I Was Never Here by Andrew Kirsch

Author:Andrew Kirsch
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781774581346
Publisher: Andrew Kirsch
Published: 2021-10-18T19:41:26+00:00

Saying Goodbye and Hopefully Not See You Soon

I apologize if this is repetitive, but I feel I need to say it again: there are people in Canada who are a serious security concern. These are bad people who want to do bad things either here at home or abroad. My target of investigation was believed to be one of them. We didn’t put these thoughts in his head or words in his mouth. They were there and my job was to determine if he was going to act on them. This was the age of terrorism. He wasn’t alone. The Toronto 18 plot was a legitimate, homegrown terror group that was trying to blow up buildings and kill a lot of people. The Via Rail terror plot involved a couple of guys who wanted to derail a passenger train. This isn’t just my opinion, either—the ringleaders were convicted in a court of law of serious criminal offences.

For my guy, the question wasn’t whether he wanted to do something, because he repeated in private and public conversations that he did. We had to determine: Will he? And if so, what, where and when would he do it?

Intelligence files aren’t like law enforcement cases. CSIS isn’t reacting to a crime and then building a case to arrest someone for it. An individual may be investigated and assessed as a threat under the mandate and never meet the threshold for formal charges. Theoretically, an investigation could go on indefinitely. There are rules for a minimum requirement for investigation, but once someone crosses that they get added to a list of ongoing subjects of national security concern. CSIS doesn’t declare them guilty or innocent of a crime, it constantly evaluates the threat, triaging and prioritizing each investigation with decisions made daily over limited resources.

Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that my guy was not an ongoing risk to engage in threat-related activities. Like many people online or in the comfort of their living room among friends, he was a lot of talk. Perhaps if the arrested terrorist recruiter had stayed in his life he may have been moved further along from his speeches to deeds. But at that point he had been saying the same thing for years, and our conversation did not change our evolved hypothesis that he was not likely to take action. I bounced this conclusion off my boss, my HQ counterpart, my communications analyst and other people involved in the case. We all agreed.

I then started winding things down. We stopped monitoring the target’s communication. Over time I handed over my human sources to other investigators who could use them on their cases. Eventually I became the last resource to go. I was transferred to another file on the same desk. At first, I would still indirectly hear about my guy. I’d get informal updates from the intelligence officers my new sources were working with. They would still see my old target from time to time. Finally I got moved to a different unit and the updates stopped.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.