In addition to its more traditional activity of monitoring suspected domestic threats, including espionage on the part of foreign governments, ASIO has embraced a much more proactive outreach program to Australia’s Muslim community, aimed largely at cultivating reliable and enduring intelligence networks. By far the most visible change to ASIO, however, has been its budgetary position. The key finding of a classified review of ASIO in 2005 was that the organisation did not have sufficient resources to effectively undertake all of the tasks assigned to it by government. The Howard government’s response was to announce that ASIO’s personnel numbers would be nearly doubled from 980 to 1860 between 2005 and 2010, a measure that further supplemented the doubling of personnel between 2001 and 2005. ASIO now routinely receives around half of all funds allocated to the Australian intelligence community in federal budgets, and its overall budget is projected to continue to expand.

A book whose title promises to examine ASIO’s role within the framework of Australia’s counter-terrorist strategy is, at face value, a welcome addition to the literature. Yet Frank Cain’s Terrorism and Intelligence in Australia: A History of ASIO and National Surveillance falls well short of providing a balanced and informative account on the subject. Cain has published widely on the history of Australia’s intelligence and police agencies, and his book The Origins of Political Surveillance in Australia (1983) is still the best work of its type. Cain’s central thesis in his latest book is that ASIO – as with the Australian intelligence community generally – remains little more than an instrument of conservative governments in their ongoing endeavour to control the national political agenda and to stifle legitimate dissent. With the back cover blurb’s pledge that the book will ‘explore the contentious notion that Australia’s surveillance agencies have today become adoptive allies of the Liberal Party’, Cain’s central thesis hardly comes as a revelation to the reader.

The primary strength of this book is its depth of historical detail on the role of intelligence agencies in the evolution of political surveillance in Australia after World War I (the subject of The Origins of Political Surveillance in Australia). There are also some interesting snippets of analysis on the post-World War II origins of ASIO and how it grew out of the Chifley government’s attempt to stabilise intelligence relationships with the United Kingdom and the United States in light of their concerns over Soviet espionage in Australia during the 1940s. Unfortunately, much of the rest of the book’s analysis contains a range of flaws and cannot seriously be regarded as a balanced account of the subject. This is evident at four main levels.

The first is the skewed structure of the book. For a book that purports to examine the relationship between terrorism and intelligence, it is odd that the first half of the text has little to say about terrorism. Operation Venona and the Petrov Affair – intriguing as they are as case studies in Cold War espionage – are unrelated to politically motivated violence; and yet they receive detailed treatment in two separate chapters (contrast this with two pages on the 1978 Hilton Hotel bombing, and one on the 2002 Bali attack). Inexplicably, it is not until chapter seven that Cain begins to explore ASIO’s role in monitoring terrorist threats to Australia.

The second is the book’s relentless bias against conservative governments. There is a popular tradition in Labor folklore that successive conservative governments in Australia have been abetted by the intelligence agencies in their attempts to cling to political power. Menzies’ clever manipulation of the Petrov Affair that precipitated Labor’s Split in the mid 1950s, and the major tensions between the intelligence agencies and senior ministers in the Whitlam government, provided grist to the mill of this particular tradition. It seemed to have died a natural death with the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s, but re-emerged with a vengeance with allegations that the Howard government exploited the ‘war on terror’ to pass legislation intended to use ASIO to stifle domestic dissent. Cain is an avid subscriber to this view: for him, the Howard years witnessed ‘the conversion of ASIO into a form of secret police’.

While there may be some grounds for arguing that elements of the postwar Australian intelligence community were by inclination closer to conservative governments’ thinking than to that of their Labor counterparts, it is nonsense to suggest they were simply the political plaything of Coalition governments. (As outlined by Des Ball and David Horner in their authoritative Breaking the Codes: Australia’s KGB Network, 1998, ASIO played a critical role in uncovering real, not imagined, Soviet spy networks in Australia, with no real support from key Labor figures H.V. Evatt and John Burton.) To argue that ASIO was somehow transformed into ‘a form of secret police’ after 9/11 wilfully ignores the constraints within which all of Australia’s intelligence agencies operate, and overlooks the strengthening of accountability and oversight mechanisms. The Intelligence Services Act in 2001 clarified the legislative basis for the activities of Australia’s intelligence agencies and established the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security to reinforce the statutory oversight role of the Inspector-General for Intelligence and Security. Strangely, none of this is mentioned in Cain’s book.

The third level relates to several basic errors and questionable observations in the text. For instance, on page 197, Cain refers to ‘the Sino-Soviet bloc growing more prosperous in the 1980s’ (the Soviet Union’s economy was in free fall for the best part of that decade); on page 218, Cain identifies the Office of National Assessments as an ‘agency that had been functioning since 1979’ (ONA was established under an act of parliament in 1977 as a result of what was then the single most important review of Australia’s intelligence community, the first Hope Commission); on page 229, he comments that Howard invoked the terms of the ANZUS treaty ‘while on his return flight to Australia’ immediately after 9/11 (invocation of ANZUS was a cabinet decision announced on Australian soil by Howard on September 14); and on page 300, Cain observes that the 2007 Glasgow terrorist attacks ‘were not an expression of Jihadism, but more a protest by educated professional Muslim men disenchanted with their status in a society that places undue emphasis on social ranking’ (British police investigations subsequently revealed that both Bilal Talal Samad and Abdullah Kafeel Ahmed were hard-core jihadists inspired by a violent hatred of the West).

Finally, the book consistently dismisses terrorism as a threat to Australia’s security. Even if we accept that governments always have a tendency to exaggerate security threats for domestic political purposes – and the Howard government was certainly guilty of this – terrorism remains a real threat to Australia’s domestic and offshore interests. Cain’s dismissive attitude is especially evident in his treatment of Operation Pendennis, Australia’s largest counter-terrorism operation conducted between 2004 and 2005, which resulted in the 2008 conviction of half a dozen members of a jihadist terrorist cell. At no point does Cain concede that ASIO and police authorities in Victoria and New South Wales were operating against a dangerous threat – ‘these men collectively met to occasionally play soccer, take fishing trips and converse on Muslim issues’ – and instead focuses on exploring a wholly unsubstantiated claim that the 2005 arrests of the men were timed to help the Howard government politically. The arrests ‘dominated the media over the following days resulting in the Liberal Party’s industrial [relations] legislation being pushed off the front pages. The “terrorists” were lodged in isolation in maximum security prisons.’   The performance of Australia’s intelligence community in the area of counter-terrorism has been, and no doubt will remain, far from perfect. Yet to argue that ASIO has been little more than an instrument to achieve the political aims of conservative governments is not only plain wrong, it also devalues the subject as an area of serious scholarship and does those of us in the academy with an interest in terrorism and intelligence no favours.