The Nizkor Project: Remembering the Holocaust (Shoah)

The Heritage Front Affair
Report to the Solicitor General of Canada
Security Intelligence Review Committee
December 9, 1994


5.12 Contacts with the Police

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listed; Court dates are no longer given; convictions and sentences are provided; but the information is almost always out of date.[152]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]

Footnotes


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