My new book: On the Origin of the Deadliest Pandemic in 100 Years: An Investigation

On the Origin of the Deadliest Pandemic in 100 Years: An Investigation is the title of my new book. It is the product of more than a year's hard digging into the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. It will be out by the end of August in Canada, the first week in September in the US. 

It is without doubt the hardest book I've ever written. Doing an investigation during a pandemic required me to reinvent the tactics I used when I started in journalism in the early 1970s. My first job for Maclean's Magazine was to research a story on the planned Montreal Olympics for a writer who had strong opinions about why it shouldn't go forward, but no facts to back them up. To do that project, I rarely left the periodical section of the University of Toronto's Robarts Library because what I found there about past Olympics --all had involved financial boondoggles-- was great support for the writer's argument. ("You found this in the library? In the newspapers? In magazines? Really?") To do this one, I rarely left the house, working instead on two computers and a smart phone which provided instantaneous access to a tsunami of information. In the beginning, when we were locked down, no one was allowed to leave their home for any reason other than to buy food (and toilet paper) or for a medical emergency. Even if I'd ignored those rules, it wouldn't have got me anywhere. Most of the researchers I wanted to interview don't live in Canada and weren't in their labs anyway.  The borders were shut. Most government officials were working from home. Parliament was closed. So I was forced to develop my own imperfect version of the method of inquiry once wielded like a broadsword by the legendary US journalist I.F. Stone. His most important scoops came from careful reading of public documents and deft use of the Freedom of Information Act.   

I read everything I could find in learned journals, in pre-print literature and on academics' blogs about the nature of SARS-CoV-2, its relationship to other coronaviruses, its chemistry, its evolutionary history, the very unusual structure of its genome and its near perfect adaptation to human beings from the very start of the pandemic. I scoured the worldwide daily press, dived down many internet rabbit holes, made too many access to information applications. Most knowledgeable researchers, to my surprise, didn't answer my emails. That was a first: usually scientists want to discuss their work with journalists. It helps them climb the tenure ladder to get their ideas circulating in the broader community. More astonishing was the lengths to which civil servants went to protect themselves and their political masters from embarrassment by means of improper redactions and outright refusals to comply with the access to information law. As I figured out who I had to talk to, if they responded (a few did) I  interviewed them by means of email and telephone. But it was mainly through their published works that I came to know then. What I learned about the way globalized virological science has been practiced over the past twenty years surprised and enraged me. Certain names kept coming up: Shi Zhengli, Linfa Wang, Peter Daszak, Ralph S. Baric, Kristian Andersen, Zhihong Hu, Xianguo Qiu, Keding Cheng, Chen Wei, E.C. Holmes, George Gao. 

The book is both a detection narrative and an exposition of the political and scientific context for the worst public health disaster since the great flu epidemic of 1918/19. It points fingers. It names names. It describes the way in which the government of China, from the very beginning, withheld vital information and promoted false-by-omission scientific narratives in order to deflect blame even as it permitted the virus to spread. China's relentless PR campaign began at the end of December, 2019 even as the first mention of a nasty pneumonia circulating in Wuhan found its way to social media sites and from there to the West. China was helped in its efforts by the WHO, whose job is to protect the world from such disasters, and even more shockingly by some of the world's best scientific journals, our leading coronavirus experts and the US institutions which fund their work. All were more anxious to protect their interests than to pursue the truth. The book describes in detail how China used the globalization of biological science as cover for dual-use research that could not be done at home, reaching into the most secure laboratory in Canada for the study of the most dangerous pathogens  (Ebola, Marburg, Nipah). China's top military/civilian scientists (there is no boundary between them) used it as if it were their very own lab for years. 

More than 4 million people are known to have died from SARS-CoV-2 since December, 2019. That number is at least twice as high if suspected, but not certified, COVID deaths in India are factored in. It will continue to grow as the virus wends its way throughout the mostly un-vaccinated developing world, mutating as it goes, stumbling on ever more clever means to infect humans and the susceptible animals that live near us. These deaths are not and will not be the result of an unavoidable accident of nature: they are and will be the product of the very best human minds.

As the 4th wave begins, it's time to hold some of those humans to account.

