Brendan Nicholson, Defence Editor
The AustralianNovember 20, 2013
An aerial image of Australian Defence Satellite Communications Station at Kojarena.
Source: Supplied
IN Building M at the Australian Defence Force's Russell headquarters
in Canberra, massive computers crunch their way through millions of
phone conversations scooped up across the region hunting for clues to
terrorist plans and other threats to Australia.
At Russell, the Australian Signals Directorate (formerly the
Defence Signals Directorate) uses key words and phrases across half a
world of languages to find the scant clues left by plotters buried in
the mundane discourse on everything from business deals to the state of
baby's nappies.
Australia constantly gathers vast amounts of
information from its neighbours in a giant electronic eavesdropping
operation that has long been regarded by its allies as one of its most
important strategic assets.
This silent surveillance of its Asian
neighbours' civil and military communications covers a giant slice of
the planet stretching from mid-Pacific to the middle of the Indian
Ocean.
As part of the "Five Eyes" alliance with the US, Britain, Canada
and New Zealand, linked ground stations at Kojarena, near Geraldton, in
Western Australia, Shoal Bay, in the Northern Territory and Waihopai, in
New Zealand, can intercept the civil and military communications of
many regional nations.
Key targets are the Palapa satellites that
provide Indonesia's mobile phone and some radio communications, and
similar telecommunications systems of nations including Thailand, The
Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Papua New Guinea.
That
information flows on to Russell, where the computers sift out valuable
information. That is supplemented by a mass of intelligence gathered by
the ADF's submarines, warships and and aircraft.
During the East
Timor crisis, Australian Oberon-Class submarines loitering off Indonesia
were gathering valuable information about Jakarta's intentions and the
likely reaction to the Australian-led UN intervention in the territory.
Leaks
during the East Timor operation in 1999 also revealed that Australia
was comprehensively eavesdropping on Indonesian military communications.
The
fact that both nations were spying on each other at the time was later
acknowledged by
Indonesia's Intelligence chief, General Abdullah Mahmud
Hendropriyono, who cheerfully admitted his men had "bugged" Australia's
embassy in Jakarta.
In 2004, Hendropriyono said he also tried, unsuccessfully, to recruit Australians as spies.
The
retiring intelligence chief claimed his agency tapped Australian civil
and military communications and politicians' phone calls.
Hendropriyono's revelations were unusual in that, while everyone knew
Indonesia and Australia spied on each other, they rarely admitted that
they did it.
The general, who headed the Badan Intelijen Negara
(the National Intelligence Agency) under president Megawati
Sukarnoputri's government, said it was well known that governments
tapped each other's communications and Indonesia had much evidence its
embassies abroad were bugged.
"Here, also, we did the same thing.
We want to know what is really discussed about us," he told the Nine
Network's Sunday program.
"We can say this is a public secret. You know,
secret but the whole public knows. This is quite common intelligence
activity."
Hendropriyono said he presumed Australia did the same thing
to Indonesia.
"She is silly if she doesn't do that, you know."
Defence
specialist Alan Behm, who was head of the international policy division
of the Australian Defence Force during the Timor crisis, said at the
time he was not surprised by the claims though there seemed to be "a bit
of braggadocio" about them.
He said Indonesia would certainly have wanted to find out, for example, what forces Australia was sending to East Timor.
Hendropriyono said the spying had ended because Indonesia and Jakarta now faced a common enemy in global terrorism.
The
reality is that one of the main beneficiaries of Australian spying
activity in Indonesia has been Indonesia - along with Australians
visiting that country.
While the role of Australian intelligence
facilities in the region is usually a closely guarded secret, details of
one classic example of close co-operation occurred in 2007.
In
June that year, Australian Defence Force and police personnel tracked
the phone calls of two alleged terrorist leaders in Indonesia and gave
Jakarta authorities the information they needed to capture the men.
With
considerable enthusiasm, a senior Indonesian official quickly confirmed
the Australian Federal Police involvement.
A man known as
Zarkasih, said to be the head of the group Jemaah Islamiah, and Abu
Dujana, said to be the movement's military commander, were arrested in
Indonesia on June 9, 2007, alone with six other JI members.
