Top spy is accidental source. The Defence Minister here in Australia has come out saying that the practice of high ranking intelligence officers giving lectures at universities is "too risky". The comment followed senate testimony by the head of the Defence Intelligence Organisation, Frank Lewincamp, in which he admitted that he may have inadvertently been the unnamed source of claims in a newspaper article. Lewincamp gave an "off-the-record" lecture at the Australian National University at which a reporter was present. Not long after, a piece in The Age claimed that the Australian defence community warned the Australian government about the unreliability of certain pieces of US intelligence regarding Saddam Hussein's capabilities. Lewincamp admitted that he had discussed the issue at the lecture, but that he denied that he was the source for the more incendiary assertions in the article:

"I have never said that the Bush administration's claims justifying an invasion were exaggerated," he said. "Nor have I said that the government was told that the Iraq WMD did not pose an immediate threat."
However, Lewincamp did not dispute the story's claim that he said Iraq's WMD capacity was "latent" and did not justify an invasion.

While both sides of the Parliament accept Lewincamp's statement that no classified material was released at this particular lecture, the incident has resulted in calls for the practice to be curtailed or at least regulated in order to prevent the possibility from happening in the future.