MIKE Burgess remembers the moment when computers started to captivate him.

It was 1982, so it was the early days the technological revolution that would sweep the world. He was in year 11 at Underdale High School and there in the middle of the classroom sat an Apple 2.

The school’s only computer.

“I remember it well,’’ Burgess says. “There were only six of us who paid any attention to wanting to play with this thing and learn how to program.

“That got my geek interest fired up and I wanted to have a job where I could build, design, touch and play with computers.’’

It was the start of a fascination that would see Burgess become director-general of the Australian Signals Directorate, a once mysterious organisation whose very existence was a secret.

The ASD is essentially Australia’s listening post on the rest of the world.

It collects foreign intelligence, it’s involved in cyber security and cyber warfare. Its motto is “Reveal their secrets, protect our own’’.

All of which makes Burgess one of Australia’s top spies.

Burgess’s road to running the ASD started in Adelaide. He and his family moved to South Australia from England in 1973 when he was seven. Attracted by the climate.

His dad was a storeman. His mum a cleaner. In the vernacular they were “ten pound poms’’.

They settled first in Modbury, in Adelaide’s north east, but Burgess’s parents were a little flummoxed.

They had moved all the way from England for a new life, but everyone in their street was an expat like themselves. So they moved south to Lockleys and bought a deli.

“Which is a very un-British thing to do. That was the start of our assimilation into Adelaide.’’

The 54-year-old Burgess has fond memories of growing up in Adelaide in the 1970s and the 1980s. For a boy who spent the first seven years of his life in England, the Australian weather was a revelation.

“The blue skies, the beach, the sea, that along with cricket,’’ he remembers. “I was taken with cricket.’’

He even quickly changed national allegiances to support the Aussies in the cricket. “Definitely summer and cricket are my fondest memories as a child in Adelaide.’’

Burgess went to Lockleys North Primary School before moving to Underdale. It was at Underdale, thanks to that Apple 2, that his ambition to pursue a career in electronic engineering took off.

He namechecks his physics teacher, a Mr Lawrence. “My teachers inspired me to want to do something geeky and something engineering wise,’’ he says.

But a move to university was not always a given. His father was not convinced that it was the right thing to do

“He was a child in London during the second world war,’’ Burgess says. “He moved out of London at an early age, 11 or 12, and never finished schooling.’’

So after school at Underdale was over, Burgess didn’t head for uni but instead took a job for a year unpacking boxes and stacking shelves at Standard Books in Rundle Mall.

“I was the first of the family to go to university,’’ Burgess says. “It was important to me. That’s why I had a year off, to save the money and convince my dad I wouldn’t be a financial burden on him.’’

His father was won over and when Burgess went to the old Levels campus at the South Australian Institute of Technology in 1985 it was with the full support of his family.

But not before he flirted with the idea of joining the Royal Australian Air Force as a way of pursuing his electronic engineering passion.

He managed to push himself as far as the final round before it all came unglued.

“I didn’t get offered a job in the end for reasons, at the time, I was not happy about, but today would understand exactly why they didn’t think this brash young man should get a job,’’ he says.

Burgess says by year 12 he was so fixated on electronic engineering as a career he didn’t choose English as one of his subjects in that last year of school.

He was questioned about his choice by the RAAF selection panel. He replied he didn’t think he needed English to be a good engineer and a something of an argument followed.

“I suspect I was a little bit too robust in my defence,’’ he says. “They probably saw me as having a bit of an attitude.’’

Still, he was fortunate he was growing up in Adelaide. It was a city with a defence industry and he knew there would be jobs out there for electronic engineers once university was over. He remembers a liftout in The Australian newspaper about the introduction of the FA-18 Hornets into service and being excited by the possibilities.

“I was particularly taken by the combat systems and the radar system and I decided that is what I want to do,’’ he says.

Burgess started his uni course in 1985. He says he didn’t necessarily have a sense where this technological revolution was heading but he just found the whole new world thrilling.

