Spying In Canada Hotter Than Ever

Details of this Russian spy case have never been publicly revealed, but a National Post investigation has pieced together the story from interviews and documents. "If you look at the activities of our traditional adversaries, they have continued unabated since the end of the Cold War. In fact, some of them have stepped up their activities," Jack Hooper, former deputy director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, said in his first interview on Canada's espionage challenges since retiring this spring. While Canadians were worrying about terrorists, foreign spies have been busy in the shadows - recruiting agents, infiltrating government, planting listening devices and using other tricks of the trade to steal Canada's military, economic, scientific and political secrets. Canadians got a rare glimpse of the world of espionage last fall when a Russian spy was arrested in Montreal, and Ottawa has recently made uncharacteristically frank comments about widespread Chinese intelligence-collection in Canada. "Foreign espionage continues to be a fact of life," Jim Judd, director of CSIS, said in testimony to the Senate committee on national security and defence on April 30. Fifteen foreign spy services are being watched by CSIS at any one time, according to Mr. Judd. Last year, the agency investigated 152 individuals and 36 organizations as part of its counter-intelligence effort - figures comparable to those in the counterterrorism program. Roughly half of Canada's counter-intelligence efforts are devoted to one country: China. Beijing runs a massive spy program in Canada. One defector estimates the Chinese government has 1,000 spies and informants in the country. "Canada, like Australia, can access the U.S. high-technology military information because these countries share information," said Chen Yonglin, a former Chinese foreign affairs official who defected in 2005. He was in Toronto and Ottawa this week to urge Canada to crack down on Chinese spying. "If China can't get it from the U.S., it can get it from Canada or Australia." China's spy services painstakingly and patiently collect little bits of intelligence from the large number of Chinese who visit Canada - exchange students, scholars, scientists and, increasingly, entrepreneurs in the science and technology and research and development sectors. "This stuff comes back in a veritable flood of many, many grains of sand," said Dan Mulvenna, a former RCMP counter-intelligence officer now at the Center for Counterintelligence and Security Studies in Alexandria, Va. "The Western intelligence services have a hard time working against that. It's interesting to note that the Chinese have been making some huge technological jumps and leaps in their military technology areas, and I would suggest to you that their intelligence collection has contributed considerably to that." http://www.canada.com:80/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=5e63cb8f-31d3-4526-927e-754d2bb549bb&k=0 [Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on June 8, 2007]

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