Five eyes/five countries: Jim Rolfe discusses New Zealand's connection with the Anglosphere security grouping.

• Author: Rolfe, Jim

For some time now New Zealand has been regaled with headlines in the international media along the lines of 'Perfidious Aotearoa? New Zealand's Five Eyes Problem or 'New Zealand Criticized for "Five Eyes" Alliance Stance ...' or even 'Five Eyes split demands Australia reset with New Zealand'. These and similar stories have several underlying and related assumptions: that the Five Eyes grouping (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States) is an alliance between states; that Five Eyes involves responsibilities in terms of international behaviour; or that Five Eyes requires unwavering commitment to a single international narrative. All such headlines are misleading at best.

Five Eyes as a term started as jargon to designate only the five countries that could have access to classified information developed by their respective signals-intelligence agencies. This recent conflation of 'Five Eyes' with any manifestation of a five-country relationship wildly over-exaggerates the requirements of the original intelligence relationship and assumes that that relationship underlies all forms of interactions between the five countries. It does not.

In March 1946 the United States and the United Kingdom signed the then (and for the next four decades) secret UKUSA Agreement. That agreement formally continued the wartime collaboration between the two countries in signals-intelligence matters. The agreement prescribed full partnership, inter-dependence and standardisation of process across collection, analysis, decryption and translation of intercepted material and was to be unrestricted except by specific exclusions, which were to be kept to an absolute minimum.

The other three countries that now make up what is known as Five Eyes did not join the agreement until later: Canada in 1948 with New Zealand and Australia in 1956. Those countries were acknowledged as being different in kind from so-called third party countries, the rest of the world, from which even the fact of the agreement was to be kept secret.

Membership of UKUSA (still the formal title) is broadly based on the operating principle of 'from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs'. On that basis, New Zealand supplies information it gains from targets primarily in the South Pacific and South-east Asia, and obtains information from its partners for the conduct of its own statecraft.

The arrangement remained more or less secret until the early and mid-1980s with the publication of James Bamford's The Puzzle Palace and Richelson and Ball's The Ties That Bind. These books publicly laid out the fact of UKUSA and the reach of its members' capabilities. In 1996 a New Zealand focus was given with Nicky Hager's book Secret Power. Later, in the first decade of the 21st century, member governments formally acknowledged the fact of the arrangement and in 2010 opened the original March 1946 documents to public scrutiny. Most recently, the 2013 leak of a trove of documents by Edward Snowden gave new insights to the range of the communications-intelligence activities.

Relationships today

There are now at least 25-30 identifiable and distinct cooperative and dialogue arrangements between the five countries, most established without specific reference to any of the others and none necessarily linked to the others. These arrangements may be grouped to simplify the discussion, although the groupings themselves are not established as distinct entities. Nor do the groupings at this highest level have any sense of internal coherence. There is no overarching co-ordination within or between the groupings and no central direction. Where the groupings do have coherence and direction is at the working level itself, in the specifics of the relationships between like agencies across the countries.

We know of the relationship between the communications-intelligence agencies--the original Five Eyes. We may infer that a similar relationship exists between the human source agencies (in New Zealand's case, the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service), counter-intelligence agencies (also the NZSIS) and the intelligence analysis agencies (the National Assessments Bureau and/or the Combined Threat Assessment Group). These relationships are all...