When the Australian Border Force set up its secret informer unit, it worried obsessively over the risk of dealing with snitches of “ill repute”, otherwise known as sources that could compromise and embarrass the agency.

It turned out they were looking in the wrong direction. When the danger came, it was from within.

The ABF had hatched a secret plan to become one of the nation’s premier intelligence agencies, deploying specialist covert operatives to recruit informers in the nation’s ports and logistics industry to gain inside access to the organised criminal syndicates breaching Australia’s borders.

It took just three years from its conception…

Read the full article at SMH.COM.AU