intelligence sharing

Five Eyes Under Strain: Allies Limit Intelligence Sharing With Washington Case by Case

The UKUSA agreement was signed in March 1946, between Britain and the United States. Canada joined in 1948, Australia and New Zealand in 1956. For most of the eighty years since, the arrangement now called Five Eyes has been the closest intelligence partnership between sovereign states anywhere. Raw signals intelligence moves between the five almost as if they were one service.

That still mostly holds. What changed in 2025 is the edges. Several allies now decide case by case what they hand to Washington, and Washington has started deciding case by case what it hands back.

Who pulled back, and why

The first public break came from the US side. On 5 March 2025 Washington paused intelligence sharing with Ukraine. The pause lasted a week. DNI Tulsi Gabbard confirmed on 12 March that it had ended, after talks in Jeddah.

In July 2025 a Gabbard memo marked intelligence on the Russia–Ukraine peace talks NOFORN, the classification that keeps material from foreign partners. That included the other four Eyes. CBS reported it.

Then the flow started running the other way. In October 2025 the Dutch services, the AIVD and the MIVD, told the newspaper Volkskrant they now share less with the United States and weigh each case on its own. Their stated reasons were politicisation of intelligence and human-rights concerns.

In November 2025 CNN reported that Britain had suspended some intelligence sharing with the US about drug vessels in the Caribbean. The pause had started more than a month earlier, over doubts about the legality of US strikes on boats, which had killed 76 people since September. Canada told Washington it didn’t want its intelligence used to target boats, while staying in its Caribbean operation. Colombia’s president ordered a suspension of sharing with US agencies outright.

None of this ends Five Eyes. It does change how it works. A partnership built on default sharing now has carve-outs, on both sides, for particular operations.

The common thread is liability. A government that hands over a target’s location shares some responsibility for what’s done with it. If a partner’s operation might breach international law, a lawyer in London or The Hague has to ask whether passing the data makes their own officials complicit.

That’s a narrower question than politics, and harder to argue away. It also explains why the cutbacks are targeted. Britain didn’t stop sharing on Russia or terrorism. It stopped on one Caribbean operation.

Europe’s other channels

Europe’s own intelligence structures can’t fill a gap left by Washington, because none of them collects much on its own.

NATO set up its Joint Intelligence and Security Division after the 2016 Warsaw summit. It has no collection capability. A senior NATO intelligence official put it bluntly: the alliance has nothing the nations choose not to provide.

The EU has INTCEN, an analysis centre inside the External Action Service, built from the old Joint Situation Centre. It works with the EU Military Staff’s intelligence directorate as a single analysis capacity, and it too depends on what member states send in. Its director since 2024 is Daniel Markić, formerly of Croatia’s security agency. In November 2025 the Financial Times reported that the Commission wanted its own intelligence unit inside the Secretariat-General, staffed from national agencies. INTCEN officials worried about duplication.

Then there’s the Club de Berne, founded in 1971: the security services of the EU states plus Norway, Switzerland and the UK. It has no secretariat and takes no decisions. It’s a place where heads of service talk.

So European intelligence cooperation runs on national services trading with each other, and on the American feed. When that feed becomes conditional, there’s no European pool to fall back on, only bilateral deals.

What to watch

Two things will tell you whether this is a rough patch or a new normal. The first is whether carve-outs spread from operations, like the Caribbean strikes, to whole subjects, like Russia. The second is money. Collection is expensive, and Europe has just committed to 5% of GDP on defence by 2035. Whether any of that buys satellites and signals capacity that Europe controls itself says more than any memo.