Adnan R. Khan is an independent writer and editor based in Amsterdam and Istanbul.
Back in the fall of 2015, while living in Istanbul, I received a message from a Canadian diplomat requesting a meeting at an obscure restaurant in Turkey’s capital, Ankara. It wasn’t an unusual request: At the time, I was reporting on Canada’s engagement in Iraq in the wake of the Islamic State’s takeover of Mosul. Global Affairs, then called the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT), had been tight-lipped about what they were up to; acquiring information meant off-the-record meetings in neutral locations.
Most of the meetings turned out to be duds. This one, though, was hugely consequential. The gist of what the diplomat told me was this: Stephen Harper’s Conservative government had embarked on a dangerous and potentially destabilizing partnership in Iraq’s Kurdistan region.
It began, according to the diplomat, with Mr. Harper’s disastrous appointment of his former bodyguard, Bruno Saccomani, as ambassador to Jordan in 2013. Canada did not have an ambassador in Iraq at the time, so despite his lack of diplomatic credentials, Mr. Saccomani took on that delicate file. Then, instead of setting up a broad-based training program, as other Western nations had done, Mr. Saccomani had endorsed sending Canadian special forces to train and support an elite group of Kurdish Peshmerga known as the Zeravani, an organization originally set up in 1997 by the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) that was fiercely loyal to Iraqi Kurdistan president Masoud Barzani. The diplomat told me it felt like Canada was effectively training and arming a political militia.
The envoy belonged to an obscure unit inside Canada’s diplomatic corps, set up after Sept. 11, 2001, called the Global Security Reporting Program (GSRP). Its purpose is to provide Canadian foreign policy makers with in-depth information about some of the most volatile and geopolitically relevant places in the world.
Unlike status-quo diplomats, who mostly rely on mundane sources of information such as local media and the host country’s own government officials, GSRP officers operate at the cutting edge of political reporting. According to Bruce Mabley, a retired diplomat and former GSRP officer, they speak with the “unusual suspects,” including opposition politicians, activists, artists and intellectuals.
“We go out into the field and meet people,” he told me. “It’s not spy work. I wasn’t paying sources or working clandestinely. But it was intelligence gathering – open-source intelligence, but intelligence nonetheless.”
The nature of its work has perennially brought the GSRP into conflict with Canada’s spy agency, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS). Most recently, the GSRP was blamed for landing Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig in a Chinese prison. Mr. Spavor, a businessman and consultant with close ties to the North Korean regime, has accused Mr. Kovrig, a former GSRP officer, of passing on information he had provided to Western spy agencies.
The details of what happened are still unclear. But if the allegation is information sharing, then Mr. Kovrig did nothing wrong. In my experience, GSRP officers do not divulge the precise role they play at embassies – and I don’t see why they should. They are acting as any normal diplomat would: talking to people, gathering information, and reporting that information back to superiors. Being “GSRP” just places fieldwork at the heart of what its officers do.
Nonetheless, travelling around asking questions can be dangerous. For a paranoid Chinese Communist Party in particular, anyone freely attempting to gather information outside its control is a threat. But that does not mean GSRP officers in China, openly travelling to the North Korean border to speak with Canadians working there (as Mr. Kovrig is reported to have done), are breaking diplomatic norms. It is not, as Chinese authorities claim, spying.
Still, the backlash in Canada has been immediate. One former CSIS official told The Globe and Mail that the GSRP was an “amateurish” attempt to “create a mini-spy agency within [Global Affairs].” Others claimed it had endangered Canadian lives on multiple occasions, without providing specifics.
The late Sven Jurschewsky, who oversaw the GSRP’s initial setup, told me in 2016 that the program was an attempt to bring back some of the political reporting diplomats would do regularly before funding cuts reduced the foreign service to little more than its administrative functions. “It was part of your job as a diplomat to go out and talk to people, openly, to try to understand what was going on, and report that back to your superiors,” he told me. It was crucial human intelligence that provided valuable context to help guide policy, he added.
That has proven useful, as I saw after my off-the-record meeting in Ankara. A few months after the Islamic State was defeated in Iraq, the Zeravani were involved in clashes with the Iraqi army over Mr. Barzani’s attempts to annex territory in the north, which nearly devolved into a civil war. Fortunately, by then, Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government had started listening to the GSRP. Mr. Saccomani was recalled from his post; the train-and-assist mission suspended; and Canadian weapons destined for the Zeravani were frozen, pending a review of Canada’s involvement in Iraq.
Zeravani fighters I met near the front lines at that time appreciated what Canada had done, but felt they had been abandoned in their time of need. “Where is Canada now that we are under attack?” one resentful fighter demanded as he piled into a truck with a dozen other Zeravani fighters heading out to take on the Iraqi army.
Canada should not have been there in the first place. Thankfully, the GSRP was.