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

Episode Date: August 16, 2026

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

into, but welcome to the rest is classified. I'm David McCloskey. I'm Gordon Carrera. And this is our third episode looking at the Five Eyes Alliance, this incredible, really unprecedented intelligence partnership. We last time looked at the Cold War. We looked at how this alliance in many ways deepens. We also looked at periods of tension in the relationship.

Cambridge Five spies. We looked at Henry Kissinger, cutting off. intelligence to the Brits in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War, we looked at the Kiwis being tossed out, but not really as they continue to get intelligence, even though they've technically been thrown out. And this time, we are going to look at the post-Cold War era and how the Five Eyes adapts to the collapse of the Soviet Union. And with us, we still have Richard Cabarge, author of The Secret History of the Five Eyes. Welcome, Richard. Nice to be back.

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So, Richard, I guess we talked about the alliance having been formed in World War II, then it survives through the Cold War. But when you hit the end of the Cold War, there's a question. It's a question. It loses its purpose. It was created in, it was officially created in 1956 as a counter-soviet alliance. So then suddenly the Soviet Union's collapsed. and they don't really have much to do.

In fact, the agencies start cutting their stuff and start cutting their resources. The Soviet desks at the CIA or NSA or MI5 or wherever else just kind of just don't have much of a purpose. So there's a slight pivot during the 1990s, and it's not a pivot that he's done in coordination with these partners together, but they start looking at could China become the next threat or the next rival? Of course, China at this point, we've gone through the 1980s. There's this sort of hope for modernization. That hope is slightly lost during Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. And then you got sort of the 1990s are ramping up.

Lots of tension in 1990s with China, but that becomes the focus, particularly for the US to an extent. And I know that to be the case towards the end of 1990s going. So what is China? What's next? What is happening here? But that's not an issue for the UK. I mean, and you get the UK agencies looking at things like organized crime and which are also kind of local and regional issues, which are of interest to the other five eyes.

So they're kind of going in different directions, aren't they? Yeah, the band is sort of fallen apart. I think we shouldn't underplay the importance of the budget cuts as well. I mean, not only is the band sort of drifting in different directions, but the, you know. No one's going to the gigs. No one's paying for the gig. Right. I mean, U.S., I mean, I think the numbers are something like.

I mean, the CIA budget, I think George Tenet, CIA director will later say the CIA budget was cut by almost 20% in real terms during the 1990s. The workforce dropped by about a quarter. And so it's harder. And Richard, I don't know if we have numbers from the end. It's always harder to get numbers from the NSA. I can give you sort of the latest numbers now just on how, because I think that will help frame the kind of overall picture. And I think that overall picture kind of remains relatively the same throughout in terms of the, budgets that they have. So if you look at the latest budget now, the U.S. intelligence community,

it's about 106 billion annually. It is roughly 11 times bigger, greater than all of the other four countries combined when you combine. When you compare the U.S. to the New Zealand budget, which is, I think, about 260 million a year, the U.S. has got 400, it's more than 400 times greater than New Zealand. But yet, this alliance, to some degree, functions as a flat harak structure to some degree. But overall, it is the U.S. that really calls the shots. It doesn't really matter what... It's just the way that it is. I think one of the interesting things about the 90s is that unlike sort of the pre-second World War era, the institutions, the SIGAN institutions, the humant institutions inside

the Five Eyes Intelligence Community have been built up and solidified. You have actual organizations, right? And you have now several decades of established processes, exchanges, a built up and pooled sigant infrastructure that's created to share information constantly and essentially to be used as one gigantic sigant apparatus. So even in the 90s, when you have this kind of drift, when budgets are cut, you don't retreat into a world of sort of mutual suspicion and fragmentation.

The alliance kind of just keeps going. It's a bit like inertia, though, to some extent. It is. Yeah. Yeah. To some degree. But it's also, I think, a reflection of the strength of the thing that had been built up, that it didn't, even when a sense of mutual threat from the Soviet Union is gone, it still keeps going forward because of the kind of patterns of behavior. behavior that have been built up during the Cold War. And then, having had this period of kind of drift in the 1990s, you get 9-11, the September

11th, 2001 attacks on the United States. So Richard, what does that do to five eyes? I mean, it creates a new sense of purpose, but it's also going to lead to some tensions, isn't it? Yes. I mean, initially, it is that they had to repurpose and very quickly. And by virtue of doing that, they had to look at what the vulnerabilities were and what the shortcomings were.

