The idea that America threatened to withdraw intelligence cooperation if British courts released evidence of alleged torture as two High Court judges suggested earlier this week has been ridiculed by the spooks on both sides of the Atlantic.
The intelligence relationship is so close that it would be simply impossible for cooperation to stop and America would be damaged at least as much as the UK. For example, a whole floor of the National Security Agency’s headquarters at Fort Meade in Maryland is staffed by spooks from GCHQ in Cheltenham. At Cheltenham itself, every intercept that goes through GCHQ’s computers is largely shared with the Americans. And both Britain and America have carved up the world between them so that intelligence gathering is not duplicated and all information gathered is shared. It was British spies in Saddam Hussein’s government that provided the best intelligence to the Americans before the current war with Iraq, and it was Britain, not America, who supplied the best human intelligence from Afghanistan prior to the invasion there.
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