A Veteran Reporter Was Branded as a Russian Spy. The Proof Didn’t Hold Up
It was the political equivalent of a drive-by shooting.
During a late–October 2024 meeting of Parliament’s Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security—one convened specifically to address disinformation and Russian interference in Canadian affairs—a former cabinet minister accused journalist David Pugliese of being a Soviet and Russian intelligence asset.
Chris Alexander, former prime minister Stephen Harper’s immigration minister, produced photocopies of documents that apparently indicated Pugliese, long associated with the Ottawa Citizen, had been a Russian operative for decades. Alexander claimed the pages originated in the “pre-1991 archives of the Ukrainian KGB.” He said these documents were in the hands of Canadian “national security officials” and that they had been authenticated by “several of the world’s leading experts on KGB documents.” Read in sequence, the pages sketched the story of a rising journalist marked, shadowed, and ultimately assessed as a potential recruit.
The accusation was extraordinary, but so too was the target. Of the small number of defence reporters in Canada, Pugliese is one of the few consistently critical voices. He has been unsparing toward politicians, the Department of National Defence (DND), the military-industrial complex, and the special interest groups in Ottawa that play an outsized role in shaping our foreign policy. Examples of Pugliese’s recent reporting include a story about the Canadian Forces’ military police failing to review a sexual assault investigation, another about malfunctioning anti-tank missiles sent to arm Canadian troops in Latvia, and how the military tracked a veteran’s social media accounts and shared private information without his consent.
Alexander’s allegations came with real consequences. Pugliese received numerous death threats, and his family was told they should be deported. He has had to increase security around his home. Pugliese’s name has also been added to Myrotvorets, or the Peacemaker—a nationalist Ukrainian website which includes a running list, and often personal details, of people deemed to be enemies of Ukraine. A search of “David Pugliese KGB” pulls up many articles that reference the initial accusation, and some Ukrainian websites—like European Pravda and Euromaidan Press—continue to condemn Pugliese as a spy.
A few weeks ago, news broke of a forensic review by independent researcher Giuseppe Bianchin which found that the documents Alexander submitted last October were “crafted with deliberate intent to deceive.” According to Bianchin’s report, completed in July, Ukrainian archives could not verify the files, and the international typographers and graphologists enlisted by Bianchin—leading figures in their field—concluded they were a hoax.
That these documents were paraded as fact—in a hearing devoted to disinformation, no less—was a bitter irony. Instead of unmasking a spy, Alexander may have ended up offering Parliament a case study in how falsehoods gain traction.
Journalists across Canada have faced escalating threats and harassment in recent years, often tied directly to their reporting. In 2022, People’s Party of Canada leader Maxime Bernier went so far as to incite supporters to “play dirty” with three journalists covering his party, posting their email addresses online and unleashing a flood of harassment—much of it laced with violent threats. This July, Globe and Mail reporter Carrie Tait was targeted with surveillance-style photos posted online, her daily routines tracked and her sources threatened as she investigated political interference in Alberta’s health care system. And, of course, attacking the credibility of reporters has practically become a hallmark of Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre.
Few journalists understand that kind of tactic better than Pugliese. He told Parliament that, over the course of his career, he has been accused of being a Central Intelligence Agency agent and a Taliban sympathizer. The defence department has tried repeatedly to undermine or intimidate him, including putting him under military investigation in 2013 after falsely accusing him of publishing classified information (the data actually came from a United States Navy press release). Esprit de Corps, an independent Canadian military magazine, reports that DND officials made three separate attempts to convince Pugliese’s editors to pull him off defence coverage.
A similar hostility seems to have animated Alexander. He claimed the documents were evidence of a KGB operation to develop intelligence sources in Canada between 1982 and 1990. Alexander further stated “there was every reason to believe” the individual in question—code-named “Stuart,” whom the files link to Pugliese—continued working as a Russian asset after the collapse of the Soviet Union. As evidence of Pugliese’s KGB ties, Alexander said that he had reported on “themes that Moscow would be delighted to promote,” and that his stories aimed “to weaken Canadian support for Ukraine.” Alexander singled out articles on “Ukraine’s Nazi links,” “Nazis in Canada,” and “defamatory pieces” about former deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland’s family. (The latter focused on her grandfather’s collaborationist past editing a Nazi-controlled newspaper, a fact confirmed by historians.)
