The Current - Could the U.S. push Canada out of the Five Eyes spy network?

Episode Date: March 5, 2025

The White House has denied reports that the U.S. is trying to eject Canada from the Five Eyes, the spy network both countries share with the U.K., Australia and New Zealand. We look at the critical role the U.S. plays in global intelligence, and whether it’s still a reliable partner.

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Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current Podcast. That was just crazy stuff. We would never ever jeopardize our national security ever ever, with allies like Canada. That's Peter Navarro. He's a key advisor to Donald Trump and a key architect of the tariffs that the administration imposed yesterday. But what he's talking about there is a report in the Financial Times last week that said that the Trump administration was also considering expelling Canada from the Five Eyes.

This is a group of intelligence agencies in Canada, the United States, the UK, Australia and New Zealand. And while Canada's position in the exclusive spy club sounds safe for now, there may be other reasons to be uneasy. Joining me now are Martin Green, former head of intelligence assessments for Canada's federal cabinet. Jessica Davis, a former CSIS analyst, now president and principal consultant at Insight Threat Intelligence and co-host of the podcast Secure Line. And Richard Kerbaj, a London-based author of a book, The Secret History of the Five Eyes, the Untold Story of the International Spy Network. Thank you all for being here this morning.

Thank you. Thank you, Matt. Richard, what are the five eyes and what kind of information do those eyes share? Well, essentially, the Five Eyes was created very much in response to the Soviet threat back in the, back in 1956. And essentially, what they wanted to do is bring these five countries together that you just named to combat the Soviet threat. And they did that through sharing information, pulling information, integrating personnel.

And it was essentially created to, as I said, combat Soviet threat, but also to kind of clarify thinking, generate a bit of dissent because within intelligence you require some dissent. You don't need agreement all the time. You need to challenge ideas to create better information. And so- What about now? What's the role that it plays now? Well, I think that it plays a far greater role now than it did then, because of course,

after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it had to kind of reintegrate and repurpose itself. And so now it fights everything from counter-espionage, kind of terrorism, misinformation, disinformation. So it's a huge part of the intelligence machinery. Martin, how important has the relationship with the Five Eyes been for Canada's national security? I think it's of fundamental importance,

particularly our relationship with the United States. But there are benefits of the five. I worked on the analytical side, and part of my job was to coordinate our own community, the analytical part of it, with the analytical parts of our partners in the Five Eyes. So at the end of the day it's essential in terms of having a consensus on different issues and of course the information sharing is you know gobsmacking in terms of its volume but at the pinnacle of that of course is the United States given their behemoth of a intelligence

community. So... Jessica, can you just pick up on that? Martin talked about the gobsmacking scale of the information sharing. How does that work on a practical basis? Well, it's done through mostly classified channels. So, there are daily inputs from all the partners to one another. I think it's important to note that it's not everything. Every country has, of course, its own intelligence. And then there's stuff that's earmarked to share with the Five Eyes. And there are conversations that develop

around that, like the Russia Ukraine war. Jessica, do you want to pick up on that and tell us a bit more about, about how that works? Yeah, it's really driven in a lot of cases by interests and operational exchanges. So on a file, something like counterterrorism, there's going to be really broad sharing, particularly with the U S and Canada, because

we share such a large border. We share a lot of common threats and common interests. And so that's really one of the places where we share a ton of intelligence. Other files like Russia will have similar volumes of sharing, and they're going to be really important. So this whole idea of, you know, the United States kicking us out of the five eyes, I think is, you know, first of all, detrimental to everyone's security. But the second, second piece of that is that the United States can't really kick us out of the Five Eyes. The Five Eyes isn't a formal agreement where one country can kick somebody out.

It's really bilateral relationships that we've all kind of agreed to govern under similar architecture, similar frameworks. So even if the United States decided that it wanted to stop sharing similar architecture, similar frameworks. So even if the United States decided that it wanted to stop sharing intelligence on say the Russia threat with Canada, Canada would continue to share and receive intelligence from probably the rest of the Five Eyes. So it's a really interesting threat that the United States has brought forward here. What does Canada contribute to the Five Eyes? There has been criticism from some that Canada can be a bit of a free rider.

And the professor Thomas Junot has said that actually it would be more accurate to call us what an easy rider, not a free rider in the intelligence world. That's right. What does that mean? Yeah. So, Tom, I'm really glad you brought that up

because Toma really characterizes that perfectly. That Canada does have a significant contribution in the Five Eyes, but we cannot compete with the scope and scale of US intelligence. So what Canada does is we contribute, what I would describe as more bespoke intelligence on areas where we have specific access, specific areas of interest.

