Spies Among Us

It was the most unlikely of places: Toronto’s Royal Agricultural Winter Fair, the annual farming exhibition that draws thousands. A man of what I guessed to be Chinese descent had a small silver camera and was surreptitiously taking pictures of the latest agricultural equipment on display. How many pictures can you take of a tractor? I thought. And then my rather slow-acting journalist’s radar went off—“Dollars to donuts if that guy’s not an industrial spy!”

Which is why I was particularly curious to review Nest of Spies: The Startling Truth About Foreign Agents at Work Within Canada’s Borders. The book, by Montreal journalist Fabrice de Pierrebourg and Michel Juneau-Katsuya, an ex-operative with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, promises—at least on the jacket cover—to shed light on the pernicious problem of industrial espionage, which has “cost our nation thousands of jobs and billions of dollars.”

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall...