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Here, reproduced under the fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s Ottawa Citizen, is a rather long “book review:”
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/life/spies+love/1986281/story.html
I have not read the book yet – it hasn’t been released, but I can recall, many years ago, but wile I was still serving in the CF, a warning about a very aggressive and effective French industrial spying campaign that appeared to have achieved some results in the telecom/IT sector.
I worked, post military career, in a technical field and I was visited, perhaps 10 years ago, by CSIS for a discussion about Chinese spies – especially amongst the many Chinese graduate students in our universities. There were rumours about Asian shopkeepers being “paymasters” and “cut-outs” (is that the right word?) for Chinese students who were bringing them “commercially confidential” information about Canadian telecom technology.
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/life/spies+love/1986281/story.html
The spies who love us
Canada is the world's No. 1 destination for foreign agents, who steal military and political secrets and up to $30 billion worth of research each year, according to a new book.
By Ian MacLeod, The Ottawa Citizen
September 12, 2009
Canada's spy-catchers suspect Soviet hockey legend Vladislav Tretiak was a "talent scout" who helped recruit sympathizers here to work for the Russian foreign intelligence service, according a new book by a former Canadian spy.
It's one of several intrigues revealed in Nest of Spies, which portrays Canada as the world's No. 1 destination for legions of foreign government agents. Ottawa is crawling with them.
Led by the Chinese but including intelligence officers from at least 20 nations including allies, the book says, the infiltrators are stealing an estimated $20 billion to $30 billion annually worth of cutting-edge research in products and technologies, other scientific, business and military know-how and political secrets.
Others, it says, are infiltrating ethnic communities, suppressing criticism of homeland governments, recruiting industrial spies, stoking political violence among the diaspora and operating front companies and political lobbies aimed at manipulating government policies.
Proportionately, it estimates more spies operate here than in the U.S.
The book, to be released next week, is authored by former intelligence officer Michel Juneau-Katsuya and Montreal investigative journalist Fabrice de Pierrebourg. Juneau-Katsuya spent more than two decades with the RCMP Security Service and Canadian Security Intelligence Service. De Pierrebourg specializes in security and intelligence issues and authored the 2008 bestseller Montrealistan.
"Canadian businesspeople must realize that the world has changed, that people are extremely aggressive now and that Canadian companies are in the forefront of their targets because it's easy to spy here," Juneau-Katsuya said in an interview Friday. "They know they won't be punished if they're caught and that we have the advanced technology," they want.
Over 371 pages, the pair expose an astonishing parade of spy-vs.-spy and espionage stories, from Tretiak and other Russian post-Cold War escapades to allegations of India's suspected involvement in the 1985 Air India disaster.
They reveal the hidden hand of Chinese intelligence in getting the House of Commons in 2007 to shame China's old enemy Japan for its treatment of foreign women during the Second World War, allege political assassinations within Canada's ethnic diaspora and explain how reductions to CSIS's counter-intelligence budget mean some of the service's elite agents, assigned to monitor suspected foreigners, no longer work weekends in Canada's big cities.
But their chief message is denouncing "the silence and inaction" of a succession of federal governments more interested in trade and diplomatic relations than crime and punishment, demoralizing the relatively few CSIS and RCMP managers and counter- espionage agents who haven't been re-assigned to post-9/11 counter-terrorism duties.
"Far from receding, espionage is on the march in Canada ... increasing at a startling rate," they write. "The players in this latest version of the Great Game are largely familiar faces from the recent past. But, in the words of a serving senior CSIS officer, 'It's no longer a game of East against West, or the United States against the USSR. It's a game of all against all'." Over the past 15 years, there have been hundreds of prosecutions of foreign spies in the U.S., Britain and France, but not a single one in Canada. "Senior law enforcement officials have taken the hint and placed their priorities elsewhere. Where limited efforts are made, government policy and government actions have not been co-ordinated." In the end, Canadian businesses are largely left to fend for themselves and their market shares against sophisticated and well-funded thieves intent on stealing (or sabotaging) their work and bringing it to market faster and without the enormous research-and-development costs.
