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Here's Kovrig's friend playing coy about his intelligence past. >Edith Terry: Michael Kovrig is a friend, and I am very conscious of the privations he has endu

Here's Kovrig's friend playing coy about his intelligence past. >Edith Terry: Michael Kovrig is a friend, and I am very conscious of the privations he has endured. And while his background is complex and possibly included intelligence gathering for the Canadian government during his diplomatic career, he was very open about his research interests and contacts. Kovrig, ex-diplomat working for a NATO funded NGO - textbook spy cover. Spavor's North Korean activities speak for themselves. The charges were Spavor providing Kovrig with photos of classified military equipment. I don't see why folks insist on being such useful idiots and pretend Canada doesn't have intelligence assets in PRC or PRC's formidable counter-intelligence mechanisms developed in last decade that has exposed every CIA asset somehow can't round up a few Canadian spies out of the thousands of Canadian expats in PRC. Canadian Spy Agency CSIS also didn't tweet "Welcome home, #Michaels" is just icing on cake. >https://www.chinafile.com/conversation/will-i-return-china https://www.chinafile.com/conversation/will-i-return-china >https://twitter.com/csiscanada/status/1441571942721593345 https://twitter.com/csiscanada/status/1441571942721593345

dragonelite 5y ago
Every nation has a counter-intelligence dossiers ready to be used in court, some light spying might be tolerated because every nations spies on each other. But when the situation needs it they can grab the known spies as a trump card. This whole Meng situation has shown that rule of law is really flexible and that US lawfare reaches far and deep.
toomanybeersies 5y ago
I won't pretend like I know anything about tradecraft beyond reading Clancy and Forsyth, but I would've thought that "ex-diplomat working for a NATO funded NGO" is about the worst non-official cover one could think of. Textbook spy cover would be a mid-level manager for a Canadian auto parts company, on assignment to the Chinese office.
- dirtyid 5y ago
  >worst non-official cover one could think of. In real life, career diplomats wind up in NGO circles where their skills are more transferrable. NGOs are also easier to spinup where needed and raises less eyebrows when they communicate and develop relevant contacts working within the established track 2/2.5 people to people system. 1000s of NGOs operated in PRC without much scrutiny until the NGO crackdown following CIA purge explicitly to reduce espionage/influence, i.e. Kovrig's International Crisis Group wasn't licensed to operate at the time of his arrest. There's also Spavor publically spamming his NK credentials. The TLDR is that PRC retaliation is calibrated, these two were rounded up because they were the most obvious spies, and while Canada/West can fool public by insisting they're just innocent individuals, to others in the IR community the message is obvious.

dragonelite 5y ago

Every nation has a counter-intelligence dossiers ready to be used in court, some light spying might be tolerated because every nations spies on each other. But when the situation needs it they can grab the known spies as a trump card. This whole Meng situation has shown that rule of law is really flexible and that US lawfare reaches far and deep.

toomanybeersies 5y ago

I won't pretend like I know anything about tradecraft beyond reading Clancy and Forsyth, but I would've thought that "ex-diplomat working for a NATO funded NGO" is about the worst non-official cover one could think of. Textbook spy cover would be a mid-level manager for a Canadian auto parts company, on assignment to the Chinese office.

dirtyid 5y ago
>worst non-official cover one could think of. In real life, career diplomats wind up in NGO circles where their skills are more transferrable. NGOs are also easier to spinup where needed and raises less eyebrows when they communicate and develop relevant contacts working within the established track 2/2.5 people to people system. 1000s of NGOs operated in PRC without much scrutiny until the NGO crackdown following CIA purge explicitly to reduce espionage/influence, i.e. Kovrig's International Crisis Group wasn't licensed to operate at the time of his arrest. There's also Spavor publically spamming his NK credentials. The TLDR is that PRC retaliation is calibrated, these two were rounded up because they were the most obvious spies, and while Canada/West can fool public by insisting they're just innocent individuals, to others in the IR community the message is obvious.