Spies, security and aid: Christopher Whitcomb’s Anonymous Male

The Development Intelligence Lab’s recent breakdown of Australia’s foreign affairs spending in the 2026 Federal Budget turns up some astonishing figures, one of which is the amount of money spent on intelligence.

According to the Lab’s number crunchers, $2.2 billion will be spent on the National Intelligence Community in 2026–27, a figure which rises to $4.6 billion if you include the Australian Signals Directorate, which resides within the Defence portfolio. That higher figure almost equals what Australia will spend on total Official Development Assistance in 2026–27 ($5.2 billion).

Yet the very nature of intelligence means details of how this money is spent and the way, if at all, it intersects with aid is obscure, seldom mentioned in public dispatches, and a furrow largely unploughed by policy researchers. There is no “Intelligence Development Lab” or “Intelligence Policy Centre”, for instance, nor an industry bench of consultants toiling on monitoring and evaluation or churning out communications products.

Tantalising peeks behind the bureaucratic curtain indicate that there certainly have been links between the worlds of intelligence and development.

These include the revelations that Australia spied on Timor-Leste’s Timor Gap negotiation strategy under the guise of an aid project in the early 2000s, with prime ministers in Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu occasionally venting suspicions about what expatriate technical advisers get up to and in some cases booting them out.

In 2013, the American whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked data that detailed efforts of countries in the “Five Eyes” network to listen in on Pacific phone networks and Pacific leaders.

Yet, for the most part, this world is closed off firmly to anyone not holding a top-secret security clearance. We are left with the feeling that there must be some connection but unsure of its contours and extent.

The shadowy worlds of espionage and aid are among those covered in Anonymous Male, Christopher Whitcomb’s memoir about his life in, out of and around the spy game. It’s a high-octane, often diverting, sometimes plain odd; the literary equivalent of a sprawling night at a sketchy bar where one can never be sure the next drink is going to result in smiles, a challenge to a knife fight or a discussion about Ernest Hemingway.

A former hostage negotiator for the FBI as well as a novelist, Whitcomb came to spying halfway through his career. The book recounts how he flitted from Afghanistan to parts of Southeast Asia and Somalia on various assignments. At each juncture, he descends ever furth