Secret files chill foes of government

State dossiers list peaceful critics as security threats

Jim Bronskill and David Pugliese

The credentials on Joan Russow's resume are rather impressive.

An accomplished academic and environmentalist, she served as national leader of the Green Party of Canada.

The Victoria woman had also earned a reputation as a gadfly who routinely shamed the government over its unfulfilled commitments.

But Ms. Russow, 62, was dumbfounded when authorities tagged her with a most unflattering designation: threat to national security.

Her name and photo turned up on a threat assessment list prepared by police and intelligence officials for the 1997 gathering of APEC leaders at the University of British Columbia.

"All these questions start to come up, why would I be placed on the list?" she asks.

Mr. Russow is hardly alone. Her name was among more than 1,000 -- including those of many peaceful activists -- entered in security files for the Asia-Pacific summit.

The practice raises serious concerns about the extent to which authorities are monitoring opponents of government policies, as well as the tactics that might be employed at future summits, including the meeting of G-8 leaders next year in Alberta.

Ms. Russow had been a vocal critic of the federal position on numerous issues, expressing concerns about uranium mining, the proposed Multilateral Agreement on Investment and genetically engineered foods.

Just weeks before the Vancouver summit, she gave a presentation arguing that initiatives to be discussed at APEC would undermine international conventions on the environment.

However, Ms. Russow went to the summit not as an activist, but as a reporter for the Oak Bay News, a Victoria-area community paper. Security staff questioned whether the small newspaper was bona fide and pulled her press pass.

But the secret files on Ms. Russow suggest there may be more to the story.

She wouldn't have even known the threat list existed if not for the tabling of thousands of pages of classified material at the public inquiry into RCMP actions at APEC, which focused on the arrest and pepper spraying of students on the UBC campus.

The threat assessment of Ms. Russow, prepared prior to the summit, describes her as a "Media Person" and "UBC protest sympathizer." A second document drafted by threat assessment officials during the summit characterizes Ms. Russow and another media member as "overly sympathetic" to APEC protesters. "Both subjects have had their accreditation seized."

Ms. Russow later complained, without success, about the revocation of her pass.

Officials with the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP concluded the RCMP did nothing wrong. But despite exhaustive inquiries, a frustrated Ms. Russow has yet to find out how and why she was even placed on a threat list.

The APEC summit Threat Assessment Group, known as TAG, included members of the RCMP, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, the Vancouver police, the Canadian Forces, Canada Customs and the Immigration Department.

The TAG files were compiled on a specially configured Microsoft Access database that "proved very successful in capturing and analyzing intelligence," says a police report on the operation, made public at the APEC inquiry.

Much of the information came from "existing CSIS and RCMP networks" as well as Vancouver police members. Other data were funnelled to TAG by RCMP working the UBC campus, including undercover officers and units assigned to crowds.

By the end of the summit, the TAG database had swelled to almost 1,200 people and groups, including many activists and protesters. Ms. Russow's photo appeared in a report alongside the pictures and dates of birth of several other people. One is described as a "lesbian activist/anarchist" considered "very masculine."

Several are simply labelled "Activist" -- making Ms. Russow wonder how they wound up in secret police files. "Why are citizens who engage in genuine dissent being placed on a threat assessment list?"

The practice of collecting and cataloguing photographs of demonstrators is worrisome, says Canadian historian Steve Hewitt, author of Spying 101: The Mounties' Secret Activities at Canadian Universities, 1917-1997, to be published next year.

"There's tremendous potential for abuse. One would suspect that they're compiling a database. And clearly, there's probably sharing going on between countries," said Mr. Hewitt, currently a visiting scholar at Purdue University in Indiana.

"Your picture is taken and it's held in a computer, and when it might come up again, who knows?"

The RCMP, CSIS and other Canadian agencies have long shared information with U.S. officials, a cross-border relationship that has grown closer to deal with smugglers, terrorists and, most recently, protesters who come under suspicion.

Canada Customs and Revenue Agency staff have access to a number of automated databases and intelligence reports that help screen people trying to enter the country.

Several protesters who were headed to the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City last April were either denied entry to Canada or subjected to lengthy delays, luggage searches and extensive questioning -- and the rationale was not always clear.

At a recent Commons committee meeting, New Democrat MP Bill Blaikie confronted RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli and Ward Elcock, the director of CSIS, about scrutiny of activists.

An incredulous Mr. Blaikie recounted the case of a U.S. scientist who was questioned by Customs officials for about an hour last spring upon coming to Canada to speak at a conference about his opposition to genetically modified food.

"Are people being trailed, watched, interviewed and harassed at borders because of their political views?" Mr. Blaikie asked, noting the "chilling effect" of such attention.

The RCMP Security Service, the forerunner of CSIS, amassed secret files on thousands of groups and individuals considered a threat to the established order, devoting its energies through much of the 20th century to the hunt for Communist agents and sympathizers.

The vast list of targets left few stones unturned, providing the Mounties with intelligence on subjects as wide-ranging and diverse as labour unions, Quebec separatists, the satirical jesters of the Rhinoceros Party, American civil rights activist Martin Luther King, the Canadian Council of Churches, high school students, women's groups, homosexuals, the black community in Nova Scotia, white supremacists and foreign-aid organizations.

CSIS inherited about 750,000 files from the RCMP upon taking over many intelligence duties from the Mounties in 1984.

As the end of the Cold War loomed in the late 1980s, the intelligence service wound down its counter-subversion branch, turning its focus to terrorism.

However, the emergence of a violent presence at anti-globalization protests has spurred CSIS to once again scrutinize mass protest movements, working closely with the RCMP and other police.

One of the threat assessment documents on Ms. Russow lists not only her date of birth, but hair and eye colour and weight -- or rather what she weighed in the 1960s, perhaps a clue as to how long officials have kept a file on her.

In 1963, a young Ms. Russow taught English to a Czechoslovakian military attache in Ottawa. She was asked by RCMP to report to them about activities at the Czech embassy, but refused. She surmises that may have prompted the Mounties to open a file on her -- a dossier that could have formed the basis of the APEC threat citation more than 30 years later.

Ms. Russow is disturbed that she learned of the official interest in her activities only by chance. And she worries about the untold ramifications such secret files might have.

"How many people have had their names put on the list and never know?"

Special Report: Criminalization of Dissent