5 - The growth of the Australian intelligence community and the Anglo-American connection

Summary

Australia, like Great Britain, entered the twentieth century without a professional espionage or counter-intelligence agency. Secret service work was carried out, when the occasional need arose, by adventurous young officers and patriotic civilians. The immediate origins of the modern secret intelligence communities in both Britain and Australia lie in the spy scares which preceded and followed the outbreak of the First World War. Wildly exaggerated reports of ’an extensive system of German espionage’ in the United Kingdom led to the foundation in 1909 of the Secret Service Bureau whose home and foreign departments have since become, respectively, the counter-intelligence agency MI5 and the espionage agency usually known as SIS or MI6. Australia’s first, rather smaller, spy scare in 1908 concerned reports of espionage by Japanese business persons, storekeepers, pearlers and prostitutes along the Barrier Reef and the north of Queensland.