The next CSIS boss needs deep experience, and teaching skills: few bureaucrats or MPs understand intelligence, threats or dangers to Canada.
Not surprisingly, a country’s security service lives in the shadows. By definition, the techniques used to collect intelligence need to remain secret and much information must stay out of the public eye. The downside, of course, is that the average citizen thinks it is all James Bond stuff (it really is not).
This increasingly open approach is a good thing. After all, nature abhors a vacuum and in the absence of good information, people will substitute what they think is going on, accurately or inaccurately. The challenge, however, is for the leadership to carefully manage the need to protect sources and methods while providing Canadians with some idea about what keeps our spy agencies up at night (and what their staff are doing about it).
As a former practitioner for more than three decades with CSE and CSIS, I acknowledge certain biases. I would like to see someone with real, significant operational experience assume the job. Spydom is complicated and a director has to understand how the intelligence omelette is made in order to fully appreciate what the team is doing, to put him/her in the best position to explain to the folks “downtown” what is happening on the national security scene and how important/dangerous it is.
At the same time, the director must be a forceful character who can aggressively present intelligence to senior government officials, up to and including the prime minister, and make strong recommendations for actions, aided by investigative and analytic findings.
The director also has to be a teacher, as very few bureaucrats, and even fewer MPs, have any background or comprehension of intelligence, threats and dangers to national security and public safety. This person will need to be patient with such ignorance and gently walk the audience through what the security intelligence community knows, how confident it is in the quality and reliability of that intelligence, why it is important to read and consume intelligence, and how it can better inform policy and decision-making.
Communication with the Canadian public is increasingly important. The director needs to assure citizens that the agency is up to snuff and doing all it can to keep us safe. Ultimately, if national security is done well, nothing happens and no one notices. When bombs do not go off and state secrets do not go missing, our spooks are doing their jobs.
I wish the next director every success at CSIS. The agency is very important to Canada and deserves the right person to deal with a cornucopia of issues: terrorism, espionage, foreign interference, low morale, etc. I would not want this responsibility. I can only hope that the current government takes this position seriously and appoints the best, most qualified Canadian possible. One thing this cannot be is a “political” appointee. Canadians deserve better.