185. The Secret Spy Network: How Snowden Nearly Destroyed Everything (Ep 3)

The Five Eyes are watching the world. But what happens when one eye is bigger than the other? And what happens when new threats emerge? Listen as David and Gordon are joined again by author, journalist and filmmaker Richard Kerbaj, to explore the history of the Five Eyes intelligence sharing alliance. ------------------- ⁠⁠The Secret History of the Five Eyes by Richard Kerbaj⁠⁠ ⁠⁠The Defector by Richard Kerbaj⁠⁠ ------------------- THE REST IS CLASSIFIED LIVE 2026 at The Rest Is Fest: Buy your tickets ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to see David and Gordon live on stage at London’s Southbank Centre on 4 September: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/the-rest-is-classified-live/⁠⁠⁠⁠ ------------------- Sign-up for our free newsletter where producer Becki takes you behind the scenes of the show: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://mailchi.mp/goalhanger.com/tric-free-newsletter-sign⁠-up⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ------------------- Join the Declassified Club to go deeper into the world of espionage with exclusive Q&As, interviews with top intelligence insiders, regular livestreams, ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, and weekly deep dives into original spy stories. Members also get curated reading lists, special book discounts, prize draws, and access to our private chat community. Just go to ⁠⁠therestisclassified.com⁠ or join on Apple Podcasts. ------------------- Get a 10% discount on business PCs, printers and accessories using the code TRIC10. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://HP.com/CLASSIFIED⁠⁠⁠⁠ for more information. T&C's apply. ------------------- EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal ➼ https://nordvpn.com/restisclassified Upgrade your online protection with an all-in-one security app! It’s risk free with NordVPN’s 30-day money-back guarantee 🌍 ------------------- Email: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@restisclassified⁠ Video Editor: Joe Pettit Social Producer: Emma Jackson Assistant Producer: Alfie Rowe Producer: Becki Hills Head of History: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03David McCloskey?

  For exclusive interviews, bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, first look at live show tickets, a weekly newsletter and discounted books, join the Declassified Club at therestisclassified.com.

• 0:25David McCloskey?

  The Five Eyes are watching the world, but what happens when one eye is bigger than the other?

• 0:30Gordon Corera?

  You get a kind of cyclops creature.

• 0:32David McCloskey?

  Is it a cyclops creature? And what happens when new threats emerge? Well, important questions about what sort of creature the Five Eyes morphs into. But welcome to The Rest Is Classified. I'm David McCloskey.

• 0:44Gordon Corera?

  And I'm Gordon Corera.

• 0:45David McCloskey?

  And this is our third episode, looking at the Five Eyes Alliance, this incredible, really unprecedented intelligence partnership. We last time looked at the Cold War. We looked at how this alliance in many ways deepens. We also looked at periods of tension in the relationship. Cambridge Five Spies, we looked at Henry Kissinger cutting off intelligence to the Brits in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War. We looked at the Kiwis being tossed out, but not really.

• 1:18Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 1:19David McCloskey?

  As they continue to get intelligence, even though they've technically been thrown out. And this time, we are going to look at the post-Cold War era and how the Five Eyes adapts to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

• 1:33Gordon Corera?

  And with us, we still have Richard Kabarge, author of The Secret History of the Five Eyes. Welcome, Richard.

• 1:38Speaker 02

  Nice to be back.

• 1:43Gordon Corera?

  This episode is brought to you by HP.

• 1:46David McCloskey?

  In intelligence, you quickly learn that you are only as strong as the network around you. It's rarely a single major event that undermines an operation. It's the gaps between systems. That's where information leaks.

• 1:57Gordon Corera?

  It's the same in business. Leaders face a constant battle against strict timelines, mismatched tools, and the worry their security isn't as tight as they think it is.

• 2:09David McCloskey?

  Which is why HP approaches technology not as a collection of gadgets, but as an integrated system.

• 2:14Gordon Corera?

  And crucially, that protection is built in at hardware level. It runs quietly in the background, blocking threats without requiring constant specialist oversight.

• 2:24David McCloskey?

  With a team of business advisors, HP helps businesses of all sizes find technology that fits their needs and budget.

• 2:32Gordon Corera?

  To see how HP helps businesses work securely and productively, visit hp.com/classified. Trick listeners also benefit from 10% off HP Business Technology with the code TRICK10.

• 2:50Speaker 03

  This episode is brought to you by Wise. It's only when you start moving money between currencies that you really think about the exchange rate, the fee, and what might be hidden away in the small print. Whether you're living abroad, paying someone overseas, or just trying to manage your money across borders, you want a fair exchange rate, an easy transfer and no surprises along the way. Wise keeps things simple. Wise is a smart way to move the currencies you need around the globe. It works in more than 160 countries and with over 40 currencies. Most transfers arrive instantly. Wise uses the mid-market exchange rate, like the one you see on Google, with no markups or hidden fees. So when money needs to move, you can see the rate, know the fee and get on with it.

• 3:36Speaker 03

  Join millions saving billions on hidden fees by downloading the Wise app today. Be smart, get wise, Ts and Cs apply.

• 3:44Speaker 04

  For adults with Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis symptoms, every choice matters.

• 3:51Speaker 04

  Tremfya offers self-injection or intravenous infusion from the start. Tremfya is administered as injections under the skin or infusions through a vein every four weeks, followed by injections under the skin every four or eight weeks. If your doctor decides that you can self-inject Tremfya, proper training is required. Tremfya is a prescription medicine used to treat adults with moderately to severely active Crohn's disease and adults with moderately to severely active ulcerative colitis. Serious allergic reactions, increased risk of infections or lower ability to fight them and liver problems may occur. Before treatment, get checked for infections and tuberculosis. Tell your doctor if you have an infection, flu-like symptoms or need a vaccine. Explore what's possible. Ask your doctor about Tremfya today.

• 4:36Speaker 04

  Call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more or visit tremfyaradio.com.

• 4:45Gordon Corera?

  So, Richard, I guess we talked about the alliance having been formed in World War II, then it survives through the Cold War. But when you hit the end of the Cold War, there's a question.

• 4:56Speaker 02

  It slightly loses its purpose.

• 4:57Gordon Corera?

  It does, doesn't it?

• 4:58Speaker 02

  It was created in, it was officially created in 1956 as a counter-Soviet alliance, right? So then suddenly the Soviet Union's collapsed and they don't really have much to do. In fact, the agencies start cutting their staff and start cutting their resources. The Soviet desks at the CIA or NSA or MI5 or wherever else just kind of, just don't have much of a purpose. So there's a slight pivot during the 1990s. And it's not a pivot that is done in coordination with these partners together, but they start looking at, could China become the next threat? Or the next rival? Of course, China at this point, we've gone through the 1980s. There's this sort of hope for modernization.

