The answers he got informed Australia’s stunning 2018 decision to block Chinese firm Huawei from bidding to build the nation’s 5G network. It also throws into stark relief a decision made this week in Britain when, on Thursday, the UK government announced it would not follow Australia’s lead. Gilding's counterparts in British intelligence had produced a very different assessment to that of Gilding’s ASD officers: in the UK, Huawei will be welcomed to participate in the 5G rollout. The internet of everything This technology, literally the fifth generation of mobile broadband, will be a crucial component of the "internet of things". It will connect every appliance in our homes and will carry the massive flows of data when trucks, trains, cars, power stations, hospitals and water utilities are automated and driverless. If a network is compromised, those doing the hacking could potentially infiltrate a host of critical infrastructure. Gilding, who left ASD last year, insists he directed his team to find a way to mitigate the risk that the Chinese government could compel Huawei to compromise these digital superhighways in Australia. “We wanted to come up with a package of mitigations to let Huawei in, and we put our best people on it,” says Gilding, who has never before been interviewed by the Australian media. “But we found we couldn’t.”

As it stands, cyber offensive teams run by spy agencies in places like China, the US and Australia must expend considerable time and effort to penetrate a secure network. “The costs are very high and it takes a huge amount of work by a big team,” Gilding says. But if a cyber offensive team — government-employed hackers — can compel the actual company that is running the network to follow its orders, then the task becomes much, much easier. We are not anti-China by any means. It is just that China has form over a decade of large-scale hacks of our networks. Former intelligence chief Simeon Gilding Huawei argues that despite being headquartered in an authoritarian country where the Chinese Communist Party’s intelligence and military apparatus reign supreme, it operates free of government influence. But Gilding doesn’t buy this. He also insists his problem is not with Huawei, but with the Chinese state’s record of cyber attacks on Australia - and the fact that it has the power to direct private firms to follow its commands. “We are not anti-China by any means. It is just that China has form over a decade of large-scale hacks of our networks.”

Mistaken assumptions The British decision to involve Huawei was, according to Gilding, based on the mistaken assumption that a country can apply “traditional” defences to stop a cyber attack launched with the help of a company running part or all of a 5G network. Gilding says this underestimates the capability of Chinese state hackers, who he calls “top tier.” US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson discuss the role of Huawei in British 5G networks at Downing Street on Thursday. Credit:Getty Images In carrying out Australia's assessment, his own team concluded that if they could coerce a network controller such as Huawei to insert complex code during a system update, they could gain control of parts of a 5G network and never be detected. “They [the British] think they can manage the risk but we don’t think that is plausible given Huawei would be subject to direction from hostile intelligence services.”

Huawei Australia’s spokesman Jeremy Mitchell says ASD’s assessment relied on at outdated understanding of how 5G will work. He argues that multiple vendors can help run parts of a 5G network, mitigating the risk of compromise. “We think the UK decision has been based on a long investment in finding how this technology works” by Britain’s intelligence experts, says Mitchell. “ASD had relied on a old version of 5G technology.” Mitchell also says that if ASD’s concern is really about China, then it should equally apply to the other key players in the 5G debate, Nokia and Ericsson, as both manufacture in China and could also theoretically face demands from the government. Huawei is hoping the British decision will be replicated across the world and may even force a rethink in Australia and the US. But in Canberra, Gilding thinks this is unlikely. Contrary to multiple press reports that assert Malcolm Turnbull simply followed US president Donald Trump’s lead when banning Huawei in 2018, Gilding insists the decision was made on his team’s advice about how to best protect Australia. That advice has not changed and is unlikely to, given the man who signed off on Gilding’s work, former ASD director Mike Burgess, now heads ASIO. Sources close to Malcolm Turnbull also point out it was Turnbull who forcefully briefed Donald Trump about the need to ban Huawei from 5G, rather than the other way around. Despite this, Huawei continues to push the line that Australia has been dancing to Trump’s tune when it comes to Huawei.

“I think the Australian intelligence agencies are more in line with the US approach than anyone else,” says Mitchell. The international view Gilding says the decision in Britain appears political, a view also shared with the Australian government and intelligence services. It is Russia, rather than China, that most occupies the minds of British counter-espionage chiefs while Britain's desire to win a post-Brexit trade deal with Beijing may have also influenced this week’s decision. Huawei is embedded in Britain’s telecoms infrastructure and removing it from the next-generation project would have been expensive and caused delays in delivery. European countries such as Germany, which was incensed at the US’s hacking of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone and which has not seen a debate about CCP interference on the scale it has been in Australia, may well follow suit.

While Britain's decision places strain on the "Five Eyes" intelligence relationship, those who have worked in or with Australian intelligence say it will have no impact on intelligence sharing — at least not in the short term. The Morrison government was hoping the Five Eyes partners would stick together on the Huawei ban, and not just to protect their networks in the short term. It also hoped to encourage investment in other service providers to take on Huawei's dominance in 5G – a position the Chinese company has achieved with the help of huge state subsidies amid accusations of intellectual property theft. Misinformation Since leaving ASD in December, Gilding has watched the debate about Huawei and 5G be muddied my misinformation from all sides. He will not comment on the company directly, or its employment of former politicians and military personnel to spruik its claims. However, he is adamant that claims that any large Chinese company could resist an order from the Chinese government are implausible. Huawei’s backers are similarly adamant, saying those who accuse the firm of spying are over-reaching given the absence of verified evidence on the public record. But Gilding’s concerns are about what could happen if Huawei was given the keys to the kingdom.