The Team House - The Secret History of FIVE EYES | Richard Kerbaj | Ep. 328

Episode Date: February 19, 2025

Richard is an award winning filmmaker, journalist & author.The Five Eyes—a spy network between the intelligence agencies of the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—has been steeped in secrecy since its official formation in 1956. Yet the Five Eyes’ very existence is not legally binding—it functions as a marriage of convenience riddled with distrust, competing intelligence agendas, and a massive imbalance of power that favors the US. Richard Kerbaj draws on interviews with intelligence officials, world leaders, and recently declassified archives to reveal the authoritative but unauthorized stories of the alliance. In bypassing the usual censorship channels, he tells this extraordinary account of the Five Eyes’ unlikely cast of characters who played a crucial role in its history, and exposes the network’s hidden role in influencing global events that continue to shape our daily lives.https://www.amazon.com/Secret-History-Five-Eyes-International-ebook/dp/B0D7NSHLND?ref_=ast_author_dpNew merch, patches, and stickers! ⬇️https://theteamhouse-shop.fourthwall.comSupport the show here:⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse___________________________________________________Subscribe to the new EYES ON podcast here:⬇️https://www.youtube.com/@EyesOnPodcast/featured—————————————————————-Today's Sponsors:____________________________________Pre-order Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" today! ⬇️https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/——————————————————————To help support the show and for all bonus content including:https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse-AD FREE AUDIO-AD FREE VIDEO-Access to ALL bonus segments with our guestsSubscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseOr make a one time donation at: ⬇️https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouseSocial Media: ⬇️The Team House Instagram:https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_linkThe Team House Twitter:https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePodJack’s Instagram:https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_linkJack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21Team House Discord: ⬇️https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6SubReddit: ⬇️https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSampleWant to sponsor the show?Email: ⬇️[e-mail] a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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Covert Ombuds. espionage, the team house, with your host, Jack Murphy, and David Park. Hey, everyone, welcome to episode 328 of the team house. I'm Jack Murphy, and our guest on tonight's show is Richard Kurbage. He is the author of The Secret History of Five Eyes, the Untold Story of the International Spy Network. So we're going to get deep into the history of Five Eyes tonight. I read this book a couple weeks ago, really enjoyed it. So for those who aren't completely aware, Five Eyes is the spy alliance essentially between

the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom that share this sort of intelligence gathering and dissemination apparatus. And Richard wrote a whole history of it. So we're excited to have him on the show tonight. Thank you for doing this. this. Hey, thanks for inviting me. It's really nice to be here. So, yeah. Good. Tell us a little bit about, you know, your background as a journalist and how you kind of came to this topic and decided to write about it. Yeah. Well, the plan initially

was not to write a book. It was actually to make a documentary series. And I just finished making a film for HBO and for Channel 4 in the UK. And I'm a very much. And I'm a very much. And I'm It was about the hunt for jihadi John. If you recall, he was the ISIS executioner who had been part of a ring of terrorists who were abducting journalists and humanitarian workers and, you know, executing them. It became a massive case and a massive story back in 2015

and 2014, so after the formation of ISIS. And I wanted to do a film about that, to do a story about the formation and collapse of ISIS. through that lens and also to get people on board who had been, who would sort of work the case, people from the CIA, GCHQ, and other people working on the sort of the operational front. And my intention was very much to make sort of a feature doc, which I did in the end.

And what I realized very quickly is that kind of there is, there's the one element, which is the operational, sort of impact on intelligence sharing and intelligence exchange regarding a case like this. There's also the human element relating to the families of the victims and some of the surviving hostages. And so I tried to sort of interweave it all together. But what became quite fascinating for me, both as a filmmaker and as a journalist, was to kind of get a sense of the tensions that existed through the sort of the transatlantic alliance

because the British were very much determined and hoping to bring this guy to justice, to get him into a court and hold him accountable. And the American's philosophy was slightly different. I just wanted to sort of take him out, find fix and finish him. That was the sort of the phrase that I came across during that research. And so I wanted to sort of explore that further. That was the beginning of my interest in seeing, in getting a sense of the intelligence relationship, that the personalities that existed on both sides of the Atlantic.

And up until that point, I had been aware of the five eyes, obviously. I'd been a reporter for some time. So in total, I covered national security for about 15 years or so for newspapers in Britain and in Australia, where I started my career. And so I had some sense of how the firebyes operated. My initial focus was counterterrorism rather than counterintelligence or counter espionage, so I had a lot to, you know, learn there. And because I don't come from an operational background, say like yourself, I've never seen it,

play out. I didn't have any sense of how it played out on the ground. I could only tell how certain operations were running or ran based on my interactions with and interviews with officials who were part of that alliance. And so the mission for me after completing that film and after the release of the film was to turn it, you know, to create a five-of-ey's documentary series. And then COVID happened. Of course, the only way that could, for me to realize the vision of creating a documentary series was to do it via Zoom, which isn't exactly that compelling. So I thought maybe there's a way of turning this into a book. So it makes sense to me that Australia went into like some very austere COVID lockdown.

So it makes sense to me that you were behind a computer and typed up this book during that time period. Well, yeah, so of course my family's in Australia at this time. I've been in the UK now for 16, 16 years or so. But yeah, but in the UK, you couldn't leave the house. So I was stuck at home with my wife and my six-month-old boy. And you can imagine the kind of the stress associated with just trying to figure out day-to-day what you're going to do, let alone sit there and write the book.

But I figured I'd have a go. I think I also thought it would be much easier than what I'd encountered. Because when you're making a film, you tend to go through the paces. You will get in touch with your sources. You ask a few questions. You get a sense of their delivery. You get a sense of the story. You get a sense of how you're going to interweave them into that story.

You put them in front of a camera and they're telling you the story. That's essentially filmmaking. you know, kind of, I'm minimizing it just for the sense of, for the sake of telling the story here. But with books, it's a lot different, as you know, because you've written several. So I started getting in touch, I almost thought, what on I go about this as a journalist? You know, let's try to find some of the human stories. And so I started getting in touch with contacts in the U.S., in the UK, in Australia, to get a sense of what they know about the Five Eyes.

and these officials I spoke to and former officials are very senior. So I thought, if anyone knows, they would know. And they knew a lot about contemporary operations regarding five eyes. They knew nothing about the history, which is a real problem because I was supposed to be writing a history. And I was writing a pitch for a history of the Five Eyes, right? So it was, they were going to be useful to me from anything from sort of, 9-11 onwards. Right, right.

But anything before, these guys just didn't really understand the history. So I had to sort of go back and start doing the research. And that took some time. And then very quickly I realized that to get the history of the Five Eyes, I need to sort of go into the World War II era. And then once I got to World War II era, I thought, okay, could it go further back? And so the embryonic years date to the interwar years, so the late 1930s. And that's kind of where I started that story.

That's where the research started. That's where I started sort of going into the National Archives and digging into it. I wanted to ask you that about your research and how you went about it, going into the archives and maybe I don't know what the process even is for a foreign national to do FOIA requests in the United States. Yeah. But all of that stuff, I mean, how did you kind of approach that? And actually the thing that, because you mentioned it briefly,

the thing I'm kind of the most curious and interested to hear about in this interview, I'm sure we'll get into it later, is the perspective of the, not the American perspective, but of our allies. But it's from these commonwealth countries, you just don't have the same sort of access and the same sort of openness. find. Like Americans, you can get them to sit down and they open up and they start telling you all kinds of wild stuff and, yeah, we cut a deal with this country and then we sent that guy to Guantanamo and that was that. But with like the Brits, the Canadians, the New Zealanders, the Australians,

like everything is so political and so politicized. It's really hard to get information out of those governments. Yeah, they tend to self-censor and I think that comes for a number of reasons. A, the fire vise is just not a flat hierarchical structure. Everyone wants you to think it is, especially people who are from agencies that aren't the CIA or the FBI or the US agencies. But if you look at the way that the alliance, the spy network is sort of set up,

there's a huge imbalance of power very much favoring the United States because if you look at the US intelligence budget, the latest, I think, is around, it's around 100 plus billion US dollars, yeah, and that is about 10 times greater than all the other four partners combined, right? That's a huge, huge sort of sway that they have, huge influence that they have. But of course, that's only one metric if you're looking at money, because as you know, someone who's operational, you know, geography matters, because one element of the five eyes is geography.

That's the whole reason for its creation. Initially, it was created in response to the Soviet threat, officially brought together all those five countries in 1956, but it's, as I said, the imperonic years date back to the 1930s. Addressing that point that you, the question you asked earlier about the research, what I found very quickly is thousands of decades, declassified or partly declassified documents in the US archives. And of course, you're going to remember again, I was doing this during COVID,

so I couldn't travel anywhere. So everything had to happen online. And a lot of the National Archives, particularly in Britain and I think Australia to some extent, were uploading a lot of information online because you just couldn't go into the National Archives. You couldn't go to the local library. So it all had, yeah. So that was quite helpful. that was quite helpful. And I realized very quickly there's a lot of information. The information was

not categorized. It wasn't in a chronological order. You really had to kind of weigh through it and pick apart bits and pieces and connect them all together. And that was part of the joy, but also part of the frustration because at every point that I would think, oh great, I've made a breakthrough. I'd go, oh, shit. No, this doesn't, I've got to go back and back and back. And I went all the way back to Yeah, it was 1938. Every answer leads to 10 more questions. Yeah, yeah, but that's also part of the, that's part of the journey, isn't it? Yeah.

When you're doing a history like this. And what I found very quickly is that the more aware I became of the history and how it all connected, how the timelines connected, the more willing people were to speak to me. I mean, in the end, I interviewed more than 100. intelligence officials, current and former intelligence officials. I interviewed world leaders. I interviewed the British Prime Minister, Theresa May, David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, Australian Prime Ministers, Julia Gillard, Malcolm Turnbull, Scott Morrison and many others. Everyone was, I felt everyone was willing to talk about this because A, they recognised its importance.

And B, they recognised that I was doing something. I wasn't just. writing a story, for instance. I was doing something that, you know, they recognize was hopefully meaningful and had some value. It's a book that their own employees will read. That what, sorry? It's a book that the people in these intelligence agencies themselves will end up reading. Hey guys, it's Jack. I just want to talk to you for a moment about how you can support the show if you've been watching it, enjoying it, but you'd like to get a little bit more involved and help us continue to do this. You can check out our Patreon. It is Patreon.com slash the Teamhouse.

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And additionally, they got T-shirts up there, water bottles, tote bag, coffee mugs, all that good stuff. So please go and check them out and support the show. We really appreciate it, guys. Thank you. Yeah, I hope so. I hope so. And I wanted to make sure that it's accurate and representative because it is not a system that exists without flaws.

There are endless flaws within the system. I mean, for instance, how is it that 14 key intelligence agencies, and when I talk about the 14 key intelligence agencies, I'm talking about the household names, like the CIA and NSA and FBI, MI5, MI6, GCHQ, the Australians have ASIO, the Canadians have CIS and so on. So there are 14 roughly key intelligence agencies. How is it that 14 autonomous agencies cooperate, share and exchange intelligence based not on a legally binding document, but essentially a pact?

It's like a handshake. and I think to get a sense of that, we need to go back into the history. And very quickly, if I can give you sort of a quick rundown on the history and why it's important here, if you were to look at the late 1930s, there was the obvious Nazi threat that was emerging from Germany. You had an apprehension in Britain where the British Prime Minister of the day was unwilling to confront Hitler, of course. Chamberlain was very much an appeaser that's quite well known. But also in the US, they had this sort of these neutrality acts.

They didn't want any confrontation. We're sort of talking post-depression. And Britain could, after a little while, sort of recognize that there's a sort of a growing threat here. But thankfully, MI5 had been doing its work and had been intercepting. someone's male and it was a Scottish hairdresser, a woman who was based in Dundee. She had been working for the Nazis as a cutout. She would essentially receive information from numerous countries, including from New York, from the United States.

And she would repackage the material and then send it on. and the point of that was that they were trying to sort of avoid any interception but of course MI5 was intercepting all of these letters it would open the envelopes take a look at the letters photograph them repackage them and send them on and then at the beginning of 1938 there was a letter that MI5 intercepted and realized very quickly that it was a plot to draw a US military official to a supposed meeting, overpower him and steal his military secrets. And that plot was to play out in New York. And it felt fairly advanced to the point that MI5 thought, well, we need to notify the

American authorities, but there was no direct line between the Americans and the British at the time. Everything that, you know, all the sporadic bits of information that was, that had been shared. Up until then, yeah, it was very much being shared through the embassies. And so if you had some intelligence, you would share it with the military attache at the U.S. embassy, who would then pass it on, and then the authorities in the U.S. would sort of divvy it up and try to figure out who's going to chase it. So in this case, when they passed on the information early 1938, it got to the FBI,

but J. Edgar Hoover was quite dismissal. He just thought there's no way that there's no way that they're Nazi spies in New York operating. I just don't believe it. So it took a while, actually. They were quite reluctant to get the investigation started. And when they did, they discovered that there were 18 Nazi spies operating in New York. So they arrested all 18 of them. They interviewed them.

And they held back four of them. So they detained four and let 14 others go. with the intention of bringing him back to a court hearing in the future. Of course, the 14 who did return, the 14 who were told to return ended up skipping the country. And then it proved to be hugely embarrassing to the FBI and it was a huge sort of disaster and intelligence failure on their part. At which point, MI5 recognized that there's potentially an opportunity there to create some kind of a bilateral relationship with them. So they spotted an opportunity and they sent an official on a sort of fact-finding mission.

And he met with officials at the FBI in Washington and in New York. And from that point onwards, they started exchanging sort of know-how and secrets. and it sort of gathered pace over the years because of course that was 1938 so then of course the war started the US was drawn into the war after Pearl Harbor and by 1943 early 1943 the FBI created its first bureau

in London and that's that's quite sort of a that was quite sort of a landmark moment because, as I said, up until then, most of the intelligence exchanges were sporadic and then were just sort of going through the embassy. And also in 1943, up until that point, they created between Bletchley Park and Arlington Hall,

the code-breaking hub in the US, they created, they sort of, they formalized signals intelligence sharing. And the reason I'm trying to distinguish, obviously, between the two is to say also that the human exchanges actually predate the SIGANs exchanges. But quite often when you read about the Intelligence Alliance, it's sort of told through a SIGINT lens. Yes. We've given the impression that it was Bletchley Park in Arlington Hall that kick started this whole thing. And I don't think that he's correct.

In fact, it was predated by several years by, you know, MI5. and the FBI. But the point being here is that in 1943, 43 is a really key year for intelligence because they created the Britain-USA agreement, known as Broussa. And Brouser essentially formalized the intelligence exchanges and divided the responsibilities that each country had.

So Britain was to oversee the analysis and co-breaking and decide, of Japanese, sorry, of German and Italian ciphers, and the Americans were sort of plowing through and decoding and decrypting Japanese ciphers. So that's kind of, that was Bruce. The other thing that happened in 1943, which is really important historically,

is that Arlington Hall, which had been largely focused, on Japanese decrypts, decided to turn its attention to Soviet messages. And this is at a time, if you think of the context, this is at a time when the Soviet Union was the ally. You know, it was part of the war. It was very much on the sort of front line. And they did that against the advice and the orders, actually, of Roosevelt.

