CSE facilities: Sir Leonard Tilley Building
Part three of my “brief” tour of CSE’s facilities, past and present. (Part one; part two.)
Sir Leonard Tilley Building (1961-present)
CSE/CBNRC’s third headquarters building, the Sir Leonard Tilley Building, was the first headquarters built specifically for the agency. Located at 719 Heron Road, at the corner of Heron Road and Riverside Drive in Ottawa’s Confederation Heights district, the building was begun in 1959 and occupied by CBNRC in June 1961.
In 1962, the government announced that the building would be named the Sir Samuel Tilley Building, but the name was quickly corrected. (Tilley went by his middle name, not his first name.)
In its current form the Tilley Building consists of four wings and a temporary annex. But the original structure was an L-shaped building containing one five-storey wing and one four-storey wing, both with basements. The five-storey wing, which also has a half storey on the roof, runs parallel to Heron Road, while the four-storey wing runs parallel to Riverside Drive.
The 1959 annual report of the Department of Public Works reported that a contract for construction of the “Communications Building (N.R.C.)” was awarded to Perini Limited in February 1959 (Report of the Department of Public Works for the fiscal year ended March 31, 1959, Supply and Services, 1959, p. 72).
Interestingly, the dimensions specified in the Public Works report were slightly different from those of the eventual building. Public Works described the project as “an L-shaped four-storey building, with basement; one wing being 62 feet wide and 168 feet long, and the other 62 feet wide and 315 feet long.” These dimensions would be very close to correct if the wing along Riverside Drive extended all the way across the end of the wing along Heron Road. In fact, however, it is the Heron Road wing that extends across the end of the Riverside wing. As noted above, the Heron Road wing also contains an extra storey and a half. Thus, while clearly derived from the original plan, the final structure ended up being about 15% larger than reported by the Department of Public Works. It may be that the plan was modified after the initial contract award, possibly as a result of an increase in CBNRC’s personnel establishment, which was raised to close to 600 (587?) sometime late in the 1950s.
Counting the half floor on top of the five-storey wing, the gross size of the building that was eventually constructed was about 15,750 square metres (about 170,000 square feet). This provided a gross area of about 26 square metres for each of the approximately 600 employees the building was ultimately designed to accommodate.
This amount of space is typical for modern office accommodations of that period, but it represented a major step forward for CBNRC, enabling the entire CBNRC staff to be brought together under one roof while still providing roughly twice as much space as had been available per employee in the Rideau Annex at its most crowded. (Of course, gross figures such as these include hallways, stairwells, elevators, utilities spaces, storage areas, etc., so in the case of both buildings the actual workspace allotted to an average employee would have been considerably smaller.)
The Sir Leonard Tilley Building has been described as resembling a downtown high school built in the mid 1950s, except that it has a guardhouse that controls entry to the compound and a fence topped with barbed wire surrounding it. Unlike the complex currently being built for CSE on Ogilvie Road, it is a building that goes out of its way not to draw attention to itself.
The building’s original marble-clad entrance lobby also lacks much in the way of visible character, if this photo of one part of the lobby is any guide. It has been reported that CSE’s first Cray supercomputer is now on display in this lobby.
The photograph on the right shows its Australian counterpart on display in the Defence Signals Directorate’s lobby. CSE’s Cray may indeed grace the lobby of the Tilley Building, but no photograph of that apparently sensitive artifact has ever been released (despite the fact that many details of the computer’s acquisition and operations have become public). [Update 2 April 2024: As I discuss here, that finally changed in 2018.]
A Heritage Building
Nondescript may be the best descriptor for the Tilley Building, but according to the explanation that accompanies its heritage designation, the building does have some architectural as well as historical significance:
Elsewhere in the description it is specified that the “slippers” were designed “to accommodate computer installations”. (Does anyone in the know care to provide more details as to what a slipper is and what it does?)
The History of CBNRC also comments on the design of the building, noting that its construction "presented many opportunities for improving the security of the Branch, by incorporating features in the structure which had not been possible (or would have been prohibitively expensive) to retrofit in an already established building such as the Rideau Annex, which after all had been designed for quite a different purpose, i.e. a convent." (History of CBNRC, Chapter 26, p. 21.)
It goes on to note that “GCHQ showed great concern [redacted].” The subject of GCHQ’s concern was probably related to the potential for unshielded communications and computer equipment to radiate intelligible information through power lines and even the air. The electrical and other systems of the Tilley Building were presumably designed to minimize such emanations.
The heritage website also ascribes some “environmental value” to the building site:
The Tilley Building’s nickname among intelligence insiders is a carryover from the days of the Rideau Annex, the original “farm”, which had actually been located in farm country outside of the Ottawa city limits when it was first occupied by CBNRC.
The building is of course much less known to the broader public. The Ottawa newspapers reported on the Tilley Building’s construction in 1959, dubbing it “NRC’s Hush Hush Laboratory” (History of CBNRC, Chapter 26, p. 19). But no connection was made between CBNRC and signals intelligence at that time, or even the year after when The New York Times published a detailed account of the National Security Agency that, among other revelations, mentioned its SIGINT cooperation with Canada and other countries.
Several years later, in 1972, the American counterculture magazine Ramparts revealed that the CBNRC was Canada’s SIGINT agency. But it wasn’t until the CBC documentary "The Fifth Estate: The Espionage Establishment" (no relation to the show The Fifth Estate) was broadcast on 9 January 1974 that CBNRC and its location in the Sir Leonard Tilley Building became widely known to the Canadian public. It was certainly well known to me as a teenager living in Ottawa at that time as the place where “the spies” worked. It wasn’t until 1983, however, that the government formally acknowledged that the agency, by then renamed the Communications Security Establishment, produced signals intelligence.
1980s expansion
By that time, CSE had entered its first major growth phase since the 1950s. Coinciding with the renewal of Cold War tensions and the reported adoption of a "harder line" towards allied agencies by NSA, this period saw CSE’s staff grow from roughly 600 (572 in 1978-79) to 907 as of January 1991.
As a result of this growth, CSE quickly began to outgrow the Tilley Building, expanding first into the Insurance Building, located across the street at 770 Heron Road.
Insurance Building (1980-present)
The Insurance Building was originally built to house the federal Department of Insurance (now part of the Office of the Superintendant of Financial Institutions). CSE occupied the building late in 1980.
