TORONTO - For most teenagers, high school in the 1960s meant homework, football games, and prom night. But it turns out the RCMP saw it as a breeding ground for subversive radicals. A Toronto researcher has uncovered long-secret documents that show the Mounties spied on students as young as 13 during the Cold War years as part of an intensive national-security effort.

The thousands of pages of archival papers have helped Christabelle Sethna piece together one of the lesser-known chapters in the history of the RCMP Security Service. "They were concerned about anyone who was involved in left-wing organizations," said Sethna. "And the fact that some of these individuals happened to be high-school students didn't make a difference."

Universities watched for decades

She plans to present her findings Sunday at the annual conference of the Canadian Association for Security and Intelligence Studies. The conference is part of the 1998 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, hosted by the University of Ottawa. Sethna, a professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, will be joined on a panel by fellow historian Steve Hewitt of the University of Saskatchewan, who is writing a book about RCMP surveillance of universities. Hewitt's research clearly shows the RCMP kept a steady watch on university campuses from the First World War until 1984, when the Security Service was disbanded. Files on virtually every university in the country have turned up in the mountain of reports produced by the Mounties over the decades. "I don't think Canadians have any idea of the extent of it," he said.

Numerous articles and books have documented RCMP interest in groups and individuals who were seen as a threat to the established order - from Soviet spies to fascist activists. But only in recent years, with the advent of freedom-of-information laws, have details about the extent of the Security Service's activities begun to trickle out. The flowering of the New Left in the 1960s prompted the RCMP to quietly probe peace groups, socialist organizations, and other causes that might attract communists. The Mounties were concerned extreme leftists would recruit secondary students to carry the radical torch into the future.

`Very paranoid age'

"The RCMP were conducting surveillance of high-school students because they considered them to be a threat," said Sethna. Her research reveals the Mounties not only staked out anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, but kept an eye on suspect picnics and poetry readings, and even clipped newspaper articles about protests over school rules against long hair. "It's quite remarkable," said Sethna. "On the other hand, it was a very paranoid age. And students were at the forefront of social movements."

By the 1970s, the Mounties were worried about young girls becoming involved in the feminist movement. One police note tells of several girls gathering to discuss birth control and women's liberation.

Sethna says the RCMP sometimes relied on first-hand reports from what could only have been teenaged sources. As early as the 1920s, the Mounties began trying to sniff out left-wing subversives on university campuses. The level of analysis improved in the mid-1960s as more Mounties began attending university themselves. For much of the century, most RCMP members had a high-school education or less.