And on the human intelligence side of things, that's going to be particular investigations, but on the signals intelligence side of things, that's gonna be particular capabilities, particular access points. So I think it's also useful when we think about the Five Eyes to think about in terms of the different types of intelligence that we're sharing and the unique perspective that Canada can bring on that. For instance, on financial intelligence, Canada has a broad access obviously to the Canadian market that the U.S. does not have access to. So that's going to be another piece of the puzzle that we can contribute to the Canadian market that the US does not have access to. So that's going to be another

piece of the puzzle that we can contribute to the Five Eyes. Martin, this new Trump administration in Washington has, how do you put it, a different approach to relationships with allies than we have seen in the past. When you take a look at the early days of this administration and its approach to intelligence. What has concerned you? It's unsettling and it's not something that's felt directly, I think, by our intelligence community yet. I think there are things to be seen there. But clearly the way President Trump uses and says things, the Zelensky meeting

and what Trump has said around that is very unsettling. Well, and there's follow-up from that this morning. The FT is reporting that the United States has cut off intelligence sharing with Ukraine. What do you make of that? I saw that they have cut off military aid and if that includes intelligence, that's huge. You know, the situational awareness for the Ukrainians is imperative for going on, but

there are a lot of other players in there. The US, as usual, would be preponderant in that. But that would be very destabilizing for the Ukrainians because a lot of their targeting, et cetera. So I don't know how far that cutoff goes, but it would have a major impact depending on how long they do it for. Pete Slauson Richard, what does that tell you? Again, this report from the Financial Times suggesting that the United States has cut off. Richard Larkin I haven't seen that report, but I mean, in regards to the report from the Financial Times suggesting that the United States has cut off. I haven't seen that report, but I mean, in regards to the report by the Financial Times

last week that was quickly discredited in regards to Canada being kicked out of the Five Eyes, and I agree with Jessica, it's not going to be kicked out of the Five Eyes. I can't see a way for that to happen because the system is so well integrated. I think there are three key- That it's in many ways the sum of its parts. Sure, exactly. But also, there are three key concerns that I keep hearing and I've been talking to a lot of people about the Fire Visor the last few weeks in particular, but there's the fact

that the administration is quite transactional. So in that sense, they may start to look at exactly what other partners within the Fire Visor contributing sort of financially. Operational standards is another issue. So for decades now there's been a very stringent and agreed upon standard where you protect information, where information is impartial, where it is not slanted in a political way. And then the third key concern is the fact that there's a worry, naturally, about intelligence being weaponized for political reasons. I think they're real threats because far from just sort of thinking about Canada

being kicked out or anyone else, and in fact any country can opt out of the Five Eyes, it is a non-legally binding agreement, that's all it is. But it's been functioning quite well. And then back to the point about contributions that you discussed earlier with Jessica and Martin, the US has about a hundred billion plus a year intelligence budget. That's about ten times greater than all the other four partners combined. But that's only one metric, because money can buy you submarines and satellites and surveillance capabilities. What it doesn't get you, it doesn't guarantee you all the time is access.

What it doesn't guarantee you is great judgment. And if the US had listened to better judgment, for instance, in relation to the invasion of Iraq, it probably could have saved $2 trillion, saved about 4,500 lives of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of lives of innocent Iraqis. The point about access is important because access is fairly singular. So you can have very talented human operatives, so human intelligence officers and agent runners, regardless of which country they come from, they just happen to just operate better. So it's a singular thing. So individuality does play a part as

well. Jessica, whether it's cutting off intelligence to Ukraine, and again, this is just one report, we'll see how that plays out, but there have been multiple reports over the weekend that the US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegs, ordered a halt to the cyber operations and information operations against Russia. How significant is that in the context of what we're talking about? I think we need to look at all of the actions

that the US has taken with regards to Russia and Ukraine to understand the real context there. Certainly the cyber command change of orders is significant. Now, I will caveat that by saying that it looks like the NSA and the National Security Agency continues to conduct collection against the Russia target. So it's not like they've closed down all SIGINT capabilities against Russia. So there are some good signs there. But when you look at everything that's gone on between Russia and Ukraine and the United

States, I think this is where we start to get some serious concerns, particularly on the intelligence sharing front. And when you add that the US's adversarial stance towards Canada, you start to wonder what Canada can and should be sharing with the United States on intelligence broadly and certainly on the United States, on Russia, on the Russia threat. So I think all of those things taken together really raises concerns that the United States is no longer really acting like an ally of Canada and has taken on a much more adversarial role and in an intelligence world, we can't be sharing sensitive intelligence with one of our adversaries. paid apprenticeships, and the unmatched feeling of saying, I made that. Learn more at Canada.ca slash skilled trades.

