183. The Secret Spy Network: How The US and UK Spy Together (Ep 1)

It is most powerful intelligence alliance the world has ever seen But what is the Five Eyes and how did it begin? Listen as David and Gordon are joined by journalist, author and filmmaker Richard Kerbaj, to explore one of the world's most significant and longstanding intelligence sharing alliances. ------------------- 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?

  It is the most powerful intelligence alliance the world has ever seen. But what is the Five Eyes and how did it begin? Well, welcome to The Rest Is Classified. I'm David McCloskey.

• 0:35Gordon Corera?

  And I'm Gordon Corera.

• 0:36David McCloskey?

  And today we are beginning a series that is looking at the Five Eyes, this intelligence partnership. We have had a lot of requests to cover this subject. We've actually also just finished a series on Bletchley Park. The origins, in many ways, of at least the US, UK intelligence relationship, this thing that will eventually sprawl into the Five Eyes. And we're going to look today, and really over the course of this four-part series, at this relationship. How did it start? How did it evolve? What does it actually do?

• 1:11Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 1:11David McCloskey?

  How does it practically work? And given just how tight the transatlantic relationship is now.

• 1:20Gordon Corera?

  You're saying that with a bit of sarcasm, I think.

• 1:22David McCloskey?

  How much deeper will it get, given the harmony in transatlantic relations?

• 1:27Gordon Corera?

  I think the question is more, will it survive? I think that's more the question about the Five Eyes. It was a very shadowy organisation. When I started doing journalism, you'd hear this kind of whispered talk about, well, Five Eyes are doing this or that.

• 1:38David McCloskey?

  Sounds like a monster.

• 1:39Gordon Corera?

  It sounds like a monster. And you never really knew publicly much about it. And actually, it's moved into the public space in the last 10, 20 years. And that's something we're going to look at. It's become much more visible, but also that's, I think, laid bare some of the tensions around it between the different countries, which we should say are the UK and US, but also Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. And I think this question about whether this really powerful alliance with an amazing track record is going to survive, is it going to grow? Is it going to expand? Is it going to shrink? I think is a really important question for today. And we're going to look at the history and how we got here. And it's worth saying that to do that, we have with us a very special guest,

• 2:24Gordon Corera?

  something of an expert on the Five Eyes, Richard Cabage. Richard, welcome.

• 2:27Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me.

• 2:32Gordon Corera?

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• 3:41Speaker 03

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• 5:00Gordon Corera?

  So Richard is an old friend, I should say. Is that right? Counterpart, rival?

• 5:03Speaker 02

  I believe so. Rival, well, both.

• 5:05Gordon Corera?

  Both.

• 5:05Speaker 02

  Both can work.

• 5:06Gordon Corera?

  You were the security correspondent for the Sunday Times newspaper. You're a BAFTA-winning. That's very impressive. That's a big award for making TV documentaries, films like My Son, the Jahadi, produced a TV drama series on Alexander Litvinenko, a story we've covered. You've also written some books, most recently The Defector, which looks at some of these aspects of the relationships, but also before that, The Secret History of the Five Eyes. And also, Richard, you are an Australian.

• 5:36Speaker 02

  I am. So between us, we've got three of the Five Eyes here. And so what I was thinking of doing is for episode two and three, I'm going to do them in Canadian and New Zealand accents.

• 5:45Gordon Corera?

  Very good.

• 5:45Speaker 02

  Yes, I'm going to do it.

• 5:46David McCloskey?

  It's like, we have the three most important eyes, though, right? We can agree on that.

• 5:51Speaker 02

  You've already ostracised the audience.

• 5:54Gordon Corera?

  I think I'm going to see my role as defending Canada and New Zealand in this, as well as the UK.

• 5:58David McCloskey?

  That's very, that's very British of you, Gordon.

• 6:00Gordon Corera?

  Because I think otherwise, I'm not going to let you gang up on them.

• 6:03David McCloskey?

