New Delhi: Five years after a diplomatic row between Ottawa and Beijing over the arrest of two Canadians in China on charges of espionage, the man at the heart of the case, Michael Spavor, has accused the Justin Trudeau government of using him for intelligence-gathering.
Spavor is seeking a multi-million-dollar settlement from Ottawa, Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail reported this month.
According to Spavor, he gave information on North Korea to co-accused Michael Kovrig, who, without his knowledge, shared it with Canada and its Five Eyes allies (the US, the UK, Australia and New Zealand).
“Fluent in Korean, Spavor is among only a handful of westerners who has met North Korean leader Kim Jong-un,” The Globe and Mail report noted.
Spavor and Kovrig were arrested in China in December 2018 on allegations of espionage soon after Canada detained Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou on a US extradition warrant.
It took China more than 18 months to press charges against the two Michaels.
While Spavor was accused of “spying for a foreign entity and illegally procuring state secrets”, Kovrig was charged with “illegally receiving state secrets and intelligence”. The duo spent almost three years in jail before being freed and returning to Canada in September 2021.
Now, Spavor is accusing Kovrig, a diplomatic officer at the Global Security Reporting Program (GSRP) within the Canadian embassy in Beijing, of passing on information he had shared with him to the Canadian government and Five Eyes allies. This deception and intelligence work, Spavor believes, led to both their arrests in China in 2018.
Spavor has also alleged, according to The Globe and Mail, that Kovrig discussed his relationship with him with a senior Beijing diplomat after Kovrig joined the think-tank International Crisis Group (ICG) in 2017.
In August 2021, a month before a deal was reached for the duo’s release, Spavor was convicted of espionage and sentenced to 11 years in prison, while Kovrig was yet to be sentenced.
The two men were allegedly kept in solitary confinement, drugged, forced to sit in a chair for long hours and subjected to threats of execution while detained in China.
While Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had called the arrests “arbitrary” in 2019, the Canadian foreign ministry last week said that “perpetuating the notion that either Michael was involved in espionage is only perpetuating a false narrative under which they were detained by China”.
In response, the Chinese embassy in Ottawa asserted that both Michaels had been “suspected of engaging in activities endangering China’s national security” and that “such facts cannot be denied”.
“Canada’s hyping up of the so-called ‘arbitrary detention’ by China is purely a thief crying ‘stop thief’. This fully exposes the hypocrisy of the Canadian side,” the embassy said.
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Who are the two Michaels?
An entrepreneur and consultant working on strengthening business and cultural ties between North Korea and the West since the 2000s, Michael Spavor is among the few western individuals who has met Kim Jong-un, and is said to have strong ties with the leader. He is also reported to have facilitated a visit to Pyongyang by American basketball star Dennis Rodman in 2013.
Having visited Pyongyang numerous times himself, Spavor has been pictured with numerous top officials in the North Korean government.
He was arrested in 2018 while living in the Chinese city of Dandong on the China-North Korea border.
Michael Kovrig is a former Canadian diplomat who worked at the Canadian embassy in Beijing from 2012 to 2014 as part of the GSRP.
Under the GSRP, the diplomat was responsible for collecting information on security in countries of strategic importance to Canada “using overt diplomatic means”, according to a 2022 Canadian Parliament report on national security.
In 2017, Kovrig joined the ICG and was working there when he was arrested in China the following year. According to The Globe and Mail, Kovrig was considered an “intelligence asset as a diplomatic officer”, both during his time at the Canadian embassy as well as at ICG.
“Kovrig was not an employee of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service but information he gathered in China was viewed as valuable by the spy agency,” the newspaper report said, quoting a source.
The Parliament report said that “domestic and allied partners ascribe a high value to GSRP reporting, characterising it as a ‘uniquely valuable product, which fills a clear niche within the security and intelligence community’”.
GSRP reports are shared within the security and intelligence community and across the Five Eyes. These officers do not pay human sources for information, the Parliament report said.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
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