Inside the Secret World of the Five Eyes: A Conversation with Richard Kerbaj

Award-winning documentary producer and investigative journalist Richard Kerbaj joins Dr. David Oakley at the University of South Florida to discuss the intricate history of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance. Kerbaj, renowned for his BAFTA-winning documentary My Son, the Jihadi and his recent television work on Litvinenko, provides a deep dive into his latest book, The Secret History of the Five Eyes: The Untold Story of the International Spy Network. Over six years of research and more than 100 interviews—including conversations with two British and two Australian Prime Ministers—shaped his gripping narrative on the intelligence-sharing pact between the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

From the clandestine origins of the alliance in World War II to the Cold War’s shifting espionage landscape and the challenges of modern counterterrorism, Kerbaj brings to life the untold stories of intelligence officers, political tensions, and the delicate balance of secrecy and trust among allied nations. The discussion highlights the real-world stakes of intelligence cooperation, from tracking down terrorist threats like Jihadi John to exposing historical tensions between Five Eyes members. Tune in for an eye-opening exploration of international espionage, the challenges of intelligence ethics, and the evolution of one of the world’s most powerful yet enigmatic security partnerships.

🔎 Listen now on Apple Podcasts and Spotify to uncover the secret world of global intelligence.

At the Boundary from the Global and National Security Institute at the University of South Florida, features global and national security issues we’ve found to be insightful, intriguing, fascinating, maybe controversial, but overall just worth talking about.

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Transcript

Jim Cardoso  0:00 
Jim, hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of at the boundary, the podcast from the global and national security Institute at the University of South Florida. I'm Jim Cardoso, Senior Director for GNSI, and back as your host for at the boundary. Today on the podcast, we'll sit in on a conversation between Richard curbage and GNSI Academic Director Dr David Oakley. Curbage is an award winning television and documenting producer, and spoke to an audience of USF students recently. More on that in a minute. First, I want to pass along congratulations to two of our students in the GNSI future strategist program, Kyle Rudd and Lily Mae Burch are going to spend five weeks in England this summer at the International and security Institute at Cambridge, one of the world's oldest and most prestigious universities, the ISI program offers students an opportunity to interact with peers from around the world and engage leading scholars and practitioners in international security. Going forward, GNSI has partnered with Cambridge and isI to fill up to four slots with deserving USF students every summer, Colin may will be the leading edge of this exciting initiative, and they'll have a tremendous time learning and building relationships in the international security world. If you're not subscribed to our YouTube channel, you missed a new episode of our GNSI video series that dropped last week. The director of the USF Center for Strategic and diplomatic studies and valued GNSI partner, Dr Mohsin Malani, recently published his latest book Iran's rise and rivalry with the US and the Middle East, and had an in depth book discussion with GNSI faculty Senior fellow, Dr Randy borom. Head over to the channel to check it out. Okay, on to today's main event. Richard curbaj is an award winning documentary producer from Australia. His documentary, my son the jihadi, is about the mother of Thomas Evans and Al Shabaab militant who was killed in 2015 the documentary won a BAFTA Award in 2016 that's the British Academy Television Awards for Best single documentary in 2022 karbaj produced a four part British television mini series called Litvinenko, a true crime drama about the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko by Russian agents in London, and starring David Tennant of Doctor Who fame COVID, his latest book, The Secret History of the five eyes, is also likely to make it onto the small or big screen, and was the primary subject of his talk with Dr Dave Oakley students. Let's drop in on the conversation.

Dave Oakley  3:01  
You know, I've said a little bit about Richard in previous classes, give you a little bit about his background, but just to you know, bring it all together again. We're very fortunate to have Richard today. So as I mentioned before, very experienced, experienced journalist, documentarian and author, also an award winning documentarian. So one of his, uh, his, or his first documentary, my son did, jihadi won a BAFTA Award. Um, many of you might have seen a second one, which was on HBO, called Jihadi John. And then finally they, I guess it would have been your third one, right? The KGB killers,