  Well, I think we should start with the most important question. Which I've actually, I've posed this question multiple times now on, on the pod, which is, why is it Five Eyes and not 10 Eyes?

• 6:14Gordon Corera?

  Because each of them have two eyes.

• 6:15David McCloskey?

  Each of them should have two eyes.

• 6:18Speaker 02

  It's not an optometrist association. It's an alliance. It brings together the countries.

• 6:23Gordon Corera?

  It's a partnership of cyclops.

• 6:23Speaker 02

  That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, it's to do with a classification. So in the US, you've got the user classification called no foreign, so not for sharing with foreign sort of partners. And for UK, you've got UK eyes only, Aus eyes only. So it's that. So they called it the Five Eyes because it brought all those eyes together in a metaphorical sense, not a literal sense. Otherwise, you're going to have tons of eyes.

• 6:50Gordon Corera?

  Yeah. I think what's interesting about your book, Richard, is that it's often portrayed as a very harmonious alliance in which everyone shares happily.

• 6:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:56Gordon Corera?

  But, but you do dive into, and that's something we're going to look at in this series, some of the tensions that did happen over history. But also, there is this fact that it's become more public recently, hasn't it? And it's taken on a new role, I think, recently.

• 7:09Speaker 02

  Well, it wasn't really properly publicised until the Snowden affair. Because in the lead up to the Snowden affair, you hardly read about it in the press. It was barely known. In fact, up until 2009, I'm not even sure that anyone had mentioned it in the press.

• 7:24Gordon Corera?

  Officially.

• 7:25Speaker 02

  Officially, yeah. Of course, among security correspondents.

• 7:27Gordon Corera?

  Yeah, we knew about it.

• 7:28Speaker 02

  We knew about it, but there was just nothing on it. No one had really connected the dots. How did this thing come about? What does it do? What does it represent? Yes, they all work together. And I remember when I set out to do this book, I started contacting people, contemporary officials in the Five Eyes. And one of them, when I rang him up, I said, so what is this Five Eyes? Where do I start here? And he said, oh, mate, it's everything. It's everything. But he couldn't really explain what everything was. I think what he was trying to establish is that it's so purposeful. We're all driven by the same and the common goals, but couldn't really define it. And I think that's, post-Snowden, it became defined in a controversial way, but it wasn't representative of what this alliance is.

• 8:10Gordon Corera?

  But it's acting maybe slightly more overtly now than it used to in the past?

• 8:14Speaker 02

  Absolutely, particularly in the wake of 2023. But in 2022, there was an event that took place. It was the first public but non-publicised event. And that was an event that took place in New York, and it was the FBI Field Office Commander, so the head of the FBI in New York, a guy called Mike Driscoll, in sort of discussions with Alan Kohler, who was the FBI's head of counterintelligence, decided that, okay, in the lead up to the, what's looking like to be a very likely invasion by Russia or Ukraine, we should do something together as the Five Eyes to put the Russians on notice.

• 8:55Speaker 02

  And so the FBI got in touch with the Russian representative, the SVR representative, so their, their foreign intelligence representative at the UN mission, Russian UN mission in New York. And they said, we'd like to come and meet with you. And initially, the Russians thought it was going to be the FBI coming to meet with the head of the SVR. And of course, then, in secret, they showed up, members of the Five Eyes. So you had the FBI MI5 ASIO, which is the Australian version of the domestic intelligence agency. Then you've got the NZSIS, the New Zealanders, we'll talk about in a second, and the Canadians. And they all sort of showed up. And I've described it in the book, it's like the equivalent of showing up to a chess game, brandishing baseball bats.

• 9:39Speaker 02

  Because they were there to sort of confront this SVR chief. And essentially, it was quite a passive aggressive move because Mike Driscoll read out a statement to the head of the SVR, essentially saying that we stand together and united regardless of what you do. It was very likely they were going to disregard this, and of course, they did disregard it. But the SVR official at the very end said, oh, you five are besties. That was his comment. And, and very much, they were. And this was the first public but non-publicised case. And I reveal that in my second book. And the setting really matters here, and we can go into why, why New York really matters for the Five Eyes story.

