.jpeg?trim=0,0,0,0&width=1200&height=800&crop=1200:800 "The most important intelligence sharing network in the west is being ruined by America – here’s how – UK Times")
Five Eyes, the most important intelligence network in the western world, binds the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand into a tapestry of shared espionage.
But now it is unravelling – and the Trump administration has pulled its threads.
Mark Carney, the new Canadian Prime Minister, said that his country may now have to “look to ourselves” following the revelations that US defence secretary Pete Hegseth shared sensitive details of plans to attack Yemen’s Houthis on a Signal messaging group which included the head of the CIA and the US director of national intelligence – and a journalist.
“We have a very strong intelligence partnership with the Americans through Five Eyes,” Carney said. “Mistakes do happen, but what’s important is how people react to those mistakes. They don’t deny the mistakes; that they are clear and transparent in addressing them.”
But every US official on the Signal group, including the head of the CIA and the director of National Intelligence, has denied there was a security breach, insisted that no secret material was shared, and brushed the whole incident off.
This has had a catastrophic effect on the faith of US-allied intelligence services in the ability of American officials to keep the most secret secrets secret.
Most importantly because it is clear that a personal phone identified as most likely in the hands of Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff, was receiving sensitive information about US military plans while he was in Moscow.
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Using a commercial messaging system rather than a government-encrypted communications system is dumb enough. Doing so using personal telephones is unforgivable. Doing both in Moscow, as it would appear Witkoff did, is downright incompetent.
As an example of the reach of Russian intelligence into mobile devices, I used an Apple device during a recent two-week trip to Ukraine which ended in Odesa, the Ukrainian port city last Saturday. Yesterday I fired that device up and found all its data traffic was being routed through Russian Sevastopol, in Russian-occupied Crimea.
When British government delegations traveled to the Russian capital, personal and government-issued mobile phones of every single member of the delegation, the air crew, and security personnel were left in the UK. That order included the prime minister.
On arrival, the delegations were issued new phones for local use. They also get trained in minimizing all communications and how to behave while in country, including while in the toilet and in bed. On departure, the phones they were issued to use in Moscow were always smashed before takeoff, the debris brought back to the UK and burned.
Witkoff has, allegedly, been wandering Moscow with his personal phone oblivious to the fact that Russian intelligence will have penetrated his handset.
They will have done this as easily as the Saudi Arabians, and the other Gulf countries he has also visited. Every resident in Saudi or the UAE is famously aware that their communications are so bugged they can sometimes hear recordings of themselves mid-chat.
US-allied intelligence agencies will now be scrambling to try to figure out what secrets of theirs Witkoff may have stored on his phone.
“What other communications have been going on between the heads of US intelligence agencies on their personal phones over Signal? It’s not just the content of the messages that’s worrying it’s that we now don’t know if their handsets themselves are even secure,” said a Middle Eastern intelligence official.
Witkoff has been at the centre of talks between Hamas and Israel in Qatar, and between Ukraine and Russia, in Saudi Arabia.
Any kind of a leak from the US side would be a catastrophic compromise. Europe now knows for sure, after the Signal message snafu, that both Pete Hegseth and JD Vance have contempt for the entire European continent.
The Signal chat group revealed by The Atlantic when the magazine’s editor-in-chief was accidentally added to a group discussing the imminent bombardment of the Houthis, and later analysis of the operation, included: Vance, Hegseth, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, “MAR,” the initials of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, “TG,” the initials of director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, “Scott B”, who is likely to be Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent “S M,” the initials of the White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, Susie Wiles, White House chief of staff and Witkoff, special envoy to the Middle East and Russia.
How many of these officials were using their own personal phones is unclear.
Ratcliffe told the Senate intelligence committee that he used Signal on his CIA office computer. Did he use it on his personal phone for CIA-related conversations?
Gabbard was vague about where she had been during the Signal chat about Yemen. She said she had been in Asia. She was, in fact, in or near Thailand and landed in India the day after the Yemen attacks.
India is a US ally but not as much as it is of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. India has close ties in defence, nuclear power, space and missile technology with the Kremlin. And like the Russians, India is a world leader in mobile phone technology.
Israeli company NSO led the commercial world with its Pegasus spyware which was able to entirely coopt the personal phones of thousands of people. It has been used in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, India, Mexico, Morocco, Rwanda and Hungary.
The truth is that Five Eyes under Donald Trump’s first presidency was already severely strained by what some members of the group saw as dangerous incompetence in handling secrets by the Oval Office.
At least one other close American ally in the Middle East confirmed that, along with one Five Eye nation, the most sensitive material, details of operations, were being held back from the CIA. The fear was that Trump would blurt secrets in meetings – and get people killed.
The most egregious example of this was when Trump disclosed highly classified information to Russia’s foreign minister about a planned Islamic State operation in 2017.
He blurted out details of an ISIS plot to blow up an airliner with a bomb in a laptop and boasted of other details – which were not even American secrets to reveal. His audience was Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak.
Russia was heavily involved in Syria at the time supporting the regime of Bashar al Assad which was also a target of US intelligence gathering.
Middle Eastern spy agencies went into elaborate contortions to protect the source of the original intelligence, who was identified as working for Israel’s Mossad, because Trump had told the Russians there was an agent inside the Isis leadership.
Intelligence officers in two different organizations told me soon after that debacle that while the CIA was trustworthy they could not risk sharing top secrets with the president of the US.
Five Eyes has been the bedrock of the Anglophone intelligence world for decades. It is a means by which signals intelligence, mostly from Britian’s GCHQ and the US National Security Agency, is shared automatically on a network between the five participating countries. They also liaise very closely on human intelligence, often sharing agents in the field, the data they collect, literally working side by side.
The UK has traditionally had the edge, along with the US, on Russia. Australia and New Zealand closely monitor their regions, Canada has a reputation for exceptional intelligence analysis.
These countries also work closely with other allies. Israel, the UK and the US have a very close relationship spying on Iran. The Germans are well known to have exceptional reach in the Middle East. And all of them see Russia, and China, as the enduring adversaries and most serious strategic threats.
They will all be horrified that not only were America’s top intelligence officials chatting on Signal but that some of them, perhaps all of them, were using personal phones. Gabbard refused to tell the Senate Intelligence Committee whether, or not, she was using a government-issued secure phone for the chat – or her personal device.
Gabbard is in charge of the National Intelligence Service that hoovers up signals intelligence for the US and liaises directly with GCHQ in the UK.
Risk averse Five Eyes intelligence agencies will draw only one conclusion from her evasion of the question. She can’t be trusted.
