UKUSA

Harry Hinsley, Sir Edward Travis and Brig Tiltman, who helped negotiate the intelligence sharing agreement between Britain and the US, in Washington in November 1945 Photo: NATIONAL ARCHIVES

'UKUSA' is the somewhat obvious acronym accorded the March 1946 secret agreement between the UK and USA concerning Communications intelligence sharing and under which the global Echelon system was built. Both the agreement itself and the Echelon system continue in operation (July 2010) with the technical capabilities of Echelon undoubtedly vastly greater than envisaged for it at the outset. Part of the agreement states:

“It will be contrary to this agreement to reveal its existence to any third party whatever” and that “each party will seek the agreement of the other to any action with third parties and will take no action until its advisibility is agreed upon.”

This explains why, in spite of its existence being widely accepted for decades, it has never been officially acknowledged.

The consequent Ministerial 'Omerta' has recently produced moments of high farce, as in the matter of allegations of UK collusion in torture, with the then UK Home Secretary David Miliband going through all manner of contortions to explain why intelligence documents that proved Binyam Mohammed's allegations could not be made public. Pre-emptive deflection of attention on the agreement has often taken the form of emphasising an alleged UK-USA 'Special Relationship' - an ambiguous phrase usually understood in cultural/language etc terms but equally applicable in logic to the UKUSA agreement itself - all of which is illustrative of the devious workings of the bureaucratic mind when faced with a dilema.

The agreement has probably undergone it's own evolution too. However, as is amply illustrated by ministerial evasions it is not only still operational but highly valued by the UK - crocodile tears and backside-covering bullshit notwithstanding.

A series of documents relating to the setting up of the agreement and the first few years of its operation were declassified in June 2010 and are available on the UK National Archives web site . A more substantial collection covering the period 1940-1956 is available from the US NSA website.

A draft of the original agreement dated 1 November 1945 in available on the WikiSpooks site and linked to below

See Also

• GCHQ
• Echelon
• File:Hw-80-2.pdf - Draft of the UKUSA agreement dated 1 November 1945

External sites

• Wikipedia UKUSA Agreement main page
• The Document that formalised the 'special-relationship' with the US