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Date: 2001-07-16
Scheiss auf ECHELON-.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- gleichzeitig ECHELON-Partner der Amerikaner sein? Dies ist zwar eine hoch/interessante Frage [siehe unten] doch ist sie momentan zumindest einem Menschen wurscht. Nach 1569 q/depeschen oder 39 Monaten mit einer einmaligen Ausfallsquote von 5 Tagen hintereinander macht der bis dato einzige Editor der q/depesche den Laden vor/erst dicht. Ob und wie es weitergeht wird sich finden. Wer vom p.t. Publikum zufällig nächstens in der nämlichen Welt/gegend weilen sollte, betrachte sich hiermit [echt] als eingeladen, leber/mordender Ouzo/runden teilhaftig zu werden, die über diesen Gateway kontaktierbar sind: http://www.chelidonia.com -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- Intimate relations Can Britain play a leading role in European defence -- and keep its special links to US intelligence? Charles Grant Charles Grant is director of the Centre for European Reform and a former defence editor of The Economist. Centre for European Reform 29 Tufton Street London SW1P 3QL -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A problem which must be addressed One of the most constant features of the geopolitical landscape is the special relationship between London and Washington on intelligence matters.1 One of the most rapidly changing and unpredictable elements of that landscape is the emergence of a European Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). This paper examines whether, and to what degree, these two phenomena may be compatible. ____________________ 1 The author wishes to thank the many people who have offered comments and criticisms of earlier drafts. Most of them would wish to remain anonymous. He is grateful to Francois Heisbourg and to Nicole Gnesotto for suggesting that he write this paper. An earlier version was commissioned by the [balance missing]. Many British officials involved in defence and foreign policy are relaxed about the question raised in the title of this paper. They assume that Britain can continue to have its cake and eat it - enjoying privileged access to US intelligence, while counting as much as any country in the embryonic CFSP. They argue that "firewalls" within the British government allow the British to keep a foot in both camps: the US will hand over certain reports on the understanding that Britain's European allies will not get to see them, while at the same time Britain can exchange other material with its European partners. But some continental officials are convinced that if Europe becomes a significant player in foreign and defence policy, Britain will eventually have to confront a painful strategic dilemma. One French official argues that Britain will not be able to play a leading role in the EU unless it jettisons the special intelligence links to the US: "Britain must choose Europe or betray it." That assessment is over-dramatic and, in the opinion of this author, false. But the British are too insouciant. For if the CFSP proves a successful enterprise, the special relationship will start to create difficulties. Since the formation of foreign policy depends, at least in part, on intelligence assessments, the fact that EU countries receive different and divergent assessments must make it harder for them to forge common policies. Intelligence may not often be the determinant factor in the making of foreign policy. But sometimes it does matter, particularly in the shaping of policy towards countries with closed societies, such as the so-called rogue states; in an open society, one can usually find out what is going on in through monitoring the media. And intelligence is hugely important for the successful conduct of military operations. Thus Europe's embryonic foreign policy and the projected European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) will be handicapped unless there is a high degree of intelligence sharing among EU governments, Britain's intimate connections to the US may make it harder for the Europeans to share intelligence among themselves - because Britain may be less interested in intra-European sharing, and because its EU partners may trust Britain less. Equally, if the Americans believe that Britain has developed special links with its European partners, and that it is part of a European enterprise that is challenging American power, they may become wary of sharing with the British. Britain has a clear national interest in encouraging the development of a European intelligence capability, as a means towards a more effective CFSP; but also in preserving its special access to US intelligence. The point of this paper is to suggest how those objectives can be reconciled. The paper examines the nature of the special relationship; the extent of intelligence co-operation among Europeans; the controversy over the Anglo-Saxon countries' signals intelligence network, known as Echelon; the argument over whether Europe should have its own spy satellites; and the significance of intelligence in the formation of European countries' foreign policy. Finally, the paper makes some suggestions on how the Europeans could deepen their cooperation on intelligence, in ways that need not damage the special UK-US relationship. The special relationship Relations between Britain and America are very special in at least three areas: The armed