AUSTRALIAN SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE & THE ADVENT OF CYBER – CLARE BIRGIN

Why does Australia have a national signals intelligence agency? How did it begin, what does it do and why is it controversial? And how significant are its ties with key partners, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand, to this arrangement? On Wednesday 16 August 2023, John Blaxland, Professor of International Security and Intelligence Studies in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre (SDSC) and co-author of Revealing Secrets, and Clare Birgin, former Australian diplomat & co-author of Revealing Secrets, provided some of the answers in a wide ranging discussion at The Sydney Institute.

AUSTRALIAN SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE & THE ADVENT OF CYBER

 CLARE BIRGIN

Good evening and thank you all for coming. I’d like to especially thank Gerard and Anne Henderson, and The Sydney Institute. I’d also like to thank our publishers, The University of New South Wales Press.

In signals intelligence, a small group of Sydney intellectuals yield to none in the contribution they made to Australian code breaking and to training Australians in Japanese. They have a key role in our book, Revealing Secrets. We hope the book gives insights into how wars, including World War II in Australia, are also won by force of thought. And, how signals intelligence drew, in various ways, on Australia’s intellectual capital and then added to it. Signals intelligence, or SIGINT, has proved to be a very sound investment.

In 1939, it was the Army’s eastern command which was firmly in favour of Australia setting up its own cryptographic organisation. This was crucial because the Navy, surprisingly, was lukewarm, and the Air Force was actually against it. Why?

I was thinking about this myself, quite hard, the other day. Part of the explanation is that, in the World War I, the Australian army became renowned for a particular talent, which was recognised by everyone, including the Brits. The ANZAC squadron’s unskilled wireless operators in Mesopotamia taught themselves to intercept Turkish wireless communications. This was what we call traffic analysis; the crucial tactical level of SIGINT that revealed, for example, the location of the enemy force, the volume of messages being sent and the level of the messages. This meant that analysts could tell when a crisis was coming, or an attack was looming, without reading the actual content of the message. So, in this art, the Australian army held the lead, and everyone recognised it. They hadn’t had the luxury of training in cryptography at that stage because it was handled by Britain. But they recognised its value.

I believe it was no accident that Australia’s early efforts at codebreaking took place near here, at Victoria Barracks in Paddington, home of Army’s eastern command. The General Staff Officer (GSO) Intelligence at eastern command identified and organised some Sydney University academics – men of the professor type as they were quaintly called – to teach each other cryptography. They included the distinguished classicist Professor Dale Trendall, the mathematician Professor Gerald Room, and Athanasius Treweek, also a mathematician, linguist and officer in militia and later Professor of Greek at Sydney University. They formed a small cipher breaking group at Sydney’s Victoria barracks.

The group started work on encoded messages from the Japanese consulate in Sydney, and also broke, within 24 hours, the cipher coded message in a letter passed to them by the censorship staff. This turned out to be part of a highly clandestine romance. Apparently, the professors very kindly tried to warn the parties by suggesting that the words “Careful, the censor” be added to the letter in the same code before it was delivered.

So, what were these Sydney codebreakers like, apart from kind and romantic? Professor Trendall, who had an international reputation as a classical scholar, and taught my mother classics at Sydney University was an expert in fourth century Greek vases. He was renowned for his uncanny intuitive judgement. On the basis of features of some Sicilian and other south Italian vases, which couldn’t be attributed to the influences of other regions or schools, he somehow worked out that there must be, in the region, a whole undiscovered school of vase painting, and that this school would have certain characteristics which he described. Needless to say, a few years later, such a school of vase painting was discovered, corresponding very closely to what Trendall had predicted. He was a natural codebreaker. He preferred the intuitive approach. But he himself couldn’t explain to anyone else how he did it, except to say you just get a feeling for it, which must have been annoying. Other gifted codebreakers, on the other hand, especially mathematicians, preferred an analytic approach.

