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A Communist for the Rcmp: The Uncovered Story of a Social Movement Informant
In 1941, the RCMP recruited Frank Hadesbeck, a Spanish Civil War veteran, as a paid informant to infiltrate the Communist Party. For decades, he informed not only upon communists, but also upon hundreds of other people who held progressive views. Hadesbeck’s “Watch Out” lists on behalf of the Security Service included labour activists, medical doctors, lawyers, university professors and students, journalists, Indigenous and progressive farm leaders, members of the clergy, and anyone involved in the peace and human rights movements.
Defying every warning given to him by his handlers, Hadesbeck kept secret notes. Using these notes, author Dennis Gruending recounts how the RCMP spied upon thousands of Canadians. Hadesbeck’s life and career are in the past, but RCMP surveillance continues in new guises. As Canada’s petroleum industry doubles down on its extraction plans in the oil sands and elsewhere, the RCMP and other state agencies provide support, routinely branding Indigenous land defenders and their allies in the environmental movement as potential terrorists. They share information and tactics with petroleum industry “stakeholders” in what has been described as a “surveillance web” intended to suppress dissent. A Communist for the RCMP provides an inside account of Hadesbeck’s career and illustrates how the RCMP uses surveillance of activists to enforce the status quo.
Defying every warning given to him by his handlers, Hadesbeck kept secret notes. Using these notes, author Dennis Gruending recounts how the RCMP spied upon thousands of Canadians. Hadesbeck’s life and career are in the past, but RCMP surveillance continues in new guises. As Canada’s petroleum industry doubles down on its extraction plans in the oil sands and elsewhere, the RCMP and other state agencies provide support, routinely branding Indigenous land defenders and their allies in the environmental movement as potential terrorists. They share information and tactics with petroleum industry “stakeholders” in what has been described as a “surveillance web” intended to suppress dissent. A Communist for the RCMP provides an inside account of Hadesbeck’s career and illustrates how the RCMP uses surveillance of activists to enforce the status quo.
- GenresNonfictionHistoryCanada
256 pages, Paperback
Published June 18, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
September 3, 2024
Essential reading. Shows just how awful the RCMP is and always has been.
November 5, 2024
In activist circles, it’s taken as a given that all movements have their infiltrators. Sometimes groups are successful in flushing out the spies in their midst, but often they remain embedded for years as trusted comrades. Frank Hadesbeck was one such case. After enlisting to fight in the Spanish Civil War for financial rather than moral reasons, in 1941 Hadesbeck was recruited by the RCMP to join the Saskatchewan chapter of the Canadian Communist Party, a membership he maintained for more than 30 years.
Biographer Dennis Gruending sets himself two tasks. The first is to use Hadesbeck’s career as a vehicle for exploring the RCMP’s scrutiny of the Canadian left in the mid-20th century. He frequently zooms out from the details of Hadesbeck’s day to day treachery to discuss broader historical points like the evolution of the RCMP and the modern surveillance state in Canada, or their rabid certainty that the architects of the Medicare program were Communist plotters. These overviews are mostly cursory in nature but, given how little has been written on the topic of police espionage in Canada, the discursions are welcome.
Gruending’s other task is to understand Hadesbeck’s motivations, and how he was able to maintain his double-life for so long. Working from Hadesbeck’s files and abortive attempt at a memoir, Gruending describes a figure of Eichmann-esque banality: a lonely man of no political principles, clinging through the decades to his own self-image as a stoic deep cover agent, even as the Communist Party withers into irrelevance and the RCMP openly treats him as disposable. Despite his occasional pretentions of patriotism, this small man played Judas because it made him feel important. In the end, the question is not how Hadesbeck lived with himself, but how his comrades lived with him so long without ever seeing the void beneath his committed veneer—and how contemporary activists can learn from such examples.
- Mul
Biographer Dennis Gruending sets himself two tasks. The first is to use Hadesbeck’s career as a vehicle for exploring the RCMP’s scrutiny of the Canadian left in the mid-20th century. He frequently zooms out from the details of Hadesbeck’s day to day treachery to discuss broader historical points like the evolution of the RCMP and the modern surveillance state in Canada, or their rabid certainty that the architects of the Medicare program were Communist plotters. These overviews are mostly cursory in nature but, given how little has been written on the topic of police espionage in Canada, the discursions are welcome.
Gruending’s other task is to understand Hadesbeck’s motivations, and how he was able to maintain his double-life for so long. Working from Hadesbeck’s files and abortive attempt at a memoir, Gruending describes a figure of Eichmann-esque banality: a lonely man of no political principles, clinging through the decades to his own self-image as a stoic deep cover agent, even as the Communist Party withers into irrelevance and the RCMP openly treats him as disposable. Despite his occasional pretentions of patriotism, this small man played Judas because it made him feel important. In the end, the question is not how Hadesbeck lived with himself, but how his comrades lived with him so long without ever seeing the void beneath his committed veneer—and how contemporary activists can learn from such examples.
- Mul
August 24, 2024
As Canadians we often act like our shit doesn't smell. Most people know about nsa spying, or Japanese internment, and fbi wire tapping. However most of what Canada has done isn't on the radar. A communist for the rcmp seeks to rectify this, and explores the Canadian side of the red scare and the state survailence that arose with it.
It follows the life of Frank Hadesbeck and his life as an Informant. What I found more interesting though was the history of the rcmp sprinkled throughout. Learning about their origins, and then the use as strike breakers and then state survailence.
I also enjoyed the sections about them being afraid of the cbc and universities as breeding grounds for left wing ideologies. Some things never change I guess.
It follows the life of Frank Hadesbeck and his life as an Informant. What I found more interesting though was the history of the rcmp sprinkled throughout. Learning about their origins, and then the use as strike breakers and then state survailence.
I also enjoyed the sections about them being afraid of the cbc and universities as breeding grounds for left wing ideologies. Some things never change I guess.
May 27, 2025
This book wants to expand from the particular to the national. Dennis Gruending has researched the life of a 30 year informant for the RCMP who worked in Calgary and Regina and was a member of the communist party while getting paid to inform on his contacts and others. What is clear is how he provided what was asked for to keep the relationship nurtured. This brings into question the need to surveil and monitor so many for so little benefit. The book does not explore any strategies or op plans that resulted from the intel. Gruending speculates that the commie threat has evolved into surveillance of citizens engaged in environmental work and First Nations activism.
March 1, 2025
Disturbing disclosure of the paranoid behaviour behind the scenes in this country. Distasteful and appalling invasions of privacy and assumptions made to further the agenda of those in power.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews