There was something suspicious about the young, hippie-looking man who rolled up to François Paulette’s home, out of the blue, in a Datsun pickup truck.

It was Yellowknife in the 1970s, an era of transformative change, so this wasn’t unusual. But the stranger, who introduced himself as “Bob,” last name unknown, soon raised some red flags.

“He started talking kind of crazy,” said Paulette, a respected Denesuline elder from Fort Smith, N.W.T., and member of the Order of Canada, in a recent interview at Yellowknife’s Explorer Hotel. 

At the time, Paulette was chief of Smith’s Landing First Nation (now Tthebatthie Denesųłiné Nation), and the youngest chief in the Northwest Territories. Bob was urging the Dene to get more militant in their struggle against the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline, a contentious proposal to bring gas from Alaska to the south, Paulette said. That was the first red flag. 

The next was something in the Datsun: a brand-new survival mess kit, a portable camping-style cookware set designed for military use. 

“Those mess kits, I know, are issued to Army and RCMP,” said Paulette, so he asked about it.  

That was the moment Paulette realized something many other Dene leaders would come to suspect in the 1970s — that he may be under surveillance. He was told the kit turned up on the side of the road. 

“Well, if this mess kit fell off the vehicle, it would have been all smashed up,” Paulette remembered thinking.

“And then I realized: This guy was bullshitting.”

Paulette may have gotten the same reaction telling this tale in the past — but not any more.

CBC News has obtained a newly declassified copy of the RCMP Security Service’s nearly 1,700-page intelligence dossier on the Dene Nation which confirms the Mounties had five paid informers “targeted specifically” against the organization as late as September 1978, in an extensive intelligence probe already five years old by then.

Paulette, three consecutive Dene Nation presidents, their advisers and others were repeatedly and unknowingly targeted by informers who surreptitiously passed information along to the Mounties, papers confirm. They were among hundreds of Indigenous people and at least 30 organizations monitored under the Mounties’ Cold War-era “Native extremism” program.

The Dene Nation organization, known first as the Indian Brotherhood of the Northwest Territories, was established to fight for land and treaty rights. Its methods — suing for Aboriginal title, pressing for self-determination, building international solidarity — were groundbreaking then. Today, they’re commonplace.

The extensive probe into the Dene Nation began in 1973 but went “full-scale” in 1976, fuelled by fears they were plotting a violent revolution inspired by African decolonization movements. By 1978, this roster of informers included four casuals and a fifth who was paid $300 per month, $6 per hour, plus expenses. A full-time spy. 

“If five informants were getting paid good money to harass me, to infiltrate me, to put me under surveillance, I think the RCMP’s conduct should be investigated,” Paulette said.

He had led an important legal battle for the Dene, asserting Aboriginal title to nearly 1.2 million square kilometres of land in 1973. But this was before his chief’s position was salaried, and Paulette recalled having to visit the welfare office at one point to get food money. 

The memory moved him to sadness.

“That raises a little bit of anger,” he said, “that a single man was getting paid by the government, the RCMP, and here I am trying to feed my family.”

In a joint investigation, CBC Indigenous and CBC Investigates interviewed seven people named in the Dene Nation dossier to reconstruct the Mounties’ Yellowknife operation. We learned Dene leaders still believe the Security Service bugged their office, broke into it, stole and leaked material while aiming to discredit them via Operation Checkmate, a national disruption program.

Georges Erasmus, Dene Nation president from 1976 to 1983, was astounded to learn his organization was infiltrated, asking simply, “Why?” But as the information sunk in, he soon had an answer.

“What it actually means is I was considered an enemy of the state,” said Erasmus, who was elected Assembly of First Nations national chief in 1988. 

“The more I think about it, the more it really bothers me. I spent my life trying to improve the policies of this country.”

Stephen Kakfwi succeeded Erasmus as Dene Nation president in 1983. He wasn’t surprised at all by the number of informers revealed in the files.

