‘In China’s model, anyone and everyone is a potential intelligence asset’

Commentary By Mata Press Service

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 Filipino 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.
Here is a small replay of some of what has happened for those who refuse to believe China’s infiltration of  Canada is real, threatening and happening;
 
• Stanley Ho has always said that there is “no foundation” to reports that claim he is associated with Macau’s triads or organized crime.
In Canada, he has been feted and wooed and given medals by the likes of Jean Chretien, Brian Mulroney and several premiers of British Columbia.
The intelligence data, which has been vehemently denied by Ho, state the operations of the gambling king are intricately linked to Asian organized crime.
A RCMP document called the Asian Organized Crime Roster has him listed as Triad leader while a similar American report put Ho on a watchlist.
During another scandal involving him in the Philippines that caused the stock market to crash, Ho took out ads in Manila newspapers to defend himself from allegations that he was linked to organized crime.
Those allegations stemmed from reports in Canadian government files.
Ho by then was named or listed in several Canadian intelligence databanks including the National Security Register of the Canadian spy agency - CSIS.
In the United States, a report prepared for the Department of Justice by Philip Baridon listed Ho as one of 27 people linked to Asian organized crime who are on an American watchlist. Ho‘s name was removed after his lawyers visited with Department of Justice.
The New South Wales Gaming Licensing Board (now defunct) has a report on Stanley Ho which is stamped “never to be released.“ Its officials have deemed Ho “an unsuitable person to hold a casino licence”
 
• In August 2003, The Filipino Post detailed how in the high-rise glass towers of Vancouver, Tricell (Canada) Inc. and Top Glory Enterprises Ltd., both incorporated in the late ‘80s, worked for the Communist government of China.
Among their jobs was to help facilitate the covert entry of China’s secret police into Vancouver by hoodwinking the Canadian government into believing they were government executives.
The agents were hunting for high profile fugitive businessman, Lai Changxing, who himself was recruited by the Chinese military to spy on Taiwan.
The visitor visas from the bogus business delegation was endorsed by Chinas Ministry of Trade and Economic Co-operation (MOFTEC) - one of the most powerful ministries in the Chinese government, responsible for such vital areas as negotiating China’s entry into the World Trade Organization.

• Then there is the relationship with China’s maritime behemoth - COSCO.
The shipping line is intimately linked to the China International Trust and Investment Corp., a key fundraiser for the Chinese government and a technology-acquiring source for China’s military.
Its vessels have been caught carrying thousands of weapons into California and Chinese missile-technology and biological-warfare components into North Korea, Pakistan, Iraq and Iran, according to U.S. intelligence reports.
Insisting there is no evidence to show COSCO is involved in any illegal activity--the Vancouver Port Authority has a “gateway to North America” deal with the shipping giant.

• When Canada’s Nortel Telecommunications based in Brampton, Ontario wanted to do business in China, they hired Katrina Leung’s company--Merry Glory Ltd.
Little did they know that the 49-year-old corporate matchmaker would be in the limelight several years later accused of having slept her way into the good graces of two FBI agents while stealing secrets for the Chinese government.
Leung, who was paid $1.2 million in 1995 and 1996 for negotiating the Nortel-China deal, has strong connections to Canada’s Chinese business associations.
Around the same time, while the modern day Matahari was greasing the way for Nortel, the Canadian spy agency--CSIS--was conducting an investigation in the offices of Ontario Hydro regarding the theft of information in the nuclear technology field by “an individual of Chinese origin.”
According to a secret intelligence report obtained by The Filipino Post, the individual sent unauthorized faxes, some containing hours worth of data, to a telephone number in the offices of the State Science and Technology Commission of China.
The report said that there were two other cases where Canadian companies have alleged that their employees had been selling industrial secrets to China.
 
• Many in the China trade lobby know of James Ting - a citizen of the world, an entrepreneur who constructed a universe of interrelated companies and finances from Toronto to Tokyo to New York.
Ting was a darling of the Chinese-Canadian trade lobby. Even Chan’s former boss, Jean Chretien had Ting on his Team Canada visits to China.
On the flip side, spy watchers were warning Ottawa without much success, that Ting was China’s frontman to acquire high and medium technology and engage in economic and industrial espionage.
Among the companies Semi-Tech showed as part of its organization were several Chinese state-owned companies, related to military and intelligence activities obviously using what seemed to be a Canadian consumer based company as cover.

