The Rest Is Classified - 184. The Secret Spy Network: Kim Philby Threatens the Alliance (Ep 2)

Episode Date: August 12, 2026

An intelligence alliance established to spy on the Soviets during the Cold War. But will it be able to hold together under crisis? David and Gordon are once again joined by journalist, author 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: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠ 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

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 the rest is classified.com. An intelligence alliance established to spy on the Soviets during the Cold War, but will it be able to hold up under crisis? Well, welcome to The Rest Is Classified. I'm David McCloskey. And I'm Gordon Carrera. This is our second episode looking at the five-on-es-old.

intelligence relationship. Last time, we looked at how US-UK intelligence cooperation during World War II, really predating World War II, sort of you get the little embryonic starts of cooperation between the two countries, how it solidifies or begins to solidify and really spreads to Canada, New Zealand, and Australia during and after the Second World War. We ended with really the beginning, the first kind of decade of the Cold War. And we are now going to pick up the story of this Five Eyes intelligence relationship as the Cold War gets going. We are once again very lucky to be joined by Richard Kurbage, who's the author of The Secret History of the Five Eyes, a wonderful book about this relationship most recently, The Defector, and who is also, maybe most

importantly, in Australia. Welcome back. It's great to be back. Thanks for having you back. So we started last time, Richard, you know, explaining a little bit about what it is and what it isn't. It's not an organisation of Five Eyes. It is still mainly a Signals Intelligence Alliance, isn't it? We should explain what signals intelligence are. That's the heart of it, isn't it? Which is collecting signals, in this case communications, intercepting traffic and communications in order to be able to decode it. That's what it grew out from, the Bletchley Park story, but also what it is at this point.

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the field. The protection is built in, hardware-level security working quietly in the background, helping reduce risk without creating more work. With a team of business advisors, HP helps businesses of all sizes, find technology that fits their needs and budget. To see how HP helps businesses work securely and productively, visit HP.com forward slash classified. The rest is classified listeners also benefit from 10% off HP business technology with code T-R-I-C-10. I think it is worth setting that because we talk a lot about SIGN, signals intelligence on this program, but it's maybe worth setting up in kind of, Richard, in the early days

of the Cold War, what are we talking about when we say signals intelligence? At this point in 1956, this again predates some of the developments, big developments that we'll hear about soon, for instance, Pine Gap in Australia, which we'll get to, but identifying Soviet missile launches, identifying Soviet comms, identifying developments in nuclear capabilities, identifying radar capabilities. All of that sort of works within the Sigin. Yeah, it's more than just communications. It's more than that.

Satellites, of course, satellites at 1956 hadn't really become a big thing yet. That's the next decade. But all of that will come under SIG-Nt collection. So it's more the technical end of intelligence. Completely technical. It's the technical end of intelligence which is being shared, which I guess is also very expensive as well, which is where there's some benefit having geography and having the cost shared.

But we left the story in 1956 as the alliance is kind of formed. But at that point, there is a crisis, isn't there? Which almost breaks it apart or risks breaking it apart? And that's the Suez crisis. I mean, we should explain. I describe it as an alliance almost breaking up during a honeymoon period. It's a bit like Madonna and some other rock star getting married and sort of gone to Vegas and falling apart. That's essentially what happened to the Five Eyes, right?

So within a few days, almost two weeks of it coming together in October, 1956 and officially being signed off, there are multiple things happening concurrently. You've got the Hungarian Revolution, which at the year. Americans were concerned about, so were the Brits. And you've got the crisis in the Middle East that was now emerging. This is a crisis in that they were essentially fighting over a narrow strip of water that was crucial for the Suez Canal. Yeah. That's the Suez Canal, right? And and so you've got the British, the French and the Israelis plotted to invade Egypt. Because NASA in Egypt has nationalized the Suez Canal. Exactly. And they're on happy with that. And I guess the crucial point is that the Brits are doing it without the

