This National Post Columnist Says He Spied for a Foreign Intelligence Agency. Experts Call His Behaviour ‘Unethical’ and ‘Absurd’.

Is it ethical for a journalist to wear a wire to dinner and spy for a foreign intelligence agency at the same time as they’re writing for one of Canada’s biggest newspapers?

Most experts on journalism ethics might say that’s clearly “unethical,” but National Post columnist Adam Zivo is adamant he sees “no problem” with presenting himself as a journalist by day while moonlighting for a foreign spy agency by night.

Zivo, who was sanctioned by Russia in August 2022, has recently been sharing dramatic and fantastical stories about a “weird espionage experience” he had while he was doing war zone reporting on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for the National Post.

In the first instalment of his story, tweeted unprompted after midnight on a weekend, Zivo revealed he worked with Ukraine’s spy agency, the Security Service of Ukraine or SBU, in a counterintelligence operation that saw him strap a wire to his chest and go undercover in an attempt to entrap a man he suspected was a Chinese spy.

“I met the Chinese man and his wife at a restaurant while wearing a wire,” Zivo said in one tweet. “The SBU officers watched us from a car parked outside, which had tinted windows.”

People are dunking on this tweet but this actually happened to me in Odesa in early 2023 with a guy who seemed to be a Chinese spy. I ended up organizing a small sting operation with two Ukrainian intelligence officers to figure out what his deal was. https://t.co/UtyFcpVCZo

— Adam Zivo (@ZivoAdam) August 10, 2024

Zivo shared additional details about his spy story in statements to PressProgress, revealing that he also compiled multiple reports which he claims he sent to Canada’s spy agency, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, as well as to the Ukrainian government and his employer, the National Post.

“After my initial interaction with Zhang, I drafted a detailed report which I quickly provided to the National Post, CSIS and the Ukrainian government,” Zivo told PressProgress. “After the recorded dinner, I produced transcripts and a follow-up report which was also shared with these stakeholders.”

According to Zivo, he has no information that confirms the man was actually a spy and his initial contact with the man, as well as with CSIS and Ukrainian intelligence, were all undertaken on his own initiative by Zivo himself.

Shortly after releasing a statement to PressProgress, Zivo elaborated with additional details while guest hosting on Toronto’s AM640 talk radio, introducing his segment with music from James Bond and the 1960s sitcom Get Smart.

Experts specializing in journalism ethics agree Zivo’s claim that he spied for a foreign intelligence agency is an ethical problem on multiple levels.

“The fact that he engaged in a wire-wearing act in partnership with an intelligence agency is absurd and it’s obviously truly unethical, but it’s clear that he doesn’t think so,” Sonya Fatah, the Associate Chair of Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Journalism told PressProgress.

“What is startling about this is just how openly he has shared this story which means that in his mind there’s no conflict.”

Brent Jolly, President of the Canadian Association of Journalists, agrees Zivo’s spy story is “problematic” and “ethically murky.”

“I think you have to be clear what your role is,” Jolly told PressProgress, adding journalists must always be “very, very clear about when you’re doing one thing and when you’re another.”

“I don’t think we can go around and just have people one minute working for CSIS and the next writing a story about what an amazing job CSIS is doing.”

Zivo says he’s written “over 80 articles about Ukraine” since the beginning of the war, and credits himself for spotlighting “local Ukrainian voices.”

However, the National Post also published several articles by Zivo about Ukraine that overlap with the timeline of Zivo’s purported spying for Ukrainian intelligence, including articles criticizing Canada and other NATO allies over their inadequate support for Ukraine’s war effort – none of the articles disclose that the author was also simultaneously spying on behalf of Ukraine’s intelligence agency.

Zivo is a man of many hats and self-identifies as a “multi-faceted professional.”

While he at times presents himself as a “journalist,” he also presents himself at other times as a “content vendor,” a “filmmaker,” an “activist” and a “geopolitical analyst via an ecosystem of NATO-affiliated NGOs.”

