The World - News from May 23, 1985

The Australian equivalent of the CIA will lose the right to use weapons and carry out certain kinds of spy operations after a series of embarrassing blunders, Prime Minister Bob Hawke said in Canberra. Hawke announced the measures in Parliament in response to a two-year investigation prompted by a series of spy scandals. He said the government has accepted a commission’s recommendations that the Australian Security Intelligence Service be barred from launching covert special and political operations, lose the right to use weapons and dispose of its stocks of weapons and explosives.