espionage
The Scientists Who Came in From the Cold: Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory Scandal, Part I
From the C2C Journal
By Peter Shawn Taylor
In a breathless 1999 article on the opening of Canada’s top-security National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) in Winnipeg, the Canadian Medical Association Journal described the facility as “the place where science fiction movies would be shot.” The writer was fascinated by the various containment devices and security measures designed to keep “the bad boys from the world of virology: Ebola, Marburg, Lassa” from escaping. But what if insiders could easily evade all those sci-fi features in order to help Canada’s enemies? In the first of a two-part series, Peter Shawn Taylor looks into the trove of newly-unclassified evidence regarding the role of NML scientists Xiangguo Qiu and Keding Cheng in aiding China’s expanding quest for the study – and potential military use – of those virus bad boys.
Acclaimed spy novelist John Le Carré established his reputation with 1963’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. Set at the height of the Cold War, it describes an attempt by washed-up British spy Alec Leamas to infiltrate East German intelligence as a double agent. It’s a grim tale of hidden identities, uncertain alliances and spymasters prepared to sacrifice their own men in pursuit of bigger game. “We are witnessing the lousy end to a filthy, lousy operation,” Leamas snaps when he realizes how he’s been deceived by his own agency. According to Le Carré – who worked for Britain’s MI6 in Germany while writing the book – the world of espionage is unpleasant, unglamourous and devoid of loyalty. Unhappy endings are inevitable.
Despite its much-lauded air of verisimilitude, however, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold remains a work of fiction set in a now-distant past. And based on recent events in Canada, the current world of international espionage appears at sharp odds with Le Carré’s downbeat perspective. In fact, newly-unclassified documents tied to one of Canada’s biggest intelligence scandals suggest modern-day spies can live very happily ever-after.
No happy endings here: The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, spy novelist John Le Carré’s masterwork, depicts a gritty and amoral vision of modern espionage. Shown, a scene from the 1965 movie adaptation starring Richard Burton.
This trove of once-secret material concerns the case of Xiangguo Qiu, an internationally-recognized scientist at Winnipeg’s National Microbiology Laboratory (NML), Canada’s highest-security biohazard facility, and her husband and fellow NML biologist Keding Cheng. Made public only after an unprecedented political struggle, the documents suggest Qiu had been doing the bidding of organizations linked to China’s military, possibly since 2016.
Using her security clearance, position and knowledge, Qiu transferred valuable information and materials out of the country – serving China’s interests while undermining those of Canada. The now-public material further suggests Qiu and Cheng took care to cover their tracks. As suspicions were raised about their activities, both lied and dissembled. And when their subterfuge was finally and fully revealed – but before Canada could be bothered to arrest them – they quietly escaped to China. Today they’re apparently living comfortably under new names while working in their preferred occupations. Here at home, the RCMP says it’s still investigating.
Qiu and Cheng, in other words, appear to have pulled off every spy’s dream: to accomplish their mission and get home safely while authorities sputter and fume comically on the other side of the border. As a recruiting ad for would-be agents, their tale succeeds brilliantly. If there is an unhappy ending to be found, it’s in the impact all this will have on Canada’s reputation as a vigilant and reliable ally.
A Curious Incident at the Lab
The NML is Canada’s only Level 4 Biosafety Lab (BSL4) and hence the only location in the country where deadly viruses such as Ebola, Henipah and Marburg along with other dangerous biological materials can be stored and studied. When the CBC first broke the story in July 2019 that RCMP officers had escorted Qiu, Cheng and their foreign research students out of the building and cancelled their security clearances, the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), which oversees the NML, dismissed it as merely an “administrative matter” involving a breach of internal policy by staff.
Internationally-renowned virologist Xiangguo Qiu (top left) and her husband, biologist Keding Cheng (top right), both worked at Winnipeg’s National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) until they were escorted off the premises in July 2019 for what was initially described as an “administrative matter”. (Sources of photos: (top left) Public Policy Forum, licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0; (top right) Governor General’s Innovation Awards; (bottom) Trevor Brine/CBC)
At the time, Qiu was Head of Vaccines and Antivirals in the Zoonotic Diseases and Special Pathogens division of NML and internationally renowned for her work on Ebola. In 2018 she won a Governor General’s Innovation Award for co-developing a breakthrough treatment for the deadly virus. Cheng held a more junior position as a biologist at NML. Both were born in China and came to Canada to work in the 1990s; both are naturalized Canadian citizens.
A few weeks after Qiu and Cheng were removed from the NML, the Winnipeg Free Press reported on a mysterious March 2019 shipment of Ebola and Henipah virus samples from the NML to China. It had been organized by Qiu, and appeared to violate standard transfer protocols. In response, the PHAC again said there was nothing to be alarmed about. “The NML routinely shares samples of pathogens and toxins with laboratory partners in Canada and in other countries,” was the boilerplate response to all media inquiries. Further, the PHAC stated the virus shipment was “in response to a request” from an institute in China and that Qiu and Cheng’s “administrative investigation is not related to the shipment of virus samples to China.” There was, PHAC repeated, no connection between the two incidents.
Yet the possibility that Qiu and Cheng were involved in something other than an administrative matter piqued the interest of both media and opposition parties. Dogged investigative reporting turned up numerous problems inside the NML going back many years. The Winnipeg Free Press, for example, revealed significant security and safety concerns at the lab, including a petri dish containing tuberculosis culture that fell behind a work desk and lay undiscovered for a year; in 2009 a former NML researcher was caught at the U.S. border with 22 vials of biological material stolen from the lab – including some Ebola virus genes – hidden in a glove in his trunk.
Iain Stewart, head of the PHAC, was brought before the bar of Parliament and admonished for his refusal to release the requested documents, something that hadn’t happened to a federal civil servant in over a century.