• 5:43Speaker 02

  That hope is slightly lost during Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. And then you got sort of the 1990s are ramping up. Lots of tension in 1990s with China, but that becomes the focus, particularly for the US to an extent. And I know that to be the case towards the end of 1990s going, so what is, what is China?

• 6:03Gordon Corera?

  What's next?

• 6:03Speaker 02

  What is happening here?

• 6:04Gordon Corera?

  But that's not an issue for the UK. I mean, and you get the UK agencies looking at things like organized crime, which are kind of local and regional.

• 6:12Speaker 02

  IRA stuff.

• 6:13Gordon Corera?

  Local and regional issues, which are of interest to the other Five Eyes. So they're kind of going in different directions, aren't they?

• 6:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, the band has sort of fallen apart.

• 6:21David McCloskey?

  I think we shouldn't underplay the importance of the budget cuts as well. I mean, not only is the band sort of drifting in different directions, but the, you know.

• 6:30Gordon Corera?

  No one's going to the gigs, no one's paying for the gigs.

• 6:32David McCloskey?

  Right, I mean, US, I mean, I think the numbers are something like, I mean, the CIA budget, I think George Tenet, CIA Director, will later say, the CIA budget was cut by almost 20% in real terms during the 1990s. The workforce dropped by about a quarter.

• 6:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:48David McCloskey?

  And so it's harder, and Richard, I don't know if we have numbers from the end. It's always harder to get numbers from the NSA.

• 6:53Speaker 02

  I can give you sort of the latest numbers now, just on how, because I think that will help frame the kind of overall picture. And I think the overall picture kind of remains relatively the same throughout in terms of the budgets that they have. So if you look at the latest budget now, the US intelligence community is about 106 billion annually. It is roughly 11 times bigger, greater than all of the other four countries combined, when you combine. When you compare the US to the New Zealand budget, which is, I think, about 260 million a year, the US has got 400, it's more than 400 times greater than New Zealand.

• 7:37Speaker 02

  But yet, this alliance, to some degree, functions as a flat hierarchy structure to some degree. But overall, it is the US that really calls the shots. It doesn't really matter what, it's just the way that it is.

• 7:52David McCloskey?

  I think one of the interesting things about, about the 90s is that unlike sort of the pre-Second World War era, the institutions, the SIGINT institutions, the HUMAN institutions inside the Five Eyes intelligence community have been built up and solidified. You have actual organizations, right? And you have now several decades of established processes, exchanges, a built up and pooled SIGINT infrastructure that's created to share information constantly and essentially to be used as one gigantic SIGINT apparatus. So even in the 90s, when you have this kind of drift, when budgets are cut,

• 8:34David McCloskey?

  you don't retreat into a world of sort of mutual suspicion and fragmentation. The alliance kind of just keeps going.

• 8:43Gordon Corera?

  It's a bit like inertia, though, to some extent.

• 8:44David McCloskey?

  It is, yeah, yeah, to some degree. But it's also, I think, a reflection of the strength of the thing that had been built up, that it didn't, even when a sense of mutual threat from the Soviet Union is gone, it still keeps going forward because of the kind of patterns of behavior that have been built up during the Cold War.

• 9:04Gordon Corera?

  And then, having had this period of kind of drift in the 1990s, you get 9/11, the September 11th, 2001 attacks on the United States. So, Richard, what does that do to Five Eyes? I mean, it creates a new sense of purpose, but it's also going to lead to some tensions, isn't it?

• 9:19Speaker 02

  Yes, I mean, initially it is that they had to repurpose and very quickly. And, and by virtue of doing that, they had to look at what the vulnerabilities were and what the shortcomings were. So you've gone from being an alliance created to combat Soviet threats to one that's now combating Islamist terrorism. So you've got language barriers immediately, you've got cultural barriers. You've got to figure out ways to not tap into just communications, but to penetrate prayer halls and mosques. Well, how do you go about doing that? How long does that take to start cultivating relationships? That's where HUMAN becomes a huge part of this. And also, a lot of the exchanges that had been happening through the Cold War

• 10:04Speaker 02

  returned pretty quickly, to the point that the intelligence exchanges between the Canadians and US become very free flowing. So the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, CSIS, and the RCMP, their police service, are frequently in contact with the FBI and CIA. The purpose for them is to stop the next potential attack against North America. If it's not happening in the US, could it be happening in Canada?

• 10:30Gordon Corera?

  But the problem, David, is that the CIA goes a little bit off the rails, some might say. It gets, goes to the dark side, as Dick Cheney often talked about it, didn't he? He said, we're going to have to go on to the dark side. And that basically means it's going to start running programs, famously the rendition program, in which they're going to pick up terrorist suspects and transport them to third countries where they're tortured, places like Syria and Egypt and other countries.

• 10:55Speaker 02

  And Thailand.

• 10:56Gordon Corera?

  And Thailand, all kinds of places. And it's a much more aggressive posture by the CIA.

• 11:02David McCloskey?

  It's fair to say that among all of the Five Eyes countries, the US took a much more militarized approach

• 11:08Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 11:09David McCloskey?

  to the war on terror after 9/11. And it, it's yet again, though, a fascinating case study in, I think, the, I mean, really, it's, I guess, the limits of the cooperation, but also how really deep tensions in different legal systems.

• 11:27David McCloskey?

  That, you know, the intelligence agencies find ways to continue working together even even in that environment.

• 11:32Gordon Corera?

  But Richard, it's true, isn't it, that for the Brits, for instance, this is quite difficult in this period because they kind of know people, suspects are disappearing. And we now know into what these called the black sites and places like that. And where the suspicion is they're tortured and the Brits don't want to get involved with that, but they don't maybe ask that many questions. They say they don't know.

• 11:53Speaker 02

  They don't ask enough questions. I think in some cases, of course, they.

• 11:56Gordon Corera?

  Because they're passing off, sometimes passing intelligence to the US to be used to render people or to question some of these.

• 12:02Speaker 02

  To pick up. And that was revealed many years later through the intelligence security committees. But I see, going back to the point that David was making, they took a much more militarized approach. I think, yes, that is absolutely the case. That's kind of putting it mildly. I don't think there's been any evidence of the Brits being involved themselves in any of the torture, but there's allegations they may have assisted in the provision of information.

• 12:28Gordon Corera?

  Passing questions to people.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  Precisely.

• 12:31Gordon Corera?

  Or passing information which leads to people.

• 12:33Speaker 02

  Completely, completely.

• 12:34Gordon Corera?

  And this is going to become quite tense in the UK, this issue about how close do you get to a, you know, to a US intelligence community.

• 12:41Speaker 02

  Well, almost 20, I think 20 people, 20 British nationals and citizens were locked up in Guantanamo. I think it was 20.

• 12:48Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 12:49Speaker 02

  And subsequently released with no charge.

• 12:52Gordon Corera?

  You know, I remember there were these legal cases about, you know, can we share information with the US if they are going to be using it for the purposes of rendition or effectively torture?