forces of Britain and the United States work together well. Cooperation between the two navies is especially intimate. The air forces are quite close. The British army, at times, has a more European bent, because so many of its soldiers have served in Germany, and because of the positive experience of peacekeeping alongside European allies in Bosnia and Kosovo. Collaboration on weapons programmes is particularly strong in the nuclear area. Britain's Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA) also works closely with the Defence Advance Research Projects Agency, its US equivalent, on conventional weapons. This may create problems in European defence industry consolidation: the US shares some stealth technology with Britain on condition that none of it is passed on to the French. This year the US persuaded the British government to modify its plans to privatise DERA; it feared that a privately-owned body would be less good at keeping American secrets. The special relationship is at its most special in intelligence. There is much cooperation on human intelligence ("humint") between the CIA and Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (the SIS, also known as MI6); on defence intelligence between America's Defence Intelligence Agency and the British Defence Intelligence Staff; on "overhead" intelligence - that deriving from satellite photos, reconnaissance aircraft or unmanned aerial vehicles - between America's National Reconnaissance Office and Britain's equivalent, the Joint Aerial Reconnaissance Intelligence Centre (JARIC), which is part of the Defence Intelligence Staff; and on signals intelligence ("sigint") between America's National Security Agency (NSA) and Britain's General Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). Each of the British intelligence services has a liaison office, staffed by senior officers, in the US. These offices obtain material from the US services and supply British intelligence to them. There are also British officers seconded to US agencies at an operational level, and vice versa. No other European or Asian country has such intimate relations with the US agencies. British-American co-operation on human intelligence usually involves exchanges of intelligence assessments, rather than joint operations. The difference in styles of the SIS and the CIA - the former stressing the use of agents, the latter devoting more resources to sophisticated technology, the processing of information and analysis - means that it is not easy for them to work together on operations. Signals intelligence is the most special part of the special relationship - and has been ever since 1941, when American and British code-breakers started to work together at Bletchley Park. Britain's GCHQ and America's NSA exchange many dozens of staff with each other. Each organisation takes responsibility for certain parts of the world. The British have listening posts in places like Cyprus, where the US has none, so the Americans regard the British contribution as very useful. But in "sigint", as in other forms of intelligence, the British services have no doubt that they get more out of these sharing arrangements than they contribute. So they are strongly wedded to the special relationship. Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and the US, bound together by various intelligence-sharing agreements that date back to 1948, reveal more to each other than to other allies. This intelligence sharing among the five Anglo-Saxon countries is institutionalised at the very heart of the British system of government. The Joint Intelligence Committee is the body in the Cabinet Office which sets goals for the UK agencies; sifts and evaluates their output; and presents summaries to the prime minister. Most other countries do not have an equivalent of the JIC, with the result that their intelligence agencies tend to be less well co-ordinated. There are two categories of JIC meeting: those at which the Anglo-Saxon allies are represented; and those at which only Britons are in the room. Britain's European allies do not attend any sort of JIC meeting. The British and American intelligence establishments are bound together not only by practical co-operation, but also by a common approach to the use of intelligence. According to senior figures in the UK and US governments, intelligence has more influence on their foreign policies than it has on the policies of continental European governments. The reason, they say, is that the Anglo- Saxons use intelligence in an empirical way: it is about gathering facts, and if the facts are significant, the policies may get changed. The view in London and Washington is that the French and other continentals, being essentially deductive in their thinking, develop sophisticated analyses and policies and then draw on intelligence to support them; but that they seldom allow intelligence to shift policy. Is that self-congratulatory British-American analysis true? According to one senior French official, the conclusion, that intelligence is less influential in France, is correct, but not because the French are so Cartesian that they ignore facts. The reasons, he says, are social, historical, and bureaucratic. "In France there has been less investment in intelligence capabilities, and a lower grade of people choose to work in intelligence, which is seen as something dirty. There is no bureaucratic system