Israel and the Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance

In the world of international intelligence, an operational and intelligence cooperation usually takes place on a bilateral basis, i.e. one intelligence service vis a vis its counterpart. Rarely one can find a multilateral cooperation and mostly this kind of cooperation may be found in instances where an intelligence incident takes place in more than one country's territory or that it contains a threat to more than one country.

Since the end of the Second World War, the global order was based on two superpowers, the US that headed the NATO bloc, and the USSR that headed the Warsaw Pact bloc. Between these blocs there was an established nuclear deterrence balance and a set of mechanisms to prevent mistakes that enabled global stability.

After the collapse of the USSR in the late 1980s, a word based on blocs of countries collapsed in an instant and was replaced with a world of single countries, tribes and demographic groups whose common denominator was reduced to two common interests: unconventional arms race and global jihadi terrorism.

The above coincided with a huge technological revolution that turned the globe into a small village. Geographic distances lost their importance; national borders lost their historical meaning; the time dimension changed and converted the world from a time dependent world to real-time world. Audio and video technologies made the world transparent to us humans and we watched as it morphs and reshapes, all in real time. The internet, cyberspace, Artificial Intelligence (Al), Data Science, Fake News, Deep Fake and quantum computing all turned the world into a one human capsule. However, and this is a big one, all these innovations could not create a harmonic world. The good and the bad are still fighting each other out there.

In this sense, the bad guys are the terror sponsoring states who simultaneously strive to develop unconventional military capabilities and radical Islamic terrorist organizations that have metastasized all over the world. These bad guys are joined international organized crime organizations who traffic drugs, launder money and misuse offensive cyber technology and the deep web. All of the above destabilize the world peace and wellbeing.

To contend with each of the above pestilences one needs, first and foremost, top grade intelligence, gathered by people, tools, means and methods that make the production of such top grade intelligence very expensive, and sometimes even a cost prohibitive product.

The global nature of these days' two main threats - unconventional weapons proliferation and global terrorism make international cooperation a prerequisite to successfully contend with them. No single country today has the capabilities to successfully contend with these threats. Only a multilateral cooperation among intelligence services, each of which contributes its relative advantages, can create power multiples that will produce effective outcomes at a reasonable cost.

In the world of intelligence there has always been one cardinal rule of safeguarding sources and methods. This rule obviously contradicts the idea of a cooperation among intelligence services however as the world evolved and developed and the cooperation component in it grew the above rule eroded. At first, intelligence services exchanged pieces of information. Then they shared evaluations on various subject matters. Next, they held research workshops for their intelligence experts. The leap happened when the intelligence war against threat became one that had to be conducted in real time. When the latter happened, intelligence services agreed to cooperate on intelligence based operational activity and by doing so exposed sources and methods.

If I am to venture a guess, I believe that, all else being equal, groups of countries with a shared interests will rise to the next level and agree on a division of labor with regards to their shared threats, in order to streamline their intelligence operations at lower costs.

In light of the above and despite the geographic distance between Israel and Australia I believe there is room to consider an established link between the Five Eyes and an Israel counterpart. Knowing the Israeli system, I can say with a high degree of certainty that Israel has a lot to contribute and share lessons it learned from its extensive experience in contending with the above threats.