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Fortune Cookie for Dechert: You're Screwed

Baird's background doesn't indicate he's a natural to head Canada's Foreign Affairs, but he has to be uneasy about Dechert's long range dalliance with Shi Rong. Baird radiates ambition. One suspects he'll get new Parliamentary Secretary when the fuss with Dechert blows over.
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A Member of Parliament becoming infatuated with a good looking gal, is worthy of a one-column headline on page 55 of a newspaper.

But when that gal is an employee of a country that is notorious for spying on its friends (and enemies), the MP should opt on the side of discretion -- if, indeed, he opts at all.

There's no apparent security breach in Mississauga-Erindale MP Bob Dechert's mildly flirtatious "friendship" with Shi Rong, a journalist with China's Xinhua news agency; an agency well-known as a propaganda and intelligence arm of Beijing.

In the days when Hong Kong was independent, journalists dealing with China had to go through vetting by Xinhua. All over the world, it reports to Beijing.

As far as Rong being just a reporter with no strings attached to China's intelligence and espionage service -- forget it. She might be a nice lady and fun to know, but as a journalist answerable to Beijing, she knows where her duty, and loyalties, lie.

From a security standpoint, what's disquieting about Dechert's e-mail friendship with Rong, is that he's Parliamentary Secretary for Foreign Minister John Baird. As such, one presumes he has access to confidential material that would be catnip to Chinese Intelligence.

Dechert should have known better.

Baird's background doesn't indicate he's a natural to head Canada's Foreign Affairs, but he has to be uneasy about Dechert's long range dalliance with Shi Rong. Baird radiates ambition. One suspects he'll get new Parliamentary Secretary when the fuss with Dechert blows over.

Apparently some of Dechert's correspondence with Shi Rong was leaked anonymously (she says her husband hacked her email). Access to Information requests have resulted in more blacked-out passages than readable parts.

That, in itself, provokes suspicions and rumours.

What has been revealed are juvenile mash notes, and thinly veiled come-ons that invite the recipient to respond in kind, and await the next overture.

When word of the friendship was leaked, Dechert posted on his website last year that he met Shi Rong "while doing a Chinese-language media communications [and while] these emails are flirtatious [...] they are innocent and simply that -- a friendship."

I suspect CSIS Director Richard Fadden might raise an eyebrow at the prospect of a "friendship" existing between an employee of the Chinese government with intelligence links, and an MP. During the Cold War, beautiful Polish women were especially recruited as "swallows" by the Soviet KGB to seduce and compromise diplomats and key targets.

It's doubtful if Fadden or anyone in the business of security, would be impressed with the Parliamentary Secretary of the Foreign Ministry writing to a Xinhua journalist: "You are so beautiful. I really like the picture of you by the water with your cheeks puffed. That look is so cute. I love it when you do that. Now, I miss you even more."

On one occasion, Dechert urged Rong to watch a vote in the House of Commons, and emailed: "I will smile at you. I miss you. Love, Bob." Ugh.

Again, there's no suggestion that Dechert did anything to damage Canada -- just that he should have known better than to play footsie with someone like Shi Rong.

As a play on words, "she" certainly was "wrong" for an MP to think an untainted friendship could develop and be maintained.

She Rong has since been recalled to other duties in China.

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