Mike Head
In a further move to block leaks exposing the criminal activities of the US-linked Australian surveillance and military agencies, Australian Federal Police (AFP) officers spent almost eight hours searching the Canberra home of a senior intelligence official on Wednesday. They left carrying large black plastic bags, reportedly containing evidence.
Police pointedly refused to state the reason for the early morning raid on the house of Cameron Gill. He works for the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD), the electronic spy agency that forms a key part of the global “Five Eyes” network led by the US National Security Agency.
Gill is a significant target. He has been a top-level adviser to a succession of key government ministers and is also the husband of Australia’s ambassador to Iraq, Joanne Loundes. The crackdown on whistleblowers is taking place at the highest echelons of the political and security establishment.
Far from backing away from such raids in response to widespread outrage over the attack on free speech and the public’s right to know the truth, Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s government is stepping up the offensive. Morrison personally endorsed the raid, saying the police were “just doing their job.”
The raid came just three months after intimidating raids against journalists accused of exposing damaging government secrets.
News Corp senior political editor Anikka Smethurst, had published documents revealing plans to legalise internal spying by the ASD. A day after ransacking Smethurst’s Canberra home in June, the AFP spent a day searching the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) Sydney headquarters. That was over the publication of stories by Dan Oakes and Sam Clark about the protracted official cover-up of war crimes by Australian Special Forces units involved in the US-led invasion of Afghanistan.
The latest raid is almost certainly connected to a hunt for the source of Smethurst’s April 2018 story. She revealed secret correspondence between Defence Department secretary Greg Moriarty and Home Affairs secretary Mike Pezzullo about how the ASD’s electronic surveillance capabilities could be used to target people within Australia.
Last month, Pezzullo bluntly told a parliamentary committee inquiry into the police raids that the person who leaked the documents to Smethurst should “go to jail for that.” He declared that the police were homing in on the source of the story, effectively foreshadowing Wednesday’s raid and prejudicing any resulting trial.
Currently, the ASD is legally barred from domestic spying, but previous documents released by WikiLeaks and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden proved that this is a sham. The material showed that the ASD and its Five Eyes partners spy on millions of people around the globe, as well as rival governments, and freely exchange data with each other.
In its submission to the parliamentary inquiry, the ASD insisted that police action was essential to stop “unauthorised disclosures” that would “undermine Australia’s relationships with international partners.”
This confirmed the little-reported statement by AFP acting chief Neil Gaughan, the day after the ABC raid, that its purpose was to protect access to the Five Eyes network. Gaughan’s remark pointed to the pressure coming from the Trump administration to ensure that information about the activities of the US spy and military forces is kept from public view.
As well as the police raids, two closed-door trials are being prepared over revealing leaks. In one, former military lawyer David McBride is accused of giving the ABC the “Afghan Files” on the Special Forces cover-up. In the other, a former Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) officer, known only as Witness K, and his lawyer Bernard Collaery could be jailed for up to two years for exposing ASIS’s illegal bugging of East Timor’s cabinet office during oil and gas negotiations.
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