It is an intelligence relationship that predates even the Five Eyes: the UKUSA alliance that began, naturally enough, in secret in 1946. But this week the strain of trying to be the closest security ally to a freewheeling White House has begun to show.<\/p>\n
Britain, it emerged, had quietly suspended<\/a> intelligence cooperation with the US in the Caribbean because London does not consider the deadly US military campaign against ships accused of drug trafficking to be in line with international law.<\/p>\n That amounts to an extraordinary open fissure in a close working relationship at a time when the US is increasing its military buildup, expanding its controversial campaign in the region with an attempt to threaten Venezuela<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m not sure if there is a previous example of this happening in the public domain. Turning off the tap completely is pretty rare,\u201d said Matthew Savill, the director of military sciences at the Royal United Services Institute thinktank and a former civil servant.<\/p>\n \u201cI suspect when the first boat<\/a> was blown up, somebody from the UK would have sought clarification from the US along the lines of \u2018can you explain what you are doing\u2019. Maybe they got an answer from the Pentagon and didn\u2019t like it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Intelligence, once the province of spies, is today increasingly a matter of sophisticated listening and snooping apparatus and surveillance technology. What the UK (and the other Five Eyes members: Australia, Canada and New Zealand) can offer to the US is global coverage, from strategic locations such as the UK base at Akrotiri in Cyprus and island territories in the Caribbean.<\/p>\n The UKUSA relationship may date back to the second world war but it was reforged after 9\/11, when Tony Blair promised to stand \u201cshoulder to shoulder\u201d with the US, and ran throughout the long \u201cwar on terror\u201d, with the Americans in the lead and at times straining at the rules.<\/p>\n There were no shortage of controversies \u2013 most notably that members of the UK\u2019s spy agencies saw or had knowledge of CIA torture and kidnap<\/a> of terror suspects \u2013 but politically these were contained. Plans to hold a judge-led public inquiry into alleged UK complicity in torture were finally abandoned by Theresa May as prime minister in 2019.<\/p>\n The UK halted some intelligence sharing during Barack Obama\u2019s US presidency amid British concerns over the legality of certain CIA drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere but the two sides managed to find a way to achieve legal alignment after much effort, said one former official.<\/p>\n Since the return of Donald Trump, however, there have been signs that the alignment is unravelling. In June, as it became clear that the US was considering bombing the Fordow nuclear enrichment site in Iran during the short Israel-Iran war, questions were raised about whether the UK would consider the attack legal.<\/p>\n It was relevant because there was an expectation that the US would launch the B-2 bombing raid from the UK base on Diego Garcia, in the southern Indian Ocean, so forcing Keir Starmer\u2019s government to take a view<\/a> on the attack\u2019s legality. But the issue was tactfully sidestepped: the US launching the attack from Missouri instead.<\/p>\n While the UK intelligence community is relatively tight, eager to avoid political controversy, and leaks are rare, the US system is larger, leakier and \u2013 particularly in Trump\u2019s second term \u2013 highly politicised. Because of the close relationship, where so much is shared, the UK is frequently dragged in.<\/p>\n This week a report in the New York Times<\/a>, sourced partly to former US officials, gave an account of how MI5 was surprised when Kash Patel, the FBI chief, went back on a verbal commitment he had given to the MI5 director general, Ken McCallum. Patel had said he would not cut a surveillance post in London that MI5 deemed critical, only for it to be axed in budget cuts a few weeks later, leaving the British agency incredulous.<\/p>\n Normally where the UK has security or legal concerns about a partner, even one as close as the US, ministers, officials and lawyers can quietly restrict the flow of intelligence, recognising that policy disagreements or leaks are more likely.<\/p>\n However, the Trump administration\u2019s rapidly escalating campaign against alleged narco-traffickers in the Caribbean and Pacific has stretched legality to what many experts consider its breaking point \u2013 and given the UK no choice but to consider its position on intelligence sharing explicitly.<\/p>\n So far the US has declared that 75 people have been killed in 19 strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific since September, and the White House has justified the campaign on the grounds that it is engaged in \u201ca non-international armed conflict\u201d with drug cartels designated by Trump as terrorists.<\/p>\n