As pressure mounted to explain what was really going on at the NML, in March 2021 the House of Commons’ Special Committee on the Canada-People’s Republic of China Relationship demanded evidence to support the contention that the case of Qiu and Cheng had no connection to national security matters. The Justin Trudeau government responded with a heavily-censored, 290-page collection of documents. Unhelpfully, whole pages were blacked out and many files were missing entirely. Of the legible material, most were media briefing notes and internal emails regarding the most mundane aspects of the 2019 virus shipment to China. (The declared value of 30 vials of some of the deadliest viruses in existence: $2.50 each.) Anything directly connected to Qiu and Cheng was redacted. The committee, comprised of an equal number of Liberal and opposition MPs, made a subsequent request, and when that didn’t work the House of Commons passed its own a motion demanding to see the full slate of uncensored documents.
Pressed hard to disclose the information, the federal Liberals dug in their heels, declaring it to be a matter of national security. In response, the House declared the government in contempt of Parliament. Iain Stewart, head of PHAC, was brought before the bar of Parliament and admonished for his refusal to release the requested documents, something that hadn’t happened to a federal civil servant in over a century. Stewart’s boss, Health Minister Patty Hadju, also refused to hand over any further documents, telling the Canada-China Committee “the information requested has both privacy and national security implications.” She also repeated the now-standard line that “there is no connection between the transfer of viruses…and the subsequent departure of these employees.”
Remarkably, even the Liberal-appointed Speaker of the House of Commons, Anthony Rota, took up the case, arguing that Parliament has an unfettered right to demand whatever it needs to do its job of holding the government to account. The Prime Minister’s Office in turn threatened to sue the Speaker in federal court, an unprecedented turn of events that prompted Rota to declare that the “Federal Court has no jurisdiction to restrict the House’s power to request documents.” What was shaping up to be a fascinating constitutional battle royale between the legislative and executive branches of government was rendered moot by the snap federal election of 2021.
After their re-election to another minority government, the Liberals had an apparent change of heart, perhaps due to legal advice that Rota’s position was unquestionable correct or, alternatively, a shift in personnel. Mark Holland, Hajdu’s replacement as health minister, agreed to make the documents available to an ad hoc committee consisting of one MP from each of the four main federal parties. Together with a panel of judges, the MPs were sworn to secrecy and allowed to examine the complete file in order to decide what documents were in the public’s interest to see and what should remain secret for national security reasons. The end result was a ground-breaking 623-page document released this past February.
A look behind the curtain: Made public in February 2024, the 623-page collection of formerly-classified documents includes (from left to right) a third-party investigation into Qiu and Cheng, secret “Canadian Eyes Only” reports from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and the pair’s own response to accusations made against them.
The package constitutes a remarkable collection of sensitive government files. It includes confidential internal investigations by the PHAC, secret “Canadian Eyes Only” reports by the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS), Qiu and Cheng’s own responses to the accusations made against them, the official letters firing them and the government’s timeline of the entire saga. The level of disclosure is wide-ranging, although the names of most individuals are obscured. And while this cache of material still leaves many important questions unanswered, it provides a coherent – and deeply troubling – narrative for one of the most consequential breaches of Canada’s national security to have ever become public.
“Scientists need to do what scientists do”
John Williamson had a front-row seat to the entire Qiu-Cheng affair. As a member of the House of Commons’ Canada-China Committee prior to the 2021 election, the Conservative MP from New Brunswick was a participant in the raucous hearings and subsequent constitutional dust-up. “It was such a highly, highly unusual situation,” recalls Williamson in an interview. “For the RCMP to go into the lab and remove the scientists didn’t fit with initial government statements minimizing the situation. It had to be more than a personnel matter.”
As time passed and suspicions grew the government’s reasons for keeping the documents secret kept changing. “First it was privacy, then it was national security,” Williamson says. “The excuses were increasingly unconvincing.” The Canada-China Committee’s ultimate success in prying the documents out of a reluctant government’s hands is evidence, he says, that Parliament remains relevant despite the vast centralization of power in the Prime Minister’s Office.
Last year Williamson was selected as the Conservative representative to the ad hoc committee reviewing the classified material. Ensconced in a windowless room in a nondescript office building in downtown Ottawa under the watchful eye of Privy Council security guards, Williamson experienced the frisson of being among the first to read the documents once considered so dangerous the Liberals were prepared to sue the Speaker to avoid making them public.
“We were presented with the documents in chronological order,” Williamson recalls. “And as I read them, my understanding of the situation progressed in stages.” In the beginning, he wondered whether all the hoopla had been worth it. “My first impression,” he says, “was that this was a simply a badly-run laboratory.”
“For the RCMP to go into the lab and remove the scientists…it had to be more than a personnel matter,” says John Williamson, a Conservative MP from New Brunswick. Williamson was the only Conservative member on the ad hoc committee of four MPs given access to the entire file of classified documents ahead of their public release. (Source of photo: John Williamson)
The initial entries explain that in August 2018 CSIS staff met with NML Scientific Director General Matthew Gilmour to discuss potential vulnerabilities. All federal high-security facilities regularly receive such “insider threat briefings.” At that meeting Qiu and Cheng were mentioned as possible subjects for further investigation. A preliminary review quickly revealed Qiu’s name on a Chinese-registered patent, in apparent violation of Canadian law; Cheng was also involved in several minor violations of security protocols. A more detailed investigation was ordered, including the clandestine “mirroring” (a form of external monitoring) of Qiu and Cheng’s computers and electronic devices, as well as formal interviews with the pair and their co-workers.
Williamson recalls thinking it ‘looked to be a made-in-Canada problem concerning public servants not following the rules. Management seemed quite lax and there was no effective oversight.’ An obvious problem, he thought, but not one with major national security implications.
