Jim Brown, (Canadian Press)
A retired Mountie says he thought he had a deal, within days of the 1985 Air India bombing, for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service to hang on to any evidence it had that could help bring the perpetrators to justice.
Former superintendent Lyman Henschel told a public inquiry Monday that shortly after Fight 182 went down, he conferred with Randy Claxton, then head of the B.C. regional office of CSIS, to discuss co-operation between police and security officials.
Henschel’s notes from the conversations indicate he was assured by Claxton that “any incriminating evidence from CSIS installations (the common jargon for wiretaps) will immediately be isolated and retained.”
At the time, Henschel didn’t know that one of the spy agency’s wiretap targets was Talwinder Singh Parmar, who was to become the prime suspect in the attack that took 329 lives.
It later turned out that CSIS, despite its initial assurances, erased hundreds of hours of the Parmar tapes before the RCMP had a chance to comb through them for clues that might help in a criminal prosecution.
The inquiry, headed by former Supreme Court justice John Major, is expected to spend most of this week trying to figure out what went wrong and who was responsible for the mistakes.
Henschel noted, with striking understatement, that in retrospect it’s clear “things went awry.” When he first met with CSIS, however, he had no reason to think there would be any problems.
“I left the discussions with a high opinion of Mr. Claxton which moved me in the direction of trust,” he said. “I was quite content with the arrangement that had been made.”
But there were soon indications that the deal with CSIS wasn’t as simple and straightforward as the Mounties thought.
Henschel observed in his written notes, for example, that Claxton had punctuated his general willingness to co-operate with a caution that there could be “one or two” sensitive areas in which CSIS would want to “consider very carefully” whether to share its intelligence with anyone.
Retired sergeant Michael Roth, who was assigned to act as RCMP liaison with CSIS, told the inquiry he encountered difficulty gaining access to some material, including written summaries of the Parmar tapes that survived.
Claxton, the key player on the CSIS side, is in ill heath and isn’t expected to testify at the inquiry. But in documents tabled Monday he told a different story from the one recounted by the RCMP.
Claxton agreed in one memo that he had told Henschel CSIS would tip the Mounties if it came across any information “vital” to their criminal investigation. But he added that CSIS headquarters in Ottawa would have to make the final call on some of the information sharing.
He also maintained he had given no blanket assurance that all wiretap tapes would be retained indefinitely. CSIS policy at the time provided for erasures of tapes after a certain period of time unless they were of immediate intelligence value.
Furthermore, wrote Claxton, the RCMP never made any formal request for CSIS to retain the entire catalogue of tapes it held on Parmar — a demand that he would have kicked upstairs to headquarters for consideration if it had been made.
Previous evidence has shown CSIS had compiled a large store of tapes of Parmar and others before the bombing, but had trouble finding enough Punjabi-speaking translators to listen to them.
An investigation in 1992 by the Security Intelligence Review Committee, the civilian body that oversees CSIS, found the service had eventually erased more than 150 tapes and retained only 54. The committee was critical of that decision but concluded no vital evidence had been lost — an assessment later challenged by the RCMP and others.
The affair served to highlight a generally strained relationship between the spy agency and the national police force.
Documents indicate, for example, that some Mounties were concerned that CSIS was poaching on their turf by interviewing potential witnesses in the wake of the bombing, rather than leaving that task to the police.
Henschel said the worry on the RCMP side was that investigators for the two agencies would end up “tripping over each other . . . muddying the water in terms of contact with witnesses.”
Roth, for his part, conceded the Mounties weren’t always blameless either. He was ordered not to turn over some RCMP witness interviews to CSIS by a superior who justified the decision with the comment: “We do all the work and they get the benefit.”
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