Richard Kerbaj  3:37 
yep, which I turned into a drama as well. Yeah, got

Dave Oakley  3:42 
turned into a drama that you can watch on MGM, which has David Tennant. If you're familiar with the British actor, David Tennant, highly recommend all those, and especially the MGM movie or, I guess, mini series. But what we're going to talk about today is his latest book, and so the secret history of the five eyes. He spent, what was it, six or seven years researching this. Yeah, six, six or seven years researching it. Had access to over 100 interviews to include two British Prime Ministers in two Australian Prime Ministers. And so the book does a really great job of telling the evolution of the five eye relationship, which which Richard will touch a little bit on through a historical standpoint, and kind of understand how he evolved. But he also captures, you know, the stories of individuals who are directly involved in it and experienced it firsthand. Fantastic book, I suspect because of how engaging it is, it will eventually be made into either a documentary or another miniseries. So hey, thanks again, Richard and I appreciate you coming and doing this talk with the class. Hey,

Richard Kerbaj  4:55 
thanks for having me, Dave. And also, before I even start talking about Fauci my. Say that David was one of the very first people I spoke to about five eyes when I started the research process, because initially I hadn't set out to write a book. In fact, the idea for a book emerged when I could no longer go about making a documentary series, because that was initially what I had planned to do, make a documentary series about five eyes. And the idea came about because, as David mentioned earlier, I had finished making a film for HBO about the hunt for G Hardy John. He was the ISIS executioner, the British guy who killed a number of people, including journalists and humanitarian workers and aid workers in Syria. And so the story very much sort of captures the hunt for this target. And during that research and during the interviewing process with some of the US and British officials, I started to get a sense of the differences and their approach to intelligence, in their in their approach to targeting, in their approach to discovering sort of someone's pattern of life and how to go about it. And there was very much the view that emerged early on for me, that the Brits were interested in were very much interested in bringing someone to justice, and the Americans were about taking someone out. And I mean that in a crass way. I think for women Americans, from the Americans perspective, they felt that it was a viable target that needed to be found and fixed and finished. And so there was a bit of a tussle between the two sides. And in the end, it was agreed upon by both parties that he needed to be taken out, and they did. So that's kind of where my interest began to develop in doing something about the five eyes. I had researched the five eyes for several years before that, but very on very basic sort of fronts, and also focusing on contemporary stories, rather than its history and what. So going back to the point about approaching Dave. When I approached Dave, I said, I'm interested in looking at some of the history, and Dave was very helpful in providing me some of the literature around sort of, sort of academic papers which which were very useful for me to get a sense of place and a sense of how this system worked. But then again, I had to go and do my own research beyond that. And what I found, very quickly as well, is that most of the contemporary officials, so most of the serving and former officials who I interviewed knew a lot about the five eyes knew a lot about the contemporary operations of five eyes, but they couldn't really tell me anything about the history, and that's because they hadn't been a history written. So I thought of Bletchley Park as a great starting point, because, of course, there has been a lot of literature written about the important role that was played by Bletchley Park in Arlington Hall, the US Army's signals intelligence service and their early interactions in the early 1940s and I thought maybe that's a great starting point there. And then I was soon introduced to a better angle that dates back to the 1930s and that's what I discovered through a historian at the FBI, that in fact, the story dates back to the 1930s that the interwar years. And so I started looking at that particular story. And before I start telling you about the story and how that story became sort of the building block and the foundational block for what would later become the five eyes. I just want to sort of say that there are several themes in the book, but also those themes of the book very much reflect the Alliance overall. And those themes are about friendships. They're about triumphs, they're about victories, they're about failures. They're about tensions. They are about breaches and imperfections, because all of that is contained in the five eyes. There is, I think, this view that somehow, that it needs to function well all the time, and everything should be consistent across the board. And it's never really been that case. Now we've seen, of course, a lot of political rhetoric off late, which