The Sunday Ishmael: 09/03/2025

 

So, I was listening to the wartime news on the radio the other day when I was struck by the phrase "Five Eyes". I'd heard it before, of course, and I thought I had a pretty good idea about what it means, but it suddenly struck me as an utterly risible phrase for something so deadly serious, so I thought I'd better look it up. 

Apologies to Ishmaelians who already know all this stuff, but for those who haven't been paying much attention, and, as usual, who, indeed, can blame you, here we go with the origins and meaning of the phrase. 

The Five Eyes, Wiki tells me, and yes, I bung them a fiver whenever they are hard up and ask me; is an Anglosphere intelligence alliance consisting of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States, all party to the UKUSA Agreement, a treaty for joint cooperation in signals intelligence. Signals intelligence is defined as a category of intelligence comprising all communications intelligence, electronic intelligence and foreign instrumentation signals intelligence, however transmitted. Informally, "Five Eyes" refers to the intelligence agencies of AUSCANNZUKUS - basically, a bunch of spies, all speaking English. Not French - no, Macron, you can't join, with your late-night broadcasts to the benighted French people, in French, trying to drum up support for the Dwarf, when all your citizens want is for you to do something about the Islamist terrorism which is eroding the French mode de vie and blowing them up, stabbing, raping and beheading them. And not Ukrainian - you can't join either, however much you want to get all that US signals intelligence back. Shouldn't have been so disrespectful, huh? Huh? Nope, it's an English-speaking spy club.

I went out with a retired spy once. He was in his forties - incredibly old, svelte and sophisticated he seemed to my 18 year-old self, with a Pathé News  voice.  I met him at work, where he was supposed to be mentoring me, but instead fell hook, line and sinker for my aforesaid 18 year-old self. He was married, but didn't let that hold him back. He fancied himself as James Bond, but without the Scottish accent.

Everybody smoked back then - it was compulsory.

He'd been a spy for Her Majesty in Rhodesia, before being retired and having to take up post as a Civil Servant back in Blighty, and never got over the sprawling bungalow, the bleck servants, the manicured gardens, never having to do any housework or shopping, and spending his days sipping martinis and spying - like Our Man in Havana,

you know, when James Wormold, a vacuum cleaner salesman in pre-revolutionary Cuba, coerced by British Intelligence into being their Havana operative, invents agents for his "cell" and submits his sketches of plans for a rocket-launching pad based on vacuum cleaner parts to make more money from the rather dense British Intelligence establishment. The film isn't a patch on Graham Greene's book, which is decidedly more menacing, particularly in its depiction of the sadistic and charming Chief of Police, who has a lampshade made from the tattooed skin of a political enemy he has had tortured to death, and divides the citizenry into the torturable and non-torturable classes. As well as playing checkers with miniature whisky bottles, thus creating a built-in handicap for the better player, as they have to drink the pieces they take.

Anyway, back to my spy - who we'll call Ted, because that was his real name. Ted decided that the best thing was for me to run away with him to Rhodesia, where he would set me up in my own bungalow and we could have a perfectly splendid life, getting pissed and bossing the bleck servants around. Good thing I wasn't tempted, despite the spy thing and the  Pathé News  voice, because Rhodesia became Zimbabwe and it wouldn't have ended well. Just goes to show you the moral and intellectual calibre of our Great British Spies.

So why is it called Five Eyes? It is one of those baby-talk American things, like No Fly Zone. It is shorthand for "AUS/CAN/NZ/UK/US Eyes only" releasability caveat (classified information). It started with secret meetings between British and American code-breakers during the second World War, was formalised in 1946 by the UKUSA Agreement, and again in the 1960s under the ECHELON surveillance system, which was developed by the Five Eyes or FVEY to spy on the communications of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc and is now used to monitor communications worldwide. So if you hear clicks and hisses on your phone line when exchanging endearments with your sweetheart or firming up jihadi plans with your best bud, it'll be ECHELON. Surveillance was ramped up during the "war on terror", which started in 2001 when those big American buildings surprisingly and neatly collapsed into their own footprints after having been flown into by inexperienced pilots. Five Eyes was able to identify the culprits when a foreign passport fluttered to the ground from one of the aircraft. Just saying. The Five Eye alliance is now a global spy mechanism, keeping its Eyes on international terrorism, cyber attacks and regional conflicts. They try to keep their activities secret, for good reason, because if the general public became aware of the extent of their reach, the shit would hit the fan, presumably. As it is, the impact of their activities on privacy and civil liberties has sparked legal challenges.  Edward Snowdon, who brought all this shit to light and was remorselessly hounded across the globe, threatened with charges of treason and hanging, by the US Government for exposing nefarious surveillance practices, described the Five Eyes as " a supra-national intelligence organisation that does not answer to the known laws of its own countries." Disclosures in the 2010s revealed Five Eyes was spying on one another's citizens and sharing the collected information with each other.

The picture heading up this blog has 9 eyes, not 5. That's because there's another secret surveillance society, consisting of the Five Eyes plus Denmark, France, Netherlands and Norway. They are not in the inner circle, but they are affiliated. Then there's the 14 eyes, which has Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden tacked on to the Nine Eyes - kind of sub- sub- spy circle.

One could ask oneself why, since Five Eyes (9 Eyes and 14 Eyes) is  the most comprehensive espionage alliance, with breath-taking surveillance tools at its disposal, does shit continue to happen? 