Dujana
was allegedly involved in the 2004 Australian embassy bombing and the
2003 Marriot hotel blast in Jakarta.
Indonesia police also said he had a
role in the 2002 Bali bombings, which killed 202 people including 88
Australians.
A top Indonesian counter-terrorism officer, Ansyaad
Mbai, said AFP officers based in Jakarta were able to trace the two key
terrorist suspects by monitoring their mobile phones and emails.
That
work was the key to finding Dujana, he said.
"The AFP are in
charge of the hardware and the operational side of things, whereas the
overall system, the satellites, are American," Mbai said in an interview
with the US news agency, Associated Press.
"I salute their work,
they are very diligent.
They sit in front of the computer, tracing
numbers.
They map them all, and follow the patterns."
In reality,
most nations assume that foreign diplomats in their capitals are likely
to include some who are there to gather intelligence.
The main
Australian intelligence agency operating on the ground overseas is the
Australian Secret Intelligence Service.
ASIS answers to the
foreign affairs minister.
The so-called "Five Eyes" intelligence sharing
agreement is better known as UKUSA - the United Kingdom-United States
of America Agreement, which also includes Australia, Canada and New
Zealand and other nations as third-party members.
The alliance had its origins during World War II but was expanded in 1947 as the world shivered into the Cold War.
Australia
has been part of that highly sensitive intelligence-gathering alliance
since 1947, when the move was approved by the Chifley government.
Its
very membership was top secret for 40 years until revealed by strategic
analysts Des Ball and Jeffrey T. Richelson in their book, The Ties That
Bind.
Ball told The Australian recently that the fact this nation
was a member of the alliance made it unlikely that the US was listening
to Tony Abbott's telephone. The US was unlikely to risk the flow of
valuable information by doing that, he said.
Most people have no
problem with their nation's spy agencies tracking the activities of
terrorists.
That has undoubtedly saved lives in Australia and abroad.
But
the whole issue has started to unravel with the revelation that
Australia was monitoring the phones of Indonesia's President Susilo
Bambang Yudhoyono and many people close to him.
Leaked documents
from US fugitive Edward Snowden show that, under the Labor government,
the DSD targeted the mobile phones of 10 prominent Indonesians in 2009.
They included the President, his wife, the Vice President and the then foreign affairs spokesman.
The
DSD appears to have then distributed its material to key allied
agencies in a PowerPoint form that was childishly gleeful over the motto
: "Reveal their secrets, protect our own."
Behm, the former
senior defence official, told The Australian yesterday that a big
problem was that the PowerPoint deck, a supposedly secret document, was
"hubristic and boastful".
"It's saying, 'Hey look how clever we
are', and, 'We've go all this'," Behm said.
"That's juvenile cockiness.
What was the purpose of writing it down.
Was it to impress somebody?"
"That
sort of stuff should certainly not go into a PowerPoint that was
distributed widely enough for the US National Security Agency contractor
Edward Snowden to get hold of it along with a mass of other material.
"Why did we convey such information on a PowerPoint, for God's sake.
And how did this deluded Lone Ranger get his hands on it?"
Behm
said if an Australian agency had lost material that caused this sort of
embarrassment for the US, the Americans would have been extremely upset
and would have made no secret of that fact.
The revelations had
thrust a huge spanner into Canberra's relations with Indonesia, he said,
adding it was very likely that there would be defence implications for
Australia in the episode.
"The Indonesians could, for instance
look at the way the Indonesian navy communicates with the Australian
navy in the Timor Sea," he said. "
They could direct their navy to be
much less accommodating.
They could also wind back some of the defence
co-operation between Australia and Indonesia."
And the episode
would be embarrassing for the Indonesian government, Behm said. "This is
a highly complex country.
We have an election campaign unfolding in
Indonesia, both a parliamentary campaign and a presidential campaign,
where nationalism will be a subtext. Australia suddenly becomes a
lightning rod for xenophobia.
"This has shown that the Indonesian
president has a public vulnerability in that he can't get on his mobile
phone to ring somebody up without Mr Abbott listening to him."
- See more at:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/five-eyes-saving-lives/story-e6frg6z6-1226763777156#sthash.DgUa6Wuh.dpuf
