includes phone and internet account information, outwards and inwards call details, phone and internet access location data, and details of Internet Protocol addresses visited (though not the actual content of communications).

Such data was accessed in Australia over 300,000 times in 2011-12, meaning that "agencies obtained private data from telecommunications and internet service providers 5800 times every week". Statistics for ASIO are security classified and are not published; presumably that goes for telephone intercepts as well.

The Greens have complained about the scope of this huge data haul - Scott Ludlam is quoted expressing his reservations in the story - but Labor is now pressing to further expand the surveillance powers available to agencies of government including "a minimum two-year data retention standard for phone and internet providers". Agencies who access such data can even include local councils and Australia Post.

So you don't know who's monitoring your internet and phone call data. You don't know if a telephone intercept has been established for your phone. But given the scale of the data access activity that the Age story exposes, it's likely that at some point your communications will be monitored by some agency or other. It could be ASIO, it could be the police, it could be the tax office. Once they start looking at you it's likely that they will continue to look at you. So what kind of country are we living in that government needs to so closely surveil the activities of its citizens?

Further, what kind of reciprocal oversight opportunities do Australians have? Occasionally there's a story in the media like the one linked to in this blog post. But all this does for us is show us something about the scope of data access operations. Stories like this never reveal any details about the kinds of data that is accessed by government authorities nor the reasons why such data is accessed. So how are we to judge whether such data access is warranted? We cannot. It all comes down to trust. We must trust that the government will only request data access when there is a pressing reason to do so. And we must trust that data monitoring will cease once suspicion has abated.

Do you trust the government?

My beef with former MI5 chief

Rimington.

I keep hearing Stella Rimington - spy novel writer and former MI5 supremo - lashing out at WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. This troubles me. Anyone who's read Rimington's memoir about her time in the spy business knows what kind of obstructions she had to fight in order to attain the lofty position she reached during her time in the agency. And she worked to open up the agency to the public. Witness the recent publication of the enormous history of MI5 which was written by an Oxbridge don. In Australia, ASIO is set to follow suit with a history to come out next year. In her memoir, Rimington applauds the statutes enacted in the mid-90s for both MI5 and its overseas cousin, MI6 (of which the British government had refused to even admit of the existence until that time!). And she worked internally to moderate the suppressive force operating within the organisation that prevents information from getting out. But when it comes to WikiLeaks, she totally caves, saying that this new type of organisation makes spying more difficult, if not impossible.

Protecting the identity of sources is essential, we're told, in the spy business. And this holds for eternity. Even a document that I got hold of through the National Library that dates from the 1950s in Australia, prepared by ASIO, contains redactions so that the names of sources are not made public. If source names are publicised, the logic goes, then in future it would be impossible to convince people to cooperate with a spy agency. Without people's cooperation, further, the spy business is impossible. Under this logic, WikiLeaks is an existential threat to spy organisations, even more dangerous, it would seem, than the terrorists or subversives it is supposed to be against.

So Rimington throws her lot in with the authorities globally who are trying to shut down WikiLeaks. For a liberal like me this is problematic. I admire Rimington's books because they're more interesting than most other spy novels. I also admire what Rimington achieved in her professional life, and condemn the forces that obstructed her rise through the ranks at MI5. But I equally admire Assange and his organisation, WikiLeaks, because I believe that there is too much secrecy in both government and governmental administration (the two must be considered separately). Of course there's less secrecy in government itself because we have laws that force publicity upon politicians, and anyway politicians are always eager to get their messages out into the space where the electorate can consume them. Spy agencies are not part of government per se, however. Secrecy in governmental administration is the journalist's bane, and I would say in the majority of cases where journalists have been denied access to individuals in the public service or to documents produced by the public service, the public interest is being ignored.

We need more oppenness. We also need equality for women and a high lever of professionalism in the public service. We need both. I applaud Rimington for bringing her talents to bear in order to achieve two of these goals, but I condemn her for condemning WikiLeaks, which is a new type of organisation that channels unauthorised document releases into the public sphere. If that happens, government has only itself to blame. The public's appetite for concealed information - like the plethora of (mostly) trashy books written about spies - is testament to the unsatisfied curiosity of this enormous and important demographic. You cannot run government for the benefit of politicians or of government departments. Government is always - and only - to be undertaken for the benefit of all the people.

ASIO powers: We can't judge what we cannot see

ASIO wants more power to scrutinise
Australians' online communications.