• 10:23Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, New York really plays a massive part in the origins of the Five Eyes relationship, I think, in starting to form this relationship. I mean, take us there. Exactly, exactly. So it's twofold. One, yes, you're right, it does play a critical role in the formation of this relationship. But two, it is where the Nazis were running an espionage ring in New York. And they were doing that out of the noses of the FBI, and the FBI had no idea about it. And so this is where the story connects between New York and the UK, but specifically Scotland. And there is a woman in Scotland who became a cutout for the Nazis, and I'll come back and explain what her significance is. But

• 11:04Speaker 02

  to tell her story, she's a fascinating person, not just because of the role she would go on to play, but because of the person she is and the upbringing that she has. So this is a woman called Jessie Jordan, who was born into a troubled situation and state. She struggled through a lot of abuse. And eventually, as a teenager, she broke away from the family. She met a young man, a German boy, and she migrated to Germany. And so they got married, she had a child, a young daughter with him. And within a few years, this man went out to fight during World War One, and he was killed on the Western Front. So it was a bad, not just a bad beginning, but bad situation overall. So she married

• 11:49Speaker 02

  a second man. He turned out to be a womanizer who cheated on her, so she divorced him, married a third man. That didn't work out. Things weren't going right for Jessie. But the one thing that she was able to do is create these successful hairdressing businesses. And eventually, in the 1930s, having realized that she no longer wants to live in Germany because she felt there was a great deal of hostility towards Westerners post-World War One, she decided to return to Scotland to set up a hairdressing salon. Now, on her way to Scotland, having gone to the port of Hamburg to get her ship, she was arrested by the Gestapo, the German secret police. According to what she would tell us, because

• 12:32Speaker 02

  we've now got archives and police interviews that we could cite, and I do cite in the book, she said she was arrested by the Gestapo. They took her in, they roughed her up and said, you must spy for Germany. She was trained by the AfV, the Defense Intelligence Agency of the Germans. And she wasn't given a great deal of training. It was very basic in how to identify military targets, how to report back to home. And then she was sent off. So she came to Scotland. And the first thing she did is she wanted to look for a front operation. And so she decided to buy a hairdressing salon. But everything was suspicious from the get-go, because the hairdressing salon was on sale for 75 pounds at the time.

• 13:15Speaker 02

  She decided to offer 300. Not a great way to negotiate if you don't want to be suspicious. Her assistant starts thinking, this woman is not right. She's barely here. She's traveling back and forth to Germany. Her assistant tips her off to the police, and the police pass on this tip-off to MI5, saying, there's something strange about this woman. But MI5 had been watching her for some time, and they'd been collecting the mail that she'd been receiving through the shop. And what they would do is they'd intercept the mail, open it, photograph it, put it back in this envelope, send it through to her. And then she would then open the mail and get the correspondence, repackage it, send it through. So it was essentially cut out to circumvent any security surveillance. Ironically,

• 13:57Speaker 02

  of course, she was being watched. Now, in early 1938, a major thing happened. So I think it was January 1938, MI5 intercept a letter, and it was actually a plot to kill a US Colonel in New York. The espionage network that was there wanted to overthrow him, so essentially drag him to a meeting, overpower him, take his military secrets, and potentially, you know, kill him if they had to. So MI5 realizes, well, this is a death threat here. We can't maintain this investigation without informing The Americans. The Americans. But there was no direct line of communication. So what they did

• 14:37Speaker 02

  is they passed on the information to the military attaché in the UK. And that was essentially the way that it worked back then. You would pass on the information to the military attaché, military attaché would pass it on to the authorities in the US, and then it would get distributed to whichever agency was supposed to investigate. So in this case, it got to the FBI. J. Edgar Hoover, who was the director of the FBI, was reluctant to investigate because he didn't believe that there would be any espionage operations going on underneath. That he didn't know about. He's watched. This is never going to happen in my town. Eventually, he appointed an officer or an agent in the US, as they call them, to conduct an investigation. And

