US intel allies alarmed as FBI remains 'adrift' under Trump loyalist’s 'inexperience'

Maritime leaders from the “Five Eyes” alliance. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Jesse Marquez Magallanes/Released).

New York Times writer Adam Goldman reports that American intelligence allies abroad are worried that FBI Director Kash Patel's "brash and partisan" demeanor "is also unpredictable and even unreliable."

Goldman details an incident in the United Kingdom in May in which the head of Britain's domestic security service asked Patel for help in protecting the job of a London-based FBI agent who dealt with high-tech surveillance tools—"the kind they might need to monitor a new embassy that China wants to build near the Tower of London," he notes.

Patel agreed to "find funding and keep the posting," Goldman notes, but that job was then "slated to disappear as the White House moved to slash the FBI budget."

"The agent moved to a different job back in the United States, saving the FBI money but leaving MI5 officials incredulous," Goldman writes, noting that "it was a jarring introduction to Mr. Patel’s leadership style for British officials."

These officials, he explains "had long forged personal ties with their U.S. counterparts, as well as with three other close allies, in an intelligence partnership known as the Five Eyes."

The Five Eyes is a major intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States, all sharing a broad range of intelligence and operating as one of the world's most integrated and comprehensive multilateral arrangements.

"All rely heavily on American intelligence to help keep their countries safe," Goldman writes, adding that Patel gives them little confidence in securing safety.

"Patel’s inexperience, his dismissals of top F.B.I. officials and his shift of bureau resources from thwarting spies and terrorism have heightened concerns among the other Five Eyes nations that the bureau is adrift, according to the former U.S. officials and other people familiar with allies’ reactions to the bureau changes," Goldman says.

Five Eyes officials "have watched with alarm" as Patel fired agents who investigated President Trump and invoked his powers to investigate the president’s perceived enemies, he explains.

"Patel, who lacked the deep experience of his predecessors and is unabashedly partisan, has had a rocky introduction to his Five Eyes allies," Goldman says.

On a visit to New Zealand, Patel brought plastic 3D-printed replica pistols as gifts to senior national security officials, but, Goldman explains, they were illegal under local laws and had to be destroyed.

And while Patel has ruffled feathers all over the world, the most tenuous relationship he has is with Britain's MI5, the UK's storied internal counter-intelligence and security agency

"The FBI's relationship with MI5 is arguably the most important in Five Eyes, a bond that dates back to at least 1938," Goldman says.

Patel's visit to the UK in May "started awkwardly," Goldman writes, as he argued that his security detail remain armed despite Britain's strict gun control laws and pushed for an exemption.

"The police assessment of Mr. Patel found he didn't meet the threshold for an exemption" to those laws, Goldman writes, but despite that, the details for the heads of the CIA and National Security Agency were armed, prompting an emergency meeting between the FBI and British security officials.

The British officials held firm, Goldman explains, and Patel moved on to complain about the number of meetings that were scheduled for him, according to an anonymous former FBI official.

And while one meeting was informal, Patel "surprised other attendees when he 'arrived wearing a trucker hat and a green hooded sweatshirt,'" Goldman says, adding that he later posed for pictures with his country music singer girlfriend and King Charles, though not in the same outfit.

But it's more than Patel's casual nature that worries experts.

“In all of my life — 32 years in the business — I have never seen a law enforcement or intelligence organization like the bureau be directed to go after people purely on political, vindictive reasons,” said Phil Gurski, a former analyst with Canada’s intelligence and cryptologic agencies. “In a Western democracy, that’s unheard of. It’s every day in Russia and China.”

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