A senior officer in the counterespionage unit of Australia’s premier spy agency ASIO has been exposed as a secret KGB mole, who stole and sold highly classified intelligence to the Russians for at least five years.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation program Four Corners has forensically threaded together decades of investigations to reveal the man’s identity. The breathtaking betrayal jeopardized Australia’s security relationship with the United States and Britain, key partners in the Five Eyes intelligence alliance.

The mole’s identity has been kept from the Australian public for nearly 30 years.

The man “was a critical [KGB] asset” according to international intelligence expert Neil Fergus.

For at least two years in the late 1970s, the ASIO mole was the feared Russian spy agency’s only back door to American and British intelligence secrets.

“This was gold for them,” Fergus said.

The mole’s ASIO colleagues suspected nothing.

His name was Ian George Peacock.

View this 2023 ABC documentary for your insider’s account.