AI-generated image by Grok – US and UK intelligence officers working in close collaboration. But for how long?
In the context of the United States urging Europe to shoulder more of the burden for their own continental security, there are also doubts over the survival of the US-UK ‘special relationship,’ and many in the British national security community are even worried about the ‘last bastion’: the countries’ approach to intelligence sharing.
US President Donald J. Trump ordered in March that American intelligence not be shared with Ukraine, the order also covered other countries in the ‘Five Eyes’ security alliance. The order has been since rescinded, but gave the operatives a terrifying window of a world without US intel help.
Politico reports:
“The links between Britain and America’s intelligence networks go so deep that it may be impossible to untangle them, or to replicate the U.S. contribution, according to current and former intelligence officials who have worked across the regions and were granted anonymity to speak candidly to POLITICO about areas of national security.”
Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) has seen a meteoric rise lately – and US capabilities can’t be matched.
So now, Britain has to begin planning for the previously unthinkable scenario where US intel may be lacking.
“Britain’s status as a comparative heavyweight in the intelligence sphere goes back decades, having been formalized in the establishment of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance of the U.K., U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand following World War II.
In the years since, the vast scale of joint operations and surveillance went largely unreported until NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked over 1.5 million classified documents in 2013 and unearthed the alliance’s work across the globe.
[…] There has been a relative decline over the last few decades in the gathering of human intelligence — often referred to as HUMINT, which broadly covers agents and assets run by the FBI and CIA in the U.S. and MI5 and MI6 in the U.K. But that drop has been matched by a meteoric rise in its digital cousin, signals intelligence — named SIGINT, covered by the work of Britain’s GCHQ and America’s NSA.”
CIA headquarters: US capabilities can’t be replicated by the UK and European partners.
The U.S. intelligence ban for Kiev, while it lasted, erased its ability to fight Russia, especially because some U.S. technologies need American intelligence and input to properly function.
“While the U.K. can help analyze imagery the U.S. collects from space, it doesn’t have the capability to collect it itself, the official said. And any sharing from the U.S. ‘can, of course, also be turned on or turned off’.”
American ventures like In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm for the CIA, is a funder in at least 29 investments in various British tech and defense companies, and many US companies like Palantir and Anduril have contracts in Britain ‘including with central government data, the NHS, the armed forces and the police’.
“Musk’s interest in influencing British and European politics has been explicit, and Palantir founder Peter Thiel — who helped fund and mentor Vice President JD Vance — is also ‘obviously highly ideological’, said one figure in the U.K. intelligence community now working in the private sector.”
The operative says: “You have to hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.”
Read more:
Trump BANS UK and Other Allies From Sharing US Military Intel With Ukraine
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