Five Eyes

Five Eyes, intelligence-sharing alliance among five Anglophone countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The alliance began during World War II between the United States and the United Kingdom and expanded to the other three countries during the early years of the Cold War. Its activities remained largely secret until an investigation by the European Parliament in 2001. Release of documents leaked by Edward Snowden in 2013 further revealed its existence and reach.

Origins and history

The earliest version of the Five Eyes arrangement began in early 1941 when American intelligence officials visited England’s Bletchley Park, the nerve center of the Allies’ code-breaking operations during World War II. The alliance began with mutual sharing of intelligence: The Americans showed the British their successful analysis of Japan’s top secret Purple code, and British personnel in return revealed their cracking of the German Enigma system. The intelligence sharing continued throughout the war.

Shortly after the end of World War II, the two countries turned their attention to combating the Soviet Union. In March 1946 they signed the British-U.S. Communication Intelligence Agreement (BRUSA, later UKUSA), promising to be transparent with and not spy on each other and to share nearly all the intelligence they gathered by breaking codes and intercepting (then primarily radio signal) communications. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—all former British dominions that became Commonwealth countries with the British monarch as head of state—were formally included in the agreement by 1955.

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Over the decades that followed, the intelligence-gathering network expanded both geographically and technologically. France, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway increased their cooperation with the Five Eyes countries and are now known as members of the Nine Eyes alliance. Belgium, Germany, Italy, Sweden, and Spain became part of a third tier, called Fourteen Eyes, sharing information in an even more restricted way.

Within Five Eyes the United States has the largest budget for surveillance and the most sophisticated technology. “Britain is a leader in traditional spying,” the Associated Press reported in 2013, “thanks in part to its reach into countries that were once part of the British Empire.” Australia plays a key role in gathering intelligence in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific. As spies, Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders have the advantage of not attracting as much scrutiny as Americans or Britons.

Cooperation among Five Eyes members stepped up after the September 11 attacks in 2001. Shared information has been used to thwart subsequent terrorist attacks and to coordinate military deployments, among other operations. For instance, it played a role in identifying and preventing a 2006 terrorist plot to blow up as many as 10 transatlantic airplanes with liquid bombs.

After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Five Eyes alliance started focusing more on China as it emerged as a global power. In 2018, based on a U.S. request, Canada arrested the chief financial officer of Chinese telecommunications company Huawei, a move that was denounced by China. The United States persuaded the other Five Eyes members to ban Huawei from their 5G wireless networks over concerns about the company’s relationship with the Chinese government. But economic policymaking has led to disagreements. New Zealand officials expressed concerns about antagonizing China, which constitutes New Zealand’s largest export market.

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In 2021 Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom signed the AUKUS security pact, which focuses on technology sharing in the Indo-Pacific to counter Chinese ambitions in the region. In 2023 the FBI hosted the first public meeting of Five Eyes representatives in Palo Alto, south of San Francisco. The conference also included business leaders, government officials, and academics for discussions on “threats to innovation” and ways to collaborate to “advance both economic security and public safety,” per the FBI’s press release.

Public surveillance and secrecy

As part of its intelligence gathering, the Five Eyes alliance established a global eavesdropping apparatus known as ECHELON. The first ECHELON network was reportedly set up in 1971. The alliance governments have not been forthcoming about ECHELON, but civil rights groups have said that it could intercept almost any electronic communication, whether carried out by phone, by fax machines, or over the Internet. ECHELON is believed to be led by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).

These tactics represented a shift in Five Eyes’ operations. In the 1946 agreement, communications between private citizens in the member countries were excluded from intelligence collection, and only communications by government agencies, parties, and individuals working on a government’s behalf were considered within bounds. By contrast, the purpose of ECHELON has evidently been to intercept private and commercial communications, including those within member countries.

The member countries tried to conceal the existence of the Five Eyes agreement and the ECHELON network, but numerous journalists reported on ECHELON’s activities between the 1970s and 1990s. In 1972 NSA analyst Perry Fellwock, writing under an alias, stated that the NSA had cracked all Soviet codes. In 1988 British investigative journalist Duncan Campbell published an article titled “Somebody’s Listening,” in which he revealed the existence of ECHELON and its purported use for corporate espionage to favor American companies. Campbell presented his report to the European Parliament in 2000, leading to a formal investigation into the network. A 2001 resolution by the European Parliament acknowledged the existence of ECHELON while admitting that European legislators had little power to change the system. More information on Five Eyes and ECHELON became public in 2013 following disclosures by American intelligence contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden.