Informant comes in from the cold

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A member of the Six Nations of the Grand River First Nation claims he has resigned as an undercover police and government informant because the information he gathered and passed on was not used for the right purposes.

Jim Moses, 53, said he provided the Ontario Provincial Police with information, four months in advance, that members of the Kettle and Stoney Point community who were occupying Camp Ipperwash planned to expand their occupation to Ipperwash Provincial Park.

The group moved into the park on Labour Day, 1995. Shortly after that move, Native land claim protester Dudley George was shot dead during a confrontation with a heavily armed police tactical squad. An OPP officer was charged and convicted with criminal negligence causing death in connection with the shooting.

The George family has filed a $7 million wrongful death lawsuit, claiming that Premier Mike Harris and others were responsible for decisions that resulted in the death. Harris has denied this is true. The family has said the lawsuit will be dropped if Harris calls a public inquiry into the events leading up to the death. The recently re-elected Ontario premier has refused to do so, electing instead to have his lawyers attempt to derail the lawsuit in court.

Moses made three trips to Camp Ipperwash to gather information. He said he saw a bandoleer, which held 12-gauge shotgun shells, but no guns. He also said that on one occasion he spent the night at the camp and the next morning witnessed a visit by a police officer who arrived to deliver a message to the protesters at the camp. When the protesters walked to the camp entrance to see what the officer wanted, one of them hid a baseball bat nearby in case of trouble.

"That made me think, 'Maybe they had no guns,'" he said.

He said he passed that information on to the OPP and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service or CSIS - Canada's version of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Moses' interest in the more shadowy elements of life in Indian Country started early. Born July 26, 1945 on Six Nations and raised in nearby Vineland, Ont., in his younger days Moses had dreams of writing novels. In his 20s, he turned to journalism as a way of paying the bills and found his Native heritage allowed him to get close to stories that mainstream, non-Native journalists couldn't crack.

All reporters who have covered the Native beat for any length of time in eastern Canada have come across Moses. He was a bit of a puzzle for investigative journalists, regularly calling newsrooms to provide reporters with additional information about stories that had already been published or to inquire about information that didn't make it into print. In this way, he has created a sizable network of contacts throughout the mainstream and Iroquois communities located along the St. Lawrence River in both Canada and the United States.

During a series of interviews with this newspaper in late May, Moses named several OPP intelligence officers and one CSIS agent as his "handlers" - the person in intelligence gathering organizations who supervises and collects information from informants. Six Nations Police Chief Glenn Lickers confirmed that Gary Lee, one of the people named by Moses, is an OPP intelligence officer who was assigned to the Six Nations area during the time Moses claims he was working for the OPP.

"I'm on the list, I'm number 409. OPP-409," Moses said. "The way they told me, they said, 'I'm making you a numbered confidential informant,' as if it was some kind of bestowal."

When contacted by phone on June 14, Lee told Windspeaker: "I can't comment at the moment. As you know, these are sensitive issues."

He promised to call the next morning, after consulting with his superiors about what comment could be made. The next day, he called to say he couldn't comment.

CSIS has a standing policy of not commenting on the actions of its intelligence operatives.

While travelling in Europe in the late 1960s, Moses kept up on poitical developments at home through newspapers and letters from his family. In 1969, his mother sent him a copy of then-Indian Affairs minister Jean Chretien's White Paper on Indian Affairs. One section jumped off the page for the would-be writer: part of the government's plan was to eliminate Indian reserves and totally assimilate Native people into the mainstream.

"I thought, 'Wow, if this political intent is acted upon, if this is pursued, it's going to cause a war in Canada between Indians and everybody else because they are not going to give up the last postage stamp of this great land that they used to own.' That's like lighting the fuse. So I thought, 'I gotta get home,'" he said.

He arrived in Montreal during the FLQ crisis and learned a few lessons about political terrorism by following the events of the day.

