CIA ex-staffer on Canada’s spying safeguards: ‘You’re kidding me’

A former CIA spy ’s eyes widen when he hears that, in Canada, the political opposition doesn’t get to see or scrutinize national-security intelligence files.

“You’re kidding me,” says John Kiriakou, who’s now under house arrest in Virginia after a two-year prison stay for revealing information about his former employer.

“That’s shocking to me. It seems to block any chance of a national consensus on an issue that I think would be very serious. There has to be oversight.”

Kiriakou described an internal controversy within the CIA over the arrest and rendition of Canadian Maher Arar to be tortured in a Syrian prison. Many colleagues protested, arguing that they were punishing an innocent man, he said. The CIA’s role in the affair has never been publicly scrutinized.

But the fallout in Canada did include a public inquiry and a $10-million government payout to Arar. A major recommendation from the inquiry was an overhaul of the model used to scrutinize intelligence work. A decade later, that recommendation from the Arar inquiry has never been implemented — even as the Canadian government prepares to provide intelligence agencies with more power in its new anti-terror bill.

The inquiry recommended giving review bodies the power to scrutinize more than one agency at a time — so that they could see, for instance, how CSIS and the RCMP co-operate on cases.

Kiriakou likened the Canadian system to Ronald Reagan appointing his own investigators during the Iran-Contra affair: “Is that real oversight? I think people need to know what the government is doing in their name ... It’s the only way you can keep people honest. When everything is in the shadows, people tend to push the envelope more than is appropriate.”