According to the Directory of Federal Real Property, the Insurance Building provided CSE an extra 2258 square metres of space, probably enough to house about 100 people.
The first CSE units to occupy the building were from the communications security (COMSEC) side of the agency, the same group that had found itself exiled from the overcrowded Rideau Annex in the late 1950s.
Later occupants included the Tutte Institute, CSE's classified cryptologic and data-mining research institute, which was established in 2009. The Tutte Institute was probably moved to Pod 1 of CSE’s new headquarters building when that structure opened in fall 2011.
Satellite terminal
Another addition in the early 1980s was the installation of a 30-foot satellite dish and associated equipment trailer in a small fenced compound south of the heating plant at Confederation Heights. This terminal, installed in 1982, probably provided CSE’s connection to NSA’s PLATFORM wide-area network, which linked the major facilities of the UKUSA SIGINT agencies. The dish was removed around the beginning of 2013. It was probably replaced by a fibre optic landline link.
Entrance structure
A new, octagonal entrance structure (now known as D Wing) was added to the Tilley Building in 1985. This structure added about 450 square metres to the building.
Billings Bridge Tower (ca. 1984?-1999?)
Around the same time, CSE expanded into leased office space in the SBI Building (now called Billings Bridge Tower) at 2323 Riverside Drive.
The Billings Bridge Tower offices seem mainly to have housed administrative units of the agency. In 1990, the military’s Electronic Warfare Emitter Data Centre also moved from the Tilley Building to the Billings Bridge Tower. (Now known as the Canadian Forces Electronic Warfare Centre, this unit is currently located at the Communications Research Centre’s Shirley’s Bay campus in Ottawa’s west end.)
Spyworld (Mike Frost & Michel Gratton, Spyworld: Inside the Canadian and American Intelligence Establishments, Doubleday Canada, 1994, p. 39) reports that CSE occupied three floors of the building. It also states, however, that CSE moved into the building during the mid-1970s. This seems unlikely, as there was little if any change in CSE’s staffing during that decade, while it grew by 50% or more during the 1980s. Furthermore, there is no indication of such a move during the 1970s in the in-house publication The Tillian. Spyworld is not entirely reliable on such details (it states, for example, that the Tilley Building was occupied by CBNRC in the 1950s and that it had previously been occupied by the Department of Agriculture). The amount of space that the book suggests was occupied by CSE in the Billings Bridge Tower may be correct, however. If so, then CSE occupied approximately 4200 square metres in the building, enough to house about 150 people. CSE’s space requirements by the beginning of the 1990s may have been great enough to require a fourth floor as well (or space at another location), for a total of as much as 5600 square metres.
The Directory of Federal Real Property shows that CSE is no longer a tenant in the Billings Bridge Tower; the exact date of its departure from the building is not public knowledge, but it was probably around 2000, following CSE’s acquisition and fit-up of the Edward Drake Building (see below).
The “Warehouse” (mid-1980s?-present?)
CSE also began leasing warehouse space sometime during this period, probably in an effort to free up space in the Tilley Building by storing non-sensitive supplies off-site. The 696-square-metre space leased was in a two-storey warehouse building fronted by small businesses located at 1867 Merivale Road. The Directory of Federal Real Property continues to show DND at this location, suggesting that it may still be in use by CSE (although CSE has been a stand-alone agency since 2011). Another possibility is that this facility has been replaced by the 873 square metres CSE now leases at the Hawthorne Commercial Centre (see below).
Tilley Building Annex/C Wing (1992-present)
Later in the 1980s, the government approved the construction of an annex to be added to the Tilley Building itself to replace the hodge-podge of accommodations that CSE had been forced to expand into.
Design work on the six-storey (five-storey with basement), 12,000-square-metre addition was begun in 1986-87 (Estimates, 1987-88, Part III: Public Works Canada, 1987, p. 3-35; Doug Yonson, "The secret's out: Spy headquarters to get $30-million addition," Ottawa Citizen, 22 January 1989, pp. A1-A2). The decision to proceed was evidently related to (and may have been made at the same time as) the 1987 decision to increase CSE’s approved establishment to roughly 900. The cost of the structure was ultimately estimated to be $35.1 million (Annual Report 1989-90, Public Works Canada, 1990, p. 42.)
Actual construction of the virtually windowless addition, nicknamed the Annie and now known as C Wing, began in the spring of 1989 and finished in 1992. Its completion increased the size of the Tilley Building by about 75 percent. Enlargement of the building was intended, in the words of a briefing note written for the Minister of National Defence, to enable CSE to "repatriate staff from space elsewhere in the city to Confederation Heights and accommodate an increase in data processing capacity that has occurred in the course of recent years." (Quoted in Peter Moon, "For their eyes only," Globe and Mail, 28 May 1991, pp. A1, A4.) The increase in data processing capacity that the briefing note mentioned included the purchase in 1984 of a Cray X-MP/11 supercomputer acquired specifically to support CSE’s cryptanalysis unit.
This photo shows C Wing under construction in 1990.
The expansion was also needed to accommodate an increase in the employment of military personnel at the agency, a step that was formalized in October 1987 with the creation of 771 Communications Research Squadron. The 771 CRS establishment peaked at about 100 personnel. Most worked in the Tilley Building, making the combined civilian/military total requiring accommodation at the CSE campus during the 1990s as high as 1000. The unit remained at CSE until it was disbanded in December 2002.
In addition to the structure’s lack of windows, C Wing used "certain innovative construction techniques" to "prevent the emission of potentially compromising electromagnetic radiation" (Briefing Note for Minister of National Defence, quoted in Peter Moon, "For their eyes only," Globe and Mail, 28 May 1991, pp. A1, A4). What this probably means is that the entire addition was in effect a giant "Faraday cage," the equivalent of a TEMPEST-protected computer on an institutional scale. The use of such extraordinary security precautions is compelling evidence of the extent to which unprotected buildings and computer systems had by that time become vulnerable to electromagnetic eavesdropping technology.
