The secret's out: our bumbling spy service comes in from the cold

WITH spies like these, who needed enemies?

After 30 years, the veil has been lifted on a damning secret report into ASIO, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation.

The 1970s royal commission by Justice Robert Hope found that poor morale, ineffective leadership and inadequate resources led him to fear ASIO may have been infiltrated by Cold War adversaries.

He found the agency to be a Cold War relic, struggling to distinguish between radical and revolutionary, where surveillance of left-wing groups overran the challenges of identifying acts of anti-Australian espionage.

"ASIO could not be taken seriously as an efficient organisation, still less an effective security organisation," Justice Hope wrote in one report.

There was "little evidence in ASIO that the qualities of mind and expertise needed … were recognised or available in any large measure", he found.

Much intelligence was ignored, the security assessment of job applicants was "somewhat haphazard", and files so disordered that the truth of particulars alleged against individuals could not be proved.

The Hope findings had been kept secret, at the late judge's urging, since 1978.

Justice Hope, of the NSW Supreme Court, conducted two royal commissions into Australian intelligence and security, the second for the Hawke government in the 1980s.

That the judge was unimpressed with the ASIO he studied in the 1970s was widely known, but the latest release of his findings adds flesh to the bones of his displeasure.

The sharpest criticism was directed at ASIO leaders, with the exceptions of Frank Mahony and Justice Edward Woodward.

George Brownbill, Justice Hope's offsider, yesterday pointed the finger at the late Charles Spry, ASIO's longest-serving chief who, he said, passed on "gossip and tittle-tattle about people and their so-called communist sympathies" to the prime minister, Robert Menzies, and others.

So untrusting was Mr Brownbill of ASIO he got another security agency, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, to install a security cordon around the royal commission, inside one already installed by ASIO.

Politicisation of ASIO would have had even worse consequences if its staff had been more competent, Mr Brownbill said. "But, as it was, their scattergun approach to the investigation of 'subversion' resulted in an equally scattergun approach to the fulfilment of their true function."

The ASIO director-general, Paul O'Sullivan, yesterday paid tribute to Justice Hope's investigations and revealed plans to commission an official history of the organisation. "ASIO places much weight on the lessons of history," he said.