The periods that McPhee has chosen for his case studies will not come as a surprise. He takes us to the first decade of Federation, when governments led by Edmund Barton and Alfred Deakin tried to resolve the tensions between imperial and national priorities. He then looks at W.M. Hughes’s use of official and unofficial intelligence organisations to discredit opponents of the conscription referenda of 1916 and 1917; the bureaucratic rivalries between military and civilian intelligence agencies during World War II; the relationship between ASIO and parliamentarians during the early decades of the Cold War; and, finally, the interaction of ASIO and the media between the 1950s and 1970s.

While the broad political context may be familiar, McPhee’s choice of the particular episodes or incidents to examine in detail is idiosyncratic. His archival research has been largely directed towards giving highly detailed coverage of episodes that have had relatively little coverage in most histories, while often overlooking cases that had a greater impact on political events and opinions. He cites cherry-picking as an example of politicisation, when policymakers choose the intelligence that suits their aims while rejecting that which does not, but McPhee can be said to have cherry-picked his own case studies.

McPhee’s choice of the particular episodes or incidents to examine in detail is idiosyncratic

McPhee correctly states that the royal commission on the intelligence agencies by Justice Robert Marsden Hope in the 1970s was ‘a landmark review of the intelligence community, without parallel’, but his coverage of Hope’s far-reaching recommendations is curiously restricted. He does not even mention that, on Hope’s recommendation, the Fraser government established the Office of National Assessments (ONA), guaranteeing by legislation that its assessments would be free from ministerial or official intervention. Whether those legislated guarantees, and other measures proposed by Hope, have succeeded in preventing politicisation of intelligence assessments is a topic worthy of detailed discussion. McPhee refers to criticism of ONA’s role at the time of the 2003 Iraq invasion, but not to earlier controversies, such as when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979.

Similarly, in discussing ASIO’s relations with ministers and other parliamentarians, McPhee relates in considerable detail an episode in 1966, known as ‘the Michaelis affair’, when an ambitious and energetic young Liberal minister, Malcolm Fraser, used ASIO material quite improperly in Parliament in order to discredit opponents of the Vietnam War. McPhee makes no mention, however, of Lionel Murphy’s ‘raid on ASIO’ in the first months of the Whitlam government, when the new attorney-general made an unexpected and heavy-handed visit to ASIO headquarters to inspect the agency’s files for himself.

Nor does McPhee mention the ‘Combe–Ivanov affair’, the controversy that dominated the first year of the Hawke government, in which the right of the head of ASIO to withhold intelligence material from its minister, Attorney-General Gareth Evans, was a central issue.

It is hard to understand either Hope’s recommendations on the relationship between ASIO and the parliament, or the subsequent actions of Labor and Coalition governments, without considering all three of these episodes. Recalling forgotten controversies like the Michaelis affair is a useful service, but only when they are placed alongside events like the ‘raid on ASIO’ and the Combe–Ivanov affair, which had a profound and enduring impact on politicians and intelligence agencies alike.

While McPhee is right to be concerned about the use of national intelligence for partisan political purposes, it is unclear what remedial action he would recommend. He hints at some form of bipartisan oversight, although seemingly directed towards the politicians as much as the intelligence agencies. He refers only briefly to what is now the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security. For some years, politicians and commentators pressed for this committee to have greater powers. Now the committee is routinely described by journalists as one of the most powerful committees in parliament.

It would be valuable to look again at what Hope said about parliamentary committees on intelligence, at a time when they were much favoured in the 1970s. Do they in fact strengthen oversight, or do they permit an exchange of information between intelligence officials and backbench parliamentarians, without ensuring that the intelligence passes through the proper processes of contestation, co-ordination, and dissemination, under the appropriate oversight?

Following the Flood report after the Iraq invasion, governments have commissioned an independent review of intelligence agencies about every five years. The next such review is due in about 2022. It will have a huge task, assessing how the agencies have operated since the Turnbull government announced in 2017 that ONA would be upgraded to become the Office of National Intelligence and that several intelligence, security, and law-enforcement agencies would be incorporated into a new and powerful Department of Home Affairs.

The review in 2022 might well be turned into another royal commission, along the lines of those conducted by Hope in the 1970s and 1980s. Like those royal commissions, it should consider not only submissions from those with personal knowledge but also independent historical and analytical evidence. Spinning the Secrets of State makes a limited but useful contribution to that evidence.