The Decibel - A new twist in the two Michaels saga

Episode Date: November 21, 2023

Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig – known as the two Michaels – were both detained by Chinese authorities on December 10, 2018. That was the start of their 1,020-day imprisonment, in which Beijing accused the men of procuring and sharing Chinese state secrets.Now, two years after their release, one of the Michaels alleges that he was only detained because of information he provided to the other Michael, that was in turn passed onto the Canadian government.Globe and Mail Ottawa Bureau Chief Robert Fife broke the story with colleague Steven Chase. Robert explains the allegations, what the Canadian government is saying now and what this means in the claims of hostage diplomacy between Canada and China.Questions? Comments? Ideas? E-mail us at [e-mail]

On December 10th, 2018, Canadian Michael Spavor was supposed to fly to South Korea from China. Early that morning, he posted on Facebook, I'll be in Seoul from Monday the 10th for a few days for new consulting work. He ended the post with a smiley face. But Michael Spavor never boarded that flight. Instead, he was detained by Chinese authorities. In another part of China on the same day, another Canadian, Michael Kovrig, was also taken into custody.

The saga of the two Michaels had begun. Their detentions happened nine days after Canadian authorities apprehended Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou in a Vancouver airport because of an extradition request from the U.S. For the first six months, the two Michaels were interrogated in facilities run by China's Ministry of State Security. After that, Michael Spavor was placed in a crowded cell in a detention center, where the fluorescent lights were kept on 24 hours a day. Meanwhile, Michael Kovrig was in another center, transferred to a three-by-three-meter jail cell with limited access to the outdoors. In total, they were imprisoned in China for 1,020 days. Their release came immediately after the U.S. came to an agreement with Meng Wanzhou,

and she was allowed to return to China. That was in 2021. Now, two years later, Globe and Mail reporters Bob Fyfe and Stephen Chase have broken the news that Michael Spavor is seeking a settlement from the Canadian government, alleging that he lost those 1,020 days of his life because of information he provided to Michael Kovrig that was in turn passed on to the Canadian government. Bob Fyfe is on today's show to explain. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail.

Bob, thank you so much for being on the podcast. Always a pleasure to join you. So this is a really complex story, Bob. It's a big story, too. So I think we should just start off by really talking about the men at the center of it. So these are the two Michaels that we hear about. Let's start with the first one. Who is Michael Spavor? Michael Spavor is a very interesting man. He's a Canadian who was from Western Canada and Calgary.

He ended up falling in love with China and North Korea. He had a very successful travel tourist consulting business. What makes him so unique, he's one of the few Westerners that not only had access to North Korea, but actually had access to the dictator, Kim Jong-un. I mean, there are pictures of Mr. Spavor having cocktails and smoking cigarettes with him on the dictator's private yacht after the two of them had gone jet skiing. So, I mean, this is incredible access. He had not only access to Kim Jong-un, but also to senior ministers. And he was able to travel large parts of the country. He even brought the NBA basketball star Dennis Rodman to North Korea.

Yeah, we've heard about their friendship. So Michael Spavor is kind of one of the guys behind this then. He was the guy behind it. So he's had a very interesting life. He didn't live in North Korea. He lived in two places for a period of time, but both of them were on the Intelligence Security Service, our Five Eyes intelligence partners, which make up the United States, Australia, the UK, and New Zealand. Because here's some guy who actually has met many of the leaders, and whatever take he would have would be of real value to Western intelligence agency, because it's very, very difficult for people to get information in North Korea. So let me ask you about Michael Kovrig then, the other Michael. What was he doing in China before he was detained?

Michael Kovrig has been a longtime foreign affairs officer at Global Affairs Canada. He has really been fascinated with China and had spent time in China at the Canadian embassy from 2012 to 2014. And then he lived for a bit in Hong Kong. In 2017, he left to work for a global think tank group called the International Crisis Group, but only on a, he took a sabbatical leave of absence. And he worked for a program, a very special elite program at Global Affairs called the Global Security Reporting Program. And this real job of people who work there was to gather information or intelligence, but not covertly, overtly, and to write up reports. And all of this information that he would have gathered are shared with CSIS, the security people in the Privy Council office, and our Five Eyes intelligence partners. They're just as a matter of course. Now, Mr. Kovrig, as part of his job,

he got to know Mr. Spavor very well, had traveled up to visit with him at his house along the North Korean border. So I know people who know both men and they say that Spavor and Kovrig knew each other very well. They spent a lot of time together, not only up near the Chinese border with North Korea, but also in Beijing and in Hong Kong where they would get together and have drinks. So I guess I just want to be clear here, though, Bob, like what was he a spy?

