Trump v the spies of Five Eyes
ON MARCH 2ND Tulsi Gabbard, America’s director of national intelligence, accused Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, of seeking a third world war “or even a nuclear war”. Ms Gabbard has a long history of conspiratorial and pro-Russian views. Her former aides say that she routinely read and shared propaganda published by RT, a Kremlin mouthpiece.
Ms Gabbard’s appointment has caused concern in American intelligence agencies, and those of its allies, yet she is not the only source of tension in America’s network of intelligence alliances. Mr Trump recently stopped sharing intelligence with Ukraine for a week to press it to make concessions. He has threatened both to annex Canada and to eject it from the Five Eyes spy pact. For now, intelligence continues to flow, freely, between America and its allies. Might that change?
American spies are connected to their allies through a vast network of relationships. The CIA, America’s human-intelligence (HUMINT) service, maintains liaison officers with virtually every allied service. It co-operates with them on espionage and covert action. In one audacious operation from the 1970s to the 1990s, for instance, the CIA and Germany’s BND secretly co-owned a leading manufacturer of cipher machines, selling nobbled devices to unsuspecting states.
In signals intelligence (SIGINT) the entanglement is deeper still. After the second world war, America, Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand established the Five Eyes, a pact to jointly collect intercepted communications and data. It is the most ambitious collection and sharing arrangement in history. Each side trusts the other to a remarkable degree. In his history of GCHQ, Britain’s SIGINT service, John Ferris, a Canadian historian, describes a “legendary moment” where an American seconded to GCHQ and a Briton to the NSA, its American counterpart, negotiated with one another “on behalf of their adopted services”. A CIA officer sits on Britain’s joint intelligence committee, which produces intelligence assessments for the prime minister.
Some fear that all this is now at risk. There are three possibilities. One is that America will disrupt these arrangements, perhaps acting on its threats to boot out Canada from the Five Eyes. Another is that allies, concerned that the Trump administration will be lax in protecting its secrets, might begin to hold back themselves or to seek other partners. In his first term, for instance, Mr Trump once divulged Israeli secrets to Russia’s foreign minister. The most likely scenario, though, is a third: that Mr Trump’s war on the federal bureaucracy and politicisation of the intelligence community (IC), as it is known, will cause turmoil and paralysis among American spies that spills over onto allies.
Start with the jitters over sharing. In practice, the risk to HUMINT and SIGINT is very different. The bond between agencies like the CIA and MI6 is deep. “We share more with each other than we will do with anyone else,” Richard Moore, the head of MI6, said last year. The two agencies operate a “best athlete” model, deciding which is best placed to go after a particular target.
The CIA’s “Russia house”, the unit that spies on the Kremlin, shares more with some European counterparts than each would do with their own service chiefs. But that intimacy has limits. In general intelligence is shared, even with ministers and other senior officials, only in redacted form, the names and details of human sources disguised. When Britain recruited Oleg Gordievsky, a top KGB officer, in the 1980s, it initially concealed his identity from the CIA—to that agency’s considerable irritation.
Western officials tell The Economist that it is largely business as usual, for now. But in the HUMINT world, intelligence can be scaled up and down, or disguised, in response to political concerns over American leakiness and reliability. “The bottom line is: there is a sacred obligation that any intelligence organisation has to its assets,” says Marc Polymeropoulos of the Atlantic Council, a think-tank in Washington, who was previously the CIA’s chief of operations in Europe and Eurasia. Western intelligence services will “sanitise things that they had shared in the past”.
The SIGINT business is different. Five Eyes is not an ironclad legal arrangement; there is no written contract demanding that allies share every last scrap of material pinched from the Kremlin’s WhatsApp group or Xi Jinping’s smart wok. But the joint system of collection and secure networks to distribute and process the take means that there is a far greater degree of automatic sharing than exists among HUMINT services. Bill Bonsall, a director of GCHQ in the 1970s, noted that the idea of withholding intelligence was dangerous: Five Eyes rested on a belief that “each partner’s contribution will not only not be withheld, but also will not even be delayed.”
In 1984, after New Zealand banned nuclear-armed or powered vessels from its ports and waters, in effect shutting out the US Navy, the country was “mostly, but not entirely, expelled” from Five Eyes until 2006, according to Mr Ferris. That was a rare exception. During the Suez crisis, when America and Britain split acrimoniously over an Anglo-French invasion of Egypt, SIGINT co-operation continued untroubled. In 1973 Henry Kissinger, then national security adviser, demanded that America cut off Britain to punish it for a spat over Middle East policy. “I’m cutting them off,” he said, privately. “We just have to show our teeth.” America’s National Security Agency “rejected this order,” writes Mr Ferris, “which would have wrecked American SIGINT collection in Europe and the Middle East.” When America and Canada clashed over the Iraq war in 2003, Canada was “locked out of many military and military-intelligence relationships”, but not Five Eyes.
In practice, says one former British spy chief, and with the exception of New Zealand—which “doesn’t contribute very much”—it would be impossible to “slice out” any country from Five Eyes without disrupting the whole. Tremors in one country tend to affect others. When America has had domestic legal showdowns over FISA Section 702, a law which governs surveillance abroad, Britain’s SIGINT machinery has had to prepare for major adjustments to its systems if the American law were to expire.
The interdependence is lopsided, of course. “We don’t have a foreign intelligence service,” says Jody Thomas, who served as national security adviser to Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, until last year. But America would still lose something. Canada has led SIGINT in the Arctic, for instance, since the 1940s. Britain has invested heavily in cryptography. Australia’s location is vital for tracking Chinese activity in Asia.
Nonetheless, that everyone would lose is not necessarily a deterrent to Mr Trump. “This is a unique situation,” argues Mr Ferris. In the past, crises within Five Eyes were resolved because American agencies understood the value of these partnerships. They “quietly picked up the pieces”, he says, if not in defiance of their political masters then at least at a safe bureaucratic distance. Today American spies are “frightened of the future, to an extraordinary degree, and unsure of where the chainsaw will go”.
It is already being wielded. In recent days the CIA has begun firing officers. Elon Musk’s cost-cutting agency, DOGE, already appears to have contributed to multiple security lapses, including the exposure of a CIA facility, and the insistence that the CIA email to it a list of new employees with their first names and initials, which could help foreign intelligence services identify them.
The risk is not just that American spy agencies will struggle to push back, as they did in the past, against the use of intelligence as a weapon against allies. It is also that they will become distracted or diverted. Kash Patel, the director of the FBI, has spent years endorsing wild conspiracy theories. His decision to shred the bureau’s leadership and focus on crime “bodes poorly for US counterintelligence”, notes Chris Taylor, an Australian intelligence official currently with the ASPI think-tank in Canberra.
At present, Western officials are concerned, but not panicked. “All the stuff flowing through the pipes is flowing as normal”, says one insider. “I would not rate this as a major crisis within the Five Eyes,” says Mr Ferris. Not yet, anyway. In 2021, amid concern over whether an independent Scottish state could join Five Eyes, Ciaran Martin, a former GCHQ official and the head of its defensive arm, the National Cyber-Security Centre, offered a simple heuristic to understand the balance of power in the Western alliance. “Five Eyes…has almost no formal governance, and very little informal governance,” he wrote. “It has, in practice, just one unwritten rule—that America makes the rules.”■