Carney says Canada was involved 'from the start' in NATO spy investigation

Carney says Canada was involved 'from the start' in NATO spy investigation

'Lessons' should be learned from situations like this, prime minister says

Canadian officials were involved in the investigation of an intern accused of spying at NATO's military headquarters from the outset, Prime Minister Mark Carney said on Wednesday.

He said "lessons" should be taken from situations like this, but stopped short of saying that the country's security screening process was being reviewed in light of the allegations.

A Canadian woman was recently arrested by Belgian authorities on suspicion of espionage.

The European country did not release her name as part of the judicial process and only stated that she was a "Canadian national of Chinese origin."

Canada involved 'from the start' in investigation of NATO intern accused of spying: Carney

A CBC News investigation, however, has identified the woman as Biwei Zhang, a systems engineer with a background in economics. Her online resumé suggests she previously worked for the Canadian Space Agency and Statistics Canada.

Her public and professional profiles match the information Belgian prosecutors provided. The agency refused to comment on the CBC investigation.

Zhang was an intern at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), the military headquarters of NATO in Mons, Belgium.

In his first public comments since the arrest, Carney said the matter is before the courts, but suggested Canadian security officials were not caught flat-footed.

"It's an active investigation, so I'm limited in what I can say," the prime minister said.

"The only thing I would add cryptically is that the Canadian officials have been involved from the start. Draw your own conclusions."

Carney didn't elaborate, but the RCMP is on the public record as saying it is co-operating with Belgian authorities.

Canadian NATO spying suspect raises questions about country’s security screening

The allegations have not been proven in court. Zhang is currently being held in custody with a further closed-door hearing to be held in Brussels next week.

Security sources, speaking to media in Europe, including the Reuters news agency, have said the intern allegedly exhibited suspicious behaviour that drew the attention of NATO's internal security services.

She was, according to the publication Le Soir, excessively curious about her colleagues, had a tendency to enter areas where she was not authorized and apparently accessed files outside her professional remit in SHAPE's IT Department.

Someone working in that section would normally have broad access to the systems that support NATO's strategic military headquarters, including network operations, cybersecurity and data centre servers.

However, interns do not have as much freedom as full-time staff members and would be subject to closer supervision and face restricted access permissions.

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While significant spying cases involving NATO are not uncommon, the arrest of someone working inside Western alliance's own institutional structure is exceedingly rare, said Keir Giles, an associate fellow at U.K.-based Chatham House.

The last publicly acknowledged one was in 2012 where a man identified only as Manfred K. by German authorities attempted to sell classified information to Russian intelligence. He was a civilian IT specialist and was stopped before anything was handed over.

You'd have to go back to Cold War to find other comparable examples, including the landmark case of Rainer Rupp, a West German economist employed at NATO headquarters who through the 1970s, '80s and '90s passed highly classified alliance documents to East Germany's foreign intelligence service, which shared them with Russia's KGB.

There was also the case of George Pâques, a French national who over several years leaked hundreds of classified NATO documents to Moscow before being arrested in 1963.

The so-called Pâques Affair forced NATO to overhaul many of its security procedures and remains one of the alliance's foundational counter-intelligence cases.

Giles said it's not clear whether NATO's spy catchers and security procedures are air-tight — or whether suspected cases were handled quietly by removing the access of suspects before anything happens.

"There's no doubt that NATO headquarters will be a priority target for a lot of unpleasant people around the world," Giles said.

"It is striking how rarely this is actually intercepted and announced publicly."

Senior reporter, defence and security

Murray Brewster is the senior defence writer for CBC News, based in Ottawa. He has covered the Canadian military and foreign policy from Parliament Hill for over a decade. Among other assignments, he spent a total of 15 months on the ground covering the Afghan war for The Canadian Press. Prior to that, he covered defence issues and politics for CP in Nova Scotia for 11 years and was bureau chief for Standard Broadcast News in Ottawa.