Revelations of how China is planning a military coup by secretly inserting 1000's of spies into Canada as business leaders.

One Man’s China Crusade or..China's secret plans to take Canada

By The Ottawa Citizen August 25, 2008

Brian Ingram
Mar 31, 2012 22:54

For Canadian diplomat Brian McAdam, it wasn’t that he had uncovered the lucrative sale of Canadian visas during his posting at Canada’s Hong Kong consulate.

Both Canadian and Chinese consular staff, he says, were selling visas to members of the Chinese mafia and Communist China’s intelligence service. The price, he heard, ranged from $10,000 to $100,000 per visa.

It wasn’t that reports he sent to his bosses in Canada — details on murderers, money launderers, smugglers and spies trying to enter Canada — were met with silence or mostly destroyed.

It wasn’t dozens of threatening calls — “Stop what you’re doing or you’re going to find yourself dead” — from Triad members during his 1989-1993 stint in Hong Kong.

What finally broke him down, he says, was “the incredible feeling of betrayal from my colleagues. I’d worked with these people for years.”

“It goes to your very soul,” he says. “It is a spiritual crisis. It is a psychological breakdown.”

There was the day he got a phone call from his Hong Kong Police Department source, who was wiretapping a Triad kingpin.

“What shocked the Hong Kong policeman was that the Triad member had phoned someone in the
Canadian immigration minister’s office in Ottawa,” says Mr. McAdam.

“The officer commented: ‘With that kind of relationship, you’ve got a really serious problem.’ ”

What shocked Mr. McAdam was what the officer said next: The Canadian reassured the Triad boss, “Don’t worry about McAdam and what he’s doing. We’ll take care of him.”
And, says Mr. McAdam, they did.

Immigration Canada offered him a good new job in Ottawa. He returned — and found that his ostracism was complete. His 30-year career in Europe, the Caribbean and Asia was over.

That stunning moment of clarity shut him down, physically and mentally. After two years on medical leave, swinging between hypersomnia — sleeping 20 hours a day — and insomnia, he says he finally did what his bosses and almost all of his co-workers wanted. In 1993, at age 51, he took early retirement.

Though bereft of job, he says, “I felt free of a horrible group of people.”

“Ill, depressed and unemployed,” he says, “I knew what I’d discovered was profoundly important.”

In his 850-page manuscript –working title The Dragon’s Deception — he writes: “I was mocked, demeaned and threatened in a hostile environment while dealing with some of the world’s most ruthless criminals. Staff in both Hong Kong and in Ottawa gave copies of my confidential reports about some of the criminals to the gangsters themselves, and that greatly put my life at risk. I received death threats for a number of years but no one has ever been concerned about my safety. The big question (was): Why did Canadian diplomats in Hong Kong and bureaucrats in Ottawa do whatever they could to destroy my work and myself?”

As he tells it, around that time, he was formulating the idea of a formal investigation to verify and enlarge his findings in Hong Kong. By 1995, a dozen CSIS and RCMP officers formally launched their first joint project: Operation Sidewinder

Concealing his ill health, Mr. McAdam supplied the team with extensive documentation of China’s criminals and the Communist government’s ambitious program of acquisition, espionage and political influence in Canada and around the world.

The RCMP’s own more narrow investigation into Mr. McAdam’s discoveries — separate from Sidewinder — had begun in 1992. They probed incidents of corruption but limited themselves to locally engaged staff — not Canadians.

A seven-year investigation ensued. Seven RCMP investigators came and went. “As soon as one (Mountie) would investigate, they’d pull him off,” Mr. McAdam says. “Another officer would come along, start to make discoveries and would be pulled off.”

“I believe both probes (by the Sidewinder team and by the RCMP) had considerable political interference to shut them down,” says Mr. McAdam, “and it was coming from the highest levels.”

Mr. McAdam credits David Kilgour, then Liberal MP for Edmonton-Strathcona and secretary of state for Latin America and Africa, for his persistent letters. Mr. Kilgour sent his first letter directly to then-prime minister Jean Chrétien asking for a public inquiry — which Mr. McAdam had requested and continues to request. However, the government ordered an RCMP probe. Mr. Kilgour later sent letters asking the force to end its delays.