So you've gone from being an alliance created to combat Soviet threats to one that's now combating Islamist terrorism. So you've got language barriers immediately. You've got cultural barriers. You've got to figure out ways to not tap into just communications, but to penetrate prayer holes and mosques. Well, how do you go about doing that? How long does that take to start cultivating relationships?

That's where human becomes a huge part of this. And also, a lot of the exchanges that had been happening through the Cold War returned pretty quickly to the point that the intelligence exchanges between the Canadians and US become very free-flowing. So the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, CIS, and the RCMP, their police service, are frequently in contact with the FBI and CIA. The purpose for them is to stop the next potential attack against North America. If it's not happening in the US, could it be happening in Canada? But the problem, David, is that the CIA goes a little bit off the rail, some might say. It goes to the dark side, as Dick Cheney often talked about it, didn't he? He said, we're going to have to go on to the dark side.

And that basically means it's going to start running programs, famously the rendition program, in which they're going to pick up terrorist suspects and transport them to third countries where they're tortured, places like Syria and Egypt and other countries. And Thailand. And Thailand, all kinds of places. And it's a much more aggressive posture by the CIA. It's fair to say that among all of the five-wise countries, the US took a much more militarized approach to the war on terror after 9-11.

And it's yet again, though, a fascinating case study in, I think the, I mean, really, I guess the limits of the cooperation. operation, but also how really deep tensions and different legal systems that, you know, the intelligence agencies find ways to continue working together even in that environment. But Richard is true, isn't it? For the Brits, for instance, this is quite difficult in this period because they kind of know people, suspects are disappearing. And we now know into what these called are black sites and places like that.

And where the suspicion is they're tortured. And the Brits don't want to get involved with that, but they don't maybe ask that many questions. They say they don't know. They don't ask enough questions. I think in some cases, of course, they knew them. Because they're passing off, sometimes passing intelligence to the US to be used to render people or to question some of these. And that sort of, that was revealed many years later through the intelligence security committees. But I see, going back to the point that David was making, they took a much more militarized approach.

I think, yes, that is absolutely the case. That's kind of putting it mildly. I don't think there's been any evidence of the Brits being involved themselves in any of the torture, but there's allegations they may have assisted in the provision of information that led to. Precisely. Or passing information which leads to people. Completely. And this is going to become quite tense in the UK, this issue about how close do you get to a, you know, to a US intelligence community.

I think 20 people, 20 British nationals and citizens were locked up in Guantanamo. I think it was 20. And subsequently released with no charge. You know, I remember there were these legal cases about, you know, can we share information with the US if they are going to be using it for the purposes of rendition or. What legal assurances do you demand in advance of sharing? And then the US got really annoyed when some of what, some of the details of what they'd been doing came out through British investigations, this famous case called Binion Mohammed. There was a bit of tension there, I think, between the two sides, David. I mean, I guess there's kind of a deep question underneath this because we're talking about the nature of the SIGAN relationship between these countries and how deeply entangled it is, is can you cut that information off in many of these cases?

Obviously, if it's information that's coming from MI5, right, if it's humant coming from an MI5 source or an MI6 source, you have much more discretionary power about how you share it when you share it and if you do it all. Whereas if it's SIGANT, can you actually. hold it back. If you're going to use it for a drone strike or something like that, you know, which is maybe your communications time. Or if it's being, if it's SIGAN that's being pulled through GCHQ, but it exists on a system that NSA officers have access to and use. You can withhold because, I mean, there are categorizations for withholding from each other. That's why you have no form. You have UKIs only. So they can withhold some of that information. And it's been proven now that they did provide some information.

So it wasn't just part of a pool. It's not like a Google search that they just jumped into and said, hey, here's another target. Let's go get him. So I think from that perspective, they did. I think largely, though, your point is correct that, yes, if it's shared and it's all there, to what extent can you hold that? The lawyers get busy, I think.