No, he's not a spy in the technical sense of the word. The Global Security Reporting Program officers there, they are not supposed to run agents. They are not supposed to pay agents. They are not supposed to recruit agents. But they are, in some ways, kind of like reporters like you and me, that they go out and they interview people and then they come back and write reports. But the big difference is you and I don't give our information to the government, right? This is information that has been given to a government. Correct. It is. But they're upfront about this, but they're saying that they're not spies because they don't operate covertly. Well, so let's go back to what was going on between these two men, the two Michaels. They knew each other, like you said.

So what does Spavor allege happened between them? Well, Mr. Spavor is alleging that he was tricked or deceived by Michael Kovrig. He thought that this was a friend and when he would ask him things, you know, over drinks or dinner, he would tell him, you know, as anybody would be fascinated about what's going on in North Korea or possibly what might be going on along the Chinese border with North Korea. So he believes that he did not know that Michael Kovrig was taking this, turning it into reports and analysis, and then sharing it with CSIS and our Five Eyes allies. people were picked up randomly and that one person's actions did not affect the other person's actions for the rest, that this was basically a hostage taking in response to Canada's detention of Ming-Wan Zhou, the Huawei senior executive and daughter of the founder, who was detained in

Vancouver, as you know, in 2018 on a U.S. extradition warrant for wire and bank fraud relating to violations of U.S. sanctions law against Iran. So they are taking a completely different tack than that. Mr. Spavor's lawyer sees things differently, and I don't know what kind of intelligence he has or what kind of evidence he has. If this goes to court, you and I will be able to see more of the details of this information. You should know that Mr. Spavor's lawyer is a very serious lawyer. He's got a lot of experience in dealing with CSIS and in the national security realm. He was very successful in getting $10.5 million for Omar Khadr after the Supreme Court ruled that CISIS had violated his rights by going down to interviewing him in

Guantanamo and then passing on that information to the CIA and U.S. intelligence services. So we'll see what happens here, but they're asking for a lot of money in what I'm told in the neighborhood of multi-million dollars. Tell us what you can here, Bob. Do we know what Spavor's lawyer is negotiating? I don't know all the details. I'm assuming that they want a significant amount of money and then they would sign a nondisclosure agreement. And if they don't and it goes to court, then we're going to see what potential evidence he has that makes the case for why he believes he was arrested and why he thinks the government of Canada and Mr. Kovach are partly responsible for them being imprisoned. So it's a settlement that is essentially for damages for what happened to him when he was detained. Correct.

All right. So let me just kind of lay out my understanding of this here, Bob. So Spavor is looking for a settlement from the Canadian government because he said he would have never been detained by China had Michael Kovrig not included him in his work here. And this work specifically was around reporting on security issues in China, it sounds like. So basically Spavor is saying that he never consented to being included in intelligence gathering, like he just thought they were chatting over beers or whatever, but he didn't realize he was going to get caught up in this. Is that right? That's correct. We'll be back after this message.

Bob, of course, you and Steve Chase broke this story. I understand you might not be able to give us a lot of details here, but how did you learn about all of this? Well, I can't tell you too much about that, but clearly there are national security implications of this kind of reporting, and we have to be very, very careful about who we've talked to and how we got this information. But nobody is denying the reporting that, in fact, Mr. Spavor is seeking a settlement from the government and that he believes that the government and Mr. Kovach should be held responsible for him being arrested and he wants the government to provide a settlement to him. So we're just finding out about this now. But of course, China laid espionage charges against both men. So Bob, what do we know about what China knew about this at the time that the Michaels were detained? Yeah. So China, the charges were against Mr. Sparrow was passing on state secrets and Mr. Kovart was charged with accepting intelligence or state secrets.

And that's really all we know about this. The Chinese embassy last night put out a statement saying, we've told you all along that these guys were involved in espionage. Yeah, I mean, it sounds like the Chinese government has a very different definition of, you know, what these men were doing compared to the Canadian government. And I mean, their definition of these things in general is broader, right? Because sometimes even journalists get caught up in this idea of intelligence gathering. Oh, yeah. I mean, China has a vast security service that, as you know, keeps an eye on a lot of people.