Americans. Exactly. And they didn't inform the Americans. Americans weren't happy about this. The Americans are always happy to lock the Brits out. But when it's the other way around, David, just so we could say, mate, it's not cool, right? It's like, I want to, all your secrets. So they've locked out the Americans, but the Americans discover this and they're not very happy. So Eisenhower at the time, he's particularly unhappy because he's got a second term that he's trying to secure. This is, in the election campaign. The election campaign, he's got to worry. about, he's got to worry about the Hungarian Revolution, the issue with the Hungarian Revolution is that the CIA had very little coverage there because it only had one officer

on the ground who was stationed at the embassy there, and I go into that in the book. But more importantly, Eisenhower is trying to figure out, well, now the Soviet Union's been quite threatening towards Britain. He didn't like that either. So he wanted to get some sense of how. much of that was genuine or how much of it was sort of just bluster and talk. And so he tasks the CIA to figure out what the situation is with the Soviet Union and whether or not Moscow is likely to attack, conduct a military attack against Britain.

Meanwhile, the UK is collecting intelligence on diplomatic and military communications from the Soviet Union. So they feel that they've got some sense of coverage of what Moscow's thinking. at that point. In addition to all of that, GCHQ and MI5 had created this operation in London where they bugged the Egyptian embassy in London. So they were listening to communications there. And this is a crucial thing because in early November, 1956, the British managed to intercept communications between the Egyptian and in the UK and the Egyptian ambassador in Moscow.

And the ambassador in Moscow told his counterpart in the UK that the Soviets were really considering military action. Now, we will never know to what extent that helped shape Britain's decision to walk away because there were a number of reasons why that ceasefire was then put in place. But what we do know is that that played a fairly crucial role in getting a sense of what the Soviets were thinking. But what the Brits didn't know at the time is that the Russians knew that the place was bugged as they were feeding misinformation through there, giving the whole kind of indication,

especially through the Cold War, that the Russians kind of seemed to be several steps ahead when it came to espionage. How big were the tensions, though, between the US and the UK oversawares when it comes to the intelligence relationship? I mean, was it at risk of breaking down? I think it declassified materials. that we've seen later suggested that it got close to, but I don't think it was ever going to break down.

I think it was more of a political issue. And so Eden, Anthony Eden, the Prime Minister of the UK, couldn't get the military backing from Eisenhower. And I think that diminished him on the global stage. So there's one argument that this is the beginning of the collapse of the empire. I don't think it, that was the moment. I think what it did is it really diminished. It's the empire's strength and projection on the world stage.

So it's more about the kind of relative power becoming clearer between the US and the UK. Well, the US became the deed on it. At that point, the US is like, you do what we say essentially. And that will become a common theme, a pattern because the US is very much the lead singer and everyone else is a vocalist, right, a backup vocalist. And a lot of people didn't like that when I described it that way, particularly the Aussies. They were like, well, why are we saying this? But it's true because it becomes the dominant force in resources, in capabilities,

and just its ability to reach. It is worth saying, I think, that the hard logic of the relationship, which I think is one of the, I mean, it's a theme, and it's something we'll continue to talk about throughout the series, is that when you talk about signals intelligence in particular, it's really, really expensive in this era.

It's very capital-intensive. And geography matters. It still matters today, but back then it really mattered because if you're trying to intercept satellite downlinks or you're trying to intercept regional or local communications, the way it's done with microwaves or high frequency rate or whatever it might be, being closer is a huge advantage, right? And so even if you have a political dispute with another member of the Five Eyes, the underlying business logic of sharing, of pooling resources, and of having access to bases in Wellington or in Cyprus, you know, or in Oman, that really, that's what it's about. And also, it's a burden sharing thing. So they essentially split the world into five pieces. there was some overlap. So with the UK in 1956, the UK's responsibilities were east of the Ural Mountains. So, you know, cutting through Russia to Kazakhstan, east of, so anything that's,

