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People stand in front of the NATO Headquarters in February, 2025.JOHN THYS/AFP/Getty Images
On July 25, Brussels said a “Canadian national of Chinese origin” working at the European headquarters of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization had been arrested on suspicion of espionage. A source identified the woman as Biwei Zhang (who also uses the name Claire Zhang), a former Canadian civil servant.
The Globe and Mail is not identifying the source, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the case.
Prosecutors said only that Ms. Zhang was suspected of “spying on behalf of a third country and of being a member of a criminal organization.” On July 30, a national security source told The Globe that the country in question was China.
Here’s what we know about the case so far, and what it could mean for Canada-China relations.
What kind of work did Ms. Zhang do at NATO?
Before being arrested, Ms. Zhang was an intern at the alliance’s operational base, Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), in the southern Belgian city of Mons, near the French border. It is not known which division she was working in. A report by a European news consortium, including EU news platform Follow the Money, and Belgian national news outlet Le Soir, said she had arrived in Mons in July, 2025, to begin her internship in SHAPE’s IT department and extended her initial six-month term to a year.
As a member of NATO, Canada has military representatives based at SHAPE. Officials at the centre plan and command joint strategy, tactics and operations. NATO’s Cyber Security Centre is also based in Mons.
While SHAPE “cannot go into specifics regarding the criminal investigation,” it can say “that it concerns alleged unauthorized activities with potential security implications,” a representative said on July 30.
Ms. Zhang has not commented publicly on the case.
Did the intern do any damage to NATO’s operations?
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The NATO star is seen through a window at its headquarters in front of the flags of the 32 member countries in April, 2025.Omar Havana/Getty Images
There was no indication the incident had affected the alliance’s operational readiness, command and control, or continuing missions, a NATO spokesperson has said.
“SHAPE continues to fulfill its responsibilities without interruption,” Colonel Martin O’Donnell, a spokesperson for SHAPE, said in an e-mail to The Globe. “NATO remains fully committed to protecting Allied personnel, safeguarding classified information, and maintaining the trust and security upon which the Alliance depends.”
As an intern at NATO, the alleged spy is unlikely to have had a high level of security clearance. But experts say the incident will be embarrassing for Canada, prompting questions about its vetting procedures.
What made NATO suspect Ms. Zhang?
Ms. Zhang had come to the attention of SHAPE’s internal counterintelligence service after exhibiting suspicious behaviour, said a report by a European news consortium.
SHAPE shared the information with the Belgian military intelligence service. The matter was then referred to the Belgian federal prosecutor’s office, which launched an investigation.
The Follow the Money report quoted a source saying the young Canadian woman was exhibiting behaviour that went beyond that of an intern at NATO. According to a security official, she had been seen loitering around NATO’s buildings and was frequently asking hypothetical questions about breaches of security protocols.
On July 23, Belgian officers searched the suspect’s home and place of work inside NATO’s command centre, with support from a computer crime unit and a forensic and scientific unit, the prosecutor’s office said. She was arrested the next day.
Who is Biwei Zhang?
Documents filed in the Federal Court of Canada and obtained by The Globe chronicle Ms. Zhang’s account of her work history, which dates back to 2017 and included stints at the National Research Council, Statistics Canada, and Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC).
Although the record of employment filed in court is only current up to 2021, a LinkedIn account that The Globe has identified as belonging to Ms. Zhang says she worked at the European Space Agency in Italy in 2022, and later as a systems engineer at the Canadian Space Agency in Quebec.
Ms. Zhang’s job applications, submitted as evidence in the court case, also list homes in North York and Ottawa as her addresses.
Ms. Zhang studied at the University of Ottawa, where she received a master’s degree in computer science and systems engineering, according to her résumé on LinkedIn. A spokesperson for York University told The Globe that she received an undergraduate degree from the school in economics in 2019. She also previously used an e-mail address from the University of Montreal to apply for a job at the Canada Border Services Agency.
In her applications, she listed past volunteering experience for the Toronto International Film Festival and for an “election campaign for Liberal Party of Canada.”
The federal Liberal Party said it had no record of Ms. Zhang in any formal campaign role.
