Behind-the-scenes book reveals US-Britain battle over Huawei 5G

Senior intelligence officials among those pressured by the Donald Trump administration to ban the Chinese telecoms giant from British network

Author’s sources say senior Washington figures had no interest in policy discussion or a compelling reason to ban the company

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Britain eventually did not use Huawei in its 5G telecoms networks, after it was initially greenlit by former prime minister Boris Johnson in 2020. Photo: Bloomberg

Published: 12:00pm, 11 Sep 2022Updated: 3:17pm, 11 Sep 2022

A book by a UK-based journalist has shed light on the pressure applied by Washington to have China’s Huawei Technologies Co. banned from Britain’s 5G network.

In The Secret History of the Five Eyes, Richard Kerbaj describes a “policy disruption mission” by a White House delegation to London in 2019, which included a five-hour meeting with senior officials from GCHQ, one of Britain’s spy services.

British intelligence maintained it could manage the risks of using Huawei’s 5G kit, unlike three of its partners in the Five Eyes intelligence alliance – Australia, New Zealand and the US – which had already banned the tech giant on national security grounds.

But, according to a senior British intelligence official who was at the meeting, “the message was, ‘we don’t want you to do this [accept Huawei], you have no idea how evil China is’”.

The unnamed official described the meeting, with former US National Security Council Asia director Matthew Pottinger, as “five hours of shouting with a prepared, angry and weirdly non-threatening script”.

“We tried to offer a policy discussion but Pottinger didn’t care,” the official told Kerbaj, whose journalism focuses on security issues.