Front Burner - The KGB and Chrystia Freeland

Episode Date: October 15, 2021

Unearthed journals that were once the top-secret communications of the KGB — the Soviet Union’s secret police — shed new light on an early chapter of Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland’s life, and give us a window into the dying days of the USSR.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. It was January 2020, and Simon Miles was in the archives wing of the offices of the SBU, Ukraine's security service in Kyiv. And he was sifting through these old journals that were once the top secret communications of the Soviet Union's infamous secret police, the KGB. If this were ever to get out to the public, there would have been a big problem.

They're marked, they're stamped top secret. The authors are all KGB officers actively serving and the readers are all KGB officers. serving. And the readers are all KGB officers. So this is kind of a for us, by us situation in which they're really strikingly frank about the situation at home. By the way, if you ever felt like skimming through a bunch of formally classified Soviet intelligence documents, Ukraine is actually a great place to do it. In Ukraine, in particular after the Russian invasion of Crimea and also eastern Ukraine, it's become a policy to make all documentation, historical documentation, from the communist pura open access so that folks can see what happened in their country at that time. Simon is a diplomatic historian at Duke University in North Carolina, and he was in Kiev poring over these KGB archives for a book he's writing on a piece of Cold War history known as the Warsaw Pact.

All that to say, he wasn't necessarily expecting to stumble on anything juicy that had to do with his home country, Canada. But there it was. The KGB's colonel, this guy named A. Stroy, was writing at some length about a Canadian student who the agency clearly did not like. A woman codenamed Freedom. A woman who actually sounded strikingly like Simon's own member of parliament back home. And so I just started thinking, you know, this biography sounds really, really familiar. started thinking, you know, this biography sounds really, really familiar. And a quick Google on my phone and I rapidly concluded, if this is not Krista Freeland, this is like Krista Freeland's college best friend, because they obviously have so much in common.

Today, how KGB journals shed light on an early chapter of Deputy Prime Minister Krista Freeland's life and the window they give us into the dying days of the Soviet Union. So Simon, let's just back up a bit here. We know Krzysztof Freeland was in Ukraine for a stint from 1988 to 1989, around the period when these archival documents you found are from. And outside of these documents, what do we know about what she was doing there? So we know that she was a student at Harvard University and we know that she was studying Russian language literature and history. Russian language literature and history. And she would have been one of an increasingly large number of foreign exchange students coming to the Soviet Union. It's not surprising that she chose rather than going to Moscow or St. Petersburg to go to Kiev because of her family's background

there. She was raised speaking Ukrainian. Her mother is Ukrainian. Her mother is Ukrainian. And we know from the KGB that she was also getting up to a lot of other activities at the time as well. Because in their eyes, she's seen as an irritant in many roles. First, as an activist, Canadian-Ukrainian fighting for an independent Ukraine. Second, as a foreign journalist working inside Russia in the 1990s, often critical of the Kremlin. And fair to say, she herself has said that she's not just, she wasn't just a student there, right? She's previously talked about her activism.

Oh, yes. She's been very open about this, about what she was doing with the Ukrainian independence movement, working with journalists. She then goes back to Ukraine, newly independent Ukraine, as a journalist later on. So this isn't an aspect of her history that she's been trying to hide by any stretch. And I also will just know now we've asked we asked Krista Phelan about all of this and we're going to read her statement later. But maybe it's not going to make a ton of sense until we work through a bunch of this stuff you found so

so let's carry on and and talk about uh what the KGB says about her so back to the journal which you initially wrote about in the Globe and Mail it talks about the Canadian student quote unquote Frida I've taken a look at this journal I mean mean, I ran it through Google Translate, so it's far from perfect. But certainly, the KGB devoted a whole four pages to this student. So what kinds of activities did they say she was up to that put her on their radar? So they were much less interested in her studies. They were much more interested in sort of two major areas of activity that she was engaged in. The first was journalistic. So she was, they recognized, making the most of her family connections by using visits to family as a pretext to travel around and bring journalists with her so that they could meet Ukrainian independence movement figures and in other ways kind of exposing

them to what was going on politically in Ukraine at the time. Democracy will be when our freedom will not depend upon our government. The second big activity that she was engaged in was working with that Ukrainian independence movement, giving them ideas about how to be more effective, how to win the upcoming first ever free and fair elections that were going to be held in the Soviet Union, and sharing, I guess we could say best practices about how to organize political parties and mobilize voters. Right. Is it fair to say that she was like essentially a leader in different student groups? Or that the KGB says that? They certainly say that she was a leader in certain student groups.

And they point to evidence of her giving big public speeches and winning kind of student group elections and things like that. A leader of the movement, I think, would be a real stretch. But certainly within the student part of it, they come away with a really strong sense that she's a central figure. they come away with a really strong sense that she's a central figure. You talked before about how it was the biography of Frida that really perked your interest and made you think it was Christopher Freeland, or at least it was like her best friend. But what was it exactly that allowed you to connect the dots here, that allowed you to determine that Frida was actually Krisha Freeland.

Right. The first was the code name, Frida Freeland. It's a tellingly lazy code name. Yeah, I was gonna say it doesn't sound like a very creative code name. Right. It's the code name you give to a troublesome university exchange student, It's the code name you give to a troublesome university exchange student, not that you give to a spy. So that was telling in the first place. But the real kind of watertight explanation is that Stroi in this article talks about an earlier newspaper piece in Pravda Ukraini, which was the state newspaper of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. And he talks about how the KGB had this placed there. And in that piece, they don't talk about Frida, they talk about Krista Freeland. So that's the link. I understand more than one newspaper wrote about her, right? Tell me about what these newspaper pieces said.

wrote about her, right? What did, tell me about the, what these newspaper pieces said. The stories are all pretty consistent. We would probably refer, use the term foreign election interference today. But what they're talking about is this meddling Canadian who is inserting herself into sort of the processes underway at the end in the Soviet Union at the time and is driving you the Ukrainian independence message forward. Only an independent Ukraine, Viktor Lentchevsky says, can provide normal ecological, economic and social conditions in the Republic. But the legacy of fear, the legacy of control remains. And the nationalist movement here, RUK,

is still far from achieving the decisive influence exercised by sister movements in the Baltics. And the KGB tried to derail her, right, and tried to keep tabs on her, according to these documents. And what do they say that they did? Right, so they tailed her, they trailed her, they followed her when she went places. They inserted, they say, some kind of either informant or agent into her inner circle. That person was codenamed Slav. They would have been tapping her phones or the phones that she,

to which she had access to. And their big ploy when they recognized how enterprising she was let's say was that they would just bury her in homework so they reach out to her ukrainian language teacher and instruct this individual to increase how much school work she has the idea being she either will have to The idea being she either will have to curtail all of the other activities or she'll fail to do it. And then they can kick her out of the country for failing to perform academically. They then kind of observe that you have this Canadian who is on a student visa to study the Ukrainian language in Ukraine, who very obviously speaks impeccable Ukrainian. So that backfires on them. And they know that they tried this and that it failed, that she tells other people to

avoid saying things on the phone, but rather to talk face to face, to try to do what in the intelligence world are called surveillance detection routes or SDRs, which is basically where you try to identify and then lose a tail. Although they don't really get too much into that. And it's unlikely that she was doing this with any kind of professional level of sophistication. And they also say that she was in contact with this diplomat, right, at the Canadian embassy, someone they call Bison? Right. So they identify this diplomat, Bison, and there's no name given there. Incidentally, I'll just say that's the kind of code name you give a spy, right? Not a sort of version of their last name. Bison's a pretty good one. So she uses Bison to get information in and out of Ukraine. They suspect he's a spy, but whatever they think, he definitely has access to a

diplomatic pouch, which according to international convention, can't be read or tampered with. So he can send secure mail in and out of the Soviet Union. So, you know, I know it's not always a great idea to take the KGB at their word here, but they say, you know, she's suspected of sending these materials abroad, and this is special, unreadable, diplomatic pouch that you just talked about. And with all this in mind, you know, I know that you said, you know, you don't think that a code name like Frida is the kind of name someone would give a spy. But I wonder, as someone who knows the history and politics and security of this time, like what you might say to some people listening right now who think like, I don't know,