Stay tuned.

Read my new serial novel That Woman (free) part VII

And now for That Woman, part 7...

Synopsis:
 
In Part 7 Marta has been placed under Dr. Sokol's care by the court. Dr. Sokol has been turning Marta into his prize patient, but what is his goal? What is he trying to make of her and for whom?  Meanwhile, Drew and Jason must find out exactly what kind of smart machine Baby is, where it came from, and why.

The past will meet present as these stories collide on the Warman Road.
Learn all about That Woman here and read all the parts.

Read my new serial novel That Woman (free) part VI

And now for That Woman, part 6...

Synopsis:
 
In Part 6, Marta finds herself in a terrifying place, learns about what Justice is and where it does not prevail, and finds a way to master her temper before it destroys her life. Drew, tired, sick, hauls Sandy McAskill's notes back to her snazzy hotel room, only to discover that while she may be on to one terrific story, without a job, so what?  And then, Baby appears.

Learn all about That Woman here and read all the parts.

Read my new serial novel That Woman (free!) Part III

And now for That Woman, part 3...

Synopsis of Part 3:
A dance at the beginning of summer....the air is sweet, the music calls to Marta and her mother and off they go to the Violette Pavilion, where there is such joy to be found. But this is Saskatchewan,  and on any Saturday night in a small town, there will also be blood.

Drew thinks she's on to a great story, but discovers that someone else is on it too, because they're on her trail, and letting her know it.  And what should she do about her boss, who never stops calling, never stops threatening to cut her off if she doesn't tell him what she knows?

When Grandad sticks his nose in, Drew knows she's in deep trouble. 


Learn all about That Woman here and read all the parts.

Read my new serial novel That Woman (free!) Part II

And now for That Woman, part 2...

Synopsis of Part 2:
Drew Pepper, hot on the trail of the Marsha Cooper story, meets a strange artist who seems to have the answers she is searching for. Meanwhile, Marta Kulyk makes her first trip to the big city. There, she triumphs, only to learn what small towns are really made of-- envy and vice and things not so nice.

Learn all about That Woman here and read all the parts.

The Big SWIFT Hack

I am old, as you can see, which means I am slow to adopt. When Windows 10 came into my life, because I hit the wrong button, I did not know what to make of the rearrangement of  my screen. Imagine my surprise at the appearance of a new icon calling herself/himself/itself Cortana. Ask me anything, it said in type on the bottom line where other useful icons dwell.

This is when paranoia reared its head. Who exactly is Cortana and what will she/he/it do with my questions? I asked myself. Am I supposed to fall in love with him/her/it and bare my soul?  What will some server deep in the wilds of the Neighbor to the South do with my queries, who will they be shared with? If I ask Cortana a question about Anonymous, which I just asked Google for example, will Cortana snitch me out to the NSA as a person interested in persons of interest? Images of two megacorps worth billions battling it out to see which gets to blow the whistle on me whirled through my head.

Okay, so that's a little over the top, but come on now, anything is a big ask.

On the other hand, isn't it far too late to worry? Everything I've asked already is recorded and known by someone, somewhere. As Edward Snowden has demonstrated, anyone with the right system administrator designation working for the right spook institution, or for any one of hundreds of spook civilian contractors, can find out what I've been investigating long before I get around to posting it. And yet something makes me draw the line at asking Cortana anything. It's the charade that gets to me: I refuse to pretend that a packet of software is my very own human slave when in fact it's the other way around. Microsoft does not need my cooperation to find out what I am up to. Without asking my permission it regularly enters my computer and has its way with it. It just dives right in. This is why every time I pay someone online I wonder where the transaction is being recorded and by whom and if one day someone out there will pretend to be me so as to explode their way through my shrinking line of credit. My bank says no worries, all the money they've lent to me is perfectly protected, no one can mess with their wonderful software. There's a lock icon on my banking screen to prove it.

