UK officials warn lawmakers of ‘turbulence’ at US cyber agencies, but say partnership will prevail

Lawmakers on Britain’s national security committee heard on Tuesday how the United States was risking its own security by politicizing and potentially downsizing its cyber agencies.

In an evidence session held by the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy, two of the United Kingdom’s most senior former intelligence officials, both now working in academia, expressed concern and surprise at recent events in Washington, D.C.

In recent weeks, the White House has fired the National Security Agency director Gen. Tim Haugh, along with his deputy Wendy Noble, as well as took aggressive actions against the former cybersecurity official Chris Krebs and his private sector employer.

Krebs, the former head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), had provoked the president’s ire by steadfastly countering Trump’s false claims of election interference.

The JCNSS evidence session was being held in the context of “major shifts in the assumptions underpinning UK national security, most notably a change in US support for European security,” and its members asked the witnesses whether any kind of decoupling from the United States would be desirable.

Speaking to the committee, Sir David Omand — formerly the director of signals intelligence agency GCHQ and now a visiting professor at King’s College London — acknowledged there was “turbulence at the top” of partner organizations in the U.S.

Former GCHQ officials David Omand and Ciaran Martin speaking to members of the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy. Image: UK Parliament

Stressing that he was speaking from outside the system and without access to privileged information, Omand said his understanding was “that day-to-day today, the intelligence partnership goes on as it went on before. Professional speaking to professional, with utmost respect for each other’s professionalism.”

“There is turbulence at the top,” added Omand in reference to the decision to fire Haugh and Noble. “I thought that a rather odd thing to do when the United States is squaring up from confrontation with China — to remove two of your most experienced signals intelligence professionals — but they’ve done that.”

“But it’s a big organization. It will survive,” said Omand.

Ciaran Martin, a former senior official at GCHQ and now a professor at the University of Oxford, cited criticisms raised by another former CISA chief, Jen Easterly.

“The U.S. is — in the words of its recently departed cyber security head — at risk of dangerously degrading its own defences through all the firings, through the sanctioning of her predecessor; the appalling treatment of Chris Krebs, which has had a chilling effect not just on the government agencies but the private sector.”

Krebs left his senior position at cybersecurity company SentinelOne after the Trump administration announced an investigation into his activities as director of CISA and included SentinelOne in its punitive actions.

Martin told the committee that the British government “would have to be careful about how it presents this in public” but that the moves by the White House raise questions about “what digital defences look like with reduced U.S. capabilities.”

But both Martin and Omand were insistent that the actual collaborative work between operators in the United Kingdom and the United States would continue, and suggested that would be the case even for other partners such as Canada.

“The Five Eyes is almost designed to withstand political turbulence,” said Martin. “[That] doesn’t necessarily mean it always will, but it is not principally even a political arrangement, it is almost an organizational administrative agreement going back to 1946, between the signals intelligence agencies.”

The alliance “has withstood serious tensions between the member countries, most notably for example when the United Kingdom stayed out of the Vietnam war,” added Martin.

“We’ve been through periods where there’s been some political turbulence before,” added Omand. “I think we’ll get through it.”