Christian Kerr writes:


Intelligence reports that raised the alarm on oil-for-food kickbacks six
years ago have been suppressed by the Cole inquiry at the request of the
Federal Government, due to “national security” concerns.

As The SMH reports today,
the existence of the reports has never previously been disclosed by the
Government:

It is
believed they were produced by the overseas intelligence service, ASIS, the
Defence Intelligence Organisation and possibly the Office of National
Assessments. They appear to date back at least six years, when the UN first
told Ms Moules AWB had been accused of paying kickbacks for wheat contracts.

The Australian
says: “So secret are the 15 documents received by the Cole inquiry that we are
not even to know the name of the spy agency, or agencies, that handed them
over.”

Politically, the greatest immediate issue
has to do with the Prime Minister’s comments on the Sunday program of 12 February and this little exchange:

JOHN HOWARD:
I’ve been told by ONA that there was no intelligence reporting, that AWB had
paid bribes to Saddam Hussein, now that’s the advice I’ve received.

LAURIE OAKES: It
doesn’t say much for the agencies.

That line doesn’t say much for the PM
either.

Back in April 2003, almost three years ago,
The SMH reported on “growing tension between Australia’s
defence and intelligence communities and the Federal Government”. It said
Professor Des Ball of the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre in Canberra could not
recall a period when the atmosphere had been so strained. It reported comments
by former ASIS station chief Warren Reed of a groundswell of disquiet coming
from a conviction that intelligence is increasingly being ignored or used
selectively to prop up policy decisions, “preventing the bureaucracy’s best
minds from talking straight to their political masters,” as The SMH put it.

The SMH quoted a former colleague of Andrew
Wilkie, who resigned from the Office of National Assessments over the Iraq war,
David Wright-Neville, as saying: “You have to write for your political masters.
There’s a form of implicit self-censorship there.”

And there were the warnings of
bastardisation we covered in Crikey on Monday (item 4) when we talked of the
cases of
Merv Jenkins and Lance Collins. We said then “Our relationship with the
United States is seen as being the ultimate guarantor of Australia’s
security. Both these cases appear to have arisen over disruptions in
the flow
of information between our intelligence agencies and the US. Both
these incidents had potential to undermine Australia’s
security by damaging our most important security relationship. Both
cases
appear to have arisen because of procedural manoeuvrings – manoeuvrings
in very
grey areas in Canberra – that seem to have stemmed from fears that
someone was making
waves.”

Des Ball has said that Jenkins, at the
Washington Embassy, was charged with pursuing relations with the CIA and
provided raw intelligence on Timor – including material designated Australian Eyes Only, AUSTEO. He
was observed and told to take “extra care” in an email from the Defence
Intelligence Organisation. Jenkins was then threatened with disciplinary
action.

A former DIO officer Paul Monk told The SMH
in 2003 that Jenkins was caught between conflicting directives. “When it comes
to lines of reporting, there is the possibility for confusion.” Jenkins fell
victim to a bureaucratic tussle and committed suicide.

Former diplomat Bruce Haigh speculated in
the same story that Jenkins realised the Americans knew he was being asked to
not give them some information. “He becomes angry, upset – he wants the
Australian Government to do the right thing.”

Haigh went further, however, and said there
are some things that the Government simply does not want to hear. “That’s the
nature of Howard. What he doesn’t know, he can deny.”

Twelve months later, in April 2004, The SMH
was back in similar territory. “If Australia’s public servants tell the
Government only what it wants to know, the politicians have an escape hatch
when things go wrong,” Mike Seccombe and Tom Allard wrote.

They covered the Collins case – the
treatment he received after expressing “disquiet when a computer
network supplying intelligence to troops was shut for 24 hours during the
height of the [1999 East Timor] conflict… Collins was soon warned that the ‘knives were out’ for
him.” Collins’s concerns also involved wider intelligence material and assessments,
relevant to Australia’s relationship with the US.

Even Senate leader Robert Hill, as defence
minister, described Collins’s treatment as “regrettable”. A former DFAT secretary
Stuart Harris told The Herald that he could not recall any government using
intelligence agencies to political ends in the way of the Howard Government.
“The whole point of ONA – to analyse but not to come to policy decisions – was
to keep them distant from the political process,” he said over children
overboard affair. “I don’t think it had ever been breached in any way before this Government
started doing it”. Talking of intelligence cherry-picking in the lead-up to Iraq, he
said: “Someone close to the Prime Minister’s office told me the PM just stopped
reading the DIO briefings.”

The Herald also spoke to Patrick Weller
from Griffith University on new patterns in administration. “Occasionally you even get things
coming back from ministers’ offices, saying ‘not seen by minister’,” he said.
“The question then is, who made the calculation that the minister didn’t want
to know?”

As the Cole inquiry continues, we have
issues of the suppression of intelligence material – intelligence material that
may have already been selectively reported to butter bureaucratic favour. As well as “what did the minister know and
when did he know it”, we seem to be confronted with question about “what didn’t
the minister know” reaching up to the Prime Minister’s office.

And there’s the intriguing possibility that
reports such as yesterday’s SMH story on the existence of highly classified documents from the Department of Foreign
Affairs and Trade discussing AWB’s dealings with Iraq that had not been handed over to
Cole means a DFAT insider is leaking.

What else could they tell us about our
security and intelligence apparatus?