Yet, as ASIS marks its 70th birthday, there is a need for Australians to better understand its work. There are, after all, no Australian James Bonds, George Smileys, or Jack Ryans to drive the myth-making around Australia’s overseas spies. As a result Australians can be forgiven for having a degree of incuriousness about ‘the Service’. These scandals aside, there are no significant cultural portrayals to give Australians a sense of the work and history of ASIS. These include accusations of supporting a CIA-backed coup in Chile in 1973 a botched armed exercise at a Melbourne hotel in 1983 and an alleged operation in the 2000s to listen-in on the Timor Leste cabinet during gas treaty negotiations. Despite being created in 1952 ASIS was not officially revealed until 1977.ĪSIS has only rarely featured publicly, and typically in relation to several historic scandals. But in considering how we are to find peace in the face of hostility from China and Russia, Australians will need to look anew at the work of their secret service, which includes foreign espionage and covert action.ĪSIS’s obscurity is partially due to the efforts of successive governments to keep hidden its highly classified operations, including discouraging media reporting on the agency. Such is the invisibility of our foreign spy agency in the historical and cultural consciousness of Australians. Some reading the word ‘ASIS’ may assume a spelling error of ‘ASIO’ – the acronym for Australia’s much better-known domestic security service. This article by Dr Will Stoltz first appeared in The Australian on.
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