Spies blow in political wind

CHRIS WATTIE / REUTERS

Canadian Security Intelligence Service Director Richard Fadden waits to testify before the Commons public safety and national security committee on Monday.

 

By: Andrew Mitrovica

Wed Jul 07 2010

Despite his calm aplomb, Dick Fadden, the director of Canada's spy service, is furiously treading water, trying to keep his fast sinking career afloat. Editorial writers and political commentators want him to resign or be fired. A few premiers have broadly hinted that they would be happy to see him walk the plank. My goodness, parliamentarians even made a special trip back to Ottawa in the oppressive summer heat to give him a good talking to, for, well, talking too much.

A few weeks ago, Fadden opened his mouth and told a CBC television interviewer that an unnamed foreign power (nudge, nudge, wink, wink, China) had several unnamed Canadian politicians in its back pocket. “Agents of influence” they call them in the spy business.

A day or so later, Fadden “distanced” himself from his remarks, limply suggesting that, in retrospect, maybe he should have kept his mouth shut and that the anonymous politicians that the unnamed foreign power had in its back pocket didn't constitute a threat to Canada's national security so he didn't bother to tell his political bosses.

On Monday, Fadden did a volte face, insisting that what he originally said was true, that he didn't break any laws by saying it, and that he wasn't going to resign. Indeed, an unapologetic Fadden tellingly revealed that he had openly mused about how several provincial and municipal politicians were secretly doing the bidding of foreign power with the blessing of not only the public safety minister but the powerful Privy Council Office, which reports to Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

If you had any doubt before, it should now be plain why a former CSIS director called the intelligence agency he once led the “Keystone Kops.” Of course Fadden's sorry, teetering on arrogant performance should see him get the boot. But I think a much larger and more important point about how so-called “intelligence” is collected and acted upon is being missed in the predictable prattle over Fadden's fate.

Several years ago, a joint team of CSIS and RCMP intelligence analysts tried to examine and chart how China was attempting, through long-standing and pervasive espionage and legitimate means, to exert influence on Canada's political, media and entrepreneurial establishment. Their work was dubbed Project Sidewinder.

Curious things began to happen when the team produced the controversial Sidewinder report. First, senior CSIS officials ordered all copies of the original report destroyed and rewritten. This, over the vociferous objections of senior RCMP officials who believed — internal correspondence later revealed — that the spy service had “compromised the integrity” of reports to Ottawa about existing and emerging security threats and charged that CSIS analysts were forced to bury their alarming conclusions. (Later, CSIS would try to explain the order away by suggesting that it routinely destroys original documentation.)

Then, when a surviving copy of the original report made its way into my hands and subsequently onto the front page of a national newspaper I was working for at the time, Ward Elcock, the then head of the spy service that generated the report, took the uncharacteristic step of publicly disparaging his analysts for having written an “interesting theory” that couldn't withstand scrutiny.

Wow, I thought at the time. That's a little odd. A CSIS director going public to effectively say that a report his agency had worked long and hard to help produce was a piece of crap. I know that CSIS produces a lot of crap. In fact, I wrote a book about how dangerously crappy the service is. But it's quite another matter for this country's top spy to publicly announce the agency's work was analytically worthless, to put it diplomatically.

You didn't have to enjoy a Sherlock Holmes-like ability to “connect-the dots” to recognize that Elcock took to print with his humiliating critique at a time when Jean Chrétien's Liberal government was spending a lot of political and diplomatic time and capital to curry favour with Beijing. That work paid a lot of economic dividends for both countries.

Fast forward a few years and the election of a new Conservative government with a more jaundiced view of China and presto, Sidewinder's once “interesting theory” that couldn't withstand scrutiny was now being embraced almost as gospel by the new top guys at CSIS.

The agency's change of tune began with Jim Judd, Elcock's successor. In April 2007, the career bureaucrat-turned-spook told the Senate committee on national security and defence that China is the agency's most formidable adversary, preoccupying almost half of CSIS's counter-intelligence apparatus.

While Fadden hasn't named China, the unrepentant CSIS director and, you guessed it, career bureaucrat, didn't deny under questioning from parliamentarians that's who he was referring to when he told the committee: “We are dealing here with a spectrum of behaviour by foreign entities that often start out innocently but later veer toward something that actually harms Canadian interests.”

Fadden's bravado and urge to appear in-the-know got him into trouble. It may yet cost him his job. But the spine of what he has said over the past several weeks about the danger of foreign influences in this nation's politics was detailed in strikingly similar language in an intelligence report that was destroyed and discredited by the very spy service he now heads.

That's how intelligence gathering is manufactured in this country by the powers-that-be. They stick their proverbial fingers in the air and see which way the political winds are blowing.