Nurturing The Good Life

For nearly 30 years Canada has tried to rid itself of Hussein Ali Sumaida, 54, who wrote about being a double agent in his 1991 autobiography, The Circle of Fear, A Renegade’s Journey from the Mossad to the Iraqi Secret Service.

"So by day I went around with the Da'wah putting up stickers that said Saddam [Hussein] was a new Hitler, and by night I went around with Saddam's agents taking them down."
"Spying, I was to learn, was not so much derring-do as it was banal snooping. I wasn't a trained commando, or a specialist in any sensitive area like weapons. My special talent was people. Talking to them, getting them to talk to me. I became a chameleon."
"I began to see how easy it was for Saddam to create his goon squads. I hated the man, and yet look how his ways had seduced me!"
"It's been 28 years. I have my life, I have my family, I have my business. I've established myself in Canada.  ... It's home."
Hussein Ali Sumaida, autobiography, Circle of Fear

Former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein on trial in December 2008 in Baghdad, Iraq. Photo by Nikola Solic-Pool/Getty Images)

 More than once a double agent, never, it would appear, certain what he should do, with whom he should ally himself but involving himself in human intelligence gathering, for none other than the Baathist regime of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, known as the "Butcher of Baghdad" for good reason. His was a governance of psychopathic hatred replete with atrocities committed against minority groups in Iraq; Jews and Kurds in particular. Saddam was a Sunni and under his rule the minority Shiite Muslims fared ill indeed.

Of Tunisian parentage, Sumaida's father was an Iraqi diplomat, a senior member of the Iraqi regime and that meant that he himself had a privileged upbringing, chauffeur-driven to school, never wanting for anything. But, he recounts in his memoirs, "I turned my hatred of him (his father) into hatred of Iraq's rulers". Sumaida considered his father to be abusive, such that he detested him. It was his father's coldness and neglect of his son that turned Sumaida against the Iraqi tyrant, not necessarily as a reaction to Saddam's penchant for mass slaughter.

Sumaida came to Canada in 1990, having decided to leave his country of birth, once he had taken, as he implied, a dislike to Saddam. He presented himself as an asylum seeker. Canadian immigration authorities identified him as a double agent working both for the dread Iraqi secret police and at one time as an infiltrator agent for the Israeli Mossad. At one juncture he also joined a secret opposition Shia group seeking to unseat the dictator Saddam, before turning away from them too, and rejoining the Iraqi secret police.

It takes no active imagination to understand that in his double roles, switching allegiance from one to another, the betrayals of identity that he was responsible for led to arrests, torture and death of those who had trusted that he was on their side, only to discover that he had no loyalty to any side, but his own self-interests. He was found inadmissible to Canada as a result of his involvement in espionage. But because he was deemed susceptible to arrest and possibly torture if he was returned to Iraq or Tunisia he was allowed to remain in Canada.

He lives in Hamilton, Ontario, where he operates a construction company. He has grown children and is himself married, and has no wish to depart Canada, though he has no legal status there. A Federal Court of Canada ruled in March upholding the refusal of the government of Canada to grant him permanent residence. He has been refused status time and again over the years. The choice he made to become a member of the Mukhabarat, the Iraqi secret security apparatus, carrying out clandestine  work for an agency known for its brutality and violence speaks volumes about this man's morals.

He claims to have felt troubled eventually, "working for the monster Saddam and his killing machine", which led him to join the Israeli intelligence agency for whom he gathered intelligence on the Iraqi embassy in Brussels and also spied on Palestine Liberation Organization members. Then he switched again, confessing to the Iraqi secret service who decided to recognize his father's position with Saddam and grant him a pardon, conditional on Sumaida agreeing to take up status as a double agent with the Mukhabarat.

He aided an arms deal with the one-time leader of the Palestine Liberation Front terrorist group, stating he hated his job but loved its "special powers". Which could be translated as having the power of life and death over those whose trust he chose to betray. Even though his application for status in Canada was denied, he remained in Canada until 2005 following years of appeals and court challenges and tribunals. He was finally deported to Tunisia.

There, he claimed, he was tortured by officials who took him in custody as he got off his flight.
"Life in Tunisia was intolerable, I couldn’t see what was going to happen one day to the next. By the summer of 2006, I made the decision to find a way to flee Tunisia", he wrote. On a "no fly" list, he drove to the border with Algeria, walked through it, arrived in Algiers, boarded a flight to Amsterdam, assumed a false identity and applied at the Canadian embassy in The Hague to issue an emergency passport under that false identity, enabling him to return to Canada.

Seeking asylum once again, claiming his life would be forfeit if he were to be once again expelled, the Immigration and Refugee Board concluded that though he failed to qualify for protection on the basis of his informing that had exposed people to torture or execution -- constituting crimes against humanity -- the puzzle was left; what to do with this man? A pre-removal risk assessment agreed he might be tortured if returned to Tunisia or to Iraq.

His prior removal to Tunisia in 2005 had not resulted in anything as drastic as Sumaida claimed would happen to him; he was simply interrogated and allowed to go on his way. He didn't enjoy living in Tunisia, claiming his future there was an unknown; in the back of his mind concern that he would be taken back into custody. However, he is a Tunisian by birth, an Iraqi by circumstances. He had chosen to embroil, integrate and soil himself with a regime infamous for crimes against humanity, of which he became a part.

Canadians have no need to burden themselves with the presence of such a specimen of a man without conscience, such as he has proven himself to be, much less one who carried out orders imperilling the lives of others, becoming responsible as he did so, of the tragedies imposed upon vulnerable people whom he betrayed. That he remains in Canada is a travesty. He plans to once again challenge this new deportation order.

Twenty-eight years after he claimed refugee status in Canada — and failed — Hussein Ali Sumaida, an ex-double agent with the Iraqi secret police and Israeli intelligence service, is still fighting for permanent residence in Canada.  Handout / National Post

"I can find no basis for overturning the [Immigration] officer’s decision. The officer reasonably concluded that Mr Sumaida’s activities on behalf of the Mukhabarat amounted to membership in an organization involved in espionage. Therefore, I will dismiss his application for judicial review."
"The Mukhabarat used torture and the murder of children to suppress opponents of the Hussein regime. The Al Da’wa was outlawed in Iraq and a death sentence was imposed on all persons affiliated with it."
Justice James O’Reilly, Federal Court of Appeal, March 2018