Until this week, I was fool enough to believe it, likely because I'm a Canadian and our big banks are institutions of wondrous probity and care. But the fact is that financial institutions, like all the rest of us hooked to the Internet, are sitting ducks for those who practice the art of the hack. Until now, the frailty of the international banking communication system has been a pretty well kept secret, but in February, some clever folk tried to steal almost a billion dollars from the central bank of Bangladesh via the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.  (Who knew Bangladesh had a billion dollars just lolling about in its account in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York? Who knew you could fool the Federal Reserve of New York into sending millions of dollars to the wrong account? The hackers!!!)

Those of you who still read physical newspapers may have noticed the third Reuters story about this theft. The first, filed from Dakkah, I'm sure you missed. The third appeared in my morning rag, the Globe and Mail, this week. Don't bother searching it on the Globe site: read the original Reuters story by Jim Finkle (and a nice job of journalism it is too). The Globe reduced it to two short paragraphs and ran it deep in the bowels of the business section underneath a longer story from Reuters about US new house sales falling in March. In other words, you needed a magnifying glass or a newspaper obsession to find it though it was probably the most important story in the paper.

Reuters ran their third and fourth stories, scoops, right after another interesting story by David E. Sanger appeared in the New York Times the day before, on Sunday, April 24. Sanger wrote on how the US government is messing with the international banking system to attack the Islamic State. According to the Times, this story marked the first public admission by the US Cyber Command of its offensive use of what one US official called cyber bombs. All very interesting, yet after I read the Reuters stories, I couldn't shake the notion that New York Times had only got its story because American officials wanted to distract attention from the Bangladesh caper. That heist, which netted the hackers $81 million instead of the $951 million they'd tried for, took place on February 4 and 5. Apparently, Sanger of the Times had been speaking to US officials since February about the US government's use of cyber tools to disrupt the Islamic State's operations, especially its ability to pay people electronically. Sanger's story referred to "implants"--likely malware-- placed within the Islamic State's computer networks, malware used by the NSA and friends to listen and watch but now used by the Cyber Command to rewrite cyber banking reality and discombobulate the enemy.

"In other cases, officials said, the United States may complement operations to bomb warehouses full of cash by using cyber attacks to interrupt electronic transfers and misdirect payments.The fact that the administration is beginning to talk of its use of the new weapons is a dramatic change. As recently as four years ago, it would not publicly admit to developing offensive cyber weapons or confirm its role in any attacks on computer networks," wrote Sanger.

These tactics, described in the Times, turned out to be just what the hackers did in the Bangladesh caper as the Reuters story of the next day revealed. The hackers fooled the SWIFT banking system by rewriting client connection software to make the records of their theft disappear. Reuters reported on the findings of British civilian contractor, BAE, which filed a report on its blog about how the heist had been done. BAE described the malware used: it had been designed specifically to mess with the SWIFT international banking communication network via the Bangladesh bank. The second Reuters story was the first time the SWIFT network had been implicated in the theft. The SWIFT network is used every time I instruct my bank to pay someone who banks elsewhere.The SWIFT network is absolutely vital to financial transactions worldwide.

SWIFT stands for The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications. It is a cooperative owned by 3000 institutions, used by about 11,000 banks to move money here there and everywhere. Like any network, it appears that the SWIFT system is only as good as its weakest link, and the Bangladesh Bank, according to the Bangladesh police is a very, very weak link, failing to erect firewalls and "relying on used $10 switches in its local networks" according to Reuters.  According to the BAE blog post, its people found the malware used because it had been uploaded to a repository used to exchange information on malicious software. The upload had originated in Bangladesh. The malware, very sophisticated, according to BAE, appeared to have been designed specifically for the Bangladesh Bank heist but BAE noted that its characteristics were generally applicable, which likely made the SWIFT people quake. While BAE could not explain exactly how the money was transferred, or by whom, it could see that this malware had been designed to rewrite transactions both in electronic and paper form so as to make them disappear from the Bangladesh Bank system just  long enough to move the money without setting off alarms. The Reuters story claimed that while several fail safe systems had worked anyway, $81 million was still missing. At first, the Bangladesh police thought they had traced the money to perpetrators in the Philippines and Sri Lanka. Turned out that several of these names had been lifted from the Philippines' voters list. In other words, the money had been routed through accounts via identity theft.

