Air India Case Cries Out For An Inquiry

McLellan points out that the government's Security Intelligence Review Committee, the body charged with overseeing the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, has already looked into the matter. But that 1992 report, heavily censored before being released publicly, raises as many questions as it answers. The CSIS it describes is so dysfunctional as to defy belief. From March, 1985, Canada's spy agency routinely taped telephone calls made by Talwinder Singh Parmar, the man (now dead) that Josephson described as the plot's mastermind. Yet, CSIS was so bereft of Punjabi speakers that the spy agency apparently had no idea what Parmar was saying. By early June, just three weeks before Air-India Flight 182 exploded over the North Atlantic, CSIS had managed to translate only tapes recorded up to the end of March. After the disaster, CSIS inexplicably erased three quarters of the approximately 210 tapes it had made — managing to do so just before Royal Canadian Mounted Police investigators formally requested them. The review committee concluded that CSIS committed "an unfortunate oversight." But it is hard to imagine any spy agency that incompetent. According to the review committee: CSIS and the RCMP had been warned by New Delhi well before the disaster that Sikh terrorists were planning to bomb Air-India flights. In early June, 1985, CSIS was told by an unnamed source that "something spectacular was about to happen." But when agents tailing suspects heard them explode a test bomb on June 4, they reported it as a rifle shot. CSIS tapped Parmar's phone because it believed he was involved in a plot to assassinate then-Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi during a visit to the United States. Yet, the agency didn't bother finding out what was in the wiretaps until after Gandhi went home. As well as destroying tapes of the Parmar intercepts before the RCMP could listen to them, CSIS may have destroyed some tapes before its own agents could review them. Asked to investigate allegations that Indian secret service agents were involved in the bombing, CSIS, according to the review committee, "did not pursue its investigation in the years after the crash to the extent that we would have expected." And that's just the material the review committee thought could be made public. As well, no one has looked into the role of the RCMP. No one has investigated the allegation, raised obliquely by the RCMP, that CSIS had a mole close to the plotters (which, if true, may explain why the agency was so casual about translating its wiretaps). In light of Josephson's damning indictment of Crown witnesses in the Bagri-Malik murder trial, the public might also want to know why these two men were ever charged. Clearly, no reliable evidence entered at trial links them to the bombing. Is there something else we haven't been told? http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1111186208926&call_pageid=970599109774&col=Columnist969907626796