you know, Poland, Ukraine, Germany, that was kind of the UK's responsibility, but they also had parts of Africa as well to monitor. Then the U.S. had Russia, China, Middle East, also bits of Latin America. The Canadians looked at eastern Russia. as opposed to west that the UK was looking at. And also it did some of Latin America. And then when the Aussies joined and the New Zealanders, they looked at sort of East Asia, Southeast Asia. And that's where China becomes a very important factor here in the 1950s,

because of course China becomes the PRC, the people who are probably in China of China in 1949, and very quickly begins developing capabilities that are quite worrying to the Five Eyes, from the nuclear developments to the eventual Sino-Soviet split. And so from a collection perspective, the Americans then set up a base in Australia in the 1960s called Pine Gap. Pine Gap is quite crucial at this stage.

It's crucial for a number of reasons. One is Pine Gap was set up under the auspices of being a military base rather than a intelligence base. the chief of Pine Gap was supposed to be a military officer rather than a CIA officer. But of course it was a CIA officer. His name is Richard Stolling. And it's a US base in Australia. Very much.

Well, it's US run. It's called a, you know, it's a cooperation. But come on. It's, yeah, the Americans are very much. Well, I mean, we have the same thing in the UK. You have men with Hill, you know, and finding deals. You have these American just trying to take over everything. Let's just face it.

And they're loosely R. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's staffed by Americans. Yeah, precisely. You know, that's the... It's joint, but, yeah, it's US. And that becomes a point of contention for a number of reasons.

Before I move on to them, I just like to set up the picture of who this guy is, Richard Stallings, from the CIA. He was... So he was a SIGAN specialist who had been based in Germany. He joined the Navy during wartime, developed a set of skills, obviously went through the ranks and got promoted and were sent to a Australia. And so in the late 1960s, when Pine Gap was created, he was overseeing it. And he will become a quite controversial figure in the early 1970s when Gough Whitlam comes into power. Gough Whitlam being the Labour Australian Prime Minister, he comes into power. And this is after more than 20 years of labour being out of power as a result of the Petrov stuff, to a great

degree that we've spoken about earlier. Of course, there are other reasons that Labor stayed at power. but this is one of the key things. And so when Whitlam comes in, eventually he wants to distance Australia from the US. He thinks we're too reliant on the Americans. He feels that ASIO, so the Australian Security Intelligence Organization, that is the domestic intelligence agency, is slightly captured by the US and too reliant on the US. And he wants to create some separation. Of course, ASIO is starting to feel separation anxiety here.

ahead of time. So they don't like this. The Americans don't like this. And eventually his government authorizes a raid of the ASEO headquarters. Imagine that. Imagine their own intelligence headquarters. Yes. Imagine, imagine someone organizing MI5. M.I.5 or the CIA or the FBI. Yeah. So they imagine it these days in America. Yeah. That's another story. Yeah. That's to come. So they They raid the plays. For a number of reasons, the reasons they were given at the time, beyond their closest to the US, is that they felt that ASEO was too focused on communists and not enough focus was given to nationalist terrorists, terrorists, etc.

That was the reasoning. And then there's a counter-explanation that, you know, he just, he had it with Azeo, and so as a result, the Whitlam government raid them. That caused a huge problem for anyone sharing with Asia, particularly the Canadians and the US, they were getting in touch. We know this now through declassified material. They were trying to get some assurances that how is this going to impact our intelligence? This is our product that we've shared. Are you going to share it on?

Eventually, that's slightly settled down, but Goff Whitlam couldn't get it out of his head that those Americans are up to something. And then he discovers that at Pine Gap, there was this guy, Richard, Stallings who would be in running Pine Gap, and he discovers that this guy may have been a CIA officer. He wasn't really a military officer. So he gets his people to look into that. And they discover that his name was never shared as part of the CIA list because there is this agreement, you know, to spy on each other, but also identify each other's officers. There was this agreement that we will give you all the information about our declared officers and vice versa.

Well, he wasn't declared. And that really infuriated Goff Whitlam. There were a number of issues that led up to his departure, eventual departure, but that was among them. There continues to be a debate about the extent to which the CIA and US played a role in his ousting. Because on the day that he was ousted by the Governor General, he was essentially sacked.

