What is up with that weird CSIS video?

SOE, Camp X, and the CSIS-CIA Camp X Award

In August 2022, I took a group of UofT students to Oxford University for a Study Abroad course. We spent four weeks studying intelligence history in the United Kingdom. We visited a number of intelligence-and-military history-related sites: The Cabinet War Rooms, the Imperial War Museums in both London and Duxford, HMS Belfast, and — of course - Bletchley Park.

In one of the garages at Bletchley, along with some cool old cars and motorcycles, there is a tan shipping crate. It bears the unmistakeable sand colour paint of the Global War on Terror (and associated stabilization activities).

The crate is a GCHQ mobile field office that had been to and from Afghanistan.

You can see a video of it here:

https://twitter.com/timsayle/status/1560236921028313090

It is brilliantly set-up so one can peer inside and get a sense of the claustrophobic conditions. There are tools for destroying equipment in an emergency, and a small escape hatch on the side.

This field office is an excellent teaching tool. Not one of us could pass by this display without thinking about how the field office represented both change and continuity in British intelligence history.

HMG’s presentation of its intelligence history must be interpreted carefully. But there is no doubt that the British do a tremendous job of sharing their intelligence past to bolster their intelligence present.

The Government of Canada? Trying… but there is room for improvement.

That peculiar CSIS video

In December 2021, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service released a video on Youtube and Twitter. It was called “Camp X’s 80th Anniversary.”

The video includes remarks by a CSIS Deputy Director, along with black and white photos, old news reels, and a dramatic voice over describing the course of the Second World War and the role played by the Special Operations Executive (SOE).

SOE, of course, was tasked by Winston Churchill to “set Europe ablaze” in the dark years of the Second World War.

The film serves as a reminder that both SOE operatives and operatives of the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) were trained at “Camp X,” on “the rocky shores of Lake Ontario.” That is, Whitby.

The main takeaway of the video is that CSIS is “a descendent organization of SOE.”

(CSIS’s tweet also claimed that CSE and CSIS had “a common precursor.”)

The history of Camp X depicted in the video is reasonable enough. Camp X is in Canada. Canadians certainly participated in SOE. We have an outstanding post over at Canada Declassified on Camp X’s role as a communications hub.

Claims about SOE and OSS’s role in the war are perhaps overblown. But, hey, this is an anniversary video.

But how and why is CSIS claiming a connection to SOE? This is the truly bizarre part.

SOE “was an underground army that waged a secret war.” It was a guerrilla force (and a guerrilla training force).

Yes, CSIS operates abroad. CSIS officers have even been allowed to carry weapons in war zones. But as far as I know, CSIS’s Threat Reduction Measures don’t extend to blowing stuff up or “setting Europe [or any other continent] ablaze.”

CSIS was created in 1985 to replace the RCMP Security Service after it had been up to no good. To me, there is no obvious connection between CSIS and Camp X.

It just doesn’t make sense.

The video’s origins

Where did the video come from? My immediate guess was that CSIS hired a production company to create the video and they’d been fed some bad history. I was wrong.

It turns out that the video in the YouTube clip had actually been made for another organization created to celebrate the 80th anniversary of SOE and Canadian involvement. (I’ll get to that in a minute.)

CSIS had taken the original video and edited it to focus more on Camp X and less on SOE.

During the editing process, someone pointed out a spelling mistake.

Someone else thought that was “pretty picky”.

If one thinks correcting a spelling mistake is picky, then no doubt one will think I’m being picky by noting CSIS is not, in any meaningful way, a descendent organization of SOE.

CANSOE

As part of the adaptation of the film, this image was removed from the original:

I had never heard of “CANSOE” but it looks an awful lot to me like “CANSOF.” (The Canadian Special Operations Forces Command is rendered as CANSOFCOM.)