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

Technically. Technically. But, but. Well, I mean, and I think vice versa, it's also true, right? the Brits are not supposed to run unilateral operations without telling FBI and presumably CIA. Yeah. So I guess the point would be if a Brit wanted to recruit, say, a Chinese person in the U.S., you're supposed to tell the Americans and work with them. Why in the hell would the Americans want a Brit? Yeah, exactly. I mean, you know, it's interesting. I mean, I had a bunch of these kind of what-if conversations with CIA officers and FBI special agents,

when I was working on London Station, my upcoming book, because I was trying to figure out in that novel, like how you could create a lot of tension in the relationship. And it wasn't impossible, but it was kind of hard because you did need examples where, for example, a British SIS officer might say, look, I have a Chinese target who's coming to Los Angeles. And I want to be the one to go and,

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

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

Without coordinating with MI5? I think the suggestion was with less. Yeah, with less oversight. Less oversight. And that caused tension. And MI5 were like, you're not doing that. Yeah. If we catch you doing that.

I think I know about that case. We're going to cause trouble. Because Richard, there is a case which becomes a big deal in Canada, doesn't it? Yes. Between the Canadians and the Americans over this, how they cooperate. That emerged shortly after 9-11. So I think about a month and a half later or so, CESIS, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service,

discovered that there was a young man who was interacting with one of their targets. So they were targeting a guy who was believed to be linked to bin Laden. A young guy called Mahir Arar of Syrian origin, who's now living in Canada and has Canadian citizenship, was interacting with this target. So they figured, okay, let's expand. and the targeting pool here and include him as one of the targets.

They started looking into him. And because of all of the intelligence sharing that's been going on, as I mentioned earlier, it was pretty much seamless. They informed the FBI about this case. They said, we're looking into this guy. We're going to surveil him, follow him, can't see anything untoward at the moment. And they maintained that operation against him, in secret, of course, it was all covert, but up until early 2002, the operation went from being a CIS tip-off

to now being run by the RCMP, so the Canadian police, but the counter-terrorism unit within the police. This Maya Arara is married to a woman of Tunisian origin, and so he travels to Tunisia on holiday, and eventually he returns to Canada, and he happens to travel through New York. So when he gets to New York, the authorities there pull him up.

And they said, oh, your name's on a wanted list. And essentially the FBI had placed his name on a terror watch list. So they take him away into the Manhattan correctional facilities, and they essentially say to him, we believe that you've committed terrorism offenses. He denies all of this. The Canadian consulates called they come through a, And they won't call till very late after they already debriefed him.

And they stand in and say, well, what evidence do you have against this guy? And they said, well, we have evidence. We can't share this evidence at this point. Anyway, they then relocate him to another detention center. And at this point, the Canadians are interacting with the FBI, trying to establish, you know, to what extent do you have any evidence against him? Because the evidence that we've provided you with never met the threshold for arrest, let alone enough evidence to convict this guy.

At one point, the Canadians seek some more information. The FBI says, right, listen, we're figuring out whether or not to send him back home to Syria. And they said, but he's Canadian. He has Canadian citizenship. He should be here. They said, well, we'll see how that goes. Eventually, they meet with the Canadians and say, we're making the final decision soon, but in fact they had already made the final decision without informing the Canadians.

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

Yes. Correct. Yeah. And that's all come out in a public inquiry in Canada in which I discuss in the book. But they pass on the information. And eventually the Syrians, I mean, he's interrogators. Even they feel sorry for him. They said, well, we don't think he's telling the truth.

We don't think that he's a terrorist suspect. Can you imagine the Syrian torture is saying this is a bit too much, even for us? So by that standard, they release him. He returns to Canada, and he wants to sue the Canadian authorities, rightly. So Canadian authorities figure, well, we need to figure out what evidence the FBI had on him to see how we go about this. The FBI say, we can't give you the evidence. Reluctantly, they give the evidence with the assurance that that evidence cannot be shared in court.

It's just for your eyes only. And it turns out that the evidence they used against this guy was the same information that Canadians had provided, which never met the threshold for arrest, let alone conviction, rendition, torture and all the other things that they've sort of carried out. So it was a big deal in Canada. Massive. He successfully sues the Canadians, I think, for 10 million plus. But then so do several other targets, Canadian targets, at least one of whom was also sent

back to Syria to be tortured. and it becomes a massive controversy in Canada. The FBI was implicated in. And that was a really dark moment. I mean, there are many dark moments throughout the war on terror, but that was a specific one that stood out to me that was very confronting. The essential point here for the Five Eyes is Canadian information

is passed via a sort of existing structural mechanism to their counterparts. the US and then that information is used against a Canadian citizen in this case to send him to Syria and it's not used. It's misused. It's misapplied. So do the Canadians make a change in what they're going to supply to the US or how it's used?

