Why the Five Eyes? - Ricerca sull'intelligenza artificiale specializzata al MIT

Why the Five Eyes?

Power and Identity in the Formation
of a Multilateral Intelligence Grouping

✣ Brad Williams

introduzione

Described variously as “the most exclusive intelligence sharing club in the
mondo,” “the world’s leading intelligence-sharing network,” “the world’s oldest
intelligence partnership,” and “the world’s deepest and most comprehensive
collaboration among spy services,” the “Five Eyes” multilateral intelligence-
sharing arrangement comprising the major intelligence services of Australia,
Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States was
formed in 1946 as the Cold War was emerging.1 The appellation of the group
was shorthand for the security classiﬁcation of intelligence documents shared
between these countries: “SECRET—AUS/CAN/NZ/UK/US EYES ONLY.”
The partnership originated out of the successful wartime intelligence relation-
ship between the United States and Great Britain and expanded over the next
decade through a series of further agreements to include Canada in 1948 E
Australia and New Zealand in 1956.

Member governments’ recent, well-publicized discussions of global issues
such as the push for transparency on COVID-19 and China’s imposition of
a new national security law on Hong Kong and their coordinated pooling of
strategic reserves of critical minerals may have created the impression of an
emerging economic and political union. This is not the case. The Five Eyes

1. James Cox, “Canada and the Five Eyes Intelligence Community,” Strategic Studies Working Group
Carte, Canadian Defence & Foreign Affairs Institute and Canadian International Council, Dicembre
2012, P. 4; Noah Barkin, “Exclusive: Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance Builds Coalition to Counter
China,” Reuters, 12 ottobre 2018; Alasdair Nicholson, “Suspicion Creeps into the Five Eyes,"
The Interpreter (Sydney), 30 agosto 2019, available online at https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the
-interpreter/suspicion-creeps-ﬁve-eyes; and Emma Vickers, “The 70-Year Spy Alliance the U.S.
Says It May Cut Off,” Bloomberg Businessweek (New York), 30 Giugno 2019, available online at https:
//www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-30/the-70-year-spy-alliance-the-u-s-says-it-may-cut
-off-quicktake.

Journal of Cold War Studies
Vol. 25, No. 1, Inverno 2023, pag. 101–137, https://doi.org/10.1162/jcws_a_01123
© 2023 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology

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Williams

is an intelligence grouping. Although members also cooperate formally in di-
verse areas of intelligence, such as human intelligence (HUMINT), covert
action, counterintelligence security provisions for data handling, and the
preparation of joint estimates, the core of these multilateral arrangements is
signals intelligence (SIGINT), a broad series of operations that target elec-
tromagnetic emissions.2 Quintuple cooperation covering exchanges of special
liaison ofﬁcers and technical intelligence on weapons research and develop-
ment, the use of shared communications systems, and the joint operation of
important facilities have contributed to the development of close personal ties
among senior ofﬁcials in the Five Eyes’ constituent intelligence agencies.3

The Five Eyes has long been shrouded in secrecy. The founding postwar
document, concluded on 5 Marzo 1946 and formally titled the “British-U.S.
Communication Intelligence Agreement,” has been depicted as “quite likely
the most secret agreement ever entered into by the English-speaking world.”4
Infatti, the agreement was so secret that Australian Prime Minister Gough
Whitlam reportedly was not informed of its existence until 1973. No govern-
ment ofﬁcially acknowledged the arrangement by name until 1999, when the
director of Australia’s Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) disclosed his coun-
try’s cooperation “with counterpart signals intelligence organizations overseas
under the UKUSA relationship” in a television interview.5 The contents of the
UKUSA agreement were ofﬁcially disclosed to the public for the ﬁrst time in
Giugno 2010.

For such a secretive grouping, the Five Eyes has often been embroiled
in public controversy, usually in relation to disclosures of mass surveillance
programs such as the ECHELON network and more recently the Edward
Snowden leaks, the latter revealing that members intentionally spied on one
another’s citizens and shared the collected information with one another to

2. Data-handling matters include secrecy agreements and standardized code words. See Jeffrey T.
Richelson and Desmond Ball, The Ties That Bind: Intelligence Cooperation between the UKUSA
Countries—The United Kingdom, the United States of America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand
(London: Allen & Unwin, 1985), pag. 5–6. Richard Aldrich notes that acute bureaucratic competi-
tion and security concerns are among the contributing factors to highly compartmentalized Five Eyes’
cooperation across the various intelligence disciplines and activities. Richard J. Aldrich, “British Intel-
ligence and the Anglo-American ‘Special Relationship’ during the Cold War,” Review of International
Studi, Vol. 24, No. 3 (1998), P. 336.

3. Richelson and Ball, The Ties That Bind, pag. 160–162.

4. James Bamford, The Puzzle Palace: A Report on America’s Most Secret Agency (New York: Penguin
Books, 1982), P. 309. Bamford is among several observers who claimed the agreement was concluded
In 1947 before an ofﬁcial disclosure in 2010 revealed the correct year to be 1946.

5. Duncan Campbell and Mark Honigsbaum, “Britain and US Spy on the World,” The Guardian
(London), 23 May 1999, P. 1.

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Why the Five Eyes?

circumvent restrictive domestic surveillance laws.6 The Five Eyes has been
in the international spotlight recently because of internal political differences
over the role of the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei in constructing
ﬁfth-generation (5G) broadband cellular networks.

The political nature of the Five Eyes, with its origins in the Anglo-
American “special relationship” and the imposition of intelligence bans on
non-compliant states, reﬂects a binary that has shaped the Five Eyes since its
earliest days: identity and power. Focusing on the ﬁrst decade of the Cold War,
this article examines the identity-realpolitik dynamic to answer what ostensi-
bly seems to be a simple question: Why does the Five Eyes comprise these
particular states? This is a study of political science rather than history. A
investigate the origins of the Five Eyes’ composition, the article therefore re-
lies largely on important secondary historical literature about wartime and
early postwar Anglo-U.S. intelligence cooperation, relations between these
two countries and their three smaller allies, and the development of their
respective spy organizations. Multiple studies that have addressed this topic
are implicitly informed by realist thinking.7 The aim here is to make explicit
what is theoretically implicit. Initially drawing on realist bargaining theory,
the article builds on these earlier studies by specifying the realpolitik mecha-
nisms that facilitate alliance formation, with a particular focus on the material
provision of territory for the establishment and operation of SIGINT facili-
ties. The article also sheds light on Britain’s attempted use of multilateralism
to enhance its inﬂuence over its key wartime ally, the United States, in the
incipient postwar SIGINT architecture.

Nevertheless, realism, despite its explanatory strength, leaves key issues
unanswered, especially those relating to the character and optimal number of
states for alliance formation. A study of the origins of the Five Eyes, Perciò,

6. James Ball, “US and UK Struck Secret Deal to Allow NSA to ‘Unmask’ Britons’ Personal Data,"
The Guardian, 20 novembre 2013, P. 1. Echelon is an automated system for the interception and
relay of electronic communications that features computer searches of collected SIGINT through the
input of keywords, enabling vast amounts of material to be processed and exploited.

7. Vedere, for instance, Richard J. Aldrich, “Secret Intelligence for a Post-war World: Reshaping the British
Intelligence Community, 1945–51,” in Richard J. Aldrich, ed., British Intelligence, Strategy and the
Cold War, 1945–51 (London: Routledge, 1992), pag. 15–49; Richard J. Aldrich, “The Value of ‘Resid-
ual Empire’: Anglo-American Intelligence Cooperation in Asia after 1945,” in Richard J. Aldrich and
Michael F. Hopkins, eds., Intelligenza, Defence and Diplomacy: British Policy in the Post-war World (Il-
ford, UK: Frank Cass, 1994), pag. 226–258; Aldrich, “British Intelligence,” pp. 331–351; Stephen
Budiansky, “The Difﬁcult Beginnings of US-British Codebreaking Cooperation,” Intelligence and Na-
tional Security, Vol. 15, No. 2 (2000), pag. 49–73; Bradley S. Smith, The Ultra-Magic Deals and the Most
Secret Special Relationship, 1940–1946 (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1993); and Wesley Wark, "IL
Road to CANUSA: How Canadian Signals Intelligence Won Its Independence and Helped Create the
Five Eyes,” Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 35, No.1 (2020), pag. 20–34.

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Williams

needs to be supplemented by an alternative approach. Liberalism is one ob-
vious candidate. A liberal (or Kantian) perspective that seeks an explanation
for the causes of cooperation by focusing on international regimes or insti-
tutions would seem to have merit. The late John Ruggie deﬁned regimes as
“a set of mutual expectations, rules and regulations, plans, organizational en-
ergies and ﬁnancial commitments [Quello] have been accepted by a group of
states.”8 One scholar even describes the Five Eyes as the “paramount example”
of an international intelligence regime.9 Ruggie’s deﬁnition neatly captures
many contemporary traits of the Five Eyes. Inoltre, there is evidence to sug-
gest that reciprocity, the core concept in the liberal perspective—manifested
as the barter or exchange of information—has at times guided the actions
of senior intelligence ofﬁcials within this grouping.10 However, an approach
that highlights the role of regimes and reciprocity does not adequately explain
why membership is limited to these ﬁve states, which constitute the inner
circle of Western intelligence-sharing arrangements. For instance, if regimes
mitigate the impact of anarchy and enhance long-term cooperation, why
not expand the membership circle of intelligence sharing and further maxi-
mize the prospects for sustained collaboration? Inoltre, why did reciprocity
result in a minilateral, ﬁve-state conﬁguration and not exclusive bilateral
arrangements?

The article adopts an analytically eclectic approach by supplementing a
realist account of the origins of the Five Eyes with an identity perspective.
The rationale for adopting this approach is that the formation of the intel-
ligence grouping was also shaped by powerful ideas that deﬁned the identity
of its members. The Five Eyes is also frequently described today using these
identity markers. Many of these ideas centered on an “Anglophone” or “Anglo-
Saxon” identity that was based on a hierarchical understanding of civilization,
culture, and race. The article’s central contention is that if an understand-
ing of identity grounded in culture suggests a natural process of international
intelligence community building, this was not the case. The formation of
the Five Eyes was not preordained. Although Anglo-Saxonism—a racialized
identity discourse emphasizing the kinship among white, English-speaking
countries that share common customs, interests, and values—was a necessary

8. John Gerard Ruggie, “International Response to Technology: Concepts and Trends,” International
Organization, Vol. 29, No. 3 (Estate 1975), P. 570.

9. Don Munton, “Intelligence Cooperation Meets International Studies Theory: Explaining Cana-
dian Operations in Castro’s Cuba,” Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 24, No. 1 (2009), P. 133.
Munton correctly notes that the Five Eyes is not a singular regime.

10. Vedere, for instance, Wark, “The Road to CANUSA.”

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Why the Five Eyes?

condition, it was insufﬁcient.11 In addition to being able to provide valuable
sites for SIGINT collection, aspiring members also had to be identiﬁed po-
litically as staunchly anti-Communist, and therefore acceptably trustworthy,
by the United States in order to participate in substantive intelligence-sharing
arrangements and become full members of the exclusive Five Eyes commu-
nity. Early postwar concerns over the political loyalties and secrecy protection
regime of the Australian government—a perceived weak link in the anti-Soviet
alliance—prompted Britain to initiate a process of socialization aimed at bol-
stering its afﬁliate’s security institutions and practices, which would also serve
to guarantee its own access to valuable intelligence from Washington.

Realism and Intelligence

As a perspective on international relations, realism would appear well suited
to explain the origins of the Five Eyes. As Don Munton notes, “Realism per-
meates intelligence theory and practice, informing the . . . literature.”12 This
inﬂuence is evident in the aphorism in intelligence studies that knowledge is
power, the primary goal of political action for realists. Intelligence can help
shed light on the intentions of decision-makers, an extremely difﬁcult un-
dertaking that speaks to one of the ﬁve basic assumptions structural realists
embrace regarding the nature of the international system: states can never be
certain about others’ intentions.13 A robust intelligence capability can also
serve as an instrument of power—a force multiplier—for states either in-
dividually or through international cooperation.14 Anglo-American wartime
intelligence cooperation offered the potential to contribute to defeating the
fascist threat but had to overcome considerable distrust.