This process revealed that Qiu and Cheng shared a surprisingly carefree attitude towards rules, an obvious problem given that they worked at Canada’s highest-level biosafety research lab. Cheng deliberately mislabelled sensitive biological material as “kitchen utensils” to circumvent necessary transportation precautions. He also improperly downloaded data onto removable storage devices and was involved in several curious incidents at the building’s front desk involving the comings and goings of his research students, most of whom had links to China.
In an interview with a third-party investigator hired by the PHAC, Qiu’s standard reply to any security concerns was that she was solely focused on research and considered excessive rule-following to be an impediment to her work. “Scientists need to do what scientists do,” was her common refrain. At other times she pointed a finger at the PHAC’s poor training practices. Cheng met bothersome security requirements with a similar shrug.
“Scientists need to do what scientists do”: Initial investigations by the PHAC and CSIS revealed that Qiu and Cheng shared a surprisingly carefree attitude towards security rules, despite working in Canada’s only Level 4 Biosafety Laboratory. Shown, Qiu at work in her Winnipeg lab. (Source of photo: CBC)
Initially taking this evidence at face-value, Williamson recalls thinking it “looked to be a made-in-Canada problem concerning public servants not following the rules. Management seemed quite lax and there was no effective oversight.” An obvious problem, he thought, but not one with major national security implications.
Following the third-party investigation of Qiu and Cheng, CSIS weighed in with its own report on the two scientists dated April 9, 2020. This includes observations that Qiu was involved in joint research with officials from China’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) top medical research institution. As a matter of national security, CSIS makes specific note of the PLA’s plans for improving its chemical and biological warfare capabilities. Another item of concern was an NML researcher – identified as “Individual 2” in the documents – who attempted to remove ten vials of material from the NML lab. Individual 2 would later be revealed to be a senior technician from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) working in partnership with Qiu.
The plot unfolds: The first CSIS investigation revealed that Qiu had conducted joint research with scientists at China’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences (shown). Despite this worrisome connection, CSIS was initially reluctant to categorize Qiu as a security risk. (Source of photo: N509FZ, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)
“As you dig deeper into the documents, you begin to realize mainland China military officials may have infiltrated the lab,” recalls Williamson. “Now it looks like we could have a clandestine espionage operation meant to remove information and Canadian lab officials are just missing it. Now we have a national security problem.”
Despite these initial warning signs, CSIS was initially reluctant to accuse Qiu of anything nefarious. While observing she had a flexible concept of loyalty towards Canada and seemed unconcerned about security procedures, the report states, “The Service does not have a reason to suggest that Ms. QIU would willingly cooperate with a foreign power knowing harm would come to Canada.” Here the matter nearly ended.
According to the federal timeline of events on April 13, 2020 – nearly a year-and-a-half after concerns were first raised about Qiu and Cheng – PHAC management was preparing to close the investigation. Reprimand letters for the pair were drafted. Sanctions against the pair were to include “disciplinary measures and training”, but they would keep their jobs and security clearances. A week later, however, this reprimand process was “paused due to new information related to external investigation.”
Complete Collapse of Canada’s National Security Interests
On April 20, 2020, CSIS reopened its files on Qiu and Cheng as a result of “newly discovered information”. Where this information came from is not revealed, and has likely been kept hidden by the ad hoc committee. It could be the result of continuing CSIS investigations, or it could have been provided by the intelligence service of an allied country. Regardless of its provenance, CSIS immediately lost confidence in Qiu’s loyalty to Canada due to her “close and clandestine relationships with a variety of entities of the People’s Republic of China.”
“When you get to the later CSIS documents, you begin to realize how huge the issue really is,” says Williamson. “Now not only do you have People’s Republic of China people in the labs, but Canadian citizens are working as agents for mainland China. At this point I realized I was looking at a complete collapse of Canada’s national security interests – this is why the government didn’t want to release the documents.”
CSIS reopened its investigation into Qiu and Cheng after “newly discovered information” cast doubt on Qiu’s loyalty to Canada due to her “close and clandestine relationships with a variety of entities of the People’s Republic of China.”
The additional information comprises the meat of the unredacted material and contains many alarming subplots. The most damning is the existence of numerous applications filled out in the name of Qiu and Cheng for China’s notorious “talent” programs. In accordance with China’s ambitions to globally dominate certain technologies and scientific fields, talent programs offer generous rewards to Chinese researchers in western countries who can bring that knowledge home by whatever means. There are hundreds of talent programs throughout China operating at all levels of government, the most famous being the national Thousand Talents Program (TTP). According to FBI research, “talent programs usually involve undisclosed and illegal transfers of information, technology, or intellectual property.” They are, in other words, thinly-veiled espionage operations.
Applications for talent programs originate with Chinese institutions and are then offered to targeted individuals before being approved by the “foreign expert affairs bureau” of the requisite level of government. One TTP application made out in Qiu’s name offered to provide up to $1 million in research funding plus preferential health care and taxation benefits. Another offered her a salary of $15,000 per month for time spent in China, plus $30,000 per year while she was outside the country. This income would be in addition to her day job with the Government of Canada. Cheng was also named in applications for regional talent programs. To be clear, the documents do not conclusively prove Qiu or Cheng were participants in any talent programs, just that there were application forms filled out in their names by various Chinese institutions. And that both Qiu and Cheng knew about this.
A talent for espionage: According to the FBI, China’s many “talent” programs usually involve “undisclosed and illegal transfers of information, technology, or intellectual property” from western countries to China.
What is crystal clear is that Qiu’s skills and position were very attractive to Chinese institutions making talent applications in her name. One particularly eager suitor was the WIV. This facility is now infamous for its proximity to the epicentre of the global outbreak of Covid-19 and its possible role as the source of the SARS CoV-2 virus. The WIV also has a long track record of collaboration with Chinese military researchers, as a 2023 report by the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence explains. Back in 2018, however, the WIV had just become China’s first BSL4 lab (also referred to as P4) and needed someone with experience to help it develop protocols befitting its new status and to get some new research projects up and running.
