Old Habits Die Hard – the dubious adventures of Grant Bristow, or how CSIS taught me everything I know about phone hacking

I’ve just recently been informed of a 2010 scandal involving ex-CSIS superstar Grant Bristow, who everyone these days knows better as Nathan Black. The story is convoluted and pathetic, and involves Grant Nathan pretending to be a phony reporter in order to conduct some mock aggressive interviews with Edmonton mayor Stephen Mendel. In other words, a déjà vu throwback to Bristow’s good old times – a dirty tricks campaign (in this case, against a Jewish person). Of course, the prank went terribly wrong since nobody quite “got” Bristow’s sense of humour and he was subsequently hit with a libel charge. Anyway, you can read more of the tawdry affair here.

Reflecting back on my own personal encounters with Grant Bristow, it now dawns on me how wrong I was about him. How that poor man must have suffered. After I provided information on the Heritage Front, my life in hiding was absolutely nothing in comparison to the suffering Grant must have endured: the abrupt cessation of those few things that gave his life such joy and meaning – telephoning people under the guise of interviewing them, donning alternate personas only to mock and scare those on the other line. Breaking into answering machines to lift information that he would pass out to Heritage Front skinheads. Oh, how he’d miss his perennial favourites – putting skinheads up to crank call individuals on his target list, individuals who would end up being followed, harassed and terrorized 24 hours a day.

Today’s media have only half the story right: yes, Grant Bristow undoubtedly did his duty as agent provocateur extraordinaire to build up a racist empire in Canada. The part where the Bristow myth falls apart is in the fact that, no matter which way you spin things, Grant Bristow did NOT take down the Heritage Front.

That task befell a number of tireless activists, a sleuthing journalist for the Toronto Sun, Bill Dunphy, and as a result of the brave actions of a House of Commons staff member, Brian McInnis, who leaked an internal report to the Attorney General which warned of possible problems involving the activities of a CSIS agent in the field.

In the several years in which Bristow moulded and partially-funded the Heritage Front and their subsequent criminal activities, NOT ONE CRIMINAL CHARGE was laid against any Canadian white supremacist as a result of his actions. But it gets even better — Bristow was even busted by Metro Police with a trunk full of smuggled guns – but the police were promptly told “from above” to let him go and not pursue the matter.

Following Bill Dunphy’s front page exposé of Bristow in the Toronto Sun, our boy was promptly plucked out of the Toronto area by his handlers and placed into the Witness Protection Program. He was given a large home in Edmonton equipped with a three-car garage and an allowance of several thousand dollars per month. I have to ask myself, For what, exactly?

Let’s first start with the definition of hero: according to Oxford Dictionary, this is “a person, especially a man, who is admired by many people for doing something brave or good.” (Uh, as in instigate terror campaigns against people because of their differing political beliefs and sexual orientation? Because that’s what Bristow did. But I’m getting ahead of myself here).

How is Bristow a hero of the people? Well, let’s go down the list:

1. Did any criminal charges get laid against any HF white supremacists as a direct result of his information? No.
2. Did he testify in any proceedings against any Heritage Front members? Nope.
3. Did he ever supplant police with any affidavits that were ultimately used to prosecute anybody? I mean, given the hundreds of thousands (likely millions) of taxpayer dollars that went into this operation, did anything concrete come out of Grant Bristow? Or are we only left with a bunch of hate speeches on YouTube and a bad taste in our mouths? Nada. Ugh, I’m starting to see a pattern here.
4. Were either himself or his handlers charged with criminal harassment over the It Campaign, over possession of illegal weapons, or instigating a riot (as in what happened in June 1993)? No again. No criminal charges were ever laid (though rumour is, the handler was either demoted or fired, though I cannot confirm this).

What makes a hero in the eyes of Canadian media? Somehow I doubt it involves such dubiously-heroic acts as teaching underage girls like myself how to break into answering machines and how to “fuck with people’s heads” until they “shit their pants and have a total breakdown.” Though that is precisely what he did.

However, such heroic acts are deemed to merit exposure in press arenas such as Walrus Magazine, or worth standing ovations from synagogue audiences who blissfully had no clue about the character of the man who they were thanking, and what they were really giving applause for.

In contrast to Bristow, I’m not as full of myself as to claim that I acted heroically. However, I can answer yes to the first 3 of the above questions.

1. YES, white supremacists were charged as a result of my information. And not just anybody, but Wolfgang Droege himself and a couple of his cronies went to jail.
2. YES, my testimony resulted in convictions. And if CSIS hadn’t told the OPP and RCMP to back off my affidavits in order to protect their operative, many MORE convictions might have resulted.
3. YES, my information was used to weed out a KKK-attending, Heritage Front member who just happened to be a police officer and gun-totting member of the Toronto Police Services.
4. NO, I wasn’t given a three-car garage mansion in the suburbs, or an allowance of $3000 a month for years and years afterwards. Hell, I wasn’t even given a change of ID.

I panhandled on the streets of Ottawa and Halifax to feed myself. I dumpster-dived for food between court appearances and lived in shelters. After I did my part to take down the Heritage Front, I had nothing, couldn’t use my ID, and was on the run for my life. I received absolutely nothing, not even protection, from this government.

