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
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.
In a letter to The Sunday Times last week, Pottinger described Kerbaj’s account as “one-sided and inaccurate” and denied shouting during the meeting.
“It is true that the US pressed the UK to refrain from using the Chinese company’s gear in British 5G networks. That’s what friends do, especially when so much is at stake,” said Pottinger, who was seen as a main driver of the Donald Trump administration’s hawkish approach to China.
He is among a handful of former White House officials who were sanctioned by Beijing after the end of Trump’s presidency, alongside secretary of state Mike Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton.
Britain eventually gave up on using Huawei in its telecoms networks, after US sanctions on the company meant the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) could no longer manage the security risks.
Just months earlier, in January 2020, former British prime minister Boris Johnson had given the company a green light to build the 5G network, despite a divided Conservative Party.
The NCSC’s former chief executive, Ciaran Martin – who was at the Pottinger meeting – told Kerbaj that Britain had been willing to work with the US to counter China’s ambitions in the technology sector, but did not see Huawei’s involvement in the 5G network as “the most important thing in a much wider strategic challenge”.
According to Kim Darroch, the British ambassador to the US from 2016 to 2019, pressure from the US to dump Huawei had been building for years.
In the book, Darroch recounts a meeting with H.R. McMaster – Trump’s national security adviser from February 2017 to April 2018 – who raised the issue and explained to him why the US believed Britain should ban the company.
“The Americans had no compelling technical arguments for banning Huawei” during his term as ambassador, Darroch said.
Responding to the book, Lu Xiang, a US studies researcher at the state-owned think tank the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said preventing the growth of companies like Huawei had been Washington’s priority.
“Not letting companies such as Huawei grow – that’s the most important aim for the US,” he said.
“In the area of 5G, if the US allowed Huawei to become stronger, then it would have no means of catching up. When its staunchest ally is using Huawei’s 5G technology and the US isn’t, the US would be put in a passive position.”
But Lu pointed out that China did not see the issue as primarily a security one, after the “golden era” of Britain-China ties under former British prime minister David Cameron.
“The Five Eyes is not as monolithic as it was,” he said.
Zeno Leoni, a lecturer at King’s College London’s defence studies department, said the book showed the US saw China as a challenge, while Britain viewed the country as a “systemic competitor” – a term used in its post-Brexit strategy review.
“It will be very self-harmful to neglect China, the Chinese economy – so the UK can’t really do that. I think what we’re seeing and what we will see is a degree of strategic ambiguity by which the UK continues to trade with China as much as it can,” he said.
“Occasionally, the United States, or maybe UK security services, will flag some sensitive areas and some sensitive issues.”
Leoni said coalitions and alliances such as the Five Eyes allowed individual countries to cooperate on future technologies and strategic industries – and even to decouple from China – to address security threats from the country.
“That’s why it’s very important to have a cohesive coalition,” he said.