Re: O/T - Jack? Were your colleagues hanging out at our college campuses ... hmmmm? ... ;)

On Jun 29, 3:04 pm, "La N" <nilita2004NOS...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2007/06/29/cia-spying...

CIA spied on left-wing Canadians in '60s, '70s: documents

B.C. professor monitored in spy operation calls it 'utterly shameful'

Last Updated: Friday, June 29, 2007 | 11:52 AM PT
CBC News

The Central Intelligence Agency spied on Canadians critical of the Vietnam
War during the late 1960s and '70s in an operation code-named "MH Chaos,"
CBC News has learned.

The CIA operation was aimed at 'sabotaging public opposition to U.S.
policy.'-Mordecai Brienberg, one of the Canadians monitored by the CIA
The U.S. spy agency targeted university professors, students and other
Canadians who the agency believed were espousing left-wing ideas.

CBC News found out about the surveillance program's activities north of the
border after obtaining declassified CIA documents.

According to the files, MH Chaos was a parallel undertaking to the CIA's
"Operation Chaos," a domestic program that kept tabs on left-wing activity
on U.S. college campuses.

The agency developed a network of informants on Canadian campuses in the
late 1960s and had reports sent down from Ottawa to the CIA's headquarters
at Langley, Va.

Among the Canadians listed for monitoring in one of those reports was
Mordecai Brienberg, a former political science professor at B.C.'s Simon
Fraser University.

Brienberg told the CBC he was not surprised to see his name surface on a CIA
document three decades later, but blasted the monitoring operation as
"utterly shameful."

"We were engaging students in a more accurate view of how the world was
organized," he said.

An outspoken critic of the Vietnam War and advocate for student rights
during that era, Brienberg characterized his activities at the time as
"democratic and vigorous discussion that had an edge to it," but said his
views hardly amounted to subversion.

He said the lens should be turned back on the CIA, accusing the agency of
"sabotaging public opposition to U.S. policy" by using double agents.

'I've been having trouble flying for years'
Several other Canadians connected to Simon Fraser University also ended up
under CIA scrutiny.

In 1969, Martin Loney was the president of Simon Fraser's student union and
a well-known radical among Canadian students.

After graduating with a doctorate in sociology, Loney said he began to
suspect the CIA, Britain's MI-5 and the RCMP were blocking his career path
with misinformation.

"I knew I was on a U.S. watch list because I've been having trouble flying
for years," Loney said.

"I was denied a job at the Nova Scotia College of Design because the
principal said, 'We're not having him here because he'll burn down the
building.'"

Recruited at Cuban, Chinese embassies in Ottawa
Another element to MH Chaos dealt with recruiting informants in the Cuban
and Chinese embassies in Ottawa.

The spies were ordered to report on U.S. citizens trying to circumvent
Washington's ban on travelling to the two Communist countries by obtaining
their visas through Canada.

The declassified CIA documents did not show whether the Canadian government
was aware the CIA was spying on Canadian campuses.

I am waiting for the local book store to get a copy so I can look up
those redacted passages and pages. I think this is the stuff they gave
the Congressional committees back in the 70s and may not include some
of the really good stuff.

.

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