1990s: The campus continues to grow
By the time C Wing was completed, the Cold War was over. In the 15 years from 1977 to 1992 the agency had grown from ca. 600 employees to ca. 900 (roughly 1000 counting the 771 CRS personnel), which represented staff growth of about 50% (or 67% counting military personnel). Over the same period, the Tilley Building had grown by about 78%, from ca. 15,750 to ca. 28,000 square metres.
These figures suggest that the growth in the Tilley Building ought to have been enough to enable CSE’s entire staff to return to the building, as had been called for in the original plan. But it was not. By the early 1990s, the building was no longer considered large enough for the agency’s needs.
Why did CSE require more space? Additional staff increases were definitely not on the agenda at this time; indeed, CSE’s staff actually dropped to about 870 during the government-wide budget cutbacks of the mid-1990s. The most probable explanation is that CSE’s data processing capacity had grown significantly in the years after the addition was designed and was at that point consuming – or more likely was expected to consume – a growing amount of space in the new wing.
The late 1980s/early 1990s saw the beginning of the transition in the computing world from single supercomputers like the Cray toward massive computing arrays operating in parallel and consuming enormous amounts of space and electrical power. The fact that CSE has maxed-out the power it can access at its current campus (acknowledged by former Chief John Adams here) provides good evidence that CSE has also been moving down this road, with growing space requirements for data processing and storage a virtually certain corollary.
Whatever the reason, in the early 1990s CSE developed a new accommodation plan, dubbed Project Eden, that called for building an additional annex to the Tilley Building. In the fiscal climate of the time, however, this was more of an aspiration than a realistic objective, and in 1995, when Public Works and Government Services Canada offered up to 8000 square metres of space in the Sir Charles Tupper Building, CSE replaced Project Eden with Project Tupper, with move-in planned for the fall of 1999. The Tupper Building, which had originally housed the Department of Public Works, did not contain any special security features, and it was not in especially good shape, but it was conveniently located for CSE, sitting on the opposite side of the Heron Road/Riverside Drive intersection from the Tilley Building.
A space of ca. 8000 square metres would have been suitable for about 300-400 personnel. The goal of the plan was to consolidate CSE’s staff into just two locations, the Tilley Building and the Tupper Building, enabling the agency to vacate the Billings Bridge Tower and the Insurance Building (and possibly the warehouse), which together totalled some 7000-8000 square metres.
The scale of the space envisaged suggests that the equivalent of as much as two-thirds of the C Wing annex of the Tilley Building was by this point set aside to accommodate data processing and data storage.
The Tupper plan was never put into operation, however. It was dropped when CSE decided instead to buy the CBC’s former headquarters building, which was also located in Confederation Heights and had recently been vacated (see below).
Edward Drake Building (2000-present)
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s iconic but aging headquarters building at 1500 Bronson Avenue, built in 1961, was sold to CSE by the CBC in February 1997 for $1.65 million. The 10,024-square-metre building was subsequently renamed the Edward Drake Building in honour of CSE/CBNRC’s first Director.
The purchase price of the building was low, but it was a fair price, as extensive work was required to repair the building’s rundown systems, perform needed maintenance, and fit it up for CSE occupation; at the time of purchase, it was estimated that some $8 million in renovations would be required over a two-year period before CSE would be able to occupy the building (Kathryn May, “Spy agency keeps rivals out of own back yard,” Ottawa Citizen, 7 June 1999):
In the end, it took until January 2000 before CSE was able to occupy the building.
When the CBC was still in the building, it had had something of the status of a national icon, and it is still considered architecturally important. Like the Tilley Building, it also has a heritage designation.
Plans for an extensive security fence around the property were modified in 2005 to enable it to better blend in with the building’s architectural style and park-like setting (Patrick Dare, “Spy agency puts security fence, boulders around 'elegant example of Modernism': Initial plan for concrete barriers changed due to appearance,” Ottawa Citizen, 16 June 2005).
Located at the corner of Bronson Avenue and Heron Road, the Drake Building is adjacent to the Tilley Building but physically separated from it by a sunken railway track. Its location thus is not as convenient as it may at first appear. Purchase of the building did, however, provide CSE a significant amount of new office space that, unlike that in the Tupper Building, did not have to be shared with other government departments.
Like the Tupper plan, the Drake Building purchase was intended to enable CSE to consolidate its staff from more distant and scattered locations. And occupation of the building probably did enable CSE to move out of the Billings Bridge Tower. As with C Wing, however, by the time CSE was ready to occupy its new facility the building was no longer considered large enough to meet all of the agency’s needs (Jim Bronskill, “Spies crunched for space: Former CBC digs too small to meet agency's needs,” Ottawa Citizen, 30 September 1999):
Bronskill’s article notes that another justification for the move to the Drake Building was to save money over the long run:
I’m not sure how to reconcile the 7000-8000 square metres that I estimate CSE had in leased sites, the 10,000-square-metre size of the Drake Building, and the “50 additional square metres” figure reported here. It is likely that the agency was comparing the amount of leased space that it had to the “rentable space” in the Drake Building (the space available for offices), which would have been considerably smaller than the building’s gross size; this probably accounts for most of the discrepancy. It is also possible, however, that CSE had a larger amount of leased space in the Billings Bridge Tower or perhaps elsewhere than estimated here.
OBL leaves his mark
CSE probably would have remained at roughly 900 personnel indefinitely had Osama Bin Laden and his followers not intervened. Close to 3000 people, including 24 Canadians, died in the 11 September 2001 terror attack.
That infamous September day was not the first time that Canadians had been killed in a horrific terrorist incident. In per capita terms, Canada suffered a higher death toll (280 Canadian lives lost, out of a total of 329 people killed) in the 23 June 1985 bombing of Air India flight 182 than the United States suffered on 9/11.
But while the Air India attack caused little immediate change in Canadian security and intelligence efforts, the shock of 9/11 produced a very different result. The U.S. reacted to the attack with a massive increase in military, security, and intelligence spending, and so did many of America’s allies, including Canada.
As Canada’s primary foreign intelligence collection agency, CSE was a major beneficiary of the new, post-9/11 spending priorities. CSE has more than doubled in size to more than 1900 employees in the years since 2001. As of 2012, it is still growing.
CSE’s post-9/11 expansion has forced the agency to find accommodations for an additional 900 or so personnel (1000 extra civilian employees minus approximately 100 military personnel no longer at CSE).
