The authors behind the official history of Australia's security agency threatened to quit if they weren't allowed to reveal the organisation had been infiltrated by Soviet spies.
Academic John Blaxland and researcher Rhys Crawley were given unfettered access to ASIO's archives for The Secret Cold War, the third volume of the series covering 1975 to 1989.
But the pair had to fight to include evidence that suggested at least one mole from the Russian intelligence service had penetrated the agency for many years, and ASIO's inability to identify it.
"This is the part of the story that is, arguably, the most embarrassing to ASIO," Dr Blaxland said following the book's launch at ASIO's Canberra headquarters on Wednesday.
"This is a demoralising story. This is a story of failure. This is a story of people spending their life's work and seeing it go to the sand effectively.
"But to the credit of ASIO, particularly the director-general, they decided to keep the story of penetration in and explain what happened as best we could up to 1989."
They did, however, prevent names and specific details - including the number of suspected moles - from being published for legal and operational reasons.
"There are people and there are agencies out there that arguably might benefit from further information being divulged, and that's something that ASIO was understandably unhappy and unwilling to do," Dr Blaxland, an Australian National University senior fellow, said.
He said it was almost impossible to determine how much damage it had caused, except that thousands of hours of covert surveillance aimed at exposing Soviet espionage had been for nothing.
The book, published by Allen & Unwin, also gives a behind-the-scenes account of the 1978 Hilton bombing in Sydney and the inside story of how ASIO handled the controversial Combe-Ivanov affair.