Forging a Wartime SIGINT Alliance: Power and Distrust in the “Two Eyes”

The genesis of the Five Eyes lies in the wartime collaboration between Britain
and the United States to balance against the expansionist military operations

11. Bentley B. Allan, Srdjan Vucetic, and Ted Hopf, “The Distribution of Identity and the Future
of International Order: China’s Hegemonic Prospects,” International Organization, Vol. 72, No. 4
(Autunno 2018), P. 852. These authors highlight Anglo-American kinship, but the bonds also extended to
Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.

12. Munton, “Intelligence Cooperation Meets International Studies Theory,” p. 126.

13. See John Mearsheimer, “Structural Realism,” in Timothy Dunne, Milja Kurki, and Steve Smith,
eds., International Relations Theory: Discipline and Diversity (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press,
2007), P. 73.

14. Munton, “International Cooperation,” p. 127.

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launched by the Nazi German and Imperial Japanese regimes in Europe and
Asia. During the early phase of the war in Europe, as German forces swept
across much of the continent, Britain and the United States explored in-
telligence cooperation. Both allies had become aware of the other’s initial
success in breaking German and Japanese codes and, following bilateral dis-
cussions, signed a highly secretive agreement in November 1940, providing
for a comprehensive exchange of technical communications systems and in-
formation relating to the Axis powers’ diplomatic and military services.15 A
small U.S. mission traveled to Bletchley Park, the top-secret home of Britain’s
code-breaking apparatus, in early 1941 to promote bilateral technical cooper-
ation.16 Both allies appeared willing to cooperate through a generous exchange
of information about their wartime enemies. For instance, NOI. ofﬁcials pro-
vided their British counterparts with an encryption machine for breaking
Japanese codes, while Britain reciprocated with advanced cryptographic and
radio monitoring systems, work on Japanese military codes, and a variety of
diplomatic material, including ciphers from several countries.17

Tuttavia, bilateral intelligence cooperation was considerably more cir-
cumspect during this early phase of the war than might have been expected be-
tween allies ﬁghting a powerful enemy undertaking hostile acts of expansion.
The British jealously guarded key information pertaining to the advanced
German Enigma encryption machine. Although the British informed U.S.
intelligence ofﬁcials about their successes against Enigma, provided informa-
tion about the device, and showed them bombes (electromechanical devices
used for recovery of daily settings), they were unwilling to hand over a ma-
chine, as the United States had earlier done, and withheld its product, Ultra—
the codename given to the highly classiﬁed Enigma output—as well as precise
details relating to processing and actual intelligence operations.18

There are three reasons for Britain’s unwillingness to engage in full reci-
procity with the United States. Primo, the British were dismayed at the U.S.
government’s lack of security, which partly derived from naïveté.19 Second,
because the U.S. Army was not ﬁghting in Europe at this early stage, it made

15. Richelson and Ball, The Ties That Bind, P. 137.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid.; Richard J. Aldrich, GCHQ: The Uncensored History of Britain’s Most Secret Intelligence Agency
(New York: Harper Collins, 2010), P. 44; and John Ferris, Behind the Enigma: The Authorised His-
tory of GCHQ, Britain’s Secret Cyber-Intelligence Agency (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020),
P. 349.

18. Aldrich, GCHQ, pag. 39, 42; Budiansky, “The Difﬁcult Beginnings,” pp. 56–57; and Ferris, Behind
the Enigma, P. 350.

19. Budiansky, “The Difﬁcult Beginnings,” p. 50; and Smith, The Ultra-Magic Deals, P. 90.

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Why the Five Eyes?

little sense for the British to entrust their leaky ally with high-level intelligence
such as Ultra.20 The third, and arguably the most important, factor was based
on power considerations. The relatively weak and vulnerable British saw Ultra
as a trump card and source of leverage in their intelligence relationship with
the United States.21 Britain therefore wished to maintain its monopoly over
this crucial intelligence source and only begrudgingly loosened control in the
wake of German technical advances that rendered the British unable to read
Atlantic U-boat trafﬁc in early 1942.22 Although he British compromised to
enable collaboration in attacking the German naval Enigma, they still sought
to dominate the breaking and distribution of Enigma trafﬁc for joint military
operations and relented only when U.S. interests alone were at stake, ad esempio
preventing U-boat attacks off the U.S. east coast.23

The United States, for its part, was also cautious regarding certain
aspects of intelligence cooperation. The United States was not eager to re-
veal all its cryptographic secrets, especially those relating to its SIGABA ci-
pher machine, because of suspicions that the British were trying to read U.S.
codes.24 These suspicions were legitimate. The British were, Infatti, seeking
to break U.S. diplomatic codes up until the Pearl Harbor attack in Decem-
ber 1941 and thereafter were believed to be working on U.S. commercial
codes.25

The beginning of joint military operations near Europe, such as Opera-
tion Torch (the U.S. and British invasion of French North Africa in November
1942), and the persistent threat from German U-boat activity along the U.S.
east coast provided the impetus for further cooperation, which ultimately led
to the signing of the BRUSA Agreement in May 1943. Subsequently lauded as
a milestone in the development of the Anglo-American SIGINT relationship,
the agreement, as Bradley Smith contends, was not inevitable. Signiﬁcant ten-
sions characterized the negotiations, with both parties described menacingly
as “walking around and eyeing each other like two mongrels who had just

20. British-U.S. naval cooperation was more advanced. Smith, The Ultra-Magic Deals, pag. 115–117.

21. Ibid., P. 90; and Budiansky, “The Difﬁcult Beginnings,” p. 58.

22. Budiansky, “The Difﬁcult Beginnings,” pp. 58–60.

23. Ibid., P. 64. Although the British provided the United States with diplomatic ciphers from a
collection of countries, this cooperation did not extend to client states such as Egypt. See Aldrich,
GCHQ, P. 44.

24. Budiansky, “The Difﬁcult Beginnings,” p. 52.

25. Aldrich, GCHQ, pag. 40–41. The British were also concerned that U.S. codebreakers would attack
and break a cypher system for joint operations and developed a new machine to alleviate this threat.
See Ferris, Behind the Enigma, pag. 356–357.

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met.”26 It is therefore unsurprising that the agreement did not fully ameliorate
the mistrust between the “two eyes.” This is evident in both sides’ continued
adherence to the classic balance-of-power resolution of dividing territory into
spheres of inﬂuence and agreeing not to interfere in the other’s territory so
they could preserve the relative power equilibrium. Britain was suspicious of
NOI. interest in the UK’s sphere of inﬂuence in parts of the Middle East such
as Iraq, and the United States withheld information regarding the countries
of Latin America.27 Both countries also concealed from each other their work
on the diplomatic codes of their putative ally, the Soviet Union.28

With the war turning against Germany and its allies after their capitu-
lation in North Africa, the Allies’ invasion of Sicily, the surrender of Italy in
1943, and the start of massive Soviet counteroffensives, NOI. intelligence of-
ﬁcials began to look ahead to the end of hostilities, when cooperation with
the British would inevitably wane, making the establishment of a fully self-
sufﬁcient intelligence capability crucial ahead of the likely dissolution of the
alliance.29 With D-Day, the liberation of Paris, and the Allied assault on Japan
well underway, postwar settlements loomed—and were likely to be adversar-
ial.30 War had brought the Allies together, but this exogenous pressure was
no guarantee of future beneﬁcial intelligence cooperation.31 Intelligence liai-
son would prove to be equally troublesome in the face of another emerging
conﬂict.

Material Resources for an Expanded SIGINT Alliance
against the Soviet Threat

The demise of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in 1945 did not result in a
sudden shift of the Allies’ intelligence efforts to focus on the threat from the
USSR. The main SIGINT targets were understandably Germany and Japan,
but Britain and the United States never ceased collecting intelligence on their
Soviet ally. As Richard Aldrich notes, until Adolf Hitler’s ill-fated decision
to launch Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, the Soviet Union was a key

26. For the signiﬁcance of the BRUSA Agreement, see Aldrich, GCHQ, P. 43; and Smith, The Ultra-
Magic Deals, P. 152.

27. Budiansky, “The Difﬁcult Beginnings,” p. 66.

28. Ibid., P. 67.

29. Ibid., P. 62; and Ferris, Behind the Enigma, P. 356.

30. Aldrich, GCHQ, P. 45.

31. Eunan O’Halpin, “Small States and Big Secrets: Understanding SIGINT Cooperation between
Unequal Powers during the Second World War,” Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 17, No. 3
(2002), P. 3.

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intelligence target for Britain.32 The initial British concern was the threat
from subversion instigated by the Soviet State Security Committee (KGB),
concerns that were subsequently compounded by anxieties arising from Soviet
aggressiveness in Eastern Europe during the ﬁnal phase of the war.33 U.S. ofﬁ-
cials shared British concerns but targeted Soviet diplomatic communications
for a different reason. The U.S. government began to intercept Soviet diplo-
matic communications in early 1943 based on fears within senior Army intel-
ligence circles that the Soviet Union might again unexpectedly seek a separate
peace with Berlin, thereby allowing Nazi Germany to focus its military forces
against Great Britain and the United States. The United States wanted to as-
certain whether secret German-Soviet peace negotiations were taking place.34
The messages—ﬁnally decoded in 1946—did not show such evidence but, In
what later became known as the Venona Project, the code-breaking effort did
reveal that the Soviet Union had directed an extensive espionage campaign
against the United States and other countries. The USSR was now seen as
the major threat to U.S. and British interests, and in this initial period of the
Cold War both countries explored the prospects for continuing their wartime
SIGINT cooperation against this foe.

Postwar Anglo-American intelligence cooperation was a complex under-
taking that also involved negotiations with select wartime allies. This sec-
tion explores these processes through the lens of realist bargaining theory.
As Thomas Risse-Kappen explains, the theory examines how states employ
power in negotiations and is “applied to specify the conditions under which
small allies are likely to exert signiﬁcant inﬂuence on their leader in situa-
tions of conﬂicting preferences.”35 In the early Cold War years, the Western
intelligence camp had two leaders: the United States and Britain. The United
States had emerged from the Second World War as the preeminent global
power, whereas Britain was subordinate within the bilateral “special relation-
ship” but still enjoyed a measure of cultural, legal, linguistico, and political
inﬂuence globally, especially over its former colonies and protectorates. Aus-
tralia, Canada, and New Zealand looked to Britain and the United States for
leadership, although as the Cold War intensiﬁed they turned mainly to the
stati Uniti. The inﬂuence that Britain and the three smaller allies possessed

32. Aldrich, GCHQ, pag. 30–31.

33. Ibid., pag. 36, 46.

34. John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (Nuovo paradiso:
Stampa dell'Università di Yale, 1999), P. 8.

35. Thomas Risse-Kappen, Cooperation among Democracies: The European Inﬂuence on U.S. Straniero
Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), P. 20.

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derived largely from fulﬁlling a certain material condition that made them at-
tractive SIGINT partners in an anti-Soviet alliance. Realist bargaining theory
thus offers interesting insights into the process of SIGINT alliance-building.
Risse-Kappen identiﬁes ﬁve conditions under which small allies can in-

crease their bargaining leverage over larger partners:

(1) Hold more intense preferences than the alliance leader;
(2) Threaten to defect or remain neutral in disputes between the superpowers;
(3) The superpower perceives a high level of threat;
(4) Control irreplaceable material resources that the superpower needs;
(5) Pool resources and confront the alliance leader with a uniﬁed position.36

The ﬁrst two conditions do not seem to be directly relevant to this case. Al-
though the United States (and Britain) placed a high value on establishing
and maintaining the nascent postwar SIGINT alliance, there is little evidence
that Australia, New Zealand, and Canada (although Canada is a possible ex-
ception) drove a hard bargain during accession negotiations to the UKUSA
Agreement, making it difﬁcult to assert they held more intense preferences.
These countries also proved to be loyal U.S. allies in the intelligence Cold War
against the Soviet Union. Regarding the third condition, the United States
clearly felt threatened by the Soviet Union and, to a lesser degree, Communist
China under Mao Zedong and established a series of bilateral and multilateral
alliances to help balance against this menace. The fourth and ﬁfth conditions
are the most pertinent to early postwar efforts to create a multilateral SIGINT
alliance.