“It was just exciting times because computers were really starting to become common place,’’ he says.

“You got to design computer chips and you got to build a computer as part of your university course. It was geek heaven.’’

After finishing university he did find a job in the defence sector. It was with a company called Thorn EMI. Thorn later became AWA Defence Industries which was then sold to British Aerospace Australia in 1996.

At Thorn Emi he worked in signals processing, developing technology built to detect submarines from ships or the RAAF’s P3 aircraft. From there it was another defence company, Vision Systems, where he worked on its laser airborne depth sounder, which measured the depth of oceans. By 1991 though, he had moved to the Defence Science Technology Organisation (DSTO). There, he worked on synthetic aperture radar. This was an imaging radar which would show the terrain below, even through clouds.

But after four years at the DSTO he was again looking for a new challenge.

He spotted a small advert in a national newspaper that was so carefully worded that it attracted his attention.

“It was a very geeky specific advert,’’ he says. It mentioned the Department of Defence and used phrases such as “radio frequency modulation” and “signal processing”.

When he rang the listed number seeking more information, the phone was answered with a brusque “hello’’ and didn’t even use the word defence. Back then the very existence of what was still called the Defence Signals Directorate wasn’t acknowledged, so the whole exercise of recruitment was necessarily all a bit cloak and dagger.

Burgess got the job. This meant moving to Canberra, but he couldn’t quite tell his parents exactly what he would be doing. He kept it vague. It was an electronics engineering job within the Department of Defence.

And even almost 25 years later, Burgess demurs a little when asked what that first job in the directorate entailed.

It was though, in “engineering to build tiny devices that might get hidden somewhere and that is all I can say even today’’.

“That was my opening to knowing intelligence agencies really do this kind of thing,’’ he says.

It was the start of a long career within the directorate. In time he would move away from the strictly technical and move into management. He would work across security and intelligence, before finally running the cyber security section.

It’s hard to quantify just how quickly that world has changed over recent decades, so the challenge to keep up with those involved in cyber crime, hacking, terrorism, data theft, drug smuggling, influence peddling in elections must be a constant headache.

But Burgess doesn’t subscribe to the theory that the authorities are always in the position of playing catch-up with the bad guys.

“I remember my very first day of university when the lecturer said to us all the half-life of an engineer is five years and if you don’t continue to study you will quickly lose your capabilities,’’ he says.

“I think today it’s probably shorter than five years but if you keep studying and you are curious and you are agile you can actually keep up with technology.’’

For five years he was the ASD’s head of cyber security before deciding to take a look again at the private sector. He took a similar job at Telstra, becoming the giant telco’s chief information officer.

“I thought if we could get cyber security right there I was still doing something for the country while doing something I really enjoyed,’’ he says.

Burgess stayed with Telstra for four years before leaving to set up his own consultancy.

Soon enough his old employers came calling with the offer to run the whole show. He was surprised to be asked but there was never any chance he would turn it down.

But he wanted to do it a little differently.

He wanted to bring the the agency out of the shadows. There were a couple of reasons for this. In an era where many are concerned about privacy and the surveillance state he wanted to assure Australians the ASD wasn’t listening in on them and that their role was focused offshore.

He also thought that if he could tell a truer story of what the directorate did then he could attract more talented people to the organisation.

“Our intelligence activities are offshore but some people may not believe us, so one way to demystify all that is to explain what we are, what we do,’’ he says.

Last October, Burgess even brought the ASD into the age of Twitter. The directorate’s first tweet: “Hi internet, ASD here. Long time listener, first time caller’’, revealing the agency may even have a sense of humour.

Burgess also gave some high-profile speeches designed to educate what exactly the ASD did.

On the same day, the ASD announced itself on Twitter, Burgess gave a speech to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute national security dinner titled Then and now – coming out of the shadows.

