ASIO chief Mike Burgess defends Tel Aviv’s intelligence on Hamas attack

Mike Burgess said it was too soon to declare whether Israeli intelligence had ‘failed’, and it wasn’t the right time for criticism given the nation’s dire straits.

ASIO director-general Mike Burgess. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

ASIO chief Mike Burgess has defended Israel’s intelligence ser­vices in the wake of Hamas’s terrorist attacks on the Jewish nation, suggesting that in any case now wasn’t the time for criticism as the Middle East teetered on the brink of all out war.

Mr Burgess, director-general of ASIO since 2019, said the public tended to be too quick to blame anything that went wrong on an “intelligence failure”, arguing intelligence services were not “all seeing and all knowing” and offering a distinction between failing to gather necessary intelligence and a failure to act on it.

“You’ve seen public statements by the head of Shin Bet, Ronen Bar, who I do know, and he has said the (Israeli) Defence Forces saw some movements in southern Gaza,” he told The Australian. “They deployed intelligence operatives (who) didn’t quite figure it out when the attack happened; they lost about eight or nine of their own officers as a result of that. Is that an intelligence failure?” he asked.

Israel’s military and intelligence services, revered as among the best in the world, came in for criticism after Hamas’s attack.

Reports Egyptian intelligence agencies had tipped off Tel Aviv on the attacks were dismissed by Israel.

Mr Burgess, who was speaking near Stanford University, where the heads of the intelligence agencies of the Five Eyes nations had gathered, said he had seen no evidence that would cause him to increase the terror threat level in Australia. He said individuals and groups linked to or religiously motivated by extremists and neo-Nazis had “consumed events [in the Middle East]” but “we’ve not seen talk about conducting an act of terrorism or inciting others to do that … not even a little bit”.