Bugs everywhere | Blogotariat

Many years ago, acquaintances of ours, Peter and Ria Gill, owned a restaurant, Peaches1,2, in the Canberra suburb of Campbell and we would occasionally dine there. The food was wonderful and the wine list was spectacular.

We dined there one lunchtime just before Christmas in 1985 with my parents. My father was very fond of assorted red wines and, although he had rarely drunk any Henschke Hill of Grace shiraz3, mostly because of the expense; as it was our Christmas outing, he thought we could indulge in some. Peter told us that we were out of luck as they didn’t have any, but he would give us a bottle of Penfolds Grange Hermitage4 for the same price. My father’s eyes brightened and he enthusiastically agreed. The wine was beautiful.

Many months before, in April 1983, Peaches had been the site of an infamous dinner meeting between Soviet diplomat (and KGB operative) Valeriy Ivanov and former federal secretary of the Labor Party and then lobbyist, David Combe5. Peaches was apparently chosen because in the freezer were several bottles of Stolichnaya vodka, which the Soviets craved6.

The month before the Ivanov-Combe lunch at Peaches, and the night before the election that brought the Hawke government to power, Combe arrived at the Canberra home of Ivanov, his wife Vera, and their seven-year-old daughter Irina. The conversation during the evening was often rambling and, in Combe’s case, increasingly slurred as he had imbibed quite a bit. He did most of the talking and had great hopes for the future — the nation’s and his own — under what appeared to be an inevitable Labor government. The whole conversation was recorded by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), which had a listening device installed in the ceiling of the Ivanov home. The fact that this conversation was relayed at the Hope Royal Commission presumably made Peter Gill wonder if there were any bugs in his restaurant, so he decided to find out. He contracted someone to ‘sweep’ Peaches and what they found stunned him. He told my partner and me that they had found six listening devices, at least some of which were buried within the woodwork of the tables. He mentioned that there was one planted by ASIO, one by the KGB, and six from the CIA! He also had the contractor sweep his home, but no more were found.

The item I read which reminded me of the Peaches bugging story was from the Chris Hedges Report where Hedges interviews Max Blumenthal and, in part of this article, they talk about visits by Israel’s war criminal prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu to the UK and the US. Blumenthal was told from a source connected to people in the White House, that Donald Trump is scared of Netanyahu and is afraid to defy him and about what could happen if he does (Epstein files anyone?). He was told that during Netanyahu’s several 2025 visits to the U.S., listening devices were planted by Israeli agents in the Secret Service’s emergency response vehicles7.

This is not unprecedented. It was reported that in 2018, during Trump’s first term, Israel had planted StingRay* listening devices near the White House to listen in on Trump’s mobile phone communications. They were discovered by the Department of Homeland Security, but the White House decided not to do anything about it, apart from removing the devices8.

In 2017, Boris Johnson, then UK foreign secretary, alleged that his security team found a listening device in his personal toilet at the British Foreign Office soon after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had used it. Johnson wrote in his political memoir that “Bibi repaired for a while, and it may or may not be a coincidence but I am told that later, when they were doing a regular sweep for bugs, they found a listening device in the thunderbox”9.

These devices are much more sophisticated than they used to be in the days of Peter Wright of ‘Spycacher’10 fame and in the days of Combe and Ivanov.

*StingRay listening devices: These are also known as “cell site simulators” or “IMSI catchers”. They are invasive mobile phone surveillance devices that mimic mobile phone towers and trick mobile phones in the area into transmitting via the device rather than the mobile phone towers, thereby obtaining the location and identifying information of the mobile phone. When used to track a suspect’s mobile phone, they also gather information about the phones of bystanders who happen to be nearby, and can be used to record conversations11,12.

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