When the plot line of a spy movie involves a senior official divulging state secrets to an enemy or to the world, it is usually played for drama rather than for laughs. But in recent days, some of the United States’s most senior defence and intelligence officials have been personally embroiled in an intelligence scandal so ridiculous that it borders on slapstick.
Vice president JD Vance, defence secretary Pete Hegseth, director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and others not only discussed what seemed to be a sensitive military operation using the Signal app—which cannot be installed on official US government phones—but did so after accidentally adding the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic magazine to the group. Appearing at a Senate hearing, Gabbard and CIA director John Ratcliffe denied that any classified information was shared. The Atlantic responded by publishing further details from the message chain which set out detailed target and weaponry information before the strikes took place.
Donald Trump and his White House are keen to downplay the leak as an embarrassing but fleeting mistake. But for the countries that routinely share much of their most sensitive intelligence with the US, it’s just the most recent and spectacular of a string of worrying incidents.
In a few short weeks, Trump and Vance have ripped up the expectations of the US’s allies. The president has not only thrown US support for Ukraine into doubt, but has served to actively undermine its chances of victory or of an equitable peace. He has threatened the sovereignty of Canada. The future of Nato seems to be in doubt once again.
All of these are serious concerns prompting action at the very highest levels. But underlying them is an even deeper practical relationship that deliberately shuns the spotlight: the intelligence-sharing alliance of the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, known as Five Eyes.
The idea of cooperation between intelligence agencies evokes scenes from a John le Carré adaptation: besuited men passing briefcases in parks, or sliding manilla folders across desks, but the reality is both more prosaic and more impressive.
A globe-spanning network with unparalleled access to the world’s communications, Five Eyes is now facing its greatest challenges since its establishment in 1946. Trump has appointed unreliable figures who have shared conspiracy theories to some of the US’s most sensitive intelligence roles. He has threatened to expel Canada from Five Eyes. No-one knows what might be coming next.
Few governments like talking about the capabilities of their intelligence agencies, and the UK is particularly coy—but a report by parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) gives a hint of how closely the UK’s spies cooperate with Five Eyes allies.
Five Eyes partners have “unparalleled levels of integration, with many shared capabilities, operations [and] common objectives”, the 2023 document notes. In practice, this means that British and American spies often work physically side-by-side, looking at the same data with the same tools.
For what is called “signals” intelligence—material intercepted from the internet, phone calls, satellite communications and more—this sharing is automatic and in real time. No-one checks what can be shared and what cannot. As the ISC states, there is “a presumption towards sharing all SIGINT [signals intelligence] material with the other Five Eyes partners”.
“Signals intelligence is the bulk of intelligence product, as you might expect,” explains Ciaran Martin, the former CEO of the UK National Cyber Security Centre and former head of cybersecurity at GCHQ. “And it’s also the bedrock of the Five Eyes… It’s an intelligence alliance bound in signals intelligence.”
As a result, GCHQ, as the UK’s signals intelligence agency, and the National Security Agency (NSA), as the USA’s, have a particularly close relationship, working together across the world, including in some of the UK’s overseas military bases. There is an attempt not to duplicate effort, focusing on different areas and skills. This applies to other partners too: Canada, for example, is known within the agencies for highly specialised intelligence analysis of data collected by other Five Eyes partners.
The Five Eyes take advantage of their geographic locations. One look at the global map of the undersea cables that form the backbone of the internet gives a strong hint at which countries provide access to which connections—and which targets might be of interest in each. Similarly, overseas bases give access to satellite or radio transmissions that would otherwise be inaccessible to any one country acting alone. The agencies work together to “follow the sun” around the world on urgent intelligence, counter-terrorism and organised crime operations.
In other words it is a deeply practical alliance, rather than a political one. Unlike some other international collaborations—Europe’s OSCE, Commonwealth security meetings, the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council, or many others—politicians are barely involved. The alliance was set up by intelligence chiefs and the network is operational, rather than for show—but that means it’s an alliance that is relied upon every day, by agencies that now haven’t worked independently for decades.
The threats to that incredibly close and prosperous relationship could hardly be more obvious. Many of Trump’s highest-profile intelligence appointees raised obvious red flags for allies, even before their messaging app habits were revealed. Tulsi Gabbard is the director of national intelligence, but has frequently seemed to be more sympathetic to Russia than Ukraine. Previously, she has shared a discredited conspiracy that Ukraine hosted secret US biolabs—Russian propaganda presumably created to justify Vladimir Putin’s invasion—and has allegedly cosied up to dictators including Putin and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, who she met in 2017.
The new director of the FBI, Kash Patel, has openly flirted with the QAnon conspiracy movement and drew up a list of Trump’s political foes that has widely been interpreted as an “enemies list” (Kash rejects this characterisation). After promising to stick with the FBI’s unbroken tradition of appointing an experienced and apolitical FBI staffer as his deputy, Patel instead appointed the podcaster and Trump superfan Dan Bongino. All of them have repeatedly referred to “Russiagate”—the idea that Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign was aided by Russian interference—as a hoax and accused the so-called deep state they now lead of being part of a conspiracy against Trump and the “real America”.