"We need to face the fact that we are a desirable target, and likely to become more so. The corporate community must acknowledge the scale of the problem and demand public assistance fighting it." 'The talent spotter' The book says the Tretiak affair began in the mid-1990s, long after his heroic performance in the 1972 Summit Series and Paul Henderson's momentous winning goal.
"The great Tretiak was quite a celebrity in his day, and not only among hockey fans. CSIS was also an avid Tretiak-watcher. A number of good sources inside the organization have told us that Tretiak was 'ticketed' at the time. That means that he was believed to be a 'co- opted' individual, somebody who has been recruited as an informer and was being paid or recompensed in some way. There were hundreds of these back then, especially among Soviet citizens like himself who had received job offers from outside the homeland." But, the book continues, "there was also a hypothesis that he was more than a simple informer." In Friday's interview, Juneau- Katsuya said one of three CSIS sources believes Tretiak worked as a "talent-spotter" for the Russian foreign intelligence service, the SVR, successor to the KGB.
"The talent-spotter will identify and mention to their controller who's favourable to the Soviet Union, who could be recruited. Then (SVR) will prepare an operation and they will approach that person, who is totally oblivious," to the role of the talent-spotter.
"He is definitely a guy who was of great interest," to CSIS, he said. "He had access to a lot of people, could influence a lot of people between a Cognac and a cigar. That's the name of the game." Tretiak, now president of the Ice Hockey Federation of Russia and a member of the State Duma, declined requests to comment for the book.
The India hypothesis Sikh extremist Talwinder Singh Parmar, mastermind of the 1985 Air India bombing, may actually have been an agent provocateur dispatched by the Indian secret service to work undercover inside Canada's "Little Punjab" community, the book alleges.
"This hypothesis comes from one of our sources," write the authors. The source claims CSIS intercepted a conversation in which Davinder Singh Ahluwalia, then India's consul-general in Toronto, asked a contact in the Sikh community to arrange a meeting with the late Parmar.
"Ahluwalia's office was bugged, and the alleged conversation took place several months before the bombing. So, a highly-placed diplomat tried to arrange a meeting with a man considered to be Terrorist Number One. This same Ahluwalia had also been repeatedly approached by the Central Intelligence Agency ... because they wanted him to become their mole in Iran." Deadly chemical plot On Jan. 14, 1987, flames destroyed the Soviet consulate in Montreal. Canadian security agents -- Juneau-Katsuya tailed the city's KGB agents for several years -- launched "Operation F" (for fire), and pulled off an intelligence coup that has passed into the annals of western intelligence history.
The book presents a new version of what happened next: "CSIS agents audaciously disguised themselves as firefighters and emergency cleanup crews. A variant on the story suggests that a legitimate industrial cleanup company agreed to do the heavy lifting for a premium price and on the condition that no questions were asked." Most of the heavily loaded trucks were directed to a weather-tight hangar at Mirabel Airport, which had been rented by CSIS. Other cargo thought to be more valuable was taken directly to a CSIS laboratory in Ottawa.
"Over the course of the next year, a handful of specialists -- chemists in particular -- reassembled countless puzzle pieces." Other specialists built a life-sized reconstruction of the top-secret "isolation room" that had existed inside the consulate.
At the fire scene, sniffer dogs from French intelligence came across, "evidence of Soviet plans for the populations of Canada in the event of a final and total war between East and West. These involved chemical and bacteriological warfare on our territory." Special teams of assassins, CSIS learned, were stationed in the country to await potential instructions to sabotage energy and transportation networks, including Hydro-Quebec dams and power transmission lines.
