185. The Secret Spy Network: How Snowden Nearly Destroyed Everything (Ep 3)

14:14David:So I guess the point would be if a Brit wanted to recruit, say, a Chinese person in the US, you're supposed to tell the Americans and work with them.

14:25Gordon:Why in the hell would the Americans want -

14:27David:A Brit running away.

14:28Gordon:Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's interesting. I mean, I had a bunch of these kind of what if conversations with CIA officers and FBI special agents when I was working on London Station, my upcoming book, because I was trying to figure out in that novel, like how you could create a lot of tension in the relationship. And it wasn't impossible, but it was kind of hard because you did need examples where, for example, a British SIS officer might say, look, I have a Chinese target who's coming to Los Angeles. And I want to be the one to go and recruit that person or pitch them or try to develop them or whatever.

15:10Gordon:And if you don't tell the FBI and you don't tell the CIA, that turns into a massive problem if it becomes known. And so there are systems and processes to sort of de-conflict these types of things. But it is true that I think in some cases, you could come up with a scenario in which it would make sense, not many, but where it would make sense to have an SIS officer come to the States and actually make the pitch. But that would usually be done in concert with the FBI, CIA, so that that product, whatever comes out of it, even if it's an SIS officer running the case, that product's going to end up being shared.

15:50David:I remember asking Brits and Americans about whether this happened. And on the American side, they said to me the only time they suspected the Brits of running unilateral operations inside the United States without telling them was against the IRA. Because they figured the Americans would probably, if you think about the FBI, might have had some sympathizers to the Irish cause within it and would have tipped them off. Whether that happened or not, I don't know. But this is what actually a CIA officer told me, that they thought the Brits were doing that. But after 9-11, the Americans, I remember hearing about this, pushed to be able to run more operations within the UK.

16:29David:So the CIA wanted to go after kind of Islamists in the UK themselves.

16:34Gordon:Without coordinating with MI5?

16:36David:I think the suggestion was with less oversight. Less oversight. And then that caused tension. And MI5 were like, you're not, you know, if we catch you doing that. I think I know about that case. We're going to cause trouble. Because, Richard, there is a case which becomes a big deal in Canada, doesn't it? Between the Canadians and the Americans over this, how they cooperate. That emerged shortly after 9-11. So I think about a month and a half later or so, CSIS, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, discovered that there was a young man who was interacting with one of their targets. So they were targeting a guy who was believed to be linked to bin Laden.

17:16A young guy called Mahir Arar of Syrian origin, who's now living in Canada and has Canadian citizenship, was interacting with this target. So they figured, okay, let's expand the targeting pool here and include him as one of the targets. They started looking into him. And because of all of the intelligence sharing that's been going on, as I mentioned earlier, it was pretty much seamless. They informed the FBI about this case. They said, we're looking into this guy. We're going to surveil him, follow him. Can't see anything untoward at the moment. And they maintained that operation against him.

17:52In secret, of course, it was all covert. Up until early 2002, the operation went from being a CSIS tip-off to now being run by the RCMP. So the Canadian police, but the counter-terrorism unit within the police. This Mahir Arar is married to a woman of Tunisian origin. And so he travels to Tunisia on holiday and eventually he returns to Canada and he happens to travel through New York. So when he gets to New York, the authorities there pull him up and they said, oh, your name's on a wanted list. And essentially the FBI had placed his name on a terror watch list. So they take him away into the Manhattan Correctional Facilities and they essentially say to him, we believe that you've committed terrorism offenses.

18:45He denies all of this. The Canadian consulates called. They come through and they weren't called till very late after they'd already debriefed him. And they stand in and say, well, what evidence do you have against this guy? And they said, well, we have evidence. We can't share this evidence at this point. Anyway, they then relocate him to another detention center. And at this point, the Canadians are interacting with the FBI, trying to establish to what extent do you have any evidence against him? Because the evidence that we've provided you with never met the threshold for arrest, let alone enough evidence to convict this guy.

19:23At one point, the Canadians seek some more information, and the FBI says, right, listen, we're figuring out whether or not to send him back home to Syria. And they said, but he's Canadian. He has Canadian citizenship. He should be here. They said, well, we'll see how that goes. Eventually, they meet with the Canadians and say, we're making the final decision soon. But in fact, they had already made the final decision without informing the Canadians. The FBI had essentially renditioned this guy to Jordan, and he was in a car being taken all the way to Syria, gets to Syria. The Canadians discovered this, but it's way too late.