Zivo graduated from the Munk School of Public Policy and Global Affairs in 2020 and has since done work for the NATO Association of Canada as well as a right-wing foreign policy oriented think tank called the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

Zivo, whose legal name is Adam Zivojinovic, is also named on corporate documents as a director of an advocacy group called the Canadian Centre for Responsible Drug Policy alongside Dr. Julian Somers, a controversial anti-safe supply advocate whom Zivo previously showcased in his past National Post columns.

Pierre Poilievre, Jordan Peterson (Twitter)

“He presents himself in a number of different ways,” Fatah observes. “He often presents himself as a journalist, but he’s also wearing a million hats and he’s obviously not engaging with the media ethics part of this.”

Fatah, who teaches a course on media ethics, says Zivo’s spy story might make an interesting case study for students in journalism schools.

Fatah points out that the spy story highlights “really problematic” questions about conflicts-of-interest, the culture of international reporting, relationships with state authorities, issues with freelance labour, as well as questions about how journalists build personal brands and share information about themselves using social media.

Adam Zivo (Twitter)

After Russia’s February 2022 invasion, Zivo says he dropped everything and traveled to Ukraine, a country with which he had no prior connection, so he could document the war as a journalist, compelled by what he describes as a sense of “moral necessity.”

“I felt that I could do more good by reporting on the war on the ground,” Zivo told PressProgress. “I quit my day job and spent two months reporting on the conflict in the spring of 2022.”

According to his various versions of the story, Zivo claims that in December 2022, several months after Russia launched its war on Ukraine, he found himself at an Odesan mall when he noticed a “guy speaking English loudly” while he was shopping for furniture at a store he describes as the “Ukrainian version of IKEA.”

(Zivo later clarified he was referring to Jysk, a Danish-owned multinational household goods retail chain that also operates in Canada).

“I look over and I see this Chinese guy,” Zivo recalls. “He was speaking English loudly and I was like ‘okay, I’m very interested in understanding minority experiences in Ukraine’ … I go and I say hi to him and I think ‘this guy could be a friend’.”

Jysk City Center Mall Odesa (Google)

After approaching the man on his own initiative and explicitly introducing himself as a “Canadian journalist,” Zivo says he began to notice “red flags.”

He claims the man told him he once lived in the Ottawa-area, had an Ontario driver’s license, was covered in tattoos and also “said ‘bro’ a lot.”

Acting only on this bad “vibe,” Zivo says he looked the man up on Facebook and began compiling a dossier on him which he later sent unsolicited to CSIS. The National Post columnist claims he “spoke for an hour on the phone with CSIS” about what he found on the man’s social media profile but was told the spy agency would not accept a PDF of his dossier for “cyber security” reasons.

Frustrated, Zivo claims he took a taxi to a Ukrainian military checkpoint surrounded by sandbags and was led to a “little wooden shed” by armed guards where he spent a full day using Duolingo to walk a perplexed group of soldiers through his suspicions about the stranger whom he had approached at the shopping mall.

In a subsequent meeting with Ukrainian intelligence agents, Zivo says he volunteered to wear a wire and record himself dining with the man at a restaurant called Kompot, which he describes as the “Olive Garden of Ukraine.” Zivo says his handlers expressed concern for his safety but he insisted he would ultimately “feel safer” if he caught the suspected spy himself.

After strapping a recording device to his chest using “scotch tape” and staging the undercover counterintelligence operation at the restaurant, Zivo claims the man abruptly fled Odesa and relocated to Antwerp, Belgium with his wife. He claims he provided the full transcripts of his recordings and a debriefing report to the Ukrainian government, CSIS and the National Post.

Kompot (Tripadviser, Instagram)

Zivo insists he sees “no problem” with what he did because he was trying to “protect fellow citizens from predatory foreign agents.”

“My actions were ethical,” Zivo told PressProgress. “​​Journalists working in war zones have a right to investigate threats to their safety, with the assistance of local security forces if necessary.”

Despite Zivo’s confidence and moral certainty, Fatah says it’s unlikely most newsrooms would condone their journalists spying for foreign intelligence agencies.

“I imagine most newsrooms would be horrified,” Fatah said. “I would assume most people wouldn’t put out a post like that because they would think ‘oh my god this is horrifying, I should never be exposed for what I’ve done’.”

