The secret agent was code numbered A-828.
Intelligence reports say the person was a “reliable source who is well acquainted with National Indian Brotherhood members.” An informer. And not just any informer. “Reliable” meant the person was a proven asset. So who were they?
A-828 was a spy for the RCMP Security Service, an infiltrator who in the 1970s penetrated the Assembly of First Nations’ predecessor while internationally respected Secwépemc leader George Manuel was national chief. From inside NIB, the spy leaked details about Manuel’s movements, private conversations, sensitive political plans, divisions in his office and more.
“It really breaks my heart to see how targeted he was,” said Manuel’s daughter Doreen, a filmmaker, residential school survivor and mother of three, in a February interview.
“I was really under the assumption that all of our people followed and believed him, because the mass of numbers did. I knew there were a few people who didn’t see eye-to-eye with him.”
Fifty years later, at home in north Vancouver with her father’s headdress beside her, Doreen Manuel saw the proof: Someone in George Manuel’s inner circle was betraying him to the Canadian government.
And she wants to know who.
“There’s two names that I found where I’m pretty certain that’s who they’re talking about. How confident am I? I would have to get through that whole pile of documents,” she said.
Her suspicions emerge after cross-referencing two very different stacks of faded papers scattered across her kitchen table. In one pile sit the journals where George Manuel wrote daily. In the other stack is the 11-volume “racial intelligence” dossier the Mounties compiled on NIB, which CBC Indigenous obtained through access to information.
The papers reveal the Mounties had George Manuel under heavy surveillance as he organized resistance to the White Paper, the Pierre Trudeau government’s plan to assimilate Indigenous people into the mainstream.
The Security Service was casually monitoring Indigenous political activity as early as 1968, amid concerns about outside influences from radicals and communists. Its posture changed in 1973, after being caught unprepared by the arrival of the Red Power movement.
Mounties later acknowledged the program was extended to legitimate groups like Manuel’s due to “intensity of anti-government feeling” and “radical elements” within.
Leading NIB from 1970 to 1976, Manuel wove together a national movement, built ties abroad and championed policies of self-determination. That made him, at least for Canada’s Cold War-era domestic intelligence agency, a potential threat.
Soon, he became a target: file number D937-8819. As national chief, Manuel interacted directly more than 50 times with informers who surreptitiously passed information to the Security Service, a CBC News analysis found.
Mounties also had Manuel under physical and electronic surveillance, and investigated his staff for suspected radicalization.
Newly declassified documents obtained by CBC Indigenous confirm that the RCMP infiltrated and sought to disrupt legitimate political Indigenous organizations in the 1970s, in an extensive program of covert surveillance, informants and countersubversion.
The surveillance was most intense in 1975 — the same year Manuel and NIB maintained a joint committee with Trudeau’s Liberal cabinet. Trudeau’s solicitor general even authorized wiretaps to monitor the phones at NIB headquarters.
For Doreen Manuel, it was saddening to see how this massive machine worked against her father.
“It must have been like walking in sand for him,” she said.
Though if it was, he didn’t show it.
Under watch
George Manuel was a survivor of Kamloops Indian Residential School, but Doreen Manuel said he also received a traditional education from Secwépemc medicine people, who taught him spirituality, foresight and determination.
George Manuel put these skills to use early in his career, for instance when First Nations people in British Columbia were charged for hunting offences. Manuel would show up in court claiming to be an interpreter and, Doreen Manuel recounted, speak with the accused in their Indigenous languages.
It didn’t matter if they both spoke perfect English or if Manuel didn’t understand the other person. Manuel only pretended to interpret. He offered a legal defence instead.
It was a trick, said Doreen, “and he’d get them off.”
As Manuel was rising as a leader, the Mounties were setting up a “racial intelligence” section” to monitor Black and Indigenous activists. It was modelled on an FBI unit of the same name, which conducted counterintelligence, or COINTELPRO, operations against the American civil rights movement.
Even today, little is known about the Canadian racial intelligence program, said author and historian Steve Hewitt.
“It doesn’t surprise me that the RCMP in some ways would mirror what the FBI was doing,” he said, “because the RCMP also during this period began to launch these disruption operations, which kind of mirrors the COINTELPRO.”
NIB landed on the national political scene in 1968, as a vehicle for First Nations people to advance their rights. By late 1969, informers were providing the Security Service with alarmist and sometimes false reports: One even claimed NIB was financing arms purchases.
A year later, coming out of the October Crisis of 1970, the Trudeau government began encouraging the Mounties to adopt a more aggressive posture, Hewitt said.
When Manuel arrived in Ottawa, he landed squarely in the crosshairs of this new disruptive approach, and he wasn’t the only one.
The Mounties soon zeroed in on his valued executive director, Blood Tribe member Marie Smallface Marule.
After a CBC News investigation revealed extensive spying by the RCMP on Indigenous leaders in the 1970s, several current leaders are calling for accountability, including an investigation and an apology.
In 1971, Marule had just been hired when an informer claimed she was “a Red Power advocate” and a “radical,” according to RCMP documents.
The Security Service was doubly concerned by her role running the NIB office and her marriage to Jacob Marule, an exiled Black South African political activist.
The Mounties were “extremely interested” in anti-apartheid South African support groups building ties with groups in Canada.
“We should follow the activities of both her and her husband closely,” a Mountie wrote.
