An Australian former intelligence officer will plead guilty to revealing an Australian spy operation against the impoverished nation of East Timor, which prompted international outcry and damaged Canberra’s reputation.
IntelNews has covered the case of the former intelligence officer, known only as “Witness K.”
since 2013,
when it was first revealed. It is believed that Witness K. served as
director of technical operations in the Australian Secret Intelligence
Service (ASIS), Australia’s foreign-intelligence agency. In 2013, he
publicly objected to an intelligence-collection operation that targeted
the impoverished Pacific island nation of Timor-Leste, also known as
East Timor.
According to Witness K., a group of ASIS
officers disguised themselves as members of a renovation crew and
planted several electronic surveillance devices in an East Timorese
government complex. The inside information gathered from those devices
allegedly allowed the Australian government to gain the upper hand in a
series of complex negotiations that led to the 2004 Certain Maritime
Arrangements in the Timor Sea (CMATS) treaty. The treaty awards
Australia a share from profits from oil exploration in the Greater
Sunrise oil and gas field, which is claimed by both Australia and East
Timor. But in 2013, the East Timorese government took Australia to the
Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, claiming that the CMATS
treaty should be scrapped. The East Timorese argued that during the
sensitive negotiations that preceded the CMATS treaty, the Australian
government was in possession of intelligence acquired through illegal
bugging.
The claim of the East Timorese government
was supported by Witness K., who argued that ASIS’ espionage operation
was both “immoral and wrong” because it was designed to benefit the
interests of large energy conglomerates and had nothing to do with
Australian national security. It is worth noting that Witness K. said he
decided to reveal the ASIS bugging operation in 2012, after he learned
that Australia’s former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Alexander Downer,
had been hired as an adviser to Woodside Petroleum, an energy company
that was directly benefiting from the CMATS treaty.
However, as soon as the East Timorese
told the Permanent Court of Arbitration that they would be questioning a
witness from ASIS, officers from the Australian Security Intelligence
Organisation (ASIO), the country’s domestic intelligence agency, raided
the Canberra law offices of Bernard Collaery, East Timor’s lawyer in the
case. The raiders took away documents that revealed the identity of
Witness K., and then proceeded to detain him for questioning. They also
confiscated his passport, which prevented him from traveling to the
Netherlands to testify in the case. In the
following months, an embarrassed Australian government quietly conceded
to East Timor’s claims and agreed to renegotiate the CMATS treaty. A new
treaty was officially ratified by the Australian government last week.
In the meantime, however, the Australian government has refused to allow
the whistleblower to leave the country and continues to describe him as a security threat.
Witness K. and Mr. Collaery have each
been charged with a single count of conspiring to share information that
is protected by Section 39 of Australia’s Intelligence Services Act,
which forbids the unauthorized release of classified information. His
hearing was supposed to start this week behind closed doors, because it
involves topics that relate to Australian national security. On Tuesday
morning, however, Mr. Collaery announced
his client’s decision to plead guilty to the charges of revealing the
spy operation against East Timor. He added, however, that he would
continue to contest the charge leveled against him. The lawyer’s
announcement was the first time that the case of the East Timor bugging
and the detention of Witness K. have been officially connected in
public.
Witness K’s lawyers said on Tuesday that they were still negotiating
with the prosecution about the full ramifications of their client’s
guilty plea. Witness K. and Mr. Collaery are expected to return to court
in late August. Meanwhile, the judge has accepted the prosecution’s
argument that it is illegal to discuss in public any information relating to the East Timor bugging case, or reveal the identity of Witness K.
https://intelnews.org/2019/08/07/01-2603/#more-16547
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