The Dili spying operation shamed Australia to the negotiating table. East Timor’s government will not be deterred in pressing its case to scrap an oil treaty worth billions of dollars over claims of spying by Australia, an international negotiator says. “The whole experience of the negotiation from 2000 on and through this whole episode was to see a country that – yes, in many ways focuses on the public good – but where corporate greed was a big part of it, because the Howard and Downer government, they were shills for the corporations,” Galbraith said. The Treaty on Certain Maritime Arrangements in the Timor Sea (CMATS) was signed in January 2006 by foreign ministers Alexander Downer and Jose Ramos-Horta. Timor-Leste’s government, with Galbraith as its chief negotiator, was desperate to get a fair deal from the bountiful underwater oil and gas reserves that lay between it and Australia, a trusted ally and regional powerhouse. “And yet our plan was to deprive them of oil revenue.”. The agreed boundary skirted the edges of the permits issued to Woodside and other companies – well north of the median line. From his viewpoint, they had revealed a crime. Charges against Bernard Collaery and his retired Asis agent client confirm the government has few regrets about an exploitative exercise against a friendly neighbour. The case drew immediate condemnation from lawyers, former judges, academics, and civil society groups. “I can’t think of anything more crass than what has occurred,” he said. Gusmão saw it as a moral issue. Clinton Fernandes, an Australian Intelligence Corps officer from 1997 to 2006 now at the University of New South Wales, is not so constrained. And it was not something you do for commercial advantage.”. Australia’s objective in the negotiations was to retain rights to hydrocarbon-rich areas of the Timor Sea much closer to Timor than to Australia.In the early 1960s, Australia issued petroleum exploration permits in the Timor Sea to Woodside, now Australia’s largest natural gas producer, in areas contested by Indonesia and Portuguese Timor. Australia defends a raid on the offices of a lawyer representing East Timor in a spying row case against Australia at The Hague. Collaery is restricted by national security legislation from talking about the operation. Australia is accused of spying on East Timor leaders in 2004 when the two countries were negotiating a gas treaty. The July 2020 cover of Australian Foreign Affairs. As Timor-Leste’s minister of state, Ágio Pereira, told a reception after the signing ceremony, the treaty marked a “new chapter in the bilateral relationship”. Australia is accused of conducting an operation that targeted East Timor’s Cabinet when the two countries were negotiating a gas treaty in 2004. East Timor will abandon the multi-billion dollar oil and gas treaty at the centre of sensational spying claims by Australia. Despite UN resolutions calling on Indonesia to withdraw, Australia commenced negotiations with Indonesia in 1979 to agree on a boundary between Australia and occupied East Timor… The prosecution of Collaery and Witness K throws a spotlight on the nexus between politics and intelligence, and the unfettered power of ministers in Australia’s intelligence regime. In 2013–2014, Timor-Leste ranked as Australia's 118th largest goods trading partner, with total merchandise trade valued at $24 Million Australia and Timor-Leste had been on an international cooperation in agriculture with Timor-Leste's largest agriculture export is Coffee. The digital recordings were then allegedly couriered across town to the Australian embassy, and sent to Canberra for analysis.”. The listening devices would reveal Timor-Leste’s bottom line, its negotiating tactics and the competing views of cabinet members. As a former US ambassador to Croatia, Galbraith had frequent access to US intelligence. The Asis operation remained secret. This week, Witness K pleaded guilty to sharing protected Asis information. Collaery’s charges related to an Australian Secret Intelligence Service operation in Dili in 2004, in which Canberra is believed to have recorded Timor-Leste officials’ private discussions about maritime boundary negotiations with Australia. The spy obtained permission to talk to an approved lawyer, Bernard Collaery, a barrister and one-time attorney general for the ACT. In Australia, it confirmed that the government will not tolerant dissent, and had few regrets about an exploitative operation against a friendly neighbour. Instead, secrecy laws should make allowances for disclosures in the public interest, the report said. The treaty was signed. She is a researcher and author of Crossing the Line: Australia’s Secret History in the Timor Sea. David Irvine, the director general of Asis at the time of the Dili maritime boundary negotiations, was then director general of Asio. Woodside discovered the Greater Sunrise oil and gas fields in 1974. “Individuals with a conscience and courage, representing the very best of Australians as I know them – instinctively sympathetic to the underdog, the weak and vulnerable.”