I think how do you're going to calculate it on a case by case basis? I mean, look, the British have been compromised and they've compromised. The Americans have done the same thing. And the view here is that it's a dark situation, but we're still driven by the same purpose, which is to catch the bad guys, right? The Islamist terrorists. I think, of course, internally, they would have sorted things out. I think the individuals who were involved in this from the Canadian side were sidelined.

I'm not sure to what extent because none of that was public. And I think the Americans were also dealt with. I just don't know to what extent. But that's slightly irrelevant because what is relevant is that one man's life was completely destroyed. He was tortured all because of that cover up and that misapplication of information. And that's a real problem. And I think that's kind of it that highlights the broader problems that were taking place during a war on terror. I mean, you could go through many cases, not dissimilar to this in regards to Guantanamo Bay and what have you.

But then the Canadians would come back a few years later and, compromise the Americans. And that happened in 2009. Oh, Jeffrey Delisle. Jeffrey Delisle. Who's a Canadian. Naval intelligence officer who had access. Who gives away lots of secrets. Well, he had access to.

Five Eyes and their technical network. Exactly. It provides it until this day they don't know to what extent he compromised. Because I think what you get from the Maharar and this kind of counterterrorism period story is you've got a unified purpose, which is dealing with terrorism. But once you start to get slightly different values, ways of doing it or methods. You start to get the tensions in the alliance, but it doesn't break it, does it? Again, there's enough common purpose there that they're trying to manage the difficulties

and the lawyers are getting involved in. In Britain, it becomes a big, you know, the equivalent stories, there's bin Laden stories about, you know, drone strikes. And there's tension, but it never really breaks the alliance because on the inside, I think everyone can see the value of perpetuating it, of keeping it. And you can sort of isolate it. So, of course, yes, there was an issue. with that, but there were multiple other cases that they did resolve. There were multiple other threats that they did foresee. So you can't apply this one case to everything that's going on. I mean, just like he can't, for instance, with the lead-up to Iraq war, there were many people within the CIA, some of whom I interviewed as well, who was completely opposed to it. They're saying

this intelligence just doesn't seem right. It doesn't sit well. And what was happening is they were being isolated away from the central discussion. And essentially what they created was an echo chamber that reflected everyone's thinking who wanted to use that material and exploited to go to war. So it doesn't turn the entire system bad. It just means that you've got some rogue people. Yeah, because, you know, not everyone joins in on the war in Iraq. I mean, Australia does, doesn't it? To an extent, yeah, very small extent.

The Canadians certainly don't. And the Canadians refuse to get because George Bush contacted his counterpart in Canada. Christian and he said to him, I'm going to send a team of CIA officers to brief you on the intelligence we had. And famously, he said, no, they can brief my intelligence officials, not me. And then we will make our minds up about whether or not this meets this threshold for taking military action. I mean, we talked about the airline plot 2006 being disrupted. And we talked about terrorist plots being disrupted. And often, even when it's done in the UK by MI5, if that's done on intelligence, provided sometimes by the NSA or the CIA or others.

So what people in the inside of the intelligence community are seeing is the value of all this material going back and forth. And what you tend to get on the outside is when the problems come. But maybe let's take a break there. And when we come back, we'll look at the moment when the Five Eyes is forced out into the public. And the reality of what it does gets global attention. See you after the break. In Toronto, every arrival is a statement. Nothing says it better than this. Cadillac Optic was the number one selling luxury EV in Canada for 2025.

Find your rhythm across a seamless 33-inch display and an immersive 19 speaker AKG surround audio system. This city demands agility and optic delivers with precision to make every drive extraordinary. Let's take the Cadillac. Find out more at Cadillac Canada.ca. Luxury sales claim based on S&P Global Mobility Canadian New Vehicle Total Registrations for calendar year 2025 for the Cadillac definition of luxury. Well, welcome back. We are now to the point in the story of the Five Eyes where Gordon, we get to reintroduce one of your favorite characters, one of your dearest friends of the pod. And that is none other than well-known narcissist and shin splints sufferer, Edward Snowden. Eddie Snowden, return to the show.

