20080428/新华社第一位驻外女记者在加拿大被调查

根据4月21日环球邮报的报导,随着最近一批“绝密”档案的解密,张海燕(Haiyan Zhang,音译)女士的案件再次使得人们聚焦于中国间谍问题。直到现在为止,加拿大政府还未能彻底信任张女士,也不让她参与机密级别较低的工作。现在她一直待在家里,等待着安全部门的调查结果。同时她也在与加拿大政府因此事而打官司。

现年45岁的张女士曾经在渥太华参加了一些中国大使馆举办的活动,同时与一位中国外交官保持着友谊。作为前中共喉舌的新华社员工,她还参加了几次新华社资助的活动。在张女士获得加拿大公民身份以后,她还在8年中往返中国8次。同时根据情报部门的资料,她在几年前曾经从美国驻埃及官员那里收到了一个里面藏有700美元的镜框。

新华社记者的礼物事件

1963年出生的张女士声称在学生时代她就对英语有偏爱。因为她在学校的高分,使得新华社招纳她成为该社最早的女性国外通讯员之一。按照张女士的说法,她在新华社的大多数的时间都辛勤工作,将国外的新闻报导翻译给国内使用。

早在90年代初期,张女士去了开罗工作。在那时,她说她与一位在美国大使馆工作的名为鲍勃(Bob)的男士成为了朋友。她请他帮忙,最终进入了美国的大学念书。作为回报,该男士要求张女士给出一份写作样本。张女士称她写了“一个手写的文章描绘在新华社中的例行政治学习会议”,文章内容包括描述她的上司因为拒绝了她写的共产主义在欧洲崩溃的文章,而要求她多写一些中东方面的故事等。鲍勃先生和他的妻子显然对她的友谊很感激。张女士称,“在我回到中国以后,我惊奇地发现,他们因为我离开而送我的镜框之内夹有700美元。”

根据加拿大情报审查委员会(SIRC)的说法,那个从美国驻开罗大使馆的鲍勃先生赠送她700美元礼物的故事“非常不一般且难以令人相信”,同时SIRC还发现张女士无法回忆起她的这个朋友具体姓什么。SIRC说这个礼品事件引发了可靠性问题,因为“它好像是美国政府偷偷摸摸地对原告提供的消息进行了补偿。”SIRC的报告提出了疑问,“为何她偏要去选择一个在新华社内部学习中的讨论来作为她的主题?中共政府并不想让手写件的主题被发表出去。”

西方的情报机构经常将新华社与情报机关等同。在一份机密报告中显示,在2005年7天的秘密听证以后,当时就任SIRC的主席保罗-格西亚(Paule Gauthier)鼓励对此产生的关注,“作为新华社的前员工,该女士可能帮其他国家从事情报活动。”

枢密院事件

在一次科威特的新闻任务中,张女士在一个新闻人士常去的酒吧中遇见了一位加拿大人。1995年两人结婚并迁至渥太华。在这以后,张女士成立了一个名为“Chinabridge Communications”的组织,该组织名义上是一家谘询公司,客户包括一些公司及联邦部门。但这个公司主要是帮助这些机构进入中国。而张女士称,“只有参加大使馆及新华社组织的一些活动才能达到目的,而且这类活动她也只参加过几次。”

在2002年,加联邦工业部雇用了张女士。在张女士的一个文档中,她写道,“我精准地拥有加拿大政府需要的才能,我还是特殊的加拿大少数族裔的一员。”有文件显示,很快枢密院(对政府提供谘询的正式机构,PCO)就对她感兴趣,一位官员诱惑她加入PCO,并保证在2年内她能学到在其他政府部门一辈子都学不到的东西。自那时开始,她在枢密院中任职高级分析师,而分析师必须在政府的会议中出席。但是在2003年的8月,PCO突然开除了张女士。

当时的情形是,一位警卫要求她离开她的桌子,并将所有的东西都留在那里。但是,张女士在一个法庭的文件中说,“我从未,将来也不会,泄露任何的信息…将与加拿大利益有关的东西泄露给任何人。”
 
SIRC的报告显示,张女士还曾经想将在她渥太华办公桌上内有加拿大政府有关资料的CD-ROM带走,但是SIRC并没有指明(资料的)具体内容。而且在她被指认为“与那些可能和情报收集活动相关的驻外代表有经常联系”之前,张女士与新华社及一位“石姓”的中国大使馆官员有特定的社交联系。这位男士还被描述为“主要的贸易代表”。

加拿大中国间谍事件曾被热议

加拿大安全情报局(CSIS)在一年前,其负责人金-佳德(Jim Judd)与加拿大参议院国家安全和国防事务委员会进行了谈话。

参议员罗德(Rod Zimmer)询问佳得先生,“其他国家往我们国家派遣(情报)人员吗?我假设他们会…”
 