So they went ahead and they decided to sort of conduct this mission. to start decrypting Soviet communications because a man called Carter Clark, who was at Arlington Hall, suspected Stalin. He said, I just, I have a feeling that they're doing something. They shouldn't be doing it. I think he was right to suspect him.

And so they created what then became known as the Venona Project, which is the Counter-Soviet project, that would go on to identify nuclear, atomic spies that would go on to identify members of the Cambridge ring and so on and so forth. So it was quite a moment. And the third thing that happened in 1943 is General Douglas MacArthur, who was the head of the sort of the Allies in the Pacific, created a cipher bureau in Melbourne, Australia,

which was then moved in 1943 to Brisbane. And of course, Douglas MacArthur had relocated to Australia after Pearl Harbor because the place where he'd been stationed in the Philippines was, you know, could they be coming under attack? So they sort of upped and went to Australia, created this cipher bureau in Australia, and they brought on board mathematicians and codebreakers from five countries. And those countries were U.S., UK, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. And that happened in 43, 13 years before the official formation of the Five Eyes.

And in a way, that was kind of like an experiment. I don't think he had intended to create an experiment for the Five Eyes. A lot of the things that happened in history were sort of unintentional. But somehow they helped form the foundational blocks of what would later become, the Five Eyes. Going back to the earlier questions about the sort of the role that smaller nations play, Well, so we've got here now this sort of experiment of the five-eyes in 1943. Also in the early 1940s, this is predating the existence of the CIA, right? You've got the formation of the OSS.

Well, when the Office of Strategic Services was created, they were trained in Canada, in Campex in Ontario. and that Campex was being run by a man called William Stevenson, who was a Canadian, who was a Canadian, overseeing North American intelligence for MI6. So it's fascinating how you can start identifying the kind of the links to the smaller countries that helped provide so much in the way of know-how,

training to the Americans who, despite the fact that they had that they were financially more capable and had more reach in some ways. During the war of course, you also had the the Jedberg teams where there were

American and British joint teams jumping behind enemy lines. Yeah. You had, you also had that sort of the double cross mission that MI5 was running where they were essentially they were turning Nazi spies.

They would arrest Nazi spies. tournament to double agents send them back with misinformation. And then MI5 introduced the FBI to the double cross team in the early 1940s and how that operated. There were other joint missions where you had members of the OSS come to London to join MI5 and run sort of joint operations. And so you've had, to going back to the OSS, you know, they got the early training. They went to Camp X to learn how to and how to,

not crack under interrogation, how to run subversion and sabotage missions, how to how to crack safes, how to avoid enemy fire, like fascinating stuff, how to how to jump out of planes to do this, or parachuting. And Canada then plays a key role. And I think Canada's, you know, it's in the headlines these days because of all the threats that it's facing in the way of the tariffs, but it played such a central part in the formation of the five-eyes. And if we go back to the point that I made earlier about five-eyes having been created in response to the Soviet threat, well, we only knew about the Soviet threat in 1945 because a cipher clerk in Ottawa, who was working out of the Russian embassy, or the Soviet

embassy rather in Ottawa, defected about five days after the end of the Second World War. And he warned the Canadians that the Soviet Union was stealing its nuclear secrets and that the Soviet Union was after its military secrets, that the Soviet Union was intending to, you know, attack the West in ways beyond just the intelligence, the theft of intelligence. The Canadians didn't have the capability or the experience to debrief this guy on their own. So what they did is they brought on board people from MI5 and MI6 to help debrief him. And they also brought on board officials from the FBI and also code breakers from Arlington Hall. So again, you see these intelligence agencies and intelligence officials coming together out of self-interest at one level and another level,

because of their common values and their shared language, their United Vision, that's very much what brought them together. And again, this is before the Five Eyes was officially formed. So these are kind of the early years. And Canada again became the first to join the UK-USA agreement. So after Brousseau was created, the Britain-USA agreement was created in 1943, it was then expanded in 1946. kind of, you know, improve the intelligence sharing, improve and expand the sharing of everything from personnel to secrets, to training, to know-how, to conferences, you know, between the two nations. And Canada was brought in, sort of late 1940s, into that circle of trust, because it was trusted and it was trusted to be capable and a capable sort of contributor. Whereas the

Australians were not. And that's because in the late 1940s, the Australians were compromised. So the Australian Department of External Affairs, which is the equivalent to say the State Department or the equivalent to the foreign office in the UK, was compromised by the Soviet Union. And as a result, the Truman administration said, right, we're severing intelligence sharing with Australia. And that was quite a tough thing for Australia because it relied heavily. heavily on US intelligence. And that also meant that he could no longer get its intelligence through the British, because the British were told by the Truman administration, you cannot pass on any of the intelligence

product we provide you to the Australians. At which point, MI5 and the British government very much came to the rescue because they appealed to the Truman administration and they said, what if we help Australia develop its standards to overcome these security breaches and help it create an intelligence agency. So with that in mind, MI5 deployed some people to help Australia create what became known as the Australian Security Intelligence Organization, ASIO. So ASIO was created in 1949. And very quickly, ASIO hit the ground running because many other agencies up until then had relied on people from adversary agencies to either come forth, so walk-ins in most cases.

So people would volunteer their services. They would try to recruit some. But the first key recruitment in the context of the Five Eyes, the first key recruitment was actually in Australia because ASEO had identified the head of the Soviet mission, intelligence mission in Canberra and very much went after it for recruitment. and they successfully recruited him. His name is Vladimir Petrov. And that recruitment

illustrated to other members of the Far Veyes that Australia was now a key player. It elevated its standing in the intelligence community in the US and UK. And it helped bring Australia into the circle of trust. So had it not been for the Canadians,

Had it not been for the Australians, we would not have a five-eyes. And then you mentioned a little bit earlier about this sort of World War II construct that also brought in New Zealand. But how did they actually get brought into Five Eyes? So the New Zealand has very much came in as, well, code breakers initially, because New Zealand didn't have a civilian intelligence capability. So the NZSIS wasn't created until the 50s. And the NZSIS, which was very much sort of created in the image of MI5 and kind of, you know, MI6 to an extent, but it was very much sort of in the image of MI5. That wasn't created until the mid-1950s.

And so it was the code breakers that came on board. And that was done through the Commonwealth lens, because as Commonwealth, members, the Australians, New Zealanders and the Canadians, where we're on the periphery of the circle of trust. It's like trust, but kind of verify sort of thing. That's where they sat. But the New Zealanders, I mean, they didn't really have a huge capability. I mean, New Zealand is a tiny country, but what they did have is a great base.

So just where geography plays a part, right? So initially when the Five Eyes was created, so when it was officially created in 1956, they sort of divided up the world into several parts. So you had, for instance, Australia was sort of reaching into Asia, you know, South Asia, and bits of the Pacific, New Zealand was sort of looking at Pacific. It also sort of looked into East Germany. you had the British looking you know they kept their eyes on everything from west of the Urals so all of Europe was sort of their responsibility they had some capabilities capabilities and assets in the Middle East they also got some capabilities and the and the Canary Islands you've got the the Canadians that was

sort of covering Latin America, the Arctic, the Americans were, the Americans probably had the best coverage in terms of sort of the reach. So they had, you know, Russia, China, bits of the Middle East. But in a way, those things matter less now because they're so well joined up that they kind of, they're everywhere and almost everywhere together. So they've got their set of responsibilities and capabilities and capabilities in READ. but they're very much in each other's basis and operations. Some of the most interesting parts about your book I thought were about the intra-politics of the alliance.

