Five Eyes alliance fabricating evidence, building rumors of China infiltration: source

The Five Eyes Alliance is collecting and fabricating evidence that intends to show China is "infiltrating politically into Western countries," with the aim of tarnishing China's image in the world, the Global Times learned from a source close to the matter.

Analysts said this is not the first time that the Five Eyes have conspired to target China and other countries. As an alliance designed for intelligence sharing, it has been conducting covert or overt operations like theft, interference, infiltration, subversion and coercion. The Five Eyes alliance is not so much as an intelligence-sharing group but an anti-China club.

The Global Times learned that intelligence agencies in the Five Eyes willfully interrogate and harass Chinese students and scholars on questionable or no grounds at all. Some even approach Chinese communities and pressure them to become agents for the Eyes. Although the Eyes are not so sharp at telling the truth from falsehood, they are adept at meddling in the internal affairs of China, among other countries in the world.

In Hong Kong, the consulates of these countries have become the headquarters and command of interference and subversion where their consular officials reached out to anti-China forces and separatists to incite violence by providing financial support and training, the source said.

The alliance has been obsessed with making up cases of China's "espionage" and "infiltration" merely based on shoddy intelligence. In 2020, Australian spy authorities raided New South Wales state legislator Shaoquett Moselmane's home for alleged links with China. But the cited political influence in Australia on behalf of China was never proven by evidence.

In recent years, Five Eyes alliance is also stepping up its efforts to steal and attack other countries in the area of cybersecurity.

A latest report from Anzer, a cybersecurity information platform, showed that the US military and government cyber agencies have remotely stolen more than 97 billion pieces of global internet data and 124 billion phone records in the last 30 days, which are becoming a major source of intelligence for the US and other "Five Eyes" countries.

The report obtained by the Global Times once again revealed the "black hand" operations of Tailored Access Operations (TAO), the cyber warfare intelligence agency under the US National Security Agency (NSA), which has been using advanced cyberattack weapons to indiscriminately "grab" data from internet users around the world.

A cybersecurity analyst told the Global Times on condition of anonymity earlier that TAO is the largest and most important part of the intelligence division of the NSA.

Founded in 1998, the main responsibility of the TAO is to use the internet to secretly access insider information of its competitors, including secretly invading target countries' key information infrastructure to steal account codes, break or destroy computer security systems, monitor network traffic, steal privacy and sensitive data, and access to phone calls, emails, network communications and messages.

TAO also assumes an important role. When US president issues an order to disable or destroy communications networks or information systems in other countries, TAO will provide relevant cyberattack weapons, and the attacks will be carried out by the US Cyber Warfare Command, the report revealed.

According to the report, the various departments of TAO are composed of more than 1,000 active military personnel, network hackers, intelligence analysts, academics, computer hardware and software designers, and electronics engineers. The entire organizational structure consists of one "center" and four "divisions."

The "center" employs more than 600 people and is responsible for receiving, sorting and summarizing account passwords and important sensitive information stolen from around the world by network information systems controlled remotely by TAO.

Knowingly violating basic norms in the virtual and the real world, the Five Eyes have been going out of their way to undermine the growth of certain foreign companies.

In the name of protecting national security, the US has been tightening its grip on the export of chips and other high technologies to China. It also abetted Canada to detain the CFO of Huawei, a leading Chinese provider of smart devices in ICT, for about three years for no legitimate reasons at all. The Five Eyes also add foreign competitors onto the blacklists of technological blockade and exclusion. All the five countries have decided to ban China's Huawei and ZTE from their 5G networks.

Apart from taking relatively secret means to achieve its political agenda, the Five Eyes also resort to brutal and bloody wars to overthrow regimes of other countries, showing no respect to international law, sovereignty and human life.

Take the 20-year-long war in Afghanistan as an example, where hardly any participating country pulled out with their hands untainted with blood. Back in 2019, 11 British detectives told an investigation team from the BBC and Sunday Times that there was credible evidence of war crimes and ensuing cover-ups in Afghanistan.

In 2020, Australia released the Brereton Report on its troops' misconduct in Afghanistan. It found evidence linking 25 Australian Defense Force personnel in the killings of 39 Afghan civilians and prisoners of war. Scandals like this are nothing new. In 2009, Australian troops were shown in some photos drinking beer out of an Afghan's prosthetic leg in Uruzgan province. Before the hasty withdrawal, the US killed 10 civilians including two-year-olds in a drone strike, only to find the target were civilians like so many times before.

Turning their eyes and dirty hands to other countries, the five countries have shown no interest in getting their own house in order. Most of the countries have not addressed their dark legacy of mistreating indigenous population by slaughter, expulsion and forced assimilation. They are yet to pay the historical debt and make compensations as the indigenous communities are deprived of the right to life and other basic rights on economic, cultural and political fronts, the source said.

The script for the Five Eyes' underhand moves may keep changing, but the end result would remain the same. The scheme to discredit and disrupt the development of other countries would only be met with disdain, and eventually lead to outright failure, the source stressed.