Interesting. It would also be interesting to at least have an indication as to how extensive our own foreign operations happen to be, but I doubt that we'll find out any time soon (if at all).The spy revolution
Cameron Stewart
June 03, 2005
FOR the spy watchers within ASIO, it has been a quiet revolution. Slowly and secretly, a new espionage player has surfaced in Canberra to fill the void left by the agents of the old Soviet KGB.
They have arrived in various disguises, most posing as diplomats, others as businessmen. And each has come armed with Sun Tzu's essential philosophy that knowledge is the key to strength.
But this new breed of spies does not hail from Moscow, although those remain plentiful. Instead they come from Beijing and they represent the unseen arm of China's economic and military modernisation.
Their primary aim is to steal the secrets of military-related technology, especially in the areas of aeronautics, shipbuilding, electronic eavesdropping and weapons systems, including long-range missiles.
To achieve this, China has dispatched a new generation of spies across the world to plunder the best of what the West has to offer.
In Australia, as elsewhere in the West, the term "Chinese takeaway" now has more sinister connections. Senior government sources tell The Australian that the number of Chinese agents in Australia has increased sharply during the past decade.
In a fundamental changing of the guard in Australian espionage, their ranks outnumber those of any other country, including Russia, which has been relegated to second spot on ASIO's counter-espionage watch list.
For Western intelligence agencies, including ASIO, this new enemy is posing a significant challenge to their resources and capabilities.
By coincidence or design, China's ramping up of its intelligence activities abroad has come as Western intelligence services have been distracted by the far greater threat of terrorism.
In the US, while the FBI was busy searching for terrorists after 9/11, Beijing's agents flooded into the country, especially California's Silicon Valley, to plunder technical secrets.
In February this year, FBI assistant director Dan Szady broke his silence, saying that the threat posed by Chinese agents to US national security was nothing short of "huge". He said Chinese spies were using about 3000 front companies in the US to facilitate illegal technology transfers to the Chinese Government.
As one FBI officer recently told Time magazine: "The Chinese are stealing us blind. The 10 years technological advantage we had is vanishing."
In Canada last December, disclosures about the activities of Chinese spies led to calls for Prime Minister Paul Martin to cut off foreign aid to Beijing.
And in Australia, senior government sources have conceded that Chinese agents have adopted an aggressive approach to the espionage game. Their targets here are largely military-related and plentiful, if difficult to penetrate.
Experts say priority targets are likely to include the eavesdropping capabilities of the Canberra-based spy agency Defence Signals Directorate and the joint facility at Pine Gap. Of particular interest to China is information relating to the capabilities and movements of the navy's Collins Class submarines, which make regular forays into north Asian waters.
But the list of potential targets is almost endless. In one recent case of Chinese espionage in the US, Blackhawk helicopter engines were stolen: the same helicopter relied on by the Australian army.
It is believed that many of the Chinese spies in Australia operate under diplomatic cover from China's embassy and consulates. The Chinese embassy in Canberra has 40 registered diplomats, excluding spouses, making it one of the largest groups of foreign diplomats based here.
ASIO and other Australian agencies have long targeted the embassy and its occupants. In 1995, the Australian and Chinese governments were severely embarrassed by media revelations that the embassy had been comprehensively bugged as part of a joint Australian-US spy operation.
For ASIO, the steady increase in the ranks of Chinese spies here has posed a challenge as the agency has been overwhelmingly focused on the threat of terrorism. With ever greater resources being devoted to counter-terrorism, ASIO's traditional counter-espionage capabilities have been under threat, notwithstanding overall increases in funding from the Government.
With no diminution of the overall number of foreign spies in Australia and no prospect of it in the near future, ASIO last year quietly requested funding to establish a new counter-espionage unit. This unit – the funding for which was approved by Attorney-General Philip Ruddock – was not created specifically in response to the Chinese threat but was aimed at beefing up ASIO's surveillance of all foreign spies and safeguarding its longer-term counter-espionage capabilities.
The emergence of the Chinese is something of a culture shock to those ASIO veterans who cut their Cold War teeth spying on the Soviet embassy from the funeral home across the road.
But luckily for them, although the Soviet Union is gone, the Russians have not. Government sources say that although their numbers have diminished since the end of the Cold War, Russian spies still operate here and they remain the second greatest challenge for ASIO's counter-espionage.
Like the Chinese, the focus of the Russians in Australia is on stealing secrets related to military technology.
However, the cloak-and-dagger battle between Canberra and Moscow is less volatile now than it was in 1993 when a spy scandal threatened to disrupt diplomatic relations. In that year the Keating government secretly expelled six Russian diplomats for spying, a decision that caused great offence in Moscow. The expulsions were aimed at breaking a spy ring that was believed to have had contact with a suspected mole inside ASIO. ASIO was tipped off about a possible mole within its ranks through evidence provided in 1992 by Russian defector and former KGB officer Vasili Mitrokhin.
Mitrokhin had spent years inside the KGB scribbling secrets on pieces of paper and placing them in his shoe. When he defected to the West with 20,000 squashed pieces of paper, it was revealed that the KGB had for years penetrated key Western intelligence agencies, including ASIO.
The Australian government's search for the suspected mole led to an unsuccessful attempt to prosecute long-time ASIO employee George Sadil on espionage changes.
The mole – whoever it was – has long gone but rumours about his identity still rattle around the hallways of Canberra's spy agencies.
Although ASIO's new counter-espionage unit will focus primarily on Chinese and Russian agents, other countries will also attract attention.
Indonesia also dispatches small teams of intelligence agents to Australia but sources say these spies tend to concentrate on infiltrating special-interest groups such as the Free Papua and Free Aceh movements.
ASIO also keeps an eye on the activities of so-called friendly Western countries, including Israel and France, which have intelligence agents roaming the region. In December last year, Israeli diplomat Amir Lati was asked to leave Australia after ASIO expressed concern about his activities. The Israeli Government denied that Lati was a spy.
Similarly, the Chinese Government denies that it has become an aggressive proponent of the world's second oldest profession. But tell that to the swelling ranks of ASIO officers who must spend their days trying to monitor the covert activities of the Sun Tzu devotees from Beijing.
Source: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,15486950^28737,00.html
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Heck even little Singapore has more modern weapons than Australia