According to documents summarized in a June 30, 2020 CSIS report, the WIV said it considered Qiu to be “the only highly experienced Chinese expert available internationally, who is still fighting on the front lines for a P4 laboratory.” Beyond Qiu’s much-needed experience and know-how, the WIV also wanted her help in gaining access to a supply of deadly viruses necessary for its future research plans. At the time, U.S. export restrictions denied China easy access to these materials and, according to the CSIS summary, Qiu’s participation with the WIV was considered “beneficial for…importing the P4 virus research resources from abroad.”
It was these comments, Williamson says, that brought his reading of the classified material to a full stop as the problems at the NML came into sharp focus. “Here was a Chinese institution stating plainly that Qiu was the only Chinese scientist available who could feed their ambitions. She was Beijing’s greatest asset in a Level 4 lab in any western nation.”
‘We are in the process of applying for the official permit to transfer BSL4 pathogens from Canada to China. To avoid confusing the leaders, it is better not to let National Microbiology Laboratory know about this project.’
Qiu made five trips to China in 2017 and 2018. In October 2018 she visited Wuhan and made a side trip to the WIV to lead a workshop on biosafety for 30 staff scientists. This event was not recorded in the official itinerary she filed with her Canadian employer. The same month the WIV formally requested the transfer of 30 vials of Ebola and other deadly viruses from the NML, a transaction overseen by Qiu. Recall that both PHAC and former federal Health Minister Hajdu repeatedly declared this shipment to be unrelated to the “administrative matter” of Qiu and Cheng being escorted off the premises of NML. Given what we now know, that seems very unlikely.
Based on the document dump, it appears Qiu was aggressively recruited by the Wuhan lab, possibly with the encouragement of a TTP, to participate in several sensitive and potentially-controversial research projects. What is referred to as WIV Project 1 included developing “mouse-adapted and guinea pig-adapted Ebola viruses”. Key to this project was a selection of virus samples identical to those ultimately provided by the NML in March 2019 through Qiu’s efforts. Reinforcing the secretive nature of the relationship between Qiu and the WIV, the project’s plan states: “We are in the process of applying for the official permit to transfer BSL4 pathogens from Canada to China. To avoid confusing the leaders, it is better not to let National Microbiology Laboratory know about this project.” Qiu seems to have done as she was told. CSIS reports “PHAC was not aware of this project.”
“The only highly experienced Chinese expert available”: CSIS uncovered documents revealing that Qiu was considered essential to the research ambitions of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (shown), an institution with close ties to the Chinese military and infamous for its proximity, and likely connection, to the initial outbreak of Covid-19. (Source of photo: AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
The weight of evidence suggests Qiu was a vital link in China’s apparently successful strategy to enhance its biological research capabilities using information and materials taken from Canada’s highest security biohazard lab. And it appears this type of subterfuge was ongoing for a considerable period of time. Documentation for an award presented to Qiu in 2016 by China’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences and obtained by CSIS says Qiu “used Canada’s Level 4 Biosecurity Laboratory as a base to assist China to improve its capability to fight highly-pathogenic pathogens…and achieve brilliant results.”
A subsequent CSIS report delves deeper into the background of the many research students and other scientists associated with the Chinese regime that cultivated connections with Qiu and Cheng during their time at the NML. Among these characters is Shi Zhengli, the WIV deputy-director widely referred to as “bat-woman” for her focus on bat virus research at the WIV prior to the Covid-19 outbreak. Shi is identified as “Individual 1” in the CSIS files. Another frequent Qiu collaborator was Major-General Chen Wei, named China’s “top biowarfare expert” by a U.S. congressional investigation. CSIS similarly describes Chen – identified as “Major General, PLA/Top Virologist AMMS (Chief 2)” in the at-times easily-broken code of the documents – as “China’s chief biological weapons defense expert engaged in research related to biosafety, bio-defence and bio-terrorism.”
Another name that pops up frequently is Feihu Yan. He is described in academic papers as being associated with the Institute for Military Veterinary at China’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences, as well as Canada’s NML and the University of Manitoba. In the declassified CSIS documents, Feihu is referred to as “Restricted Visitor 4”, which means he had access to NML’s BSL4 lab under Qiu’s supervision. Qiu and Feihu appear as co-authors on ten research papers published in a variety of scientific journals from 2016 through 2021. Over the same period, Qiu and Chen co-authored two papers. All the research concerns deadly viruses such as Ebola and Rift Valley fever.
Bosom buddies: Shi Zhengli, WIV’s deputy-director and often referred to as “bat-woman” (left), and Major-General Chen Wei, China’s “top biowarfare expert” (right), frequently collaborated with Qiu during her time at the NML. (Source of left photo: Chinatopix via AP, File)
As the CSIS documentation makes clear, this research has both civil and military applications and is of considerable interest to China’s PLA. Among the Academy of Military Medical Science’s tasks, CSIS observes, is “the development of military biotechnologies, biological counter-terrorism and prevention and control of major diseases.” As for China’s greater goals, then-U.S. Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe caused a stir in 2020 with a Wall Street Journal commentary about the threats posed by China’s talent programs and its use of scientific research stolen from western countries. Referring specifically to its biowarfare ambitions, Ratcliffe said China had “conducted human testing on members of the People’s Liberation Army in hope of developing soldiers with biologically enhanced capabilities.” In an ominous coda, he warned “There are no ethical boundaries to Beijing’s pursuit of power.”
Espionage? Never Heard of it
CSIS’s evolving investigation into Qiu and Cheng established numerous situations in which they attempted to keep their deep links with China’s scientific and military establishments hidden. As early as 2016, for example, Qiu held multiple positions at Chinese universities which she left off her Canadian CVs. She also had her name scrubbed from the online program of a 2017 conference in Wuhan at which she gave a talk. And there are the gaps in her travel itineraries and the secrecy surrounding the 2019 virus shipment. Cheng’s work seems equally cloaked in mystery. According to CSIS, he had been conducting a three-year research program at the NML on behalf of China’s Centre for Disease Control – without NML management’s knowledge.
