The mathematics of spying: when the figures don't add up

So where are our equivalents of Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames? Don't hold your breath. We're just not into catching whales; instead, we're lucky to catch the odd sardine every once in a while.

In 1999, the Australian media reported on the arrest in the US of Jean-Philippe Wispelaere, a 28-year-old Canadian-born intelligence analyst with Australia's Defence Intelligence Organisation (DIO). Wispelaere wasinfatuated with spying and had been expelled from Wesley College in Melbourne for creating numerous teenage identities of himself. None of this behaviour or history had been picked up when he was subjected to tough security screening for the position in DIO. Hehad only worked with that Organisation in Canberra for six months when he attempted to sell over 1,300 US-supplied secret intelligence documents to two Asian countries. The FBI arrested him in a sting operation in which he was lured to Washington. He was prosecuted in a federal court in Virginia and given a fifteen-year prison sentence, the latter part of which could be served in Australia under an international prisoner transfer scheme. It is, however, unclear whether he did in fact return to Australia or go to Canada. His US lawyer at the time of his sentencing suggested that the US had claimed jurisdiction over the documents Wispelaere had tried to sell and prosecuted him under US law because Australian law was so feeble.

ASIO's security vetting procedures had also failed to pick up the fact that Wispelaere had three nationalities (Australian, Canadian and French), had financial problems, an obsession with aliases and was hooked on anabolic steroids. This was all open source information, which the media readily exposed after the arrest.

A few months after the sentencing of Wispelaere, the Howard Government announced strengthened security procedures across the public service and especially in Australia's intelligence agencies. The country's espionage laws were toughened, with the maximum penalty increased from seven years to twenty-five.

In 2001, another employee of DIO, Simon Lappas, who suffered from depression, attempted to sell US secrets with the help of a friend who was a prostitute. The pair's plan was to gain financially by dangling their stolen wares before foreign embassies, particularly the Russians. During the charging process, the Americans remained adamant that they would not tolerate their secrets being openly displayed in any Australian court of law. This led to a farcical situation where lawyers were instructed to turn their backs when the secret documents involved were presented. After three trials, both Lappas and his associate were convicted.

The most extensive inquiry into treachery in Australia got under way in 1993, led by Michael Cook, then an immediate past Australian ambassador to Washington. It ranged well beyond ASIO and uncovered things no one wanted to deal with. So bad were the findings that the outgoing and incoming governments in March 1996 – from Labor to the Liberal/National Party Coalition – were moved to reach yet another "understanding" that what had been uncovered would never be revealed to the public.

You don't need to be a mathematician to realise that all this points to a continuous cover-up on a grand scale.

It also points to a number of choice ironies. One is that foreign intelligence services hostile to Australia and its democratic way of life, know almost everything about treachery in Australia while the citizens of our country know precisely nothing. Another is the stark contrast this failure poses when matched against our protective agencies' noteworthy success in thwarting numerous terror attacks on Australian soil. And last but not least, is the fact that loyal Australian intelligence officers often joke that it pays much better to betray our country than to serve it honestly. QED.