A couple of weeks ago, I got a particularly surprising phone call. It was from a man I didn’t expect to contact me about one of the biggest stories of the decade – the war crimes of Ben Roberts-Smith.

He wanted to talk about something that started seven years ago, in mid-2018.

At the time, this masthead’s reporting about Australia’s most decorated living soldier was unfolding, and the military inspector-general’s investigation into war crimes in Afghanistan was coming to a head. Known only to a few was something else – the fact that the military had referred two criminal allegations about its most decorated soldier to the Australian Federal Police.

The police referral was highly classified. AFP investigators tapped Roberts-Smith’s phone and began, slowly, building a case against him.

But within weeks of that referral, Roberts-Smith started going dark. He bought burner phones. He installed encrypted messaging apps and started boasting that it meant nobody could listen in. It was a significant impediment to the inquiry.

Then, on June 15, 2018, just over two weeks after the secret referral had been made, Roberts-Smith called a confidant. The call was tapped as part of the criminal investigation, and in it, he made it clear he thought the police were on his tail.

Somebody must have leaked that information to him. So who was it?

In 2020, we partially answered that question. My colleague, Nick McKenzie, reported that retired AFP commissioner Mick Keelty had held two meetings with Roberts-Smith and had tipped him off.

But who in the police had talked to Keelty – by then long retired from the AFP? That mystery remained open – and was subject to a long-running police and anti-corruption commission inquiry.

The surprising call to me and my colleague, Chris Masters, a fortnight ago was from Keelty himself. The former AFP commissioner wanted to talk.

It turned out these events have plagued him for half a decade. He was emotional. The story caused him professional scars and personal heartache, and he wanted his side told.

In his view, the police investigation into the information leak had caused an injustice that cost two men their cherished careers and perhaps millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money – and ended up finding nothing.

Compounding the fault, according to Keelty, was the ongoing determination by the police to keep the details of the whole debacle hidden from the public.

I know how hard they’ve fought because, since 2021, I’ve been trying to wrest the information out of the AFP using a freedom of information request.

That battle has been waged and blocked, time and again, up and down the court system, and still not a word of information has been released.

“It’s a cover-up,” Keelty told me.

Even if it damages his own reputation, he says, he wants the public to know the truth.

Which takes us back to what happened in mid-2018, when Keelty twice met Roberts-Smith. It was a dual mission, Keelty says – firstly, a welfare check, and secondly to recruit the big soldier on behalf of consultancy firm Accenture.

Before the meetings, though, Keelty asked around the senior echelons of police. He says he wanted to know if there was anything he should avoid saying. He calls it “deconflicting” the conversation. So over a couple of weeks, he spoke to the three most senior cops – the then-commissioner, Andrew Colvin, and two of his deputies, Ramzi Jabbour and Neil Gaughan. Keelty believes they should have warned him to avoid meeting Roberts-Smith, but they did not.

During Keelty’s first meeting with the “not all that bright” ex-soldier, Roberts-Smith appeared to mistake the former cop for an active AFP representative (Keelty had retired almost a decade earlier). Then after the meeting, Roberts-Smith, whose phone was tapped, immediately told confidants he now believed a police investigation had been launched.

But if Keelty had inadvertently leaked the information to Roberts-Smith, who had given it to Keelty? Gaughan, who had ultimate oversight of the Roberts-Smith investigation, suspected his fellow deputy commissioner, Jabbour.

Gaughan instigated an internal investigation – Operation Geranium.

In an affidavit prepared for the freedom of information case, Keelty said that, at the time, Jabbour had been “one of the leading contenders to become the AFP commissioner”. Appointed to run the internal investigation were two officers that Jabbour had previously disciplined and moved out of the professional standards division.

They tapped Jabbour’s phone and, in March the following year, he was stood down from his job. He resigned soon after.

Jabbour told me last week that, at the time, he had known nothing about either Roberts-Smith – he was out of the loop and everyone knew that – or Operation Geranium.

But for two years, the investigation drifted on. When the leak to Keelty could not be substantiated, internal investigators looked at other alleged misdemeanours. Eventually, two low-level, completely unrelated, charges were laid against Jabbour (misusing police time to help someone with their homework and carrying a weapon without permission). Both were unceremoniously thrown out by an ACT magistrate in March 2021.

