We just ask.” For decades, the intelligence partnership was never acknowledged by respective governments, let alone talked about in public. Or, as Admiral Dennis Blair, Barack Obama’s first director of national intelligence, said in Australia in 2013: “We do not spy on each other. The partnership has one core rule, that the members agree not to spy on each other. It also provides an intelligence windfall for its smaller members, like Australia. The Five Eyes has given America’s deep state a phenomenal reach and an unmatched level of integration with its allies that the West’s geopolitical rivals, notably China and Russia, cannot replicate. Like an omnivorous, 24-hour news organisation, the Five Eyes’ operations and facilities cover all time zones and continents, from listening stations at Pine Gap, near Alice Springs, to naval ships off Iran and satellite ground stations in the UK countryside, on top of the partnership’s hub, the National Security Agency, near Washington. The members have since extended co-operation to include exchanging personnel and strategic assessments. The Five Eyes grew out of a UK-US agreement to share signals intelligence after World War II, a partnership which later expanded to include Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Put another way, how did a once little-known intelligence pact become such a blazing target for China’s nationalist tabloid? The answer to that question lies much closer to home. Equally instructive is how the Chinese media came to focus on the Five Eyes in the first place. The focus on the "Five Eyes" by the Global Times and other Chinese commentators, however, is acutely revealing, not least because it displays how Beijing sees itself hemmed by the West, particularly the old Anglosphere. The fact that the warrant had been issued by a grand jury in the US for bank fraud, and reviewed independently by a Canadian judge, carried little weight with Beijing, which sees US law as little more than a political weapon. The arrest, after all, came in the middle of a high-stakes geopolitical fight involving Huawei, with the US, Australia and New Zealand pushing the global Chinese company out of next-generation mobile networks, for fear Beijing would use them for spying. That the Chinese might be looking at multiple avenues for hitting back after the Huawei detention is hardly surprising. ![]() ![]() As one Chinese journalist told me, the Global Times “is sort of like Fox News under a Republican administration”. “In this complicated game,” said the Global Times, “China should focus on the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, especially Australia, New Zealand and Canada, who actively follow the US against China.” The Global Times doesn’t speak for Beijing, but it has an outsized voice in China nonetheless, courtesy of its owner, the People’s Daily, itself the official mouthpiece of the Communist Party. ![]() Amid this furore, one prominent Chinese media outlet suggested another target to turn the screws on Ottawa. And Beijing made clear more was to come, threatening “grave consequences” unless the Huawei executive was released. Top-level meetings for Canadian diplomats dried up. A couple of Canadians who, until then, had been working openly in China, were detained. ![]() They include a Scotland Yard detective who became a spymaster and inspired the first exchanges between MI5 and the FBI.After Canadian authorities seized a top Chinese executive from the telecommunications giant Huawei at Vancouver Airport last month on a US arrest warrant, Beijing immediately set about retaliating. Through personal interviews with world leaders - including British Prime Ministers Theresa May and David Cameron - and more than 100 intelligence officials, this book explores the complex personalities who helped shape the Five Eyes. Richard Kerbaj, an award-winning investigative journalist and filmmaker, bypasses the usual censorship channels to tell the definitive account of authoritative but unauthorised stories of the Western world's most powerful but least known intelligence alliance made up of the US, Britain, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.Īs Kerbaj shows, spy stories are never better than when they are true - and these span from 1930s Nazi spy rings to the most recent developments in Ukraine and China. The Secret History of The Five Eyes: The untold story of the international spy network, is a riveting and exclusive narrative of the most powerful and least understood intelligence alliance, which has been steeped in secrecy since its formation in 1956.
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