Ottawa, Jan. 24 (CNA) Communist Chinese spies stole Canadian nuclear secrets to build a pirate copy of a research reactor, and has been marketing its cheap clone around the world, a Canadian newspaper reported on Monday.
Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. (AECL), the federal Crown corporation that developed the Slowpoke reactor, has shelved its own sales program because it cannot make money on exports, the paper said in a front-page report.
"The Chinese pretty well picked the place clean," the daily quoted a veteran Canadian security officer who investigated the loss of the nuclear secrets.
The report said that in many ways, Beijing's elaborate espionage operations to steal Canadian nuclear power reactor plans parallel its theft of nuclear weapons designs from US government facilities at Los Alamos.
It quoted counterintelligence officers as saying they were aware of communist Chinese interest in stealing Canadian nuclear technology going back to the late 1960s and early 1970s, but only obtained hard evidence of Beijing's success in 1985 when a visiting Canadian scientist from the University of Toronto saw a Slowpoke clone in operation at a lab about 25 kilometers outside Beijing.
According to Cold War veterans, Beijing sent one of its best spies, Bu Chaomin, to Canada, posing as a correspondent for the state-controlled People's Daily newspaper, in the late 1960s.
Bu was an experienced operative with a branch of mainland Chinese intelligence called the United Front, which specializes in recruiting agents from within overseas Chinese communities.
Bu cultivated contacts among Canadians who worked at the Chalk River lab and at other AECL facilities. Mainland China sent other spies to help him when Beijing opened its embassy in Ottawa in 1970. "Nuclear technology was No. 1 on their list of targets," a counterintelligence official was quoted as saying.
Operating under diplomatic cover, the spies organized Chinese friendship and cultural organizations and cultivated contacts with Canadians of Chinese ancestry.
But it wasn't just people of Chinese ancestry who were targeted. Beijing also invited scientists and engineers from a variety of universities and institutes to visit mainland China, the daily said. The guided tours invariably included suggestions about how the treasured Canadian friends might help a poorer, less advanced country such as mainland China, it noted.
The loss of Slowpoke technology did not pose a national security threat because the Canadian reactor, unlike the nuclear weapons technology reportedly stolen from Los Alamos, has no military application, said AECL spokesman Larry Shewchuk. (By S.C. Chang)
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