Alexander didn’t stop there. Shortly before concluding his presentation to Parliament last October, he stated that “previous efforts to expose this journalist’s long-running covert ties to Moscow have resulted in attempts to intimidate current and former Canadian parliamentarians, including my former colleague James Bezan as well as Canadian Army officers.”
No one present—not the MPs who comprise the committee nor any of the panellists invited to participate—challenged Alexander’s extraordinary claims. No one asked how it was that Alexander came into possession of archival KGB photocopies now in the hands of national security officials, nor whether making such information public might compromise any ongoing investigation. If there had been any attempts to intimidate current or former parliamentarians, or army officers, or Bezan specifically, this seemed like the first anyone had heard of it. (“That was stunning testimony,” one minister said.) Though he was sitting in the same room, Bezan didn’t provide any details about this, nor was he asked about it.
While he wasn’t present to defend himself, Pugliese responded the next day on social media, calling Alexander’s claims “entirely false.” Postmedia, his employer, dismissed the allegations as “ridiculous and baseless,” while both the Canadian Association of Journalists and a group of fifty-nine reporters issued open letters in support of Pugliese.
Pugliese himself framed the episode as another attack on Canada’s fourth estate by a politician. His reporting on various scandals related to the country’s Afghanistan mission may have embarrassed Alexander personally, given his deep diplomatic and parliamentary connections to the deployment. Pugliese has also exposed shocking details about the controversial Victims of Communism monument, recently unveiled in Ottawa. The project, launched by Harper, drew fierce criticism for its plan to commemorate Nazi collaborators and suspected war criminals. Alexander, then immigration minister, became one of the memorial’s most visible champions, regularly appearing beside minister Jason Kenney to promote it.
Two points are worth noting. Alexander asserted the photocopied documents were authentic but provided the committee with no evidence of how the conclusion—that cast Pugliese as a covert operative in Russia’s orbit—was reached. And by levelling his allegations under the protection of parliamentary privilege, he guaranteed he could not be sued for defamation.
The documents are certainly striking. There are seven photocopies in all, ostensibly KGB records from the 1980s through 1990. One is a handwritten note; the rest are typewritten memoranda. The effect is that of a mini dossier, a set of surveillance records that resemble Cold War–era intelligence paperwork.
The handwritten piece is a single-page report, in blue ink, on plain paper. The typewritten portions resemble internal memos, often stamped “Secret” or “Totally Secret.” Some are formal correspondence between the Kyiv and Moscow offices of the KGB. A few include annotations filled in by hand. The pages appear yellowed or pale, with standard Soviet formatting and signatures of named colonels or lieutenants at the bottom. On the face of it, they suggested a decade-long effort by an agent named “Ivan” to draw a Canadian journalist into the Soviet fold. They detail steps to monitor him, assess his weaknesses, and explore “whether he could be used in the field (as an operative).”
The seven alleged KGB documents Chris Alexander presented to Parliament in October, with translations from Giuseppe Bianchin’s analysisAlexander’s insistence that these materials were genuine ran into trouble even before the recent revelations about their forgery. Global News discovered that neither of the two main Ukrainian KGB archives in Kyiv had any documentation similar to what Alexander claimed was both authenticated and in the hands of Canadian national security experts. Per Rudling, a historian with Lund University in Sweden who specializes in Eastern European nationalism and is familiar with Ukrainian KGB archives, also contacted the same archivists as Global and was told they had nothing resembling the materials Alexander presented. Rudling further noted that the photocopies shared by Alexander were conspicuously missing the file numbers that the archives routinely used to catalogue their records.
In addition, specific details in the purported documents didn’t match reality. “As I outlined in my appearance to the House of Commons committee, Alexander’s so-called records contain significant factual errors,” said Pugliese in a statement to The Walrus. “They claim I was in Ottawa in 1984 and 1988. This is false. Alexander claimed that my first job was at the Ottawa Citizen. This, too, is false.” The files contend that in the early 1980s, Pugliese was attending a lecture on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, something he insists never happened. They also depict him as a left-leaning “student activist” sympathetic to the Kremlin. But on November 7, 2024, appearing before Parliament to defend himself, Pugliese pointed out that in the 1980s, he wrote for specialized publications, such as Armed Forces Journal in Washington, DC, which he called “pro-military, pro-NATO, and anti-Soviet.”
