Discussion Iran - China - Canada connection

OTTAWA – An Iranian immigrant living in Vancouver spent more than five years buying American missile-testing equipment and drone cameras for Iran’s Department of Defense, routing the goods and the payments through front companies in China. A Seattle court sentenced him to 42 months in prison in 2018. He was arrested not by Canadian police but by an American agent, at the border crossing in Blaine, Washington.

The case is a public record illuminating the Iranian-Chinese procurement system that now sits at the center of Washington’s financial war against Iran, and that Canada has never confronted. Iranian government buyers stand at one end of it, Chinese operators and their front companies at the other end, and hundreds, if not thousands of Canadian residents from Iran serve as its trusted Western face, operating from major Canadian cities, wired into Canadian banks, trade and technology and real estate companies, and Canada’s political system.

The scheme moves sensitive American technology to Tehran through fake import and export firms and transshipment points, and it settles the bills in oil and Chinese currency, often laundering euros and US currency through currency exchange hubs in the Middle East, Canada or Hong Kong.

According to one of The Bureau’s sources, the file also explains the unexamined machinery behind an explosive story by the Canadian national security reporter Stewart Bell.

Bell revealed that the son of a former Iranian vice-president, described by Canadian Security Intelligence Service as a participant in a covert weapons procurement structure for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, spent a quiet decade in Edmonton winning some $2 million in contracts from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Department of National Defence.

CSIS warnings went nowhere inside Justin Trudeau’s government, and Ottawa’s single attempt to remove him apparently collapsed on a notorious structural error in Canadian law: intelligence gathered by the spy service often cannot be used in court by the border enforcement agency that needs it. More on this story at

thebureau@substack.com