"What most people don't realize to this day was that the FLQ was only six people. I realized then how simple it would be for a very small group to appear to be a vast insurrection," he said.

It was at this time that cigarette smuggling was becoming a highly profitable industry on the reserves around Montreal and Cornwall. As he talked to traditional chiefs and grassroots people in these communities, Moses came to hold the opinion that the Native people involved in the cigarette trade were acting in ways that paralleled other terrorist groups.

He believed the Mohawk Warrior Society, a group Moses maintains was made up of people who profited from the cigarette trade and the smuggling of other commodities, was hiding behind the legitimate fight to assert the collective rights of Native people, in order to protect their profitable, but illegal, business endeavors. He also believed the mainstream press had been hoodwinked by the Warriors and that Canadian authorities were doing nothing to correct the false impression that the press was creating because "it was easier to say 'no' to a Warrior than to a reasonable, responsible Native leadership."

As an Iroqois person, Moses was outraged by both the overt and the more subtle forms of intimidation employed by the Warriors. He made up his mind to combat them and, at the same time, make a living as a freelance investigative reporter.

"My problem was I didn't have the time to build up a reputation. I wanted to be able to walk into an editor's office with a story and have them trust me and accept what I was telling them. So I thought, that's how to do it. I'll start my own investigation," he said. "I don't have to do a thing. I'll just dig and dig and dig and even if I don't find anything they'll be really scared because I might find something. So I wrote a letter to Ian Scott, who was the (Ontario) attorney general at the time and told him I'm starting my own investigation. I got letters back from (then Ontario premier David) Peterson, Scott and the commissioner of the OPP saying it's the responsibility of the police to investigate criminal activity."

Moses said he saw that the police kept their distance from reserve communities because of a lack of understanding of the people and their culture. He felt this left the door open for the Warrior minority to intimidate the law-abiding majority.

"Why should an Elder be sitting down in his house so afraid that he doesn't want to talk to me?" he asked. "He's worked for his people his whole life. Why should he be that afraid when police are getting paid large wages to protect him? He's not getting that protection. That's what really pissed me off, is that the reserves weren't getting the protection they deserved. Normal, innocent people were being intimidated and frightened. I had to keep up my pressure on the police. The only pressure I had available was embarrassment - the possible embarrassment in the minds of police who, because of lack of resources, lack of information, difficulty in investigation, confusion, weren't doing the job on Indian reserves because they tended to think of it as 'not my problem. If I don't look, it'l go away; they'll settle it.'"

He found he had to educate newspaper editors and fight against the momentum the Warriors had created.

"The press, the media in general, not just the press, tended to treat Indians as a block. So any Indian who said anything could be accepted as a Native spokesman," he said. "It's like, pick up a newspaper and say 'Who has the press elected as a leader now?'"

He found friends in some newsrooms and eventually worked on investigations with the CTV news show W5. He also contributed to a number of investigative stories written by newspaper reporters and eventually did a lot of work for CBC's The Dark Side of Native Sovereignty.

A source close to the Iroquois Confederacy chiefs on the United States side of the border said Moses has been a very useful source of information for the chiefs in their fight against the Warrior movement. Many sources who preferred not to be named said they had serious concerns about any Native person spying on his own people for the benefit of the police or the government, but each noted that Moses shared his information with the Native leadership.

Respected Six Nations Elder, Huron Miller, told Windspeaker that Moses kept him up to date on his investigations and frequently sought his advice.

Six Nations police chief Glenn Lickers said he was not aware that Moses was working for outside police services, but he said it didn't surprise him. Lickers, the immediate past-president of the First Nations Chiefs of Police Association, backs up Moses' assertion that the Warriors profited from rivalries between police organizations.

"Over the years, we've become aware that there were inaccurate intelligence reports involving our community," the police chief said. "None of the information was ever shared with us. Last fall, for example, an RCMP intelligence report stated there were huge stashes of arms on First Nations. If there's illegal weapons in our community, shouldn't they be sharing that information with us? But we