CIA Spies In Canada

The Central Intelligence Agency spied on Canadians critical of the Vietnam War during the late 1960s and '70s in an operation code-named "MH Chaos," CBC News has learned. The declassified CIA documents did not show whether the Canadian government was aware the CIA was spying on Canadian campuses.

Well duh. Of course they were. As it was reported in the Ubyssey in 1967;

The Canadian Union of Students is among 25 organizations
identified as receiving contributions from foundations connected
with the U .S . Central Intelligence Agency.

Since the RCMP, and now CSIS ,to this day have a joint information sharing agreement with U.S. intelligence and police forces.. And the RCMP was doing the same thing.

Spying 101: The RCMP’s Secret Activities at Canadian Universities, 1917-1997. By Steve Hewitt. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. 295 pages.

If you were expecting a book about a course in basic espionage, look elsewhere. Spying 101 is predominantly a study of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s involvement on Canadian university campuses for eight decades monitoring radicals and subversive activities inspired by communists and Quebec separatists. Historian Steve Hewitt sees this period less as one of “monitoring,” than as one of infiltration, subversion, and spying. But, however one characterizes it, when the radical targets and their supporters found out that the government was watching and listening, they were furious and still are. Hewitt admits there was indeed plotting against the State, but suggests that it was, for the most part, nothing serious. He contends that the RCMP, with the concurrence of its political masters, intentionally exaggerated the threats to secure an inflated budget and arouse public antipathy.

The relationship between the CIA and the RCMP began back in WWII with its forerunner the SOE.

In the 1960's as the cold war raged, the CIA began to interfere in Canada's internal politics. Rumour has it that the CIA was only too happy to help defeat the Diefenbaker government.

CIA Fingerprints in Canada

  In 1962, the U.S. Ambassador to Canada, Livingston Merchant, and his Second
Secretary Charles Kisselyak, fuelled a plot among the Canadian Air Forces,
Canadian journalists and others to dispose of Prime Minister Diefenbaker.
Kennedy hated Dief largely for his anti-nuclear stance.  Merchant and
other U.S. embassy officers with espionage backgrounds, met at
Kisselyak's home in Ottawa to feed journalists with spaghetti, beer and
anti-Diefenbaker/pronuclear propaganda.

Among the many participants in these off-the-record briefings was Charles Lynch
of Southam News. Diefenbaker later denounced these reporters as "traitors" and
"foreign  agents."  He lashed out against Lynch on a TV program saying,
"You were given briefings as to how the Canadian government could be
attacked on the  subject of nuclear weapons and the failure of the
Canadian government to do that which the U.S. dictated."

The Liberals used information provided by the RCMP to bring down the Diefenbaker government.

The Munsinger Affair was Canada's first national political sex scandal. It focused on Gerda Munsinger, an East German prostitute and Soviet spy living in Ottawa who had slept with a number of cabinet ministers in John Diefenbaker's government.

Most noted amongst these was the Associate Minister of National Defence, Pierre Sévigny, who had seen her since 1958 and had even signed Munsinger's application for Canadian citizenship. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) discovered her background, however, and informed Justice Minister E. Davie Fulton of her activities. She was deported to East Germany in 1961. The matter was dealt with behind closed doors and Sévigny resigned in 1963.

Traditionally in Canada, the personal lives of politicians are not discussed in parliament or in the media, but in 1966 the Liberal government was under attack for an unrelated security breach. On March 4, an angry Justice Minister Lucien Cardin rebutted the Tories by bringing up the Munsinger Affair in the House of Commons. The story dominated the media for weeks and was followed with rapt attention across the country. It became a massive distraction and all but shut down all other parliamentary activity for some weeks.

And thus the long political relationship with the RCMP as 'their' secret police began.

Conventional wisdom holds that police forces in democratic societies face a dilemma whenever the use of unlawful methods appears warranted to enforce the law. This dilemma is of greatest concern in consensus theories. In conflict theories, an "ideological dilemma" emerges: police must maintain legitimacy by appearing to uphold the law equally for all, while acting preferentially to serve the powerful. A small sample of secret RCMP Security Service communications is examined as: (a) an indication of awareness of the ideological dilemma; (b) evidence of "editing processes" to produce "bureaucratic propaganda"; (c) examples of "official deviance." The ability of the RCMP to resist labelling for official deviance, and maintain legitimacy, is considered in terms of organizational advantages not common in similar security services.

