The Murphy raids on the offices of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) occurred on 16 March 1973. The purpose of the raids, instigated by Attorney-General Lionel Murphy, was to obtain terrorism-related information that the ASIO was accused of withholding. Murphy was operating without any permission from the Prime Minister at the time, Gough Whitlam or the Cabinet. No warrants were obtained from the judiciary. Although called "raids", the only raid carried out was on the Canberra office as this was by surprise whereas the investigation of the Melbourne office (ASIO's headquarters) was done hours after the Director-General had been informed of Murphy's intentions. Background Global terrorism and Australia The Whitlam Government came to office shortly after the terrorist attacks at the 1972 Summer Olympics and the Sydney bombings involving Croatian separatist groups in Australia, including the Ustaša. One of the first acts of the new government was to help US-led efforts in the United Nations General Assembly to counter the rise of 'political violence' to person and property around the globe. These efforts failed because the Non-aligned Movement states believed that political violence or terrorism was not inherently illegitimate, given resistance and revolutionary activities in the former colonies. A planned visit by Džemal Bijedić, the Yugoslavian Prime Minister, in March 1973 generated considerable angst within the government about the security situation and the safety of the visiting dignitary. There was also much concern in Yugoslavia, which was a member of the Non-Aligned Movement. The President of Yugoslavia Josip Tito said before the visit: "We will send more agents to Australia. We will crush these people [Croatian separatists]. We will destroy them root and branch". This indicated the possible presence of a Yugoslavian counter-terrorism operation in Australia. In 2016 it was shown that such an operation existed from at least the late 1970s. Labor and the Whitlam government were highly suspicious of ASIO and perceived the organisation to be a partisan tool of the Liberal governments in the 1950s and 1960s. At the 1971 Federal Labor Party conference, only a single vote (22 in favour, 23 against) had defeated a proposed motion "that ASIO be abolished." The raids Murphy, with the help of his advisor Kerry Milte—a former Commonwealth Police official and barrister—gained entry to the Canberra office of ASIO, which was then a regional office, at midnight on 16 March. They located a document which implied that ASIO and