12: TIME TO LEAVE
Although my employment prospects in Sydney weren’t good, as I couldn’t discuss the classified details of my work at Pine Gap with potential employers and my network in Defence was primarily in Canberra, Lou and I decided that living together as a family was more important than my future with the United States Government.
My final three-year tour at Pine Gap was scheduled to end on 5 August 2008 but I requested a two-month extension to 5 October because I wanted to complete my supervising role with a new trainee and end my tour on the anniversary of my arrival at Pine Gap. It also seemed a fitting way to wrap up my career.
We decided that I would try to find a position with the NSA in Canberra, three hours’ drive from Sydney, as it was known that the NSA had an office there.[1] Lou shared custody of her son and couldn’t bring him to live in Alice Springs, so I was going to be the one to move. But unfortunately NSA positions in the Australian capital are relatively rare, and although highly qualified for two positions I applied for, I was unsuccessful.
When I resigned, approximately 40 per cent of the NSA workforce had only five years’ experience or less, but my twenty-three years with the agency, as well as my qualifications, training and established network within Australia, were simply not enough of a supporting argument to secure a continuing position with the agency. One problem was that the leadership in Maryland who selected the candidates had their favourites and hadn’t met with me. I had been away for a very long time and I didn’t communicate with those at Ft Meade who were responsible for placing an individual into sensitive liaison positions. Although I had established an excellent working relationship with more than fifty Australians in the Canberra office where I would be assigned, I was a wildcard candidate to my management in the United States. I had found that working at Pine Gap was equivalent to serving ‘out of sight, out of mind’ to many in the leadership chain in my parent office at Ft Meade, regardless of my accomplishments and reputation in the field.
Although I had over twenty years of experience and an ability to provide solutions to the diverse intelligence requirements demanded in my profession, I wasn’t able to continue using my experience with the NSA. The effect of this type of loss was summed up succinctly in relation to the CIA’s own workforce:
By the CIA’s own standards, roughly half its workforce were still trainees. Few were ready and able to produce results. But there was nothing to be done about it; the CIA had no choice but to promote them beyond their levels of ability. As youngsters in their 20s replaced people in their 40s and 50s, the result was an abridgment of intelligence. The clandestine service began to abandon the techniques of the past—political warfare, propaganda, and covert action—because it lacked the skills to conduct them.[2]
In 2007, over a year before I resigned, I asked the American security office at Pine Gap and the NSA if I could become an Australian resident by applying for an Australian spousal visa in the event I wasn’t selected for an NSA position in Canberra. I wanted to be eligible to live and work in Australia if I voluntarily resigned in 2008. Security told me, however, that if I applied for Australian residency via a spousal visa, I would show a ‘foreign preference’ and I would likely lose my clearance and my job. They stated that applying for Australian residency ‘would be inconsistent with my eligibility to hold a United States security clearance’.
I was surprised at this response as Australia was a close ally, and Security made it sound like I was applying for residency in Iran or North Korea. They cited a regulation found in the ‘Director of Central Intelligence Directives 6/4 (DCID 6/4), Annex C, Guideline C: Foreign Preference’, which said that if I sought ‘(4) residence in a foreign country to meet citizenship requirements’, I may ‘be prone to provide information or make decisions that are harmful to the interests of the United States’.[3] At the time I wasn’t planning to obtain citizenship, so I explained to Security that I was simply applying for residency in case I later resigned, as I would need residency to enable me to live and work in Australia. Sadly, Security refused to listen to my case. They were determined to make my transition from agency employee to Australian resident as difficult as possible.
I then sought a ruling from the NSA’s Office of General Counsel, the legal experts at the NSA. I cited the case that I wasn’t seeking citizenship but they said that they couldn’t give me a legal interpretation of this guideline in DCID 6/4, telling me ‘it was not a legal question but rather a security matter’. Apparently the legal department was unable to rule on a legal question and lacked the capability to interpret the legal extent of agency directives. My lack of progress and feedback from Security convinced me that the breed chosen to work in that department had to be the most paranoid collection of employees the agency could find.
I eventually gave up on Security providing any assistance to me when my timeframe to resign had narrowed to a few months and my Department of Immigration contact assured me I would have no trouble obtaining my spousal visa immediately, given the amount of time I had already spent in Australia and the length of my relationship with Lou. He also told me that I would be eligible for permanent residency status immediately and that the citizenship timeframe would be approximately twelve months.
As I had come to love my new home, and I already identified myself as an Australian in spirit, citizenship was what I now wanted. When I initially considered resignation over a year earlier, I only wanted Permanent Residency and to continue working with the NSA or within Australian Defence, in which case I needed a citizenship waiver to receive an Australian security clearance. But citizenship would also make it easier for me to receive an Australian Defence security clearance without the waiver and would allow me to make my twenty-three years of experience with the NSA available to the Australian Government, either as a contractor or as a government employee.
To cut any further red tape and make sure I obtained citizenship as quickly as possible, I requested help from my local MP, Maxine McKew, the Member for Bennelong. Her team was able to provide a letter from the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, Senator the Hon. Chris Evans, that allowed me to take the oath only two weeks after I submitted my application for citizenship. Their help was invaluable in my efforts to become a citizen in the shortest possible time.
Unfortunately for me, as George W Bush prepared to leave office and my time at Pine Gap was coming to an end, the global financial crisis began to tighten its grip. I had chosen to resign at a time when the job market was progressively flooded with thousands who had held previously secure jobs but were now desperately seeking work. I believed I was in an advantageous situation as I had unique experience and skills that were quite rare in the Australian Defence industry. Experienced ELINT and intelligence analysts with a twenty-three-year history with the NSA were quite uncommon in both Australian government and contractor organisations. As early as 2008 I had verbal assurances from two very senior Australian government officials (former deputy chiefs on the SES level) that they would personally support my efforts to receive an Australian citizenship waiver to receive a security clearance as I was not eligible to receive a general Australian security clearance until I became a citizen. For these reasons I wasn’t overly concerned about beginning a new career. I believed I would be out of work for only a few months after resigning before finding a suitable position working within the Australian Defence industry in some capacity.