• 15:21Speaker 02

  they identified an espionage ring with 18 people in it. They arrested them all. They interviewed them, 14 of whom were released without charge on the basis that they would return to face court. Of course, they fled the country. And the other four were held. A hugely embarrassing episode for the FBI. And that's when MI5 spotted an opportunity, because they realized that the FBI has been, it's sort of this crime fighting machine, but they don't really have the skills that MI5 had developed now for almost, for a bit more than three decades. And they figured, well, what if we can provide them with some of the know-how, and we can create a direct Relationship, a link.

• 16:03Speaker 02

  And so MI5 dispatched an officer called Guy Little. Yeah, very eminent head of counter espionage. He was deputy head at the point, but he would then become the head of counter espionage. He came and he did a tour in the US, met with State Department officials and FBI officials and Army officials. And he realized very quickly that there's a great deal that the two could share. And so that sharing started to happen eventually. In the 1930s, we probably don't have the same overlapping geopolitical interests that the US and the UK have today, right? We have a pretty powerful isolationist political

• 16:44Speaker 02

  wing in the US who kind of think, we don't, we don't want to get dragged into a potential European conflict. The Brits, through the publication of the Zimmerman Telegram, had probably dragged us into the, you know, the First World War. So you have a kind of skepticism, I think, of transatlantic partnership. Almost rivals. Right, yeah. But there was also legislation in place to stop them becoming involved in the war. Right, right, right. And things like that. You have a really immature US intelligence community. Or non-existent. Non-existent. I mean, you have pockets in the Army and the Navy, but But there was no civilian There's no civilian. The CIA doesn't exist. The OSS hasn't been formed yet. Correct.

• 17:27Speaker 02

  Those will all be created during and after the Second World War. So who the British even liaise with on foreign intelligence is a bit of an open question. And you also have the fact that, at the same time that the Brits are thinking about helping MI5, I mean, they're spying in the US and conducting influence operations. So what you get is, you get these initial links in the late 30s, based around quite specific, you know, hunting Nazi spies. Then, I mean, as we talked about at Bletchley Park, the war, as the war begins, America's not even in the war when that first American mission goes to Bletchley Park. Exactly. But they realize, well, we've got something we can learn from each other when it comes to code breaking. So then you start to get, you know, a mutual interest at that point in the

• 18:12Speaker 02

  Post-Pill Harbour. Post-Pill Harbour. It really starts to come together, and, you know, they're now allies, and the intelligence community is starting to work together. Is it worth, I mean, mentioning, does Australia have any role in this? Is it really just US, UK? Well, actually, that's why I said post-Pill Harbour, because on December 8, after attacking Pill Harbour the previous day, the Japanese then attacked the Philippines, and they hit Manila. And they hit several airfields. Among them is an airfield that was housing US troops, and almost 100 US troops, if not more, are killed, hundreds more are injured. And so

• 18:53Speaker 02

  Douglas MacArthur, who is the commander in the Far East, US commander in the Far East, sticks around for a little while, but eventually he's told by Roosevelt that he has to ship out, just go elsewhere. It's no longer safe for us here. And so he relocates to Australia in 1942, in March of 1942. And very quickly after relocating to Australia, he figures that he'd like to set up a signals intelligence capability. And that's where the central, the cipher bureau is born. So it doesn't exist prior to that? It does not exist before this. In the conflict. No, it doesn't. No, not in that context. In fact, he wasn't operating from Australia, right? Yeah. So he goes to Australia and he becomes the supreme commander for the South Pacific. And he wants to bring these people on board. And of course, one of the people that you

• 19:38Speaker 02

  mentioned in your Bletchley Park series is Sinkov. So he calls on Abraham Sinkov to go to Australia to help set up this center. And Sinkov brings on board people from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, US, and Britain. And it almost becomes like a Five Eyes experiment, even before it was even conceptualized as the Five Eyes. And so they put them all together, and they bring on board mathematicians, analysts, engineers, and they bring linguists on board. And they were tasked with deciphering and decoding Japanese signals, mainly. There was a bit of collection that was going on, but it was predominantly analysis work. And

