A slab of black plastic teeters on George Webb’s cluttered desk in a windowless government office. It looks like an oversized ice cube tray –except for the complex circuitry inside.
A Toronto customs officer found it in a package being shipped to Syria. It was labelled “personal effects” but it didn’t take long for experts to figure out what it really was: part of a missile guidance system.
“You open up a box and you find these,” says Mr. Webb, a 38-year veteran of the customs service and, for the past 14 years, the intelligence officer at the centre of Canada’s secretive fight against the proliferation of nuclear weapons. “Same with these,” he says, picking up an innocuous-looking metal bar that is also a missile guidance component. “The only way we know is we detain it, give it to our partners. It’s a very difficult job.”
Halting the spread of nuclear weapons was the top issue at the United Nations last week.
And yesterday the Security Council members met with Iran to express their concerns about Tehran’s clandestine nuclear enrichment activities.
While diplomats and politicians do the talking, the weighty task of preventing Iran and others from getting their hands on the technology needed to develop effective nuclear arsenals falls to intelligence officers like Mr. Webb.
As manager of Canada Border Services Agency’s Counter Proliferation Section, Mr. Webb’s job is to figure out which of the heaps of exports leaving Canada each day might contain nuclear or weapons components.
“We do not want a Made in Canada sticker on something used on an IED, in the Iranian nuclear program, something like that. That’s what we try and stop,” he says in an exclusive interview in his downtown Ottawa office.
To illustrate what he is up against, Mr. Webb points to an organizational chart pieced together by his staff. It plots an elaborate network of Canadian companies that his office is investigating.
He believes the companies are fronts that together form a sophisticatedprocurement ring whose mission is to acquire and export sensitive weapons technology.
He has tracked many such rings.
“They’ll come in and they’ll actually open up five or six companies, register them as legitimate companies and they’ll just sit. And they’ll operate under ABC Limited until the very first time that we target a shipment,” he says. “That day, that afternoon, that company’s closed and they move onto the second.”
A common tactic is to import U.S. defence materials into Canada and then attempt to export them overseas under a false bill of goods. American military technology moves relatively freely into Canada, which is exempted from many of the restrictions imposed by Washington’s International Traffic in Arms Regulations. But once in Canada, those goods are not supposed to be exported.
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A lot of what Mr. Webb does is to ensure those imported U.S. strategic and “dual-use” items are not repackaged, relabelled as tires or auto parts, and sent overseas by foreign agents and profiteers.
“We have a bigger problem, issue, than most allied countries in the world, only because of our close proximity, plus because we have a much freer trade in military goods between Canada and the United States,” he says.
He estimates that 90% of the three to four million shipments of strategic and dual-use shipments that leave Canada each year are legitimate and have the required export permits. It’s the other 10% that are targeted by his 72 officers across Canada.
“Out of that 10%, probably 5% are in fact — what’s a good word — entrepreneurs. People trying to make a buck, that’ll sell anything to anybody for a profit,” he says.
“The other 5% are in fact state-sponsored procurers that actually come in,” he says. “And we have to sort those people out, finding the needle in the haystack.”
And they find a lot.
Two years ago, his officers seized three 20-foot shipping containers filled with ancient computer monitors. A closer inspection, however, revealed that concealed within were cutting-edge microchips. The shipment was destined for North Korea.
“For their delivery systems,” Mr. Webb says. “I mean, picking on North Korea, they certainly have a uranium centrifuge program, they have an enrichment program, it’s all there. And now what they need is delivery.
“They have rockets, they have some 1,500-kilometre rockets, as far as distance. They’re still working on the accuracy, and this is where the North American technologies come into play.”
The CBSA Counter Proliferation Program was created in 1985. Ten years later, Mr. Webb was running the Canada Customs drug operations unit when he was asked to help out on the counter-proliferation side. It was supposed to be a six-month assignment but he has been at it ever since.
Figuring out which shipments are suspect is a calculation based largely on intelligence. Mr. Webb’s office works with the Department of National Defence, RCMP and Canadian Security Intelligence Service as well as allied foreign agencies.
“We have teams of uniformed staff at our major international airports and our marine ports who specifically just target shipments that we normally supply to them from headquarters,” he says.
“We talk about a warehouse at Pearson International Airport, there may be at any given time 10,000 shipments going out. Well, we’re looking for perhaps 10 that we have to impede, stop, detain, seize and turn over … to the RCMP or to our own criminal investigations section.”
When he finds an illegal shipment, Mr. Webb routinely shares the details with Canada’s allies so they know that a certain country is shopping for a particular item and that they should be on the lookout.
“So it is a global effort,” he says. “I’ll get a telephone call at 3 o’clock in the morning from somebody in Germany saying, ‘We just stopped a highly anticorrosive pump going to Iran and it came out of Canada.'”
If Mr. Webb’s officers open a box and find something suspicious, they may ask DND weapons experts to analyze it. Sometimes they draw upon the private sector as well.
When a customs officer found odd-looking devices inside a box labelled as truck parts, Mr. Webb called the parts manager of a Canadian truck manufacturer, sent him photos of the items and asked for his opinion.
The manager agreed they were not truck parts. CBSA held onto the devices and three days later, officers found a similar shipment at another port — the same parts but this time packaged with rotary engine blades. The items were seized for analysis and turned out to be unmanned aerial vehicle parts. “They were going to Pakistan,” Mr. Webb says.
Investigators occasionally link procurement rings to terrorist groups such as Hezbollah or Hamas, but Mr. Webb says “the vast majority of our efforts are on state-sponsored cells.”
What are they after?
“Soup to nuts,” Mr. Webb says. “It really is, depending on the area. Like Syria is a very prolific country for chemical-biological weaponry. So we have incubators, we have pressure chambers going there. We have anything to do with a nuclear program going to Iran.
“We have our own issues with the People’s Republic of China. They’re in a major reconstruct of their whole military program. It’s much easier to copy something than it is to do your own R&D work and develop it yourself. So is there procurement operations going over there? Yes.”
Foreign students are a “flourishing problem,” Mr. Webb says. “There’s a lot of national research done in universities in the United States and Canada, leading edge, so you pop a student in there doing his doctorate degree and that’s first-hand access to it.”
Like drug smugglers, procurement cells continually adapt their routes to law enforcement pressures. The United Arab Emirates remains a key transshipment point but goods are increasingly going west through places such as China. “Canada has been a leader in aggressively fighting dangerous nuclear proliferation,” says Christopher McCluskey, a CBSA spokesman. “We have successfully disrupted efforts to aid Iran’s nuclear program through illegal technology transfer in the past.
“We have prosecuted those engaging in such efforts. We will continue to be vigilant. The message is clear. Canada is serious about doing all we can to stop Iran advancing their dangerous nuclear proliferation plans.”
Last April, the RCMP charged a Toronto man with attempting to export pressure transducers, necessary to produce nuclear weapons, to Iran through Dubai. Mahmoud Yadegari is scheduled to go on trial in January. But arrests are rare.
“They’re tough cases,” Mr. Webb says. “We actually have arrested people and, of course, then they’re no shows because they disappear, and I mean literally disappear, and we can crank out all of the CSIS assets and they’re just gone.”
That was what happened with the missile guidance system that was destined for Syria (which has a military co-operation agreement with Iran). The shipper was never identified so there were no arrests, and no prosecution. But the Syrians never received their deadly package.
sbell@nationalpost.com
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