Time for Five Eyes to reform, welcome India

In September 2021, after The Sunday Guardian published a report about an imminent terror attack on New Zealand cricket team members, the team touring Pakistan went back without playing a single match.

- ABHINANDAN MISHRA

This was followed by the England cricket team also backing out.

Hours later, the Pakistan government, led by its Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry and Interior Minister Sheikh Rashid, addressed a nearly two-hour press conference in Islamabad, claiming that The Sunday Guardian report, which led to the cancellation of the tour, was part of a fifth-generation hybrid warfare against the country.

However, these allegations by the Pakistan government fell flat days later after it was confirmed that the findings of the report by The Sunday Guardian were also collectively verified by the "Five Eyes"—an intelligence-sharing alliance comprising the United States, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and Canada. According to people aware of the workings of the Five Eyes, the United States and the United Kingdom are the two countries that contribute the most to the intelligence shared on the platform, especially in matters related to Asia.

In June 2023, when Khalistani operative Hardeep Singh Nijjar was killed in Canada, US Ambassador to Canada, David Cohen, stated that "shared intelligence among Five Eyes partners" informed Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's assertion of a potential link between Indian agents and Nijjar's murder.

Who contributed what part of the intelligence to link Nijjar's death to India was never made public, but informed guesses suggest that the allegations were first put on the table by Canadian officials.

In January 2024, the Canadian government sought 30 years of imprisonment for one of their own, Cameron Ortis—a former director-ranked official with the National Intelligence Coordination Unit of the RCMP—who in 2023 was found guilty of leaking secret information to members of an international terror network. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) is equivalent to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the United States.