Mubin Shaikh walked into a Toronto restaurant, sat down uninvited at a table full of men he’d only ever seen in photographs, and talked his way in. That was the beginning of the infiltration of the Toronto 18.
He’d been working undercover for Canadian intelligence for two years by then, most of it still classified. In December 2005 he was handed off to the RCMP’s national security team, which changed the job entirely. He wasn’t just reporting on the group anymore. He was building the case from inside it. He went to the winter training camp north of the city. He was there as the cell moved from talk to capability – remote detonators built out of cell phone parts, an order placed for three tonnes of ammonium nitrate, target sets that included Parliament Hill, CSIS headquarters and downtown Toronto. Months of it, knowing what these men were capable of, knowing they trusted him completely, and knowing what happens if one of them figures out why he’s really there.
He could do the job because he’d lived the other side of it. He got pulled into the global jihadist movement as a teenager and stayed in it into his twenties. Then 9/11 happened and the story he’d been told stopped holding together. He spent two years in Damascus studying Arabic and Islamic theology, not to sharpen the ideology but to check it against the source. It didn’t survive the reading. He came home in 2004, opened the paper, saw that his old Quran school classmate had been arrested on terrorism charges, and called Canadian intelligence that same day.
Now he works the other end of the problem. Mubin’s an exit interventionist with Parents for Peace, which runs a national confidential helpline for families who can tell something’s gone badly wrong with someone they love and don’t know what to call it or who to ask. Every case gets two people – a licensed clinician, and someone who used to be in a movement themselves. That’s his seat. He’s the one who can say I know exactly what that feels like and be believed.
We got into all of it on Dexter Ingram: Declassified.
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