‘Hostile’ powers sending spies to West’s universities: Canada’s former intel chief

Spy agencies from ‘hostile’ nations are now focusing on infiltrating universities and companies in the West, David Vigneault, the former head of Canada’s intelligence service, has revealed. Vigneault also stressed the need for increased vigilance from academics after a recent “industrial-scale” attempt by China to steal new technologies was detected. “The frontline has moved, from being focused on government information to private sector innovation, research innovation, and universities,” he said in an interview with the Guardian, his first since leaving the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), which is part of the “Five Eyes” intelligence sharing alliance including the US, UK, Australia, and New Zealand.

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Vigneault accused Beijing of being the main culprit and said it was using a combination of cyberattacks, infiltrated agents, and recruitment among university staff to acquire sensitive technologies.

“The system is built to … in a very systematic way strip out the military applications of these new innovations to then put them into production for the People’s Liberation Army,” he said in the interview on the sidelines of an intelligence conference in The Hague.

Vigneault said China’s leadership was stunned by how swiftly the US Army took over Iraq in 2003 and initiated a long programme of military regeneration.

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Beijing decided to invest in “asymmetric capabilities” and steal as much technical knowledge as possible from the West, he added. “Being an organisation that doesn’t have to worry about the election cycle every four years, they had the ability to look at it from a very long perspective,” he said.

The CSIS also found that China meddled in two Canadian elections, in 2019 and 2021. But when it comes to stealing research, Vigneault said all of society, not just politicians, needed to come together to fight the threat.

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Vigneault, who now works for the US company Strider, which advises organisations on potential espionage threats, said university staff were recruited by foreign powers based on either naivety, ideology, or greed.

He also admitted that focusing on China could lead to a problematic sense of racial profiling among students and faculty in institutions.

“What I’ve tried to do is always make the distinction that the problem is not China or the Chinese people, the problem is the Chinese Communist party,” he said, adding that some espionage cases linked to China involved people with no Chinese heritage.