The first target for their bombing campaign was the Sherbrooke branch offices of the Bank of Canada. In the eyes of the insurgents, the Bank of Canada represented all the worst elements of 20th century predatory Anglo-Canadian capitalism, and to those masterminding the bomb attacks its offices seemed like the perfect place to launch their assault. If the bank bombing were successful, the FLQ insurgents would follow it up with a similar attack directed against the city’s main RCMP station. There were also plans in the works to assassinate the
city’s mayor and several members of the city council; some of the more bloodthirsty types among the guerrillas even entertained the idea of
planting bombs in some of the local primary and secondary schools.

The architects of the planned bomb attack on Sherbrooke’s Bank of Canada branch had a surprising inside man to help them with their raid: a security guard who worked the bank’s morning shift. Embittered by what he considered a lack of respect on his employers’ part and a humiliating demotion the month before, this guard was a highly willing accomplice to the insurgents’ bomb plot-- albeit more for personal reasons than ideological ones. By his own account of his first encounter with the guerrillas, the war to separate Quebec from the rest of Canada was largely an abstract matter for him. He was more interested in exacting payback on his superiors for imagined past slights than in advancing the FLQ’s agenda; subsequent RCMP and QPP interviews with his co-workers described the man as having been largely apolitical before he got involved with the Sherbrooke bombing
plot.

    The conspirators spent all of May and much of the first half of June of 1971 getting things ready for their initial attack. Two of the conspirators worked at a building demolition company, which made it easy for them to obtain the necessary explosives for the attack and subsequent bombings. Another conspirator was a taxi driver before he joined the insurgency and therefore knew all of the quickest routes to
and from the targets chosen for the bombing campaign. Last but hardly least, there was a man in the ranks of the conspirators who had been
studying architecture at McGill University before being expelled for what the authorities called “subversive activities”; he was familiar with the bank’s structural layout and understood just where to put the
bombs for maximum destructive effect.

Finally, on the morning of June 14th, the FLQ insurgents were ready to begin their terror bombing campaign. At around 9:00 AM local time,
just as the Sherbrooke Bank of Canada branch was opening for business, the first set of bombs detonated; five minutes later a second batch of bombs, incendiaries meant to trigger a fire inside the bank, went off down in the bank’s basement. (There was a third set bombs at the bank meant to kill its senior officials, but for various technical reasons these failed to detonate.) By the time local fire and police personnel
got things under control, 68 people were dead and another 127 had been seriously injured, many of them suffering from second-degree or third degree burns.

     That afternoon the FLQ released a two-page typewritten statement boasting about the bank bomb attack and promising further such attacks throughout Quebec unless and until the Trudeau administration over in Ottawa capitulated to their demand for an independent Quebecois state. The government responded to this with its own press statement pledging to hunt down the bombers to the last man; by nightfall RCMP detectives were combing Quebec and parts of Ontario for any possible leads on the bombers’ whereabouts. In Washington, the Canadian embassy to the U.S. requested assistance from the FBI after provincial and federal police uncovered evidence suggesting the bombers might have had some measure of material support from sympathizers living in the Great Lakes or New England regions.

      There was even a brief investigation by Canadian intelligence agents into the theory that the bombers had joined forces with rogue elements of the KGB to secure additional equipment for their terror campaign against the Trudeau government. This theory was quickly put
to rest when a cable surfaced indicating then-KGB chief Yuri Andropov was reluctant to get his agency too closely involved with the FLQ
uprising lest the blowback should adversely impact on KGB operations elsewhere in the Americas. Although a successful insurrection against the Trudeau government would undermine NATO and thereby take some of the pressure off Soviet interests in central Europe, Andropov wasn’t entirely convinced the FLQ insurgency would accomplish its objectives. Indeed, most of his senior staff at the Kremlin and a considerable number of his station chiefs in North America had been operating under the premise that the uprising would probably collapse within less than a year.

    This cautiousness frustrated junior KGB officers in North America no end, to say nothing of the displeasure it aroused among dedicated Marxists within the FLQ. Part of the raison d'être behind the bombing campaign had been to inspire the Soviets to lend their weight to the cause of Québeçois independence by showing the FLQ insurgency was able to wage the kind of no-holds-barred partisan warfare which the Soviets themselves had practiced so well during World War II. Yet Moscow stood aloof from the bombers....

******

    ...and not just because of Andropov’s doubts as to whether the FLQ uprising could succeed in achieving its goal of an independent Quebec. The Kremlin was genuinely and deeply worried that if word got out the Soviet Union was backing the FLQ Canada’s chief foreign ally, the United States, might retaliate by giving financial and political support to dissident groups in Soviet-controlled eastern Europe or reviving the defunct JFK-era CIA campaign to overthrow Fidel Castro’s regime in Cuba. And that, Andropov’s cronies agreed, was a nightmare to be avoided at all costs.

    Those concerns didn’t stop Radio Moscow from relentlessly blaring out pro-FLQ propaganda on its English-language broadcast service as a way of needling both Canada and the United States. Interviews with FLQ partisans, surreptitiously recorded within rebel-controlled sectors of Quebec, were also aired over the network. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation countered these broadsides with its own propaganda blitz Emphasizing the repressive nature of Communism and the atrocities the FLQ had committed thus far since launching their uprising against the Trudeau government.

