Canadian security agencies mounted WikiLeaks defence: documents
Posted December 16, 2010 8:09 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
OTTAWA _ Concerns over a cache of WikiLeaks documents on the war in Afghanistan prompted Canadian military and intelligence officials to hold two secret summer damage assessments.
The concerted effort to sift through and analyze the 91,000 classified U.S. military logs reveals how seriously the Harper government took the unprecedented late July leak about coalition operations in the bloody, long-running war.
The Privy Council Office’s Afghan Task Force met July 29 to “review and assess the impact of the leaked documents” on Canadian government programs related to Afghanistan, newly declassified memos say.
Officials from the PCO, the government’s bureaucratic nerve centre, Foreign Affairs, National Defence, Public Safety and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service gathered in an Ottawa boardroom to discuss what each “has been doing, intends to do and their assessment to date” regarding the leaked documents.
The Canadian Press obtained CSIS minutes of the meetings, originally classified secret, under the Access to Information Act. Portions of the memos were withheld from release.
The disclosure comes amid a WikiLeaks flood of U.S. diplomatic cables, including several containing candid Canadian views about Afghanistan.
The CSIS account of the July meeting says a four-person forensic analysis team from Defence was reviewing the leaked documents, while at Foreign Affairs “a small number of officers” had begun studying the files.
Members of the intelligence service and PCO were also poring over the files.
The only leaked document of concern at that time suggested four Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan in 2006 were not victims of the Taliban but of a U.S. guided bomb. The Defence Department would later insist the deaths were not due to friendly fire.
A followup meeting Aug. 5 included members of the same agencies along with a representative of the Communications Security Establishment, the government’s highly secretive eavesdropping agency.
A PCO official summarized efforts by noting that while the WikiLeaks documents were “a concern (and it would have been preferred if the documents had not been exposed), to date no specific leaked document has been identified” as a significant threat to government personnel or programs in Afghanistan.
The controversial WikiLeaks site followed up with another huge release of U.S. documents about the Iraq war and, more recently, a sprawling series of American diplomatic cables featuring frank comments from Canadian authorities.
In one cable, William Crosbie, Canada’s ambassador to Afghanistan, was quoted as saying the corruption of Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s government made his “blood boil.”
In another, then-CSIS director Jim Judd painted a bleak view of progress in Afghanistan, due in part to Karzai’s “weak leadership, widespread corruption, the lack of will to press ahead on counter-narcotics,” and limited Afghan security and policing.
CSIS spokeswoman Isabelle Scott had no comment, saying the service “does not publicly discuss specifics on any operational activities, interests or methodologies.”
Both CSIS and the Privy Council Office referred questions to Foreign Affairs.
However, Foreign Affairs refused to answer questions about the summer meetings, or whether the high-level panel had reconvened to discuss the latest leaks.
A military spokesman said Defence had sent an official to Foreign Affairs to help comb through the diplomatic cables.
