At this stage, we were reasonably confident that nothing in the manuscript posed a threat to national security, but given the very nature of the project and the fact that Australia was in a kind of state of war, we decided to seek a second opinion. More research ensued, resulting in advice to seek a lawyer with military and intelligence experience. Martin Toohey, who had recently reviewed Lance Collins’s allegations for the government, seemed the right man for the job. Chris Feik, the book’s editor, phoned the Canberra-based Toohey, who proposed an hourly rate and agreed to review the manuscript. Then followed one of the most surreal sagas in my thirty-year publishing career.

A few days after the manuscript was sent to Martin Toohey, we received a fax from the federal attorney-general’s office informing us that the manuscript was in their possession – Toohey had delivered it into their hands without telling us! In the next two weeks, the manuscript was circulated through the various national intelligence agencies for vetting, and a small delegation of senior personnel from the attorney-general’s office and the Office of National Assessments came twice to Melbourne to negotiate cuts and edits. So civil and unthreatening were these meetings that it was impossible to know if we were involved in high drama or high farce. It wasn’t hard to agree to their proposed changes; it all seemed so eminently reasonable in that friendly atmosphere. To this day, I can’t figure out if the changes were frivolous or if their negotiation was a great save carried out in the nick of time. There is no doubt that Wilkie’s manuscript was political dynamite in an election year, and our concern that the intense interest in it was likely to be politically motivated cannot simply be attributed to paranoia. It is true, however, that we weren’t asked to make any changes of a political nature.

When the changes were finally agreed upon, it came time to erase what had been removed from the published book. It wasn’t just a matter of a simple, old-fashioned ‘shred’; the offending material was out there, in cyberspace, in the ephemeral domain of e-mails and hard drives. A SWAT team of young techies spent a week at Black Inc.’s offices tracking and deleting bits and bytes, ‘cleansing’ the computers that had held the original manuscript. Again, I didn’t know if I should be alarmed or comforted. Should I be alarmed that we had come so close to endangering our country, or comforted by the diligence and efficiency with which our services dispatched this real danger? Or should the alarm be at the government’s frivolous waste of resources on what was a mere storm in a teacup?

Whatever the case, it was Toohey’s actions that seemed truly alarming. Were his actions not a serious breach of professional confidentiality? We believe that they were and have lodged a complaint against him with the Law Society of the Australian Capital Territory. The complaint is still in train and it is therefore not proper to air its details, save to consider the general implications for publishers in the fraught post-September 11 era. In part, Toohey, in defending his actions, asked whether I was aware that ‘the mere fact of having the documents in [my] physical possession without the knowledge of the appropriate Security agencies rendered [me] liable to prosecution’. This, of course, has serious implications for freedom of the press, not to speak of amounting to a chicken-and-egg paradox. How is a publisher to know if material falls into this category without first seeking legal advice? Or are lawyers redundant in such matters and publishers obliged to send anything smelling suspicious straight to the attorney-general’s office? Or are lawyers obliged to act as agents of the attorney-general’s office and pass on all offending material to the attorney-general without reference to their client?

It is a relief to learn from a Senior Counsel that: ‘A bit of research shows that the barrister was plainly in the wrong IF he had been retained. If he had NOT been retained, there can be no criticism of his action.’ In our case, there is no doubt in our minds that Toohey WAS retained.

With all the controversy surrounding the book, it is easy to overlook the seriousness of what it reveals and the courage of its author, who risked everything to expose an historically monumental intelligence and political scandal. At the time of Wilkie’s resignation, the extent of that scandal was unimaginable and its exposure seemed distinctly unpatriotic, especially by a senior intelligence officer. But time has told: in early July, a bipartisan US Senate Intelligence Committee report found that the pre-war assessments on which the war was predicated were ‘unreasonable and largely unsupported by the available intelligence’.

Will our institutions be called to account in the same way? It would be heartening to think so. The security services and the government have shown themselves to be vigilant when it comes to publishers and dissident voices, but can they now discipline and review themselves?