Former Canadian Intelligence Analyst’s Book Reveals RCMP Evidence of Beijing’s Successful Operation Against Pierre Trudeau
In his new book Under Assault, historian Dennis Molinaro traces how UBC student Paul Lin, acting under Beijing’s guidance, targeted Pierre Trudeau and helped secure the CCP’s first diplomatic victory.
OTTAWA — In a groundbreaking new book, former Canadian intelligence analyst and historian Dennis Molinaro argues that nearly a thousand pages of newly declassified RCMP Security Service files indicate Pierre Elliott Trudeau was the first Canadian prime minister ever targeted by a successful Chinese Communist Party influence operation—one whose reverberations shape the central geopolitical crisis of our time: Beijing’s threat to invade Taiwan.
The clandestine operation’s architect, Molinaro writes, was a young Canadian scholar, Paul Ta-Kuang Lin, a University of British Columbia student who became a trusted asset of Premier Zhou Enlai, Mao Zedong’s urbane diplomat-spymaster. In Quebec, Paul Lin would later found the Canada China Business Council, a bridge between Beijing and Ottawa that—as Molinaro traces—intersected with the Desmarais family’s empire in Montreal, where, as journalist Peter C. Newman once reported, “plans for Pierre Trudeau’s candidacy were launched in 1968 in the offices of Power Corporation.”
That nexus of Power Corporation and the Canada China Business Council has deep interrelationships with no fewer than four prime ministers, Molinaro writes: Liberals Trudeau Sr., Jean Chrétien, and Paul Martin, as well as Conservative Brian Mulroney.
On Beijing’s covert influence over Pierre Trudeau, Under Assault’s conclusion is both incisive and sweeping: Trudeau’s 1970 decision to recognize the People’s Republic of China appears to have been the CCP’s first major foreign-interference success in the West—a political operation achieved through personal cultivation, covert access, and the strategic seduction of a leader predisposed to admire China.
“From the first day of Canada’s official relationship with the PRC,” Molinaro writes, “Canada, its people, and its leaders have been interference targets of the Chinese Communist Party.”
While Molinaro’s book is a work of history, it also serves as a guidebook to the predominant geopolitical forces that will shape the next decade—and to the evolving superpower contest between democratic Washington and autocratic Beijing.
Citing Chen Wenzhao, the former PRC ambassador to New Zealand, Molinaro writes that “when Premier Zhou Enlai told Mao that Canada had agreed to recognize the PRC, Mao laughed and stated, ‘Now we have a friend in America’s backyard!’”
Chen later clarified what Mao meant: “Canada was America’s ally. The establishment of diplomatic relations with Canada broke a hole in the backyard of America,” and “created a ‘Canadian formula’ that other nations could follow to recognize China while bypassing Taiwan.”
Molinaro’s research on Paul Lin’s targeting of Pierre Trudeau is explosive, drawing on RCMP documents that explicitly warned Lin was sent by the Chinese Communist Party’s highest authorities to serve as an agent of influence in Canada—and, evidently, a “talent spotter” of elites in business, politics, and academia who could advance Beijing’s plan to pull Ottawa away from Washington.
The picture he develops, with the precision of a historian and the intuitive reasoning of an intelligence analyst, amounts to an early blueprint for the CCP’s modern United Front playbook—a system of “friends” and proxies cultivated to advance Beijing’s interests, which, Molinaro argues, finds a striking echo decades later in Justin Trudeau’s campaign for prime minister, when a 2015 Toronto fundraiser placed the younger Trudeau among numerous known Chinese operatives.
Through newly declassified RCMP documents Molinaro digs up a number of explosive scoops that will advance international understanding of the Chinese Communist Party’s clandestine ways and means, with specific implications on Ottawa’s lack of diligence in countering Beijing’s interference since the 1990s, according to the author.
One of these nuggets finds that Chinese intelligence’s fusion with Triad narcotics and human-trafficking syndicates—long documented in jurisdictions such as Hong Kong and Taiwan—was also recognized in a stunning case involving the PRC consulate in Toronto.
