Pre-ASIO The Australian Government assumed responsibility for national security and intelligence on
federation in 1901, and took over various state agencies and had to rationalise their functions. There was considerable overlap between the civil and military authorities. Similarly, there was also no Commonwealth agency responsible for enforcing federal laws. At the outbreak of
World War I, no Australian government agency was dedicated to security, intelligence or law enforcement. The organisation of security intelligence in Australia took on more urgency with a perceived threat posed by
agents provocateurs,
fifth columnists and
saboteurs within Australia. In 1915, the British government arranged for the establishment of a Commonwealth branch of the Imperial Counter Espionage Bureau in Australia. The branch came to be known as the
Australian Special Intelligence Bureau (SIB) in January 1916, and maintained a close relationship with state police forces, and later with the Commonwealth Police Force, created in 1917, to conduct investigations independent of state police forces. After the war, on 1 November 1919, the SIB and Commonwealth Police were merged to form the
Investigation Branch within the Attorney General's Department. Robert Frederick Bird Wake, one of the foundation directors of ASIO, is credited the creation of the Australian intelligence community in 1949, as claimed by Valdemar Wake, in his biography
No Ribbons or Medals of his father's work as a
counter espionage officer. Wake worked closely with Director-General Reed. During World War II, Reed conducted an inquiry into Wake's performance as a security officer and found that he was competent and innocent of the charges laid by the Army's commander-in-chief, General
Thomas Blamey. This was the start of a relationship between Reed and Wake that lasted for more than 10 years. Wake was seen as the operational head of ASIO.
Establishment and 'The Case' Following the end of World War II, the joint United States-UK
Venona project uncovered sensitive British and Australian government data being transmitted through Soviet diplomatic channels. Officers from
MI5 were dispatched to Australia to assist local investigations. The leak was eventually tracked to a spy ring operating from the
Soviet Embassy in Canberra. Allied Western governments expressed disaffection with the state of security in Australia. On 9 March 1949, Prime Minister
Ben Chifley created the post of
Director-General of Security and appointed
South Australian Supreme Court Justice
Geoffrey Reed to the post. On 16 March 1949, Chifley issued a
Directive for the Establishment and Maintenance of a Security Service. The Security Service's first authorised telephone interceptions were in June 1949, followed in July by a raid on the
Sydney office of the
Communist Party of Australia. In August 1949, Reed advised the Prime Minister that he had decided to name the service the 'Australian Security Intelligence Organization' . The new service was to be modelled on the Security Service of the United Kingdom
MI5 and an MI5 liaison team (including Sir
Roger Hollis) was attached to the fledgling ASIO during the early 1950s. Historian
Robert Manne describes this early relationship as "special, almost filial" and continues "ASIO's trust in the British counter-intelligence service appears to have been near-perfect". Among the prime suspects of the investigations were
Wally Clayton, a prominent member of the
Australian Communist Party, and two diplomats with the
Department of External Affairs, Jim Hill and
Ian Milner. However, no charges resulted from the investigations, because Australia did not have any laws against
peacetime espionage at the time.
The Petrov Affair 5 February 1951 saw the arrival in Sydney of
Vladimir Mikhaylovich Petrov, Third Secretary of the Soviet Embassy. An ASIO field officer identified Petrov as a possible 'legal', an agent of the Soviet Ministry of State Security (
MGB, a forerunner to the
KGB) operating under
diplomatic immunity. The Organisation began gently cultivating Petrov through another agent, Dr.
Michael Bialoguski, with the eventual goal of orchestrating his defection. Ultimately, Petrov was accused by the Soviet Ambassador of several lapses in judgement that would have led to his imprisonment and probable execution upon his return to the
Soviet Union. Petrov feared for his life and accepted the defection life-line provided by ASIO. The actual defection occurred on 3 April 1954. Petrov was spirited to a
safe house by ASIO officers, but his disappearance and the seeming reluctance of Australian authorities to search for him made the Soviets increasingly suspicious. Fearing a defection by Petrov,
MVD officers dramatically escorted his wife Evdokia to a waiting aeroplane in Sydney. There was doubt as to whether she was leaving by choice or through coercion and so Australian authorities initially did not act to prevent her being bundled into the plane. However, ASIO was in communication with the pilot and learned through relayed conversations with a flight attendant that if Evdokia spoke to her husband she might consider seeking
asylum in Australia. An opportunity to allow her to speak with her husband came when the Director-General of Security, Charles Spry, was informed that the
MVD agents had broken Australian law by carrying firearms on an airliner in Australian airspace and so could be detained. When the aeroplane landed in Darwin for refuelling, the Soviet party and other passengers were asked to leave the plane. Police, acting on ASIO orders, quickly disarmed and restrained the two MVD officers and Evdokia was taken into the terminal to speak to her husband via telephone. After speaking to him, she became convinced he was alive and speaking freely and asked the
Administrator of the Northern Territory for political asylum. The affair sparked controversy in Australia when circumstantial links were noted between the leader of the
Australian Labor Party and the Communist Party of Australia (and hence to the Soviet spy ring).
