From the birth of ASIO to the present day, Toohey traces innumerable national security controversies, highlighting a long history of incompetence and attempts to use official secrecy to prevent embarrassment. Secret is far-ranging, from Australia’s claims of sovereignty in Antarctica to the Maralinga nuclear testing, from the Whitlam dismissal to Australia’s involvement in Afghanistan. Toohey, a stalwart of national security journalism (most recently for the Australian Financial Review), has seen most of it up close. Secret is thus at once both a quasi-memoir and a history of Australia’s national security policy, linked by a common thread: the use and misuse of official secrecy.

Brian Toohey (photograph via Melbourne University Publishing)

It is an entertaining read, full of intrigue, more than a few scandalous bedroom exposés and laugh-out-loud moments. Richard Nixon offers his opinion of Gough Whitlam (‘Marshall, I can’t stand that cunt’), while an American ambassador proposes to drill for oil on the Great Barrier Reef.

Secret is richly sourced, with more than thirty pages of endnotes. Toohey’s extensive archival research is evident throughout, although he complains at the end: ‘Unhappily, the archives are not easy to search.’ But the book is made all the more compelling for the personal insight that the author brings to bear. Toohey broke many of the stories that form the core of this book, facing numerous government lawsuits as a result. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, he can also reflect on the bigger picture, and uses archival material to better understand the wider ramifications of his reporting.

Toohey’s latest book has three shortcomings. First, while broadly chronological, Secret proceeds thematically. This necessitates temporal hopping back and forth, which induces confusion – compounded by occasional non sequiturs. Second, it becomes evident that Toohey is using the book to settle scores against past and present foes. Secret contains criticism of Professor John Blaxland (official historian of the Australian Signals Directorate), Sydney Morning Herald international editor Peter Hartcher, now-deceased senior mandarin Arthur Tange, former Foreign Minister Gareth Evans, and ex-Prime Minister Julia Gillard.

These grudges may be deserved. Tange’s anger over bureaucratic leaks to Toohey saw him pressure the US embassy not to grant the journalist a visa. Evans alleged that Toohey’s reporting had caused the death of Australian spies, and commenced proceedings in the High Court to prevent the publication of a story that did not exist. But the axe-grinding detracts from Secret’s overall coherence.

Finally, and most significantly, Secret feels at times like several books crammed into one. Toohey makes a valuable contribution in telling the history of Australian national security policy, with titbits that even seasoned political observers will find alternately amusing and alarming. Within this, like a Matryoshka doll, is the often one-sided, sometimes fraught history of Australian–American relations. Toohey offers a timely reminder that Australia needs the United States more than it needs us. We have no guarantee of their military support in a time of need; indeed, two different American ambassadors to Canberra have admitted to not having read the ANZUS Treaty. Toohey criticises Australia’s ongoing attachment to America, and recommends a more sophisticated, multi-vector foreign policy.

Stated plainly at the beginning, and interwoven throughout, is a damning indictment of the triumph of official secrecy over government transparency. It is here that Secret makes its most important contribution. The analysis is clear-eyed (‘the past was by no means a golden era’), balanced (‘few deny there can be a legitimate role for government secrecy’), and witty (on an intelligence agent testifying as ‘Officer 1’ against Mamdouh Habib in his defamation battle with the Daily Telegraph, Toohey observes: ‘Sitting here in my Moscow apartment, I wonder what News Limited would have to say about this practice in a Russian court’).

Australia’s national security history, and the Australian–American relations that sit alongside it, offers important context for Toohey’s warning on the decline of government transparency. Yet that central thesis sometimes goes missing down rabbit holes as Toohey recalls stories with only marginal relevance to the issue at hand. With a tighter edit, and a greater focus, Secret might have packed a heftier punch.

These are, ultimately, minor complaints. Secret offers firsthand insight into the rise of the Australian security state, backed with rigorous archival and secondary research. It is an important book that should cause all Australians to pause and reflect on the direction of our society. As Toohey highlights, over the past decade spending on our secret services has grown by more than ten per cent annually, while ‘the annual average for all government spending, including on schools, hospitals and age pensions, was under 3.5 per cent’. Our lack of explicit constitutional or legislative protections for civil liberties means that parliament has enacted laws that would never pass scrutiny in comparable liberal democracies.

Throughout Toohey’s book, which spans more than half a century, we see an inexorable creep towards a national security state. The author at one point observes: ‘there is almost no example since 1952 of an Australian government repealing a national security law without replacing it with a tougher version’. That should alarm all Australians.

If we look across the Pacific, the United States is suffering from a similar plight. In neither jurisdiction was this inevitable. Around the same time that these issues came to the fore in Australia, set against the context of the Cold War, the US government asserted official secrecy to block a lawsuit by the widows of an Air Force plane crash. At first instance, Judge William H. Kirkpatrick rejected the government’s position. This was affirmed on appeal, with Judge Albert Maris quoting jurist Edward Livingston:

No nation ever yet found any inconvenience from too close an inspection into the conduct of its officers, but many have been brought to ruin, and reduced to slavery, by suffering gradual imposition and abuses, which were imperceptible, only because the means of publicity had not been secured.

The United States Supreme Court failed to heed this warning. Its ultimate judgment gave deference to the government’s desire for secrecy, and has been the progenitor of seven decades of opacity. As Toohey makes amply clear in Secret, Australia has hardly fared better.