MPSC 2024 Prelims Paper-I · Question 100 of 100

Correct — option (1), '(a), (b), (c), (d)'. The Five Eyes is the intelligence-sharing alliance of five English-speaking countries — the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand — party to the UKUSA Agreement on cooperation in signals intelligence. Six countries are printed in this question: America, Britain, New Zealand, Australia, France and Germany. Four of them are members, and the answer is simply those four. The fifth member, CANADA, is not printed at all, and that is the feature of the question a candidate must notice rather than resist: the stem asks which of the following countries are included, so the answer can only be drawn from the six names on the page, and the absence of one member does not make the set of four wrong. France and Germany, the two names that are printed and are not members, are not arbitrary choices — both belong to the wider circles that have grown around the core alliance. France is one of the four countries added to the Five Eyes to make the Nine Eyes, along with Denmark, the Netherlands and Norway; Germany is one of the five added beyond that to make the Fourteen Eyes, formally the SIGINT Seniors Europe group, along with Belgium, Italy, Spain and Sweden. So the two decoys are countries that cooperate with the alliance without being in it, which is exactly the distinction being tested.

• (2)(a), (b), (c), (e) — This option drops Australia, a founding partner of the alliance, and substitutes France, which is not a member of the Five Eyes at all. France belongs to the Nine Eyes, the wider circle that adds Denmark, France, the Netherlands and Norway to the core five. Swapping a member for a close associate is the standard way of falsifying a membership question, and it works on any candidate who remembers 'Western intelligence partners' as a single undifferentiated group rather than as a set of concentric circles.
• (3)(a), (b), (e), (f) — This option keeps only two members, America and Britain, and replaces New Zealand and Australia with France and Germany. It reflects an intuition that a major intelligence grouping must be built around the largest Western powers, and it is wrong about the alliance's actual character: the Five Eyes is an arrangement among English-speaking countries with a shared wartime origin, and New Zealand — the smallest member by a wide margin — is as much a party to the UKUSA Agreement as the United States is. Germany, by contrast, sits in the outermost circle, the Fourteen Eyes.
• (4)(a), (b), (c), (d), (e) — This option correctly names all four members that appear on the page and then adds France, which is not one. It is the most dangerous of the three, because a candidate who has counted the alliance's name and noticed that only four members are printed may reach for a fifth country to make the number up. That instinct has to be resisted: the missing member is Canada, which is not among the printed choices, and adding a non-member to complete a count is not an available repair. Note also that this option lists five labels while the other three list four, which is a visible signal that it is doing something different from the rest of the grid.

The Five Eyes is the oldest and closest of the modern intelligence-sharing arrangements. It grew out of the collaboration between British and American codebreakers during the Second World War — the first meetings at Bletchley Park took place in February 1941, before the United States entered the war — and was formalised in the UKUSA Agreement signed in March 1946 between the American and British signals agencies. Canada, Australia and New Zealand were brought in over the following decade, giving the alliance its present membership of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Its original business is signals intelligence — the interception and analysis of communications — and it is built on a division of collection responsibilities and an undertaking to share the product, which in practice makes it far more integrated than the ordinary intelligence liaison between friendly states. Cooperation has since widened to military, human and geospatial intelligence. Around the core sit two wider groupings that are frequently confused with it: the Nine Eyes, which adds Denmark, France, the Netherlands and Norway, and the Fourteen Eyes, formally the SIGINT Seniors Europe, which adds Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden. India is not a member of any of them, and the distinction between membership and cooperation is what questions on this topic usually test.

International groupings are among the most heavily examined current-affairs topics in Indian state services, because they are compact, factual and easy to falsify by one member. This question uses two devices at once. The first is the wider-circle decoy: France and Germany are printed because they belong to the Nine Eyes and the Fourteen Eyes respectively, so a candidate with a vague sense that they cooperate with the Anglophone alliance can be pushed into including them. The second is the missing member: Canada is not offered, so the answer names only four of the five, and the candidate has to be comfortable answering with an incomplete set because the question asks only about what is printed. That is a general rule for statement questions in this paper — never argue about an item that was not printed, and never assume the answer must account for every element of the concept being tested. Note also that this question prints SIX statements, (a) to (f), which is the longest list in the paper; reading the list to its end before touching the options is a real precaution, not a formality.

• The Five Eyes alliance consists of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
• It rests on the UKUSA Agreement, signed in March 1946 between the American and British signals intelligence agencies, with origins in the Anglo-American codebreaking cooperation begun at Bletchley Park in February 1941.
• Its original subject is signals intelligence; cooperation has since extended to military, human and geospatial intelligence.
• The Nine Eyes adds Denmark, France, the Netherlands and Norway to the core five.
• The Fourteen Eyes, formally SIGINT Seniors Europe, adds Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden to the Nine Eyes.
• India is not a member of the Five Eyes or of its wider circles.

• Including France or Germany, which belong to the wider Nine Eyes and Fourteen Eyes circles but not to the Five Eyes
• Trying to make the printed list yield five members when the fifth, Canada, is not offered at all
• Assuming the largest Western powers must be the members and overlooking New Zealand
• Not reading to the end of a six-item list before turning to the options

Membership questions on international groupings appear in every MPSC current-affairs section and are asked in three forms: which countries are members, which country is not a member, and which grouping a named country belongs to. The decoys are almost always countries that are associated with the grouping without being in it. Prepare by keeping a single sheet of groupings with their full membership written out, marking clearly which include India, and noting for each the wider circles of partners that questions use as distractors.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which of the following countries is a member of the Five Eyes alliance but is often omitted from lists of its members ?

  • (a)Canada
  • (b)France
  • (c)Germany
  • (d)Japan

  Answer(a) Canada — the five members are the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. France belongs to the wider Nine Eyes and Germany to the Fourteen Eyes; Japan is not a member of any of the three circles.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Five Eyes alliance is based on which agreement ?

  • (a)The UKUSA Agreement of 1946
  • (b)The Atlantic Charter of 1941
  • (c)The North Atlantic Treaty of 1949
  • (d)The ANZUS Treaty of 1951

  Answer(a) The UKUSA Agreement of 1946 — a treaty for joint cooperation in signals intelligence, signed between the American and British signals agencies and later extended to Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The North Atlantic Treaty created NATO and the ANZUS Treaty was a separate Pacific security arrangement.