Australian Secret Intelligence Service - Definition and Overview

The Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) is Australia's foreign intelligence service, roughly equivalent to the British Secret Intelligence Service or the Central Intelligence Agency. However, its role is considerably more circumscribed.

It is legally banned from any paramilitary activities and there are no reports of it being involved in any, since a spectacularly botched training exercise held at the Sheraton Hotel in Melbourne on Wednesday, 30 November 1983, in which trainee agents were subsequently arrested by police and threatened with prosecution for a long list of offences.

ASIS is also not primarily responsible for the high-level analysis and reporting of the data it collects, a task performed by the Office of National Assessments.

ASIS is Australia's external Intelligence Collection Agency and it is a part of the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Almost all ASIS staff are employed outside of Australia and the agency is specifically a 'collection only' agency. This means that ASIS does not undertake analysis of the material obtained. Rather, ASIS passes this material to other agencies, (ASIO, DSD or Office of National Assessments) where the analysis takes place.

A highly secretive organisation, it is only in recent years that the Federal Government even acknowledged the existence of the agency.

External links

• ASIS home page (http://www.asis.gov.au/)