One of the most constant features of the post-war geopolitical landscape has been the "special relationship" between London and Washington on intelligence matters. For all its undoubted benefits, this intelligence relationship is now grating against the drive-led by Britain and France-to create an effective European defence force. Something may have to give.
Most British officials see no contradiction between the special relationship and Europe's new foreign and defence policy. Taking their lead from Tony Blair, they insist that Britain can be pro-American and pro-European integration at the same time. They assume that Britain can continue to enjoy privileged access to US intelligence, while playing a lead role in the EU's Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP).
But some Americans and continental Europeans are not so sure. They believe that the apparently arcane practice of intelligence gathering could be the issue which forces Britain to decide whether its destiny is European or transatlantic. The subject of spying, like the use of armed force, excites strong national feelings. It makes people think about who their real friends are. One French official argues that the British will not be able to play a leading role in the EU unless they jettison their special intelligence links to the US: "Britain must choose Europe or betray it."
That is an exaggeration. But British officials may be too insouciant. If the CFSP proves a success, the special relationship will start to create difficulties. Because the formation of foreign policy depends, at least in part, on intelligence assessments, the fact that EU countries receive different assessments must make it harder for them to forge common policies. Britain's intimate connections to the US may also make it harder for EU states to share intelligence among themselves-because Britain may be less interested in intra-European sharing, and because its EU partners may trust Britain less. Equally, if the US believes that Britain has developed special links with its EU partners, and that it is part of a European enterprise which to some degree challenges the US, it may become wary of sharing with the British.
The question of whether Europe should develop its own intelligence capabilities poses existential questions for the EU, as well as for Britain. Is the EU a junior partner in the same global enterprise as America, albeit with some differences of emphasis? Or is the EU trying to create an alternative centre of power to the US, in order to restrain its international dominance? Many Britons would answer those questions very differently from most French people.
Signals intelligence ("sigint") is the most special part of the special relationship-and has been so since 1941, when American and British code-breakers began to work together at Bletchley Park. Britain's GCHQ and America's NSA exchange many dozens of staff each year. Each organisation takes responsibility for certain parts of the world. The British have listening posts in places such as Cyprus, where the US has none, so the Americans regard Britain's role as very useful. Indeed, notwithstanding some embarrassing failures, Britain regards itself as good at spying (President's Putin security adviser recently said that British spies were the best). However, in "sigint," as in other forms of intelligence, Britain gets more out of the sharing deal with America than it contributes.
Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and the US, bound together by various intelligence-sharing agreements which date back to 1948, reveal more to each other than to other allies. This intelligence sharing among the five Anglo-Saxon countries is institutionalised at the very heart of the British system of government. The Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) is the Cabinet Office body which sets goals for the UK agencies; sifts and evaluates their output; and presents summaries to the prime minister. There are two categories of JIC meeting: those at which the Anglo-Saxon allies are represented; and those attended only by Britons. Britain's European allies do not attend any sort of JIC meeting.
There is a good deal of intelligence-sharing among European governments. Some of this sharing is within Nato, the Western European Union (the EU's current defence club) and the "Club of Berne" (which brings together the domestic agencies such as MI5). But governments are reluctant to circulate the highest-grade material within multinational organisations, because too many people are liable to see it.
Governments are usually more willing to share tactical intelligence, which would be relevant to a military operation, than political or strategic intelligence. For example, in June 1999, just after Milosevic agreed to withdraw from Kosovo, the Russian army dispatched 200 of its peacekeeping troops from Bosnia to Pristina airport. This was the first move in a plan which, if it had succeeded, would have led to thousands of Russians flying into Pristina and partitioning Kosovo. Through signals intelligence the Americans discovered the troop movement as soon as it started, and informed their Nato allies at once.
But all governments are reluctant to share military intelligence, even in bodies such as Nato. The American, French, British and German intelligence services do provide reports to Nato, but they are doctored, with sensitive references removed. America's allies have long complained that it is especially mean with its intelligence; for example it refused, until recently, to let Nato allies see satellite photos.
America's reluctance is understandable: any multinational organisation is leaky. In 1998, a French officer working within Nato, Pierre-Henri Bunel, was found to have passed Nato's target plans for Kosovo to a Yugoslav diplomat. And in March this year it emerged that at the start of the bombing campaign against Serbia, 600 people within Nato had had access to the flight plans of Nato bombers.
