The US representatives, which had arrived in the UK in 2019 to convince its government not to use Chinese tech giant Huawei's equipment in its national 5G network, aggressively pushed their view that doing so was dangerous from the national security standpoint, a new tell-all book dubbed The Secret History of the Five Eyes claims. Its author, Richard Kerbaj, called it a "policy disruption mission" by the White House, which at the time was waging a trade war against China and sent war ships to waters deemed national by Beijing.
Part of that mission was a five-hour meeting between US officials and the GCHQ, a British intelligence and security body, the book claims citing an anonymous UK official, who was present at the meeting. During the encounter, the UK intelligence reportedly tried to insist that it can deal with whatever China might have planted in Huawei's devices, as the US claimed. Their American colleagues, however, refused to budge, as per the source:
"The [US]' message was, 'we don’t want you to do this [accept Huawei], you have no idea how evil China is'."
The official further noted that the discussion was not entirely civilized and described it as "five hours of shouting with a prepared, angry and weirdly non-threatening script." The British side reportedly was trying to launch a "policy discussion" initiative with the US, but the head of the American delegation, then-National Security Council Asia director Matthew Pottinger, "didn’t care", as the UK official described it to the book's author.
Pottinger himself denied in his comment for The Sunday Times, that he had shouted during the five-hour long negotiations and dismissed the book's reporting as "one-sided and inaccurate."
Furthermore, Ciaran Martin, NCSC’s former chief executive, told the book's author that the UK was ready to work with the US to counter China's ambitions in the sphere of high technology. However, Martin said the UK did not deem the use of Huawei in the country's 5G sector as being "the most important thing in a much wider strategic challenge."
Another official, then-British ambassador to the US Kim Darroch also told in an interview for the book that Washington has been ramping up the pressure on the UK over Huawei for years. But at the same time, the US did not have any hard evidence to back up its claims about the threat Huawei was allegedly posing.
"The Americans had no compelling technical arguments for banning Huawei," the ambassador said.
Eventually, London broke with its initial promise of sticking to Huawei's tech. The breaking point for the UK to change the mind on Huawei equipment was the threat of the secondary US sanctions against the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), the book's source says.
The US convinced several countries in Europe and Asia to deny Huawei entrance into their 5G network building process, even as the tech giant repeatedly denied the unsubstantiated claims by the White House that its products contained backdoors installed by Beijing. Washington further tried to pressure the company by banning the sale of the US-made technologies to it, including chips and software, forcing Huawei to switch to the domestically produced substitutes. The company accused the US of using state power to hamper American tech firms' powerful foreign competitors, as Huawei was gradually gaining market share globally.
Beijing also condemned the US global campaign to smear Huawei's reputation and slammed Washington for engaging in illicit competition to promote its own companies. The tech giant and the Chinese government also vowed to combat the US ban on technology exports in courts, disputing them as the illegal competition practice.