indicates that maybe there are growing tensions within it. But I'm going to give you a few stories that will give you a sense of the early tensions that existed and the way that the intelligence Alliance overcame those tensions. Because when we talk about. The Alliance. We're not talking about an individual group. There is no such thing as a sort of a giant headquarters where you walk through scan your card as a Five Eyes official. This is made up the five eyes is largely made up of autonomous organizations, and there are 14 key intelligence agencies that I focus on in the book, and they're largely the household names, so CIA, NSA, FBI, he got mi five, mi six, and GCHQ at this end, you've got ASIO in Australia and Asus, and a number of the other groups, including, for instance, CSIS, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, and a lot of those organizations, particularly, for instance, CSIS, the Canadian Security Intelligence organization that wasn't created until the 1980s you know, the CIA wasn't created until 47 the NSA didn't come about until 52 so a lot of them grew out of multiple relationships that really kick started the kind of the essence and the foundational blocks of this alliance. And it all goes back to a story in Scotland. And that story in Scotland dates back to 1938 January, 1938 and during 1938 mi five had been given a tip off about a woman who was a hairdresser in Scotland who was using her hairdressing salon as a cover for her operations for the Nazis. She was essentially working for the Nazis, providing him with information relating to military movements, and she was going to military installations and drawing up these really crude drawings on maps to give him a sense of where these installations were in Scotland. She was she was a terrible expire. She She was largely inexperienced, and she'd been given sort of a crash course by the Stasi on her way to Britain in 1937 when she relocated to Britain, because she's actually of Scottish origin, as I said. And so when mi five intercepted her mail, and they in one letter they intercepted in particular, featured a plot that was being planned and plotted by a Nazi espionage ring in New York in order to so that it identified a military official. They wanted to, they wanted to get this military official to a meeting under the pretext that they were going to basically meet with him. And they planned this idea that the the people who planning the idea were essentially going to pretend to be military officials themselves, take him along to a meeting, overpower him and steal his secrets. That was, that was the plot that was kind of identified in this letter that mi five intercepted at the time that mi five intercepted this letter in 1938 the British intelligence organization didn't have a direct link with the FBI. In fact, all the intelligence, and there wasn't a great deal of it, but any intelligence that was going through from Britain to the US was done through the US Embassy in the UK, and vice versa, through the British Embassy in Washington, back to here. And usually what they would do is they provide a bit of intelligence to the military at who would then pass it on to their people in the US and vice versa. So there was no direct contact. And there was an initial resistance by the FBI at the time to even investigate this potential plot, because Hoover, J Edgar Hoover, who's the head of the FBI, didn't think that they could possibly be Nazis operating in New York, but they investigated, nonetheless, reluctantly, and they found that there were 18 people working as part of this espionage ring. They arrested all the 18 people, they interviewed them, and they released 14 of the 18 on the basis that they would return for a court hearing at a later date. Of course, those who were released fled the country, and it was hugely embarrassing for J Edgar Hoover personally, and for the FBI largely and they mi five recognized that this kind of setback, that the that the FBI had, was potentially a good opportunity for my five to approach the FBI directly and say, well, we've got some experience, and have had some experience now for several decades dealing with. With counter intelligence, perhaps we can provide some assistance. And so mi five deployed an official to Washington and then New York to meet with MI five official with FBI officials. And that's kind of where the very early interactions started. That's when they started sharing a bit of know how and insights into their respective technologies that then led to greater cooperation at the beginning of the Second World War, and then when Britain, when the US, joined the war in late 1941 by that stage, Bletchley Park had invited Arlington Hall officials from so code breakers from the USS Arlington Hall to to discuss the possibilities of sharing Enigma Secrets and in exchange getting Japanese decrypts from the Americans, there were multiple tensions and and there was a great deal of unease about sharing, particularly on the British front, they didn't really trust the Americans, even though the Americans were actually far more open and willing to share and and also, what was really odd and ironic about that Is that is that it was the British who approached the Americans to