Last week I had a bit of a jaundiced spray against ASIO, Australia's domestic spy agency, in which I said that the organisation is unconstitutional because its activities are invisible to the public. If effective government requires freedom of political speech - as the High Court has decreed - then ASIO can have no part in government since its activities are never talked about, or if talked about then not in sufficient detail. Therefore it is unconstitutional. Apart from that, it appears, ASIO's powers represent an "assault on civil liberties", according to UNSW law professor George Williams. Williams "was speaking at the NSW Council for Civil Liberties dinner in Sydney where a national campaign to roll back the nation's anti-terrorism laws was unveiled".

The anti-terrorism laws have sunset clauses which come into effect in 2016. At that time they can be repealed, amended or made permanent.

The national campaign aims to force decisions of intelligence agencies, which negatively affect human rights, to be subject to a merit review and to ensure any future laws are scrutinised by the community before they are enacted to stop further erosions of civil liberties.

(Emphasis added.) Well, that would be nice wouldn't it? But it falls short in the practicality stakes because, once more, there will never be any publicly-available information about decisions taken by intelligence agencies due to their restrictive secrecy policies. Forcing decisions of intelligence agencies to be "subject to a merit review" could, of course, entail some form of secret cabinet of appointees tasked with reviewing the decisions that have been taken by an intelligence agency. It doesn't necessarily follow that such a review would be a public one. And scrutiny of proposed laws "by the community" may indeed involve public access to information about any such laws, but it will be impossible for the community to have an informed opinion about their merits or otherwise because the public would not have access to specific information about how similar laws had been used - or abused - in the past. Due to the same secrecy policies of intelligence agencies. Checkmate.

So what do we have? We have a bland headline pointing to a talk given at a dinner held by a group of well-intentioned individuals by a university professor who says that ASIO has too much power. (Stifles yawn.) Goodness me, knock me down with a feather. How compelling is that? How likely is such a story to engage the community in such a way as to spark the kind of broad-ranging debate that is required for people living in Australia to understand how ASIO is using all the powers given to it - largely by John Howard, the man who took the nation to war on the strength of a bald lie? I'm sure that ASIO head David Irvine and his senior officers are simply trembling in their shoes at the thought of what could happen as a result of this story being published by Fairfax.

I respect Williams' views, of course, and I wish that when those sunset clauses in those laws kick in the laws will be repealed. But I don't see this kind of story making any difference. There are too many other things to occupy peoples' attention, such as doping scandals in the cycling fraternity and kiddy fiddling perpetrated by Catholic priests. So this story just brings me back to my original point: that ASIO cannot be legal because it is secret. It is not enough to ask Australians to tolerate this agency simply on account of the vagaries of any kind of trust. If ASIO is asking for more powers to avoid "intelligence failures" in addition to the unwarranted powers that it has been granted by governments, then it must come clean and demonstrate exactly why it should be given such powers. In order for that to happen, it is necessary for ASIO to disclose to the public the ways in which it is currently using the powers is already has. Failures must be aired, discussed publicly, and freely. Only in this way can people living in the community be confident that the organisation is not abusing the powers it has, and will not abuse any powers that a government might see fit to grant it in future.

Is ASIO unconstitutional?

The answer to this question can only be based on an assessment drawn from my own acquaintance with the constitution which is, I admit, pretty meagre. My knowledge of the agency is even slimmer, naturally. What I do know, though, is that the constitution requires representative government. The High Court has created a doctrine of "implied freedom" of speech, where in order for representative government to exist the electorate must be adequately informed. From Wikipedia: "freedom of public discussion of political and economic matters is essential to allow the people to make their political judgments so as to exercise their right to vote effectively".

In the ASIO annual report for 2011-12, we find the report's authors relying on the threat of war to justify the agency's existence, as in: "Well developed national capabilities take considerable effort to build and are difficult to re-establish in an emergency." It's a warning that prudence requires the existence of a secret arm of government in case Australia enters into a war against a foreign nation. After all, the CIA was established after WWII, as was MI5. The FBI dates from WWI. Secretive law enforcement agencies tend to rely on international conflict and the shenanigans that opposing sides get up to in order to achieve total domination, to justify their existence. But clearly ASIO is an arm of the civil authority.