I'm not sure he's one of my favorite characters. I just think the point of him in this story is he reveals this signals intelligence relationship, doesn't he, to the world. relationship that has somehow survived the entirety of the Cold War. Henry Kissinger. Henry Kissinger. It survived Henry Kissinger. It survived Philby. And it survived aimlessness and budget cuts in the 1990s is brought to its knees by a Booz

Allen Hamilton contractor. I mean, it's just, it's striking, isn't it, Richard, how much of this relationship we now know about and frankly how much of sort of the backbone of what. signals intelligence collection had become by 2012, we know. As a result of Edward Snowden. Yeah. Point that David made about how this alliance had survived the Cold War and the beginning of the war and terror and everything else.

I think largely survived because of the lack of public accountability. No one knew what was happening. If you can imagine, if we knew as much about Cold War matters as we knew as a result of Snowden's disclosures, maybe it wouldn't have survived, or maybe it would have looked a lot different. So Snowden, I mean, he's going to reveal lots about the five eyes. I didn't realize you liked Snowden so much, Gordon. That changes my opinion about it.

Gordon has a very soft spot. He's got, Gordon's a dark horse when it comes like, you just don't. I do not have a soft soft spot for Snowden. Young Philby. Young Philby, young Philby. He calls him interesting. He calls Snowden interesting. That in itself is a compelling sort of insider.

Yeah, this is all my friends at GCHQ are now switching off. or they're at least taking your side. Yeah, take my side. By the book. Let's get back to the story of the Five Eyes. Because that moment where he reveals what they're collecting, that is a moment of crisis for the Five Eyes. Yeah, so before it's even revealed,

because of course, before Snowden came out publicly, there was the first leak to a newspaper, and it was the Guardian newspaper. And on the night that the Guardian was about to go to press, the director of GCHQ, Sir Ian Lobbin, received a phone call, I think about 2 a.m. at his home from some NSA officials saying, can you do anything about stopping this story? As if he's somehow going to do their press work, you know, that in itself was so patronising that they would call him up, but they did.

And from his perspective, he was quite conflicted because he knew that there's going to be some material that's coming out in the public domain, which was going to be very damaging. They could tell from the questions that the Guardian had asked off the NSA and GCHQ, but he also believes in freedom of the press. So you don't intervene, and that's not his job. The story breaks. Then there are discussions that go on between the leaders of NSA and GCHQ, and Keith Alexander, who was the NSA director at the time,

gave the essentially told GCHQ that we believe the breach is from your end. It's a Brit. It's the British. Someone in Britain has leaked this material. And so that sends the British into a tailspin, particularly because of the security breaches that they've had. Historically, we've talked about McLean and Filby and Burgess and all of the other cases. And so they start feeling that, well, we need to conduct an inquiry.

So they did a security breach investigation, started looking for some potential moles to figure out who it could be. And then Snowden would come out publicly as he did and the whole world will discover it's Snowden. But here's the key thing. I asked people about this and I said at which point did the Americans inform you that it was actually Snowden who was behind the league? They never did. GCHQ all the way to the top discovered this when the rest of the world discovered this. There was never an apology subsequent to that.

nothing else. If it had been the British who had leaked the information, so if someone from Britain, I strongly believe, given the subsequent controversy, that there's a very good chance that the Brits may have been squeezed out to some extent, if not completely. It would have looked a lot different. If it had been a British. If it had been a Brits. And in fact, a few months later, there was a meeting, a Five Eyes meeting in Sydney, Australia, and the British were intending to confront the Americans about this. It's like saying this is really damaging for all of us, but particularly, you know, this has, this had nothing to do with us.

This is a contractor who's done this. And no one would really team up with the Brits because the Aussies are going, well, you know, look, wait, do we kind of want to stay on good terms with the Americans and the New Zealanders couldn't really speak up and the Canadians were saying, well, we've got our own issues that they had with Jeffrey Delisle. So the Americans just took it. And the broader point here is that every intelligence agency within everything, every five ice country has been breached to some extent.

And in so doing, those breaches have directly or indirectly affected other fire vice partners. So you have to live with it. It's not, the Snowden case is so unusual, but also so damaging because it revealed to our closest partners the spying operations that we were conducting against them. Like the Germans. Well, yeah. Some of the others. Maybe it's helpful to start with just the capabilities that Stodendellate leaks.

what do the leaks say about the capabilities that the Five Eyes had in, you know, I mean, this is now a decade and a half ago, but what do they say about the world of signals intelligence and the way the Five Eyes have sort of divvied it up in 2012? Yeah, but we've spoken about the divining up earlier, but I think what it did is it showed the world what that divvying up looked like. And it also showed the world what access they can get, what information they can access from internet traffic to phone calls, essentially, you know, anything that's in your palm is accessible, you know, through these signals hovers, right?