"One proposed secret plan involved putting deadly chemicals in the city's drinking water system. This helped explain why the Montreal consulate was ... well supplied with protective clothing its employees would require if they were to carry out such an order and survive." Fishing for secrets -- and sturgeon In the early 1990s, Sergei Tretyakov, code-named "Comrade Jean," arrived in Canada to head the KGB/SVR Ottawa operation. Over time, he became marginalized and angry with his master in Moscow and signalled to CSIS that he had no desire to return to Russia. (When the Russian spies weren't fishing for secrets, they often gathered on the Ottawa River beneath Parliament Hill to fish for sturgeon.) The answer from CSIS was "categorically nyet." "There were no resources to process another defector. There was nobody available to debrief him, nobody to parse his statements word by word, nobody to investigate and verify, and certainly nobody to organize the costly and obligatory jaunt that would show him off to the English, French and American espionage services." When another SVR operative from Ottawa was accepted for defection -- his terms were a simple $1 million for a batch of documents -- Tretyakov was transferred to the United Nations in New York and became part of the Soviet's massive espionage operation.
But by 1997, his disillusion returned and he defected to the open arms of the Americans, to whom he spilled his guts about the Soviet's North American spy network, allegedly including the identity of Robert Philip Hanssen, a Soviet mole working inside the FBI.
China 'most aggressive' Nest of Spies delves most deeply into Chinese spying. As of 2007, Beijing intelligence agents occupied about half the time of CSIS's spy-catchers.
"Of all the countries that dance across the Canadian border to shoplift our technology, China is far and away the busiest and the most aggressive," writes Juneau-Katsuya, whose years with CSIS include heading its Asia-Pacific desk.
"They don't even much bother to disguise what they're doing. The Canadian government, including CSIS itself, is so befuddled that it hasn't begun to understand how serious the problem is.
"While we have the ability to take on CIS (the Chinese Intelligence Service), we lack the will. Instead, we are blinded by what we mistakenly see as the opportunities presented by trade with China. This leaves China's spies in full control of the situation. When everything is taken into consideration, we have to say that our leaders have done more damage by enabling CIS than CIS could ever have done on its own." The Chinese agents also cultivate legislators at every level, according to the book.
In November 2007, the Commons unanimously passed a motion calling on Japan to apologize to foreign women forced into military brothels during the Second World War.
The authors say an "official investigation," presumably by CSIS or the RCMP, revealed that a Chinese intelligence service -- the United Front Work Department -- orchestrated and financed the Chinese-Canadian group that lobbied parliamentarians for the motion.
"Japan is China's principal competitor on the Asian subcontinent, and so it was in China's interest to create a chill in Canada-Japan relations. The 'atrocities' were the handiest available tool. Canadian legislators ... none of them asked for CSIS's opinion on what was going on." 'Silencing' dissident voices So-called "foreign interference" has a much more sinister side.
Many countries "send agents to Canada to report on the behaviour of their emigrant community. Some instruct agents to occasionally silence dissident voices. There have been assassinations." Juneau-Katsuya elaborated in Friday's interview.
"There were very, very strong suspicions that in the Iranian community and the Sikh community and even in the Tamil community, (that) there have been assassinations that took place. (They) were investigated as crimes, but we know that they took place" for political reasons.
"I'm aware of three different cases, but I think there would have been more, over the last 20 years. It sends a strong message when you kill somebody and it has a very strong effect within the community." But "we're not geared in Canada to get a clear picture of what's going on. We need to have an official body, and I suggest a Senate committee, that has the power to call witnesses and start research to find out what is going on" with foreign intelligence operatives in Canada.
imacleod@thecitizen.canwest.com
© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen
I have not read the book yet – it hasn’t been released, but I can recall, many years ago, but wile I was still serving in the CF, a warning about a very aggressive and effective French industrial spying campaign that appeared to have achieved some results in the telecom/IT sector.
I worked, post military career, in a technical field and I was visited, perhaps 10 years ago, by CSIS for a discussion about Chinese spies – especially amongst the many Chinese graduate students in our universities. There were rumours about Asian shopkeepers being “paymasters” and “cut-outs” (is that the right word?) for Chinese students who were bringing them “commercially confidential” information about Canadian telecom technology.