• 13:02Speaker 02

  What legal assurances do you demand in advance of sharing?

• 13:05Gordon Corera?

  And then the US got really annoyed when some of what, some of the details of what they'd been doing came out through British investigations, this famous case called Bin Yeh Mohamed. So there was a bit of tension there, I think, between the two sides, David.

• 13:17David McCloskey?

  I mean, I guess there's kind of a deep question underneath this because we're talking about the nature of the sigint relationship between these countries and how deeply entangled it is, is can you cut that information off in many of these cases? Obviously, if it's information that's coming from MI5, right? If it's human, it's coming from an MI5 source or an MI6 source, you have much more discretionary power about how you share it, when you share it, and if you do at all. Whereas if it's sigint.

• 13:45Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 13:46David McCloskey?

  Can you actually hold it back?

• 13:49Gordon Corera?

  If you're going to use it for a drone strike or for something like that, you know, which is maybe your communications targeting.

• 13:54David McCloskey?

  Or if it's being, if it's sigint that's being pulled through GCHQ, but it exists on a system that NSA officers have access to and use.

• 14:05Speaker 02

  No, you can withhold because, I mean, there are categorizations for withholding from each other. That's why you have no fore and you have UK eyes only. So they can withhold some of that information. And it's been proven now that they did provide some information. So it wasn't just part of a pool. It's not like a Google search that they just jumped into and said, hey, here's another target, let's go get him. So I think from that perspective, they did. I think largely, though, your point is correct, that yes, if it's shared and it's all there, to what extent can you hold that?

• 14:34Gordon Corera?

  The lawyers get busy, I think.

• 14:35Speaker 02

  The lawyers were busy.

• 14:37Gordon Corera?

  It gets us to another interesting question, which is, I mean, one of the things we talked about is that the five eyes, they're not supposed to spy on each other. But I remember around this time, there was a question, which is, could you run operations in a partner country? So if you're the CIA, could you run an operation in the UK? If you, I mean, I think, tell me if I'm wrong, David, but you're allowed to do that if you're the CIA, if you inform the Brits, basically.

• 15:03David McCloskey?

  Yes.

• 15:04Gordon Corera?

  And you have kind of agreement.

• 15:05Speaker 02

  Technically.

• 15:06Gordon Corera?

  Technically. But.

• 15:08David McCloskey?

  Well, I mean, and I think vice versa, it's also true, right? The Brits.

• 15:14Gordon Corera?

  And not supposed to run unilateral operations.

• 15:18David McCloskey?

  Without telling FBI and presumably CIA.

• 15:21Gordon Corera?

  Yeah. So I guess the point would be if a, if a Brit wanted to recruit, say, a Chinese person in the US, you're supposed to tell the Americans and work with them.

• 15:32David McCloskey?

  Why in the hell would the Americans want?

• 15:34Gordon Corera?

  A Brit running around.

• 15:35David McCloskey?

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, it, you know, it's interesting. I mean, I had, I had a bunch of these kind of what if conversations with CIA officers and FBI special agents when I was working on London Station, my upcoming book, because I was trying to figure out in that novel, like, how you could create a lot of tension in the relationship. And it wasn't impossible, but it was kind of hard because you, you did need examples where, for example, a British SIS officer might say, look, I have a Chinese target who's coming to Los Angeles and I, I want to be the one.

• 16:12Gordon Corera?

  To recruit.

• 16:13David McCloskey?

  To go and recruit that person or pitch them or try to develop them or whatever. And if you don't tell the FBI and you don't tell the CIA, that turns into a massive problem if it becomes known, you know? And, and so there are systems and processes to sort of de-conflict these types of things. But it is true that I think in some cases, you, you could come up with a scenario in which it would make sense, not many, but where it would make sense to have an SIS officer come to the States and actually make the pitch. But that would usually be done in concert with the FBI, CIA. So that, that, that product, whatever comes out of it, even if it's an SIS officer running the case, that product's going to end up being shared.

• 16:57Gordon Corera?

  I remember asking Brits and Americans about whether this happened. And on the American side, they said to me, the only time they suspected the Brits of running unilateral operations inside the United States without telling them was against the IRA because they figured the Americans would probably, if you think about the FBI, might have had some sympathizers to the Irish cause within it and would have tipped them off. Whether that happened or not, I don't know, but this is what actually CIA officer told me that they thought the Brits were doing that. But after 9/11, the Americans, I remember hearing about this, pushed to be able to run more operations within the UK. So the CIA wanted to go after kind of Islamists in the UK themselves.

• 17:41David McCloskey?

  Without coordinating with MI5 or SIS?

• 17:44Gordon Corera?

  I think the suggestion was with less.

• 17:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:47Gordon Corera?

  With less coordination.

• 17:48Speaker 02

  Less oversight.

• 17:49Gordon Corera?

  Less oversight. And then that caused tension and MI5 were like, you're not, you know, if we catch you doing that.

• 17:53Speaker 02

  I think I know about that case.

• 17:54Gordon Corera?

  We're going to cause trouble. Because, Richard, there is a case which becomes a big deal in Canada, doesn't it?

• 17:59Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 18:00Gordon Corera?

  Where between the Canadians and the Americans over this, how they cooperate.

• 18:04Speaker 02

  That emerged shortly after 9/11. So I think about a month and a half later or so, CSIS, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, discovered that there was a young man who was interacting with one of their targets. So they had a target, they were targeting a guy who was, who was believed to be linked to Bin Laden, a young guy called Maher Arar of Syrian origin, who's now living in Canada and has Canadian citizenship, was interacting with this target. So they figured, okay, let's expand the targeting pool here and include him as one of the targets. They started looking into him. And because of all of the intelligence sharing that's been going on, as I mentioned earlier,

• 18:46Speaker 02

  it was pretty much seamless, they informed the FBI about this case. They said, we're looking into this guy, we're going to surveil him, follow him, can't see anything untoward at the moment. And they maintained that operation against him, in secret, of course, it was all covert up until early 2002. The operation went from being a CSIS tip off to now being run by the RCMP, so the Canadian Police, but the counter-terrorism unit within the police. This Maher Arar is married to a woman of Tunisian origin. And so he travels to Tunisia on holiday and eventually he returns to Canada.

• 19:30Speaker 02

  And he happens to travel through New York. So when he gets to New York, the authorities there pull him up and they said, oh, your name's on a wanted list. And essentially the FBI had placed his name on a terror watch list. So they take him away into the Manhattan Correctional Facilities and they essentially say to him, we believe that you've committed terrorism offences. He denies all of this. The Canadian consulate's called, they come through and they won't call till very late after they'd already debriefed him. And they stand in and say, well, what evidence do you have against this guy? And they said, well, we have evidence, we can't share this evidence at this point.