Scrubbed clean: Qiu held multiple positions at Chinese universities as early as April 2016, but hid these facts from PHAC management and lied about them in her initial interview with CSIS.
Confronted with evidence of their deceptions, Qiu and Cheng adopted differing tactics to explain away their behaviour. In a November 26, 2020 written response to the accusations against her, Qiu took on the aura of a workaholic, politically-clueless scientist. “Please let me express my sincere gratitude to you and PHAC administration for the opportunity and consideration on the clarifications of the [security] report,” her letter begins. She then claimed, “It was only during the investigative interview that I started to know some new words to me, such as ‘NATO’, ‘Spy’ and ‘espionage’.” Qiu further insisted that, “I have dedicated almost all my time to the beauty of science through hardworking and national and international collaborations, no TV watching, no time to take vacations.”
Qiu maintained this façade of the dedicated-if-naïve scientist throughout the investigation. When confronted with contrary evidence, such as TPP applications filled out in her name, her central role in WIV Project 1, an undeclared bank account in China, unrecorded trips to the WIV and so on, she repeatedly claimed it was a mistake or the result of her poor grasp of English. It was not always a convincing tactic. Pressed to explain the presence of “Restricted Visitor 1” in her lab, an individual who held a Chinese public affairs passport and had clear ties to the Chinese military through bioweapons expert Major-General Chen, Qiu claimed not to know anything about her. It was later revealed Restricted Visitor 1 had rented a house owned by Qiu and Cheng when she was in Winnipeg.
“There are no ethical boundaries to Beijing’s pursuit of power”: Former U.S. Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe raised the alarm about China’s biowarfare ambitions in 2020, noting that China has “conducted human testing on members of the People’s Liberation Army in hope of developing soldiers with biologically enhanced capabilities.” (Source of photo: Texas A&M University-Commerce Marketing Communications Photography, licensed under CC BY 2.0)
In his own letter in response to PHAC’s investigation, Cheng took a more pragmatic approach to explaining his actions. When presented with a talents form in his name that required the applicant to declare they “passionately love the socialist motherland”, he observed that applying for jobs was a very Canadian thing to do, and that he was simply “putting bread and butter on the table.” Maintaining a healthy income was often central to Cheng’s responses.
When these efforts didn’t dissuade the investigators, the couple launched a union grievance claiming racial discrimination. In an August 5, 2020 complaint, Qiu and Cheng alleged they were “treated differently and more severely than other employees” because of their Chinese background, and that this was an example of “racial profiling.” This accusation of racism appears to have added two months to the investigative process. After being identified as potential security risks as early as September 2019, it wasn’t until January 19, 2021 that Qiu and Cheng were both formally stripped of their security clearances and fired.
Adherence to numerous human resources procedures, union-erected obstacles and sensitivity towards the feelings of the alleged spies – even after it was well-established they were “not being truthful” – largely explains why it took so long to finally fire them. Much of the federal timeline’s 14 pages (what is called the “Investigative Critical Path”) depicts an investigation bogged down by protocols and rules. There is little hint of urgency. “Conduct the interviews in a respectful and professional manner,” reads one entry advising investigators to avoid upsetting Qiu and Cheng. “Care will be taken to avoid any comments or behaviours that could intimidate or be perceived as badgering.” This approach continued right through to the letters firing them. “I appreciate that this may be a stressful time, and remind you that the Employee Assistance Program is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week,” their identical termination letters conclude. Such velvet-glove treatment seems absurd given the obvious threat they posed to Canada’s national security.
WIV got its hands on its desired collection of deadly viruses thanks to the efforts of Qiu, who also provided invaluable expertise and advice on the operation of its BSL4 lab. WIV Project 1 was presumably a great success.
And while the investigation did ultimately remove Qiu and Cheng from the NML, the message embedded in their fate is hardly one of deterrence. After all, the pair were never arrested and charged, let alone tried, convicted and imprisoned. In nearly all countries throughout history, the penalty for espionage has been death. In Communist China today, it still is.
Instead, according to a Globe and Mail investigation, they are now enjoying comfortable lives back in China. Qiu seems particularly active in her chosen field, with four Chinese patents filed since 2020, suggesting she has been carrying on an active research agenda after being removed from the NML. Two of these patents are with the WIV, two with the prestigious University of Science and Technology of China. Cheng appears to be employed as a professor of biology at Guangzhou Medical University; in 2021 and 2022 he was identified as an immunologist at KingMed Diagnostics, a Chinese-based testing laboratory.
Intriguingly, the Globe reports that both of them appear to be living under new names: Sandra Chiu and Kaiting Cheng. The academic biographies of these two individuals are identical to their previous Canadian identities and a few of their email addresses even include their old names. Qiu/Chiu is also reportedly the author of an upcoming book on Ebola to be published by Huazhong University of Science and Technology, an institution with well-known ties to the Chinese military.
Spies happily ever-after: According to a Globe and Mail investigation, Qiu and Cheng currently live in China and are each employed in their chosen fields. Curiously, they appear to have adopted new names – Sandra Chiu and Kaiting Cheng.
As for any crimes that might have been committed by Qiu and Cheng prior to their leaving Canada, “The RCMP investigation into this matter is ongoing,” says RCMP Sgt. Kim Chamberland via email. “National Security criminal investigations are often complex, multijurisdictional, and resource intensive and can take several years to complete.” Of course, it has already been several years. And the facts on the ground suggest the case is closed as a practical matter, even if the RCMP claim otherwise. The spies have already come in from the cold, so to speak. The entire matter appears to be yet another humiliating debacle for Canada’s troubled national police force.
