Crimes and Mercies Read Online Free PDF

knew nothing about it.
    A few days later I was on the phone – the same phone – to my publisher in Toronto, Nelson Doucet. I told him about a discovery I had recently made about the prisoners, and my opinion of it. I also told him this was secret.
    A few days after that, I was talking by phone – again, the same phone – to Sir John Keegan in London about a mistake he had made in reviewing my book, and he told me, ‘But you think …’ and went on to repeat what I had told Doucet. I was dumbfounded. How had he known that? Elisabeth and I discussed it and I said the place was bugged, but she pooh-poohed the idea. I could hardly believe it myself. For that to be true, I thought, the French would have to know about my book, which had not even been published in France. Then they would have had to realize I was in France, and then track me down. And the villa we were in was not rented – it was borrowed, and the phone was in the name of the owners. To the French police, I believed, I was just a tourist who had been there many times before, and represented no danger. Why then would someone bug my phone, and keep recording all the calls – always in English – and analyze them?
    Above all, why phone Sir John Keegan and tell him? This was the most preposterous thing of all. But then, how did he know what I had told Doucet in confidence? Did he guess? Did someone phone him? Did Doucet blab? But Doucet is a discreet, loyal and courageous publisher. I could not imagine him doing such a thing. The whole affair seemed so bizarre that I simply had to dismiss it. So I did nothing about it for five years.
    Then, in 1994, my editor at Saturday Night magazine, John Fraser, suggested that I meet Rod Stamler, a forensic accountant who had been until recently an Assistant Deputy Commissioner in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Over lunch in Toronto,Stamler said he already knew about me. He said that after the publication of my book Other Losses in September 1989, ‘You were targeted right away.’
    Stamler knew what he was talking about because he had been in one of the agencies that had done the spying. I told Stamler the story about me and Nelson Doucet. He explained how it was done. He said that the Americans were ‘on to you as soon as you published.’ He told me that as soon as I had arrived in Paris, the French police, who had been warned by the Americans, entered my hotel room and copied or read what they wanted and bugged the room. From then on it was easy to trace me in France.
    He then explained the phone calls. The Americans routinely listen to all the international calls that interest them. They tape-record these calls, which are listened to by computers which are able to recognize key words. The computers are so sophisticated now, he said, that they have syntax built in. They distinguish between ‘fall’ as a verb and ‘fall’ as a season. If a phone call contains the key word or clusters of key words that interest them, the tape is turned over to a human being for analysis. The Canadians do the same thing. The French do the same thing. The British, Norwegians and others do the same thing. Since the Americans and Canadians (and presumably the others) are forbidden by their laws to bug their own citizens without a court order, they must either get that order, listen illegally, or not listen at all.
    Not to listen is, for these spies, inconceivable. So, Stamler said, the Americans listen to Canadian calls, and the Canadians to American calls, all the time. The Canadians then offer the Americans everything they have and vice versa. Technically, no law is broken. And this is so routine now that the words Stamler used to describe it were ‘they publish this,’ meaning they exchange it regularly in an organized and prearranged manner, but, of course, always within narrow and secret limits.
    This capacity naturally applies to all information that is transferred digitally or by satellite, such as bank transfers, faxes,