“For them to keep track of us, they needed more than just one person at the airport,” said Kakfwi, who later became a territorial cabinet minister and then premier of the Northwest Territories.

“They needed to know where we’re staying. They needed to know what meetings we were going to. Some of the information seems to read like they must have been tapping into people’s phones.”

He too was upset by the Mounties’ focus on sensitive information about spouses and personal lives, internal factionalism and division.

“It confirms that it was true, my suspicions were true,” he said. 

“But it also makes me angry. I think, what kind of a country is this? What kind of people would do that?” 

A link to Wounded Knee

The answer to that question lies on Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, where the militant American Indian Movement (AIM) occupied the village of Wounded Knee in February 1973, igniting a deadly, 71-day armed confrontation with U.S. authorities.

A few months later, 2,300 kilometres north, James Wah-Shee, who was president of the Dene Nation, had just landed in Yellowknife to a cryptic message from his wife about visitors at home.

“When I got there, I saw South Dakota plates,” Wah-Shee recalled. 

“AIM was there. I had no prior contact with them. I had nothing to do with them.”

Wah-Shee vowed to keep silent to protect the Dene Nation. No media. No interviews. Nothing. He’s never publicly told the story. The uninvited guests were fugitive AIM leader Dennis Banks and his bodyguard Doug Durham, wanted by U.S. authorities in connection with Wounded Knee.

What no one knew then was that the trusted bodyguard, who had his own plane, was in fact an undercover FBI agent. Durham’s plane was under comprehensive surveillance in Canada the moment it landed, and this led Mounties straight to Wah-Shee’s doorstep. 

“They told me that the FBI and CIA were concerned about these individuals and that I would be possibly charged for harbouring fugitives,” said Wah-Shee, a Tłı̨chǫ elder and former territorial MLA.

In its reports, the Security Service said its goals were to “offset” any AIM influence in the North, where Mounties were disturbed by what they saw.

“There are innumerable situations where moral and social decay have progressed to deplorable levels,” wrote Insp. R.O. Byrne, who warned of potential volatility in the North.

Wah-Shee meanwhile was unsurprised to learn the Mounties had informers in his circle. AIM would soon leave, but the Security Service would not.

Investigation intensifies

Soon the methods intensified. First it was overt surveillance.

Stephen Kakfwi remembered walking into the brotherhood office one day, when he spotted a man crouched low in the backseat of a car, snapping Kakfwi’s picture. So he walked in and told the staff, who “thought it was an RCMP fellow by the name of McMartin.”

In fact, Sgt. R.W. (Rick) McMartin was Yellowknife’s new permanent Security Service investigator. In January 1976, he was busy establishing the office, working to “re-establish contact with new and old sources.”

This was largely a response to the Dene Declaration, a statement of rights released in summer 1975 asserting the Dene right to “self-determination within the country of Canada.”

The Mounties panicked: “The next logical step could entail terrorist acts to reinforce their demands,” one member wrote, while McMartin predicted “a political kidnapping” was a “real possibility.”

Erasmus and Kakfwi said McMartin liked to visit the iconic Gold Range bar looking for sources, and he wasn’t exactly discreet. Sometimes people fed him bogus tips.

“We knew what he looked like, and by himself he couldn’t deliver what he was asked to,” said Kakfwi.

“So I think he probably had somebody that worked in the Gold Range bar where a lot of us frequented.”

Then there were peculiar leaks. Paulette recalled telling Erasmus, “I think we have an informant in our group. I’ll check them out,” but the checks came back clean, so they began checking their office instead. 

Paranoia was spreading. Herb Norwegian, the current grand chief of the Dehcho First Nations, was standing by as staff started tearing apart a certain boardroom where Dene leadership met to make political plans.

“They went into the attic to check the vents,” Norwegian said.

 “And sure enough, we found a bug.”

“It was a listening device,” said Paulette. 

“We brought it to the RCMP and they denied it. They didn’t say it was theirs, or somebody must have planted it there. They just totally denied it.”

And then came the break-ins.

