A publisher has cited legal considerations in halting Canadian shipments of a book that alleges a former Conservative MP from Calgary was a paid informant for the Russian intelligence service.

It is the latest controversy to flare up over Comrade J, American journalist Pete Earley's account of espionage in the early years of the post-Cold War era.

The volume is based on the recollections of Sergei Tretyakov, who spied for Moscow in Ottawa and subsequently at the United Nations before defecting to the United States with his family in 2000.

The book alleges Alex Kindy provided information that wound up in numerous spy cables in return for thousands of dollars in cash. It says Kindy, codenamed Grey, was recruited in 1992 by Vitali Domoratski, a vice-consul actually working in counter-intelligence for the Russians from their embassy in Ottawa.

Kindy, 78, did not return Earley's telephone calls or respond after being sent copies of Tretyakov's account. There was no answer Wednesday at his Calgary home.

Lynn Kyba, Kindy's assistant from 1984 to 1993, said there was no way the MP would have spied for the Russians.

"He was a dedicated Canadian," she said in an interview. "It just doesn't fit.

"Of all the things you'd say about him, that's not one."

Added David Kilgour, once a fellow Alberta Conservative MP: "I'd be very surprised if such an allegation were true."

The book has been greeted with skepticism in other quarters. The International Atomic Energy Agency dismissed Tretyakov's allegations that he enlisted the co-operation of a Canadian nuclear expert working with the outfit in Vienna.

Penguin temporarily suspends Canadian shipments

In a statement Tuesday, legal counsel for publisher Penguin Group's U.S. division said the company had temporarily suspended shipments to Canada "to allow time to evaluate the legal ramifications, under Canadian law, of speculations about the book that have arisen in the Canadian market."

This does not apply to the many copies already available in Canadian stores.

Comrade J says U.S. intelligence officials told Earley that Tretyakov, who served in Ottawa from 1990 to 1995, recruited five trusted contacts in the Canadian capital who provided him with classified military and political information. The material included details of U.S. and Canadian efforts to track Soviet submarines in the Arctic.

But the biggest Canadian fish was allegedly reeled in by Domoratski, one of Tretyakov's officers at the Ottawa embassy.

The Ukrainian-born Domoratski is said to have met Kindy, whose parents hailed from Ukraine, at a reception. The two soon became friends.

Earley, a former Washington Post reporter, acknowledges that Kindy — a strident anti-Communist — was an unlikely mark for the SVR, the post-Cold War successor to the Soviet Union's ruthless KGB.

However, Domoratski reportedly thought Kindy was vulnerable because he needed cash for his re-election campaign.

Kyba, who ran Kindy's 1993 campaign, disputes the notion he was hard up for money. "He did not have any problems at all. None at all."

In an e-mail message, Kilgour said Wednesday that Kindy, knowing how the Ukrainian people suffered under Stalin's rule, would be unlikely to put Russia's interests ahead of those of Ukraine.

Kindy, a physician and father of three children, was first elected to the House of Commons in 1984, winning the Calgary East riding for the Progressive Conservatives.

He took the Calgary Northeast riding in 1988 but was booted from the Tory caucus in April 1990, along with Kilgour, after they voted against their own government's introduction of the widely hated GST.

Tretyakov says Kindy accepted Russian cash in a series of meetings in 1992 and 1993.

The book quotes Tretyakov as saying Moscow was interested in getting Kindy to discuss "various intrigues inside the Canadian Parliament and government. This was intimate information about his colleagues and also details about international manoeuvres that were going on."

When Domoratski returned to Moscow, his replacement in Ottawa was supposed to become Kindy's new handler, the book says. But the MP refused to speak to him.

CSIS, RCMP decline comment on allegations

Manon Berube, a Canadian Security Intelligence Service spokeswoman, said CSIS was aware of the book, but declined comment on the allegations. "We don't discuss specific cases or situations."

An RCMP spokeswoman was unfamiliar with the book and had no immediate comment.

Kindy is remembered as a blustery and oft-quoted maverick on Parliament Hill and an outspoken foe of Communism. He was also critical of government efforts to prosecute Eastern Europeans for alleged Nazi war crimes.

Kindy and another Tory MP, Andrew Witer, tried in 1987 to stall passage of a bill to create a permanent war crimes investigative body in Canada. They expressed concern at the time that politically motivated witch hunts would masquerade as the legitimate pursuit of international justice.

Kindy ran for re-election as an Independent candidate in the 1993 election but lost to the Reform Party's Art Hanger.

Book alleges spies also recruited from Ottawa organization

Earley also alleges that three employees of the now defunct Ottawa-based Canadian Centre for Arms Control and Disarmament were recruited by Tretyakov in 1990 to spy for the KGB.

The author says these unidentified agents, code-named Arthur, Semion and Lazar, provided political information and stolen classified military documents. None has ever been charged, he says.

The centre was established in 1983 to spur Canadian debate about international security issues and promote arms control.

John Lamb, now assistant deputy minister of environment in the government of Nunavut, founded the centre and was its executive director in 1990.

"It's rubbish," he said of the book's claims when reached at his home. "The allegations that the centre or any of its staff were engaged in espionage in any sense at all is preposterous and wrong.

"From what I've heard, this book should be placed in the fiction or fantasy section of book stores. Because the allegations are simply ridiculous."

The idea that he or his staff passed on classified information is especially ludicrous, Lamb said. "The fact is that the arms control centre, in its entire 10 years, didn't have access to classified information of any kind."

Lamb stressed that the centre was funded by and reported to the federal government along with its board. "It had a staff made up of respected academic researchers, and it was nationally and internationally respected for over 10 years."

Lamb declined further comment until he has had a chance to read the entire book. He left the centre in 1993, and it folded by the mid-1990s.

Douglas Ross, professor of political science at Simon Fraser University in B.C., was a member of the centre's founding board of directors. In 1990, he was on its advisory council.

The centre was by that time a "tiny" cash-strapped collection of staff trying to keep it afloat as government funds for such think-tanks dried up under the Mulroney Conservatives, Ross said in an interview.

He recalled spending a heady week in Moscow and Leningrad in 1991 with a Canadian delegation that included former politicians and centre staff. It was a fact-finding mission of meetings with Russian, U.S. and Canadian officials, he said.

"The whole business of being at the centre was that you talked to everybody. And you'd tell them what you think. And if you get information from the U.S. government, from Russian sources, from British sources that's useful … in terms of trying to move the Canadian government in more progressive directions on arms control, and away from nuclear arms buildup, you'll pass it along. Does that make you an agent of the Russians?"

"Show us some proof," he said of the book's allegations of espionage.