Territory for Basing

Controlling issue-speciﬁc resources required by the alliance leader can en-
able client states to enhance their bargaining power.37 As Hans Morgenthau
argued,

A weak nation may well possess an asset which is of such great value for its strong
ally as to be irreplaceable. Here the unique beneﬁt the former is able to grant or
withhold may give it within the alliance a status completely out of keeping with
the actual distribution of material power.38

36. For the purpose of narrative ﬂow, the fourth and ﬁfth conditions have been reversed from the order
given in Risse-Kappen, ibid., pag. 23–24.

37. Ibid., P. 22. For the particular importance of military installations as a small power resource, Vedere
also Robert O. Keohane, “The Big Inﬂuence of Small Allies,” Foreign Policy, No. 2 (Primavera 1971),
P. 165.

38. Hans Morgenthau, Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York: McGraw-
Hill, 1993), P. 201.

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Not only did the United States emerge from the war with a strong economy
and military, but its SIGINT apparatus “stood at the zenith of its power and
prestige.”39 In quantifying this strength, Matthew Aid notes that the main
NOI. SIGINT agencies, the U.S. Army’s Signal Security Agency and the Naval
Communications Intelligence Organization, comprised over 37,000 military
and civilian personnel, operating 37 listening posts “and dozens of tactical ra-
dio intelligence units around the world.”40 However, postwar demobilization
led to the dismantling and downsizing of U.S. SIGINT capabilities, with the
Army and Navy units losing 80 percent of their personnel.41 This diminishing
capability compelled the United States to seek assistance from its key wartime
intelligence ally.

Although Britain was one of the victorious allies, the economic costs of
the war took a heavy toll. The British economy lost considerable wealth and
struggled to stay solvent, forcing the government to adopt harsh austerity mea-
sures. Compared to other areas of Britain’s defense establishment, intelligence
agencies were less adversely affected by postwar austerity. Nonetheless, IL
increasingly expensive nature of the technology underpinning the SIGINT
work of the UK military and the Government Communications Headquar-
ters (GCHQ, known prior to 1946 as the Government Code and Cypher
School, GC&CS) resulted in rising costs that could not be sufﬁciently cov-
ered by the budget.42 This left Britain also looking for international partners
to help share the intelligence burden.

Britain still possessed a vastly experienced and impressive SIGINT ap-
paratus rivaled only by that of the United States. In the early postwar years
the United States lagged behind Britain in many cryptanalytic areas, held
GC&CS and general British COMINT (communications intelligence) O-
ganizational capabilities in extremely high regard, and readily accepted tute-
lage from its wartime ally.43 However, among the resources Britain could
provide to the United States following the latter’s signiﬁcant improvements to

39. Matthew Aid, The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency (New York:
Bloomsbury Press, 2009), P. 8.

40. Ibid.

41. Ibid., P. 9.

42. Aldrich, “Secret Intelligence for a Post-war World,” pp. 16, 28–29. British signals intelligence
began in 1914 after the outbreak of World War One in the form of separate naval and military orga-
nizations. These organizations merged in 1919 to become the GC&CS.

43. Thomas R. Johnson, American Cryptology during the Cold War, 1945–1989, Book 1: The Struggle
for Centralization, 1945–1960 (Fort Meade, MD: Center for Cryptologic History, National Security
Agency, 1995), P. 16. Many thanks to an anonymous reviewer for alerting me to this source. For the
point about British tutelage, see Ferris, Behind the Enigma, P. 374.

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its quantitative and qualitative SIGINT in the early 1950s, one of the more
valuable was territory—not only its own but also the array of colonies, do-
minions, protectorates, mandates, and other lands that constituted a “resid-
ual empire” upon which could be established military bases and other
appropriate sites for the technical collection of intelligence.44 Comprising
about one-quarter of the earth’s land surface by the outbreak of war, the British
Empire soon began a process of contraction through decolonization. Tuttavia,
a policy of peaceful disengagement allowed the British to maintain healthy re-
lationships with most former colonies and protectorates, which reorganized
into a voluntary association known as the Commonwealth of Nations. IL
territory constituting this global empire was especially important in the ab-
sence of space and advanced airborne collection systems in the ﬁrst years of
the Cold War, which required the United States to build a network of global
partners to aid in the interception of Soviet communications.45 The develop-
ment of satellites and long-range reconnaissance aircraft did not obviate the
necessity of ground-based installations, which were still superior “for certain
types of SIGINT collection.”46 Pooling resources bolstered the expanding al-
liance’s capacity to see through the Iron Curtain.

From BRUSA to UKUSA: Balancing and Bilateralism

The need to join forces facilitated by ﬁscal austerity and the threat posed
by the Soviet Union led to a ﬂurry of diplomatic activity to establish the
modalities of collaboration. It is unclear which side made the initial offer to
extend the wartime alliance.47 Nevertheless, during the closing stages of the
Paciﬁc War, both sides agreed on nearly complete cooperation in SIGINT
production. The agreement and the overall power imbalance did not mean,
Tuttavia, that Britain would easily accept a subordinate position within the

44. Aldrich, “British Intelligence,” p. 349. Ferris, in Behind the Enigma, P. 383, argues that “until
1952, British Sigint was bigger and better than American” and by early the next decade was “smaller
but still better.”

45. Richelson and Ball, The Ties That Bind, P. 174.

46. Ibid.

47. Johnson suggests the U.S. side proposed extensive cooperation with Britain against the Soviet
Union in June 1945. Johnson, American Cryptology, P. 159. Andrews mentions a British mission
to the United States at the end of April 1945 that sought to continue bilateral wartime SIGINT
cooperation. Christopher Andrews, For the President’s Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American
Presidency from Washington to Bush (New York: Harper Collins, 1995), P. 152. Ferris indicates that, COME
the war in Europe ended, the British made an informal proposal for continued cooperation against the
Soviet Union and the United States informally recommended that such collaboration be complete and
comprehensive. He does not clarify which side made the initial offer but states that this “cooperation
began just before Japan surrendered.” See Ferris, Behind the Enigma, pag. 360–361.

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Why the Five Eyes?

emerging anti-Soviet SIGINT architecture. Britain looked to key constituents
of its “residual empire” in a bid to diminish any subservience ahead of difﬁ-
cult negotiations with the United States, calling these afﬁliates to a Common-
wealth SIGINT conference in London from 22 February to 8 Marzo 1946. As
Aldrich explains, the aim of the forum was to pool resources and “create a crit-
ical mass” that could equalize or offset the imbalance in capabilities favoring
the United States.48

Britain’s objective was achieved somewhat when the participants agreed
at the London conference to establish a Commonwealth SIGINT Organi-
sation (CSO) that comprised the constituent specialist intelligence agencies
from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and Britain. The British envisioned
that this arrangement might be supplemented by the establishment of a
Commonwealth-wide architecture composed of Joint Intelligence Bureaus
(JIB) in which London would serve as a “hub” connecting JIB “spokes” in
each member state.49 The geographic division of labor was based on “poten-
tial for maximum intercept coverage,” with the British zone of responsibility
covering Africa and Europe east of the Ural Mountains.50 Australia’s agreed
contribution to the CSO’s global intercept network included “65 operating
teams, totalling 417 personnel,” which “would be shared equally between the
services.”51 Australia would have operational responsibilities for intercept ac-
tivities over “Ceylon, Malaya, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Australia and all
areas within this perimeter.”52 Canada would assist the CSO through the
provision of 100 intercept stations, con 35 on its east coast and 65 on the
west.53 These stations would target communications from the Soviet Union’s
polar regions, northern Europe, East Asia, and parts of Latin America.54

48. Richard J. Aldrich, “Signals Intelligence and GCHQ, 1945–70,” Intelligence and National Security,
Vol. 16, No. 1 (2001), P. 78; Aldrich, GCHQ, P. 92; and Aldrich cited in Richard Norton-Taylor, “Not
So Secret: Deal at the Heart of UK-US Intelligence,” The Guardian, 25 Giugno 2010, P. 3.

49. Owen L. Sirrs, “The Perils of Multinational Intelligence Coalitions: Britain, America and the
Origins of Pakistan’s ISI,” Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 33, No. 1 (2018), P. 39.

50. Desmond Ball and David Horner, Breaking the Codes: Australia’s KGB Spy Network, 1944–1950
(Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1998), P. 186; and Duncan Campbell, “Inside Echelon,” Global Pol-
icy Forum, 25 Luglio 2000, available online at https://archive.globalpolicy.org/empire/analysis/2000/
0725echelon.htm.
51. Ball and Horner, Breaking the Codes, P. 166.

52. Ibid., pag. 185–186.

53. Lt. Col. E. M. Drake, Memorandum to Chairman, CJIC, “Canadian Post-war Intercept Facilities,"
16 Gennaio 1946, in Library and Archives Canada, RG24, Vol. 8088, File 1274-10, pt. 1, cited in
Jensen, Cautious Beginnings, pag. 165–166.

54. Jensen, Cautious Beginnings, P. 166; and Matthew Aid, “All Glory Is Fleeting,” p. 12, cited in
Jensen, Cautious Beginnings, P. 169.

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New Zealand’s early contribution was the establishment of an intercept and
direction-ﬁnding (D/F) station under Australian authority, which would fo-
cus on the South Paciﬁc and Southeast Asia.55 The D/F function was also
part of an agreed Commonwealth global network that would connect stations
in Britain, Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus, India, Ceylon, the Coco Islands, Hong
Kong, Fiji, Canada, Bermuda, and Sierra Leone.56

British intelligence ofﬁcials were pursuing international negotiations
along two tracks. While negotiating multilaterally at the Commonwealth
SIGINT conference, the British were also engaged in bilateral talks with the
United States that would result in a landmark accord. Signed on 5 Marzo
1946 by Colonel Patrick Marr-Johnson of the British Army General Staff
on behalf of the London Signals Intelligence Board (LSIB) and Lieutenant
General Hoyt Vandenberg for the U.S. State-Army-Navy Communication
Intelligence Board (STANCIB) after six months of tense negotiations, IL
British-U.S. Communication Intelligence Agreement (BRUSA) formalized
the postwar SIGINT alliance between the two countries.57 The seven-page
document consists of twelve articles, calling inter alia for the “unrestricted”
exchange of intelligence products in six areas: (1) collection of trafﬁc; (2) ac-
quisition of communication documents and equipment; (3) trafﬁc analysis;
(4) cryptanalysis; (5) decryption and translation; E (6) acquisition of infor-
mation regarding communication organizations, practices, procedures, E
equipment.58 The absence of restrictions is conditional upon the exchanges
not being prejudicial to the “national interest” and the withholding of infor-
mation when “special interests so require.”59 By specifying these qualiﬁcations

55. Nicky Hager, Secret Power: New Zealand’s Role in the International Spy Network (Nelson, Nuovo
Zealand: Craig Potton Publishing, 1996), P. 60.

56. Drake, Memorandum to Chairman, cited in Jensen, Cautious Beginnings, P. 166.

57. The Army-Navy Communication Intelligence Board (ANCIB), consisting of the heads of intel-
ligence and communications for the two services, was established in March 1945. ANCIB became
STANCIB with the addition of the State Department in December 1945. The board changed its
name again to the United States Communications Intelligence Board in 1946. See Johnson, American
Cryptology during the Cold War, pag. 5–7.

58. The outline of the 1946 BRUSA Agreement and some of the declassiﬁed appendices and their
annexures have been accessible via the UK National Archives and U.S. National Security Agency
websites since 2010.

59. Some U.S. ofﬁcials were concerned that Britain might take advantage of comprehensive bi-
lateral COMINT exchanges to further its own commercial interests. NOI. concerns were ame-
liorated somewhat with suggestions of a British commitment not to engage in such activities,
which they were conﬁdent would be adhered to as long as Ernest Bevin remained foreign sec-
retary. See U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), “Communications Intelligence—8 Feb. 1946,"
UKUSA Agreement Release, available online at https://www.nsa.gov/Helpful-Links/NSA-FOIA/
Declassiﬁcation-Transparency-Initiatives/Historical-Releases/UKUSA/.

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Why the Five Eyes?

in otherwise unconditional intelligence exchanges, IL 1946 BRUSA Agree-
ment is in line with realist predictions.

