| Australia’s top spy makes first public address |
SYDNEY Australia’s top spy warned of the “very real threat” from extremists on Thursday, in the first public address by the head of the country’s Secret Intelligence Service (Asis) in its 60-year history.
Nick Warner said the security challenges for agents had dramatically changed over the past decade, as he provided a rare glimpse into the agency’s work in a speech designed to raise public awareness about Asis.
The 9/11 attacks and the Bali bombings a year later in 2002 had redefined how spies worked. Those events had seen Asis intensify its focus on the “very real threat” posed by organisations like Al Qaeda.
Warner said there was now “a web of links between extremists from Australia to Indonesia, to the southern Philippines, to the FATA region (tribal districts) in Pakistan, and to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen, and on to Somalia”.
“We know that the intention to conduct mass casualty attacks against Western countries, including Australia, remains very real,” he said, speaking at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra.
The threats had seen ASIS evolve from “a small, essentially regional body vitally focused on the Cold War into a larger, geographically dispersed organisation” that leases with foreign intelligence services in 70 countries.
Agence France-Presse
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