RCMP Watch

Kim Bolan, CanWest News Service

Two former RCMP officers told the Air India inquiry yesterday that Canada’s spy agency had pledged full co-operation in their criminal probe of the deadly June 23, 1985, bombing.

But, despite meetings after which the RCMP believed vital evidence would be retained, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service destroyed dozens of tapes it made of telephone calls between bombing mastermind Talwinder Singh Parmar and other suspects as the plot was hatched.

The controversial tape destruction and inter-agency feuding dominated the inquiry yesterday when it resumed after a three-month summer recess.

CSIS has been widely criticized for the erasures by senior RCMP officials and victims’ families.

Former RCMP Supt. Lyman Henschel testified yesterday that he met with the spy agency’s B.C. director Randy Claxton just four days after the bombing and was reassured that all crucial evidence would be turned over.

“I had left those discussions with a high opinion of Mr. Claxton which moved me in the direction of trust,” Henschel told inquiry commissioner John Major.

“At the time I didn’t see any reason to distrust CSIS.”

Henschel said he was not told that CSIS, then less than a year old, had been wiretapping the No. 1 suspect in Canada’s biggest mass murder.

He was shown cryptic references to the wiretaps as “sensitive installations” in just declassified documents.

“In my view any intercept activity on a prime suspect in a crime should probably result in a decision to retain all tapes, all material,” Henschel said.

Former Mountie Mike Roth, who was the RCMP liaison officer to CSIS at the time, said he was also unaware until July 24, 1985, that CSIS had been wiretapping Parmar, the founder of the terrorist group Babbar Khalsa and then a Burnaby resident.

Roth said had he known of the existence of the Parmar intercepts early on: “We may have been able to do more to stop the destruction of the tapes.”

CSIS was so protective of its material that it would not even photocopy translator notes of the tapes for the RCMP.

Earlier yesterday, families of the Air India victims recommended that the government development a comprehensive response plan to help Canadians in the event of future terrorist attacks.

Lawyer Jacques Shore said victim testimony from the first phase of the Air India inquiry proves that the Canadian government completely failed to provide assistance and support to the families when the plane exploded off the coast of Ireland in June 1985.

“The sentiment [is] that the Canadian government’s response was woefully inadequate to the victims,” Shore said.

Shore said that if there is another attack, the government should send a rapid deployment team with appropriate resources and expertise in grief counselling. And he said more effective communication with families has to be established through a 1-800 telephone number, an Internet website and multi-media news releases.

CSIS has not yet testified about the tape erasures; statements previously given by Claxton to police were entered into evidence yesterday. “At no time did I receive a direct request from the RCMP to preserve all/any CSIS tapes, or in fact draw any inference that I was expected to,” Claxton, who is now too sick to testify, said in 1989.