20:02And for the next year or so, he's tortured. And at the beginning of the torture, they're smashing his hands with cable wires and all sorts. And the FBI is sending questions to the interrogators to ask him. Eventually, he confesses. And he says, he starts claiming that he's trained with bin Laden and he's got these links. But of course, none of that was true. He just wanted the torture to stop. The FBI was sending questions to the Syrians? Yes, correct. Yeah. And that's all come out in a public inquiry in Canada, which I discuss in the book. But they pass on the information and eventually the Syrians, I mean, his interrogators, even they feel sorry for him.

20:44They said, well, we don't think he's telling the truth. We don't think that he's a terror suspect. Can you imagine the Syrian torturers saying, this is a bit too much, even for us. So by that standard, they release him. He returns to Canada and he wants to sue the Canadian authorities, rightly. So Canadian authorities figure, well, we need to figure out what evidence the FBI had on him to see how we go about this. The FBI say, we can't give you the evidence. Reluctantly, they give the evidence with the assurance that that evidence cannot be shared in court. It's just for your eyes only. And it turns out that the evidence they used against this guy was the same information that Canadians had provided, which never met the threshold for arrest, let alone conviction, rendition, torture, and all the other things that they've sort of carried out.

21:31So it was a - And it becomes a big deal in Canada. Massive. He successfully sues the Canadians, I think for 10 million plus, but then so do several other targets, Canadian targets, at least one of whom was also sent back to Syria to be tortured. And it becomes a massive controversy in Canada. The FBI was implicated in. And that was a really dark moment. I mean, there are many dark moments throughout the war on terror, but that was a specific one that stood out to me and that was very confronting.

22:03Gordon:The essential point here for the Five Eyes is Canadian information is passed via a sort of existing structural mechanism to their counterparts in the US. And then that information is used against a Canadian citizen in this case to send him to Syria and be doing it. It's not used. It's misused. It's misapplied. So do the Canadians make a change in what they're going to supply to the US or how it's used? I think it's usually calculated on a case-by-case basis. I mean, look, the British have been compromised and they've compromised. The Americans have done the same thing. And the view here is that it's a dark situation, but we're still driven by the same purpose, which is to catch the bad guys, right?

22:52The Islamist terrorists. I think, of course, internally, they would have sorted things out. I think the individuals who were involved in this from the Canadian side were sidelined. I'm not sure to what extent, because none of that was public. And I think the Americans were also dealt with. I just don't know to what extent, but that's slightly irrelevant because what is relevant is that one man's life was completely destroyed. He was tortured all because of that cover-up and that misapplication of information. And that's a real problem. And I think that highlights the broader problems that were taking place during the war on terror.

23:30I mean, you could go through many cases not dissimilar to this in regards to Guantanamo Bay and what have you, but then the Canadians would come back a few years later and compromise the Americans. And that happened in 2009. Oh, Geoffrey Delisle. Geoffrey Delisle. Who's a Canadian... Naval intelligence officer who had access. Who gives away lots of secrets about the Five Eyes

23:53David:and their technical network. Exactly. It provides... And to this day, they don't know to what extent he compromised. Because I think what you get from the Maharar and this kind of counter-terrorism period story is you've got a unified purpose, which is dealing with terrorism. but once you start to get slightly different values or ways of doing it or methods, you start to get the tensions in the alliance, but it doesn't break it, does it? Again, there's enough common purpose there that they're trying to manage the difficulties and the lawyers are getting involved in. In Britain, it becomes a big, you know, the equivalent stories, there's Binyam Muhammad, there's other stories about, you know, drone strikes and there's tension, but it never really breaks the alliance because on the inside, I think everyone can see the value of perpetuating it, of keeping it.

24:39And you can sort of isolate it. So of course, yes, there was an issue with that, but there were multiple other cases that they did resolve. There were multiple other threats that they did foresee. So you can't apply this one case to everything that's going on. I mean, just like you can't, for instance, with the lead up to Iraq war, there were many people within the CIA, some of whom I interviewed as well, who was completely opposed to it. They're saying this intelligence just doesn't seem right. It doesn't sit well. And what was happening is they were being isolated away from the central discussions.