• 20:23Speaker 02

  they become hugely successful in identifying troop movements in the Pacific, in identifying the order of battle operations. And that becomes, so that in itself becomes a success. And that's now happening in 1943. And that's around the same time that the FBI sets up a bureau in London. That then solidifies this intelligence exchange between the FBI and MI5, and starts to seep into other exchanges later on. So the 1940s played a really crucial role during wartime in helping develop those sort of communication sharing methods, and also this sort of early days of the alliance.

• 21:08Speaker 02

  It's really interesting, isn't it? Because I think we've tended to focus, you know, on the podcast and other places, more about the kind of European side of World War Two, but remembering it's a Pacific War as well, explains why Five Eyes is going to be important, because you've got Australia and New Zealand in there. Yes. And so I guess we've already got this sense of it being a primarily a signals intelligence relationship, but also with this other kinds of intelligence exchange, for instance, between the FBI and MI5. But this is really brought together by wartime. The question is, is it going to survive after the war? Let's take a break, and afterwards, we'll see if it does.

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• 24:36Gordon Corera?

  Welcome back. So we've looked at how some of these relationships were forged during the Second World War. As it comes to an end, though, there's a question about what's going to come next. We know, of course, now that it's the Cold War, but in some ways, the signs that there's going to be a Cold War, particularly when it comes to intelligence and espionage, comes out of a case which is in Canada.

• 24:59Speaker 02

  Yes, it does, and that's a case relating to Argo Gazenko, who was a cipher clerk working at the Soviet Embassy in Canada. He'd been there for almost two years, and his background's quite fascinating because I don't think he was well-suited for that kind of role. He was passionate about art and architecture. I think he studied architecture. And then he joined the military when the Soviet Union joined the Second World War in 1941. And when it started expanding its recruitment campaign, they reached out to the young communists, and he was a member of that. So he was brought on board, trained in signals, and obviously, he was clever enough and capable

• 25:40Speaker 02

  enough to be recruited and trained, and then he was sent to Canada. So now we're at the close of the Second World War, he's in Canada, but a few days before the end of the Second World War, he is taken aside and castigated by his boss for not securing all the paperwork that he should be securing. So he was basically leaving his papers on his desk. And so as a result, they said, right, you're going to be, you're fired from this role, and so in two weeks, you have to pack your bags and get back home. In the meantime, while he was waiting to be sent back home, he had a chat with his wife, and he was like, we kind of like it here in Canada.

• 26:23Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 26:24Speaker 02

  The weather is cool. The people are really nice.

• 26:27David McCloskey?

  I wouldn't think of Soviet intelligence as sort of a two-weeks-notice kind of the enterprise.

• 26:31Speaker 02

  Well, that, well, there's been a few of those cases, but that's exactly that. So, big mistake, that's right. His wife agreed that if we can get political asylum, we will stay here. So what he did cleverly is he started collecting documents that will be of use to US, British, and Canadian intelligence. He already had his eyes on three of the Five Eyes. He was way ahead of himself. And eventually, on the 7th of September, 1945, he left the embassy with 109 documents stashed into his coat. And then he went off to try and interest a newspaper in his story, thinking, if we could break this story, it could be a great thing.

• 27:12Speaker 02

  Well, of course, the newspapers can't always spot a great story, Gordon, as you know. So they're like, well, not really, that's not one for us. The night editor was not there, and then he was there at the time, and he's like, this is not one for us. I'm not sure that's going to make a front-page story, you know? Feels like me talking to my editors back in the day on Sunday Times. And so eventually, he returns, and the Soviets are now looking for him. Like, what's happened? Where is this guy? So they try and confront him at his house, but they don't get there because he's hiding with his family at his neighbor's place, so they get there.

• 27:47Gordon Corera?

