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][2][3] Kiriakou says the U.S. does not operate against Canada for this reason, since Five Eyes partners share literally everything they collect.[3]
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.” Kiriakou says a CIA officer is just as likely to pass an MI6, Australian, or Canadian counterpart in the hallway as another American.[1][2]
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.[4][5] Kiriakou recalls the alliance being announced to CIA officers by Tenet in an all-hands email shortly after 9/11, stating that Five Eyes partners would have access to literally everything; many officers were skeptical it would really happen, but MI6, MI5, GCHQ, and Australian officers were soon embedded at CIA headquarters and the NSA.[6][7]
Continuity of government
In the same conversation, Kiriakou also described Mount Weather, the underground continuity-of-government facility to which senior officials — but not ordinary Washington residents — would be evacuated in the event of a nuclear attack.[8]
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.”[9]
Sharing everything — except with Israel (HOPE 2025)
John Kiriakou says the Five Eyes — the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand — now share “literally everything,” to the point that the old “secret, no-foreign” classification is no longer even needed among them. Israel is the opposite: the U.S. has not been permitted to spy on Israel since the Nixon administration, even as Israel runs “hundreds of undeclared spies” across American defense contractors and universities.[10][11]
Kiriakou directly rejects Netanyahu-era claims that Israel functions as a “sixth eye” of the alliance. He says the CIA-Mossad relationship, while close, doesn’t extend to Israelis walking freely around CIA headquarters the way British, Australian, New Zealand and Canadian officers can; after the Five Eyes were formalized post-9/11 and the agencies were instructed to “open the books,” CIA headquarters visitors could expect to see a CIA officer sitting next to an MI6 or ASIO officer — but never an Israeli.[12][13]
Kiriakou attributes the closeness of the Five Eyes less to any special intimacy than to shared English language and Commonwealth ties: the U.S. does not spy on Australia, for instance, even though Australia still fingerprints American visitors, because Australia is Five Eyes and Germany or France are not.[14]
The contrast with Israel
Explaining in 2026 what embedding a foreign service actually means, Kiriakou noted that post-9/11 the United States does host foreign officers inside the CIA and the wider community — “the UK’s MI6, the Canadians, the Australians, and the New Zealanders” — under a special relationship going back to the 1940s. The qualifying condition is mutual: “They don’t spy on us ever. And we don’t spy on them ever.”[15][16]
He uses that to reject the proposed permanent intelligence-sharing arrangement with Israel: “we also don’t spy on Israel, but the Israelis, to remind you, are critical threat for counter intelligence. The Israelis are not our friends. As simple as that.”[16][17]
His position is not that allied espionage is illegitimate. Citing Edward Snowden’s disclosure that the NSA intercepted Angela Merkel’s phone, he says: “I want NSA to intercept Angela Merkel’s cell phone. Right? Because we compete with the Germans.” The distinction he draws is about proximity rather than surveillance — “We’re not joined at the hip with the Germans. The Germans aren’t sitting at the Pentagon. The Germans aren’t sitting next to us at the CIA. And the Germans are not critical threat for counter intelligence.”[18][19]
Applied to Israel, that means he expects Israeli interception of American negotiators — Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, probably Trump himself, who “uses his regular iPhone” and whose number “half the reporters in Washington” have — and considers it unremarkable as collection. What does not follow from it is access: “then you don’t give them a seat next to your analysts in CIA headquarters. You don’t give them a seat at the Pentagon with access to the Secretary of Defense.”[19][20][21]