ASIO chief Mike Burgess reveals state-sponsored murder plots

ASIO chief Mike Burgess has issued a pre-election warning, revealing foreign states have plotted to kill Australian-based critics and steal defence secrets and anti-Semitic attacks will continue.

ASIO Director General Mike Burgess. Picture: AAP

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ASIO chief Mike Burgess has ­issued a pre-election warning that the country faces its most complex and challenging security environment on record, revealing that foreign states have plotted to kill Australian-based critics and steal defence secrets, anti-Semitic attacks will continue and terrorists are being radicalised online at a younger age than ever.

As Australia confronts its most “difficult threat environment” in at least 50 years, ASIO’s ­director-general said the domestic spy agency was moving to ­neutralise foreign-interference operations and politically motivated violence ahead of the federal election, expected to be called within weeks.

In his sixth and most “sobering” annual threat assessment on ­Wednesday night, Mr Burgess raised concerns about Russia, Iran and other countries ramping up sabotage operations against Australia and revealed that AUKUS and critics in diaspora communities had become priority targets for hostile intelligence services.

The spy boss, who used the speech to declassify parts of ASIO’s 2030 security outlook ­describing terror, espionage and sabotage threats over the next five years, said ASIO had disrupted multiple attempts by hostile ­countries to harm critics in ­Australia or lure them overseas to be silenced.

“ASIO investigations have identified at least three different countries plotting to physically harm people living in Australia. In a small number of cases, we held grave fears for the life of the person being targeted,” Mr Burgess said.

In one thwarted plot, a foreign intelligence service wanted to ­silence a human-rights activist by tricking the individual into ­travelling to a third country to be killed or injured in a staged ­“accident”.

“More recently – last year in fact – ASIO intelligence indicated a different hostile foreign intelligence service wanted to harm and possibly kill one or more individuals on Australian soil,” he said.

“Working with our inter­national partners, we determined this plot was part of a broader ­effort by the regime to eliminate critics of the foreign government around the world – activists, journalists, ordinary citizens.”

Mr Burgess said multiple foreign regimes continued to “monitor, harass, intimidate and coerce” diaspora communities, trying to convince some to return home to face questioning “or worse”. He said ASIO knew of at least four countries that had plotted such forced repatriations.

The warning follows his 2021 revelation about a “nest of spies” being kicked out of Australia for trying to steal sensitive defence ­secrets and monitor diaspora ­communities, which was later revealed to be an Indian espionage ring. Indian diplomats were last year linked to serious criminal ­activities in Canada, with police claiming they were involved in targeted assassinations, extortion, intimidation and coercion against Sikh community members.

After a record surge in anti-­Semitic attacks across the country, including dozens in NSW this year alone, Mr Burgess warned that ­incidents targeting Jewish-­Australians had “not yet plateaued”. “Anti-Semitism festered in Australia before the tragic events in the Middle East, but the drawn-out conflict gave it oxygen – and gave some anti-Semites an excuse,” he said. “Jewish Australians were also increasingly conflated with the state of Israel, leading to an ­increase in anti-Semitic incidents.

“The normalisation of violent protest and intimidating behaviour lowered the threshold for provocative and potentially violent acts. Narratives originally ­centred on “freeing Palestine” ­expanded to include incitements to “kill the Jews”.

“Threats transitioned from harassment and intimidation to specific targeting of Jewish communities, places of worship and prominent figures,” he said. “I am concerned these attacks have not yet plateaued.”

On the wider threat environment, Mr Burgess said Australia was facing “multifaceted, merging, intersecting, concurrent and cascading threats … major geo­political, economic, social and security challenges of the 1930s, 70s and 90s have converged”.

“Australia has entered a period of strategic surprise and security fragility,” he said. “Over the next five years, a complex, challenging and changing security environment will become more dynamic, more diverse and more degraded. The future threat environment will be more difficult than anything we have seen in at least 50 years.”