But I ain’t a hero, and unlike Bristow, I wouldn’t feel comfortable making such a claim. I’m just a nobody, someone who did what they had to in order to dismantle a vicious organization and take those bastards down.

And no, I’m not only talking about the Heritage Front here.

UPDATE: For a comprehensive media library of what took place in the 1990s, please start by checking out this blog entry (Race Traitor: The Media Library) and the mainstream media articles and documentary footage listed.

Also – here is a free PDF excerpt of my book, which includes affidavit-backed details of Bristow’s criminal activity within the Heritage Front: RACE-TRAITOR Excerpt by ELISA HATEGAN

If you enjoyed the read or found it useful, please consider dropping a dollar in my Patreon donation jar .

History that is forgotten is destined to be repeated

This time of the year, around Remembrance Day, I get more emotional than usual. I search through my genetic memory and reach for my dead, faceless grandfathers. One was a captain in the Austro-Hungarian army during WW1, the other died in battle during WW2 while my mother was an infant. I never knew either of them. I never saw a photo of either of them.

War is a brutal, awful thing. It destroys photographs, it curls up the edges of memories and leaves only a hollow longing in its place.

My mother’s father was shot through the head in the Romanian battlefields at the end of the Second World War, in 1944.  A bullet smashed through a gap in his helmet and entered through his left ear just as my mother, an infant at the time, fell from a great height and shattered her tympanic membranes, rendering her deaf in the same ear.

My father’s father was a highly-decorated captain who met my grandmother Anna in Transylvania, where his troops were stationed. She eloped with him to Hungary, where she had her baby. But his family, because of Anna’s lack of dowry (my great-grandfather denied her inheritance because she’d ran off with a Hungarian), intercepted the marriage. My poor grandmother, all of eighteen, was put out on the street with a baby in her hands. A baby who ended up deaf, the villagers gossiped, because Anna had kept him a secret throughout the pregancy. But my father would never know his own Papa, because my grandfather would be killed in battle only two years later.

Even though I’ve never known, much less seen a mere photograph of them, both my grandfathers are here with me today. Their courage flows through my bloodstream. The untold horrors they must have faced in open combat claw at my consciousness.

We live in a world where so many people my age take for granted the freedoms we enjoy, the personal liberties that surround us, the fact that we can sit back and write sarcastic quips on the internet mocking this war and that one, but we lack the understanding that sometimes war is necessary for survival. That sometimes picking up a weapon is not an option, but a need. That is courage. What those naive, red-cheeked young people who entered battles for the love of country, for the love of all that was right, and met with hatred, and terror, and death. Who came home — if they were lucky — scarred in psyche and in body, their innocence ripped from them by the savagery of war.

War is in my blood, and whether you deny it or not, it’s in your blood also. You can’t run from it. Its legacy, for better or for worse, is all around us. We are the descendandants of several millenia of bloodshed and revolutions. The fact that we are here signifies that our lineage is built on the triumph of the victorious. We are the ones who survived, and we did so because of our ancestors. Because of the countless wars and savage battles they fought to give us our freedoms today, as frought with uncertainty as they are.

So let us remember our grandfathers and grandmothers and all those brave souls who were forced to grow up way too fast, and whose innocence was robbed well before their time. For if we forget the greatest treasure they gave us — our life and our freedom — then history is destined to be repeated.

Starbucks: conscious promoter of social change, or consumer whore?

Yesterday, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz made international news with his announcement of Starbucks’ generous new approach to lifting the American economy from the gutter through their new “Create Jobs for USA” program: selling cheap wristband bracelets to help the poor.

Within a few hours, Twitterverse was buzzing with conscientious shoppers doing their part to help the poor. Instead of dropping a fiver into the empty cup held by that drunken bum at the corner, Manhattan fashionistas were walking away from Starbucks with a frappuccino and a piece of garbage elastic trinket around their wrist, feeling all the better for having done their social duty. Who would have thought helping the impoverished could be as sexy as a lattee-soaked biscotti? I mean, how better a way to celebrate having a job (and therefore, money) than buying a $5 lattee while thinking that you’re helping the unemployed?

The sweet irony here is that it’s Starbucks — Starbucks! the ONE company whose profits have not gone down during this recession, but way up — of all companies, to come forward with the whole “let’s help the poor without hurting our profit bottom line” idea, when, if you really think about it, they could help society all the better by donating one day’s worth of sales to any of a gazillion agencies helping the unemployed.

Methinks if Starbucks donated so much as ONE HOUR’s worth of total profits, the world would be a far better place. Instead, they come out with a marketing/advertising campaign designed to draw people inside their coffee shops — where hopefully they’ll buy more than a shitty nylon bracelet. But speaking of that shitty trinket, whose minuscule net profits (after marketing and production costs are deducted, understandably) will go toward some faceless unemployed schmuck in the hopes that he/she will soon raise back to their feet and revisit their neighbourhood Starbucks.

So yeah, let’s see this transformation from Starbucks-the-obscenely-priced-superchain to Starbucks-the-superhero-chain which single-handedly tackled the US jobless woes with a wristband and a cuppa java. Pretty ironic, ain’t it, for a monster company that has long been criticized for putting small coffee shops out of business.