The Invisible Front: The Importance of Effective Counterintelligence - MAJ Paul Patty

'These people aren’t ghosts, as much as they attempt to be or seem like it ...’

In this week’s episode, we sit down with MAJ Paul Patty, an Intelligence Officer in the Australian Army, to unpack counterintelligence (CI) in modern conflict. MAJ Patty is an expert in counterintelligence, and his skills have been relied upon in both the private and government sectors. We open with two stark contrasts: a contemporary case study on Ukraine’s operational planning and the consequences when CI is poorly conducted, set against the UK’s Double-Cross system in the Second World War—a successful approach to turn Axis spies to report bogus information back to Germany. We also examine how Russian services seeded spies inside Ukraine and across other post-Soviet states to run grey-zone deception operations, leaking operational plans back to Moscow and distorting Ukrainian decision cycles before contact.

We also confront a hard truth at home: Australians are not immune to recruitment by Foreign Intelligence Services. The classic levers of MICE—money, ideology, coercion, and ego—remain timeless vulnerabilities. Understanding how these levers are pulled, and recognising them early in ourselves and our teams, is essential to preventing insiders from becoming access points into our operations.

From there, MAJ Patty lays out what CI is (and isn’t): not just security compliance, but a campaign to degrade, deny, and manipulate an adversary’s understanding of our intent, capabilities, and movements. We explore how offensive and defensive CI intersect—neutralising hostile HUMINT networks, protecting sensitive capabilities, countering technical collection, and planning for counter-sabotage and partner-force integrity—and why CI effects must be integrated into operations from the start, not bolted on at the end.

Whether you’re a junior leader looking for practical CI habits or a planner figuring out how to wire CI into targeting, deception, and signature management, this conversation offers a clear, hard-edged primer on how to fight for decision advantage when it matters most.

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