Front Man

THE INSTANT Grant Bristow answered the telephone on Friday morning, August 12, 1994, the new, sedate life he had built in a bland Toronto suburb for himself, his wife, and son began to unravel. For six years, Bristow had inhabited the perilous universe of white supremacists as a mole for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (csis).

Months earlier, Bristow had gladly walked away from racists and espionage, his cover still safely intact. Now the reassuring routine of home, work, and soccer practices was about to be replaced by a whiff of panic. The caller was Bill Dunphy, a Toronto Sun reporter who had unearthed Bristow’s unlisted home telephone number.

“Grant, we need to meet,” Dunphy said.

“What’s up?” Bristow said warily.
“It’s important,” was all Dunphy would say. Bristow agreed to a meeting that afternoon in the parking lot of a nearby restaurant.

Dunphy was waiting when Bristow arrived. He hopped into the front seat of Bristow’s car and got right to the point. “Grant,” he said, “I’m going to press with a story that says you were a csis mole inside the racist right wing. This is your opportunity to tell your side of the story.”

“I’ve got nothing to say,” Bristow replied, trying to mask his shock behind a steady gaze. When Dunphy made it clear that the story would run in less than forty-eight hours whether he talked or not, Bristow made an appeal. “You’re going to press with something that will anger some people,” he said. “I’ve got a family to protect. At least give me a little time to get my kid to safety.”

Dunphy refused.
“Don’t be an asshole,” Bristow snapped before leaving. After racing home from the unsettling rendezvous, Bristow calmly told his wife about the planned exposé, then called his former csis handler to cobble together an escape plan. The family quickly packed, crammed their suitcases into their Chevrolet Cavalier, and headed for a nearby hotel, where Bristow checked in using a prearranged alias.

At the hotel, his ex-handler and another intelligence officer greeted Bristow with handshakes and strained smiles. Bristow’s sickening sense of unease began to subside when they assured him that, whatever the story’s spin, the covert operation had been a resounding success and that he had little to fear from the impending publicity. “At this rate,” Bristow assured himself, “I was beginning to think that I might be a national hero by Monday.”

As Bristow waited for the article to appear, his mood oscillated from mild anticipation to an almost paralyzing anxiety. But when the paper arrived early Sunday morning, his worst fears were realized. The tabloid’s headline blared: “Spy Unmasked: csis informant ‘founding father’ of white racist group.” Quoting members of Canada’s racist right, Dunphy drew a damning portrait of Bristow as a government-paid villain, a key architect of the campaign of racial hatred run by the Heritage Front, the country’s largest, most notorious neo-Nazi group. Bristow stared at the headline, slowly shaking his head in a mixture of anger and bewilderment. “It was the worst day of my life,” Bristow said later.