How Chrystia Freeland tricked the KGB with a Playgirl magazine

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OTTAWA — Chrystia Freeland made headlines this week for her dramatic departure from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s cabinet, which precipitated the publication of an unauthorized biography called “Chrystia: From Peace River to Parliament Hill.”

Author Catherine Tsalikis interviewed over 130 people for this book, including Freeland’s family, friends and former colleagues, delving into her Ukrainian family’s complicated history, her rapid ascension as an international journalist with all its trials and tribulations but also her entrance into the world of politics and trade negotiations.

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Tsalikis paints a portrait of a witty woman who has been able to disarm the richest and most powerful men on the planet to get scoops, but also a fiercely loyal deputy news editor who stood by her bosses even as their popularity was dwindling — foreshadowing her future as Trudeau’s deputy prime minister.

Below are a few revelations from the new book, which was originally scheduled for a February release, but is now available starting Dec. 20.

She bypassed KGB searches thanks to Playgirl magazines

It is no secret that Freeland was under surveillance and even intimidated by the KGB — the Soviet Union’s secret police — while in Ukraine as an exchange student from Harvard University in the late 1980s. The KGB even tagged her with the code name “Frida.”

What is lesser known is how exactly the young woman eventually managed to bypass some of the KGB’s extensive searches when transiting through Moscow during her travels.

Former Harvard classmate Alison Franklin remembered Freeland showing her pro-democracy material she had brought back with her from Ukraine via Moscow and said she was dying to know how she had evaded detection with all her clandestine items.

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“Chrystia’s secret? Playgirl, and its photos of nude men,” reads the book.

“Recognizing that the Soviet border guards had a lot in common with the rural ‘farm guys’ Chrystia had gone to school with in Alberta, she’d lined her bags with copies of the salacious magazine, guessing correctly that the guards would be too embarrassed or disgusted to delve any deeper into her belongings,” it adds.

After her undergraduate studies, Freeland would go on to return to Ukraine, where she cut her teeth as a young reporter for the Financial Times.

She used brains and short skirts to get Russian oligarchs talking

At 26, Freeland became the youngest ever journalist to run the Financial Times’ operation in Moscow, Russia.

The rest of the press corps, usually older men, initially saw her as talented but somewhat inexperienced. But former Economist correspondent Edward Lucas said Freeland was “half their age, half their height, and just scooping them again and again and again.”

Freeland would eventually become known as the only Western journalist who had the direct phone numbers of some of Russia’s most powerful men, the oligarchs.

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One of her secrets was to turn on her feminine charm to disarm her interviewees. “She was a wonderful interviewer. She would quite famously say that she put on her shortest skirt when she interviewed them,” said former FT Moscow bureau chief John Lloyd.

But she would come to those interviews prepared. Friends who knew her at the time described how she “would prepare for her meetings with the oligarchs, mining her contacts and social circle for details to back up her suspicions and readying different angles to take depending on which way the conversation went.”

Her relationship with the oligarchs was not an easy one, however, and she faced “a barrage of sexual innuendo.” American journalist Andrew Meier remembers Freeland brushing off unfounded suggestions over lunch from Russian deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov that “she must be getting her information in untoward ways.”

Loyal ‘sometimes to the point of infuriation’ as deputy news editor

Freeland would go on to serve as deputy editor of The Globe and Mail in Toronto, before returning to the Financial Times as deputy editor in London, UK.

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In both roles, despite mounting criticism against her bosses, she showed herself to be “a faithful and devoted deputy,” reads the book. That description is reminiscent of the loyalty she showed in her recent role as deputy prime minister and finance minister to Justin Trudeau. She resigned this week after she was told she would be shuffled out of her role.

The Financial Times’ John Lloyd said she was “extremely loyal” under Andrew Gowers, who would go on to resign in 2005 citing “strategic differences.” Lionel Barber, who was then the FT’s managing editor in New York, gave Freeland credit for sticking by Gowers despite the criticism, noting that she was loyal “sometimes to the point of infuriation.”

Barber would go on to replace Gowers as editor in London, and shuffled Freeland to his old job in New York. Her friends and allies said the move was seen as a demotion, but Lloyd said Freeland was seen as a threat to Barber and he wanted her out.

“He didn’t want her around. He certainly didn’t want her as deputy editor, because he knew pretty well that her activity, her intelligence, her sheer talent, and her ambition would be a threat to him,” said Lloyd.

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In 2009, after four years as the New York editor, Barber felt it was time to shuffle his team, so he proposed a new role for Freeland as Washington editor which she felt was a demotion. She went on to work for Thomson Reuters before entering politics.

Fighting back tears was deliberate strategy after collapse of CETA talks

Fast-forward a few years, and Chrystia Freeland was elected Liberal MP in Toronto before she was named minister of international trade in Trudeau’s first cabinet.

Her first challenge would be to convince all European member countries to sign onto the Canada-EU trade deal, known as CETA, but a tiny francophone state in Belgium called Wallonia voted to reject the deal — thus leaving the entire agreement up in the air.

Freeland and Steve Verheul, Canada’s chief trade negotiator, arrived in Belgium to try to solve the impasse but with no success. Verheul suggested that they take a break and advised it was time to step away from the negotiating table in a dramatic fashion.

“Chrystia knew that pulling out of the negotiations, especially as a fairly new minister, would draw a lot of attention and would be disruptive to the entire negotiation process,” reads the book.

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When was time to face the press, Freeland seemed to fight back tears. She told the press that she would be heading home and expressed disappointment that the EU was unable to come to an agreement with “a country as nice and patient as Canada.” “The only good thing that I can say is that tomorrow morning I will be home with my three children.”

Canadian officials, including Trudeau himself, were taken by surprise by the strategy. In the end, it worked, and Wallonia ended up approving the deal. In reflecting on the turn of events, Verheul said that Freeland “was always prepared to make bold moves.”

She was part of the duo that “got sh-t done” during the pandemic

When the COVID-19 pandemic started, Freeland was already known as the “minister of everything.” She would certainly get things moving after Canada realized it was sorely lacking personal protective equipment (PPE) to keep front-line workers safe.

“During COVID, Anita (Anand, minister of procurement) and Chrystia were the duo that got sh-t done,” said Maryam Monsef, who served as minister of women and gender equality at the time.

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Dominic Barton, then Canada’s ambassador to China and a former global managing director of McKinsey & Company, said Freeland called him up in early March requesting that he build up a supply chain to get live-saving PPE to Canada in a matter of days.

“She fired me up—she said, ‘This is going to be the biggest management challenge you’ve ever dealt with, anything you did at McKinsey is chicken shit compared to this.’”

She said one of the items Canada desperate needed was reagent, a substance used in COVID-19 testing kits. “I said, ‘Well, I don’t even know what reagent is.’ And she goes, ‘Dom, you get it here by Friday, or people will die, you understand me?’ And then she hung up the phone.” She would never call him “ambassador” — just “Dom.”

A week after they spoke, an Air Canada flight carrying reagent landed in Canada.

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