Legal scholar David Milward said he found the surveillance of Marie Marule alarming and offensive.
“She has a very stellar, well-remembered legacy and reputation,” said Milward, a professor at the University of Victoria, and a member of Beardy’s and Okemasis First Nation in Saskatchewan.
Marie Marule, who died in 2014, became a groundbreaking academic who helped turn Indigenous studies into a legitimate academic discipline, while Jacob Marule today represents the African National Congress in South Africa’s Limpopo Provincial Legislature.
“I do think racism is a very large part of the picture,” Milward said, adding that informers are a accepted method against hostile states or terrorists, but not legitimate groups.
The Mounties were “trying to undermine the political will and the representatives of Indigenous peoples themselves,” he said.
“Again, that’s a misplaced priority.”
Penetration and phone tap
First, they tracked him.
Manuel and Marie Marule worked to build international solidarity among Indigenous and colonized peoples, leading to Manuel’s founding of the World Council of Indigenous Peoples in 1975.
In December 1971, as Manuel visited Tanzania to meet with president Julius Nyerere, the Security Service scribbled concerned notes across copies of diplomatic cables sent to External Affairs from Dar es Salaam.
Officials thought the visit may have been the Tanzanian leader’s “mischievous” rebuke of Canada’s human rights record.
Then it was direct surveillance. The Mounties soon knew Manuel’s every move.
In July 1974, an informer told them Guyanese minister of state Philip Duncan was slated to land in Ottawa, where Manuel would whisk him on a whirlwind countrywide tour. A covert surveillance detail kept watch at the airport.
Manuel arrived as predicted, and Security Service agents were so close they overheard the conversation. As the group departed, Mounties jotted down licence plate numbers, physical descriptions and tried to take pictures, but the camera malfunctioned.
Next came the penetration and monitoring of phones.
The surveillance was most intense between June 1975 and June 1976, a period where the Security Service’s electronic surveillance branch produced more than 150 intelligence reports, CBC News found.
In July 1975 alone, investigators produced 27 individual reports about NIB’s inner workings —nearly one per day — indicating full-scale infiltration. Many of these reports read like verbatim conversations, Hewitt noted, describing the use of electronic eavesdropping as significant.
“Technical sources were used somewhat sparingly, so I was told by ex-Mounties,” he said.
“The fact they’re being used here suggests that, I would think, it’s a fairly high-profile target.”
The widening net
Like Manuel, Wet’suwet’en leader Gloria George was caught in the “Native extremism” program’s widening dragnet.
In 1975, George was president of the Native Council of Canada in Ottawa, the first woman to lead a national Indigenous organization. The surveillance was so thorough that simply inviting Manuel and Marie Marule for a meeting at her office was enough to generate a report.
In an interview in Vancouver, George remembered being followed repeatedly in Ottawa, an unnerving experience she now sees in a different light.
George couldn’t afford parking, so she walked to and from work every day. Sometimes she had an eerie feeling of being followed. Then one winter night, she saw the man.
“I’d sense somebody following me about a block behind me, and I’d stop, and the person would turn around,” she said.
“I didn’t want to be obvious about this, because I didn’t know if I was being victimized or if I would be a witness.”
George sped up, her boots crunching on the dark ice. It was frightening. The memory is burned in her brain.
“I turned around, and that person — I’m sure it was a man, I’m judging by the dress — would be behind me about a block,” she said.
“He would turn to the side and pretend he was going across the street. And didn’t cross the street.”
It never occurred to her that she may have been under surveillance, and she was beyond shocked to see the files.
“I just find it amazing but also deplorable that so many people spent so much time with us and then documented lies, major untruths about who we were and what we were trying to do,” she said.
“It’s very sad. And I hope to God they’re not doing it now.”
‘Report and talk’
Ultimately, after snooping on NIB affairs for six years straight, the Security Service acknowledged in August 1975, “The National Indian Brotherhood is a legitimate national Indian organization” that “does not comprise a threat to the nation’s security in any form.”
The all-out infiltration began to wind down, though Mounties continued to monitor Manuel’s successor Noel Starblanket for years.
In 1979, as reports emerged that the Security Service had used dirty tricks and illegal tactics for years, Starblanket raised allegations of inappropriate spying before the McDonald Commission, which was investigating these reports.
Starblanket wanted the program exposed, yet when the commission rendered its report, NIB’s allegations were buried in an anonymized summary. These findings have gone unreported for 50 years, and only became apparent after CBC News reviewed the entire NIB dossier.
“The Security Service infiltrated the organization, employed undercover members, paid informants who were members of the organization to attend meetings, and questioned group leaders,” the commission found.
“The Security Service monitored the telephones of some of the organization’s headquarters but in each case an authorization to intercept private communications was obtained under the appropriate section of the Official Secrets Act.”
Infiltration. Covert operatives. Wiretaps. It was all true.
For Doreen Manuel, that leads to an urgent message for these informers and spies, should any be alive and listening.
“Today, do the right thing and report,” she said.
“How is the government going to hurt you today? Report and talk and tell everybody and make the government accountable for the behaviour that they have carried on against Indigenous people.”
NIB morphed in 1982 into the Assembly of First Nations which, joined by other Indigenous organizations countrywide, is calling for transparency, an inquiry and an apology from the prime minister, following an expression of regret from the RCMP this week.
