News

Bill Dunphy responds to ‘Stirring it up again’

By Kevin Steel ⋅ April 20, 2008 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

Photo montage–(l to r) David Duke, Wolfgang Droege with Grant Bristow

Following is a guest entry written by Bill Dunphy [originally posted here by Mr. Dunphy] in response to ‘Stirring it up again‘. Back in the 90’s Dunphy worked as an investigative reporter for the Toronto Sun and was responsible for exposing both the white racist Heritage Front’s efforts to infiltrate the Reform Party and the key role a CSIS mole, Grant Bristow played in creating and running that organization. He now works for a large newspaper chain managing an in-house web and digital technology training centre.

—

A response to: “Stirring It Up Again“

by Bill Dunphy

As the reporter who exposed Grant Bristow, the CSIS mole in the Heritage Front, and also revealed that group’s efforts to infiltrate the Reform Party, permit me to set the record straight where I can, and to add some opinions which your readers might find helpful. My opinions are based on four years of ongoing, contemporary research of the Heritage Front while working as a reporter for the Toronto Sun. During that period — 1991-1995, I had access to, and earned the trust (or at least the ear) of significant players within each of the forces at work: the local white racist leadership; the police and intelligence forces that monitored them; the mainstream Jewish community groups; and anti-racist groups that sprung up to oppose the Heritage Front and their allies.

Your post raised several issues. Let me deal with the Reform Party first.

I do not believe the efforts of several Heritage Front members to join and then gain control of a couple of Toronto riding associations of the Reform Party back in 1991/92 was part of any grand conspiracy by Conservatives or Liberals or any other group. Certainly I can say as a matter of fact that my exposure of those efforts had nothing to do with the actions or wishes of Jean Chretien or Warren Kinsella. Chretien’s 1992 letter attacking the Reform Party and its policies as racist had nothing to do with the Heritage Front or Bristow — it was a common and politically expedient accusation leveled against the party by it’s opponents at the time.

The fact is, the HF’s initial efforts to infiltrate the Reform Party were genuine and motivated by the belief by several of the secondary players (especially Alan Overfield) that the Reform Party was, if not an answer to their political prayers, then at least an opportunity too good to miss.

Your readers may not know that 20 years earlier Overfield and some of the same people had moved in on the Social Credit Party (an earlier party giving voice to Western disaffection) as it expanded to Ontario (just as the Reform Party was doing in 1991). Indeed that group had actually succeeded in taking control of the Ontario wing. Briefly. They clearly hoped for a repeat success with the nascent Reform movement. It is conceivable, I suppose, that this earlier take-over was also an elaborate conspiracy by Liberals or Conservatives or papists or Masons — but I suggest we shave with Ocham’s razor and in the absence of contrary evidence assume the obvious is likely — this marginalized group hoped to achieve some measure of power or at least attention by leaping aboard a new movement and reaching for the the steering wheel.

Droege and SOME of the HF actually believed that they could build a “legitimate” public movement around their racist philosophy. In this, Droege was following in the footsteps of his mentor, friend and fellow former Ku Klux Klan cell leader, David Duke. The year before the HF was born, Duke had succeeded in getting elected to the Louisiana legislature, despite — or because of — his racist past.

No one tipped me to this story, no one suggested or planted it. It was a chance remark by one of the HF security at their Sept 91 meeting/coming out party (”Hey, didn’t I meet you out at the International Center last month?”) that led me to uncover the connections between Reform and the HF, which I exposed in Feb ‘92 after a hell of a lot of licence plate, home ownership, newspaper archive and public record searches.

AFTER the HF was exposed and expelled from the party, HF leader Wolfgang Droege was stung by Preston Manning’s swift denunciation and what he felt was a betrayal by “kosher conservatives”. Droege then did conspire with Michael Lublin, a young Jewish activist and Reform party member, to embarrass the Reform Party by showing up at several Reform public events. There was some evidence (recounted in the SIRC report) to suggest the Tories (not the Liberals) assisted in those efforts. If true, it was opportunism, not conspiracy.

As for Bristow’s (and CSIS’s) role in Operation Governor, you wrote:

If you look at what Bristow did during Operation Governor, it’s obvious his mission was more than simple infiltration.

Wrong, I’m afraid. His mission was to monitor the newly-repatriated ex-con, Wolfgang Droege — a racist with ties to the deadliest white racist gang around, The Order. Droege had returned to Canada following a stint in US federal prisons for possession of cocaine and, if memory serves, a ceramic knife he’d smuggled onto a plane while flying to Atlanta. He was going there as an advance man for a plot by members of the The Order to murder Morris Dees, an anti-racist activist lawyer with the Southern Poverty Law Centre. Droege’s racist activities stretched back to his teen years and included both political and violent acts ranging from punching a Toronto Sun journalist to plotting the violent armed overthrow of the government of Dominica. Monitoring Droege with a human agent (Bristow) was a perfectly lawful, intelligent decision by CSIS.

You can be forgiven for looking at the events as they unfolded and deducing that there was a larger game afoot, but my opinion is you’d be wrong. You’re forgetting the human element.

The problematic behaviours I saw were motivated by emotions and human need, not politics.

Bristow certainly played a key role in the founding and growth of the Heritage Front. And he exceeded his brief repeatedly over the course for his six year run, encouraging actions that on their face appear unlawful, ranging from obstruction of justice (in the Elise Hategan and Tyrone Mason cases) to criminal harassment with the infamous “It” campaign targeting anti-racist activists.

