The following is the presentation I made on day one of the Canadian Intelligence History at the Crossroads conference, held in Ottawa on 3-4 October 2024.
(Image credit: Charles Stankievech)
The birth of the Canadian Security
Intelligence Service dominated the headlines in the mid-1980s, but Canada’s
signals intelligence agency, the Communications Security Establishment,
underwent a quiet rebirth of its own during the same years, shifting from an
almost exclusive focus on the Soviet north and adding an array of new
collection and processing capabilities to increase the agency’s value both to
the Canadian government and its intelligence partners.
From its beginning, CSE worked in
close integration with the UKUSA intelligence partnership, now commonly called
the Five Eyes, in particular with its much larger U.S. and U.K. members. By
1957, the Canadian SIGINT program was focused almost entirely on Soviet long-range,
high-frequency radio communications in the Arctic and the northern Soviet Union.
This material provided the main Canadian contribution to the allied foreign
intelligence partnership, in return for which we got access to a very wide
range of U.S. and U.K. intelligence reporting.
You can read more about the
development of CSE’s Arctic role in Wesley Wark’s 2020 article “Favourable geography:Canada’s Arctic signals intelligence mission” in the journal Intelligence
and National Security.
On this map you can see the radio
intercept stations that were operated for CSE by the Canadian Forces
Supplementary Radio System during the 1970s and into the 1980s: Leitrim here in
Ottawa, Gander in Newfoundland, Masset in Haida Gwaii, B.C., plus two stations
in the Far North, Inuvik and Alert, with Alert being the most important of the collection
sites.
The Supplementary Radio System also operated a
radio direction-finding site in Bermuda, used mostly to monitor the movements
of Soviet missile subs and other maritime operations, which David Charters will
be talking about later today.
This division of effort worked
well for CSE, but as time went on HF radio declined in importance in Soviet
communications, leading to allied dissatisfaction with the scale of Canada’s already
small contribution. There was also concern within the Canadian government about
a lack of political and economic intelligence on topics of special interest to
Canada that were not well covered by allied reporting.
Some efforts were made to
diversify CSE’s collection and processing in the 1970s, but only minor progress
was made, due to a number of factors, including very tight budget constraints
and lack of strong Cabinet-level engagement.
[Parenthetic comment I didn't have time for in the conference presentation: Not all diversification efforts were unsuccessful. The image shows a Soviet troposcatter communications site. Although more isolated locations and mobile emitters such as ships and aircraft continued using HF radio, troposcatter systems replaced a lot of Soviet communications in the far north. This posed a problem for CSE as these systems couldn't be monitored by Canadian intercept stations. But they could be monitored by the geosynchronous SIGINT satellites that the U.S. began launching in the late 1960s, and in 1971 CSE was brought in to help process the take from those satellites.]
Things started to improve for CSE in
the early 1980s with the start of the PILGRIM program, which picked up from an
earlier experimental intercept site in Canada’s Moscow embassy that had operated
for a couple of years starting in 1972.
However, the big change came in 1984,
when CSE cut a deal with the Department of National Defence and Treasury Board
to close the intercept site at Canadian Forces Station Inuvik but continue
funding the station’s 276 person-years for use elsewhere in the SIGINT program,
mostly at CSE itself. DND, which was receiving large annual budget increases of
its own by this time, also agreed to provide a small injection of new capital funding
for CSE and the SRS.
This enabled CSE to propose a wide-ranging
set of improvements to its collection and processing programs, which it put
forward in its Strategic Overview for the Cryptologic Program, 1985-1988,
presented to the Interdepartmental Committee on Security and Intelligence in
March 1984.
(Huge thanks, by the way, to the
Canadian Foreign Intelligence History Project for obtaining the release of this
document and many of the others relied upon for this presentation.)
The plan was designed to help CSE address three
main challenges: to broaden its collection focus to provide the government with
more domestically produced economic and political intelligence while continuing
to provide defence-related intelligence; to improve CSE’s contribution to the
UKUSA intelligence pool and thus preserve our access to the vast output of our
UKUSA partners; and to modernize CSE’s collection and processing capabilities,
maintain compatibility with partner systems, and keep up with changing
communications technologies used by SIGINT targets.
Presented with an improvement
program requiring no new budget allocations, the committee had few objections. Each
of the separate elements of the plan was considered individually by the
committee, however, with the proposal to purchase a supercomputer approved
immediately, other elements approved during the summer, and still other,
longer-term, parts dealt with over the next several years, with some of the latter
delay caused by the need to complete policy reviews initiated by the new Mulroney
government after the September 1984 election.
The first element of plan that ICSI
approved was Project ELEVATOR, the purchase of a Cray X-MP supercomputer and
hiring of the staff needed to revitalize CSE’s cryptanalysis, or codebreaking,
program.
This is a photo of that computer,
which was the most powerful computer in Canada at the time of its purchase. Today
the smartphone in your pocket would leave it in the dust, but when it was
received in 1985 it revolutionized Canada’s cryptanalytic capabilities.
