![]() While rumours of a traitor had circulated for years, ASIO received its first concrete tip in 1980. Everything about Australia, the United States, mutual cooperation, political plans, agents planted in the Soviet embassy, surveillance squads, I mean, everything," Oleg Kalugin said in 2004. "You think that you've got an operation which is going to hit pay dirt and it just turns to dirt."Įven more significantly, he is said to have provided the Russians with highly classified intelligence documents shared with Australia under the Five Eyes intelligence alliance. But there was an absolute stonewalling of operations," he said.Īnother former officer, Gary Michael, said it was "very frustrating". I worked with a lot of inventive, intelligent people. "Invariably at some point, it wouldn't work. The operational planning in Sydney trying to expose Soviet espionage "took a lot of resources, a lot of time and effort, 25/7 you're on call", Russell recalled. In a typical case, ASIO had just begun to bug the house of a Soviet military spy in residential Canberra when he was suddenly relocated to the Soviet compound, safe from further eavesdropping.įormer ASIO counterespionage officers recalled how, year after year, their operations would fail, despite increasingly detailed preparation. The intelligence enabled the Russians to thwart virtually every operation mounted by ASIO's counterespionage teams for years. The documents stolen and sold to the Russians also included profiles of Soviet personnel in Australia, warrants taken out for operations against them, and details of the surveillance operations and rosters used by ASIO. The information was so extensive and so critical that then-KGB chairman Yuri Andropov, who later became Soviet leader, was regularly briefed on the ASIO mole's activity. The classified material provided by Peacock to his KGB handlers included details of operations conducted in Australia against Soviet targets at a time of high tension in the Cold War. ![]() So that indicates how many meetings there might be a year," Mulvenna said.įour Corners' five-month investigation forensically threaded pieces of information gathered over decades to uncover the truth about the mole. "It was very large amounts about every five or six weeks. ![]() The money paid to the mole was regularly dispatched from Moscow in a diplomatic pouch. Shmatkov would retrieve the documents and leave large wads of cash as payment. Highly classified documents would be stashed in agreed hiding spots in locations around Centennial Park. The exchanges involved a system of "dead letter box" drops. Only then would he make his way to collect the mole's secrets. "He wouldn't be the last person I'd suspect, but he wouldn't be the first." "Somehow, somewhere along the line, something happened, something happened to him, something really big or something snapped," said former Peacock colleague Harry P Russell, who is now a spy novelist. Peacock's career seemed to have plateaued as a new breed of tertiary-educated officers moved up through the ranks. Some longtime officers like Peacock, known in the service as "the old and bold", were frustrated, believing the organisation had lost direction. Its military-style leadership had gone and a judge, Edward Woodward, had been put in charge. Former colleagues described him as a keen golfer who was personable, intelligent and popular.īy the late 1970s, he held the position of supervisor-E (espionage) and had top-secret security clearance.Īt the time, ASIO was undergoing a difficult transformation. Peacock spent several years posted in Rome before returning to Australia with his family where he worked at ASIO's NSW headquarters, then located at Kirribilli on the shores of Sydney Harbour.
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