Edward Snowden played a key role in elevating the partnership’s visibility as well. In July, in Nova Scotia, the Canadians convened the partnership’s intelligence chiefs’ annual get together, a meeting which also received an unusual amount of publicity, right down to the lobster served at dinner. He also ensured the ministers were photographed together for the newspapers. When Peter Dutton, the Home Affairs Minister, hosted his Five Eyes counterparts on the Gold Coast in August, he didn’t just announce the meeting. It has been strange to move back to Australia, as I did last year, and confront constant references in the media to “Five Eyes ministers” and “Five Eyes meetings”, as though the pact is so embedded in daily politics that it needs no explanation. That secrecy has now been dispensed with, nowhere more so than in Australia. Duncan Campbell, a longtime investigative reporter in the UK, thinks the first time the Five Eyes name was mentioned in public was barely a decade ago, in the pages of The Sydney Morning Herald. We just ask.” For decades, the intelligence partnership was never acknowledged by respective governments, let alone talked about in public. Or, as Admiral Dennis Blair, Barack Obama’s first director of national intelligence, said in Australia in 2013: “We do not spy on each other. The partnership has one core rule, that the members agree not to spy on each other. It also provides an intelligence windfall for its smaller members, like Australia. The Five Eyes has given America’s deep state a phenomenal reach and an unmatched level of integration with its allies that the West’s geopolitical rivals, notably China and Russia, cannot replicate. Like an omnivorous, 24-hour news organisation, the Five Eyes’ operations and facilities cover all time zones and continents, from listening stations at Pine Gap, near Alice Springs, to naval ships off Iran and satellite ground stations in the UK countryside, on top of the partnership’s hub, the National Security Agency, near Washington. The members have since extended co-operation to include exchanging personnel and strategic assessments. The Five Eyes grew out of a UK-US agreement to share signals intelligence after World War II, a partnership which later expanded to include Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Put another way, how did a once little-known intelligence pact become such a blazing target for China’s nationalist tabloid? The answer to that question lies much closer to home. Equally instructive is how the Chinese media came to focus on the Five Eyes in the first place. The focus on the "Five Eyes" by the Global Times and other Chinese commentators, however, is acutely revealing, not least because it displays how Beijing sees itself hemmed by the West, particularly the old Anglosphere. The fact that the warrant had been issued by a grand jury in the US for bank fraud, and reviewed independently by a Canadian judge, carried little weight with Beijing, which sees US law as little more than a political weapon. The arrest, after all, came in the middle of a high-stakes geopolitical fight involving Huawei, with the US, Australia and New Zealand pushing the global Chinese company out of next-generation mobile networks, for fear Beijing would use them for spying. That the Chinese might be looking at multiple avenues for hitting back after the Huawei detention is hardly surprising. As one Chinese journalist told me, the Global Times “is sort of like Fox News under a Republican administration”. “In this complicated game,” said the Global Times, “China should focus on the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, especially Australia, New Zealand and Canada, who actively follow the US against China.” The Global Times doesn’t speak for Beijing, but it has an outsized voice in China nonetheless, courtesy of its owner, the People’s Daily, itself the official mouthpiece of the Communist Party. Amid this furore, one prominent Chinese media outlet suggested another target to turn the screws on Ottawa. And Beijing made clear more was to come, threatening “grave consequences” unless the Huawei executive was released. Top-level meetings for Canadian diplomats dried up. A couple of Canadians who, until then, had been working openly in China, were detained. After Canadian authorities seized a top Chinese executive from the telecommunications giant Huawei at Vancouver Airport last month on a US arrest warrant, Beijing immediately set about retaliating.
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