5G wars: the US plot to make Britain ditch Huawei

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Donald Trump’s arrival in Washington in 2017 had quickly united the Five Eyes spy network against the misinformation emerging from the White House. The assurances given by US agencies to their counterparts in the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand proved that the preservation of intelligence-sharing should be safeguarded from politics.
It was a laudable effort — until the CIA and National Security Agency (NSA) sided with White House officials on matters relating to Huawei, the Chinese tech firm with links to the Chinese Communist Party. Britain was determined to engage with Huawei based on a recommendation made by Ciaran Martin, whose team at GCHQ had made detailed intelligence and technology assessments.



A White House delegation arrived in London in May 2019 on a policy-disruption mission. Their brief was to oppose a British plan that would allow Huawei limited access to help build the country’s next-generation 5G cellular data network.
Within minutes of the delegation’s arrival at the Cabinet Office, Martin and other senior officials, including the deputy national security adviser, Madeleine Alessandri, were effectively shouted at by one of their guests for five hours.
That guest was Matthew Pottinger, a former US Marines intelligence officer parachuted into the White House in early 2017 to become the National Security Council’s director on Asia. He was known for his distrust of China’s authoritarian regime, a sentiment shaped during his previous life as a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal in Beijing, where he had been subjected to surveillance and physically attacked by the authorities.
Pottinger’s influence on US policy towards China was immediate on taking up his role. He was described by Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist, as “one of the most significant people in the entire US government”. One year into his role, Pottinger had played a key role in the White House’s decision to impose tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese goods. Trump had already declared that “trade wars are good, and easy to win” when he had decided to punish China over, as he saw it, the American jobs being lost to its cheaper workforce. Beijing retaliated with its own tariffs on US products.
While Pottinger and Martin were both in their mid-forties and equally influential in their respective governments, that was pretty much where the similarities ended.
John Bolton, who was Trump’s national security adviser
John Bolton, who was Trump’s national security adviser
ANNA MONEYMAKER/GETTY IMAGES
“We were keen to work with the US to counter [China’s strategic] ambitions,” Martin recalled. “The problem was, on our side, we didn’t think Huawei’s limited involvement in UK 5G was the most important thing in a much wider strategic challenge — whereas the US were only interested in that part of the problem, for reasons we couldn’t fathom.”
A British intelligence official who was at the meeting said: “Pottinger just shouted and was entirely uninterested in the UK’s analysis. The message was, ‘We don’t want you to do this, you have no idea how evil China is’. It was five hours of shouting with a prepared, angry and weirdly non-threatening script. We tried to offer a policy discussion but Pottinger didn’t care. We even said that we didn’t contest the analysis of the Chinese threat and explained our technicalities, but the US officials weren’t interested in that. Pottinger was continuously and repeatedly obnoxious.”
Martin had anticipated a debate with the visitors — if not the shouting. The Trump administration had expressed its disapproval of the British plan after details, which should not have been made public for almost another year, were leaked to The Daily Telegraph two weeks earlier by Theresa May’s then defence secretary, Gavin Williamson. He was sacked , despite repeatedly denying being the leaker. He was among a small but vocal group of Conservative MPs who vehemently opposed any involvement from Huawei in the creation of Britain’s 5G network.
Ten years’ distrust
Washington’s hostility to Huawei could be traced back to 2012, when an investigation by the US House intelligence committee concluded that it was a national security threat, because it was unwilling to “provide sufficient evidence” regarding its “relationships or regulatory interaction with Chinese authorities” in Beijing. The Obama administration banned Huawei and another Chinese firm, ZTE, from bidding for US government contracts. Five years later, the Trump administration warned that China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law, which states that organisations must “support, co-operate with and collaborate in national intelligence work”, could force Huawei to snoop for Beijing on countries in which it was operating.
US intelligence agencies and White House officials had repeatedly lobbied all members of the Five Eyes to ban Huawei on national security grounds. While New Zealand had followed Australia and banned the Chinese telecoms company in November 2018, Canada was still considering its options, and would not announce its intention to ban Huawei until May this year. The US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo — a director of the CIA during the early days of the Trump administration — had declared in a thinly veiled warning to Britain in February 2019 that countries using Huawei equipment were a risk to the US. Staff from his office were also reminding their counterparts in Britain that they were risking their place in the Five Eyes should the UK decide to approve Huawei.
In May 2019 — the same month Pottinger flew to Britain for the meeting at the Cabinet Office — the US president signed an executive order to prohibit Chinese companies, including Huawei, from selling equipment in America because of the “undue risk of sabotage” and “catastrophic effects” on communications systems and infrastructure. The Department of Commerce placed Huawei and 68 of its affiliates on a trade blacklist for “activities contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States”.
Martin gave Pottinger assurances that Huawei’s work on the 5G network would not compromise the UK’s intelligence-sharing channels with the Five Eyes, government systems or nuclear facilities, because such sensitive areas were linked to computer networks inaccessible to Huawei. Such guarantees were not enough to appease their Americans during — or after — their meeting in London.
