The Very Strange Case of Hussein Ali Sumaida

Hussein Ali Sumaida is back.

The bald, stocky, clean-shaven, forty-two-year-old, self-confessed spy sits in his lawyer’s Toronto office sporting faded designer jeans, a white T-shirt, and a blue cotton jacket. Sumaida is relaxed, flashing an engaging smile as he begins to recall playing both sides of the espionage divide, having worked as an operative for former dictator Saddam Hussein’s ruthless intelligence service and for Israel’s espionage agency, the Mossad.

But the Iraqi-born double agent isn’t supposed to be in Canada.

In a split decision of sorts, this nation’s gatekeepers, the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB), ruled in 1991 that while Sumaida would likely be persecuted if sent back to Iraq or his adopted Tunisia, the more odious aspects of his espionage career made him complicit in crimes against humanity and therefore excluded from refugee status.

The Canadian government faced a quandary: it wanted Sumaida out, but where to ship him? The solution arrived in 2004 when Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) ruled that Sumaida would not be at risk of torture, death, cruelty, or punishment in Tunisia. With its decision, after a thirteen-year legal wrangle, Ottawa deported the married father of three to Tunis in September 2005. Canada thought itself finally rid of Hussein Ali Sumaida.

Canada was wrong.

In August 2006, just eleven months after his deportation, Sumaida engineered his return to Toronto. He insists he came back to Canada for a normal life, free of fear and the duplicitous world of spies. “This is [my] last chance,” Sumaida says, with a hint of an accent. “Tunisia will not take me alive.”

Unconvinced, Ottawa ordered the ex-agent back to Tunisia within days of his unexpected return last summer. Sumaida and his lawyer, Rocco Galati, fought the deportation order, and on April 30, 2007, they won a reprieve. In a volte-face, CIC stayed the order and ruled that Sumaida would face persecution if sent back to Tunisia or Iraq.

This latest twist adds another layer to Sumaida’s stranger-than-fiction story. The tale of his time in Tunis and how he masterminded his reappearance in Toronto brims with ambiguity, intrigue, deceit, and accusations that Canadian officials hand-delivered a man into imprisonment without charge and then forgot about him.

“[Canada] said: He’s not our problem. He’s not a Canadian citizen,” says Galati. “We don’t care where he is held.” Now Canada, he insists, must grant his client safe haven. “We can’t deliver non-Canadians to torture.”