Months after two passenger planes flew into the World Trade Center and another crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11, Huda Mukbil joined Canada’s spy agency as an intelligence officer.
Months after a white supremacist gunned down six Quebecers praying in a Quebec City mosque in 2017, Mukbil turned whistleblower.
Those 15 intervening years are captured in a recently released book that tells the story of how Canada’s first Black Arab-Canadian Muslim spy was treated at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.
It depicts an agency dragging its heels on recognizing the relevance of diverse staff and describes how biases including misogyny, racism and homophobia obstruct the agency from doing the job with which it’s tasked: national security.
In the memoir, Mukbil chalks out her service in terms of fulfilment and purpose but also glass ceilings and dashed dreams, with a pit stop at Britain’s MI5 along the way.
Her story of being a rarity — an Arab (Yemeni) and African (Ethiopian) who grew up in Egypt and Canada and who could speak English, French, Harari and Arabic — along with possessing intelligence and drive meant she quickly became an expert at the forefront of the fight against terrorism.
“The way I was made to feel was that I have a certain skill set that they need and so they will tolerate having me there,” she writes.
The book states — and this is no spoiler — that the spy agency, which until 1984 was a branch of the RCMP and continues to recruit people from there,...
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