Trump v the spies of Five Eyes

Will the US President damage the world's most powerful intelligence pact?

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On March 2, Ms Tulsi Gabbard, America's director of national intelligence, accused Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky of seeking a third world war, "or even a nuclear war"

Ms Gabbard has a long history of conspiratorial and pro-Russian views. Her former aides say that she routinely read and shared propaganda published by RT, a Kremlin mouthpiece.

Ms Gabbard's appointment has caused concern in American intelligence agencies, and those of its allies, yet she is not the only source of tension in America's network of intelligence alliances.

US President Donald Trump recently stopped sharing intelligence with Ukraine for a week to press it to make concessions. He has threatened both to annex Canada and to eject it from the Five Eyes spy pact. For now, intelligence continues to flow, freely, between America and its allies. Might that change?

American spies are connected to their allies through a vast network of relationships.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), America's human intelligence (Humint) service, maintains liaison officers with virtually every allied service.

It cooperates with them on espionage and covert action. In one audacious operation from the 1970s to the 1990s, for instance, the CIA and Germany's BND secretly co-owned a leading manufacturer of cipher machines, selling nobbled devices to unsuspecting states.

In signals intelligence (Sigint), the entanglement is deeper still.

After World War II, America, Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand established the Five Eyes, a pact to jointly collect intercepted communications and data. It is the most ambitious collection and sharing arrangement in history.

Each side trusts the other to a remarkable degree.