Cloak and digger

as posted here

Bringing Kim Beazley in from the cold completes a new foreign policy and security apparatus for the Rudd Government. But it has many parts, report Deborah Snow, Jonathan Pearlman and Cynthia Banham.

Kevin Rudd put the final touches to his newly-shaped foreign policy hierarchy this week. Kim Beazley's appointment as Canberra's man in Washington redefines Australia's most important bilateral relationship on Rudd's own terms. Beazley is a man with significant standing in both countries. He commands bipartisan respect, and has a great fondness for the US.

But with Afghanistan the top immediate issue for Australia as it navigates its relationship with the US, it is Beazley's formidable background in defence that will play to Canberra's advantage.

Coming on the heels of a slew of recent appointments to top foreign and domestic security apparatus, and in tandem with Brendan Nelson's appointment as EC and NATO representative, the Beazley job completes the biggest rewrite of foreign policy pecking order since John Howard's election 13 years ago.

Unlike Howard's night of the long knives - when the then new prime minister cut through the upper ranks of the public service in 1996 - Rudd bided his time. For his first year and a half in government he left in place most of his predecessor's appointments even though, said one insider, Howard ''promoted more people from his personal staff into senior positions in government than any other prime minister''.

At the change of government in 2007, the heads of Defence, Foreign Affairs, ASIO and the Office of National Assessments had all worked on Howard's personal staff. Now Rudd, the former diplomat, has remade the chessboard. And with half a dozen key appointments he has woven a tight net of carefully-picked, tried and tested individuals across the top of the security and intelligence community.

After Rudd became Labor's foreign affairs spokesman in 2001, David Irvine, a senior diplomat who would soon become the head of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, asked to see Alexander Downer on a matter of some sensitivity. He told the Foreign Minister he had served with Rudd as a diplomat in Beijing and was godfather to a Rudd son.

Irvine went on to take the helm of ASIS, Australia's overseas spy outfit, and acquitted himself so well that in February this year Irvinsky (as Rudd calls him) was handpicked to head the domestic spy agency, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, making him the first man to have led both ASIS and ASIO. Irvine is described by one longtime associate as an astute operator with ''a slight touch of the 19th century bureaucrat-scholar about him''.

Rudd's and Irvine's personal connection was not raised publicly when Irvine moved to ASIO seven months ago. The latter's credentials were impeccable, flying against any suggestion of cronyism. But insiders see the appointment as carrying Rudd's strong personal stamp.

Signs Rudd wanted change were there in his first national security statement last December.

His call for ''seamless'' relationships across Australia's intelligence and law enforcement agencies hit a raw nerve for those reading between the lines. The 2007 Haneef debacle - which saw ASIO and the AFP dramatically split over whether the Indian doctor was a terror suspect - loomed like Banquo's ghost over that part of the speech.

Rudd spoke of achieving a ''cohesive national security culture''. But no simple redrawing of management diagrams would deliver that. Chemistry at the top needed changing.

The Australian Federal Police got a new broom in the shape of Tony Negus, sworn in this week to replace Mick Keelty. Nick Warner, the bruised head of Defence, is moving to fill Irvine's vacancy at ASIS, a much better fit for Warner. Ian Watt, a tough numbers man, moves into the Defence chair.

And in August Peter Varghese left the helm of the Office of National Assessments (the premier intelligence analysis agency) to become the ambassador to Delhi. Moving into Varghese's spot is Allan Gyngell, a former Keating adviser who has become prominent in recent years as head of the private think-tank, the Lowy Institute for International Policy.

But the pivotal appointment, apart from Beazley's, is that of Dennis Richardson, a former ASIO head who is returning from the Washington ambassadorship to reinvigorate a demoralised Foreign Affairs and Trade Department.

Richardson was Rudd's first boss at Foreign Affairs, and worked in Immigration and Prime Minister and Cabinet before joining Bob Hawke as the prime ministerial foreign affairs adviser in 1990 - for the year leading up to Hawke's ousting by Paul Keating.

