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Five Eyes Would Go Blind Without US Backing: US Army Vet and Intel Specialist

Britain's intelligence establishment reportedly started "rationing" what info to pass on to the US after Trump's election, and his thrashing of Zelensky at the White House last month has sparked talk of a 'breakaway' 'Four Eyes' intel-sharing pact. Sputnik reached out to a leading US military intel specialist for details on what this could entail.

Sources told The Mail on Sunday that while joint work intercepting electronic communications could be ‘hard to disentangle’, human intelligence by agents on the ground could be held back from being shared with the US, especially “raw intelligence, which can be very exposing of sources if it falls into the wrong hands.”

Diplomatic sources, meanwhile, told the newspaper that the US intelligence establishment is “in a state of panic” over Trump’s approach, and actively destroying files on assets in Russia.

Five Eyes Without US is Nothing

“The US share is huge,” retired US Army Lt. Col. Earl Rasmussen told Sputnik. “There’s very little the remaining Five Eyes would have without the US,” the observer noted, highlighting that America provides:

Immense signals intelligence (SIGINT) capabilities including information from satellites (about 5,000 of the world’s roughly 8,000 satellites are American), in Rasmussen's estimation

a military feed from the US Defense Intelligence Agency

substantive human intel

real-time open-source info collection and analysis capabilities

security intelligence via cooperation between the FBI and the Five Eyes’ allies' analogs.

👁FIVE EYES WOULD GO BLIND WITHOUT US BACKING - HERE IS WHY

💬“The US share is huge,” retired Army Lt. Col. Earl Rasmussen told Sputnik, commenting on a report that non-US Five Eyes allies are mulling the creation of a separate ‘Four Eyes’ arrangement🧵(1/3) pic.twitter.com/9lszlVujph

— Sputnik (@SputnikInt) March 9, 2025

If the Five Eyes were to break up, Rasmussen doesn’t exclude the creation of new, regional intel-sharing alliances, like:

Australia and New Zealand partnering up with Japan and South Korea

The UK ramping up intel cooperation with France and Germany

As for the Five Eyes’ “global reach, the fusion of information, the mass experience, the analytical tools that are commonly operated…almost all the major ones have either been operated completely by the United States, or via a shared operation with the United States and another [country],” the observer summed up.