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#1 2007-05-07 11:03:47
- RobertDyck
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- From: Winnipeg, Canada
- Registered: 2002-08-20
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Re: Canadian commemorative quarter led to spy coin warnings
From CBC: Poppy quarter led to spy coin warnings
The surprise explanation behind the U.S. government's sensational but false warnings about mysterious Canadian spy coins is the harmless poppy quarter, the world's first colourized coin.
The odd-looking coins were so unfamiliar to suspicious U.S. army contractors travelling in Canada that they filed confidential espionage accounts about them.
The worried contractors described the coins as "anomalous" and "filled with something manmade that looked like nanotechnology," said once-classified U.S. government reports and e-mails.
The 25-cent piece features the red image of a poppy inlaid over a maple leaf. The quarter is identical to the coins pictured and described as suspicious in the contractors' accounts.
The supposed nanotechnology actually was a conventional protective coating the Royal Canadian Mint applied to prevent the poppy's red colour from rubbing off. The mint produced nearly 30 million such quarters in 2004 commemorating Canada's 117,000 war dead.
...
The confidential accounts led to a sensational warning from the U.S. Defence Security Service, an agency of the Defence Department, that mysterious coins with radio frequency transmitters were found planted on U.S. contractors with classified security clearances on at least three separate occasions between October 2005 and January 2006 as the contractors travelled through Canada.
...
Meanwhile, in Canada, senior intelligence officials expressed annoyance with the U.S. spy-coin warnings as they tried to learn more about the oddball claims."That story about Canadians planting coins in the pockets of defence contractors will not go away," Luc Portelance, now deputy director for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, wrote in a January e-mail to a subordinate.
...
The Defence Security Service never examined the suspicious coins, spokeswoman Cindy McGovern said."We know where we made the mistake," she said.
"The information wasn't properly vetted. While these coins aroused suspicion, there ultimately was nothing there."
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#2 2007-05-07 18:23:40
- Number04
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- From: Calgary Alberta Canada
- Registered: 2002-09-24
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Re: Canadian commemorative quarter led to spy coin warnings
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