Fidel's Disciple

The hunt lasted three months. Combing through Quebec in search of the mysterious terrorists who were setting off bombs in public buildings and mailboxes, police checked out some 500 leads without making an arrest. But then came a hot tip, and the cops finally pounced. At week's end in Montreal's jails were 17 Front de Liberation Quebecois "suicide commandos," caught with the tools of their trade: cheap alarm clocks, wires, electrician's tape and sticks of dynamite.

Canadians expected the bombers to be violent French Canadian nationalists, the far out lunatic fringe of a movement agitating for a separate and independent French-speaking Quebec. And so they were. The shock came when Canada learned that the FLQ was also largely leftist-and that at least one of its leaders had direct ties to Fidel Castro's Cuba.

A Hero to Emulate. He is Belgian-born Georges Schoeters, 33, a nervous, myopic member of the FLQ's five-man "leadership committee." Husky and humorless, Schoeters (he pronounces it scooters) arrived from Belgium in 1951, telling stories of how he was a teen-age partisan against the Nazis in World War II. With the help of a sympathetic University of Montreal sociology professor, he quickly learned English, then entered the university to study economics. All went well for a while until he suffered a nervous breakdown from which, as one friend said, he emerged with a "terrific instability."

Fellow students at the university found him an unfriendly loner, spouting politics and economics, yet scorning the usual student bull sessions as mere "time-wasting." Sloppy and unkempt, he drifted from rooming house to rooming house, along the way married an X-ray technician whose income supported them. Then came the Cuban revolution, and Schoeters found a hero to emulate. He listened avidly on short-wave radio for news from the hills, talked incessantly about traveling to Cuba.

"Practically a God." He got his chance in April 1959 when Castro visited Montreal on his famous trip to the U.S. and Canada. There to meet Fidel at the airport was Schoeters, a one-man student welcoming committee from the University of Montreal. Three months later, in answer to Castro's plea for "technicians," Schoeters, his wife and ten university students flew to Cuba. For two weeks they toured the island as Castro's guests. On his return, Schoeters excitedly informed friends that "Castro is practically a god." There was another trip in 1960, and this time he stayed several months, working, he said, for the National Institute of Agrarian Reform. He met Che Guevara and came home bubbling about that "first-class hero." His apartment, a friend recalls, was littered with Cuban maps, flags, and a prominently displayed copy of Che Guevara's guerrilla warfare manual.

Soon after, as the story was pieced together last week, Schoeters was drawn to the cause of French Canadian separatism. Most of the separatists he met disagreed with his thesis that revolutions always bring solutions. But he did find a few like-minded souls-an unemployed newspaperman, a Canadian Broadcasting Corp. messenger, the son of a prominent Quebec attorney, a draftsman and a proofreader. Early this year several of them founded the FLQ and decided that something dramatic was necessary to win Quebec's masses to the separatist cause.

Death in a Garbage Can. One of the first dramatic acts was to set fire to the women's washroom in the Mount Royal railroad station outside Montreal last February. "The revolution has started," said one of the arsonists as he watched the flames. They then sent a communique to Montreal newspapers declaring their mission: "To completely destroy, by systematic sabotage, all the symbols of colonial institutions." From arson the band moved to bombing-the creation of public impact by dynamite. FLQ targets were such "colonial" institutions as armories, Royal Canadian Mounted Police and army buildings. On April 20 an army recruiting center nightwatchman was killed when he attempted to remove a bomb planted in a garbage can outside the building. Four weeks later a Canadian army bomb expert was maimed when a bomb in a mailbox exploded in his face.

Last week Schoeters and his associates were being held for questioning, and a coroner's inquest of the watchman's death was scheduled to reopen. If Quebec's "liberators" are found criminally negligent, at least six "suicide commandos" will probably stand trial for murder.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.