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Ernst Zundel's detention


March 3, 2003

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:



Ernst Zundel is in maximum lockdown in the Niagara Detention Center. I talked to him very briefly yesterday and a little longer this morning. He says the guards hang their heads because they are ashamed at what is happening but will not give him any explanation why he has to be in lock-down 24 hours a day. He says that he is being treated like Rudolf Hess, having his food shoved in without words, being permitted only a plastic spoon/fork combination - called a "spork", by the way - some kind of black humor? He writes his notes to himself and what letters he is allowed to send on the seat of his toilet, the only surface available to him.

I believe this treatment is being meted out to keep him from communicating with anyone, including media. The reason is that last Friday, he told the "war crimes" attorney acting for the government that the very agency, namely CSIS, that is trying to brand him as a "terrorist" is the outfit that had knowledge of the parcel bomb en route to the Zundel-Haus to kill him in 1995 - yet did not see fit to warn him or anybody else!

This WILL be said at the next hearing - if such a hearing is ever to take place. Allegedly, this hearing, scheduled for Friday, is open to media. When I talked to Ernst this morning, nobody had yet notified him of the date. I feel I have reason to fear that Ernst's enemies will move heaven and earth, and may even attempt to harm him, to prevent this hearing from happening.

Here is the pertinent information that has only recently come to light in a book titled "Covert Entry / Spies, Lies and Crimes: Inside Canada's Secret Service" by Andrew Mitrovica.

Andrew Mitrovica is one of Canada's leading investigative journalists. He has won numerous national and international awards for his reporting. He has worked at the fifth estate, CTV national news, W5 and most recently at the Globe and Mail, where he covered security and intelligence issues. Born in Melbourne, Australia, Mitrovica lives in Toronto.

The inside book flap carries this text:

"Canada's espionage agency, CSIS, enjoys operating deep in the shadows. Set up as a civilian force in the 80s after the RCMP spy service was abolished for criminal excesses, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service was to be a squeaky-clean contrast to its disgraced predecessors. But it's hard for Canadians to get a fix on how well CSIS is doing its job or how well it is behaving. This country's spymasters work diligently to prevent journalists, politicians and watchdog agencies from prying into their secret world.

"Few journalists have come close to rivalling Andrew Mitrovica at unveiling the stories CSIS does not want told. In COVERT ENTRY, the award-winning investigative reporter uncovers a disturbing pattern of venality, law-breaking and incompetence deep inside the service, and provides a fascinating window on its daily operations.

"At its core, COVERT ENTRY traces the eventful career of John Farrell, a veteran undercover operative who worked on some of the service's most sensitive cases and was ordered to break the law by senior CSIS officers in the name of national security. Mitrovica delivers a ground level, day-to-day look at who is actually running the show in national clandestine operations. The picture he paints definitively shatters the myth that CSIS respects the rights and liberties it is charged with protecting."


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From the back flap we learn this about John Farrel, the CSIS undercover agent who came out of the closet about his, and other operatives', illegal activities:

"As a dedicated operative in CSIS's covert war against terrorists and spies, John Farrell was once a true believer in the intelligence service's "Ways and Means Act": if you have a way to get things done, the means - legal or not - are justified. He is the first CSIS operative to openly discuss the details of his highly classified work. Whether he is condemned or applauded for breaking his silence, Farrell is offering up his story so that Canadians can gain a clearer understanding of what actually takes place in this country in the name of national security. And what this unofficial tour deep inside the service's cloistered world reveals is an alarming portrait of incompetence - and worse."

This hardcover, put out by Random House Canada, is listed at $35.95 and is available from Amazon.


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Mitrovica addresses how CSIS dealt with Ernst Zundel, a lifelong opponent of those individuals, groups and organizations who do not want the orthodox version of the Holocaust challenged, much less investigated. In the vernacular referred to as the Holocaust Lobby, Zundel has many times characterized the actions of this powerful and ruthless entity as being an extortion racket based on fictitious stories regarding the genocidal gassings of Jews in World War II in German concentration camps.

As you read Mitrovica, please keep in mind that this investigative journalist describes a highly unpopular, politically incorrect dissident activist who has been systematically demonized by Canadian media for decades - while under a judge's gag order for years that prevented him from defending his motives and honor.


Page 136 - 140 of Covert Entry:

Mitrovica: Ernst Zundel was another prime target of CSIS's allegedly covert campaign against white supremacists. For years, the balding, German-born immigrant ran what amounted to an anti-Semitic propaganda factory from his Victorian home in downtown Toronto. Working out of his ramshackle basement, Zundel churned out pamphlets on his printing press, held meetings and gave lectures, all with a common theme: the Holocaust was a hoax.


 

 

 

Mitrovica: The man who once described Hitler as his idol distributed his message to fellow travellers around the globe in an infamous booklet entitled DID SIX MILLION REALLY DIE? In it, Zundel claimed the Holocaust was a Jewish-inspired fraud. Canada Post temporarily stopped delivering Zundel's mail in 1981 because he was using the postal service to spread hatred. In 1985, Zundel was sentenced to 15 months in jail after being found guilty of wilfully causing harm to Canada's racial and social harmony.


