Huda Mukbil is an Ottawa author who I had the pleasure of meeting very briefly as she was awarded her Ottawa Book Award for Agent of Change. Mukbil’s family fled Yemen when she was a girl, and she spent her first formative years in Egypt before coming to Canada. Eventually her academic path and command of multiple languages landed her at Canada’s spy agency where she eventually became the first CSIS agent to wear the hijab. Her book recounts the racism she encountered at the agency and the check on her career growth that institutional racism created. She eventually left CSIS after pursuing recourse that was settled without disclosure, and her book seeks to tell her story within the confines both of national security and legal constraints.
Mukbil is not a natural writer and some of the prose lands flat, but her tale is nonetheless gripping and fast-moving. She touches on many of the national security issues of our time and had a front-row seat to the War on Terror that is fascinating. Even prohibited from fully telling her tale – something many who work in Ottawa encounter on a not-irregular basis – there is enough hint of Le Carré to keep the reader glued to the page. Unfortunately, the racism she clearly faced at CSIS will only confirm for many progressive readers the impressions we have of para-military organizations as bastions of reactionary attitudes. Mukbil is not shy about rooting her employer’s bias in its CAF and RCMP origins, and there are few Canadians who consider either to be welcoming of racialized women – to say the least.
Mukbil’s story is intensely personal and she leaves it to the reader to determine what, if anything, should be done to prevent CSIS from treating others as it treated her. Certainly, her own legal efforts are part of the answer. Readers will have to determine for themselves whether recruitment from non para-military and military organizations to become a truly civilian agency will be enough to reform CSIS, or whether the agency is beyond redemption.