Having reviewed the intelligence services, Richardson was made head of ASIO when Howard won government in 1996. The agency had been regarded as something of a backwater but the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington changed all that. He was well regarded in Canberra's inner councils and he and Irvine know each other's modus operandi intimately.

The plain-speaking Richardson will need toughness at DFAT, a department sluggish and demoralised and a long way from its glory days at the pinnacle of the public service.

Rudd has been unimpressed with the quality of its advice, particularly around the time of the G20 leaders meeting in London last April. ''DFAT's response was not up to scratch,'' says a senior diplomat. ''It was slow to recognise the centrality and importance of the G20 summit to the government's priorities, and indeed slow to recognise its importance to Australia.''

It is instructive to witness the flurry of activity in the run-up to the next G20 meeting, to be held in Pittsburgh next month.

Michael L'Estrange, the outgoing head of DFAT , was closely associated with Howard and the Liberal Party, having headed up the Liberal think tank the Menzies Research Institute in 1995. After the 1996 election, he joined Howard's inner team as cabinet secretary for four years before the high commissioner posting to London and, then, the DFAT job from early 2005.

His relationship with Downer became strained. The latter has told colleagues he wanted L'Estrange to clear out senior echelons of the DFAT to make way for new blood, but the cautious L'Estrange would have none of it.

The department's budget languished under Downer, says one insider, and that ''ate into its morale and confidence''. Over the past eight years, DFAT's funding rose by 45 per cent; ASIS's rose by 357 per cent and ASIO's by 521 per cent.

Says a former official who has seen Richardson at close quarters: ''Dennis is the critical appointment because it brings back into the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade a very strong personality, a person with real policy passions, who has views and expresses them strongly. I think he will probably energise the policy debates. He is always prepared to take people on, including ministers and prime ministers.''

Rudd told a US-Australia dialogue in Melbourne last month that ''there are those who doubt that the words Dennis and diplomacy belong in the same sentence''.

Richardson was one of the few Howard government ambassadors to buck a departmental requirement that all speeches by senior diplomats first be cleared with Canberra.

Not all share the high hopes associated with Richardson's return, however. ''He's still got a minister [Stephen Smith] who's subservient to Rudd and Rudd's own foreign policy team in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, which has grown enormously,'' one sceptic said. "Dennis will be a much stronger leader and far more prepared to lay things on the line with the minister … [but] he's got to get him [Smith] to stand up and take a line."

Rudd has coralled much decision-making into the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. Capability and experience has been drafted in and Duncan Lewis, a former SAS commander, last year was made Rudd's first national security adviser.

Another burden on Richardson will be the boom in consular work pressed on DFAT by Australians getting into hot water overseas. ''Governments now think they have to give Australians overseas a higher service level than they would get here,'' says an insider.

Irvine's challenges include getting ASIO's relationship with the AFP back on track. Like L'Estrange, the outgoing ASIO head, Paul O'Sullivan, worked as a Howard adviser and kept a low profile at ASIO, failing to prosecute the agency's interests in the tussle with the AFP over Haneef, say internal critics. The police pursued Haneef long after ASIO concluded the Gold Coast doctor was not a threat.

A former senior ASIO officer told the Herald that O'Sullivan ''cocooned himself inside the organisation".

Mick Keelty, by contrast, aggressively promoted the AFP. Howard ministers knew him as ''Media Mick''. Keelty, who retired on September 2, hit his heights in the aftermath of the Bali bombings, but allegedly soured relations with NSW and Victorian police forces for not sharing credit sufficiently on joint operations.

The AFP decision to open a war crimes investigation on the killing of five Australian journalists in Timor more than 30 years ago could unwind Keelty's greatest legacy - the strong relationship he built with Indonesian police after the Bali bombings. Proof enough, it seems, you cannot control all outcomes.

as posted here