Director General of Security in the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) Mike Burgess announced Wednesday that the ASIO uncovered a foreign spy network that recruited a former Australian politician to serve the interests of their foreign regime.
Delivering his fifth Annual Threat Assessment, Mike Burgess outlined that the ASIO identified a team of spies, labelled as the “A-team,” who work for a foreign intelligence service that has been targeting Australia by recruiting national citizens, including a former politician, who have access to “privileged information” without mentioning the latter’s identity or the foreign country involved. The recruited politician allegedly “sold out his party, country and former colleagues to serve the interests of the foreign regime,” and Burgess claimed the political even offered to bring the prime minister’s family members to the spy ring, without succeeding because the ASIO was able to localize and identify the members of the spying network.
Mike Burgess mentioned other examples of spying schemes that ASIO succeeded in uncovering. One of them is the case of Australian academics and politicians who were once invited to attend a conference overseas, with the organizers covering all the expenses. When the attendees arrived in the hosting country, they were met by alleged bureaucrats who turned out to be members of the A-team. Australian domestic intelligence found out that the conference was only a cover to build relationships with Australian leading figures who had access to official documents and shortly after the “conference,” one of the attendees provided the A-team with information about Australia’s national defence priorities.
The A-team members have allegedly been operating in Australia for several years, “trawling professional networking sites.” They managed to recruit leading Australian academics, political figures, researchers, students, business people, law enforcement officials, public servants and used fake anglicised names such as Sophy, Amy and Ben to contact their targets. Their common recruiting method is to propose consulting opportunities to targets who would write reports on Australian trade, economics, politics, foreign policy and defence for thousands of dollars with additional payments for “inside or exclusive” information. Spies used professional networking sites in addition to social media, email and messaging platforms to directly approach their Australian targets, but they also used other Australians as intermediates to contact the “recruit” on their behalf.
The head of ASIO pointed out in his speech that he decided to declassify this foreign espionage case for two main reasons. The first is to confront the spying A-team and let them publicly know that their “cover is blown.” “I want the A-team and its masters to understand that if they target Australia, ASIO will target them,” Burgess said. The second reason according to the Australian intelligence official is to raise Australians’ awareness about foreign espionage. He asserted that many Australians, including government employees, expose important details about their job positions on professional networking sites, such as working in an intelligence department or being involved in defence projects, the technologies they are working with or the programme they are working on. For this reason, Mike Burgess urged government employees and all citizens to report any suspicious approaches similar to those used by the disrupted spy network to the security manager or through “ASIO’s contact reporting scheme.”
ASIO posted a series of tweets on X stating that tackling espionage is “a national challenge that needs a national team to meet it. Every Australian can help keep Australia safe.”
