TORONTO -- The Canadian government conceded Wednesday that its military specialists tried to buy a top-secret Russian torpedo, but denied that their work was connected to a Moscow spy scandal.
A report in Wednesday's Washington Post suggested the attempt might have inadvertently triggered the arrest of Edmond Pope, a retired U.S. Navy captain who had been sentenced to life imprisonment in Russia for espionage.
Cmdr. Kevin Carle, a spokesman for the Department of National Defence, said the Canadian effort was "a legal and authorized transaction to acquire that torpedo" and insisted there was no connection to Pope.
The government did confirm that it has been trying to acquire a handful of the rocket-powered torpedoes, which can travel underwater at speeds as high as 500 kilometres an hour and could revolutionize naval warfare.
Defence officials would not say why Canada -- which will have a submarine fleet of only four ships after it finishes taking delivery later this year of four used subs purchased from Britain -- would need such state-of-the art torpedoes.
"It's the Canadian Forces who would be acquiring these torpedoes," said Alastair Mullin, a spokesman for Defence Minister Art Eggleton. "There would be a variety of functions."
Pope, 54, was released from prison on Dec. 14 on humanitarian grounds and expelled from Russia after spending eight months in jail charged with stealing state secrets.
The former U.S. Navy intelligence officer has admitted to buying designs and technical details involving the Shkval (Squall) torpedo system, but he insisted he had acted legally and his company, CERF Technologies International of State College, Pa., was interested only in the torpedo's civilian applications.
The Shkval torpedo is a revolutionary new weapon that has special hydrodynamic properties that enable it to travel twice as fast as any similar weapon made by countries in the West.
Western military experts suspect last August's tragic sinking of the Russian nuclear-powered submarine Kursk may have involved a top-secret test of an "improved" Shkval torpedo.
Just weeks before the Kursk mysteriously exploded and sank, killing 100 seamen on board, a Canadian bid to buy five Shkval torpedoes and their blueprints for between $6 million and $10 million suddenly collapsed.
According to Wednesday's Washington Post article, U.S. intelligence sources say the Canadian government, acting though unidentified European middlemen, had been spearheading an international deal to purchase the top-secret torpedoes from a defence plant in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan.
The deal was apparently on the verge of going through when it collapsed.
Within a matter of days of the collapsed deal, Pope was arrested in a Moscow hotel room on suspicion of espionage.
According to the U.S. intelligence sources quoted in the Washington Post, Pope "fell afoul of a (Canadian) intelligence operation in which he was not involved."
