Has US-UK Intelligence Sharing Been Too Cozy?

America's spy agencies have been under relentless scrutiny over mistakes they made on Iraq and their failure to prevent the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. A public report from the Senate intelligence committee expected to be released soon will spell out the flaws in US intelligence in Iraq in more detail and the spotlight will return with a later report from the panel investigating the September 11 attacks.

British agencies will face a similar examination over the Iraq war next week with the publication of Lord Butler's review of intelligence on weapons of mass destruction.

As their records are examined, the fortunes of the intelligence agencies of the two countries will to some extent rise and fall together. While their assessments of the threat posed by Iraq in 2002 did not agree on everything, they shared an enormous amount of raw information and co-operated closely on the analysis. Inevitably, intelligence co-operation across the Atlantic will come under intense review.

According to Thomas Powers, a US intelligence historian, the close co-operation between the American and British services"helped President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair make their case for war while protecting them from awkward questions".

In many respects, US and UK co-operation represents the most significant aspect of the so-called special relationship. Its closeness is often the source of great frustration to the intelligence services of Britain's European Union partners. Indeed, European governments argue that Britain's obsession with its transatlantic partner obstructs intelligence sharing within Europe - which is especially important in light of the terrorist bombings in Madrid last March. From the British perspective, the relationship with Washington has no peer. Britain's intelligence budget is large in international terms, but it represents only about 5 per cent of American spending. Piggy-backing on the US opens a world of information to the government in London to which it would otherwise have no access. Nowhere is that more true than in signals intelligence, known as sigint, where a network of satellites, computers and other high- technology assets is used to eavesdrop electronically on targets all over the world.

Some people in Britain are sceptical of its utility to the UK, but a central part of British strategy since the second world war has been directed towards securing and retaining a high level of US intelligence co-operation.

Some current and former British intelligence practitioners say that, as the junior partner in a complicated relationship, the UK tries harder to retain the attachment and to be useful to its American partner."In secret intelligence more than in most activities, a good reputation is slowly gained, and easily lost," said Michael Herman, a retired intelligence officer formerly with Britain's General Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), at a recent conference at Oxford University.

Other experts, however, see it differently."It's a servant-master relationship," says Cees Wiebes, professor of comparative politics at the University of Amsterdam. In contrast to its free sharing with the US, Britain tends to be parsimonious with the information it shares with its European partners."In 2001, the Dutch almost broke off liaison with British GCHQ because it refused to share (information) with the Dutch," he says.

So what does Washington benefit from retaining the UK as its junior partner? With the possible exception of Israel, the intelligence relationship with Britain is America's most important, say US experts. Jeffrey Richelson, of the National Security Archive in Washington, says:"Very important is one way to put it. Another way would be that if the relationship were to disappear overnight, there'd be rather a significant loss in terms of US intelligence capability."

The relationship is managed on a host of different levels, but most UK-US co-operation is with the equivalent intelligence agency on the other side of the Atlantic. For instance, the key relationship for the National Security Agency (NSA), the US main signals intelligence operation, is with GCHQ in the UK. Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, known as MI6, liaises closely but not exclusively with the Central Intelligence Agency and the Security Service (MI5) with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the CIA.

According to UK officials, a new Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre in London - with 100 personnel drawn from 10 government departments - has made it a priority to liaise closely with the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, an interagency group in Washington set up last year.

But it is in the field of signals intelligence that the relationship is the closest."The two Sigint organisations operate almost - but not quite - as if they were separate national divisions of some larger international conglomerate," said Mr Herman, the former GCHQ officer.

The relationship is governed by secret accords finalised in 1948, usually described as the Ukusa agreement, which also includes ties with Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The agreement goes beyond the exchange of intelligence, providing for common security standards, a division of responsibility in terms of signals collection, and the sharing of intelligence assets.

Large numbers of GCHQ personnel go to the NSA, usually for three-year spells, and vice versa."We have integrated: Americans working here are firmly part of the team," says one official at GCHQ."But it's a relationship that nobody takes for granted. It's about very hard-headed business judgments. . . The Americans aren't there to subsidise us or feed us or direct our work. It's about mutual support."

Sharing intelligence is not automatic, but much more is shared among the Ukusa Sigint organisations than among their human intelligence (humint) counterparts. Material collected by US intelligence satellites does not go automatically into a common system. However, some activities - such as the Echelon arrangement that targets commercial communications satellites and allows interrogation using specific key words - is said by specialists to be available to all the Ukusa countries.

The closeness of the alliance occasionally produces strange outcomes. Take, for instance, the Suez debacle in 1956 when France, Britain and Israel launched an invasion of Egypt against strong US opposition."The UK continued its intelligence exchanges with its US critic while denying them to its French ally, and the US at the same time supplied Britain with timely U-2 bomb damage assessments of the RAF's attacks on Cairo airfields," says a former UK intelligence officer....