MILITARY INTELLIGENCE OPERATOR

A debut memoir of a memorable 27-year career as an intelligence officer in the Canadian military.

Fletcher entered the Canadian Armed Forces as an infantryman in the late 1970s and was later recruited to join the intelligence section, partly on the basis of his artistic prowess, as he served both as an intelligence operator and the unit’s graphic artist. He would spend the remainder of his impressive career working in intelligence in all three of its principal disciplines, which he calls the “Holy Trinity”: imagery (reconnaissance photography), human intelligence, and signals intelligence. Over the course of this book, the author’s remembrance is an admirably candid one; he concedes that he was wholly unprepared for his appointment as a Middle East analyst,“an admittedly somewhat pretentious designation in both title and capability, considering my qualifications.” He served in Germany and Afghanistan, among other places, and was uniquely positioned within the intelligence community to master its internal machinations; his memoir is brimming with astute aperçus about NATO, the problematic interrogation of “uncooperative” people, such as prisoners of war, and the Canadian Armed Forces’ particularly difficult experience during the 1990s. Along the way, he provides an astute insider’s peek into a world in which, the author says, a few of the people he met “should have been issued a straightjacket instead of a uniform.” He never overdramatizes his experience and instead offers an unvarnished, realistic view of military bureaucracy: “The overarching lesson here was that if anyone still believed that the military was a wholly selfless organization, free from the political machinations and self-interest that is encountered in other government departments, they were in for something of a shock.” Fletcher’s narrative can get lost in a haze of professional detail, though; he often detours into territory that won’t arouse casual readers’ interest, such as the politics of naming units or the “contentious politics and policies surrounding health and fitness.”

An eye-opening, if occasionally meandering, account of intelligence work.