A few days after a certain gentleman was named head of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, I found myself sitting beside him at a dinner party.
Shortly after the soup I turned to him and said: "Now that you're our spymaster, tell me a secret."
After some thought he replied: "Well, I've read most of the files and I can tell you ... there are a lot of bad spellers in CSIS."
Our agents may have other faults as well, but we'll never know, of course, because everything is concealed beneath their cloaks. But it certainly would be comforting to know more about their competence in this age of terrorism and just how much good intel is reaching the police and government people who can act upon it.
I'm a big spy fan, read all the Bond books, all of LeCarre and a good deal about real American spooks. But there's not much public stuff available about how CSIS operates. We do know that our spies are doing more undercover work abroad after years of debate about whether Canada should have covert agents in other countries.
A recent CSIS report says, "The accelerating international dimensions of the terrorist threat have seen foreign collection techniques employed more frequently." This apparently means our spooks are spying alone and not just depending on foreign sources, although we have increased our liaisons with overseas intelligence agencies from 50 in the 1960s to 250 today.
These covert operations abroad are part of the history of cloak and dagger in Canada. Shortly after Sir John A. MacDonald set up a spy system, our spooks were infiltrating the U.S. to collect info on the Fenians. And at the turn of the century, rumours about an American plot to annex the Yukon, sent Canadian agents to spy on the plotters and infiltrate their presumed organizations.
Then, under the Mounties, the security service pretty well stuck to planting an agent our two in our embassies abroad to work with foreign agencies.
Now that CSIS -- spun off from the RCMP in 1984 -- is faced with serious terrorism, the current spymaster says, "The service is increasingly engaged in covert foreign operations." This involves recruiting of foreign sources, sending Canadian-cultivated agents abroad and meeting sources in third countries.
Still, the government's handling of intelligence matters has its critics.
One of them is Brig. Gen. Jim Cox who ran the intelligence staff at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe from 1998 to 2004. He is now pursuing his doctorate in intelligence studies at the Royal Military College.
Cox says Canada does not yet recognize intelligence as a primary tool of national power. The spies' work is spread over too many departments, many of which are ill-equipped to handle it. "There is no embedded professional intelligence culture at any level," he says.
What Canada needs, Cox insists, is a national security intelligence policy under robust leadership. The policy would direct more attention to professional intelligence training, to threat assessment and to the function of intelligence in decision making. Overall, this would mean a "culture of intelligence" throughout the entire government. And it's urgent, Cox says ... "it was needed yesterday."
It doesn't sound like something James Bond would worry about but perhaps it's M's department.
In any case, it's obvious that intelligence is now at the heart of how we protect ourselves. No matter how sophisticated our collection of intelligence becomes, if it's not acted upon it's wasted.
So let's have a government that's a lot more spooky.