Canadian Security Agencies Cleared China-linked NATO Suspect Vetting Despite a Court Finding of Fraud in Her CBSA Job Application

UPDATE: The suspect has appealed her continued detention. Belgium's Federal Prosecutor's Office told The Bureau that she has lodged an appeal before the Indictments Chamber against Tuesday's decision.

OTTAWA — The Canadian woman of Chinese origin held in Belgium on suspicion of spying inside the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) military command for a third country, and of membership in a criminal organization, was vetted by CSIS and the RCMP and cleared for the posting — despite a finding by Canada’s public service watchdog that she committed fraud in a hiring competition run by the CBSA, CSIS’s sister agency inside the Public Safety Canada portfolio.

The Federal Court upheld that finding in a published judgment 11 months before she took up her post at allied command.

Whether the fraud finding ever surfaced in the screening, Ottawa will not say. As The Bureau reported Tuesday, CSIS referred questions about its vetting to Public Safety Canada, which declined to comment on specifics. Global Affairs Canada, which makes the final decision to grant, deny or revoke clearances for Canadians taking positions with international organizations including NATO, would not discuss the case.

She was arrested Friday, a day after searches of her home and her workplace at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe in Mons, after her conduct was flagged by alliance security services.

On Tuesday a Belgian pre-trial judge refused her release and ordered her held for at least another month as the investigation continues. Thursday, the prosecutor confirmed the suspect has appealed that decision.

She has not been officially identified; Belgium’s Federal Prosecutor’s Office told The Bureau it never discloses the identities of suspects in ongoing investigations, and The Bureau is currently withholding her name for that reason.

CBC News identified her Wednesday through open-source techniques, Reuters reported her earlier as Claire Z., and the European outlet Follow the Money published similar material. The Bureau had independently assembled the same online resume profile this week and held it.

Her trajectory through the Canadian government’s national security and sensitive information and technology departments is on the public record.

She was a data scientist at the National Research Council for six months in 2017, an economist at Statistics Canada from April 2018 to October 2022, and a systems engineer at the Canadian Space Agency from May 2022.

She lists a policy analyst role at the European Space Agency, work in the economic research and statistics division of the World Trade Organization, and seats on mirror committees of the Standards Council of Canada.

She took a master’s degree at the University of Ottawa in 2022. In July 2025 she posted in a Mons housing group that she was arriving for a six-month internship at allied headquarters, CBC reported. A security source told Reuters she worked in its information technology department.

Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree has previously committed to establishing whether the suspect worked for any Canadian agency.

“Ultimately, we need to get to the bottom of this, and we need to ensure that these types of incidents do not occur in the future,” he said. He has not yet commented on the CBC’s reporting.

What the minister says he intends to establish is already on the public record, in a Federal Court judgment issued last year. Public Safety Canada runs CSIS, the RCMP and CBSA — the two agencies that vetted her, and the agency whose own competition produced the fraud finding against her. Global Affairs Canada holds the final clearance.

In January 2019 she filed two applications to the same CBSA competition, 13 hours apart, from two university email addresses carrying two different orderings of her name.

The applications were nearly identical.

Invited to sit two standardized examinations under each, she signed confidentiality agreements for both. That March, CBSA asked her to re-sign one using her own full name rather than the other name she had used.

She complied without asking why.

She then sat the examinations twice inside 24 hours, against instructions imposing a 180-day wait before any rewrite. When the testing contractor flagged the duplication and CBSA asked directly which application was hers and whether she had filed two, she gave a single application number.