Intelligence agencies more Three Stooges than Five Eyes

The current Washington omnishambles is creating problems for the Australia–US alliance and, in particular, the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing partnership between the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

President Trump’s vendetta against Canada has led to suggestions that he may evict it from the group; his affection for Putin has led to suggestions that intelligence may leak to Russia. Are we at risk of having our intelligence services blinded?

Well, the first thing the government should do, of course, is to look at what the Australian security services have predicted about the problem. You would expect, given the amount of money we’ve put into this (the Australian Secret Intelligence Service costs the country $640 million a year), that there would have been a paper on the PM’s desk a year ago forewarning us of the possibility of these upheavals and suggesting countermeasures.

Prediction is the test. The purpose of an intelligence service is to give us advance knowledge of the factors that bear on our big decisions. Information sources that confine themselves to saying ‘Told you so’ after something bad has happened aren’t really that valuable. And by this measure, the Five Eyes needs a rather peculiar set of spectacles.

Big-picture intelligence reports from the Five Eyes have been consistently misguided for 60 years. The US has got itself into a more or less continual sequence of small and medium-sized wars that it has either lost (Vietnam, Afghanistan) or found were a waste of time and money (Iraq). The UK hasn’t taken a trick since the loss of the empire. We Australians have swung between seeing China as a Russian-puppet yellow horde (when it wasn’t) to seeing it as a friendly capitalist enabler (when it wasn’t that either).

Yes, it’s difficult to make predictions, particularly about the future, as baseballer Yogi Berra once said, and intelligence is complicated, with different fragments pointing in different directions and signals often being swamped by noise. The question is, though, whether this inherent uncertainty makes it so unreliable as to be pretty pointless. How much does it actually improve decision-making? What’s the value add?

I’m not saying that the spies got everything wrong. It’s highly probable that they’ve got it right some proportion of the time, and that when they have, the government has ignored them and taken the wrong decision anyway. WMDs, anyone? On the other hand, if all we want is support for whatever we’ve already decided to do, it’s hard to believe that a parrot trained to say ‘Spit happens’ at regular intervals wouldn’t be cheaper and take up less downtown office space.

And a parrot that had been trained to say ‘No, don’t join this war’ at regular intervals since 1964 would have been correct every single time (parrots are a long-lived species) so far.

There’s now a proposal from a not-for-profit organisation to set up a national spy museum in Canberra, to “portray Australia's history of espionage and pay tribute to those who have spied”. I’d certainly be interested to see the exhibit on our spying on East Timor during oilfield contract negotiations, but I’m not sure that that’s what they mean.

Until the museum appears, however, we don’t really know whether our intelligence services ever get it right, and we certainly don’t know if they get it more right than wrong, because finding out what they’ve said is classed as spying rather than quality assurance. We can say, however, that intelligence didn’t stop us getting into AUKUS.

Without going into any of the economic, military, strategic, ethical or nationalistic arguments against AUKUS, it would surely have been sufficient for the spooks to point out to their masters that AUKUS is a ‘treaty’, something that the current US regime uses as comfort tissue in its gold toilets. If Australian decision-making can’t save us from the latest grift from the world’s most consistent cheap con man, what good is it?

It’s easy to get seduced by the mythology of spying (I so love Jason Bourne), or the more up-to-date mythology of phone interception, into acting as if the titbits we pick up really matter. What we need in the councils of government is what we have always needed: someone who has as their special subject the bleeding obvious.

Some principles are invariant. We can’t rely on America now, and we never could. Correspondingly, there’s no point trying to suck up to them. On the other hand, we’re not going to be invaded by China. Correspondingly, there’s no point spending lots more on our defence forces (at least until they’ve worked out a way to promote generals who know how a drone works). In any case, that money is needed first to rejig our energy profile in the light of climate change, or to fix homelessness, or to bridge the gap, or anything actually useful to somebody.

Nothing in those realms depends in any way on covert intelligence.

Military intelligence is very like artificial intelligence – expensive, detailed, superficially convincing, and prone to bizarre hallucinations. We shouldn’t accept either without checking it against common sense. Our security structure is less Five Eyes than Three Stooges.

Denis Moriarty is group managing director of OurCommunity.com.au, a social enterprise that helps the country's 600,000 not-for-profits.