• 20:12Speaker 02

  Anyway, they then relocate him to another detention centre. And at this point, the Canadians are interacting with the FBI, trying to establish, you know, to what extent do you have any evidence against him? Because the evidence that we've provided you with never met the threshold for arrest, let alone enough evidence to convict this guy. At one point, the Canadians seek some more information and the FBI says, right, listen, we're figuring out whether or not to send him back home to Syria. And they said, but he's Canadian, he has Canadian citizenship, he should be here. They said, well, we'll see how that goes. Eventually, they meet with the Canadians and say, we're making the final decision soon. But in fact, they had already made the final decision without informing the Canadians.

• 20:57Speaker 02

  The FBI had essentially renditioned this guy to Jordan and he was in a car being taken all the way to Syria. Gets to Syria, the Canadians discover this, but it's way too late. And for the next year or so, he's tortured. And at the beginning of the torture, they're smashing his hands with cable wires and all sorts. And the FBI is sending questions to the interrogators to ask him. Eventually, he confesses and he says, he starts claiming that he is trained with Bin Laden and he's got these links. But of course, none of that was true, he just wanted the torture to stop.

• 21:33David McCloskey?

  The FBI was sending questions to the Syrians?

• 21:36Speaker 02

  Yes, correct. Yeah. And that's all come out in a public inquiry in Canada, which I discuss in the book. But they pass on the information and eventually the Syrians, I mean, his interrogators, even they feel sorry for him. They said, well, we don't think he's telling the truth. We don't think that he's a terror suspect. Can you imagine the Syrian torturer saying, this is a bit too much, even for us? So by that standard, they release him, he returns to Canada and he wants to sue the Canadian authorities, rightly.

• 22:09Speaker 02

  So Canadian authorities figure, well, we need to figure out what evidence the FBI had on him to see how we go about this. The FBI say, we can't give you the evidence. Reluctantly, they give the evidence with the assurance that that evidence cannot be shared in court. It's just for your eyes only. And it turns out that the evidence they used against this guy was the same information that Canadians had provided, which never met the threshold for arrest, let alone conviction, rendition, torture, and all the other things that they've sort of carried out. So it was a

• 22:39Gordon Corera?

  It becomes a big deal in Canada, doesn't it?

• 22:41Speaker 02

  Massive. He successfully sues the Canadians, I think, for 10 million plus. But then so do several other targets, Canadian targets, at least one of whom was also sent back to Syria to be tortured. And it becomes a massive controversy in Canada. The FBI was implicated in. And that that was a really dark moment, you know, I mean, there are many dark moments throughout the war on terror, but that was a specific one that stood out to me. And that was very confronting.

• 23:10David McCloskey?

  The essential point here for the Five Eyes is Canadian information is passed via, you know, a sort of existing structural mechanism to their counterparts in the US. And then that information is used against a Canadian citizen in this case to send him to Syria and

• 23:29Speaker 02

  It's not used, it's misused, it's misapplied.

• 23:32David McCloskey?

  So, yeah, so do the Canadians make a change in what they're going to supply to the US or how it's used? I mean, how, because how do you protect yourself?

• 23:43Speaker 02

  I think it's usually calculated on a case by case basis. I mean, look, the, the, the British have been compromised and they've compromised. The Americans have done the same thing. And the view here is that it's a dark situation, but we're still driven by the same purpose, which is to catch the bad guys, right? The Islamist terrorists. I think, of course, internally, they would have sorted things out. I think the individuals who were involved in this from the Canadian side were sidelined. I'm not sure to what extent, because none of that was public. And I think the Americans were also dealt with, I just don't know to what extent. But that's slightly irrelevant, because what is relevant is that one man's life was completely destroyed. He was tortured all because of

• 24:28Speaker 02

  that cover up and that misapplication of information. And that's, that's a real problem. And I think that's kind of, that highlights the broader problems that were taking place during the war on terror. I mean, if you could go through many cases, not dissimilar to this in regards to Guantanamo Bay and what have you. But then the Canadians would come back a few years later and compromise the Americans. And that happened in 2009.

• 24:53Gordon Corera?

  Oh, Geoffrey Delisle, isn't it?

• 24:54Speaker 02

  Geoffrey Delisle.

• 24:55Gordon Corera?

  A Canadian

• 24:56Speaker 02

  Naval intelligence officer who

• 24:57Gordon Corera?

  Who gives away lots of secrets

• 24:59Speaker 02

  Well, he had access to

• 25:00Gordon Corera?

  About the Five Eyes and their, their technical network.

• 25:02Speaker 02

  Exactly. It provides, until this day, they don't know to what extent he compromised.

• 25:06Gordon Corera?

  Because I think what you get from the Maharar and this kind of counterterrorism period story is, is you've got a unified purpose, which is dealing with terrorism. But once you start to get slightly different values or ways of doing it or methods, you start to get the tensions in the alliance.

• 25:22Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 25:23Gordon Corera?

  But it doesn't break it, does it?

• 25:24Speaker 02

  No.

• 25:25Gordon Corera?

  Again, you, there's enough common purpose there that they're trying to manage the difficulties and the lawyers are getting involved. And in Britain, it becomes a big, you know, the equivalent stories. There's Bin Laden, there's other stories about, you know, drone strikes. And there's tension, but it, it never really breaks the alliance because on the inside, I think everyone can see the value of perpetuating it, of keeping it.

• 25:46Speaker 02

  And you can sort of isolate it. So of course, yes, there was an issue with that. But there were multiple other cases that they did resolve. There were multiple other threats that they did foresee. So you can't

• 25:58Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 25:59Speaker 02

  You can't apply this one case to everything that's going on. I mean, just like you can't, for instance, with the lead up to Iraq war. There were many people within the CIA, some of whom I interviewed as well, who was completely opposed to it. They're saying this intelligence just doesn't seem right. It doesn't sit well. And what was happening is they were being isolated away from the central discussions. And essentially what they created was an echo chamber that reflected everyone's thinking, who wanted to use that material and exploit it to go to war. So it doesn't turn the entire system bad. It just means that you've got some rogue people.

• 26:34Gordon Corera?

  Yeah. Because, you know, not everyone joins in on the war in Iraq. I mean, Australia does, doesn't it?

• 26:39Speaker 02

  To an extent, yeah, very small extent. The Canadians certainly don't.

• 26:43David McCloskey?

  Yeah.

• 26:44Speaker 02

  And the Canadians refused to get, because George Bush contacted his counterpart in Canada, Christian, and he said to him, I'm going to send a team of CIA officers to brief you on the intelligence we had. And famously, he said, no, they can brief my intelligence officials, not me. And then we will make our minds up about whether or not this meets the threshold for, you know, taking military action.

• 27:08Gordon Corera?

