Claws of the Panda by Jonathan Manthorpe

Author:Jonathan Manthorpe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cormorant Books Inc.
Published: 2018-12-29T16:00:00+00:00

EIGHT

SNAKEBITE

China remains one of the greatest ongoing threats to Canada’s national security and Canadian industry. There is no longer any doubt that the Chinese Intelligence Services have been able to gain influence on important sectors of the Canadian economy, including education, real estate, high technology, security and many others. In turn, it gives them access to economic, political and some military intelligence of Canada.

— SIDEWINDER REPORT

BRIAN MCADAM WAS a thirty-one-year veteran of the Department of External Affairs in 1991 when he was assigned to the Canadian diplomatic mission in Hong Kong. McAdam has told several interviewers in the years since that he was posted to Hong Kong to root out suspected security problems that appeared to have arisen since Ottawa started the drive to attract immigrants from the British colony in the mid-1980s. A subsequent RCMP disciplinary review committee report tagged the concerns to one incident. There was “a complaint by two Hong Kong residents who indicated they had received an offer to expedite the processing of their visa application from two women who identified themselves as employees of the Mission if they were prepared to make a payment of $10,000 through the intermediary of a local immigration consultant. They declined the offer and complained about it in writing to the Mission but received no response and therefore decided to subsequently complain to the RCMP.”

McAdam soon became convinced that corruption was not confined to this one incident but was rampant, especially among locally hired staff, and that entry visas and residency permits were being sold to Hongkongers for large sums of money. He found that about two thousand blank visas were missing, and he also found counterfeit stamps, ostensibly from Canadian diplomatic missions in other parts of the world, used to validate visa documents. This trail led McAdam to evidence that several Triad members had obtained Canadian visas and had moved their families to Canada despite their known criminal backgrounds. He also began to suspect that the computer system had been hacked in order to doctor the biographies of known criminals. McAdam started firing off reports — thirty-two in all — to senior officials in Ottawa, setting out his evidence as it accumulated. But there was no response from his superiors. McAdam says he only truly understood what he was up against when he got a phone call from one of his contacts in the Royal Hong Kong Police Force charged with combating organized crime, which involved monitoring the telephones of known Triad leaders. “What shocked the Hong Kong policeman was that the Triad member had phoned someone in the Canadian immigration minister’s office in Ottawa,” McAdam said in an interview with the Ottawa Citizen newspaper in 2008. “The officer commented: ‘With that kind of relationship, you’ve got a really serious problem.’” Then, said McAdam, the Hong Kong police officer described the Canadian official telling the Triad boss, “Don’t worry about McAdam. We’ll take care of him.”

Whether or not the taped phone call was the stimulus, in 1993 McAdam was offered a major promotion to a post in Ottawa.

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