this sounds like spy stuff. Like could Christopher Freeland have been a spy? What would you say to that? Well, first, I would say this would be a way better story if that were the case. But it isn't. And I think we've got a lot of evidence to that effect. First and foremost, first and foremost, she wouldn't have been so open, right? Were she actually some kind of operative? The last thing in the universe you would want her to do is get up and give big speeches, somewhat inflammatory speeches by the standards of the time, and put a target on her back. You would want her to just work away at her studies and make contact surreptitiously, quietly with people to give them material, equipment. And she did pass around video and

audio recording equipment or just cold hard cash. The last thing you'd want is for her to become a figure of any note in that sort of world. The second really strong evidence, piece of evidence that I think we have is that she does get caught. And she gets caught for something pretty basic in the world of espionage, right? She has sort of pro-democracy materials, some VHS cassettes in her luggage. When she's flying back from a trip to the UK. She's going to Ukraine. She flies via Moscow. That's kind of spycraft 101. We can imagine that this would have been taught to a real spy very early on, and that mistake wouldn't be made. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem.

Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income?

That's not a typo, 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. Have you had the chance to talk with Krisha Freeland about any of this? When I wrote the piece up for The Globe, the fantastic team there encouraged me to reach out to her office. And I posed a series of questions,

some fairly specific, trying to get her take on some aspects of this. And I received the statement back, which was printed in the Globe and Mail piece. But I haven't had an opportunity to talk to her. I don't know her about any of this. I would be very interested to, but that opportunity hasn't presented itself. Okay. And I just, talking about her statement, we also asked Freeland about several things, why she was allegedly sending materials abroad, the way the KGB said, where she would have learned these sort of evasion skills, the KGB accused her of employee, where she would have learned these sort of evasion skills, the KGB accused her of employee, like employing, like avoiding surveillance or hiding her actions.

We also asked her if she ever worked for Western intelligence agencies. But I just want to read for our listeners. So if you don't mind me droning on for a minute, I just want to read the response that we got from her. My mother was Ukrainian-Canadian, and I speak Ukrainian, so I decided to travel to what was then the Ukrainian SSR as a 20-year-old student between 1988 and 1989. It was the Soviet era, and I am grateful to have had that experience. In addition to my studies, I worked part-time as a fixer, translator, and occasional writer, helping connect Western journalists with Ukrainian political activists and eyewitnesses, and helping to uncover stories of life in the Soviet Union, including one about a previously unknown mass grave of people murdered

under Stalin. I am aware that my work with pro-democracy and environmental activists invoked the ire of the Soviet KGB. I remember being the target of smear campaigns in the Soviet press, though I was eventually forced to leave the country. I have no regrets about my time in Ukraine. Out of this experience, what struck me very powerfully was how quickly a rotten political system could collapse and how important the work of brave dissidents could be. Yeah, funnily enough, that's the exact same statement that she gave me. Okay, okay. So Simon, before we end this conversation,

I do want to try and zoom out a little bit, if you don't mind, and just try to place this all in the time it would have been happening. So in these final years of the USSR, like this is around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall. They danced on the Berlin Wall this week.

They sang, they embraced, they laughed, they cried. They poured champagne, they chipped away at it with axes and chisels. By Friday night, they had brought in bulldozers to tear part of it down. This morning, the mayors of East and West Berlin came together for a ceremonial opening of a 50-foot gap in the wall in Potsdamer Square. Even in this year of dizzying change, this week's events in Germany were truly extraordinary. And so in these KGB journals, these internal communications that you're reading, what sense do you get of how these intelligence officers saw the state of the USSR at this point? Like, were they aware that these

might be the dying days of the Soviet Union? Right. That's a fantastic question. And actually, that exact subject is the topic of a much bigger piece of writing that I'm working on about how the KGB participated in the major reforms of the time, which were implemented by Mikhail Gorbachev. He was the eighth, and it turned out, last Soviet leader. They were called perestroika and glasnost, which mean restructuring, economic restructuring and openness. And it was an enormously transformative period of time in the Soviet Union. So he recognized that there were dire economic straits. Basically, at this point, the Soviet Union was the 20th century's most advanced 19th century economy. KGB officers, going back to the early 1980s, were some of the most aware of the dire problems that the Soviet Union faced.

