Five Eyes

• 1. Introduction

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  The Five Eyes alliance began with a line in a diary. In February 1941, Alastair Denniston, head of the British code-breaking establishment at Bletchley Park, wrote "The Ys are coming!" The "Ys" were Yanks. An entry from the 10th of February reads simply "Ys arrive". The visitors were American code-breakers, and the United States had not yet entered the war.

  Those informal, secret meetings grew into a lasting partnership among Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. The name comes from a handling label, "AUS/CAN/NZ/UK/US Eyes Only", a releasability caveat that marked material for those five countries alone. Today the group is counted among the most comprehensive espionage alliances.

  How did a handful of wartime meetings between code-breakers turn into a permanent system? What did the partners do with it once the Cold War began? What did journalists and a former contractor reveal about it? And what happens when allies who promise not to spy on one another are accused of doing exactly that?

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• 2. Wartime Handshake

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  Each side in those early meetings handed over a secret that mattered enormously. The British disclosed that they had broken the German Enigma code. The Americans disclosed that they had broken the Japanese Purple code. For the rest of the war, figures such as Denniston and the code-breaking expert Alan Turing travelled back and forth across the Atlantic.

  The formal alliance can be traced to the Atlantic Charter of August 1941, which set out Allied goals for the post-war world. On the 17th of May 1943, the British and American governments signed the British-US Communication Intelligence Agreement, known as BRUSA. It eased cooperation between the US War Department and the British Government Code and Cypher School.

  The 5th of March 1946 brought the UKUSA Agreement. It turned the secret wartime arrangement into a signed treaty at the start of the Cold War. It is still the basis for all signals intelligence cooperation between the American NSA and Britain's GCHQ.

  Canada was brought into UKUSA in 1948. Norway followed in 1952, Denmark in 1954 and West Germany in 1955. Australia and New Zealand joined in 1956. All of these countries took part as "third parties".

  By 1955, a newer version of the agreement recorded a sentence that singled out three of them: "At this time only Canada, Australia and New Zealand will be regarded as UKUSA-collaborating Commonwealth countries." The European third parties never became part of the core group, which left the alliance with the five names it carries today.

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• 3. Cold War Operations

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  Soviet traffic was only part of the target list. During the Cold War, GCHQ and the NSA also shared intelligence on China and on several eastern European countries they called "Exotics". Over several decades, the ECHELON surveillance network was built to monitor the military and diplomatic communications of the Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc allies.

  In 1953, the British SIS and the American CIA jointly orchestrated the overthrow of Iran's Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. From 1955 through 1975, during the Vietnam War, Australian and New Zealander operators in the Asia-Pacific region worked directly to support the United States. GCHQ operators in British Hong Kong were tasked with monitoring North Vietnamese air defence networks.

  In 1961, SIS and the CIA jointly orchestrated the assassination of the Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba. Outgoing President Dwight D. Eisenhower had authorized the operation the year before, in 1960. In 1973, Australia's ASIS joined the CIA in overthrowing Chile's President Salvador Allende.

  Secrets also leaked the other way. Over at least five years in the 1970s, Ian George Peacock stole highly classified documents and sold them to the Soviet Union. He was a supervisor-E (espionage) in the counterespionage unit of Australia's ASIO and held top-secret clearance. Peacock retired from ASIO in 1983 and died in 2006.

  During the Falklands War in 1982, the United Kingdom drew on intelligence from its Five Eyes allies and from third parties such as Norway and France. In 1989, during the Tiananmen Square protests, SIS and the CIA took part in Operation Yellowbird to exfiltrate dissidents from China. After the Gulf War in 1991, an ASIS technician bugged Kuwaiti government offices on behalf of SIS. Within a decade, the network behind much of this work would be debated by a European parliament.

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• 4. ECHELON Exposed

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  In 1972, a former NSA communications analyst told Ramparts magazine that the agency had developed technology that "could crack all Soviet codes". It was an early public hint of what the alliance could do.

  A clearer picture came in 1988, when Duncan Campbell published a piece in the New Statesman called "Somebody's listening". It revealed the existence of ECHELON, an extension of the UKUSA Agreement on global signals intelligence. Campbell described eavesdropping that was used not only for national security but also, regularly, for corporate espionage in the service of American business. Outside journalism, the piece passed largely unnoticed.

  New Zealand journalist Nicky Hager gave a detailed description of ECHELON in 1996, in a book titled Secret Power: New Zealand's Role in the International Spy Network. By the end of the century, the network could collect telephone calls, faxes, email and other data traffic. It drew on intercepted communication bearers such as satellite transmissions and public telephone networks.

