The Heritage Front Affair
Media reports suggest that Bristow, as a
Heritage Front member, made use
of police information. Bristow, within the
Heritage Front, was very
secretive about how he obtained his information, and often said to his
racist colleagues that he had personal police sources.
5.12.1 CPIC Information
We questioned Bristow on this matter. He denied ever having approached
members of the Metro Toronto Police Force to obtain Canadian Police
Information Centre (CPIC) information. He says he did not need information
from CPIC, and, in any case, he rarely operated within the jurisdiction of
that police force. Much of the time, he would pass information to the
police through his full-time employment duties.
Bristow stressed that he never used CPIC for the
Heritage Front.
Droege was
told, falsely, that Bristow used CPIC information to find cars. As regards
CPIC printouts, he said that no policeman would be so mentally deficient as
to give a print-out of a CPIC report, because it identifies the individual
who accesses the report. He said that police sometimes showed him
information, in the course of his investigations for his employer, but this
was never CPIC information. [148]
Alan Overfield,
Droege's employer told SIRC that he knew that Bristow
received CPIC information. He said that every investigator has contacts:
police, the telephone company, and others. These contacts help them to
obtain information for their tracing activities. CPIC material, he said
would be used for tough cases and could provide, for example, court dates
when their quarry would show up.[149]
Overfield said that he was amazed that Bristow had complete CPIC
print-outs: some 300 over the years 1990 - 1993 he estimated. When we
asked Overfield for examples, he responded that Bristow never let him
keep them. He said that he could not remember a single name of any of the
subjects of the investigations.[150]
Wolfgang Droege told the Committee that he did not know if any CPIC
information was acquired by Bristow. [151]
A Detective of the Ottawa Police Service told SIRC that using CPIC to
collect information is not particularly useful: addresses are rarely
listed; Court dates are no longer given; convictions and sentences are
provided; but the information is almost always out of date.[152]
CPIC members are subject to random audits; the RCMP even audits its own
detachments. All CPIC queries or printouts can be traced to a particular
machine, and logs are kept.
We found no information from the Source in CSIS files that Bristow had
ever obtained CPIC information.
5.12.2 Police Communications
The Source was asked about the monitoring of police communications. He
noted that Bristow would constantly tell the
Heritage Front that he would
monitor police communications, but Paul Graham did most of this.
Eric Fischer provided scanning devices and metal detectors, using money from
his military severance pay and his savings.[153]
When the American white supremacists were in town, the Source would pick
them up and put the Mitre 5 scanner on to see if the police were
following them. In fact, the information he was picking up was quite
irrelevant. The Americans thought it was important though, and they had
a sense of security.[154]
Bristow, and Front "security" were often seen with handheld
walkie-talkies. According to Bristow,
Eric Fischer, an ex-member of the
Canadian Airborne Regiment, ran physical security for
Heritage Front meetings. Fischer used two-way communications systems; Bristow had
contributed three hand held radios which did not work well.[155]
One of the stories Bristow told Front members was that he had special
sources of information, and that he was always running licence plate
numbers. Bristow said that he had not run any licence plates through the
Motor Vehicle Bureau for the
Heritage Front. Droege, on the other hand,
had access to Overfield's account while Bristow did not, and it was a
regular practice for
Droege to run the plate numbers when
Zundel wanted
information.[156]
The
original plaintext version
of this file is available via
ftp.
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Report to the Solicitor General of Canada
Security Intelligence Review Committee
December 9, 1994
5.12 Contacts with the Police