Krystyna Henke – Ryerson Review of Journalism :: The Ryerson School of Journalism

The secret relationship between reporters and spies

Krystyna Henke — Thu, 03 Apr 2014 16:27:44 +0000

Illustration by Julia Breckenreid

By Krystyna Henke

It’s about 10 o’clock on a Friday morning in October 2009 when Dru Jay hears a knock. He throws on some clothes and opens the door of his Montreal apartment. A man and a woman stand in front of him. Jay stares at a badge that reads “CSIS.” The visitors ask to come in. He refuses. The agents then ask if they can all go for a coffee somewhere. At first, Jay says no thanks; thenhe thinks, Let’s just keep this close to my place, open and public. He decides that the three of them should walk across the street to a park bench.

Jay, an independent journalist who covers protest movements, is a founder of The Media Co-op, an online grassroots news network. He’s also founding editor of the bimonthly online and print newsmagazine The Dominion. His visit from the Canadian Security

Intelligence Services wasn’t a complete surprise; other activists had written about similar experiences. Still, he was caught offguard,and now admits, “I was a little freaked out.” Jay had reason to be wary. The agents asked him about demonstrations

against the upcoming 2010 Vancouver Olympics. They asked him about oil sands protestors. They wanted to know which groups were active in Montreal. They asked him if he would co-operate if a protest turned violent. Then they told him not to share what was said in their conversation, and asked if they could call him for more information. “The reason they wanted to talk to me,” he says, “was to turn me into some kind of informant.”

But instead of ratting out colleagues, Jay publicized his experience in a blog post. “Independent journalist visited by CSIS” detailed everything Jay could remember about the encounter. “CSIS visits have multiple functions,” he wrote. “On one level, they serve to gather information and recruit informants. On another level, they serve to intimidate people who are politically active, create divisions . . . and plant misinformation.” Further, he added, “The targeting of journalists for CSIS visits is, in this context, all the

more alarming, given the chilling effect—second-guessing and paranoia, for starters—that inevitably results.”

Jay’s experience, while disturbing, is not unusual. Journalists are tempting sources, and government intelligence agencies make it their business to seek out those with privileged information. Reporters might come upon a whistle-blower, a leaked document or an otherwise desirable source. And journalists have “a tremendous ability to add insight to the narrative,” says Globe and Mail investigative reporter Colin Freeze, who covers national security. “We can hop borders with great ease. Governments can’t do that. And we can ask people questions with relative ease.”

A quid pro quo develops between the two groups when journalists want a bit of help poking into hidden recesses of the government. This is how the game has been played for decades, and reporters have always known the score: when they use informants

as contacts, they might end up getting used themselves. That was the deal, but now, with global mass surveillance firmly entrenched, the government can hop any border it wants on its own. In this environment, bargaining power is all but gone, and journalists are no longer sure of their footing.

That doesn’t mean they aren’t going to try to regain it. Almost two decades after police shot and killed Dudley George at the Ipperwash standoff, Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (CJFE), CBC and the Radio-Television News Directors Association are bringing a case before the Ontario Superior Court—they want the Ontario Provincial Police to end its practice of impersonating journalists for the purposes of gaining intelligence. On Labour Day, 1995, a First Nations land-claim protest began peacefully at Ipperwash Provincial Park, near Grand Bend, Ontario. About 30 members of the Stoney Point Ojibway band wanted to reclaim the park, which is on the site of a sacred burial ground, but the occupation turned ugly after a reported 200 OPP officers showed up.

The day before acting Sgt. Kenneth Deane fired three shots at George, two men set up a camera and audio recording equipment and started filming. They claimed they were freelancing for United Press Associates, a fictitious outfit. It was later revealed that they were plainclothes officers. Impersonating journalists is an accepted strategy in the OPP. In fact, according to one of the force’s policy documents, the technique extends to pretending to be “other ‘persons in authority,’ including lawyers, priests and judges.”

At Ipperwash, there was another actor to consider. Toronto Star crime reporter Peter Edwards covered the crisis and discovered that CSIS and the OPP had paid aboriginal journalist Jim Moses Intelligence agencies are increasingly powerful in the age of global surveillance—and for investigative journalists, the job is now harder than ever to supply information about the protestors. “He thought that he was doing a good thing by targeting the First Nations people he thought were criminals,” he says. “And then he felt badly used by the OPP and CSIS.”