Relations between the French and US intelligence services are often strained. The French are particularly exercised at present about "Echelon," a signals intelligence network between the five Anglo-Saxon countries, which was established in the 1980s. It is alleged that Echelon can record, through a network of listening stations on the ground and in space, any normal phone call, fax or e-mail. The use of certain key words triggers an analysis of the communication. One of the rules of Echelon is that the five countries do not listen to each other. Thus senior officials in the US government see reports of intercepts from all the European countries bar the UK.
A European parliament report published in 1998 claims to describe the Echelon network in detail. Le Monde picked up the report and led with a story about it in February this year, under the headline "How the US spies on you." The story described Britain's central role in a network of industrial espionage. It claimed that information supplied by the NSA to American companies had allowed them to beat their European rivals to lucrative contracts-alleging, for example, that in 1995 Airbus lost a battle with McDonnell Douglas for a Saudi Arabian contract after its offer was overheard and passed to the Americans. George Sarre, a left-wing French deputy, said that "the participation of the UK in spying on its European partners for and with the US creates an acute conflict of interest with the EU."
American sources responded by claiming that the US agencies have never supplied intelligence to American companies for their commercial advantage. But they admitted that agencies have passed evidence of attempted bribery to foreign governments. James Woolsey, a former director of the CIA, wrote a colourful article in the Wall Street Journal entitled "Why America Spies on its Allies: because they bribe." He wrote: "When we have caught you at it... we haven't said a word to the US companies in the competition... Instead we go to the government you're bribing and tell its officials we don't take kindly to such corruption. They often respond by giving the most meritorious bid (sometimes American, sometimes not) part of the contract."
In these "sigint" games, the French are not necessarily innocent. Anglo-Saxon sources point out that France is busy collecting signals intelligence too-even if its more limited resources and its lack of signals intelligence satellites mean that its networks are not so comprehensive. For example, France has 15 listening stations in places such as French Guyana, Nouvelle Cal?donie, La R?union and Djibouti.
"We assume the French are listening to us when we use open phones," says a highly-placed American defence official. "If their listening systems are not so high-tech as ours, they'll certainly be trying to develop ones that are." And a US intelligence officer adds: "What is in the open air is fair game. But the French shouldn't worry. The increasing use of both encryption and fibre-optic cables [which cannot easily be tapped] will solve their problem."
British officials say that Echelon is not nearly so powerful as journalists, French officials or Euro-MPs claim, and that it is administratively and technologically impossible to keep tabs on the explosion of communications traffic. They point out that Echelon has also scored many successes in combating terrorism, the drug trade and weapons proliferation; it recently intercepted a large drug shipment from Colombia.
when tony blair and Jacques Chirac launched their plan at St Malo in December 1998 for the EU to develop a military capability, they agreed that the EU should be able to run "autonomous" military missions. The French are adamant that autonomous missions require an EU intelligence capability. The British accept the logic of the French position, without much enthusiasm. So the St Malo declaration calls for the Union to have its own "sources of intelligence." But there is a divergence of thinking on how to interpret those words. The French believe that Europe should develop its own network of military intelligence satellites. The British point to the US's declared commitment that it will be involved in any big security crisis in Europe. That means, as far as the British are concerned, that the US will provide intelligence when Europe really needs it; and that the huge cost of building European satellites, just for those minor operations when the US is absent, is not worth it. They argue that, given the pressure on defence budgets everywhere, there are more urgent priorities. Of course it is easy for the British to take that line when they enjoy privileged access to data from US satellites.
The French assert that Europe will not be capable of having an independent foreign policy so long as it is dependent on the US for satellite intelligence. They argue that Europe cannot always rely on the Americans to provide the data-because US satellites may be busy with other parts of the world; because some of them may be faulty; or because the US may pass on low-grade or mislead-ing intelligence.
The British are dismissive of the performance of France's two Helios 1 satellites. The British contribute about ?1m a year towards running the WEU satellite centre at Torrej?n in Spain, which processes Helios imagery, but complain that during the 1999 Kosovo conflict its output was slow in coming and of poor quality. The French maintain that Helios 2, to be launched within a few years (at a cost of 2 billion euros), will be a more powerful satellite. "Helios gives us a level of comfort, so that the Americans cannot provide us with nothing, or with misleading information," says a former French defence official. "We have just enough capability to keep the US on the straight and narrow." Because of this, he believes, the Americans are more forthcoming than they were ten or 15 years ago. "Then, the US either gave us no information, or just sent summaries... I remember an American coming to Paris and virtually saying to us, 'take a good look, children, because I cannot trust you to keep these photos.'"
Until now the Germans have not thought European military satellites worth the money. But the German defence ministry is now complaining about the quality of satellite imagery that the US provided during the Kosovo conflict. The complaint is that, on three occasions, the US provided inadequate or misleading material which was relevant to the well-being of German forces. So there is talk in Berlin of investing in a German radar satellite which would use relatively cheap off-the-shelf technologies.