  The European Parliament cited Hager's book in a 1998 report titled "An Appraisal of the Technology of Political Control". On the 16th of March 2000, the Parliament took up a resolution that would have called for the "complete dismantling of ECHELON". Three months later it created the Temporary Committee on ECHELON to investigate. Finnish politician Esko Seppanen was among those who said the European Commission hindered the work.

  In the United States, congressional legislators warned that ECHELON could be used to monitor American citizens. On the 14th of May 2001, the US government cancelled all its meetings with the Temporary Committee. A BBC report that month noted that the American government still refused to admit that Echelon even existed. That refusal came only months before the September 11 attacks, which would change the alliance's priorities.

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• 5. After September 11

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  The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon pushed Five Eyes members to greatly expand their surveillance as part of the war on terror. Much of the new emphasis fell on the Internet. The sharing itself was never limited to signals intelligence. It also covers military, human and geospatial intelligence, drawn from multiple sources.

  The run-up to the Iraq War showed how far the reach extended. The Five Eyes monitored the communications of UN weapons inspector Hans Blix. British agents bugged the office of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. An NSA memo described plans to increase surveillance of the UN delegations of six countries, as part of a "dirty tricks" campaign to pressure them into voting for force against Iraq.

  SIS and the CIA also formed a surveillance partnership with Libya's leader Muammar Gaddafi. The deal let them spy on Libyan dissidents in the West, and in exchange they gained permission to use Libya as a base for extraordinary renditions. As of 2010, Five Eyes-affiliated agencies could also reach SIPRNet, the American government's classified version of the Internet.

  In 2013, documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden exposed numerous jointly operated programs. PRISM, run by the NSA with GCHQ and the ASD, gathers user information from technology firms such as Google, Apple and Microsoft. The related Upstream system collects communications directly as they cross infrastructure like fiber cables. XKeyscore was operated by the NSA with contributions from the ASD and New Zealand's GCSB. Tempora belonged to GCHQ, with contributions from the NSA, while MUSCULAR was run by GCHQ and the NSA. STATEROOM involved the ASD, CIA, Canada's CSE, GCHQ and NSA.

  In March 2014, the International Court of Justice ordered Australia to seal documents and data that ASIO had seized in a raid on the office of Bernard Collaery, a lawyer for East Timor. The material related to Timor Sea Treaty negotiations and included a statement by a former ASIS agent alleging that Australia had eavesdropped on East Timor. It was the first time the court had restricted the spy agencies of a Five Eyes state.

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• 6. Pressure From Beijing

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  On the 1st of December 2018, Canadian authorities arrested Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou at Vancouver International Airport. She faced charges of fraud and conspiracy in the United States. China responded by arresting two Canadian nationals. The South China Morning Post reported that analysts saw this as the start of a direct clash between China's government and the Five Eyes governments. The United States then restricted technology exchanges with China, and Beijing saw a "fight... waged with the world's oldest intelligence alliance, the Five Eyes".

  Starting in 2019, Australian parliamentarians and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urged the United Kingdom not to use Huawei technology in its 5G network. In 2021, the British government announced it no longer planned to use it. In November 2020, the alliance criticised China's rules disqualifying elected legislators in Hong Kong.

  The united front had a visible crack in mid-April 2021. New Zealand Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta said her country would not let the Five Eyes dictate its bilateral relationship with China. She added that New Zealand was uncomfortable with widening the group's remit. Australia's government voiced concern that Wellington was undermining collective efforts against what it regarded as Chinese aggression.

  Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern echoed Mahuta. She said New Zealand stayed committed to the alliance but would not use it as the first point of contact on non-security matters. The Telegraph's defence editor Con Coughlin and British MP Bob Seely criticised New Zealand. China's Global Times praised it for putting its own national interests first.

  After New Zealand's 2023 general election, Winston Peters became Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister and promised closer cooperation with Five Eyes partners. The Economist and Foreign Policy magazine reported a shift away from China. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon told The Economist he wanted to "diversify New Zealand's diplomatic and trade relationships away from its reliance on China".

  China took its own precautions. In late April 2021, the Global Times reported that China's Ministry of State Security would monitor employees of organisations considered at risk of foreign infiltration when they travelled to Five Eyes countries. These employees must report their destinations, agendas and meetings with foreign personnel. They also face "pre-departure spying education" and must use different electronic devices at home and abroad.

  In mid-December 2021, the US Secretary of State, the foreign ministers of Australia, Canada and New Zealand, and the UK Foreign Secretary issued a joint statement. It criticised the exclusion of opposition candidates under Hong Kong's national security law. China answered that the elections were fair and accused the Five Eyes of interfering in Hong Kong's domestic affairs.