share and then withheld some of the information. And those lines stay out the book, because I really wanted to tell a story, but about policy, but about people. And so when you read the book, and hopefully you know all of you will and get get the same sense that I wanted to generate within that book. I wanted to tell the story of the people, because this is a story about people. There is no there is no legally binding agreement or contract linking all of these agencies, agencies together. They're just these are, these are patterns of patterns of behavior, and and, and for and formal intelligence, arrangements that are non legally binding, that have been handed down from one generation to another. And it's and they're the most compelling and fascinating thing, because they shouldn't really work on paper. The Five Eyes, a should not exist. B should just not work, because you're essentially asking spies to trust other spies, and it's all based on trust. So that just makes no sense, but somehow it functions and and may it continue, but I'll get to that in a second. So, so now we're sort of in the early 1940s and in 1943 the FBI created its first bureau in London. And during that time, in 1943 which is a very crucial year, there were a number of developments. So the Britain USA agreement was created to formalize intelligence sharing and sharing of technical know how the sharing of collection and analysis and the sharing even of personnel between between Arlington Hall and and Bletchley Park. And then also in 1943 General MacArthur, who was the head of the Allied he was head of the allies in the Southwest Pacific, had relocated to Melbourne, Australia and then subsequently Brisbane, Australia, to get away from the Philippines, where he'd been based in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attack and also in the wake of Japan's attack on the Philippines. So he'd relocated, and when he relocated, he was very determined to create a code breaking bureau. So he created what he named the Cipher Bureau. And it was very much sort of done in the image of the Cipher Bureau that had existed in the US. But instead of just having it manned and and sort of operated by US personnel, he brought on board people from all the five eyes countries. So we had, you know, US and British and Australians and New Zealanders and Canadians. There were, there were code breakers, and there were mathematicians working as part of this bureau. And that was essentially the first, essentially the first experiment, as it were, in the fireplace. It wasn't intended to even be an experiment. I don't even think that when General MacArthur had done this, he thought he was creating something that would a hold and B become something else. That was kind of the first experiment, and it was hugely successful, because they managed to decrypt a lot of Japanese code to sort of the latter years of the Second World War, leading up to 1945 and then also in 43 there was another huge breakthrough when the Americans, in this case, again, Arlington Hall Re. Realized that Stalin could not be trusted, despite the advice and order really by Roosevelt at the time not to spy on Russians and on the Soviet Union, a very determined and quite brave and ballsy general echoed General Carter Clark, decided that they should create, they should create a code breaking mechanism, Soviet code breaking mechanism. Keep it totally secret from the White House. And so they created what would become the Venona project, which would go on to expose a lot of the sort of the nuclear spies, the atomic spies, and many other spies, including some members of the Cambridge five, who I'm sure you've all heard about, and this is kind of now leading up to, sort of 1945 they've had. The Allies have had great success in combating the axis. And ultimately, 1945 becomes a significant year, not because of the Triumph relating to the Second World War by the allies, but also because of the discovery that the Soviet Union was, in fact spying on its ally. So despite this reset with Moscow, which we are obviously seeing right now, play out, and I wanted to tell that in parallel to what's happening now in a second. So despite this reset with Moscow, Stalin was essentially running his spies who were stealing nuclear secrets through the Manhattan Project. They had penetrated the Manhattan Project through the recruitment of British and American scientists and spies and getting the information. And we only know about this because a cipher Clark, a Soviet cipher Clark in Ottawa defected five days after the end of the Second World War, and his name is agro gizenko. When he when he defected, he warned the west through a series of debriefings with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to begin with and subsequently with MI five and the FBI and also Arlington hole, he warned them that the Soviet Union was stealing secrets. Was determined to get as much information as it could about Western military operations, including the troop movements, including their technological developments, their nuclear secrets and so on. And so that warning really came. That warning came in Canada, and that's quite a pivotal moment, because arguably, that was the beginning of the Cold War. You

Dave Oakley  22:55 
know, Richard talking about the two thoughts, the first one, I wanted to find out. What I really like about your booking approach is the personal stories you told. One thing that I did not realize was the most prominent cover job was hairdresser at this period. Because in your first door there was like two separate hairdressers who were actually spies. Yeah, exactly.

Richard Kerbaj  23:16 
So there was actually the hairdresser who was in the early 1900s so in the lead up to the First World War, there was a hairdresser working for the czar that and the German czar, and he was essentially in working out of East London, collecting information based on, you know, what he was picking up through his, yeah, his barber shop in, I think it was in Hoxton or something. And so that was quite fascinating. And then the other, of course, was Jean Grabill. Sorry, not Jean gra Beall. The other one was Jesse Jordan, the hairdresser who was in Scotland and and you're right, you're right to point out that there are all these sort of fascinating characters that almost presented themselves to me, and it was a huge opportunity to delve into their personal stories, because I think it helped bring the story more to life and make it a bit more relatable.

Dave Oakley  24:12  
No, I agree. I agree. Is very engaging, and, you know, made me think, you know, when I go to the barber shop to watch what I say. But the other thing I found interesting is you really captured, yeah, I want to highlight something you said earlier, but first I wanted to do talk about this, what I would call the strategic turning points. And so you were getting ready to hit on that, you know, the transition from World War Two to the Cold War. And you really captured, nicely these transitions, but, but this goes back to something you said earlier about this, not you know this relationship not being a physical place, right? That this relationship is built on, on, on trust and interest and stuff. But if you think about it, you know this temporary alliance. Has lasted over 80 years. And so in during that time, it goes through these strategic turning points to transition to these other periods. And so I was hoping you could talk a little bit about the strategic Turning Point to the Cold War, where maybe the obvious direct threat of a war was not so obvious at the time. Yeah,

