Canada: End of a Bad Dream

Monday, Dec. 14, 1970
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FOR a fortnight, the first-floor flat in the working-class suburb of Montreal North had been under tense surveillance. Only when police were completely satisfied with the accuracy of their tips and leads did they swing into action. They routed the residents out of a four-block area. Hundreds of policemen, Mounties and troops in battle dress were rushed in to encircle the stark apartment building at 10945 Des Recollets Avenue. The electricity was cut off. A nearby school was closed so that it could be used as a helicopter pad. Finally, two hours after the siege began, a lead pipe came flying out of one of the flat's windows. Said the message inside: "If you try anything (gas, guns, etc. . . .), M. J. Cross will be the first to die."

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Monsieur J. Cross is British Trade Commissioner to Quebec James Richard ("Jasper") Cross. The defiant note was the last truculent gasp from the Quebec Liberation Front fanatics who had held Cross—and Canada—in fear, anger and uncertainty for 59 days. When the F.L.Q. members finally freed Cross last week, their price had come down considerably: a safe-conduct to Cuba for four terrorists and three of their relatives.

Cracking Down. The Oct. 5 abduction of Cross—the first political kidnaping to occur north of the Rio Grande—set in motion a series of events that shocked the world. Acting with unflinching determination, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau rejected the terrorists' initial extravagant demands for Cross' release: $500,000 in gold bullion, plus transport and safe conduct for 23 jailed F.L.Q. thugs to Cuba or Algeria. After the ransom was denied, another group of kidnapers then abducted Quebec Labor Minister Pierre Laporte, prompting Trudeau to crack down really hard. Under a little-used World War I security measure, the Prime Minister invoked emergency police powers —something that had never been done in peacetime in tolerant, democratic Canada—and sent battalions of special police and troops into Quebec to deal with what he called an "insurrection, real or apprehended." The F.L.Q.'s response was swift and savage. Less than two days after Trudeau's action, Laporte was found in the trunk of a car, dead by strangulation. Little hope was held out that Jasper Cross would ever be found alive.

That Cross could be kept hidden in an ordinary apartment just ten miles from downtown Montreal for two solid months suggested that the Canadian police were rather sorry sleuths. They also did badly in one of thousands of raids carried out under the 1914 wartime-security act. Police searching for an F.L.Q. suspect named Gerard Pelletier stormed into the rambling Montreal residence of Canadian Secretary of State Gerard Pelletier.

In the house of another suspect, the police found a telephone number on a scrap of paper; the same number had turned up in other raids. Incredibly, 19 days passed before anyone got around to tracing the number. Sure enough, when the police finally did so, they nabbed another suspect, Bernard Lortie, who admitted his role in the Laporte kidnaping and even named his accomplices. But he neglected to reveal that the accomplices were in the house all the time he was talking, hiding behind a false wall in a closet. When the police padlocked the front door and left, the hoods crawled out of their hiding place and quietly slipped out the back.