 

 

 

 

 


"Three years later, [Zundel's] conviction was upheld on appeal. But in 1992, Zundel won an unexpected victory when the Supreme Court of Canada overturned his conviction on a charge of knowingly spreading false information about the Holocaust. The decision, not surprisingly, thrilled and emboldened the Holocaust denier and his supporters, including the nascent Heritage Front.


 

 


Mitrovica: After winning his legal reprieve, Zundel often made public appearances wearing a hard hat and carrying a large wooden cross.


 

 

 


Mitrovica: Zundel had prepared for the onslaught by wrapping his home in plastic. Riot police beat back the demonstrators. The ugly skirmish helped Zundel and his admirers get the media attention they longed for.


 


Mitrovica: But CSIS was also training a close eye on Zundel. The service was busy intercepting mail for Zundel's home from a postal station at 1 Yonge Street. Farrel says Zundel was also watched by the service. The APIs were called when Hitler's admirer was seen posting mail. A Canada Post driver would then be summoned to open the mailbox and allow an API to retrieve the mail. Who was this API? Frank Pilotte, [a postal inspector] though Farrell was often enlisted to help. Letters and packages for Zundel arrived from all over the world. On some days he received as many as 20 pieces of registered mail. CSIS was keen to establish a list of Zundel's worldwide supporters by noting the return addresses attached to each piece of correspondence. To Farrell's surprise, Zundel often received letters of encouragement and support from doctors, lawyers, university professors, as well as prison inmates.


 


Mitrovica: Farrell noticed that Pilotte took a particular interest in Zundel's mail. Just how much interest became apparent early one morning when the two APIs met behind a large grocery store on Danforth Avenue. Pilotte drove up in his white Buick, while Farrell arrived in his Geo Metro, a car he liked because it saved him money on gas. Pilotte had just returned from the postal station carrying a batch of Zundel's letters. As he flipped through the mail, Pilotte noticed that one letter was partially open. Curious, he decided to unseal it. Farrell urged him not to, warning him that the letters might be booby-trapped and that he was only inviting more trouble from Lunau. [Don Lunau was Farrell's superior] Pilotte opened the letter. Inside, he found a short note addressed to "Dear Ernst" urging the Holocaust denier to continue his campaign "to tell the truth." To help in that effort, the letter also contained a ten-dollar American bill, which the API slipped back into the envelope.

"It was amateurish," Farrell says. "It was none of the API's business what was in the mail."

Farrell didn't want to get embroiled in Pilotte's escapades, but as the program's troubleshooter, he had little choice. He told Lunau, who once again went easy on Pilotte.

Then Farrell caught a break on the Zundel beat during one of his routine visits to Canada Post's station at 1 Younge Street. Dishevelled and unshaven, he arrived at 6:30 a.m. and walked up to the station's second floor offices. He lumbered through a door leading to a restricted area that housed bag after bag of registered mail. On his way, he waved at Patrick Hilberg, the registration clerk who often handled Zundel's registered mail, and George Fyfe, the station's supervisor. Farrell had befriended them because he knew the pair could make his job a whole lot easier. They didn't know he was working for CSIS; they assumed he was still a postal inspector.

Farrell began rifling through the mail bags, searching for Zundel's registered mail. He often had to flick through a thousand pieces before plucking out Zundel's letters and packages. The mail, marked priority post, arrived from Australia, Germany, Austria, France and Switzerland. It was imperative that Farrell get his hands on the mail before Hilberg, because once the clerk documented its arrival, the clock began ticking on how long the service could hold on to the letters and packages. The sooner Farrell dumped Zundel's letters back into the mail stream, the less likely Zundel would complain about how tardy the postal service was.


 


Mitrovica: Farrell reached into the mail bag and pulled out a small box. Later he learned that he had just laid his hands on the Heritage Front's complete membership list and the names and addresses of every individual in Canada and overseas who received Zundel's anti-Semitic literature.


 


Mitrovica: It was an extraordinary stroke of luck. Rarely did that kind of information fall so conveniently into the laps of spy services. Finally, Farrell thought, Operation Vulva had paid dividends.


 


Mitrovica: Handling Zundel's mail was a risky business. Violence gravitated to the Holocaust denier. A pipe bomb once exploded behind his Carlton Street home, causing extensive damage.


 


Mitrovica: Farrell was always concerned when he intercepted Zundel's mail. He knew the self-promoting propagandist had enemies and that one day one of them might use the mail to deliver an unmistakable and violent message to his front door. Farrell liked his hands and wanted to keep them.


 


Lunau warned the APIs to be especially careful when handling any mail addressed to Zundel from a post office box from Vancouver. He refused to explain why the Vancouver address was on a watch list, but it was clear that he was worried that mail from that address might be used to conceal a bomb.