And you pointed out a couple. I mean, if I recall correctly, there was like a 20-year span where New Zealand was just like cut off. Yeah. It's so wild. You never expect that kind of thing. No, and that wasn't very publicized. In fact, the opposite was publicized because

it happened in 1985 David Langy had become Prime Minister in New Zealand and he wanted to remain true to his campaign promise that they wanted to be committed to non-proliferation so there was completely anti-nuclear

and there was a US military ship that was nuclear powered that wanted to dock in Wellington. And David Langy said, well, we're not going to let you do that. You can't dock your ships here. And it was a pretty balsy move for this guy who's saying,

no, we're not going to let you do this. And he didn't let them dock. So as a result, the Reagan administration was furious. The New Zealanders telling us what to do. What? Who are you guys? So he said, right, we're going to sever our contacts with New Zealand. So the intention was to sever all contact, you know, political, military, intelligence, everything.

But very quickly, the National Security Agency kind of appealed to the Reagan administration and said, listen, we can't actually do this because we really do rely on New Zealand. And we're relying on New Zealand's capability and reach. And so what they did is without disclosing that public. publicly, you know, on paper, the New Zealanders were kicked out, but they were only partially kicked out of the circle of trust, out of the Far Veyes. But the intelligence sharing remained between the NSA and the New Zealanders, and also they got, New Zealanders got intelligence through the Far Vise circuit, as it were. And also, I think the CIA provided some training

to New Zealand's NZSIS as well during that period. But yes, that was one of the points. I mean, the other point, of course, was in the early Australia. In the early 1970s, yeah, and the CIA's assessment on that was completely wrong. The CIA assessed that the election of Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in the early 1970s was going to be a positive thing for its relationship with Australia. and they were so wrong about it because Goff Whitlam was very hostile. He hated the CIA, right?

Like he was just disgusted with them. Yeah, yeah, but and he tried to distance, you know, Aesio and Aces, the human intelligence agencies in Australia. He tried to distance them from their counterparts in the US, but they pushed up against that. And I think rightly so, and they succeeded. But he really suspected the CIA's role in Pine Gap

because up until that point, the Pine Gap, which had enormous reach and capability as a sort of an anti-missile defense site was sold to the Australian public as a joint military base for the US. and Australia. But of course, it was a CIA asset. And when he discovered that, he wanted to know more. And he wasn't, the CIA guy was not declared to the Australian government. Like that was the big deal, right? Yes. Yeah. Well, that was one of the things. I mean, he just didn't want any foreign sort of,

he perceived it as foreign interference and he did not want them in the country on that front. But yes, the CIA, the guy who ran it, who had been running the mission in the late 1960s had not been declared so he was he was not known to asio which was shocking in itself because you're supposed to declare your your role and he wasn't a knock you know he was right he was supposed to be there right and and so they started looking into him and eventually uh goff whitlam wanted to sort of to expose his identity in parliament and when that when that became known the CIA expressed its concern about that to the Australian authorities saying that this is this can't happen you can't sort of expose his identity and soon after Goff Whitlam was sacked from government I mean picture that this

is unprecedented for any prime minister let alone a prime minister who's contending what's happening at the time and pushing back against what he felt was kind of you know hostile style interference. He got, he essentially got kicked out. He got kicked out of government. He was fired from government. Now there is no, I don't think there's a smoking gun. There were suspicions that his intention to sort of expose the CIA's role may have played a part. And there is questions that are still sort of going, but I don't think he could rule other way. It's kind of Inc Inclusive, but that's one of the chapters that are right about in the book as well. And there are other tensions as well that took place during the 1970s, of course, because

Ted Heath, who is a conservative prime minister and who was elected in the early 1970s, he wanted to reset the relationship with Washington, because up until then, the relationship was very much seamless, the transatlantic relationship, the special relationship, as it were, was very much seamless. And so he wanted to reset that relationship because he had a couple of things in mind, but particularly he wanted to bring the UK closer to Europe.

So he wanted to bring Europe into what would later become known as the European Union. And so because Britain's attempt, to join the EEC in the 1960s was twice stopped by the French. Charles de Gaulle said, I don't want the British in the European Union because the British are too close to the Americans. So twice, on two attempts that were rejected. And so Ted Heath wanted to ensure that he brought Britain into the European Union.

And so when he met with Nils. for the first time. And this is something that I'm researching, this is actually part of my second book that's going to be coming out later this year. But this is, I know about it a pivot because I've delved into the archives. But when he met with Nixon, he said to him,

he said, instead of talking about the special relationship, we should talk about the natural relationship. Because if we say special relationship, that's slightly isolationist, that makes the others feel out of the group. You know, our relationship is historical. It's, you know, dates back to the, particularly the World War II. So we should just call it natural relationship.

So, yeah, there was this emphasis to try and reset that relationship. And he very much did because up until then, every British Prime Minister was quite deferential to the United States. Well, Ted Heath took a different approach. And in 1971, September 1971, he decided to expel Soviet spies from Britain, because up until then, the MI5 had gathered a great dossier on all of the Kremlin assets in the UK, people who were sort of working as trade officials or even diplomats, but who would really be using that as a cover

to run their KGB or GRU operations. And so MI5 with the help of a defector, he hadn't yet defected, but he was actually another walk-in, another Soviet volunteer here in Britain. His name is Oleg Learland. With Oleg Learland's help, were able to identify 105 Soviet spies in Britain.

And so when it came time to expelling the spies, Ted Heath made sure not to tell Nixon, because, of course, Nixon's priority was to preserve Dayton and not necessarily to look after Britain's own security interests. It was very much about his own interests and his own nation's interests. And so Ted Heath didn't warn Nixon ahead of time, and they decided to expel the Soviet spies at which point both Nixon and his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, were very irritated about what had happened. And then that relationship deteriorated a couple of years later in the wake of the Yom Kippur War, where Britain refused to get involved. And that led to a

breakdown of relationships for about six months between the British security agencies and the American security agencies. And that was a real thing. And I, again, I go about that and the or write about that in the book, The Five Highs. Let's jump a little bit. forward into the 1990s and the rise of Putin, which, I mean, I grew up in the 90s, so I kind of maybe have like a biased view, but I mean, that's a very like odd time in history, right? Geopolitically, the fall of the Soviet Union, but before the war on terror. What was the Five Eyes relationship like during that time period? That's a great, that's a great area to go into, and it's a great question to ask, because

the Five Eyes, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Five Eyes, after the collapse of the Soviet, Union, given that it was designed to deal with the threat of the Soviet Union. Like NATO, what is it for now? Yeah, it kind of became rudderless. Right. It became purposeless. It kind of had nothing to do. So for about 10 years or so, even more about that, yeah, yeah, about 10 years.

So post-Soviet collapse until 9-11, it wasn't really doing much. And anyone who I spoke to had been operating during that time cannot even remember them doing any kind of any operations because it just wasn't doing anything that wasn't because its intended purpose to begin with was counter-soviet threat right so now you've got this there's no threat so they're not doing much and in fact what they did is in the wake of Putin's election to power you know when he came to power I think in 1999 there was this view as well that maybe Bruton Putin, sorry, could be brought into the circle of trust. Maybe he could be a friend of the West.

And there was an interview that Putin gave. And this is, I'm not even saying this to be funny. This is true, but I can't believe that anyone believed it. But Putin gave the impression that if he were asked to join NATO as an equal partner, he would do so. And it's fascinating that people thought this would even be true, because he never intended to join NATO. And, I mean, he's a Czechist at heart.

Putin, you know, former KGB, he's... But there have always been, there have been, you know, at least communicated at elite levels, I guess you could say. I mean, I recalls the big new Brzezinski talking about potentially bringing Russia into the European community at some point. Yeah. And then after not, 9-11, we also had a sort of intelligence-sharing relationship, which went nowhere, as I understand it.

