Former Canadian Intelligence Analyst’s Book Reveals RCMP Evidence of Beijing’s Successful Operation Against Pierre Trudeau

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.”

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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.’”

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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.”

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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.

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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.”

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