  The alliance's first known public meeting took place in 2023 at Stanford University's Hoover Institution in California. The leaders had been meeting privately nearby in Palo Alto. They were Mike Burgess of ASIO, David Vigneault of CSIS, Andrew Hampton of the NZSIS, Ken McCallum of MI5 and FBI Director Christopher Wray. They spoke publicly about the death in Canada of Hardeep Singh Nijjar and about Chinese state-backed hackers.

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• 7. Spying On Each Other

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  "We do not spy on each other. We just ask." So said US Director of National Intelligence Admiral Dennis C. Blair in 2013, describing one of the alliance's core principles. Documents leaked in the following years suggested otherwise. They showed member agencies intentionally spying on one another's private citizens and sharing what they collected. The member nations maintain that all sharing is lawful under their own domestic law.

  Edward Snowden called the Five Eyes a "supra-national intelligence organisation that does not answer to the known laws of its own countries". Shami Chakrabarti, director of the advocacy group Liberty, wrote that the arrangement lets member states "subcontract their dirty work" to each other.

  In late 2013, Canadian federal judge Richard Mosley sharply rebuked CSIS in a 51-page ruling. He found that CSIS and other federal agencies had illegally enlisted Five Eyes allies in global surveillance dragnets while keeping domestic courts in the dark.

  In 2013, Britain's Intelligence and Security Committee investigated and concluded that GCHQ had broken no domestic laws in using data gathered through the NSA's PRISM. GCHQ's documents conformed with its duties under the Intelligence Services Act 1994, and its requests to the US matched existing interception warrants under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000. The committee still questioned whether the British legal framework was sufficient.

  In 2014, New Zealand's Parliament asked the NZSIS and the GCSB whether they had received money from Five Eyes partners. Neither agency answered, saying only that they do not collect metadata on New Zealanders. Labour leader David Cunliffe said the public was entitled to know about foreign funding if disclosure would not compromise operations.

  In early 2014, a report from the European Parliament's civil liberties committee confirmed that the agencies of New Zealand and Canada had cooperated with the NSA. They may also have shared the personal data of EU citizens. The report did not examine whether any laws were broken, and the NSA maintains that its collection on the EU followed American and international law.

  As of April 2024, no court case had been brought claiming that a US intelligence agency went around American law by soliciting foreign countries to spy on US citizens. That may change with expected releases about Operation Lobos 1, Operation Trojan Shield and Project Habitance, which drew on information from foreign governments. The FBI began Trojan Shield, which would have been illegal in the US, and so relied on the Australian government. Seventeen US citizens were charged in federal court between 2021 and 2024, and none of those cases had moved past the early pretrial stages.

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• 8. Rings Around the Five

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  In 2009, according to the French magazine L'Obs, the United States proposed that France join the treaty and form a "Six Eyes" alliance. President Nicolas Sarkozy asked for the same status as the other members, including a "no-spy agreement". The NSA director approved. The CIA director and President Barack Obama rejected it, and France refused.

  In 2013, New York magazine reported that Germany was interested in joining. Members of Congress including Tim Ryan and Charles Dent were pushing for its entry. Singapore, one of the world's biggest digital telecommunications hubs, is a key "third party" that collaborates intensively with the alliance, according to Snowden's leaks. Israel, South Korea and Japan have also worked with the Five Eyes but are not formal members.

  As of 2018, an initiative sometimes called "Five Eyes Plus 3" gave the alliance information-sharing agreements with France, Germany and Japan, aimed at countering China and Russia. A separate arrangement sometimes dubbed "Five Eyes Plus" links the five with France, Japan and South Korea to share information on North Korea's military activities, including ballistic missiles.

  The "Nine Eyes" is a different group. It adds Denmark, France, the Netherlands and Norway to the five. A document leaked by Snowden describes a working agreement among 14 nations officially known as "SIGINT Seniors Europe", or "SSEUR". This "14 Eyes" group adds Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden to the Nine Eyes.

  Privacy International lists still more issue-specific agreements. One is an area-specific arrangement among 41 nations, including the 14 Eyes and the international coalition in Afghanistan. Another is a "focused cooperation" on computer network exploitation, joining the Five Eyes with countries such as Austria, Poland, Switzerland and Turkey. The Club de Berne has 17 primarily European members, and the Counterterrorist Group is wider than those 17. Maximator links Denmark, Germany, France, the Netherlands and Sweden. The broadest circle is the NATO Special Committee, made up of the heads of the security services of NATO's 32 member countries.

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