Richard Kerbaj  25:25 
I suppose. So that takes us back to the point in 1945 that the this guy defected in Canada, and that was a massive turning point, because the Allies had won, and they had to reorient their thinking about who the next. And it was, of course, the great threat was a threat for economic and military and intelligence supremacy that the Soviet Union was very obviously presenting. And so they started to essentially tool up and gear up to defend against that threat. And at the time, the Five Eyes hadn't yet been officially formed. In fact, it was still going through some major teething problems, because in the late 1940s for instance, about 47 through the Venona project that I was talking about earlier, they discovered that the Australians had been penetrated. So the Australian Government was penetrated by Soviet spies, and so it presented a huge challenge for the allies, and particularly for the US. The Truman administration said, right, we need to disengage with the Australians and essentially remove them from this circle of trust. And it took a great deal of lobbying from the British to the Truman administration to help Australia get back into the picture. And the way they did that is that the head of MI five at the time, a guy called Sir Percy silito, and the Prime Minister of the day visited Truman and they essentially appealed to him, saying, What if we elevate Australia's national security standards and help them create an intelligence agency that's very much in MI five image. So they created what became the Australian Security Intelligence organization, which is ASIO. And Asia very quickly hit the ground running in 1949 and within a couple of years, recruited the lead, the sort of the spy chief, Soviet spy chief in Canberra, a guy called Vladimir Petrov. And through that recruitment, they managed to identify, yet again, what the Soviet Union was was trying to get out of sort of the US, and out of Britain and out of other Western nations. And the way that it was really aggressively targeting those five hours countries, and of course, the UK USA agreement was then expanded in 1956 to become the five eyes. And that five eyes was essentially, was initially created as a sync signals intelligence agreement. So in the Five Eyes document, which is largely redacted anyway, but you cannot find a single mention of any human intelligence agency. There is no mention of CIA, FBI, MI, five, mi six, and those interactions that were predominantly sort of taking place yet again on trust, and there wasn't any formality to bringing those agencies together, not even for an annual conference, Until the late 1960s in fact, the first conference I've just discovered now as part of a research that I'm doing for this second book that I'm doing came in 1967 in Melbourne, Australia, where they brought together the human Five Eyes members to discuss counter intelligence. And the 60s are a very crucial period, because the 60s very much indicated the true winner in the Cold War, and it certainly wasn't the five eyes. In fact, the Soviet Union had somewhat, we're not just some, was defeating, was defeating the five eyes during 1960s not because of its capability, but because of enormous misjudgments and miscalculations that were being made, particularly at the CIA, with the help of their own defector, a guy called Anatoly gillitan. If you haven't heard of him, you should look him up. He's a fascinating character who essentially warned the West that the KGB had created a unit specializing in turning diplomats into defectors. So of course, that kind of thinking reoriented the Five Eyes approach to anyone approaching them who is a potential defector. And so they turned a lot of people back. And that really hampered their investigations. It hampered their thinking. It turned them, I mean, it made them so paranoid that they mi five even investigated its own director and Deputy Director General. Yeah, mi five even suspected Harold Wilson, who was the Prime Minister of the day in the 1960s of potentially being inspired based on wrong information that had been fed by the CIA's counter intelligence stuff, chiefly run by Jim Angleton at the time. And that gets us that's sort of the 1960s the 1970s there's a quick turnaround. And I think that happens in 1971 and that's a turning point that I get to, because it's an important one. And that's when Britain, in the wake of the emergence of a new political leader, a guy called Ted Heath, who was a conservative political leader of Britain, a prime minister in Britain decided that he wanted to take a firmer approach against Soviet espionage, because during the 1960s when Harold Wilson was in place, mi five appealed to him repeatedly to do something about Soviet espionage, and they expelled a few people here and there, but they just wasn't enough political will to do anything. And politics really plays a huge part, not just in the five eyes, but in intelligence in general. Because, you know, politics to an extent can shape intelligence policy, just as intelligence policy can shape politics to an extent, but in the 19, early 1970s in Britain, there was a really important turning point, because the Conservative leader needed to figure out a way to expel Soviet spies without irritating Nixon and Kissinger, because President Nixon had had this Dayton in place, which is had been in place for several years with the Soviet Union, because both sides wanted to sort of focus on their own domestic issues, and Nixon didn't want anything to happen that, and neither did Kissinger. But from Ted Heath's perspective, the British prime minister, he was more concerned about his own national security, and so he knew that if he were to tell Nixon about his plans to expel Soviet spies, there was every chance that Nixon would rule against that, and then that would leave Ted Heath in a position of complete discomfort, where he would very much unlikely have gone on with it. So what they decided to do is to withhold the information from the Americans. And of course, there's a categorization within the five eyes that allows for that to happen, because, again, just because they share a lot of signals intelligence product. On the human intelligence side, it's a lot different, and it's more of an exchange, and it's more transactional, and it's not so smooth sailing. And so they decided to expel the Soviet spies in september 1971 and the reason that they were successful in identifying 105 spies is because mi five had a volunteer in early 1971 – a guy called Oleg leolin, who was in fact the subject of my next book. And it was a hugely lucky break for Britain, because up until then, it had been