25:12And essentially what they created was an echo chamber that reflected everyone's thinking who wanted to use that material and exploit it to go to war. So it doesn't turn the entire system bad. It just means that you've got some rogue people.

25:27David:Yeah, because, you know, not everyone joins in on the war in Iraq. I mean, Australia does, doesn't it? To an extent. Yeah, a very small extent. The Canadians certainly don't. And the Canadians refused to get because George Bush contacted his counterpart in Canada, Christian, and he said to him, I'm going to send a team of CIA officers to brief you on the intelligence we had. And famously, he said, no, they can brief my intelligence officials, not me. And then we will make our minds up about whether or not this meets the threshold for, you know, taking military action. I mean, we talked about the airline plot 2006 being disrupted and we talked about terrorist plots being disrupted.

26:06David:And often, even when it's done in the UK by MI5, that's done on intelligence, provided sometimes by the NSA or the CIA or others. So what people in the inside of the intelligence community are seeing is the value of all this material going back and forth. And what you tend to get on the outside is when the problems come. but maybe let's take a break there and when we come back we'll look at the moment when the five eyes is forced out into the public and the reality of what it does gets global attention see you after the break this episode is brought to you by facebook so you were scrolling on marketplace and there it was the bike you'd been searching for you sent a message and it turned out the seller was super chatty kind of funny and an avid cyclist the next thing you know you're in a cycling crew.

26:55David:Well, a community cycling group. The thing about Facebook, you might find more than what you're looking for. From a browse to a bike ride, this summer, find more on Facebook. This episode is brought to you by Starbucks.

27:10Gordon:That is fire. Whoa, that's good. This might be the drink of the summer. Okay, I like this one too. I'm rocking with it, okay. Try it for yourself. Starbucks refreshers concentrates are coming home. Find them in the coffee aisle and make it yours.

27:25David:Starting a business can seem like a daunting task, unless you have a partner like Shopify.

27:30Gordon:They have the tools you need to start and grow your business. From designing a website, to marketing, to selling and beyond, Shopify can help with everything you need. There's a reason millions of companies like Mattel, Heinz, and Allbirds continue to trust and use them. With Shopify on your side, turn your big business idea into... Sign up for your$1 per month trial at shopify.com slash special offer.

27:58Gordon:Well, welcome back. We are now to the point in the story of the Five Eyes where, Gordon, we get to reintroduce one of your favorite characters, one of your dearest friends of the pod. And that is none other than well-known narcissist and shin splints sufferer, Edward Snowden. Eddie Snowden, return to the show.

28:19David:I'm not sure he's one of my favorite characters. I just think the point of him in this story is he reveals this signals intelligence relationship doesn't he to the world.

28:27Gordon:This relationship that has somehow survived the entirety of the Cold War and the post 9-11 era, it survived Henry Kissinger, it survived Philby and it survived aimlessness and budget cuts in the 1990s is brought to its knees by a Booz Allen Hamilton contractor. I mean, it's striking, isn't it, Richard, how much of this relationship we now know about and frankly, how much of the backbone of what signals intelligence collection had become by 2012, we know because of Edward Snowden. Yeah. Point that David made about how this alliance had survived the Cold War and the beginning of the war and terror and everything else.

29:11I think largely survived because of the lack of public accountability. No one knew what was happening. If you can imagine, if we knew as much about Cold War matters as we knew as a result of Snowden's disclosures, maybe it wouldn't have survived or maybe it would have looked a lot different. So Snowden, I mean, he's going to reveal lots about the Five Eyes. I didn't realize you liked Snowden so much, Gordon. That changes my opinion about it.

29:37Gordon:Gordon has a very soft spot. But Gordon's a dark horse when it comes to like, you just don't. I do not have a soft spot for Snowden. Young Philby.

29:45David:Young Philby, maybe. Young Philby, yeah. He calls him interesting. He calls Snowden interesting. That in itself is a compelling sort of insight. Yeah, this is all my friends at GCHQ are now switching off. Or they're at least taking your side. Yeah, take my side, please. Buy the book. Let's get back to the story of the Five Eyes. Because that moment where he reveals what they're collecting, that is a moment of crisis for the Five Eyes. Yeah, so this is before it's even revealed. because, of course, before Snowden came out publicly, there was the first leak to a newspaper, and it was the Guardian newspaper.

