EXCLUSIVE: Canada threatening India with 'Five Eyes' while the US considering to invite India and Other Democracies into Intel Alliance
Strange as it may seem, but it is true that the Five Eyes intelligence partnership, which Canada is relying on the most to prove its charges of Indian involvement in the murder of a Khalistani terrorist and gathering intelligence on other such terrorists on its soil, is potentially open for India along with Japan, Germany, and South Korea.
This idea has emanated from the United States, arguably the leader of the Five Eyes. In 2022, a Congressional subcommittee on Intelligence and Special Operations asked the Director of National Intelligence and the Secretary of Defence to consider expanding the Five Eyes. Since then, the idea has been under discussion among policymakers.
Incidentally, the “Five Eyes” multilateral intelligence-sharing arrangement comprises the major intelligence services of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Its origins can be traced to 1946, when the Cold War was emerging, with Soviet Russia being seen as the biggest threat to democracy and the Western value system.
It has been described as “the most exclusive intelligence-sharing club in the world,” “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 origin of the Five Eyes can be traced to the decision by the then British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in 1941 to include the US in one of the greatest secrets of all time—that the UK (with help from the Poles and French) had broken the German Enigma cipher system. The secret (known as ULTRA) was very tightly controlled in the UK, and the idea of sharing it with the Americans was not without risk, but it proved to be an astute political calculation.
After the war, this Anglo-American cooperation was formalized in the 1946 UKUSA agreement. Canada joined in 1948, and Australia and New Zealand joined in 1956 through what was called “their Dominion status within the British Commonwealth.”
The group’s appellation was shorthand for the security classification of intelligence documents shared between these countries: “SECRET—AUS/CAN/NZ/UK/US EYES ONLY.”
The agreement was so secret that Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam reportedly was not informed of its existence until 1973. No government officially acknowledged the arrangement by name until 1999, when the director of Australia’s Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) disclosed his country’s cooperation “with counterpart signals intelligence organizations overseas under the UKUSA relationship.”
Indeed, the contents of the UKUSA agreement were officially disclosed to the public for the first time in June 2010.
Each of the Five Eyes states is said to be conducting interception, collection, acquisition, analysis, and decryption activities, sharing all intelligence information obtained with the others by default.
However, it is to be noted that the foundation of their intelligence activities happens to be signals intelligence-sharing (i.e., sharing foreign intelligence gathered from communications and information systems).
With the passage of time, other cooperative areas have been added, including human intelligence sharing (i.e., information gleaned from personal contacts), technological co-development, and military equipment and communications interoperability.
Besides, intelligence-sharing agreements have now expanded beyond the core Five Eyes to Nine Eyes (with the addition of Denmark, France, the Netherlands, and Norway), 14 Eyes (nine Eyes plus Germany, Belgium, Italy, Spain, and Sweden), and 41 Eyes (all of the above, with the addition of the allied coalition in Afghanistan).
However, it is to be noted that the scope of other Eyes is limited to sharing some of the resources of the Five Eyes, not all. They cannot access all the data of the Five Eyes. Be that as it may, in a fast-changing world, Five Eyes is beset with new challenges.
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