Officers of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service have played a crucial and long-standing role as interrogators of a vast swath of captured Taliban fighters, The Canadian Press has learned.
The spies began working side-by-side with a unit of military police intelligence officers as the Afghan war spiralled out of control in 2006, according to heavily censored witness transcripts filed with the Military Police Complaints Commission.
The spy agency's previously unknown role in questioning detainees adds a new dimension to the controversy about the handling and possible torture of prisoners by Afghan security forces.
It also raises more questions about the critical early years in Kandahar when the Canadian military found itself mired in a guerrilla war it had not expected to fight.
CSIS acknowledged in 2006 that its members gathered intelligence in Afghanistan, but the spy service's precise role has remained in the shadows until now.
Maj. Kevin Rowcliffe, former staff adviser to Canada's overseas operations commander, told investigators with the complaints commission there were questions about how much experience the army's intelligence officers had in grilling prisoners.
“There was a lot of discussion in my headquarters about who was qualified to do interrogations, because we're not talking the normal police interview, we're talking interrogations, which (censored) were doing, not (military police),” says an edited transcript of the Dec. 6, 2007, interview.
The military simply had no expertise. It had been decades since they had to interrogate prisoners of war. And if the military lacked that expertise, you can be sure, CSIS lacked it in spades. — Wesley Wark, University of Toronto
A copy of the document was obtained by The Canadian Press.
Military police “were involved in that, but they weren't necessarily involved in interviewing or interrogation related issues; that would be (censored) or some other parade that had special training in interrogation.”
Sources familiar with the unedited version say the blanked-out references are to CSIS.
Intelligence expert Wesley Wark says the revelations are disturbing, partly because CSIS would have had no specialized knowledge of how to elicit information from Afghan prisoners.
“I find that stunning,” said Mr. Wark, a historian at the University of Toronto.
The spy agency is legally permitted to gather intelligence anywhere in the world concerning threats to the security of Canada, and has increasingly operated abroad in recent years.
In Kandahar, CSIS officers conducted what's known as tactical field questioning, essentially the first interrogations of suspects, said another source familiar with the process.
They tried to sort out who was a bona fide insurgent commander — or a simple field soldier.
The spies would sometimes make recommendations on which Taliban prisoners to hand over to the National Directorate of Security, Afghanistan's notorious intelligence service, the sources said.
The final say on whether to transfer always rested with the military task force commander.
The Military Police Complaints Commission asked questions about CSIS's role in Kandahar, but abandoned the angle when it became bogged down in legal challenges about its authority to investigate Ottawa's overall prisoner-transfer policy.
Diplomat-whistleblower Richard Colvin testified before a special House of Commons committee last November that the majority of prisoners Canada handed over to the Afghan intelligence service were tortured — a claim the Conservative government and military commanders, past and present, angrily denied.
Maj. Rowcliffe's interview transcript prompts questions about whether the military and CSIS officers had enough time to conduct proper interrogations early in the war, when newly arrived troops had little intelligence on the threats they were facing.
The military has 96 hours after capture to decided whether to hand over a prisoner to Afghan authorities, but Maj. Rowcliffe said there was pressure to turn them over sooner.
