The world of national security intelligence collection, analysis, and dissemination is, of necessity, shrouded in secrecy. So, a book that purports to be a history of any aspect of this world must pierce the veil and rely on open source or unclassified works, purloined or leaked materials, and the remarks—both on and off the record—of those who work in the intelligence community.
Award-winning filmmaker, writer, and journalist Richard Kerbaj does just that in his first book The Secret History of the Five Eyes: The Untold Story of the International Spy Network. In it, he recounts the founding, growth, successes, and failures of an organization of partners “drawn together by common values, language and cause” over more than seven decades.
Today this association of the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand remains both an exclusive and exceptional arrangement for collecting and sharing the secrets of national security intelligence. The arrangement is unique because these countries collect and exchange raw intelligence data. Moreover, there is no other intelligence network with the “round-the-clock geographical reach and capabilities of the Five Eyes, where intelligence, analysis, technology, tradecraft and even personnel are shared between like-minded organizations in the interest of a common purpose.”
Kerbaj traces the foundations of Five Eyes to the informal meetings between British and American codebreakers before WWII. Those informal liaisons continued during the war years, when intelligence was passed in hard copy labeled for “Eyes Only,” and led to the 1946 UK-USA Agreement to share signals intelligence during the Cold War. The exigencies of those years drew the other three nations to the pact. The author tells the personal stories of the “complex and, at times, flawed personalities whose achievements and failures have helped guarantee the Five Eyes evolution since its formation.” Theirs was an unwritten arrangement to share all-source intelligence among the five nations and create an organization well-positioned for not only the Cold War, but for the Global War on Terror and for the challenges of the twenty-first century.
An Agreement of Trust
In researching this book, Kerbaj had remarkable access to highly placed political and intelligence community leaders who agreed to interviews and shared their reminiscences and observations. Among them are candid accounts the author gleaned from former British Prime Ministers Theresa May and David Cameron, former Australian Prime Ministers Julia Gillard and Scott Morrison, and more than a score of intelligence officials including Admiral Mike Rogers (Director, NSA), General David Petraeus (Director, CIA), Sir Iain Lobban (Director of Government Communications Headquarters, UK) and others who chose not to be named.
These interviews repeatedly validate Kerbaj’s claim that Five Eyes is “built on a framework of institutional and individual trust, secrecy, information assurance, and friendships.” This kind of research is both welcome and rewarding to both general readers and scholars in the field seeking insights that provide explanations and context for the historic episodes Kerbaj features. These first-person accounts are also far more revealing than the secondary sources the author leans on in some parts of the book.
The Secret History of the Five Eyes is also a story of intelligence failures. Kerbaj recounts the Soviet penetration of British intelligence by the Cambridge Five spy ring (1930s to 1950s) without adding any new insights. He repeats the now well-known tale of how a single source, aptly code-named “Curveball,” completely misled analysts in the hunt for hidden weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But the author’s account of the treasonous leaks and defection of Edward Snowden is more fully explored.
In the chapter, “The Snowden Affair,” Kerbaj is at his best, gleaning from first-person interviews how Snowden’s disclosures of highly classified operational capabilities “spooked intelligence officials on both sides of the Atlantic.” The episode also drives home the point made throughout the book that the United States was always the “big dog” in the five-nation pact and so, in the words of one unnamed source, any time it is “a US cock-up, the other members of the alliance have to mask their discontent and be statesman-like about it.”
Errors, Omissions, and Digressions
Five Eyes is an ambitious book that would have been improved by a fact checker, a keen-eyed copy editor, and an aggressive content editor. The work is sprinkled with errors of fact including statements that Franklin Roosevelt ran for governor of New York in 1932 (he was a presidential candidate that year) and that OSS founder William “Wild Bill” Donovan was a decorated WWI ace pilot (he was highly decorated, but as an infantry officer). The US National Security Council is misnamed as the National Security Committee. And Kerbaj labels Nixon’s Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger as an “intelligence czar,” despite the fact Kissinger never held any leadership position in the US Intelligence Community.
Fully, objectively, and dispassionately recounting the history of more than seven decades of an international intelligence organization steeped in secrecy is, admittedly, a heavy lift.
Most readers would gloss over these errors. But, in addition to these mistakes, the narrative in The Secret History of the Five Eyes often loses its focus and drifts into long passages that are only tangentially related to the topic. Kerbaj, for example, writes at length about Jihadi John (British citizen Mohammed Emwazi) who gained notoriety for his Internet broadcasts of beheading Western captives of the terrorist Islamic State (ISIS). In a more tightly structured historical account of Five Eyes, this incident would warrant little more than a reference for an example of joint intelligence support for attacks targeting terrorists. Perhaps because Kerbaj was the producer of the HBO documentary, Unmasking Jihadi John, the episode takes on outsized importance in his book.
The narrative also sometimes bogs down in numbing detail, nearly page-long paragraphs, and episodes only remotely linked to the history of Five Eyes. In one instance, the sluggish account of an amateur Nazi spy in Scotland—which drones on for pages—includes the name and street address of the hair salon owned by the hapless woman. Inexplicably, the author also penned a postscript for this work critical of Australian Prime Minister Morrison’s successful efforts to terminate a faltering submarine construction contract with France, for a joint deal with the US and Britain to build nuclear-powered subs. Other than the fact that three of the nations in this joint agreement are members of Five Eyes, there is nothing relevant to the history of Five Eyes in recounting this controversial contracting issue.
The same can be said of Kerbaj’s extended treatment of Donald Trump’s controversial relationships with US intelligence agencies and the FBI. The author dismisses Trump as “someone who had never relied on facts, let alone evidence,” and rehashes Clinton’s missing e-mails, the Steele dossier, Russian election interference, and illegal wiretapping as if these episodes were essentially integral to the history of Five Eyes. More dispassionate readers will recognize Kerbaj’s biases here.
Then too, more informed readers will be disappointed by the absence of a fuller account of operations conducted during the Cold War that galvanized Five Eyes multi-lateral cooperation. During that period, for example, the US and UK launched an initiative to gather signals intelligence with manned aircraft in Soviet airspace (Gary Powers’s U2 flight was part of this effort). There was also Operation GOLD, an audacious attempt by the CIA and British intelligence to construct a tunnel under East Berlin and tap Soviet hard communications lines. Similarly, US and Royal Navy submarines were tasked to coordinate to gather intelligence. One remarkable subsurface operation was undertaken to latch onto underseas cables with a pincer to surreptitiously access foreign message traffic. Exploration of topics like these would have been revealing additions to this book and as welcome as the author’s solid chapter “The Future of the Five Eyes.”
The errors, omissions, and out-of-place content in Five Eyes undermine a book of otherwise genuine insights, often punctuated by the candid and informed observations of the people who shaped the world’s most exclusive and enduring intelligence partnership. Fully, objectively, and dispassionately recounting the history of more than seven decades of an international intelligence organization steeped in secrecy is, admittedly, a heavy lift. The Secret History of the Five Eyes, however, sometimes staggers under that weight.
