Reading the Australian Federal Police’s secret report into its elite network of undercover operatives is a confusing experience.

On the one hand, you are hit by the seriousness and the difficulty of the task confronting these elusive officers. They infiltrate hard-bitten and suspicious criminal organisations in countries all over the world – drug cartels, terror organisations – with little but their charm, their training and their antenna for danger to make sure they come out alive.

Their work is increasingly important as encrypted communication devices make it harder to crack criminal networks any other way. It’s also more dangerous as their secret identities come under new threat from facial identification software and DNA databases.

To do these jobs, they must have a well-resourced, well-managed organisation and people they trust back home, not least to build and backstop “legends” – fake identities – that will stand up to scrutiny.

It all sounds like the stuff of Hollywood movies – and one former undercover officer, Damian Marrett, said it was as addictive as heroin. But how the AFP has treated these people fits much more comfortably on the set of the ABC’s satire of public service life, Utopia.

Officers in the field have been undermined back at base, according to the report of former assistant commissioner Frank Prendergast, by the banality of budget cuts, management changes, obsolete technology. Box ticking.

‘It’s easy to see how these most risk-exposed officers felt abandoned, even betrayed by the organisation they relied on.’

Here’s the human resources system at work. “Covert personnel details are currently compartmentalised in SAP,” Prendergast’s report says, referring to a software suite for HR management, but “given changes being made to SAP this may no longer be possible”.

The real identities of undercover operatives could simply appear on the broader AFP system, he warned.

QOSHE - Undercover cops did a Hollywood-style job under management more like Utopia - Michael Bachelard
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Undercover cops did a Hollywood-style job under management more like Utopia

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05.12.2023

Reading the Australian Federal Police’s secret report into its elite network of undercover operatives is a confusing experience.

On the one hand, you are hit by the seriousness and the difficulty of the task confronting these elusive officers. They infiltrate hard-bitten and suspicious criminal organisations in countries all over the world – drug cartels, terror organisations – with little but their charm, their training and their antenna for danger to make sure they come out........

© The Sydney Morning Herald


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