Wallowing In Conspiracy Theories

We're led to believe that our intelligence agencies were alerted to the presence of a home-grown spy feeding information to a foreign source long before he was apprehended. Informed by someone in the know, with reliable contacts that because a suspect had been singled out for especial attention in the belief that he had engaged in espionage he was fed misleading, inaccurate information once his activities were detected.

To sour the source, the information that was transmitted was also geared to eventually alert the receiving agents that something was not quite right. That the intelligence they were receiving was suspect. And, that being the case, they would be led to suspect or to wonder whether any of the previously-received information, that which was relayed to them before Canadian intelligence became aware of the leaky source, would also become suspect.

So it's a game of counter-intelligence to counter-act the possible harm done through the original handover of classified data to a foreign source. There is certainly nothing new in all of this; most countries engage in espionage and counter-espionage. The game is an old one and always afoot. The goal is to enrich one country's knowledge of the other's activities and secrets, be they military, political or industrial.

Some countries are more adept at this kind of covert activity to give them advantages over the nother, than are other countries, and engage in it as a passionate pursuit. There are times when the information gained could be critical to the very survival of a country, as during a war situation. But when two countries engage in cool diplomacy, distrusting one another and imputing to each other malign purpose, things can get nasty.

In the case of Canada revealing the presence of a home-based spy in our midst, feeding classified information to a foreign entity, presumably Russia, there are many doubters. Those with a background in international relations and diplomacy as academics view such incidents with a jaundiced eye when they interpret them to have been occasioned through the exigencies of self-serving politics.

So that, Canada's current government has its skeptical critics, citing an ideological-based mistrust of Russia among the current crop of government ministers as an strictly political one, blown out of all proportion to reality for those same political purposes. Classifying Russia as a potential enemy, renewing the cold war, where there is no practical rhyme nor reason to do so.

But the fact is there are real tensions between Russia and the West, not the least of which is that country's support for regimes that do pose as a threat to peaceful international relations. Russia is not alone in that; it has a giant partner in China, in that regard. And Russia is also antagonistic to Canada's Arctic sovereignty claims; both countries are eyeing the future accessibility of natural resources deep in the ocean floor.

It was Russia that planted a flag of ownership on the ocean floor, long before it could prove its geological connectivity to parts of the Arctic seabed also claimed by Canada. And while it's true that Canada has been blowing the hot steam of belligerency in a political way to persuade Canadians to support an expensively-armed military, it is also true that its sovereignty must be defended.

While Russia claims ownership of the undersea oil-and-gas deposits and rich mineral deposits extending from the Lomonosov Ridge, that long range reaching from Ellesmere Island to Siberia, new scientific geological studies are anticipated to reveal Canada's claims of ownership. That data will be presented to the UN's agency responsible for approving offshore territorial claims in reflection of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.

Russia is adept at espionage, as has been proven time and again, when its diplomats have been courteously escorted out of a country they have been placed within to pursue diplomatic ties, while they have simultaneously been engaged in the subterfuge of ferreting out information not officially cleared to be shared. Canada is somewhat less adept at similar enterprises, and perhaps less interested in pursuing them.

Unlike Great Britain, engaged in its own efforts to extract from Russian sources classified information that is felt to be of interest to Britain. And whose famed spy agency was not itself immune to the most clumsy of tactics when it was revealed by Russia that British agents had used an electronics-infused fake rock in its Moscow-located tactics several years ago; then denied, now sheepishly admitted.

But it is also questionable to assert as some academics have done that "The Canadian government is stuck in a Cold-War mentality ... We now have a Cold War lite", accusing the current Conservative-led government of wallowing in conspiracy theories.