The head of Australia’s ASIO intelligence agency said it was not uncommon to find foreign countries trying to influence diaspora communities. “Some of them would surprise you,” he said, without giving names.
The director-general of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO), Mike Burgess, told broadcaster ABC on Sunday that his organization had caught several countries seeking to interfere with or influence diaspora communities in Australia.
Australia had last year accused Iran of engaging in foreign interference and said ASIO had disrupted a surveillance operation on an Iranian-Australian’s home.
But Burgess said other countries were also seeking to interfere in Australia’s political system and its diaspora communities quite regularly, sometimes unintentionally and sometimes consciously.
‘Some of them are also our friends’
“I can think of at least three or four that we’ve actually actively found involved in foreign interference in Australian diaspora communities,” Burgess said in the interview on the “Insiders” program.
“Some of them would surprise you. Some of them are also our friends,” he said.
The spy chief declined to elaborate on which countries he was talking about, except to confirm the government’s allegation of an Iranian case.
“In diaspora communities, there are multiple countries that attempt to threaten and intimidate Australians living in this country,” Burgess said. “When we find it, we deal with it effectively.”
Burgess was speaking on the issue after the Australian government rebuked the Iranian ambassador for a social media post seeming to call for the violent and rapid removal of Israelis, or “the Zionist plague” as the ambassador put it, from “the holy lands of Palestine.”
“I don’t normally comment on diplomats and what they say, but actually that one was an example that was worthy of being called out,” Burgess said. “What a classic, terrible example of actually inappropriate, unacceptable language that … can actually drive violence in our society.”