H.V. Evatt, the leader of the Labor Party at the time, accused Prime Minister
Robert Menzies of arranging the Petrov defection to discredit him. The accusations lead to a disastrous split in the Labor party. an English-Australian woman as an agent for Soviet intelligence; however, she was in fact an agent of ASIO. In April 1983, ASIO uncovered more Soviet attempts at espionage and
Valery Ivanov, who also held the post of First Secretary at the Soviet Embassy, was declared
persona non grata. He was ejected from Australia on the grounds that he had performed duties in violation of his diplomatic status.
Penetration by the KGB These successes were marred, however, by the penetration of ASIO by a
KGB mole in the 1970s. Due to the close defence and intelligence ties between Australia and the United States, ASIO became a backdoor to American intelligence. Upon realising ASIO was compromised, the United States pulled back on the information it shared with Australia. Following a strenuous internal audit and a joint
Federal Police investigation,
George Sadil was accused of being the mole. Sadil had been a Russian interpreter with ASIO for some 25 years and highly
classified documents were discovered in his place of residence. Federal Police arrested Sadil in June 1993 and charged him under the
Crimes Act 1914 with several espionage and official secrets related offences. However, parts of the case against him collapsed the following year. Sadil was committed to trial in March 1994, but the
Director of Public Prosecutions decided not to proceed with the more serious espionage-related charges after reviewing the evidence against him. Sadil's profile did not match that of the mole and investigators were unable to establish any kind of money trail between him and the KGB. Sadil pleaded guilty in December 1994 to thirteen charges of
removing ASIO documents contrary to his duty, and was sentenced to three months imprisonment. He was subsequently released on a 12-month
good behaviour bond. It is believed that another ASIO officer, now retired, is suspected of being the mole but no prosecution attempts have been made. In November 2004, former KGB Major-General
Oleg Kalugin confirmed to the
Australian Broadcasting Corporation's
Four Corners programme that the KGB had in fact infiltrated ASIO in the late 1970s and early 1980s. ASIO acknowledged in October 2016 that it had been infiltrated. In 2023, the mole was identified as Ian George Peacock. Peacock's code name within the KGB was "Mira".
Australian Greens party leader
Bob Brown described ASIO monitoring environmentalists as a "political weapon" used by the Government for the benefit of "foreign-owned mining corporations".
Chinese intelligence activity Nicola Roxon, the Attorney-General of Australia, blocked Chinese, state-owned company
Huawei from seeking a supply contract for the National Broadband Network, on the advice of the ASIO. The Australian government feared Huawei would provide backdoor access for
Chinese cyber espionage. In May 2013,
ABC News claimed that
China stole blueprints to the headquarters of the ASIO.
Sheri Yan and
Roger Uren were investigated by ASIO on suspicion of spying for China. Uren, former Assistant Secretary responsible for the Asia section of the
Office of National Assessments, was found to have removed documents pertaining to Chinese intelligence operations in Australia, and kept them in his apartment.
Expansion of powers, 2020 In 2020,
Peter Dutton, then
Minister for Home Affairs, introduced the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Amendment Bill 2020, which expanded ASIO's questioning powers to cover espionage, foreign interference, and political violence, while the age which ASIO can compulsively question minors has been reduced to 14 from 16. Furthermore, ASIO can authorize the usage of tracking devices without warrants. The
Law Council of Australia criticized the bill and compared it to the
2020 Hong Kong national security law, due to its expansion of questioning powers to cover political violence, which the LCA argued could be used against acts of lawful protest, a claim that ASIO head Mike Burgess rejected. In March 2021, ASIO's director-general
Mike Burgess told
The Guardian Australia that the agency had removed a "nest of spies" from an unidentified country in 2020. Burgess also acknowledged that ASIO's counter-terrorism case load relating to
right-wing extremism had increased from 30% to 40% since the
Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand. During a 2021 speech, Burgess also confirmed that ASIO would use new terminology including "ideologically motivated violent extremism" to refer to right-wing extremism and "religiously motivated violent extremism" to refer to
Islamic extremism. In early May 2024,
The Washington Post reported that ASIO had expelled two officers from India's foreign intelligence service, the
Research and Analysis Wing in 2020, alleging they were part of a "nest of spies" who had sought to cultivate politicians, monitor diaspora communities and obtain classified information. The
Post reported that the 2020 incident was part of a series of clashes between RAW and other Western domestic security services in
Germany and the
United Kingdom. In early November 2025, Burgess stated that three unidentified countries were capable of assassinating perceived political dissidents in Australia. He also confirmed that ASIO had disrupted a foreign intelligence gathering operation involving an Australian citizen, who had been instructed to gather information about Australia's economy, critical minerals and the
AUKUS defence pact.
Iranian state-sponsored terrorism In late August 2025, an ASIO investigation found that
Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IGRC) was implicated in an arson attack on a Jewish restaurant in Sydney in October 2024 and a
Melbourne synagogue in December 2024. In response, the Australian Prime Minister
Anthony Albanese declared the Iranian Ambassador Ahmad Sadeghi and three other Iranian officials
persona non grata and withdrew Australian diplomats from
Tehran. The Australian Government also confirmed it would designate the IRGC as a terrorist organisation. ==Royal commissions, inquiries and reviews==