Secret ASIO documents leaked to a newspaper in 2004 were sent from the Batemans Bay Post Office during a Canberra resident’s trip to the area.
For more local news and photos grab a copy of the Bay Post or Moruya Examiner.
Francis Matthew O’Ryan, a housemate of former ASIO officer James Paul Seivers, photocopied the sensitive documents in the Bay and mailed them to The Australian newspaper.
The documents outlined what the agency knew of the terrorist threat to Australians in Indonesia in the lead-up to the 2002 Bali bombings.
Mr O’Ryan paid for an Express Post envelope with his credit card, which provided the link for investigators from the Australian Federal Police to track him down.
Justice Malcolm Gray found the pair guilty on Wednesday of leaking secret documents that could have prejudiced national security.
A jury found Mr Seivers and housemate Mr O’Ryan guilty in April of conspiring in 2004 to leak sensitive ASIO documents to the media.
It was the second attempt by the Commonwealth to secure a conviction against the two men after their first trial, in May last year, ended in a hung jury.
Justice Gray sentenced both men to 12 months’ imprisonment, with Mr Seivers to serve six months in periodic detention and Mr O’Ryan three months.
Mr Seivers had been a junior member of an ASIO team in mid-2003 assigned to provide material to a Senate inquiry into the deadly bombings.
He handed three documents to Mr O’Ryan, who sent them to The Australian newspaper in October 2004.
During his trial, he said he had taken the documents home inadvertently, while Mr O’Ryan said he had come across them by chance while cleaning the house.
The trial heard the ASIO papers contained intelligence assessments that in the months before the October 2002 attacks, Indonesian Islamist groups were planning attacks on nightclubs frequented by Westerners, which the terrorists dubbed “sin spots”.
More than 200 people, including 88 Australians, died in the bomb attacks on Paddy’s Bar and the Sari Club at Bali’s Kuta Beach, but two subsequent inquiries found the Howard Government was not provided with intelligence that could have been used to prevent the atrocities.
Through his lawyer James Sabharwal, O’Ryan told the court he had decided to supply the documents to the press so the public would know the bombings could have been averted. O’Ryan said he had acted alone in taking the papers and sending them to the newspaper. But counsel for the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions, Stephen Hall, SC, told the jury records of telephone calls between the two men on the afternoon the documents were sent proved they had acted with a common purpose.
In handing down the sentences on Wednesday, Justice Gray said the disclosure of the information could have put at risk the confidence of other intelligence organisations in ASIO’s ability to protect sensitive information, and that Seivers would have been aware of these consequences.
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