佳德说,“是的,他们是来到这里。。。奇怪的是特别活跃的旅行者人数之多和他们来自的地方。我不想做出政治性的错误,所以我不对这些具体的国家点名了,但是在这方面,在一个特定的时间,大约有15个国家是我们比较感兴趣的,人数时多时少,要看当时的情形。”

参议员克林-肯尼(Colin Kenny),“ 可以不用怀疑的说,去评论我们看到的有关中国人和他们在这个国家进行的有攻击性的活动的报告不是错误的。政府已经对此进行了公开的评论。”佳德先生则表示他们是15个国家中的一个,而且位于名单的最上面。当被问到处理中国间谍活动是否占了你们大约50%的时间的时候,佳德先生承认,“接近这个数字。”

在去年五月,针对以上谈话,加拿大通讯社、渥太华公民报、多伦多星报、环球邮报等加拿大主流媒体纷纷聚焦外国间谍问题。环球邮报的报导说,“尽管情报局主任不愿直接指出间谍的来源国家。。。但是,国家安全和国防参议院委员会的主席肯尼先生却说,当公众报导都查询到了在加拿大‘有侵略性的’的间谍计划是由中国人进行的时候,不指出中国这个国家,几乎是不合适的。”多伦多星报则报导,“两年前,在澳洲寻求庇护的中国官员称,中国在加拿大派驻了数千名间谍和线人,主要分布于温哥华和多伦多;在哈珀总理还是反对党主席的时候曾断言在加拿大的中国间谍可达一千名。”

在去年6月前中共驻澳大使馆官员陈用林访加期间,更是针对这个问题做出了评论,使得该问题成为当时全加的热议话题。

*张海燕女士的简历:
1963:生于中国大陆的兰州
1998:获得中国大学的新闻系硕士学位
1989:成为中共国家新闻机构,新华社的第一位驻外女记者
1989-91:新华社驻开罗记者
1995-1999: 移居加拿大,创立一个名为Chinabridge Communications的谘询机构,并获得了渥太华大学经济管理学硕士学位
1999: 获得加拿大公民身份
2002: 成为加拿大政府部门雇员,最开始在加拿大工业部工作
2003年2月: 被雇佣为枢密院(Privy Council Office)的高级分析员
2003年8月:在加拿大安全情报局进行安全调查之后,被枢密院解雇。
2003年11月:在裁决组听完张的申诉后,她再次获得了一个涉及国家安全性较小的政府工作。
2005: 在秘密听证后,情报审查委员会(Security Intelligence Review Committee)支持加拿大安全情报局做出的将张女士从枢密院辞退的决定。
2006: 联邦政府给张女士安排了一个不是要害部门的工作,但是最后被告知回家等候另一个新的安全调查。
2008: 加拿大服务部的一名女发言人称调查还在继续。

(责任编辑:于飞)         
http://www.aboluowang.com/news/data/2008/0424/article_47029.html

Loyal civil servant or threat to national security?

Recently declassified documents reveal how several Ottawa agencies worked to rid the bureaucracy of one of its rising stars

Haiyan Zhang was a rising star in the federal bureaucracy, until a security guard escorted her from her Ottawa office. She was ordered to leave everything behind.

Six months into her job as an analyst for the Privy Council Office, a sensitive department that’s like Ottawa’s nerve centre, a series of red flags had gone up. Now, nearly five years later, documents obtained by The Globe and Mail reveal the specifics of why the Chinese-born Ms. Zhang was declared a threat to national security – and summarily fired.

The declassified documents, once marked “top secret” but now filed in Federal Court, yield a rare insight into how, in an era of escalating concern about Beijing’s spies, several Ottawa agencies worked to rid the bureaucracy of one perceived threat, Ms. Zhang. Even so, she remains on the government’s payroll, having successfully grieved her 2003 ouster. But she has not yet persuaded the government to let her show up to a less sensitive job on a continuing basis; she is being paid to stay home most days, pending the outcome of a new security-clearance investigation, expected shortly.

Confident, attractive and trilingual, Ms. Zhang, now 45, had raised eyebrows with her attendance at some Chinese embassy functions in Ottawa and her friendship with a Chinese diplomat. She had also attended gatherings sponsored by her former employer, Xinhua, the state-controlled Chinese news service. The fact that she had visited China eight times in eight years after getting her Canadian citizenship was deemed noteworthy as well.

Security-intelligence agents also fixated on a financial transaction – what they allege was a strange $700 gift Ms. Zhang received years earlier from U.S. officials in Egypt who included the money along with a picture frame and mailed it to her.

Foreign correspondent

“I pose no past, current or future threat to Canada,” Ms. Zhang wrote in court-filed documents, which lay out her life story and legal defence.

