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Born out of the Cold War, Five Eyes is a
multinational spy network comprised of
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, and the
United States. The member states of Five Eyes gather intelligence about foreign countries, sharing it freely between themselves.
The
United Kingdom – United States of America Agreement (UKUSA) is a multilateral agreement for cooperation in
signals intelligence between
Australia,
Canada,
New Zealand, the
United Kingdom, and the
United States. The alliance of intelligence operations is also known as the
Five Eyes. In classification markings this is abbreviated as
FVEY, with the individual countries being abbreviated as AUS, CAN, NZL, GBR, and USA, respectively.
Emerging from an informal agreement related to the
1941 Atlantic Charter, the
secret treaty was renewed with the passage of the
1943 BRUSA Agreement, before being officially enacted on
5 March 1946 by the United Kingdom and the United States. In the following years, it was extended to encompass Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Other countries, known as "third parties", such as
West Germany, the Philippines, and several
Nordic countries, also joined the UKUSA community in associate capacities, although they are not part of mechanism for automatic sharing of intelligence that exists between the Five Eyes.
Much of the sharing of information is performed via the ultra-sensitive
STONEGHOST network, which has been claimed to contain "some of the Western world's most closely guarded secrets". Besides laying down rules for intelligence sharing, the agreement formalized and cemented the "
Special Relationship" between the UK and the US.
Due to its status as a secret treaty, its existence was not known to the
Prime Minister of Australia until 1973, and it was not disclosed to the public until 2005. On 25 June 2010, for the first time in history, the full text of the agreement was publicly released by the United Kingdom and the United States, and can now be viewed online. Shortly after its release, the seven-page UKUSA Agreement was recognized by
Time magazine as one of the
Cold War's most important documents, with immense historical significance.
The
global surveillance disclosure by
Edward Snowden has shown that the intelligence-sharing activities between the
First World allies of the Cold War are rapidly shifting into the digital realm of the
Internet.
The documents, including diary entries, detail the war time meetings that began at Bletchley Park and led to the UKUSA deal being signed in March 1946. The alliance involved working together to intercept communications and break codes, sharing almost everything.
A short entry from February 1941 in the diary of Alastair Denniston, released for the first time today by GCHQ, marked the beginning of what was once the most secret of relationships. Denniston was head of Bletchley Park and he was welcoming a group of American code breakers at a time when the US had not yet entered WW2.
"The Ys are coming!" the entry read - meaning the Yanks. The Americans had undertaken a perilous crossing with their boat shot at by Nazi planes but they arrived at the home of British code breakers on a mission of huge importance.
With the permission of then-Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the two groups of spies would share their most sensitive secrets - that the UK had broken the German Enigma code and the US the Japanese code called Purple.
Further diary entries reveal how key figures would travel back and forth over the Atlantic, including Denniston to meet with his opposite number as well as code breaker Alan Turing.
The power of the alliance in WW2 has made it the heart of what is sometimes called the "special relationship" between the two countries. The term seems increasingly outdated but the one place where it has always been real is when it comes to code breaking.
The relationship forged in that visit would outlast WW2 and, after a series of meetings, be formalised at the start of the Cold War with a document signed in Washington on 5 March 1946. The agreement was something of a "marriage contract" - each agreed honesty, openness and commitment to the other including a "no spy agreement" in which they would not target the other side. They would share nearly all the intelligence they produced through breaking codes and intercepting communications (known as signals intelligence or SIGINT) although the agreement did allow some wiggle room if one side felt they had to act independently.
Initially known as UKUSA, over the next 10 years it would be expanded as Australia, Canada and New Zealand joined, making up what is known today as the Five Eyes alliance.