Among the RCMP officers sent to Hong Kong was a 26-year veteran, Cpl. Robert Read, who, in 1996, spent months reviewing and corroborating many of Mr. McAdam’s findings. When RCMP Supt. Jean Dubé pulled him off the file in 1997, the Mountie publicly accused him of obstruction — a charge the RCMP dismissed. Supt. Dubé fired Cpl. Read.

“They fired him to stop the investigation,” says Mr. McAdam. Cpl. Read took his case — the incriminating material, political connections between the Chinese government and Mr. Chrétien’s Liberal government, the evidence of a coverup — to the media.

In 2003, an RCMP external committee confirmed Cpl. Read’s findings. It found the RCMP “consistently demonstrated a reluctance to investigate” and ordered the force to rehire him. The RCMP refused. Cpl. Read sued.

Recently retired Giuliani Zaccardelli was RCMP commissioner at the time.

In 2005, Federal Court Justice Sean Harrington heard Cpl. Read’s case and upheld the firing for “lack of loyalty to the government.” In 2007, the Supreme Court of Canada refused to hear the case. Cpl. Read’s and Mr. McAdam’s stories are told on fairwhistleblower.ca.

The Sidewinder report supported Mr. McAdam. It went further: “They found that crime members with ties to China’s military intelligence had invested billions in Canada,” says Mr. McAdam, “in high-tech, in computer companies, telecommunication companies.”

A few days after Sidewinder’s final report was sent to CSIS in 1997, Sidewinder was shut down. CSIS disbanded the team and directed the investigators to destroy every document. Says Mr. McAdam: “It tells you there’s a coverup going on.”

The Sidewinder team destroyed hundreds of pages of Mr. McAdam’s research, his books and his reports.

“I trusted I’d get it all back” — he laughs at the idea of having to make copies to protect his material from Canadian law enforcement. “I never dreamed this would be the outcome — all kinds of material, just gone.

“The (Sidewinder) team leader was demoted after submitting the report. He resigned. And CSIS’s almost sole China expert also resigned in disgust.

“At least six investigations by the U.S. Senate and Congress, from 1997 to 2003, corroborated Sidewinder’s findings,” he says. “Though senior management at CSIS maligned the
report as ‘rumour-laced conspiracy theory,’ others saw it as ‘groundbreaking’ and ‘years ahead of the curve.’ ”

Ward Elcock, who retired in 2004, was CSIS director at the time.

Since then, the FBI has named China as the biggest intelligence threat to the U.S., says Mr. McAdam.
And Canada, he says, is now known as “one of the world’s centres for Chinese organized crime and espionage.”

Last year, CSIS director Jim Judd testified before the Senate that nearly half of all spies from 15 countries who operate in Canada work for China — and consume half his counter-espionage resources.

Mr. McAdam says: “I feel better than I have for 15 years. I feel fantastic, tremendous. I feel back to normal.”

What saved him? “The love of my wife, Marie. I’d never be alive without her. She nurtured me and cared for me beyond belief.” And, he adds, determination. “I wanted to stop Chinese criminals and spies from trying to destroy our country.”

These days, although he’s never called upon by his own government, Mr. McAdam has started to do international consulting work on global operations — including Canada — of the increasingly strong partnership of Chinese intelligence and organized crime.

“I’m on a crusade,” he says. “I don’t know how to describe it any other way. I don’t think we should be selling our country to China.”

Next week: McAdam: China’s Top 5 Myths

© (c) CanWest MediaWorks Publications Inc.

If that’s not enough, try this Canadian media commentary from 2010, quoting no less a personage than the head of the CSIS:

Here is an old adage from the world of espionage.
It goes something like this.
Consider a beach the target country and the sand on it the coveted intelligence.
The Americans would use satellites to probe from high altitudes what they can make of it.
The Israelis would creep up onto the beach at night in inflatable boats and grab a bagful for analysis.
The Chinese would declare a national holiday, send everyone to the beach so they can all pocket a bit of sand and bring it home.

As former FBI analyst Paul D. Moore puts it; “In China’s model, anyone and everyone is a potential intelligence asset.”

The quicker our elected officials understand this, the safer Canada will be.

Richard Fadden, the director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service was trying to articulate this fact when he warned in a CBC interview that some of our elected politicians, including municipal officials in B.C., are under the influence of foreign governments.

“There are several municipal politicians in British Columbia and in at least two provinces there are ministers of the Crown who we think are under at least the general influence of a foreign government,” said our top spy before being forced to backtrack on his comments because it triggered a tongue lashing from the Chinese-Canadian community and politicians from coast-to-coast.