Whether Europe really needs its own satellites depends, to a large extent, on the US. If, through their words and actions, the Americans can convince the Europeans that they will always provide them with the right photographs at the right time, the British argument-that European satellites are an unnecessary expense-is compelling. But to judge from the recent German reaction, the Americans have still got some work to do.
few senior figures in Whitehall worry that the special relationship could pose problems for Europe's defence identity. As one foreign office official put it: "Our EU partners should see it as an asset that we have access to US intelligence." Perhaps so. But many of Britain's partners regard that special relationship as yet another indication, alongside the opt-out from euroland, that Britain is less than fully committed to the EU. One retired British intelligence officer worries that "if political integration proceeds in Europe, Britain will have to choose between the US and the EU-the French will force us to choose." And according to one senior state department official, a successful CFSP could lead some Americans to question the special relationship with Britain.
But these gentlemen should probably not fret too much-at least for now. European defence is still on the drawing board. The kind of problems that they envisage are problems of success. The Europeans are a long way from having an effective and coherent foreign and defence policy. So they have several years to think about how that can be reconciled with the Anglo-Saxons' special relationship.
There is a broader question. How much does intelligence really matter-outside military conflict? It is clearly important for policy towards closed societies. The US needed spy planes to discover that Cuba was installing Soviet missiles in 1962. In an open society, you can usually find out what is going on through monitoring the media. And over the past 20 years, the number of closed countries has greatly diminished.
Those who stress the importance of intelligence point to the case of Iran. Britain and the US have often taken a tougher line on Iran than have France, Germany and Italy. At various times in the 1990s, US and UK intelligence suspected Iran of links to terrorism, of seeking to build nuclear weapons and of plans to disrupt the middle east peace process. According to British officials, different perceptions in London and Bonn can be explained, in part, by the British and German governments having access to different intelligence. But if that was the case, why did not the British pass material to the Germans, in order to influence them? This question elicits three responses from officials. First, "we did pass on intelligence, but only now and then... because they were not getting a regular stream of intelligence from us, they took these specific reports less seriously than they might have." Second, "some of our intelligence was too sensitive to pass on." And third, some of the material passed to Germany was passed to Iran, "an experience that discouraged further exchanges."
One American official cites ballistic missiles as another area in which policy divergences are partially explained by intelligence divergences. The US has taken the threat of ballistic missiles more seriously than its European allies. America has also favoured a more robust response to the threat; hence its current plans for a system of National Missile Defense (NMD), designed to shoot down ballistic missiles from rogue states. In February this year, I was told by US officials that Britain was becoming more supportive of the American desire for the National Missile Defence system (a point disputed by some in London); and further, that one reason for this British policy shift was that it had seen the same intelligence on North Korea, Iran and Iraq.
However, other highly-placed officials in London and Washington play down the role of intelligence in the making of foreign policy. "Britain and France have very similar assessments of what is happening in Iraq, but still have very different policies," says a senior British official. France has often taken a different line on Iraq because of its commercial interests, its genuinely different analysis of how best to handle Saddam Hussein and-perhaps-its desire to challenge US hegemony in some parts of the world.
National traditions have a big impact on foreign policy: given the same assessment of a country, the Anglo-Saxons will be inclined to take a tougher line than the Germans. That may count for as much as intelligence itself in explaining Anglo-German differences on Iran. At one point, for example, Germany's Iran policy was heavily influenced by the imprisonment of a German businessman.
On ballistic missiles, too, plenty of things other than intelligence determine policy. The recent (and tentative) British-American rapprochement on the desirability of NMD is probably not principally as a result of intelligence. The British defence establishment is inherently uncomfortable opposing an American policy-especially when (as with NMD) America appears bent on pursuing that policy regardless.
The truth is that intelligence is rarely a crucial factor in the making of foreign policy. Domestic party politics, economic interests, personal relations with other foreign leaders, shifts of public opinion and reports in the media often count for more. To a large degree, it was the television pictures of Albanian refugees-seen by people in every Nato country-which made it fairly easy for Nato governments to gain public support for their campaign of bombing Serbia. The Russian people saw no such pictures, and thus favoured a very different foreign policy.
