The Western intelligence group known as Five Eyes is a group as old as it is gruesome, which seems to have come out of a spy novel like those written by John Le Carré, where the good guys were the British and their CIA friends and the bad guys were everyone else.

By Guillermo Alvarado

The Western intelligence group known as Five Eyes is a group as old as it is gruesome, which seems to have come out of a spy novel like those written by John Le Carré, where the good guys were the British and their CIA friends and the bad guys were everyone else.

 Although they managed to remain secret for almost six decades, and once they were out in the open they continued to function almost as usual, in reality they have nothing to do with fiction, but with the ominous purpose of maintaining strict control of the world.

The network was born during World War II, when the United States and the United Kingdom signed an agreement in 1943 to automatically share all intelligence information on what was then the main enemy, the German Nazi regime and its allies in Italy and Japan.

The pact was made official in 1946, already at the dawn of the Cold War, and also connected the signals interception systems of the American National Security Agency with its counterpart in London.

Canada joined in 1948 and New Zealand and Australia joined in 1956, when the objective was clearly to spy on the then Soviet Union and all anti-imperialist movements worldwide.

It is striking that "Five Eyes" was so compartmentalized that even some governments were unaware of its functioning, until 1973, when the Australian Prime Minister, Labor's Gough Whitlam, was astonished to discover that his country was connected to this network.

According to a paper published by Philippe Leymarie in the British newspaper The Guardian, Whitlam also learned that the Australian eavesdropping base at Pine Gap had come under the virtual control of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, CIA.

Despite the Australian government's denunciations, the network continued to work in secret and it was 2010 that the full content of the agreement was revealed, but there was no clear awareness of its magnitude until Edward Snowden leaked tens of thousands of data collected by that system in 2013.

The spying pact was born during a very hot conflict, grew and strengthened in the cold war, but when this period ended, instead of disappearing, it diversified through the Echelon program, which monitored friendly and enemy civilian targets alike.

Now, in these confusing and difficult times, the network is being studied to expand, not only in terms of members but also in its activities, which will be directed against China, the new enemy that Washington is manufacturing, but that, my friends, will be the subject of other works.