30:14And on the night that the Guardian was about to go to press, the director of GCHQ, Sir Ian Lobban, received a phone call at, I think, about 2 a.m. at his home from some NSA official saying, can you do anything about stopping this story? as if he's somehow going to do their press work. That in itself was so patronizing that they would call him up, but they did. And from his perspective, he was quite conflicted because he knew that there's going to be some material that's coming out in the public domain, which was going to be very damaging. They could tell from the questions that The Guardian had asked off the NSA and GCHQ.

30:55But he also believes in freedom of the press. So you don't intervene, and that's not his job. The story breaks. Then there are discussions that go on between the leaders of NSA and GCHQ. And Keith Alexander, who was the NSA director at the time, gave the essentially told GCHQ that we believe the breach is from your end. It's a Brit. It's the British. Someone in Britain has leaked this material. and so that sends the british into a tailspin particularly because of the security breaches that they've had historically we've talked about mcclain and philby and burgeson and all of the other cases and so they start feeling that well we need to conduct an inquiry so they did a security breach investigation started looking for some potential moles to figure out who it could be and then snowden would come out publicly as he did and the whole world will discover it's snowden But here's the key thing.

31:54I asked people about this and I said, at which point did the Americans inform you that it was actually Snowden who was behind the leak? An American, yeah. They never did. GCHQ, all the way to the top, discovered this when the rest of the world discovered this. There was never an apology subsequent to that, nothing else. If it had been the British who had leaked the information, so if someone from Britain, I strongly believe given the subsequent controversy, that there's a very good chance that the Brits may have been squeezed out to some extent, if not completely. It would have looked a lot different.

32:31If it had been a Brit. If it had been a Brit. And in fact, a few months later, there was a meeting, a Five Eyes meeting in Sydney, Australia, and the British were intending to confront the Americans about this. It's like saying, this is really damaging for all of us, but particularly, this had nothing to do with us. This is a contractor who's done this. And no one would really team up with the Brits because the Aussies are going, well, you know, look, we kind of want to stay on good terms with the Americans. And the New Zealanders couldn't really speak up. And the Canadians were saying, well, we've got our own issues that they had with Jeffrey Delisle.

33:05So the Americans just took it. And the broader point here is that every intelligence agency within every five-year country has been breached to some extent. And in so doing, those breaches have directly or indirectly affected other Five Eyes partners. So you have to live with it. It's not, the Snowden case is so unusual, but also so damaging because it revealed to our closest partners the spying operations that we were conducting against them. Like the Germans or some of the others.

33:39Gordon:Maybe it's helpful to start with just the capabilities that Snowden leaks. I mean, what do the leaks say about the capabilities that the Five Eyes had? I mean, this is now a decade and a half ago, but what do they say about the world of signals intelligence and the way the Five Eyes have sort of divvied it up in 2012, 2013? We've spoken about the divvying up earlier, but I think what it did is it showed the world what that divvying up looked like. And it also showed the world what access they can get, what information they can access from internet traffic to phone calls, essentially, anything that's in your palm is accessible through these signals hoovers, right?

34:22David:And it's back to the point as well that geography matters, isn't it? Which is where we started to some extent with the five eyes because it showed that there was like a global system, I guess. But also financing, I mean, it revealed. We didn't know prior to the disclosures, the public didn't know prior to Snowden's disclosures to what extent the British were receiving funds from the Americans. Yeah, NSA were paying for upgrades of intersense stations and things like that.

34:46Gordon:You had that great piece of data you had in your book, which is that I think it was between 2010 or 2009 and 2013 or something like that, the NSA had directly paid GCHQ over 100 million pounds. I mean, part of their budgeting, I know this to be true, GCHQ and other agencies, is every year you have to figure out what value are we providing the Americans to maintain that cash flow and the investment. And I think, I mean, it's not peculiar. It's part of the partnership. You have to give something in return. It is transactional. There is this kind of concept that we all share information. We all love each other.

35:24But it's largely transactional and for a good purpose, right? You've got to get something out of this. It is transactional.

35:30David:But the complication is when you have one partner, which is so much bigger than the others. I think that is the thing, is that for the Brits, maintaining the flow of US intelligence becomes an end in itself and something very important. So it means the Americans can afford to go, well, if Snowden had been yours, then maybe we can cut you off. But for the other four eyes, it's about maintaining the flow, whereas the Americans can afford to dictate in a different way. Also, more than a million documents were shared. I mean, I think we still don't know to the extent that, we still don't know the extent to which that breach damaged national security because there was, I've spoken to people, I'm sure you have too, Gordon.

