Article Alleged Nato Spy More Federal Departments Previously Reported Court

The NATO intern arrested last month by Belgian authorities on espionage charges has a work history with the Canadian government that is more extensive than previously reported, according to employment records she filed in court.

Documents filed in the Federal Court of Canada and obtained by The Globe chronicle Ms. Zhang’s account of her work history, which the records say dates back to 2017 and included stints at the National Research Council, Statistics Canada, and Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC).

She filed her employment history and an affidavit in court when she unsuccessfully appealed a ruling that she had committed fraud within the civil service when she wrote the same job exam twice for a single posting at the Canada Border Services Agency.

The CBSA became aware of Ms. Zhang’s dual applications in 2019 when a third-party human-resources provider flagged them as a potential issue, the records show. She never worked for the border agency.

Arrested NATO intern has history of fraud, was ordered to take ethics course

“It was never my intention to create such an awkward and embarrassing situation for myself,” she wrote in an apology letter, which she also filed in court. “I extremely enjoyed my career and appreciated my professional experience that government of Canada brought to me.”

Authorities in Belgium have not publicly named the country Ms. Zhang is accused of spying on behalf of, but two Canadian national-security sources have previously told The Globe that Belgian prosecutors have accused her of working for China.

Since her arrest, Ottawa has faced questions how she managed to pass the federal vetting process.

At a Wednesday news conference in Toronto, in to a question whether Canada’s screening processes need reform, Prime Minister Mark Carney said, “Any time you have a situation, you should take, you take stock and take lessons from this.”

Mr. Carney said the probe into Ms. Zhang is “an active investigation,” which he said limits what he can say it.

“The only thing I would add cryptically is that Canadian officials have been involved from the start,” he added.

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A senior government source said the Prime Minister was referring to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. The source said that the spy agency was keeping the Prime Minister updated. The Globe is not naming the source because they were not authorized to the matter publicly.

CSIS declined to , citing in a statement that the matter is subject to a continuing investigation.

Ms. Zhang wrote detailed accounts of her life in her job applications that were submitted as evidence in the court case. She lists an address in Toronto’s North York as her and also listed an Ottawa address. She was hired for several government jobs, her affidavit says, as part of the federal student work experience program. English is her second language, she said in the filings.

In her applications, she listed past volunteering experience for the Toronto International Film Festival and for an “election campaign for Liberal Party of Canada,” which she did not specify.

The federal Liberal Party said in a statement that it had “no record of the individual in question holding any formal campaign role.”

Arrested NATO intern accused by Belgium of spying for China, source says

At the time of her application to the CBSA, she was completing an honours economics degree from York University.

In a 2017 summer placement, she said in the filings, she worked as a junior data scientist at the federal National Research Council. Part of her work, she said, was to analyze ship movements in the port of Montreal.

The year, according to the documents, she studied “swine movement data” for Statistics Canada’s agricultural division before migrating to ESDC in early 2019 to do data analysis for programs such as Old Age Security and the Canada Pension Plan. She said her work there was devoted to developing “predictive models and other data-driven tools to ensure that the right Canadians are being paid the right benefit at the right time.”

The NRC, Statistics Canada and ESDC all declined to , citing the continuing investigation.

She responded to a CBSA posting for a permanent staff position that paid up to $94,000 a year. The security agency said it was modernizing by hiring staff who “have a passion for analytics.”

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Ms. Zhang was among 1,200 candidates who applied for the job, but she submitted two applications, using different e-mails and calling herself “Biwei Zhang” in one application and “Zhang Biwei” in the other, the court filings show.

When it came time to write the civil-service test, she wrote it twice – on March 14 and March 15, 2019. This was despite federal rules that say job candidates cannot write the same test twice within 180 days.

After being alerted to her multiple applications, the Public Service Commission, a government watchdog for federal hiring, began investigating her and demanded a sit-down interview.

In 2023, while the commission found that Ms. Zhang had not acted dishonestly in submitting two applications, it ruled that she had committed fraud in sitting for the examination twice and failing to confirm that fact when “asked directly” by the border agency. In 2024, a Federal Court judge ruled against Ms. Zhang, ending her appeal.

The court records show that as early as 2019, investigators with the commission had sought interviews with her the CBSA applications, and that her interview with the watchdog took place in December, 2020.

However, Ms. Zhang was re-hired by Statistics Canada in May, 2020, through an external non-advertised appointment and worked there for a year, according to the PSC’s investigation that was contained in the court records.

Although the record of employment filed in court is only current up to 2021, a account that The Globe has identified as belonging to Ms. Zhang says she worked at the European Space Agency in Italy in 2022, and later as a systems engineer at the Canadian Space Agency in Quebec.

Colleen Bauman, a labour lawyer who acted for Ms. Zhang in the Federal Court appeal, said Wednesday that she could not on the case.

“I have no information whatsoever,” she said, adding that she worked on Ms. Zhang’s case years ago.

With a report from Ian Bailey

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