The Canadian spies, white supremacists and South African secret agents affair…

This all started three days ago with a blog about a Canadian striptease club called Le Strip.

Life seemed so simple then.

Yesterday’s follow-up blog was titled: THE NOT-SO SIMPLE TALE OF A CANADIAN STRIP CLUB AND TERRORISM IN THE 1980s.

It was about David Hughes, who worked as a doorman/cashier/DJ at Le Strip 1982-1994… and as a trainman on the Canadian Pacific Railway system 1986-2019…  and as a ‘Confidential Informant’ for the Ontario Provincial Police… and for CSIS (the Canadian Security Intelligence Service) around that time.

Now take a big breath…

BOSS, (the apartheid South African government’s Bureau of State Security 1969-1980) enters the story…

In yesterday’s blog about David Hughes’ undercover work in Canada, he said:

“Grant Bristow’s meeting with Max French at Le Strip was arranged by me… At the time, Grant was a Confidential Informant for CSIS (which I also had a indirect role in creating).”

So, obviously, I asked about this role.

He replied:

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The role I am referring to is how Grant Bristow came to the attention of CSIS and ended up becoming a CI for them.  It was as a result of his recruitment by the South African embassy in Toronto (around 1984?) to provide intelligence on ANC (African National Congress) personnel in the city who were organizing protests against the apartheid regime in South Africa at the time.

Grant had met a couple of the South African embassy’s “diplomatic staff” (BOSS agents, no doubt) and parlayed his friendship and knowledge of my serving in the Rhodesian Army in 1979/80 into a job offer from them to provide information that would assist the South Africans in their battle against the ANC.

At the time Grant was working for Kuehne+Nagel in Toronto… One of the services they offered back in the 1980s/1990s was private investigators (who were required to be licensed under Provincial legislation) to ferret out employee theft and fraud.

They had contracts with Canada Post to provide security services at the Gateway Postal sorting facility and Grant spent a lot of time there doing undercover work for the security company in addition to his part time work as a DJ at Le Strip. 

Kuehne+Nagel was where (I think?) he got his first taste of undercover work which was to stand him in good stead when he began to act as a CI for CSIS. He had a unique personality trait that I think helped ingratiate him into whatever role was required of him at the time. His personality could be demure as a sheepdog or as brash and bombastic as a WWE wrestler calling out his opponent in the ring combined with a chameleon like ability to instantly blend into whatever social environment he was enmeshed in at the moment. 

He managed to gather a handful of  would-be security staff into his plan and out of the blue one day called me up and asked if I would give his ‘recruits’ a lecture on the ANC.

I agreed and about a half dozen of ‘Grant’s Gaggle’ showed up at my apartment one weekend. I spent the next hour or so giving them the benefit of what I knew about the ANC as a result of my experiences in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe in 1979/80… which, honestly, wasn’t really much.

Grant was a little vague about exactly what he was up to… I could not figure out whether what he was telling me about the South Africans was legitimate or not.

Through all of this, though, Grant attracted the attention of CSIS and they managed to turn him into a CI and he began working against the interests of the South African Embassy in Toronto and gave CSIS information which ultimately led to the expulsion of a number of the South African diplomatic staff for “activities inconsistent with their diplomatic status”.

All of this occurred before his recruitment into the white supremacist neo-Nazi Heritage Front (see previous blog) and activities as a CSIS spy in that group for several years in what was called by CSIS, “OP Governor”.

When Grant’s role was exposed by the Toronto Sun in the mid-1990s, a public outcry led the Conservative Government of the time to convene an inquiry by the Security Intelligence Review Committee into the matter.

I gave in-camera testimony at the committee and their report, titled The Heritage Front Affair, under the Chairmanship of the Right Honorable Val Meredith ultimately determined that CSIS (while testing the limits of what was appropriate for the agency) acted within the limits of their mandate under the law and that Grant Bristow had performed an act of great benefit to his country and its citizens.

A conclusion that, in my opinion, was entirely correct.

