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.

Forged KGB Documents Used to Smear Journalist in Parliament | The Walrus

Ex-MP Chris Alexander accused David Pugliese of being a Russian spy. Forensic experts now say the evidence was fabricated

The Walrus (thewalrus.ca)