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We've less than anyone could imagine. But it's time to imagine what we can do with more. Join Scarborough Health Network and together, we can turn grit into greatness. Donate at lovescarborough.ca. This has been raised beyond the relations between Canada and the United States, just in the context of who is going to be in charge

of national intelligence, particularly when it comes to the cabinet appointments. Have a listen to the Democrat Senator, Adam Schiff, speaking at the confirmation hearing for Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence. This nomination is not just unwise. It is dangerous. Make no mistake, Ms. Gabbard is entitled to her own personal opinions. She can apologize for Assad or Putin or any other murderous dictator to her heart's content. But we're not considering Ms. Gabbard for some position in which her bizarre fondness

for foreign despots is beside the point. She is not the nominee for postmaster general. Tulsi Gabbard has been sympathetic to the Russian government. She visited the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad while under US sanctions, has criticized the intelligence community, defended Edward Snowden who leaked NSA secrets. Martin, what message do you think this appointment as director of national intelligence sends to members of the Five Eyes, to other people who, to Jessica's point, are sharing intelligence with but also relying on the intelligence of the United States?

Well I think it's very problematic and she already with respect to the Zelensky meeting and Russia-Ukraine war, has adopted what I think are the Russian speaking points. And the Russian state agencies are celebrating her nomination. I mean, yeah, the happy people in all of this are she and Putin, because one of their main objectives is to drive a cleavage between Five Eyes countries

and NATO countries. And it would look like we're going down that path a bit because if the intelligence gets politicized, it's going to have impacts on our foreign defense and national security policies across the board. So the politicization thing is very interesting. And when she was asked about Russia, she comes, she basically adopted those speaking points. And, you know, I know that it's not the assessments that her own community is giving her with respect to Russia, who was the aggressor and how this is coming out. So Jessica's quite right. It means we're going to have to have a real good talking

to ourselves or look in the mirror with respect to what we're sharing with the Americans. Jessica, do you want to pick back up on that? I mean, there are observers who have suggested that she might not be, Tulsi Gabbott might not be trusted by members of the intelligence community and they might hesitate to pass along things that perhaps could become vulnerable because of who is in that position. What do you think of that? Yeah, Martin's right.

And I'm gonna pick up and try to make this a little bit more concrete for people because I think it's important for listeners to understand sort of the decision-making that goes into the intelligence sharing. So for someone who, and the human agencies in human intelligence, so perhaps you have a sensitive source, maybe in Russia or outside of Russia who's reporting on important issues happening in Russia. But if you share that intelligence with any allies, there's always a risk that that source will be discovered that there'll be even when we take precautions to hide the identities and hide the access points.

Sharing intelligence has some risks associated with it. Normally those risks are very managed in the fire bias because we're not all that concerned about it. But when you have someone like Tulsi Gobert, and I would even go so far as to say someone like Trump, in these positions of power, the idea that they could either directly or indirectly identify the source of that intelligence puts your sources at risk in a way that, you know, we cannot overstate. And the same thing is very similar for the signals intelligence world.

Perhaps we have a very sensitive access point that we haven't necessarily shared the specific source with our allies, but just by dint of sharing that information, how unique it is, it can expose where it is. And again, in the normal context with the Five Eyes, this is not something that we're all that concerned about, but in the context of Gabbard and Trump, who very well could turn around and tell Russians what they know about those sources, I think this is a very real issue.

Because they're not trusted. Because they're not trusted. Because they're not trusted because in some cases they might have a political debt to Putin. Um, so even at the very operational level, intelligence analysts, intelligence handlers are going to be making decisions about what is releasable to the U S and what is not. Richard, I mean, in some ways they're spying on

the spy agencies, but what do you think those conversations are within the members of the Five Eyes about the cabinet appointments of Donald Trump? I think, so within the Five Eyes, there is a categorization where you can withhold information from one another. And so that generally, that does happen from time to time.

