Haiyan Zhang was a rising star in the federal bureaucracy, until a security guard escorted her from her Ottawa office. She was ordered to leave everything behind.
Six months into her job as an analyst for the Privy Council Office, a sensitive department that's like Ottawa's nerve centre, a series of red flags had gone up. Now, nearly five years later, documents obtained by The Globe and Mail reveal the specifics of why the Chinese-born Ms. Zhang was declared a threat to national security - and summarily fired.
The declassified documents, once marked "top secret" but now filed in Federal Court, yield a rare insight into how, in an era of escalating concern about Beijing's spies, several Ottawa agencies worked to rid the bureaucracy of one perceived threat, Ms. Zhang. Even so, she remains on the government's payroll, having successfully grieved her 2003 ouster. But she has not yet persuaded the government to let her show up to a less sensitive job on a continuing basis; she is being paid to stay home most days, pending the outcome of a new security-clearance investigation, expected shortly.
Confident, attractive and trilingual, Ms. Zhang, now 45, had raised eyebrows with her attendance at some Chinese embassy functions in Ottawa and her friendship with a Chinese diplomat. She had also attended gatherings sponsored by her former employer, Xinhua, the state-controlled Chinese news service. The fact that she had visited China eight times in eight years after getting her Canadian citizenship was deemed noteworthy as well.
Security-intelligence agents also fixated on a financial transaction - what they allege was a strange $700 gift Ms. Zhang received years earlier from U.S. officials in Egypt who included the money along with a picture frame and mailed it to her.
Foreign correspondent
"I pose no past, current or future threat to Canada," Ms. Zhang wrote in court-filed documents, which lay out her life story and legal defence.
Never charged with any crime, she launched a wrongful-dismissal case that landed in Federal Court. Her lawyer has said she will make no public comments until the case is completely resolved.
Born in China in 1963, Ms. Zhang says she loved learning English as a student, especially after Canadian émigrés introduced her to Shakespeare. Top marks in school, she says, led Xinhua to hire her as one of the agency's first female foreign correspondents.
Western counterintelligence agencies often liken Xinhua to an intelligence agency, but Ms. Zhang says she was merely a journalist. Most days were filled with drudgery, she says, rewriting foreign news reports for consumption in China.
During the early 1990s, while still in her 20s, she was posted to Cairo. She found life in the Xinhua compound there difficult. It reminded her of a "miniature repressive Chinese society," she says in documents filed in her defence. She stresses: "I was NOT a Communist party member."
While in Cairo, she says she befriended a man named Bob who worked at the U.S. embassy. She asked for his help getting into U.S. universities. In turn, he requested she give him a writing sample.
Ms. Zhang says she came up with "a handwritten piece describing a routine, political study session at the Xinhua bureau" - including how her bosses were asking for more stories from the Middle East as they rejected pieces on the collapse of Communism in Europe.
Bob and his wife apparently appreciated Ms. Zhang's friendship. "After I returned to China, to my surprise, I found US $700.00 in the package containing the picture frame they had given me as a going-away gift," she writes.
Before she left the Egyptian compound, she says, her bosses had kept close tabs on her, fearing she might be drawn to Western ideals or, worse, Western men.
During a rare out-of-country assignment to Kuwait, however, Ms. Zhang met a Canadian at a hotel bar frequented by foreign correspondents.
In 1995, they married and moved to Ottawa. After arriving, Ms. Zhang started Chinabridge Communications, a consultancy whose clients included corporations and federal agencies.
The idea was to help them make inroads into China. Given the job, Ms. Zhang says, it only made sense to attend some embassy functions - and some parties held by Xinhua. Her attendance was sporadic, she says.