“From the publishing side, the publisher and the editors should be aware of this and should be having a conversation and should consider whether or not it’s appropriate to work with a journalist who engages on the side with intelligence agencies.”

Jolly agrees, noting that acting as a foreign intelligence asset could compromise the integrity of journalists and news organizations.

“I would be concerned if I was his editor to see what compromises perhaps have been made or what was the arrangement,” Jolly said. “There’s all kinds of quid pro quos that go out there that I think can be used to manipulate the press or to have one’s integrity be compromised.”

Jolly noted journalists occasionally embed on police stings or drug busts, though newsrooms are typically careful to avoid being seen as a “plant for any law enforcement agency” – “there’s a process and a lot of conversation and deliberation about whether to engage in that.”

Ukrainian soldier stands guard at military checkpoint in Odesa, Ukraine in March 2022 (Laine Nathan/ABACA)

National Post Editor-in-Chief Rob Roberts and Managing Editor Carson Jerema did not respond to several requests for comment from PressProgress, though Zivo says the National Post was aware of what he was doing.

“I informed them of what was occurring and that I was working with local authorities to address my safety concerns,” Zivo told PressProgress, later clarifying he “did not run this by my editors for a sign off” since he did not “need permission” because he’s a “freelancer, not a staff writer.”

While Zivo suggests his actions were designed to protect “international journalists” from “hostile foreign agents,” given the Russian government’s long track record of murdering and jailing journalists, Jolly said Zivo’s story could have the opposite effect and put international correspondents and local Ukrainian journalists on the ground at greater risk by legitimizing the narratives of “Russian propagandists.”

“Whether it’s Putin or the Belarusian guy or whoever, journalists are high value diplomatic tools and jailing them or discrediting them is an Orwellian tool in an authoritarian playbook,” Jolly said. “We know the Russian government has a huge capacity to put out propaganda and disinformation and I think this is something that could very easily fall into their hands and legitimizes their arguments.”

Fatah says Zivo’s “epic classic old school western story tale where he’s going to root out these bad guys and help the system” also speaks to a problematic way in which “Western journalists interact in non-Western environments.”

“There’s a bravado about being a reporter in war zones” that can “posit on a reporter a sense of power that can be really problematic if you are not in touch with the ethics of what you’re doing,” Fatah said.

“This falls in the same space of the self-centredness of the journalist who has some power but doesn’t see the whole field, doesn’t see the impact of their actions or responsibility for their words because they’re in their own world where they’ve centered themselves.”

“The de-centering of self is so important in journalism.”

Zivo dismisses Fatah as a “leftist professor” and, pointing to her bio on the TMU website, requested PressProgress provide him with “more details about her time and/or work in Russia.”

(Fatah, who has lived in several countries and worked as an international reporter for the Toronto Star and Globe and Mail, clarified she spent “about two months” living in Saint Petersburg in the summer of 1997 while she was an undergraduate student at Oberlin College as part of a cultural exchange program run by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.)

Asked if he was implying a journalist with decades of international experience and the Associate Chair of one of Canada’s top journalism schools was a Russian asset,  Zivo said he was questioning the “colonial” mindset underlying her ethical framework.

“Fatah’s eagerness to speak for Ukrainians, and dictate what is best” reflects the way “academics who have studied Russia internalize colonial mindsets towards Eastern Europe, and Ukraine in particular,” Zivo said, adding he’s shared his spy story with multiple contacts in Ukraine and “no one has expressed concerns.”

“When someone who has academically studied the culture or language of a colonial empire claims to advocate for that empire’s former colonial subjects, and then fails to consult with these former subjects when inventing grievances on their behalf, that is indeed problematic,” Zivo said.

Zivo clarified he was “born and raised” in Canada, has no Ukrainian heritage and had “no connections prior to the war” in Ukraine.

Zivo denies having any current or past relationships with CSIS, the CIA or any other foreign intelligence agencies. When asked if he still communicates with Ukrainian intelligence, Zivo replied: “Not to my knowledge.”

Editor’s Note: In response to Adam Zivo’s request for “more details” about TMU journalism professor Sonya Fatah’s “time and/or work in Russia,” this article has been updated to include details about Fatah’s two month university exchange trip to Saint Petersburg in the summer of 1997.