And it's back to the point as well that geography matters, isn't it? Which is where we started, to some example, the Five Eyes, because it showed that there was like a global system, I guess. But also financing, financing, I mean, it revealed. We didn't know prior to the disclosures, you know, the public didn't know prior to some disclosures to what extent the British were receiving funds from the American. Yeah, NSA were paying for upgrades of interest stations and things like that. There was also...

You had that great piece of data you had in your book, which is that I think it was between 2010 or 2009 and 2013 or something like that. The NSA had directly paid GCHQ over 100 million pounds. I mean, part of their budgeting, I know this to be true, GCHQ and other agencies, is every year you have to figure out what value are we providing the Americans to maintain that cash flow and the investment. And I think, I mean, it's not peculiar. It's part of the partnership. You have to give something a return. It is transactional. There is this kind of concept that we all share information. We all love each other. But it's largely transactional. And for a good purpose, right,

you've got to get something out of this. It is transactional. But the complication is when you have one partner, which is so much bigger than the others. I think that is the thing, is that for the Brits, maintaining the flow of US intelligence becomes an end in itself and something very important. So it means the Americans can afford to go, well, if Snowden had been yours, then maybe we'd have, you know, we can cut you off. But for the other four eyes, it's about maintaining the flow. Whereas the Americans can afford to dictate in a different way. Also, more than a million documents were shared.

I mean, I think we still don't know to the extent that we still don't know the extent to which that breach damaged national security because there was, I've spoken to people, I'm sure you have too, Gordon. I spoke to people shortly after the synodian disclosures and then subsequent to that while researching the book about the impact that had on human operations. I mean, a lot of sources kind of disappeared. And also a lot of know-how, so a lot of operational capabilities that were used against targets became redundant because you can no longer use them. They knew how to counter those now.

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

Geography matters because, you know, so it's like one of them was third party in liaison, Okay. One of them is a regional, which is basically in every embassy in the world, there's an upper room that's full of antennas, right? And that are targeting very local signals, hugely important. And there were, you know, 80 plus dots on the map for those in most embassies, right? The other one, we talked about this in our Stuxnet series, is computer network exploitation. At the time, it was called NSA's tailored access operations, I believe, TAO.

and that's getting into very small bespoke networks like at Natanz in Iran. But then there's the large cable, fiber cables, right? So you think about undersea cables that come up on the coast of cordwall. Well, if you want to put a splice in those cables to essentially siphon off every piece of traffic that goes through them, if you're going to do that in Cornwall, you want to do that with the Brits. You're going to do it with the Brits. And then the last one, which I think is kind of one of the oldest of the kind of modern methods is all the intercepts of the satellite dishes, right? Even though that is kind of a smaller piece of the pie today, you still want big radomes around the globe to intercept that traffic or try to, but also to be able to control your own drones and your own satellites and your own sort of regional communication, kind of command and control posture.

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

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

It's valuable. And you can't replace it if you lose it. There was also the public relations disaster that followed the certain disclosures because the public sort of lost faith in the agencies. You know, this is, they went from having to deal with their image post-Iraq and all of the controversy that brought with it about renditions and detention centers and whatever else that we've already discussed to now going, well, the general members of the public are concerned about this because are they accessing

my information and to what extent? What about the communications I'm having with family or friends? Is that accessible? One of the interesting questions which came up are out of Snowden, which I think it's worth addressing, is this issue about spying on each other because one of the questions, I think some of the reporting raised early on, was whether Five Eyes was being used to get round controls on spying on your own citizens. So I think the claim was, well, NSA is not supposed to spy on its own citizens. So does it ask GCHQ to spy on Americans? And that became a claim. And that was the claim. And actually, it was proven not to be true. Sure. But also that that became quite controversial when Trump came into power. Trump accused GCHQ of spying on his electoral campaign, if you recall.

And this claim that what Five Eyes was is a secret way of spying on each other citizens and bypassing controls. And if you speak to Five Eyes people, they're very adamant that that is not how it works. And that if you're the UK, you know, you were under the same restrictions as the US in spying on US citizens. And that there are controls on that. But that was one of the kind of interesting questions, which I think Snowden made people think that maybe this global surveillance system was being turned around them. They also started looking like the bad guys. I think they had to do a lot of work on public relations and transparency. I mean, there was a big thing about would the fight.

