The Secret History of the Five Eyes by Richard Kerbaj

Author:Richard Kerbaj
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Blink

CHAPTER ELEVEN

MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS

SURVEILLANCE OFFICERS FROM THE Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) were immediately intrigued by Maher Arar when he walked into a café in Ottawa on 12 October 2001 to meet with a member of the local Muslim community whom they had been monitoring. Arar was unknown to the undercover operatives, but the person whom he was meeting, Abdullah Almalki, was suspected by the RCMP of being an ‘important member’ of Al Qaeda and a ‘procurement officer’ for its leader, Osama Bin Laden. Fearing that the terrorist organisation had been plotting operations in Canada – following its attacks on the United States the previous month – the RCMP stepped up its monitoring of Almalki to gain a clearer understanding of his activities and networks. His interaction with Arar at Mango Cafe made surveillance officers suspicious because the pair ‘appeared to be taking great pains not to be overheard’ before leaving for a stroll outside to continue their conversation in the rain. It was unlikely that the two men had known they were being tailed as they subsequently visited a local prayer hall for around 15 minutes before driving in Arar’s car to examine computer equipment at a shopping mall nearby. In the three hours that Arar had spent with Almalki between the late afternoon and early evening that Friday, he unknowingly went from being a random guy who had stumbled into a surveillance operation to a ‘person of interest’.

The RCMP started investigating Arar’s background within three days of his meeting with Almalki, and quickly found common threads between them. Both were engineers of Syrian origin and, at 31, Arar was only about one year older than his friend. But unlike Almalki who had been of interest to multiple agencies, including the FBI in the United States, Arar had never emerged on the radar of any security organisation nor had he been suspected of any wrongdoing since he had arrived in the country to settle in Montreal 14 years earlier. By the time he had relocated to Ottawa from Montreal in 1998 with his wife, Dr Monia Mazigh, and their daughter, Arar had become a Canadian citizen and was on his way to landing a job as a communication engineer with The MathWorks, a tech firm headquartered south of the border in Boston, Massachusetts. He was still working as a consultant for the company when he was ensnared by the RCMP’s investigation.

In Ottawa, counterterrorism officials within the RCMP and its sister agency, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, had been overcome by the same kind of operational hysteria surrounding the threat of Al Qaeda that had plagued the judgements of organisations in other Five Eyes countries. In the name of defending western democratic values and way of life, the distinctions between legitimate terrorists and those who were suspected of aiding them was almost completely eroded as Five Eyes members followed in lockstep with the United States to disrupt and destroy enemies within – citizens with questionable allegiances – and Islamist organisations with global reach.

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