In the introduction to his official history of British intelligence in the Second World War, Professor F.H. Hinsley says he has not attempted to cover the war in the Far East, ‘when this was so much the concern of the United States’. The United States, on the other hand, did not hesitate to publicise its signals intelligence victories over the Japanese. The nature of signals intelligence is such that a smaller country, like Australia, can and did make a difference. But because there has been no official history of Australian intelligence in the Second World War, Australia’s achievements have been largely overlooked and are only now beginning to receive recognition.

Australia, like Great Britain, entered the twentieth century without a professional espionage or counter-intelligence agency. Secret service work was carried out, when the occasional need arose, by adventurous young officers and patriotic civilians. The immediate origins of the modern secret intelligence communities in both Britain and Australia lie in the spy scares which preceded and followed the outbreak of the First World War. Wildly exaggerated reports of ’an extensive system of German espionage’ in the United Kingdom led to the foundation in 1909 of the Secret Service Bureau whose home and foreign departments have since become, respectively, the counter-intelligence agency MI5 and the espionage agency usually known as SIS or MI6. Australia’s first, rather smaller, spy scare in 1908 concerned reports of espionage by Japanese business persons, storekeepers, pearlers and prostitutes along the Barrier Reef and the north of Queensland.