Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By John Blaxland & Clare Birgin, UNSW Press, $49.99
It’s a fair question: why does Australia have a national Signals Intelligence (Sigint) agency? This book addresses this question, among others, to explain the antecedents of Sigint and cyber for a contemporary audience.
For a long time, the Sigint story has been kept secret – until now. What does it do and why is it controversial? How significant are its ties with key partners, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand, to this arrangement?
This is the first book to offer a consolidated history of Australian Sigint and cyber in Australia, covering the period all the way from Federation through to the present.
Blaxland, Professor of International Security and Intelligence Studies in the Stragetic and Defence Studies Centre, and Birgin present a broad panorama giving a sense of the scale and the scope of Sigint and its role in the advent of cyber.
Revealing Secrets is a compelling account of Australian Signals intelligence, its efforts at revealing the secrets of other nations, and keeping ours safe. It brings to light those clever Australians whose efforts were for so long entirely unknown or overlooked.
Blaxland and Birgin, who during a 30-year career at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade placed focus on national security and intelligence, traverse the royal commissions and reviews that shaped Australia’s intelligence community in the 20th century and consider the advent and the impact of cyber.
In unearthing this integral, if hidden and a little understood part of Australian statecraft, this book increases our understanding of the past, present and what lies ahead.
Full of facts and figures, charts and diagrams, Revealing Secrets tells the noteworthy but little-known story of how a small, back-room military office grew into a major Australian government agency. It’s well researched, commanding and comprehensible,