For China, it is the very opposite – an unambiguous victory. Most obviously, the WIV got its hands on its desired collection of deadly viruses thanks to the efforts of Qiu, who also provided invaluable expertise and advice on the operation of its first BSL4 lab. We can only assume WIV Project 1 was a great success. The full scope of information, know-how and materials Qiu and Cheng allowed to be transferred out of the NML by their own hand and/or by welcoming numerous foreign agents into their lab may never be known. But it seems inevitable that their actions while working as federal government employees significantly enhanced the Chinese military’s biotechnology capabilities. And in doing so, made all Canadians less safe. Now it appears they’re comfortably back home, enjoying the fruits of their labour and free from worries about extradition or additional sanctions. It’s a career path that would make any spy feel warm all over.
“Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory Scandal, Part II” will examine the damage done to Canada’s international reputation and national security by the Qiu-Cheng affair.
Peter Shawn Taylor is senior features editor of C2C Journal. He lives in Waterloo, Ontario.
Source of main image: Governor General’s Innovation Awards, adapted by Emily Moyes.
The Vials and the Damage Done: Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory Scandal, Part II
A Congressional investigation committee released an extremely concerning report this week entitled: “FINANCIAL SURVEILLANCE IN THE UNITED STATES: HOW THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT WEAPONIZED THE BANK SECRECY ACT TO SPY ON AMERICANS” that details how the US government has been monitoring American citizens through bank transactions, with an emphasis on citizens who have expressed conservative viewpoints.
“Financial data can tell a person’s story, including one’s “religion, ideology, opinions, and interests” as well as one’s “political leanings, locations, and more,”’ the report begins. This investigation began after a whistleblower who happens to be a retired FBI agent alerted Congress that the Bank of America (BoA) voluntarily provided the Biden Administration information on customers who used a credit or debit card in Washington, D.C., around the January 6 protests. The new report has revealed that federal agencies have been working “hand-in-glove with financial institutions, obtaining virtually unchecked access to private financial data and testing out new methods and new technology to continue the financial surveillance of American citizens.”
As I’ve said countless times, “money laundering” is ALWAYS the excuse for why the government must track and monitor our financial transactions. The Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) E-Filing System is a system for financial institutions to file reports required by the BSA electronically. By law, the BSA requires businesses to keep records and file reports to help prevent and detect money laundering. This is how the Biden Administration is attempting to disregard privacy and weaponize financial institutions.
US intelligence agencies searched through records for terms like “Trump” and “MAGA” to target Americans who they believed may hold “extremist” views. The agencies searched for Americans who purchased religious texts, such as the Bible, and also labeled them extremists. Anyone expressing disdain for the COVID lockdowns, vaccines, open borders, or the deep state were placed on a watchlist. Again, the BSA was used as a premise to pull transactions placed by the individuals on this list.
As explained by the investigative committee:
“With narrow exception, federal law does not permit law enforcement to inquire into financial institutions’ customer information without some form of legal process.9 The FBI circumvents this process by tipping off financial institutions to “suspicious” individuals and encouraging these institutions to file a SAR—which does not require any legal process—and thereby provide federal law enforcement with access to confidential and highly sensitive information.10 In doing so, the FBI gets around the requirements of the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA), which, per the Treasury Department, specifies that “it is . . . a bank’s responsibility” to “file a SAR whenever it identifies ‘a suspicious transaction relevant to a possible violation of law or regulation’”11 While at least one financial institution requested legal process from the FBI for information it was seeking,12 all too often the FBI appeared to receive no pushback. In sum, by providing financial institutions with lists of people that it views as generally “suspicious” on the front end, the FBI has turned this framework on its head and contravened the Fourth Amendment’s requirements of particularity and probable cause.”
Under this premise, anyone who held a viewpoint that opposed the Biden Administration was considered a “suspicious” individual who required monitoring. The Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network created a database to carefully watch potential dissenters. Over 14,000 government employees accessed the FinCEN database last year and conducted over 3 million searches without a warrant. In fact, over 15% of FBI investigations during 2023 has some link to this database. It is estimated that 4.6 million SARs and 20.8 million Currency Transaction Reports (CTRs) were filed in the last year.
The committee noted that the government is incorporating AI to quickly search the web for “suspicious” Americans:
“As the Committee and Select Subcommittee have discussed in other reports, the growth and expansion of AI present major risks to Americans’ civil liberties.211 For example, the Committee and Select Subcommittee uncovered AI being used to censor “alleged misinformation regarding COVID-19 and the 2020 election . . . .”212 Those concerns are not hypothetical. Some AI systems developed by Big Tech companies have been programmed with biases; for example, Google’s Gemini AI program praised liberal views while refusing to do the same for conservative views, despite claiming to be “objective” and “neutral.” With financial institutions seemingly adopting AI solutions to monitor Americans’ transactions, a similarly biased AI program could result in the systematic flagging or censoring of transactions that the AI is trained to view as “suspicious.”
This is extremely troubling and goes beyond government overreach and violated numerous Constitutional protections. The government effectively transformed banking institutions into spy agencies, and anyone who could potentially hold a view that did not fit the Biden-Harris agenda has been treated as potential terrorist. It is completely insane that someone could be seen as an extremist for purchasing a religious text or purchasing a firearm. This is discriminatory, predatory behavior that puts millions of lives at risk. Think of governments in the past who have rounded up names of dissenters based on religion or ideology. They claim they are merely observing us, but the goal is to silence us.
The committee said their investigation has just begun as they will not allow the government’s abuse of financial data to go unchecked. Furthermore, they are concerned that these warrantless searches can lead to widespread debanking practices where the government can easily block any dissenter from participating in society by crippling them financially. This is yet another reason why governments want to push banks to create CBDC so that they can punish citizens with a simple click of a button.