36:13I spoke to people shortly after the Synergian disclosures and then subsequent to that while researching the book about the impact that had on human operations. I mean, a lot of sources kind of disappeared. Yeah. And also a lot of know-how, so a lot of operational capabilities that were used against targets became redundant because you can no longer use them. They knew how to counter those now.

36:38Gordon:I mean, the interesting thing though is that it's one of the more famous PowerPoint slides that Snowden leaked, which shows this kind of, it's almost an incomprehensible slide because it shows a map of the world and it shows all of the different types of installations that are part of the Five Eyes. And one of the things that's on there, I believe it's on the slide, is the different, the way, I thought this was so fascinating, is the way the NSA and presumably the rest of the Five Eyes, SIGINT agencies, think about what SIGINT is. And it shows, and the reason I bring this up is it goes to show why even though the Brits are smaller, the Kiwis are tiny, there's still in the modern age - Geography.

37:25Gordon:Geography matters. So it's like one of them was third party and liaison. One of them's a regional, which is basically in every embassy in the world, there's an upper room that's full of antennas and that are targeting very local signals, hugely important. And there were 80 plus dots on the map for those in most embassies, right? The other one, we talked about this in our Stuxnet series, is computer network exploitation. At the time, it was called NSA's Tailored Access Operations, I believe, TAO. And that's getting into very small, bespoke networks like at Natanz in Iran. But then there's the large cable, fiber cables, right?

38:08Gordon:So you think about undersea cables that come up on the coast of Cordwall. Well, if you want to put a splice in those cables to essentially siphon off every piece of traffic that goes through them, if you're going to do that in Cornwall, you want to do that with the Brits. You're going to do it with the Brits, right? And then the last one, which I think is kind of one of the oldest of the kind of modern methods is all the intercepts of the satellite dishes, right? Even though that is kind of a smaller piece of the pie today, you still want big radomes around the globe to intercept that traffic or try to, but also to be able to control your own drones and your own satellites and your own sort of regional communication kind of command and control posture.

38:57Gordon:The geography still really matters. So even though America is the dominant partner and is paying for, I think the installation that the NSA was paying for a renovation of, was it at Butte? At Butte. At Butte. At Butte. At Butte. Yeah. 100 million. Yeah. So you're paying for that geography, but we're still living in a world where because of the undersea cables and because of the need for essentially satellite communications, command and control, it matters. It's valuable. And you can't replace it if you lose it. It was also the public relations disaster that followed the certain disclosures because the public sort of lost faith in the agencies.

39:37They went from having to deal with their image post Iraq and all of the controversy that brought with it about renditions and detention centers and whatever else that we've already discussed to now going, well, the general members of the public are concerned about this because are they accessing my information? and to what extent? What about the communication that I'm having with family or friends? Is that accessible?

40:01David:One of the interesting questions which came up out of Snowden, which I think is worth addressing, is this issue about spying on each other because one of the questions I think that some of the reporting raised early on was whether Five Eyes was being used to get round controls on spying on your own citizens. So I think the claim was, well, you know, NSA is not supposed to spy on its own citizens, so does it ask GCHQ to spy on Americans? And that became a claim. And that was the claim. And actually, it was proven not to be true. Sure. But also, that became quite controversial when Trump came into power.

40:34Trump accused GCHQ of spying on his electoral campaign, if you recall.

40:40David:And this claim that what Five Eyes was is a secret way of spying on each other's systems and bypassing controls. And if you speak to Five Eyes people, they're very adamant that that is not how it works. And that if you're the UK, you know, you are under the same restrictions as the US in spying on US citizens and that there are controls on that. But that was one of the kind of interesting questions, which I think Snowden made people think that maybe this global surveillance system. They also started looking like the bad guys. I think they had to do a lot of work on public relations and transparency.

41:13I mean, there was a big thing about would.

41:15Gordon:SIGINT agencies are great at PR. Yeah, exactly. Well, SIGINT and human, because a big question that I was asking people when I was interviewing for this section was, could transparency have gotten to the point that it's at now without the Snowden case? And people said, well, eventually it was going to get there. I don't think so. I think intelligence agencies act when there's a controversy and it's happened with a very regular pattern. You could see it all throughout the Cold War, for instance, the 1960s and 1970s in the US and subsequent to that, the Snowden case, they only act when there's a controversy and they act properly.

