I don’t know about you but I find most spy novels (especially titles by John Le Carre) or movies based on those novels are too opaque and difficult to follow in their layer upon layer of intrigue and betrayal.
My preferred option is to read non-fiction accounts about spying by journalists who intuitively understand how to tell a good story.
The Ottawa based Dennis Gruending accomplishes this and more in his latest book, A Communist for the RCMP: The Uncovered Story of a Social Movement Informant.
Formerly, a federal NDP MP from Saskatchewan and a working journalist, the author uses the story of one man to venture into the little understood area of external civilian sources working as secret informants on behalf of the RCMP inside targeted groups or organizations — perceived as subversive to the interests of the Canadian state and the business class. At the top of the list during much of the last century was the Canadian Communist Party, the political left in general and unions. (The activities of the far right generated less interest).
Informants represented an important tool for the security and intelligence folks inside the RCMP to conduct investigations. But they were not of a criminal legal nature leading to a charges and possible conviction in court. Instead, what the informant discovered was written up in a report, placed inside a secret file on an individual and shared with those responsible for national security policy within the federal government. Such information was used to weed out certain employees including closeted gay people working inside the federal civil service.
While the RCMP had officers working undercover to undermine gangsters and so-called subversives, it did not have enough personnel on the ground to watch and monitor the entire political left and various social justice movements (unions, Indigenous activists, environmentalists, anti-poverty groups, feminists, etc.) The force was less interested in the far right and domestic fascists.
One estimate by a royal commission in the late 1970s and early 1980s is that between 1919 and 1979 the RCMP opened up files on more than 800,000 individuals and organizations in Canada. “More consistent with a police state than a mature democracy,” writes historian Gregory Kealey in the preface of this book.
At the height of the Cold War, there was a secret federal government plan, starting in the late 1940s and going by the name of PROFUNC, to detain without warrant known communists and other suspected people, in case of war with the Soviet Union or China. Fortunately, it was never activated.
Dennis Gruending is fortunate to have discovered a treasure trove of personal papers from one informant, Frank Hadesbeck, who spent 35 years from the 1940s to the 1960s pretending he was a loyal member of the Canadian Communist Party in Alberta and Saskatchewan. The author also backed up his research with interviews and historical records obtained via access to information requests. It should be stressed that Hadesbeck, as a civilian source, was not a uniformed officer in the RCMP, nor did he require formal training.
In exchange for money, Hadesbeck participated in party activities and provided reports on members and potential supporters who were not members outside a CP core base to the RCMP.
Whatever you might think about the Soviet Union, the Communist Party in Canada was a very effective and worthwhile organization in the early and mid-20th century in organizing unions and the unemployed — and this fact frightened and disturbed both employers and politicians.
Hadesbeck was instructed by the RCMP as a source not to record anything on paper about his surveillance work.
But here the informant defied his RCMP handlers and secretly preserved his notes with the intention eventually of writing a book about his clandestine activities which he found rather exciting. At the end of his life though Hadesbeck was disillusioned and felt abandoned by his handlers. He had no pension from an organization for whom had been a loyal soldier.
Hadesbeck was married but we don’t have a sense that his wife Bernadette had a full understanding about his informant work. He passed away alone in 2006 at the age of 100 without ever fulfilling his writerly dream.
Hadesbeck was a Hungarian German immigrant of modest origins who worked in both Canada and the US on farms and ranches. He also had a brief stint in in 1926 with the US military which ended in a dishonourable discharge.
A little over ten years later Hadesback joined other Canadian and American volunteers in Spain fighting with the Republican side to preserve its democratic government. This turned out to be a losing war against a much better organized German Nazi backed coup under the command of General Franciso Franco.
Hadesbeck explained later years later in an interview about his time in Spain that he went overseas to improve his lot in life after drifting from job to job or going on relief. He was not motivated either by concerns or fears about the rise of fascism in Europe prior to the start of World War II or sympathy for the Soviet Union which backed the Republican side. We learn quite a bit in Gruending’s book about the battles Hadesbeck endured since he recorded his impressions in a diary.
“More consistent with a police state than a mature democracy.”
–Gregory Kealey
One can assume that the RCMP viewed Hadesbeck as an ideal recruit since as Gruending notes the overwhelming majority of Spanish civil war veterans returning to Canada resisted any efforts by the Mounties to recruit them to spy on the CP.
Hadesbeck became an informant for the RCMP purely for the money so he could alleviate his poverty.
The man was destitute and desperately looking for another farm or ranch job when he was recruited 1941 by Herbert Darling, the commanding officer of the RCMP division in Lethbridge.
Incidentally, Darling was architect of a centralized registry of subversion related files in the RCMP and had an expertise in finger printing which was just emerging.
With the help of the RCMP and the company management of Burns and Co., a meat packing operation in Calgary, Hadesbeck took a job where he assisted what turned out to be a failing campaign to form a company union.
This is a sample of how an informant s job involved at times something more than just notetaking. It could also mean direct action to serve the interests of a conservative employer or group.
In the case of Saskatchewan in the early 1960s, Hadesceck and the RCMP were supporting those reactionary interests in the province opposed to the NDP government’s plans for a public medicare system such as the chamber of commerce and the Free Citizens Association.
In his report to the Mounties Hadescbeck used hearsay and rumour to speculate about alleged Communist influences inside the NDP and among its labour supporters on this issue.
This is what he wrote in an internal report to the RCMP about Walter Smishek, the executive director of the Saskatchewan Federation of Labour. In 1961 the unionist was appointed to a committee examining a proposal for public medicare by the NDP government led by Tommy Douglas.
“A good contributor and fellow traveler. Also, that (Smishek) is left of centre politically and perhaps could be recruited to the Communist Party if he isn’t already a member at large.”
What is remarkable is that the RCMP and its informant still took the CP seriously which by the 1960s was a vastly insignificant political force in Canada.
Hadesbeck was a secretive man who managed to blend into the woodwork of his environment. He did get expelled from the CP in Calgary, possibly for being an RCMP informant, but after moving to Regina he returned to the party as a member and continued to take notes about its internal workings.
What did his wife Bernadette know of her husband’s double life? It’s not clear from the notes left behind. There was tension between the two over his party membership.
Hadesbeck married Bernadette Blayon a woman of French and Metis origin, in 1941 which was the year he was also recruited to be an informant in the CP. The RCMP discouraged its agents from marrying but he did it anyway. At the same time, the Communist Party was officially atheist – but Hadesbeck managed to keep secret from his comrades the fact that his wedding ceremony was held in a Catholic church in Calgary. It was a second marriage for Bernadette and his first. She had an active social life and was close to her own family. He tried to make friendships with his RCMP handlers. The couple stayed together until her death in 1970. They had no children.
Missing from A Communist for the RCMP is the larger context of how the RCMP maintained and built its network of civilian informants. That’s not the fault of the author. Historical records, especially on national security are very hard to obtain, unless they are severely redacted, due to very restrictive access to information provisions. Today, historians cannot, for instance, fully examine the entire file that the RCMP maintained on Tommy Douglas.
Today, in a post Cold War period the targets for the RCMP and other federal security and intelligence operations like CSIS (formed in 1984) are more likely to be environmentalists, Indigenous rights campaigners and maybe perhaps (relying on historical precedent) the current pro-Palestinian movement.
Judging from press reports about Mountie clashes with protests in BC over logging and pipeline construction it appears that the RCMP still has a problem distinguishing between legitimate dissent and journalism versus real criminal activity.
Dennis Gruending is writing about the past and yet his book remains relevant for what is happening today.