Of course, Grant was given a new identity by CSIS and spirited to an unknown location somewhere in Canada where he was paid for the services he had rendered to the Government of Canada as a CSIS spy.

For me, life went on as normal and I worked often with Max French at CP Rail until I transferred to the London Division in 1998 and spent the remainder of my career working out of that terminal. Oftentimes I would run a train to Toronto and see Max in passing. In all of that time he never indicated that he suspected me during our association.

To this day, unless he reads this blog, I wonder if he ever did…

PS – I attach a photo of me back in those days…much better than the AI pic you created yesterday.

…and also one of me in the Rhodesian Army. 

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HOLD ON! HOLD ON!… “One of me in the Rhodesian Army”… ???

(…AND THE ANSWER IS HERE…)

“Confess your crimes against the people of North Korea or you will not be allowed to leave the country tomorrow”

North Korea, land of the Kims, is truly a People’s Paradise

In North Korea, you can see new buildings being constructed as skeletons of concrete, brick and stone but rough and unsophisticated. The final surfaces, though, are very well-designed and finished. They look superficially perfect.

There is another simile for North Korea here. It looks OK from a cursory glance but, underneath…

The Chinese build better foundations.

It seems to me the Chinese have tried to change their society from the bottom upwards. The North Koreans manage any change from the top downwards. They start with the triumphant monuments to success and then (ironically in this supposed people’s paradise but – hey! – this is Communism) there is a rigid hierarchy through which change may trickle down to the bottom though it seems not to have done in the 26 years since I was last here.

One odd feature in the relentless propaganda is that, since I was last here, the Great Leader Kim Il-sung’s mother and early wife seem to have appeared as pseudo Mary Mother of Jesus figures. I do not remember them being mentioned before; now they occasionally appear in pictures. Both long dead, of course, as all the best icons are.

This is my last day in the People’s Paradise. The train out of North Korea leaves Pyongyang at 10.10am this morning. It arrives in Beijing at 8.33am tomorrow morning. No US passport holders are allowed to take the train out of North Korea; they have to fly out.

In the train, I have lunch with a British woman who lives in New York (she has a British passport). She was at the big military parade on Kim Il-sung’s birthday. The one we were not allowed to go to. She was with another foreigner who reckoned some of the giant rockets on display were not real: they were possibly made from wood. She does not know; he did not know; I do not know; this is North Korea; I only mention it as an observation from someone who was there.

She told me someone else she knows managed, accidentally, to go onto the ‘hidden’ floor in their hotel – the floor at which lifts do not stop. There was no decor. Just a bare concrete corridor and bare walls. The door to one room was slightly ajar. He looked through the crack. A man was sitting looking at a TV monitor. He left the floor quietly and returned to the ‘allowed’ parts of the hotel.

I also get talking to a man who is one of the three others I share the four-berth compartment with on this train from Pyongyang to Beijing. He was born in a Western European country (which shall remain nameless to disguise his identity). But he has lived in the US for many years. So he has both a US passport and a passport from the European country of his birth. Obviously, as he is on the train, he is using his European passport.

Last night, he was booked into the same hotel as me – the Yanggakdo in Pyongyang. He came into North Korea with a Kindle e-reader and a laptop computer which the border guards did not query because neither has GPS.

In my opinion, he was silly on the North Korean trip. He was not in my group, but he told me he had sat at the front of his tour bus, near the two guides, taking photographs of the North Korean countryside (which is not allowed). He had also, with a fellow group member, wandered out of their hotel one night unaccompanied. Again, this is not allowed.

Last night, there was a problem with the keys to his hotel room which escalated to the point at which he was taken off to a room in the hotel and interrogated for seven hours, from 8.00pm to 3.00am.

“Why have you been taking bad photographs to make our country look bad?” the questions started, before moving on to “Why have you been disrespectful of our guides?” and so on, round and round in circles for seven hours with five interrogators.

“You are not a real tourist,” they eventually said. “You have been taking photographs of people in the countryside and in the towns. They are all waiting downstairs to denounce you… We have talked to the other members of your group. They all say you are not a real tourist. You are a spy. We know you are here to spy on our country and take bad photographs.”