The agreement is also notable for its anomalous treatment of Australia,
Canada, and New Zealand. These states were not signatories to what was
a bilateral Anglo-American accord. Referenced as “Dominions” that enjoyed
greater autonomy, they were therefore not parties to the agreement but were
also not regarded as third parties. Canada, whose participation in the nascent
SIGINT grouping was deemed especially crucial, was also treated differ-
ently from the other dominions.60 According to Article Six, any arrange-
ments STANCIB made with the other dominions required LSIB approval, Ma
proposed collaboration between Canada and STANCIB required the United
States to obtain only “the views” of its British counterpart. This provision
reﬂected U.S. recognition of Canada’s relatively greater strategic position in
relation to the main Soviet threat and was seen by Ottawa as evidence that it
might be possible to reshape its wartime intelligence links with the aim of “as-
sert[ing] an independent . . . role and avoid[ing] being subsumed into a Com-
monwealth apparatus led from London” like its dominion counterparts.61 In a
reﬂection of Canada’s distinctive position compared to the other dominions,
the Canadian government concluded a bilateral signals intelligence sharing
agreement with the United States in 1949 called CANUSA, which bolstered
Ottawa’s independent SIGINT status.62

IL 1946 BRUSA Agreement did not represent the endpoint of early
postwar SIGINT alliance formation among the wartime partners. British and
NOI. ofﬁcials engaged in further negotiations over the next two years to ﬁnal-
ize technical details and offer clariﬁcations for cryptologic cooperation, adding
these “as appendices to the core BRUSA Agreement.”63 The agreement was ex-
tended and amended in the following years to include ﬁrst Canada in 1948
and then Australia and New Zealand in 1956 in a process entailing a “package
of agreements, letters and memoranda of understanding” that would collec-
tively become known as the UKUSA Agreement.64 This protracted process
represented the alliance’s transition from the “two eyes” to the “ﬁve eyes.”

60. The head of GC&CS, Sir Edward Travis, remarked at an Anglo-American SIGINT meeting in
ottobre 1945 that the “exclusion of Canada from the proposed Agreement would be embarrassing for
all concerned.” Therefore, “Canada . . . must of necessity be included . . . [while] . . . Australia should
probably be included.” New Zealand was not mentioned in this document. See NSA, “Joint Meeting
of ANCIB and ANCICC—15 Oct. 1945,” UKUSA Agreement Release; emphasis added.

61. Wark, “The Road to CANUSA,” p. 23.

62. Ibid., pag. 20–34.

63. Jensen, Cautious Beginnings, P. 168.

64. Aldrich, “Signals Intelligence and GCHQ,” p. 76.

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Realism and the Five Eyes: Explanatory Strengths and Limitations

Realism is consistent with many aspects of early Five Eyes SIGINT coop-
eration. The alliance grew out of Anglo-American wartime collaboration that
was a response to the threat of German and Japanese aggression in Europe and
Asia. Signiﬁcant as this threat was in bringing Britain and the United States
together, it was insufﬁcient to eradicate the distrust between the two coun-
tries. They were keenly sensitive to intrusions into their respective spheres
of inﬂuence and, in the case of the British, reluctant to share prized in-
telligence secrets, which were perceived to be a valuable source of leverage
over a powerful ally. If Britain began the war as the dominant intelligence
power, the United States rose to preeminence by bringing to bear its substan-
tially greater technoeconomic resources. The British initially sought to offset
this power imbalance by pooling resources with leading afﬁliates as part of a
Commonwealth-wide endeavor. An especially important resource Britain pos-
sessed was an (albeit contracting) empire comprising strategically located ter-
ritories that were sites for facilities to intercept Soviet-bloc communications.
Tuttavia, the United States had clearly emerged as the hegemonic anti-Soviet
force during the early Cold War years, and this global resource was subsumed
into a Washington-dominated multilateral SIGINT alliance in which London
was increasingly forced to accept junior-partner status.

Britain’s subordination to the United States from the early 1950s was
evident in its formal designation within the UKUSA framework. The Five
Eyes is an asymmetrical alliance in which the United States was and re-
mains primus inter pares. The United States was formally designated the sole
“ﬁrst party,” whereas Britain, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand were “sec-
ond parties” to the agreement. The dominant U.S. status was underpinned
by increasingly superior SIGINT collection and military capabilities.65 The
SIGINT gap between the United States and its allies grew continually during
the Cold War—to the extent that, by the 1980s U.S. security and intelligence
agencies were estimated to account for “90 percent of the total budgets and
personnel of all the UKUSA agencies.”66 Given the resource dominance of
the United States, NOI. intelligence agencies were responsible for the largest
SIGINT collection zone, which covered the Caribbean, China, the Soviet
Union, the Middle East, and Africa.

65. Richelson and Ball, The Ties That Bind, pag. 7–8.

66. Ibid., P. 303. Even though the United States possesses superior resources, the NSA highly values
its Five Eyes partners’ speciﬁc SIGINT contributions, such as GCHQ’s technical capabilities and the
bulk data collection and geographical coverage of the other members. Many thanks to an anonymous
reviewer for drawing my attention to this point.

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The United States has used its vast intelligence power to shape its al-
liance partners’ security standards, screening criteria, and counterintelligence
requirements in a manner more consistent with its own prerogatives.67 Failure
to adhere to the dominant power’s standards resulted in the loss of access to
Washington’s vast intelligence resources. The U.S. government has not been
hesitant to use this access as a stick to punish its Five Eyes allies when they
adopt policies perceived to be inimical to U.S. interests. The United States
has occasionally employed such intelligence “cutoffs” to protest against, for
instance, the British government’s pro-European polices in the early 1970s,
New Zealand’s refusal to allow nuclear-capable warships to dock in its ports
since the mid-1980s, and Canada’s reluctance to send naval vessels to the Gulf
In 1990.68

Britain, with its long pedigree and pretensions, was not an equal of the
other “second parties” and exerted considerable inﬂuence over the domin-
ions during the early Cold War years. British intelligence agencies are be-
lieved to have accounted for 8 per cento, whereas the three smaller powers to-
gether contributed only about 2 percent of the Five Eyes’ material resources
by the 1980s.69 Below the Five Eyes’ ﬁrst and second tiers are the “third
parties” that are connected to the UKUSA Agreement through formal, bi-
lateral arrangements negotiated between the U.S. National Security Agency
(NSA) and their national SIGINT agencies in the 1950s and 1960s. IL
“third parties” cooperate with the Five Eyes in two main groups: (1) the Nine
Eyes, which comprises the Five Eyes plus Denmark, France, the Netherlands,
and Norway; E (2) the Fourteen Eyes, formally known as the SIGINT

67. Reg Whitaker, “Cold War Alchemy: How America, Britain and Canada Transformed Espionage
into Subversion,” Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 15, No. 2 (2000), P. 180. This standardiza-
tion of security practices is not unique to the Five Eyes but is applicable to other arrangements such
as U.S.-UK nuclear cooperation and also facilitates intelligence sharing beyond simply reﬂecting U.S.
interests. For more on common code words in Anglo-American SIGINT relations, see David Easter,
“Code Words, Euphemisms and What They Can Tell Us about Cold War Anglo-American Commu-
nications Intelligence,” Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 27, No. 6 (2012), pag. 875–895. Many
thanks to an anonymous reviewer for highlighting this point and drawing my attention to Easter’s
article.

68. For the concept of the “cutoff” and the British and Canadian examples, see Richard Aldrich, “Allied
Code-Breakers Co-operate—But Not Always,” The Guardian (London), 24 Giugno 2010, P. 10. Aldrich
notes in the same op-ed article that the Heath government retaliated with its own “cutoff” during the
1973 Yom Kippur War. Nicky Hager claims that New Zealand’s 1984 declaration of a nuclear-free
zone affected only the supply of U.S. military intelligence and that other intelligence ﬂows “continued
uninterrupted.” See Hager, Secret Power, pag. 23–24.

69. Richelson and Ball, The Ties That Bind, P. 303. During the Cold War, the Dominions were be-
lieved to contribute about 30 percent of GCHQ’s intercept and analytical capacity. See Ferris, Behind
the Enigma, P. 390.

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Seniors Europe and consisting of the Nine Eyes plus the Federal Republic
of Germany, Belgium, Italy, Spain, and Sweden.70

The “second parties” possess greater rights than their third-tier counter-
parts. U.S., UK, Australian, and New Zealand citizens are generally exempt
from intelligence targeting, unless approved by the host country government.
No such restriction exists for the Four Eyes’ “third party” peers. Inoltre,
although the “second parties” are able to engage in “essentially unqualiﬁed”
intelligence exchanges with the “ﬁrst party,” the “third parties” have a “looser,
more limited association.”71 The asymmetry between the United States and
the “third parties” is especially sharp. A former NSA analyst noted in the
early 1970s: “The Third Party Countries receive absolutely no material from
us, while we get anything they have, although generally it’s of pretty low
quality. . . . As it works out, the treaty is a one-way street.”72

In sum, realism helps explain key features of Five Eyes SIGINT coopera-
zione. Tuttavia, it also leaves important questions related to alliance formation
unanswered. For instance, Britain was eager to use its Commonwealth af-
ﬁliates to balance against the United States. Tuttavia, why did it choose to
cooperate with Australia, Canada, and New Zealand when enlisting the
support of other Commonwealth members, some of whom also occupied
geostrategically important locations for the interception of Soviet-bloc com-
munications, would have enhanced Britain’s bargaining power against its main
wartime ally? Wartime familiarity is sometimes offered, at least implicitly, COME
an explanation for the composition of the Five Eyes.73 The common expe-
rience of ﬁghting an enemy that waged wars of aggression and perpetrated
widespread atrocities in occupied territories, undertaking mass murder and
genocide, undeniably helped to galvanize and unite the Allied powers and
provided a shared platform for future military and intelligence cooperation.
Tuttavia, Five Eyes members were not the only countries to rally together
against the expansionist threat in Europe and Asia and the newer menace

70. Though not formally part of these two groups, Israel, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea are also
believed to be “third parties.”

71. Richelson and Ball, The Ties That Bind, P. 142; and Martin Rudner, “Britain Betwixt and Between:
UK SIGINT Alliance Strategy’s Transatlantic and European Connections,” Intelligence and National
Sicurezza, Vol. 16, No. 1 (2004), P. 574. According to one observer, the “third parties” are able to
trade raw data with the NSA but have less access to its database. Richie Koch, “What Countries Are
in the 5 Eyes, 9 Eyes and 14 Eyes Agreements?,” ProtonVPN, 30 agosto 2018, available online at
https://protonvpn.com/blog/5-eyes-global-surveillance/.
72. Winslow Peck, “U.S. Electronic Espionage: A Memoir,” Ramparts Magazine, Vol. 11, No. 2
(agosto 1972), P. 50.

73. Aldrich suggests this commonly held view is unsatisfactory. See Aldrich, “British Intelligence,"
P. 343.

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Why the Five Eyes?

of Soviet Communism. An extension of the “wartime familiarity” argument is
that Australia, Canada, and New Zealand proved themselves to be dependable
allies during World War II and were therefore included in a SIGINT group-
ing that was essentially a continuation of the wartime alliance.74 Although this
argument has merit, perceptions of dependability are not immutable. Signif-
icant security concerns in one membership aspirant during the early postwar
years substantially tarnished its reliability in the eyes of the larger powers, E
yet this issue did not prevent the country from ultimately joining the inner
circle of the UKUSA Agreement. The following discussion looks to an iden-
tity perspective in international relations as a supplement to help explain why
the Five Eyes comprises its current membership.

Identity and Intelligence

In contrast to realism, a constructivist perspective emphasizing identity might
ostensibly seem to offer fewer insights into the origins of the Five Eyes. Infatti,
one scholar boldly declares that constructivism, an inﬂuential approach that
argues identities are shared and can be constructed only through repetitive
social interactions, “has hitherto been unable to present anything that would
beneﬁt Intelligence Studies.”75 This criticism is misdirected in this particular
instance. Commentary on the Five Eyes frequently highlights the member-
states’ shared culture, history, and values.76 These ideational variables help
bind the members together into a community of actors engaged in the repe-
tition of culture, discourse, lingua, and ritual through which identities are
socially constructed.77 In the early postwar years, the milieu against which
states interacted was deﬁned by a hierarchy of ideas about civilization, cul-
ture, and race.78 The community in which the Five Eyes member-states was
situated was the Anglosphere.

74. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for highlighting the signiﬁcance of wartime SIGINT
liaison. David Horner, in un 14 Luglio 2020 communication with the author, noted the continuity aspect
of the Five Eyes.

75. Ralf G. V. Lillbacka, “Realism, Constructivism, and Intelligence Analysis,” International Journal of
Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Vol. 26, No. 2 (2013), P. 305.

76. Vedere, for instance, Cox, Canada and the Five Eyes Intelligence Community, P. 5; Norton-Taylor,
“Not So Secret”; and Martin Rudner, “Canada’s Communications Security Establishment, Signals
Intelligence and Counterterrorism,” Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 22, No. 4 (2007), P. 481.

77. Ted Hopf, “Russian Identity and Foreign Policy in Estonia and Uzbekistan,” in Celeste A. Wallan-
der, ed., The Sources of Russian Foreign Policy after the Cold War (Boulder, CO: Westview Press 1996),
P. 151.

78. David Capie, “Power, Identity and Multilateralism: The United States and Regional Institution-
alization in the Asia-Paciﬁc,” Ph.D. Diss., York University, Toronto, 2002, P. 64. Capie’s thesis and

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Inside the Anglosphere: The “Special Relationship,” “Old Dominions,"
and “New Commonwealth”

On 5 Marzo 1946, the same day Anglo-American intelligence ofﬁcials signed
the BRUSA Agreement, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill
delivered one of the most signiﬁcant speeches of the Cold War in Fulton, Mis-
souri. Churchill’s address, formally titled “Sinews of Peace” but later dubbed
the “Iron Curtain” speech, was replete with realist-inspired language.79 The
British elder statesman began by praising his U.S. hosts for standing “at the
pinnacle of world power.” He warned against the Soviet Union’s expansionist
policies, which were creating an “iron curtain” across Central and Eastern
Europe, and also spoke of “communist ﬁfth columns” operating throughout
the southern and western parts of the continent. Churchill emphasized the
Soviet Union’s obsession with power and denigration of military weakness.
Despite noting the importance of the recently established United Nations
(UN) in preventing war—a nod to liberalism—Churchill recommended a
realist prescription, an international armed force of “sheriffs and constables,"
to bolster the UN’s capabilities. In addition to preventing war and organizing
and policing the postwar order, Churchill declared that the UN also required
“the fraternal association of the English-speaking peoples” manifested as “a
special relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the
United States.”80

Churchill’s speech tapped into a body of thought that had risen in promi-
nence since the mid-nineteenth century and was known as Anglo-Saxonism,
a “racialized identity discourse that held Britain and the United States were
‘kinsmen’ with common interests, customs and values.”81 As Churchill hinted,
Anglo-Saxonism extended beyond the United States and Britain to incorpo-
rate the Anglophone peoples and societies of Australia, Canada, and New
Zealand. These ﬁve countries together constituted an Anglosphere, under-
stood as

an extensive but ill-deﬁned Anglophonic community bounded by a shared lan-
guage and associated forms of literature, culture, sport, media and familial ties,

another excellent study by Hemmer and Katzenstein examine in detail the relationship between iden-
tity and security institution-building in the Asia-Paciﬁc region. Christopher Hemmer and Peter J.
Katzenstein, “Why Is There No NATO in Asia? Collective Identity, Regionalism, and the Origins of
Multilateralism,” International Organization, Vol. 56, No. 3 (Estate 2002), pag. 575–607.

79. Winston Churchill, “Sinews of Peace, 1946,” National Churchill Museum, available online at
https://www.nationalchurchillmuseum.org/sinews-of-peace-iron-curtain-speech.html.
80. Ibid.

81. Allan, Vucetic and Hopf, “The Distribution of Identity and the Future of International Order,"
P. 852.

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Why the Five Eyes?

as well as the mutual commemoration of past and present military conﬂicts,
and ascription to a “civilisational” heritage founded on the values, beliefs and
practices of free-market economics and liberal democracy.82

In what clearly contradicted common understandings of liberal politics that
emphasize equality, the identity discourse underpinning this Anglophonic
“lifeworld,” to borrow from Risse, was an “implied natural unity and moral
superiority of” its constituent members, who sat atop a racial hierarchy con-
sisting of a predominately core, “white Self” and a “peripheral and overwhelm-
ingly non-white Other.”83

Anglo-Saxonism is argued to have contributed to the improvement in
Anglo-American diplomatic relations into the early twentieth century, helping
to overcome negative U.S. perceptions of Britain after the American Revolu-
tion and subsequently paving the way for cooperation that would lead to the
establishment of a bilateral “special relationship” proclaimed by its supporters
to be uniquely deep and close.84 However, common values and the exceptional
relationship they were purported to underpin did not translate into fully un-
restricted intelligence exchanges, especially during the early war years when
Britain sought to preserve its SIGINT advantages. As Britain struggled enor-
mously amid harsh postwar austerity, the overall power imbalance between
the two tilted more strongly in favor of the United States, which led to di-
vergent understandings of the importance of the special relationship. Prime
Minister Clement Attlee of the Labour Party was not as inclined as Churchill
to make overt appeals to English-speaking solidarity, but Atlee and his succes-
sors recognized the importance of the Anglo-American “special relationship”
for achieving key foreign and security policy objectives, including deterring
Soviet aggression and maintaining a pretense of preeminence in the face of
declining global status.85 The U.S. government was cognizant of Britain’s de-
sire to use the United States as a fulcrum to enhance its international fortunes.
Although U.S. ofﬁcials perceived the UK to be a valuable Cold War ally, Essi

82. Andrew Mycock and Ben Wellings, “The Anglosphere: Past, Present and Future,” British Academy
Review, No. 31 (Autumn 2017), pag. 42–45.

83. Thomas Risse, “Let’s Argue! Communicative Action in World Politics,” International Organiza-
zione, Vol. 54, No. 1 (Inverno 2000), pag. 1–39; and Srdjan Vucetic, Anglosphere: A Genealogy of Racial-
ized Identity in International Relations (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), pag. 3, 6.

84. Allan, Vucetic, and Hopf, “The Distribution of Identity,” p. 852.

85. Richard A. Best, Jr., “Co-operation with Like-Minded Peoples”: British Inﬂuences on American Security
Policy, 1945–1949 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), P. 22; and Daniel W. B. Lomas, Intelligenza
Security and the Atlee Governments, 1945–1951: An Uneasy Relationship? (Manchester, UK: Manchester
Stampa universitaria, 2017), P. 149.

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gave less weight than the British to the bilateral relationship.86 This is not to
say that mutual bonhomie was lacking. Infatti, a signiﬁcant feature of the
early Cold War intelligence alliance was the cultural bonding between socially
and ethnically conscious Oxbridge and Ivy League elites.87 However, Britain,
in particular, also found instrumental value in the “special relationship”
identity.

Anglo-Saxonism was a more prominent ideational variable shaping
Britain’s relationships with its imperial subjects. Not all the territories con-
stituting the British Empire were equal. Although all were British dominions,
only six had become “Dominions” by the early twentieth century: Canada,
Australia, New Zealand, Newfoundland, South Africa, and the Irish Free
State. These select polities enjoyed more than the grammatical distinction of
being referred to with an uppercase “D”; IL 1926 Balfour Declaration rec-
ognized these “Dominions” as “autonomous communities within the British
Empire,” giving them political equality with Great Britain, a status that be-
came a legal reality with the passage of the 1931 Statute of Westminster. Questo
community of Dominions was united in allegiance to the Crown, with the en-
tities ofﬁcially constituting the British Commonwealth of Nations. Amid the
gradual postwar dismantling of the empire, several former colonies also be-
came members of this community, which after the 1949 London Declaration
was formally called the “Commonwealth,” omitting the word “British.”

The British government continued to distinguish between its former
colonies during this transition. The reformed and retitled Commonwealth
was perceived to comprise, on the one hand, the older “kith and kin,” former
“large D” Dominions that were “real,” “original,” and “white”; E, on the
other hand, the newer Asian members that were speciﬁed by oppositional ad-
jectives.88 British leaders enjoyed especially amiable relations with their coun-
terparts from the “old” Commonwealth who were loyal subjects.89

This racialized distinction was evident in the UK’s intelligence rela-
tions with its Commonwealth partners. For instance, even though India
and Pakistan technically qualiﬁed to receive sensitive “Category A” classiﬁed

86. Aldrich, “The Value of ‘Residual Empire,’” pp. 226–227; and Christopher Thorne, Border Cross-
ing: Studies in International History (London: Blackwell, 1988), P. 76.

87. Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, In Spies We Trust: The Story of Western Intelligence (Oxford, UK: Oxford
Stampa universitaria, 2013), pag. 94, 117.

88. Vucetic, Anglosphere, P. 57.

89. Ritchie Ovendale, The English-Speaking Alliance: Britain, the United States, the Dominions and the
Cold War, 1945–51 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1985), P. 283.

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intelligence as British Commonwealth Dominions (after independence and
partition in 1947), they were treated as “Category B” non-Commonwealth
members.90 Both remained at the bottom of the security classiﬁcation hier-
archy as “Category C” states, even after MI5’s revision of the grading system
for intelligence in 1949.91 London’s variable treatment of its Commonwealth
partners was also evidenced in its provision of cypher equipment, vital for se-
curing communications. Australia was provided with a new cypher machine,
whereas India received only an older, less secure model.92 The formal justiﬁca-
tion for this inequitable treatment was the “practically non-existent” security
standards in India and Pakistan.93 In a clear reﬂection of the discriminatory
attitudes of the time, these poor standards were attributed to the “oriental
mente,” which acted as a barrier to these “new” Commonwealth members ever
reaching the levels of security consciousness of their British counterparts.94

Not only the subcontinent suffered from lax security during the early
Cold War years; insecurity was a problem faced by many democracies, includ-
ing the incipient Five Eyes, as Soviet-bloc spies undertook extensive efforts to
inﬁltrate key state and social institutions. Initial concerns centered on Canada
when a cipher clerk at the Soviet embassy, Igor Gouzenko, defected to Ottawa
nel mese di settembre 1945, just days after the end of the Second World War, con
a trove of documents on the Soviet Union’s espionage activities in the West.
The Canadian government hurriedly convened a Royal Commission early the
following year and, after establishing an internal panel and making arrests of
those named in the Gouzenko affair, appeared to restore U.S. and British con-
ﬁdence in Canada’s security arrangements.95 Ottawa’s decisiveness in dealing
with the crisis helped reafﬁrm its anti-Communist credentials.

90. Sirrs, “The Perils of Multinational Intelligence Coalitions,” p. 39. India’s dominion status was
temporary until its new republican constitution was promulgated in 1950, and Pakistan remained a
dominion until it became an Islamic republic under its 1956 constitution.

91. Calder Walton, Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire (Lon-
don: HarperPress, 2013), P. 146.

92. David Easter, “Protecting Secrets: British Diplomatic Cipher Machines in the Early Cold War,
1945–1970,” Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 34, No. 2 (2019), P. 161.

93. Sirrs, “The Perils of Multinational Intelligence Coalitions,” p. 39.

94. Ibid. British thinking about the Soviet Union by the end of the war was also underpinned by
cultural and racial stereotypes. Intelligence reports asserted that Russians in the USSR “are peasants
and should be regarded as such” and that “it would be unreasonable to expect Anglo-Saxon stan-
dards of behaviour from a primitive and largely Asiatic race.” Cited in Aldrich, “British Intelligence,"
P. 332.

