The day the Five Eyes showed up to confront Russia about its plan to attack Ukraine

It has been revealed that a group of Five Eyes officials delivered a dramatic and potentially unprecedented in-person warning to a Kremlin official about the consequences Moscow would face for attacking Ukraine, days before the start of its full-scale invasion.

An account of the February 2022 meeting was first disclosed in Richard Kerbaj’s The Defector: The Untold Story of the KGB Agent who Exposed the CIA and Saved MI5, which was recently published in Canada.

The meeting involved five individuals — each representing a Five Eyes member — who joined together to deliver a face-to-face message to a Kremlin diplomat known to be the official representative to the SVR, Russia’s foreign spy service.

The five representatives of the intelligence-sharing alliance met on his turf, at the Russian diplomatic mission in New York City. Roughly a week later, on Feb. 24, Russia went ahead and launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

“I’ve compared it … to showing up to a chess game brandishing baseball bats,” said Kerbaj, an espionage historian and investigative journalist, who cited the accounts of two former senior FBI officials in his reporting.

Mike Driscoll, the former assistant director of the FBI’s New York field office, attended the meeting for the Americans.

In an interview with CBC News, Driscoll said the meeting provided an opportunity to convey two things at once: a formal message that was read out at the meeting, and a show of “that strength of the relationship” among the Five Eyes members, who include the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia and New Zealand.

Kerbaj said in an interview that the sending of spies-in-arms to deliver a message like this was not an accident.

“This was intentionally done to bypass the diplomatic process,” he said, noting this followed prior warnings from Western leaders over Russia’s intentions in Ukraine.

Yet Driscoll said that “governments find many ways to communicate to each other, both through very publicly made statements and through the teams that work for them.”

That can include messages passed from intelligence service to intelligence service, he said.

An apparent Five Eyes first

Alan Kohler, a former FBI counter-intelligence official, helped co-ordinate the meeting but did not attend. He told CBC News that from the Five Eyes’ perspective, “there is some value” in letting the other side know the alliance members are working together.

Kohler and Driscoll both say they are not aware of another occasion in which the Five Eyes engaged with an adversary like this — confronting a spy chief, at his diplomatic mission, with such a group in tow.

“To my knowledge, this was the first time it had been done in that way,” Kohler said.

Driscoll said he was likewise unaware of a parallel episode from the past. “I think this incident was fairly unique,” he said.

Kerbaj said the fact that this was the apparent first time the Five Eyes members had taken action this way speaks to the kind of sign-off that the meeting would have required.

“That mission would have been authorized from the very top,” said Kerbaj, who is also the author of a prior book on the history of the intelligence alliance.

His book reports that U.S.-based members of Five Eyes agencies — including a representative of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) — attended the meeting alongside the then-FBI’s Driscoll.

When contacted by CBC News, the respective agencies declined to comment on, or confirm their participation in, the meeting. The Russian diplomatic mission didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Phil Gurski, a former senior strategic analyst at CSIS, said the Five Eyes action described in the book speaks to the apparent strength of the intelligence at hand and the need the agencies felt “to send a message to the Russians.”

He said the Five Eyes may be “picking the ball up again” with respect to Russia, compared with where things previously stood.

“Nobody did more to encourage Five Eyes co-operation than Vladimir Putin,” Kohler said.

According to Kerbaj’s account of the meeting in The Defector, the message delivered in New York made it clear that “a Five Eyes intelligence campaign would be waged against Russia” if it went ahead with its invasion plans. Whatever happened next has not been made public, he said.

While CSIS did not comment on Kerbaj’s reporting, the spy agency did provide a brief description of what a Five Eyes intelligence campaign would generally involve: “an operation or issue where each country … contributes collectively to an intelligence problem or question.”

Out of the shadows

Kerbaj said the Five Eyes network has continued to publicly show its co-operation on threats from adversaries abroad.

He pointed to a conference held in California in 2023, when the Five Eyes gathered to discuss adversaries’ use of technology and threats to innovation and research. That event was acknowledged as the first-ever joint public appearance of the intelligence partnership leaders.

Earlier that year, the Five Eyes issued a warning relating to a reported state-sponsored cyber threat linked to China.

In 2024, the RCMP and CSIS joined Five Eyes partners in highlighting concerns about youth radicalization, citing “a rising prominence of young people and minors in counter-terrorism cases.”

Earlier this month, Five Eyes members warned about the threat that Chinese military intelligence posed on online job networking sites.

CSIS highlighted some of these same joint efforts, telling CBC News that “the Five Eyes’ unity and collective purpose are essential” and that Canada maintains strong ties with all member agencies in the intelligence network.

Driscoll, the former FBI assistant director, said it’s been his experience that Five Eyes collaboration “was always there,” whether the public recognizes it or not.