Spies and Canadian Identies

The recent use of Canadian documents by Russian spies is just one more example of the use of Canadian identies by other governments and their emmisaries. Eleven people are now in custody facing what Moscow calls “baseless” American charges. The affidavit from an FBI officer charges that four of the 11 claim Canadian birth or citizenship, including one who allegedly took the identity of a Montreal infant who died in 1963. All are charged with spying, for a decade or longer, on the U.S. for Russia’s foreign intelligence agency while posing as average suburban couples in New York, New Jersey, Seattle and Virginia. The incident confirms how easy it can be to claim to be Canadian if you want to slip under the radar. It’s also a tactic that’s been used in the past by other countries. Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, tried to pass off two of its spies as Canadian tourists in 1997 while on a mission to kill a Hamas official in revenge for a suicide bombing in Israel. Another known incident occurred in 1973, when Mossad agents with Canadian papers killed a man in Lillehammer, Norway who they mistakenly believed was involved in the attack on the Israeli Olympic team at the 1972 Games in Munich.
Opposition party MPs called for the government to try to dissuade countries that maintain stables of overseas spies from using posing as Canadians, experts say there’s little chance of that happening. Tracing every last lost or stolen passport, birth certificate and driver’s license would require a massive bureaucratic effort.While it only becomes front page news every 20 years or more, the incidents are sufficient to make me wonder how often they have been used and never detected.


I cannot help but wonder why our official documentation like passports cannot be made so that they are 1) more difficult to duplicate and 2) more difficult to get with a false identity. Surely our country owes it to ourselves to ensure that those people who claim Canadian citizenship are actually Canadian. These people are choosing Canadian documentation for a reason. Is it that the documents are easy to obtain or that our world wide reputation makes the spy's assumed identity more believable and less threatening? One way or the other, this has to be stopped to preserve the Canadian reputation around the world.