95. Aldrich, “Secret Intelligence for a Post-war World,” p. 37.

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Laborite Australia: The Perceived Pro-Kremlin Security Weak Link

Australia was a different story. The U.S. Army’s Signal Intelligence Ser-
vice, the precursor to the NSA, began a top-secret program targeting the
USSR, its wartime ally, in February 1943. Later codenamed Venona, NOI.
SIGINT agencies collected and decoded Soviet diplomatic cables passing be-
tween Moscow and its various embassies in the 1940s. The United States,
with the assistance of Britain, began to decrypt some of these messages in
1946, and the program continued until it was formally terminated in 1980.
The Venona messages pertaining to Australia were unique in that some were
decrypted in “near real-time.”96 The decrypts revealed that Soviet spies had
penetrated the upper echelons of the Australian government, including the
Department of External Affairs, which extended to the ofﬁces of Minister
Herbert Evatt and Secretary John Burton.97 Soviet intelligence had used its as-
sets in Australia, considered an Achilles’ heel in the wartime allies’ intelligence
sharing network, to obtain copies of classiﬁed British defense documents.98
The U.S. government—its Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Navy, In
particular—had expressed reservations about Australian security since early
1947, and these concerns continued to mount. Di conseguenza, the United States
gradually tightened its release of classiﬁed information to Canberra before de-
ciding in mid-1948 to cease cooperation until further notice.99

The U.S. intelligence embargo was the direct result of poor security
in Australia. Tuttavia, Washington’s perceptions of Australian security were
also shaped by political identiﬁcation. Australia and the United States shared
many commonalities across the three constitutive elements of identity: cul-
ture, economics, and politics. Culturally, they had a common racial origin
and shared linguistic, religious, and cultural values. Despite exhibiting slightly

96. Robert L. Benson, The Venona Story (Fort Meade, MD: Center for Cryptologic History, NSA,
2012), available online at https://www.nsa.gov/portals/75/documents/about/cryptologic-heritage/
historical-ﬁgures-publications/publications/coldwar/venona_story.pdf. Documents from the Venona
program were declassiﬁed in 1995-1996.

97. Established upon federation in 1901, the Australian Department of External Affairs became the
Department of Foreign Affairs in November 1970 and since July 1987 has been the Department of
Foreign Affairs and Trade.

98. Dominique Clément, “Canada’s Integration into Global Intelligence-Sharing Networks: From
Gouzenko to the Montreal Olympics,” Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 33, No. 7 (2018),
P. 1057.

99. Ball and Horner, Breaking the Codes, pag. 174–176. Frank Cain contends that the U.S. naval at-
taché, Commander Stephen Jurika, and the ambassador, Myron M. Cowen, shared unfavorable views
of the Labor government and the domestic Communist threat, which inﬂuenced security decision-
making in Washington. See Frank Cain, “Venona in Australia and Its Long-Term Ramiﬁcations,"
Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 35, No. 2 (April 2000), pag. 235–236.

124

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different preferences regarding the role of the state in the market and the na-
ture of the social contract, they were capitalist economies. Politically, they were
democracies underpinned by liberal norms. Institutionally, the United States
differed by having a presidential system in contrast to the parliamentary sys-
tems found in Australia, Canada, Britain, and New Zealand. Tuttavia, a far
more signiﬁcant political issue for the United States was its perception of the
Australian government’s ideological leanings in the mid-to-late 1940s, Quale
resulted in an assessment of Australia as a poor security risk. This divergence
in political norms prevented Australia from being fully welcomed into the
incipient postwar allied intelligence community.

Australia was under Labor Party rule and had been since the advent of
the John Curtin government in late 1941. Curtin had forged close military
ties with the United States since the early months of the Paciﬁc War, E
he enjoyed a strong working relationship with the Allied Supreme Comman-
der in the Southwest Paciﬁc Area, General Douglas MacArthur. After defeat-
ing a caretaker leader in a leadership ballot following Curtin’s death in ofﬁce
In 1945, Ben Chiﬂey became prime minister, serving until December 1949.
According to a study of his foreign policy achievements, Chiﬂey was anti-
Communist but diverged from prevailing political attitudes in London and
Washington about the proximate cause for the early postwar push for inde-
pendence in Asia, believing these movements were driven more by nationalist
aspirations than by Communism.100 The United States, nevertheless, saw the
Chiﬂey administration as “a leftist government greatly inﬂuenced by commu-
nistic inﬁltrated labor organizations” that was the product of “political im-
maturity” and made Australia “a poor security risk.”101 Chiﬂey himself believed
NOI. ofﬁcials were biased against Australian security to the point that they had
“psychological problems” that were “extremely difﬁcult to overcome.”102 U.S.
ofﬁcials, who believed Australia’s security problems were unresolvable as long
as the “pro-communist” Labor Party was in power, hoped the party would be
replaced at the next elections.103

100. Julie Suares, JB Chiﬂey: An Ardent Internationalist (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press,
2019).

101. “Report to meeting of SANACC-MIC, 18 May 1948,” in File 206/57, RG353, NOI. National
Archives and Records Administration, cited in Cain, “Venona in Australia and Its Long-Term Ramiﬁ-
cations,” pp. 235–236; emphasis in original.

102. Exchange of Information with the United States, Minutes of a Meeting Held at 10 Downing
Street, 27 April 1949, in CAB 130/46, Public Record Ofﬁce, London, cited in Cain, “Venona in
Australia and Its Long-Term Ramiﬁcations,” p. 237.

103. Private Reports from Washington and London on Secretary’s visit to Washington, n.d., in A5954,
National Archives of Australia, cited in Cain, “Venona in Australia and Its Long-Term Ramiﬁcations.”

125

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Similar fears in Washington and London also inﬂuenced policies toward
France and India, two countries whose material power resources ostensibly
might have earned them passage to the inner circle of Anglo-American-led
intelligence cooperation. In the early postwar years both governments were
believed to have been penetrated by Communists and were considered poor
security risks. In the case of India, Western perceptions that the Nehru gov-
ernment, at the very least, had a benign view of Communism compounded
the orientalist thinking of Anglo-American security practices.104 There is no
evidence to suggest that France and India were ever invited to participate in
the emerging postwar SIGINT architecture. France’s and India’s autonomous
foreign policy orientations might have prevented their acceptance of such an
invitation, had it been forthcoming. This autonomy drive, Tuttavia, did not
preclude the establishment of SIGINT relationships, as both countries, anche
as Pakistan, engaged in more focused, bilateral intelligence cooperation with
the United States.105

NOI. concerns about these matters can be understood only by looking at
the historical context. The late 1940s was the beginning of a period in the
United States of deep anxiety about Communist subversion. Lasting through
the 1950s, this period of extreme paranoia was characterized by intensiﬁed
political repression and a campaign, led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, con
whom it became synonymous, that escalated fears of Soviet espionage and
Communist inﬂuence on U.S. istituzioni. The high-proﬁle case of Alger
Hiss, a senior State Department ofﬁcial who was accused of spying for the So-
viet Union and was ultimately convicted of perjury, had a far-reaching impact
on public and elite opinion. Hiss was widely, and controversially, considered
the tip of the Communist espionage iceberg, with the Venona decrypts later

104. For a declassiﬁed CIA report on Jawaharlal Nehru’s view of Communism, see CIA, “Nehru on
Communism: An Awakening,” in U.S. National Archive and Records Administration (NARA), CIA
Records Search Tool (CREST), Doc. No. CIA-RDP78-02771R000400010002-2. The British and
Americans also believed the French to be a poor security risk because of their perceived national
character. See Thomas K. Robb and Michael Seibold, “Spying on Friends: British Assessment of French
Sicurezza,” The International History Review, Vol. 36, No. 1 (2014), pag. 117–118; and Jones, In Spies
We Trust, P. 29.

105. Desmond Ball notes that Indian SIGINT operations had “an extraordinary purview for a . . .
non-aligned country” and included cooperation chieﬂy with the United States and the USSR and to
a lesser extent Great Britain, West Germany, and Italy. See Desmond Ball, “Signals Intelligence (SIG-
INT) in South Asia: India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka (Ceylon),” Canberra Papers on Strategy and Defence
No. 117, Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Research School of Paciﬁc and Asian Studies, Aus-
tralian National University, Canberra, 1996, pag. 13, 28. Like India, Pakistan also moved away from
Great Britain and gave priority to a close intelligence relationship with the United States, which be-
came its most important international partner. See Ball, Signals Intelligence, pag. 49–53; and Sirrs, "IL
Perils of Multinational Intelligence Coalitions,” p. 43.

126

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Why the Five Eyes?

revealing that 349 Americans maintained clandestine relations with Soviet in-
telligence.106 The Soviet Union’s installation of puppet regimes in areas it oc-
cupied across Central and Eastern Europe, its nuclear bomb test in August
1949, which took many observers by surprise, and the Communist victory
in the Chinese Civil War—dubbed “the loss of China”—were international
developments that combined with threats of espionage and government pene-
tration to heighten U.S. fears that Communism was in the ascendency. Al
heart of these fears was the understanding that Communism was the antithe-
sis of the core ideological pillars of the United States: capitalism, democracy,
and Christianity. The U.S. government thus had to be cautious about shar-
ing secrets with a government with perceived pro-Kremlin proclivities, even a
purported ally.

The ramiﬁcations of the U.S. decision to stop sharing classiﬁed intelli-
gence with Australia were felt beyond this bilateral relationship. As Aldrich
notes, Australian intelligence leaks also served to undermine U.S. conﬁdence
in Great Britain. NOI. ofﬁcials feared that material they shared with London
would subsequently ﬁnd its way to the Kremlin by way of Canberra. Britain
was concerned that this could result in the curtailment of U.S. intelligence
and technical cooperation.107 Britain’s response was to undertake an effort to
socialize political leaders in Australia in order to encourage Canberra to pursue
more stringent security policies.

Socialization for Security and Community

Examining broadly how hegemonic states assert control over smaller polities
in the international system, John Ikenberry and Charles Kupchan focus atten-
tion on non-material processes of socialization by which secondary state elites
accept and internalize norms the hegemon articulates, which facilitate their
adoption of policies consistent with the dominant power’s beliefs about the

106. Haynes and Klehr provide another list of individuals who had secret relations with Soviet intel-
ligence: 139 Americans not sourced in Venona, 33 foreigners who were resident in the United States,
and an additional 24 Americans the Soviets targeted for recruitment. Haynes and Klehr, Venona,
pag. 339–390. Hiss maintained his innocence until his death in 1996, but the Venona papers and
the subsequent release of Alexander Vassiliev’s notebooks of transcribed Soviet intelligence documents
belie Hiss’s denials.

107. Aldrich, “The Value of ‘Residual Empire,’” p. 243. The U.S. Congress passed the McMahon
Act in 1946; it forbade the transfer of classiﬁed nuclear weapons information to any foreign country,
including Great Britain. Revelations that the British physicist Alan Nunn May had passed information
about the Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union contributed to the bill’s passage.

127

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international order.108 With the UK’s national power sapped by two world
wars and the contraction of the British empire, London’s hegemonic days
were a distant memory. Tuttavia, Britain, despite its declining power, still
had the world’s third-largest economy in the early postwar years, possessed
impressive military and, particolarmente, intelligence resources, and was ﬁrmly allied
with the world’s newest hegemon in the global struggle against Communism.
Inoltre, Britain continued to hold substantial ideational sway over many
of its dominions, old and new. Socialization, Perciò, captures important
aspects of the intelligence relationship between London and Canberra in the
late 1940s.

Ikenberry and Kupchan identify three mechanisms through which social-
ization occurs: (1) norm persuasion; (2) external inducement; E (3) inter-
nal reconstruction. Normative persuasion occurs when the hegemon relies on
ideological persuasion and transactional learning to secure the compliance of
secondary states. External inducement is a coercive approach that entails offers
of economic and military incentives to persuade smaller states to change their
policies. Internal reconstruction occurs when the hegemon intervenes directly
in the secondary state and transforms its political institutions.109 With some
minor variations, the British used these mechanisms in an effort to socialize
Australia into enhancing its secrecy protection regime.

Concerns about Australian security were the primary motivation for
the British to undertake an exercise in multilateral norm persuasion in the
form of a Commonwealth Security Conference that was held in London in
ottobre 1948.110 British ofﬁcials hoped the development of uniform coun-
terintelligence practices would help thwart the threat of Communist sub-
version and expansion.111 Representatives from the security agencies of
Australia, Canada—which, despite its drive for SIGINT independence, con-
tinued to maintain an “anglophilic” orientation—New Zealand, South Africa,
and Southern Rhodesia were invited to attend.112 The newly independent gov-
ernments of India, Pakistan, and Ceylon were snubbed.113 The early exclusion

108. G. John Ikenberry and Charles A. Kupchan, “Socialization and Hegemonic Power,” International
Organization, Vol. 44, No. 3 (Estate 1990), pag. 282–315.