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

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

infrastructure or whether there's a yeah yeah and you've just paraphrase the america you the osse took the first step and it's very interesting because there's a quite a significant difference between the five eyes because the UK already has Chinese telecoms kit in its infrastructure from the 2000s and it's allowed it in GCHQ was kind of monitoring some of the kit they thought they had a handle on it they could control it and the question becomes as do you allow more Chinese telecom's influence. And you're right. The Americans are going to say no and the Aussies are going to say no.

The Australians went first. Malcolm Turnbull, who was the prime minister at the time, actually tasked the head of the ASD at the time. The Australian Signals Director. The Australian Signals Director, which is the version of the NSA in the US. And so they looked into this and they looked into whether or not there was a way to isolate some of the technology, away from the sensitive systems, and they came to the conclusion that there wasn't away.

Now, some people would argue that was a commercial decision that was made. They weren't to cut out. China, I think there was a lot of, based on what I was told, I think they were right to do that. And also, they were particularly worried because China introduced legislation in 2017, the National Intelligence legislation, which essentially obligated anyone, whether they're a corporate entity or an individual. to provide information to the intelligence agencies in China when requested. That's by law, right? So it was difficult to see their way around that.

So Australia took the first step, and then the Americans came aboard, and that's when it created a bit of tension with the UK, yes. And to play that through, I mean, what that national intelligence law directly says, which frankly, I would wager with the Ministry of State Security was kind of treating that law as precedent well before it existed. For decades. Right.

If you happen to be working for Huawei in Sydney, and you're not, you don't work for the MSS, right? But you're a Chinese citizen who happens to be on a contract with Huawei in Sydney and someone from the MSS ask you to do something. You are obliged under this law to cooperate with them. We'll be illegal if you're right with it. Can I ask a subversive question? Is it any different if you're an American telecoms company or a British telecoms company? You can say no as a telecom. There's a warrant signed by that.

Well, then that can become public. The difference between dealing with an authoritarian regime. There's a difference in the democratic process. If that happened here, someone will tip you or me off and will write a story about it. In China, who are you going to tip off? No, no, it's true. The China Daily or what? In a sense, I'm not disputing.

I mean, Huawei obviously say they don't, you know, spy. But in a sense, that's what Snowden revealed is all the Western telecoms companies are entirely complicit in intelligence gathering. I mean, that in a sense is why Huawei was so sensitive, because everyone knew this is possible. This is how it works. Because Western telecom companies were shown, you know, they're up on the slides, they're providing their data from global customers to British, you know. But the legislation goes many steps further in China. And we're a democratic states and they're a different state and we have different values. That's fine.

But all I'm saying is, you know, the reason why we're worried about Huawei is because of what we're doing in five eyes. I guess the point is that in the UK, I presume, and in the US, it's not that Google or Verizon or Microsoft are able to say, no, you can't have access to anything, but that there's a legal framework in place that is not as authoritarian, not as state focused as we have in China. So my point is that there's a reason why people were worried about Huawei, because we know what you can do with control of global telecoms. We know we, as the five eyes, understand the power of control over telecoms because we've been using it for decades. That's why, as China becomes a global power and start selling telecoms equipment, we're like, that's a risk. We understand the risks. There's a great analog in the crypto AG story we did on the pod, where if you actually control the hardware and then obviously the associated software that goes with that hardware that's designed for it, you can. embed, bugs, loopholes, backdoors into that tech that the other side may not be able to

find. I mean, it absolutely is true. It's not, I don't think it's a question of fairness. It's a question, I agree with you, of understanding the advantage that control of the telecommunications or communications backbone gives you. You don't want to grant that to the other side. Yeah, yeah. No, I'm not saying we should.

What are you saying, Gordon? I'm saying, and now a message for our sponsors, Huawei. The Ministry of State Security. Yeah. No, I'm merely saying that the fears over Huawei come from us knowing in the Five Eyes what we've been doing. What capabilities? Yeah. What we've been doing.

That's why we worry about it. But actually, what is interesting in the context of the Five Eyes. The Five Eyes is not about fairness, Gordon. It's about intelligence advantage. It's about information advantage over our adversary. But what's so interesting in this case is, is that. The Americans are like, don't use Huari equipment. And the Brits, GCHQ are like, we can manage the risks.