  So it's a manhunt now. They're looking for him.

• 27:49Speaker 02

  Completely. The next day, RCMP, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, come to the rescue.

• 27:54Gordon Corera?

  The Mounties.

• 27:55Speaker 02

  Exactly. And they take him in for a debriefing, and they realize that this guy is really distressed, really distressed, to the point that declassified debriefings that I went through for the book reveal that he was on the verge of suicide, but also, they thought that if they were to release him, he could murder his wife and child and then kill himself. He was that distressed. Helpfully for them, he had 109 documents to go through, but the Canadians didn't really have the capability or the know-how to interpret and analyze those documents. So they called on the Brits, because of course, the Brits are ever so reliable. And they get someone from MI5 is dispatched to do a debriefing.

• 28:39Speaker 02

  And here's where it becomes really compelling to those of us who are obsessed with espionage. All the information that the British were getting from him and interpreting and analyzing was being sent back to the UK, but it had to go via a person who's appointed to receive it all. And that person's someone you guys may have heard of called Kim Philby. He was working MI6 at the time, and he said, I'll take this on board. Let me have a look at this. And he'll pass it on. But also, what it did is it encouraged other agencies to join in the interpretation and analysis. So the FBI debriefed him, and so did Arlington Hall. They also did their own debriefing.

• 29:20David McCloskey?

  Home of the Army, Signals Intelligence Service.

• 29:22Speaker 02

  Precisely, which is the counterpart to Bletchley Park during wartime. And so the intelligence that they got really put Canada in a great standing in the eyes of the US and UK, but also importantly, arguably as well, triggered what would become the Cold War. That was kind of the moment that we discovered that this has happened. And of course, we discover as well through him and through the intelligence he shared, the atomic, a lot of the atomic spies that the Americans and the British were pursuing, and the Canadians too.

• 29:57Gordon Corera?

  The crucial point about Gazenko is that he reveals that the Soviet Union is spying massively on the West.

• 30:02Speaker 02

  And particularly on the US.

• 30:03Gordon Corera?

  And particularly on the US. And they hadn't really known that before.

• 30:06Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 30:07David McCloskey?

  Well, then going back to Australia, there's another big defector there that sort of pulls the Aussie thread in the early days of the Cold War.

• 30:17Speaker 02

  Sure. And I think in the lead-up to that, it'd be good to frame it in what actually was happening in Australia, because of course, Australia was the setting where the cipher bureau was created by General MacArthur. And then it becomes the problem child of the Five Eyes situation, before the Five Eyes even called the Five Eyes. And that is because in, right after the Second World War, so in the 1946, 47, the British and Americans discover that the Australian Department of External Affairs, which is the equivalent of the State Department in the US or the Foreign Office in the UK, has been penetrated by the Soviet Union.

• 31:02Speaker 02

  And there are two suspects in there who were thought of being sharing information with Moscow. And that's eventually proven, but at this point in the late 1940s, the Truman administration decides, we need to cut Australia from the intelligence loop. We no longer trust these Aussies. They've got nice beers and barbecues, but they cannot be our friends for these purposes. So they leave them out. They shut them out. And the Brits come to the rescue once again, like they did with the Canadians, because of the Commonwealth, you know? And the Brits appeal to the Truman administration, saying, we've got to keep the Aussies on

• 31:41Speaker 02

  board, and what we can do is improve their security situation. We can improve their security standards, and perhaps we can help them create something that is in the same kind of spirit as MI5. And so in 1949, early 1949, they help the Aussies create what would become to be known as ASIO, which is the Australian Security Intelligence Organization, ASIO. And very quickly, ASIO hits the ground running in 49 and 50. And they hit the ground running because an agent they had on board was gathering some

• 32:23Speaker 02

  intelligence from the Russian diaspora in Sydney, passing it on to ASIO. They start targeting information, obviously, from the embassy in Canberra. And this is where we get this fascinating character who emerges, who is sent to Australia to run the Soviet intelligence mission. His name is Vladimir Petrov, and he's there with his wife and his dog. He's obsessed with his dog and his rifle. And ASIO start getting some information about him, and they discover this guy's a bit of a drunk and is a womanizer. So he's quite vulnerable to potential recruitment.