Imagine being fired. Imagine the prime minister. He was fired. Not just being fired, but he was fired. And the opposition leader was appointed as caretaker prime minister. I mean, it's unprecedented and it's never going to happen again, maybe. I don't know. But it was just so shocking.

And there's, I go into that in great detail in the book. So the suggestion is that actually the... He was going to reveal details about Pine Gap and he was going to reveal details about the Pine Gap chief, former chief. And that that may be why he's... There's a theory, at least. Well, it's a very strong theory. And also there was just a fear within the CIA and US intelligence that by coming out to discuss all of these, this could compromise intelligence. So it was a buildup to that.

What does, what does pine in this period of the Cold War, what value is Pine Gap providing to the signals intelligence agency inside the five eyes? The 1960s sort of the satellites era. So it's communicating with US satellites to intercept communications, say, from Russia and China, as I said. So China at this point has now developed the nuclear weapon. So they're able to track radar communications. They're able to track missile tests. They're from re-entry of high ballistic missiles to ballistic missiles being launched. They're trying to identify, in some cases, troop movements, thinking, you know, try to get ahead of time.

That's essentially what it is doing. So they're with a sense of maybe some of the tensions between the US and Australia. Let's take a break. And afterwards, we'll look at some of the tensions between the UK and the US. And also how the New Zealanders get into all kinds of trouble. See you after the break. Get your tickets now for the dog stars. It's no surprise how fast civilization can disappear.

Go! Out there, just kill or be killed. Jacob Alluredy. There are people out there. They need our help. Shoot first and inquire afterwards. Margaret Quali. Okay, tough guy.

And Guy Pearce. Arm up! The Dog Stars, directed by Ridley Scott. In theaters August 28th. Get tickets now. Hello, it's Gordon here, and I'm with Tabby from Gollhanger's new show, The Book Club. We're not here, are we, Tabby, to announce the new James Bond. But we are here to discuss a book that you've just covered, which may have inspired the character.

That is correct, Gordon. So this week, Dominic Sambrick and I have been discussing John Buckens, the 39 Steps. And now this is undoubtedly one of the greatest British spy thrillers of the 20th century. And it's a real trailblazer for that genre, so the birth of Bond. Absolutely. Secret Squirrels will know that here on Classified, we're a big fan of historical intrigue. And in the 39 steps, we meet the dashing Richard Hane, based on David McCloskey, as he races to prove his innocence, whilst inadvertently foiling a German plot to spark the First World War. Yeah, and it's a plot that bears an uncanny resemblance to the assassination of the figure that sparked the First World War in real life.

So that's intriguing. And Hane's journey takes us from the hustle and bustle of London to the Scottish Highlands in this game of cat and mouse and espionage that starts to unfold around our main character. So to listen to the 39 steps search for the book club, wherever you get your podcast and follow along so you don't miss out on more of their upcoming thrillers. Yeah, including Goldfinger and Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy. So lots to look forward to. Thank you so much for listening.

Thank you for having me, Gordon. Goodbye. No problem, Tabby, bye. Welcome back. So we talked a bit about Australia there, but actually there's going to be some tension between the two, I guess, core partners, the US and the UK. The special relationship. The special relationship is going to come under some strains in the 60s and 70s. and it's particularly thanks to our dear friend Kim Filby, isn't it?

And that issue of whether the Brits can be trusted. And we've done some of our series on Philby, the early Philby, but we're going to come to the later Philby towards the end of this year. But it does play a big role, doesn't it, in creating suspicion within the five eyes in between the US and the UK, Richard. I'm not just creating suspicion, but also I think it impacts Britain's confidence, self-confidence, because in the late 1950, 51 you had Burgess and McLean defect, and then you had Blake defect in early 1960s, and then you had Philby defect, I think, in 63, 64.