What Fadden was saying was not new because it has been said many times before in reports, analysis and interviews across the globe.

It is however alarming that our naïve politicians don’t and won’t believe what Fadden said is happening.
So they demand for proof, fully well knowing that evidence and human sources gathered in the intelligence game, will for the most part always be kept confidential.

The Asian Pacific Post and its sister papers have for the past decade chronicled incidents, interviews and reports to show how China’s agents of influence have been infiltrating Canada.

We have shown how an assortment of front men from tycoons to Triad members infiltrate Canada’s business, political and financial infrastructure.

Despite this litany of reports the naïve, gullible and influenced keep their heads buried in the sand, with some camouflaging China’s efforts as engagement, instead of infiltration.

The recent comments by CSIS boss Fadden also prompted a terse reply from Prime Minister Stephen Harper’ office which stated it did not know what our top spy was talking about.

Obviously no one checked Harper’s attack at the Liberals back in June 2005 when he accused the Liberal government of the day of not addressing the presence of Chinese industrial spies during question period.

“Today the former head of the CSIS Asia desk confirmed reports from defectors that close to 1000 Chinese government agent spies have infiltrated Canada,” Harper said then.

Harper quoted the former CSIS official, Michel Juneau-Katsuya, as believing Chinese spies cost Canada $1 billion every month through industrial espionage. Juneau-Katsuya oversaw the CSIS Asia desk during the mid-1990s.

How soon we forget. That’s perhaps why Chinese spies like us.

Hi Ian,

The Security Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC or the Committee) was established in 1984 as an independent, external review body which reports to the Parliament of Canada on the performance of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS or the Service). The current members apart from the director are not civil servants but respected independent members of the public so the analogy of a ‘Yes Minister’ situation is highly unlikely. Recent media reports on Operation Sidewinder and the fact they may be ” singing the same song today that they were a decade ago”, is not a confirmation that Sidewinder had substance. However that is not to say there is none. A former Liberal MP says former Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff stopped him from calling witnesses and submitting evidence in a parliamentary hearing last year that would have pointed to Chinese influence on Canadian politicians. If Canada is indeed heavily influenced by China, it appears to have done them little good in regards to trade and political standing with China.
I am sure that NZ intelligence, civil service and politicians are well aware of how China plays the game, and how to respond to it and possible equal and or even outplay them at it. Internationals relations is very akin to marriage you have to trust each other as the relationship matures and deepens but at the same time not be willfully blind to actions of the other which are contrary to that relationship and which endanger it.

Mar 31, 2012 23:15

“I am sure that NZ intelligence, civil service and politicians are well aware of how China plays the game, and how to respond to it and possible equal and or even outplay them at it.”

Sadly, NZ – particularly at MFAT level – has proven clumsy in the past and utterly unaware of embarrassments that Investigate magazine had to bring to their attention, (see http://www.investigatemagazine.com/march00pres.htm ).

I won’t bother reprinting the Yang Liu scandal that Investigate broke, or the fact that we were first to confirm the criminality behind the original Crafar Farms deal consortium out of China.

The latest Investigate contains some diplomatic cables revealing NZ is aware of China’s punch, but doesn’t actually know how to deal with it.

You are right, of course, when you say “Internationals relations is very akin to marriage you have to trust each other as the relationship matures and deepens but at the same time not be willfully blind to actions of the other which are contrary to that relationship and which endanger it.” BUT, it’s the responsibility of the Fourth Estate to wake sleepy NZ career diplomats and trade officials up to the real world.

Even Paul Buchanan agrees on this: http://www.nbr.co.nz/article/huawei-nz-almost-certainly-front-chinese-intelligence-defence-analyst-rv-114974

I’m all for good relations with Beijing, and my children are getting private tuition in Mandarin as a recognition of the growing importance of that relationship, but my experience at a political level leaves me with few illusions that Sir Humphrey in NZ is as astute as he needs to be when it comes to Chinese ambitions.

PS..was just perusing the James Riady story I wrote 12 years ago…and I think this passage shows MFAT was as dumb then as it possibly remains now (all of the following is from the article):

…”Finally and most importantly, US intelligence agencies report that one of Mr Riady’s chief business partners, China Resources, is an intelligence gathering agency of the communist Chinese Government.”

