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.
It sounds like Zivo thinks he's an MC and wanted to play James Bond. From that explanation, it sounds like he got a polite brush off from CSIS, but the Ukrainian intelligence agency gave him some rope.
I'm not a fan of the National Post, but I'm not sure they're to blame if one of their content creators goes off their chain.
Zivo probably should be limited to writing op-eds after this.