I think that's gonna probably happen a lot more now. That's kind of the indication that I'm getting. That doesn't sound helpful broadly if the point of this agency is to protect us all. Sure. I think on probably on counterterrorism matters, I think they'll continue to share as per usual. On matters relating to Russia though, I think that's where there's potentially going to be a change. I mean, there's been a change in tone and rhetoric just in the past week, let alone

the past few weeks. And I think it's kind of a developing picture. But despite that, I know that Jessica said that this will start affecting sort of operational operations. I think yes to a point, but I think there will be a pushback from within. I mean, that's the sort of the pushback that they call the so-called deep state. And we have to kind of be clear-headed about this. I know there's a lot of rhetoric around Trump at the moment and there's tons of headlines

being generated, but this alliance has really survived endless administrations and governments. And I think for that reason, it is likely to very much continue because people from within and that happened during the first term under Trump, and Martin will tell you this because he shared that with me for the book, and people got together within the agencies across the Five Eyes and said, right, let's kind of sort of, you know, keep ourselves away from some of that political rhetoric and continue sharing, not withhold sharing. Martin? Yeah, I think, you know, it's fundamental, particularly during these times. It's not easy to do, but you need to keep those channels of communication open. A lot of this is built on personality and trust. In my experience,

you know, the sort of longer I was involved with different folks in the Five Eyes, doors would suddenly open. You know, at the beginning it's a little bit reticent, but it really is, you know, in many cases driven by those trust and personality factors. On another point, which I think is really important, is, you know, talking about being kicked out of the Five Eyes. I don't think there would ever be a press release in that regard, like, you know, the United States has decided you're kicked out. It's a lot more nuanced and subtle than that.

You will just suddenly see or you'll notice that, gee, we're not getting this stream of reporting or that the reporting is much more generic and less exquisite, as people say in the business. And that's problematic. And we also, like Jessica said, are going to have to have a hard look at that because the last thing you want is something that you've shared being politicized or trumpeted in some way to adversaries because it will uncover your tradecraft. So those things have to be treated with great sensitivity. Jessica, we're just a bit out of time.

Let me ask you briefly in the, again, the context of what we've been talking about, what would it take for, for this country, for Canada to become more self-sufficient in terms of intelligence gathering? If there are questions hanging around, at least temporarily over the goals and the motives of, of one of the partners of the Five Eyes or members of that team. What do we do to be more self-sufficient? The short answer to your question is money and resources.

But that does not happen overnight. There's very little we can do in the short term to fill the gap if any gap exists in US reporting. But what we can do over the longer term is invest in our security and intelligence agencies, which means, you know, obviously more resources. In some cases, it might even mean considering a foreign intelligence agency.

CSIS, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, has a limited mandate to collect foreign intelligence. In a world where the United States isn't sharing as much intelligence with us, it becomes much more important for Canada to be able to develop foreign intelligence sources to enable our trade relationships, to understand our geopolitical interests better, and to basically position Canada as a leader economically and politically in the world. And that is not the kind of thing that's going to happen overnight. That's, you know, at least a 10 year project, if not longer. But I think this

moment gives us a real opportunity as Canadians to have a rethink on this. So yes, we've got Trump for three more years, plus however many days we're into the administration at this point. But I don't think the Trump moment is something that we should consider in isolation. There are broader trends at play, a broader push away from multilateralism. And I think Canada needs to resist that. We also need to learn to stand on our own two feet from an intelligence perspective.

Richard, just last minute to you. What's at stake if this relationship between these key allies, everybody working together, as we said, it's the sum of its parts in some ways, if that relationship becomes further strained. I think one thing that's being excluded here is the influence that the other allies have on the US. So Canada doesn't exist in isolation within the five eyes,

and I've spoken to people from Britain and Australia and New Zealand who are doing a lot behind the scenes and will continue to do so. And we know that historically that's happened. For instance, when Australia was frozen out of the intelligence circle in the 40s, the Brits came to the rescue. When the New Zealanders were partially frozen out in the 80s, the others came to the rescue.

So I know this sounds a bit crazy at this time to say that I'm pretty hopeful, but I'm hopeful because I know that the values that are shared, that the language that's shared, that the history that's shared within the Alliance will help preserve it regardless of the sort of the political rhetoric at the top. We'll take that hope. There's not a lot of it around these days, it feels like. I appreciate you. This has all been fascinating. I appreciate you all being here this morning. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Matt. Cheers, Matt. Martin Green is a former assistant secretary to cabinet for intelligence assessment. Jessica Davis is a former CSIS analyst, now the president and

principal consultant at Insight Threat Intelligence and co-host of a podcast called Secure Line. And Richard Kerbaj is the author of The Secret History of the Five Eyes, the untold story of the international spy network.