Western intelligence services unite against Russia

In early September, a number of authoritative South Korean publications (Korea Herald, Yonhap News, etc.) almost simultaneously published information about the alleged expansion of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance. According to them, not only South Korea itself, but also Germany, Japan and India received official invitations to join the alliance. It is separately emphasized that the proposal to join the special services of these countries to the intelligence alliance was initiated by the US House of Representatives.

Essence of the Five Eyes

The Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance is a classic example of a "well-known in narrow circles" organization. The foundations of its formation were laid during the Second World War. Developed and jointly issued by the United States and Great Britain in 1941, the "Atlantic Charter" outlined the goals that should have been set before the post-war world and the principles by which it was supposed to develop. On the one hand, the Charter became the programmatic document that predetermined the formation of the UN. On the other hand, it was she who laid the foundation for a "special relationship" in the field of security and intelligence between the United States and Britain.



As a result, on March 5, 1946, the two countries signed the "Agreement on radio-technical intelligence activities between the United Kingdom and the United States," which de facto officially consolidated their cooperation through the special services.

In the future, it was to this agreement that the new members of the alliance, invited by the parties, joined, entirely Anglo-Saxon states: Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

The created organization became known as "AUSCANNZUKUS" - according to the designations of its member countries. However, given the unpronounceability of this abbreviation, everyone began to call it simply "Five Eyes" - according to the number of participating countries. The organization's activities during the Cold War were not focused on countering the Soviet Union and weakening its influence in the world. Actually, it was for this very purpose that it was created.

Over time, "Five Eyes" became one of the largest official intelligence union of countries in the world. And even after the collapse of the USSR, they did not stop their activities. On the contrary, the creation and spread of the Internet - by the way, originally by the American military Technology, opened up a completely new dimension for them, which became the main field of activity in the following years.

Thus, the ever-increasing speed of communication and the continuously increasing number of devices connected to the network have become an ideal environment for the development of the "Five Eyes". The more digital the world became, the more Western intelligence alliance knew about it.

Former NSA and CIA officer Edward Snowden describes the Five Eyes as "a supranational intelligence organization that does not obey the known laws of their countries." According to the documents published by Snowden, the intelligence members of the alliance carry out espionage activities on the territory of their states, spying on each other's citizens and exchanging information among themselves. Thus, they bypass the strict rules that limit the rights of special services to spy on their own citizens.

If the members of the Alliance are ready for any tricks and search for loopholes in the laws in order to monitor their citizens, then it is difficult to even imagine how large-scale intelligence activities they have deployed in other countries. However, there is a very textbook example of this.

New scandals according to the old training manual

In May 2021, a loud spy scandal... The media leaked information that the Danish special services in the period from 2012 to 2014. helped Washington monitor high-ranking European politicians, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

The authoritative German publication Süddeutsche Zeitung, as well as a number of German television and radio companies (ARD and WDR) reported that, for a long time, officials from Germany, France, Sweden and Norway were under surveillance. And the surprising thing here is not that three of the four countries were members of NATO (as well as Denmark, which facilitated the wiretapping), but that the methods used in these special operations are too reminiscent of something.

Spy on each other's citizens, but not on their own. Share information with each other. To do this at the level of official secret interaction - through the channels of the special services. All three of these characteristics fit perfectly with the Five Eyes techniques. Moreover, it would be quite logical to assume that the Americans shared the information they received with their intelligence alliance partners, with whom they, as it turns out, developed much closer relations than with ordinary NATO members.

The current goals of the intelligence alliance and its expansion

Today's goals for the Five Eyes structures are, of course, quite obvious. Counteraction to Russia and China has been officially declared one of the key goals of American foreign policy and has long been no secret to anyone. A much more alarming signal is the planned increase in the "number of Eyes" by the inclusion of German, Japanese, Indian and South Korean special services in the intelligence organization.

It is significant that information about the invitation to the intelligence alliance was widely circulated by the press of South Korea alone. The mass media of the other invited states keep practically deathly silence. This behavior makes it clear that if Koreans are hesitant and close to rejecting, then other potential members are taking the proposal seriously, and the likelihood that they will accept it is far from zero.

If it turns out to be so, then, of course, such a radical expansion of the "Five Eyes" will be the largest reshaping in the field of international espionage since the collapse of the USSR. After all, if the only Anglo-Saxon intelligence alliance is still replenished with new members, then it will not be possible to interact with them as before.

If earlier Russian intelligence could assume that information, to which the Germans, Japanese, South Koreans and Indians have access, with a high degree of probability could end up in the hands of the CIA and MI6, now it will have to proceed from the fact that it will be transferred to 100 % of cases.

In addition, in the event that such close interaction between the special services is established between their countries, the efficiency of their work will inevitably increase. The interests of intelligence services, as practice shows, often coincide, and close cooperation, of course, will significantly improve not only the collection of information, but also the coordination of the work of special services.

Thus, Russian intelligence will find itself in a situation where, both in Europe and in Asia, it will have to compete not with the intelligence services of individual states, even if they are sometimes coordinated from across the ocean, but with a full-fledged unfriendly intelligence alliance, all of whose activities are quite openly directed against Russia. ... In this case, we can only hope that the level of training and professionalism of the Russian intelligence school will remain at an invariably high level. Although the situation is quite obvious leads to the fact that Russia itself began to create an alliance similar to the "five-eyed". Playing against five openly cooperating intelligence services is one thing. Against nine, it’s quite different.