Some alternative thoughts on the Spy Who Loved Bob Dechert

The Bob Dechert (left) scandal. Have you heard about it?

I first wrote about it last Friday:

The parliamentary secretary to the minister of foreign affairs, MP Bob Dechert, says flirtatious e-mails he sent to a Toronto-based reporter for China's state news agency are harmless.
But the e-mails, some signed “Love, Bob Dechert,” raise questions about foreign influence in official Ottawa circles
Last year, the head of Canada's spy service, Richard Fadden, suggested the Chinese government was actively seeking ways to influence decision-makers in Ottawa, though he declined to name any politicians.
John Baird, the foreign affairs minister, told QMI Agency in Calgary Friday that he had no knowledge of the matter.
Karl Belanger, a spokesman for NDP leader Nycole Turmel, said: “We want this Conservative government to be more friendly on the world stage, but this isn't what we had in mind.”
Dechert, a two-term MP for Mississauga, Ont., said in a statement posted on his website that he met Shi Rong of the Xinhua News Agency while doing “Chinese-language media communications” and that he came to know her as a friend. [Read the rest here]

Since then, the drumbeats — including many thumps from within my own organization —  have grown for Dechert to resign his position as Parliamentary Secretary to the Foreign Affairs Minister for, depending on the critic, showing bad judgment or compromising national security.

Regardless of why they're calling for his resignation, though, the common assumption of Dechert's critics is that Shi was a spy and we know that because — according to the unchallenged narrative now sweeping us all along — is that all reporters for Xinhua News Agency are spies working against the interest of Canada and for the interests of the government of China.

What we have here, then, is  “Logic 101”:

1. All reporters for Xinhua News Agency in Canada are spies for China.
2. Shi Rong is a reporter for Xinhua News Agency in Canada.
3. Shi Rong is a spy.

But the key assumption behind that logic — that all reporters from Xinhua News Agency in Canada are spies — seems to me far from proven. And now there is growing evidence on the public record to suggest it is not true that all Xinhua reporters are spies and, if that's not true, then we need some more evidence that Shi Rong is or acted like a spy. For if we don't have that, then what's Dechert's foul? (His wife, Ruth Clark, might yet have some awkward questions but his fellow MPs, not so much. And I note that, so far, only the NDP have called for Dechert's resignation but the Liberals — to their credit — have not yet done so.)

So: Was Shi acting like a spy? (How do spies act? Beats me.) On that point, The Globe and Mail this evening reports:

… notes [from Shi's husband back in China] accused Ms. Shi of seeking to dissolve her marriage “in order to be in love” with this “congressman,” or MP. “This is the Shi Rong you should have known,” the angry note says in Chinese.
Another is apparently directed at Ms. Shi’s Xinhua editors in Beijing.
“Shi Rong’s husband found out about these problems but failed so many times to persuade her [to stop], so [I] wanted to reflect this situation to [Xinhua] which sent her to work” in Canada. “Shi Rong was praised many times by headquarters and has also almost reached the end of her posting, [so she] is afraid this thing will affect her future development.”

Ok. First of all: maybe I'm naive but if Shi Rong was a spy and had gotten a Really Important Canadian like Bob Dechert to fall for her, wouldn't that be good for her career as as spy? Why, if her real mission was bagging Bob Dechert, would anyone be afraid that that wouldl affect her future development. Hell, she should go print up a t-shirt  with “Mission Accomplished” on it!

The Ottawa Citizen correctly spots an interesting twist: A note written in Chinese at the top of the e-mails sent around to journalists and others last week quotes the aggrieved husband back in China saying Shi wanted a divorce to continue her relationship with Dechert:

The person who hacked emails between the Mississauga MP and Xinhua News correspondent Shi Rong appended the note at the top of the package of emails, which were forwarded last week to 250 recipients on Shi's contacts list.
“In order to love this MP, Shi Rong has not hesitated to ask to end her marriage while posted abroad,” the note said in Chinese. “This is the Shi Rong you should know about.”
Shi has said it was her own email account her husband hacked, and that he circulated the messages between her and Dechert, which date to April 2010.
An alternate translation of the message by the newspaper Epoch Times reads: “To continue her love affair with this member of Parliament, Shi Rong pitilessly asked to end her marriage while stationed overseas.”

But I'm not sure the Citizen piece gets the significance of that added note. Certainly, it opens up some more questions we'd like to put to Mr. Dechert as to the candour and honesty of his statement on Friday. But where does this leave us on the issue of whether Shi was a spy? If she was a spy, wouldn't she be rock-solid with the real husband back in China while doing the equivalent of “Close Your Eyes and Think of China” thing here in Canada? If Shi was, in fact, getting ready to leave her husband in China in the hopes of staying in Canada with an MP — or any other Canadian citizen — well, do spies do that? I don't know, to be honest.

And if, as we all seem to be assuming, that all Xinhua News Agency reporters in Canada are spies, why does a Xinhua reporter have the same press credentials I do from the Parliamentary Press Gallery? (This is a rhetorical question for I was on the executive of the Press Gallery when we approved applications for credentials for reporters from Xinhua. And while I had suspicions, they satisfied our criteria.)

And finally, here's an interesting piece from Parliamentary Press Gallery member Mark Bourrie, a Canadian, who, he reports himself, was almost sucked into the Xinhua vortex …

Now don't get me wrong: The Dechert e-mails are certainly worthy of continuing public discussion. But as for me: I'm not ready just yet to pronounce Dechert's doom. I'd like to know a little bit more about this whole relationship. Over to you, Mr. Dechert …