When the FBI Comes Calling…®

UKUSA Accord of 1947

Throughout World War II, Great Britain and the United States cooperated closely to address common security threats. Naturally, a major element of this cooperation was significant intelligence sharing efforts between the UK's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and the US's National Security Agency (NSA), brought together in a Britain-US Communications Intelligence (BRUSA-COMINT) alliance of 1943 and later expanded by the British creation of the Commonwealth SIGINT Organization, incorporating Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Following the war, of course, with the signing of the 1947 UKUSA agreement, the majority of the information sharing was geared towards the Soviet threat. And, as expected, with the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union, the UKUSA intelligence sharing structure, now with each of the five English-speaking countries dividing intelligence responsibilities in different regions of the world, has begun to take on new tasks, namely terrorism and transnational organized crime. It can be expected that as the intelligence gathering capacities of the member states' expanded, so too did the purview of the agreement, leading to the development of the ECHELON system.