But when one deals with an autonomous paramilitary organization like the RCMP one has to be careful as they have their own political agenda, which may not be the same as their Masters.

Plummer a secret Agent man

Set almost entirely in an interrogation suite in a Montreal hotel in 1964, Agent of Influence stars Plummer, 72, as John Watkins, the former Canadian ambassador to Moscow who died in 1964 in RCMP custody.

A close friend of former prime minister Lester B. Pearson, Watkins was suspected of being a communist spy by the CIA.

Days after the interrogation, he was found dead.

"The reality of the story is, did Watkins die in police custody? Yes. Did the RCMP cover it up? Yes," says Ian Adams, who authored the novel upon which the movie is based and co-wrote the screenplay.

"Has there been any evidence produced of Watkins' guilt? No."

'BLOODLESS COUP'

Instead, what Adams uncovered was evidence of an attempted "bloodless coup" by the CIA to depose Pearson in part by accusing the former ambassador of spying.

The Americans theorized the KGB had blackmailed Watkins over his homosexuality.

But Adams believes it was the RCMP buckling under the pressure of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA head of counter espionage, that doomed Watkins, along with his homosexuality -- which was illegal in Canada until 1968.
Two decades after Watkins' death, and only after an inquest and autopsy, did the RCMP admit the diplomat had never succumbed to Soviet blackmail, says Adams.

"There is not one shred of evidence he was guilty."

The author sees Agent of Influence as a cautionary tale following the events of Sept. 11.

"(Intelligence agencies) are now operating with enormous freedom which they have historically abused."

The CIA also attempted to destabilize the NDP Government in B.C. under David Barrett after its success in doing the same in Chile.

At the same time the CIA was using Cuban Mafia connections in Canada to attack the Cuban Embassy in Ottawa, a series of bombings. Which conveniently never resulted in any arrests by the RCMP. In a bombing in Cuba a Canadian was killed. The bombing was orchestrated by Luis Posada Carriles, who is wanted by Venezuela as a terrorist and is being protected by the U.S. government.

As we mentioned earlier, Canada was not spared from the decades-long campaign of violence against Fidel Castro's Cuba.

In the 1960s and 70s anti-Castro groups targeted the Cuban Embassy in Ottawa and the Cuban Trade Commission office in Montreal. Sergio Perez Castillo, a Cuban security guard was killed in the second attack.

And years later -- on September 4th, 1997 -- Fabio Di Celmo, a Montreal resident vacationing in Cuba, died in a bombing at the Copacabana Hotel in Havana. Luis Posada Carriles confessed to that attack, but later recanted.

And of course there was the Canadian governments complicity with CIA brainwashing experiments in Canada known as MKULTRA.

Early in 1957, Dr. D. Ewen Cameron, Director of the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal, formally applied for funding from the "Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology," a CIA front at Corn-ell University Medical School, New York City.

In the 1980s, the CIA and State Department launched a public counterattack on the Canadian government for questioning the propriety of CIA activities. The CIA effectively converted the Canadian government into an active and hostile opponent.

In press briefings, interviews and Court pleadings, the CIA hammered away at one theme - Canada funded Cameron too. Legally, this was irrelevant, but politically, it was devastating. As one U.S. Attorney said, "We're going to wrap the Canadian Government financing of Cameron right around their necks."

CIA brainwashing victims seek Canada court action

In a case that sounds like science fiction, a Montreal court is deciding whether a class action lawsuit can be brought against the Canadian government on behalf of more than 250 psychiatric patients who were unwittingly subjected to radical experiments in the 1950s.

The so-called MK-ULTRA tests were part of a secret mind-control programme funded by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Canadian government in the 1950s.

