On June 28, FBI agents busted a Russian espionage network, arresting 11 deep-cover agents of the Russian SVR, successor to the Soviet Union’s KGB. On June 26-28, President Obama was making nice with Communist China’s President Hu Jintao at the G8/G20 confab.
Just prior to the Toronto summit, Canada’s intelligence chief warned that China’s spy agencies are operating aggressively inside Canada. Richard Fadden, the director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), told CBC News the CSIS suspects that cabinet ministers in two provinces, as well as members of municipal governments, are under foreign control. “I’m making this comment,” Fadden said, “because I think it’s a real danger that people [can] be totally oblivious to this kind of issue.”
In a June 26 commentary for Canada’s Telegraph Journal, Miron Rezun, a Professor of International Relations at the University of New Brunswick, wrote:
Most people just don’t realize CSIS has been shadowing Chinese agents and corporations for years. They have been tracking the increasing and largely successful theft of intellectual property and industrial secrets – at our universities, in our corporations. The Chinese invest heavily in Canadian banks and businesses, not only for financial gain but also as part of a broader national strategy to access key people of influence, financial information or technical data.
Under the centralized control of China’s efficient foreign intelligence service, called the “Guoanbu” (short for Guojia Anquan Bu), agents in Canada and elsewhere are known to work at times with the Chinese criminal Triads.
As far back as June of 1997, Dr. Rezun notes, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and CSIS “drafted a secret report (which is not secret anymore) describing how Chinese Triad crime syndicates and the Guoanbu had infiltrated the Canadian economy.” According to the report, says Rezun, “Hong Kong and Beijing tycoons have allegedly invested heavily in financial ventures that are used as a foil for both criminal and intelligence activities, with these same wealthy tycoons using their financial status to gain influence in Canadian politics. The report alleges that more than 200 Canadian companies ‘have passed into Chinese… ownership since the early 1980s through the triads.'”
“Remember,” says Rezun, “this was written almost 15 years ago. What might it be today! The companies referred to in the report ranged from banking to high-tech to multinationals to real estate.”
It was precisely these very real dangers from our supposed new “allies” in Moscow and Beijing that we warned about at length here a year ago, in an article entitled, “Decades of Suicidal Policies Vis-à-vis Russia and China.”
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