Hello friends!

Quietly buzzing behind Australia’s COVID-19 stories and how to keep the football on telly is a scandal of epic proportions. But when it comes to the long-running spy scandal, in which Australia bugged Timor-Leste during border negotiations in 2004, the reality is so deliberately obscured that it’s hard to focus.

So, as I typically do when it comes to Australian-Timor relations, I asked Sophie Raynor. The Melbourne by way of Dili by way of Perth writer is herself promising evidence that once we can put all this hideousness behind us Australia and Timor-Leste can enjoy a productive and fruitful relationship. Let her explain just WTF is Witness K.

If you’d like to continue supporting this project please do so here for $60 a year or $6 a month:

Or just give it a share!

ThanksErin Cook

Is this not the most iconic graffiti? Snapped by Janina M Pawelz at the Australian Embassy in Dili in 2014 and accompanying many of these stories (and a very funny Instagram story I can tell you one day) ever since.

Spies disguised as aid workers popping listening devices inside the offices of a country just five years on from a devastating war. The man who led the operation eventually blowing the whistle, ultimately scrubbing out the multi-billion-dollar oil deal negotiated from those bugged rooms. His country’s top lawyer authorising prosecution of the whistle-blower and his lawyer — but not for managing the spying program. For telling the world.

That man is called Witness K. His lawyer is Bernard Collaery. The pair are facing national security charges in Australia, for K’s revelation that his county spied on Timor-Leste to gain the upper hand in lucrative oil and gas negotiations. It’s a capital-S saga that’s been described as Australia’s Watergate. Here’s what you should know about it. 

What happened in Timor-Leste?

Back in 2004, Timor-Leste was just two years into independent government and five years on from the end of a 24-year-long occupation at the hand of neighbouring Indonesia. Australia offered a grant of aid to refurbish the old Palacio de Governo, which had housed governments since Timor-Leste’s days as a Portuguese colony. Timor-Leste agreed, and Australian intelligence agents promptly joined the contractors, secretly installing covert listening devices into the building.

The devices would broadcast Timor-Leste’s private conversations back to Australia. This was important because Australia and Timor-Leste were at the time embroiled in negotiations overuse of oil and gas resources buried beneath the Timor Sea, which borders both countries. The resulting treaty split future revenues from the Greater Sunrise fields fifty-fifty and hit pause for 50 years on negotiating the proper, permanent maritime boundary that was then still missing.

After Witness K spilt the truth of the spying, Timor-Leste tore up that treaty and took Australia to The Hague. Two years of arbitration led to the agreement of a permanent boundary in March 2018, which conceded nearly the entire area of the fields lay on Timor-Leste’s side — and that it was entitled to either 70 or 80 per cent of the revenue, depending on where resources were processed. Australia had negotiated itself the deal of a lifetime and would have gotten away with it — if it weren’t for Witness K.

How did the secret come out?

Four years after managing the Timor-Leste bugging exercise, K had retired from Australia’s intelligence agency, ASIS. He was disappointed at being passed over for a promotion and had consulted an ASIS-approved lawyer. 

That lawyer was Bernard Collaery: a highly regarded barrister, a former attorney-general of the Australian Capital Territory, and, coincidentally, a legal advisor to the Government of Timor-Leste. 

K told Collaery he believed what happened in Dili was linked to his being passed over for the promotion. He said he was appalled at what they’d done, and mentioned Timor-Leste’s high infant mortality rate — development struggles as it rebuilt after occupation was a driving factor for Timor-Leste to secure its share of oil and gas revenue. Collaery first helped his client speak internally to ASIS’ Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security. And in 2012, K went public.

He had learnt the man who was foreign minister at the time of the bugging, Alexander Downer, had retired from politics to a lucrative consulting job at one of the mining companies benefitting from the old treaty. He told journalists and a member of Australia’s parliament about the bugging operation — which led to a national outcry, Timor-Leste’s revocation of the treaty on bad-faith grounds, and the raiding of both men’s homes. K had his passport seized, but no charges were laid against him.

Why are they being charged?

Prosecutors had initially considered charging the pair, but the nature of the national security charges meant they required the attorney general's approval. Porter’s predecessor hemmed and hawed for more than two years, seeking specialised advice three times — but Porter approved prosecution within six months. 

His government has since spent $2 million prosecuting the pair, whose hearings haven’t yet reached trial. Porter received a national security certificate, upheld on appeal, which will lock both trials behind closed doors, on national security grounds. Experts have roundly criticised both the government’s decision to prosecute and its insistence that the charges be pursued in secret, saying it doesn’t properly balance principles of open justice and press freedom. 

K intends to plead guilty once a statement of facts is agreed. Collaery is fighting the charges. Very little else is known. In a statement handed to journalists outside another pre-trial hearing in Canberra in May, Collaery wrote of “these sad times”  and Australia’s “now fragile democracy.” It seems K’s revelation was only the beginning of this saga, not the end, and its consequences even more troubling than its already scandalous beginnings.