• 33:06Speaker 02

  And there's a great file that I found at the National Archives in Australia, where the police discover this drunken man driving through the streets of Canberra, and the police motorbike starts chasing him. So of course, instead of stopping, he figures, I've got diplomatic immunity, so he guns it straight to the embassy, gets out, hobbles into the embassy, and then an embassy official comes out to have a chat with a police officer, saying, there's nothing to see here. The police didn't know at the time that ASIO had already been watching him, because of course, that agent that ASIO had, who had penetrated the Russian diaspora, was now interacting with Vladimir Petrov, and Petrov thought he had recruited the agent.

• 33:47Speaker 02

  So he was tasking him to get bits of information, get alongside politicians and other prominent members of the community, and ASIO is getting all of this back. Eventually, they think, we might be able to get Petrov, but they couldn't be seen as encouraging him to defect. So they figured, maybe we can engineer this in some way. At which point, the agent they had, who was running him, who was running, you know, running him on behalf of ASIO, decides he wants more money for his work. It becomes very difficult to manage. ASIO lets him go, then brings him back, and eventually, they think, right, we've got

• 34:29Speaker 02

  enough to potentially get Petrov on board. And Petrov, I'll go into the story in more detail in the book, obviously, but Petrov eventually defects to Australia in 1954. And his defection has a huge impact, not on just what the alliance will become, the Five Eyes, but also a huge impact on local politics, because prior to his defection, the Labour Party was ahead in the polls, and it was very likely that Labour will get into power, so a Labour leader will get in, Evatt. But as a result of the defection, they start to build this up as, you know, this is kind of the communists who are spying on us.

• 35:12Gordon Corera?

  Left-wing threat, yeah.

• 35:13Speaker 02

  Precisely. And I think that works in their favor. It keeps the Conservatives, you know, in power, and that really destabilizes the political situation in Australia. But from a Five Eyes perspective, it has a tremendous impact, because Australia goes from being shut out of the circle of trust to being brought back into the circle of trust. J. Edgar Hoover and, I think, the CIA chief at the time, send these congratulatory messages to ASIO.

• 35:52Speaker 02

  And now ASIO is cemented as being a serious player in the intelligence game, and also the intelligence they gather from Petrov goes to be of great service to the Americans and the Canadians and the British. This is now 1954, 55, now in 56 is when the alliance comes together officially, because of course, in the lead-up to all of that, the buildup from the late 1930s right through the 1940s and into the mid 1950s, there are interactions, there are tensions, as we've pointed out.

• 36:30Speaker 02

  But now in 1956, the UK-USA agreement, which was created in 1946, is expanded to include Canada, New Zealand, and Australia to become the Five Eyes.

• 36:44Gordon Corera?

  So at this point, the Five Eyes now kind of exists, but we should say, shouldn't we, it's not an organization, is it? It's not, you know, there's not a Five Eyes headquarters building, some like secret base somewhere, is there, David?

• 36:59David McCloskey?

  Which would be great.

• 37:00Gordon Corera?

  So what, it's a kind of, yeah, how should we understand it?

• 37:04Speaker 02

  How should we think about it? Yeah. I mean, think about it in the context of, say, NATO or something like that. It's an alliance, right? So you've got these partnerships. Not all Five Eyes organizations were embedded in each other's offices at this point, right? Because some of them weren't even created. Like, for instance, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service wasn't created until the 1980s. So this is now 1956. The CIA has only been around now for less than a decade. The NSA has just come about a few years earlier.

• 37:33Gordon Corera?

  1952, yeah.

• 37:34Speaker 02

  NZSIS is about to emerge. It's not even created properly yet. So there's not much going on. So from that perspective, yes, there's, they've got the shared purpose and shared interest, and also this global reach. And we can go into that a bit later on, about what that represents, but that's essentially what it is.

