The release of the Chilcot report into the British government’s decision to join the United States-led invasion of Iraq took almost as long to deliver as the battle to investigate one of Australia’s most highly classified leaks — to Andrew Bolt.
In 2003 Andrew Wilkie resigned from the Office of National Assessments over the decision by Australia’s government to join the fight. But before quitting, Wilkie, as an analyst, had written a top-secret intelligence paper on the potential humanitarian impact of invading Iraq.
In June 2003, after Wilkie had been speaking out in the media and before parliamentary committees on Iraq, Bolt sought to discredit Wilkie’s expertise on the Iraq campaign. He wrote a Herald Sun column entitled “Spook misspoke” quoting from the ONA report:
“Andrew Wilkie sells himself as the spy who couldn’t be fooled over Iraq. He’s the one spook who didn’t buy what he calls the Howard Government’s ‘fairytale’ and ‘exaggerations’ about the threat of Saddam Hussein. But when I go through the only secret report that Wilkie ever wrote about Iraq as an Office of National Assessments analyst, I wonder just who fell for a ‘fairytale’.”
While Federal Police have been swift to raid the offices of the Labor Party in relation to leaks from the NBN, we gather Bolt’s office was never raided as part of the investigation into how he obtained such highly classified material. Bolt’s source is still unknown. According to Media Watch at the time, all copies of the report were supposed to be under lock and key, except for a copy given to then-foreign minister Alexander Downer’s office three days before the Bolt article was published.
Although Wilkie ultimately ended up in Parliament as the MP for Denison, Labor has kept up the battle to find out who the leaker was. The AFP conducted an investigation throughout late 2003 and 2004 into the leak but police made no arrests or prosecutions. Under freedom of information law, Labor MP Andrew Leigh sought a copy of the AFP report from the investigation in April 2015 and obtained a redacted copy, in which the names of the staffers in Downer’s office who had been interviewed as part of the investigation were removed.
Leigh had, correctly, speculated that Liberal minister Josh Frydenberg, then a staffer for Downer and John Howard, would be named in the document.
[Chilcot Inquiry: how Blair deliberately made the terror threat worse]
In late May, the case went before the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, which ultimately decided, to the objections of the staff involved, to publish the names in the report. While Bolt was seeking to use the document to discredit Wilkie, the report is a chilling insight into the AFP’s methods to attempt to track down a journalist’s source. Police accessed Downer and Frydenberg’s call records to hunt down the leaker but could not find any contact with Bolt at the time.
The AFP report reveals Downer’s office had three copies of the report; the third was faxed to Downer staffer Craig Maclachlan, who was working with Frydenberg. The report suggests there was “nothing to link” the staffers’ calls at the time to Bolt. In the interview given to the AFP at the time, Frydenberg said he had locked the report in question in a safe overnight and then faxed it to Downer in the morning. Downer was said to have “disposed of the document in a suitable manner”. There were 84 copies of the report in circulation and “widespread non-compliance with document handling procedures”.
The AFP investigation ultimately found no direct evidence to suggest the document Frydenberg had was the source used in the Bolt article. The ONA document, while being top-secret, was “unremarkable”, according to the AFP, and Wilkie himself put much of its contents in the public arena before Bolt’s article.
While Bolt said he was going through the report, the AFP found that without any visual image “it cannot be categorically ruled out that he compiled his story without direct access”.
Wilkie again referred Bolt to the AFP when he again made reference to the report in an article in 2014, but the AFP said there was not enough evidence to warrant reopening the investigation. Following the damning Chilcot report released this week, Wilkie is now calling for a Chilcot-style inquiry into Australia’s involvement in Iraq:
“Frankly, the blood of the Australians killed in the 2005 Bali bombing, and in the Lindt Cafe siege and elsewhere, is on their hands. These matters have never been properly investigated in Australia and there remains a pressing need for an inquiry similar to Chilcot.”
Hey Josh. Great to see you/Crikey running with this. For what it’s worth here’s a link to a bunch of stories I wrote for Margo Kingston’s Webdiary at the time. I spent a lot of time chasing this story coz my bro was fighting in Iraq and as an ex-army officer myself it angered me very much that people would use classified material for pure political purposes so recklessly in a time of war.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/06/08/1086460283634.html
Crikey readers if you check out the links please do keep in mind that like most of us at Webdiary I was not a professional journo or a terribly fabulous (ie succinct) writer. The style and tone is at times excruciatingly turgid and hysterical, a bit embarrassing to my own ears now. There was so much disbelief at Webdiary at what was unfolding re: Iraq, so blatantly and unashamedly, so observably. It was as if the entire public polity was going insane; that whole war ‘debate’ was a titanic farce. We mostly ran on righteous anger around Margo’s joint, she was under constant pressure from even her own SMH colleagues and a stream of daily filth from the RWDB Murdoch crew. Our totally OTT style and stance was as much protective of our own battered souls as anything else. But I went as methodically as I could to ‘the horse’s mouth’ on the ONA leak. I interviewed Wilkie at length, Bolt (phone), texted with Chris Kenny (brief FU Jack!) and emailed the AFP, DPMC and Foreign Affairs etc multiple times.
