The problems perpetuated by the bureaucratisation of our intelligence agencies.
The phone call came in at 0630, an ungodly hour. Normally I would not be in the office so early but now that Barney is Chief of Joint Operations (CJOPS), as well as VCDF, life grows ever more interesting.
Luckily Barney and I will only have to sit it out until the next change in ADF command and control is announced. On past form this should be in about three weeks.
The caller identified himself as the Chief-of-Staff to the prime minister and asked to be 'put through to CJOPS'. I immediately wondered whether Barney had been ambushed by reporters during his morning walk with his dog.
Needless to say, Barney was not in yet. However, the caller was very polite and asked that Barney return a call to the PM ASAP. When Barney rang back, I thought it best to listen in on the conversation. It went something like this:
‘Stoush, did you see Mateline on the ABC last night?’ That was a bad start; Barney never watches television apart from war movie reruns. He claims films like Tora Tora Tora or Midway or are more informative and accurate as well as entertaining.
‘I missed that one, prime minister. I was representing the CDF at one of those endless diplomatic receptions’.
‘Well, according to Mateline, there has been a coup in Upper Kunjingini. I’ve asked ONA about it and they say they’ve never heard of the place so it must be a defence matter. Find out why we weren’t warned and let me have a report’.
To cut a long story short, Barney set up a committee to investigate the affair with himself as chairman and me – you guessed it – as secretary.
The first meeting was a bit of a farce. Foreign Affairs did not send anyone because no deputy secretaries were available to represent them, at an appropriate protocol level, at a meeting chaired by an ADF three-star.
International policy division in Defence was represented by an acting EL2. The lad in question was really a newly qualified graduate trainee who had been no further afield than a post-exam holiday in Fiji the year before. Barney assumed IP had sent him because of his unusually detailed expertise on the region within the division.
The DSD representative said that Upper Kunjingini had no external communications. Their radio transmitter had broken down and their telephone had been cut off for failure to pay the bill. ASIO’s rep said it had nothing to do with them because it was a foreign country.
The ASIS rep said their closest thing to a man on the spot, in next door Lower Kunjingini, had been expelled because his cover as a Maserati salesman was exposed when he declined to hand over a new model to the president for a mere $LK250.
The relevant DIO area desk officer – a newly transferred-in Arabic (not Kunjingin) linguist – was not yet completely across all the countries on her new beat. She did, however, produce an email referring to a briefing that had been organised some years previously for a military mission to the Kingdom of Upper Kunjingini.
The two ONA reps were triumphant (they now always attended meetings in pairs to ensue a witness to any advice offered). They knew that the fault was not theirs. It was truly a Defence matter – and they could tell the prime minister so.
Barney scratched his head a bit at all this. I could see that, accustomed as he was to bureaucratic buck-passing (and not a bad exponent of it himself), he was faced with the awful prospect of explaining yet another apparent INTELLIGENCE FAILURE to the prime minister.
That was when I won my CSC. I whispered to Barney that an intelligence analyst from the Joint Operations Intelligence Centre in Sydney had just arrived. Perhaps, I told the VCDF, our new arrival could solve the problem.
Some present expressed scepticism. Probably because they had read the recent voluminous opinion articles in the newspapers by retired senior officials claiming ADF intelligence specialists can never know anything about strategic intelligence matters.
Sergeant ‘Bulldog’ Drummond was duly summoned. Despite the name, Drummond was a slight, clerkly looking and not very smartly presented. Barney, being an air force type, was not too concerned about appearances.
‘Do you know anything about this coup in Upper Kunjingini?’ he asked. ‘What coup, sir?’ The confident query stunned the gathering. ‘Mateline said there has been a coup’, argued Barney, ‘and that a new bloke called Akepa is in charge’. ‘How would you know anyway?’ sneered one apparently inveterate newspaper reader.
Being an analyst, Drummond was silent momentarily as he pondered, but then smiled at the doubting bureaucrat. ‘Well, ladies and gentlemen, when I interpreted for the military mission to Upper Kunjingini, I became pretty friendly with the King who enjoys a beer or three. I Iater looked after his son some weekends when he started at Canberra Grammar’.
‘He told me recently that his father wanted a bit of time off to go hunting. Following an old Kunjingin custom he called in all his brothers and cousins to draw straws to work out who would stand in as King for three months. Cousin Akepa drew the short straw. There hasn’t been a coup, gentlemen.’
Barney had the last word. ‘Perhaps’, he suggested, ‘the committee could recommend an inquiry into the operations of Mateline.’