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Australia hiring more spies

An influx of Chinese spies has forced Australia's home espionage agency into a recruiting drive to counter the threat as well as that posed by Muslim extremists, a newspaper report said yesterday.

The Australian newspaper said the the Australian Security and Intelligence Organization (ASIO) had more than doubled the number of spies from non-English speaking backgrounds in the past two years in a major recruitment drive, with most of the newcomers fluent in Chinese, the paper said.

Attorney-General Philip Ruddock said it would be inappropriate to reveal the language skills and cultural backgrounds of the new recruits, but said ASIO had been on a major recruitment drive since the Sept. 11 attacks in the US.

"We have committed very significant resources which has enabled ASIO to expand its staffing to 1,200, double the number it had at 2001," Ruddock told reporters.

"This campaign that we have been engaged in has been certainly very innovative and recruited high-quality staff with a range of experience and backgrounds," he said.

The Australian said around 88 linguists had been employed since 2004 under the recruitment drive which plans to see ASIO grow to more than 1,800 by 2011.

ASIO is responsible for protecting Australia against espionage, acts of terrorism and sabotage. ASIO agents have no arrest powers and are not armed.

The Australian said many of the new Chinese-speaking recruits had been assigned to a counter-espionage unit set up specifically to address concerns Beijing was running extensive spy networks in Australia.

A government source said Australia was being aggressively targeted by Chinese agents, who were mostly operating undercover as diplomats or business figures.

But ASIO was having less success recruiting fluent Arabic speakers, with fewer than a dozen working inside security and intelligence agencies, the report said.
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