Participation in the Five Eyes requires Canada to spy on Cuba for the US, according to John Bolton. With an annexationist Trump ratcheting up its bid to overthrow that country’s government, it may be time to reevaluate involvement in a Washington-dominated intelligence sharing alliance.
In Saturday’s Globe and Mail John Bolton told Robert Fife he was near certain Canada spied on Cuba for Washington. The former US national security adviser is quoting saying, “‘people would be stunned if that didn’t happen’ since Canada is part of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance with the U.S., Britain, Australia and New Zealand.”
The article is part of a series Fife has done on ‘Havana syndrome’ and Canadian spying on Cuba. A week ago, the Globe confirmed Canadian officials have long spied for the US in “Canadians passed intelligence to U.S. at time of alleged attacks in Cuba: source.” Fife reported, “A Canadian diplomat was sharing intelligence with American spies in Havana and Canadians were using satellite equipment brought into Cuba by the United States when officials from both countries began experiencing debilitating symptoms caused by alleged sonic attacks linked to Russia.”
In addition to two initial sources quoted in his first article, Fife marshalled other insiders who confirmed the espionage. In a highly revealing comment, former assistant director of operations at CSIS, Andy Ellis, complained that officials at Global Affairs Canada’s elite Global Security Reporting Program “would take risks that nobody else would do. They would do whatever the CIA asked them to do. [The CIA] absolutely owned them.”
(In another little-known form of assistance to the CIA in Cuba, the agency employed biological weapons researched in Canada on several occasions. In the 1970s the CIA attempted to kill President Fidel Castro with a nearly untraceable pill consisting of shellfish toxin. Canadian military researchers helped the US turn a shellfish toxin into a weapon and sent it to Fort Detrick in Maryland. Also, in the 1970s the CIA employed mosquito-borne viral pathogen Venezuelan equine encephalitis and released African swine fever virus on the island, forcing the Cuban government to slaughter 500,000 pigs. Weaponizing African swine fever and Venezuelan equine encephalitis was tested at Grosse Isles near Quebec City in the 1950s.)
As part of an aggressive bid to overthrow the Cuban government, the US is tightening its chokehold over the island. Last week Washington further restricted travel and banking and Friday the US Coast Guard seized a ship carrying fuel to Cuba as part of a suffocating illegal oil embargo.
As I detailed last week in “History will tell how Canada’s spies helped Trump in Cuba”, Fife’s recent reporting confirms how Canada has long spied on the island for the US. Since the 1959 Cuban revolution Canada’s Communications Security Establishment (CSE) has listened to Cuban leaders’ conversations from an interception post inside the embassy in Havana. Canada also spied on that nation from a diplomatic post outside Cuba. In the early 1980s CSE wanted to establish a communications post in Jamaica, notes former CSE officer Michael Frost in his book, to intercept “communications from Fidel Castro’s Cuba, which would please NSA to no end.”
At NSA’s behest CSE opened interception posts in many Canadian diplomatic outposts in the 1970s and 1980s. According to a NSA document released by whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013, CSE operated clandestine surveillance activities in “approximately 20 high-priority countries.”
NSA has trained CSE cryptanalysts and in the 1960s the US agency paid part of the cost of modernizing Canadian communications interception facilities. With CSE lacking capacity, intelligence collected at interception posts set up in Canadian embassies was remitted to NSA for deciphering and analysis. In the 1986 Target Nation: Canada and the Western Intelligence Network, James Littleton writes, “much of the SIGINT [signals intelligence] material collected by Canada is transmitted directly to the U.S. National Security Agency, where it is interpreted, stored, and retained. Much of it is not first processed and analyzed in Canada.”
Established during World War II, CSE now has 4,200 employees and a $1 billion budget. The highly secretive agency is Canada’s main contribution to the Five Eyes, which includes the US’s NSA, Australian Signals Directorate, New Zealand’s Government Communications Security Bureau, and British Government Communications Headquarters. A series of post-World War II accords, beginning with the 1946 UKUSA intelligence agreement, created the “AUS/CAN/NZ/UK/US EYES ONLY” arrangement.
Writing prior to the Internet, Littleton notes, “almost the entire globe is monitored by the SIGINT agencies of the UKUSA countries.” With major technological advancements in recent decades, the Five Eyes now monitor billions of private communications worldwide. Probably the most important intelligence sharing alliance in human history, the head of CSE in the early 2000s Keith Coulter called the Five Eyes “the greatest and most historical partnership that we have had.”
The Five Eyes accord is ultra-secretive and operates with little oversight. Snowden labeled it a “supra-national intelligence organisation that doesn’t answer to the known laws of its own countries.”
The Five Eyes accord has certainly made Canada complicit in belligerent US foreign policy decisions. It has also pushed Ottawa towards Washington’s global strategic outlook.
As a president threatening to annex Canada runs roughshod in Cuba and elsewhere, nationalists, the left and people of conscience should be pushing Ottawa to withdraw from the imperial Five Eyes intelligence alliance.
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