Yeah, well, I suppose what they did is they, yeah, there was a reset. There was a sort of a relationship reset following the 9-11 because there was a united kind of vision for who the enemy was, right? So Al-Qaeda was a big threat. It was a threat to the West. It was a threat to Russia. So they were sort of united by this common purpose and by this. common enemy. And yeah, they started meeting and sharing and there were exchanges. I mean,

there were official trips between, say, the UK and Russia and vice versa. But all the meanwhile, what Russia was doing, which is very similar to what happened during the 1940s. And as I said earlier, in the 1940s, while the Soviet Union was an ally, it was also stealing nuclear secrets, as we would later discover. Well, in this case, while the Russians, while Russia was an ally, they were stealing, they were hacking into US,

British and Canadian institutions. This was the Midnight Mays? Yeah, Moonlight Mays. Yeah, there was an investigation that was set up by the FBI called Moonlight Mays to look at these kind of hacks into US institutions. They hit the Pentagon. They hit the Department of Energy

trying to steal nuclear secrets. They were going after British interests and Canadian interests. And it all seemed really odd. So the FBI sent a team out to Russia to try and get a sense of where this was coming from. Then you was coming from Russia, but they were trying to get a sense of whether or not

it was Kremlin sponsored. It was just a bunch of hackers. There's a very good chance that it was. And I think it was Kremlin sponsored. and the great fact that emerged from that investigation and from the, you know, partly declassified material, because a lot of still classified, is that they stole enough documents that if you were to print them and lay them on top of each other, that would stack up to a thousand six hundred and fifty feet tall, which is roughly three times the height

of the Washington Monument. That's a lot of secrets. Yes. And that's a lot of information, classified, unclassified. I mean, basically, they were just hoovering stuff up. So this was happening in 99, early 2000s, which is quite fascinating because that's when Russia was brought into the fold. What was also happening during that time

is that Russia was deterred. and particularly under Putin's regime, determined to go after dissidents. And the first known dissident that they went after was Alexander Litvinenko in London. He was at that time he'd become a British citizen. And they basically essentially assassinate him. They poisoned him with Polonium 210 and killed him. And he was killed. I mean, he died on, I think, 23rd November.

2006, I know a little bit about that because I made a documentary about Alexander Venanko and also a TV drama, a full-part TV drama about his life. But that sort of gives you a sense of what the Russians were doing. All the meanwhile, there were apparently our friends, right? And so now, when we sort of fast forward to what's going on now in the context of Ukraine, you know, Russia invaded Ukraine, it's now in a process of potentially negotiating some kind of a ceasefire and exit strategy. And a lot of it just makes absolutely no sense because that gives us the impression that we're about to have another reset. But is that reset going to be across the five eyes?

Because all of a sudden there's this misalignment right now. The reset thing is like such a misnomer. to begin with. I mean, we desire a reset, but for the Russians, they see a continuity of history over a long period of time. So Hillary Clinton supposedly had a folder that actually said reset on it when she went to go visit the Russians. And my girlfriend speaks Russian, and she said that the translation was wrong. It wasn't reset, it was overcharge, basically, is what it translates into in Russian. Right. Yeah, well, I mean, yeah, there is, from their perspective, I just don't see why they would. They haven't. I mean, historically, they have not, you know, ever since the Russian Revolution, they've always been after Western secrets. They've always intended to undermine Western democracy at every turn. And history's taught us that. And I just can't, I can't see how we would experience anything else. I'm sure that there are people with far larger brains than mine

who are far more capable and analytical, and maybe they could give a reason. I'd love to listen to it, but I just don't understand how that's going to happen. So that's kind of, so on the, that's on the Russian front. And then if we're to also look at the, I know that we've spoken a little bit about sort of the war on terror, but the kind of the ISIS, post-IS periods quite fascinating to see how the Five Eyes was sort of

brought together on operations. I mean, there was that hunt for jihadi John that I mentioned at the beginning of this conversation. Was he a British national? Yeah, he was. Yeah, he was British. Yeah, so he wasn't born in British, but he'd got on to become a British citizen, in fact. Yeah, yeah. And then, And then what you had, during that period, there's a fascinating case that emerged here in the UK and that forms, that that is part of my book as well, that I reveal in the book. But the Five Eyes was desperate to get any intelligence about the flow of jihadists from the west to Syria to join ISIS because, of course, ISIS had created this kind of this impression that they were setting up the so-called caliphate and they were drawing young men and women

to it and part of their propaganda campaign on social media and the way they sort of weaponized social media was to make it as attractive as possible for these young people including you know very vulnerable young people and children in some cases and there is a case relating to three young girls three children yes it was like 16 year old girls yeah Yeah, 15 and 16 year old girls, three of them, who escaped Britain, got a plane to Turkey, met with a fixer in Turkey who was able to smuggle him into ISIS territory. And when I looked at that case, I looked at it because it emerged shortly after they got into Turkey, how they got into Turkey.

And the story came out in the Turkish press that they were brought into Turkey or their path was sort of facilitated, their entry was facilitated rather, by someone working for Western authorities. And then it emerged later that they were working this guy who facilitated, the fixer, as it were, he'd been working for the Canadian authorities. So after that emerged, after that story came out, it kind of died, it just went away, you just never heard about it. And so I decided when I was looking at the Five Eyes to start making some inquiries. And very soon I discovered that this guy had been recruited by CIS, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.

And he was recruited because he was trying to seek political asylum at the Canadian Embassy in Jordan. And they identified him as a potential recruit. And so they recruited him. trained him up and said, we want you to go back to doing your smuggling. He was essentially part of the smuggling racket. So he went back and continued smuggling people. And on the back of that,

they would get the intelligence fed back to them. And they said to him, what we want you to do is to go in with every person you take in, you create a pretext that you need their identification to buy them transport tickets to get them across the border. and then you upload the information into your computer

and you send it through to us. And so CIS, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, was using this product to kind of showcase its ability in the field because all the other Five Eyes agencies kind of had very little visibility on the ground. They had aerial surveillance, but they didn't have human capabilities. And this was kind of great. It was a black hole at the time. Yeah.

And as you know, on an operational level with humans, you don't share information in human. You exchange information. So you're getting something in return for your product. And it's not just prestige. But in this case, it was quite prestigious. But while this is happening, the British are desperate to stop the flow of jihadis. And, you know, 5, 10 were leaving every sort of week. And the numbers kept going up and up.

And before you know, you had hundreds and then thousands of young men and women fleeing the West, Britain, Australia, US, everywhere to get into Syria. And ultimately, once the Turkish authorities arrested this Canadian agent and he confessed to what he was doing, they got in touch with the Canadian authorities and said, we know he's one of yours. At which point the Canadian authorities sent two CIS officials to Scotland Yard here in Britain to say, oh, by the way, there's a story that's about to come out in the press about a guy who has been working for us

and who would be grateful if you don't rope that story into your overall investigation. And so with the help of Scotland Yard, they covered the whole story up. And I blew the story open in the book and it became, so when a book came out in the UK, it caused many headlines. But of course, there's been, there were attempts to investigate this. So Justin Trudeau came out shortly after the story broke and he said, we're going to investigate this.

Nothing's happened. No one's been held to account. But it gives you a sense of the kind of the tension within the five eyes because on one level, you got one agency desperate to stop the flow of jihadists. On another level, you've got another agency, a sister agency, as it were, you know, partner agency. accelerating the flow of jihadists in the interest of gathering intelligence.

And that's just one of several others. There's another case that relates to the Canadians and the Americans, where the Canadians in this case were the victims, rather than the perpetrators of the mischief. There was a case shortly after 9-11, so shortly after 9-11, of course, the borders between any intelligence agencies within the five eyes were essentially collapsed and the intelligence sharing was really ramped up

because going back to the point that you mentioned earlier that the Five Eyes lost its purpose during the 1990s. So, you know, come 9-11, terrorist attacks happened and they quickly had to kind of regroup and repurpose and rethink about this new threat, this major threat. And it was one of those threats that it was so international in scope that whatever was affecting you domestically could potentially have ramifications internationally.

