The country’s top spy has warned of the growing danger of espionage and foreign interference, revealing a former politician “sold his country” to a foreign actor using professional networking sites to target Australians with inside information.
In a rare insight into the workings of the country’s spy agency, Mike Burgess, director-general of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, delivered his annual threat assessment on Wednesday night.
He warned there was at least one nation state laying the groundwork to potentially sabotage Australia’s key infrastructure in the future.
He said that while ASIO still believed a terrorist attack was “possible”, the risk of espionage and foreign interference was rather “certain”.
‘The threat is real. The threat is now. And the threat is deeper and broader than you might think,” he said.
He said the ‘A-team’ – a team operating within a ‘particular foreign intelligence service’ – had become one of the most significant threats the agency was fighting.
Burgess said the A-team scours professional networking sites for Australians with access to high-level security, defense and risk information.
ASIO chief Mike Burgess delivered his annual threat assessment on Wednesday, warning against the growing threat of foreign espionage and interference.
Burgess said the team used “fake English personas,” posing as consultants, headhunters, civil servants, academics and researchers from fictitious companies to get close to targets.
He said they had tried to recruit students, academics, businessmen, police and public servants at all levels of government.
Even elected officials have fallen for the A-team, and Burgess tells of a former politician who had been “successfully cultivated and recruited” by the A-team.
“This politician sold his country, his party and his former colleagues to promote the interests of the foreign regime,” Burgess said.
‘At one point, the former politician even proposed including a relative of the prime minister in the spy orbit.
“Fortunately, that plot did not come to fruition, but other plans did.”
Burgess did not make clear who the former politician was, or whether he had unknowingly committed himself to the A team or had done so deliberately.
In another such scheme, prominent Australian political figures and academics traveled overseas to attend an all-expenses-paid conference attended by a large number of A-team spies pretending to be bureaucrats, who built relationships with the Australians and the “They attacked aggressively.”
“A few weeks after the conference concluded, one of the academics began providing the A-team with information about Australia’s defense and national security priorities,” Mr Burgess said.
‘Another Australian, an aspiring politician, provided information on his party’s factional dynamics, an analysis of a recent election and the names of up-and-comers, presumably so the A-team could target them too.
‘ASIO thwarted this plan and confronted the Australians involved. While some didn’t know it, others knew they were working for a foreign intelligence service.’
The head of ASIO stated that the former politician “proposed incorporating a relative of the prime minister into the spy orbit.” In the photo, Parliament House in Canberra.
Burgess said ASIO had helped extract those who were not in the know, cut ties between the others and foreign actors, adding: “a number of people should be grateful that the espionage and foreign interference laws are not retrospective.”
Burgess said ASIO took on the A team directly online last year.
‘The spy was being spied on. He was playing the gambler,” Mr Burgess said.
He said many Australians were overlooking the warning signs or making the A team’s job “too easy”.
‘On one professional networking site alone, there are 14,000 Australians publicly boasting about having a security clearance or working in the intelligence community. Some even present themselves as intelligence agents, even though they prove to be not particularly good!’ he said.
“I understand that people need to promote themselves, but please be smart and discreet; don’t make yourself an easy target.”
Mike Burgess claimed that a former politician “sold his country” to a foreign actor
Also during his speech, Burgess gave a chilling warning that he feared that sabotage – major security concerns in the 1950s – could re-emerge, particularly in relation to critical infrastructure.
“There are not many things that terrorists and spies have in common, but sabotage is one of them,” he said.
“ASIO is seeing both cohorts talking about sabotage, investigating sabotage, sometimes carrying out reconnaissance for sabotage, but, I stress, they are not planning to carry out sabotage at this time.”
He said ASIO was aware that a nation state was making “multiple attempts to scan critical infrastructure” in Australia and elsewhere, targeting water, power and energy transport networks.
Describing reconnaissance as “highly sophisticated” and a means of mapping networks and testing digital locks, Burgess said there was a possibility the nation could carry out sabotage in the future.
Citing the impact on Australia of last year’s Optus network outage, unrelated to sabotage, Mr Burgess questioned what it would mean for the country if a foreign state “knocked out all networks or cut power during a wave of heat”.
“I assure you that these are not hypotheses,” he said.
“Foreign governments have frontline cyber teams investigating these possibilities at this time, although they are only likely to materialize during or near conflict.”