. “Whatever happens from here, the courage they have displayed is already etched into Australian political history,” she says. After a border dispute and spying scandal, can Australia and Timor-Leste be ... invasion and forced integration of East Timor in 1975-76. According to the article, “Downer directly authorised the operation to listen covertly to the negotiations in a cabinet room built with Australian aid”. Tensions rose last week when the Australia Security Intelligence Office raided the Canberra office of the lawyer who is representing East Timor in the spying … This week, Griffith University integrity expert Prof AJ Brown and his team published a major study examining the experiences of whistleblowers. The 2005 Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor estimated that more than 150,000 people, a quarter of the population, were murdered or deliberately starved to death between 1974 and 1999, when the territory was under Indonesian rule – a brutal occupation aided and abetted by Australia. Those who blew the whistle externally experienced at least a third more repercussions than whistleblowers who stayed internal, the research found. “Witness K, as the secret agent became known, and Collaery, are brave Australians,” former Timor-Leste president José Ramos-Horta wrote last month while calling for the pair to be awarded his nation’s highest honour. Peter Galbraith was playing a high-stakes game. “I didn’t see it as a national security issue then and I don’t now,” Preston tells Guardian Australia. They now face jail time, Last modified on Tue 13 Aug 2019 00.43 EDT. Those forces would wait almost a decade to exact revenge. His efforts to get it back stretched across six years of secret hearings in the administrative appeals tribunal. This was the outcome the Howard government was desperate to avoid in the negotiations more than a decade earlier – so desperate that it allegedly diverted intelligence assets from the war on terror to assist Australia’s negotiating team in Dili. Australia’s Scott Morrison with Timor-Leste’s Taur Matan Ruak at the Government Palace in Dili on 30 August 2019. Labor has, so far, been relatively quiet on the case. The raid lasted six hours, stretching well into the afternoon. In his 2018 book Island off the Coast of Asia, Fernandes writes that the listening devices installed in the Palácio do Governo “were turned on and off by a covert agent inside the building. The most shocking development came midway through last year. Australia refused Portugal’s requests for talks and instead negotiated a treaty with Indonesia in 1972. He said he would travel to Canberra if necessary, to give evidence in support of Collaery and Witness K, because, he told me, it would be against his conscience not to. Patrick, the crossbench senator, used parliamentary privilege earlier this year to highlight Downer and Woodside’s role in the Timor Sea negotiations. Then came the former spy who raised his concern about the involvement of the Australian Secret Intelligence Services (ASIS) in the illegal bugging. Witness K’s home was simultaneously raided and his passport confiscated. It’s a stark contrast to their treatment in Australia. Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP, Witness K and the 'outrageous' spy scandal that failed to shame Australia. And it is arguably what drove Witness K to later raise with the Inspector General of Intelligence and Security disquiet within Asis about the operation. In October 2004, the Dili bugging operation reportedly commenced during the second round of boundary negotiations between Australia and Timor-Leste. Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s government is intensifying the drive, commenced under the previous Labor government, to shut down East Timor’s legal case and prevent further public exposure of the spying operation, which began in 2004 during negotiations in Dili on the $40 billion oil and gas treaty. To stay independent, free, and sustainable, our community needs the help of friends and readers like you. Australia ordered by The Hague to stop spying on island formally known as East Timor during dispute over £21.5 billion oil and gas fields George Brandis, Australia’s attorney-general Photo: … But does that social licence extend to using espionage for illegal, immoral or corrupt acts? They did this in the Nuclear Test case (Sir Ninian Stephen) and also in the East Timor Case (Sir Garfield Barwick). The report also identified a separate need to reform blanket criminal prohibitions on the unauthorised release of information, similar to those used to prosecute Witness K and Collaery case. Other whistleblowers have faced threats and termination for revealing information clearly in the public interest. Unbeknownst to Galbraith, Australian Secret Intelligence Service (Asis) agents had been instructed to bug key offices of the Timor-Leste government. Retired diplomat Bruce Haigh says Asis officers involved in the Dili operation were put in an impossible position: “People in Asis are not devoid of conscience. Files from the house and office of Canberra-based lawyer for