  I mean, we talked about the airline plot, 2006 being disrupted. And we talked about terrorist plots being disrupted. And often, even when it's done in the UK by MI5, that's done on intelligence, provided sometimes by the NSA or the CIA or others. So what people in the inside of the intelligence community are seeing is the value of all this material going back and forth. And what you tend to get on the outside is when, when the problems come.

• 27:31Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 27:32Gordon Corera?

  But maybe let's take a break there. And when we come back, we'll look at the moment when the Five Eyes is forced out into the public.

• 27:38Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 27:39Gordon Corera?

  And the reality of what it does gets global attention. See you after the break.

• 27:42Speaker 05

  Want to be the one who's always in the know about the game, the scores, the plays? Here's a tip, the Apple Sports app. Just pick your favorite teams and get automatic live updates without even knowing their schedules. And when your team scores, it shows up right on your iPhone lock screen, making it easy to check in anytime. So rule the group chat and download Apple Sports for free on the App Store or find it on your new iPhone.

• 28:07Speaker 06

  This episode is brought to you by Petivity. Cat parents are basically mealtime detectives. Who actually ate? Did they finish? Was that less than yesterday? The new Petivity Smart Feeder for cats turns everyday meals into meaningful health insights, helping you identify changes in your cat's habits and be more proactive about their health. Plus, you can feed them from anywhere. Take the mystery out of mealtime. Visit petivity.com, P E T I V I T Y dot com slash cat feeder to learn more.

• 28:37Speaker 07

  Are you looking for support in your weight management journey? Zepbound Terzepatide may be able to help. Zepbound is a prescription medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with obesity, or some adults with overweight who also have weight related medical problems to lose excess body weight and keep the weight off. Zepbound is approved as a 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, 12.5, or 15 milligram injection. Zepbound contains Terzepatide and should not be used with other Terzepatide containing products or any GLP-1 receptor agonist medicines. It is not known if Zepbound is safe and effective for use in children. Don't share needles or pens or reuse needles. Don't take if allergic

• 29:21Speaker 07

  to it, or if you or someone in your family had medullary thyroid cancer, or if you've had multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2. Tell your doctor if you get a lump or swelling in your neck. Stop Zepbound and call your doctor if you have severe stomach pain or a serious allergic reaction. Severe side effects may include inflamed pancreas or gallbladder problems. Tell your doctor if you experience vision changes before scheduled procedures with anesthesia. If you're nursing, pregnant, plan to be, or taking birth control pills. Taking Zepbound with a sulphonal urea or insulin may cause low blood sugar. Side effects include nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting, which can cause dehydration and worsen kidney problems. Talk to your doctor. Call 1-800-545-5979, or visit zepbound.lily.com.

• 30:06David McCloskey?

  Well, welcome back. We are now to the point in the story of the Five Eyes where, Gordon, we get to reintroduce one of your favorite characters, one of your dearest friends of the pod. And that is none other than well-known narcissist and shin splints sufferer Edward Snowden.

• 30:30Gordon Corera?

  Eddie Snowden, return to the show. I'm not sure he's one of my favorite characters. I just think the point of him in this story is he reveals this signals intelligence relationship, doesn't he, to the world?

• 30:42David McCloskey?

  This relationship that has somehow survived the entirety of the Cold War.

• 30:46Gordon Corera?

  Henry Kissinger.

• 30:47David McCloskey?

  And the post 9/11 era.

• 30:48Gordon Corera?

  Henry Kissinger, rendition.

• 30:50David McCloskey?

  It survived Philby. And it survived aimlessness and budget cuts in the 1990s is, is brought to its knees by a booze Allen Hamilton contractor. I mean, it's just, it's striking, isn't it, Richard? How much of this relationship we now know about? And frankly, how much of sort of the backbone of what Signals Intelligence Collection had become by 2012, we know because of Edward Snowden.

• 31:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. Point that David made about how this alliance had survived the Cold War and the beginning of the war on terror and everything else. I think largely it survived because of the lack of public accountability. No one knew what was happening. If you can imagine, if we knew as much about Cold War matters as we knew as a result of Snowden's disclosures, maybe it wouldn't have survived. Or maybe it would have looked a lot different.

• 31:44Gordon Corera?

  Yeah. So Snowden, I mean,

• 31:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:46Gordon Corera?

  He's going to reveal lots about the Five Eyes.

• 31:48Speaker 02

  I didn't realize you liked Snowden so much, Gordon.

• 31:49Gordon Corera?

  I know.

• 31:50Speaker 02

  That changes my opinion about it.

• 31:51David McCloskey?

  Gordon, Gordon has a very soft spot.

• 31:53Gordon Corera?

  I do not have a soft spot for Snowden.

• 31:56Speaker 02

  Gordon's a dark horse when it comes to like, you just don't

• 31:57Gordon Corera?

  I do not have a soft spot for Snowden.

• 31:59David McCloskey?

  Young Philby.

• 32:00Gordon Corera?

  Young Philby, maybe.

• 32:01Speaker 02

  He calls him interesting. He calls Snowden interesting. That in itself is a compelling sort of insight.

• 32:06Gordon Corera?

  Yeah, this is, all my friends at GCHQ are now switching off, or they're at least taking your side.

• 32:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, take my side, please. Buy the book.

• 32:12Gordon Corera?

  Let's get back to the story of the Five Eyes. Because that moment where he reveals what they're collecting, that is a moment of crisis for the Five Eyes.

• 32:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. So this is before it's even revealed. Because of course, before Snowden came out publicly, there was the first leak to a newspaper and it was the Guardian newspaper. And on the night that the Guardian was about to go to press, The director of GCHQ, Sir Ian Lobben, received a phone call, I think about 2am at his home, from some NSA official saying, can you do anything about stopping this story? As if he's somehow gonna do their press work, you know, that in itself was so patronizing that they would call him up, but they did. And from his perspective, he was quite conflicted because he knew that there's gonna be some material that's coming out of the public domain, which was gonna be very damaging.

• 33:04Speaker 02

  They could tell from the questions that the guardian had asked of the NSA and GCHQ. But he also believes in freedom of the press, so you don't intervene, and that's not his job. The story breaks. Then there are discussions that go on between the leaders of NSA and GCHQ. And Keith Alexander, who was the NSA director at the time, gave the, essentially told GCHQ that we believe the breach is from your end.

• 33:33Gordon Corera?

  It's a Brit, they

• 33:34Speaker 02

  It's the British, someone in Britain has leaked this material. And so that sends the British into a tailspin, particularly because of the security breaches that they've had historically. We've talked about McLean and Philby and Burgess and and all of the other cases. And so they start feeling that, well, we need to conduct an inquiry. So they did a security breach investigation, started looking for some potential moles to figure out who it could be. And then Snowden would come out publicly, as he did, and the whole world will discover it's Snowden. But here's the key thing. I asked people about this and I said, at which point did the Americans inform you that it was actually Snowden who was behind the leak?

