The US wanted Britain to give up Huawei’s 5G infrastructure, in a move that would eventually cost the British taxpayer about two billion pounds. All the means were kosher. The American intelligence service, the CIA, went to smear Britain in a battle of intelligence services, White House advisers shouted at the British cabinet, and finally Trump decided to ban Huawei from using American components – a decision that closed the door on the line that the GCHQ intelligence service tried to promote against the Americans.
A policy disruption mission
These details are revealed by a recent publication by thetimes.co.uk about how a White House delegation arrived in London in May 2019 on a policy disruption mission. The intention was to oppose a British plan to allow Huawei limited access to help build the country’s next-generation mobile data network.
Within minutes of the delegation’s arrival at the Cabinet Office, GCHQ’s Ciaran Martin (the equivalent of 8200) and other senior officials, including Britain’s Deputy National Security Adviser, Madeleine Alessandri, were shouted at by one of their American guests for five hours straight.
That guest was Matthew Pottinger, a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer who parachuted into the White House in early 2017 to become the director of the National Security Council for Asia. He was known for his distrust of China’s regime, a sentiment shaped during his earlier life as a foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Beijing, where he was subject to surveillance and physical assault by the authorities. One year after his appointment, Pottinger played a key role in the White House’s decision to impose tariffs on $200 billion in imports of Chinese goods into the United States.
“We were eager to work with the US to address the ambitions [האסטרטגיות של סין]”, Martin recalled. “The problem was, on our end, we didn’t think Huawei’s limited involvement in 5G in the UK was the most important thing in a much wider strategic challenge – while the US was only interested in that part of the problem, for reasons we don’t understand.”
A British intelligence official who was at the meeting said: “Pottinger just shouted and was completely uninterested in Britain’s analysis. The message was, ‘We don’t want you to do that, you have no idea how bad China is.’ Moser is not threatening. We tried to offer a policy discussion but Pettinger didn’t care. We even said we didn’t dispute the analysis of the Chinese threat and explained our technicalities, but the American officials weren’t interested.’
The leak angered the White House
According to the publication, the Trump administration expressed its disapproval of the British plan after details, which were not to be made public for almost another year, were leaked to The Daily Telegraph two weeks earlier by Theresa May’s then defense secretary, Gavin Williamson. He was fired, despite repeatedly denying he was the leaker. He was among a small but vocal group of Conservative MPs who strongly opposed any involvement of Huawei in the creation of the UK’s 5G network.
“Washington’s hostility to Huawei can be traced back to 2012, when a US House Intelligence Committee investigation concluded that it was a national security threat because it was unwilling to “provide sufficient evidence” about its “relationship or regulatory interaction with The Chinese authorities in Beijing,” they write in the publication.
“The Obama administration banned Huawei and another Chinese company, ZTE, from bidding for US government contracts. Five years later, the Trump administration warned that China’s 2017 National Intelligence Act, which states that organizations must “support, cooperate and cooperate in the work National Intelligence,” could force Huawei to allow Beijing to snoop in the countries where it operates.”
In May 2019 – the same month Pottinger flew to the UK for a Cabinet Office meeting – the US president signed an executive order banning Chinese companies, including Huawei, from selling equipment in America because of the “excessive risk of sabotage” and “catastrophic effects” on communications systems and infrastructure.
The Commerce Department placed Huawei and 68 of its partners on a trade blacklist for “activities that are contrary to the national security interests or foreign policy of the United States.” (The same list that included the Israeli companies NSO and Candiro).
“There weren’t really convincing technical arguments”
Martin gave Pottinger assurances that Huawei’s work on the 5G network would not compromise Britain’s intelligence-sharing channels with 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 the Americans during – or after – their meeting in London.
Lord Darroch, who served as Britain’s national security adviser before becoming Britain’s ambassador to the US in January 2016, said the US delegation “didn’t really have any compelling technical arguments that challenged those of GCHQ. I remember GCHQ looking pretty unimpressed. The meeting revealed that the case in the US was political, not technical. So GCHQ stuck to theirs, and at first so did the Prime Minister.’
The CIA tried to discredit Britain’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 Britain’s “misjudgment”. British intelligence officials were furious at what they described as a CIA-led black ops mission – some even calling it treason.
According to the publication, the special relationship between London and Washington was strained and risked permanent disruption. The new Prime Minister, Boris Johnson supported Martin’s recommendations to deal with the Chinese media giant. In January 2020, it gave Huawei limited permission to build the 5G network, but with additional restrictions, excluding access to military and nuclear sites and national infrastructure. Huawei was allowed to build only the parts of the network that connect equipment and devices to the antenna masts.
“Now completely dependent on Nokia and Ericsson”
Then came Trump with sanctions that banned Huawei from using US-made chips in its equipment. Britain’s defiance was met with the ultimate checkmate. Martin could no longer guarantee the security of Huawei’s products, and two months later, in an extraordinary public U-turn, Venson has finally banned Huawei from operating in the UK, a move that will delay the country’s 5G rollout by up to three years and cost it at least £2bn to remove all Huawei 5G equipment from its networks by 2027.
This, after in 2020 a local council in England approved the first phase of a project, funded by Huawei, amounting to more than a billion dollars to build a new R&D facility in the country. The center was to be built in Sawston, a village in the English countryside of Cambridgeshire.
The site was to eventually serve as Huawei’s international headquarters for its optical electronics business, where it will research, develop and manufacture semiconductor technology focused on electro-optics used in fiber optic broadband networks.
Martin resigned as head of GCHQ’s National Cyber Security Center in September 2020 to become a professor at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government. He claims that his confidence in the plan for Huawei to help build the country’s 5G network was always based on technical assessments, and he was under no illusions about the potential risks that Huawei posed.
“In reality, anyone can try to hack anything,” he said. “We in the UK, thanks to the US sanctions, are now completely dependent on Nokia and Ericsson. To be sure, we trust their boards. But are we seriously saying that just because they’re not Chinese, they can’t be hacked? By neighboring Russia, for example? Or China?”