From Matt Taibbi of Racket News
Depoliticization, decentralization, and transparency are all achievable goals
On August 13, 2001, 33-year-old French citizen Zacarias Moussaoui paid $6,800 in $100 bills to train on a 747 simulator at the Pan-Am International Flight Academy in Eagan, Minnesota. A retired Northwest Airlines pilot named Clarence “Clancy” Prevost thought Moussaoui’s behavior was odd for someone with no pilot’s license and told his bosses as much. When they said Moussaoui had paid and they didn’t care, Prevost said, “We’ll care when there’s a hijacking and the lawsuits come in.”
The company went to the FBI and on August 16, in what should have been one of the biggest arrests in the history of federal law enforcement, Moussaoui was picked up on an immigration violation. Agents on the case wanted permission to search Moussaoui’s belongings, with one asking superiors as many as 70 times for help in obtaining a warrant. The situation grew more urgent when the French Intelligence Service sent information that Moussaoui was connected to Islamic radicals with ties both to Osama bin Laden and the Chechen warlord Khattab, and that even within this crowd, Moussaoui was nicknamed “the dangerous one.”
Coleen Rowley, the Chief Division Counsel for the Minneapolis Field Office, absorbed agents’ concerns quickly and was aggressive in asking superiors to seek a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to investigate further. One of the goals was a look at Moussaoui’s computer, as agents believed he’d signaled he had “something to hide” in there. But unlike the former Northwest pilot Prevost, whose superiors trusted his judgment and escalated his concerns, Rowley and the Minneapolis field office were denied by senior lawyers at FBI Headquarters. The Bureau was sitting on the means to stop 9/11 when the planes hit the towers.
This story is actually worse than described, as Rowley made clear in what became a famous letter she wrote to then-Director Robert Mueller the following May. “Even after the attacks had begun,” she wrote, “the [Supervisory Special Agent] in question was still attempting to block the search of Moussaoui’s computer, characterizing the World Trade Center attacks as a mere coincidence with Misseapolis’ prior suspicions about Moussaoui.”
While the Bureau blamed 9/11 on a lack of investigatory authority, the actions of the Minnesota office showed otherwise. Rowley’s decision to confront Mueller with a laundry list of unnecessary bureaucratic failures made her perhaps the FBI’s most famous whistleblower. Her letter excoriated the Bureau’s Washington officeholders for failing to appreciate agents in the field, and for implicitly immunizing themselves against culpability.
“It’s true we all make mistakes and I’m not suggesting that HQ personnel in question ought to be burned at the stake, but, we all need to be held accountable for serious mistakes,” she wrote, adding: “I’m relatively certain that if it appeared that a lowly field office agent had committed such errors of judgment, the FBI’s [Office of Professional Responsibility] would have been notified to investigate and the agent would have, at the least, been quickly reassigned.”
The relentless and uncompromising style of Rowley’s letter made it a model for whistleblower complaints. As the administration of George W. Bush hurtled toward war in Iraq, Rowley was made a cultural and media icon, occupying the center spot on Time magazine’s “Persons of the Year” cover in January, 2003.
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For these reasons and more I was pleased to see after running articles earlier this week about the FBI and the reported choice of Kash Patel as Director that Coleen commented under the second one. I’d reached out to her previously after four whistleblowers came forward about questionable post-J6 investigations, and with the choice of Patel and rumors of a major housecleaning of the Bureau’s Washington office, similar issues seemed in play.
“A large majority of FBI agents always held Headquarters in contempt, knowing that it only attracted the losers, brown-nosing careerist political hacks who wanted to climb the ladder to go thru the ‘revolving door’ at age 50 to make their corporate millions,” she wrote. “The best, most competent agents typically refused to sacrifice their integrity and their families to climb the ladder in that Washington, DC cesspool.”
Part of my personal frustration with the FBI story is that the audiences that cared about its Bush-era offenses have largely turned a blind eye to its issues since Donald Trump’s rise to power, even though many problems are similar. Coleen, who manages the tough trick of maintaining the respect of both liberal and conservative audiences, is the perfect person to help bridge that gap. I reached out to her earlier this week and we talked about Patel, the long-term challenges facing the Bureau, and possible fixes.
MT: Kash Patel made public comments about closing the Washington headquarters and turning it into a “museum of the deep state.” He added he’d then “take the 7,000 employees that work in that building and send them across America to chase down criminals.” Does that make any sense?
Coleen Rowley: I hate to go to bat for Kash Patel because I’ve been disappointed by all of these people in Washington. It’s such a cesspool. I really don’t think anybody can keep their head above it. So I hate to really laud him, but I do think he is completely correct on three or four things, and they’re major things. And he’s getting smeared for the thing that he’s most correct about. FBI headquarters: the FBI itself wants to take that down.
MT: How?
Coleen Rowley: Agents hate the J. Edgar Hoover building on Philadelphia Avenue. They’ve been talking about moving forever, all the agents. It was considered a matter of pride to not stoop to go to headquarters. This goes way back. Everyone knew that the ones who were going to headquarters were the ones trying to climb the ladder. They didn’t care about cases. They would always do what’s politically correct. And so they were all made fun of. In fact, Jules Bonavolonta wrote a book about how bad headquarters was.
MT: Is it The Good Guys?
Coleen Rowley: That sounds right. Everyone in the FBI knew that the people in that building were corrupted, because they’d decided to sacrifice themselves to go to headquarters in order to become somebody, by managing. And then especially in later years, the real incentive was to go through that revolving door to make a lot of money. And that’s the Strzoks and McCabes, and all those people.
MT: You’ve talked in the past about a dichotomy between agents in the field and the politically-minded managers at headquarters. Why is that divide harmful?
Coleen Rowley: Because the real work is done in the field. Headquarters was just there to help you do your work. Well, the 9/11 story is a perfect example. I wrote another op-ed in the Los Angeles Times called WikiLeaks and 9/11: What If? It was about this whole idea that’s very counterintuitive to what people are brainwashed to think, but sharing information is the key. The 9/11 Commission even said that if they had just shared information between agencies and then with the public, 9/11 would not have happened.