• 34:19Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 34:20Speaker 02

  They never did. GCHQ, all the way to the top, discovered this when the rest of the world discovered this. There was never an apology subsequent to that, nothing else. If it had been the British who had leaked the information, so if someone from Britain, I, I strongly believe, given the subsequent controversy, that there's a very good chance that the Brits may have been squeezed out to some extent, if not completely. It would have looked a lot different.

• 34:46Gordon Corera?

  If it had been a Brit.

• 34:47Speaker 02

  And in fact, a few months later, there was a meeting, a Five Eyes meeting in Sydney, Australia, and the British were intending to confront the Americans about this. It's like saying, this is, this is really damaging for all of us, but particularly, you know, this is, this had nothing to do with us. This is a contractor who's done this. And no one would really team up with the Brits, because the Aussies are going, well, you know, look, do we kind of wanna stay on good terms with the Americans? And the New Zealanders couldn't really speak up, and the Canadians were saying, well, we've got our own issues that they had with Jeffrey Delisle. So the Americans just took it. And, and the broader point here is that every intelligence agency within every Five Eyes country has been breached to some extent.

• 35:31Speaker 02

  And in so doing, those breaches have directly or indirectly affected other Five Eyes partners. So you have to live with it. It's not, the Snowden case is so unusual, but also so damaging because it revealed to our closest partners the spying operations that we were conducting against them.

• 35:51Gordon Corera?

  Like the Germans.

• 35:52Speaker 02

  Well, yeah.

• 35:52Gordon Corera?

  Some of the others, yeah.

• 35:53David McCloskey?

  Maybe it's helpful to start with just the capabilities that Snowden leaks. I mean, what, what do the leaks say about the capabilities that the Five Eyes had? In, you know, I mean, this is now a decade and a half ago, but what do they say about the world of signals intelligence? And the way the Five Eyes have sort of divvied it up in 2012?

• 36:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, but we've spoken about the divvying up earlier, but I think it, what it did is it showed the world what that divvying up looked like, and it also showed the world what access they can get, what information they can access from internet, internet traffic to phone calls. Essentially, you know, anything that's in your palm is accessible, you know, through these signals hoovers, right?

• 36:36Gordon Corera?

  And it's back to the point as well that geography matters, isn't it? Which is where we started to some extent with the Five Eyes, because it showed that there was like a global system, I guess.

• 36:44Speaker 02

  But also financing, financing, I mean, it revealed, we didn't know prior to the disclosures, you know, the public didn't know prior to Snowden's disclosures, to what extent the British were receiving funds from the Americans.

• 36:56Gordon Corera?

  NSA were paying for upgrades of intercept stations and things like that.

• 37:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, and there was, there were also

• 37:02David McCloskey?

  You had that great piece of, of data you had in your book, which is that, I think it was between 2010 or 2009 and 2013 or something like that. The NSA had directly paid GCHQ over a hundred million pounds.

• 37:16Speaker 02

  I mean, part of their budgeting, I know this to be true, GCHQ and other agencies, is every year you have to figure out what value are we providing the Americans? To maintain that cash flow and the investment. And I think, I mean, it's not peculiar, it's, it's part of the partnership. You have to give something a return. It is transactional. There is this kind of concept that we all share information, we all love each other. But it's, it's largely transactional and for a good purpose, right? You gotta get something out of this.

• 37:43Gordon Corera?

  It is transactional, but the, the complication is when you have one partner, which is so much bigger than the others. I think that is the thing, is that for the Brits, maintaining the flow of US intelligence becomes an end in itself and something very important. So it means the Americans can afford to go, well, if Snowden had been yours, then maybe we'd have, you know, we can cut you off, or, but for, for the other four eyes, it's, it's about maintaining the, the flow.

• 38:09David McCloskey?

  Yeah.

• 38:09Gordon Corera?

  Whereas the Americans can afford to dictate in a different way.

• 38:12Speaker 02

  Also, more than a million documents were shared. I mean, I think we still don't know to the extent that we don't, we still don't know the extent to which that breach damaged national security. Because there was, I've spoken to people, I'm sure you have too, Gordon. I spoke to people shortly after the Snowden disclosures and then subsequent to that, while researching the book, about the impact that had on human operations. I mean, a lot of sources kind of disappeared.

• 38:39Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 38:39Speaker 02

  And also, a lot of know-how, so a lot of operational capabilities that were used against targets became redundant, because they could, you can no longer use them. They, they knew how to counter those now.

• 38:53David McCloskey?

  I mean, the, the interesting thing, though, is there's that, it's one of the more famous PowerPoint slides that Snowden leaked, which shows this kind of, it's almost an incomprehensible slide. Because it, it, it shows a map of the world, and it shows all of the different types of installations that are part of the Five Eyes. And one of the things that's on there, I believe it's on this slide, is the different, the way, I thought this was so fascinating, is the way the NSA and presumably the rest of the Five Eyes SIGINT agencies think about what SIGINT is. And it, it shows, and the reason I bring this up is it goes to show why even though the, the Brits are smaller, the Kiwis are tiny,

• 39:37David McCloskey?

  there's still in the modern age, geography matters, because, you know, so it's like, one of them was third-party in liaison, okay. One of them's a regional, which is basically in every embassy in the world, there's an upper room that's full of antennas, right? And that are targeting very local signals, hugely important. And there were, you know, 80-plus dots on the map for those in most embassies, right? The other one, we talked about this in our Stuxnet series, is computer network exploitation. At the time, it was called NSA's Tailored Access Operations, I believe, TAO. And that's getting into very small bespoke networks, like at Natanz in Iran. But then there's the, you know, large cable, fiber cables, right?

• 40:22David McCloskey?

  So you think about undersea cables that come up

• 40:25Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 40:26David McCloskey?

  on the coast of Cornwall. Well, if you wanna put a splice in those cables to essentially siphon off every piece of traffic that goes through them, if you're gonna do that in Cornwall, you wanna do that with the Brits. You're gonna do it with the Brits, right? And then the, the last one, which I think is kind of one of the oldest of the kind of modern methods, is all the intercepts of the satellite dishes, right? Even though that is kind of a smaller piece of the pie today, you still want big radomes around the globe to intercept that traffic or try to, but also to be able to control your own drones and your own satellites and your own sort of regional communication kind of command and control posture.

• 41:11David McCloskey?

  The geography still really matters. So even though America is the dominant partner and is paying for, I think, I think the installation that the, the NSA was paying for, like a renovation of, was it at

• 41:22Gordon Corera?

  Bude, Bude, Bude, Cornwall.

• 41:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, or the hundred million, a hundred million.

• 41:26Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 41:27David McCloskey?

  Yeah. So you're, you're paying for that geography, but it, we're still living in a world where because of the undersea cables and because of the need for, you know, essentially satellite communications, command and control.

• 41:39David McCloskey?

  It matters, it's valuable and you can't replace it if you lose it.