So something that was happening, a plot that was uncovered in Australia might have an impact on the US, one that was uncovered in Canada could have an impact on something that's happening in Britain and so on and so forth. But this particular case in Canada where the Canadian authorities

were monitoring an alleged al-Qaeda terrorist. managed to get someone else on their radar when this person called Mahir Arar, who was a Canadian citizen of Syrian origin, happened to be meeting with someone who was under investigation. And Mahiriririr had never been under investigation. He was completely unknown to the authorities. And by virtue of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, they, initiated an investigation to it and they passed on the investigation so initially it was CIS and the RCMP Royal Canadian Mounted Police then RCMP had sort of a counterterrorism unit specialising

in these kind of investigations passed on the information to the FBI and the FBI was very determined to be regularly briefed on this because you know in the context of what was happening They were trying to sort of identify the next potential threat, and it could well be coming from across the border in Canada. And so they kept an eye on him on this guy, Mahra, and they were sort of investigating his background, investigating his connections, to try and get any sense of sort of criminal behavior,

but nothing they got was meeting the threshold of a full investigation or a criminal inquiry of any, major kind. The next year, he was traveling, he traveled to Tunisia on holiday to meet with his wife's family. And on the way back, his plane went through, his plane was, I think, his flight was rerouted through New York. And so when he got to New York, he went through customs and his name was flagged up. And it was flagged up on the Terra, watch.

list. So the US authorities took him in to a correctional facility in Manhattan to question him. And very quickly, they were accusing him of terrorism offenses. And he's saying, well, I don't know what you're talking about. They said, well, you're a terrorist. You know, you're working with Al-Qaeda, and he denied it. And the Canadian authorities were informed. And the Canadian authorities sort of came forth and said, well, what do you have on him? And they said, well, you know, we've got our own investigation into this guy. The long and short of it is that the US authorities, the FBI didn't know, well, gave the impression that they didn't know what to do with him. You know, do he sending back to where he came from?

Do he sending back to Canada? They were having discussions with the Canadians. And the Canadians were ultimately told, listen, we'll probably just let him go through to Canada. But when that message was relayed, it was relayed seven hours after he had already been, or several hours, maybe seven or ten hours or whatever it was, after he had already been flown out to Jordan and taken to Syria, to where he was tortured for an entire year. And the questions that he was asked during his torturing sessions were questions that had been sent by the FBI to the Syrian torturers, yeah?

It's a crazy story. And so eventually, under duress, he'd been beaten with electric cables over his hands, like tortured for an entire year. And living in such awful and dreadful conditions and under such awful and dreadful circumstance, he started confessing to crimes that he'd never committed. And so they took that as, you know, obviously he was complicit

in all of these offences. but after a year the Syrian authorities appealed to the Americans and said listen we don't think he's telling the truth we don't actually think this guy is a terrorist and we're just going to send him back so they gave him they gave him they handed him over to the Canadian authorities it flew back to Canada and he subsequently sued the Canadians at which point the Canadians got in touch with the FBI and said listen he's tried to sue us. Can you provide us with any of the evidence that you had against him, which you used to rendition him to Syria? And Syria was his place of birth, right? So to rendition him to Syria or he was tortured. And the FBI initially resisted, providing any information, saying we won't,

and then eventually they relented and said, we'll give you information relating to this case, but you cannot use it in the court case. It cannot be used. And they said, fine. So they provided the information to the Canadians. And it was the very same information that the Canadians had given them, which they had recategorized as their own

and which never met the threshold for a full investigation to begin with, let alone a rendition treatment. Jeez. Wow. So that's, yeah. So that's another case of the five eyes. So, yeah.

Where is that guy today? He was, he's in Canada. He's in Canada. He sued for more than 10 million Canadian dollars. I think 10.5 million. Yeah. I'd go after a bit more than 10.5 at that point. I mean, that's what he got it.

He went through hell. And also the initial guy who was meeting with, who was the alleged suspect, he too successfully sued. Really? Wow. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Several people sued successfully. based on just bad, bad intelligence.

And I mean, yeah, we've, we've been talking here about these non-state actors like ISIS. I really want to probe your information about how Five Eyes targets, what is usually described as hard targets, Russia, China, Iran. How does, how does that play out? Well, based on, I suppose, the interviews that I did, I mean, the, I mean, the, on on China it's had it's had some success

I suppose in SIGINT but it's also had some major setbacks I mean we know that the CIA lost some of its agents on the ground about when was that about 10 maybe 10 years ago I've got the dates

Not quite that long They're not coming Yeah but so it's a little while ago they lost some agents on the ground And that's because They Yeah I think the Canadians sorry, the Chinese have become much better identifying human operatives,

but also the other issues relating to China and the firebys' issue relating to telecoms. So Huawei, the telecommunication network, that became a point of contention and a point of controversy in sort of 2018 onwards. And that's because the Australians initially said that, the telecommunication network poses a threat to national security because the Canadian Prime Minister at the time, Malcolm Turnbull, said that there are laws in China that prohibit companies from withholding information from government if the government asks for that information. So therefore, what if they're asking for details relating to their systems in

foreign countries, including, for instance, countries within the far-v-eyes. So Australia was the first to ban the five-v-eyes and then the Americans soon followed. And the British didn't want to ban far-vise because they had sort of, sorry, sorry, didn't want to ban Huawei. So the, yeah, the Americans and the Australians banned Hawaii. the British figured there is a way to work around it. They figured there's a way to protect the system, like the internal government systems from any Huawei tech and then use the Huawei tech to build the external infrastructure

for the 5G network. And I think that was quite fascinating because that was quite, they took a sort of unilateral approach on this. the British and they felt based on the intelligence that they had that they would be able to keep the threat at bay. Well, the Americans disagreed and they dispatched a couple of officials to the UK to say, well, you know, we don't agree with this. And ultimately, and I go into that in great detail on the book, but ultimately the Americans got what they wanted and Hawa was bad in Britain.

And so that's kind of illustrative of a case where there is misalignment between agencies. And I think misalignment is not such a bad thing. It's a good thing. You need dissenting voices. Right, right, right, right. And that dissent, and that sort of dissent exists

and has existed. I mean, I'll go into the Russian example in a second to talk to you about it. But if you look at, in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, there was a great deal of dissent within the agencies themselves. So I interviewed a lot of people from the CIA or DIA

who were opposed to the intelligence that was being provided to them and the intelligence on which the war, the invasion was going to be based. And there would essentially be shut out of the room because they created, they created, in the end, these kind of echo chambers that regurgitated the same message

in the interest of the political will and the political agenda that had been imposed on them in order to fast-track the US, Britain and the rest of NATO, to the invasion of Iraq. The Canadians didn't buy it. So, of course, the Canadians, there's a great story where George W. Bush got in touch with the Canadian Prime Minister of the day, Jean-Christian, and he said to him, I'm going to send my officials to go and brief you on the intelligence that we had

and which, you know, reveals that there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And the Canadian Prime Minister said, we can send them across, but they can brief my intelligence officials. And then intelligence officials will brief me. And so he wanted to sort of create a divide between him and them, and I think that was the right thing to do. And so, of course, Canada dissented.

And they were right. and other Five Eyes countries were wrong as a result of the bad intelligence that the British and the Americans provided at the time. Yeah. Sorry, let me just have a quick drink. Oh, it's okay. Another question I'd like to ask you,

I mean, before we talk about, you know, sort of today's challenges of Five Eyes, there's been some talk, there's been articles written about the potential. for five eyes to become six eyes bringing in Japan. Yeah. What do you feel about that?

I mean, do you feel like that's a realistic possibility? And what would that bring to five eyes? How would that enhance its capabilities? Yeah. So to break your question up in two, the first part of your question, is that possible? I think it's impossible. And here's why.

