AUSTRALIAN SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE & THE ADVENT OF CYBER – JOHN BLAXLAND

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 Bergin, 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

JOHN BLAXLAND

It’s a great honour and a pleasure for me to be back at The Sydney Institute. I remember being here my first time as a young subaltern working at Victoria Barracks, as it happens, and came to a Sydney Institute address and thought “Maybe one day they’ll invite me to come and speak”. Sure enough, I got invited and I’m back. So, I must have done something right. Thank you, Gerard and Anne. It’s a pleasure to be back with you. It’s been an absolute pleasure and an honour working with Clare Birgin. You’ve seen a snapshot of what an intellectual giant she is, and what a contribution she’s made to make me look much better than I should. I’m very much in her debt.

One of the things I like to do – and Gerard will have picked up on this in my work with the history of ASIO – is to talk about the contemporary policy relevance of history. One of the things about this book is that it talks about the span of history, cryptography, signals intelligence and the advent of cyber. The cover starts with a picture of women from the Fleet Radio Unit Melbourne. What is a fleet radio unit? Well, they’re not providing communications support to the fleet, they’re eavesdroppers. But the title, like with many of these titles in the SIGINT world, were all meant to deflect attention from the actual purpose. What’s now the Australian Signals Directorate started out as the Defence Signals Bureau. What is that? Is that like a Telstra for defence? No, it’s an eavesdropping body. It was meant to hide its real purpose. So, what we see is, over time, a transformation takes place. It’s kind of like a Copernican revolution of secrecy, where this body has developed the electromechanical computers of the Second World War. The first IBMs in Australia are introduced with McCarthur to Central Bureau to unravel the code. This is really the intellectual hearth for when we go through the digital revolution, which we all know and love so much.

We’re all suffering so many consequences of the information revolution. But one of the things about it is that we’ve gone from being web enabled to web dependent, and in turn, we’re vulnerable. Who could we turn to, to help us make sense of this and come up with some kind of response? It was the Australians Signals Directorate. Why? Because for generations, they have been the intellectual hearth of computing excellence, cryptographic excellence and mathematical genius. It is in that context that we were able to formulate, 20-25 years ago, as the fourth industrial revolution or the digital era was kicking in, people were saying “These ones and zeroes, they’re going to change the world”. I remember thinking “What drugs are you on? Who are you kidding?” Of course, we now know that the world has changed dramatically because of digital technology. It’s going apace. It’s from ASD that sprung the Australian Cyber Security Centre and its offices in capital cities; Canberra, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and elsewhere. We are now reliant on them to provide us a service as a nation, as a shopfront drawing on this intellectual pedigree to provide us as Australians, and as a nation, our government departments, our industry, our schools, our own personal devices, with an understanding of how to protect ourselves. This is quite a transformation. A Copernican revolution. That has enormous ramifications for today.

The other aspect of this story which I find is particularly resonant for policymakers and people thinking about where Australia sits in the world today, is that, historians have tended to write history with constrained access to the sensitive intelligence material. World War I historians that we know and love; most of them wrote before the 30 year rule kicked in. Much of the history of the Second World War was written before, for instance, the revelations of the book by F.W. Winterbotham, The Ultra Secret. Winterbotham was the special liaison officer who would go from London to outposts and check to make sure that people were looking after the ultra-secret intelligence systems correctly. To make sure that the secret didn’t leak. In this business, the secret of success – as we say in the book – is in keeping your successes secret. Because if you divulge or brag about how good you are, then you give your target an opportunity to think about how to prevent you continuing that access. There are some incidents in the book of politicians in the UK, in particular in the 1920s and 1930s, bragging about breaking the Soviet codes; about them waving pieces of paper, mocking the Soviets for their surprising foreign interference operations, that were going on back then, which echoes today. The folly of bragging about the successes of secrecy led to an extraordinary transformation. Up until that point, the Soviets had been relying on electromechanical encryption devices.

The Germans and the Japanese in the Second World War continued thinking that electromechanical encryption devices were foolproof. Thank goodness they did because that enabled Western powers, particularly the US and the UK, and Australia in that mix, to break the codes that they were using. The electromechanical code concept goes back, and we both felt it was really important to provide some historical context to the idea of cryptography, and what it was we were talking about. What it is about hiding messages. What it is about how you do that mechanically and conceptually. There were a variety of techniques that were employable. First of all, there was this idea of monoalphabetic substitution, where you swap the letters; you say ABC becomes DEF. This is the one that Julius Caesar used to use. Another one is the transposition cipher which is the wrapping of the code around in a message on his baton. The idea of the field marshals’ baton comes from the idea of that message only being decipherable when you read the message on that part of the strap that was featured on the baton at that point. It’s a very clever transposition cypher idea, that monoalphabetic substitution cipher.

Then the next one is poly-alphabetic substitution, where you would get a wheel and you’d have the letters that you could switch around. You’d have a couple of them, hence polyalphabetic substitution. The more wheels you have, the harder it is to crack the code, unless you know what the code is. I’m a humanities guy, I’ve got a history degree, I’m not a scientist or a mathematician. But I had a lot of fun unpacking this and trying to put it in plain English with Clare, and trying to help us communicate to the average Australian about what this is all about. How it works, why it works, why it was so important to keep it secret. That’s what led to the concept of the German Enigma machine. It originally had three rotors, and then four and then five. They got suspicious that three wasn’t enough. They added another one and thought there’s no way you could possibly work through so many permutations of potential options, and then they got to the 5^th. The Japanese were doing something conceptually very similar with the purple machine. The Americans focused more on the purple with Australia, and the Brits focussed more on the Enigma machine. They had this continual battle of trying to break the code, and then the Japanese and Germans would change the code and they’d have to quickly try and catch up.

