RCMP informants decades of spying on social reformers are chronicled in new book [Video]

As a Communist Party member in Calgary in the early 1940s, Frank Hadesbeck performed clerical work at the party office, printed leaflets and sold books.

But he also had tasks his party comrades could know nothing about: snooping on mail, copying phone numbers from scratch pads and rummaging through waste baskets.

Hadesbeck, known to his RCMP handlers as agent 810, would pass along any information he could glean to the national police force.

His lengthy tenure as a paid informant for the Mounties’ security branch is chronicled in “A Communist for the RCMP” by Dennis Gruending, a former New Democrat MP who has worked as a journalist and authored several books.

Before the First World War, Hadesbeck’s family left what was then southern Hungary for Canada, settling in Saskatchewan. Frank had a difficult childhood. He was orphaned at age 11, worked on farms, spent time in the United States, and …