Johnston's report revealed a mess behind intelligence sharing. What can be done?

A look at four takeaways on fixing process

Highly sensitive information adrift “in the sea of material” floating through government. No one tracking who, specifically, is receiving, reading or responding to intelligence reports.

Although special rapporteur David Johnston dismissed the need for a public inquiry in his first report on foreign meddling, he did offer insights into how badly intelligence is shared within government.

Wesley Wark has been inside the government. He's had top secret security clearance; he knows how that process works. “The people are great. The system really sucks. And it's really a legacy system that no one has really paid proper attention to,” said Wark, a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation who also writes a Substack newsletter on national security and intelligence.

The question Johnston hasn't yet addressed, which Wark thinks he will have to eventually, is: Do we take intelligence seriously enough?

“I think many people who have worked inside the intelligence system, or viewed it from outside, will say we do not,” Wark said. “We have an intelligence culture problem. We don't pay sufficient attention to intelligence. We don't appreciate the unique value of intelligence.”

The National Post asked Wark to deconstruct some of Johnston's observations on the “long known but little tackled” dissemination problem. His responses have been edited for clarity and length.

❚ JOHNSTON: CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service) and CSE (Communications Security Establishment) write reports and intelligence analysis … these reports are often addressed to departments, not individuals.

These reports may say “PCO, GAC, PS, ND” on them, meaning they will go to the Privy Council Office, Global Affairs Canada, Department of Public Safety, and National Defence. However, it is rare for specific names to be mentioned, so specifically who at these departments received these memos cannot be determined from the documentary sources.

There can be intelligence that is “sent” to various consumers, but it does not always actually get consumed. ❚ WARK: Consumers is the standard lingo in the intelligence world. There are many consumers at different levels of government — from a senior official in a government department to the prime minister or PMO. The problem is that the system as it's set out, or the part that (Johnston) is referring to, essentially involves “mailing” intelligence reports to mailboxes.

And the expectation is that, at the receiving end, people will take out of those mailboxes these intelligence reports and make sure that they're properly distributed and read. So the onus is not on the sender of intelligence — the intelligence agency — to make sure that it gets to the right address. The onus is on the receiving end to make sure it's properly circulated.

It's somebody else's problem in terms of making sure that an intelligence report gets to the right reader or the right consumer. And that's not a good way to run an intelligence collection flow and an analytical flow. Partly it reflects the enormous, rapid turnover of personnel in key departments and agencies so that very often the intelligence agency won't know the exact name of the person they really want to get this report to.

❚ JOHNSTON: Staff at the PMO (Prime Minister's Office) speak of being given a large binder in a secure room with an agency client relations officer ( CRO) present, a short time to review it, with no context or prioritization of the material, and no ability to take notes (for security reasons).

The binder may have a significant mix of topics from around the world, and no one says, “you should pay attention to this issue in particular.” If staffers are away, they may not see the binder that day.

❚ WARK: It's a real scenario. It's an old- fashioned legacy system, it's paper based, which may come as a surprise to people in a world that is increasingly paperless. We haven't really created the digital channels to transmit highly sensitive information in ways that can be read at the consumer end. As valuable as CROs are, that system is for a bygone age. It was invented in the late 1940s to pass around to a very small group of civil servants and political figures in Ottawa highly sensitive intelligence information.

You cannot ask busy decision makers to sit down with a binder, where they can't take notes, where they have limited time, where they aren't allowed to reflect.

❚ JOHNSTON: The current arrangements can lead to situations where information that should be brought to the attention of a Minister or the Prime Minister does not reach them because it can be lost in the sea of material that floats through the government. At the same time, other material is not brought to the attention of a Minister or the Prime Minister because it is judged in isolation not to be sufficiently reliable or actionable to warrant briefing to that level…. It needs to be someone's job (or multiple peoples' job) to decide what goes to the (National Security and Intelligence Advisor) and what gets briefed to the political levels (i.e.to Ministers and their offices).

Large and undifferentiated binders, a lack of accountability about who is reading those binders, or whose job it is to respond to what is contained in them, is not what is required of the current era of international relations and the attendant threats.

❚ WARK: To be honest, I think the only resolution to this system is to increase the power of co-ordination and control of intelligence flows with the National Security and Intelligence Advisor. It needs real power, real clout, real control, real co-ordination capacity. .

❚ JOHNSTON: I should note that the Prime Minister asserted that the fact that he or a Minister does not get a particular piece of information does not mean that the system is not working; it means that the information was not credible or serious enough that it required his or the Minister's attention. That is often true, but it is not true in all cases. We have seen intelligence that should have at least made it to the Ministerial level that the relevant Minister did not see.

❚ WARK: I think it's accepted as alarming, something that shouldn't happen. It's always a judgment call about the quality of intelligence that should be given to a minister, because, understandably, reputations are on the line.

Intelligence agencies in the federal system are nervous about their reputation because they don't always have great standing with their political masters. They tend to want to take a sort of perfectionist approach to what they give to ministers or the prime minister, so as to try and defend their reputation for quality work.

But on the other hand, it's rare that ministers or the prime minister will go out of their way to ask the agencies that are responsible to them for more intelligence, or better intelligence. That whole engagement with intelligence needs to be boosted.