Undercover: Cases of the RCMP's Most Secret Operative

Steven R. Hewitt is a graduate history student at the University of
Saskatchewan.

Journalists Dubro and Rowland present here a case history of RCMP member
Frank Zaneth, whose opponents over 30 years included forgers, mobsters,
smugglers, and Communists. The main source for the work is recently
released RCMP documents that pertain to the exploits of the man who
became known in the Mounted Police as Operative No. 1. It is an
entertaining publication that often seems too exciting to be a work of
nonfiction.

Entertainment, however, is the major value of the book. The account of
Zaneth’s police life is extremely descriptive, offering very little
analysis of the actual events and even less in the way of context for a
particularly tumultuous period in Canadian history, the 1920s to 1940s.
Part of the problem, undoubtedly, is Undercover’s heavy reliance on
RCMP documents as a source. The narrow perspective of these records
obstructs the authors’ attempt at using Zaneth’s record to
illustrate the transformation of the RCMP (and Canada, for that matter)
during these years. Remarkably, the authors fail to consider inherent
problems with police documents, including their reliability. Nor do they
even deal with the ethicalness of some of their main character’s
activities. The overall impression created by the book is of a
newspaperlike chronology of Zaneth’s career in the RCMP. In that
respect it is interesting but not particularly enlightening.