It turns out that CANSOE 80 was the organization created to mark the 80th anniversary of the SOE. The group was made up of current and retired CSIS employees, the Canadian Armed Forces liaison officer to CSIS at the time, and others from non-governmental organizations interested in intelligence and special operations heritage and history. The group even developed an Intrepid tartan tie and whiskey. Overall, this is pretty cool!

CSIS aided in the making of the CANSOE video, and so perhaps retained rights to it.

The group, CANSOE, also approached the Canadian War Museum about possible cooperation and my Access to Information request to the War Museum on this topic led to some interesting records.

Someone created an inventory of thirty SOE artifacts in Canada.

Note the Sten was on display at CSIS national headquarters. There were also plans to have an “aerial display” at NHQ— a mannequin suspended as if descending by parachute. Did this happen?

Another part of the commemoration was to be a display at the Royal Canadian Military Institute in Toronto featuring a mannequin dressed in SOE gear.

A pair of overalls had been identified as the only authentic SOE uniform that remained in Canada. But the zippers on the overalls had corroded shut. It seems like a plan was made to have a specially-made mannequin don the overalls and travel to Toronto (perhaps specially built to fit into the overalls without unzipping them)?

This did not happen because CSIS would not pay the cost to transport the overalls.

CSIS and Camp X

It was CANSOE’s efforts to commemorate the SOE, then, that provided the raw material for the CSIS video about Camp X. CSIS then acknowledged the Camp X anniversary in its own internal communications.

In today’s national security and intelligence world, it seems that a link to the Second World War is the coin of the realm. The result is these historical gymnastics by CSIS.

One released document suggests a particular target for this myth-making: the U.S.A.

In 2021, CSIS launched the “Camp X Awards” intended to “recognize transformational and innovative advances conducted jointly between CSIS and the CIA.”

The Canadian Glomar

After CSIS released this information about the Camp X Awards, I asked for any records about the origins of the award.

I was particularly curious to see records that might shed light on CSIS’s celebration of its *ahem* links to Camp X and SOE. (I did not ask for any information about nominees or award winners — this would obviously be denied.)

Much of the Canadian Access to Information world has moved to a new online system for ATI correspondence. CSIS, in its own particular way, still only communicates by snail mail. They use full-sized 9” x 12” manila envelopes to mail unfolded letters, themselves printed on glossy paper with a coloured CSIS crest.

When I pulled one such envelope from my mailbox this week, I could tell it would be disappointing because it was so thin. Inside was what the Americans call a “Glomar response”:

“Pursuant to subsection 10(2) of the Act, we neither confirm nor deny that the records you requested exist.”

CSIS refuses to acknowledge that any records regarding the creation of the Camp X Award exist, even though the same Camp X Award was described in an Unclassified letter released to me under the Access to Information Act.

What does it all mean?

Referring to Camp X clearly helps the Government of Canada remind the United States that Canadians have been intelligence partners for decades. This seems like a reasonable thing to do.

But because of the quirks of Canada’s intelligence history, CSIS feels the need to position itself as a descendant of SOE which is, of course, simply not true.

At the same time, it is important that today’s CSIS employees consider themselves as descendants of the legendary men and women of SOE who trained at Camp X. This should not be taken lightly. CSIS is most certainly not the RCMP Security Service under a different name. But I don’t think CSIS is much like the SOE, either.

I recognize CSIS faces a challenge: It is an organization created in the wake of scandal and so its history is a tricky one. For this reason, I think it ends up doing not much history at all. (The CIA, in contrast, spends significant effort promulgating parts of its history.)

CSIS is now nearly 40 years old. I think it is in CSIS’s interest to be more forthcoming with Canadians about CSIS’s own history: what it has been and what it has become.

There is only so much that can be shared and I understand that. But like the GCHQ shipping container, there are parts of CSIS’s recent history that could be shared without harm. Sharing this recent history will help Canadians better understand the Service today while ending the impulse to make up artificial connections to the past.

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Am I being picky? Let me know in the comments.

The information above comes from my Access to Information Acts, CSIS release 117-2021-547 and Canadian War Museum release A-2022-01.