the East Timorese government, Bernard Collaery, were removed by ASIO in the raid. • This is an edited extract of Kim McGrath’s essay Drawing the Line from the latest Australian Foreign Affairs - Spy v Spy, published on Monday. Select groups of congressmen also receive briefings on specific operation types prior to their occurrence, he said. Collaery helped the Timor-Leste government build a case against Australia at The Hague, alleging the bugging had rendered the treaty void. Prosecutors have lodged separate criminal proceedings against Richard Boyle, a tax office whistleblower, and David McBride, a military lawyer who leaked documents to ABC journalists. “I’d taken protective measures against Australian espionage, which I thought would be based on cell phones and internet, but I thought it was pretty crude to be bugging the prime minister’s offices. The cases have opened a debate about the adequacy of Australia’s whistleblowing protections. East Timor had signed an oil and gas treaty with Australia but after the bugging case was publicly reported, tried to have the treaty scrapped on the grounds the bugging was illegal. These provisions should be adopted in Australia.”. The revelations were splashed across mainstream media, first through the Australian, then the ABC. Last month, the Australian Capital Territory supreme court ruled that essential parts of the trial would be heard in secret. Bernard Collaery says the head of ASIS ordered a team into East Timor to conduct work which was well outside the proper functions of ASIS. The following year, with Australia’s covert support, Indonesia invaded Portuguese Timor. The pair’s actions embarrassed powerful forces within government, intelligence, and corporate Australia. Unlike Portugal, which had argued for a median-line boundary, Indonesia suggested joining the end points of the 1972 treaty, which would have put Greater Sunrise entirely in Australian waters. ABC Radio Darwin reported on the statement, but the dispute was ignored by the national media until Leo Shanahan published a story in the Australian on 29 May 2013. Collaery’s own attempts to publish a book on the affair prompted threats of jail from the Australian government. “Furthermore, all members of the House and Senate intelligence committees and their key staffers are regularly provided with extended footage of completed operations involving, for example, drone strikes. In September, the Coalition, led by Tony Abbott, won the federal election. Gusmão planned to go to Canberra to give evidence in the trial, until Covid-19 restrictions prevented him from travelling. “There’s another aspect to this affair that most Australians haven’t appreciated – the moral injury felt by the people of Timor-Leste,” Fernandes said. The 2002 Timor Sea Treaty was intended as an interim agreement, that is without prejudice to the position … Witness K and Collaery now face jail time for helping correct what they saw as a gross injustice. “Such a reform would parallel improvements to whistleblower laws, rather than seeking to convert whistleblower protection laws into more general laws aimed at public disclosure of information.”. A second raid was taking place at the home of Witness K, who was preparing to give evidence at The Hague. The 127-room Central Maritime Hotel was a converted Russian hospital ship that was rebuilt in Finland, used as a hotel in Myanmar and then towed to Dili because there were no hotels or restaurants of suitable standard for international visitors. Fernandes, from UNSW, said the case speaks to another critical institutional failing: the inability for Australia’s parliament to scrutinise intelligence operations. Such an approach was recommended in 2010 by the Australian Law Reform Commission’s inquiry into secrecy laws but has not been implemented. Crossbench senator Rex Patrick accused prosecutors of sitting on evidence for three years to avoid a diplomatic incident. Unfortunately for Collaery and Witness K, and the 7,000 staff currently working in Australia’s intelligence agencies, it also shows that opportunities for an operative to challenge a direction to perform an immoral or illegal act are limited and likely to be career-ending. The subject of the meeting was Bernard Collaery, Gusmão’s former lawyer, who was pleading not guilty to breaches of Australia’s intelligence act. Close. Civil society groups have printed “solidarity with Bernard Collaery” T-shirts and banners, which Fernandes says will soon be a visible presence across Dili. “That was what was really important to them. John Howard meets Australian troops leading the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Timor-Leste on 1 September 1999. “It was outrageous,” Galbraith tells Guardian Australia from his home in the US. “What’s worse is that what they revealed should be deeply shaming to Australia. It was a good deal for the Australian government, and a boon for the joint venture of multinationals, led by Woodside, seeking to exploit the Timor Sea. Relations between the governments of Australia and East Timor have been strained as a result of the dispute