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Australia’s foreign spy agency, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) has appointed its first ever female director-general, Kerri Hartland.

The former senior public servant will finish her current role overseeing the reform of workplace culture in federal parliament to commence her new position with ASIS next February.

She is part of a growing number of women are being appointed into leadership roles at intelligence agencies, including Rachel Noble, who became Director-General of the Australian Signals Directorate in 2020, Avril Haines, who became the first female Director of U.S National Intelligence in 2021, and Elisabetta Belloni, as Italy’s first female Head of Secret Services.

“I am incredibly honoured to be appointed as the 13th Director-General of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service,” Hartland said in a statement.

“With an increasingly complex geostrategic landscape, intelligence will continue to be critical to securing Australia’s safety, prosperity and sovereignty. To lead an organisation that so significantly contributes to Australia’s national security is a true privilege.”

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Hartland has decades’ worth of experience leading large transformational initiatives — skills which some experts say will be exercised in her new role.

William Stoltz, the policy director at the National Security College, told VOA News Hartland will oversee big changes at ASIS.

“The operational environment necessitates that the work of ASIS has to change,” Stoltz said.

“I mean, we have come off about 20-years of ASIS working quite closely with British SIS (Secret Intelligence Service) and the American CIA with a predominant focus on counterterrorism and counter-insurgency operations in the Middle East.”

“We are very firmly shifted to an operating environment where ASIS’s work needs to be much closer to home focusing on preventing and understanding, I suppose, the great power competition that is happening between China and the United States and so that means it is a very different intelligence collection target set.”

In 2011, Hartland was appointed deputy director-general of the domestic spy agency, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation — a role she had until 2017.

In a statement released earlier this month, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Hartland would bring “excellent strategic, operational and people leadership” skills to the role.

The Prime Minister also thanked outgoing Director-General, Paul Symon AO, for his leadership of ASIS over five years.

“Symon’s career has been one of service to Australia,” he said. “He has contributed with distinction in senior Defence and intelligence roles both domestically and internationally.”

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Australia: foreign spy agency ASIS appoints…