BAE suggested that the Alliance Access server software which many banks use to interface with the SWIFT system had been manipulated through a server somewhere in Egypt.  This sort of thing, of course, was exactly what the US had just advertised that it was going to do to IS. Or had already done?

The next day the fourth Reuters story appeared that was not carried in my papers, again by Jim Finkle. In it, the SWIFT people admitted that other suspicious transactions, okay thefts, had occurred via their network. They did not say how many or for how much, or where, just advised their bank clients to go over their security systems very, very carefully.

This story also mentioned that the Bank of Bangladesh investigation involved a very interesting US based company called FireEye. I have written about FireEye before. It has a relationship with the CIA though Finkle did not mention that. FireEye got its initial investment in 2006 from Sequoia, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and also from a non for profit company called In-Q-Tel. In-Q-Tel was created by the CIA so it could keep abreast of the rapidly expanding cyber technologies. The Principal Threat Intelligence Analyst at FireEye is a fellow named Nart Villeneuve who worked for years with the Citizen Lab, an organization set up with a Ford Foundation grant at the University of Toronto to investigate the dark world of cyber spooking and cyber crime back in 2001. Citizen Lab had help later from a company called Palantir, which In-Q-Tel also invested in, back when the Citizen Lab was working on its Ghost Net investigation. Citizen Lab watched and tracked hackers as they wormed their way into the Dalai Lama's computer systems, reading this, copying that, tracing the hackers back to a Chinese military intelligence complex. So it is interesting that FireEye is now tracking down who did this to the banks and exactly how. Villeneuve has written several papers explaining how it is possible to follow the "breadcrumbs"  left by hackers back to their point of origin.

To me, it is shocking that none of the heist stories were carried on the front pages of everybody's newspapers, that SWIFT said nothing about the other thefts that had occurred through its system until after BAE's blog post appeared on the 25th and was reported on by Reuters.The thing to remember is that this wasn't just a hack on the Bank of Bangladesh, a third world financial entity. It was at root a successful hack of  the Federal Reserve Bank in New York. I'm pretty sure this heist is what goosed the US Cyber Command to say we're coming for you, IS, via the pages of the New York Times. If there is one thing the US government can not tolerate it is someone messing with its banking system. 

If there is one thing that should strike terror into all our hearts it is that someone found a way to do it.

I wonder who.

On Happiness: Brazil,Canada, Coups, and Corruption

Permit me to briefly wallow in how we do things, in other words, in human politics. Politics are the products of the intelligence of individuals acting together. It is of a higher order than that which you display when going about the business of your own life. This may explain why it is so very hard for most of us to understand what the hell is going on when a presidential candidate like Donald Trump attracts followers, especially when he says out loud that the State should use torture to deal with terrorists.

In the US, they are big on the politics of happiness. It's so important a purpose of American political life that it's listed as an inalienable right in the Declaration of Independence. Its pursuit is something Jefferson (and Locke before him) thought that the State exists to protect. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a more modern document, is prudently silent on the subject, yet Canada, we were told last week, ranks very high on the World Happiness Report. We're number six. The US is several ranks below.

This list has been compiled and released with ballyhoo every year, for the last four years, on World Happiness Day, brought to you by the UN, a notoriously unhappy institution. The Happiness Report is mainly written  by economists--practitioners of the dismal science. So what exactly is happiness in a political context and how is it measured? The World Happiness Report is compiled from statistical data derived from various sources, but also includes the results of interviews with several thousand individuals in each country listed. Nation is then pitted against nation and ranked.

One of the economists involved is John Helliwell of the University of British Columbia. I first read his work in the 1980s when he wrote about the energy pyramid, the relationship between the price of oil and gas and the amount that can be found and brought to market:the higher the price, the greater the available resource. This idea of an elastic supply was a startling notion at the time: organizations like the Club of Rome were screaming loudly then that we were running out of oil and thus the world economy was about to collapse. Another economist behind the Happiness Report is Jeffrey Sachs. As a very young professor at Harvard, he was asked to re-engineer the economy of Bolivia as it transitioned from top-down control to democracy and a free market. The result was an ugly process which created considerable unhappiness and may have contributed to the rapid expansion of the cultivation of Bolivian coca, the precursor for cocaine. Yet Sachs was invited to provide similar advice to various East Bloc states, including Poland and Russia, as they made the same shift.