After raising the terror threat level to “probable” in August last year, which means a greater than 50 per cent chance of an onshore attack or attack planning in the next 12 months, Mr Burgess said radicalisation was now occurring “within days and weeks rather than years”.

Examples of radicalised minors, who Mr Burgess said “can pose the same threat as adults”, included: youths sharing beheading videos in the schoolyard, a 12-year-old wanting to blow up a place of worship and a 17-year-old watching Nazi propaganda and Ku Klux Klan videos and scrawling “gas the Jews” on the walls of the classroom.

ASIO also identified a 12-year-old planning a school shooting in the US, passing on details to local authorities and preventing a ­“potential massacre”.

“Of all the potential terrorist matters investigated last year, fewer than half were religiously motivated,” he said. “The majority involved mixed ideologies or ­nationalist and racist ideologies. Almost all the matters involved minors. All were lone actors or small groups. Almost all the ­individuals were unknown to ASIO or the police and it is fair to say they allegedly moved towards violence more quickly than we have seen before.”

While religiously motivated ­violent extremism, including Muslim extremists, remained a top threat, Mr Burgess said ASIO expected “nationalist and racist violent extremists to continue their efforts to “mainstream’ and expand their movement”.

Following the return of Donald Trump as US President and heightened global competition, Mr Burgess said foreign regimes would “seek to exert more influence and control over diaspora communities”.

“Espionage and foreign interference will be enabled by advances in technology, particularly AI and deeper online pools of personal data vulnerable to collection, exploitation and analysis by foreign intelligence services,” he said. “AI will enable disinformation and deep fakes that can promote false narratives, undermine factual information and erode trust in institutions.”

Ahead of a federal election to be fought over the economy and national security, Mr Burgess warned foreign actors and extremists that ASIO would disrupt any attempt to undermine the election. The Australian understands MPs and senators have been targeted by threats from ­violent extremists, with some ­politicians provided with special protection. Mr Burgess said: “We have ­already established specialist teams and operations to work with the electoral commission and other partners to protect the integrity of the poll.

“We will be watching. If a ­foreign regime tries to meddle in the election by pressuring diaspora groups, directing foreign language newspapers, spreading disinformation on social media or using any of the other tactics sometimes seen overseas, we will know. And we will act.”

Discussing the evolution of ­extremist motivations, Mr Burgess spoke of individuals “cherrypicking seemingly antithetical ideologies to create new, hybrid beliefs”.

“In one case last year, we found an individual apparently motivated by Islamic State propaganda and neo-Nazi propaganda,” he said. “In ­another, an individual ­allegedly described himself as a left-wing environmentalist aligned with Adolf Hitler. Yet ­another apparently considered himself to be ‘a radical communist anarchist’ while allegedly embracing nationalist and racist violent extremism.”

Mr Burgess said the defence sector would come under greater threats from espionage and ­foreign interference and even sabotage, with the AUKUS submarine program offering an enticing target for foreign spies.

“Multiple countries are relentlessly seeking information about our military capabilities,” he said. “Defence personnel are being targeted in person and online. Some were recently given gifts by international counterparts. The presents contained concealed surveillance devices.”

Mr Burgess said AUKUS, which is already being monitored by an Australian Federal Police special command, would be a ­priority target for foreign adversaries and friendly nations, as they sought to steal information on critical capabilities and undermine the US and UK’s confidence in Australia. As the submarine program matured, he said, foreign interference would pose more of a threat, as nations sought to undermine community confidence in the initiative.

The spy chief said sabotage would pose an increasing threat, especially to defence ­assets, with the pre-positioning of cyber back-doors in critical systems that could be exploited at a later date.

“We are getting closer to the threshold for high-impact sabotage,” Mr Burgess said.

Chinese ambassador to Australia Xiao Qian attended the threat assessment speech on Wednesday night, marking the first time Beijing’s top representative has made an appearance.

Over several years, China has been linked to major cyber security attacks against Australian critical infrastructure, orchestrating foreign interference operations in the country and targeting CCP critics in the Chinese-Australian community.