I have some personal understanding of what it's like to be a 30-year old being interviewed by federal police about Russian contacts, since, back in 1980 or so, when I was around 32, only a few years older than Papadopoulos, I was interviewed by the RCMP counterintelligence (the Canadian federal police) about potential Soviet spies. Much of my antipathy towards FBI handling of Papadopoulos comes from this experience. I hadn't thought about this incident for years and very seldom, if ever, talked about it.
As deep background, my grandfather McRuer, a former Chief Justice of Ontario, had extensive personal experience in prosecuting Soviet spies. The Cold War is usually said to have begun with the defection of Russian cyber-clerk Igor Gouzenko in 1946, bringing with him records of Soviet spying. McRuer was one of the lawyers on the Taschereau Commission, which was formed to investigate the Gouzenko documents. Later, as an Ontario judge, he convicted several spies. When a well-known US congressional committee sought to interview Gouzenko in Canada, McRuer was selected to preside over the questioning under Canadian rules.
In 1980, I was then working on business development in commodity import/export for a Canadian mining company with extensive international operations.
In the late 1970s, though this is now mostly forgotten, there had been a major thaw in relations between USSR and the West. This was particularly true in Canada, where the rivalry in hockey had forged a type of bond. For Canadians, the 1972 Canada-USSR hockey series was riveting. I went to the 1972 game in Toronto and listened or watched every minute of every other game. I can remember the names to this day: Tretiak, Mikhailov, Ragulin, and, of course, Kharlamov. To this day, I'm shamed by Bobby Clarke's near-criminal swinging slash on the brilliant Kharlamov (at instructions of the Canadian coach), which broke the leg of the best player on the ice. But, despite this criminality on our part, the USSR, after leaving the ice, decided to play on and the rest of the series was dramatic.
Through the 1970s, the Red Army hockey team returned more or less annually, with the New Years Eve games between Montreal Canadiens and Red Army being by far the best game of every season. Putin, said to be a hockey fan, probably watched or listened to all these games as well. For the hockey players of this generation, the bitter original partisan rivalry turned into admiration and then friendship. Russian players are in the Hockey Hall of Fame. This thaw ended with the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, but that was still in the future when I attended a trade show at a Toronto convention center, where I stopped at a booth hosted by a couple of USSR trade representatives and had discussed potential import of mineral commodities to Canadian industry. (Taking a longer view, the Russian adventure in Afghanistan can perhaps be viewed as the first chapter in the now decades-long conflict with radical Islamism, but that didn't occur to anyone at the time. )
The two trade representatives were very different in appearance. One seemed very old to my 30-year old eyes, though he was probably only in his mid-50s. He looked like he was very out-of-shape and probably smoked (I was then playing league singles squash), but he was relatively knowledgeable about mineral commodities. The other trade representative was about as opposite as could be. He was in his 20s, he was handsome and looked extraordinarily fit – I recall thinking that he looked like he could have done a marathon over rough country and then done his duty with a Bond girl with the martini shaken, not stirred. I chatted to him a little about cars. I had owned a Fiat sport (not fancy) in the late 1970s and USSR was then trying to export a knock-off Fiat design (the Lada) to Canada. The young man said that he had owned a Lada. I took notice of this, since I presumed that very few young Soviet men would then have owned a car.
After the trade show, I followed up with request to the USSR Embassy for quotes on the commodities which we had discussed. In those days, the requests were probably by telex - a forgotten technology which preceded fax. I forget whether they acknowledged the request, but I do know that I didn’t get a quotation. I tried a couple more times, still without a quotation. I got annoyed with them and, rather than abandoning the pointless effort, sent them reminder telexes from time to time, never obtaining a quotation. It was a very organized company with good reporting systems, but I don't think that I had included this initiative in my regular reporting, as nothing had materialized that was worth reporting.
One day, the communications from my company to the Soviet Embassy attracted the attention of the RCMP, who were obviously wire-tapping the Embassy. They contacted the company at a senior level, no doubt causing considerable consternation to whatever top executive was first contacted by the RCMP. They presumably initiated a search of the telex records where the telexes to the Russian embassy would have been quickly located. I was duly summoned to the office of KH, the president of the subsidiary where I worked.
KH was a very intelligent, experienced and scrupulous man. Like me, he was an Oxford graduate and our families were in similar social circles. He’d dealt on even terms for many years with the shrewdest commodity producers and traders all over the world. He would have been on a first name basis with Marc Rich and nickname basis with Pinky Green, both of whom were big fish in copper business in the 1970s. But Noranda was then an even bigger fish.
I explained the story to him. He told me to tell the RCMP what I knew – to stick to the facts, don't speculate, don't go beyond what you know. In all areas, he was a stickler for subordinates carefully distinguishing what they knew as a fact from what they estimated or believed – an insistence which has stayed with me.
I met the two RCMP officers in Toronto at our company offices. I explained the context of my request for commodity quotations. They explained that their interest was in distinguishing legitimate commercial representatives from potential spies. They asked me how well the trade representatives knew their commodities? Did they know their stuff? Did anything seem out of place?
I described the various details from my encounter, summarizing that the old guy had a handle on the commodities, while the young athletic man with the Lada didn't. Disregarding my boss' advice not to speculate, I told them that it was the young man that they ought to be interested in. I never heard from them again and that was the end of the story, other than, many years later, I wondered whether Putin might have done a stint in Ottawa as a young man, but the ages and dates were a little off.
Thinking back, there are obvious contrasts between how RCMP counterintelligence approached me for information about potential Russian spies and the adversarial way in which the FBI approached Papadopoulos.
Thirty years later, I was interviewed by UK counterintelligence about the Climategate hack, which, like the DNC hack, was hack and dissemination on the eve of an important convention. Like the DNC hack, it was blamed by climate scientists on Russia. For reasons that are well known to readers of the Climate Audit blog, I had a unique perspective on these events, many of which I've never discussed. Much of my interest in the DNC hack arose from this experience, which I'll discuss on another occasion.