183. The Secret Spy Network: How The US and UK Spy Together (Ep 1)

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0:24It is the most powerful intelligence alliance the world has ever seen. But what is the Five Eyes? And how did it begin? Well, welcome to The Rest is Classified. I'm David McCloskey. And I'm Gordon Carrera. And today we are beginning a series that is looking at the Five Eyes, this intelligence partnership. We have had a lot of requests to cover this subject. We've actually also just finished a series on Bletchley Park. The origins in many ways of at least the US-UK intelligence relationship, this thing that will eventually sprawl into the five eyes. And we're going to look today and really over the course of this four-part series at this relationship.

1:07How did it start? How did it evolve? What does it actually do? Yeah. How does it practically work? and given just how tight the transatlantic relationship is now. You're saying that with a bit of sarcasm, I think. How much deeper will it get given the harmony in transatlantic relations?

1:27David:I think the question is more, will it survive? I think that's more the question about the Five Eyes. It was a very shadowy organization. When I started doing journalism, you'd hear this kind of whispered talk about, well, Five Eyes are doing this or that. Sounds like a monster. It sounds like a monster. And you never really knew publicly much about it. And actually, it's moved into the public space in the last 10, 20 years. And that's something we're going to look at. It's become much more visible. But also, that's, I think, laid bare some of the tensions around it between the different countries, which we should say are the UK and US, but also Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

2:04David:and I think this question about whether this really powerful alliance with an amazing track record is going to survive, is it going to grow, is it going to expand, is it going to shrink, I think is a really important question for today and we're going to look at the history and how we got here and it's worth saying that to do that we have with us a very special guest, something of an expert on the Five Eyes, Richard Kabage. Richard, welcome. Thank you for having me.

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4:39David:So Richard is an old friend, I should say. Is that right? Counter, rival? I believe so. Rival or both? Both can work. You were the security correspondent for the Sunday Times newspaper. You were a BAFTA winning. It's very impressive. That's a big award for making TV documentaries, films like My Son, the Jihadi, produced a TV drama series on Alexander Litvinenko, a story we've covered. You've also written some books, most recently The Defector, which looks at some of these aspects of the relationships, but also before that The Secret History of the Five Eyes. And also, Richard, you are an Australian.

5:15David:I am. So between us, we've got three of the five eyes here. And so what I was thinking of doing is for episode two and three, I'm going to do them in Canadian and New Zealand accents. Very good. That's how I'm going to do it. It's like we have the three most important eyes though, right? We can agree on that. You've already ostracized the audience. I think I'm going to see my role as defending Canada and New Zealand in this as well as the UK. That's very British. Because I think otherwise I'm not going to let you gang up on them. Well, I think we should start with the most important question. I've posed this question multiple times now on the pod, which is why is it five eyes and not 10 eyes?

5:53Because each of them have two eyes. Each of them should have two eyes. It's not an optometrist association. It's an alliance. It brings together the countries. That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's to do with a classification. So in the US, you've got the user classification called no foreign. so not for sharing with foreign sort of partners and for UK you've got UK eyes only, Oz eyes only. So it's that. So they called it the five eyes because it brought all those eyes together in a metaphorical sense, not a literal sense. Otherwise you're going to have tons of eyes. Yeah.

6:30David:I think what's interesting about your book, Richard, is that it's often portrayed as a very harmonious alliance in which everyone shares happily. But you do dive into, And that's something we're going to look at in this series, some of the tensions that did happen over history. But also there is this fact that it's become more public recently, hasn't it? And it's taken on a new role, I think, recently. Well, it wasn't really properly publicized until the Snowden affair. Because in the lead up to the Snowden affair, you hardly read about it in the press. It was barely known. In fact, up until 2009, I'm not even sure that anyone had mentioned it in the press.