it had experienced nothing but failure for almost two decades in the face of Soviet aggression, it had failed at every front. It had been penetrated. It had a number of defectors, including Burgess and McLean and Philby and Blake who defected to the other side of the Iron Curtain, and it was hugely embarrassing for every agency in in the UK and for every political leader as well, because they just couldn't find a way around it. So hence why they were so deferential to the US. They would constantly turn to the US for advice and direction, and anything that was coming from the other side of the Atlantic seemed like gospel, until they realized in early 1971 that actually none of these leads have led to anywhere. And so when they were approached by this volunteer, a guy called Oleg lealen, who was working as a trade official, that was his cover role, and in fact, he was a key member of the sabotage mission for for the KGB, and it was a department they created called department v. And so he had a very good sense of who the spies were working inside the trade trade mission, also at the embassy. And he helped ml five identify 100 And five of them, and they expelled him. It was the biggest expulsion, it remains to be the biggest expulsion of Russian spies to this day. So that's a huge turning point in 71 and I think that also helped shake up the CIA and US intelligence, because up until then, it was really under the dominance of Jim Angleton, and it was one of the reasons, also not the chief reason, but one of the reasons that led to Jim angleton's dismissal from the CIA and the CIA sort of revamp. So that was one of the kind of tensions, political tensions, another political tension related to the way that the Australians were trying to reorient their relationships with the West away from the US, that features in the book. And then we go into the 1980s where there was a real, there was a real, sort of cut off point between the US and a member of the five eyes. And that took place in 1985 after a prime minister in New Zealand who was fairly left leaning and very opposed to nuclear weapons. And in fact, he had been elected on on campaigning against nuclear weapons. This guy, David Lange, his name is, refused to allow a US military ship, which was nuclear power, to dock in Wellington. And when that happened, Reagan wasn't very impressed about that. In fact, he made his views pretty immediately known, and very quickly they briefed the press that New Zealand was no longer kind of in the circle of military trust. It was no longer a, you know, a closed ally. And there were also stories from that time that were being fed to the press indicating that they've severed, not just military exercises and military cooperation with New Zealand, but also severed intelligence ties. Well, when going through those records, I discovered that actually those elements of the story had not been true. So that misinformed the press, because in fact, what had happened is that when, when Reagan and his administration said, Right, let's cut them from everything, the NSA appealed to the administration and said, well, actually, we can't just cut them because we rely on New Zealand's collection capabilities in that part of the world, in the Pacific and Indo Pacific, because they've got great signals capabilities, and we're so well integrated, we can't just cut them off. So although they gave the impression they had been cut off, in fact, New Zealand was only partially cut, and it was cut for a couple of decades, but their exercises so for instance, the CIA continued delivering some training for the New Zealanders, and the signals intelligence sharing was maintained. Yes, there were tensions caused by the politics, but it largely kind of outlive that, and then those kind of four, five decades in the you know, after the Cold War had kicked off, were very much intense decades that focused specifically on that Soviet threat. So when the Soviet Union collapsed, as a result, largely off the five eyes work. You know, on the intelligence front. Of course, there were military operations, there was Afghanistan and everything else to do with it, but five eyes agencies played placed, you know, central roles in that. In the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse, the five eyes was kind of in a limbo for about a decade. It didn't really have a purpose, because it was its entire purpose had been dissolved. Its mission was over. So they they pretty much downed tools. And there were even some agencies, I think, including in Australia, that shut down their Russia desks. They thought, okay, nothing to see here. We're fine. Mi five didn't, and I know this because I was speaking to some people who were involved at that point who said we scaled down operations, but we just kept things going here. And I think at the CIA, they had some presence as well, and other agencies had similar things, but everyone scaled down because what was about to emerge was the next big threat. And of course, 911 happened, and that became the next big threat. So having gone from defeating Nazis to defeating the Soviet Union, now you have this emergence of a new threat that looked completely differently to a previous threat. It was unconventional. These guys were conducting terrorist operations that had an impact on the entire globe. So a case in Australia could have an impact on the US, a case in the US could have an impact on Canada and so on and so forth. And they were very they didn't go about their operations conventionally. And it was around that time that actually, in. Russia was brought into the fold. Because, if you recall, in the late 1990s Russia was brought into the g7 it became the g8 and then Putin gave the impression that if he were invited to become part of NATO and treated as an equal partner, he would happily do so. And so post on 11, they were kind of united with Moscow in a very strange way, because they shared a common enemy, and Moscow was no longer presenting an obvious threat. But of course, at that time, Moscow was running cyber campaigns to steal technology from the from the US, UK and Canada. It was also trying to identify ways of getting back at dissidents. And so it it showed its ways, and it revealed its ways as its distrustful ways. In fact, in 2006 when it went after Alexander Litvinenko and the you know, FSB was deployed to poison him and kill him with polonium, 210, a radioactive substance, and that very much severed ties, not just between the UK and Moscow, but largely between the five eyes and Moscow. And so they started to see Moscow, yet again as a hostile player, so they kind of rebooted operations against Russia.

