The sheer extent of the global surveillance system overseen by the US and its allies made it difficult to hide. An NSA analyst sitting in an office in Fort Meade, Maryland, receives signals from radio interception antennae in Tangimoana and taps on subsea internet cables on the bed of the Sea of Okhotsk. The system collects a massive volume of information: phone calls, satellite communications, emails, internet traffic, webcam images, billions of mobile phone location records and tens of billions of text messages every day.
The Five Eyes members share listening posts and much of the signals intelligence they collect. The NSA is by far the most powerful signals intelligence agency in the world, but global surveillance is a shared effort of the Anglosphere. British cryptanalysts had already broken Enigma though not yet the more sophisticated naval version. The Bletchley meeting became the basis for a wartime agreement between the US and UK to share codebreaking methods.
After the culprit was arrested, another MI5 officer, Guy Liddell, travelled to the US to discuss the case with American officials and to push for more co-operation between British security services and the FBI. Many of the early efforts at transatlantic co-operation were less about intelligence-sharing than about drawing the US into the war.
MI6 tried to improve links with American security officials with the help of the Canadian-born pilot turned industrialist William Samuel Stephenson. The plan was for American and British intelligence agencies to share the burden of monitoring the world by drawing up zones of influence β a version of the principle still applies today. The British wanted American money, radios and boats.
Given the speed at which American naval yards were churning out ships, fifty old destroyers was a price the US could easily pay. And the land it received in return came with benefits. Neither Washington nor London saw any reason to end intelligence co-operation at the end of the war. Besides, the US had bigger plans. It became an important part of the postwar security architecture established by the US at the height of its power. What the US needed was territorial reach.
