The secret meetings that made the AUKUS deal work

Senior US defence officials told AFR Weekend a particular meeting at the Pentagon in the past 18 months stood out.

“There was a meeting that [US Defence Secretary] Lloyd Austin hosted with the [UK Secretary of State for Defence] Ben Wallace and Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles in December last year, where there was a moving conversation about the magnitude and the gravity of what our three countries had embarked on,” the official said.

“It’s accurate to say it was one of the most moving governmental meetings most of us have ever seen because of how monumental it was.”

Long history

Sharing defence information is not usual for the Americans. Along a corridor on the second floor of the Pentagon there is a permanent display of former US defence personnel and the jail time they received for disclosing classified information. The display has dozens of stories printed on large plastic dog tags about officials leaking secret military details for various motives.

The AUKUS deal started in April 2021 when Andrew Shearer, the director-general of Australia’s Office of National Intelligence, pitched the idea to the Biden administration’s Asia Pacific co-ordinator Kurt Campbell at a breakfast in the Hay-Adams hotel overlooking the White House.

Abraham Denmark, who was senior adviser to Austin on AUKUS, along with under-secretary of the Navy Erik Raven, deputy under-secretary of defence for policy, Mara Karlin, and director of the Undersea Warfare Division, Rear Admiral Douglas Perry, all played key roles.

Once US President Joe Biden finally gave the nod, the program started to gain momentum and in November of that year, the administration named James Miller to coordinate US efforts to implement the AUKUS agreement with Admiral Frank Caldwell.

Inevitably, with so many meetings and so many personnel, there was plenty more breaking of bread between the Americans and Australians.

One senior US defence official recalls dining with Shearer at Sydney’s Circular Quay.

“I’ve known Andrew for a long time and I think my favourite dining experience was after one of the joint steering group meetings. We had dinner at a beautiful restaurant, overlooking Circular Quay which usually has a beautiful view. Except there was a cruise ship docked there that night. So all we could see was the side.”

Back in Washington, DC, the Bluejacket restaurant and bar in Navy Yard saw plenty of heavy lifting on AUKUS between Australian, American and British personnel.

But a vast proportion of the meetings between the countries was done by secure video teleconferences.

Looked to the past

“The number of video teleconferences that we had at 6am in the US, midday in the UK, and probably 10pm in Australia, wow … talk about three countries really sacrificing for each other,” one of the US officials says.

There was never a code name for the whole AUKUS operation like many global investment banking deals usually have. “We probably should have had one,” a US official says.

Those in the AUKUS deal may have looked to the past for inspiration. Australia and America already share the Pine Gap satellite surveillance base in the Northern Territory.

For US Congressman Joe Courtney, a supporter of AUKUS, Pine Gap is part of the history so crucial in building trust between the two nations.

“I think the Five Eyes program was also a really strong entree for this decision and, of course, the Pine Gap facility in some ways is the heart of the Five Eyes work that goes on,” he says.

“I think the shared foreign policy history, the military policy history, and the intelligence operations history really has created a context where, whether it’s in the navy, whether it’s in the national security community, or whether it’s in Congress, most people in Australia we can trust.”