109. Ibid., pag. 290–292.

110. Christopher Andrew, Defend the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 2009), P. 371; and Horner, The Spy Catchers, P. 99.

111. Philip Murphy, “Creating a Commonwealth Intelligence Culture: The View from Central
Africa,” Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 17, No. 3 (2002) P. 142.

112. On Canada’s orientation, see Wark, “The Road to CANUSA,” p. 29.

113. Murphy, “Creating a Commonwealth Intelligence Culture,” p. 142.

128

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of the three South Asian governments facilitated the reproduction of a socially
constructed identity for the CSO as an exclusive Anglo-Saxon intelligence-
sharing arrangement. The three “new Commonwealth” members were invited
to the conference that followed in 1951, by which time the British believed
they had to inculcate a common intelligence culture across their former
empire.114

Recognizing that intelligence community reform would greatly assist in
Australia’s internalization of more robust security norms, the British govern-
ment had begun pressuring Canberra to establish a new counterespionage or-
ganization in early 1948. The existing body responsible for this function, IL
Commonwealth Investigation Service (CIS), which was created in Novem-
ber 1945 out of a merger of the Commonwealth Investigations Branch and
the wartime security service, was deemed incapable of being reformed.115 A
team of senior MI5 ofﬁcials led by Director-General Sir Percy Sillitoe and
including the head of the counterintelligence section focusing on the Soviet
Union, Roger Hollis (a future director-general), traveled to Australia in Febru-
ary to investigate the leaks and make the case for a new security organiza-
zione. After a month, Sillitoe returned to Britain, from where he continued
to monitor developments in Australia. The visit was the ﬁrst of three Hollis
made to Australia over the following twelve months in an effort to convince
a somewhat reluctant Chiﬂey of the necessity of establishing an MI5-type
organization. After being briefed on Venona and recognizing the damage in-
ﬂicted on Australia by the U.S. intelligence embargo, Chiﬂey agreed to a new
counterintelligence organization in September 1948.116 The unnamed orga-
nization was inaugurated in March the following year with a staff of ﬁfteen
under the leadership of a respected judge, Sir Geoffrey Reed, and ﬁve months
later was formally named the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation
(ASIO).

Beyond extensive lobbying—an activity in which the United States
also engaged—the British contribution to Australia’s counterintelligence
institution-building was multifaceted. Hollis and the MI5 liaison ofﬁcer
to CIS, Robert Hemblys-Scales, provided advice on the new organiza-
tion’s charter, responsibilities, structure, and appointments.117 ASIO’s charter

114. Ibid.

115. Horner, The Spy Catchers, P. 99.

116. Horner also includes Hollis’s identiﬁcation of the individuals who passed intelligence to the So-
viet embassy and John Burton’s efforts to persuade Chiﬂey of the importance of Australia’s security
contribution to the British Commonwealth as contributing factors. Ibid., pag. 103–104.

117. Ibid., P. 116.

129

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mirrored MI5’s own directive, and its structure, also similar to that of
its British counterpart, was based on three core activities: B1 (Counter-
Subversion), B2 (Counter-Espionage), and C (Protective Security).118 IL
British also helped interview potential staff whom Australian ofﬁcials had
identiﬁed as suitable and even provided input into the location of the new
organization’s headquarters away from Canberra, where ASIO would have
been too conspicuous.119 ASIO’s planners ultimately decided the headquar-
ters should be based in Sydney, where the organization’s main target, the Aus-
tralian Communist Party, was concentrated and also where the CIS’s relevant
ﬁles were located.120 In a departure from the British model, owing to Aus-
tralia’s larger geographic area, ASIO was organized on a regional basis, con
three directors, one each based in Canberra, Melbourne, and Sydney.121

Britain played a similar role in the establishment of Australia’s key
SIGINT and foreign HUMINT organizations, the Defence Signals Bureau
(DSB) and the Australian Secret Intelligence Service respectively. When the
DSB was established in April 1947, it exhibited an unusual characteristic for
a sovereign state: it was headed by a British ofﬁcer, Lt. Commander Teddy
Poulden. Although four Australian candidates stood for the position, Aus-
tralian leaders agreed, despite some local misgivings, to the UK’s demands that
a British ofﬁcer lead the new organization. This was a precondition for Britain
to share the product of its intercepts with Australia.122 Australian authorities
accepted Poulden’s appointment in the belief not only that it would ensure the
best possible access to British intelligence but also that an Australian would ul-
timately assume the directorship.123 Poulden, who brought with him a twenty-
person team of British SIGINT ofﬁcers to work in the DSB, had received his
own personal ciphers from GCHQ to communicate with its director-general,
Sir Edward Travis.124 The DSB’s unusual leadership arrangement was discon-
tinued in April 1950 when Ralph Thompson succeeded Poulden as direc-
tor, a post he held for nearly three decades. By this time, the DSB had been

118. Christopher Andrew, “The Growth of the Australian Intelligence Community and the Anglo-
American Connection,” Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 4, No. 2 (1989), P. 228; and Horner,
The Spy Catchers, P. 130.

119. Ibid., P. 112.

120. Ibid., P. 130.

121. Ibid.

122. Ball and Horner, Breaking the Codes, P. 167.

123. Ibid.

124. Andrew, “The Growth of the Australian Intelligence Community,” p. 223.

130

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renamed the Defence Signals Branch (In 1949), the ﬁrst of four name changes
for the country’s premier signals intelligence agency.125

Ikenberry and Kupchan argue that socialization occurs primarily after
wars and political crises.126 The British campaign to socialize Australia, anche
as other members of the Commonwealth, into upgrading their security prac-
tices began in the aftermath of the Second World War and intensiﬁed as a
new conﬂict, the Cold War, was taking shape. Australia, in particular, faced a
political and security crisis as it was slowly excluded from the nascent Anglo-
Saxon intelligence-sharing network—a form of external inducement—as a re-
sult of leaks arising from Soviet espionage. In addition to taking place in a
post-conﬂict milieu, internal reconstruction occurs only when the hegemon
occupies a defeated secondary state and assumes responsibility for its recon-
struction or when the imperial power colonizes a peripheral state.127 Australia
was neither a defeated state under occupation nor a formal colony. How-
ever, in this case of internal “reconstruction light,” an otherwise loyal for-
mer colony ultimately agreed in the face of persistent lobbying to subvert its
own sovereignty and accept the symbolic imperial center’s tutelage and over-
sight in the reorganization of its intelligence apparatus to ameliorate material
and identity-based concerns about poor security, enabling Australia to take its
place in the nascent postwar Anglo-Saxon SIGINT community.

Although the formation of ASIO was a positive step in bolstering Aus-
tralia’s counterintelligence capabilities, the United States remained skeptical
of the security risk in Canberra.128 A political development in Australia at the
end of 1949 helped alleviate U.S. concerns. After eight years of Labor rule,
a conservative Liberal–Country Party coalition won the federal election in
Dicembre 1949 and returned its leader, Robert Menzies, as prime minister.
Menzies was ﬁercely anti-Communist and in his previous government (1939–
1941) had banned the Communist Party and imprisoned its ofﬁcials only to
see Attorney General Evatt of the new Labor government reverse this policy.129
Upon reelection, Menzies again sought to ban the Communist Party, but this

125. The DSB retained this title until 1964, when it became the Defence Signals Division. Following
IL 1977 Hope Royal Commission into Intelligence and Security, the organization was renamed the
Defence Signals Directorate (DSD). In May 2013, the DSD was renamed the Australian Signals
Directorate (ASD), a reﬂection of its whole-of-government role in national security. See Australian
Signals Directorate, “History,” available online at https://www.asd.gov.au/about/history.
126. Ikenberry and Kupchan, “Socialization and Hegemonic Power,” p. 284.

127. Ibid., P. 292.

128. Aldrich, “Secret Intelligence for a Post-war World,” p. 38.

129. Evatt concurrently held the posts of attorney general and minister for external affairs from 1941
A 1949.

131

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was overturned by the High Court. Undeterred, Menzies conducted a national
referendum on the party’s legality, but this was also defeated. Despite these
setbacks, his second period as prime minister lasted for a record sixteen years,
and Menzies earned a reputation as a populist, anti-Communist Cold War
leader.130 He responded to the Communist threat abroad by sending troops
to the Korean War, Malayan Emergency, Indonesia-Malaysia confrontation,
and Vietnam War. Australian military involvement in these conﬂicts was
coordinated closely with traditional allies Britain and the United States, con
whom Menzies sought to maintain strong ties. With the signiﬁcant dimin-
ishment of British power, Menzies began increasingly to look to the United
States for security, concluding the trilateral Australia, New Zealand, United
States (ANZUS) Treaty in San Francisco in September 1951. The ANZUS
Treaty was one of several regional defense pacts the United States signed in
the early Cold War years to combat the Communist threat. The decline of
British power, Tuttavia, did not curb Menzies’s admiration for Britain. Lui
readily declared himself to be “British to the bootstraps.”

With improved security measures and a new conservative government
in power, by early 1950 the United States began easing its restrictions on
the sharing of classiﬁed information with Australia.131 Colonel Charles Spry
was appointed as ASIO director-general in July and emerged as a key ﬁg-
ure in the Menzies government’s anti-Communist campaign.132 Among the
early changes Spry implemented was a reorganization of ASIO, the trans-
fer of the organization’s headquarters to Melbourne, E, more important,
improvements to its professionalism and operational practices.133 However,
ASIO’s crowning glory was its role in the defection of Soviet diplomat and
spy Vladimir Petrov in April 1954. The defection of Petrov, the most senior
Soviet intelligence ofﬁcer to abscond to the West in over ﬁfteen years, and the
subsequent royal commission “brought ASIO worldwide respect and status,
especially within the international Allied counter-intelligence community.”134
In a sign of ASIO’s heightened international standing, Spry briefed partici-
pants on the Petrov affair at the July 1955 Commonwealth Security Confer-
ence in London and met with senior U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and

130. Cain, “Venona in Australia and Its Long-Term Ramiﬁcations,” p. 239.

131. Horner, The Spy Catchers, P. 160.

132. Ibid., P. 170.

133. Ibid., P. 200.

134. For the statement regarding Petrov’s seniority, see Robert Manne, The Petrov Affair: Politics and
Espionage (Sydney: Pergamon, 1987), P. 219; and Nigel West, “ASIO Opens Its Books,” International
Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Vol. 28, No. 3 (2015), P. 626.

132

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Why the Five Eyes?

CIA ofﬁcials in the United States as part of his overseas tour.135 CIA Director
Allen Dulles came to hold Spry in high personal regard as a result of their
meeting, which thereafter facilitated the development of substantive relations
between the two spy organizations.136

Both countries’ SIGINT organizations also sought to develop closer
intelligence embargo in 1952. In
relations after the lifting of the U.S.
Marzo 1953, Australia was included as a COMINT “collaborating nation” in
wartime planning, joining the United States, Great Britain, Canada, and New
Zealand. Among the agreement’s provisions in the event of hostilities, IL
United States would coordinate Paciﬁc-area activities with Australia to avoid
interception and processing duplication and also dispatch a working party to
participate “in the operations of the Center in Australia” that would “serve as
the cadre for any further augmentation” of the DSB’s activities.137 NSA ofﬁ-
cials met with their DSB counterparts under the auspices of a COMINT con-
ference in Melbourne in September 1953 to consider a second party exchange
program. A U.S. liaison ofﬁcer was assigned to the DSB in 1954, which was
reciprocated the following year.138 The gradual thaw in relations between the
Australian and U.S. intelligence communities paved the way for Australia to
join what by now was called the UKUSA Agreement in May 1956 when Min-
ister for Defence Philip McBride formally endorsed the relevant revisions of
the appendices, as agreed upon at the Melbourne COMINT meeting.139

Australia’s formal admission into the UKUSA Agreement solidiﬁed its
place within the postwar anti-Communist camp following the conclusion of
the ANZUS Treaty. In addition to securing protection from the United States
against the possibility of a resurgent Japan and the spread of Communism
regionally to compensate for Britain’s inability to meet its defense obliga-
zioni, the Australian government also believed the ANZUS Treaty would help

135. Manne, The Petrov Affair, P. 220; and Horner, The Spy Catchers, P. 396.

136. Manne, The Petrov Affair, P. 220.

137. Dated 19 Marzo 1953, appendix Q of the agreement, titled “Principles of Wartime Collabora-
tion among COMINT Centers of the U.S., U.K., and Other British Commonwealth Countries,” also
stipulates that Britain would increase its personnel contributions to the Australian center. National Se-
curity Agency, “UKUSA COMINT Agreement and Appendices Thereto,” UKUSA Agreement Release,
https://media.defense.gov/2021/Jul/15/2002763685/-1/-1/0/UKUSA_COMINT_AGREE.PDF.
138. NSA, “Six Decades of Second Party Relations,” Cryptologic Almanac 50th Anniversary Series, avail-
able online at https://stationhypo.com/2021/07/11/six-decades-of-second-party-relations/
139. Personal communication with an ASD ofﬁcial, 13 May 2020; and NSA, Central Security Service,
“Declassiﬁed UKUSA Signals Intelligence Agreement Documents Available,” press release, 24 Giugno
2010, available online at https://www.nsa.gov/Press-Room/Press-Releases-Statements/Press-Release
-View/Article/1629812/declassiﬁed-ukusa-signals-intelligence-agreement-documents-available/.
The name BRUSA was changed to UKUSA at British request in 1954, according to Johnson,
American Cryptology during the Cold War, P. 19.

