**This title will be released on February 2nd, 2027**
A never-before-seen and adrenaline-filled journey into the shadowy world of Canada’s secret service, guided by a senior CSIS intelligence officer.
Following 9/11, Canada joined a coalition of nations undertaking military operations in Afghanistan, calling on CSIS—Canada’s national intelligence service—to support the Canadian military presence in the country. CSIS was tasked with establishing a vast network of human sources across Afghanistan for the purposes of anticipating Taliban activity and targeting their forces. This perilous and complex mission—the largest deployment of CSIS personnel in the organization’s thirty-five-year history—endured for over a decade.
CSIS’s activities are shrouded in secrecy. While scores of books and movies have been based on the clandestine work of the CIA, very little is known about the inner workings of Canada’s so-called spy agency and the officers who do its critical work. In Spiders on the Ceiling, author and senior CSIS intelligence official Ruari Nicholson gives voice to the men and women who served with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2014. This book is the dramatic tale of a group of civilian intelligence officers who found themselves thrust into a complex and dangerous conflict, asked to undertake unprecedented intelligence operations for Canada. This is a story that has never been told before, and it offers a rare glimpse into the shadowy world of Canada’s intelligence-gathering activities.
Full of rich history, human drama, and imbued with reflections on courage, bravery, and fear, Spiders on the Ceiling—the first memoir from an active CSIS officer—is a raw, honest, and absorbing account of the opaque and hidden world of Canadian intelligence operations in one of the world’s most dangerous places.