Sydney University’s intellectual contribution to signals intelligence went beyond men of the professor type. Many women were involved, in fact thousands in the end, including Dr Elizabeth Shepherd, a codebreaker working with Professor Trendall in what was to become Australia’s elite diplomatic special intelligence section. Shepherd was also a resident tutor in English at Women’s College at Sydney University. There was Margaret Lake, a lecturer at Sydney University in Japanese and Japanese handicrafts. Two of the codebreaker mathematicians had to learn Japanese in no time, and she managed to teach them in just eight weeks. Professor Room said, “The two terms I have spent under Ms Lake have proved as useful in my present job as 20 years in mathematics.”

The woman who did most for Australian signals intelligence is very much with us tonight. She was an intellectual of a different kind; I’m talking about Florence Violet McKenzie, who won a scholarship to Sydney Girls High School in 1904. She qualified as a maths teacher at Sydney Teachers College in 1913. She then studied maths and science at Sydney University before becoming the first woman in Australia to enrol in an engineering course. She was the first woman in Australia to open an electrical shop. She also corresponded with Einstein.

I say she is with us tonight, because in 1928, she opened a radio shop in this very street. She had more foresight, as well, about the future demand for signallers than the Naval board. Prompted by Chamberlain’s announcement of peace in our time, which she disagreed with, she opened a school to train girls in morse code and radio. In December 1940, she wrote to the Minister of Navy, offering the services of her women signallers. Thanks to her, there were women in all three services, and they were high performers.

After Japan entered the war in December 1941, Sydney continued to supply outstanding codebreaking talent, including the 19-year-old private Ronald Bond, who had just graduated with first class honours in Greek and Latin in Trendall’s classics department. 18-year-old Gunner John Davies obtained first class honours from Trendall’s Latin III class. And Eric Barnes, another Sydney University graduate, was not a classics scholar but a winner of the University prizes in mathematics and French. He had been brought to Trendall’s attention by Room, his professor, and by Bond, his senior by one year at Canterbury Boys High School. In 1944, Trendall recruited and trained three additional cryptographers, including Private Tony Eastway, who was probably recommended to Trendall by his classics master at North Sydney Boys High School, and Sergeant Ken McKie, who had “only” won high distinctions by that stage in his second year at Sydney University. McKay later went to Cambridge and took a first in Classical Tripos in 1950.

In addition to Sydney University, the teaching at schools in Sydney, particularly Canterbury Boys High School, also attended by former prime minister John Howard, but also other Sydney schools including North Sydney Boys High School and Sydney Girls High School, helped to create this extraordinary pool of talent. In recent times, Mike Burgess, now our Director General of Security and previously Director General of the Australian Signals Directorate, has spoken publicly about the achievements of the professional descendants of these codebreakers and SIGINT operators. But the pressure to stay ahead of the game is still on.

The question is, what can Australia do to keep up? The role of intellect, or force of thought, is perhaps more important than it’s ever been if we’re going to meet unprecedented challenges, including artificial intelligence and its risks and opportunities. It’s not just a matter of keeping up technologically – although that’s very important – but also keeping a critical eye on the choices the government is making on cyber strategy and other challenges. Justice Robert Marsden Hope did that in his Royal Commission reports on intelligence and security.

I was reminded of this by a recent statement signed by hundreds of prominent figures in artificial intelligence, including academics, which refers to the existential risks it presents. Potential misuses could include the development of more advanced cyber weapons, and more advanced pathogens. Thankfully, Australian thinkers and policy makers are onto this. Two Australian papers – the Rapid Response Information Report on Generative AI and a Discussion paper on Safe and Responsible use of AI in Australia – have already been commended by the President of Rand, one of the world’s leading thinkers on artificial intelligence, Jason Matheny.

Revealing Secrets also discusses ASD’s REDSPICE program – which has been in the news again and which began before a new strategy for cyber security was announced in December 2022. We touch on Justice Robert Marsden Hope’s 1970s recommendation for a more independent approach for signals intelligence.

We were asked recently about what we thought of the Five Eyes arrangement, whether we thought it was as important now as it once was. We still see the Five Eyes as unique and invaluable, that maybe once again Hope was onto something as he so often was, when he said on his third Royal Commission Intelligence and Security Report, “We also need constantly to reassess the benefits to Australia from intelligence relationships with other countries against the cost.” Maybe the conclusion from all of this is that the role of intellectuals in signals, and actually all intelligence, whether they are practitioners or not is more important than ever.