According to RCMP and Toronto Police intelligence reports cited in Under Assault, a consular official identified as “Siu Cheung” assisted a Chinese human-trafficking network in providing false Canadian passports to PRC nationals seeking to move in and out of the country undetected.
The 1992 report detailed how purchased or stolen passports were passed to Cheung, who then issued new replacements through the consulate bearing altered photographs. Each document was valued at roughly $1,500, and the operation drew upon landed immigrants who later reported their passports stolen to conceal the scheme. The RCMP concluded the activity was impossible without awareness inside the consulate—a revelation that, Molinaro argues, demonstrates how Beijing’s intelligence and organized-crime arms were already operating in tandem in Greater Toronto, years before reports of Chinese election interference run clandestinely from the Toronto Consulate.
Molinaro then asks the question that still echoes through Canada’s national security establishment: how was intelligence—such as the Toronto Consulate’s organized-crime and human-smuggling ties—being received in Ottawa? He writes that former officials believed the Chrétien government, like its predecessors, showed little interest in PRC intelligence warnings, suggesting that “the degree to which we were knowledgeable, at any official level, was pretty thin.”
Within the first two chapters, Molinaro also cites testimony from defected Chinese diplomat Chen Yonglin, who revealed that classified Chinese documents identified two Canadian leaders as “old friends of Beijing.” In one of the book’s most stunning assertions, Molinaro notes that those names were Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chrétien.
“A ‘friend’ of China is trusted—a business partner, for example—but an ‘old friend’ is even more than that,” Molinaro explains. “Old friends have a close and lasting connection to the PRC; not to the people of China, but to the CCP. Chen told me he recalled reading a file on North American and Oceanic Affairs while he was still working with the foreign ministry. Within that file he noted that among the many ‘old friends’ of China—such as a former US secretary of state—were two prominent Canadians. One was Pierre Trudeau.”
‘Paul Lin was tasked with conducting foreign interference in Canada’
This Part One review of Under Assault: Interference and Espionage in China’s Secret War Against Canada—focusing on Molinaro’s explosive exposure of Paul Lin’s targeting of Pierre Trudeau—also flags for readers that The Bureau’s prior reporting independently points in the same direction. As detailed later in this piece, newly released CIA files show that before 1970 the Agency was not only deeply aware of Paul Lin, then teaching at McGill University in Montreal, but was also monitoring Toronto’s Committee for New China Policy, where York University academic Daniel Tretiak—in direct dialogue with Zhou Enlai’s network—was urging recognition of Beijing and the repudiation of Taiwan during the 1968–1971 window. In short: while Molinaro’s thesis is anchored in Canadian security files and the Zhou Enlai–Paul Lin channel into Ottawa, The Bureau identified a parallel, American-archival channel that reaches the same conclusion.
Drawing on Foreign Affairs briefings newly obtained under access-to-information law, Molinaro reconstructs Beijing’s intent in the cultivation of Pierre Trudeau: to break the West’s isolation of the Chinese Communists, marginalize Taiwan, and use Ottawa as a lever against the powerful Anglo-American alliance that had established peace and order in the wake of the Second World War.
The author’s evidence is direct. Zhou Enlai’s network identified Canada as the accessible middle power whose recognition could legitimize Communist China worldwide. Pierre Trudeau—charismatic, independent, and philosophically anti-imperialist—offered the ideal target: a Western leader who saw rapprochement not as capitulation but as moral progress. “In Canada,” Molinaro writes, “the PRC saw a small country desperate to carve out its own space in the world while resenting the American dominance that encroached on it culturally, politically and economically. The CCP would take full advantage.”
That advantage began long before Trudeau took office. In 1945, as a young traveler, he made his first journey to China. In 1960 he returned, on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, and was received in a meticulously stage-managed tour. From the moment he arrived, everything he saw was curated—down to a copy of Trudeau’s first book, a minor work on labour conflict in Quebec, conspicuously placed in a grand library display prepared for a pair of precocious Eastern Canadian elites. In Two Innocents in China—his own travelogue—Trudeau recorded how guides also ushered him into an “Institute of the Minorities of China.”
