A Canadian CIA? Why We Need a Foreign Spy Agency

In 1945, Sir William Stephenson was back in Ottawa, fresh from running Britain’s spy station in New York, where he had coordinated Allied espionage efforts. He arrived at a moment of national shock: Igor Gouzenko, a clerk at the local Soviet embassy, had defected, carrying with him more than 100 secret documents tucked under his shirt. The files revealed a vast Soviet spy network working to infiltrate Western governments and steal nuclear secrets.

Sensing an opportunity, Stephenson pitched a bold plan to his superiors: dispatch him abroad as Canada’s master spy. He saw the country as dangerously unprepared in a world now tilting toward a Cold War. He knew the covert game. He had established and overseen Camp X, a secret training facility near Whitby, Ontario, that trained Allied agents in sabotage, cryptography, and guerrilla tactics. He wanted to bring that same thinking to his country writ large. He believed that without a global spy network of its own, Canada would be blind to threats and sidelined in a world rapidly reorganizing itself around espionage.

The proposal met with skepticism. “Master spy” sounded thrilling on paper, but to federal officials still finding their postwar footing, it looked less like strategy and more like a liability. Skepticism was, in fact, to become a defining feature of Canada’s approach to espionage in the decades that followed. Cautious bureaucrats totted up the risks, uncertainties, and costs of creating a foreign spy service; questioned whether Canadians would approve; and reassured themselves that allies could always be relied on to do the clandestine dirty work.

Over the decades, the allure of the “great game”—a phrase popularized by Rudyard Kipling’s spy novel, Kim—exerted its glamour. Kipling saw secret agents as the true enforcers of imperial rule, battling on the frontiers of empire for influence and knowledge. The reality of the cloak-and-dagger trade ended up being a little more prosaic, but the core idea stayed the same: steal secrets to gain an informational edge and stay one step ahead of an opponent.

Sure, you can dig up what the other side knows inside your own country—this is the art of counterintelligence. But since the run-up to World War I, when modern spycraft got its start, with every great power desperate to decode the coming storm, the big prize hasn’t changed: plant human beings as close as possible to the action. Proximity is power, whether you’re tracking an enemy or keeping tabs on a friend.

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Some efforts were made, as the Cold War froze in place, to keep the idea of a Canadian secret service alive, sometimes nudged along by the British. But to no avail. When the Canadian Security Intelligence Service came along, in 1984, to replace the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Security Service—whose operations had become synonymous with overreach, inefficiency, and public scandal—the reigning idea was that it would be sufficient for it to function as a domestic intelligence service.

CSIS is today Canada’s domestic watchman. Its eyes are trained inward. It keeps a watch on foreign spies, terrorists, and violent political influencers in our midst. CSIS can post officers abroad in Canadian embassies and consulates, and mount operations beyond Canada’s borders, but there are constraints imposed by legislation, resources, and expertise. Compare this to America’s Central Intelligence Agency, which roams the globe. CSIS guards Canada’s gates. The CIA hunts secrets overseas.

Creating our own CIA—stationing eyes and ears in the world’s most volatile places—has become a serious question again, circulating quietly in secret corridors in Ottawa and occasionally surfacing in public debate. What brought the idea back to life once more? Fear.

Fear of Russian aggression spilling beyond its efforts to conquer Ukraine. Fear of an aggressive China pushing out into the South China Sea and against Taiwan. Fear of madness on the part of a nuclear-armed North Korea, with its new alliance with Russia. Fear of worsening instability in the Middle East: a regional war between Israel and Iran spiralling into something far bigger, with the US stepping in to stop Iran’s nuclear program—and maybe toppling the regime. It’s fear of hybrid war: influence operations, disinformation campaigns, cyberattacks, undersea cable cutting, sabotage using criminal proxies, theft of economic secrets and IP.

But there’s something else too. Fear of Canada being left out in the cold by an unpredictable and potentially dangerous partner on which we are dependent for a vast portion of our global intelligence: the United States.

