23 February, 2025. In the chapter on secret intelligence in my Diplomacy: Theory and Practice I endorse the common assumption that international ‘liaisons’ and especially formal ‘alliances’ between intelligence agencies have the added value of discreetly supporting diplomatic relationships when these become strained. Unfortunately for NATO, the seismic political changes in Washington are probably undermining the Five Eyes’ alliance itself.
The Five Eyes’ alliance embraces the USA, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and the American intelligence community spends far more on intelligence gathering by technical means than the other four ‘eyes’ put together. At first glance, therefore, it might be thought that the same transactional considerations that shape President Trump’s attitude to NATO will also dictate his approach to the Five Eyes’ alliance – bin it. But as Richard Kerbaj points out, human intelligence gathering and the analysis of raw intelligence from all sources remain of great importance; so, too, do listening posts well beyond the water’s edge. And it is in such areas that America’s allies will continue to prove of great value to it. It is perhaps significant that Trump’s new director of the CIA, John Ratcliffe, has stressed the importance of human intelligence (HUMINT) and the agency’s existing weakness in that department. Ratcliffe himself was not one of the president’s crazier appointments either, as evidenced by the fact that his nomination was approved by the Senate on a 74–25 vote.
But these points are about all there is going for the survival of the Five Eyes’ alliance. On the other side of the ledger, Trump himself is notoriously careless with secrets, his well-advertised partiality for Putin’s Russia must be a red flag on a tall mast, and both his vice-president, J. D. Vance, and clearly deranged ‘deep state’ buster Elon Musk, have openly aligned Washington with the extreme right-wing AfD in Germany. And while John Ratcliffe’ appointment to the CIA might give America’s Five Eyes’ partners a modicum of reassurance, The Wall Street Journal reported that one of his aides divulged that Trump’s CIA would have a greater focus on the Western hemisphere, targeting countries not traditionally considered adversaries of the US. Who could he have had in mind? Most likely Five Eyes’ partners Britain and Canada, as well as Ukraine and the more ‘woke’ states in the European Union so loathed by Trump and his grovelling courtiers. Since the CIA – like other federal agencies – is being gutted of personnel and generally thrown into morale-degrading turmoil, it is unlikely to be seen as such a useful partner in the Five Eyes’ alliance anyway.
Furthermore, controversial individuals have been appointed to key positions in the 18-agency US Intelligence Community. First among these is former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, the new Defense Secretary, whose position at the Pentagon brings under him not only the Defense Intelligence Agency but both Cyber Command and the NSA (the American sigint counterpart to Britain’s GCHQ). Making his massive fiefdom more unsettling still is the possibility that the current one-hat control of Cyber Command and the NSA will be brought to an end and lead to a lengthy period of bureaucratic confusion. After Hegseth comes conspiracy theorist Kash Patel, the new head of the FBI, of whom Christopher Steele, former head of MI6’s Russia desk and no innocent in knowledge of Trumpism, told Times Radio that Britain should not and, indeed, could not ‘do business’ with him.’
To cap it all there is the arrival of Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence, a post-9/11 position created to coordinate and distil for the president’s ear the product of the entire US intelligence community. For she was considered so unfit for this office that she had as much of a struggle to get Senate support for her nomination as Hegseth and Patel; in the end, she won on a 52 to 48 vote, with the long-time Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, himself voting against her. Speaking in the Senate on 11 February 2025, the justly respected Elizabeth Warren summed up a common view of Gabbard. Among other black marks on her record, she said, Gabbard was ‘an apologist for Vladimir Putin, routinely spreading Russian misinformation.’ As a result, she continued, it would be entirely reasonable for America’s allies to start withholding the intelligence they had gathered for fear that their own operatives would be put at risk. She did not mention the Five Eyes’ alliance but she did not need to.
On balance, therefore, it seems obvious that the Five Eyes’ alliance must already be under unprecedented stress. For good reasons, just about everyone is being tight-lipped about this at the moment, although there is the odd exception. On 11 February The Insider, for the time being safe in Latvia, reported the view of a former CIA officer that trust within the Five Eyes was ‘already beginning to fray,’ with the exchange of HUMINT in particular being affected. This being the case, there is little hope that it will help to shore up NATO, now on the verge of collapse since Donald Trump has effectively announced that he will not honour Article 5 of the treaty. One acid test of Washington’s commitment to the North Atlantic alliance will be its willingness to keep the agreement made with Berlin by the Biden administration in July 2024 to deliver new long-range conventional missiles to Germany starting in 2026. I’m not holding my breath. It’s time for the EU plus the UK to organize as a defensive alliance.
PS. Two further signs of trouble in the Five Eyes’ alliance. First, a long report just noticed in the Financial Times on 25 February that Peter Navarro, one of Trump’s closest advisers, was urging him to expel Canada from the membership, although even Steve Bannon is reported to have said that this was a bad idea. Second, and far more serious, the headline-grabbing, jaw-dropping security lapse in the middle of March 2025 involving the inadvertent invitation of a journalist to a group chat of Trump’s top national security team on Signal, an insecure commercial app that obviously shouldn’t have been used anyway, two hours prior to US air strikes on Houthi positions in Yemen. See especially here.