They brought in an IT expert with a laptop computer which he attached to the man’s laptop computer to search the hard disk. They then confiscated the hard disk. They then looked through all the still photographs he had taken and erased a lot. “Where have you hidden the other memory cards?” he was asked.

“I have no other memory cards,” he told them. But the questioning and re-questioning went on for seven hours.

It escalated more and more.

“You will not be allowed to leave the country,” they told him. You have committed crimes against the people of North Korea. Confess your crimes against the people of North Korea or you will not be allowed to leave the country tomorrow.”

“Oh shit,” he thought.

“You must sign a confession to your crimes,” he was told, “or you will not be allowed to leave the country. If you publish any photographs you have taken in North Korea, we will publish your confession on the internet.”

“Oh shit,” he thought.

He eventually signed the ‘confession’.

“You have committed crimes against North Korea,” he was then told. “You must compensate North Korea. Do you have $10,000?”

When he made it clear he was not carrying $10,000 on him, they feigned anger that he thought he could bribe them.

“If you publish any photographs you have taken in North Korea,” they told him, “or continue your crimes after you have left our country or tell anyone this interrogation has taken place, we will publish your confession to your crimes on the internet.”

“They were frightening but not very efficient,” he tells me. “I had a video camera in my case and they never looked. I declared it at the border on the way in, but they never knew it was there. It had much ‘worse’ images.”

After he was released at 3.00am, he went back to his room and erased all the material he had shot on his video camera. He did this under his bed covers in case – as well as having sound bugs – the hotel room had video bugs.

I wonder what will happen at the border.

This could go one of two ways for me.

I am sharing a compartment with the guy.

Either I will be given a bad time because I will get guilt by association. Or I will sail through because the border guards will focus so much on him.

At the border, the first North Korean border guard comes into our compartment and goes straight for him.

“Camera,” he says.

Three other North Korean border guards come in. I go and stand in the corridor as they interrogate the guy, go through his stills camera, picture by picture, find the video camera in his case and examine that.

“My camera – my stills camera – takes videos and I have my video camera too,” he tells them, “but I took no videos while I was in North Korea.”

I think, listening to this in the corridor, that it must sound more than a little suspicious.

“You have more memory cards,” the guards say. “Where are your other memory cards?”

“I have no other memory cards,” he tells them.

“Do you have memory cards hidden in your hair?” one of them asks him.

They interrogate him for around 35 minutes. Then they turn to me:

“Camera,” the guard barks at me.

I give him my camera. He looks at all the photographs. There are 168 on the memory card. He erases 17 of them – one of the border at Panmunjom, mostly just photos of ordinary people in the very public Kim Il-sung Square in Pyongyang.

There are only three sets of photos on that memory card: Panmunjom, Kim Il-sung Square and the music concert we attended in Pyongyang. I had intentionally taken the Panmunjom photos so they could, if necessary, be erased. The other 900+ photos I had taken in North Korea are on another memory card in the rolled-up sleeve of my shirt.

The guards never ask if I have a video camera. Which I do, with five one-hour tapes filled-up.

Afterwards, the European guy tells me that, halfway through his grilling by the border guards, he realised that the European passport on which he was travelling in North Korea had an out-of-date visa for China in it. His up-to-date visa for China was in the US passport in his bag, which the guards superficially searched. They did not realise he had a second, US passport (remember US citizens cannot legally leave North Korea by train) and they did not check the dates on the Chinese visa in his European passport. But, he tells me, “I was shitting myself.”

The guards were paranoid, but not very efficient. However, they may have been hungry.

In another compartment in the railway carriage, a female border guard saw a chocolate bar in the suitcase of some Swiss travellers. She looked at their passports. “Swiss?” she asked. “Yes,” they replied. She unwrapped the chocolate bar and ate it, unsmiling, in front of the two Swiss. “It is good chocolate,” she told them.

… CONTINUED HERE …