The Cold-War-era experiments, carried out by a Scottish doctor in Montreal, included forced isolation, induced-comas, electro-shock therapy and the use of hallucinogenic drugs, including LSD and paralysis-inducing narcotics.

Lawyers for Janine Huard, a 78-year-old great-grandmother, told a Montreal court last week that their client suffered for years as a result of Dr. Ewan Cameron's experiments at the Allan Memorial Institute, a psychiatric hospital based at Montreal's McGill University.

As to all those Fox News claims that Canada is harboring 'terrorists', they happen to be CIA trained, FBI informants and protected by the U.S. while using Canada as a safe haven.

In the al-Qaida camps, he was known as Abu Mohamed al Amriki -- "Father Mohamed the American." And, until he was finally arrested and convicted in 2000 -- after two decades of high profile terrorism, including helping to plan attacks on American troops in Somalia and U.S. embassies in Africa -- Ali Mohamed roamed free and even protected.

He was so untouchable, he was taken from quick-thinking Canadian officials, who suspected he may have been a threat.

Mohamed was a U.S. Army sergeant, FBI operative and possible CIA asset, who, on the side, was a friend to Osama bin Laden, trained the leader's bodyguards, was instrumental in killing Americans and was the middle-man in an historic and vile union between bin Laden's forces and the Lebanese Hezbollah. His fingerprints can be traced to those who assassinated Jewish militant Meir Kahane and blew up the first truck bomb to hit the World Trade Centre.

Mohamed himself had come to the FBI's attention in 1989, when the agency's Special Operations Group photographed a cell of his trainees firing AK-47s at a Long Island shooting range. The bureau would drop that investigation -- as it would in many other cases involving the terror spy.

It would also keep him safe. Even in Canada. Lance connects all the dots, including how Mohamed came, in 1993, to be questioned by suspicious RCMP officers in Vancouver. Lance says he was set free after handing the RCMP a phone number that connected them with his FBI handler.

"The Canadians placed the call," Lance writes. "Whatever (the special FBI agent) said, caused the Mounties to let Mohamed go... . Al-Qaida's master spy was free."

Canada has been used by the CIA to dump off its undercover operatives, to keep them out of harms way.

Age of Secrets - The Conspiracy that Toppled Richard Nixon and the Hidden Death of Howard Hughes by Gerald Bellett

John Herbert Meier

• was responsible for Richard Nixon's downfall, which is always missing from books on the subject.
• was Howard Hughes' most trusted courtier from 1966 to 1970.
• was forced to flee the U.S.
• His many businesses & companies were stripped from him.
• Since 1972 was chased out of England, Japan, Australia, and Tonga by the CIA. Was helped by the British and Cuban intelligence sevices.
• has been falsely charged with tax evasion, fraud, obstruction of justice, forgery and murder. Life threatened, and family stalked for kidnapping.

Meier was still under CIA surveillance. The RCMP Security Service gave Meier a cover: they pretended Meier was working with CLEU (British Columbia's Coordinated Law Enforcement Unit).

From a CIA contact, Meier obtained documents that he gave to Canada's Security and Intelligence Branch, and later to Canada's Liberal politicians. Contained info on:

• Canadian politicians, including Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and members of his cabinet.
• the Canadian military, and defense systems and defense industries.
• leading CIA agents in Canada, Cleveland Cram and Stacey Husle

Of course once exposed for using Canada as a fly over/stop over location for its illegal rendition operations, the CIA gets an endorsement from our own PM.

"Twenty different planes for the CIA have arrived in Canada over the last four years," said Serge Ménard, a member of Parliament from Quebec. "Italy is prosecuting people from the CIA" allegedly involved in renditions. "Why doesn't the prime minister do likewise?"

Prime Minister Stephen Harper responded in the House of Commons on Wednesday, saying that an investigation into the CIA plane landings revealed "no indication there were any illegal activities."

Good old Stevie boy, he took the word of the CIA that they were not doing anything illegal. LOL.

In the panic after 9/11, Canada enacted anti-terrorism legislation that curtailed civil liberties in favour of national security. Faced with American pressure, is the Harper government poised to go even further?

h/t to buckdog.

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