The Decibel - The Five Eyes: security, spying and surveillance under Trump

Episode Date: January 27, 2025

Donald Trump is not a fan of international coalitions. He is also not a fan of intelligence agencies. And yet, the U.S. is the biggest member of the Five Eyes network – one of the world’s most powerful spying operations. As a second Trump administration begins in Washington, Canada and the other Five Eyes countries await to see what will happen. Richard Kerbaj is a journalist and author. His new book is called The Secret History of the Five Eyes: The Untold Story of The International Spy Network. He explains Canada’s role in the Five Eyes, how the alliance has evolved over the years and whether it can withstand another Trump presidency. Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

It's no secret that Donald Trump is not a fan of international partnerships. On his first day back in office, he withdrew America from the Paris Agreement on Climate Change and the World Health Organization. He also doesn't like intelligence agencies, including his own. Here's my plan to dismantle the deep state and reclaim our democracy from Washington corruption once and for all, and corruption it is. We will clean out all of the corrupt actors in our national security and intelligence apparatus and there are plenty of them.

And yet, the security that much of the Western world enjoys is in part due to an intelligence-sharing coalition between the U.S., the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. It's called the Five Eyes, and it's one of the most powerful spying networks in the world, at least for now. Richard Courbaj is my guest today. He's a journalist and author of a new book called The Secret History of the Five Eyes, the untold story of the international spy network. He's on the show to explain Canada's role in the Five Eyes, how the alliance has evolved over the years,

and whether it can withstand another Trump presidency. I'm Menaka Ramon-Wililms and this is The Decibel from the Globe and Mail. Richard, thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you for having me. So Richard, I'm wondering about what it means for these five countries to have an intelligence sharing network. So I know you looked at this for your book. Why did you want to write this book?

Well, I was just fascinated by this concept that you can have 14 key intelligence agencies that operate autonomously existing under this one umbrella. How does it actually work? And the more I looked into it, the more I realized how fascinating but bizarre it is. There is nothing legally binding about it. It's evolved over the years to be far greater than just the sum of its parts. It's not just

about signals intelligence collection. It is human intelligence collection. It is defined by human intelligence collection to a certain extent. It brings together your household names, everyone from household names, everyone from the FBI and CIA to CSIS and MI5 and MI6 and CSE. And over time, it's been able to collect open source and secret information, predominantly on its adversaries, to help inform the governments that are within the Five Eyes about current and future threats. And that's essentially what it is. It is a national security alliance and sometimes it malfunctions. So I guess broadly speaking, how would you define the purpose of this network? What is its ultimate goal here?

Protecting our national security, protecting our infrastructure because any adversary is always trying to get access to our information, whether it's educational information, scientific information, military information, intelligence information. It's about disrupting our networks and disrupting our way of life. And its real purpose is to foresee and hopefully stop threats that are emerging. I think there is definitely a balance between sort of civil liberties and privacy and national security. And now within the Five Eyes, within each country, there's an oversight committee to ensure or to help ensure that they don't overstep those boundaries when they're going about their work to, you know, protect our way of life.

That's what our taxes pay them to do. RG Richard, you've written that this is one of the most powerful intelligence networks in the world. Why is that? MG I think because of its reach and its capability. It's essentially five countries over multiple time zones all around the world. To begin with, they divided the world up into different bits. So for instance, Canada and its ability to reach East Russia, Latin America, Arctic, that's where the Canadian responsibilities originally were.

Then you've got the US looking at everything from Africa to Russia to bits of China. You've got the UK which was essentially in place to look at anything west of the Urals and Europe and bits of Africa and the Middle East. You've got Australia looking at South Asia, New Zealand looking at the Pacific and other parts of Asia. They've essentially got their eyes on the entire globe. And over time, as they've evolved, they've become much more interdependent. They're no longer just looking at certain areas that belong to them. They're all sort of working in all the areas. And there's a great deal of strength that comes with unity. And unity and relationships are very much at the heart of the Five Eyes. And those things are sort of being passed down from generation to generation.