7:04Officially, yeah. Of course, among security correspondents. Yeah, we knew. yourself. We knew about it, but there was just nothing on it. No one had really connected the dots. How did this thing come about? What does it do? What does it represent? Yes, they all work together. And I remember when I set out to do this book, I started contacting people, contemporary officials in the Five Eyes. And one of them, when I rang him up, I said, so what is this Five Eyes? Where do I start here? And he said, oh, mate, it's everything. It's everything. But he couldn't really explain what everything was. I think what he was trying to establish is that it's so purposeful, we're all driven by the same and common goals, but couldn't really define it.

7:41And I think that's post Snowden, it became defined in a controversial way, but it wasn't representative of what this alliance is. But it's acting maybe slightly more overtly now than it used to in the past? Absolutely, particularly in the wake of 2023. But in 2022, there was an event that took place. It was the first public but non-publicized event. And that was an event that took place in New York. And it was the FBI field office commander, so the head of the FBI in New York, a guy called Mike Driscoll, in sort of discussions with Alan Kohler, who was the FBI's head of counterintelligence, decided that, okay, in the lead up to what's looking like to be a very likely invasion by Russia or Ukraine, We should do something together as the Five Eyes to put the Russians on notice.

8:34And so the FBI got in touch with the Russian representative, the SVR representative, so their foreign intelligence representative at the UN mission, Russian UN mission in New York. And they said, we'd like to come and meet with you. And initially, the Russians thought it was going to be the FBI coming to meet with the head of the SVR. And of course, then in secret, they showed up members of the Five Eyes. So you had the FBI, MI5, ASIO, which is the Australian version of the Domestic Intelligence Agency. And you've got the NZSIS, the New Zealanders, which we'll talk about in a second, and the Canadians.

9:12And they all sort of showed up. And I've just described it in the book. It's like the equivalent of showing up to a chess game brandishing baseball bats because they were there to sort of confront this SVR chief. and essentially it was quite a passive aggressive move because Mike Driscoll read out a statement to the head of the SVR essentially saying that we stand together and united regardless of what you do it was very likely they were going to disregard this and of course they did disregard it but the SVR official at the very end said oh you five are besties that was his comment and and Very much, they were.

9:49And this was the first public but non-publicized case. And I reveal that in my second book. And the setting really matters here. And we can go into why. Why New York really matters for the Five Eyes story. Well, I mean, New York really plays a massive part in the origins of the Five Eyes relationship, I think, in starting to form this relationship. I mean, take us there, Richard. Exactly. Exactly. So it's twofold. One, yes, you're right, it does play a critical role in the formation of this relationship. But two, it is where the Nazis were running an espionage ring in New York. And they were doing that under the noses of the FBI, and the FBI had no idea about it.

10:30And so this is where the story connects between New York and the UK, but specifically Scotland. And there is a woman in Scotland who became a cutout for the Nazis, and I'll come back and explain what her significance is. But to tell her story, she's a fascinating person, not just because of the role she would go on to play, but because of the person she is and the upbringing that she has. So this is a woman called Jessie Jordan, who was born into a troubled situation and state. She struggled through a lot of abuse. And eventually as a teenager, she broke away from the family. She met a young man, a German boy, and she migrated to Germany.

11:13And so they got married. She had a child, a young daughter with him. And within a few years, this man went out to fight during World War I, and he was killed on the Western Front. So it was a bad, not just a bad beginning, but a bad situation overall. So she married a second man. He turned out to be a womanizer who cheated on her. So she divorced him, married a third man. That didn't work out. Things weren't going right for Jessie. But the one thing that she was able to do is create these successful hairdressing businesses. And eventually, in the 1930s, having realized that she no longer wants to live in Germany because she felt there was a great deal of hostility towards Westerners post-World War I, she decided to return to Scotland to set up a hairdressing salon.

11:58Now, on her way to Scotland, having gone to the port of Hamburg to get her ship, she was arrested by the Gestapo, the German secret police. According to what she would tell us, because we've now got archives and police interviews that we could cite, and I do cite in the book, she said she was arrested by the Gestapo. They took her in. They roughed her up and said, you must spy for Germany. She was trained by the ABFA, the Defense Intelligence Agency of the Germans. And she wasn't given a great deal of training. It was very basic in how to identify military targets, how to report back to home. And then she was sent off.