You can look up their methods of measuring happiness here.

Canada's rank apparently means that we`s all happy here, almost as happy as those who live in the five countries above us (all western, all northern). Brazil, the biggest country in Latin America, is at number 17. In general, Latin America and the Caribbean are not as happy as North America, despite all those travel brochures showing clear blue waters and pristine beaches, and despite the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Mexicans in the drug wars plus the millions who voted with their feet and trekked to the US in droves, which drives Donald Trump crazy. Brazilians are allegedly much less sad than those who live in China, or Burundi which appears on the bottom of the list at number 158.

The Report`s definition of happiness turns on statistical facts like life expectancy, GDP per capita, income equality, and perceived levels of government corruption. Corruption, they insist, makes people unhappy.

And yet: the same week the Happiness Report placed Brazil fairly high on the happiness list, millions of Brazilians were marching in cities throughout Brazil to protest rampant government corruption. These were, for the most part, middle class people very, very unhappy about the shenanigans of their leading politicians and their corporate friends.  Brazil's Congress, we were told by Stephanie Nolan in the Globe and Mail, is about to impeach its President, Dilma Rouseff, for moving money from one government department to another to get around banking rules--not to enrich herself or her cronies, you understand, but to pay for government programs. Many of the other top politicians in the major Brazilian political parties are embroiled in legal troubles of their own. One leading fellow is under criminal indictment for stashing ill gotten gains in Switzerland: many are enmeshed in a vast kickback/money laundering scandal known as Lava Jato. Lava Jato means carwash. The Brazilians have many clever, mordant nicknames for their dank business/ political relationships. My favorite, shared with me by an old Brazil hand just before my first trip to Brazil as a reporter, is jeitinho--little arrangements. When Brazil was taking its first steps toward democracy in the early 1990s, certain forms of jeitinho were organized to be legal. Brazil permitted only charities to make campaign contributions to political parties and candidates, an absolute no no in Canada and the US. It also permitted non governmental groups outside the country to donate to such politically connected charities, also a no no in Canada and the US --for obvious reasons. For more, see Cloak of Green, my first book ( if you can find it.)

Lava Jato is jeitinho on stilts. Allegedly, billions of of reais have been plucked from the pockets of the Brazilian government via Petrobras, the state oil company. Its board is presided over by politicians. Dilma Rousseff chaired the board herself during the presidency of her mentor, the former trade unionist and mill worker, Lula da Silva.  While she has not been directly implicated in Lava Jato-- yet--others just below her have been. It is alleged that company officials were paid off by contractors who got contracts awarded in return. These officials allegedly put some of that money in their own pockets, but significant sums were also kicked back to finance political campaigns. A judge and prosecutors in the city of Curitiba stumbled on this scheme when an individual arrested for one thing began to sing about these things.

Judges have investigatory powers in the Brazilian legal system. The Brazilian legal system is also famous for its complexity and politically inflected outcomes. Former Brazilian President, Getulio Vargas, the un-elected strong man of Brazilian politics before World War II, the elected strongman after, who  killed himself while in office in 1954 ( or was it just made to look like suicide?), used to say: "for my friends, anything, for my enemies, the law." Vargas was the fascist/nationalist who created Petrobras. Petrobras and the other state-owned companies Vargas set up became the means by which military officers enriched themselves when the military ran the country for thirty odd years. So this sort of Lava Jato is traditional in Brazil.

The investigating judge and his prosecutors went so far as to have the former president, Lula da Silva, arrested at home for questioning about how he came to enjoy the use of a beach front condo owned by a certain contractor. In order to protect da Silva from worse, Rousseff appointed him to her cabinet. Cabinet officers may only be investigated by the Supreme Court which takes its sweet time to do these things. But that appointment was declared void, as the judge released wire-tapped conversations between Rousseff and da Silva, and da Silva and others, though some of the conversations had been improperly tapped after legal authority had run out. The judge, according to Nolan, has become a hero in Brazil, someone who is determined to finally stop impunity in its tracks. Others are a little worried about the judge's judgement. Still others, like da Silva and Rousseff, are calling these actions  tantamount to a coup. Rousseff was tortured during the military dictatorship which came to power via a coup so she knows a lot about coups. The last time I was in Brazil, in 2012, to speak to the alumnae of a very famous military school, many there took me aside to allege that da Silva, through his family, had been on the take while in office, and that the Rousseff government had to be gotten rid of. So a coup is not so far fetched.

