Serge Protector?

In the annals of espionage, Frank Hadesbeck isn’t a major figure. Not as nefarious as the atomic spy Klaus Fuchs. Not as controversial as the Rosenbergs, sent to the electric chair in 1953. Not as compelling as the Cambridge Five — Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross — subjects of countless television dramas. Not as respected as James Jesus Angleton, the Cold War master of counterintelligence. And not as celebrated as Nathan Hale, executed for spying on British troop movements for the rebellious American colonists. No nuclear secrets were compromised because of Hadesbeck, and none were stolen from our enemies. He hid no microfilm in pumpkins (Whittaker Chambers) and turbocharged no political careers through his activities (Richard Nixon’s ascent was aided by his pursuit of Reds). He was a colourless informant who might have been completely forgotten had not a former journalist and one-time New Democratic member of Parliament unearthed his undertakings and placed him in the broader context of mid-century Canadian politics. And even then, Hadesbeck’s significance probably is more as symbol than as spy.

Dennis Gruending’s indefatigable efforts in A Communist for the RCMP to set out how Hadesbeck infiltrated various Communist and labour cells provide a glimpse into how Second World War and Cold War anxieties shaped if not warped Canada almost as much as they did the United States. It must be said, however, that there was enough Communist activity in Canada — and, more critically, a surfeit of RCMP paranoia — to keep a man like Hadesbeck fairly well occupied for more than a third of a century. Indeed, in these pages the RCMP emerges as an agency of congenital conservative impulses, deep suspicions about the motives and activities of Canadian citizens, and habitual misgivings about social and cultural transformation — an organization that, Gruending argues, continues to align “its efforts with those who want to prevent that change from occurring.”

The son of German-speaking Hungarian immigrants living near Aylesbury, Saskatchewan, Hadesbeck was orphaned at age eleven. Over the next two decades, he worked as a ranch hand on the American Great Plains and the Canadian prairies and served in and deserted the U.S. military. He landed in Spain in 1938 to fight on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War; after his return, he was recruited by the Mounties as a paid informant. Suspicion of Communism began with the Russian Revolution and metastasized with the Winnipeg General Strike two years later; the political atmosphere was filled with questions about the motives of those who flocked to the Spanish conflict. A memo from the commanding officer in Saskatchewan to the RCMP leadership in Ottawa captured the skepticism about Republican volunteers: “Our experience in Saskatchewan is that the vast majority of these men have been drawn from the transient and unemployed elements, men who are disgruntled and have become discouraged, whose mental outlook has become warped and unusable owing to the restlessness attendant on their mode of life during the past few years.” So much for the romance that drew George Orwell, André Malraux, John Dos Passos, and Ernest Hemingway to Madrid to witness the conflict or to battle Francisco Franco and the Nationalists.

The RCMP’s great fear: that starry-eyed idealists and innocent dupes, infected by socialism and Communism, would return to Canada and spread the spores of revolution across the country. William Lyon Mackenzie King felt likewise, and his government in 1937 passed the Canadian Foreign Enlistment Act, which made it illegal for Canadian volunteers to fight in another country’s conflict. Idle and drifting — the Mountie in Saskatchewan wasn’t entirely wrong — Hadesbeck pretty much wandered into the civil war nonetheless, mostly for the prosaic reason that he had little better to do. A few Communists and socialists paid his way from Lethbridge to Calgary to Toronto to New York and then, in third-class accommodations on the SS President Roosevelt, on to Europe. “Hadesbeck was naive to believe that he would improve his lot in a war zone,” Gruending writes, “but the prospect of fighting in Spain was more alluring for him than working on a sheep ranch or being an unemployed drifter.”

Hadesbeck showed early distrust of politics — of Communism especially. When a researcher working for Pierre Berton asked him about his time in Spain, Hadesbeck described it as “a great experience” but added, “It taught me this one thing, not to believe a politician. I now feel that the war was fought for political reasons rather than to better conditions for the people.” Welcome to the real world, Frank.

