Covert Entry: Spies, Lies and Crimes Inside Canada's Secret Service Paperback - 2003

Excerpt

Introduction

This book is about secrets and spies. It is also an account of lies and crimes ordered and condoned by high-ranking public servants in the name of Canada’s national security. Covert Entry had its origins in 1999, when as an investigative reporter at the Globe and Mail, I first cast a critical eye on Canada’s spy agency, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS).

I soon realized how little Canadians knew about the mandate, powers, resources and leadership of the intelligence service that is supposed to protect us from increasingly amorphous enemies at home and abroad. Beyond that depressing fact, I also discovered how difficult it was to pierce the culture of complacency that has grown up around CSIS. When the Berlin Wall crumbled, the Cold War and the cataclysmic threats the world faced seemed to vanish with it. In Canada, we took particular comfort in the reassuring but illusory notion that our international reputation as a peace-broker made us immune from the often costly consequences of terrorism and espionage. We also took comfort in the idea that Canada was, in a literal and figurative sense, a safe haven: it was unlikely that the architects of terror could, or would, export to North America the ugly conflicts that haunted the rest of the globe.

That all changed on September 11, 2001. Twenty-four Canadians were among the 3,054 civilians who perished when the political, entrepreneurial and military heart of the United States was attacked with such shocking ferocity. The onslaught on our doorstep jolted Canadians out of their stupor and revealed that in the netherworld of intelligence, the stakes can be very high. It also made clear that the safety and security of Canadians are dependent, in large measure, on csis’s ability to detect, monitor and root out the dangers lurking in our midst. My unofficial tour deep inside the service’s cloistered world does not inspire confidence.

* * * * *

Canada’s intelligence agency was born in 1984 out of the discredited remnants of the RCMP Security Service. In pursuit of intelligence on Quebec’s separatist movement, the service had been caught burning barns, stealing dynamite and committing other illegal acts. The final report of the McDonald Commission into rcmp wrongdoing, issued in 1981, laid part of the blame for the transgressions on an insular police culture and unaccountable police powers. It recommended that the Mounties get out of the intelligence business altogether and that, instead, the federal government establish a civilian spy agency -- the Canadian Security Intelligence Service -- whose mandate would be a kind of cross between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and whose focus would be domestic security.

The new agency was invested with extraordinary powers in order to protect “Canada’s national security interests and the safety of Canadians.” In fact, CSIS’s ability to invade the lives of Canadians is unmatched in government. If it decides, in secret, that you constitute a threat to national security, CSIS can listen in on your telephone calls at home and at work. It can deploy an army of watchers to monitor and record your every movement twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. It can intercept and open your mail without your knowledge. It can break into your home and office and install state-of-the-art voice- and video-recording devices. If you become a target, your family, friends and neighbours can also be subjected to this suffocating scrutiny. Your life -- past, present and future -- is fair game. In effect, the act that created CSIS simply made legal the old service’s tactics.

When the act was passed, however, Canadians were assured that in exercising these powers, CSIS would respect the rule of law. It would get rid of the renegades from the old service and usher in a new breed of intelligence officer who would be a model of probity for espionage agencies around the globe. The image was of newly recruited and eager university graduates with intellectual heft, trained to analyze the degree of risk posed to the country by foreign spies, terrorists, neo-Nazis, organized crime syndicates, as well as new immigrants determined to import their sometimes incendiary troubles to Canada. But in its haste to get up and running, CSIS turned to the Mountie “dinosaurs,” who ended up running the show.

To watch over the new recruits and old veterans, CSIS is scrutinized by two civilian watchdogs: the Security Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC), which reports on the agency’s conduct and performance to Parliament through the solicitor general, and the inspector general, who acts as the solicitor general’s eyes and ears inside the service. Both have the power to audit the service’s files routinely and to review judicial warrants and the affidavits upon which they were obtained.

On the ground, much of CSIS’s $200-million annual budget and 2,100 employees are focused on two main branches: counter-terrorism (CT) and counter-intelligence (CI). Members of the physical surveillance units, or “watcher” service, (known inside CSIS as the “surveillant service” or SURs) regularly assist in operations conducted by intelligence officers assigned to the CI and CT branches. The service also posts liaison officers in Washington, London, Paris, Rome and Tel Aviv, and is permitted, on a limited scale, to undertake covert operations abroad.

Many of the recruits begin their careers in CSIS’s security-screening branch, conducting background checks on government employees, or in the service’s research and analysis branch, where they follow global developments to predict -- with wildly oscillating degrees of success -- emerging threats to Canada’s national security.

Indeed, when relations between East and West thawed over a decade ago, CSIS shifted some of its resources away from ferreting out foreign spies to combatting terrorism. According to CSIS’s current director, Ward Elcock, every major terrorist organization in the world has a presence here. Elcock insists that terrorists routinely use this country to raise money, set up bank accounts and plan operations. Elcock often reminds Canadians of that chilling assessment. In a June 2002 report to Parliament, he went further, declaring that Canada was no longer being used by terrorists for logistical and support activities but was becoming a possible “staging ground for terrorist attacks.” He said that this country was “at risk of being targeted directly or indirectly by a terrorist network.” As a result, more of the service’s resources were being poured into fighting terrorism.

Another of Elcock’s familiar refrains is that the intelligence service he commands is a professional, law-abiding operation that Canadians needn’t fear or fret over; that under his direction, the service keeps its eye firmly fixed on its vital mandate and scarcely needs its oversight agencies to ensure that its unrivalled powers are wielded with caution and discretion.

