Dechert emails underline need to guard against Chinese espionage: Expert
OTTAWA — Amidst the brewing scandal that is slowly enveloping the Harper government over the supposedly “flirtatious” emails of a Tory MP with a foreign journalist who may actually be a Chinese spy, two questions stand out.
Why hasn’t Prime Minister Stephen Harper dumped Toronto MP Bob Dechert yet from his privileged post as parliamentary secretary to the foreign affairs minister?
And if this affair isn’t stickhandled delicately, will this embarrassing episode mushroom into a much bigger problem that threatens to derail Harper’s plan to repair Canada-China relations?
Foreign policy and security experts said Wednesday that the answers aren’t clear, but at the very least, Harper should now recognize that Canada needs to reinforce its intelligence apparatus to guard against Chinese espionage.
Brock University professor Charles Burton, a former political and economic counsellor in the Canadian embassy in China from 1998 to 2000, said it’s clear the Asian economic giant will continue to conduct espionage.
Already, this has occurred in areas such as commerce, the military and the cyber sphere. Earlier this year, just a few blocks from Parliament Hill, the computer system of a key government department — the Treasury Board — was apparently infiltrated by hackers believed to be based in China.
And Burton confirmed that — while experts are now puzzling over why Dechert chose to have a very friendly relationship with Xinhua news agency’s Toronto correspondent, Shi Rong — it was clear to him as a diplomat in Beijing that he should be wary of such activities.
“Before I left, I received a briefing from the security people in Foreign Affairs talking about exactly this sort of thing. When I was a diplomat in China I was occasionally approached by young women through different means — email or instant message — suggesting that we might want to meet up. But I didn’t do that.”
Burton added that the appropriate thing for Dechert to do now would be to “step aside” while the RCMP conducts an investigation.
A key question, he said, would be whether the “young Chinese woman” was sending emails and photos of herself to the much older Dechert simply out of pure romance, or whether she “wants something from him.”
“If I got such letters, as soon as I found out the photographs were from someone from the Xinhua news agency, I would be hitting the delete button pretty quick. Mr. Dechert evidently didn’t appreciate that.”
After initially adopting a hostile approach to China five years ago, the Tory government is now pursuing a foreign policy to promote a stronger trading relationship with that country. Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird visited China recently and Harper is expected to make his second visit there this fall.
“They have to appreciate that we can’t go into it with blind or naive enthusiasm,” Burton said of the Tories.
“As we engage China more closely there’s going to be more opportunity for Chinese intelligence agencies to engage in more spying. Therefore, commensurate to strengthening our capacity to trade and investment with China, we should be strengthening our capacity to counter Chinese espionage activities.”
So far, at least, Harper and Baird are standing by Dechert — a much different approach from the quick retribution that was unleashed on then foreign affairs minister Maxime Bernier in 2008.
At that time, he resigned from cabinet after leaving sensitive NATO briefing papers at the apartment of his girlfriend, Julie Couillard, who had connections to biker gangs.
But this episode is being treated differently.
“No government likes to have to demote a secretary of state or minister if they don’t feel they are absolutely compelled to,” said security expert Wesley Wark, a visiting professor at the University of Ottawa.
“And presumably, from all that we’ve seen from the government’s response, they believe that they can weather this storm, they can pooh-pooh it and they can wait it out.”
Fen Hampson, director of the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University, said Dechert is “damaged goods” and will eventually be shuffled out of his post — though not necessarily now.
“His credibility has obviously been thrown into question. My observation would be they’re not going to throw him overboard today, but he might find himself swabbing decks tomorrow.”
As for the broader question — will Dechert’s actions be injurious to Canada-China relations — experts suspect Harper will do his best to prevent this from happening.
“What they’re trying to avoid is this becoming a hot button issue in which bigger questions are raised about the activities of the Chinese government, or the activities of Chinese representatives,” said Wark.
When Harper first came to power in 2006, his government was fiercely critical of the Chinese government over its human rights record. Also, then-foreign affairs minister Peter MacKay openly accused the Chinese of “economic espionage” in Canada.
Harper backed him up and said the espionage was well-documented, despite angry denials from the Chinese who complained the new Tory prime minister was endangering Canada-China relations with false accusations.
Since then, the Tories have dropped their pubic admonishments, and experts don’t believe they will come out swinging in the case of Dechert.
“The preferred method that they have learned in government is to deal with it quietly and internally,” said Wark.
“What the Harper government now realizes is that there is no point in making a public political brouhaha about Chinese espionage. It’s not going to get you anywhere. It’s not going to stop espionage and doing anything beneficial to Canada-Chinese relations.”
In the case of Dechert, there’s another reason why the Tories are reluctant to accuse the Chinese of establishing a spy operation through their journalist.
“They won’t say that because when you say that, you’re pretty well forced to expel them,” noted Hampson. “And they’ll do the same thing to our journalists. This is a tit for tat world and if you start pointing the finger at spies, then they will end our reciprocal arrangements to the journalists over there.”
Dechert has, in past, had the support of Harper, who he accompanied on a trip to China in 2009 — later receiving the promotion as the right-hand man to Canada’s foreign affairs minister.
But now, the leaked emails have turned him into a liability. The emails show that Dechert was writing to Shi, whose news agency is commonly regarded by experts as a intelligence-gathering operation for the Chinese government.
In the emails, written from his parliamentary office account, he describes her as “beautiful” and compliments her for how she looked in a photo “by the water with your cheeks puffed.”
Dechert, who has not spoken to the media since the emails were leaked last week, released a written statement describing the emails merely as “flirtatious” and that he merely had an innocent “friendship” with Shi.
But experts question Dechert’s political judgment in this regard.
They note that after the Bernier affair, Harper was determined to read the riot act to senior Tories so that there would not be another potential security breach.
Wark isn’t so sure it worked.
“The message should have gotten out to all cabinet ministers and all political appointees, all secretaries of state. You have security responsibilities. You have to be aware of the security landscape and who might be operating against the interests of Canada. You have to be aware that people will contact you who are not what they appear to be, including journalists from foreign countries.”
mkennedy [at] postmedia [dot] com
By on 16/09/2011