41:52And then there's a bit of transparency.

41:54David:Let's focus on one other area where there was a bit of tension with the Five Eyes, though, before we finish this episode, which is actually over China. Because after that Snowden period, you start to get China coming onto the agenda as the kind of new threat and the new big problem. And here, again, you get a slight difference between them. And the difference comes over Huawei, this Chinese telecoms company, this issue about whether you should trust a Chinese telecoms company to build your 5G or new next generation phone infrastructure. No. Whether there's a – yeah. Yeah. And you've just paraphrased it.

42:31David:Well, the Aussies took the first step on that. And it's very interesting because there's quite a significant difference between the five eyes because the UK already has Chinese telecoms kit in its infrastructure from the 2000s. And it's allowed it in. GCHQ was kind of monitoring some of the kit. They thought they had a handle on it. They could control it. And the question becomes, do you allow more Chinese telecoms influence? And you're right. The Americans are going to say no, and the Aussies are going to say no. The Australians went first. Malcolm Turnbull, who was the prime minister at the time, actually tasked the head of the ASD at the time, Mike Burgess.

43:07The Australian Signals Director. The Australian Signals Director, which is the version of NSA in the US. And so they looked into this and they looked into whether or not there was a way to isolate some of the technology away from the sensitive systems. And they came to the conclusion that there wasn't a way. Now, some people would argue that was a commercial decision that was made. They wanted to cut out China. I think there was a lot of... Based on what I was told, I think that they were right to do that. And also they were particularly worried because China introduced legislation in 2017, the national intelligence legislation, which essentially obligated anyone, whether they're a corporate entity or an individual, to provide information to the intelligence agencies in China when requested.

43:54That's by law, right? So it was difficult to see their way around that. So Australia took the first step and then the Americans came on board and that's when it created a bit of tension with the UK, yes.

44:06Gordon:And to play that through, I mean, And so what that national intelligence law directly says, which frankly, I would wager the Ministry of State Security was kind of treating that law as precedent well before it existed. For decades. Right. If you happen to be working for Huawei in Sydney and you don't work for the MSS, right? But you're a Chinese citizen who happens to be on a contract with Huawei in Sydney and someone from the MSS asks you to do something, you are obliged under the law to cooperate with them. Can I ask a subversive question?

44:44David:Is it any different if you're an American telecoms company or a British telecoms company? You can say no as a telecoms. If there's a warrant signed by that. Well, then that can become public. The difference between dealing with an authoritarian regime. There's a difference in the democratic process. If that happened here, someone will tip you or me off and will write a story about it. Yeah. In China, who are you going to tip off? No, no, it's true. China Daily or what? In a sense, I'm not disputing. I mean, Huawei obviously say they don't, you know, spy. But in a sense, that's what Snowden revealed is all the Western telecoms companies are entirely complicit in intelligence gathering.

45:18David:I mean, that in a sense is why Huawei was so sensitive, because everyone knew this is possible. This is how it works. Because this is how it works. Because Western telecoms companies were shown, you know, they're up on the slides. They're providing their data from global customers to British, you know. But the legislation goes many steps further in China. That's us and we're democratic states and they're a different state. We have different values. That's fine. But all I'm saying is, you know, the reason why we're worried about Huawei is because of what we're doing in Five Eyes.

45:46Gordon:I guess the point is, is that in the UK, I presume, and in the US, it's not that Google or Verizon or Microsoft are able to say, no, you can't have access to anything, but that there's a legal framework in place that is not as... Authoritarian. Not as authoritarian. Agreed. Not as state focused as we have in China. Agreed. Agreed.

46:08David:So my point is that there's a reason why people were worried about Huawei, because we know what you can do with control of global telecoms. We as the five eyes understand the power of control over telecoms because we've been using it for decades. That's why as China becomes a global power and starts selling telecoms equipment, we're like, that's a risk. We understand the risks.

46:33Gordon:There's a great analog in the crypto AG story we did on the pod where if you actually control the hardware and then obviously the associated software that goes with that hardware that's designed for it, you can embed bugs, loopholes, backdoors into that tech that the other side may not be able to find. I mean, it absolutely is true. It's not – I don't think it's a question of fairness. It's a question – I agree with you – of understanding the advantage that control of a telecommunications or communications backbone gives you. You don't want to grant that to the other side. Yeah.