It is this revelation that poses a grave problem for the New Zealand Government. Intelligence briefings prepared for the then Prime Minister Jenny Shipley and released to Investigate do not reveal any link between China Resources and Chinese Intelligence. Indeed, the New Zealand briefing reads as though it could have been prepared by Chinese Intelligence, judging by its innocuous contents:

“The Lippo Group has a strategic position in China and Hong Kong with substantial investments and relationships with powerful business and government people and organizations.

“It owns 49% of the Hong Kong Chinese Bank with the remaining 51% held by China Resources (Holdings) which is a wholly-owned enterprise of China’s Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation.”

Which raises the question: was the New Zealand Government sucked in to beginning a relationship with James Riady on the basis of flawed intelligence?

What is the ongoing implication of that if such flaws are not corrected?

And just how bad was the NZ intelligence?

Canadian Governments Have ‘Failed Abominably’ On China: Ex-CSIS Director Richard Fadden

Richard Fadden called the success rate on this foreign policy front “pretty low.”

Nov 28, 2019

Richard Fadden at Senate national security and defence committee in Ottawa on April 27, 2015.

OTTAWA — The former director of Canada’s spy agency says recent Conservative and Liberal governments have “failed abominably” on foreign policy work with China.

Richard Fadden, who led the Canadian Security Intelligence Service until his retirement in 2016, told an audience Thursday that he sat in on cabinet meetings for years “listening to ministers and prime ministers trying to come up with foreign policy.”

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“The success rate has been pretty low” for each government, he said on a panel at the Summit on Canada’s Global Leadership in Ottawa.

The frank words by the ex-national security adviser to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and former prime minister Stephen Harper come a day after U.S. President Donald Trump signed a bipartisan bill supporting pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong.

Watch: China furious after Trump signs Hong Kong legislation. Story continues below video.

“Mr. Harper’s government, Mr. Trudeau’s government both tried very hard to articulate a Canadian policy… and they both failed abominably because there was no consensus in cabinet at all,” Fadden said. “And there’s no consensus in Canada about the policies.”

Protests in Hong Kong have continued for six months after opposition to a controversial, now-scrapped extradition bill ignited decades of simmering tensions between the semi-autonomous region and Beijing.

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Trudeau called for the “de-escalation of tensions” in Hong Kong back in August, but has remained relatively quiet since. The region is home to approximately 300,000 Canadian citizens.

Two separate issues have exacerbated Canada-China relations in the last year: Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou’s arrest at the Vancouver International Airport and her ensuing extradition hearing; and the continued Chinese detention of Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor.

The relationship between the two countries has turned frosty. In May, China’s former ambassador to Canada described bilateral relations to be at “rock bottom.”

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau hold their meeting at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing, China on Aug. 31, 2016.

Fadden said Canada doesn’t have close relations with countries that don’t share similar principles, suggesting that strategic diplomacy could make the country less isolated.

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He recently identified China and Russia as two “biggies” among states that are “prepared to use virtually any means to attain their goals.”

“Our values are not always shared by the rest of the planet,” Fadden told the crowd. “We have a bad habit of simply assuming that we are correct and everybody else is wrong.”

Fadden said in the three years since he retired, conversations he’s had around the world about Canada have reflected little praise for Canadian diplomacy. “We have a reputation of lecturing the planet. And that’s not enough. Telling people they’re not doing things properly is not good enough.”

Panellist Bob Rae, former interim leader of the federal Liberal party, agreed. Canada needs to engage with the world by contributing more resources or risk not being taken seriously, he said, suggesting there’s little value in being the “best sermonizers in the world.”

He added the government shouldn’t feel intimidated to be upfront with the public and state it doesn’t have a position on Hong Kong. But the “dramatic shift” in China’s foreign policy will likely impact the entire world, he said.

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Canada's Special Envoy to Myanmar Bob Rae takes part in a news conference in Ottawa on April 3, 2018.

Chinese government and Hong Kong officials have repeatedly dismissed international opposition to its handling of human rights and democratic issues as “unwarranted” interventions into its internal affairs.

Rae suggested another avenue for criticism: China’s promise to the world of “one country, two systems.”

“That is an area where one can say to the Chinese, look, we’re not interfering in your country. We’re discussing with you a commitment that you made internationally to other countries and the United Nations… let’s have that discussion.”

The Liberal government hit reset on its foreign policy last week.