The real problem with our spies GLOBE ANALYSIS: Before we rush to invest more money and power in our intelligence services, let's consider how well they use what they have. By ANDREW MITROVICA Monday, September 24, 2001 As in any historic battle, spies will likely be fighting at the front and behind enemy lines in the new war on terrorism. In the still raw residue of last week's terrorist attacks, powerful voices on both sides of the border want to arm these silent soldiers with more powers and money. Their reasoning: For too long, Ottawa and Washington have slowly stripped intelligence agencies of the resources, means and will to root out and destroy the invisible foes. The time has arrived to unleash the spies. To be sure, this is compelling rhetoric. But is it really necessary, or wise, to heap resources on a slew of security services that already wield potent powers and whose coffers are brimming with billions of dollars to wage what is likely to be a never-ending war on the architects of terror? The answer is a resounding no. First, there is broad consensus among academics, intelligence experts, even veterans of the second-oldest profession, that the ingenious, catastrophic attacks in the political, military and entrepreneurial heart of America on Sept. 11 represent a calamitous intelligence failure. While firefighters dig through the remnants of the World Trade Center, U.S. agents are, no doubt, quietly sifting through databases, mountains of memos, and haranguing their sources, searching for how and why they missed such a lethal plot. In the spy trade, this necessary postmortem is called, appropriately, a damage assessment. Experienced intelligence officers know that occasionally one has to look back before moving forward. This work will surely be unprecedented in scope and is likely to yield important clues as to where the weaknesses and shortcomings of existing intelligence-gathering capabilities exist. Before that work is done, it would be unwise to lavish more money and likely irreversible powers on security agencies that do not know what went so terribly wrong and precisely how to fix it. Second, the alphabet soup of spy services and law enforcement agencies in Canada and the United States already enjoy and routinely employ extraordinary powers of seizure, detention and intrusiveness. Canada's spy service, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, has the power, for example, to open your mail and listen in on your telephone calls at home and work if it decides, in secret, that you constitute a threat to national security. CSIS can deploy an army of watchers to monitor and record your every movement, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It can break into your home and office and install state of the art voice and video recording devices. Your neighbours, friends and lovers would not be immune from this scrutiny if you were a target. Your life past, present and future is fair game. Properly directed, CSIS has more than enough power to root out any prospective terrorist in Canada. Perhaps too much power. If, for instance, you chose to complain to CSIS's watchdog, the Security Intelligence Review Committee, about how the service exercises its broad powers, you and your lawyer will not be entitled to hear or challenge the evidence the spy service has amassed against you. It is an arrogance that rankled SIRC's first chair, Ron Atkey. Writing in The Globe and Mail in 1999, the lawyer lambasted CSIS director Ward Elcock's disdain for the checks and balances imposed on the espionage agency. "Mr. Elcock appears to have shown precious little regard for the review process established by law, or for any kind of political scrutiny for that matter," he wrote. It is a sobering note of caution for anyone who advocates furnishing CSIS with even more powers and dollars. The U.S. security-intelligence infrastructure is equally intimidating and features an unrivalled arsenal of technical wizardry. The awe-inspiring array of spy satellites under U.S. command can photograph, for instance, the hands on Osama bin Laden's wristwatch and intercept every call he makes on his cell phone. In fact, the list of U.S. agencies involved in the intelligence business is seemingly endless: from the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the Defence Intelligence Agency to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Customs Service and the intelligence arms of the U.S. military. When the final bill was tabulated last year, U.S. taxpayers shelled out approximately $28-billion to underwrite the secret work of this mélange of agencies. That works out to $100 for every man, women and child in the United States. On a per capita basis, the $200-million budget for Canada's two principal intelligence-gathering agencies, CSIS and the super- secret electronic eavesdroppers, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), approaches that of their U.S. counterparts, the FBI and NSA. Despite this, both CSIS and CSE have complained that slashing of staff has imperiled their vital work. Is it true? Intelligence analysts point out that CSIS was bloated and most of the jobs chopped came from secretarial and administrative staff, not from its two core branches: counterterrorism and counterintelligence. With 2,000 employees, the spy service remains one of the federal government's largest employers. For its part, CSE has seen a 50-per-cent increase in staff since 1980. So, if billions of dollars and extraordinary powers are not the easy fix, what is? The short answer is that there is no quick fix. If this new war on terrorism is simply designed to rid the world of Osama bin Laden and his ilk and to bring to heel the states that offer them safe haven, then the public should be told bluntly that is the endgame. In that event, a seismic shift in thinking at our intelligence agencies needs to take place. CSIS and its sister agencies in the United States are still largely populated by intelligence officers who were reared in, and remain wedded to Cold War targets and techniques. The evidence of this atrophy is embarrassing and telling. Last week, in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, the world's so-called premier law enforcement agency, the FBI, put out an urgent call for Arabic and Farsi translators to help in their investigations. CSIS is faring no better. The last intelligence officer on the Islamic desk in Toronto who had a working knowledge of Arabic was drummed out of the service in the late 1990s. U.S and Canadian intelligence agencies must learn from their tragic mistakes. Recent events demonstrate that in the netherworld of espionage, the stakes can sometimes be excruciatingly high. Failure will only invite more tragedies. Andrew Mitrovica is an investigative reporter for The Globe and Mail, specializing in police and security issues.