In 2022, the Robert Menzies Institute appointed Dr. William Stoltz as a Visiting Fellow. His initial remit was a primary research project to explore the Menzies government’s creation of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS), founded 70 years ago that year. ASIS is Australia’s secret foreign intelligence service, equivalent to America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). Menzies enacted the creation of ASIS on 13 May 1952 in the midst of the early Cold War.

The creation of the Service is one of the less examined legacies of the Menzies government, not least of all because the existence of ASIS was not officially acknowledged until 1977 and many records regarding its creation still remain classified. However, as Dr. Stoltz’s research explores, the creation of the Service was an important component of the Menzies government’s foreign policy and its approach to issues of intelligence and national security. He argues that the story of ASIS is also part of understanding how Australia sought to exercise power over its international environment in the twentieth century.

Australia faced a troubling international outlook in the early 1950s. The threat of nuclear destruction and a third world war loomed large in the imagination of Menzies and his ministers. Communist-backed insurgencies and proxy wars stretched across Australia’s neighbourhood from Korea to Indochina and Malaya. The power of Australia’s familial ally Britain was also wanning, and it was unclear if Australia could rely on the United States to take Britain’s role as the leading Western power in the Asia-Pacific. In this context an Australian secret service – modelled on the British SIS – was seen as an important way that Australia could better understand and shape its volatile neighbourhood and contribute to a vital allied intelligence network with the UK and US. Menzies’s Cabinet colleague and former-rival Richard Casey hoped that with its own secret service Australia could become an ‘intelligence power’.

ASIS’s creation also marked an important evolution in Australia’s approach to intelligence and security. Coming to power in 1949, Menzies’s government inherited an under-developed intelligence establishment and strained relations with the CIA and SIS, which had been damaged by revelations that top secret allied material had been stolen from Australia’s Ministry of External Affairs by Soviet agents. Furthermore, issues of espionage and national security had been of key interest to Menzies’s Liberal Party even prior to coming to government, as evinced by election commitments to address Soviet infiltration and ban the Communist Party of Australia. Dr Stoltz’s research indicates that the creation of ASIS was a decidedly Liberal policy, owing in part to the closeness of party luminaries to the intelligence communities of the United Kingdom and United States.

To share his research insights with the RMI community, Dr Stoltz engaged in a number of activities including a podcast episode, articles and a conference paper, as well as an in-person event to mark the 70th anniversary of ASIS in May 2022.