Previous flags from Canadian federal agencies
In 2023, Ms. Zhang was found to have committed fraud within the civil service when she wrote the same job exam twice for a single posting at the Canada Border Services Agency.
The CBSA became aware of Ms. Zhang’s dual applications in 2019 when a third-party human resources provider flagged them as a potential issue, the records show. She never worked for the border agency.
Ms. Zhang was among 1,200 candidates who applied for the job, but she submitted two applications, using different e-mails and calling herself “Biwei Zhang” in one application and “Zhang Biwei” in the other, court filings show.
Ms. Zhang wrote the civil-service test twice – once on March 14, and once on March 15, 2019. This was despite federal rules that say job candidates cannot write the same test twice within 180 days.
After being alerted to her multiple applications, the Public Service Commission, a government watchdog for federal hiring, began investigating her and demanded a sit-down interview.
Ms. Zhang filed her employment history and an affidavit in court when she unsuccessfully appealed the fraud ruling in 2023. A Public Service Commission report in June, 2023, found that Ms. Zhang had not acted dishonestly in submitting two applications, but she had committed fraud in sitting for the examination twice and failing to confirm that fact when “asked directly” by the border agency. In 2024, a Federal Court judge ruled against Ms. Zhang, ending her appeal.
The report added that if she joined the federal public service within a year, she must also complete an ethics course followed by a discussion with her manager within two months of starting the job.
What was the vetting process for the NATO job?
A source told The Globe that the overseas posting was sponsored by Global Affairs Canada, and that the department was responsible for her security check. Before starting her NATO internship, Ms. Zhang had been granted security clearance by the Canadian government after vetting by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and a criminal record check by the RCMP.
Jody Thomas, a former national security adviser to Justin Trudeau, told The Globe that it was unusual that someone with Ms. Zhang’s background in computer science – and not defence or security – would apply and be approved to work at NATO. She said senior Canadian federal officials should be reviewing how Ms. Zhang was vetted and received clearance.
What have Prime Minister Mark Carney and other MPs said?
Mr. Carney said the probe into Ms. Zhang is “an active investigation,” which he said limits what he can say about it.
Former clerk of the Privy Council Michael Wernick said there should be a fresh look at the security screening process. He said it is a “long-standing problem” in the Canadian public service that “people can slip between the cracks and move from one place to another despite transgressions of conduct and mismanagement.”
He has also called for the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians, made up of MPs and senators who have top-secret security clearance, to look into this case and any potential flaws in the overall security screening apparatus.
What impact could this have on Ottawa and Beijing’s relationship?
The allegations against Ms. Zhang are not the first time China has been accused of spying on NATO members.
In February, Greek and French authorities arrested multiple people accused of spying for China, including a colonel in the Greek air force, who was alleged to have shared classified and top-secret information on NATO projects.
The next month, Agence France-Presse reported that China had been using fake LinkedIn profiles to solicit information from people working for NATO and European Union institutions.
For years, “various civil servants, academics and other influential figures around the world have been approached by what turned out to be an agent of the Chinese intelligence services,” Belgian Justice Minister Annelies Verlinden said in March.
The Chinese authorities did not comment on any of those cases.
The case could put a strain on Canada and Beijing’s relationship. “To date, no non-anonymous source or official body has reported any link to China,” a spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Brussels said in response to media.
On July 31, China’s Ministry of Commerce said it was extending an anti-dumping investigation into Canadian pea starch to February, 2027, because of the “complexity of this case.” A month before, Beijing had imposed a 73.5-per-cent preliminary tariff on pea starch imports from Canada after a more-than-10-month probe.
Beijing has long been accused of using trade policy for political purposes. In 2022, NATO issued a strategy document warning that China poses “systemic challenges” to Atlantic security, and “employs a broad range of political, economic and military tools to increase its global footprint and project power.”
At the time, Beijing accused NATO of “hyping up the so-called China threat,” and urged the alliance to stop its “groundless accusations and provocative rhetoric.”
China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said in June that Beijing opposed “vilifying China by peddling the so-called ‘Chinese spy’ narrative, which is totally baseless.”
With reports from Marie Woolf, Colin Freeze, Sara Mojtehedzadeh, Paul Waldie, James Griffiths and Greg Mercer