133

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Williams

it gain access to information on U.S. global strategic planning.140 The Aus-
tralians must have hoped that UKUSA membership would further contribute
to achieving this latter objective in particular. If ANZUS provided Australia
with a means “to rebalance its traditional ties with Britain by fostering a closer
strategic relationship with the United States,” UKUSA membership would re-
quire no signiﬁcant reorientation for the simple reason that both major intel-
ligence allies were the driving forces behind this SIGINT grouping.141 Indeed,
the September 1953 conference that established the foundations for Australia’s
full participation in this SIGINT partnership was a tripartite gathering where
British and U.S. authorities gave approval for the revised appendices to which
Canberra subscribed.142

Like Australia, New Zealand sought protection under the U.S. security
umbrella but was far more cautious than its otherwise pro-British, trans-
Tasman neighbor about committing to the “republican cousins” for fear of
jeopardizing traditional ties with the “imperial mother.”143 The New Zealand
government in the early postwar years did not consider a separate SIGINT or-
ganization to be necessary, believing the country should be incorporated into
the Australian structures.144 New Zealand did establish a small SIGINT inter-
cept facility known as NR1 (Navy Receiver 1) In 1948, but it served under the
DSB’s direction, with a contingent of SIGINT ofﬁcers regularly posted to the
Australian organization.145 New Zealand was essentially “a SIGINT adjunct to

140. Andrew Kelly, ANZUS and the Early Cold War: Strategy and Diplomacy Between Australia, Nuovo
Zealand and the United States, 1945–1956 (Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2018), P. 179.

141. Ibid., P. 2.

142. NSA, “COMINT Collaboration with Australia," 17 agosto 1954, Friedman-Documents: Panel,
Committee, and Board Records, available online at https://www.nsa.gov/portals/75/documents/
news-features/declassiﬁed-documents/friedman-documents/panel-committee-board/FOLDER_300/
41753259079242.pdf.
143. Travis Hardy employs this familial description when discussing Australian Minister for External
Affairs Richard Casey’s views of relations with Britain and the United States in the late 1940s. Travis J.
Hardy, “The Consanguinity of Ideas: Race and Anti-communism in the U.S.-Australia Relationship,
1933–1953,” Ph.D. Diss., University of Tennessee, 2010, P. 154. In contrast to Australia’s ambivalent
approach, New Zealand also differed by fully supporting Britain’s membership in ANZUS. Kelly,
ANZUS and the Early Cold War, pag. 93, 179.

144. Hager, Secret Power, P. 61.

145. Ibid.; and David Filer, “Signals Intelligence in New Zealand during the Cold War,” Security
and Surveillance History Series, Gennaio 2019, available online at https://www.wgtn.ac.nz/__data/
assets/pdf_ﬁle/0003/1726923/2019-1-Signals-Intelligence-in-New-Zealand-during-the-Cold-War-
David-Filer-2019.pdf. The New Zealand government established a Combined Signals Organisation
In 1955, which was transformed into the Government Communications Security Bureau in 1977.
Until the bureau’s establishment, New Zealand relied almost entirely on the DSB for the provision of
SIGINT material. See Richelson and Ball, The Ties That Bind, P. 77.

134

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Why the Five Eyes?

Australia.”146 Having undertaken a vigorous purge of suspected Communist
sympathizers in the public service and begun moving toward the creation of a
specialized counterespionage agency, also under British tutelage, New Zealand
joined the UKUSA at the same time that Australia did.147 Thus was born the
quintuple Anglophone intelligence-sharing grouping that came to be known
globally as the Five Eyes and whose inner-circle membership has remained
constant to this day.

Conclusione

With a temporal focus on the ﬁrst decade of the Cold War, this article has
examined the origins of the Five Eyes, addressing in particular why its mem-
bership is limited to Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom,
and the United States. Drawing initially on realist bargaining theory, it has ex-
plored how these ﬁve countries pooled important material resources, primarily
in the form of territory for the deployment of a global network of SIGINT
facilities, to counter the Cold War Soviet threat. This was a contentious pro-
cess of alliance-building as Britain, suffering under economic austerity, sought
to bind key constituents of its crumbling empire into a grouping that would
both help to offset the imbalance in capabilities that favored the United States
and enhance UK inﬂuence and prestige in the emerging anti-Soviet SIGINT
architecture. Although realism is able to explain other important features of
the Five Eyes, it leaves key issues unanswered, especially those relating to the
character and optimal number of partners for alliance formation.

The article adopted an analytically eclectic approach by supplementing
a realist account of the origins of the Five Eyes with a constructivist iden-
tity perspective. Focusing on Anglo-Saxonism, which entailed a hierarchical
understanding of civilization, culture, and race, the article showed that, if an
understanding of identity grounded in culture suggests a natural process of
international intelligence community building, it was not the case that the
formation of the Five Eyes was preordained. Anglo-Saxonism was a necessary
condition, but it was insufﬁcient. Aspiring Anglophone members not only

146. Rudner, “Britain Betwixt and Between,” p. 603 N. 11.

147. The New Zealand Security Service, later renamed the Security Intelligence Service, was estab-
lished in November 1956. For an interesting analysis of New Zealand’s anti-Communist purge, Vedere
Aaron Fox, “The Price of Collective Security: State-Sponsored Anti-Communism in New Zealand
during the Cold War,” in Ian McGibbon and John Crawford, eds., Seeing Red: New Zealand, IL
Commonwealth and the Cold War, 1945–91 (Wellington: New Zealand Military History Committee,
2012), pag. 1–29. Three New Zealand citizens were suspected of spying for the Soviet Union during
the Cold War: Desmond (Paddy) Costello, William Sutch, and Ian Milner.

135

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Williams

had to provide geostrategically valuable sites for SIGINT collection activi-
ties but also had to be identiﬁed politically as anti-Communist, and there-
fore acceptably trustworthy, by the United States to participate in substantive
intelligence-sharing arrangements and become full members of the exclusive
Five Eyes community. The British government, fearful of the negative implica-
tions for its own continued access to U.S. secrets, upgraded security practices
and institutions by socializing a loyal former colony perceived to be politically
suspect.

Since the inclusion of Australia and New Zealand in 1956, the mem-
bership of this Anglophone intelligence community has remained remarkably
stable. This is not to say that a generally common Anglo-Saxon culture, ad-
herence to liberal-democratic values, and often- compatible national interests
have precluded tensions among the Five Eyes. The dominant United States
has periodically used intelligence “cutoffs” as a stick to pressure its allies into
adopting policies that are more aligned with U.S. interests. The U.S. gov-
ernment’s veiled threat to Britain during the Huawei controversy is the most
recent example of this dynamic. Arguably the greatest challenge to the Five
Eyes’ cohesion was New Zealand’s refusal in the mid-1980s to allow nuclear-
capable warships to dock in its ports. An indignant United States responded
by effectively suspending New Zealand from the trilateral ANZUS alliance.
Tuttavia, intelligence cooperation with New Zealand continued unscathed,
and the issue of expelling the country from the Five Eyes was never seriously
considered during this tense period in bilateral relations.

Factors shaping the power-identity binary that underpinned the Five
Eyes, so prominent during the intelligence grouping’s formative years, Avere
diminished over the decades. The development of satellites and long-range
reconnaissance aircraft curbed the value of allies’ contributions of territory
for the siting of SIGINT infrastructure, although not comprehensively given
the continued importance of ground-based installations for certain collection
activities. Demographic changes among the Five Eyes members have been
more signiﬁcant. During the ﬁrst decade of the Cold War, when the Five
Eyes was established and consolidated, the demographic proﬁle of the mem-
ber states was overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon. The share of Caucasian, native
English speakers who identiﬁed closely with Britain among the political and
military elites was even more pronounced. Tuttavia, waves of immigration
from outside the Anglosphere since the 1960s have altered member-states’
demographic composition, with the subsequent gradual embrace of multi-
culturalism helping to diminish the hitherto shared sentiment that citizens
are exclusively English kin, the recent efforts of conservative political actors

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Why the Five Eyes?

notwithstanding.148 This period also witnessed a considerable weakening of
Britain’s ties with the Commonwealth, with the former’s accession to the Eu-
ropean Communities in 1973 and subsequent evolution as a European Union
member-state signifying a further decline of British inﬂuence, in particular
over its former Dominions. Brexit certainly did not help restore these connec-
tions or enhance British sway.

The diminution of the cultural element of shared identity, combined with
the realpolitik-driven desire to meet new security challenges, has raised the
prospect of expanding the inner circle of this exclusive intelligence-sharing
arrangement. France and Germany, Nine Eyes and Fourteen Eyes members,
rispettivamente, have been put forward as possible candidates.149 However, dis-
cussions have broken down over a reluctance to extend to these two countries
the same terms the Anglophone allies enjoy—speciﬁcally, an agreement not to
spy on each other. A more recent development involving these two countries
and the Anglophone allies has been dubbed “Five Eyes plus.” Also including
Asian democratic partners such as Japan and South Korea, this intelligence-
sharing arrangement is aimed at countering an assortment of threats from
China, North Korea, and Russia.150 At the time of writing, the “Five Eyes
plus” remains an informal coalition that will only undertake partial intelli-
gence sharing to counter speciﬁc threats. Whether this framework is envisaged
as a stepping-stone to full membership sometime in the future for these seem-
ingly like-minded countries is unclear. Should some or all of these countries
be fully welcomed as members of a reconstituted arrangement, it would con-
comitantly signify a conﬁrmation of the political component of their shared
identity and the demise of the cultural normative basis of this preeminent
Anglophone intelligence grouping.

148. Mycock and Wellings, “The Anglosphere,” pp. 43–44.

149. Daniel W. Drezner, “Why Can’t Germany and France Be Invited to Join the Five Eyes?” For-
eign Policy, 29 ottobre 2013, available online at https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/10/29/why-cant
-germany-and-france-be-invited-to-join-ﬁve-eyes/; and Corey Pﬂuke, “A History of the Five Eyes
Alliance: Possibility for Reform and Additions,” Comparative Strategy, Vol. 38, No. 4 (2019), pag. 302–
315.

150. See Barkin, “Exclusive”; Kenji Wada and Shinichi Akiyama, “Five Eyes Intel Group Ties Up
with Japan, Germany, France to Counter China in Cyberspace,” The Mainichi (Tokyo), 4 Febbraio
2019, available online at https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20190204/p2a/00m/0na/001000c; E
Ankit Panda, “‘Five Eyes’ Countries Eye Expanded Cooperation amid North Korea Challenges,” The
Diplomat (Washington, DC), 28 Gennaio 2020, available online at https://thediplomat.com/2020/01/
ﬁve-eyes-countries-eye-expanded-cooperation-amid-north-korea-challenges/.

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