The Five Eyes is the intelligence-sharing partnership of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The five governments have given each other “literally cart blanche to do anything, to see anything, to go anywhere.” The members do not spy on each other.[1]
Personnel from one member service routinely sit physically alongside personnel of the other members inside intelligence facilities. “We literally had people sitting next to us from other intelligence services, foreign intelligence services from those countries.”[1]
Where the Five Eyes relationship is strongest
The Five Eyes relationship is most operationally significant at the National Security Agency — “even more important at some place like NSA than it is at CIA or FBI” — because the signals-intelligence work that dominates NSA operations is naturally suited to a shared collection and shared access model.[1]
Tenet’s “open the files” directive
The contemporary practice of total file-level access among the Five Eyes services dates to a personal directive from CIA Director George Tenet in the early 2000s. Tenet ordered the agencies “to open the files. … And he meant literally open the files.” The practice of liaison officers from each service sitting physically inside each other’s headquarters is the operational consequence.[2][3]
Bounded comparisons
No other countries have a relationship equivalent to the Five Eyes with the United States. France, for example, is a NATO ally and European Union member with close intelligence cooperation, “but we don’t give them everything like we do with the Five Eyes.”[4]