12:39So she came to Scotland. And the first thing she did is she wanted to look for a front operation. And so she decided to buy a hairdressing salon. But everything was suspicious from the get-go because the hairdressing salon was on sale for£75 at the time. She decided to offer£300. Not a great way to negotiate if you don't want to be suspicious. Her assistant starts thinking, this woman's not right. She's barely here. She's travelling back and forth to Germany. Her assistant tips her off to the police, and the police pass on this tip-off to MI5, saying there's something strange about this woman.

13:12But MI5 had been watching her for some time, and they'd been collecting the mail that she'd been receiving through the shop. And what they would do is they'd intercept the mail, open it, photograph it, put it back in this envelope, send it through to her. And then she would then open the mail and get the correspondence, repackage it, send it through. So it was just essentially a cutout to circumvent any security. surveillance. Ironically, of course, she was being watched. Now, in early 1938, a major thing happened. So I think it was January 1938, MI5 intercept a letter, and it was actually a plot to kill a US colonel in New York.

13:51The espionage network that was there wanted to overthrow him. So essentially drag him to a meeting, overpower him, take his military secrets, and potentially kill him if they had to. So MI5 realizes, well, this is a death threat here. We can't maintain this investigation without informing the Americans. But there was no direct line of communication. So what they did is they passed on the information to the military attache in the UK. And that was essentially the way that it worked back then. You would pass on the information to the military attache, military attache would pass it on to the authorities in the US, and then would get distributed to whichever agency was supposed to investigate.

14:35So in this case, it got to the FBI. J. Edgar Hoover, who was the director of the FBI, was reluctant to investigate because he didn't believe that there would be any espionage operations going on underneath. That he didn't know about. This is never going to happen in my town. Eventually, he appointed an officer or an agent in the US, as they call them, to conduct an investigation and they identified an espionage ring with 18 people in it. They arrested them all. They interviewed them, 14 of whom were released without charge on the basis that they would return to face court. Of course, they fled the country.

15:15And the other four were held, a hugely embarrassing episode for the FBI. And that's when MI5 spotted an opportunity because they realized that the FBI has been is sort of this crime-fighting machine, but they don't really have the skills that MI5 had developed now for a bit more than three decades. And they figured, well, what if we can provide them with some of the know-how and we can create a direct relationship? A link. And so MI5 dispatched an officer called Guy Little. Yeah, very eminent head of counterespionage. He was deputy head at the point, but he would then become the head of counterespionage.

15:54He came and he did a tour in the US, met with State Department officials and FBI officials and army officials. And he realized very quickly that there's a great deal that the two could share. And so that sharing started to happen eventually. In the 1930s, we probably don't have the same overlapping geopolitical interests that the US and the UK have today, right? We have a pretty powerful isolationist political wing in the US who kind of think we don't want to get dragged into a potential European conflict. The Brits, through the publication of the Zimmerman - The World War. Have probably dragged us into the First World War.

16:38So you have a kind of skepticism, I think, of a transatlantic partnership. Almost rivals. Right. But there was also legislation in place to stop them becoming involved in the war.

16:51David:Right, right, right. Things like that. You have a really immature US intelligence community. Or non-existent. Non-existent. I mean, you have pockets in the army and the navy, but - But there's no civilian intelligence. There's no civilian. The CIA doesn't exist. The OSS hasn't been formed yet. Correct. Those will all be created during and after the Second World War. So who the British even liaise with on foreign intelligence is a bit of an open question. And you also have the fact that at the same time that the Brits are thinking about helping MI5, I mean, they're spying in the US and conducting influence operations.

