What Five Eyes is and how it works

Twelve paragraphs, and two boards

The British-U.S. Communication Intelligence Agreement runs to twelve numbered paragraphs, and its outline lists them on one page. Paragraph 1 names the parties: the State-Army-Navy Communication Intelligence Board, representing the United States State, Navy and War Departments, and the London Signal Intelligence Board, representing the Foreign Office, Admiralty, War Office and Air Ministry. A footnote defines communication intelligence as all processes involved in the collection, production and dissemination of information derived from the communications of other nations.

Paragraph 3 sets out what is exchanged, the products of six named operations relating to foreign communications: collection of traffic, acquisition of communication documents and equipment, traffic analysis, cryptanalysis, decryption and translation, and acquisition of information regarding communication organisations, practices, procedures and equipment. Its own footnote defines a foreign country as any country whether or not its government is recognised, excluding only the United States, the British Commonwealth of Nations and the British Empire. Paragraph 5 governs third parties and opens by making it contrary to the agreement to reveal its existence to any third party whatever. Paragraph 9 bars dissemination, without prior notification and consent in each instance, to anyone who will exploit the material commercially. Paragraph 10 supersedes every earlier British and American agreement in the field, and paragraph 11 lets either party terminate the whole of it at any time on notice.

The three that are not parties

Paragraph 6 is headed The Dominions, and it holds that while the Dominions are not parties to the agreement, they will not be regarded as third parties. It requires the London board to keep the American side informed of arrangements with any Dominion agency, and requires the Washington board to obtain London's views before completing any arrangement with an agency in Canada.

Fifteen years later the same distinction is written out at length. Appendix J of 13 February 1961 records that Commonwealth countries other than the United Kingdom are not parties to the UKUSA agreement but will not be regarded as third parties, and that Canada, Australia and New Zealand, with whom there are special agreements on policy, are referred to as collaborating countries. Its Annexure J1 notes that the Melbourne centre was not a purely national one in the way the Ottawa centre was: Defence Signals Branch Melbourne is described there as a joint United Kingdom, Australian and New Zealand organisation with an integrated staff, civilian, under the Australian Department of Defence, with technical control exercised on behalf of the London board.

What came before, and the year each was added

GCHQ dates the earlier arrangement, BRUSA, to 17 May 1943, signed between the United States War Department and the Government Code and Cypher School, and covering the sharing of intelligence to support American forces in Europe, the exchange of personnel and joint handling regulations. Its account puts agreement in principle to continue the work after the war at 12 September 1945, and the settling of the bilateral text at a visit to Washington in November 1945.

On the accessions the two agencies disagree in print. The National Security Agency's release notice says the agreement was later extended to encompass former British Dominions: Canada in 1948, Australia and New Zealand in 1956. The GCHQ timeline dates Canada to 1949 and Australia and New Zealand to 1956. Both publishers are the agencies themselves, and this catalogue records the two dates rather than choosing between them. A revised text dated 10 May 1955 sits in the released set alongside the original.

The release

GCHQ and the National Security Agency published the declassified documents together on 24 June 2010, covering the period 1940 to 1956, on the agency's own site and on that of the United Kingdom National Archives. The GCHQ account adds that the agreement was not officially acknowledged before then, although its existence had been known about from the 1980s.

Declassification did not stop in 2010. The scanned outline of the 1946 agreement carries an approval for release by the agency dated 2014 under a mandatory declassification review case, and Appendix J carries one dated 4 April 2018 under a Freedom of Information Act case in litigation. The images are of carbon copies, and the sheets still show their control numbers and the standing note that the document is subject to semi-annual inventory.

What meets now

Two standing bodies carry the arrangement in public. The Five Country Ministerial is an annual meeting of home affairs, public safety, interior, security, border and immigration ministers of the member governments, with a scope running from border and migration security to counter-terrorism, aviation security and online harm. It first met at Monterey in California in July 2013, and immigration ministers were invited to join in 2016.

The Five Eyes Intelligence Oversight and Review Council is the other, and it is not one body per country but seven in total. Canada sends both its Office of the Intelligence Commissioner and its National Security and Intelligence Review Agency, New Zealand sends both its Commissioner of Intelligence Warrants and its Office of the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security, and Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States send one each. It works to a charter, compares review methods, and states that it keeps contact with countries outside the group.

What the documents do not settle

The phrase Five Eyes appears nowhere in the text signed in 1946. The papers work with two categories instead, parties and third parties, and the National Security Agency's own description of the released archive calls Australia, Canada and New Zealand second parties. The line the documents draw runs between two signatories and three collaborating countries, not between members and non-members, and no instrument in the set makes the group a treaty organisation with a seat, a secretariat or a procedure for joining.

What the member records hold in common is thinner than the name suggests. All of them sit in the United Nations, the OECD and the World Trade Organization. Four are in the Commonwealth of Nations and the United States is not. Three are in NATO and the G7, and Australia and New Zealand are in neither. The group spans three continents, and outside the United Nations, the OECD and the World Trade Organization, this is the only grouping every one of them belongs to.