Global spy role grows: CSIS head
Canadian agency operating 'sans frontiers'
Policy-maker wonders if new agency needed
BRUCE CAMPION-SMITH
OTTAWA BUREAU
OTTAWA—A clandestine meeting in the smoky café of an Algerian town, a back alley rendezvous in Kabul, action in the Punjab or hot on the trail of Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka.Just where Canadian spies are at work around the world, Ward Elcock won't say. But the director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) admits this much. Canadian intelligence officers are abroad. "Foreign sources of threat-related information have become predominant," he told a Vancouver conference of Canadian intelligence experts on Oct. 17. "Events have increasingly required us ... to operate abroad." It wasn't the first time Elcock had admitted this fact. Indeed, he has never made a secret of the fact that his agents are searching out threats to Canada in other countries.But what struck his most recent audience, many of them veterans of the spy world, was Elcock's hint that foreign operations had reached a new scale."Working covertly abroad has become an integral part of the service's operations," he said."Extremists respect no barriers, either international or moral. This situation calls for an integrated approach to intelligence collection that is not bound by artificial, administrative barriers," he said.Or borders, it seems. On paper at least, CSIS was given the ability to operate outside of the country. But in reality, it started out in 1984 as a domestic intelligence agency with only modest forays abroad. Now CSIS seems to be operating "sans frontiers," according to one former top-level intelligence expert.Elcock's decision to pull back the curtains ever so slightly on his agency's ever-increasing global reach raises big questions for policy-makers.First, just how much spying should Canada be doing abroad? Second, should CSIS be given a bigger mandate to conduct these shadowy tasks or should the job be given over to a new, separate foreign intelligence agency?
`Events have increasingly required us ... to operate abroad.'Ward Elcock, CSIS director
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Even among experts who make their careers out of studying the spy business, there's fair debate over just what CSIS is doing abroad right now.Some see it as little more than liaison work, exchanging information with counterparts in the intelligence branches of other countries.But others imagine a more ambitious, even exotic role for CSIS operatives. "You can expect a CSIS officer to run an agent, place them in a particular terrorist group, run that agent, get the intelligence required and bring that intelligence back home," said Martin Rudner, director of Carleton University's Canadian Centre of Intelligence and Security Studies.Elcock makes no apologies for the mystery: "I doubt very much whether anybody really understands what we do outside the country. We don't make a real effort to tell anybody."The real question is whether CSIS should be doing this kind of work at all."What happens in a world in which the boundaries between domestic and international security are now completely blurred? Has CSIS simply occupied the field and has that been with the approval of the Canadian government?" said the former federal intelligence officer, who asked not to be identified."Maybe Elcock has gone too far for CSIS' mandate. But over-all, it's not far enough for Canada's interests," the source said.CSIS has the legal power to collect intelligence here and abroad to investigate threats to national security. But it's barred by law from spying on foreign governments and is limited to collecting foreign intelligence within Canada. Some in the intelligence community argue that it's time to expand CSIS' mandate to collect foreign intelligence and allow Canadian agents to investigate not just terrorist threats, but also gather sensitive information on economic and trade issues and organized crime. "We're the only country in the world that confines the collection of foreign intelligence to the domestic scene. I have always thought that somewhat strange and unwise," said Peter Russell, who was research director on the royal commission on the RCMP that led to the creation of CSIS.Liberal MP David Pratt (Nepean-Carleton), who chairs the Commons' committee on national defence and veteran affairs, says it's time Parliament debated the role of Canada's intelligence agents overseas. He's put together a private member's bill proposing the creation of the Canadian Foreign Intelligence Agency.Not surprisingly, Elcock is no fan of the move to create a new intelligence agency. He argues that because of the cost and difficulty of running foreign operations, a new intelligence agency might not be able to do much more than CSIS is doing now.
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