17:25David:So what you get is you get these initial links in the late 30s based around quite specific hunting Nazi spies. Then, I mean, as we talked about at Bletchley Park, the war, as the war begins, America's not even in the war when that first American mission goes to Bletchley Park. But they realize, well, we've got something we can learn from each other when it comes to code breaking. So then you start to get, you know, a mutual interest at that point in the post-Pole Harbour. Post-Pole Harbour. It really starts to come together. And, you know, they're now allies and the intelligence community is starting to work together.

18:01David:Is it worth mentioning, does Australia have any role in this? Is it really just the US, UK? Well, actually, that's why I said post-Pelharbour, because on December 8, after attacking Pearl Harbor, the previous day, the Japanese then attack the Philippines and they hit Manila. And they hit several airfields. Among them is an airfield that was housing US troops and almost 100 US troops, if not more, are killed. Hundreds more are injured. And so Douglas MacArthur, who is the commander in the Far East, US commander in the Far East, sticks around for a little while, but eventually he's told by Roosevelt that he has to ship out, just go elsewhere.

18:44It's no longer safe for us here. And so he relocates to Australia in 1942, in March of 1942. And very quickly after relocating to Australia, he figures that he'd like to set up a signals intelligence capability. And that's where the central, the cipher bureau is born. So it doesn't exist prior to that. It does not exist. In the conflict. No, it doesn't. No, not in that context. In fact, he wasn't operating from Australia, right? So he goes to Australia and he becomes a supreme commander for the South Pacific. And he wants to bring these people on board. And of course, one of the people that you mentioned in your Bletchley Park series is Sinkov.

19:21So he calls on Abraham Sinkov to go to Australia to help set up this center. And Sinkov brings on board people from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, US, and Britain. And it almost becomes like a Five Eyes experiment, even before it was even conceptualized as the Five Eyes. And so they put them all together and they bring on board mathematicians, analysts, engineers and they bring linguists on board and they were they were tasked with deciphering and decoding japanese signals mainly there was a bit of collection that was going on but it was predominantly analysis work and they had and they become hugely successful in identifying troop movements in the pacific in identifying the order of battle operations and that becomes so that in itself becomes a success.

20:17And that's now happening in 1943. And that's around the same time that the FBI sets up a bureau in London. That then solidifies this intelligence exchange between the FBI and MI5 and starts to seep into other exchanges later on. So the 1940s played a really crucial role during wartime in helping develop those sort of communication sharing methods. And also this sort of early days of the alliance.

20:48David:It's really interesting, isn't it? Because I think we've tended to focus on the podcast and other places more about the kind of European side of World War II. But remembering it's a Pacific war as well explains why Five Eyes is going to be important because you've got Australia and New Zealand in there. And so I guess we've already got this sense of it being primarily a signaled intelligence relationship, but also with this other kinds of intelligence exchange, for instance, between the FBI and MI5. But this is really brought together by wartime. The question is, is it going to survive after the war?

21:21Let's take a break and afterwards we'll see if it does. Got a Sam's Cafe pizza order up. You know the best part about this spicy Italian sausage? I voted for this topping. Yeah, just another perk of being a member.

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22:45David:Welcome back. So we've looked at how some of these relationships were forged during the Second World War. As it comes to an end, though, there's a question about what's going to come next. We know, of course, now that it's the Cold War. But in some ways, the signs that there's going to be a Cold War, particularly when it comes to intelligence and espionage, comes out of a case, which is in Canada. Yes, it does. And that's the case relating to Agar Gazenko, who was a cipher clerk working at the Soviet embassy in Canada. He'd been there for almost two years. And his background is quite fascinating because I don't think he was well suited for that kind of role.

23:24He was passionate about art and architecture. I think he studied architecture. And then he joined the military when the Soviet Union joined the Second World War in 1941. And when it started expanding its recruitment campaign, they reached out to the young communists. And he was a member of that. So he was brought on board, trained in signals. And obviously, he was clever enough and capable enough to be recruited and trained. And then he was sent to Canada. So now we're at the close of the Second World War. He's in Canada. But a few days before the end of the Second World War, he is taken aside and castigated by his boss for not securing all the paperwork that he should be securing.