A Communist for the RCMP

Those of you who follow this blog may have noticed that I have not been posting regularly in recent months. There is a reason for this. I was hard at work finishing a new book called A Communist for the RCMP.

RCMP informant

The book tells the story of Frank Hadesbeck, a long-time civilian informant for the RCMP Security Service, first in Calgary and later in Regina. Hadesbeck infiltrated the Communist Party over a span of thirty-five years, between 1941 and 1976.

But Hadesbeck’s “Watch Out” lists on behalf of the Security Service went well beyond the Communist Party to include almost anyone who exhibited progressive tendencies. They included labour activists, medical doctors, lawyers, university professors and students, journalists, Indigenous and progressive farm leaders, members of the clergy, and anyone involved in the peace and human rights movements.

Defied warnings, kept notes

Defying every warning given to him by his RCMP handlers, Hadesbeck kept notes. They described in detail how he was recruited; how he operated as an agent; the “persons of interest” that he was asked to inquire about; who his handlers were; how he related to them and they to him; and eventually what he thought about the ethics and wisdom of his double life.

Telling his story

After the RCMP cut him loose in 1976 Hadesbeck became obsessed with telling his story. He wanted to strike back at them by making public what had been hidden away. In solitary retirement, he recorded his experiences in many drafts of labouriously handwritten notes. He turned them over to a university professor in Regina in 1987, hoping that they would become a best-selling book.

That never happened, but almost forty years later those notes were given to me. They allow me to describe Hadesbeck’s daily life as a paid informant and interactions with his handlers. Hadesbeck was but one of many human sources deployed by the Security Service in cities and towns across Canada. In describing his experience, I can provide a detailed, on-the-ground portrayal of how the RCMP conducted surveillance in Canada, in this case from the 1940s through the mid-1970s, and into how the force organized itself to undertake those efforts.

World events

Much of what Hadesbeck described is consistent with analysis by academics and journalists about political policing. The narrative has links to some major upheavals of the 20th century, including the rise of Communism in the Soviet Union and its appeal in Canada; the Great Depression; the Spanish Civil War; the Second World War, and the Cold War.

Taking the leap

The Security Service always guarded jealously against the release of any information about its human sources. It is almost unheard of for one of them to take the leap and to go public. This is the story of how Frank Hadesbeck became and remained a communist for the RCMP; a story he wanted to tell but never did.

Old tricks, new guises

Hadesbeck’s life and career are in the past, but the RCMP’s old surveillance tricks continue in new guises. The Communist Party is irrelevant today, but at a time when climate change is wreaking havoc in our country and elsewhere, the RCMP’s earlier obsession with communists has shifted to Indigenous land defenders and their allies in the environmental movement. The RCMP routinely brands them as potential terrorists while sharing information and tactics with petroleum industry “stakeholders” who have doubled down on their extraction plans in the oil sands and elsewhere.

More to come

In future blog posts, I will not provide a lot of detail about what is in the book. You can find that by reading it. But I will tell you how I came upon Frank Hadesbeck’s treasure trove of private notes and other materials, and how I went about researching and writing this unique book.