Hostile spy agencies are now as focused on infiltrating western universities and companies as they are on doing so to governments, according to the former head of Canada’s intelligence service.
David Vigneault warned that a recent “industrial-scale” attempt by China to steal new technologies showed the need for increased vigilance from academics.
“The frontline has moved, from being focused on government information to private sector innovation, research innovation and universities,” he told the Guardian in his first interview since leaving the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), which is part of the “Five Eyes” intelligence sharing alliance with the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand.
Vigneault highlighted Beijing as the main culprit, saying it was using a combination of cyber-attacks, infiltrated agents and recruitment among university staff to acquire sensitive technologies.
“The system is built to … in a very systematic way strip out the military applications of these new innovations to then put them into production for the People’s Liberation Army,” he said in the interview on the sidelines of an intelligence conference in The Hague this week.
Vigneault said China’s leadership had been on a long programme of military regeneration after being horrified by how swiftly the US army took over Iraq in 2003.
Beijing decided to invest in “asymmetric capabilities” and steal as much technical knowledge as possible from the west.
“Being an organisation that doesn’t have to worry about the election cycle every four years, they had the ability to look at it from a very long perspective,” he said.
The CSIS concluded that China meddled in two Canadian elections, in 2019 and 2021, conclusions which led to a political scandal over whether or not the agency had adequately warned politicians. But when it came to stealing research, Vigneault said all of society, not just politicians, needed to come together to fight the threat.
Vigneault left the CSIS in July last year after seven years there and now works for the US company Strider, which advises organisations on potential espionage threats.
He said he said seen “the full spectrum” of approaches – from cyber-attacks to “people who are infiltrated into programmes, get the information and bring it back”.
University staff were recruited by foreign powers based on either naivety, ideology or greed, he said.
He claimed these threats justified the decision to require national security evaluations for university programmes in sensitive areas that received government funding.
He dismissed criticism from some researchers that the rules were too restrictive and could stymie academic excellence and openness. “You cannot imagine that you work in isolation. You’re not living on an island and doing pure research for the good of humanity,” he said.
Vigneault conceded that focusing on China could lead to a problematic sense of racial profiling among students and faculty in universities and other sectors.
“It’s an absolutely critical point – we are not far from potentially being accused, wrongly or rightly, of racism,” he said.
“What I’ve tried to do is always make the distinction that the problem is not China or the Chinese people, the problem is the Chinese Communist party.”
He added that some espionage cases linked to China involved people with no Chinese heritage.
Vigneault said his seven years in charge of Canada’s intelligence service had been marked by an “evolution from the focus on terrorism to big power politics”. He was in charge during the run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, when Canada had access to almost everything collected by US and UK agencies on Vladimir Putin’s plans.
Vigneault described that intelligence as “exquisite” and said he had had little doubt that Russia would invade for several weeks before it did.
He suggested that, as well as lacking the same detailed intelligence, the failure of European security services to anticipate the attack was at least partly down to dependence on Russian oil and gas. The fear of the “political cost or the economic cost of trying to diversify before an invasion” made it easier to hope the invasion would not take place.
“We saw it with Germany, which later had to reorient a large part of their energy,” he said. “That has an impact on decision-making, that has an impact on how you assess information.”
Although Canada is dealing with the hostile rhetoric and high tariffs imposed by its erstwhile closest ally, the US, Vigneault called for a pragmatic approach. This meant identifying areas where cooperation was crucial and “building sovereign capabilities” where it might be preferable not to rely on an increasingly erratic ally.
He added: “In the world we are in now, and the world we foresee for the future, data is going to be absolutely critical. So how do you make sure that you know you have a level of sovereignty over your data to protect your citizens, your national securities?
“Developing sovereign cloud capabilities … allows you to control your information, and not be at the mercy of a company that may have legal requirements to share this information back to the US.”
