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ANALYSIS: When ASIO chief Mike Burgess revealed foreign nations could be plotting to assassinate dissidents on Australian soil, it was a warning as much to the bad actors as to the public. By Lydia Khalil.

ASIO’s warning on foreign interference

ASIO’s director-general Mike Burgess.

Credit: AAP Image / Dan Himbrechts

When ASIO’s director-general, Mike Burgess, delivered the annual Lowy Lecture earlier this month, he made effective use of the rule of three. He clearly identified the service’s most pressing security concerns: “espionage, foreign interference and politically motivated violence”. He spoke of how these three threats are being accelerated by rapid advances in technology, where the “internet incubates, social media accelerates, [and] artificial intelligence exacerbates”.

He also identified three distinct cohorts of people challenging Australia’s social cohesion: “the aggrieved, the opportunistic, and the cunning”. But it was the last three that got everyone’s attention. He revealed that “ASIO assesses there is a realistic possibility” that there are at least three nations who “will attempt to assassinate a perceived dissident in Australia”.

Burgess remained tight-lipped about which three countries are targeting dissidents in Australia and why. The sensational claim, and the lack of follow-up detail, naturally induced a lot of public attention and speculation. Guesses ranged from Russia and Iran, to less obvious countries such as Cambodia and Rwanda, which also have a history of targeting dissidents.

Burgess’s public remarks may have come as a surprise given Australia has, thankfully, experienced no targeted killings by a foreign government. The assassination of dissidents and targeted killings is, however, increasingly becoming a tool of grey zone statecraft.

The grey zone is a realm of international relations between war and peace. Grey zone activities are designed to be abstruse, coercive and subversive. Also known as political warfare, sharp power and foreign interference, they are activities by nation states that are designed to coerce or undermine another state while avoiding direct military conflict. They are in contravention of international rules and norms, and include tactics such as underhand and disguised influence and information manipulation, coercive trade and economic practices, and targeted assassinations on foreign soil.

It’s an ancient type of statecraft practised and promoted by strategists from the likes of Sun Tzu, who always aimed to “subdue the enemy without fighting”, to the Indian Arthashastra texts that discuss how the incitement of coups, rebellions and targeted assassinations can be used to achieve strategic aims.

It’s also a modern phenomenon transformed and aided by digital technology and an increasingly transnational environment. Intelligence agencies have warned that grey zone activities, such as targeted killings, will likely increase in the coming years. A 2024 United States National Intelligence Council report assessed that they would even likely become a “dominant feature of great power competition and international relations more broadly because of eroding or nonexistent norms; emerging, evolving, and expanding domains; and … authoritarian leaders’ perceptions of their comparative advantages and fewer risks.”

Fans of the spy thriller television series Slow Horses have seen grey zone tactics fictionalised, where the latest season revolves around a Libyan group conducting a “destabilisation strategy”. As the book tells it, the strategy was devised by Britain and is used against it as revenge for British involvement in the military intervention that led to the overthrowing of Libyan president Muammar al-Gaddafi. One of the steps in this fictional strategy is to assassinate a populist leader.

In international relations, whether it’s diplomacy or warfare, there are rules and norms that govern how states are expected to behave and provide parameters and mechanisms for how other countries can respond. Grey zone tactics deliberately skirt those rules. They disguise actors, intentions and even desired outcomes, which makes combating the adversarial actors that use them all the more difficult. Ambiguity is the name of the game.

As one analysis by British defence think tank Royal United Services Institute describes it, grey zone statecraft is a hybrid threat where the “distinctions between power, war and crime, and between spies and thugs, begin to dissolve”. Are grey zone tactics such as targeted assassinations and violent attacks the work of a state, a criminal syndicate, a terrorist group, or all three? States that use such tactics deliberately keep you guessing to thwart prevention and response. Because grey zone tactics fall between the states of war and peace, it is unclear which international laws and norms apply for response or deterrence.

The country most known for targeted assassination is Russia. President Vladimir Putin’s critics, international dissidents, human rights activists and journalists have all been pursued by the Kremlin, using tactics as varied as they have been prolific. From plane crashes to poisonings, shootings to killings disguised as suicides, Russia has found many ways to kill Putin’s opponents within the country and across the globe.

A recent study by Ardavan Khoshnood, a researcher at Sweden’s Lund University, outlines how Iran, too, “has employed assassinations and proxy violence as tools of statecraft”, where the regime has targeted, threatened and killed dissidents in exile. Iran has conducted terrorist attacks and deployed assassinations against its perceived enemies in foreign countries since the founding of the Islamic Republic in 1979. Though the regime has always sought to deny involvement, journalists and intelligence organisations pointed to evidence linking Iran and its security arm, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, to such attacks. Khoshnood cites an interview this year in which a former commander admitted that the IRGC was behind a number of assassinations and detailed how the corps outsourced these plots, often to criminal outfits, creating a “multilayered structure that shielded Iranian officials from direct attribution”.

It’s not just authoritarian adversaries that have been accused of engaging in this tactic. India stands accused as well. Two years ago, Canada accused the Modi government of using a criminal network to target and kill a Sikh activist and Canadian citizen in British Columbia, as part of India’s campaign against dissidents and those calling for Khalistan independence. In June, Canada’s intelligence service warned the government that the assassination reflected a “significant escalation in India’s repression efforts” and noted “Indian officials, including their Canada-based proxy agents, engage in a range of activities that seek to influence Canadian communities and politicians”. The report came a day after the G7 summit in Alberta, where Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney sought to mend relations with India.

Whether it’s our geographical distance or national disposition, Australians tend to believe we are largely immune from global trends. Such things don’t happen here – until they do.

Three of our Five Eyes partners, the US, the UK and Canada, have seen foreign government-sponsored targeted killings or foiled plots to kill on their soil. One could say there is an intimacy between these countries, with shared societal structures, diverse diaspora and migrant populations, a similar openness and shared adversaries. If it can happen there, it can happen here too.

In August, when the Albanese government expelled the Iranian ambassador and publicly accused Iran of foreign interference in Australia and directing third parties to conduct a series of violent attacks against Jewish targets, Australians were surprised. We should not have been, given Iran’s history of sponsorship of political violence and foreign interference, and Australia’s strategic position.

The regime has long intimidated and harassed Iranian diaspora communities within Australia. In 2023, the then Home Affairs minister Clare O’Neil named Iran in a speech about foreign interference. An Australian Senate select committee inquiry into foreign interference also received hundreds of submissions from the diaspora detailing Iran’s intimidation and threats.

Iran is not the only country that poses a threat in Australia, and while the general public may be unsure which three countries Burgess was referring to, the very public announcement likely served its intended, but less obvious, purpose.

The use of targeted killings is increasing. To help deter it, more states are willing to publicly call out this phenomenon, as Burgess did during the Lowy Lecture. But just as grey zone tactics are vague and opaque, so must be the warnings by states against them, lest a more direct approach spark a bigger confrontation. Burgess’s oblique reference to the threat of targeted assassinations on Australian soil is as much a warning to those adversaries attempting to conduct such action as it is an assessment of the actual threat.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on November 15, 2025 as "ASIO’s strategic ambiguity".

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