'Secret: The Making of Australia’s Security State'

Here's a book that couldn't be timelier.

Why? Because the anchors that keep free speech firmly fixed at the centre of our liberal democracy are inexorably drifting, or more correctly, being subjected to undue tug and pull.

For anyone who has worked in the Australian Intelligence Community (AIC), the motivation behind new legislation that limits free speech, some of it draconian, is readily understandable. It is not difficult to see why certain agencies seek new or extended powers, often to be locked into place to guard against contingencies. The driving force is there for all to see: a determination to avoid a repeat of the horrors of 9/11 in the United States, of the depravities of Islamic State, of home-grown terrorism, and of foreign espionage activity in, or aimed at Australia. The AIC's track record in protecting us from home-grown attacks in particular, is impressive, and we are all grateful for that.

But those who have worked in the AIC are also acquainted with another dimension of intelligence work. Not only can they assess these developments from both inside and out; they are also keenly aware of how human foibles sometimes run amok in the protected and rarefied atmosphere of our country's secret intelligence apparatus. It's like a huge hothouse where most plants from the tropics thrive, where the odd cactus flourishes, and other species either wither or turn into monstrosities. You have to have been in it to know how bad it can get. And, of course, it's a glasshouse that few people ever get close enough to, to throw a stone.

Why Toohey's new book is not only timely, but important, is because he holds a unique position in Australian journalism; he's been studying our intelligence community and the ways in which it interrelates to other agencies overseas, especially to our Five Eyes partners, for near on a half century. He's often had extraordinary access, by whatever means, to some of our most closely guarded secrets, including those shared with Australia. Over a decade ago, this writer was privileged to spend time with Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker in his Washington office, stacked high with a cornucopia of files and documents. When asked roughly what percentage of the material he came by, or that was leaked to him, saw publication, an expected answer was roughly twenty to thirty per cent. Just one- to one-and-a-half, he replied. Most of what comes my way, he explained, is to keep me in the picture so I know what to run with and what not. It's not so much to avoid me going off half-cocked. In our smaller Australian context, Toohey has taken on a status something like that. And, as with Hersh, not only does he know how to keep a secret, his judgement of whatever does come his way is informed by a healthy streak of cynicism.

Toohey is one of a bevy of top investigative journalists that Australia is lucky to have – names like Chris Masters, Hamish McDonald (ex-Sydney Morning Herald) and Ross Coulthart readily come to mind. They can sense something awry in our intelligence system like a well trained dog sniffs out truffles.

Why SECRET: The Making of Australia's Security State is important is because it's a creatively structured compendium of everything a reader needs to know to get a solid overview of where we've been with intelligence in Australia, where we are now, and the dangers that lurk up ahead. It comes in bite-sized chunks, some bigger and some smaller but all easy to read. There's enough history and back story to place everything in context. It's a mosaic that anyone can look at, whether aficionado or newcomer to this field, and pick out what's going on.

It strikes just the right balance. Few books on intelligence do that. Most are either turgid or simplistic. Many are didactic and heavily laced with the author's own political beliefs. Toohey, who's left-of-centre, let's you know what he thinks, but not in a way that obstructs the reader forming his or her own assessment of the events, characters, and successes and failures portrayed.

This is a book for thinking Australians who know that democracy isn't perpetuated by accident; it takes hard yakka. Ponder this wily definition from an unexpected quarter – Norman Mailer, the late American novelist. Addressing the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco in 2003 he observed that:

Real democracy comes out of many subtle individual human battles that are fought over decades and finally over centuries … [It] is a state of grace attained only by those countries that have a host of individuals not only ready to enjoy freedom, but to undergo the heavy labour to maintain it.

This is why the book should also be recommended reading for all state and federal politicians as well as bureaucrats.

If you're wavering over reading SECRET, ask yourself one simple question: apart from the harsh treatment dished out to scapegoats and whistleblowers, how convinced are you that anyone is ever punished for failure, or even treachery, inside our AIC? Don't rush for pen and paper to draw up a list. Can you remember the Haneef case in Queensland? He was the young Indian doctor on the Gold Coast who, in 2007 was arrested and charged with the "reckless" provision of material support for a terrorist group. As Toohey points out, shortly after the case began, the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) recommended that the charges be dropped because of a lack of evidence. More than twelve months and $8.2 million later, the Australian Federal Police admitted Haneef was no longer a suspect.

Maybe you're wondering what's behind the current case of former Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) officer, Witness K (who led the team that bugged the cabinet office in Timor Leste), and his erstwhile lawyer Bernard Collaery, and why it's dragging on endlessly, to the abject dismay of ASIS men and women serving under cover overseas, many in dangerous environments.

In essence, Toohey's book is all about accountability, a surfeit of which Australia is hardly suffering from. The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse and the more recent banking royal commission have attested to that.

Accountability is crucial to any democracy's intelligence apparatus. Why, because it's most likely that if a democracy is suborned and ultimately dismantled it is most likely to start within that intelligence community, working in tandem with politicians. While the majority of men and women who work in our agencies are loyal and hard-working, it's those who go rogue that we need to worry about. That's why intelligence whistleblowers should be taken seriously.

As Toohey points out, well-informed leaks about the phoney intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction might have prevented the 2003 invasion and its disastrous consequences. Cast your mind back to the famed Pentagon Papers that reported on how badly the Vietnam War was going. They were leaked by Daniel Ellsberg and first came to the attention of the public on the front page of The New York Times in 1971. The US Supreme Court refused to stop publication. As Toohey observes, this was a win for transparency that would be impossible under recent new laws in Australia that rule out the "public interest' defence used in the Pentagon Papers case. Nor does Australia have anything similar to the protection of free speech contained in the first amendment to the US Constitution.

Toohey writes that two Australian academic lawyers, Keiran Hardy and George Williams, in a forthcoming book, Free Speech and Counterterrorism in Australia, make a strong case that the "lack of formal protection for free speech and other human rights has allowed Australia's federal parliament to enact many laws in response to terrorism that would be unthinkable in other [democratic] countries."

Moreover, when things get sloppy we need to be concerned. On 16 November 2018, for example, the Inspector-General for Intelligence and Security, Margaret Stone, told the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security that she was "very concerned that the inspector-general's office doesn't appear in the legislation" it was expected to oversight. When things like that happen, we know we should not just be alert but also alarmed.

If you could freely wander around the engine rooms of our intelligence agencies and chat to the men and women who do the hard yards, there's one thing they'd tell you in their customary laconic way: Never forget that age-old saying, "Who guards the guardian?" Toohey's book explains why they'd say that.