Revealing Secrets

An Unofficial History of Australian Signals Intelligence & the Advent of Cyber

By John Blaxland and Clare Birgin

Published by UNSW Press
RRP $49.99 in paperback  |  ISBN 9781742237947

This book, published two months after The Factory,  is the book that started life as the official history of the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD), only for the contract to be cancelled half way through the project following a change in the leadership at ASD.

Did the new head want to exercise more control? It’s one reason that’s been suggested.

In any case, it is clear that, freed from the constraints of ‘official’ status, Blaxland and Birgin have produced a highly readable account of the early history of the Australian Signals Intelligence (or Sigint) story, their only constraint in the later chapters being the necessity of relying on ‘unclassified’ or public sources of information.

Revealing Secrets is indeed a compelling account of the development of Australian Signals intelligence capability. It brings to light those clever Australians whose efforts were shrouded in secrecy for so long.

Blaxland and Birgin traverse the royal commissions and reviews that shaped Australia’s intelligence community in the 20th century and consider the advent and the impact of cyber.

In unearthing this integral, if hidden and little understood, part of Australian statecraft, this book increases our understanding of the past, present and what lies ahead in the age of cyber.

On the possibility of Chinese tech giant Huawei being allowed to build the country’s 5G network, Simeon Gilding, a former senior Australian cyber security official, puts it succinctly. It would be like ‘paying a fox to babysit your chickens’.

Amongst all this, of course, is the natural suspicion of liberal democratic countries towards a surveillance state where citizens’ private information is routinely accessed without consent.

The authors contend there is a need for Sigint and cyber to be better explained to the Australian people, without, no doubt, disclosing tradecraft secrets.

In fact they recommend that all Australians ‘take a renewed and personal interest in their intelligence history’.

VERDICT: This book would be good place to start to understand intelligence history, with its deep dive into the history of signals intelligence and its new and increasingly important role in the twenty-first century.