It's been 25 years since a group of left-wing political extremists, dubbed the Squamish Five, were arrested by a team of disguised police officers along the Sea to Sky Highway. The incident thrust Squamish into national headlines, and its greenspace became notorious as training grounds for terrorists.
Several locals can still recall how they lent a hand in the elaborate investigation. Its success brought an end to six months of violent protests in B.C. and Ontario. The suspects, all in their 20s, had planted five different explosions in places ranging from a B.C. Hydro substation to a chain of adult video stores.
Their most infamous attack on Litton Industries in Toronto left 10 people injured.But on Jan. 20, 1983 the reckless streak came to an abrupt end. With the help of local Ministry of Transportation (MOT) staff, tactical officers from the RCMP were outfitted as a road crew.
"They talked to the road foreman here it was all, I guess, a trap to catch them. To have people out there who weren't police-looking," said Tom Cloutier, an MOT equipment operator at the time. It was his job to set aside a few dump trucks and a pick-up truck for the operation.To keep the plan under wraps, he wasn't told how the vehicles would be used, only ordered to leave them in the yard.
The trucks were taken to stretch of highway just north of Squamish where officers pretended to go about regular maintenance operations as they waited for the suspects to return from their training grounds near the Tantalus lookout.When the five suspects stopped for the seemingly routine delay, they had no time to reach into their stock of weapons. The surprise arrest proved to be a wise move.According to Globe and Mail reports at the time, the brown-pick up truck carried a .45 caliber rifle, semi-automatic rifle, pump-action shot gun, two semi-automatic pistols and a .357 magnum handgun.
It was through such reports that Cloutier learned how his equipment had been used."We didn't find out until after the fact and then it was like, 'Oh, that was pretty neat,'" he said.
Longtime Squamish resident Don Behrner described how the town's brush with terrorism stayed alive through stories."I worked for highways after that and it was something they used to talk about," he said. "Usually those things don't happen near to where you're living. It was kind of a big deal to have them originate from this area."He was quick to point out that none of the group members had come from Squamish, but were reportedly using it as a secluded place for test shots.
Though Corporal Dave Ritchie was not policing locally at the time, he said the area offers the city proximity and remote wilderness criminals seek, especially when hiding stolen goods or a body.The Squamish Five crept into his own police work last September when a crate of old dynamite was discovered by hikers near Furry Creek.
A detective who had worked on the original case caught wind of the discovery and called him to see if the explosives could be traced back to the Squamish Five, who once operated under the moniker Direct Action."It was so old that we couldn't specifically say it was from 1982 or 1983," Ritchie said.Stolen dynamite had been a staple weapon among the group, who used more than 400 pounds of the explosive when bombing the Cheekye-Dunsmuir power station on Vancouver Island.
The five suspects, Ann Hansen, Brent Taylor, Gerry Hannah, Juliet Belmas of New Westminster and Doug Stewart of Vancouver each faced 15 charges.
All five members of the group were convicted - some were handed life sentences. Each has since been released from prison.Time in prison did not hush Hansen or Hannah who continue to keep very public profiles. In 1995, Hannah reunited with his punk band The Subhumans, which released the album New Dark Age Parade in 2006. In an interview last October with the Yukon News, he expressed some remorse for the destruction caused by Squamish Five."In retrospect, our actions were pretty reckless, but out hearts were in the right place," Hannah said.
Hansen has been less apt to apologize. In 2001, the Toronto publisher Between the Lines, funded in part by the Government of Canada, published her book Direct Action: Memoirs of an Urban Guerilla.
In an interview with the publisher, she described her stance."I am certainly not opposed to peaceful protest. Yet, I also believe that to make real social change people and movements must be prepared to go beyond. In some cases that means so-called political violence," she said.
While time may have allowed Hansen to downplay her violent actions, for people like John Krzanowski, who helped prepare the tactical unit along with Cloutier, it has only made the incident more real.
"Obviously there was a threat with what they're doing but you don't really think it at the time," he said. "After a while you start to reflect back on it and you think, 'Yeah there was a potential for some real danger there.'"