They had access, in fact they produced, the raw intelligence as opposed to the cooked kind of politicized intelligence that was feeding a lot of the decision making at the time. So during this period, what amazed me was uncovering all of these stories written by KGB officers for KGB officers about how they're trying to good faith fix the Soviet Union, using intelligence tactics to cut down on corruption and graft, to streamline and make more efficient the economy. Yes, to prevent sort of American and Western misbehavior, but also to try to get American and Western technology that could really kickstart the economic system, especially computers and computerization, a field in which the Soviet Union lagged woefully, woefully behind. So Gorbachev is doing all of this, and we see KGB officers trying to play a leading role in that. That was really interesting to me because that's the exact opposite of the conventional wisdom. I mean, you yourself said we would certainly think twice about taking them at their word.

would certainly think twice about taking them at their word. They have this aura of menace, but also an image of being really kind of the hardline conservative faction within the Soviet Union, the security services, right? That's a story we tell about Vladimir Putin's Russia today as well. And what I uncovered was a real disconnect between, yes, very conservative leaders at the top, but KGB kind of rank and file are not just committed to this reform process, but see why it needs to happen and are trying to speed it along, ultimately unsuccessfully, because the process of the Soviet Union's unraveling goes faster. That is so interesting. And just to cap this off, I do want to jump forward to today because in some ways the fight going on in 1989 continues right now, right? Like Russia has occupied Crimea, which both Ukraine and Russia say

they have a legitimate claim over. And many countries, including Canada, are part of a military effort they say is aimed at preventing Russian expansion. And Freeland has been very vocal in support of that. You know, that is an issue that Canada has a very clear position on, and that I personally have a very clear position on. Russia grossly violated international law by invading and annexing Crimea and continuing to support war in the Donbass is something we cannot allow to stand.

Is that desire to keep Russia out of Ukraine universally desired in that country right now? In Ukraine? Well, I think it's clear that that's not entirely the case, because there are people in Crimea, for example, which was annexed by the Russian Federation, who voted in favor of that, although the plebiscite which returned that result was entirely rigged. And there are certainly folks in eastern Ukraine, in Donetsk and Luhansk regions, who also see their future more lying with Russia than with Ukraine. But certainly, if you walk the streets of a place like Kyiv, or points further west within the country, you see a country that's really mobilized. And I should mention that the law that actually made all of these materials open and accessible was passed in the immediate aftermath of the Russian invasion and lists in its kind of rationale in the text of the law that this is a retaliatory measure against Moscow for what they're doing.

against Moscow for what they're doing. And how formative do you think this period in Ukraine, when Christopher Freeland was there around 88, 89, how formative do you think it was in shaping the dynamics we see in the region today? Oh, absolutely critical. It's on the 8th of December, 1991, when the leader of Russia, the Russian Federation, the Russian Soviet Republic, as it was called then, Boris Yeltsin, the leader of Ukraine, Leonid Kravchuk, and also the president of Belarus, Stanislav Shishkevich, they sign an agreement that's

declared the Soviet Union has ceased to exist. So this process that Freeland is living through and witnessing and active in is what tears apart the Soviet Union, in particular that severs Ukraine from Russia, which is something that historically Russians have real trouble coming to terms with. Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, recently published an article about the intimate historical links between Russia and Ukraine that should not be severed and that were artificially severed. He and a great many Russians believe. So this experience of rending has definitely left a hangover. Simon, thank you so much for this. This is so interesting. Thank you. Thank you.

All right. That is all for this week. Front Burner is brought to you by CBC News and CBC Podcasts. The show is produced this week by Imogen Burchard, Simi Bassi, Ali Janes, and Katie Toth. Our sound design was by Brittany Amadeo, Julia Whitman, and Austin Pomeroy. Our music is by Joseph Shabison of Boombox Sound. The executive producer of Front Burner is Nick McKay-Blocos. And I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.

For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.