To reassure the electorate of ASIO's legitimacy the annual report is full of comforting language. There's a fair bit of stick, of course, such as the bit about "violent jihadist ideology" that comes up early in the section on terrorism. This section headlines Part 1 of the annual report, 'The security environment 2011-12 and outlook'. That's a pretty loaded phrase, right there. After all, "jihad" means "struggle", so it's hard to see how a jihad can be an ideology. A method, certainly. Yes, sometimes Islamic extremists are violent, there's no question about that. But a jihadist can equally be viewed merely as a voluntary participant within the activist element of pan-Islamic identity politics. ASIO's report is generally full of bland managerial material aimed at putting a positive, professional spin on its activities, and at deftly demonising social elements that it is focused on disrupting. It should be the kind of report that a journalist reads with one eye half closed out of a sense of caution.

Anyone can read this thing, it's public and available. Of course, most people won't bother, or won't bother finishing it (like me) because it's chockers with the kind of bureaucratic, self-referential language that has excessive significance for the initiated but means zip to a member of the general public. Most of the acronyms are ones the average citizen will never have heard of. There are no points of reference apart from those that are carefully inserted in the text in order to generate the enemy the agency requires to justify its existence. Your eyes glaze over helplessly as you ineffectually scan through line after line of impenetrable prose that is designed to reassure and terrify at the same time.

Getting back to the implied freedom thing, if we don't know about ASIO's activities how are we able to gauge its effectiveness, its rasion d'etre, or its legality? Even whether it is legally carrying out its activities, or ethically following either the law or professional codes of conduct? ASIO's status as a statutory authority MUST be a matter of parliamentary - and public - scrutiny, if it is to be constitutional. Simply put, we can't know about it so we can't talk about it. Oh, sure, from time to time there is a story in the media about ASIO and persons it deems to be of interest. There was one a couple of weeks ago about ASIO's activities with regard to an Islamic bookshop in suburban Melbourne. But apart from that we are forced to rely on something called the 'Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security' who it seems oversees ASIO's activities. Maybe (how would we know?). Then there's Nicola Roxon who is reponsible for ASIO as part of her portfolio. But the one person is never talks about ASIO in the media and the other person never talks about ASIO in Parliament. And if the media is not talking about ASIO, in my book, it's not constitutional.

The agency is to publish a book about its past, in 2013. How revealing will that be? We know from reading Wikipedia that there was a Russian infiltration of ASIO some 40 years ago and we can therefore assume that this will be discussed in the book. But it's likely to be a whitewash. You can imagine a lackey in some sweaty foreign secret service bureau going to Amazon to order the book and, with his fingers trembling feverishly on the computer mouse, clicking through to his checkout basket, intent as he is on securing access to vital information about Australia's security apparatus. Or not.

For Australians it comes down to trust. The burden lies with Australians to trust the agency, since the agency does nothing to substantiate its role or justify its existence in the public eye. But all sorts of things can happen that we can never know about. The risk of extortion, for example, is extremely high. An ASIO employee can access information, transport it out of the office, and use it to persuade a person to fork out money under threat of the release of information that might be incriminating in an ethical or reputational sense, but that cannot reasonably be used to prosecute that individual for a crime. There is also the risk of employees selling information to foreign agencies.  There is also the risk of excessive zeal. I worked for a NSW crime commission for a year as a sub analyst and I know how much "rubbish" data is carefully collected, collated, and entered into a searchable database on a daily basis. You have police officers taking things from the premises of suspects and handing it over to junior clerks, who go about processing the material - pieces of paper, notebooks, airline ticket stubs, receipts - and using that information to populate a database that can be accessed remotely from multiple, isolated locations. Even Stella Rimington, the ex-MI5 chief-turned novelist, in her memoir talks about how junior clerical staff in MI5 were tasked with creating files on suspects and populating them with "relevant" information.

It's not hard to find examples from the past of excessive zeal. Oh, sure, the McCarthy era is SUCH a long time ago now (and things are different, I hear voices say, today), but in those days people were investigated by ASIO simply because they expressed an interest in socialism or belonged to a book club. And even when you get to see the files created in those days, which have been declassified in recent times, there are parts blacked out, including names of informants and other details, that keep you wondering about what really happened. Read the history of the CIA written by Tim Weiner a few years ago, and the document trail ends some 40 years ago. Anything more recent than Nixon remains classified, and not available for public scrutiny.