Forget James Bond, forget Jason Bourne. A well-placed spy (technically a HUMINT operative, short for human intelligence) doesn’t deal in derring-do. From their perch inside foreign countries and hotspots, they can tap the hive mind of the adversary. Your key asset may be a dissident official or a bummed-out employee of a rival covert service. Maybe, while you pose undercover as a company geologist, a well-placed source will tell you what an image from an overhead satellite pass actually means; or you’ve recruited an IT subcontractor who will pinpoint which trove of electronic data your own government might want to hack or disrupt. A spy can be a secret diplomat, a back-channel influencer. In an era of complex and shifting dangers, the advantage doesn’t always go to the strongest. It goes to the best informed.

As intelligence veteran Sir David Omand says, the whole purpose of having secret agents is to reduce ignorance. That was the logic in March 2003, when then Liberal member of Parliament David Pratt tabled a private member’s bill to create a spy agency. The war on terror had reshaped how countries thought about security, and Pratt believed Canada needed its own means of tracking terrorist networks overseas. As Stephenson had intuited decades earlier, HUMINT remained the persistent missing piece in our knowledge of a destabilized world. A well-trained, properly funded clandestine bureau would help Canada match the pace of global threats but also signal its credibility as an international partner—especially as the only G8 (as it was then) nation without a foreign intelligence service. It was the first such legislation of its kind. But Pratt’s bill never made it past first reading in the House of Commons.

If we are serious about launching our own Le Carré–like outfit, the counterarguments have to be confronted. They have piled up over the years. How could such a team be created without draining valuable and scarce resources from intelligence activities already conducted by agencies like Communications Security Establishment, Global Affairs, the military, and the RCMP? Would it be too expensive? Would political leaders risk their necks advancing the idea? Would Canadians even buy it?

Most importantly, where in the world would Canadian spies go without tripping over the activities of other allied secret services or sticking their heads in a lion’s mouth? How could a small (by definition) intelligence team function effectively, especially if it tried to target so-called “denied area” regimes such as Russia or China, with their ferocious surveillance, internal security, and censorship capabilities. If a Canadian service couldn’t infiltrate big enemies, what would the point of it be? Would there be any real return on investment, especially given the dangers?

I put this question to several distinguished former heads of Canada’s intelligence community. A few remain opposed, but interestingly, some former doubters now embrace the idea.

Let’s start with the dissenters. Dick Fadden spent much of his professional life in government in or near the Canadian intelligence community. He was the security and intelligence coordinator at the Privy Council Office when the 9/11 attacks happened. He served as CSIS director from 2009 to 2013 and as deputy minister of defence from 2013 to 2015. In his last post, he was the prime minister’s national security adviser, serving both Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau, from 2015 to 2016.

Fadden doesn’t believe that Canada today needs a foreign spy service. “To the extent that we have an intelligence gap,” he told me, “we should first attempt to fill those gaps by refining the mandates and increasing the resources of existing institutions.” Intel gathering against our strategic adversaries, he argues, would be a daunting task that even the US and the UK find difficult. He also thinks we could make much better use of open-source intelligence, or OSINT. That’s the stuff you can get from scouring the internet and other published sources: websites, social media, public records. The volume is huge; the challenge is winnowing it. But good generative AI can help.

I heard something similar from Ward Elcock, the longest-serving CSIS director, who held that office from 1994 to 2004. During his forty years in public service, he also served as deputy minister of defence, from 2004 to 2007, and as special adviser at the PCO on human smuggling and illegal migration, from 2010 to 2016.

Elcock doubts the need for a foreign intelligence agency, believing that increased resources for CSIS would be enough to address many of the issues supporters raise. He fears that a separate service could simply end up creating two ineffective agencies competing for funds—hardly a net gain. He also reminds me that, as part of CSIS’s mandate, valuable foreign intelligence can be gathered successfully at strategic “choke points” within Canada, such as embassies and consulates. It was CSIS, for example, that intercepted communications between Chinese consular officials and intermediaries involved in suspected foreign interference during the 2021 federal election. These operations also have the benefit of being less risky. It just doesn’t sound as sexy as dispatching spies into hostile terrain.

These views, no doubt, have traction in Ottawa. That may be the reason, when the idea popped up in 2006, nested in the Conservatives’ campaign platform, the party under Harper walked away from the promise despite winning the election.