Edwards, who reports on biker gangs and the Mafia, worries that such techniques put his integrity—and safety—at risk. “With bikers,” he says, “if they think you’re being two-faced, that’s when you’ve got a problem.” Government recruitment and impersonation

of journalists does more than make the job difficult, he says: “It endangers me.”

Nor is it good for reporters to create the impression they might be working as spies. In an affidavit filed in the CJFE case, CBC reporter Dave Seglins stated that he faced this suspicion in 2009 while covering a Six Nations protest at Douglas Creek Estates, southwest of Hamilton. Because of this, he was unable to interview the main protestors. Farther afield, it can get riskier when the line between agents of the state and journalists becomes blurred. In 2002, Pakistani militants believed Wall Street Journalcorrespondent Daniel Pearl was a spy, and kidnapped and beheaded him.

Nine years after Pearl’s death, the Canadian government admitted Beverly Giesbrecht, publisher of the website Jihad Unspun, had likely died at the hands of the Taliban.

Relations between reporters and intelligence agencies haven’t always been adversarial. During the Second World War, British journalists eagerly carried out censorship, wrote propaganda and took covert assignments. Correspondents who went overseas with Canadian units were embedded as officers. British military censors edited their reports, and readers back home knew little of the process. “Entire incidents were kept out of the papers,” says journalist and historian Mark Bourrie. Reporters wrote positive stories to keep morale high on the home front, and they floated believable rumours to other journalists in Axis countries. One disinformation campaign concerned Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, who, Italians were told, had a Swiss bank account and was going to flee as soon as the Allies invaded. Bourrie says this rumour knocked Italy out of the war. “We were a propaganda arm of our governments,” the late Charles Lynch, who once worked for Reuters, told Phillip Knightley, author of The First Casualty. “It’s humiliating to look back at what we wrote during the war. It wasn’t good journalism. It wasn’t journalism at all.”

During the Cold War, hundreds of U.S. journalists worked with the CIA, providing information and cover for its operatives. The scope of the practice—which involved outlets such as Time, Lifeand The New York Times—was covered up in Senate hearings in 1976. “Journalists in the field generally took their assignments in the same manner as any other undercover operative,” wrote Carl Bernstein in a 1977 Rolling Stone cover story. They recruited spies “and they had the reputation of being among the best in the business.” These journalists planted “subtly concocted pieces of misinformation,” according to Bernstein, even going so far as to offer “propaganda to leading foreign journalists” at social events. They also acted as go-betweens for money and agents, “providing their hotel rooms or bureau offices as ‘drops’ for highly sensitive information moving to and from foreign agents.” Sometimes, according to Bernstein, they manned CIA-funded media fronts such as the Rome Daily American.

Most journalists would have trouble picturing themselves in such situations, but government manipulation—such as disinformation hiding behind unnamed sources—is still commonplace. When the Maher Arar story broke in 2002, many Canadian journalists were quick to

file a manufactured story. The Syrian-Canadian software engineer was on a stopover at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport while on his way home to Canada. After an RCMP tip linked him to Al-Qaeda, he was detained, and then deported to Syria, where he was tortured. Relying on anonymous government sources and leaked information, story after story described Arar’s “alleged” terrorist links.

The next year, Ottawa Citizen reporter Juliet O’Neill’s “Canada’s dossier on Maher Arar” made a strong, if not airtight, case that Arar was a terrorist. O’Neill, who declined to be interviewed for this story, received what all journalists dream of: an exclusive leak of highly classified government intelligence. “She had this great story—so she thought,” says retired York University political science professor Reg Whitaker, a member of the Arar Commission of Inquiry’s advisory panel. “She was being used as a tool by these people, who were using their own anonymity.”

Many allegations about Arar, in articles by O’Neill and others, would later prove to be false. Details began to emerge about how government officials carefully selected information, stripped it of context and then leaked it to journalists. O’Neill was not the only one to quote unnamed officials, but she became the poster child for government disinformation disseminated through the media.

