Adrian Humphreys (National Post) – In the fall of 1984, three men secretly met to discuss a dark plot, placing a bomb aboard an Air India passenger jet in Montreal. A briefcase full of cash was shown as proof of funding and intent.
Not long afterward, two of those three men had independently snitched to police. “There’s a plot to put a bomb on an airplane, right?” a Vancouver police officer asked one of the men during his interview with him.
“Yeah.… Maybe two,” the man replied.
“What kind of airplane?” he was asked.
“Air India 747.”
“Is this going to be leaving from Montreal?”
“Yes.”
With such early warnings and potential inside access, perhaps the most astounding aspect of the Air India tragedy is that it happened at all.
Alas, seven month later, on June 23, 1985, a conspiracy of failure unfolded: Air India Flight 182 departed Montreal and exploded mid-fight, killing all 329 passengers and crew.
Fumbling the early warnings from the two informants, however, was only the beginning. Many costly and humiliating mistakes — correcting any of which might have saved all on board — are documented in the final report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Air India bombing released yesterday.
“This remains the largest mass murder in Canadian history, and was the result of a cascading series of errors,” the report says. Other advance warnings were similarly ignored or fumbled.
It took more than five months for CSIS to get a warrant to monitor telephone conversations of Talwinder Singh Parmar, a man wanted for murder in India who was travelling across Canada preaching violence to avenge the Indian government’s attack on the Golden Temple in Punjab.
“What if there had been an additional five months of intelligence?” the report asks. Could it have provided “sufficient intelligence to prevent the bombing?”
Even when the wiretap was up and running, delays in transcribing and translating the calls meant agents had no warning of a planned trip Parmar made to Vancouver Island, three weeks before the bombing.
CSIS agents scrambled to secretly follow him, Inderjit Singh Reyat and a third, unidentified, person onto the ferry and along a logging road into the woods near Duncan, B.C.
There, the two agents heard an explosion, powerful enough that it lifted the female CSIS agent out of her car seat. A subsequent but cursory search of the area found nothing and surveillance was called off early before the suspects had even left the area.
The mystery man was not even photographed because none of the surveillance officers had a camera. It is believed the explosion was a test blast of a bomb.
“The failure to obtain a photo of Mr. X was a significant missed opportunity, with the result that, to this day, the identity of Mr. X remains a key mystery in the Air India narrative,” the report says.
Two weeks before the bombing, a Vancouver police officer working with a source in the Sikh community had also been told an attack was coming “in two weeks” by Sikh extremists. This information was not properly acted on until it was too late.
Then there was the warning read by James Bartleman, at the time the director the Intelligence Analysis and Security Bureau in the Department of External Affairs. He saw a Communications Security Establishment document warning that Air India was being targeted the weekend of June 22, he said. He said he brought it to the attention of the RCMP.
Flight 182 was the only Air India flight leaving Canada that weekend.
(The government denied such a document existed and dismissed Mr. Bartleman’s testimony. The report, however, vindicates him.)
Building on that, was a telex warning of sabotage efforts against its planes sent by Air India on June 1, 1985. It received “a half-hearted Canadian response” and was dismissed, partly, as an attempt by Air India to get more security paid for by the Canadian government rather than by the airline.
Long before the passengers started boarding Flight 182, various intelligence and police agencies had reason to believe an attack was imminent. Individual and collective failures meant it was not prevented.
“Information-sharing failures,” the report says, “prevented any one agency from piecing together the mosaic of the threat information that would have pointed to the high risk of a bombing to Flight 182.”
Once the doomed passengers started gathering for their flight to India, there was still time to save them, the report says. But airport security was appalling.
The day before the bombing, by coincidence, Brian Simpson, an aircraft cleaner in Toronto saw a parked Air India aircraft and went on board. Cleaners liked to know which flights might be the dirtiest in order to avoid them.
Despite Air India planes supposedly being under a heightened security regime, he walked on board unchallenged and unnoticed. The access codes to the secured doors were written on the wall beside the locks.
“He went to the cockpit and sat in the captain’s chair for a few moments to enjoy the view. He had access to the entire plane,” the report says.
The bomb that brought down the plane was concealed in a piece of checked baggage and put aboard a CP Air flight in Vancouver and delivered to Air India in Toronto, where the doomed jet started its voyage.
The airline scanned checked baggage for explosives using an X-ray machine, but that evening, the machine malfunctioned, with only about half the bags being loaded onto Flight 182 inspected.
Furthermore, Air India did not conduct passenger-baggage reconciliation, meaning that every bag in cargo was not linked to a passenger on board. Had that been done, the suitcase with the bomb would have been flagged and removed because it did not match any passenger.
But even as Flight 182 sat on the tarmac fully loaded and ready to take off again from Montreal’s Mirabel airport there were still more missed opportunities to save those on board.
Three suspicious checked bags were identified before the flight left. Security guards notified the airline but the RCMP was not alerted until three hours later, just 13 minutes before departure.
Even then, they were hampered by the fact that all of the RCMP explosives detection dogs at both Montreal and Toronto were away with their masters at a training session.
“Serious consideration must be given to the question of why all of the RCMP dogs were away at the same time during a period of high threat to Air India,” says the report.
Sergeant Serge Carignan, a Quebec provincial police officer, and his explosive detector dog Arko were called in from home to check the plane.
When Sgt. Carignan and Arko arrived, however, the flight had already left. The plane had been cleared for departure because the three suspicious bags were left behind. They were the wrong bags: none contained explosives.
“Carignan has been haunted by this tragedy and by the decision made by others to release the aircraft,” the report says.
“He believes that, had he and Arko been able to search the unaccompanied baggage on the flight as he had wanted to on the night of June 22, 1985, they would have found the explosives.”
Given what Air India knew of the threats and the problems with the baggage that night, it is “incomprehensible” that airline officials allowed the plane to leave.
“At a time when no security measure should have been overlooked, few of the authorities responsible for the safety of Air India Flight 182 responded with any sense of purpose to the numerous failures and warning signs that day,” the report says.
“The puzzle pieces take the form of possible leads, tips and warnings: some coming from human informants, some coming from intercepted conversations, others coming from the intelligence community in other countries, still others coming from direct observation by domestic security and intelligence personnel,” the report says.
“A series of seemingly unrelated clues appear that may fit together to solve a puzzle. At the time these events took place, there was no awareness that such a puzzle existed.”
Despite its harsh criticism over the system failures, however, the report offers a word of caution about assigning blame.
“Hindsight always makes it easier to notice gaps, identify errors and point out failures.”
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