and hit a low point after the spying allegations emerged in 2013. The raids were just the start. They would object to such an immoral operation, but there is no avenue for them to raise concerns.” The former Asis spy Warren Reed argues that most intelligence officers have “a keen sense” of democratic values and “will generally stand firm against attempts by their service’s management to diverge from those widely accepted norms of behaviour”. A provisional agreement, the Timor Sea Treaty, signed when East Timor became independent on 20 May 2002 defined a Joint Petroleum Development Area – J.P.D.A. ... As Australia and Timor-Leste prepare to … Timor-Leste had by then dropped its case against Australia, paving the way for the signing of a new treaty on the Timor Sea maritime boundary in March 2018. Prof Clinton Fernandes says civil society groups have printed ‘solidarity with Bernard Collaery’ T-shirts and banners. It was 2004 and, in the Dili heat, the distinguished US diplomat sat opposite Australian officials, bartering over a nation’s future. “A party to a legal case, had just waltzed into their opponent’s chambers, and seized their legal briefs. Supporters of Bernard Collaery and Witness K outside the supreme court in Canberra. In 2002, he became Timor-Leste’s first president, and later served as its prime minister. In the first week of January 2019, a private jet landed at Presidente Nicolau Lobato International Airport in Dili, the capital of Timor-Leste. “As a law clerk, a week out from being admitted as a solicitor, and as an Australian citizen, who believed that I lived in a fair democratic country, I lost a lot of confidence in the government, and the law, that day.”. Australia’s spy watchdog is carefully considering a complaint alleging Australia broke the law when it bugged East Timor’s cabinet during lucrative oil and gas negotiations, documents show. According to a statement Collaery made to federal parliament, part of the complaint involved an operation Witness K “had been ordered to execute in Dili, Timor-Leste”. “This preserves executive freedom while also ensuring a check on executive overreach,” Fernandes said. “You need physical access to the room, so you have to invent a plausible story. In early 2008, Witness K approached the IGIS, Ian Carnell, alleging that a cultural change within Asis had led to his constructive dismissal. “They want Australia to be a good neighbour, not an eavesdropper who breaks the 10th commandment repeatedly. It was conveniently moored opposite the waterfront white-stuccoed Palácio do Governo. Then you have to map the geometry of the office, check the acoustics, work out where to place the listening devices, and because it’s going to go on for several weeks or months, you need a power source.” And in this case, where the cover story involved renovating the government offices under the guise of an Australian aid program, Asis needed skilled tradespeople to carry out the renovations. The office of the IGIS is responsible for ensuring Australia’s intelligence agencies act “legally and with propriety, comply with ministerial guidelines and directives and respect human rights”. He said Australia could consider adopting the US model, where intelligence and judiciary committees are regularly briefed about intelligence collection programs. Collaery had flown to The Hague 24 hours earlier to ready Timor-Leste’s case against Australia. It focused attention on Australia’s hypocritical criticism of China’s South China Sea claims and made a mockery of Australia’s backing of the “international rules-based order”. Timor-Leste then took Australia through a compulsory conciliation process under United Nations rules, which against Australia's initial objections, resulted in a new Timor Sea Treaty in 2018. On 3 May 2013, the then foreign minister Bob Carr and attorney general Mark Dreyfus issued a statement advising that Timor-Leste had initiated arbitration: “Timor-Leste argues that ... Australia did not conduct the CMATS negotiations in 2004 in good faith by engaging in espionage ... Australia has always conducted itself in a professional manner in diplomatic negotiations and conducted the CMATS treaty negotiations in good faith.”. In 3 of those 5 (including the current Timor Leste case), Australia has appointed a former High Court judge as its ad hoc judge. They drove Bracks to the waterfront café at the Novo Turismo Resort and Spa, where Gusmão was waiting. This was a damning indictment of Australia’s negotiators, some of the best and brightest lawyers in government, backed by the resources of multiple departments. The revised deal was far more favourable to the smaller nation, and it is now expected to reap between 70% and 80% of total revenue. As Collaery told Steve Bracks in April 2020, the Timorese “knew they’d been dudded, they just didn’t know how”. Lawyer Bernard Collaery arrives at the ACT law courts in in August 2019. n the first week of January 2019, a private jet landed at Presidente Nicolau Lobato International Airport in Dili, the capital of. 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