Perhaps reassuringly for US allies, the direct threat posed to American intelligence allies from those figureheads is less than it might first appear, and on its own could be manageable. The director of national intelligence is, on paper, the most senior intelligence official in America—a role created by George W Bush in the wake of 9/11. But in practice, the DNI doesn’t run any agencies and so is easily marginalised by other intelligence bosses.
Similarly, in normal times spies could keep the FBI’s top bosses largely out of the loop on their routine operations against serious and organised crime. There is real concern about the hollowing out of senior staff below these top figures, though. James Dennehy, for example, the most senior FBI officer in New York, was reportedly forced into early retirement in recent weeks after resisting orders to purge agents involved in January 6th prosecutions. Dennehy oversaw the most complex counter-intelligence operations across America. The politicisation of the agencies, the loss of proper vetting and the mounting insider threat is surely a pressing concern.
This is a bigger issue for some in the alliance than others. Five Eyes countries have specialities, often tied to their geography. Australia does not do much collection on Russia, for example. Much of that is left to the UK, which now has to work out whether it is still safe to share sensitive source information as freely as it always has.
Politics well beyond the intelligence world will also have ramifications for how Five Eyes works. Further breakdown of diplomatic relations between the US and Canada couldn’t help but affect the alliance; Trump may threaten any other member tomorrow. And the US has already cut off Ukraine from its intelligence once (though this was reinstated). Given this order included instructions to allies not to share any intelligence which had used any US systems or capabilities, this also stymied the UK’s ability to try to fill the gap. Five Eyes clearly might need to change with the times.
The most dramatic possibilities, such as the idea of the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand kicking the US out of Five Eyes, can immediately be dismissed. Such a move might be great for a TV drama—despite the unfortunate Four Eyes rebrand—but it is not an option in real life.
This is because Five Eyes is not a partnership of equals. The exact details of who provides what, who funds what and the scale of collection are all highly classified, but there is agreement among former insiders and experts that the US provides somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of all Five Eyes intelligence collection. The UK is the second biggest partner, with around 10 per cent to 15 per cent of the total. The other three nations together account for the final 10 per cent or so. Cutting off the United States would effectively blind the remaining intelligence partners, who get far too much from the alliance to voluntarily end it.
In theory the rest of Five Eyes still have immense leverage with Washington in providing round-the-globe coverage and a range of capabilities it would take the US months if not years to replicate. The automated, large-scale nature of intelligence sharing means there is no obvious way to restrict the US’s access to sensitive information without that being immediately obvious. But that might mean little to a president who seems to find briefings from the Kremlin more interesting and trustworthy than those from his own spy agencies (in recent weeks he repeated Russian claims that Ukrainian troops had been “encircled” in Kursk, when there was public evidence this was untrue). The danger of trying to use intelligence sharing as negotiating leverage with Trump is that he may simply not care about the consequences.
There is likely a lot of contingency planning happening behind the scenes. Trying to work out what might happen and how to respond to it, after all, is one of the key roles of intelligence agencies.
One possibility is that the UK and other agencies might quietly try to replicate capabilities previously left to the US, for example by reproducing intelligence vital to Ukraine’s defence so it could be provided in the event of the US withdrawing its systems. Similarly, it would be prudent to plan for a scenario of Canada or another nation being abruptly ordered out of Five Eyes by Trump.
“Five Eyes systems are incredibly intertwined and on such a long-term collection target such as Russia I think untangling what can be shared will be hard work. It’s inescapable it will have significantly dampened the UK’s ability to share as much intelligence as it might have liked with Ukraine,” explains Eric Kind, managing director at data rights law firm AWO, and an expert in surveillance law.
“I think there is a non-trivial risk that Trump looks at Five Eyes and decides the US is getting poor value… Combine that with the geopolitical changes of how this US administration is treating allies like Canada, and its shift of posture on Russia, and I think there will be a lot of questions being asked within intelligence circles as to the future of the alliance.
“I imagine some of that work is trying to be assessed now with some urgency.”
Five Eyes has always been something of a strange beast: a tangle of the whitest former colonies of the British state, negotiated by intelligence chiefs rather than politicians. But perhaps because of the lack of attention and scrutiny it receives, it is one of the most profoundly connected alliances the US enjoys. Put simply, it could not be unpicked without dramatic losses of intelligence collection to every partner.
If Five Eyes collapsed, operations against criminal gangs might fail, the movements of insurgent groups in the Middle East and elsewhere could go untracked, terrorists could slip back under the radar. Yes, the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand would be more vulnerable, but so would the USA. The danger is that no-one near Donald Trump knows enough or cares enough to prevent that from happening.
The chiefs of the various agencies that make up Five Eyes will be hoping for the nearest possible approximation to business-as-normal, to continue doing their job even amid present political ructions. But the task of preparing for the worst is a challenge, given that the very act of those preparations might escalate tensions. Everyone involved is paid to find out what other countries are up to, after all, and a core principle of the network is that no nation runs intelligence operations against any of the others.
Five Eyes is the deepest and most enduring intelligence partnership the world has ever known. It is due to turn 80 during Trump’s presidency, in 2026. Making sure it survives to that milestone is a task that might make even George Smiley blanch.
