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

GCHQ was confident it could work safely with the Chinese tech firm. An American official thought otherwise — and, in a Cabinet Office meeting, shouted about it for five hours
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.
“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.
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