Roger Uren: former Australian spy pleads guilty to breaching secrecy laws
Roger Uren, a top former spy and diplomat, has admitted to having an illegal stash of intelligence documents scattered around his Canberra home.
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Top former spy and diplomat Roger Uren has admitted to breaching Australia’s secrecy laws, years after a police raid on his house uncovered reams of highly classified documents.
Uren, a former Office of National Assessments official who was once touted as potential Australian ambassador to China, pleaded guilty in the ACT Magistrates Court on Wednesday to two charges of retaining records from the ONA and one charge of retaining records from ASIO.
The guilty plea followed months of legal roadblocks, with his lawyers required to view some parts of the evidence in a dedicated room at a secretive facility in Canberra.
The court has previously heard lawyers for Uren, the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions and the Commonwealth Attorney-General also had to communicate on encrypted phones.
Uren has previously stated he kept the records out of personal interest, largely to see whether assessments he made about world events would pan out to be accurate.
The raid on Uren’s house was part of a probe into his corrupt wife, Sheri Yan, a Chinese national who has served jail time in the United States for bribing former United Nations General Assembly president John Ashe.
Uren remains married to Yan, who has been described as the former “queen” of the Chinese-Australian social scene, although Yan now lives in China where she cares for her elderly parents.
Uren was granted strict bail to visit Yan last year as legal negotiations progressed.
As a diplomat, Uren was posted to Kuala Lumpur, Beijing and Washington DC.
He is also an expert on the history of the Communist Chinese intelligence service, and worked as an Australian spy from 1993 to 2001.
The precise details of Uren’s offending are unlikely to ever be made public because the documents he took from his former employers remain highly classified, despite being decades old.
Prosecutors are expected to file a publicly-available document outlining the general details of Uren’s offending, which will be accompanied by a secretly-held annexure can only be seen by Uren, lawyers involved in the case, Magistrate Glenn Theakston and a handful of court staff.
Both Uren and his lawyer, Noor Bloomer, declined to comment outside court.
He returns to court at a later date.