for diffusing assessments to the key branches of government. " The result, he says, is that decision-makers do not have a lot of confidence in what the intelligence services provide. Thus the common ground between the British and American intelligence services is extensive. It is inconceivable that a British government would ever wish to abandon the special relationship. So the key questions are whether, and how that special relationship can be made to fit with Europe's emerging CFSP. Intelligence sharing in Europe There is a large amount of intelligence sharing among European governments. Some of this sharing is multilateral, within NATO and the Western European Union (a rather sleepy organisation which has acted as the EU's defence club2). However, governments are generally reluctant to circulate the highest-grade material within multinational organisations, because too many people are liable to see it. They tend to be more willing to share sensitive material bilaterally. ____________________ 2 The WEU has ten full members: the EU's 15 countries, minus Austria, Denmark, Finland, Ireland and Sweden. But it often meets with those five, plus the six European countries in NATO but not the [balance missing]. It is important to distinguish between the raw data of intelligence - reports from agents, transcripts of wire-taps or satellite photos - and the assessments based on the data. Governments are naturally more relaxed about sharing analysis than source material. For example, if Britain passed on a report from an agent in Iraq, it could endanger his or her life; passing on the assessment of that report need not. Even assessments, however, are often regarded as highly sensitive. If one government studies several of another government's assessments carefully, it may be able to guess the sources, and it will certainly gain some insight into the other government's intelligence capabilities. Thus a country with sophisticated intelligence networks is unlikely to want to share high-grade assessments with another country unless it thinks it will get a good "trade" in return. On the other hand, one government's intelligence is more likely to influence another government if it is passed on in a relatively raw state: a photo of a missile silo is more potent than a report saying "there are missile silos". It is also worth distinguishing between political intelligence, which is relevant to decision-making at the highest levels of government; and military intelligence. The latter can be "strategic", concerned, for example, with a country's weapons programmes, or its defence industrial base; or "tactical", information that is relevant to a military operation. Governments tend to be more willing to share tactical intelligence than the political or strategic sort, particularly with allies who are engaged in a common military enterprise. For example, in June 1999, just after Milosevic agreed to withdraw from Kosovo, the Russian army despatched 200 of its peacekeeping troops from Bosnia towards Pristina airport. This was the first move in a plan which, if it had succeeded, would have led to thousands of Russian troops flying into Pristina and partitioning Kosovo. The Americans discovered the troop movement as soon as it started, through signals intelligence, and informed their NATO allies immediately. The allies therefore knew about the troop movement before the Russian foreign ministry. All governments are inherently reluctant to share even military intelligence, especially within multilateral bodies such as NATO. The American, French, British and German intelligence services are among those that provide reports to NATO, but they are doctored so that references to sources or sensitive pieces of information are removed. America's allies have long complained that it is particularly mean with its intelligence; for example it refused, until quite recently, to let NATO allies see satellite photos. However. the US has become more generous in recent years, perhaps because of the growing availability of imagery from commercial satellites. Any multinational organisation is by definition leaky. Throughout the Bosnian war, NATO secrets were ending up in Bosnian Serb hands. In November 1998 a French officer working within NATO, Pierre-Henri Bunel, was found to have passed NATO's target plans for Kosovo to a Yugoslav diplomat in Brussels. And in March 2000 it emerged that, at the start of the bombing campaign against Serbia which had begun a year earlier, 600 people within NATO had had access to the flight plans of the NATO bombers. That may explain why the Serbs evacuated so many prime targets in Kosovo a few hours before the bombs struck. The Western European Union, which will soon be folded into the EU's Council of Ministers secretariat, has a small unit that gathers and analyses intelligence from its member-governments.3 The WEU also has its own "satellite centre" at Torrejón in Spain. This processes information from commercial satellites and the two Helios 1 spy satellites (which belong to France, Italy and Spain). Mehr http://cryptome.org/uk-us-abed.htm -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- - -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- edited by Harkank published on: 2001-07-16 comments to [email protected] subscribe Newsletter - -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- 
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