    On June 17th, three days after the Sherbrooke bank bombing, the bombers struck again. This time their intended target was the Circuit raceway in the town of Trois Rivières, a popular gathering spot for local auto racing enthusiasts. But in marked contrast to the deadly effectiveness of their bank raid in Sherbrooke, their attack on the Circuit was a failure...and a conspicuous failure to boot: one of the would-be bombers was literally caught in the act of trying to plant an explosive charge near one of the raceway’s fuel storage tanks. All the FLQ succeeded in accomplishing on this occasion was to make themselves into temporary laughingstocks and to get three of their most skilled guerrilla fighters arrested the by RCMP, who wasted little time moving the prisoners to a secure location to begin questioning them about the details of the FLQ’s bombing campaign.

The prisoners held firm for more than four days, during which time their comrades-in-arms bombed newspaper offices in the Montreal suburb
of Hampstead and the town of Saguenay as well as the Côte-Nord branch of the RCMP’s “C” Division. There were also plans to bomb the American consulate in Montreal, but these were scrapped when the FLQ leadership became concerned that someone might have alerted the FBI to the coming attack. By the time the trio of captured insurgents were finally ready to talk, the death count in the FLQ’s bombing campaign had surpassed 200 and there was every indication that the toll would go even higher before it was all over.

   Just before midnight on June 26th, the first of the detainees in the failed Circuit raceway attack finally caved in and began to talk to police about what he knew regarding the bombing campaign. Within a matter of hours his two fellow detainees were also making confessions to police interrogators; armed with the information obtained from the three prisoners, the RCMP began to hunt down the remaining members of
the FLQ bombing conspiracy. In a panic, the insurgents began to speed up the timetable of their terror campaign in Sherbrooke-- a decision
which would have lethal consequences for at least one well-known FLQ
rebel commander.

******

The events of July 1st, 1971 spelled the beginning of the end for the FLQ’s terror bombing operation-- though few people on either side of the Quebec Rebellion would have dared to suggest so at the time. It was Canada Day, and in spite of the violence the FLQ’s insurgency had brought to Quebec substantial crowds were still turning out at public events in la belle province to mark the occasion. One of those events had been targeted by the FLQ for its latest terror bombing....but in the end the only casualties of the intended attack would turn out to be the bombers themselves and their leader, the legendary figure known as “Commandant Vert”(Commander Green).

     Even by the brutal standards of the Quebec Rebellion, CommandantVert-- also known to Quebec provincial police and the RCMP as Serge Dubonnet --was a singularly vicious man. And Dubonnet didn’t restrict his viciousness to his perceived enemy in combat: papers captured by Canadian Defense Forces units near the end of the Rebellion revealed he had once slit a fellow insurgent’s throat simply because the man in question had made a critical comment about his hairstyle. He also shot an unarmed civilian in cold blood during a holdup attempt gone awry.

      July 1st, 1971 marked the 104th annual observance of Canada Day; with that in mind, Commandant Vert decided the time had come for his cell to strike right at the heart of the mainstream Anglo Canadian society he so roundly despised. It was a decision that would end up costing not only his own life but also the lives of at least three of his fellow guerrillas. His plan was to set off a bomb in the crowd at Sherbrooke’s annual Canada Day parade, preferably at the point where said crowd would be most densely packed.

      The chain of events that led to his death has been reconstructed partly with the aid of the sole survivor of the explosion, a then-27 year-old recruit to the cause who was sitting in the main bedroom of Vert’s safe house when the bomb Vert was planning to detonate at the parade instead went off prematurely inside Vert’s own kitchen. “I was reading a map of the parade route,” the survivor told police shortly after he was pulled out of the rubble of the safe house, “when I felt a burst of hot air slamming into my back and I crashed to the floor as if somebody had clubbed me over the head. Before I could get up again a piece of the bedroom wall fell on top of me and I was trapped....the next thing I knew I could smell smoke coming from the kitchen, and at that second I realized the bomb must have exploded.”

      An examination of the ruins of the safe house by local and provincial police and evidence recovered from the epicenter of the blast by Sherbrooke fire brigade arson investigators led authorities to conclude that the explosion must have been primarily the result of a fuse in the bomb being improperly set. There was also speculation spontaneous combustion might have been a factor as well, given that the chemicals used in producing the bomb were extremely volatile. One Sherbrooke fire official candidly told a CBC News correspondent: “It’s a wonder the whole damn neighborhood didn’t go up in smoke.”

      The collapse of Commander Vert’s parade bomb plot, combined with the death of Vert himself and the leaks about the rest of the FLQ’s terror bombing conspiracy as a result of the Circuit raceway fiasco, prompted the FLQ’s top military leaders to pull the plug on the Sherbrooke bombing campaign. After one final bomb attack, made on July 7th against the Sherbrooke bureau offices of the MontrealGazette, the FLQ abandoned any further plans for bombing in attacks in the Sherbrooke area. Some say the FLQ lost its guerrilla war with the Trudeau government right then and there; certainly it had lost a significant battle....

To Be Continued