Commentary
Some 42 years ago, I found myself in a sparsely-decorated office in the Sir Leonard Tilley Building, part of a government complex in the southern part of Ottawa. I was there to receive my “indoctrination” for what I had been led to believe was a job as a multilingual analyst for the Department of National Defence. In actual fact, I was being read-in on the mandate of the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), Canada’s signals intelligence agency.
CSE had not even been acknowledged publicly by the Liberal government of the day, and was so hush-hush that I was warned against saying anything to anybody about what I did. I was even told that I could get up to 14 years in prison for contravening what was then the Official Secrets Act (now the Security of Information Act) for acknowledging where I worked….