What’s it like to work as a spy? ‘Crippling’ paperwork

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The business model is antiquated, the mission is muddying and the burden of paperwork has grown "crippling." The culture may have grown risk averse and middle managers may be setting the wrong goals. Worse still, the pool of customers is drying up – and some of those who remain give the product failing grades.

Sound familiar? Such complaints can arise within all manner of enterprise – though most are typically uninvolved in the crucial business of spying for the state. Yet the Canadian Security Intelligence Service engaged in some stinging self-criticism a few years ago, when senior managers suggested that their organization was hard-pressed, hamstrung and failing key "clients."

"The application of rigour has led to increased bureaucracy. … Efforts to counteract this 'rigour mortis' began in October, 2009" reads the agency's 2010 "Business Modernization Plan," an internal document recently obtained by The Globe and Mail.

"Rigour mortis" was a playful turn of phrase, especially given the sombre feeling at CSIS that too many rules had piled up. So much so that the organization's fundamental mission – spying – was said to put in jeopardy. "CSIS needs to make a concerted effort to reduce red tape by eliminating rules and challenging the creation of new ones," reads the document, obtained under the Access to Information Act.

Such arguments found a sympathetic ear. Not long after the report was circulated, the Conservatives eliminated one of the spy agency's two watchdog agencies.

Yet the intelligence bureaucracy still continues to hold sway over Canada's spies. Pop culture may teach us that spies reach for their Walther PPKs when not grabbing at their cloaks or daggers, but the reality is that their workaday existence can bear more resemblance to Steve Carell pushing paper products in The Office than, say, Daniel Craig pushing terrorists off ledges in Quantum of Solace.

Some Canadian intelligence officers do bug phones and run agents in exotic locales. But at the end of the day, the job is always to summarize secret threat information into classified reports, which are in turn fed to "clients" in other federal departments.

And the customer is always right – even if they are finicky, according to the CSIS equivalent of customer-satisfaction surveys.

"Written product received high marks from provincial and municipal law enforcement," says the CSIS modernization report, upholding that the cops gave the product rave reviews.

As for Canada's diplomats and generals? Not so much. "Low marks were given by DFAIT and DND" – the departments of Foreign Affairs and National Defence.

These are the federal agencies whose leadership is often eager to know about specific threats to their personnel stationed abroad. And their disappointment is not surprising, given that CSIS is hardly the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

Despite the Canadian agency's claims that it can keep tabs on all manner of global threats, its foreign footprint is relatively light – in fact, it sends only a few dozen intelligence officers out into the wider world abroad at any time. (The collection of "foreign intelligence' for Ottawa is primarily conducted by an electronic eavesdropping agency – Communications Security Establishment Canada.)

Most CSIS officers stay within the confines of Canada because CSIS was created in 1984 to operate as a purely domestic "security intelligence" service. The agency rose from the ashes of a rogue RCMP squad. During the 1960s and 1970s, the relatively freewheeling RCMP Security Service committed a litany of crimes in the name of protecting national security. And, after all this erupted into scandal, CSIS was born as a civilian alternative, one swaddled in a straitjacket of legislatively imposed checks and balances.

Some constraints have lately loosened. In 2012, the Conservative government eliminated the watchdog Inspector-General tasked with scrutinizing CSIS, even as it gave the spy agency steroidal cash infusions to fight terrorism. Soon "the Service's budget will exceed $500-million, which will represent a 100 per cent increase since 2001," concedes the 2010 report. (Today, the budget does indeed exceed half a billion dollars.)

But, according to the senior managers at CSIS headquarters on Ottawa's Blair and Ogilvie roads, the rules amassed at an even faster rate than the riches. Layers of budgetary, judicial and investigative review are said to have created "unrelenting demands" on CSIS. "The impact of corporate requirements on operations was crippling in 2009," the report says.

"Policy is over-prescriptive and is a disconnected amalgam of two decades of external recommendations," the report reads.

Why might this matter?

"There is a perception of risk avoidance in operations."

Language like this pushes panic buttons in the wider security bureaucracy. Around Ottawa (and certainly in Washington) no one wants to hear that one of the Canada's primary counter-terrorism agencies has gotten weak in the knees.

Meantime, the CSIS workforce had fundamentally changed – the vestigial Mounties who started up CSIS in the 1980s retired en masse during the 2000s. A cohort of intelligence officers with new postgraduate degrees replaced them. So Canada's spy agency effectively traded in wizened street smarts for bright young brains.

The shifting demographics forced changes at CSIS that are subtle to outsiders, but regarded as profound within.

In any spy agency, the brainy analysts who weave together intelligence threads at headquarters compete for attention and resources with the far-flung field officers who gather string by recruiting and running sources.

What's happened during the modernization exercise is that the CSIS brass wrested the steering wheel away from the operations veterans, giving it instead to the brainiacs at the Intelligence Assessment Branch. "Continuation down the path where IAB has the lead … will ensure a broader understanding of CSIS intelligence collection and production efforts and their link to GoC [government of Canada] intelligence priorities," the strategy document says.

Ray Boisvert, a CSIS executive who retired two years ago, said all this amounted to "revolutionary" change. Distill the strategy to plain English, he says, and the message is simple: " 'Listen boys and girls we've got to stop being a parochial intelligence service …. We're going turn this place upside down.' "

Changes were necessary, Mr. Boisvert said, because "the old stereotypical gumshoes were gone" and that at one point, 86 per cent of the CSIS counter-terrorism staff had had less than two years' work experience. The spy service was producing reports that were not as relevant as they could be, he said, so it reorganized itself to step up reporting on a more diverse array of threats – weapons of mass destruction, economic threats and countries such as Iran and China.

"At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is intelligence," Mr. Boisvert said.

Colin Freeze reports on national security issues.