MT: They said there was a “failure to connect the dots,” I think.
Coleen Rowley: I was asked this when I testified to the Senate Judiciary about siloing and how the information, when it goes up the pipeline, gets convoluted and bottlenecked at headquarters because they want to keep power for themselves there. They really don’t want to let the field and the agents do the job. They want to have so-called oversight. I mean, that’s the good term for it, oversight, but it’s worse than that. They just want to keep the power there.
MT: You wrote that one of the things you liked was the possibility that Patel might decentralize the Bureau. What might that entail?
Coleen Rowley: They could delegate down FISA, and I’m not the first person to have this idea. Legal scholars say one of the best ideas to avoid this bottlenecking of information that occurs at headquarters is for the FISA judges not to have to travel to one particular SCIF [Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility] in Washington. Keep the judges actually out in the field.
MT: I didn’t realize that.
Coleen Rowley: Yeah. They have SCIFs all over the country. So it’s not a problem. And it could be easily delegated down. Why does every request have to go through headquarters and the DOJ, except for control reasons? In all other matters, like criminal Title IIIs, you go straight to a judge. Some judges, they’re going to have differing opinions on things. And maybe a judge, every once in a while, would say no to a Title III.
MT: But that happens anyway, doesn’t it?
Coleen Rowley: Yeah. Very seldom with FISA, but yes. With a FISA application, they’re usually a hundred pages long and there’s tons of probable cause, and every Title III I ever read was beyond reasonable doubt by the time a judge saw it, to be honest. But this travesty that occurred with FISA is because it’s all bottlenecked up there for control in Washington DC, and with a handful of people who don’t want to share this information. I mean, I’ve got so many stories. They won’t even share the Moussaoui story with other offices even after 9/11.
MT: What?
Coleen Rowley: Yeah, because they’re trying to cover it up… It’s a long story but the desire for control at headquarters is a huge thing.
MT: The last time we talked, you might’ve mentioned the suggestion of having more of the Bureau’s top officials gain experience in the field. Wouldn’t that give them more grounding in what’s actually going on in the world? It seems like that’s a problem.
Coleen Rowley: These supervisors at headquarters learn bad habits. You try to “punch your ticket.” That’s the terminology. You try to go there for your year and a half. You hate it, but you do it. You have to bend over and please the bosses to get through that year and a half in order to “punch your ticket” and climb the ladder. The risk aversion is incredible. As a whole, the most competent and best investigators, and this goes to Kash Patel, he gets kudos for actually having investigated something. He was a public defender for seven years, so he has seen things from the other side of an investigation. Meanwhile, by contrast, Comey came out of Lockheed, and I forget where Wray came from [eds. note: Wray worked at King and Spaulding, earning $14 million advising clients like Chevron, Wells Fargo, and Johnson & Johnson], but they came out with millions in their pockets. What is their background? Did they ever actually investigate? Did they ever actually even work in criminal justice? No. So they are political creatures. Not case-makers. Kash at least has some experience.
MT: Seemed like he did a good job with the Nunes memo…
Coleen Rowley: Yes. Whoever did the investigation – I doubt it was solely him – but yeah, they did a great job on that because controlling the press and everything. It’s sad though that it hasn’t reached a lot of the public after all this time. I think it’s important because between the call for transparency… The funny thing is Patel will be all for the whistleblowers of the FBI that you called me about before, the ones that were chagrined about all the stuff they had to do after January 6th. But now he’s going to be against anybody being a whistleblower if he abuses power? It’s always that way. But that call for transparency is key. That’s a test. Then the debunking of Russiagate, and how the FBI got so politicized. And then thirdly, the decentralization of the FBI, so that you take that power out of Washington, DC, where it’s so close to corruption and revolving doors.
MT: There’s one more thing that I wanted to ask about, because you mentioned it in a piece you sent to the New York Times about Comey before he was named Director. You talked about the tactic of trying to “incapacitate” suspects who can’t be prosecuted. This goes along with that issue of “disruption” or “discrediting.” Does the Bureau need to get back to making cases as opposed to these extrajudicial techniques? Can Patel do that?
Coleen Rowley: All that goes back to COINTELPRO.
MT: Right.
Coleen Rowley: One of the things I would hope for, which I haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere, is that he could do something to reduce the entrapment-type cases that just burgeoned with Mueller. Talk about hypocrisy. He went to the ACLU and gave a speech about civil liberties. The whole ACLU stands up and applauds him, all while he is starting those entrapment cases. I was still in the FBI. I retired a year later, took my pension and left. I was like, oh, this is so wrong. They hired these con artist informants to infiltrate Muslim groups. There are books written about this now. [On a recent radio show] I said it’s possible that yes, maybe some of these tactics actually did prevent some nut from going further. You can’t say that isn’t true. On the other hand, the numbers here of cases that were based on the FBI telling vulnerable people, “Look, we can get you a bomb. We can get you this.” And then all of a sudden, when the guy looks like he’s going to press the button on it, that’s when they have the take-down.
It’s such a formula and you’re not accomplishing anything if you’re creating crime. We have so much crime in this country now. If I was Kash Patel, that’s what I would be saying. When they asked me those questions, I’d say, “We’ve got so much crime. It’s all over the country. Why can’t we have more agents out in the field working cases and trying to reduce the violence and the crime and the drug dealing, et cetera?” I think that would be a real winner politically for him to say.
MT: It sounds like you think it’s possible for him to fix some things. But we shouldn’t set ourselves up for disappointment.
Coleen Rowley: I’ve just gotten so cynical. I don’t put hope in anything or anybody anymore. Obama… even going way back, I don’t put hope out with anybody… But if he gets support on some of these things, the call for transparency, depoliticization and decentralization, there’s a chance.
MT: Let’s hope. Thank you!
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