• 41:42Speaker 02

  There was also the public relations disaster that followed the Snowden disclosures because the public sort of lost faith in the agencies. You know, this is, they went from having to deal with their image post Iraq and all of the controversy that brought with it about renditions and detention centers and whatever else that we've already discussed to now going, well, the general members of the public are concerned about this because are they accessing my information and to what extent? What about the communication that I'm having with family or friends? Is that accessible?

• 42:15Gordon Corera?

  One of the interesting questions which came up are out of Snowden, which I think is worth addressing, is this issue about spying on each other. Because one of the questions, I think that some of the reporting raised early on was whether Five Eyes was being used to get around controls on spying on your own citizens. So I think the claim was, well, you know, NSA is not supposed to spy on its own citizens. So does it ask GCHQ to spy on Americans?

• 42:40Speaker 02

  And that became a claim.

• 42:41Gordon Corera?

  And that was the claim. And actually, it was proven not to be true.

• 42:45Speaker 02

  Sure, but also that that became quite controversial when Trump came into power. Trump accused GCHQ of spying on his electoral campaign, if you recall.

• 42:55Gordon Corera?

  And this claim that what Five Eyes was is a secret way of spying on each other's citizens and bypassing controls. And if you speak to Five Eyes people, they're very adamant that that is not how it works. And that if you're the UK, you know, you're under the same restrictions as the US in spying on US citizens and that there are controls on that. But that was one of the kind of interesting questions, which I think Snowden made people think that maybe this global surveillance system was being turned around.

• 43:20Speaker 02

  They also started looking like the bad guys. I think they had to do a lot of work on public relations and transparency. I mean, there was a big thing about would

• 43:30David McCloskey?

  Sigent agencies are great at PR.

• 43:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Sigent and human, because a big question that I was asking people when I was interviewing for this section was, could transparency have gotten to the point that it's at now without the Snowden case? And people said, well, eventually it was going to get there. I don't think so. I think intelligence agencies act when there's a controversy. And it's happened with a very regular pattern. You could see it all throughout the Cold War, for instance, the 1960s, the 1970s in the US and subsequent to that, the Snowden case. They only act when there's a controversy and they act properly. And then there's a bit of transparency.

• 44:08Gordon Corera?

  Let's, let's focus on one other area where there was a bit of tension with the, with the Five Eyes though, before we finish this episode, which is actually over China. Because after that Snowden period, you start to get China coming onto the agenda as the kind of new threat and the new big problem. And here, again, you get a slight difference between them. And the difference comes over Huawei, this Chinese telecoms company, this issue about whether you should trust a Chinese telecoms company to build your 5G, your new jet, next generation phone infrastructure, or whether there's a, yeah. And you've just paraphrased.

• 44:45Speaker 02

  Well, the Aussies, the Aussies took the first step on that.

• 44:47Gordon Corera?

  And it's very interesting because there's quite a significant difference between the Five Eyes. Because the UK already has Chinese telecoms kit in its infrastructure from the 2000s and it's allowed it in. GCHQ was kind of monitoring some of the kit. They thought they had a handle on it, they could control it. And the question becomes, as do you allow more Chinese telecoms influence? And, and you're right, the, the, the Americans are going to say no, and the Aussies are going to say no.

• 45:13Speaker 02

  The Australians went first. So Malcolm Turnbull, who was the Prime Minister at the time, actually tasked the head of the ASD at the time, Mike Burgess.

• 45:21Gordon Corera?

  The Australian Signals Director.

• 45:22Speaker 02

  The Australian Signals Director, which is the, and version of NSA in the US. And so they looked into this and they looked into whether or not there was a way to isolate some of the technology away from the sensitive systems. And they came to the conclusion that there wasn't a way. Now, some people would argue that was a commercial decision that was made. They wanted to cut out China. I think there was a lot of, based on what I was told, I think that they were right to do that. And also, they were particularly worried because China introduced legislation in 2017, the national intelligence legislation, which essentially obligated anyone, whether they're a corporate entity or an individual,

• 46:04Speaker 02

  to provide information to the intelligence agencies in China when requested. That's, that's by law, right? So it was difficult to see their way around that. So Australia took the first step and then the Americans came aboard. And that's when it created a bit of tension with the UK. Yes.

• 46:20David McCloskey?

  And to play that through, I mean, it's what that national intelligence law directly says, which frankly, I would wager the Ministry of State Security was kind of treating that law as precedent well before it existed.

• 46:33Speaker 02

  For decades.

• 46:34David McCloskey?

  Right. If you are a, if you happen to be working for Huawei in Sydney, and you're not, you don't work for the MSS, right? But you're a Chinese citizen who happens to be on a contract with Huawei in Sydney, and someone from the MSS asks you to do something, you are obliged under this law to cooperate with them.

• 46:55Speaker 02

  It will be illegal if you do it.

• 46:57Gordon Corera?

  Can I ask a subversive question? Is it any different if you're an American telecoms company or a British telecoms company?

• 47:02Speaker 02

  You can say no as a telecoms.

• 47:04Gordon Corera?

  If there's a warrant signed by them?

• 47:06Speaker 02

  Well, then that can become public. The difference between dealing with an authoritarian regime.

• 47:10Gordon Corera?

  Yeah, there's a difference in the democratic process.

• 47:12Speaker 02

  If that happened here, someone will tip you or me off and will write a story about it. In China, who are you going to tip off? The China Daily or?

• 47:20Gordon Corera?

  In a sense, I'm not disputing, I mean Huawei obviously say they don't, you know, spy. But in a sense, that's what Snowden revealed is all the Western telecoms companies are entirely complicit in intelligence gathering. And I mean, that in a sense is why Huawei was so sensitive, because everyone knew this is possible.

• 47:37David McCloskey?

  This is how it works.

• 47:38Gordon Corera?

  Because this is how it works. Because Western telecoms companies were shown, you know, they're up on the slides, they're providing their data from global customers to British,

• 47:48Speaker 02

  but the legislation goes many steps further in China.

• 47:52Gordon Corera?

  That's us and we're democratic states and they're a different state and we have different values. That's fine. But all I'm saying is, you know, the reason why we're worried about Huawei is because of what we're doing in Five Eyes.

• 48:00David McCloskey?

  I guess the point is, is that in the UK, I presume, and in the US, it's not that Google or Verizon or Microsoft are able to say, no, you can't have access to anything. But that there's a legal framework in place that is not as, not as authoritarian, not as state focused as we have in China.

• 48:22Gordon Corera?

  Agreed, agreed. So my point is that there's a reason why people were worried about Huawei, because we know what you can do with control of global telecoms. We know, we, we as the Five Eyes, understand the power of control over telecoms because we've been using it for decades. That's why, as China becomes a global power and starts selling telecoms equipment, we're like, that's a risk. Well, we understand the risks.

• 48:47David McCloskey?