Yes. And so the Americans actually put quite significant pressure on the UK government through the context of five eyes. Deployed a few officials here to confront some British officials at the cabinet office. Yeah, I think there's a scene that I write about in the book where they... Well, I think Kieran Martin, who's head of NCSC. Yeah, he's in there. Yeah. He's confronted by American officials.

Yes. To be told get rid of Huare. Yeah. Otherwise kind of thing. Yeah. How would the Brits even... come to a different conclusion about the sensitivity. Because I would assume that given the tightness between NSA and GCHQ, that the perspective

on the vulnerability from a system would be quite similar. I mean, I can give you the brief, we could do episodes on this. The brief answer is we'd let them in almost without thinking in the early 2000s. And then we retrofitted a security regime around it, particularly in 2010. In 2010 at Banbury, which is a place which I visited, which was paid for by Huawei, but staffed by effectively GCHQ people who were examining the kit and doing technical oversight of it. Now, that means they felt they could see what was going on with Huawei kit. If you wanted to be really cynical, you could say there are advantages if you're an intelligence

agency in being able to understand and pour over the kit. And that might even offer you certain benefits as well as security management. So the Brits were like, this is actually this kind of work for us. We're inside Huawei's deployment of its infrastructure. We can see what's happening and we can assess it for security reasons. So in their minds, that meant they could manage the risks. This became a really interesting debate. We might talk about it because I think we're going to talk to Kieran Martin, who was overseeing this on the podcast in a bonus episode for our members about why the Brits had a different view from the Americans. But the Americans, I mean, the Americans turn up the pressure to the point where they say, we're going to, we may not

trust you enough to share certain forms of intelligence because of you having Huawei in your infrastructure? I mean, they said that, didn't they? I mean, whether they were really going to do it, I'm not sure, but there was a threat. Never got to it in the end. But there was a threat, wasn't there, Richard? What would the Americans have cut off? It was the Americans in coalition with the Aussies.

Yeah, both turned up. So the Aussies played a significant role in putting pressure on the Brits saying... But it would have been, for instance, if you've got US bases, you have been, you in the UK, if any of the communications would have gone off Huawei infrastructure, they'd be like, well, we can't trust that. Therefore, we may, and they are never quite specified. I mean, maybe we should ask Kim about this, what the cutoffs might have been.

But the suggestion was not as a punishment they were claiming. Okay. But as a security measure. As a security measure, we can't trust some of our information going on your networks if those networks have Huawei in it. Of course, the truth is, anything really, really top secret wouldn't go over a Huawei network. So the Brits were like, this doesn't make sense.

And so I think it was more case of political pressure by threatening it than actual cutoffs. There was definitely tension there, wasn't that, Richard? Yeah. Well, I think the political pressure is a key point. I spoke to Theresa May about this subsequent to the UK, you know, banning Huawei. And I think that's the impression I got there was because they're. They felt they could protect the overall system by virtue of keeping them out of the sensitive areas, keeping Hawaii out.

But I think there was pressure. But also there was the cost pressures because Huawei was the cheapest. Yeah. You know, it was cheaper than Erickson, I think, and the other organization that was providing. Well, maybe there as we talk about politics becoming a feature of this alliance. Let's end. when we come back next time, we'll talk about what Five Eyes looks like in the age of Donald Trump. It's going to be a while ride. And just a reminder, of course, you can listen to that episode right now.

If you're a member of the Declassified Club, you'll get access to our bonus episodes in which we're going to talk to people who've sat at the heart running agencies of this Five Eyes Alliance. So do join up for that at The Rest Is Classified.com. But otherwise, we'll see you next time. We'll see you next time. Hey guys, this is Anthony Scaramucci for the rest is politics, U.S. Caddy K and I want to tell you about our North American tour in October. Donald Trump is rewriting the history of the United States. From trade wars to immigration crackdowns to global conflicts, we are here to make sense of all of it. You know, we're in an era defined by depolarization and American institutions are breaking under Donald Trump.

Katty and I will be live on stage, breaking down what's really happening, sharing insider perspectives, and answering your questions. This October, we're heading to Toronto, Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., a host of other American cities to get into all of the political action. We would love to see you there. Come and join us. So head to the rest is politics, US.com, to get your tickets and come see us live.