Two years later, Jabbour extracted a letter from the police anti-corruption commission saying: “The evidence obtained during the investigation did not support [corruption] … allegations … All matters have now been finalised with no adverse findings against you.”

Jabbour says it was a “perfect storm” for his career. Keelty lost his job as the inspector-general of the Murray Darling Basin Commission – what he describes as the “best job I ever had”.

“It’s all but broken me. All for trying to do the right thing by everyone,” Keelty told me. “But I’m not looking for sympathy, but I am looking for honesty and I am looking for the truth to come out.”

I’d like the same thing.

Four years ago, in 2021, I lodged my freedom of information request. I asked for the statements to Operation Geranium of Colvin, Gaughan and internal investigations head Nigel Ryan, as well as the final report.

The police knocked my request back, citing a spaghetti of clauses and sub-clauses. Large parts of the documents were irrelevant, the police said. They would prejudice the enforcement of a law, have a “substantial adverse effect on the management of personnel”, damage the “proper and efficient conduct of the operations of an agency”, and involve the unreasonable disclosure of personal information.

They then turned down an internal review. The official appeal body (the Office of the Information Commissioner) dodged the question and referred it to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. The tribunal member heard the case and knocked us back there, too. So profoundly supportive of the police position was he that he added a new reason for refusal that they hadn’t thought of.

Each time the police argued their case, the reasons for denying my request morphed.

We appealed to the Federal Court. There, a full bench of three judges – who had read the documents – thoroughly rebuked the tribunal member and demolished the police arguments. Many parts of the documents could safely be released, and there was a clear and over-riding public interest.

“To lose sight of that would be to lose sight of the principal object of the FOI Act,” said the key judgment. “Scrutiny, discussion, comment and review of the activities of the Commonwealth government and its agencies, and the conduct of those performing functions on their behalf, is a public purpose.”

To sort out the details, the judges referred the case back to the tribunal. It had been so long that, in the meantime, the tribunal’s name had changed.

This gave the police one more chance to oppose us. So, of course, they have.

This time, they’re arguing that to release these documents would deter everyone in the AFP who sees corruption from coming forward to report it.

So ridiculous is this contention that it prompted Keelty to call us.

As a result, we now know a lot more about these events than we did. We know why Keelty made the dreadful misstep of agreeing to meet Roberts-Smith. We have Keelty’s account of whom he spoke to before that meeting, and a plausible theory of how Roberts-Smith came to the view he was under investigation.

We know whom Roberts-Smith called after the meeting and, roughly, what he said. And we’ve seen the previously secret note that kicked off the internal investigation.

We also know that the police are protecting neither Keelty nor Jabbour by keeping these documents under wraps. Both men rejected requests from the police lawyers to help them in the freedom of information case, and both are now on the record saying they want the documents released.

Jabbour told me: “My hope, to be honest, is that the experience isn’t forgotten and can serve as a catalyst for genuine reform. Because I think the integrity framework shouldn’t be vulnerable to weaponisation, which I think is what has occurred in this case.”

Keelty has sworn an affidavit supporting our case.

To his credit, so far, the tribunal’s president has shown little patience for the AFP’s dissembling. He told their lawyers last week he wanted to see all the documents – including ones they were withholding from him. They should, he warned, employ “common sense”.

That would be nice.

What we’re still not sure about is why they’re fighting so hard.

Initially, I thought they were protecting a wrongdoer. Now I’m inclined to think they’re covering for good old-fashioned incompetence. Perhaps they’re opposing this – at the expense of hundreds of thousands, or millions, of taxpayer dollars – out of pure embarrassment.

And the FOI Act has something very clear to say about that: s.11 B 4 (a): “The following factors must not be taken into account in deciding whether access to the document [is in] the public interest: … Embarrassment … or cause a loss of confidence.”

The FOI battle returns to the tribunal for a hearing next week.

And as for Roberts-Smith? Well, a further catastrophic AFP stuff-up in the war crimes investigation – unrelated to Keelty or Jabbour – meant the federal police were taken off the case five years after it began. A whole new prosecution body, the Office of the Special Investigator, was established to carry it forward.

And still no charges have been laid.