Australia has a history of bugging its neighbour

Timor-Leste spying claims: Australia has a history of bugging its neighbour

Eavesdropping allegations shows picking a fight is higher on Timor-Leste’s agenda than pursuing Indonesia's military

PAUL DALEY

Reheated allegations that Australia bugged Timor-Leste's leaders during negotiations over resource revenues will reinforce perceptions that colonialism still underpins our foreign policy approach to smaller, less wealthy and more troubled northern neighbours.

But they will surprise few seasoned diplomats and intelligence experts the world over.

For they know that Australia’s intelligence agencies have infamously carried out extensive electronic eavesdropping (not to mention human intelligence) operations in Timor-Leste since well before Indonesia’s invasion and annexation in 1975.

The veracity of the allegations, which relate to negotiations in the Timor-Leste capital Dili in 2004 and Canberra in 2005, is yet to be publicly proven. While international arbitrators investigate whether Australia did actually gain an unfair advantage by spying, the standard federal government refusal to confirm or deny only adds further conjecture to the claims.

If they are untrue, they should be denied outright. The national interest can’t possibly be served by heightening the perception that Australia would cheat on this poor, fledgling nation to get a bigger slice of the resources pie.

Unless, of course, the allegations are true. Which seems likely. Because a denial could be embarrassingly exposed as a lie should Timor-Leste actually produce proof that Australia bugged its government’s cabinet room in Dili, as alleged, in 2004.

And so the charade continues.

The truth is that the “national interest” as defined by successive federal governments is utterly arbitrary. Australian governments confirm – even leak – stories about “intelligence” that suit them politically and strategically; take, for example, the decision earlier this year to publicly confirm the intelligence about Australians who are returning from fighting in Syria.

Suggestions that Australia spied on Timor-Leste during the resources negotiations were first raised in Shakedown, a book about the grab for Timor oil written by journalist Paul Cleary – a former adviser to the Timor-Leste government who now writes for the Australian.

Cleary sat in many of Timor-Leste's tactics meetings in Dili and later in Canberra, when members of his team met Australian officials.

Timor-Leste has insisted that spies from the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS), which collects intelligence offshore, bugged the cabinet room and ministerial offices in Dili where the government’s tactical discussions took place. This seems plausible on several levels.

Firstly, ASIS – which had been active in Timor-Leste in the lead-up to and after the 1999 UN-sponsored autonomy vote and subsequent transition of sovereignty in 2002 – was already taking close interest in the government of Mari Alkatiri when the 2004 Greater Sunrise oil negotiations began. From the outset, Alkatiri’s administration was beset by intrigue and tensions with the country’s fledgling military of the type that, justifiably, provoked an active interest from Australian intelligence services. A failed state on Australia’s doorstep at the height of global radical jihadi activity in the wake of 9/11 was rightly feared in Canberra.

Secondly, on a practical level, bugging the offices of the Timor-Leste government was simple.

As one person close to Alkatiri’s government said: “As far as I am aware, no preventative measures were ever taken. It was so easy for them to do it, it would almost have been [done] as a matter of course. The Australian intelligence services knew those buildings well from Portuguese times and the [Timor-Leste] government knew that.”

In 2005 in Canberra, the Timor-Leste negotiating team declined to hold its tactics meeting in the office provided for it by Australia in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade building, suspecting that it was bugged.

Cleary recounted last week how he and his colleagues instead held their discussions amid the Rodins and Moores in the National Gallery of Australia’s sculpture garden and how he had taken all of the mobile phones from the group and placed them in a bag well away from the discussions.

Such caution was commendable but perhaps ultimately ineffective. Some agencies, it is said, have long had the capacity to eavesdrop on private conversations conducted near mobile telephones even if they are switched off and unless the batteries are removed.

The Timor-Leste government first went public with the spying allegations last May.

Its decision to raise them again this week have largely been dismissed in government circles (not least by former foreign minister Alexander Downer, who seems to be creating a new role for himself as interference runner-in-chief for incumbent Julie Bishop) as a cynical attempt to leverage off the greater spying scandal involving Australia and the Indonesian president.

Which it probably is. But when you’re as small as Timor-Leste you must use whatever opportunity presents itself.

During Indonesia’s long occupation of Timor-Leste, Australian intelligence technicians comprehensively eavesdropped on the radio and phone communications of the Indonesian military (and, sometimes, the resistance fighters) across the province.

Based on these intercepts Canberra-based intelligence analysts were able to provide forensically detailed briefs to relevant departments, including foreign affairs, on military actions including widespread atrocities against civilians.

Such intelligence gathering intensified in 1999 in the lead-up to the UN autonomy ballot. The Australian Defence Intelligence Organisation concluded that – contrary to assertions by the then federal government that only “rogue elements” of the Indonesian military were co-ordinating the violence of nationalist militias – responsibility for militia violence went all the way to the top.

The Australian intelligence heavily implicated Indonesia’s military commander in chief, General Wiranto, later a failed presidential candidate.

In 1999 one of those involved in Australia’s Timor-Leste intelligence operations told me: “When they say it, we hear it.”

And that included the militias’ plans to raze the province after the autonomy ballot. As predicted by Australian military intelligence, terrible violence ensued. The militias fled and the widespread violence stopped when the Australian-led Interfet force entered the province 16 days later.

Much of the incriminating material gathered by Australian intelligence services back then might have formed the evidentiary basis of a compelling case against the Indonesian military for the gross violation of human rights in Timor-Leste.

And here’s the irony at the heart of all of this intelligence stuff regarding Timor-Leste.

Timor-Leste is reluctant to pursue the Indonesian military for its crimes, provable in part due to Australian eavesdropping, in the name of enhanced relations with its all-powerful neighbour in Jakarta. But they are more than willing to pick a fight with strategically less important Australia over alleged eavesdropping during the resources negotiations.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/29/east-timor-spying-claims-australia-bugging