This was about working out the threads. Clare was talking about traffic analysis before; when you think about what you do, you get a message garbled, just letters – what is it? First of all, for a Japanese one, you’ve got to understand that it’s in Kana, which is the Japanese alphabetised version – it’s not something we recognise as script, but it’s the Japanese equivalent of the alphabet. They had to learn that, and then translate that. This is interesting, because how do you even start? Where do you pick out the threads? Firstly, the frequency principle is really important. In English and French, for instance, T and E are the most popular letters. There are these trends you can pick up. The other thing you can work out is, there’s probably a salutation at the start of the message, a common form. If you pick it, you can then use that and start to unweave the thread. You can then put it on the bombe machine, that Alan Turing developed with help from these brave and clever Polish cryptographers, who gave the Brits and the French the early Enigma and a bombe machine, this electromechanical computer to unpick the codes.

So, what this spoke to was the classics and the mathematics. It’s the mixture of both sides of the brain; the humanities, the social sciences and the STEM. So, you’ve got HASS and STEM making cryptography work; not one, not the other, but both together. This extraordinary story led to incredible breakthroughs in the Second World War. Historians looking back, shortly afterwards, would say “Wasn’t it amazing how Rommel was able to work his way across the north of Africa and defeat a succession of British generals?” There’s a thing called the fingerspitzengefühl; the uncanny ability of knowing exactly where to put your finger – that’s the spot, we attack there and then. How did he do it? What was this magic thing he had? Well, he had signals intelligence. They had broken the American codes, and there was a very conscientious American military attache in Cairo, writing back to Washington, about what the British plans were for the next week. Very conveniently intercepted by the Germans signals intelligence unit working for Rommel in North Africa.

That unit got captured by troops from the 9^th Australian division. They came across this odd kit and thought “What is this?” They passed it back and they kept on fighting, then people thought it was very interesting, all the devices they had come across. So, when the Battle of El Alamein comes along, Monty has the advantage because they have now broken through the German Enigma code. Rommel’s now blind. Now, the shoe’s on the other foot. It now looks like Monty, who had a tradition of being a fairly conservative, detailed methodical planner and a very cautious general – not the kind of general of flair and elan that Rommel was renowned for. It was a stark contrast. Yet, Monty starts winning all these key battles. Historians look back and think “He was so meticulous in his planning, so careful”. True, but incomplete. Why? Because he’s got the SIGINT. But, of course, for decades afterwards, no one wanted to talk about it. Why? Because the secret was so worthwhile keeping secret.

When we think about the world today – and this is the space I like to talk on – and draw the history and talk about its contemporary relevance. Clare and I have been such a great team working to make this happen, because between us we bounced a lot of these ideas out, and teased out the “So, what?”, the implications, the consequences, and aspects that are worth reflecting on. Clare talked about the significance of Justice Robert Marsden Hope, and that came out in the ASIO history volumes as well. Gerard criticised me for the work on Volume II: The Protest Years. I would argue it’s the Nadir of ASIO, the low point of ASIO where it came close to losing it’s way. In part because Sir Charles Spry was in too long, and the Communist Party had lost its mojo after the Hungarian Uprising and the Prague spring. Just as that’s happening, the antiwar movement’s peeking, and ASIO’s chasing Communist Party members. I would contend that, for a while there, it lost the wood for the trees.

There’s a story of redemption, and that’s the story of Volume III of the ASIO history, where Justice Hope talks about the reforms that need to be implemented. We see that; Gough Whitlam tells him to go and conduct a Royal Commission, from 1974-1977. That leads to the Royal Commission on Intelligence and Security which is implemented while Malcolm Fraser is prime minister. Bob Hawke gets him back to do another one in 1983. In 1984, there’s the Royal Commission on Australian Securities and Intelligence Agencies, as well as the Protective Security Review after the Hilton Bombing in the middle as well. Three reviews done by Justice Hope; extraordinary reviews that make incredibly consequential recommendations that shape the governance architecture for the intelligence community today. So, in a liberal democracy like ours, where we value the fragile nature of what Karl Popper described as the open society and its enemies, we have, in Australia today, like in large part thanks to Justice Hope, a system of oversight that is the envy of the world. It is in that context that we have secret bodies that still perform very secret functions, about which we went to the very edge on with this book. We didn’t cross the line; we were very careful not to cross the line, because there are things that are important to keep secret for very compelling reasons.

Yet we as a liberal, open democracy need to have confidence that our institutions of state are held to account. That when they say they are operating for our good, there are ways of somebody checking them. The Inspector General of Intelligence and Security, the Independent National Security Legislation Monitor, the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, the National Anti-Corruption Commission. All these mechanisms are in place to provide checks and balances to the extraordinary power that we have given to the intelligence community to conduct operations on our behalf, to protect us and our nation in a world that is in the fourth Industrial Revolution, spinning so quickly it’s doing our heads in. I like to think that this book has some very important resonance for society today. It’s useful to understand what it is that was made so secret and why it was so secret. I think it’s important to understand it’s relevance for today, and to understand why oversight and accountability is so important, and yet why the function still needs to be performed. Despite all that’s going on.