  There's a great analog in the crypto AG story we did on the pod, where if you actually control the hardware and then obviously the associated software that goes with that hardware that's designed for it, you can embed bugs, loopholes, backdoors into that tech that the other side may not be able to find. I mean, it absolutely is true. It's not, I don't think it's a question of fairness. It's a question, I agree with you, of understanding the advantage that control of a telecommunications or communications backbone gives you. You, you, you don't want to grant that to the other side.

• 49:26Gordon Corera?

  Yeah, yeah. No, I'm not saying we should.

• 49:28Speaker 02

  What are you saying, Gordon?

• 49:30Gordon Corera?

  I'm saying.

• 49:31David McCloskey?

  And now a message for our sponsors, Huawei.

• 49:35Gordon Corera?

  The Ministry of State Security.

• 49:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:37Gordon Corera?

  No, I'm merely saying, I'm merely saying that the, the fears over Huawei come from us knowing in the Five Eyes what we've been doing.

• 49:45Speaker 02

  What capabilities? Yeah.

• 49:46Gordon Corera?

  What we've been doing. That's why we worry about it. But actually, what is interesting in the context of the Five Eyes?

• 49:51David McCloskey?

  The Five Eyes is not, it's not about fairness, Gordon.

• 49:53Gordon Corera?

  No, it's about intelligence advantage.

• 49:55David McCloskey?

  It's about information advantage over our adversary.

• 49:57Gordon Corera?

  But what's so interesting in this case is, is the Americans are like, don't use Huawei equipment. And the Brits, GCHQ are like, we can manage the risks. And so the Americans actually put quite significant pressure on the UK government through the context of Five Eyes.

• 50:11Speaker 02

  Deployed a few officials here to confront some British officials at the Cabinet Office.

• 50:17Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 50:17Speaker 02

  And there's a scene that I write about in the book where they.

• 50:20Gordon Corera?

  Well, I think Kieran Martin, who's head of NCSC.

• 50:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's in there.

• 50:23Gordon Corera?

  Is confronted by American officials to be told, get rid of Huawei.

• 50:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, otherwise kind of thing. Yeah.

• 50:28David McCloskey?

  How would the Brits even come to a different conclusion about the sensitivity? Because I would assume that, given the tightness between NSA and GCHQ, that the, the, the perspective on the vulnerability from a system would be quite similar.

• 50:43Gordon Corera?

  I mean, I can give you the brief, we could do episodes on this. The brief answer is, we'd let them in almost without thinking in the early 2000s. And then we retrofitted a security regime around it, particularly.

• 50:55Speaker 02

  In 2010.

• 50:55Gordon Corera?

  In 2010 at Banbury, which is a place which I visited, which was paid for by Huawei, but staffed by effectively GCHQ people who were examining the kit and doing technical oversight of it. Now, that means they felt they could see what was going on with Huawei kit. If you wanted to be really cynical, you could say there are advantages if you're an intelligence agency in being able to understand and pore over the kit. And that might even offer you certain, you know, benefits as well as security management. So the Brits were like, this is actually, this kind of works for us. We're inside Huawei's deployment of its infrastructure. We can see what's happening and we can assess it for security

• 51:37Gordon Corera?

  reasons. So in their minds, that meant they could manage the risks. This became a really interesting debate. And we might talk about it, because I think we're going to talk to Kieran Martin, who was overseeing this on the podcast in a bonus episode for our members, about why the Brits had a different view from the Americans. But the Americans, I mean, the Americans turn up, turn up the pressure to the point where they say, we're going to, we, we may not trust you enough to share certain forms of intelligence because of you having Huawei in your infrastructure. I mean, they said that, didn't they? I mean, were they were really going to do it? I'm not sure, but there was a threat.

• 52:14Speaker 02

  We never got to it in the end.

• 52:14Gordon Corera?

  But there was a threat, wasn't there, Richard?

• 52:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:16David McCloskey?

  What would the Americans have cut off?

• 52:17Speaker 02

  It was the Americans in coalition with the Aussies.

• 52:20Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 52:20Speaker 02

  So the Aussies played a significant role in putting pressure on the Brits.

• 52:26Gordon Corera?

  But it would have been, for instance, if you've got US bases in the UK, if any of the communications would have gone off Huawei infrastructure, they'd be like, well, we can't, we can't trust that. Therefore, we may, and they never quite specified. I mean, maybe we should ask Kieran about this, what the cutoffs might have been. But the suggestion was not as a punishment, they were claiming.

• 52:48Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 52:49Gordon Corera?

  But as a, as a

• 52:51Speaker 02

  Security measure.

• 52:51Gordon Corera?

  As a security measure, we can't trust some of our information going on your networks if those networks have Huawei in it. Of course, the, the truth is, anything really top secret wouldn't go over a Huawei network. So the Brits were like, this doesn't make sense. And so I think it was more a case of political pressure by threatening it than actual cutoffs. There was definitely tension there, wasn't there?

• 53:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, I think, I think the political pressure is a key point. I spoke to Theresa May about this, subsequent to the, to the UK, you know, banning Huawei. And I think that's, that's the impression I got. There was, because they felt they could protect the overall system by virtue of keeping them out of the sensitive areas, keeping Huawei out. But I think there was pressure, but also there was the, there were the cost pressures because Huawei was the cheapest.

• 53:44Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 53:44Speaker 02

  You know, it was cheaper than Ericsson, I think, and the other organisation that was providing.

• 53:49David McCloskey?

  Well, maybe there, as we talk about politics, becoming a, a feature of this, of this alliance. Let's end, and when we come back next time, we'll talk about what Five Eyes looks like in the age of Donald Trump.

• 54:04Gordon Corera?

  It's gonna be a wild ride. And just a reminder, of course, you can listen to that episode right now. If you're a member of the Declassified Club, you'll get access to our bonus episodes in which we're going to talk to people who've sat at the heart, running agencies of this Five Eyes alliance. So do join up for that at therestisclassified.com. But otherwise, we'll see you next time.

• 54:22Speaker 02

  We'll see you next time.

• 54:27Gordon Corera?

  Marketers have used AI to create more marketing than ever, but generic AI tools produce generic results. That's why Profound built your AI marketer, a marketing agent that has real time context

• 54:38Speaker 04

  on your brand, audience, competitors and positioning, and knows what performed best in the past. The result is AI powered marketing that you're actually proud to publish and a new teammate that you trust to run at scale. To see why a third of the Fortune 100 choose Profound's AI marketer, go to profound.com.

• 54:57Speaker 04

  Where some see heroes and others see egos. Bloomberg sees the era of billionaire athletes. While others follow the noise, we follow the money. Learn more at Bloomberg.com.

• 55:12Speaker 06

  Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities, so do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do at mintmobile.com/switch.

• 55:31Speaker 05

  Upfront payment of $45 for three month plan, equivalent to $15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See full terms at mintmobile.com.