All this mayhem among the happyish people in Brazil made it into the front sections of Canadian newspapers, which is unusual. Mainly we ignore Brazil though it is one of Canada`s most serious trade competitors. However, it is also true that we ignore lots of things going on at home. For instance, a corruption story that broke last week in happy Canada did not get lavish attention. The former deputy leader of the Quebec Liberal Party, Nathalie Normandeau, who once stood at former Premier Jean Charest's right hand, was arrested, along with several others, and accused of various forms of wrongdoing adding up to Brazilian style corruption. The others arrested were either long- time fundraisers for the Quebec Liberals, or for the Parti Quebecois. One had worked for the Liberals and also went to work at the engineering company Roche which got municipal contracts, allegedly in return for political contributions rendered. One commentator, Chantal Hebert, argued that this was the first time in her memory that any leading politician had been arrested for such wrongdoing. Of course there was an inquiry into former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney's relationship to one Karlheinz Schreiber who handed out what the Germans call schmiergeld (no translation required) to get the attention of politically useful folks who could get contracts issued to the right parties. Though Mulroney eventually admitted taking $225,000 of Schreiber's geld, he vehemently denied ever rendering such services ( and Schreiber actually sued him for failing to do anything for the money). No criminal charges were laid.

Those arrested in Quebec were investigated and charged by a police unit set up specifically to poke into political corruption after a number of political scandals unfurled in Quebec. The list is long. First came the Sponsorship scandal associated with the last referendum, which led to the Gomery Commission, which was not kind to Prime Minister Chretien and officials in his office but only led to criminal charges against ad executives and civil servants. The Sponsorship scandal led directly to the fall of the Paul Martin government and the rise of Stephen Harper. Then came the Charbonneau Commission of Inquiry into municipal corruption in Quebec. That's where we learned that major municipal infrastructure contracts, especially in Laval and Montreal, were handed out to a few engineering firms that operated as a cabal, deciding among them which would bid on which contract at what price, working hand in glove with political officials, civil servants, labor union officials, and of course, the Mob. This resulted in puffed up prices for municipal infrastructure projects, and also provided the wherewithal for kickbacks to municipal politicians and civil servants who turned a blind eye, or granted the necessary approvals. The Commission, appointed by the Premier, did not probe hard at whether or not such collusion went on at the provincial level. We heard about cash stuffed in socks, and cash wrapped in plastic, and rides on flashy boats, and expensive dinners and trips.

And don't forget the SNC-Lavalin affair which unraveled at the same time. It was triggered by a Swiss investigation into the affairs of an executive of this major international engineering firm which is based in Quebec. Allegedly, its executives played expensive ($100 million plus) footsie with Gadaffi's sons to gain contracts in Libya (and did the same thing with others in other governments in other countries). SNC-Lavalin also came to some sort of agreement with the director of the McGill University Health Network, Dr. Arthur Porter, which allegedly resulted in SNC winning the contract to rebuild the Centre. Millions were allegedly improperly paid out.  While running the McGill deal, Porter was also appointed by Prime Minister Harper to head the SIRC, which oversees the workings of Canada's security and intelligence service. Porter, SNC-Lavalin, and several of its executives were eventually charged with various acts of fraud in regard to that hospital contract but Porter decamped to the Caribbean and then to Panama. He died of cancer before Justice had its say. Have I mentioned that two very prominent political personalities, a former Conservative Senator, Hugh Segal, and a former Liberal Senator, Lorna Marsden, served on the SNC-Lavalin board which was apparently unaware of these issues?

And lest you think these problems are peculiar to Quebec, the Globe and Mail reminds us in an editorial this week of all the other places in this country where corruption is the order of the day.

But what the heck. We`re number six on the list.

So maybe corruption doesn't make people unhappy after all.