While Molinaro refrains from calling Trudeau a useful idiot, his selection of particular text from Trudeau’s book—an example of romanticism, Orientalism, and ignorance of the millions of deaths that would follow Trudeau’s blinkered tour—makes the argument sufficiently.
“Marvelling at everything they witness, Trudeau and [journalist Jacques] Hébert request to see how China treats its minorities,” Molinaro recounts. “They are taken to the Institute of the Minorities of China. In this charming building bustling with professors and students, they open one door and find [according to Trudeau’s writing]: ‘a Tibetan girl of seventeen, with a very pretty face framed in two braids of black hair; she is playing the cello. In the next room we find an adorable Korean girl with enormous eyes who sings a folksong of her country at our request. We speak to a Tibetan girl of less than twenty. “What will you do after you graduate?” “What will be best for the country—what the Party decides.”’”
Molinaro states the obvious, with the acerbic flair characteristic of the book’s sharpest assessments: “Perhaps not surprisingly, the pair were not shown the results of China’s occupation of Tibet and the bodies of the thousands killed by the PRC when the PLA entered Lhasa in 1959, only a year earlier, and dissolved the government of the Dalai Lama,” he writes. “That demonstrated another way the PRC had been dealing with the ‘minority problem.’”
“And it is a wonder,” Molinaro asks, “how millions were imprisoned and killed during the Cultural Revolution of the later decade, given there were only ‘garden prisons.’”
By the time Trudeau entered 24 Sussex Drive in 1968, his worldview had been set. Recognition of Beijing, he believed, would “end China’s isolation” and help stabilize the world.
The epoch-shaping question, Molinaro wonders, is whether Trudeau’s decisiveness came through his connection to Paul Lin, a name long buried in intelligence archives. Lin was no ordinary academic. Born in Vancouver and raised in British Columbia, he left for China in 1949 to assist the new regime, working in propaganda bureaus and cultivating relationships within Zhou Enlai’s inner circle.
“Back to what I discovered in declassified files, specifically on Lin,” the former Canadian national security analyst writes. “I obtained nine hundred newly declassified pages of Lin’s RCMP Security Service file from CSIS. Was he a spy and secretly working for China? According to the RCMP Security Service, yes, he was. Lin’s file is heavily redacted, but what is clear is that Lin was a surveillance target of the Security Service.”
He continues, explaining that “In August of 1970, the director general of the RCMP Security Service, John Starnes, wrote to Don F. Wall, secretary of the Security Panel within the Privy Council Office. He stated that Lin ‘is known to us [RCMP]’ and that he is ‘[redacted] known to have a direct link to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China.’ Starnes noted that Lin returned to Canada in 1964 … ‘It is established,’ Starnes wrote, ‘that he [Lin] returned to Canada on an assignment for the Chinese Communist authorities. We believe Lin’s principal role here to be that of an “agent of influence,” an advocate on behalf of Communist China.’”
While Molinaro methodically reconstructs the intelligence files linking Paul Lin to Zhou Enlai and Pierre Trudeau—and explains how Canadian intelligence reached its conclusions (a process detailed later)—his forward-looking questions are best understood first.
“My examination of Lin’s file covered the years 1970 to 1977, but it was clear based not only on what I saw, but what files remain redacted, that Lin was a high-profile and sensitive target of investigation for decades, presumably because of his ability to influence leading Canadians and Americans,” Molinaro writes.
“So much of his file is redacted, and so many questions remain: What did government officials know of Lin? Clearly some were briefed, as was the Privy Council Office. What did the PM know of Lin’s activities? Did they all choose to ignore these briefings the RCMP gave? If so, why? Lin went on to help create the Canada China Business Council. Did later prime ministers and government officials know of Lin’s past activities? The historical record clearly reveals that Canadian, and likely American, intelligence believed quite certainly that Lin was working for the PRC and engaging in foreign interference in North America. But if so, Lin’s greatest achievement may have been the recognition of the PRC—likely China’s first major interference operation against the West. Given the number of individuals he could have steered toward the PRC since, it is little wonder he was treated with such esteem in China.”