Canadian participation in ECHELON,
the UKUSA program to monitor traffic on commercial satellites, was given
initial approval in June 1984. Legal concerns, possibly related to the
potential for inadvertent collection of Canadian private communications,
delayed the start of monitoring operations, but by 1988 those concerns had been
resolved.
This photo shows Leitrim in 1991.
You can see the radomes covering the ECHELON satellite dishes at the top of the
image.
A redacted part of CSE’s Strategic
Overview seems to indicate that a different site was originally proposed
for this program. I think that site may have been in Alberta, but that’s just a
guess, and it may well be wrong. I submitted an Access to Information request on this question just over
a year ago, but any of you familiar with that process can guess how that’s
going. Still waiting.
PILGRIM was the program to operate
intercept sites in Canadian diplomatic facilities. Approval to conduct surveys
of potential sites seems to have been granted around October 1981. According to
former CSE employee Mike Frost, the first permanent site began operations in
New Delhi in 1983. (That’s the High Commission shown here).
All discussion of PILGRIM was
redacted from the released version of CSE’s Strategic Overview document,
but there is little doubt that additional sites figured as part of CSE’s plan,
and other documents confirm that expansion of the program got the go-ahead no
later than 1987.
MADRIGAL was the covername for foreign
intelligence collection in Canada under s.16 of the CSIS Act. This of
course depended on the passage and then entry into force of that Act, which happened
at the end of August 1984.
This was a program that CSE had
long pushed for. A tri-ministerial memorandum of understanding on how to
initiate such operations was completed in 1987, but according to CSIS’ original
watchdog, the SIRC, actual operations took a while to get off the ground, with
little activity before the 1990s.
None of the foregoing meant that
Canada was abandoning HF radio collection in the north, and the Strategic
Overview plan also contained a program, PORCUPINE II, to modernize and
streamline conventional radio collection at the intercept sites and ensure its
compatibility with UKUSA partner systems.
Approved in August 1985, the
program was expected to improve collection and compensate for the closure of
Inuvik while generating an additional savings of 22 person-years.
Largely as a
result of the Inuvik bargain, CSE was able to grow from around 600 employees at
the beginning of the 1980s to around 900 by the end of the decade.
This included an
increase in the SIGINT part of the organization from around 460 to around 700,
enabling the agency to hire more analysts to cover its broader range of
targets, begin limited 24/7 operations (mostly, I think, related to real-time
processing of Soviet air activities facilitated by PORCUPINE II [and also by the High Arctic Data Communications System]), and staff the
Client Relations Officer program that was used to relay SIGINT directly to
senior departmental consumers.
Here's an ad CSE placed in the Ottawa Citizen in 1986
looking for Transcriber Analysts with “Slavic, Oriental, Middle Eastern or
Romance language” abilities, reflecting the agency’s growing range of targets.
Some of the Inuvik person-year savings were retained by the
military and used to create 771 Communications Research Squadron, which stood
up in October 1987. Rather than serving at a intercept site, this unit was
assigned to the Sir Leonard Tilley Building, CSE’s headquarters at the time,
and its members were integrated into CSE’s SIGINT sections, boosting the total
number of SIGINT personnel working within the agency to around 800 by the end
of the decade – an increase of nearly 75% over the beginning of the 1980s.
To accommodate all these people, C Wing, the windowless
concrete structure on the right, was added to the Tilley Building. Construction
began in 1989 and was completed in 1992. I took this photo in 1990.
As most of you probably know, CSE left the Tilley Building
in 2014-15, and — perhaps less well known — the newly renovated C Wing is soon
to be the new home of the Government Operations Centre.
All of this was completed just around the time the Cold War ended, taking with it many of CSE's old Soviet targets.
Much of interest continued going on in the former Soviet
space, of course, but CSE might well have shrunk significantly had it not
already built the capability to monitor a much wider array of targets around the world.
Instead, the agency’s budget and staffing remained fairly
static over the 1990s, declining only slightly, even as virtually every other
department and agency in Ottawa suffered sharp reductions.
Since the 1990s, and particularly since 9/11, CSE has been
growing almost continuously. It is now four times the size it was at the end of
the 1980s. Four times!
The agency’s operations are increasingly cyber-focused, but
not everything has changed. The satellite dishes are still in place. The
embassy sites remain. S.16 operations continue. And even the radio intercept
sites are still in operation, although remotely operated from Leitrim.
The red line on this satellite photo shows a 1-km-long
Beverage antenna at the Masset intercept station. DND recently built a
boardwalk to facilitate maintenance of this antenna, showing that it is still
in active service.
An antenna like this is very highly directional, so it is
not too hard to figure out what it’s listening to. The long-range radio transmissions it collects emanate from
northern Russia.
I mention all this to bring things full circle. CSE did come
“south from the cold” in the 1980s, and the changes since then have been even
greater. But even with all the change that has happened, the Arctic mission was
never abandoned, and it still goes on today.
Update 28 January 2025:
As this image shows, the original four satellite monitoring dishes at Leitrim were removed sometime in late 2023 or early 2024. [Update 1 February 2025: The dishes were removed in January/February 2024.] There are still three uncovered dishes at the station — later additions — that may be involved in SIGINT activities, but this change seems to indicate a significant decline in Leitrim's role in satellite monitoring.