But as geopolitical realities shift into uncharted territory, more recent officeholders have changed their thinking. Vincent Rigby is one example. Rigby served as the prime minister’s national security and intelligence adviser from 2020 to 2021, when new security threats arose in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Vincent confessed he had “vacillated” about a foreign intelligence service over the course of his long career, which included previous stints as a senior official at Global Affairs, Public Safety, and the Department of National Defence. During that time, he said, he regarded a Canadian spy service as a relative luxury—“nice to have” rather than “must do.”

Rigby has revised his stance, prompted by the sharp downturn in international security and the loss of the United States as a trusted ally. Now, he says, spy work—learning the trick of seeing without being seen—is mission critical. Hurdles remain: cost, the time needed to stand up such a service, and winning public support. He wonders whether Canadians, who typically pay scant attention to national security, would back the idea.

Rigby isn’t alone in his reversal. Jody Thomas came into the hot seat as national security and intelligence adviser in early 2022, just as the “Freedom Convoy” protests began and as Russia geared up for its war in Ukraine. Even as recently as December 2023, she disavowed any immediate need to create a foreign spy service. Now retired from the hurly-burly, she told me that “Canadian intelligence needs have evolved to the point where, yes, a human foreign intelligence agency is required.”

However, she has caveats. CSIS must continue to receive full funding, and the proposed agency would need serious investment in training and resources. “Two half funded agencies will not meet the need, and lives would be at risk.”

What should finally resolve the debate? Let’s look, first, at the question of whether we would be any good at the overseas spy business. Canada, I think, has unique capabilities. We are a multicultural society with plentiful linguistic resources and ties around the world. We also have the technological know-how to run missions that have to slip past even the most sophisticated surveillance nets.

I also believe, to address Rigby’s nagging doubt, that if the argument for a foreign-facing intelligence service is properly made, Canadians would buy it, especially at a time of heightened national pride and anxiety over our sovereignty. Canadians would understand that our dependency on the US for foreign intelligence is no longer a source of strength but of weakness. The idea is sellable.

Yes, a Canadian spy operation should be kept relatively small and its budget modest. The Australian Secret Intelligence Service, founded in 1952, offers a useful comparison. ASIS has supported the US and Britain in Middle Eastern operations and helped break up terrorist networks in Southeast Asia after the 2002 Bali bombings. It’s proof of concept for a middle power like Canada (if the Aussies can do it, why not us?). It could take years, maybe a decade, to get fully up to speed, requiring recruitment, extensive training (much of it with select allies), and the build-out of overseas infrastructure, where secure operations and communications would be paramount. Its limited size and specialized staffing might prevent it from poaching talent from other departments. Even so, CSIS’s own capabilities would have to be protected and, ideally, reinforced.

Next, what do we even do with these shadow operatives? That’s the million-dollar question—and one that will never be answered fully in public, for obvious reasons. It probably won’t be globe-trotting like the CIA or even the MI6. More likely, it would be limited to collecting intelligence rather than engaging in more action-oriented schemes to undermine or overthrow regimes. No buying generals and coup leaders. No ginning up protest movements, no exploding cigars. It would, in short, need a niche—a target region and a set of secrets for our agents to hunt.

We could send our spies out to the Russian High North and Arctic. Or we could point them at targets in the Caribbean, especially Haiti and Cuba, with maybe a side gig in Venezuela. We could exploit intelligence-gathering opportunities in the Southern Cone states of Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile—regions that, to my knowledge, are only lightly monitored by our allies. We could use our French-language proficiencies to base our activities against a set of francophone states of interest in West and Central Africa, including Mali, Niger, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Rwanda.

Far-flung regions, disparate targets—but all tied together by a single aim: harvesting secrets Canada and its allies can use. That means prying into military threats, political unrest, and the meddling and espionage of Russia and the People’s Republic of China, as well as gaining economic insights on everything from the race for critical minerals to the PRC’s Belt and Road ambitions.

Of course, balancing risk with return will be at the heart of the idea. The reward is real, as every state that operates a foreign intelligence service knows. Even in a technologically saturated world, the oldest form of spying—HUMINT—still matters. Let the great game begin.