Temporary buildings (2005-present)
Some of the extra personnel were accommodated in two temporary buildings built on the CSE campus in 2005. One of the temporaries is beside the Drake Building, and the other is beside the Tilley Building.
The Edward Drake Annex has a floor area of 2176 square metres, while the Sir Leonard Tilley Annex has a floor area of 1750 square metres. (The DFRP pages incorrectly state that these buildings were built in 2000 and 1992, respectively.) Together, the two buildings give CSE almost 4000 square metres of additional office space, sufficient to accommodate about 250 occupants.
Even in 2005, however, these two buildings were not enough to handle CSE’s growth. In 2006, journalist Stewart Bell reported that, in addition to the two “large portables”, CSE “occupies three buildings at its headquarters complex and has space in a fourth...” (Stewart Bell, "Listening in on the enemy," National Post, 16 April 2006). The three buildings were the previously mentioned Drake Building, Tilley Building, and Insurance Building. The building in which CSE occupied an unspecified amount of space remains unidentified, but the location and availability of the Sir Charles Tupper Building make that building one possible candidate. Another possibility, assuming rental space was available at the time, is the East Tower of Canada Post Place, located beside the Insurance Building and just across the road from the Tilley Building at 750 Heron Road. Whatever its identity, the building probably began to be occupied by CSE by 2003 or earlier.
[Update 12 November 2013: Canada Post Place is indeed the other building.]
At some point in recent years, CSE also obtained 873 square metres of warehouse space in the Hawthorne Commercial Centre at 3020 Hawthorne Road. This location presumably either supplemented or replaced CSE’s space at 1867 Merivale Road.
Summary of CSE Confederation Heights campus
As of late 2011 CSE occupied six buildings at its Confederation Heights campus (Tilley, Drake, Insurance, the two temporary annexes, and rental space in a sixth building, presumed also to be at Confederation Heights). In addition, it occupied warehouse space in one or two buildings elsewhere in Ottawa.
In gross terms, CSE's buildings provided approximately 45,000 square metres of space plus whatever rental space the agency occupied, perhaps as much as 10,000 square metres, making a total possibly on the order of 55,000 square metres.
This might appear to be ample space for the approximately 1900 employees that CSE had on staff by the fall of 2011, but it is my guess that perhaps as much as 10,000 square metres of that space was dedicated to data processing/storage facilities by that time, making the space available for accommodating employees considerably more cramped. (It is also possible that CSE was making use of additional off-site data facilities, but I haven't seen evidence of that.)
The fact that some CSE sections operate on a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week basis would have mitigated the crowding in CSE's facilities to some extent, as it means that not all employees are in the buildings at the same time.
Very slightly exacerbating the crowding, on the other hand, is the fact that the Drake and Tilley buildings also house "Third Party" tenants who occupy 62 square metres in the former and 49 square metres in the latter. These offices probably belong to CSE's oversight body, the Office of the Communications Security Establishment Commissioner.
New headquarters complex
CSE's crowding problems will disappear when its new headquarters complex, currently under construction at a new site on Ogilvie Road in Ottawa's east end, is completed in 2014. The Long-Term Accommodation Project (LTAP), as it is currently known, is expected to house as many as 2200 employees and contractors. It will also provide the space and access to electrical power necessary to enable a huge additional expansion of CSE's data processing/storage capabilities.
Construction of a 6000-square-metre office building and data centre originally known as the Mid-Term Accommodation Project and now known as Pod 1 of the Long-Term Accommodation Project was begun earlier at the same site. This building was completed in November 2011 and is now occupied by some 200 employees. The opening of Pod 1 will undoubtedly have helped considerably to reduce the overcrowding in CSE's Confederation Heights campus.
Counting Pod 1, the LTAP will have a gross size of some 88,700 square metres.
When the LTAP is completed, it is expected that CSE will vacate the buildings at the current campus, bringing an end to 53 years of accommodation at the Sir Leonard Tilley Building.
[Update 1 May 2012: Added the Insurance Building to the summary section at the end. I intended it to be there all along, but apparently a senior moment intervened.]
[Update 16 May 2012: Added information about the building's original name, the Sir Samuel Tilley Building.]
[Update 16 March 2014: Construction year of D Wing changed from 1984 to 1985. DND was still soliciting tenders for construction of the wing in February 1985.]
[Update 14 July 2014: It looks like CSEC has expanded into a couple of additional buildings—the PBX Building and the Federal Study Centre—as it awaits the final move into its new headquarters.]
[Update 23 January 2015: Updated to note the removal of the 30' satellite dish at Confederation Heights. I used to think that this dish might be the southern terminal of the High Arctic Data Communications System link to CFS Alert, but since that link is still operational it doesn't seem likely that the Confederation Heights dish was involved. The southern terminal of the system is probably at CFS Leitrim.]
Sir Leonard Tilley Building (1961-present)
CSE/CBNRC’s third headquarters building, the Sir Leonard Tilley Building, was the first headquarters built specifically for the agency. Located at 719 Heron Road, at the corner of Heron Road and Riverside Drive in Ottawa’s Confederation Heights district, the building was begun in 1959 and occupied by CBNRC in June 1961.
In 1962, the government announced that the building would be named the Sir Samuel Tilley Building, but the name was quickly corrected. (Tilley went by his middle name, not his first name.)
In its current form the Tilley Building consists of four wings and a temporary annex. But the original structure was an L-shaped building containing one five-storey wing and one four-storey wing, both with basements. The five-storey wing, which also has a half storey on the roof, runs parallel to Heron Road, while the four-storey wing runs parallel to Riverside Drive.
The 1959 annual report of the Department of Public Works reported that a contract for construction of the “Communications Building (N.R.C.)” was awarded to Perini Limited in February 1959 (Report of the Department of Public Works for the fiscal year ended March 31, 1959, Supply and Services, 1959, p. 72).
Interestingly, the dimensions specified in the Public Works report were slightly different from those of the eventual building. Public Works described the project as “an L-shaped four-storey building, with basement; one wing being 62 feet wide and 168 feet long, and the other 62 feet wide and 315 feet long.” These dimensions would be very close to correct if the wing along Riverside Drive extended all the way across the end of the wing along Heron Road. In fact, however, it is the Heron Road wing that extends across the end of the Riverside wing. As noted above, the Heron Road wing also contains an extra storey and a half. Thus, while clearly derived from the original plan, the final structure ended up being about 15% larger than reported by the Department of Public Works. It may be that the plan was modified after the initial contract award, possibly as a result of an increase in CBNRC’s personnel establishment, which was raised to close to 600 (587?) sometime late in the 1950s.
