CANBERRA, Sept 20: Australia spied on the United States in the 1980s and stole top-secret radar codes for its fighter jets, former defence minister Kim Beazley said in parliament on Thursday.

Beazley said Australia felt compelled to spy when he was defence minister because Washington refused to share the codes its F/A-18 fighters needed to identify potentially hostile aircraft.

In his farewell speech to parliament before retiring, Beazley said he went “up hill and down dale” in Washington trying without success to persuade top US defence officials to hand over the codes.

“In the end we spied on them and we extracted the codes ourselves and we got another radar that could identify them (enemy planes),” said Beazley, who was defence minister from 1984 to 1990 and later became deputy prime minister.

Australia is part of the US-led coalition in Iraq and Beazley said Washington remained Australia’s most important ally.—AFP