Spying 101 is a very interesting book about the security service of the RCMP and its operations in universities, from its inception after the First World War until its demise in 1984 when it was replaced by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. The book was written following a limited but important opening of RCMP files to scholars made possible by the Access to Information Act. Many files consulted by Steve Hewitt were partially blacked out but there was enough to construct this history.

The RCMP came into existence as a result of the Winnipeg general strike in 1919, and it was not long before it developed a secret service and an interest in the universities. From the beginning, many officers in the RCMP regarded those who agitated against the status quo as Bolsheviks, later Communists. Any adverse remarks about the British Empire were regarded as subversive, as Frank Underhill discovered. This focus between 1917 and the Second World War led it to ignore the Japanese, whom it considered an inferior race, as well as those who sympathized with fascists.

There were, of course, real spies, particularly after the Second World War, and we now have proof that the Communist Party in Canada was both directly financed by Moscow and its leadership was instructed in the Stalin era to spy. However, only one convicted spy turned up in Canadian universities - Hugh Hambleton, of Université Laval, although he was imprisoned for spying when he worked for NATO.

This lack of spies in turn led the RCMP to downgrade its focus on spies and espionage in the universities and instead turn its attention to the notion of subversion. Since subversion was a vague and imprecise notion, it could mean whatever the person using the term wanted it to mean as Hewitt amply demonstrates.

Because many members of the RCMP had difficulty in distinguishing between social democrats and those who wished to overthrow the state by violence, it cut a wide swath on campus, particularly in the late 50s, 60s and 70s. This, to a later generation, may seem quaint or amusing but not to those in the 1970s who found that the RCMP was using these secret files on thousands of Canadians to secure dismissals in the federal civil service in areas as remote from the action as the Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation.

Hewitt notes, however, that the widespread assumption that the RCMP had taps on university telephones or engaged in other forms of electronic spying in the universities was generally false. After 1971 the solicitor general had to approve (and politicians developed a wariness about approving) actions that might, if made public, embarrass them.

The unpleasant truth was that most of the information gathered came from informers, mostly unpaid, including one whose name was deleted but was somewhere in the CAUT network.

Until the 1960s the RCMP assumed agitators in the university were Communists or directed one way or another by the Communist Party. It considered social protest simply a sign of the hidden influence of the Communist Party. It assumed students were naive and would only engage in agitation against the social order if they were converted or directed by adults.

Confusion arose in the late 1960s and 1970s when it became apparent that students could organize a wide range of protest movements on their own, a small number of which generated their own home-grown violence. Few of these were associated with the Soviet Union which had lost its glamour with the revelations about the terror of the Stalin years and the 1956 invasion of Hungary.

The splintering of the New Left (the war in Vietnam, black, Canadian and Quebec nationalisms, feminism, etc.) into a variety of organizations resulted in an information overload at RCMP headquarters.

The focus on Black Power led not only to vigorous investigation of the 1969 violence at Sir George Williams in Montreal (after the fact) but also to the opening of files on non-whites across Canada who advocated a better deal for blacks, for example Howard McCurdy, subsequently an NDP member of Parliament and president of CAUT. One of the difficulties, was that at the time of the events at Sir George Williams, the RCMP had no black members, and had to import an informer from the United States.

However, the real focus in the 70s and 80s was separatism in Quebec, and once again the RCMP and their political masters chose not to distinguish between violent and constitutional separatists.

The later 70s and 80s saw a marked decline in radicalism on campus although separatism remained alive and well in Quebec. Nonetheless, the RCMP remained vigilant. It considered the anti-apartheid movement subversive. It opened files on feminism but, as with blacks, it was constrained in terms of staff because it kept women out of the service until 1974. It was concerned about historians who wrote about radicals in Canadian history.

It opened a file on McMaster University's library because it had created an archive about Canadian radicalism, and on McMaster students who received a grant to put on plays by Berthold Brecht. It opened files on gay rights organizations.

But, the overreach of its counter-intelligence activities finally provoked the creation of the McDonald Royal Commission and the Keable Commission in Quebec. This was the beginning of the end, and in 1984 the service was shut down to be replaced by CSIS.

CAUT plays an up-and-down role in this history. Hewitt considers that a 1963 agreement between CAUT and the government was useless since the RCMP routinely ignored it. However, Hewitt also thinks that adverse publicity was what the RCMP feared most, especially ridicule about infiltrating organizations like the Student Christian Movement.

He notes that from the 1960s on, CAUT was a constant critic of the excesses of the RCMP, using the 1963 agreement as a template by which to judge the particular activities of the force as they came to light. Such excesses eventually led to the creation of the McDonald commission.

Hewitt also suggests that a particularly effective change was the creation of an overview structure for CSIS, a development strongly supported by CAUT. He notes that the Mulroney government was unsympathetic to demands from CSIS to water down the rules about surveillance on the campus because it did not want to stir up old wars with CAUT. The Conservatives finally abolished the counter-subversion division.

He also suggests that one of the difficulties of agreements or rules is that the RCMP and CSIS secretly lobbied to have them modified or nullified and, when that did not work, applied an almost Talmudic zeal to their interpretation in order to allow actions which their authors had hoped to prevent.

Hewitt does not believe that the security force has no place on campus:

"The problem lies in what constitutes a threat, what restrictions should govern the work to counter the perceived threats, and most important of all, who or what defines the previous two."

The trouble in the past arose because, by and large, the security forces defined their own mandates, and usually in secret. Clearly any mandates, particularly new ones, arising from the war on terrorism, need to be debated in public and ultimately administered by politicians who are accountable to the House of Commons and the general public.

Exactly the same sorts of questions are going to arise in the war on terrorism as in the Cold War. It remains to be seen whether Ottawa has learned any lessons from the past.

Donald C. Savage is a consultant in higher education, former executive director of CAUT and an adjunct professor of history at Concordia University.