Revealing Secrets; An Unofficial History of Australian Signals Intelligence and the Advent of Cyber. By John Blaxland and Claire Birgin. NewSouth Publishing, Sydney, 2023.
Reviewed by Tim Coyle
The Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) contracted John Blaxland, Professor of International Security and Intelligence Studies at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University and former army intelligence officer, and Claire Birgin, a distinguished former diplomat, to write an official history of Australian signals intelligence in 2019. A change in ASD management policy stopped the project, so the writers elected to continue as an unofficial history; Revealing Secrets has emerged as a comprehensive history of Australian sigint from Federation to the present.
Intelligence, incorporating sigint, is a perennially popular topic and official histories of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (in three volumes – two of which were authored by John Blaxland) and the UK GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 (the latter only up to 1949!) have been published in recent years. Apart from the ASIO history, Australian intelligence history is covered in biographies such as A Man of Intelligence: The Life of Captain Theodore Eric Nave, Australian Codebreaker Extraordinary (Ian Pfennigwerth, 2006), and The Intrigue Master: Commander Long and Naval Intelligence in Australia 1913-1945 (Barbara Winter, Boolarong Press, 1995). A general all-source intelligence history is Australia’s First Spies: The Remarkable Story of Australia’s Intelligence Operations 1901-1945 (John Fahy, Allen and Unwin, 2018). Not least are the extensive writings of the late Australian National University academic, Desmond Ball, who specialised in sigint.
US intelligence histories are numerous; a particularly comprehensive naval sigint history is Combined Fleet Decoded; The Secret History of American Intelligence and the Japanese Navy in World War II (John Prados, Random House 1995) and a biography of the eccentric and undervalued Commander Joe Rochefort USN in Joe Rochefort’s War; The Odyssey of the Codebreaker Who Outwitted Yamamoto at Midway (Elliot Carlson, Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, 2011).
Although Australian military forces were very much the junior sigint partners in both World Wars, their contributions to the allied efforts grew to be a formidable establishment in the Pacific war. Always in the shadows, the operators, many of whom were women, guarded their experiences closely – some for the rest of their lives. The RAN-led Coastwatcher reporting, particularly in the Guadalcanal campaign of 1942, was vital to its success. Australian-based sigint organisations included Fleet Radio Unit Melbourne (FRUMEL), formed with USN personnel evacuated from the Philippines and joined by RAN members, was a contributor to the US victory at Midway. Eric Nave founded Central Bureau, a combined sigint organisation supporting General MacArthur’s South-West Pacific command where Americans were in initially responsible for cryptanalysis, with the Australians providing traffic analysis – a specialty developed to a high standard, having begun in the First World War. Additional to FRUMEL and Central Bureau was the Diplomatic (D) Special Section in which Japanese diplomatic traffic, intercepted by Australian Army Special Wireless Section, was decoded.
World War II mobilisation soon demonstrated to military authorities that manpower alone could not satisfy wartime demands. This led to the induction of women to the armed forces; despite initial bureaucratic reluctance, government and the services had to acquiesce. Intelligence authorities soon found women were excellent sigint intercept operators and they formed a significant proportion of the agencies’ complements.
While Australian intelligence organisations, integrated with US agencies, provided high-grade product once established and set to work, internal relationships were not always amicable. Relationships between the US Army and Navy intelligence staffs were difficult and stovepiped. FRUMEL was initially established as a combined naval organisation; the US section was led by the doctrinaire Lieutenant Commander Rudolph Fabian with the Australian section under Commanders Eric Nave and Jack Newman. Personalities clashed with the result that Nave was detached to form Central Bureau. Others, such as the Australian Lieutenant Colonel Alastair Sandford and US Major Abraham Sinkov, calmed the waters due to their superior organisational and management skills.
Three of Revealing Secret’s 11 chapters are dedicated to the fascinating sigint record of the Second World War. Chapter Five – Sigint in the Second World War 1939-41, sets the scene covering early sigint and national intelligence arrangements. Chapter Six details sigint arrangements and the War in the Pacific while Chapter Seven discusses wartime sigint successes, bureaucratic and other challenges.
As a singular Australian sigint history, the book begins with a brief description of early cryptology and intelligence in Chapter One before moving on to post-Federation Australian espionage and wireless interception leading to World War One in Chapter Two. Chapter Three covers First World War Allied Sigint. Here the RAN figured prominently through the capture of the German merchant ship HVB code and naval telegraphists developed skills in interception and traffic analysis of German East Asia Squadron communications, and victory in the Sydney-Emden action. Army wireless units followed British practice and Australian units’ traffic analysis skills were highly regarded by British commanders in the Middle East theatre.
Australian Sigint in the interwar years is the subject of Chapter Four in which Eric Nave prominently figured due to his cryptographic skills exercised in the British Far East Combined Bureau against Japanese codes.
The book’s primary sources, in the form of official archival collections, cease at 1945; the termination of the official ASD history project having precluded access to later still-classified records. Consequently, Chapter Eight – Post-war sigint to Vietnam, Chapter Nine – Reform, computers and military sigint since the 1970s, and Chapter 10 – Legislative reforms and the coming of cyber, are based on publicly available material. However, this should not disappoint as the narrative is as comprehensive as the earlier chapters. Chapter 10 reviews developments in the first two decades of the 21st century, discussing how ASD emerged from being a secretive national sigint agency into a more accountable, visible, and better understood entity. The cyber threats from state and non-state actors are a daily challenge for ASD and its mandate is now extended beyond specific sigint support to the ADF. The future will be increasingly challenging for Allied sigint agencies; artificial intelligence may render encryption obsolete.
Revealing Secrets may be an ‘unofficial’ history of Australian sigint but the book’s holistic presentation, from its infancy in World War One to the present and beyond, considerably adds value and direction to the previously disparate published literature on this topic. Each Chapter is subdivided into ‘bite-sized’ sub-topics’. For example, Chapter Six – Sigint Arrangements and the War in the Pacific includes:
– Naval Sigint Sharing and the fate of the Far East Combined Bureau;
– US Navy Sigint team arrival and FRUMEL;
– The struggle over Nave;
– Diplomatic (D) Special Section;
– Australian arrangements for protecting ‘Y’ material, and continuing security concerns;
– Revised empire-wide instructions on Sigint and Ultra;
– Sigint arrangements and MacArthur’s command;
– Central Bureau – organisation and staff, Central Bureau’s technology (discussing the US Sigaba, Rockex and Sigsaly machines;
– The Role of Women in Sigint and Allied relations;
– Service special wireless interception units;
– Radio countermeasures and radio direction finding (radar); and
– Section 22 and close US-Australian collaboration.
All this should be enough to satisfy any intelligence enthusiast; and this is only one Chapter! The narrative is supported by a range of contemporary images and organisational and workflow diagrams. The narrative style is disciplined and engaging, and the detail is such that more than one reading is needed to absorb all the detail.
Revealing Secrets should attract a wide readership – not only as a primer for intelligence practitioners wishing to explore the fascinating history of their profession, but for the general reader to go beyond James Bond and John Le Carre.
Highly recommended.