You've got a system that's been, you know, it does have its flaws, but it's been operating fairly well for almost, you know, eight decades now, if you trace it back to its early roots. Emma Cieslik This is really interesting because you're kind of describing this worldwide surveillance network in a way. But I do wonder how much of an equal partnership is this? Because I have to imagine, just by sheer size, that the US must be the most important player in this alliance. Is that right? It's certainly the greatest financier. Yeah. So I mean, it's the richest. The US intelligence budget is more than 100 billion. And that's about 10 times larger than all the other four countries combined.

The other four countries combined. Wow. Okay. Yeah. If you were to look at the five eyes as the Marvel universe, then I suppose given the scale that the U S brings, the U S is sort of equivalent to Iron Man and Captain America and the Hulk all put into one. Then you look at say Britain, which is like Dr. Strange, maybe Canada is Hawkeye, the Australians Thor and New Zealand's probably Ant-Man. And that's not to diminish New Zealand because you know, Ant-Man is quite endearing. And sometimes as well, being the smallest doesn't mean that you're not able to bring something to the game. And I think geographically, New Zealand brings a lot to this. And geography matters in the

five eyes because one way to look at it is that it's real estate, it's coverage across the world. The thing is, is that if you were to look at it just based on its finances, it'd be the incorrect way to see this because money doesn't guarantee safety. It helps. It helps prevent attacks. It helps buy resources. You can get yourself the submarines and you get yourself the satellites and you can get yourself the missiles or whatever else, but that doesn't guarantee safety. What guarantees safety is access. And access is based on relationships. It's based on being in the right place at the right time. And that means that some of the best access points within the Five Eyes history haven't always necessarily come through the US. In fact, Canada played a significant role in identifying

the Soviet threat to the world, particularly the Western world, in 1945 because someone defected in Canada, a guy called Argyr Gizenko, who gave a fascinating insight into the Soviet Union's theft of nuclear secrets. That's what we know about the nuclear spies. That's where we knew that the Soviet Union was going to be the next greatest threat after the collapse of the Nazi regime. And so that's a case in point where a smaller contributor to the Five Eyes has played a leading role. And there has been many other examples of that. So just because the US has the most amount of money, it doesn't mean that it is the most important. But there is an imbalance in the sense that, yes, the US has the most dominant voice.

That's interesting. You mentioned that incident in 1945. Is this, I guess, how Canada became part of this intelligence sharing network to start with? Because this was around the founding of the Five Eyes. Mason-Pence Pretty much. I mean, in the lead up to that, there's a couple of incidents where Canada contributed. And particularly, there was a case where General MacArthur, who was the head of the allied forces in the Pacific, created like a cipher bureau, essentially code breaking bureau in Melbourne, Australia, which was then moved to Brisbane. And then he together mathematicians and code-breakers from the five countries. You could argue that that was a little experiment of what the Five Eyes would look like. But then later on, you had the Argo-Gazenko defection. They switched gears. They started focusing on the Soviet threat. Canada was the

first to be brought into the circle of trust because the Five Eyes is the result of the expansion of an agreement called the UK-USA agreement and that was expanded in 1956 but Canada actually joined in the late 40s. So several years before the entire agreement was expanded to include Australia and New Zealand. So yeah, it's played a very key role, an outsized role, in fact. Yeah. Something else I've been wondering, Richard, is why is it these five countries? Like, for example, why is like France not included? I think, yeah, the shared language, the shared culture, the similar laws, the similar outlooks, that's kind of what's helped. Now with France, yes, you've got France, you've got Germany, you've got Japan, you've got many partners that they work with fairly regularly. You've got bilateral relationships within the Five Eyes. So it doesn't mean

that every single operation needs to bring everyone in. The other thing is that it's taken about 80 years to develop that level of trust. And so if you're bringing someone new into the exclusive network, you're expanding the aperture of risk. And when you do that, you're potentially compromising something. And I don't think the FireVise is going to expand, of course, unlike NATO, which did expand because it started out with 12 members and it's now I think 32 or something. Yeah. So it's interesting, you're really saying that trust is kind of a binding force here. That's very important. Is there also a formal agreement? Because we think about

