Party of One (34 page)

SIRC is an independent external review body that reports to Parliament and depends entirely on the integrity of its members. SIRC reviews the past activities of CSIS, and also examines complaints made against it, including those lodged by applicants who are denied a security clearance. It meets once a month and reports to Parliament, and can make recommendations to the minister of public safety. Two years after Porter joined the board, Prime Minister Harper elevated him to chair of SIRC on June 24, 2010.

Dr. Arthur Porter was charming, cherubic, and a brilliant networker. He also had the common touch, being comfortable in conversation with anyone. He was also, like all con men, deceitful to the bone. The committee that chose Porter to become head of the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) apparently didn’t
know there were serious clouds over his previous posting, when he was in charge of the Detroit Medical Centre (DMC). Although Porter was never accused of improper activity by the board, there were allegations in the media of overspending and conflict of interest. The place was falling apart under his stewardship, and was near bankruptcy when the board finally pulled the plug on Porter. One board member recalled, “It was my understanding that the DMC board asked him to leave because he really wasn’t accomplishing what they had in mind.” Yet Porter was headhunted for the Montreal job. He was recruited to oversee an immense project, the building of a super-hospital that would give Montreal a world-class medical institution that would conduct groundbreaking research and provide health care of the highest quality.

Like Jacobson, Dr. Porter had friends in high places. In 2003, Porter donated the maximum, $25,000, to the Republican National Committee, and the maximum to the Bush–Cheney 2004 re-election campaign. As Jacobson did with his picture taken with Harper and Netanyahu, Porter displayed photos in his office of himself with Bush and Cheney. Porter was also ambassador plenipotentiary for his native Sierra Leone, and an advisor to that country’s president. The plenipotentiary is authorized to represent the head of state. This was a clear conflict of interest and held obvious potential for foreign influence should he ever be considered for public office. Once he arrived in Montreal, he began donating the maximum to the Conservative Party of Canada.

According to a CBC documentary about Porter that aired on January 28, 2013, David Angus, retired senator and former chair of MUHC’s board of directors, introduced Porter to the prime minister. Harper and Porter toured the old Montreal General Hospital together in 2006. The prime minister appointed him to health advisory boards, and on September 4, 2008, the PCO appointed him to the SIRC board, on the express recommendation of the
PMO. Bigger things were just ahead. Porter assumed his new position as head of SIRC the same month he reached an agreement with alleged arms dealer Ari Ben-Menashe about a business transaction in Sierra Leone.

On the same day that the CBC broadcast Terence McKenna’s documentary “Porter’s Way” on
The National
, the prime minister launched his famous Twitter charm offensive. Most of the media offered banal shots of the PM driving in the limo, working hard at the office, showing off the cat and the family’s pet chinchilla. The tweets succeeded in muting response to the documentary, a report that entered far deeper waters.

Porter’s appointment was sandwiched between two important events. Two days before he was made chair of SIRC, the director of Canada’s civilian spy agency, Richard Fadden, made an extraordinary statement. He said that cabinet ministers in two provinces might be under the control of foreign governments. A CBC interview with Fadden hinted at China and countries in the Middle East, economic espionage, and the sharing or outright theft of state secrets. And two days after Porter’s appointment, on June 26, 2010, the G20 Summit began in Toronto. A billion dollars was spent on the event with virtually no oversight, a sum never before paid for these summits. Dr. Porter would now provide the oversight for whatever CSIS did during those meetings. As it would later be revealed, though not by Porter, Canada assisted the US National Security Agency to spy on allies while this country was their host—information that became public through documents leaked by American whistle-blower and fugitive Edward Snowden.

And then there was the matter of Arthur Porter’s extracurricular business dealings. The June 2010 contract between Porter and Ari Ben-Menashe to receive $120 million from Russia, and the June 2010 groundbreaking for the Montreal hospital to be built by SNC-Lavalin, gave Porter connections to Russia, Israel, and the
security/spy world, where national borders are becoming obsolete. Stephen Harper had created a very powerful subordinate. So powerful that he could intervene in banking matters when his business partner, Ben-Menashe, was under pressure from his bank. The bank had become suspicious because of large money transfers going through Ben-Menashe’s account. In October 2010, Porter sent a reference letter to the Bank of Montreal on behalf of Ben-Menashe. Using Privy Council stationery, with the address of SIRC at the bottom, Porter vouched for his partner and told the bank, “In all my dealings with him, I have found him honest and straightforward.”

