(CHRIS WATTIE/THE CANADIAN PRESS FILE PHOTO) Jim Judd, director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, had given no signal he intended to retire.

Tonda MacCharles
Bruce Campion-Smith
OTTAWA BUREAU

OTTAWA – In a surprise move, the head of Canada’s spy agency is stepping down after just over four years in the job.

“The director (Jim Judd) is near the end of his term and is retiring after serving 36 years in the government,” Canadian Security Intelligence Service spokesperson Manon Bérubé told the Star, adding that Judd will retire in June.

A long-time diplomat and bureaucrat, Judd, 61, was appointed to a five-year term as head of the spy agency in November 2004. Previously, he had served as secretary of the Treasury Board and deputy minister at the Department of National Defence.

A separate government official said last night that a search is already underway to find a replacement to head the agency, which operates in Canada and abroad to probe what it calls threats to Canadians, including terrorism and espionage.

Judd had given no signal he intended to retire. Under him, and his predecessor Ward Elcock, the agency emerged after 9/11 with much more resources and increased staffing.

Last spring, Judd observed the post-9/11 push to knit together many national security organizations and agencies is still “a work in progress.”

“The result has been a rash of institutional ‘marriages’ – some the result of shotgun weddings.”

Although Judd’s term at the head of CSIS saw the spy agency go through several inquiries – the O’Connor inquiry into Maher Arar’s torture ordeal in Syria, the Iacobucci inquiry into three other Muslim-Canadian cases, and the still-unfinished Air India inquiry – CSIS had escaped much of the blame to date.

Appearing recently at a parliamentary committee, Judd gave a vigorous defence of the agency after a senior CSIS official said there was no outright ban on the use of information extracted through torture.

Judd said the official had “got it wrong.” He insisted it did not use or condone the use of torture in its intelligence-gathering.

He called CSIS the most reviewed intelligence agency in the world. He took pride in pointing out that of nearly two dozen recommendations that emerged out of the O’Connor inquiry, only a handful directly related to CSIS’s handling of sensitive information. That inquiry largely blamed the RCMP.

Still, the torture testimony Judd was forced to disown two weeks ago had embarrassed the government.

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Tags: 9/11, Air India inquiry, Canada, CSIS, Iacobucci inquiry, Jim Judd, Maher Arar, O'Connor inquiry, RCMP, Spy Agency

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