OTTAWA - The man who is now the target of so much Conservative scorn was thought suitably intrepid to be assigned by his government masters to some of the hottest counter-insurgencies over the past 15 years.
A spokesperson for the Foreign Affairs Department said Richard Colvin, who has unleashed a political tsunami on the government with his stunning testimony about torture in Afghanistan, doesn't rate an official biography because he is a relatively lower-level functionary.
And yet Colvin served out sensitive Foreign Affairs missions in Sri Lanka and the Palestinian Territory before he was posted to Afghanistan. He is among the rare diplomats who have served in both Moscow and Washington, where he is now a first secretary in the intelligence liaison office.
Those are the kinds of assignments usually reserved for an upwardly mobile foreign service officer rather than a dead-end bureaucrat now derided by the government for peddling hearsay.
In Afghanistan, he was no mere cipher clerk. Colvin was the charge d'affaires or acting ambassador in Kabul, handling over a dozen sensitive files including Afghanistan's notorious drug dealers, its vast corruption as well as Afghan detainees.
His 17-month-stint there in 2006-07 also saw him work in the field with the provincial reconstruction team in the Kandahar region where he would often be one of the few westerners for kilometres around in territory rife with Taliban supporters.
As political director for the Canadian provincial reconstruction team in Kandahar, he was one of the replacements for Glyn Berry, the diplomat killed in a roadside bomb incident in January 2006.
Those who have met with him say there is little difference between the demeanour he displays privately and his comportment before the parliamentary committee. Colvin read his statement and responded to questions in the deliberately clipped cadence of a member of a well-educated British caste.
His tone did not change discernibly whether he was describing his career or his accusations of beatings and rape of Afghan prisoners.
He is clearly a naturalized, rather than a native Canadian, but he espoused and defended what he called traditional Canadian values and respect for international law.
"Our detainee practices (were) un-Canadian, counter-productive and probably illegal," Colvin told the committee.
He appears to be in his 40s, but there is little official or unofficial information to confirm these kinds of personal details.
He seems to be a typically private bureaucrat. There are no Facebook pages, no tweets and no blog.
Web searches, while they turn up hundreds of recent entries connected to his Afghan allegations, produce nothing on the man or his career
He didn't submit a resume to the Commons committee before his bombshell testimony, nor did he give one to the Military Police Complaints Commission when he was earlier supposed to testify there.
The Liberal and New Democrat MPs, who are using his testimony to belabour the government, have no information about him beyond the fact that he worked in Afghanistan and now is in Washington.
What is known is that he joined the foreign service in 1994 as a political, as opposed to trade, officer.
His current assignment as first secretary in Washington is not the pinnacle in the ranks of the foreign service. His post puts him in fifth place behind ambassador, minister, minister-counsellor and counsellor.