So there have been these defections to the other side of the Iron Curtain. It's not looking good for MI5 as a domestic agency. And so it's becoming increasingly deferential to the CIA. At the CIA, you've got this very strong character, strong-willed character, who suffers from a great deal of paranoia as well in a man called James Jesus Angleton, who was the head of counterintelligence at the CIA, so essentially the chief mole hunter. And he is convinced that the CIA has got moles

and the KGBs penetrated the CIA, but also convinced that they've penetrated MI5 and potentially MI6. And the reason he's convinced is twofold. One, he was really broken by Philby's defection because Philby was one of his mentors in the lead up to the defection. And two is because a man who defected to the West in 1961, Anatoly Galitzin, can reinforce that belief that the KGB had penetrated the CIA.

And he said to him, you've got spies all over. So they ran more hunts within the CIA. And even the British Prime Minister, you know, Harold Wilson might espire. Harold Wilson in 1964. In fact, there's a great scene where Jim Angleton flies over to the UK to meet with the heads. respective heads of MI5 and MI6, and he says, I believe we've got evidence that Harold Wilson, your new prime minister, is a spy. And they said, well, can you share the intelligence? And he said, no, we can't share the intelligence. And you can't tell the cabinet members about it, but we need you to sort of

investigate. And of course, MI5 just thinks this is going a bit too far. We're not going to act on this. And they rightly didn't act. And that was proved to be information that he'd obtained from Galitzin. And another case, so at this point, the CIA is also trying to impact, affect changes in leadership at MI5. So in coalition with the White House, they dispatch a couple of officers under the cover of CIA offices. So these two people come out to the UK to ingratiate themselves with the British intelligence community. And they're specifically here to collect dirt on MI5, on its leadership, on its managerial setting, and on Roger Hollis, who was the Director General of MI5 at the time,

and who would eventually become a suspect himself in these sort of mollhunts. And then they went back, these two individuals pulled together a report that criticized MI5. MI5 discovered this, and so they confronted the deputy head of the CIA station here, saying, if this happens again, you'll be kicked out. So these are tensions now bubbling up. You fast forward through the 1960s towards the end. And a lot of the information that the CIA had provided is being discredited. It turned out to not be true.

All of the mole hunts have resulted in nothing. About 40 to 50 people at the CIA had their lives torn apart and ruined because of this mole hunt that went nowhere. So in the early 1970s and 1971, MI5 gets an approach. from a young KGB officer, Oleg Learland, who was working out here in the UK as a trade official. And he approaches MI5 through a police station saying, I have information to give. And they quickly discover this is a guy who's suffering from a premature sort of midlife crisis, who's got multiple girlfriends cheating on his wife, and he wants to figure a way out of it. They debrief him repeatedly, and they eventually discover that,

what he's telling him is actually true, but the key thing here is that they didn't share any of that information with the CIA. Why not? Because the CIA had tried to convince MI5 and did convince MI5 through the 1960s that any defector who comes your way is likely to be a scent defector. And so that meant that if they were to share that information about Oleg Leigh-Leon... The Americans would just dismiss it. Precisely.

So they held it back. They corroborated the information and eventually worked out that we need to expel Soviet spies. And that's the subject of my new book that effect that. And I'll go into that in some detail. But the point being there is that they identify 105 Soviet spies to kick out of the country. The big question was, do we tell the Americans that we're going to do this? Well, the Americans were always going to prioritize Dayton. As part of their thinking. Improving relations with the Soviet Union. And they didn't care about if the two things had to compete, if preserving Dayton had to compete with Britain's national security, they'll always choose detente over that. So Ted Heath at the time

decides we're not going to tell our American friends. And so they trigger this expulsion of Soviet spies. And that's what really irritates Henry Kissinger, who at the time is the national security advisor, and also Richard Nixon, who's the president. One of the dynamics that I do find really fascinating about the whole alliance is a lot of the stories we talk about, most of them actually, center on essentially the humant relationship, which makes sense because that tends to be louder, much easier to get into the public But it's far more compelling as well, than people sitting in front of keyboards. Right, exactly. But what's fascinating is that even when you have tension,

