It’s quite a coup to get Australia’s top international spy to your book launch, but that’s what political journalists Chris Uhlmann and Steve Lewis have pulled off this evening.
Nick Warner, the Director General of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, will be launching the pair’s fiction novel The Shadow Game at the National Press Club.
Warner is the only member of ASIS, Australia’s international spy agency, who can be legally named. He’s been in the top job since 2009.
The book, the third in the Secret City trilogy, follows events in Canberra as the world’s superpowers, the US and China, come to conflict over the South China Sea.
In real life, tensions over the South China Sea are rising as China continues to assert sovereignty over a number of islands, reefs and atolls.
Last month the Philippines won a case decided by a panel under the United Nation’s Convention on the Law of the Sea which refuted China’s claim.
China has said the decision doesn’t change anything, while the United States is backing the Philippines and other neighboring countries.
It’s unclear exactly what Nick Warner will discuss at tonight’s event, but the South China Sea issue is understood to be one of Australia’s greatest strategic security challenges.
Warner’s agency is responsible for managing Australia’s spy network to gather intelligence from around the world.
ASIS officers gather information from sources and foreign intelligence agencies and produce reports for agencies including the Office of National Assessments, the Defence Intelligence Organisation and Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
The reports cover a wide range of topics, from political developments to terrorism, social cohesion to economics.
In 2012, Warner became the first ever serving Director-General to give a public speech, in honor of ASIS’s 60th anniversary.
“There's little public awareness of ASlS's contribution to national security in helping to protect and advance Australia’s interests in our neighbourhood, of our support for military operations, and of our efforts in the areas of counter-terrorism and counter-proliferation, to name just a few,” he said at the time.
“This of course stems from the inevitable paradox inherent in publicising the achievements of an organisation whose activities are – by design – secret,” he said.
Warner previously served as Secretary of Defence and as a senior adviser to the Prime Minister. He’s also served overseas in Iraq, the Solomon Islands, Port Moresby and Tehran.
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