(This
column was published in the North
Shore News on
Oct. 13, 1999)
Report
raises concerns over gov’t, triad links
By Leo Knight
BY
nature, I'm not a conspiracy theorist.
Nor
do I see bogeymen around every corner. But the events of the
past couple of months have me wondering what's going on.
The
boatloads of refugees from the Fujian province of the People's
Republic of China have focused a lot of attention on Asian
immigration especially the illegal kind.
The
issue of illegal alien smuggling and the influence of Asian
organized crime was underlined by the revelations of former
foreign services officer Brian MacAdam and RCMP Corp. Robert
Read concerning corruption in our Hong Kong consular operations
and reaching into the upper echelons of the federal government.
Then
came the shocking disclosure of the CSIS investigation into
high-level links between triad gangsters and senior levels of
the Chinese government and the connections to Canada.
The
project, dubbed Sidewinder, was designed to look into suspicions
that the Beijing government and Hong Kong-based criminal gangs
were actively making political contributions in Canada, forging
links with elected officials and attempting to purchase a
Chinese-language media outlet for propaganda purposes.
Launched
in 1995, Sidewinder was inexplicably terminated in 1997 because
of concerns of political interference.
Last
week came a story in the Toronto Globe & Mail
claiming the director general of CSIS, Barry Denofsky, ordered
the destruction of all copies of the report and, amazingly, all
other material associated with the file -- e-mails, drafts,
notes and all other bits and pieces with any link to the
investigation.
CSIS
spokesman Phillip Gibson confirmed the destruction of the
material, saying, "We do not report conspiracy theories ...
rumour and innuendo."
What
would be the point of saving it, Gibson said in a media
interview.
According
to my sources, there were a lot of good reasons to save it even
if the agency disagreed with its conclusions. Realistically,
it's inconceivable that a bureaucrat would destroy anything
unless there was a cover-up of some sort. Frankly, it's against
the religion of the civil service, not to mention federal
legislation governing how long files are to be kept and when
they can be accessed.
The
Sidewinder report concluded that CSIS and the federal government
needed to recognize that the People's Republic of China and the
triads were increasing their holdings in Canada through
legitimate business entities and the national security of this
country could be affected.
Yet,
if CSIS management felt the report was little more than rumour
and innuendo, why then did CSIS publish a report in 1998
analyzing the aims of the Chinese government?
The
report, authored by Holly Porteous, a specialist analyst in
tracking missile and nuclear-related trade in China, Taiwan, and
the Korean peninsula, looks at the so-called united front
strategy espoused by Mao Tse-tung and re-instituted by Deng Xiao
Ping to expand the influence of the Chinese Communist Party.
Hong
Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) has been a
challenging test for the modern day application of united front
strategy by China.
United
front work in Hong Kong and elsewhere aims to extend the
influence of the Chinese Communist Party by winning over
non-Communist community leaders and using them to neutralize
party critics, Porteous said in her report.
Because
they are international in scope and occasionally coercive,
activities associated with this work can amount to interference
in the internal affairs of other nations, she continued.
The
united front strategy is defined in the Porteous report: United
front work is essentially about taking power from a position of
weakness. Temporary alliances of convenience with non-Communist
entities empowered a fledgling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to
first establish and then maintain its hold on power in China.
Rather
than "kicking out in all directions," the party
identified elements of Chinese society it could ally with to
destroy the handful of "die-hard" elements who posed
the greatest threat to its existence.
In
this manner, the voice of one political adversary after another
was systematically quieted.
Later,
having established the Peoples' Republic, the CCP continued to
use the united front to ensure that no potential opposition bloc
could exist for long outside the party-dominated system.
Porteous'
analysis demonstrates how the temporary alliances of convenience
were in fact the major Hong Kong and Macau triads who were given
the wink by the government to continue their illegal activities
with the proviso they would not work against the aims of the
communist government of China.
But
this is not simply an effort by the communist Chinese government
to solidify control in post-takeover Hong Kong, nor is it simply
about repatriating Taiwan.
Let's
go back to the Porteous report.
Inducing
Chinese abroad, by threat or by appeal to patriotism, to conduct
economic and technical espionage is also an aim of united front
work, says the CSIS report.
This
is frightening stuff.
It
becomes even more frightening in light of the allegations by
MacAdam and Read and the subsequent cessation of the Sidewinder
investigation and destruction of all relevant documentation.
CSIS investigators are angry about what's going on. They asked their superiors for the resources to conduct a full-blown investigation into the information derived from Sidewinder. But they were shut down. The speculation as to why has much to do with the energy and political capital the prime minister has poured into cultivating improved trade ties and business investment with the communist government of China.
Clearly the government doesn't want any light shone on any of this. Equally clear is the need to get to the bottom of this mess.
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