Unfortunately, such reassurances about CSIS’s conduct have little connection to what actually takes place at its fortress-like headquarters just outside Ottawa and throughout regional offices across the country. What I discovered behind the carefully constructed artifice is an intelligence service, still in its infancy, riddled by waste, extravagance, laziness, nepotism, incompetence, corruption and law-breaking. Far from being a shining example to sister intelligence services, CSIS and its imperious leadership remain wedded to its predecessor’s destructive habits. As a result, the service’s future and, ultimately, the security of Canadians are in jeopardy. In the aftermath of the terrible events of September 11, unearthing the truth about CSIS for this book left me shaken and very worried.

* * * * *

At its core, this book tells the story of a young man named John Farrell and his decade-long journey through Canada’s intelligence community.

At thirty-four, Farrell has seen his share of trouble. The youngest of thirteen children who grew up in a housing project in Toronto’s east-end, he has the physique of a light heavyweight boxer. His fights were waged not in the ring but on the street, in the schoolyard and in the tavern -- usually after someone had crossed the invisible line that Farrell draws in the sand around him. His hands are scarred, but his face remains strangely undisturbed by violence. His temper, volcanic as it can be, is well-camouflaged by his manners and quick flashes of his engaging smile.

During his youth, Farrell’s family was ravaged by drug abuse and alcoholism, and he found temporary sanctuary in the love of his mother, in school and in the Catholic church -- the only constants in his life. But he also exacted his revenge on the world that wounded him. He and a small band of miscreants planned and executed scores of thefts. Their victims were neigbourhood businesses, delivery men, store clerks and the occasional passerby. The young thugs were devoted and loyal to each other. Their oath of secrecy was tested by parents and police, but they never wavered.

Farrell learned to live a double life, to act any part at any time. A natural chameleon, he could flit from one persona to the next and was able to persuade his teachers and priests to act as character witnesses when he was finally caught and sentenced for his crimes. Even now, he can be generous and kind yet brutish and selfish, dedicated and hard-working yet lazy and slovenly, open and warm yet secretive and cold, gregarious and bright yet conniving and stoic, learned and wise yet foolish and short-sighted. These are the very contradictions that made Farrell a gifted Canada Post and CSIS operative. So eager were Canada Post and then CSIS to recruit the former gang leader -- and arrange his seamless move into the world of spies, safe houses and secrets -- that his criminal record was expunged by Ottawa.

Farrell was a willing and enthusiastic conscript into the covert life. In 1989, as a postal inspector for Canada Post Corporation, the ex-thief learned that while senior executives shielded managers who defrauded taxpayers out of hundreds of thousands of dollars, they spent untold amounts of money to spy on postal workers and their union leaders. Appointed divisional intelligence officer for Canada Post in Toronto when he was only twenty-one, Farrell was charged with collecting information on troublesome union leaders and their families. He carefully built dossiers full of intimate details about them. And with the help of private security firms, he also entrapped gold-bricking postal workers. All of this was done, he insists, on the orders of his superiors.

In 1991, Farrell joined CSIS at the urging of his boss at the Crown corporation. For a spy service that publicly assured Canadians that it operated under the law, recruiting Farrell was an act of hypocrisy. He worked for the intelligence service until 1999. Throughout his eventful years with CSIS, he applied the tough and lasting lessons he learned in his youth. The only difference was that now Farrell was a government-paid thief.

He was assigned to work on some of the service’s most sensitive and dangerous cases, including running the day-to-day operations of CSIS’s top-secret mail intercept program in southern Ontario. He was good at getting things done quickly and without attracting unsettling attention -- vital qualities for any intelligence officer. His ability to succeed when other CSIS officers failed, sometimes miserably and embarrassingly, also made him valuable to his bosses.

Farrell was welcomed into the very heart of CSIS’s Special Operational Services (SOS). SOS is where the small, often unrealistic hope of almost every officer to play a part in the heart-thumping world of a John le Carré novel is fulfilled. The elite corps is where the men and women of CSIS really do get to play at being spies. It’s where the action is. For almost six years, beginning in 1994, Farrell worked with the unit in the largest, most target-rich region of the country: Toronto. Farrell became a close confidant of, and took his orders from, some of the service’s most senior officers in Toronto, including Don Lunau and Ray Murphy, the veteran intelligence officers who ran SOS in the city.

Farrell had no trouble finding his place in SOS. His guile, charm, strength, cunning and insatiable thirst for a good payday were a perfectly calibrated mix of traits that assured his success with Canada’s spy service. Farrell and CSIS were a perfect fit.


From the Hardcover edition.

Media reviews

“In the post-9/11 climate of fear and paranoia, few voices have criticized the civil liberties abuses by agencies charged with safeguarding the security of Canadians. That may change with this remarkable exposé by reporter Andrew Mitrovica…. This insider’s account documents a decade’s worth of official illegality, corruption, and incompetence.” -- Quill & Quire

“[The] Security Intelligence Review Committee should read Mr. Mitrovica’s book and do its job.” -- Clayton Ruby, B.A., LL.B., LL.M., and prominent member of the human rights community, The Globe and Mail

“We need the Andrew Mitrovicas of this world to rattle the cages of secrecy.” -- The Globe and Mail

“Farrell has an intriguing story and Mitrovica tells it entertainingly…. he argues a convincing case against the serrvice.” -- The Gazette (Montreal)

“Covert Entry … is a shocking indictment of the federal spy agency.” -- The Chronicle-Herald (Halifax)

“Mitrovica has written a book that he hopes will rattle both CSIS and its toothless watchdog.”-- The Calgary Herald / The Edmonton Journal