Spy gifts aren’t a conspiracy theory. A coin, a carved eagle, or a lanyard can all carry tracking devices.

The White House delegation to China reportedly kept all received gifts separate rather than bringing them home. Michel Juneau-Katsuya, a former CSIS senior intelligence officer, calls it a good counterintelligence reflex. His preference: examine the gifts rather than discard them, because a captured device is an intelligence opportunity. Russian intelligence once planted a listening device inside a carved wooden eagle gifted to the American ambassador and listened to every conversation in his office.

The technology is the same passive antenna system in every tap-to-pay credit card. A beam of electricity activates the antenna, the antenna charges a chip, and the chip transmits. Michel Juneau-Katsuya says Canadian businesses and government have been naive about this threat for too long, leaving an opening that foreign intelligence services have used to their advantage.

Topics: spy gifts, CSIS intelligence, China counterintelligence, listening devices, espionage technology

GUEST: Michel Juneau-Katsuya

Originally aired on2026-05-20