And journalists are certainly ones that they watch as well. And in the case of Mr. Kovrig, because he had diplomatic cover, he was able to go to a lot of places and meet a lot of people. And clearly, we now know that China was watching everything he was doing. Right. And when he was detained, Kovrig was, in fact, on a leave of absence from his diplomatic post, right? So that's why he didn't have diplomatic immunity at the time. So Bob, I guess we should really get into this a little bit more and talk about Kovrig's diplomatic job, because this seems to be an important part of this, especially when it comes to Spavor's accusations here. So what exactly is the Global Security Reporting Program? This is an elite group of diplomats whose

main function is to overtly go and get as much intelligence as possible and write it up and share it with CSIS and Five Eyes intelligence community. We do not have a foreign intelligence agency like the CIA or like MI6 of Britain. So in a way, they kind of fulfill that role, although I have to say they're not doing covert work. Yeah. So these are not considered spying or espionage jobs. This is different. They're about gathering intelligence. So I guess how public would these reports have been that COVID was producing, Bob? Is this something that everyone could see? Nope. We are actually going to see if we can try to get some of these reports now under access to information, but you and I couldn't just go and read these reports. They were,

my understanding, they're sent to a small group of people in global affairs, and then it goes to the Privy Council office, which has an intelligence assessment branch. And then it's also shared with CSIS and as well with the CIA and FBI and MI6, MI5, everybody is part of the Five Eyes Intelligence Community. Right, the five. So Canada, the US, UK, New Zealand, Australia. Let me ask you about what the different parties are saying here then, Bob, I guess, starting with Michael Spavor. So what has he said or what has his lawyer said when you approached him for comment about these talks between his lawyer and the government? Well, Mr. Spavor, who lives in Calgary,

we sent quite a detailed list of questions to him and he did not respond. His lawyer, we also sent detailed questions and his lawyer said he had not received instructions to comment. We sent detailed questions to Mr. Kovrig and he responded back that, first of all, he didn't want us to write the story, but he responded back that he played by the rules and regulations of the government of Canada and Foreign Affairs Department. And then we did a very, very detailed questions to the government of Canada as well, Global Affairs, and they came back with a statement to the effect that he was not a spy and this is a false narrative that plays in the China's hands and that there was nothing untoward here and that the arrest of the two men was not because of anything that the two of them may have done together.

I'm wondering about the end result here, because when we look at the timing of everything, right, when the Michaels were detained just days after Meng Wanzhou's arrest, and the release came immediately after she was released to go home, right? So I guess ultimately, even though we've talked about all these things today, like ultimately, wasn't this still a case of hostage diplomacy? Oh, absolutely. There's no doubt about that. I mean, this does change the take that we've looked at how these two men were dealt with. But I don't think we should take away from the fact that China arrested these two men, clearly as a hostage taking form of diplomacy

in response to the arrest of Meng Wanzhou. So, you know, maybe they would never have done anything about the two Michaels, or maybe they would have. It's hard to know, because I don't think we want to take away from the fact that here's what China did. They did this. Now, maybe they felt these were two good guys to pick up, because we have something on them, and we can say that these guys were up to something. And the Canadian government, of course, as you know, has denied it all along. Yeah, it gives us some context, maybe as to, you know, why things went down the way they did. But I mean, ultimately, these are two guys who were detained in pretty difficult conditions in China for, you know, over 1000 days. It was terrible what they both men went through. You know, look,

I'm told that Michael Spavor was made to sit on these chairs for many long hours. They apparently threatened to execute him. He might have been drugged. And I'm sure that Michael Kovrig faced very similar situations. My understanding is that Mr. Spavor did admit to the Chinese interrogators that, yeah, he shared this type of information. He shared that information. He didn't think what he was doing was wrong. He thought, it was my friend.

I told him this stuff. He didn't have an idea that this is the kind of information that would have gone back to intelligence services. Bob, thank you so much for being here. You're welcome, thank you That's it for today I'm Mainika Raman-Wells Our producers are Madeline White Cheryl Sutherland

and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin David Crosby edits the show Adrian Chung is our senior producer and Angela Pachenza is our executive editor Thanks so much for listening and I'll talk to you tomorrow Adrienne Chung is our senior producer and Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening and I'll talk to you tomorrow.