Jul 2026: CAN Citizen Accused of Spying @ NATO (split from CHN Superthread)

[OldSolduer]

Yeah, we're just gobsmacked how foreigners could sneak past our indomitable defences.

But we're so nice....

The Red Queen would say

 

[Halifax Tar]

Unconfirmed reports that she was also an LPC election worker. I'm open to this being false, but it wouldn't surprise me with that party.

https://twitter.com/x/status/2086446271900930531

 

[Czech_pivo]

Unconfirmed reports that she was also an LPC election worker. I'm open to this being false, but it wouldn't surprise me with that party.

https://twitter.com/x/status/2086446271900930531

Brutal.

 

[The Bread Guy]

Unconfirmed reports that she was also an LPC election worker. I'm open to this being false, but it wouldn't surprise me with that party.

https://twitter.com/x/status/2086446271900930531

Globe & Mail (archived link) reported this Friday ...

... and before that:

 

[Blackadder1916]

Unconfirmed reports that she was also an LPC election worker. I'm open to this being false, but it wouldn't surprise me with that party.

https://twitter.com/x/status/2086446271900930531

I would be more surprised if her stint as an "election worker" was anything more than one of (in the words of the LPC) "the tens of thousands of volunteers ...[that made]... 21 million knocks on doors and calls to connect with voters before and during the 2019 campaign",

 

[Halifax Tar]

I would be more surprised if her stint as an "election worker" was anything more than one of (in the words of the LPC) "the tens of thousands of volunteers ...[that made]... 21 million knocks on doors and calls to connect with voters before and during the 2019 campaign",

Still a Liberal

 

[Jarnhamar]

I bet she worked for Han Dong.

 

[RangerRay]

I bet she worked for Han Dong.

 

[The Bread Guy]

Def/Secur analyst Wesley Wark's theories, offered with the caveat, "None of the scenarios strike me as an obvious winner. But then all spy cases have their weirdness" ....

1. Zhang was an innocent with an imperfect grasp of her security responsibilities, and an over-developed curiousity about work that wasn’t her business.

Security mindedness does not always come naturally to people.

2. Zhang was a “Walter Mitty.” A person attracted to the allure of espionage and pretending to be a spy
3. Zhang was an apprentice spy in the making. Groomed by a foreign power to seek out job opportunities that might offer access to valuable intelligence.
4. Zhang was a penetration agent. Established in the espionage business (though remarkably restless)
5. Zhang was a false-flag recruitment. Meaning: she was approached by a foreign power asking for her assistance, perhaps in the beginning with a few innocent-seeming requests, but that foreign power was not who it pretended to be and had a longer-term game plan for Ms. Zhang. (OK, if you need a clue, think Russia pretending to be, say, the PRC) ...

Wark piece also archived here if link above doesn't work.

 

[dapaterson]

Is there anything quite as funny as PP complaining about someone else's security clearance?

 

[Fishbone Jones]

It doesn't exactly look great that the RCMP and CSIS vetted her, post committing fraud, and cleared her to work at NATO.

Hindsight is 20/20 but apparently there's some redflags that when looked at in their totality, paints a picture. Arguably one the RCMP and CSIS should have recognized.




LinkedIn shows a string of sensitive adjacent roles.

A pattern of federal government and technical/systems access roles.

A career built around institutional access, moving between government, international orgs, and now NATO's military command HQ.

Completed a master's degree in computer science/systems engineering at the University of Ottawa( IT/systems access at a NATO command center is a high value target role for espionage).

Ex-CSIS officer Dan Stanton noted intern roles are a common in-road for intelligence gathering, since sensitive info often leaks through casual conversation rather than outright file theft.

Facebook posts placed her seeking housing in both Mons and Geneva right before internships at SHAPE and the WTO respectively - sequence of postings at increasingly sensitive institutions.

Perhaps it's a failure of the system. After all, they appear to have applied all the same criteria here as they did to all investigations of the liberal government.

 

[OldSolduer]

Fck. Face palm

I've been using that one a lot lately