• 37:53Gordon Corera?

  How did the Kiwis get in?

• 37:54Speaker 02

  Well, the Kiwis got in in the early 1940s during the MacArthur experiment. They're part of the Commonwealth, and so they contributed to the Cypher Bureau in Brisbane. And eventually, their contribution would grow. Of course, the Kiwis are the smallest partner budget-wise, but huge spirit, and they're very lovable. And they are, they are.

• 38:20David McCloskey?

  Lasted dollars, number one in spirit.

• 38:23Gordon Corera?

  We're going to come back to the Kiwis later on in this series.

• 38:26David McCloskey?

  It is, the other thing that really is, I think, interesting is when you look at the organizations that form the Five Eyes, it is essentially like, they're all trained and modeled off of Britain.

• 38:41Speaker 02

  The British.

• 38:42David McCloskey?

  I mean, so the Brits train OSS.

• 38:45Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 38:46David McCloskey?

  The Brits, all of the sort of tradecraft that goes into what eventually becomes the CIA.

• 38:51Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 38:52David McCloskey?

  Comes from MI6.

• 38:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, they just improve on it, of course. I mean, what the Americans do, and they tend to do that, and have done that throughout history, is they take a concept and just improve on it. You've got the manpower, and you've got the perspicacity, you've got really intelligent people, they just are, right? And you know this, we all know this, right? Because we've interviewed a lot of American officials, and they're just, there's just something about the depth of knowledge that they bring to operators. The British, hold on, hold on a second. I'm not saying this in any way to discredit the British. I think the British were there first, right?

• 39:26Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 39:27Speaker 02

  And I think they all feed off each other. I mean, if you think about the British role in ASIO, they didn't just help set up ASIO. The deputy director of ASIO was British, she was an MI5 officer.

• 39:38Gordon Corera?

  So what you have here is a picture of, I mean, something which has come out of the war, the Second World War, but which is sustained, because now you've got the Cold War.

• 39:47Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 39:48Gordon Corera?

  You've got the Common Language, which I think, you know, we shouldn't underestimate. You've got the fact, Britain, the UK, arguably the kind of progenitor of all these other intelligence communities, but by the 50s, the US is already, you know, showing that it's got the resources to be the biggest, and it's going to be, become the biggest. So you've got, you can see why there's something there, which isn't, I mean, it's not, as we said, an organization. What it's doing is sharing information, basically, and also, we should say, agreeing not to spy on each other, which we'll come back to maybe later on.

• 40:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course, that was never followed.

• 40:21Gordon Corera?

  Whether, that was actually followed.

• 40:23Speaker 02

  I think they did a bit of that.

• 40:24Gordon Corera?

  But that's the idea, is like, we're common partners. We're going to, we're going to collect intelligence together, we're going to share it, we're not going to spy on each other, we've got a common interest. But let's stop there, and then next time, we can look at actually how some of the tensions emerge between those Five Eyes as the Cold War goes on, and how some are even pretty much almost kicked out of the alliance. So Richard, thank you very much. A reminder, of course, his book, The Secret History of the Five Eyes, also his more recent book, The Defector, out there. As I said, next time, we'll dive a little bit deeper into what really happens inside the Five Eyes in the Cold War.

• 40:57David McCloskey?

  We'll be doing four episodes on this series. You do not have to wait to binge listen to those. You can go and join the Declassified Club at therestisclassified.com, get access to all of them now, and here's some really interesting bonus episodes we'll be doing for this series, isn't that right, Gordon?

• 41:14Gordon Corera?

  With some people who've actually run some of the Five Eyes intelligence agencies in the past.

• 41:18David McCloskey?

  They were one of the eyes.

• 41:19Gordon Corera?

  They were one of the eyes. We're going to be hearing from them about what it's actually like to be in some of those top-secret Five Eyes meetings. So do join up, and we'll see you next time.

• 41:26David McCloskey?

  We'll see you next time.

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