Aside from the fact that Pugliese says key details are wrong, the documents don’t even prove what is being insinuated. If, for the sake of argument, we accept Alexander’s account of the records as true—that, in his words, they “document a KGB operation to talent spot, recruit, develop and run” Pugliese as an agent—they still offer no evidence whatsoever that Pugliese became an informant. At no point do the documents show that Pugliese knowingly engaged with, or even recognized, the KGB’s efforts. Rudling, in an interview with The Walrus, stresses that the KGB surveilled millions of people who weren’t intelligence agents. “My sense is that his file would be one of tens and hundreds of thousands that the KGB kept track of,” he said.
And, of course, the documents remain what they are: photocopies. The credibility of Alexander’s whole argument rests on evidence no one seems to have seen in its original form.
Pugliese told the Canadian Press he suspects the documents that Alexander brandished are tied to an ongoing civil lawsuit against him over his reporting about faulty equipment sent to Ukraine. In January 2023, Pugliese revealed that an Ottawa-based charity, staffed partly by active Canadian Forces officers, was accused of mismanagement—supplying Ukrainian troops with defective night-vision goggles and inadequate medical gear and in some cases failing to deliver promised aid. His exposé, backed by complaints from both Ukrainians and the charity’s own volunteers, painted a picture of serious irregularities. The article remains in its entirety on the Ottawa Citizen’s website, without corrections or clarifications.
What is known about the $7 million lawsuit is limited. It appears to have been launched by a businessman who supported the charity and submitted the KGB files into evidence as proof Pugliese was a Russian operative, while also alleging he played hockey for the Russian embassy in Ottawa. Pugliese, in his only public comment on the subject, denied the allegation—joking he can barely skate—and countered the businessman was “linked” to Alexander.
“It is clear to me,” writes Bianchin in his report analyzing the alleged KGB documents, “that David Pugliese has been subject to a coordinated character assassination campaign.” The report was published in July on academia.edu, a site for sharing research outside of formal peer review. Though Bianchin may be an academic newcomer—the paper is his only known work, and he has no institutional affiliations—the experts he consulted are not. Forensic graphologist Ira Boato is a judicial consultant in Italy called on to verify disputed documents and weigh in on contested evidence. Erik van Blokland is a Dutch typeface designer with more than thirty years’ experience in experimental and digital typography. These two key sources both confirmed to The Walrus their participation in Bianchin’s findings.
And what did they find? Van Blokland came to the conclusion that two central memos were not written on Soviet-era typewriters but with a digital font he himself created in 1993—three years after the documents were supposedly produced. He also spotted repeating “dust specks” in identical letters, proving the pages had been generated on a computer. A second forensic examiner—Germany’s Bernhard Haas, a renowned criminologist with thousands of case reports to his name—agreed, concluding there was “much to suggest” the documents were digital forgeries, not 1990 records. When Boato reviewed the handwritten portions, she found recurring traits, such as stroke direction and letter sizing, that were “highly likely attributable” to the same individual, undercutting claims they were produced by different officials at different times. And as with Global and Rudling, the two Ukrainian archivists Bianchin enlisted could not locate the originals, nor confirm provenance.
The peculiarities of the forgery—which blends forged typewritten pages with contrived handwritten notes—make it harder to blame the quirks on standard agency practice of recopying, reformatting, and reclassifying documents. Clerical accidents can’t explain why records from different offices and years share the same penmanship and digital marks. What it points to, for Bianchin, is a carefully staged attempt to frame Pugliese as a Cold War spy.
For all the considerable stress of the past few months, Pugliese doesn’t seem to have slowed down. In June, he received an award from the Canadian Association of Journalists for his defence reporting. “My articles are accurate. I am proud of my 40 years of journalism,” Pugliese posted on social media. “I have no intention of changing the way I conduct my reporting or retiring anytime soon.” Among his most recent stories is how, even as US president Donald Trump menaces Canadian sovereignty, the DND is pressing ahead with a $5 billion deal for twenty-six rocket launchers built in the United States, defying Carney’s vow to curb American arms deals.
Despite repeated requests for comment, Alexander has refused to speak to The Walrus on the record, citing unspecified national security concerns. He has not made any statements outside parliamentary protection on the subject of his accusations against Pugliese, and no new evidence has been offered. “I think there is now reason to seriously entertain the notion that they are forgeries,” says Rudling, who has corresponded with Bianchin about his investigation of the documents. “The burden of proof is now squarely on Alexander.”
The post A Veteran Reporter Was Branded as a Russian Spy. The Proof Didn’t Hold Up first appeared on The Walrus.
Unpublished Newswire
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