these international organizations often have very formal agreements that I guess keep these security agencies together. Yeah. So the UK USA agreement was kind of to formalize the intelligence sharing between the codebreakers of post World War II, right? And that's pretty much it. But that agreement in itself is not legally binding. And in the agreement, there is no mention of any of the human intelligence agencies. So for instance, all the household names like CSIS or RCMP or the CIA or MI5 or MI6, none of them are mentioned in that agreement. What's so fascinating about this alliance is that it is very much based on personal relationships and trust. They

have a tendency to get things right most of the time, but every now and then they get things wrong. For instance, when they get things right, they shut down espionage networks, they take out terrorists and terrorist organizations. When they get things wrong, they could lead their countries to major wars. We'll be right back. OK. So Richard, it sounds like the whole point here

is to help each other with information. Can we look at an example that illustrates the effectiveness, I guess, of the Five Eyes? Yeah, there's an example from 2010 where the FBI, shortly after 2010, the FBI discovered that a Canadian naval officer, a man by the name of Jeffrey DeLisle, had been working for the Russians and he'd been leaking secrets to the Russians. They notified the Canadian authorities about that and soon after, the Canadian authorities arrested him and he admitted to his offences. It turned out that he was stealing Five Eyes' secrets and giving them to Russia. It's obviously irritating when that happens,

but they've learned to deal with it because it's part of the game. I mean, you're dealing with secrets and secrets sometimes get out, not because of a failure on your part, but because of an inclination by someone within your intelligence agency to give secrets away, which is essentially what happens.

And how do you protect that? You can protect against it to an extent, but I think it's impossible to stop. I also wonder too, I mean, given that these are spy agencies that we're talking about, do they ever end up spying on each other? There certainly have been historical examples of that happening.

So for instance, MI6's outfit in New York during the early days of the Second World War was called the British Security Coordination. That British Security Coordination was actually being run by a Canadian man called William Stevenson, and that was accused of spying on FBI officers. Then of course, the greatest example relating to misalignment on the Five Eyes would have to be the Canadian example where John Christian said no to the false intelligence that he was presented with in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq and he kept Canada out of that.

Yeah, that's the UK and the US bringing this intelligence to Canada and Canada basically. Correct. Jean Chrétien, the Prime Minister at the time, yeah, saying no, we're not going to go in. You guys go ahead, not for us. Correct. Jean-Christian, the Prime Minister at the time, yeah, saying, no, we're not going to go in. You guys go ahead, not for us. Yeah. There's one more example I want to ask you about, Richard, when we're talking about countries withholding information or misleading each other.

This was in 2015, and this was related to three British schoolgirls joining the Islamic State and CSIS actually played a role there. Can you tell me about that? CSIS played a major role, in fact. Cesis recruited an agent through its embassy, so through the Canadian embassy in Jordan. So there was a Syrian man who went to seek political asylum. He was recruited by Cesis and then Cesis got him into the field and he was essentially smuggling aspiring jihadists from Turkey into Syria. And among those they smuggled were three British schoolgirls. The smuggler was subsequently arrested and when he was arrested by Turkish authorities he admitted that he'd been

working for the Canadian authorities and in particular CSIS. At which point CSIS realized that they'd been compromised. But just before that story became public, CSIS officials approached British officials to tell them that something was coming. They essentially went hat in hand saying, we're sorry about this. they encouraged the British authorities to cover this whole thing up. And it was covered up until 2022 when I revealed the story. An investigation was kickstarted reportedly by Justin Trudeau, but I haven't seen any results of that yet. So it's interesting, we've talked about different threats over the decades. So we can kind of see how these global threats change.

Spy work in World War II is different from spy work during the Cold War. And I want to kind of ask you about the current situation here, Richard, because now China, I think we can say, is a major adversary. Yes, I know. And in Canada, foreign interference in our elections has actually become a major public issue in the last few years. So how does the Five Eyes view China? Yeah, I think it's a good point that you bring up about the political interference,

because there was an inquiry in Canada, right? Yeah, there was a public inquiry. We're actually supposed to hear more about that in a few days. Yeah, I think they're very much aligned. The Five Eyes are very much aligned about the threat that China poses. It just so happens that in the past few days, in the wake of Trump's inauguration, he's given a suggestion that he may want a reset with China. Whether or not that is actually going to happen or whether or not he's negotiating for something or this is something, a position that he's taken on, I don't know.

