Former spy Molly Sasson reveals secret suspicion that Soviet mole infiltrated ASIO
Updated
A former ASIO spy is breaking a 46-year silence to reveal what she says is the darkest secret of all, something which ASIO and successive governments have never admitted in public.
"I have no doubt at all that ASIO was penetrated," Molly Sasson told 7.30.
"The Soviets always seemed to be a step ahead of us. If we put on an operation, it failed.
"There must have been a tip off. It can't have been otherwise."
After working for British intelligence during World War II, and then MI5 in the post-war period, Ms Sasson was offered a job with ASIO in Canberra by its then chief Charles Spry.
Ms Sasson was given one of the most sensitive jobs in ASIO, to compile the daily intelligence report on Soviet diplomats who the agency suspected were operatives for the KGB or GRU, Soviet military intelligence.
"I used to get all the reports from the intercepts, from agents' reports," she said.
"I saw the static sight reports and had the surveillance team behind me and from that I got a pretty good idea of what they were doing."
At first Ms Sasson put the failure of ASIO's counter-espionage operations against the Soviets in Canberra down to incompetence.
But as operation after operation failed, she gradually came to a more sinister conclusion.
One operation in particular raised her suspicion.
She was chasing a suspected Russian agent who she believed was going to meet an Australian contact in a Canberra park.
"We were waiting for this particular man to come at 6:30 that night and they were all in place and I was in the office waiting," she said.
"But they never turned up, he never turned up. He took the evening flight to Moscow.
"Then we found out that he had travelled from the embassy in the morning and drove to Sydney and caught that flight.
"So somebody tipped him off and he was keen to get out."
Fears of Soviet mole inside ASIO dismissed
Ms Sasson was in no doubt that there was a Soviet mole working in ASIO.
She confided her fears to her immediate superior, ASIO's deputy director Colin Brown, but those fears were dismissed.
"He said to me, 'Well, don't open this can of worms'," she said.
In 1974, Ms Sasson also revealed her suspicions to Justice Hope during the royal commission into ASIO.
She was scheduled to have half an hour with Justice Hope, but ended up getting two hours.
There she handed over six sheets of evidence to him, which contained the names of several ASIO colleagues whom she suspected of being too close to the Soviets.
The royal commissioner reached no firm conclusion, finding only that "ASIO may or may not have been penetrated by a hostile intelligence service".
The Americans knew that ASIO had been compromised.
He looked at me and smiled and said: 'We can't do that, you're penetrated, we know that.'
Molly Sasson
Ms Sasson recalls a dinner conversation in the mid 1970s with the then-CIA station chief in Canberra.
"I said to him, 'Why don't you join us for some operations?' she said.
"He looked at me and smiled and said: 'We can't do that, you're penetrated, we know that'."
Neither ASIO nor the government have ever admitted that ASIO was compromised during the final decades of the Cold War.
But Ms Sasson said she just wanted to set the record straight.
"It's very, very important for ASIO to be fully believed. If they can confront their past, and do it properly," she said.