Even, in the end, had a spray at ‘the Meeja’ for being so apathetic over the story. As I was wont to do, back in the day…
Keep at it, Josh! This stuff matters. A lot of players involved are still around, and still powerful and influential. Bravo Crikey, too.
And incidentally, Josh…I can appreciate Crikey’s/journos’ instinctive inclination to be generally reluctant in supporting the pursuing of sources of leaks. But as critical to a functioning press as the laudable collegiate sentiment of the principle of source confidentiality is surely a collective responsibility among journalists to ensure that that principle is not cynically abused. The Bolt ONA ‘leak’ was not an example of a brave whistleblower risking all to reveal important information in the public interest. It was the quasi-governmental spoon-feeding of said information to a friendly, politically-biased propagandist, who then grossly distorted it for rank partisan purposes. Journalists need to recognise the difference and reject such cynicism angrily, if they want continued public support for and good faith in what is a crucial vocational convention.
The Bolt ‘leak’ and its lingering unresolved aftermath in my view damages rather than strengthens the integrity of that convention. Cheers.
Could Bolt be a ASIO UNDERCOVER agent, reporting back to Murdoch?
Long may Wilkie remain as a thorn in the side of those Howard apologists and armchair warmongers. Another reason why his seat in Denison will remain his as long as he wants it.
Apologies not necessary Jack. I was incapable of coherent thought due to the disbelief and anger of the decision.
I would love to see an extended inquiry into this, and while we’re there perhaps we could have another genuine look at all the connections to the grim episode of selling wheat (?) to Iraq in contravention of UN sanctions. Downer was the Foreign Affairs Minister then too.
So turgid, so dirty, I doubt that any of us have any real understanding of the decisions and the skullduggery involved. Howard cites that given what he knew at the time he believes it was the right decision, but as others have pointed out (Paul McGeogh, SMH today) the politicians made sure that the spooks only provided what they wanted to hear, which is essentially why Andrew Wilkie resigned. They insisted on not reading anything that was counter to their initial decision, to go to war with George W.
Andrew Wilkie’s intelligence paper might have been top-secret, but its gist was readily available in a small book entitled “War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn’t Want You to Know”. It was written in 2002 by political activist William Rivers Pitt and consisted of an in-depth interview with former United Nations weapons inspector Scott Ritter. In it, Pitt and Ritter examine the Bush administration’s justifications for war with Iraq and call for a diplomatic solution instead of war. Ritter had been a part of the UNSCOM teams that went through Iraq like a dose of salts after the First Gulf War and argued that the country’s unconventional weapons capability had been either destroyed or degraded, making the “weapons of mass destruction” claim “shaky at best”. Ritter also correctly identified a “theocratic alignment” between Iraq’s Shia majority and Iran, implying the fall of Saddam Hussein would draw those countries closer together. This is of course what eventually happened. Another unrelated source later suggested that the Iranians deliberately baited the Americans with false information about Saddams’s WMD’s in order the draw the US into attacking Iraq, thus both destroying their hated neighbour as well bogging the US and its allies in endless Middle East wars. Clever if true.
The point is that in December 2002 I bought a copy of the book for a few dollars off the shelf in a book shop in a country town in WA, and found its arguments sufficiently compelling to later join the protests against going into that war. How odd that I was able to obtain this information while John Howard, Alexander Downer and the whole apparatus of State of which they were a part, including the military, could not. A Royal Commission is definitely in order.
‘Downer was said to have “disposed of the document in a suitable manner”.’
As if this story didn’t have a stench about it already, the name Downer joins the fray. It’s nothing short of a miracle Downer had clear recall of this as, immediately prior to gaining access to Wilkie’s paper, he was suffering acute memory lapse of all matters to do with Iraq regarding the Oil for Wheat scandal. At the Cole Inquiry he couldn’t recall, couldn’t remember, wasn’t sure, couldn’t be certain, didn’t know etc. In fact his testimony was as useless as an ashtray on a motorbike.
However, Downer had pure clarity that Wilkie’s document “was disposed of…in a suitable manner.” As if. Credibility rating? Nil.
NPA too?