“Disgraceful! It’s just disgraceful,” says Andrew Mitrovica, a weekly media columnist foriPolitics, an independent, non-partisan online publication. In a 2006 article in The Walrus, he condemned fellow reporters for jumping on the bandwagon, relying on leaks and collectively branding Arar a terrorist. Mitrovica reviewed at least 2,500 articles and newscasts, and only a few journalists came out unscathed. “We are not supposed to be the PR conduit for the security intelligence services,” he says. Freeze calls the fiasco “putrid journalism.” Then again, he is self-aware enough to wonder whether he would have acted differently had he been in O’Neill’s position.

The difficulty for journalists is gauging when sources are giving good information. Seasoned reporters lean on the basics—they remain skeptical about a source’s motives, they verify and double-check information and they look to official sources and records whenever possible. Victor Malarek, an investigative reporter for CTV’s W5, has spent years developing a network of intelligence sources he can trust. “I have had a couple of very good CSIS contacts who made sure that I was not being fed bullshit.” He met his sources in the intelligence community at national security conferences and by being on different beats over the years. “I had contacts in the CIA, and I used to know a lot of people in the RCMP,” he says. “It takes a long time before they can trust you.” But even with reliable sources and physical documents, things can go wrong—something Malarek learned first-hand when he was a Globe reporter. Someone had leaked him information suggesting that a Sikh refugee claimant named Dr. Santokh Singh had terrorist links. Malarek ran hard with the tip and was aiming for a front-page story. “My editor, when he first saw the file on this guy, said, ‘Let’s go with it now.’” Malarek was about to pursue the story when doubts crept in and made him waver. He asked himself, “Why was this stuff sent to me in a brown paper envelope?” He dug deeper and ended up with a different front-page story—one that unmasked the Canadian government’s efforts to sacrifice Singh in order to strengthen trade relations and appease the Indian government, which was embroiled in a conflict with the Sikh independence movement.

Of course, the basics can only take a reporter so far. In an era of revelations about the NSA’s mass electronic surveillance in the U.S. (mirrored in Canada by the Communications Security Establishment Canada), some reporting conventions may no longer be enough. Journalists must now employ additional techniques to protect themselves.

Matthew Millar, national correspondent and parliamentary reporter for online newspaperVancouver Observer, is aware of these challenges. He assumes the government monitors journalists who cover Parliament Hill. “We’re dealing with sensitive topics,” he says. “When you’re watching the watchers, that can only be expected.” Millar says journalists in Ottawa all take various steps “to protect our sources and to protect ourselves.” Some reporters use disposable “burner” cellphones so they can’t be traced. Millar relies on face-to-face meetings—“the old-fashioned way,” he says. “There’s a lot that I don’t talk about with sources on the phone.”

These challenges require many journalists to calibrate their levels of concern case by case, and sometimes the needle goes over the red line. Paul Palango, formerly an investigative journalist at the Globe, faced this when researching his book that dealt with a number of security issues, including the Arar case. He believed Arar was working for the FBI or the CIA to infiltrate the Syrian prison where he was held.

During Palango’s research, strange things started happening. Three of his computer hard drives were destroyed over a three-week period. His Internet service provider told him to call the police, saying, “Whoever is attacking you is much more sophisticated than we can handle.” He thought the book was “one of the scariest stories I’d ever done.”

When Dispersing the Fog: Inside the Secret World of Ottawa and the RCMP came out in 2008, Palango went on the usual media tour—or he was supposed to. He says that on the night he was scheduled to appear on four major programs, all of them cancelled. Apparently, the book was not up for public debate. Palango realized that Arar was being portrayed as a victim-hero, and no one wanted to disturb that. “If you try to defeat that narrative,” he says, “you’re up against a very powerful force.”

The obstacles reporters face as they go about seeking the truth and informing the public are not all external. They can erect obstacles all by themselves. “It is the routine ways in which journalists do their craft that give rise to disinformation and propaganda,”

says Bruce Wark, a former CBC Radio reporter and retired journalism professor at the University of King’s College. “And some of those ways are the clichés we use. We talk about fairness and balance, and those kinds of things lend themselves to propaganda.” Whether journalists deal with police, or military or secret intelligence sources, there tends to be a bias in favour of the establishment. Reporters often frame stories by giving competing claims equal time, which can obstruct the truth. “The sides aren’t equal,” Wark says. “This requires extra effort on the part of journalists to find out which side is telling the truth.”