Counting the half floor on top of the five-storey wing, the gross size of the building that was eventually constructed was about 15,750 square metres (about 170,000 square feet). This provided a gross area of about 26 square metres for each of the approximately 600 employees the building was ultimately designed to accommodate.
This amount of space is typical for modern office accommodations of that period, but it represented a major step forward for CBNRC, enabling the entire CBNRC staff to be brought together under one roof while still providing roughly twice as much space as had been available per employee in the Rideau Annex at its most crowded. (Of course, gross figures such as these include hallways, stairwells, elevators, utilities spaces, storage areas, etc., so in the case of both buildings the actual workspace allotted to an average employee would have been considerably smaller.)
The Sir Leonard Tilley Building has been described as resembling a downtown high school built in the mid 1950s, except that it has a guardhouse that controls entry to the compound and a fence topped with barbed wire surrounding it. Unlike the complex currently being built for CSE on Ogilvie Road, it is a building that goes out of its way not to draw attention to itself.
The building’s original marble-clad entrance lobby also lacks much in the way of visible character, if this photo of one part of the lobby is any guide. It has been reported that CSE’s first Cray supercomputer is now on display in this lobby.
The photograph on the right shows its Australian counterpart on display in the Defence Signals Directorate’s lobby. CSE’s Cray may indeed grace the lobby of the Tilley Building, but no photograph of that apparently sensitive artifact has ever been released (despite the fact that many details of the computer’s acquisition and operations have become public). [Update 2 April 2024: As I discuss here, that finally changed in 2018.]A Heritage Building
Nondescript may be the best descriptor for the Tilley Building, but according to the explanation that accompanies its heritage designation, the building does have some architectural as well as historical significance:
The Sir Leonard Tilley Building is a Recognized Federal Heritage Building because of its historical associations, and its architectural and environmental values.
Historical value:
The Sir Leonard Tilley Building is associated with national security through communications intelligence which originated during World War II. Built specifically to serve as the headquarters of the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), the Sir Leonard Tilley Building was also part of the first phase of development of Confederation Heights, a new urban node of federal institutions in Ottawa.
Architectural value:
The Sir Leonard Tilley Building is a good example of the use of a more conservative, modern architecture, and is a very good example of Jean-Serge LeFort’s work. Constructed of good quality traditional materials, the Sir Leonard Tilley Building was custom designed for use by intelligence services. The building’s exterior elevations conceal specialized features linked to intelligence gathering such as the design of “slippers” beneath the floor plates and the electrical and mechanical systems.
Elsewhere in the description it is specified that the “slippers” were designed “to accommodate computer installations”. (Does anyone in the know care to provide more details as to what a slipper is and what it does?)
The History of CBNRC also comments on the design of the building, noting that its construction "presented many opportunities for improving the security of the Branch, by incorporating features in the structure which had not been possible (or would have been prohibitively expensive) to retrofit in an already established building such as the Rideau Annex, which after all had been designed for quite a different purpose, i.e. a convent." (History of CBNRC, Chapter 26, p. 21.)
It goes on to note that “GCHQ showed great concern [redacted].” The subject of GCHQ’s concern was probably related to the potential for unshielded communications and computer equipment to radiate intelligible information through power lines and even the air. The electrical and other systems of the Tilley Building were presumably designed to minimize such emanations.
The heritage website also ascribes some “environmental value” to the building site:
Environmental value:
The Sir Leonard Tilley Building is located on a triangular parcel of land situated at the corner of Riverside Drive and Heron Road, and its strong presence in the area reinforces the urban character of the campus-like setting of Confederation Heights. The Sir Leonard Tilley Building is well known to the intelligence community as “The Farm,” and is a recognizable landmark to the residents of Confederation Heights and to the employees of the CSE and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS).
The Tilley Building’s nickname among intelligence insiders is a carryover from the days of the Rideau Annex, the original “farm”, which had actually been located in farm country outside of the Ottawa city limits when it was first occupied by CBNRC.
The building is of course much less known to the broader public. The Ottawa newspapers reported on the Tilley Building’s construction in 1959, dubbing it “NRC’s Hush Hush Laboratory” (History of CBNRC, Chapter 26, p. 19). But no connection was made between CBNRC and signals intelligence at that time, or even the year after when The New York Times published a detailed account of the National Security Agency that, among other revelations, mentioned its SIGINT cooperation with Canada and other countries.
Several years later, in 1972, the American counterculture magazine Ramparts revealed that the CBNRC was Canada’s SIGINT agency. But it wasn’t until the CBC documentary "The Fifth Estate: The Espionage Establishment" (no relation to the show The Fifth Estate) was broadcast on 9 January 1974 that CBNRC and its location in the Sir Leonard Tilley Building became widely known to the Canadian public. It was certainly well known to me as a teenager living in Ottawa at that time as the place where “the spies” worked. It wasn’t until 1983, however, that the government formally acknowledged that the agency, by then renamed the Communications Security Establishment, produced signals intelligence.
1980s expansion
By that time, CSE had entered its first major growth phase since the 1950s. Coinciding with the renewal of Cold War tensions and the reported adoption of a "harder line" towards allied agencies by NSA, this period saw CSE’s staff grow from roughly 600 (572 in 1978-79) to 907 as of January 1991.
As a result of this growth, CSE quickly began to outgrow the Tilley Building, expanding first into the Insurance Building, located across the street at 770 Heron Road.
Insurance Building (1980-present)
The Insurance Building was originally built to house the federal Department of Insurance (now part of the Office of the Superintendant of Financial Institutions). CSE occupied the building late in 1980.
According to the Directory of Federal Real Property, the Insurance Building provided CSE an extra 2258 square metres of space, probably enough to house about 100 people.
The first CSE units to occupy the building were from the communications security (COMSEC) side of the agency, the same group that had found itself exiled from the overcrowded Rideau Annex in the late 1950s.
