The book, written by two historians at the Australian National University, John Blaxland and Rhys Crawley, is based on interviews with current and former ASIO officers and access to official records. ASIO cleared the book for publication, which is the third volume of its official history.

The files show that ASIO allocated huge resources fighting intelligence gathering by the Soviet Union and its satellite states during the Cold War, and unsuccessfully tried to get Australian spies inside their embassies.

The Polish plan

One of ASIO's targets was the Polish Intelligence Service, which was one of the most active Soviet satellite spy agencies operating in Australia. In 1977 the Polish government finished a new embassy in the Canberra suburb of Yarralumla and its diplomats moved in.

ASIO had been planning "a series of operations" against the the new embassy for some time, the book says. When the operation failed badly - the book doesn't specify how - ASIO suspected it may have been deliberately compromised by an insider.

The Secret Cold War, The Official History of ASIO, 1975-1989, reveals how the spy agency tried to recruit what it thought were vulnerable Soviet diplomats. Allen & Unwin

"More worryingly, ASIO became concerned that a number of operations were failing and in some cases simply came to an abrupt stop," the book says.

"Certainly there were many possible explanations but the fact that the need-to-know principle had not been rigorously adhered to raised questions about ASIO's operational security."


ASIO's internal security section, which was responsible for finding spies among its spies, had only three staff in 1974, a time when tensions were growing between the East and West and KGB officers around the world were being told to recruit "a new generation of penetration agents in the West".

Mole hunts

While there were suspicions at the top of ASIO that it had been penetrated, internal investigations went nowhere. In 1981, Brian Toohey, a former Washington correspondent for The Australian Financial Review, reported that the KGB had planted a mole in a key government position in Canberra, citing CIA sources.

A building in Richmond, Melbourne, that was a suspected ASIO office. Supplied

The new ASIO Director-General that year, Harvey Barnett, confided to a colleague that he was worried there was a spy in the agency and about the lax security of its communications, the book says.

The book criticises ASIO's then Director of Internal Security, who isn't named, for naively suggesting the spy wouldn't be an Australian. The mole hunt lacked a "rigorous or methodical approach," it says.

"ASIO's inability to identify the degree and extent of penetration of the Organisation is an indictment but at least understandable if considered in isolation," Dr Blaxland and Dr Crawley write.

"But when placed alongside the evidence from other foreign leads that would emerge later, the picture becomes clearer that ASIO had been penetrated."


Mr Ian Barker QC arrives at the ASIO office in Canberra for the Royal Commission into Combe, 14 June 1983. Sydney Morning Herald

Missing files

The evidence for a mole comes from ASIO's failed operations, and reports from KGB defectors and spies.

ASIO was told in 1980 that Geronity Pavlovich Lazovik, a KGB agent who had been based in the Canberra embassy, was awarded a medal - possibly the Order of the Red Star - for "an intelligence recruitment while he was stationed in Australia".

Using diplomatic cover, Lazovik met dozens of public servants, Parliament House employees, journalists, members of communist parties, Soviet sympathisers and foreign diplomats when he lived in Australia from 1971 to 1977.

ASIO officers recommended in 1972 Lazovik be expelled. ASIO Director-General Peter Barbour decided not to submit the recommendation to the government because he did not want to create political controversy before that year's federal election, when power changed from the Coalition to the Labor Party.

An ASIO report into a member of the Communist Party of Australia. The Age

When ASIO agents looked up its Lazovik files in 1980 after being told about the medal, they found that 19 volumes had been destroyed without a reason being recorded.

"While not conclusive, this in itself was a possible indication of unauthorised and untoward action by somebody," the book says.

An official inquiry into the possible penetration of ASIO in 1994 by former diplomat Michael Cook has never been released.