"The Secret History of the Five Eyes
By Richard Kerbaj
Union Square, 448 pages, $29.99
Not many people outside policy and government circles know about the Five Eyes, the intelligence-sharing network formed by the U.S., the U.K., Australia, Canada and New Zealand that has existed since World War II. Perhaps that's what justifies the title of Richard Kerbaj's "The Secret History of the Five Eyes," a book that draws largely from public sources, including news articles and interviews with major political figures.
Mr. Kerbaj gives readers a valuable look at the origins and trajectory of the oldest and most successful intelligence network in the world. It's the one that sustained the U.S. and its allies during World War II and the Cold War, and even after 9/11 and during the War on Terror. As the author shows, it's an alliance that's faced its share of internal strife, over the Suez crisis, the Vietnam War and now Donald Trump.
"The Five Eyes" refers to the five intelligence agencies that meet annually to discuss how to share information, including the fruits of signal intelligence, human-intelligence capabilities and law-enforcement activities (among them, those of the FBI), with each member having access to whatever the other four uncover.
The arrangement also involves a geographic division of labor, with the U.S. covering Latin America and the Caribbean as well as major portions of Asia, Russia and the Middle East; the U.K. is responsible for Europe and Africa; Australia watches over South and East Asia and southern China; and New Zealand monitors the south and west Pacific. Canada covers the increasingly important polar regions of Russia and the interior of China.
"On the one hand, the Five Eyes is equivalent to a band of brothers and sisters drawn together by common values, language and cause," Mr. Kerbaj writes, with each member ultimately responsible to its respective government. On the other, "the alliance is a non-binding marriage of convenience riddled with distrust, competing intelligence agendas, and a massive imbalance of power that predominantly favors the United States," with its resources far greater than the other four put together and the global responsibilities to match. Given the asymmetry, it's not surprising that the others can be resentful, even engage in outright pushback.
At first the urgency of the war against Hitler compelled trust and cooperation between the U.K., the U.S. and Canada. As the war expanded into the Pacific, these Atlantic-based partners drew Australia and New Zealand into their orbit.
Cooperation on codebreaking was the group's original focus and strength, first against the Germans, then the Japanese.
Mr. Kerbaj underlines what we've all learned since: that this cooperation proved decisive for victory in both theaters.
During the Cold War, the Five Eyes shared a trove of secret Soviet information decrypted through an operation codenamed the Venona Project. Gene Grabeel, a former American home-economics teacher, took charge of sifting through thousands of old encrypted Soviet communications. Her efforts led to the unmasking of the Soviet spies Klaus Fuchs, Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs, among others.
How Venona got started is one of the most interesting and engaging passages of Mr. Kerbaj's book.
America's original codebreaking partner, the U.K., remains the closest of its Five Eyes partners. With the end of the Cold War and the rise of China, however, Australia's importance has been growing.
Mr. Kerbaj describes how Australia's rise has graduated to strategic cooperation in the so-called AUKUS agreement between Australia, the U.K. and the U.S. for building the Australian navy's first nuclear submarines.
New Zealand remains the least represented and, from the American perspective, the least trusted of its Five Eye partners, given its government's serial proclivity for anti-American rhetoric and agendas. But as China expands its influence into the South Pacific, the New Zealand connection, too, will gain value. The same will happen with Canada, the other junior partner, as China and Russia look to dominate new sea routes in the arctic region.
In many ways, Canada's junior status in the Five Eyes arrangement remains a puzzle. Mr. Kerbaj points out that one of the Five Eyes' founders, William Stephenson, was a Canadian; Canada worked closely with both the U.S. and the U.K. on secret atomic research during World War II. But since then Canada and the U.S. have often seemed to be on divergent political trajectories. Canada was a critic of America's Vietnam policy (Australia, by contrast, stood loyally by and sent 60,000 troops to serve alongside American GIs). It also refused to join the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, based on suspicions by Canadian intelligence officials that the claims regarding Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction had been fabricated. "It was, in fact, the first time ever that there was a war that the Brits and the Americans were involved [in] and Canada was not there," Jean Chretien, Canada's prime minister at the time, is quoted as saying.
Mr. Kerbaj's discussion of Mr. Trump's impact on the Five Eyes is perhaps the least satisfactory part of the book. Written in 2021-22, it reflects the disdain and distrust the author's sources held for Mr. Trump, and echoes their narrative that if Mr. Trump wasn't an out-and-out collaborator with Vladimir Putin during the 2016 election, then at the very least he recklessly disregarded the risks of being overly friendly with the Russian dictator.
Today we know considerably more about how the so-called Russian hoax began as a Hillary Clinton campaign ploy, and how the FBI engaged in questionable, if not actually illegal, spying on the Trump team.
This time lag is unfortunate in another way: The book doesn't give us a full picture of what happened to the Five Eyes during the Joe Biden years, while the author's chapter on "The Future of the Five Eyes" falls well short of Mr. Trump's ascent to the White House for a second term. Mr. Trump has proved he is determined to shake up America's international relations, even with its allies. There's no reason to think he won't do the same with the Five Eyes.
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Mr. Herman is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and author of "Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II."" [1]
1. A Select Club Of Spies. Herman, Arthur. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 28 Apr 2025: A15.
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