Early on March 31, 1977, Dene Nation staff found the office totally ransacked. Thieves had slipped in through a ceiling tile, yet nothing of cash value was stolen. Only documents. One of McMartin’s informers monitored internal reaction: “Debbie DeLancey is the only one who feels the RCMP, CIA or FBI may have been responsible.”

DeLancey said in an interview she was acutely aware of the FBI’s tactics because she’s originally from New York. Now a long-time Northerner and former territorial deputy minister, she ran the Dene’s Southern Support Group advocacy body in Ottawa, where she too had experienced an unnerving string of break-ins.

“One time they smeared makeup on the bathroom mirror,” she said.

“There was excrement on the floor. They plugged the bathtub and left it to overflow. Plugged the toilet and flushed it a few times so there was water on the floors. Another time they put some eggs in a pan, and left it on the stove cooking.”

Twice they cut phone wires, and one time they took a clothes iron, plugged it in, turned it to high heat, and then put it in the bed with blankets over it, she said. The culprit clearly knew how to pick a lock and had the premises under surveillance. 

The Ottawa police told them it was likely political harassment. DeLancey said police did little to investigate, “and so after two months of this, we actually moved out.”

Why?

Documents show Mounties in 1975 began to fear a coterie of radical white communists, hired as advisers under Wah-Shee, were plotting the next Wounded Knee in Dene country, using First Nations leaders as puppets.

The Security Service was likewise equally concerned about the work of Thomas Berger, the judge who was leading a public inquiry into the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline proposal.

According to the documents, N.W.T. Commissioner Stu Hodgson reportedly told the RCMP the Dene had “systematically prostituted the Berger Commission with the willing participation of Judge Berger” to advance their land claim.

Paulette called this theory “ludicrous,” but it’s what the Mounties thought. A senior Security Service agent even scrawled atop this report: “Is Berger a willing tool or just naive?” The same note also asked if there was “any way or means open to us to discredit” the Dene Nation’s non-Indigenous advisers.

Erasmus said it was later confirmed to him “by a very prominent Canadian,” whom he did not name, that the Mounties did the break-in because they were looking for a draft copy of Berger’s report. As for informers, researchers say human sources could be more effective and less risky than electronic sources.

“The U.S. version of this was the counterintelligence program, or COINTELPRO and it was also used to disrupt and destroy these types of organizations,” said political theorist Glen Coulthard from the Yellowknives Dene First Nation, director of the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies at University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

“So if you had rumours of infiltrators or rats or whatever, you would corrode the solidarity and the trust between activists so they would eat themselves from the inside.”

Checkmate

On that, consider Operation Checkmate, the Security Service’s national disruption program.

The papers reveal the Mounties incorrectly believed Paulette was leading an AIM-North chapter, which made him a target. He remembered driving on an Alberta highway one day when two unmarked police cars pulled him over. The Mountie in the back was close to Paulette’s tailgate.

“He grabbed his car phone. And I just overheard him say, ‘We have a Checkmate here. What should we do with him?'” Paulette said.

It meant nothing to him then. But now?

“The RCMP had developed the code for leaders, Indians, that were under surveillance and being watched,” he said. 

“The code was Checkmate. Now we find that information: Operation Checkmate.”

In fact, top Mounties ultimately responsible for the “Native extremism” programs decided to destroy the Checkmate files in 1974-75 and 1977, according to the McDonald Commission, which was later tasked with investigating illegal Security Service tactics.

When it came time to actually destroy the papers, the task was handed down to junior members. One was a Sgt. Hearst. 

The other was McMartin.

The Checkmate files may be gone, but the legacy of this era lives on. 

Kakfwi said he continued checking under beds and paintings for years. DeLancey still checks her home for intruders every time she gets back. Erasmus dismissed the idea of an apology out of hand. Paulette called it “an unnecessary, dangerous time that the police put us in.”

Later this year, he intends to ceremonially burn his copy of the Security Service’s intelligence dossier on the Dene Nation. It will put this dangerous time behind him for good.