Later occupants included the Tutte Institute, CSE's classified cryptologic and data-mining research institute, which was established in 2009. The Tutte Institute was probably moved to Pod 1 of CSE’s new headquarters building when that structure opened in fall 2011.
Satellite terminal
Another addition in the early 1980s was the installation of a 30-foot satellite dish and associated equipment trailer in a small fenced compound south of the heating plant at Confederation Heights. This terminal, installed in 1982, probably provided CSE’s connection to NSA’s PLATFORM wide-area network, which linked the major facilities of the UKUSA SIGINT agencies. The dish was removed around the beginning of 2013. It was probably replaced by a fibre optic landline link.
Entrance structure
A new, octagonal entrance structure (now known as D Wing) was added to the Tilley Building in 1985. This structure added about 450 square metres to the building.
Billings Bridge Tower (ca. 1984?-1999?)
Around the same time, CSE expanded into leased office space in the SBI Building (now called Billings Bridge Tower) at 2323 Riverside Drive. The Billings Bridge Tower offices seem mainly to have housed administrative units of the agency. In 1990, the military’s Electronic Warfare Emitter Data Centre also moved from the Tilley Building to the Billings Bridge Tower. (Now known as the Canadian Forces Electronic Warfare Centre, this unit is currently located at the Communications Research Centre’s Shirley’s Bay campus in Ottawa’s west end.)
Spyworld (Mike Frost & Michel Gratton, Spyworld: Inside the Canadian and American Intelligence Establishments, Doubleday Canada, 1994, p. 39) reports that CSE occupied three floors of the building. It also states, however, that CSE moved into the building during the mid-1970s. This seems unlikely, as there was little if any change in CSE’s staffing during that decade, while it grew by 50% or more during the 1980s. Furthermore, there is no indication of such a move during the 1970s in the in-house publication The Tillian. Spyworld is not entirely reliable on such details (it states, for example, that the Tilley Building was occupied by CBNRC in the 1950s and that it had previously been occupied by the Department of Agriculture). The amount of space that the book suggests was occupied by CSE in the Billings Bridge Tower may be correct, however. If so, then CSE occupied approximately 4200 square metres in the building, enough to house about 150 people. CSE’s space requirements by the beginning of the 1990s may have been great enough to require a fourth floor as well (or space at another location), for a total of as much as 5600 square metres.
The Directory of Federal Real Property shows that CSE is no longer a tenant in the Billings Bridge Tower; the exact date of its departure from the building is not public knowledge, but it was probably around 2000, following CSE’s acquisition and fit-up of the Edward Drake Building (see below).
The “Warehouse” (mid-1980s?-present?)
CSE also began leasing warehouse space sometime during this period, probably in an effort to free up space in the Tilley Building by storing non-sensitive supplies off-site. The 696-square-metre space leased was in a two-storey warehouse building fronted by small businesses located at 1867 Merivale Road. The Directory of Federal Real Property continues to show DND at this location, suggesting that it may still be in use by CSE (although CSE has been a stand-alone agency since 2011). Another possibility is that this facility has been replaced by the 873 square metres CSE now leases at the Hawthorne Commercial Centre (see below).
Tilley Building Annex/C Wing (1992-present)
Later in the 1980s, the government approved the construction of an annex to be added to the Tilley Building itself to replace the hodge-podge of accommodations that CSE had been forced to expand into.
Design work on the six-storey (five-storey with basement), 12,000-square-metre addition was begun in 1986-87 (Estimates, 1987-88, Part III: Public Works Canada, 1987, p. 3-35; Doug Yonson, "The secret's out: Spy headquarters to get $30-million addition," Ottawa Citizen, 22 January 1989, pp. A1-A2). The decision to proceed was evidently related to (and may have been made at the same time as) the 1987 decision to increase CSE’s approved establishment to roughly 900. The cost of the structure was ultimately estimated to be $35.1 million (Annual Report 1989-90, Public Works Canada, 1990, p. 42.)
Actual construction of the virtually windowless addition, nicknamed the Annie and now known as C Wing, began in the spring of 1989 and finished in 1992. Its completion increased the size of the Tilley Building by about 75 percent. Enlargement of the building was intended, in the words of a briefing note written for the Minister of National Defence, to enable CSE to "repatriate staff from space elsewhere in the city to Confederation Heights and accommodate an increase in data processing capacity that has occurred in the course of recent years." (Quoted in Peter Moon, "For their eyes only," Globe and Mail, 28 May 1991, pp. A1, A4.) The increase in data processing capacity that the briefing note mentioned included the purchase in 1984 of a Cray X-MP/11 supercomputer acquired specifically to support CSE’s cryptanalysis unit.
This photo shows C Wing under construction in 1990.
The expansion was also needed to accommodate an increase in the employment of military personnel at the agency, a step that was formalized in October 1987 with the creation of 771 Communications Research Squadron. The 771 CRS establishment peaked at about 100 personnel. Most worked in the Tilley Building, making the combined civilian/military total requiring accommodation at the CSE campus during the 1990s as high as 1000. The unit remained at CSE until it was disbanded in December 2002.
In addition to the structure’s lack of windows, C Wing used "certain innovative construction techniques" to "prevent the emission of potentially compromising electromagnetic radiation" (Briefing Note for Minister of National Defence, quoted in Peter Moon, "For their eyes only," Globe and Mail, 28 May 1991, pp. A1, A4). What this probably means is that the entire addition was in effect a giant "Faraday cage," the equivalent of a TEMPEST-protected computer on an institutional scale. The use of such extraordinary security precautions is compelling evidence of the extent to which unprotected buildings and computer systems had by that time become vulnerable to electromagnetic eavesdropping technology.
1990s: The campus continues to grow
By the time C Wing was completed, the Cold War was over. In the 15 years from 1977 to 1992 the agency had grown from ca. 600 employees to ca. 900 (roughly 1000 counting the 771 CRS personnel), which represented staff growth of about 50% (or 67% counting military personnel). Over the same period, the Tilley Building had grown by about 78%, from ca. 15,750 to ca. 28,000 square metres.
These figures suggest that the growth in the Tilley Building ought to have been enough to enable CSE’s entire staff to return to the building, as had been called for in the original plan. But it was not. By the early 1990s, the building was no longer considered large enough for the agency’s needs.
