Reporter shocked to learn RCMP planned to follow him

Mounties hoped journalist would lead them to leak of secret information

A Canadian journalist expressed dismay Tuesday after learning that the RCMP were planning to shadow him in hopes he would lead them to the person who leaked secret information on a suspected terrorist.

The proposed surveillance was part of an investigation into the leak of a sensitive spy agency document about Adil Charkaoui to Montreal’s La Presse newspaper.

“I’m in a bit of shock still,” La Presse reporter Joel-Denis Bellavance said from Ottawa. “We live in a democratic country. Freedom of the press is a guaranteed freedom.”

Information about the surveillance is in highly classified RCMP documents a Federal Court ordered disclosed as part of a lawsuit filed by Abousfian Abdelrazik, another man the government once branded a terrorist and who was also subject of a damaging leak.

The records show Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) had concluded the Charkaoui document, passed to La Presse in 2007, came from Citizenship and Immigration Canada. But the agency could not identify the source despite using fingerprints and DNA analysis. At the time, Charkaoui was under a national security certificate as a suspected Al Qaeda sleeper agent.

CSIS then called in the Mounties, who proposed questioning immigration employees while tailing Bellavance in what was dubbed Project Standard.

“It is expected that the view questionnaire process will generate communication between the source and the journalist, which should provide a unique opportunity to capture the meet through surveillance, and to identify the source,” states an RCMP report in December 2008 marked “Top Secret.”

Surveillance of the reporter was to be limited to a “specific period of time.” The document also suggests that there was a “purpose and a motivation” to the leak that warranted investigation.

In their final report, dated April 7, 2011, RCMP said they had not been able to find the culprit “due to poor record management and lack of recall or co-operation from (Immigration) staff.”

It made no mention of Bellavance surveillance.