SPIES NEED TO GET OUT IN THE COLD

U.S. drug enforcement agents and agents of the Federal Bureau of
Investigation congregated near Lynden, Washington, yesterday to shut
down a tunnel that drug smugglers had built from the basement of a
building in British Columbia, connecting it to a Quonset hut in
Washington. They arrested three people on the first day the tunnel
was supposed to be open for business.

The Associated Press, quoting an unnamed government official, said
that police had been watching construction work on the tunnel for the
last eight months. They used sensitive detection equipment to monitor
progress of the work but they kept out of sight until the smugglers
started using the tunnel. Then they pounced.

You can only imagine the disappointment of those who laboured for
eight months, grubbing about in the dirt, laying the concrete floor,
shoring up the roof, lining the sides. Now they learn that the police
were watching them all that time and were never going to let the
tunnel be put to use. Here they were slaving away to eliminate
bottlenecks in the two-way trade between Canada and the U.S., just
like diplomats keep talking about in their after-dinner speeches, and
what thanks do they get for it? They get slapped in jail and their
tunnel gets sealed up by the drug enforcement agency, that's what.

The police cannot go looking for tunnels along every foot of the
enormously long border where Canada and the U.S. touch. I suspect
that the police had a tip, that some associate of the tunnellers was
aware of the project, thought that the police might like to know
about it and whispered something to them. Rather than just catch the
diggers in the act, the police waited until the users actually put it
to use and collared them.

I would wish the British police equal success in gathering
information about the people who think it's clever to carry bombs
into London buses and the Underground. It seems by yesterday's news
that a new, lower category of bomb-thrower has been drawn into the
transit bombing business. The bombers who made their move on July 7
killed themselves and 52 other people at the same time, a paltry
total compared to earlier attacks in Madrid, Bali, New York and
Washington, but still a mass murder. In yesterday's contemptible
stunt, they apparently threw their backpacks of explosives into
trains in the tunnels of the London Underground and then ran away.
They injured people, frightened many and shut down three subway lines
but they did not kill anyone. Two suspects were arrested.

These operations work a whole lot better when the master terrorists
recruit suicide bombers who stick with the mission, keep their mind
on the job and make sure the bomb goes off in circumstances where it
will inflict terrible damage. But the latest attack in London was
either a spontaneous effort by amateurs or a badly-executed operation
using the dregs and riff-raff of the terrorist movement, cowards and
losers in a gang that couldn't bomb straight. The British police are
going to need advance information and surveillance opportunities of
the kind that lead (I am presuming here about the advance
information) to arrests at the tunnel between Lynden, Washington and
Aldergrove, B.C. Canadian police will need information of the same
quality to head off the corresponding attacks in Canada.

The Air India bombing investigation drew attention to weaknesses in
Canada's law enforcement and intelligence communities. Those
weaknesses have been described in different ways by different
commentators so that there is not yet a consensus about what went
wrong. My own theory is that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and
the Canadian Security Intelligence Service had been staffed and
trained to deal with threats from Eastern Europe and the Soviet
Union. Those threats disappeared, but the people trained for that era
remained on staff and enjoyed secure jobs so that the agencies had
few people who could recruit Punjabi-speaking informants or
intelligently intercept Punjabi-language conversations.

Canadian police have long experience with sending undercover agents
to hang around among the dope dealers and pick up information. They
need to be at least as effective against the terrorist groups of this
time, who can inflict a whole lot worse damage than the marijuana
smugglers ever will, with or without a tunnel.