From UBC to Beijing to McGill to Stockholm to Peking
By 1965, Lin was teaching at McGill University’s new Centre for East Asian Studies. His lectures praised Mao’s modernization and dismissed Taiwan as an American pawn. In 1968, newly elected Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s foreign policy adviser, Ivan Head, asked Lin to submit policy papers on recognizing the PRC. Lin obliged, publicly urging that Canada “normalize relations with the government in Peking.” Within months, the CIA had him under watch. A 1973 National Security Council memo by analyst Richard Solomon—later declassified—described Lin as “a total PRC supporter… very close to governing circles in Peking” and “potentially very dangerous.” When Solomon checked with the CIA, the response was terse but revealing, according to Molinaro: “Nothing in this report is new to the Agency.” The CIA already knew Paul Lin very well.
Molinaro’s breakthrough lies in connecting these American assessments to Ottawa’s own awareness of the relationship between Lin and Trudeau. He draws heavily on the “China Logs,” a series of internal reports compiled by the Canadian Embassy in Stockholm during the recognition negotiations with Beijing. These dispatches, sent to the Undersecretary of State for External Affairs, recorded every known contact between embassy staff and representatives of the PRC. The twentieth log—covering July 2 to August 7, 1970—documented a pivotal encounter between Canadian diplomat Robert Edmonds and a Swedish journalist from Sveriges Radio known only as “Pier.”
Molinaro identifies this exchange as a crucial intelligence lead. Pier told Edmonds that in May 1970 he had attended a China-focused seminar in Austria where Paul Lin was also present. At that meeting, Lin privately asked him to help arrange an invitation to Stockholm so he could “get into Stockholm without anyone knowing.” The request unsettled Pier, who later “confided” to Edmonds that he possessed information for Canadian “officials only,” warning that “Lin had obtained a visa to visit China and had been seen at the Hsing Chao Hotel in Peking at the same time as Ambassador Wang Tung”—one of China’s negotiators in the Stockholm talks. Pier further said he believed “that Lin had a close personal connection with Prime Minister Trudeau,” and during the conversation, wondered aloud if the two had met during Trudeau’s 1960 visit to China. (Molinaro assesses: “It is certainly a strong possibility. Trudeau and Hébert documented in their book that they attended a banquet celebrating the PRC’s founding on October 1, which Premier Zhou Enlai attended and spoke at, and Lin was close to Zhou by then and still in the country.”)
Returning to the private discussion between Canadian diplomat Edmonds and Swedish Radio journalist Pier, Edmonds denied any knowledge of Lin’s relationship with Trudeau. But Pier pressed on, saying Lin might be acting as “an intermediary between the Canadian and Chinese governments, with close access to both.” Molinaro quotes from a secret embassy memo sent back to Ottawa detailing that conversation: “Subsequently, Pier said (For CDN Govt Info Only) Lin obtained visa for PRC and had been seen at Hsing Chao Hotel Peking during period of Wang Tung’s [sic] return.”
Molinaro adds that the next sentence was underlined in the original archived copy: “Pier believed Lin had close personal connection with PM Trudeau.”
Molinaro reads this episode as a turning point—a contemporaneous signal, buried in the embassy’s China Logs, that Canadian diplomats possessed early intelligence which, while unconfirmed, clearly warned of Lin’s dual role as both Trudeau’s informal emissary and Beijing’s covert influence channel.
Publicly, both men denied any relationship. Privately, Lin’s name kept surfacing. The Montreal Gazette reported on February 28, 1969 that Lin had flown “undercover” to China as Trudeau’s secret emissary, carrying assurances that Ottawa would abandon Taipei. The story faded, but RCMP surveillance continued. According to Molinaro, Lin’s media appearances were logged, his lectures summarized, his travel documented in minute detail. “He was under what appears to be constant surveillance,” the author writes. “His file shows continuous interest by both Canadian and American intelligence.”
So what exactly did the RCMP know about Lin’s activities in the early days of Trudeau’s rise to power in Ottawa? Lin was not acting alone on Canadian soil. According to RCMP intelligence, he appeared to have tasked another agent—a woman with whom he was engaged in an extramarital affair—identified by the Security Service in 1969.