Andrew Wilkie - Before Politics

Before Politics

Wilkie trained at the Royal Military College, Duntroon and graduated in 1984. He joined the Young Liberals while a cadet. After graduation and being stationed in Brisbane, he became a member of the Liberal Party. His military career spanned 1980–2000 and he rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel. He was seconded to the Office of National Assessments (ONA), an Australian intelligence agency, from 1999 until late 2000. After a stint with US defence company Raytheon, Wilkie returned to the ONA shortly after the 11 September attacks.

In the run-up to the 2003 Iraq war, the Australian, British and United States governments were asserting that intelligence reports showed that Iraq held weapons of mass destruction. Wilkie resigned from the ONA on 11 March 2003, claiming that the reports did not support such claims and in the years since his resignation, no valid evidence supporting the pre-war claims of weapons of mass destruction has ever been found.

Wilkie has stated that he increasingly encountered ethical conflict between his duty as an intelligence officer and his respect for the truth and, on 11 March 2003, he resigned from the ONA and placed evidence of this conflict before the Australian public. In response to widespread opposition to the war, Wilkie gave extensive television interviews and accepted numerous offers of public speaking engagements. He subsequently gave evidence to official British and Australian inquiries into the government's case for involvement in the Iraq war.

In 2004, Wilkie published Axis of Deceit, an account of the reasons for his decision and its results. He describes his views on the nature of intelligence agencies and the analyst's work, the history of the Iraq war, the untruths of politicians and the attempts to suppress the truth.

Wilkie was a member of the Australian Greens by 2004 and ran unsuccessfully on the Tasmanian Senate ticket in 2007. He resigned from the party in 2008, criticising it for a lack of professionalism.