On a dark, snowy night in the fall of 1998, an enormous Russian cargo plane, larger than our own C-130 Hercules, flew into Canada over the North Pole and landed at the airport in Churchill, on the western shore of Hudson Bay. The pilot switched off his landing lights as soon as he landed, presumably to avoid detection from a satellite. In the morning, an unmarked Bell 206 helicopter arrived from the south. The Russian crew unloaded several large shipping containers from their cargo holds and loaded them onto the helicopter. The helicopter took off for the south and the Russian plane immediately took off and left Churchill. Canadian intelligence tracked the unmarked cargo plane until it landed in an airport in an area in Russia known to be controlled by Russian organized crime. The only security at the Churchill airport was an unarmed night shift watchman. The were no Canadian police or military units that could have gotten to Churchill in anything less than a matter of hours.

The following year, a Chinese research ship appeared to be en route to the North Pole, reportedly to study climate change. As the ship rounded the coast of Alaska, it became trapped in ice floes. With the help of both Canadian and U.S. ice-observing satellite networks, the captain of the Chinese ship was guided out of the ice floes into open water. But instead of heading towards the North Pole, the Chinese ship headed into an Intuit Indian village on the coast of the Canadian Northwest Territories. Before it was able to depart, a makeshift group of Canadian Mounties and local Intuit policemen boarded the ship and inspected it. They found a cache of weapons and ammunition, several opened but empty shipping containers, and at least one unaccounted for passport. The ship captain explained that they had stopped to meet with a Chinese tour guide who was supposed to be in the area. No one in the village had ever seen or heard of a Chinese tour guide or any tourism activity, particularly in the dead of winter. While suspicions were elevated, no laws had been broken, so the ship was permitted to depart. Interestingly, the coastal Intuit village was only a hundred miles or so from three of the richest and most productive diamond mines in the world in the Slave geologic province. Normally, those mines are only accessible during the winter months using ice roads and ice road truckers to provide supplies and bring out diamonds. Other than the terrain and weather, there is no security for the mines and none available within several hundred miles. There have been concerns that smugglers or Russian organized crime had an interest in the mines.
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This was ten years ago. Has much changed today? Reports are that conditions are essentially the same. And we're having a tough time getting a fence built to protect us from hordes of invading Mexicans!

Methinks we have no idea the seriousness of security risks we face.