The truth can be uncomfortable to those wielding power, which is why reporters often encounter challenges. The government can impose its own agenda on journalists in various ways, including intimidation of the kind two CSIS officers inflicted on Jay that Friday morning in 2009. Jay worries about an uninformed public that takes its democracy for granted. “People don’t know about some basic things that the government is doing, that corporations are doing.” This is one reason he’s remained an independent journalist. Only a media outlet free of government manipulation—“as opposed to these people who have an interest in pulling the wool over our eyes”—can serve Canadians who depend on accurate, reliable information.This piece was published in the Spring 2014 issue of the Ryerson Review of Journalism.

Endangered species: why we’ll miss radio documentaries when they’re gone

Krystyna Henke — Tue, 04 Mar 2014 16:21:07 +0000

Steve Wadhams is editing and layering the voices for a CBC radio documentary about the persecution of Italian Jews during the Second World War for his show, Living Out Loud. His office in the Canadian Broadcasting Centre in Toronto is small and the door is open. The foot traffic of radio colleagues out in the hall is a reminder of what’s happening in the here and now, particularly as Wadhams loses himself in the words and voices of people speaking to him from the colour-coded soundtracks on his computer screens.

There are not many like him left. He becomes wistful when asked why he is one of the last radio documentary makers. “It’s not valued somehow or other. Not enough anyway,” he says. “This can die, you know. Easily. Roman Empire died. British Empire died. Everything dies unless you nurture it.”

Although budgets are shrinking and audience numbers in radio have fallen over the years, Wadhams still believes radio docs matter because they take us to new places and connect us emotionally by letting us hear how people experience their lives. “The aim is to take the listener into somebody else’s world,” he says. “Let them spend some time in that world and begin to have some kind of understanding of what it’s like.”

According to Matthew Ehrlich, a journalism professor at the University of Illinois and author ofRadio Utopia: Postwar Audio Documentary in the Public Interest, radio lends itself to effective documentary storytelling. “Radio is a very intimate medium,” he says. “Even when it’s being broadcast to millions of people, it’s still experienced very much one-on-one.” In the 1970s, ’80s, and even into the ’90s, there was ample financial and technical support for radio documentaries at Canada’s national broadcaster. But the production budget for Wadhams’s weekly one-hour program is only $12,000 a year. Still, he has a lot of freedom to do what he wants. He’s paying a freelancer almost half of that budget to co-produce the episode he’s working on: “The Good Italian?” New documents have surfaced and he feels strongly that the story should be told.

“It’s not valued somehow or other,” Steve Wadhams says about radio documentaries (PHOTO: KRYSTYNA HENKE)

Wadhams, who has a British accent even after living in Canada for 40 years, is a tall, lean man. In the mid-’70s, he worked on As It Happens with Barbara Frum and Mark Starowicz. Later, he was one of the original producers at Sunday Morning, a weekly three-hour program that he calls “documentary heaven.” It eventually morphed into The Sunday Edition. Wadhams then tried TV for three years, including two as a documentary producer at The Journal. In 1990, he went back to radio, eventually producing Outfront, a program of personal storytelling by ordinary people that ran until 2009. Living Out Loud incorporates similar elements, notably people telling their own stories. Carol Penner, whose account of helping a stranger through her kidney donation recently aired on the show, says, “He is such an inquiring person with such a kindness about him that he opens people up. I felt I could trust him to tell my story.”

Internationally recognized for his radio docs, Wadhams has received an array of awards, including the prestigious Prix Italia. Ken Puley, senior media librarian at CBC English Radio Archives, remembers being impressed by the sheer breadth of “Africa Week,” an award-winning series that ran for four hours a night for a week in 1980. (Wadhams worked in central Africa before coming to Canada.) “He’s got amazing energy,” Puley says. And Bernie Lucht, former executive producer of Ideas, a show Wadhams contributed to, says he brings a uniquely dramatic imagination to his documentaries. “I think he’s utterly brilliant.” Wadhams, who also gives radio storytelling workshops, emphasizes that stories are not information. They’re meant to make people feel something “below the neck,” he says. “Life is complex. It’s tragic. It’s funny,” says Randall Barnard, a former senior manager at CBC Radio. “And a great documentary tugs on those heartstrings.”

