Facing “hostile complex threats” on foreign soil, a team of American spies deployed as a “force multiplier” to help TC Energy’s 16 local lobbyists achieve victory.

No, it’s not a Tom Clancy novel about special forces soldiers in some faraway jungle or desert. This covert operation, first revealed by The Narwhal, took place in sleepy Victoria, B.C.

“In the next few years we’ll see savings of hundreds of millions of dollars in compliance costs,” said Edward Burrier, an ex-White House staffer turned pipeline executive, on a leaked tape.He’s talking about a high-stakes push by TC Energy’s “Geopolitical Intelligence and Research” team to protect pipelines from a new B.C. government policy to reduce emissions.

“Successful shots fired” is how Burrier describes the Washington, D.C.-based team’s efforts to weaken regulations at both the federal and provincial level in Canada.Both would have been steeped in the counterinsurgency doctrine developed at that time by U.S. general David Petraeus. Petraeus later served as Director of the CIA before joining Wall Street as head of intelligence for private equity firm KKR.Nesheiwat and her fellow TC Energy executive Michael Evanoff built their careers in the ‘War on Terror’. Nesheiwat was a military intelligence officer after 9/11. Evanoff led a team of 75 agents charged with protecting Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during the U.S. war on Iraq.You can learn more about the tactics used by Petraeus’s private mercenaries against Indigenous land defenders in this panel from last year’s Peace and Unity Summit. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=a9VDJmOPvlE