ASIO boss Mike Burgess reveals foreign spies seeking to disrupt AUKUS, hunt for secrets

The director-generals of ASIO and the Office of National Intelligence, Mike Burgess and Andrew Shearer, have revealed efforts are already under way by adversaries to disrupt the trilateral technology-sharing deal between Australia, the US and the UK through disinformation and manipulation of opinion.

"This is happening. It's real," Mr Shearer said.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced the decades-long nuclear-powered submarine program in March, alongside US President Joe Biden and UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

The estimated $368 billion program will allow Australia to become just the seventh country to have access to nuclear-powered propulsion technology after the US, the UK, France, China, Russia and India.

Speaking on a National Security College podcast, released Thursday afternoon, the two heads said the role of intelligence agencies was to thwart efforts seeking to undermine the deal.

Mr Burgess said ASIO had been originally formed in response to US and UK intelligence reports informing Australia it had been "penetrated with Soviet spies" and could not be trusted with secrets.

"Seventy-four years later, our allies, our mates, are sharing with us some of their most sensitive technology," he said.

"They trust us to protect those secrets. We know that to be true and as Andrew [Shearer] said, people are already coming after those [AUKUS] secrets and looking to interfere with this."

Mr Shearer, a former national security adviser to Tony Abbott, said it was the second pillar of AUKUS in particular that needed to be well-guarded.

Pillar two aims to give the three nations a technological edge to counter China.

"Another area where intelligence is working incredibly hard in concert with Defence and the wider government team [is] to make sure that we maximise the benefits of the partnership," Mr Shearer said.

"And that obviously involves a whole lot of opportunities around the nuclear-powered submarine program but it also involves the new technologies that are being developed under pillar two of AUKUS, which goes to areas like hypersonics, quantum applications, sensing robotics, and so forth, just incredible opportunities for us."

READ MORE:

The ASIO head said Australia's open justice system and transparency could sometimes mean the agencies were at a disadvantage from adversaries seeking to "have a crack".

But Mr Burgess said his decision to take some of ASIO's work out from the shadows would make the country more secure.

"There's no point having this stuff if we're just putting it in a filing cabinet for government to read," he said.

"The reason why I started the threat assessment is I think I have to explain to the people of Australia the threats we face.

"There's no point just having a view of it and, of course, we could just have a view and take our own action and do all that quietly.

"But I think it's important, not to alarm them, but just to help them understand the world in which we live."