I'm not even sure anyone will know because developments from the White House these days move at such a pace that I can't even keep up. But I think it's more important to take note of what his confirmed CIA director has said. So John Ratcliffe, who's just been confirmed recently as CIA director, said that China is the greatest threat that the US faces, but I think the West faces as well. And I think we have to take him into his word. And I think that's very much in alignment with what the other Five Eyes countries believe and also

what the other agencies are working towards. So I think yes, I think China is the great threat. That's not to say that the Russians don't present the threat. Of course they do. And they'll continue to do so. And they have been since the 1940s, right? But I think the fact that the Chinese threat is the greatest is, is right. Let me ask you a little bit more about Donald Trump here because he has a track record of taking a very transactional approach to politics, right? And these international alliances as well. How can other members of the Five Eyes prove their worth, I guess, in this network? Yeah, that's a really good question.

I think the historical links really matter because historical links have formed and resulted in joint operational work. And there's some joint operational work that's going on as we speak. I mean, there are staff members within each other's offices. You've got joint communication and the fear and campaigns going on. You've got joint defenses going on. You've got joint analytical and analysis units going on. So they're so intertwined.

So this concept that somehow he could just click a finger and just bring it all to an end. I'm hopeful that can't happen. I think what could potentially happen is if Five Eyes partners outside the US start fearing that the information they're providing could potentially be compromised, then they're more likely to be able to withhold some of that information. And there's a categorization within the Five Eyes that allows for that to happen. So for instance, any country within the Five eyes can withhold material for its eyes only.

And that's happened multiple times in history. The issue with that is that when you start withholding material, mistakes start to happen. So the Canadians withheld the material regarding their agent who was smuggling people into Syria. Then eventually it came out and it was very damaging for the first CIS. There needs to be ongoing alignment and hopefully that will remain. I'm pretty confident in the sense that the Alliance has outlived every single administration and government that it served, including the first Trump administration. So we've been there once before. And from all the conversations I'm having, of course,

there's reticence and there is apprehension about what Trump's presidency will mean for the alliance. But I suppose time will tell. But for the time being, everyone's just remaining hopeful. So it sounds like just to end here, Richard, you've done years of reporting here on the intelligence community and the Five Eyes specifically. Do you see the next Trump presidency as a threat to the Five Eyes or is there a current threat, I guess, to the stability of that organization? I mean, he can impose his political will. He's done that in the past. I mean, within a few months of getting into office,

during his first administration, he fired the FBI director because the FBI director wouldn't do what he asked. He indirectly accused Britain of wiretapping his campaign, completely denied by GCHQ, which is Britain's signals intelligence service. And what was really encouraging in the context of what happened there is that I interviewed some of the people who were involved in those cases and in every case intelligence officials gathered around each other to protect the

system rather than let it be politicized. And so in the case of GCHQ, the former head of the NSA, at the time the National Security Agency, approached Trump and said, you can't be saying this about our closest partners. And the apprehension that existed within the intelligence community across the five eyes during his first administration didn't lead them to share less. In fact, the intelligence officials sort of got around and said, this is the time to remain close to each other because there are things that happen at an operational and tactical level that are way beneath the political surface. Those things I think will continue to go on.

I think what's unhelpful is when you've got political headlines that are being generated almost purposefully by Trump's administration at the moment, particularly in relation to say Canada. I don't think it's helpful to go out there and lambast the Canadian Prime Minister, regardless of your political in alignment, because essentially you create a divided image and it's unity that's the Five Eyes' greatest strength. And so once that unity starts to break down, our adversaries will be cheering. So why would we want that to happen? Richard, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show.

Hey, thank you for having me. That's it for today. I'm Maynika Ramon-Wilms. Our producers are Madeleine White, Michal Stein, and Ali Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Matt Frainer is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you soon.