But there is no evidence to suggest those excesses were created in a conspiracy that ranged from Bristow to his CSIS handlers to the Liberal Party and beyond. Rather, Bristow had a vested interest in keeping that pot bubbling, in magnifying or dramatizing the threat, in keeping himself at the centre of this intriguing cat and mouse game between the HF and the intelligence community. Bristow, for the record, denies obstructing justice and says the “It” campaign served to redirect racist energies and anger away from real violence.

For those who weren’t on the “inside” of this intense political/police game, it is hard to explain just how addictive and exciting it was for many of the participants — especially the non-professionals. It takes a very certain kind of person to successfully infiltrate an illicit organization — and that kind of person is someone who thrives on and craves that secret knowledge, power and importance and that knowledge that one’s actions “matter.” This isn’t all ego — there’s a significant streak of altruism in people like Bristow, they make real sacrifices to do the work they do.

But the required personality traits of a good agent maximize the likelihood that they will mess up — “handling” infiltrators is a difficult task. CSIS blew it.

You are correct to assert that the “Bristow Affair” wasn’t properly investigated — despite the rather extraordinary report that the Security Intelligence Review Committee put together in such short order following my outing of Bristow in Aug 1994. The SIRC accepted far too much of Bristow’s testimony and CSIS reports at face value, ignoring evidence that pointed in different directions. This seemed to be partly because there was so many lies told AFTER I broke the story that many people destroyed their credibility, effectively constructing a field full of straw men that the SIRC report was able to busily demolish one after the other.

My story, nine months in the making, was based on the evidence of my own eyes and interviews with people who thought I was writing a history piece, a book, and had no idea that Bristow was a CSIS informant. As a result, mostly, they told me the truth.

Here’s the thing about Droege and the Heritage Front — I truly believe that Droege dreamed of building a movement that would tap into the race consciousness he imagined was present in “white” Canadians and most of the time he worked pretty hard to keep “his” people in line with the law. He always kept an eye on the law and the media, carefully calculating the impact of his group’s actions and decisions. Bristow — and others — would argue that, at best, Droege and the Heritage Front were the Sinn Fein to the white racist underground’s IRA, that the canny old ex-con, ex-KKK leader was aping David Duke and covering up his evil with a political patina.

To which I would reply — exactly.

Politics is where the 1990’s Droege’s arguments belong and where he tried to take them. Inside the political arena, Droege and the HFers stood revealed as delusional clowns, easily dispatched. Hell, the reality is that they were out-organized on the street and in the schools by a ragamuffin band of homeless street kids and anarchists — the ARA.

The danger lay, not directly in the very visible and aging Droege and his cartoon politics. The danger lay in the twisted types who responded to his call and then hung in the shadows, drawing nourishment from the ideas and attention and noise the HF created.

There were several truly dangerous developments within the HF and mostly Bristow and CSIS et al either missed them or failed to contain them. They failed because they were too dependent on Bristow — and Bristow had little or no success penetrating those fringes — the COTC and the “Crueller Gang”. (The Crueller Gang committed two armed robberies and had displayed an interest in bomb making. They were busted by a smart local cop in Durham, not CSIS and not Bristow.)

Which leads us to the curious case of the dog that didn’t bark in the night — Warren Kinsella.

Kinsella’s failure to even mention Bristow’s key role in creating and nurturing the HF — hell, his failure to even name him in the first edition of Web of Hate — is very curious and I’ve never been able to understand it. Either he was a sloppy researcher who exaggerated his intelligence community connections, or he withheld knowledge of Bristow deliberately.

Unfortunately both answers are possible — Web of Hate’s 1st edition suffered from a hysterical tone and more than a few critical errors of fact.

Perhaps the best way to judge is to understand that, whatever else he was by 1994, Kinsella was no longer a journalist. He had abandoned that role in favour of advocacy and the book, Web of Hate, should be read and understood as advocacy — not journalism. He fed the hysteria of the times (to sell more books? to advance his political views? for the hell of it?), he functioned as a partisan. And looking at his gleeful confessions in his later book on spin doctoring, we can safely assume that he would see nothing wrong with applying those tactics in Web of Hate.

Look at his response to your criticism here — a shamefully misleading distortion of the truth that he had the National Post print - telling readers there that he HAD mentioned Bristow numerous times in the 2nd edition of Web of Hate, but not telling any of his readers that:

1) Indeed he had failed to mention Bristow in the first edition and
2) The 2nd edition came out AFTER Bristow had been exposed.

Compare his public comments with his private email to Kevin. ‘Nuff said.

Any real journalist who misled his editors and readers like that would be fired. Kinsella however, is not, and hasn’t been for a very, very, long time, a real journalist.

And lastly, regarding the parallels between the Bristow affair and recent developments in the anti-terrorism investigation that resulted in the arrest of the Toronto 18: I was, and remain, deeply skeptical of our intelligence agencies when their “agents” turn up at the very heart of the alleged illegal action. Learning that it was an intelligence agency informant who arranged for the purchase and delivery of the supposed fertilizer to be used in the supposed bomb, and seeing that their training seems to have consisted of a few speeches and paintball game or two, only served to deepen my skepticism.

But.

Please remember that, for all his faults, Bristow took on a necessary and difficult job and, though he crossed boundaries with impunity, and though the media exaggarated the danger of HF and misdirected the public, the reality is that there was real danger inside that movement. And Bristow and CSIS did play a role, however hamfisted, in the dismantling of that danger.

I say we wait and see the facts in this newest case and then make up our minds.