Porter was also appointed to the board of Air Canada, giving him free flights around the world. He was made a member of the Queen’s Privy Council, a lifetime position, the day he was appointed to SIRC. Gilles Duceppe, the then Bloc Québécois leader, refused to endorse the SIRC appointment because he said there was “a lack of clarity” about the doctor’s departure from Detroit. Duceppe said he was aware of Porter’s problems in Detroit from news reports in
L’Actualité Médicale
, and
Le Devoir
. He also worried about Porter’s apparently close ties to George Bush and Dick Cheney.

In May 2013, Brian Hutchinson of the
National Post
obtained a letter dated July 6, 2010, showing that Porter was trying to be appointed honorary consul-general to the Bahamas from Côte d’Ivoire just two weeks after Harper made Porter the head of SIRC. Bells should have been going off in the PMO and Foreign Affairs. At the time, the African country was run by unelected strongman Laurent Gbagbo, who a year later was sent to The Hague to face charges of crimes against humanity. The request was denied despite Porter’s thirty-three-page résumé and photos of his three luxury cars. Porter apparently had wanted to register a bank in Côte d’Ivoire, as well as open a branch in the Bahamas.
Asked about Porter’s attempt to be appointed as a diplomat of a foreign country on May 29, 2013, Andrew MacDougall, the PM’s spokesperson, said in an email, “To my knowledge, our office was not aware.”

On April 1, 2010, David Angus, chair of MUHC, had announced the winner of the $1.38-billion hospital project: SNC-Lavalin. On April 23, 2010, $10 million was wired to Sierra Asset Management (SAM), a Bahamas-based company incorporated on November 19, 2009. In July 2010, Sierra Asset Management received another $5 million. By August 2011, the SAM company had received $22.5 million of an alleged $30-million kickback to Porter. According to SNC-Lavalin company accounts, the $30 million to Sierra Asset Management Inc. was to be paid in installments disguised as legitimate payouts for a gas project in Algeria. Porter’s activities flew under the radar until another of his clandestine deals hit the newspapers.

On November 8, 2011, the
National Post
broke the Porter/Ben-Menashe story. Ari Ben-Menashe alleged that Porter approached him in 2010 with a proposal to hire Ben-Menashe’s lobbying company, Dickens & Madson (Canada) Inc., to help raise $120 million for an infrastructure project in Porter’s native Sierra Leone. According to Ben-Menashe, Porter made the original proposal through a banker friend in the Bahamas, Hermann-Josef Hermanns. Hermanns was a German-born Montrealer who ran the Bahamas branch of a Swiss-based private bank, Compagnie Bancaire Helvétique (CBH). The money was to be deposited in the Helvétique bank. For his part, Porter would pay Ben-Menashe a $200,000 lobbying fee. Asked about his frequent description as an arms dealer, Ben-Menashe told me, “We are consultants, we consult governments, we do lobbying work for governments.” Many of his deals involved acting as go-between in Russia’s dealings with developing countries.

Ben-Menashe’s bank accounts in Canada have been frozen, and he believes intelligence agents are after him. Journalists are some sort of protection, he told me, because at least the public knows about his situation. When I asked him about Porter’s job as chair of the MUHC, he replied, “He shouldn’t have gotten the job in the first place. He was working in Detroit, then suddenly he appears in Canada.” As reported in the
Post
on November 18, 2011, Ben-Menashe readily accepts he has a reputation: “I’m a liar, I’m crooked, I’m delusional. I’ve heard and read all of it.” But he said it’s not true, that “people keep getting it wrong.” He has been charged but never convicted of anything. (In 1989, the US government charged him with trying to sell three US-built military transport planes to Iran. His defence was that the deal was officially sanctioned by Israel. He was acquitted.)

