Word: canadians
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...actually have been targeting U.S. trade secrets or military information. Whatever the reasons for Hampel's clandestine activities, Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay anticipated U.S. concern and deflected part of the blame back to the Americans. Washington's Western Hemisphere travel initiative, which will soon require passports for any Canadian crossing to the U.S., is already overloading Canada's passport bureaucracy, MacKay said. "What this does is it essentially reminds us of how diligent we have to be in every aspect of the issuance of passports," MacKay told TIME. "It's this balancing act of getting the security in line...
...According to evidence the Canadian Security Intelligence Service filed at Federal Court, Hampel, apparently aged 40, obtained three successive Canadian passports over seven years, the last one in 2002 after security had ostensibly been strengthened. The number on his 1971 Ontario birth certificate belonged to someone else, a legitimate citizen, the evidence said. His real identity has not been revealed; a Globe and Mail headline dubbed Hampel "The Man of Mystery on Docket DES-3-06." Even the landlord of his basement apartment could not remember him. The court summary of evidence said only that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service...
...Although the Canadian counter-intelligence service claims Hampel was an agent for the SVR, successor to the cold-war-era KGB, Canadian security experts say part of Hampel's espionage "legend" - the false identity and public trail he allegedly established through nefarious means - does not entirely match the old KGB modus operandi. KGB agents would be reluctant to use the records of an existing citizen for the foundation of a spy's fabricated life...
...Russian Ambassador to Canada, Georgiy Mamedov, attempted to brush off the allegations without directly denying them. "From my unenlightened position, this case is far from a slam dunk," he told CBC Newsworld. "I don't see anything that pins him to our door." Mamedov noted that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had recently rounded up 70 alleged Mafia kingpins and underlings in Montreal and speculated that Hampel might be a mobster. "We're not in the cold-war mode any longer, so I don't see any secrets that would be so important as to send some kind of illegal...
...Canadian military historian and security analyst Jack Granatstein suggested a range of motives might be behind Hampel's alleged activities. "We're a country of immigrants," Granatstein told TIME. "We have just about every single ethnic group here and a lot of these people are interested in the home country, and they are fertile ground for spying, for money-raising, for arms-buying." Granatstein also noted that Montreal is the center of the Canadian aerospace industry and has sophisticated information technology firms as well as a significant share of the country's pharmaceutical research and development sector, reportedly a favored...