Over the next few years, Bristow polished his skills with several investigation firms in Toronto, conducting surveillance, background checks, probes into insurance fraud and vandalism, and providing hotel security. He graduated to undercover operations that required him to assume a variety of identities and win people’s faith and confidence while erasing any evidence of his past. The work built on his innate ability to observe, anticipate, and mimic the actions of others. With time, Bristow became an accomplished actor, and that, combined with his appetite for a healthy paycheque and his love of the work, made him an ideal undercover agent.
Bristow’s taste for intrigue and subterfuge seemed at odds with another, more charitable, aspect of his nature. His mother, Bristow says, imbued him with a devotion to civil rights. The stirring speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., and John F. Kennedy, and the courage of Rosa Parks, the mother of the civil-rights movement in the United States, cemented Janet Bristow’s abiding belief in the equality of all races, says Bristow. Like her, he became determined to make the world “a less hateful place.”
Another early and potent influence was a family friend, Maurice Klagsbrun, a European Jew who, as a child, had seen most of his family destroyed by the Holocaust. Sheltered by Belgian nuns, Maurice survived, and was later taken in as a foster child by a Jewish family whose name he adopted. Klagsbrun’s story left an indelible mark on Bristow.
Bristow’s long, covert affair with csis began in early 1986 when a South African diplomat called from Ottawa and offered the budding private eye a lucrative contract to provide security for the then-rogue state’s diplomatic missions in Canada. (At the time, the government of President P.W. Botha was still brutally suppressing the country’s majority black population, and anti-apartheid demonstrators around the globe routinely vented their revulsion and anger in front of South Africa’s diplomatic posts abroad.) Bristow expressed an interest and met the envoy – an immaculately dressed man with a beaming smile – for an expensive lunch at the Sutton Place hotel in downtown Toronto. Between courses, the diplomat discreetly told Bristow that he needed someone to build up dossiers on Canadian “agitators.” Bristow realized that he was being asked to spy on Canadians who were legitimately expressing their opposition to apartheid. He was willing to provide security for the South Africans, he says, but he was not prepared to cross the line into espionage for a foreign government. He feigned interest, however, and then, on the advice of a friend, arranged to meet a csis officer to report the South African’s overture. Not surprisingly, the officer wanted to reel in the foreign diplomat-cum-spy, so Bristow agreed to take on the assignment and report back to csis.
Bristow’s first foray into the duplicitous world of espionage was an unqualified success. On August 20, 1986, Ottawa expelled one South African diplomat from the country and barred another from returning to Canada. In the nomenclature of spies, Bristow had become an “asset.”
Early the following year, Bristow had a chance meeting with Max French, described as a “right-wing nut bar” by the friend who introduced them. At the time, Bristow knew little, if anything, about right-wing extremism in Canada. Nevertheless, he reported his encounter to csis and was encouraged to befriend French and take a peek into the racist right. Bristow agreed, but cautioned his new csis handler that he had just joined Kuehne and Nagel, one of the world’s largest logistics and transportation firms, as an in-house investigator.
To help ease Bristow’s entry into the white supremacists’ milieu, csis gave him a cursory sketch of the movement’s principal players, along with a copy of The Turner Diaries; written in 1978 by William Pierce, a former physics professor and neo-Nazi, it is a fantasy novel that serves as a manifesto for many white supremacists. (The book centres on a fictional race war that results in the overthrow of the U.S. government and the systematic killing of Jews and non-whites, followed by the establishment of an “Aryan” world order.)
Bristow’s efforts to befriend French failed, but a few months later he managed to penetrate the extreme right when a fellow private investigator introduced him to a zealous anti-Communist and a Jew who had apparently repudiated his faith. He invited Bristow to a meeting of the Nationalist Party of Canada, held at the modest Toronto home of its leader, Don Andrews. Andrews had emigrated from Yugoslavia in 1952; he later used money he made as a landlord to bankroll a steady stream of racist propaganda, which led to his conviction in 1985 for spreading hatred. By then, Andrews was a fixture in the white supremacist movement in Canada, holding court on Saturday mornings when his followers, dubbed “Androids,” would gather at his home to listen to his paranoid invective.
In the fall of 1988, Bristow stepped into what was then the heart of Canada’s racist right. And so began csis’s Operation Governor. According to Bristow, when the operation was launched, there was no master plan, no timetable, and no list of defined targets. In fact, the probe was little more than a fact-finding mission, with Bristow poking at the margins of the radical right. Although he regularly took instructions from his handlers, Bristow enjoyed a large measure of autonomy. Operation Governor’s success or failure would depend entirely on him.
Bristow had arrived at an opportune time. The movement was aching for new members and he stood out, intellectually and financially, from most Nationalist Party members, many of whom were high-school dropouts, unemployed, or on welfare. Andrews welcomed him unreservedly and, in return, Bristow stroked Andrews’ large ego and mimicked the Nationalist Party leader’s behaviour and rhetoric. In intelligence lingo, Bristow was “mirroring” his target in order to establish a psychological kinship with him.
