OTTAWA – Canada’s security intelligence establishment was unwillingly drawn into the public spotlight again on Thursday when a CSIS surveillance officer accidentally left his secret decoder ring on a sink at an Ottawa Tim Hortons restaurant. The potentially serious security breach took place while the officer was moonlighting at the restaurant part-time.

“Well, I’m sorry for the mistake and everything, but this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone,” said Timothy ________, (not his real name). “I had to take the Tim Hortons gig because I needed to make my car payment.”  He explained that he hadn’t received any pay from his spy agency job in more than six months because of the federal government’s failed pay system, Phoenix.

This current embarrassment for CSIS comes on the heels of a food scandal at its Ottawa headquarters where an employee threatened to: “…raise the issue with Amnesty International.”

The CSIS secret decoder ring is a highly classified piece of kit; a James Bond-type device that is issued to all CSIS field employees after they qualify to be field employees. It comes with a detailed set of written instructions that self-destruct after they are read, however if an operative forgets how to use it they are available on the Internet.

Officer ________ agreed to go public with his story as a caution to other CSIS colleagues who might find themselves in similar circumstances, because of part-time employment. He said that he doesn’t think that his slip of CSIS protocol at Tim Hortons would cause any harm because the “ring was only off my finger for a couple of minutes while I washed my hands —the food service industry has very strict rules, you know.”

A spokesperson at CSIS headquarters who would not give his name declined to comment for this article on the grounds that whatever he said would compromise national security. Source: FNT Staff

 

Photo credit: Original images by: Mobilesyrup /Tim Hortons, Toronto Star,