Common-Sense Intelligence - The Precautionary Principle

"The decisions to deny the Top Secret status and revoke the Secret and Reliability Stats must be quashed and sent back for redetermination by the director."
Justice Catherine Kane, Ottawa court ruling

Irina Vladirmirovna Koulatchenko, born in Kyrgyzstan 36 years ago, is now a citizen both of Russia and Canada. As an analyst at Canada's anti-terrorism financing agency, her security clearance was denied and she was stripped of her position after informing a Canadian intelligence officer that she had met Russian diplomats at ethnic social gatherings in Ottawa. Although she was never accused of wrongdoing, her contacts with Russian embassy officials appeared a red light to the intelligence community.

Unsurprisingly, since her security clearance was revoked in February of 2012, which just happened to be a month after Canadian naval officer Jeffrey Delisle was arrested in Halifax, caught selling secrets to Russian intelligence officers working out of the Russian embassy in Ottawa. Simply coincidental, it appears, with her own contacts with embassy officials appearing to be on a strictly casual, social footing, having nothing whatever to do with illegal, and suspicious counter-agent activities.

According to a Canadian Security Intelligence Service report, she had met three Russian diplomats and one other individual she inferred was with the intelligence services. Never, she said, had she ever been asked for information relating to what she might have known about Canadian intelligence. But after receipt of the CSIS report, the Director of the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre where she was working, revoked her security clearance as well as her job appointment.

Leading her to appeal to the Federal Court of Appeals. The court finally ruled that because of the sensitive nature of FINTRAC's work, grounds for concern were legitimate relating to Ms. Koulatchenko's "loyalty and her reliability". On the other hand, they held that she had been denied procedural fairness, never having been offered an opportunity to respond in her own defence to those reasonable security concerns.

She had informed CSIS that her loyalty to Canada was unquestioned. She was on her guard if she ever discussed her job. "There have been no encounters with Russian diplomats that cause her to become concerned", the CSIS report cited her having assured them. "Ms. Koulatchenko, however, added that two or three years ago, she met a Russian embassy official whom she felt was from the Russian intelligence services."

She informed CSIS at that time that should she ever have been approached by the Russians to relay information to them "she would 'most likely say no' and then contact her supervisor", according to the redacted report. She might not decline to be helpful on request by the Russians immediately, in the thought that perhaps her superiors might have wanted her to become a double agent.

It is not unknown in Western intelligence circles that Russians on occasion assume the identity of a Canadian or an American while reporting to Russian intelligence. Famously, several years back the identities of a number of Americans were revealed to have been false; they were Russian operatives who had lived for a lengthy period of time as ordinary Americans in pursuit of their undercover activities on behalf of Russian intelligence.

Ms. Koulatchenko came to Canada from Cuba in 2000 as a refugee. She was offered a position with FINTRAC in 2010 as a policy analyst. Her position in the Terrorist Financing Unit, however, required top-secret clearance. When she revealed during her screening interview with CSIS that in her previous employment at the Parliamentary Centre she had been required to have contact with diplomatic personnel, including those from the Russian embassy, perhaps alarm bells rang.

They certainly should have. She revealed during that interrogation that she had met one Russian diplomat "at various academic events but then began to have contact several times with him as he was a friend of her ex-fiance", read the CSIS report. Yet another Russian diplomat counted as a "social acquaintance", was someone she met at a Cirque du Soleil show, who later emailed her invitations to Russian embassy social events.

If these innocently, presumably naive revelations did not raise alarm bells, then what might have? Ye Gods!