One conclusion could be that it is allowed to.

Another, less conspiratorial conclusion could be that they are all as shit at spying as the Bulgarians.

Vanya Gaberova, 30, Katrin Ivanova, 33, and Tihomir Ivanchev, 39, Bulgarian spies who were all living in London, were part of a group who travelled Europe carrying out surveillance on journalists, a former politician and a US military base in Germany between 2020 and 2023. But why do you say they were shit, mrs ishmael? The Metropolitan Police's Commander Dominic Murphy said the methods they used were the sort of thing you would expect to see in a spy novel, and was an extremely sophisticated operation.

Because, during their trial, Ivanova and Gaberova admitted spying but said they didn't know they were spying for Russia. Ivanchev had said the same thing in police interviews, but didn't give evidence during the trial. What sort of a spy do you have to be not to know who you are spying for? A rubbish one, that's what. Anyway, they were found guilty this week and the case has been adjourned for sentence at a later date, together with three other spies from the same ring. Can't wait for the film to be made.

On the last thread, mr mike recommended the 1957 film, The Cranes are Flying, a Soviet war drama. I watched it the other evening. It is available on Youtube - either follow the link provided by mr mike, or just ask Youtube's Search box for it. It is available in the original, black and white version, in Russian with English subtitles, or a colourised, dubbed version, which is possibly more accessible.  It was directed by Mikhail Kalatozov, availing himself of the directorial freedoms afforded Soviet film-makers following the death of Stalin, who had rather idiosyncratic views about what he liked to see in a film. The cinematographer was Sergei Urusevsky, who achieved some amazing effects before there was access to CGI and  drones - having seen his gravity-defying sequences, particularly where the heroine is closely tracked whilst pushing through a crowd, then the point of view lifts to film her from above as she runs through the dust between tanks, you can trace his influence on subsequent directors and cinematographers. 

The heroine, who looks like a normal-sized Audrey Hepburn, endures the destruction of  her home and the death of both her parents by Nazi bombs, rape by her fiancée's cousin, resulting in a forced marriage, and the death of her fiancée on the Ukrainian muddy frontline. There are harrowing hospital sequences, reminiscent of the wards that Florence Nightingale set about cleaning during the Crimean War, a century earlier. Wounded soldiers are bussed from one full hospital to another. The destruction of Moscow

and the comrades taking shelter in the subway remind one of the hammering inflicted upon London and other British cities by the same adversary. Britain endured 150,000 military deaths and 300,000 civilian deaths, whereas the figure for the Russian death toll is unclear, but enormous: in 2020 the Russian Federal archival project stated that between 15.9 to 17.4 million civilians were killed by Germany on Soviet territory, and the Russian Central Defence Ministry Archive has a database listing the names of 14 million military dead. A further 2.4 million are still officially considered missing in action and that of the 9.5 million buried in mass graves, 6 million are unidentified.  

The Cranes are Flying won the Palme d'Or at the 1958 Cannes Film Festival. To a modern eye, it is a bit melodramatic, a bit monumental, the music a bit heavy-handed - but it is a significant film, I'm glad I watched it, and it helps explain Putin's fear of the West and its intentions. After all, Germany, the nation that inflicted unbelievable levels of damage upon Russia, is now totally rehabilitated, everything explained as the work of the bad evil Nazis, nothing to do with the hard-working, clean 'n' tidy Germans - yeah, sure - just like Hamas isn't synonymous with the people of Gaza. And Russia is regarded as the enemy of the West. The post-war relationship with Russia was handled so badly by the West that we now find ourselves teetering on the edge of the Third World War.

It is dismaying that Starmer is in bed with the Europeans, instead of making nice with the Five Eyes nations. Especially the big one.

Not much to laugh at in today's post, I fear, but  the four splendid anthologies of the writings of mr ishmael and stanislav, the young Polish Plumber are available, as ever.  The anthologies have been compiled and produced by editor mr verge, the house filthster, in answer to the appalled and bereft reaction of ishmaelites to the passing of mr ishmael in January 2020.  

You can buy the Quartet from Amazon or Lulu. Here's how:

Honest Not Invent, Vent Stack, Ishmael’s Blues, and the latest, Flush Test (with a nice picture of the late, much lamented, Mr Harris of Lanarkshire taking a piss on a totem pole) are available from Lulu and Amazon. If you buy from Amazon, it would be nice if you could give a review on their website.

IIshmaelites wishing to buy a copy from lulu should follow these steps 

please register an account first, at lulu.com. This is advisable because otherwise paypal seems to think it's ok to charge in dollars, and they then apply their own conversion rate, which might put the price up slightly for a UK buyer. Once the new account is set up, follow one of the links below (to either paperback or hardback) or type "Ishmael’s Blues" into the Lulu Bookstore search box. Click on the “show explicit content” tab, give the age verification box a date of birth such as 1 January 1960, and proceed.

Link for Hardcover : https://tinyurl.com/je7nddfr

Link for Paperback : https://tinyurl.com/3jurrzux

https://www.lulu.com/shop/ishmael-smith/flush-test/paperback/product-9yjvn7.html?q=Flush+Test&page=1&pageSize=4

At checkout, try WELCOME15 in the coupon box, which (for the moment) takes 15% off the price before postage. If this code has expired by the time you reach this point, try a google search for "Lulu.com voucher code" and see what comes up.

With the 15% voucher, PB (including delivery to a UK address) should be £16.84; HB £27.04.