Dave Oakley  41:28  
Yeah, Rich, I was hoping you could touch on because one of the things I found fascinating about your war on terrorism, or your war on terrorism portion, is you hit a lot of stories that we probably all familiar with, the students are familiar with, and you highlight the tensions that they caused in the relationship. So, for example, the Mohammed Emwazi one, the Snowden one, and then, to be honest, one that I wasn't even aware of, and I'm gonna mess up his name, but the Canadian citizen of Syrian heritage, yeah, amwar. I think his name is Maher Arar,

Richard Kerbaj  42:01  
okay. I mean, that was a fascinating story. In fact, that story will give us, will hopefully give your students a sense of what the tensions were and how they developed, uh, early on in the war on terror. So this is a few days after 911 had hit. And, of course, the borders between, I mean, there is not really a physical border, really between Canada and the US, but even the borders relating to intelligence sharing were all pretty much downed and collapsed in the interest of sharing everything, because they had no idea where the next threat was going to come From, whether or not, it would emerge from Canada across the border, or from Europe or somewhere else. And so the Canadians had identified a potential al Qaeda suspect, and they had been pursuing him. And just by sheer chance, during a chance meeting with a friend of his, this guy, Maher irar, the investigation that the Canadians were running that was the RCMP, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police started to look at this guy, Maher irar, and they identified that just like the friend that he was with, he was of Syrian origin, it successfully sought political asylum in Canada. He'd been living there for several years. He's got children, but they had and he was also working quite an impressive job in engineering, but he had, there was nothing on him. They had nothing on him. He was largely sort of clean skin in targeting terms. So the Canadians shared the information with the FBI, and the FBI was very encouraging to to call on the Canadian keep, you know, collecting information on this guy. But despite collecting information on him for several months, they couldn't really find anything untoward about his behavior, they couldn't really find anything that suspicious. I think that would really meet the threshold of a full scale investigation, let alone an arrest. And so about a year later, this guy was trolled out to Tunisia to visit his family, and it was actually his wife's family who's living there. And on the way back, his plane went through. He flew through Manhattan, and when he got to Manhattan, to JFK, he was his name was flagged up on the system, and Border Force authorities there picked him up, passed him off the FBI. They took him to Manhattan's correctional facility, and they said to him, Listen, we believe that you're a al Qaeda terrorist. And he said, but I'm not. He tried to contest it. It didn't go anywhere. They then alerted the Canadian consulate, and the Canadian consulate had no idea that he was, you know, linked to al Qaeda. They had investigated him partially, but they didn't have anything on him because. The long and short of it is that the FBI misinformed the Canadians. Intentionally misinformed the Canadians about what they had against this guy. And they said what we have on him, you know, gives us real confidence that he is, in fact, a terrorist. And then they also then gave him the impression that if it doesn't work out, we'll send him back to Canada. But they told so many lies that they must have just gotten so mixed up in it all that on the very day that an FBI official was meeting with a Canadian official Several weeks later, after this man had been detained in Manhattan and then subsequently moved to Washington. On that very first day that the FBI was meeting with the Canadian official, they gave the Canadians the impression that he'll be returning home, when, in fact, several hours earlier, he had been flown on a private jet to Jordan and then uploaded onto a bus or a van and driven to Syria, where he was then subsequently beaten and tortured for an entire year. And during the torture process, he confessed to being a member of al Qaeda, of meeting Bin Laden, I think, once or twice, and of essentially agreed to everything they were thrown his way, and it was all based on questions that were raised with Him that had been written by the FBI. Well, ironically, the Syrians got to a stage where they said, We think he's lying. We actually don't think he he is member of al Qaeda. And in fact, we don't want him here anymore. I think we should just send him back. So they sent him back to the Canada and this guy went on to sue the government. And so when the lawsuit emerged, it was a very substantial lawsuit, sued for more than 10 million pounds, 10 million Canadian dollars. So the Canadians appealed to the FBI, saying, well, listen, you know, we've got this guy trying to sue us. Can you at least present us with the evidence you have against it so that we could defend ourselves? And the FBI initially resisted and then ultimately relented and said, We will provide you with the information, providing as long as you give us assurances that it will not be used in court. So the Canadians gave those assurances, and when they looked at the information, it was the very information that the Canadians had initially provided the US, which did not meet the threshold of a wide scale investigation, let alone a prosecution or a conviction. And that's when they realized that they had been done over by their closest partner. So that's yet another example of how things can malfunction within the system. The shocking story, isn't it?

Dave Oakley  47:52 
Yeah, no, I that was one that kind of, you know, the moving and disappointing pieces, but also the pieces that highlights the tension that this relationship has gone through, and how it survived, you know, even these tense moments. But that's

Richard Kerbaj  48:06  
kind of that is the story, you know, of the five eyes, something that started out very much as a, you know, in self interest by the US and UK, and grew to become something far greater than the sum of its parts.

Jim Cardoso  48:28  
It's not very often that we get the chance to listen to a world famous documentary producer whose award winning work is based on actual, real world national security and intelligence operations. Our thanks today to Richard curbadge BAFTA, Award winner for his documentary and British television work, as well as Dr David Oakley GNSI, Academic Director. Next week on at the boundary, we'll feature Lily shores of the GNSI future strategist program speaking with Joe Blankenship, the co founder and chief data officer of Certis core, a software company founded by veterans dedicated to changing the way people and machines interact with data. Blankenship will be a speaker at the upcoming cyber frontier summit on april 15. Here at USF the student led conference being produced by FSP. We encourage everyone to support these incredible students at FSP and attend. There's no cost involved, but registration is required. We'll drop a registration link in the show notes. Thanks for listening today. If you like the podcast, please share with your colleagues and network. You can follow GNSI on our LinkedIn next accounts at USF, underscore GNSI, and check out our website as well, at usf.edu/gnsi where you can also subscribe to our monthly newsletter that's going to wrap up this episode of at the boundary. Each new episode will feature global and national security issues we found to be insightful, intriguing, fascinating, maybe controversial. But overall, just worth talking about. I'm Jim Carlos so and we'll see you at the boundary.