How RCMP spies infiltrated the 1970s Indigenous rights movement

The Mounties called it the "Native extremism program." Today, it sounds like a spy novel.

Intelligence dossiers stuffed with documents. Wiretaps. Paid informants. Covert operatives with code numbers like "A-828." A Red Power dissident photo album. Surreptitious surveillance at homes, offices, airports and bars.

But it wasn't fiction.

In fact, newly declassified RCMP Security Service files confirm Canada's Cold War-era domestic intelligence agency infiltrated and sought to disrupt legitimate political Indigenous organizations in the 1970s, in an extensive program of covert surveillance, informants and countersubversion.

The files also corroborate for the first time that the Liberal government in the mid-1970s approved covert RCMP wiretaps to monitor the telephones of the National Indian Brotherhood, known today as the Assembly of First Nations, in Ottawa. 

That's no surprise to First Nations leaders like Georges Erasmus, former Dene Nation president and Assembly of First Nations national chief. He always knew the state was watching. Now he has the proof.

"Because it's been happening for so long, it's just become second nature," Erasmus said.

"I've always one way or another known that they were there."

Nearly 6,000 pages of documents reveal the Security Service was casually monitoring Indigenous political activity as early as 1968, amid concerns about outside influences from radicals and communists. Its posture changed in 1973, after 200 non-violent youth activists occupied the Department of Indian Affairs in Ottawa for 24 hours and made off with duffel bags full of documents. 

The Mounties never saw it coming. "The Security Service was unprepared," says a 1978 secret internal history, describing the agency as "unable to respond to government requests for intelligence."

"This, combined with a realization that continued unrest would generate more of these incidents, convinced the Security Service to embark on an extensive program of human source development in the Native area," the paper says.

A CBC Indigenous investigation has found the program evolved into a widespread and intrusive countrywide surveillance operation targeting far more than suspected radicals. Hundreds of Indigenous people and at least 30 legitimate political organizations were monitored.

The documents were released in 2025 after four access to information requests. The federal government fought the requests in court, delaying the release for years.

The files comprise hundreds of surveillance reports contained in more than two dozen manila file folders marked "racial intelligence." They name 150 RCMP members and confirm methods like paying informants, physical surveillance, filming, photographing, monitoring and meeting with media, liaising with Indian Affairs and the FBI, and checking sensitive government and privately held records.