Terror tsar role has its own dangers

“I’ve pretty well given up,” said Guy. “In fact, I’ve as good as signed on in the Foreign Office.”

Major Tickeridge showed deep concern. “I say, that is a pretty ­desperate thing to do.”

—Evelyn Waugh, Men at Arms

Evelyn Waugh obviously never met Greg Moriarty, Australia’s new Counter-Terrorism Co-­ordinator. Moriarty is the very ­opposite of the striped pants, ­cocktail-sipping dilettante of smooth words, sibilant chatter, emollient enunciations and general uselessness of Waugh’s imagined Foreign Office archetype.

A professional diplomat of the highest quality, with military and intelligence experience, Moriarty is the right man for the job. The deeper, more troubling question is whether the job is the right one in the first place. At least since 9/11, I seem to have been writing never- ending stories about plans and schemes to create better co-­ordination among our various agencies concerned with counterterrorism. In going down this road, our government has ­followed the US and Britain.

Here is the problem, however. In the US, there is some evidence a lack of co-ordination among its ­intelligence agencies was a problem. In Australia, there is no ­evidence this has been a problem. Indeed Tony Abbott, George Brandis and other government spokesmen went out of their way this week to say the existing ­arrangements were working fine. Thus the government is declaring there is no problem, and they are determined to fix it.

What harm, you might ask, can greater co-ordination bring? Well, look at the American experience.

One obvious case was the ­creation of the post of Director of National Intelligence, with the precise role of making sure all the intelligence agencies were co-­ordinating their activities and ­giving the President more direct control. The DNI’s role in the US has been a disastrous failure, for one simple reason. The DNI had no power.

Even though appointed by the President, acting with the President’s authority, and enjoying the personal confidence of the President, one DNI after another has been burned off in often quite ­vicious turf wars with the heads of the powerful agencies.

At times, the situation reached farcical levels, with the DNI proclaiming particular government policies and the CIA director flatly contradicting them and refusing to implement them.

Barack Obama appointed Dennis Blair as his first DNI. Blair tried to get authority to appoint the chief US intelligence officers in foreign countries. He tried to get some control over CIA covert operations. He tried to change the way the CIA offered its daily briefing to the President.

He failed on all counts, and when push came to shove, Obama sacked him. The end result of all this was the diversion of top-level energy into sterile bureaucratic infighting and the creation of yet more layers of bureaucracy.

But the co-ordination efforts had a much greater harmful impact as well. The access to vast quantities of sensitive information by such low-level people as ­Private Bradley Manning was a ­direct consequence of the let’s-share-all-information approach of the post-9/11 era.

Manning’s leaks of vast quan­tities of sensitive US intelligence ­information, and the other bulk leaks like it, have seriously harmed the counter-terrorism campaign, not least by disclosing to terrorists the manner in which they were being tracked.

Neither of these results is likely in the Moriarty appointment. Like the DNI, he won’t have much real power. Unlike the DNI, he won’t be trying to build an empire, steal daily control or usurp the operational decisions of line agencies.

The position will probably work OK because Moriarty is too smart to let it work badly. And while he won’t have any operational power, any agency chief who ignored a request from Moriarty would be a fool, because it is clear Moriarty enjoys the full confidence of the Prime Minister and the government.

Moriarty’s high reputation is thoroughly deserved. The Abbott government likes senior bureaucrats who can get difficult things done. Mike Pezzullo, the head of the Department of Immigration and Border Protection, Nick Warner, the head of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, and Duncan Lewis, the head of ASIO, all fall into that category. Moriarty’s standing is so high that I would guess he is the front runner to succeed Peter Varghese as the next head of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, with Frances Adamson, the ambassador in Beijing, also a credible ­candidate.

However, the creation of Moriarty’s position still has the potential to be messy and somewhat counterproductive.

It reinforces what has been a pretty bad trend under all recent governments to centralise power in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and in the Prime Minister’s office itself.

Prime ministers come to office swearing they won’t do this, but they do it nonetheless. It’s bad process and it tends to undermine cabinet government.

And how will the Counter-­Terrorism Co-ordinator sit with the existing National Security ­Adviser within PM & C?

Of course, there were much worse options available and we can be thankful none of them was embraced.

One would have been to make Lewis, the head of ASIO, the Counter-Terrorism Co-ordinator. Lewis is a man of the highest ­ability but this would have meant having a part-time director general of ASIO at a time when ASIO has never been more important.

An even worse option would have been the creation of a single department under one cabinet minister running all the counterterrorism agencies. This would have been an unmitigated ­disaster.

For a time something like this was seriously considered as a way of bringing Scott Morrison’s prodigious political and administrative talent to bear on security ­issues.

But the US Department of Homeland Security has been such a mess that other governments have shied away from the model. Discussion in the Abbott government focused instead on replicating Britain’s Home Office.

But our federal structures are not remotely suited to this. Further, there are very good reasons for having the different intelligence agencies in different departments, reporting to different ministers, but well co-ordinated.

The government is obsessed with its Operation Sovereign Borders success. To try to replicate that success, built on a single command structure, in counter-terrorism would have been extremely damaging. So we have escaped the worst.

But does this new structure ­actually add any extra value?

We’ll see.