Farrell's own nervousness peaked when Lunau ordered him to temporarily stop intercepting parcels destined for Zundel's home. "I got a call from Lunau and he said, 'Stop checking the parcels. Just check the registered letters,' Farrell recalls. Lunau wasn't kidding. Farrell could hear the urgency in his voice.

In May 1995, a package arrived at Zundel's door apparently from a Vancouver post office box. Zundel let the package sit unopened in his home for nearly a week before claiming to notice that "it made a funny noise" when he shook it. He drove the suspicious package, cushioned by a bag of bird seed in the trunk of his car, to a local police station, where bomb experts discovered that it contained a powerful pipe bomb filled with large nails. Police cordoned off a block around the 51 Division police station in downtown Toronto. A remote-controlled robot gingerly placed the package in a blast-proof hopper. Later, the pipe bomb was detonated at a nearby spit, leaving behind a large crater. Zundel said the parcel, camouflaged to look like a book, bore an outdated return address for the post office box of his friend Tony McAleer, a B.C.-based white supremacist. Police said the bomb was packed with enough explosives to seriously maim or kill anyone within ninety meters of the blast.

Zundel was certain that Jewish groups were behind a plot to kill him. Initially, police investigated a phone call to the Toronto Sun by someone claiming responsibility in the name of an unknown organization called Jewish Armed Resistance. But the police weren't convinced that the Holocaust denier was telling the truth about the circumstances leading up to the discovery of the mail bomb. Why had Zundel waited five days before alerting them to the suspicious package?


 

 

 

 


Mitrovica: By late summer, however, the skepticism evaporated. Several police forces launched a joint probe after mail bombs were sent to five different targets: Zundel; another B.C.-based white spremacist, Charles Scott; the Mackenzie Institute, a Toronto-based terrorism and security-policy think tank; Kay Gardner, a Toronto City councillor; and Alta Genetics, Inc., a Calgary cattle-breeding centre. The Mounties believed that four of the bombs originated in Vancouver.

The mystery surrounding the mail bombs was solved when a shadowy group of anarchists, called the Militant Direct Action Task Force, sent "communiqués" to several media outlets claiming responsibility for all the potentially lethal letters, save the one to Kay Gardner. In its letters, which provided compelling evidence that the group was behind the mail bombs, the anarchists responded to media reports about the grave dangers to postal workers who had unwittingly handled the mail bombs. "We have tested our devices and found that only extremely rough handling (or opening them) would cause them to detonate. All packages have been marked PERSONAL to keep unauthorized people from opening them," the group wrote.


 

 


Mitrovica: Farrell is convinced that the package containing the pipe bomb delivered to Zundel's home was intercepted by either himself or Pilotte. This raises the possibility that the intelligence service was aware of the package's potentially lethal cargo before Zundel received it. Farrell says Lunau's warning to temporarily stop intercepting packages addressed to Zundel's home came only after police had detonated the first pipe bomb. What CSIS might have done to alert either Canada Post, Toronto Police or Zundel himself remains a mystery. But what is clear is that the rash of letter bombs prompted police to issue an extraordinary warning to Canadians to be extremely cautious when receiving unexpected packages or letters.

Regrettably, Farrell says, Canada's spy service failed to heed the warning and, as a result, unnecessarily put the lives of Canadians at risk. That's because when CSIS resumed the interception of Zundel's mail, it continued to ship hard-to-open packages by passenger plane to Ottawa for inspection, even though a pipe bomb had already been discovered. "My concern was that there could always be a bomb in Zundel's mail," Farrell says. "And how are we sending that stuff up to Ottawa? It was being shipped by Air Canada. So what do you think was likely to happen if a bomb went off while we were transporting his mail by commercial jet?"

Farrell repeatedly raised this issue with Lunau. "I was concerned about my own safety and the crew and passengers on the plane. I told Donnie many times that I didn't think it was wise to send Zundel's packages up to Ottowa by plane. But he didn't seem that concerned. I would say, 'Don, for the record, we shouldn't be doing this." Lunau would say, "Okay. Noted."

Farrell rang the alarm, but no one at CSIS bothered to listen.


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So much for Mitrovica's exposé of CSIS. And CSIS is the very same Canadian government outfit responsible for Ernst Zundel's detention - and that wants to tar him as a "security risk to Canada"!

Ask yourself what kind of "justice" he will get.

I ask myself if he will live to tell his story Friday when media will be there. I don't think I exaggerate the danger.

Ingrid Zundel

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Nous nous plaçons sous la protection de l'article 19 de la Déclaration des Droits de l'homme, qui stipule:
ARTICLE 19 <Tout individu a droit à la liberté d'opinion et d'expression, ce qui implique le droit de ne pas être inquiété pour ses opinions et celui de chercher, de recevoir et de répandre, sans considération de frontière, les informations et les idées par quelque moyen d'expression que ce soit>
Déclaration internationale des droits de l'homme, adoptée par l'Assemblée générale de l'ONU à Paris, le 10 décembre 1948.

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