And these guys ask us to trust them. Really, they do. ASIO is essentially an un-democratic agency of government where there is no guarantee that the government even knows what is going on in the street in our name. There is zero scrutiny by government or by Parliament or by the media. As a result, the electorate cannot know what the agency does or assess dispassionately whether the people it is targeting deserve to be targeted, or whether the methods used to target them are legal or ethical. This complete absence of transparency commits me to declaring that I think that ASIO is unconstitutional, and should be scrapped immediately.

Book review: Rip Tide, Stella Rimington (2011)

Yesterday's announcement of an arrest and seizures of guns and data from people associated with the al Furqan centre and bookshop in suburban Melbourne remind us of the continuing danger posed by home grown terrorists. In fact, the head of ASIO prefigured this action a week or so ago when he said publicly that domestic terror was still a reality in Australia. No doubt there are similar investigations underway in other countries. For her part, former MI5 head and novelist Stella Rimington thinks that this remains a problem for law enforcement in the UK because the conspiracy in Rip Tide (2011) centres on a mosque in Birmingham where young men of Pakistani extraction are radicalised and sent overseas to be trained for violent jihad. And in her 2006 novel Secret Asset an MI5 mole recruits and guides a cell of domestic terrorists who attempt to carry out an attack in Oxford.

In Rip Tide, we meet up again with Liz Carlyle, an MI5 agent runner whose job is very much her life and who teams up once more with the efficient researcher Peggy Kinsolving in order to crack the secret of how a young man with Pakistani parents came to find himself among the crew of a pirate skiff that has attacked a container ship transporting aid supplies from Greece to Kenya. Liz travels to Paris to interview Amir Khan but gets nowhere. In the UK, MI5 are alerted to unusual goings-on in a Birmingham mosque by Boatman, an agent they have run for some time. And in Greece at the headquarters of the aid shipping business USCO there are suspicions that only the more valuable cargoes of aid are being targeted by the pirates operating off Somalia. Liz must tie all these strands together.

The book offers curious readers plenty of standard spook tradecraft but few clues. There are some violent incidents, particularly when Maria Galanos, an MI6 agent living in Greece, who is tasked with infiltrating USCO and watching for clues as to who is leaking information to the pirates, is killed in her apartment. Boatman also suffers when he is pushed off the back of a bus in Birmingham, and sustains injuries. While these incidents may be necessary for the forward movement of the plot they do not add much to the satisfaction the reader gleans from the book; violence in a spy novel should be the very last place of resort for the author. Especially in the case of Maria, also, the reader can see the danger coming from a mile away, as the unhappy woman walks home from a night out in a club spent with two girls from the office. If anything, such episodes expose a weakness in Rimington's style, which is otherwise inscrutable and masterful. From the plot perspective, such a death might not be the best method to use, for Maria's demise alerts MI5 to the fact that her cover is blown. There might have been a better way to handle this element of the plot.

Relations between the UK and the US spy agencies are canvassed in the book, too. Because the USCO employee who alerted MI6 to his suspicions, Mitchell Berger, is a former employee of the CIA, that organisation becomes involved in the case, too, in the form of Andy Bokus. Bokus and Geoffrey Fane, the head of MI6 who has a crush on Liz, spar with each other over which country should lead an operation to capture the pirates, and Bokus resents Fane's implication that the Americans tend to go into such operations with too much firepower and too little tact. In the meeting, it is Liz's current squeeze, the Frenchman Martin Seurat, who breaks the impasse by suggesting that a French Navy frigate should be the contact vessel. But in the end it is careful work by operatives like Liz and Peggy who discover the links between the Birmingham mosque and USCO, and who uncover the identity of the mole inside USCO. But there is still one more dastardly plot to tease out involving a radicalised youth, a bomb and a pop concert.

As usual, Rimington uses very short chapters to deliver the narrative. The puzzle is suitably complex and of course it is current, inasmuch as she tends to write stories that have some real-world connection. There is not much use of metaphor and few descriptive passages; Rimington prefers to focus on the kinds of information about people that might be found in a case file: age, background, career, appearance, clothes, vehicle used, etcetera. As is her wont Rimington here again takes a long hard look at the realities of life in the agency for female spies like Liz. What kind of choices does she have to make in order to build her career? What problems are specific to the lives of women in the business? What kind of personal life is possible for a female spy, and how does she negotiate between its demands and the demands of her career? In this way, Rimington succeeds in humanising Liz, and making her situation universal in this sense, bringing her closer to us. The result is a better book, and this one is certainly good.