47:12David:No, and I'm not saying we should. What are you saying, Gordon? I'm saying – And now a message for our sponsors. Huawei. Yeah. The Ministry of State Security. Yeah. No, I'm merely saying that the fears over Huawei come from us knowing in the Five Eyes what we've been doing. What capabilities, yeah. What we've been doing. That's why we worry about it. But actually what is interesting in the context of the Five Eyes. The Five Eyes, it's not about fairness. No, it's about intelligence advantage.

47:41Gordon:It's about information advantage over our adversary.

47:43David:But what's so interesting in this case is the Americans are like, don't use Huawei equipment. And the Brits, GCHQ, are like, we can manage the risks. Yes. And so the Americans actually put quite significant pressure on the UK government through the context of Five Eyes. Deployed a few officials here to confront some British officials at the cabinet office. Yeah. And there's a scene that I write about in the book where they - Well, I think Kieran Martin, who's head of NCSC - Yeah, he's in there. Is confronted by American officials to be told, get rid of Huawei. Otherwise kind of thing.

48:14Gordon:Yeah. How would the Brits even come to a different conclusion about the sensitivity? Because I would assume that given the tightness between NSA and GCHQ, that the perspective on the vulnerability from a system would be quite similar.

48:29David:I mean, I can give you the brief, we could do episodes on this. The brief answer is we'd let them in almost without thinking in the early 2000s. And then we retrofitted a security regime around it. In 2010. In 2010 at Banbury, which is a place which I visited, which was paid for by Huawei, but staffed by effectively GCHQ people who were examining the kit and doing technical oversight of it. Now, that means they felt they could see what was going on with Huawei kit. If you wanted to be really cynical, you could say there are advantages if you're an intelligence agency in being able to understand and pore over the kit.

49:07David:And that might even offer you certain benefits as well as security management. So the Brits were like, this is actually, this kind of works for us. We're inside Huawei's deployment of its infrastructure. We can see what's happening and we can assess it for security reasons. So in their minds, that meant they could manage the risks. This became a really interesting debate. And we might talk about it because I think we're going to talk to Kieran Martin, who was overseeing this on the podcast in a bonus episode for our members about why the Brits had a different view from the Americans. But the Americans, I mean, the Americans turn up the pressure to the point where they say, we may not trust you enough to share certain forms of intelligence because of you having Huawei in your infrastructure.

49:53David:I mean, they said that, didn't they? I mean, whether they were really going to do it, I'm not sure. But there was a threat. But there was a threat, wasn't there, Richard? What would the Americans have cut off? It was the Americans in coalition with the Aussies. So the Aussies played a significant role in putting pressure on the Brits. But it would have been, for instance, if you've got US bases in the UK, if any of the communications would have gone off Huawei infrastructure, they'd be like, well, we can't trust that. And they're never quite specified. I mean, maybe we should ask here about this.

50:28David:what the cutoffs might have been. But the suggestion was not as a punishment they were claiming, but as a security measure. We can't trust some of our information going on your networks if those networks have Huawei in it. Of course, the truth is anything really top secret wouldn't go over a Huawei network. So the Brits were like, this doesn't make sense. And so I think it was more a case of political pressure by threatening it than actual cut-offs. There was definitely tension there, wasn't there, Richard? Yeah. Well, I think the political pressure is a key point. I spoke to Theresa May about this, subsequent to the UK banning Huawei.

51:11And I think that's the impression I got. There was because they felt they could protect the overall system by virtue of keeping them out of the sensitive areas, keeping Huawei out. But I think there was pressure. but also there were the cost pressures because Huawei was the cheapest. It was cheaper than Ericsson, I think, and the other organization that was providing. Well, maybe there as we talk about politics becoming a feature of this alliance,

51:42Gordon:let's end. And when we come back next time, we'll talk about what Five Eyes looks like in the age of Donald Trump.

51:49David:It's going to be a wild ride. And just a reminder, of course, you can listen to that episode right now. If you're a member of the Declassified Club, you'll get access to our bonus episodes in which we're going to talk to people who've sat at the heart running agencies of this Five Eyes Alliance. So do join up for that at therestisclassified.com. But otherwise, we'll see you next time. We'll see you next time.