Donald 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 she routinely read and shared propaganda published by RT, a Kremlin mouthpiece.
Ms Gabbard’s appointment has caused concern in American intelligence agencies and in 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 example, 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” when an American seconded to GCHQ and a Briton to the National Security Agency (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 his politicisation of the intelligence community (IC), as it is known, will cause turmoil and paralysis among American spies that spill over onto allies.
The jitters over sharing differ depending on whether it has to do with HUMINT or SIGINT. The bond between agencies like the CIA and Britain’s 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 and jointly develop the technology that supports espionage.
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. Its 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 Trump enigma
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.” The result has been a torrent of intelligence that has far exceeded what any one country could achieve on its own.
In 1984, after New Zealand banned nuclear-armed or -powered vessels from its ports and waters, in effect barring the US Navy, the country was largely shut out of 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 should exclude 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 NSA “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 big 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, the fact that everyone would lose does not necessarily deter Mr Trump, who is happily tearing down a similarly interdependent economic order with his tariffs. “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. The cull is limited, so far, but it has revived memories of mass firings in the 1970s. Ominously, on March 12th, Elon Musk visited the NSA to meet its head. Mr 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 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 resist, 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 intelligence official at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
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.” ■