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.