we talk about tension in the political relationship, shaping the security relationship, even when there's tension in the humant relationship. Yes. I mean, are there examples in this period of tension in the human relationship bubbling into the SIG-int sharing. Yeah, the Yom Kippoo War in 1973. So that's where the British refused to join the war and also refuse to allow the Americans to use their bases. Very similar to the debate recently about the British bases being used in the Iran War this year. Precisely. And so in that case, Britain and the Heath government, which is quite pro-European as well,

which the Americans don't like, they get very angry about it. They get very angry. In fact, they cut, that was the only time that I could find in the archives where they severed intelligent sharing with the Brits. And that lasted for about six months or so where the CIA and NSA stopped. Mainly, I think it was CIA. So there were still sort of signals, but there was a lot of tension that was going on. Now, the problem with completely severing is that I don't think you're ever going to have that because you're still going to get interactions on a personal level. as we're talking about sort of the importance of that.

But that was a really tense period. Do you have any sense in that period of, well, I guess, how the human was cut off? Is it, or maybe even going deeper, how do you turn the sigant off? I mean, it sounds like it kind of half turned off. Yeah. And they wanted to turn it off, but they didn't. But you can't because it's in their best interest to keep it on. Exactly.

So it's, I mean, because it sounds when you read the accounts of it, as if what happens is Henry Kissinger, National. Security Advisor says stop this. Correct. But actually, at the working level, they kind of keep going on the signals intelligence. He orders the CIA and the NSA to just cut them. He says cut them. And there are transcripts of telephone conversations that are now declassified in which he goes into that.

He said, like, cut these. But then they work around it. And that's not uncommon. They work around it, basically. They work around. So the professionals, the intelligence professionals, find ways of keeping sharing, even though they've been told to stop. And that's always that's a very common pattern because that's the, I think that's one of the most fascinating things about the alliance is that, yes, you've got the political leadership and your political masters.

But what's happening on the ground is on another level. And it might be below all the chaos. But that's where the important sharing matters. Right. I mean, we'll come back to that, I guess, you know, later. Well, the other piece is that, especially when you're talking about SIGANT, the way those reports are disseminated. inside the US system is that I as an analyst don't get a report that says this is from GCHQ necessarily or from the Aussies or the Canadians or whomever. That stuff tends to go through NSA and then when it's disseminated by NSA it's oftentimes not exactly clear which foreign partner it came from. They relabel it. The net result of that is that oftentimes policymakers in particular when they get to the higher levels don't have an understanding. Yes. how much of the SIGANT comes from foreign partners of where it comes from.

And so you can see why Kissinger is saying, well, hey, cut it off. Someone from the NSA might go to him and say, well, hold on. You don't know that half the stuff you're getting. A bunch of these reports you're reading about Chinese submarine activity in the Pacific are not actually coming from us necessarily. So that actually, that kind of tension is there in 1973, but doesn't lead to an actual break. the one time someone does get kicked out or kicked out maybe is a bit strongly. Partially kicked out is New Zealand.

So we should talk about that because this is, it's interesting, isn't it? For many years they are, even though technically they remain part of the Five Eyes, they're pushed out. And it's over, it's right, it's about New Zealand not wanting. A submarine wanting to dock in New Zealand warships. Not wanting to test. So essentially you had David Langy, who was a newly elected prime minister in New Zealand in the mid-1980s, and he campaigned on non-proliferation. So when he got into power, he wanted to stick by his and honor his campaign message.

So when the Reagan administration wanted to dock a nuclear-powered submarine in New Zealand waters, he said, you can't do it. And what's extraordinary here is that the smallest member of Five Eyes stood up to the biggest member of Five Eyes. So very quickly, Reagan did not like that. He's had enough of people standing up to the U.S., but particularly like New Zealand, standing up to the U.S. He wasn't going to take it. So he essentially ordered that military sharing stops and military training and also wanted

to sever the signals intelligence exchanges. And that's when the NSA director at the time approached the White House, said, well, we can't actually do this. We physically can't do this. we're so embedded in each other's networks. However, what we'll do is we'll keep that quiet. Because, of course, at this time, no one even knows what the five eyes is. None of this is public yet.

