Australia’s First Spies: The Remarkable Story of Australia’s Intelligence Operations, 1901–1945

A prospective reader might be tempted to assume that this book is devoted to the origins of Australia’s best-known domestic spying agency, ASIO. In fact, its purview is a much wider and in many ways more challenging one. The book is a detailed study of the development of Australia’s capacity to undertake international espionage activities, both through signals intelligence (SIGINT) and through human intelligence (HUMINT). Though such activity ultimately has global dimensions, unsurprisingly the connections with the Asia-Pacific region are the strongest, especially during periods of war.