It's taken decades to create this pact, to create this level of trust. And there's a shared vision. There's a shared language that comes into place, similar cultures, similar laws and very similar standards. And so if you get to bring someone in, you're already going to be expanding that sort of aperture of risk because you're going to inherit risk, naturally, as you do,

if you bring in a partner on board into the five eyes. and so and in order to do that wouldn't you want to vet them and to vet them what is the likelihood that they're going to tell you about all the breaches they've had all the setbacks they've had all the errors that they've had it's it's highly unlikely right so from that perspective it's it's never going to happen but what does happen on a regular basis is that you've got bilateral and trilateral relationships even within the the five-wise. So they've already got a great relationship, say, with Japan, with South Korea, with Germany, with Spain, Italy. Those relationships with the European Union, those relationships do exist. And on any particular mission that you're involved in, if you need to draw someone in, you can. So it's sort of done on ad hoc basis. And I think it will very much remain that way. I just can't see it expanding because it's been like that now, you know, since, since 1956, since its official formation and everyone's asked to join it.

And there's a great story that David Cameron told me. So when I interviewed him about the Five Eyes, he said there was this kind of professional jealousy that exists within the intelligence communities about not being within the Five Eyes. And it's a real thing. because it is so unique in its reach. It is so unique in its scope. There's been nothing like it in history, genuinely. There is no organization, there is no spy network that is as far reaching and as capable.

And despite all of the flaws, and I've mentioned just a few of them, there are many other floors. There are many other breaches. You look at the breaches. I mean, every single agency in the far-byes has either been directly. We didn't even get into Edward Snowden. and all that. Yeah, well, I'll fast track to that very quickly, but every single one of them has either been indirectly or directly breached. Now, you look at, let's go back to the sort of the 1940s. The Australians were breached. They were compromised in the late 1940s. They had to lift up their

game, improve their standards to create ASEO and so on. If you look at the 1950s, the Cambridge spiring started to play out so you had burgess and mclean who compromised britain and subsequently kim philby in 1963 who defected uh 63 64 sorry early 1960s who defected to the soviet union and that really shook up the integrity of intelligence in the UK but also it shook up britain's confidence in its ability to be critical in its assessments and its and its intelligence gathering. And then, of course, around the 1960s, you had the kind of the mole hunt that was going on at the CIA, thanks to James Jesus Angleton and his, you know, side show, his sidekick, and Atolli Gillitson. They were convinced that the CIA was compromised and that, you know,

moles were running around. And that kind of led to nothing, but it really did weaken intelligence analysis and intelligence sharing because it contaminated intelligence on both sides of the Atlantic. If you look at, you fast forward to say, a Russian example, you said, what are they doing with Russia on a sort of contemporary case? Well, Jeffrey Delisle in Canada, he was a Canadian naval officer who decided to just walk into the Russian embassy in Ottawa in 2007, I think it was, to start offering some secrets. he was sharing specifically, specifically five-eye secrets. Till this day, no one knows how many secrets he shared.

And he wasn't arrested until 2012 when the FBI caught wind of what was going on because it was based on an investigation they were doing. They sort of ran into this guy, tipped off CESIS, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. CESIS did nothing to begin with. and then they tipped off the RCMP who did act and they arrested him. No one knows how many secrets he stole, but he absolutely compromised. Fast forward to Edward Snowden, 2013. He compromised all of the agencies as well.

I mean, in the end, they reckon about 1.5 million documents were leaked. And there's a great story about that in the book, because I spoke to officials, within GCHQ and the NSA, what was most fascinating to me about the Snowden leak, a lot of it is known in the public domain. What I hadn't anticipated and what I hadn't realized is how it was treated internally to begin with. So when the first leak hit the newspapers,

the NSA gave GCHQ the impression that the leak had come from Britain, not from the US, even though the NSA was aware that the leak had come from the US. So the NSA intentionally misled GCHQ to believe that it was internal leak. GCHQ then ran a mole hunt into the leak because they were petrified that this could be... I believe that's what you guys call a row. Yeah. Yeah, it's just crazy.

I mean, yeah, it does happen. I mean, that's fascinating. That I was so shocked by that. And that forms part of the Snowden chapter that I've written about in Five Eyes. Then you sort of look at, where is the other sort of case? I mean, there are endless, you know, disagreements, endless tensions. It is very much a marriage of convenience, the Five Eyes, but it functions. And it's outlived every single government and administrative.

it's served. And so that brings us up to this latest administration. Is it likely to survive this? And I've got a feeling, like, I'm optimistic, you know, despite all of the headlines that are circulating on a daily basis now. I'm optimistic that it will because I think what happens on a tactical and operational level, and you would know about that because you lived it, that happens like below the radar. I think those relationships will remain intact. If anything, what the first Trump administration showed us is that those relationships become far tighter than they would otherwise because of this potential political threat to them. And so we know that from Trump's first term, so four key things happened in Trump's first term in regards to five eyes.

One is that within a few months of being in office, the White House, his White House, indirectly accused GCHQ of wiretapping his campaign, at which point GCHQ came out publicly and denied that. And that was pretty extraordinary because GCHQ, it was an unprecedented move for the British Signals, intelligence agencies, you can't do that. Then he fired Comey, the head of the FBI. Then he, around that time, he likened the,

the US intelligence community to Nazi Germany, if you recall. He also went through four national security advisors. Yeah? So at NSA's, that was what happened under his watch. Despite all of that, the five eyes remain intact, and it worked and functions really well. It functioned very well. In fact, testimony to that is that during that, time during his administration, the authorities also took out the head of ISIS, al-Baghdadi

was killed. They degraded and essentially destroyed ISIS and they took out Soleimani, the most powerful Iranian general. So good things also did happen during that first term, in spite of, you know, the sort of the political uncertainties and upheavals at time. These like institutional relationships are very interesting and I have to imagine I've never worked there but I imagine they're very

tight between like MI6 and CIA you know, like But also MI5 and CIA Yeah, like for instance like I traveled to the Philippines during the first Trump administration

and there is a lot of political drama, both on our side and also the Filipino side with Duterte. And what I noticed was that, like, our relationship with the Filipino military goes back like 100 years. Like, it's so incredibly strong that it's not necessarily going to be broken by any one president or one prime minister. Right. Yeah, exactly.

I think you can create tensions. You can create because uncertainty creates tension. I think also there's going to be, I think there's currently there's definitely uncertainty about how the intelligence that has been shared already, so not current intelligence, but previous intelligence that has been shared, how that may be treated in the event that standards are lowered for declassification, for instance, because if you're declassifying documents for for investigative or political purposes with a disregard for intelligence that's being shared with you

or what impacts are they going to have on the intelligence that your far-vice partners have shared? I think that's one of the questions that's being raised right now. I don't know this, I'm talking to a lot of people about it. The other concern is the kind of the reclassification of material, the idea that, you know, British, or Australian product can just be reclassified as U.S. product and declassified, ultimately. That's a serious issue.

So that's causing a lot of pause and concern. I think on a day-to-day, though, on a day-to-day level, I just can't see it stopping because there are so many joint operations, you know, human and SIGAN operations that are going on. And I think those will be preserved. And I really do hope that that remains the case. I mean, we were talking about this earlier, you and I. No one can't even predict what's going to happen next week.