Eventually the Mounties got their hands on Hadesbeck. “I was alone and broke and looking for a job,” he later recalled. It was intelligence about his experience, judgment, and psychological profile that attracted the RCMP. To some extent, Gruending must speculate when it comes to Hadesbeck’s motives, but a newspaper clipping in his files —“Communists are parasites who live on, and who have risen to office on the backs of, deluded labor-unionists”— suggests a growing ideological strain, slight as it may be. That meshed nicely with what Gruending calls “an expansion in the RCMP’s capacity to carry out surveillance on the subversives that it believed existed everywhere.”

And so there was deep irony in Hadesbeck’s assignment: his job as an informer depended on his willingness to join the Communist Party. As he eventually wrote in his private papers:

In direct contradiction to the famous but naive axiom of the former U.S. secretary of state H. L. Stimson —“Gentlemen don’t read each other’s mail”— Hadesbeck intercepted an enormous amount of correspondence. He ferreted out letters left around the party office and copied down phone numbers on scratch pads and on papers he retrieved from the trash basket. He was able to produce a list of names and addresses of nearly 200 Communists in the Calgary area; of those who attended various mass meetings; of the subscribers to the party newspaper; and of the donors to a strike fund for Ontario gold miners. A sometimes busy guy, he produced news releases and leaflets for the party and sold books with such alluring titles as The Teachings of Karl Marx, Problems of Leninism, and The War of National Liberation, by Joseph Stalin. Presumably he didn’t read any of them; it is almost hard to believe anyone did. He also went to work at a meat-packing plant to, as he put it, “keep track of the inroads the Alberta Communist Party was making in the labour movement.”

As part of Hadesbeck’s subterfuge, he even kept secret the fact that he had been married in the decidedly un-Communist setting of St. Mary’s, the Roman Catholic cathedral in Calgary. Despite his efforts to live a parallel life, he inevitably was found out and was expelled from the Labour Progressive Party in 1945. But that didn’t end his surveillance work. He relocated to Regina and, in time, monitored students and professors at the city’s University of Saskatchewan campus. He also cast his eye on members of farm organizations and the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission, as well as Indigenous leaders (including those of the Indian-Métis Friendship Centres and the Saskatchewan Native Women’s Association, very likely not looming threats to Canadian security). Among his targets were Berton (“A good contributor and fellow traveller say some Communist Party members,” he wrote in a memo) and Farley Mowat (“Some say a C. party member”). In fairness, or perhaps in an example of unfairness, Mowat was denied entry to the United States in 1985 for a book tour on the basis that he might have had associations with “Communists, anarchists or subversives.” The renowned author believed the notion was spurious and might have been sown by gun rights lobbyists across the border.

Gruending came away with a dim view of his subject, a mere foot soldier in the government fight against Communists. “It is easy to see Hadesbeck as deceitful, cynical, and self-serving,” Gruending writes. “He did not become an informant for ideological reasons or as an act of patriotism. He did it for the money and perhaps a sense of power and excitement.” Admittedly, Hadesbeck himself, who died in 2006, held a dim view of his own work. “The basic objective, it seemed to me, was to maintain the status quo in the country, and therefore our responsibility was to infiltrate and inform on organizations or people who were wanting to change the status quo,” he wrote in the late 1970s. “Most people in this category would be left of centre.”

The RCMP does not emerge in Gruending’s telling with a sterling reputation — anything but. Its methods, targets, surveillance activities, and arrests resemble something of a conservative jeremiad. In an example of Newtonian physics grafted onto Canadian politics, the abusive overreach of Ottawa and its anti-Red impulses served to create an opposite reaction that actually boosted the Communist Party in the country. Even the party’s support of Canada’s efforts in the Second World War did not dampen the government’s ardour.

“The Security Service betrayed Canadians by casting such a wide net in its surveillance and using that information against ordinary and well-intentioned people,” Gruending declares in his preface. “Politicians who guided the process betrayed those whose rights and freedoms were violated in such a cavalier manner.” This certainly was not a case of (as F. R. Scott, remembered for his devastating takedown of Mackenzie King, might have put it) doing “nothing by halves / Which can be done by quarters.”