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The Evolution of International Counter-Terrorism in the RCMP Security Service, 1972–1984

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The Evolution of International Counter-Terrorism in the RCMP Security Service, 1972–1984 Intelligence and National Security ISSN: 0268-4527 (Print) 1743-9019 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fint20 Cold War counter-terrorism: the evolution of international counter-terrorism in the RCMP Security Service, 1972–1984 Steve Hewitt To cite this article: Steve Hewitt (2017): Cold War counter-terrorism: the evolution of international counter-terrorism in the RCMP Security Service, 1972–1984, Intelligence and National Security, DOI: 10.1080/02684527.2017.1323833 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02684527.2017.1323833 Published online: 09 May 2017. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=fint20 Download by: [University of Birmingham] Date: 10 May 2017, At: 04:49 INTELLIGENCE AND NATIONAL SECURITY, 2017 https://doi.org/10.1080/02684527.2017.1323833 ARTICLE Cold War counter-terrorism: the evolution of international counter-terrorism in the RCMP Security Service, 1972–1984 Steve Hewitt ABSTRACT This piece provides a detailed case study of the evolution of counter- terrorism within a specific domestic security agency of a liberal-democratic state in the context of the Cold War. It does so by examining the creation of a counter-terrorism unit within Canada’s Royal Canadian Mounted Police Security Service and how it responded to international terrorism. This occurred in between major terrorist attacks in Canada in 1970 and 1985 and included a growing focus on counter-terrorism even as counter-subversion remained a top priority within a still dominant Cold War domestic security framework. Ultimately, the article, based on thousands of pages of previously secret documents, argues that the Security Service could conceive of in a broader strategic sense the threat of terrorism but found it more challenging, for a variety of reasons, including the dominance of the Cold War and the difficulties around infiltrating ethnic communities, to collect intelligence. Introduction Since the attacks of 11 September 2001,1 domestic security agencies in a number of liberal-democratic countries have had one key national security priority: counter-terrorism.2 Questions remain, however, about whether such agencies created during or even prior to the Cold War are fit for counter-terrorist purposes in a post-Cold War era.3 Nevertheless, terrorism did not suddenly appear once the Cold War had finished. Rather, domestic security agencies, in the 1960s and 1970s, found themselves having to adjust to new security concerns with the emergence of terrorism, or re-emergence in some cases, even while espionage and subversion associated with communism remained their top priority. This was true in the United Kingdom with the Security Service (MI5) and the violence in Northern Ireland plus some Middle Eastern terrorism, and in the United States with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and threats posed by far-left violence from the Weather Underground and the far right through the Ku Klux Klan.4 The threat of terrorism, particularly international terrorism, also had an impact on Canadian domestic security. In a 1973 speech, John Starnes, the first civilian head of its domestic intelligence agency, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) Security Service, warned of the increasing threat of interna- tional terrorism to Canada and what its implications might be over the coming decades.5 Underlying his comments was disquiet framed in security terms about an increasingly diverse Canada that had ended official racial discrimination in its immigration policy in 1962.6 Canada and Canadians are no more immune to international terrorist activity than any other country or people. Indeed, for various reasons, Canada offers a more than usually attractive target. Canada has a wealthy post-indus- trial society indistinguishable from its powerful southern neighbour. We have at least one revolutionary cause important enough to attract outside support and our travel and immigration controls are almost non-existent.7 CONTACT Steve Hewitt [email protected] © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 2 S. HEWITT In this passage, Starnes alluded to Canada’s recent experience of terrorism, the battle with the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) across the 1960s that culminated in the ‘October Crisis’ of 1970 when the British Trade Commissioner to Canada, James Cross, and a Quebec provincial cabinet minister, Pierre Laporte, were kidnapped by different FLQ cells. Laporte’s kidnappers later murdered him while Cross was rescued.8 Although the FLQ reflected international trends in relation to a broad movement of decolonization and other intellectual and terrorism currents, it was perceived by the Canadian state as a domestic terrorist threat.9 In the aftermath of the 1970 violence in Quebec, which effectively marked the end of the FLQ as a serious terrorism threat, Starnes’ speech instead focused on the new international terrorism landscape dominated at the time by the Palestinians in the aftermath of the notorious killing of 11 Israeli Olympic team members by Black September at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Terrorism would become a much discussed phenomenon for the remainder of the 1970s and into the decade that followed. Eventually, a second major terrorism attack involving Canada occurred. On 23 June 1985, Sikh extremists based in Canada but with international links blew up Air India Flight 182 travelling from Toronto to Montreal to London to Delhi to Mumbai. All on board–329 people including 268 Canadians–died off the coast of Ireland. It remains the worst ever terrorist attack on an airline and the deadliest mass murder in Canadian history.10 This paper will offer a unique and detailed case study of the evolution of a specific domestic secu- rity agency in a liberal-democratic state during the Cold War in response to the rise of international terrorism as a threat. Details of similar transformations in the United Kingdom and the United States can be found in various places but not as the centre of the works in question.11 Nor have questions around the linkage between subversion and terrorism and multiculturalism during the Cold War been historicized within a study of counter-terrorism. This paper will analyse the beginnings of a movement of a domestic intelligence agency away from what it had done for decades toward what has become the main security priority in the twenty-first century. Ultimately, the RCMP Security Service succeeded in terms of imagining accurately what an era of international terrorism might consist of and in describing what problems those engaged in counter-terrorism might face but experienced difficulties for a variety of structural reasons, including the impact of the Cold War on domestic security priorities, when it came to the practical aspect of generating and acting on intelligence related to such threats. And, in echoes of the domestic security landscape after 9/11, the RCMP Security Service expressed growing concerns about non-Western European immigration to Canada in security terms around the threat of terrorism. This process of ‘securitizing’ these communities would remain relevant after 9/11 and equally reflected an on-going Cold War mentality in which security state ‘othered’ subversive threats as foreign.12 Counter-terrorism history This study is neither a history of the RCMP Security Service nor a comprehensive account of counter- terrorism across the broader Canadian state. The definitive history of the Security Service and domestic intelligence in Canada appeared in 2012 with Reg Whitaker, Gregory Kealey, and Andrew Parnaby’s superb Secret Service: Political Policing in Canada From the Fenians to Fortress America.13 That work is a macro history of Canadian domestic intelligence including how it responded to major terrorist incidents such as the October Crisis and the Air India bombing. It does not provide an account of the rise of counter-terrorism in the Security Service in response to the threat of international terrorism in the 1970s. The same point applies to the excellent False Security: The Radicalization of Canadian Anti-terrorism by two legal scholars, Craig Forcese and Kent Roach. It spends part of one page discussing the Security Service’s counter-terrorism in the 1970s in the context of its disruption operations against suspected Quebec separatists.14 Another relevant study, an article published in 1993, looks at counter-terrorism at an elite level in terms of government responses to acts of violence. Finally, J.I. Ross, offers a fascinating exam- ination of the bureaucratic evolution of Canadian counter-terrorism policy between 1977 and 1999.15 This study, in contrast, is a micro study of the development of a counter-terrorism role in Canada’s domestic intelligence agency in the 1970s and early 1980s. It is based on thousands of pages of pre- viously secret RCMP Security Service records, including organizational charts, acquired by the author INTELLIGENCE AND NATIONAL SECURITY 3 through over 40 requests under the Canadian Access to Information Act. The material, however, was not released uncensored. While the Security Service records were transferred to the National Archives of Canada (now Library and Archives Canada) in the 1980s, the RCMP Security Service’s successor, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) retains final control over what gets released through an Access to Information request. Documents
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