So I have no idea exactly what's going to. But I mean, there have to be like major tensions going on where our current president is threatened to annex Canada. They're getting into fights with Denmark. I mean, it goes on and on, right? Yeah, sure. I mean, in regards to Canada, I mean, yeah. I mean, there's Greenland.

there's the sort of his sort of ambition for taking over Greenland there's the threat to annex Canada but in spite of that some Canadian officials have come out publicly and others I've spoken to off the record

who've said that in spite of that yes the threat there's that obvious threat existential threat there is the threat of tariffs but they do believe that there is a way to kind of isolate the intelligence sharing and maintain it. And I think because it's mutually beneficial. And if you think about it from Trump's perspective, I mean, there is something, there are three

things that are key to the five eyes that I think would appeal to Trump. And I've, and I wrote an op-ed piece for the Globe and Mail and Canada about that very thing. Sorry. The transactional nation, the transactional notion of it. Yeah, that is certainly one element, but the other thing is that there's an image and an exclusivity that comes attached to the farbyes. It's an exclusive club that even our closest allies can't join. And that kind of appeals, I think, to Trump. There's the image, the fact that it's got the greatest and most far-reaching reach. And its historical ties are fairly fascinating. And also the fact that it's, I kind of likened it to the to the Avengers, in a sense, that you've got this alliance with these agencies that have these superhero capabilities.

And every now and then, some of them go rogue, individuals go rogue. But predominantly they're pretty well focused on the adversary. And they've got a pretty good strike rate in going after that adversary, despite all of the setbacks they've had, despite all of the failures they've had, despite all of the internal feuds and the tensions. And so from that perspective, you know, I want to remain hopeful and I am hopeful that it would remain intact. Yeah. Talk to us a little bit about your next book.

You said you're working on the research for that. Where are you going to this one? So my next book is about the expulsion of Soviet spies from Britain in 1971, told through the lens of a series of defectors, but there is one defector that becomes the ultimate defector, and that is a guy called Oleg Learland, who is a KGB officer who was stationed in London under the pretext of being a textile merchant. He was apparently a textile specialist working out of the trade department. That was his cover role. And the reason I picked that era is because the 1960s, I was always fascinated by the 1960s, particularly while I was researching

Five Eyes, because it was a time of such confusion and bad intelligence analysis and paranoia. And that didn't happen in isolation that happened as a result of multiple breaches, some of which I spoke about earlier. So you've got the breaches in Britain where Burgess and McClure. plane defected to the Soviet Union. And then there were concerns about whether or not Kim Filby was a spy and ultimately it would prove that he was. But there was also the Profumo affair scandal. There was in the US, there was a case relating to Popov, who was a sort of a military intelligence officer and the CIA's very first Soviet recruit who was essentially, was also a walk-in during a Cold War, and he was recruited, and he was providing these fascinating

insights and military secrets to the CIA, and then he was killed in 1959, 60, I think, around that time. And when that happened, the CIA's head of counterintelligence at the time, James Jesus Angleton, was convinced that there had to be, it had to be some sort of an, inside job. Someone from within had to have betrayed him. And then you had the surveillance playing the U-2 plane that came down in 1960. Then in 1961, 62, then you start sort of looking at the Bay of Pigs disaster. You look at the Cuba Missile Crisis. So there were so many events that were taking place that intersected with intelligence. And so I was fascinated by that.

And I thought, is there a way to tell that story to get a sense of what was happening through the 60s and look at all the bad decisions that were made across the Atlantic and do it in a sort of compelling way? And that's going to be the next book. So I'll finish writing that. That comes out in September of this year. It's already done. But I'll, yeah, but I'm in the process of writing the epilogue now.

and the epilogue will bring us up to date. So it goes from sort of 1971 to kind of now, you know, what's the threat looking like now from the Kremlin? And there's that continuity, as you mentioned earlier, that remains continuous. So once that comes out, I'll come back and we'll have a chat. So the book is The Secret History of Five Eyes, the Untold Story of the International Spy Network, available now. You guys can find it on Amazon. Did you say it was kind of a pain in the ass to find it in the United States? No, so you can.

So the addition that you've got there is the Canadian edition. And the U.S. edition is a blue cover. So they're just different. Okay. So the American edition is out there. Folks can find it. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.

We will have down in the description of this podcast, we'll have some links to Richard's book so you guys can go and find it. Thank you so much. Richard, is there anything else that, like, I didn't ask that you'd really like to cover? No, this is... No, I think we've pretty much covered it all. I mean, this is great. I just realized it's almost midnight in the UK.

Yeah, but this is, it's been so wonderful, man. Such a great time. I really have enjoyed this. Yeah, thanks for coming on the show. We should continue the conversation. Thanks for having me. Yeah, thanks for writing this book. You know, it was an eye-opener for me, too.

Thank you. Thank you. I look forward to staying in touch. and good luck with your next projects as well. Oh, we got some questions for Richard. Oh, yeah. This is from M. Corbin. What are your opinions on the death of Gareth Williams?

I don't go into it in the book. It's unrelated to Five Eyes. So I tried to very much stick to stories that are related to Five Eyes. And that's for a number of reasons. One is each one of the Intellectuals, agencies within the fire vies is how they had an official or an unofficial book written about it. So you can essentially write one book per agency. To get so many stories into one book, I'm essentially doing, it was essentially a story of

almost a hundred years into one book, was so difficult. So I had to be very selective. And the Gareth Williams story, I mean, that is not a far-wise related case. that is very much UK-based story. So I haven't looked into that. So I'm sorry to disappoint you. We have a couple more from Bill Gage, former guests on the show, actually.

Secret Service agent. Yep. Sorry. With the recent revelations about the close connection between USAID and the CIA, do any of the other five-eyes countries have a USAID equivalent? Do the Pritz use Oxfam?

etc. or has a U.S. been the main funding source for Five Eyes to advance U.S. slash NATO interests around the world? Wow, there are three parts of that question. First one, I don't know any other country that has anything even close to similar as U.S. aid. So no, I don't. And also, I'm not sure if there is any connection and what the connection would be to. five eyes. Again, this is all, so all the US aid revelations are very contemporary. I mean, this is sort of happening now in the past four weeks. I hadn't been, I don't think anyone had been aware of the extent to, you know, financing or whatever else is going on. So it just wasn't part of my research. And I just don't think, I mean, I don't want to pontificate about it because

there are so many people pontificating. I try to base my answers on, you know, research. And I just don't know about this. All right. One more from Norm Anderson. Will the U.S. abandon Ukraine like it does all its friends? And when that happens, will Europe step into the breach? What role will Canada, Australia, and New Zealand play? Well, just in the past 24 hours, we've seen numerous headlines about the Europeans

sort of getting together and bringing on board. I would say UK is part of Europe, even though it's not part of the European Union, but it's very much on board to try and facilitate some kind of exit strategy. If there is one where Ukraine will come out and get some kind of a fair deal, it's so hard to gauge. It's so hard to predict what's going to come next. given the stipulations that have been made out of Washington already, because the impression is that the US would not be involved in any security capability

that's based in Ukraine in the wake of an eventual ceasefire and agreement. They're also suggesting that there will be no NATO presence. Article 5 is sort of out the window. You know, what will that mean? In regards to Canada, I mean, I think Canada is fighting so many battles on its own front now in addition to what's happening in Ukraine. I mean, it's essentially fighting for survival. There's a great deal of concern and apprehension in Canada about these tariffs

and the impact they could have on its economy. So, yeah, I think time will tell. It's so difficult to predict. And I was talking to Jack about this earlier. I mean, it is impossible to predict anything. And I suppose the counterpoint to that is that if I can't predict anything, how can I predict the survival of the five eyes?

Well, I can't. But just based on what history has taught us, it seems to have managed to get through all of these tensions. these attentions that we're witnessing now, which are unprecedented. So things may change, but, you know, I'm going to remain hopeful. Thanks, Richard. Appreciate your time. Listen, thank you so much.

Thank you so much for having me, and I hope that you guys enjoyed this. Yeah, I did, man. And, you know, hit us up when the new book comes out and we'll do it again. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, definitely. Thanks again for your time. Yeah, absolutely. All right.

And we will see all of you guys next time. Thank you. Thank you. Goodbye.