The former US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, was a director of the CIA during the early days of the Trump administration
The former US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, was a director of the CIA during the early days of the Trump administration
JOHN RAOUX/AP
Lord Darroch, who served as Britain’s national security adviser before becoming the UK’s ambassador in the US in January 2016, said the US delegation “didn’t really have any compelling technical arguments that undermined the GCHQ case. I remember GCHQ seeming pretty unimpressed. The encounter exposed that the US case was really political, not technical. So GCHQ stuck to their guns, and, initially, so did the prime minister.”
Theresa May, who was prime minister until July 2019, said: “Any decision taken by a politician can by definition be described as a political decision, but this was not a decision based on politics. It was based on the fact that we believed that . . . we had the capability of ensuring that we could protect what needed to be protected.”
The unshakable position on Huawei held by the US officials was particularly insulting to their British colleagues, because GCHQ had spotted a technical threat in the Chinese company’s products two years before the company had been banned by the White House. In fact, GCHQ had created an oversight facility in Banbury, Oxfordshire, to identify any risks associated with Huawei’s products. The only reason for not excluding the Chinese company altogether was because its products were significantly cheaper than those of its competitors, Nokia and Ericsson.
The CIA tried to discredit the UK’s position on Huawei in the eyes of its European allies. Officers from the agency’s Belgium station met their counterparts in the French, German, Italian and Norwegian intelligence services, among others, to express their concerns about the UK’s “misjudgment”. British intelligence officials were outraged by what they described as a “black ops” mission facilitated by the CIA — some even calling it a betrayal of friendship. Yet again, the special relationship between London and Washington had been strained and risked being permanently disrupted.
Johnson capitulates
On July 14, 2019, two months after his team clashed with Pottinger in London, Ciaran Martin travelled to Washington with Britain’s national security adviser, Mark Sedwill, to meet US officials at the White House. Among those present were Pottinger and John Bolton, Trump’s latest national security adviser. Notably missing was Sir Kim Darroch, the ambassador, who had been handling the crisis behind the scenes but had been forced to resign a few days earlier after leaked emails revealed he had described Trump as “incompetent”, “insecure” and “inept” in cables he had sent to London shortly after the president had been elected to office.
During the hour-long meeting, Bolton reassured Martin and Sedwill that he was sympathetic to the UK’s assurances and said he would ask members of his own security council to devise a plan that would help resolve their differences over Huawei. Pottinger seemed largely deferential to Bolton during the meeting, and the aggression he had shown in London had all but disappeared. Perhaps it was because he knew the US had a trick up its sleeve.
The new prime minister, Boris Johnson, had supported Martin’s recommendations on dealing with the Chinese telecommunications giant. In January 2020, he gave Huawei limited approval to build the 5G network, but with more limitations, excluding it from access to military and nuclear sites and national infrastructure. Huawei would be allowed to build only the parts of the network that connected equipment and devices to phone masts.
Kim Darroch served as Britain’s national security adviser before becoming the UK’s ambassador in the US in January 2016
Kim Darroch served as Britain’s national security adviser before becoming the UK’s ambassador in the US in January 2016
VICTOR J. BLUE/BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGES
Britain’s defiance was met with the ultimate checkmate. Trump introduced further sanctions in May 2020 that banned Huawei from using US-made chips in its equipment. As a result, Martin could no longer guarantee the security of Huawei’s products, and two months later, in a remarkable public U-turn, Johnson finally banned Huawei from operating in Britain. His move would delay the country’s 5G rollout by up to three years and cost it at least £2 billion to remove all Huawei 5G equipment from its networks by 2027.
Pompeo welcomed Johnson’s decision, saying: “The UK joins a growing list of countries from around the world that are standing up for their national security by prohibiting the use of untrusted, high-risk vendors.” Pottinger must have also been cheering. Not only had his opposition to Huawei’s role in Britain come to fruition, but by the time it did, Trump had promoted him to deputy national security adviser.
“There was a lot of media speculation and parliamentary interest in whether we would ban Huawei or not,”’ said Darroch. “In my time, GCHQ had led on detailed analysis about the risk from Huawei kit on the communications network and had concluded that, provided it was not at the core of the network, it was OK. This analysis was a central part of the discussion at the national security council and key to the then-agreed outcome that Huawei equipment could be used in certain parts of the network. It was basically driven by the analysis of GCHQ . . . It would be legitimate to do it [drop Huawei] for political reasons, or because it was so important to the Americans, or as an expression of Five Eyes solidarity, or whatever. But it shouldn’t be dressed up as technical.”
Martin stepped down as head of GCHQ’s National Cyber Security Centre in September 2020 to become a professor at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government. He maintains that his confidence in the plan for Huawei to help build the country’s 5G network had always been underpinned by technical assessments, and he had been under no illusions about the potential risks that Huawei posed.
“In reality, anyone can have a go at hacking anything,” he said. “We in the UK, thanks to the US sanctions, are now entirely dependent on Nokia and Ericsson. For sure, we trust their boards of directors. But are we seriously saying that just because they’re not Chinese, they can’t be hacked? By neighbouring Russia, for example? Or China?”