ASIO Recruits Latte Sippers John Birmingham Blunt Instrument
I am indebted to my Facebook buddy Sasha Uzunov for alerting me to this advert for ASIO surveillance officers published in a local rag in Melbourne: …
Blunt Instrument
John Birmingham tells stories.
The Age
The man with the golden … cufflinks and matching tie pin
February 25, 2010
Comments 56
We are doomed.
Not because, as the government has suddenly realised in its Counterterrorism White Paper, the beardy nut-jobs are here to stay, but because our response to this is to unleash on them the awesome power of a fully operational espresso machine. While the Ruddbot and his national security advisers are worrying late into the night about national resilience, counter-intelligence, and terrorism as a “persistent and permanent” condition, the front line agency charged with protecting us from things that go boom in the nightclub has decided to recruit its next generation of spies from the idle wanker demographic.
I am indebted to my Facebook buddy Sasha Uzunov for alerting me to this advert for ASIO surveillance officers published in a local rag in Melbourne:
see link: http://teamuzunovmedia.blogspot.com/
Australian Government Australian Security Intelligence Organisation ASIO YOU’RE SITTING AT YOUR FAVOURITE CAF [sic] ON CHAPEL QUIETLY WATCHING THE WORLD GO BY. YOU’VE ORDERED THE USUAL. THERE’S A MAN SITTING ACROSS FROM YOU. YOU NOTICE THE PATTERN ON HIS SHIRT IS SIMILAR TO THE PATTERN IN THE FROTH OF YOUR CAPPUCCINO. HE’S ON HIS OWN. HE LOOKS UP, PAUSES FOR A MINUTE AND SCRIBBLES SOMETHING DOWN ON A SERVIETTE. HE DOES THIS AGAIN. HE MUST BE A WRITER, YOU THINK. THE NEXT TIME HE LOOKS UP, YOU CASUALLY ASK WHAT HE’S WRITING ABOUT. JUST JOTTING DOWN IDEAS FOR HIS NEW BOOK, APPARENTLY. PERCEPTIVE. INTUITIVE. ASSURED. YOU DON’T THINK TWICE ABOUT IT, UNTIL YOU DISCOVER THESE ARE THE QUALITIES YOU’LL BE VALUED FOR AS A SURVEILLANCE OFFICER. ASIO.GOV.AU/SURVEILLANCE WE ACTIVELY ENCOURAGE WOMEN AND ETHNIC MINORITIES TO APPLY.
One hardly knows where to begin extracting the urine. With the effete, latte-sipping obsessive compulsive shirt pervert, who loves nothing more than to attract attention to him or herself by questioning the members of the public about their private business? Or with the seething, medieval bazaar of Chapel Street in which shady frock sellers mingle with former KGB baristas and rogue CIA sauvignon blanc fanciers in a dangerous world of fast-paced espionage, state-sponsored murder, and retail therapy.
I mean, WTF? I’d always assumed the reason that the government refused to comment on anything involving security or intelligence matters was because somewhere out there in the dark we had a legion of cruel spies and agents and rogue death-dealing assassins harvesting our enemies as soon as they foolishly put their heads up.
Oh how my heart thrilled this morning when I read that some of the cold-eyed killers who necked that Hamas villain in Dubai were carrying Aussie passports. That’s the ticket, I thought. Our tax dollars well spent in the dark arts of statecraft and political murder.
But no, the truth is much scarier, if more predictable. They weren’t gallant little vegemiters at all. Probably just your common and garden variety wet work squad from Mossad or one of the cooler arms of the CIA. Our government, of course, won’t comment.
The reason it won’t comment is because we would die of shame to discover that our national security is being safeguarded by the sort of inner-city fops and dilettantes who’d be more at home in a vegan yoga class than getting split up the middle by a laser beam in Auric Goldfinger’s torture dungeon. Not for our spies a silenced pistol and a spring-loaded throwing knife. No, not when they might clash horribly with the delightful little Burberry clutch they picked up in Chapel Street when they should have been gouging eyeballs and pulling teeth on the North-West frontier.
We are doomed, I tell you. Doomed.