• Less than two months after stepping down, former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien was hosted by the state-owned China International Trust and Investment Corp or CITIC which is the communist regimes most politically connected financial and industrial conglomerate.
CITIC’s top dog is Wang Jun, a Chinese princeling who has been linked to everything from illegal arms shipments to illegal campaign donations in the United States.
In a 1997 report entitled, Chinese Military Commerce and U.S. National Security, the RAND Center for Asia Pacific Policy reported that CITIC acts as a shell or front operation on behalf of Chinas Peoples Liberation Army.
The report on CITIC noted that the Beijing-based investment firm had acted as a front for Poly Technologies Inc., an arms manufacturer owned directly by the Chinese army.  According to the Rand Corporation report, Poly Technologies, Ltd., was founded in 1984, ostensibly as a subsidiary of CITIC, although it was later exposed to be the primary commercial arm of the PLA General Staff Departments Equipment Sub-Department.  Throughout the 1980s, Poly sold hundreds of millions of dollars of largely surplus arms around the world, exporting to customers in Thailand, Burma, Iran, Pakistan, and the United States.

• For former Canadian foreign service officer Brian McAdam, the recent comments by CSIS boss McFadden reads like a passage out of a report he worked on for the Canadian spy agency.
McAdam worked on “Project Sidewinder” which was conducted by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and aided by the RCMP between 1994 and 1996.
The conclusions were never publicly released, until leaked to the media amidst allegations that “political influence nixed the project.”
The report was generally ignored by the politicians. It was ahead of its time.
Sidewinder among other things said many of the companies identified by the analysts have contributed “several tens of thousands of dollars to the two traditional political parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives.”
A major financial and brokerage house gave the Liberal party C$20,432.94 in 1994, a large petroleum company owned by a Beijing-friendly tycoon gave more than C$100,000 to the same two parties and political donations were also made by a triad-run Chinese film studio.
At the time of the study, analysts said at least 200 Canadian companies are under the direct or indirect control of China. Today that number is estimated to be about 500.
The report said one China-controlled multinational with assets of more than US$23 billion, had spent more than $500 million buying companies in the forest sector in B.C., petrochemical firms in Alberta and real estate in central Canada.
Sidewinder warned that the Chinese government was taking advantage of growing business and political ties between China and Canada to provide cover for intelligence services.

• A secret police request to probe tycoon Li Ka-shing’s billion-dollar buying spree in Canada was rejected after high-level negotiations between Ottawa and Hong Kong, The Province newspaper reported.
The Special Branch of the Royal Hong Kong Police, concerned about the business activities and political connections of Li, one of the world’s wealthiest men, asked Canada’s spy agency, CSIS, to investigate him in 1988.
Li at the time was buying up large amounts of real estate, including the Expo lands in Vancouver, and acquiring stakes in the gas and oil sector, finance, banking, telecommunications and transportation industries in Canada.
The request was rejected after discussions between the department of foreign affairs in Ottawa, Anne Marie Doyle, the Canadian commissioner to Hong Kong at the time, and Sir David Wilson, who was governor of the former British colony.
Described by various intelligence agencies and in U.S. Senate hearings as a “front man” for communist Beijing, Li’s empire covers the globe.  Li has denied any connection to the People’s Liberation Army.
Despite his denial, a U.S. Senate hearing was told that Li Ka-Shing and his Hong Kong-based company and subsidiaries are closely associated with the Beijing regime and have a history of acting as sources of funding or acting as intermediaries in deals for the People’s Liberation Army.

• Intelligence reports filed with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, the department of external affairs and Immigration Canada as far back as 1992 warned about people-smuggling operations run by triads -- the Chinese mafia -- and their contacts in the Chinese security forces.
People-smuggling syndicates in Canada and the United States have direct links with three Chinese government agencies, investigations by an Australian expert show.
Australian analyst Mark Craig said the syndicates based in Vancouver, Toronto, New York and San Francisco work directly with contacts in the People’s Liberation Army, the People’s Armed Police and the Public Security Bureau to help organize migrants in Fujian province.
Craig, who briefed Immigration Canada and RCMP intelligence officers in Vancouver in 1996 on Chinese people-smuggling rackets, said some of the masterminds are the children of senior Chinese government officials who left Fujian in the early ‘80s.
Despite this information Immigration Minister Elinor Caplan visited Fujian to brief local police and military officials. Some of them were later connected to massive human trafficking syndicate busted by the U.S. government.