One of Helmut Kohl's former diplomatic advisers recalls that sometimes intelligence was a help, "for example when we learned of Iran's missile programme." But he says that "during ten years with the chancellor, I do not recall that we made any decisions of life and death on account of intelligence reports." Michael Alexander, a former British ambassador to Nato, agrees. He says that in all the time that he was a private secretary to Alec Douglas-Home, Jim Callaghan and Margaret Thatcher, "I cannot recall any occasion where, in dealing with the fundamental objectives of government policy overseas, inputs from the intelligence community had a decisive impact on government thinking. In all three cases-but most obviously in the case of Thatcher-basic political instincts were far more important."
And yet, even if Alexander is right, the special relationship still poses problems for the EU's foreign and defence policies. For one thing, intelligence does have some impact on foreign policy, for example, towards rogue states. For another, it will have an important bearing on the success of EU military operations. Furthermore, intelligence links, or the lack of them, have a psychological impact on relations among governments-nurturing or damaging the trust that politicians from different countries feel for each other. The furore over Echelon created bad feelings about the British, and not only in France. Without mutual trust the CFSP will not get very far.
so britain, its EU partners and the US should at least recognise that there is a problem. In the interests of an effective European defence policy and a healthy transatlantic relationship, they need to build the EU's intelligence capability, but in ways which respect Britain's special ties to the US. Here are a few ideas.
Javier Solana, the EU's new high representative for foreign and defence policy, needs good intelligence from Nato and from EU governments. Without it he will find it hard to succeed in his mission of guiding and coordinating EU foreign and defence policy. Because the EU has a reputation for being leaky, and because some of its members are non-aligned, Nato is reluctant to pass intelligence to the EU. So the EU must ensure that the staff working on foreign and defence policy are situated within a special secure building. Rigorous vetting procedures will be required, as well as stringent codes of conduct on access to documents and buildings, and harsh penalties for security breaches.
Solana's policy unit and his military staff are supposed to provide him with intelligence from the EU member states. In the long run, however, he will need a more extensive capacity for analysing intelligence. He should establish an EU-level Joint Intelligence Committee on the British model, made up of senior intelligence figures from each member state. This Euro-JIC would seek to coordinate the tasks of the various national agencies, so that they did not pursue divergent lines and priorities.
The EU still has a strong interest in gaining access to as much US intelligence as possible. There is a risk that autonomous EU military missions could be hampered by a lack of access to US assessments. The Americans, of course, will be reluctant to share. But they do not want the CFSP to evolve in directions which oppose US interests. So the Europeans should point out that the sharing of intelligence would-other things being equal-encourage US and EU policies to converge rather than diverge. The best way of getting the Americans to share information is to make them feel involved in Europe's foreign policy machinery. They need to learn that the CFSP is not a scheme to undermine Nato or US global influence. So they should attend some meetings of the Euro-JIC, just as they attend some meetings of the UK-JIC. In return for US representation in the CFSP machinery, the EU should insist on having equivalent representation in the National Security Council.
Meanwhile, the EU intelligence effort should seek to deploy its limited resources to maximum effect. Satellites tend to be useful for big operations and big threats-when Nato, rather than the EU, is likely to be the main organisation involved. Europe should place greater emphasis on developing autonomous capabilities in the less costly field of aerial reconnaissance. During the Kosovo conflict, the thick cloud meant that some unmanned aerial vehicles took more useful pictures than spy satellites. At the moment, several EU countries are spending money on developing their own, independent unmanned aerial vehicle programmes. If they pooled their efforts they could create an autonomous EU capability which would provide battlefield intelligence to its task forces, to its governments and also to Nato.
Finally, we need a transatlantic understanding on industrial espionage. The Americans and the French should agree on a set of non-binding rules on what is allowed and what is not allowed. The reality is that they will continue to spy on each other. But if they agreed to follow a set of rules, these activities would be much less damaging. Such rules would be easier to accept if they applied to the whole of Nato, rather than just to France and America.
The above suggestions, if implemented, would give the EU its own intelligence capability-albeit one based mainly on national sources. It need not harm EU-US relations. It is the current chasm between the US and its European allies in intelligence capabilities which has led to mutual mistrust. "Europeans don't believe US assessments of many threats, whether of proliferation or evidence of Sudanese complicity in attacks on US embassies in 1998," argues Kori Schake, of the Institute for National Strategic Studies in Washington. "Better intelligence would allow America's European allies to validate the factual basis of US assessments." She thinks that better EU intelligence will-other things being equal-help to bring about a convergence of European and American views on security threats.
Like Schake, I believe that there need be no contradiction between a UK-US special relationship on intelligence, a developing EU intelligence capability, a stronger European foreign and defence policy, and a more balanced transatlantic relationship. But the achievement of all those goals will require an immense effort, and will not come without tears.
