RCMP Watch

Jeff Sallot, Globe and Mail

The Air India bombing, the worst peacetime intelligence failure in Canadian history, might have been averted if police and intelligence agencies were sharing more of their secrets, a former senior Mountie believes.

Henry Jensen, who was the RCMP deputy commissioner in charge of criminal investigations, told the Air India inquiry yesterday that “somewhere there are dots that could have been linked, that should have been linked.”

He blamed federal politicians for creating circumstances leading up to the intelligence failure, and suggested that the Mounties shared little of the fault.

The highest-ranking RCMP official to testify at the federal inquiry to date, Mr. Jensen described the unpleasant rivalry that existed between the national police force and the fledgling Canadian Security Intelligence Service in 1985, the year Sikh militants blew up Air India Flight 182.

“This was the biggest and most disastrous civil intelligence failure that Canada has ever faced,” he said, blaming “naive parliamentarians” for gutting the RCMP’s intelligence-gathering capacity to set up CSIS.

Right from the start, CSIS was far too protective of its turf and its intelligence sources, Mr. Jensen said, adding that he felt the intelligence service displayed “a certain paranoia” in its dealings with the RCMP.

CSIS intelligence officers didn’t want police investigating CSIS informants who might have been involved in small-time criminal activities, he said.

It is often the case that a reliable informant can be recruited from among people on the fringes of the criminal underworld, he explained.

The same holds for terrorist groups. But CSIS was so secretive about the identity of its informants that it wouldn’t bring the Mounties into the picture, Mr. Jensen said.

If the Mounties had the entire picture, they could have steered clear of investigating individuals for relatively minor offences - if those individuals were CSIS sources providing valuable information about a much bigger conspiracy to harm national security, he added.

CSIS was established in 1984, just 11 months before the Air India bombing, to replace the RCMP security service. Most of its first cadre of officers - a group of about 2,200 - transferred directly to the new agency from the RCMP.

The federal government wasn’t fully prepared for the switch, Mr. Jensen said. But there was a “political imperative” relating to the growing strength of the separatist movement in Quebec.

The RCMP security service’s reputation was badly damaged with the exposure of anti-separatist operations in Quebec, including theft of a Parti Québécois membership list.

The Liberal government of the day wanted to get CSIS up and running before the September election in 1984, Mr. Jensen said.

The retired Mountie also claimed that the RCMP, as a police organization, could have obtained a wiretap warrant for the phone lines of a Sikh terrorist suspect, Talwinder Singh Parmar, in just two weeks.

In fact, it took CSIS nearly six months to get the wiretap warrant, under new national security procedures established when the agency was created, previous witnesses have said.

Terrorism is a crime, and creating a civilian agency to deal with it as a political issue “was a gross error on the part of government,” Mr. Jensen said.

Splitting the investigative functions between the RCMP and CSIS in 1984 made Canada more vulnerable to terrorists, he said. “I still believe that.”

Mr. Jensen said his own family was touched by the Air India bombing. His daughter played in a string quartet with two of the victims. His daughter had to help identify their remains.

“I had a personal stake [in the case], as did every other Canadian,” he said.