AUSTRALIAN SECURITY INTELLIGENCE ORGANISATION• 251984, written largely in the third person by David Rees. It contained
a detailed breakdown of the StB’s structure and identified dozens of
the organization’s personnel. In his memoirs, August described the
entrapment of a source he referred to by his StB code namelora,
who was actuallyEdward Scott, formerly the British charge ́d’af-
faires in Prague; Scott was never prosecuted for passing classified
information to the Czechs.AUSTRALIAN SECURITY INTELLIGENCE ORGANISATION
(ASIO).British Intelligence has always enjoyed a close relationship
with ASIO, which was created in March 1949 as a direct conse-
quence of representations made byMI5with respect to classified in-
formation that was known to have leaked to the Soviets. Several
venonatexts exchanged between Moscow and the Soviet embassy
in Canberra indicated that a particular document dealing with post-
war defense planning and dated March 1946 had been compromised,
and MI5’sRoger Holliswas sent to Australia in 1947 and again in
1948 to assist in the investigation. The evidence invenonasug-
gested widespread penetration of the Australian government, and the
prime minister, Ben Chifley, was persuaded that a security service
based on the British model was required. Accordingly, a respected
judge, Geoffrey Reed, was appointed to head ASIO and MI5 lent
Robert Hemblys-Scalesto assist in developing its research capabil-
ity. Thereafter MI5’s Far East expert,Courtney Young, was as-
signed to the British High Commission as thesecurity liaison
officer, with responsibility for supervising the pursuit of leads pro-
vided by ‘‘the source,’’venona.
The first spies to be identified were Wally Clayton, codenamed
claude, who was a well-known Communist activist, and Alfred
Hughes, a police sergeant in the vice squad, codenamed ben.
Uniquely, ASIO was to benefit from almost contemporaneous decryp-
tion of thevenonatraffic to Canberra until the Soviets changed their
cipher procedures in 1949, thereby terminating the source.
Since 1949 ASIO has developed a close relationship with its Brit-
ish counterpart, in much the same way that the Australian Secret In-
telligence Service (ASIS), created in 1952 with advice fromFergie
Dempsterof the BritishSecret Intelligence Service, is exception-
ally close to SIS and the Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) is