Why Mounties paid 5 informers to spy on Dene leaders: Inside a secret surveillance operation

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.