Why did CSE require more space? Additional staff increases were definitely not on the agenda at this time; indeed, CSE’s staff actually dropped to about 870 during the government-wide budget cutbacks of the mid-1990s. The most probable explanation is that CSE’s data processing capacity had grown significantly in the years after the addition was designed and was at that point consuming – or more likely was expected to consume – a growing amount of space in the new wing.
The late 1980s/early 1990s saw the beginning of the transition in the computing world from single supercomputers like the Cray toward massive computing arrays operating in parallel and consuming enormous amounts of space and electrical power. The fact that CSE has maxed-out the power it can access at its current campus (acknowledged by former Chief John Adams here) provides good evidence that CSE has also been moving down this road, with growing space requirements for data processing and storage a virtually certain corollary.
Whatever the reason, in the early 1990s CSE developed a new accommodation plan, dubbed Project Eden, that called for building an additional annex to the Tilley Building. In the fiscal climate of the time, however, this was more of an aspiration than a realistic objective, and in 1995, when Public Works and Government Services Canada offered up to 8000 square metres of space in the Sir Charles Tupper Building, CSE replaced Project Eden with Project Tupper, with move-in planned for the fall of 1999. The Tupper Building, which had originally housed the Department of Public Works, did not contain any special security features, and it was not in especially good shape, but it was conveniently located for CSE, sitting on the opposite side of the Heron Road/Riverside Drive intersection from the Tilley Building.
A space of ca. 8000 square metres would have been suitable for about 300-400 personnel. The goal of the plan was to consolidate CSE’s staff into just two locations, the Tilley Building and the Tupper Building, enabling the agency to vacate the Billings Bridge Tower and the Insurance Building (and possibly the warehouse), which together totalled some 7000-8000 square metres.
The scale of the space envisaged suggests that the equivalent of as much as two-thirds of the C Wing annex of the Tilley Building was by this point set aside to accommodate data processing and data storage.
The Tupper plan was never put into operation, however. It was dropped when CSE decided instead to buy the CBC’s former headquarters building, which was also located in Confederation Heights and had recently been vacated (see below).
Edward Drake Building (2000-present)
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s iconic but aging headquarters building at 1500 Bronson Avenue, built in 1961, was sold to CSE by the CBC in February 1997 for $1.65 million. The 10,024-square-metre building was subsequently renamed the Edward Drake Building in honour of CSE/CBNRC’s first Director.
The purchase price of the building was low, but it was a fair price, as extensive work was required to repair the building’s rundown systems, perform needed maintenance, and fit it up for CSE occupation; at the time of purchase, it was estimated that some $8 million in renovations would be required over a two-year period before CSE would be able to occupy the building (Kathryn May, “Spy agency keeps rivals out of own back yard,” Ottawa Citizen, 7 June 1999):
Real estate analyst Brendan Hanna said the CSE was the only logical buyer because it would have been a tough sell in the private sector.
The building's layout is awkward, it's full of asbestos, window frames are rotting, the roof leaks and the mechanical and electrical systems are obsolete. To complicate matters, road access is difficult. Appraisers valued the 15-acre site, with the building, at $ 1.5 million to $ 2.3 million.
"It may be nice-looking building, but it's not worth a lot" said Mr. Hanna. "The building is a piece of junk, it had reached the end of its economic life and what the hell would you do with the land? Farm it?"
In the end, it took until January 2000 before CSE was able to occupy the building.
When the CBC was still in the building, it had had something of the status of a national icon, and it is still considered architecturally important. Like the Tilley Building, it also has a heritage designation.
Architectural value:
The CBC Building is one of the best examples of Canadian modern architecture, particularly in its representation of the expressionist strain of modernism. Designed by David Gordon McKinstry, the Chief Architect of the CBC and a renowned acoustician, the functional design of the CBC Building is characterized by a “quiet” ventilation system, an efficient interior layout consisting of offices, each of which has its own window, centrally located services, and the stairwells at the building wingtips. The CBC Building is constructed of luxurious, high quality materials particularly on the exterior facades and at the interior of the entrance pavilion, and features a high level of craftsmanship and sophisticated detailing.
Plans for an extensive security fence around the property were modified in 2005 to enable it to better blend in with the building’s architectural style and park-like setting (Patrick Dare, “Spy agency puts security fence, boulders around 'elegant example of Modernism': Initial plan for concrete barriers changed due to appearance,” Ottawa Citizen, 16 June 2005).
Located at the corner of Bronson Avenue and Heron Road, the Drake Building is adjacent to the Tilley Building but physically separated from it by a sunken railway track. Its location thus is not as convenient as it may at first appear. Purchase of the building did, however, provide CSE a significant amount of new office space that, unlike that in the Tupper Building, did not have to be shared with other government departments.
Like the Tupper plan, the Drake Building purchase was intended to enable CSE to consolidate its staff from more distant and scattered locations. And occupation of the building probably did enable CSE to move out of the Billings Bridge Tower. As with C Wing, however, by the time CSE was ready to occupy its new facility the building was no longer considered large enough to meet all of the agency’s needs (Jim Bronskill, “Spies crunched for space: Former CBC digs too small to meet agency's needs,” Ottawa Citizen, 30 September 1999):
The move was intended to consolidate the agency's four separate sites into two large buildings -- the old CBC headquarters and the nearby Sir Leonard Tilley Building.
But there's a twist -- the CBC digs aren't quite big enough. So CSE will continue to occupy the small Insurance Building just across from the Tilley Building, the agency's principal home in Ottawa's south end. That means CSE will have three sites instead of two.
Government records declassified this week show the "newly identified space shortfalls" have prompted Public Works to allow CSE to retain space in the Insurance Building at no charge until Oct. 31, 2002. But the occupancy is subject to "early termination" should Public Works need the space. "In that instance, (the department) will seek alternative accommodations for CSE."
Bronskill’s article notes that another justification for the move to the Drake Building was to save money over the long run:
Calculations indicated the move, though providing CSE only 50 additional square metres overall, would save money compared with continuing to lease a number of Ottawa sites.
I’m not sure how to reconcile the 7000-8000 square metres that I estimate CSE had in leased sites, the 10,000-square-metre size of the Drake Building, and the “50 additional square metres” figure reported here. It is likely that the agency was comparing the amount of leased space that it had to the “rentable space” in the Drake Building (the space available for offices), which would have been considerably smaller than the building’s gross size; this probably accounts for most of the discrepancy. It is also possible, however, that CSE had a larger amount of leased space in the Billings Bridge Tower or perhaps elsewhere than estimated here.
OBL leaves his mark
CSE probably would have remained at roughly 900 personnel indefinitely had Osama Bin Laden and his followers not intervened. Close to 3000 people, including 24 Canadians, died in the 11 September 2001 terror attack.
That infamous September day was not the first time that Canadians had been killed in a horrific terrorist incident. In per capita terms, Canada suffered a higher death toll (280 Canadian lives lost, out of a total of 329 people killed) in the 23 June 1985 bombing of Air India flight 182 than the United States suffered on 9/11.
But while the Air India attack caused little immediate change in Canadian security and intelligence efforts, the shock of 9/11 produced a very different result. The U.S. reacted to the attack with a massive increase in military, security, and intelligence spending, and so did many of America’s allies, including Canada.
As Canada’s primary foreign intelligence collection agency, CSE was a major beneficiary of the new, post-9/11 spending priorities. CSE has more than doubled in size to more than 1900 employees in the years since 2001. As of 2012, it is still growing.
CSE’s post-9/11 expansion has forced the agency to find accommodations for an additional 900 or so personnel (1000 extra civilian employees minus approximately 100 military personnel no longer at CSE).
Temporary buildings (2005-present)
Some of the extra personnel were accommodated in two temporary buildings built on the CSE campus in 2005. One of the temporaries is beside the Drake Building, and the other is beside the Tilley Building.
The Edward Drake Annex has a floor area of 2176 square metres, while the Sir Leonard Tilley Annex has a floor area of 1750 square metres. (The DFRP pages incorrectly state that these buildings were built in 2000 and 1992, respectively.) Together, the two buildings give CSE almost 4000 square metres of additional office space, sufficient to accommodate about 250 occupants.
Even in 2005, however, these two buildings were not enough to handle CSE’s growth. In 2006, journalist Stewart Bell reported that, in addition to the two “large portables”, CSE “occupies three buildings at its headquarters complex and has space in a fourth...” (Stewart Bell, "Listening in on the enemy," National Post, 16 April 2006). The three buildings were the previously mentioned Drake Building, Tilley Building, and Insurance Building. The building in which CSE occupied an unspecified amount of space remains unidentified, but the location and availability of the Sir Charles Tupper Building make that building one possible candidate. Another possibility, assuming rental space was available at the time, is the East Tower of Canada Post Place, located beside the Insurance Building and just across the road from the Tilley Building at 750 Heron Road. Whatever its identity, the building probably began to be occupied by CSE by 2003 or earlier.
[Update 12 November 2013: Canada Post Place is indeed the other building.]
At some point in recent years, CSE also obtained 873 square metres of warehouse space in the Hawthorne Commercial Centre at 3020 Hawthorne Road. This location presumably either supplemented or replaced CSE’s space at 1867 Merivale Road.
Summary of CSE Confederation Heights campus
As of late 2011 CSE occupied six buildings at its Confederation Heights campus (Tilley, Drake, Insurance, the two temporary annexes, and rental space in a sixth building, presumed also to be at Confederation Heights). In addition, it occupied warehouse space in one or two buildings elsewhere in Ottawa.
In gross terms, CSE's buildings provided approximately 45,000 square metres of space plus whatever rental space the agency occupied, perhaps as much as 10,000 square metres, making a total possibly on the order of 55,000 square metres.
This might appear to be ample space for the approximately 1900 employees that CSE had on staff by the fall of 2011, but it is my guess that perhaps as much as 10,000 square metres of that space was dedicated to data processing/storage facilities by that time, making the space available for accommodating employees considerably more cramped. (It is also possible that CSE was making use of additional off-site data facilities, but I haven't seen evidence of that.)
The fact that some CSE sections operate on a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week basis would have mitigated the crowding in CSE's facilities to some extent, as it means that not all employees are in the buildings at the same time.
Very slightly exacerbating the crowding, on the other hand, is the fact that the Drake and Tilley buildings also house "Third Party" tenants who occupy 62 square metres in the former and 49 square metres in the latter. These offices probably belong to CSE's oversight body, the Office of the Communications Security Establishment Commissioner.
New headquarters complex
CSE's crowding problems will disappear when its new headquarters complex, currently under construction at a new site on Ogilvie Road in Ottawa's east end, is completed in 2014. The Long-Term Accommodation Project (LTAP), as it is currently known, is expected to house as many as 2200 employees and contractors. It will also provide the space and access to electrical power necessary to enable a huge additional expansion of CSE's data processing/storage capabilities.
Construction of a 6000-square-metre office building and data centre originally known as the Mid-Term Accommodation Project and now known as Pod 1 of the Long-Term Accommodation Project was begun earlier at the same site. This building was completed in November 2011 and is now occupied by some 200 employees. The opening of Pod 1 will undoubtedly have helped considerably to reduce the overcrowding in CSE's Confederation Heights campus.
Counting Pod 1, the LTAP will have a gross size of some 88,700 square metres.
When the LTAP is completed, it is expected that CSE will vacate the buildings at the current campus, bringing an end to 53 years of accommodation at the Sir Leonard Tilley Building.
[Update 1 May 2012: Added the Insurance Building to the summary section at the end. I intended it to be there all along, but apparently a senior moment intervened.]
[Update 16 May 2012: Added information about the building's original name, the Sir Samuel Tilley Building.]
[Update 16 March 2014: Construction year of D Wing changed from 1984 to 1985. DND was still soliciting tenders for construction of the wing in February 1985.]
[Update 14 July 2014: It looks like CSEC has expanded into a couple of additional buildings—the PBX Building and the Federal Study Centre—as it awaits the final move into its new headquarters.]
[Update 23 January 2015: Updated to note the removal of the 30' satellite dish at Confederation Heights. I used to think that this dish might be the southern terminal of the High Arctic Data Communications System link to CFS Alert, but since that link is still operational it doesn't seem likely that the Confederation Heights dish was involved. The southern terminal of the system is probably at CFS Leitrim.]
posted by Bill Robinson at 6:18 pm
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Great readding your post
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