Ari Ben-Menashe explained to me on November 18, 2011, why his deal with Arthur Porter fell apart. Porter had initially told him that his Africa Infrastructure Group was a government agency. Ben-Menashe did some investigating. He claimed that he visited the Geneva headquarters of the Helvétique bank, and grew suspicious when he discovered that it was what he called a “rickety bank”—one small office in the Bahamas, one in Geneva. And there was more. Ben-Menashe claimed that he terminated the agreement because it was supposed to be with Africa Infrastructure Group, but this turned out to be a Porter family–owned company registered in Sierra Leone, not a government agency as he had been led to believe. At that point, Ben-Menashe said he returned Porter’s money and backed out of the deal. According to the ex-Israeli military intelligence officer, Porter begged him to reconsider, reminding Ben-Menashe, “I’m a very powerful guy.”

For his part, Arthur Porter denied that Ben-Menashe had returned the $200,000, telling the
Post
that he, in fact, had asked for his money back. Porter kept to his story, explaining that he was
introduced to Ben-Menashe by his friend Hermanns. The idea was to raise money for Sierra Leone. He said he knew nothing about Ben-Menashe’s past, his work with Israeli intelligence, or with the infamous leader of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe—something a simple Google search would have revealed. Yet Stephen Harper had made Arthur Porter chair of SIRC. As part of his agreement with Ben-Menashe, Porter was to obtain the consent of Sierra Leone’s president for the development of new port facilities for use by the Russian Federation for non-military purposes. That consent was not given.

So who was telling the truth, if anyone? Ari Ben-Menashe had made his accusations in the media but was not sued by Porter. And despite his protestations of innocence, on November 9, 2011, Porter decided to leave SIRC. The prime minister accepted his resignation. In a brief statement, Harper thanked Porter “for his service on the Security Intelligence Review Committee and to his country.” He didn’t specify which one.

After his resignation as chair of SIRC, which Porter attributed to the
National Post
’s “scurrilous portrayal” of him in its November 8, 2011, edition, he offered a final self-serving explanation for his resignation. He was leaving because he did not want the baseless allegations to tarnish SIRC during a period of “significant transition.” He offered no explanation of what that meant, stating only, “I am a proud Canadian and a man for whom integrity, honour, and respect hold tremendous meaning.” As for his foreign dealings, Porter repeated that his motives were philanthropic: he simply wanted to help rebuild his birthplace, Sierra Leone, which had been devastated during a terrible civil war. Upgrading harbour facilities to accommodate the Russians seemed a strange way of doing that.

Other board members at the MUHC were now in a quandary. They held an emergency, six-hour, Sunday-night, closed-door meeting to discuss Porter’s future as head of the hospital network that
employed twelve thousand people. The MUHC issued a statement on November 14, 2011, stating its support for Dr. Porter. Yet in the delicious language of euphemism, the board added that it had formed a committee to oversee a smooth transition to his scheduled departure in April 2012. Arthur Porter was now under surveillance.

The PMO trotted out its typical response: the prime minister had no knowledge of the dealings between Porter and Ben-Menashe outlined in the
National Post
story. When asked how such a person could have been recruited for one of the most sensitive positions in Canada’s security establishment, the PMO passed the buck: it was not responsible for background checks and financial disclosure, and any questions on those matters should be directed to the Privy Council Office. The PCO would not comment on whether they knew of Porter’s business dealings, a stunning abdication of public accountability. As for Porter himself, he claimed that he was interviewed about his résumé in 2008 by PCO staff and that “They know what I do.”

During the Quebec anti-corruption investigation, it was discovered that MUHC was on the verge of clinching a medical consulting deal with Kuwait that would see possible infrastructure spending in the kingdom. The letter about the project was signed by Arthur Porter.

Less than a month after Arthur Porter resigned from SIRC, on December 5, 2011, the bow-tied sweet talker stepped down as director of MUHC, four months before his contract was up. MUHC threw two lavish farewell parties for him, and announced that the curved road in front of the hospital would be called Arthur T. Porter Way—a decision that would be revoked on March 20, 2013, with red faces all around. On September 18, 2012, police raided MUHC headquarters. Quebec’s task force on corruption had been probing how the contract for the Montreal mega-hospital deal had been “awarded” to SNC-Lavalin Group Inc. Porter had overseen the
deal for the complex, which he considered one of his greatest legacies. Investigators on Project Lauréat were particularly interested in records related to the awarding of the $1.3-billion hospital contract. They found crucial information in the fourteenth-floor corner office of former MUHC director general, Dr. Porter. Framed photographs of Porter with George W. Bush, Stephen Harper, Dick Cheney, and Sierra Leone’s president had once decorated the suite.