We're talking about secrets, you know, things happening and, you know, chat rooms and backrooms or what have you. No one knows about this in the real world. So they decide to maintain that intelligence sharing, but also the CIA continues to provide some training to NZSIS. Yes. So there are exchanges, but they're not complete. And publicly, they're kind of, they've fallen out with New Zealand. And that's not for 20 years.

Yeah, about 19 years, I think it was. Yeah. Amazing, isn't they really? It's fascinating. It's fascinating. But then again, what's really fascinating about it is that they didn't fall apart. So there was a lot happening under the surface. And that's quite reassuring, particularly when you get to see what's happening.

today and we'll get to that era at some point where you hear a lot of noise and chaos and you go, what's actually going on to happen with this alliance? And I'm pretty confident that it'll remain in fact, but we'll get back to that. Well, and I also think you were going to, I could tell you, you were going to try to close out this episode without reading the quote from William Odom. Why don't you read it? This is a great question. You were trying to escape.

No, read it. I think you should read it because it's an American quote. And it's in the diary of William Odom, who's head of the NSA, the American Signals intelligence. So it's his kind of diary rather than the public statement in the late 1980s. It's quoted, though, in the authorized history of GCHQ. It's about, which I wonder why GCHQ put this in the official history. Yeah, go on. And I think the analytical point here is that, you know, we've talked about political friction and sort of how even when that gets pretty hot, the way it bubbles down into the intelligence relationship is pretty limited. And the signters, in particular,

find ways to keep sharing stuff, even when the politicians don't like it. But even when there are personal frictions between the cichinters, the sharing continues. So this is William Odom, who'd been the head of the NSA in the late 80s, who wrote in his diary. He said, he wrote, Peter Mary Church, my UK counterpart, is the least attractive of the lot. A tense, nervous, slightly insecure civil servant. He has, as his main task to stay fully entangled with the U.K. U.S. system, to try and act as our equivalent in Europe to stand between us and other Europeans, if possible. He and his immediate subordinates hold, in my view, a vastly inflated view of their

own competence and talents. Their system, under the foreign office, has poor ties to the Ministry of Defense and therefore cares little about intelligence support to military operations. I would argue that's still true today. The big question for me is what geographic access in the U.K. cost for the rest of the century. This is really about all we are getting and can get for this excessively entangled bilateral connection. Socially, I no longer find the British amusing, merely a pain in the ass. Wow. Words you could echo. That's great. After after a, put it on a t-shirt. I think it's such an interesting quote because, I mean, I think Odin was quite, I met him once actually. It was quite a kind of cantankerous military-focused NSA guy.

Well, he didn't find you a music. No, he definitely did not find you. He was a pain in the earth. But I think you're right. The point about that that's interesting is that even when you have clearly a bit of animosity and friction between the boss of the NSA and the boss of the GCHQ, the relationship fundamentally survives. And I think that's because of the common interests, isn't it at that point?

It is. But it's also, as he notes, to some extent, a very technical problem in that we're all excessively, in his words, excessively entangled. And Britain's bringing geography to the table and bringing stuff to the table. And for the Americans, it's hard to disentangle. Right. And his line there, which is actually quite cantankerous

but perceptive, is how much is that geographic access going to cost me? What's it worth? What's it worth? So that's maybe a good place to stop this episode as we get really to the end of the Cold War. Next time we'll look at how far the Five Eyes adapts to the end of the Cold War

and whether it survives into a new era, with new threats. Thank you again to Richard Kabarge, author of The Secret History of the Five Eyes. And also, which is note, for club members, of course, we'll get access to this entire series right now, including the bonus interviews we're doing with people who have actually sat in the chair at these Five Eyes meetings and have really, I think, a deep sense of the inner workings of the alliance. So if you have not already, do go and join the Declassified Club at the Rest Is Classified.com. We'll see you next time. See you next time.

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