Never charged with any crime, she launched a wrongful-dismissal case that landed in Federal Court. Her lawyer has said she will make no public comments until the case is completely resolved.

Born in China in 1963, Ms. Zhang says she loved learning English as a student, especially after Canadian émigrés introduced her to Shakespeare. Top marks in school, she says, led Xinhua to hire her as one of the agency’s first female foreign correspondents.

Western counterintelligence agencies often liken Xinhua to an intelligence agency, but Ms. Zhang says she was merely a journalist. Most days were filled with drudgery, she says, rewriting foreign news reports for consumption in China.

During the early 1990s, while still in her 20s, she was posted to Cairo. She found life in the Xinhua compound there difficult. It reminded her of a “miniature repressive Chinese society,” she says in documents filed in her defence. She stresses: “I was NOT a Communist party member.”

While in Cairo, she says she befriended a man named Bob who worked at the U.S. embassy. She asked for his help getting into U.S. universities. In turn, he requested she give him a writing sample.

Ms. Zhang says she came up with “a handwritten piece describing a routine, political study session at the Xinhua bureau” – including how her bosses were asking for more stories from the Middle East as they rejected pieces on the collapse of Communism in Europe.

Bob and his wife apparently appreciated Ms. Zhang’s friendship. “After I returned to China, to my surprise, I found US $700.00 in the package containing the picture frame they had given me as a going-away gift,” she writes.

Before she left the Egyptian compound, she says, her bosses had kept close tabs on her, fearing she might be drawn to Western ideals or, worse, Western men.

During a rare out-of-country assignment to Kuwait, however, Ms. Zhang met a Canadian at a hotel bar frequented by foreign correspondents.

In 1995, they married and moved to Ottawa. After arriving, Ms. Zhang started Chinabridge Communications, a consultancy whose clients included corporations and federal agencies.

The idea was to help them make inroads into China. Given the job, Ms. Zhang says, it only made sense to attend some embassy functions – and some parties held by Xinhua. Her attendance was sporadic, she says.

In 2002, Industry Canada – a former client – hired Ms. Zhang, now a citizen. “I was precisely the kind of talent the Government of Canada needed,” she writes in her filings, “especially as a member of the visible minority community.”

The PCO soon poached her. Filings show that one official who enticed her to join promised she would learn more in two years at the PCO than in an entire career anywhere else in the government.

Officials recall the analyst being a forceful presence in government meetings. But in August, 2003, the PCO took the extremely rare step of firing Ms. Zhang.

Credibility problems

Ms. Zhang writes she had just gotten back from a trip to China, her eighth taken between 1995 and 2003. This time, she says, she had gone over to attend her brother’s funeral and also donated 200 schoolbags to poor children.

Regardless, a security guard told her to leave her desk and leave behind everything on it. Five years later, Ms. Zhang is still fighting that decision. “I have never, nor will I ever, divulge any information … about Canada to anyone that could compromise the interest of the country,” she says in court documents.

The PCO acted on the advice of Canadian intelligence, which spent six months studying Ms. Zhang’s background – a standard check to see whether a civil servant merits “secret” clearance. The Security Intelligence Review Committee, a watchdog body, ended up backing the intelligence investigation completely.

After seven days of secret hearings in 2005, the SIRC chairwoman of the time, Paule Gauthier, upheld all the concerns. “As a former employee of Xinhua, the complainant may have engaged in intelligence activities on behalf of a foreign state,” reads the once-secret report.

It mentions certain social contacts Ms. Zhang made with Xinhua and with a specific Chinese embassy official – a Mr. Shi, described as the “principal trade representative” – before concluding that she “appears to maintain regular contact with foreign representatives who may be involved in intelligence collection activities.”

The SIRC report then goes on to highlight credibility problems. The story of the $700 gift from “Bob” at the U.S. embassy in Cairo was “highly unusual and unbelievable,” according to SIRC, which found it odd that Ms. Zhang couldn’t remember her friend’s last name.

SIRC says the gift raised questions of trustworthiness, as it “gave rise to the appearance the complainant was compensated surreptitiously for the information” by the U.S. government.

“Why would she choose a subject that had been discussed at an internal study session by Xinhua?” asks the SIRC report. “The Chinese government did not want the subject matter of the handwritten piece to be published.”

A CD-ROM Ms. Zhang wanted to take from her Ottawa desk contained information that belonged to the Canadian government, according to SIRC, but it did not divulge precisely what it was.

‘SHE WAS SOMEONE WHO WAS NEVER GOING TO DISAPPEAR INTO THE CROWD’

The Canadian government may consider Haiyan Zhang a threat to national security, but a prominent movie producer in Montreal thinks better of her.

