Timor-Leste: The Story of Alexander Downer's First Major Spy Scandal Involvement

The role of Australian diplomat and former Foreign Minister Alexander Downer has been well established as his interaction with George Papadopolous was the original reason for the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation against the Trump campaign and it was blatant Australian interference in the 2016 election but the actions of Alexander Downer are nothing new. 

On Australia’s doorstep, there is a country known as Timor-Leste, a young small country with virgin islands, golden beaches, rich agricultural land, and a lot of oil and gas. Timor-Leste in the colonial days was neglected and not looked very well after but the hell that the people of Timor-Leste suffered was going to get much worse. 

In 1975 the regime in Indonesia of brutal dictator Suharto launched a violent invasion of Timor-Leste and conducted one of the 20th century’s most brutal military occupations. Before the invasion, it had a population of 600,000, and after the first year alone an estimated 60,000 to 100,000 were massacred by regime forces. An estimated 200,000 were killed from military action, starvation, or disease during the occupation. 

In 2002 after independence from Indonesia, the country is in the midst of a health catastrophe. 50% of children in Timor-Leste suffer from stunted growth. In 2018 in Timor-Leste 10,000 were said to have rheumatic heart. Health workers in the country say that the health crisis has caused hundreds of preventable deaths. Infant mortality rates are some of the highest in the world and progress in addressing this problem has been very weak and very slow. 

As of 2017, Timor-Leste has a GDP of only $2.955 billion, and the GDP per capita of about $2,279, the institutions are weak, transportation infrastructure is weak, communications networks in the country are poor quality, and infrastructure like buildings are normally very weak. The country has a lot of problems but these issues have made considerably worse by the theft of an estimated $7 billion in oil and gas revenues which were supposed to go to the new country emerging out of a brutal occupation but no it didn’t.

Whistleblower only is known as Witness K exposed that in 2004 the Australian government launched a scheme to bug the cabinet room in Dili, and it was ordered by none other than Alexander Downer. The new country was coerced into signing a treaty which allowed Australia to keep looting their oil and gas even with the maritime dispute between the two nations going on. Woodside Petroleum is the energy company which has the license over the oil fields and it gave Alexander Downer a lucrative consultancy. 

The Australian Secret Intelligence Agency was used to conduct corporate espionage on behalf of Australian companies so that it could continue the theft of oil revenues from Timor-Leste. The conducting of this espionage occurred during the same time that terrorists bombed the Australian embassy in Jakarta. 

Excuses were made regarding the bugging of the cabinet room in Dili and as first it was claimed that facilitating economic development is in Australia’s national security’s interest, which doesn’t make sense at all because one what matters pertaining to development occurred from spying on the cabinet room in Dili? Likewise $7 billion in oil revenues have been stolen from Timor-Leste which could have gone to development projects which is $5.1 billion more than what Australia gives the country in foreign aid. 

National Security excuses have also been made as to why ASIS decided to spy on the cabinet room of the country they worked so hard to see become independent in the first place. Are we really supposed to believe Australia supported the independence of a country that was genuinely a national security threat to them? Also, what did ASIS do during that time when terrorists bombed the embassy in Jakarta?

ASIS also acts in the economic interests of Australia and the claim of the corporate espionage being in Australia’s economic well being is also a lie. The gas is shipped to Japan and is sold at a 40% cheaper rate than in Australia which is much closer than Japan is. It isn’t in Australia’s economic well being for gas prices to far more expensive than in Japan for the same product from the same location. Woodside Petroleum and these companies also used a lot of cheap foreign labor which suppresses the wages in Australia as companies naturally will seek to maximize their benefits. 

The exposure of this scandal by Witness K led to the Australian government throwing everything they could to try to prosecute the Whistleblower who exposed the defrauding spying and theft from Timor-Leste. Defrauding is an offense under Section 334 of the ACT’s criminal code, and there were many more crimes committed by the perpetrators of this scandal but the government tried to get Witness K tried in a secret court. 

To recap Alexander Downer ordered the bugging of the cabinet room in Dili, Timor-Leste signed a treaty that allowed for Woodside Petroleum to keep the license over these oil and gas fields, they use cheap labor, and the gas is 40% more expensive for Australians than it is in Japan. Alexander Downer is a corrupt crooked criminal thief and his disgusting actions against Timor-Leste have similarities to what the Clintons did to Haiti.