The organisation’s history goes back to 1947 when it began as the Defence Signals Bureau, itself emerging from the Central Bureau’s Fleet Radio Unit which intercepted, decoded and reported on Japanese naval communications during World War II.

“ASD's purpose is to defend Australia from global threats and help advance Australia's national interests. We do this by mastering technology to inform, protect and disrupt,’’ he said in the speech.

He talked, in general terms, of the ASD’s role in disrupting drug smugglers, of assisting Australian Defence Force operations overseas, of helping free Australians who had been taken hostage in foreign countries.

He also spoke of providing technical advice to protect the security of the same-sex marriage survey in 2017 and its role in advising the government not to allow “high risk vendors’’ to have any part in the building of Australia’s 5G network.

This was widely interpreted to mean China’s Huawei should be excluded from any role in constructing 5G.

In March, Burgess gave more details of the directorate’s “offensive cyber operations”, and how it worked with the ADF, in a speech to the Lowy Institute.

But he started by explaining how its operatives weren’t like the stereotype of a hacker portrayed in the movies.

“There’s always a geek – invariably a guy – wearing black and working in low-lighting, instantly hacking into systems at will. Usually, they are cavalier – with no regard for the law – punching the ‘enter’ key to blow up buildings or do impossible things with electrical surges.’’

The reality of an ASD operative is far different.

“They come from all sorts of backgrounds - everything from computer science to marketing, international relations, the law, linguistics, biology and mathematics to name a few.’’

Then he gave some examples of what he meant.

Of how at the height of the ADF’s fight against terror group ISIS, ASD’s offensive cyber operators were “firing highly targeted bits and bytes into cyberspace’’.

The result was that ISIS communications were disabled and their commanders couldn’t connect to the internet or communicate with each other.

“The terrorists were in disarray and driven from their position – in part because of the young men and women at their keyboards some 11,000 kilometres or so from the battle,’’ he said.

In another example, Burgess talked of how his people can assume fake identities online to talk to terrorists and would-be terrorists.

There was a case involving a young man overseas who was trying to join a terror group.

The ASD tracked the man down and a covert operator, a female science graduate, started talking to him over the internet.

It’s a delicate process pretending to be someone else. The operator had to be convincing as a terrorist commander, win the target’s trust over a series of conversations. She persuaded him to change his methods and modes of communication.

“Our operative typed in deliberately broken English and was so convincing, she was able to influence the man’s behaviour,’’ Burgess said.

“Eventually, she convinced the aspiring terrorist to abandon his plan for jihad and move to another country where our partner agencies could ensure he was no longer a danger to others or himself.’’

Part of the reason Burgess told the story was to break down that stereotype of the type of people who work for ASD. In this case, the operative grew up in the suburbs, studied science at uni, enjoyed yoga, hiking and playing touch football.

Burgess says it’s working.

“The benefit of that has really been fabulous in terms of the recruitment campaign we had underway,’’ he says. “

It was a really impressive response which will serve us well in terms of getting good men and women into ASD, which is the whole objective.’’

Burgess says the marker for a good operative “is that they are intelligent and they are curious’’ and there is no limit to the background from where they can emerge.

“Some of our best analysts have medieval history degrees,’’ he says.

It’s hard to imagine some of the stuff Mike Burgess must carry around in his head. The bad and the worse of humanity and some of the horrors that are shielded from the Australian public.

Burgess says he sleeps well at night and despite it all is an optimist, even though he knows this is not a 100 per cent game. That there will be losses as well as wins.

“Generally humanity is capable of doing bad things and bad things happen but in the main there is much goodness in the world and good things happen,’’ he says.

He says he can never quite switch off from the job – even when he is pottering around his garden in Canberra – but that he loves what he does and that forms the basis of the career advice he will give anyone who asks.

“The real secret is to find something you like doing and the rest will take care of itself.’’

And sometimes that starts in an Adelaide classroom, staring at an Apple 2.