“She was the best student I ever had,” said Kevin Tierney in an interview. In a strange wrinkle to the national-security case, the man behind 2006’s record-setting Canadian film, Bon Cop, Bad Cop,said he taught Ms. Zhang advanced English in China while working abroad in the early 1980s.

Mr. Tierney distinctly recalled meeting Ms. Zhang. He and his wife were teaching English in Lanzhou, 36 hours from Beijing by train. At the time, China wasn’t anywhere as open to the West as it is today.

But the drive of one teenager, Ms. Zhang, always stood out. “I thought of her as by far the most ambitious,” Mr. Tierney said.

He recalled teaching Shakespeare’s Macbeth to the class. Subversively, he drew parallels between Mao Zedong and his wife and the bloody ambition of the tragedy’s namesake couple. In his narrative, premier Zhou Enlai assumed the role of Banquo, the friend betrayed by the couple.

The theme was pretty radical for the time, especially for young Chinese students cowed by the Cultural Revolution and its fallout. Yet Ms. Zhang was receptive to the literature and the debates it prompted.

“For a young woman, she had loads of confidence, when you weren’t supposed to stand out,” Mr. Tierney said. “She was someone who was never going to disappear into the crowd.”

Mr. Tierney returned to Canada and produced movies. His English student became a foreign correspondent. Eventually, she married a Canadian and moved to Ottawa.

Once established, she looked up her old English teachers. To Mr. Tierney, it was gratifying to see his former student living out her dreams. But in 2003, federal officials fired Ms. Zhang after branding her a possible espionage threat.

“I went from complete shock – and then it became sort of outrageous,” said Mr. Tierney, who still occasionally dines at the Zhang house in Ottawa. He noted his friend still doesn’t know the full case against her.

“At the very least, to be held in abeyance this long seems to me to be cruel and unusual punishment,” Mr. Tierney said. He said that, when it comes to Ms. Zhang, he is now less inclined to think of Shakespeare than of another writer.

“It’s Kafkaesque,” he said.

Colin Freeze

Zhang at a glance

Haiyan Zhang’s career has including working as a foreign correspondent in Egypt, an analyst’s role inside a sensitive Canadian government department and, most recently, a five-year legal battle to go back to work for Ottawa after she was branded a security threat.

1963: Born in Lanzhou, China

1998: Earns a master’s degree at the China School of Journalism

1989: Becomes the first female foreign correspondent for Xinhua, China’s state-run news agency

1989-91: Reports for the Xinhua bureau in Cairo

1995-1999: Emigrates to Canada, starts Chinabridge Communications, a consultancy. Earns a master’s of business administration from the University of Ottawa

1999: Receives Canadian citizenship

2002: Joins the Canadian civil service, starting at Industry Canada

February, 2003: Hired by the Privy Council Office as a senior analyst

August, 2003: Escorted from her office and fired, following a security-screening investigation by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service

November, 2003: An adjudicator hears her grievance and gives Ms. Zhang another job, with a lesser security clearance

2005: After secret hearings, the Security Intelligence Review Committee upholds the CSIS investigation to fire Ms. Zhang from the PCO

2006: The federal government assigns Ms. Zhang to a less sensitive job. She works for only a few days at Service Canada before she is told to go home and await the outcome of a new security investigation

2008: A Service Canada spokeswoman says the investigation is continuing

Colin Freeze

CSIS and Chinese agents

The Canadian government’s five-year legal battle with an employee deemed to be an espionage threat is taking place at a time when counterintelligence agents complain that the Chinese agents are keeping them very busy. Jim Judd, director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, had the following exchange with the Senate Committee on National Security and Defence one year ago.

Senator Rod Zimmer: Do other countries send individuals into our country? I presume they do…

Mr. Judd: Yes, they do come here. … It is sometimes surprising the number of hyperactive tourists we get here and where they come from. I do not want to be politically incorrect, so I will not name specific countries, but at any given time there are maybe 15 countries that would be of interest to us in that regard. It ebbs and flows, depending on issues.

Senator Zimmer: Is it equal, or is there a fair number of individuals who come from certain countries?

Mr. Judd: There does tend to be a concentration of sorts, yes.

The Chairman

(Senator Colin Kenny): Surely it is not politically incorrect to comment on the public reports we have seen about the Chinese and what is reputed to be an aggressive program that they have in this country. The government has commented on this publicly.

Mr. Judd: They would be one of the 15 countries.

The Chairman: Are they at the top of the list?

Mr. Judd: Pretty much.

The Chairman: Do they take up 50 per cent of your time?

Mr. Judd: Close to it.

(Colin Freeze)

http://www.aboluowang.com/news/data/2008/0424/article_47029.html

环球邮报:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080421.wzhang21/BNStory/National/?&pageRequested=all&print=true _(博讯记者:晴续) (博讯 boxun.com)

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