Interested in the stories people tell when they’re in extreme situations, Wadhams creates a sense of place by following people around and recording the sounds as they happen. To understand him, you have to know how he feels about music. “That defines how he hears radio,” says Alan Guettel, former colleague and senior producer of Dispatches, which CBC cancelled in 2012. Wadhams, who at one point wanted to be a professional French horn player, sings in a choir. In his documentaries, he finds music in the real-life scenes he records. And he applies musical concepts such as cadence, rhythm, pacing and pitch, infusing the productions with a dramatic feeling. Indeed, he is much like a composer when he edits and layers the various elements of voice and actuality.

Barnard, who also started at CBC Radio in the mid-’70s, recalls the early days: “We were blessed, Steve and I, when we came into the organization at that time,” he says. Programs were available for some great long-form radio productions. This was supported by a management structure that understood how important it was to have those programs. But some years later, when Barnard joined the radio management team in Toronto, he says, “We had a 40 percent cut to staff and it was brutal. Absolutely brutal.” He had to go across the country, he says, and “deliver the message to way too many people.”

In 1980, as part of the 20-hour CBC Radio Special, “Africa Week,” Steve Wadhams travelled to southern Africa and interviewed a man in Lesotho, who was trying to sell an ox to help pay for his university studies (PHOTO: COURTESY OF STEVE WADHAMS)

Documentaries are expensive to produce and, management, looking to be competitive in the marketplace, wanted a larger audience and broader demographic. But, as Guettel points out, since its inception in 1936, CBC’s mandate has been to bring Canadians together by offering them stories about people from all regions and all walks of life. Radio documentaries did just that.

Feature radio documentary “doesn’t have to die,” Wadhams says. The resources are in place so it’s just a question of redirecting a bit of money. He’d like to see the art form continue and pass on his skills. “Mentoring a few people, big deal. It’s not really expensive at all.”

But at the beginning of this year, Living Out Loud went on hiatus. Wadhams hopes it will start up again in the fall. In the meantime, he is taking existing documentary material and recycling it for In the Field, a show without a budget. “He’s not appreciated,” says Guettel. “Otherwise, they’d give him money and give him a real show.”

The Canadian Jewish News makes a comeback

Krystyna Henke — Fri, 28 Feb 2014 16:48:26 +0000

By Krystyna Henke

The Canadian Jewish News seems to be one of those improbable miracles—a phoenix rising from the ashes—thanks to an extraordinarily vocal and determined community that would not let its weekly go extinct.

Last spring, the community publication, with offices in Toronto and Montreal, a circulation of almost 42,000 and an estimated readership of 100,000, announced it would be shutting down. Like most newspapers these days, it suffered from declining advertising revenue and technological changes in how people consume news. The shock of its demise among readers led to widespread efforts to resurrect the paper, resulting ultimately in the paper’s revival, but with an overhaul of its business and editorial practices.

As of January, a new editor, 33-year-old Yoni Goldstein, is at the helm of the independent Jewish publication. He has replaced Mordechai Ben-Dat, who, for almost two decades took a centrist, non-confrontational approach to the content in the CJN. Goldstein, a former editor at Maclean’s and blogger for The Huffington Post, has big plans. A redesign of the paper is in the works and will be on newsstands mid-April. “It will place The Canadian Jewish News at the top of the Jewish press in the diaspora, in terms of design,” says Goldstein.

Yoni Goldstein, the new editor of The Canadian Jewish News, wants to rebrand the paper as the voice of the Jewish community in Canada. (PHOTO: Alexandra Sipos-Kocsis)

Goldstein says he plans to create a serious newsmagazine with analysis and commentary that will matter to the Jewish community. He is looking to open bureaus across the country and will be hiring someone to revamp the paper’s online presence.

With an improved website comes a different kind of audience. Traditionally, the CJN was read by an older generation. Goldstein wants to make the paper accessible for a younger audience, while keeping ties with its senior base. He is pushing for investigative, original reporting. A recent cover story delves into the controversy over Israeli-Canadian documentarian Simcha Jacobovici, who has sued a biblical archeologist over allegations that Jacobovici’s work about the remains of Jesus and his relatives involves forgery and fraud. Another issue featured an exclusive, in-depth story about the ultra-orthodox group Lev Tahor.

Goldstein says a forthcoming investigative series will be taking a hard look at “a major Jewish institution in Toronto,” raising questions that have been whispered in the Jewish community, but have not been addressed publicly until now. But the editor says he’s “not in the business of pissing people off just for the fun of it.”

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