The article Puppets of Beijing

The article Puppets of Beijing 

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Brian McAdam, a former foreign service bureaucrat who ran Canada’s immigration office in Hong Kong from 1968 to 1971, and again from 1989 to 1993, was one of the key figures whose suspicions about the PRC’s infiltration of Canada led to the Sidewinder investigations. He says that in the eighties, as the Chinese takeover of Hong Kong in 1997 began to draw near, the Communists in Beijing struck a deal with the powerful Hong Kong triads—criminal organizations specializing in the international smuggling of drugs, weapons and humans. The government and the gangs would work together to exploit the West for mutual advantage. One of the primary strategies was to curry favour and influence with political leaders through large campaign donations. “They are very good at talent spotting,” McAdam says, noting that Chinese agents were donating to Bill Clinton’s campaigns while he was still governor of Arkansas. 
In fact, the same sort of so-called conspiracy theories that characterized Sidewinder were unearthed in an American investigation into Chinese influence peddling and intelligence gathering in that country. In 1999, the Chinagate scandal rocked the Clinton presidency, when it emerged that the president had accepted large campaign contributions throughout the nineties directly or indirectly from Chinese intelligence agents. What followed, under Clinton, was a U.S. foreign policy adjust- ed in a way that made it easier for the Communists to get their hands on leading military technology. Defence contractors were permitted to work closely with the PLA to help advance its missile capabilities. What the Chinese couldn’t get legally, they stole through a series of front companies based in the U.S. and Canada.

Detailed in an investigation headed by U.S. Representative Christopher Cox, the 1999 scandal was partly overshadowed by the disclosure of then president Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, and few took notice, especially here in Canada. But many of 

the same figures that were identified in the Cox report were the same ones fingered by Sidewinder. Both look into the connections of Li Ka-shing, who, in addition to his Husky holdings, has invested millions in Canadian properties, banks and telecom firms. Also making appearances in both the U.S. and Canadian reports are Macau gambling magnate Stanley Ho, COSCO and CITIC, which was caught making illegal contributions to Clinton’s campaign. 
Al Santoli, director of the Asia America Initiative and a former national security advisor in the U.S. Congress, says the Sidewinder report made a big impact in the States. “It got people to look at what was developing here in the U.S.,” he says. “It was something that was systematic. It had a pattern to it. And because of the deft knowledge of the authors—and a few other reports that were coming out at that time—it drew an expanded light on what was going,” Santoli says, adding the Canadian intelligence underlined the extent to which political systems and electoral processes were being subverted. “Sidewinder put it in a contextual pattern and that was very important.”

Had CSIS had its way, those details might never have come to light. The agency’s unorthodox attempts to suppress the report eventually resulted in an investigation in 2003 by Canada’s Security Intelligence Review Committee, the public body that oversees CSIS. Shortly afterward, the investigation was quietly abandoned. 
Coincidentally, there were several members of the SIRC board who themselves were linked to some of the names that popped up in the Sidewinder report. Former Ontario premier Bob Rae also sat on the SIRC board. Rae’s broth- er, John, is an executive and director at Power Corp. (with its stake in CITIC). The SIRC board was headed by Paule Gauthier, who up until her first appointment to SIRC, in 1995, had spent 25 years as the corporate secretary of Power Communications, a Power subsidiary. Power Corp’s links to CITIC are mentioned in the Sidewinder report, under “Case Studies.”