RCMP Watch

CBC News

Canada’s security agency failed to tell an RCMP task force in the days after the 1985 Air India disaster that it had been recording the phone conversations of a well-known Sikh extremist, a former Mountie testified Monday.

Former RCMP superintendent Lyman Henschel, who appeared at the resumption of the Air India inquiry after its summer break, said senior officials from the RCMP and a CSIS liaison held a top-level meeting shortly after the bombing to set up a task force.

Henschel said that despite the presence of the CSIS official at the meeting, he was not told that the intelligence agency had been recording Talwinder Singh Parmar’s phone conversations for three months before the disaster.

“I was not made aware of the existence of — relevant to the Air India investigation — intercept material,” said Henschel.

The retired Mountie said he left discussions with Randy Claxton, the head of CSIS in B.C. , who is in ill health and isn’t expected to testify, feeling assured CSIS would preserve key evidence related to the Air India bombing.

Henschel’s notes from the conversations indicate he was assured by Claxton that “any incriminating evidence from CSIS installations [the common jargon for wiretaps or electronic intercepts] will immediately be isolated and retained.”

“I left the discussions with a high opinion of Mr. Claxton, which moved me in the direction of trust. I was quite content with the arrangement that had been made,” said Henschel.

Air India commission lawyer Anil Kapoor showed the inquiry a memo from CSIS that was dated four days after the June 23 bombing. It referred to “sensitive installations” the agency would have to consider sharing. Henschel said nobody told him the intercepts were linked to Air India or the issue of Sikh extremism.

Canadian intelligence officials described Parmar as the leader of a terrorist organization, the Babbar Khalsa, which promoted an independent Sikh homeland in northern India.

Air India Flight 182 exploded near Ireland as it was en route from Canada to India. The blast killed 329 people, including 280 Canadians.

Parmar tapes erased

The tapes rolled on those calls for three months before the Air India bombing — and as soon as the explosion occurred, CSIS agents knew Parmar was the prime suspect.

CSIS maintains the hundreds of hours of tapes, which were later erased, had no value.

Henschel said he would have been concerned if he had known the tapes were erased.

“In my view, any intercept activity on prime suspects in the crime should probably result in a decision to retain all tapes, all materials,” he said.

While the tapes were destroyed, the transcriber notes survived, indicating Parmar had conversations with a contact in Germany about a plot to assassinate former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi.

Denied access to tapes

Another retired Mountie, Mike Roth, testified he first learned CSIS had wire tapped Parmar more than a month after the disaster — July 24.

Roth, who headed up an RCMP unit to liaise with CSIS when it was created in 1984, said he was initially denied access to the intercepts and transcriber notes.

“I was in a bit of disbelief,” he said, adding he quickly set up a meeting with Claxton to find out why.
In a subsequent meeting with the provincial CSIS boss, Roth said he was told he would receive the information in daily situation reports issued to the Air India task force by CSIS. Such reports were a synopsis of the transcribed notes, “cleansed for the protection of material,” said Roth.

Claxton assured him if any of the recordings could have been used for evidence, a copy would be made, he said.

Roth gained access to the transcriber notes in early September, but couldn’t explain the delay.

CSIS tapes covered months before bombing

The tale of the tapes began in the suburban home of self-styled Sikh holy man Parmar, who lived in a house on Howard Street in Burnaby, B.C.

Parmar was wanted for murder in India. He preached death to Hindus and authorities soon came to believe he was the mastermind behind the Air India bomb, which was allegedly planted in baggage loaded in Vancouver and then transferred to Flight 182, which departed from Toronto.

Indian police killed Parmar in 1992 — an event that the inquiry will also examine soon. First, though, John Major, the commission chair, wants to know what happened to those tapes of Parmar chatting with his contacts around the world from his phone at Howard Street.

Standard procedure to erase tapes, CSIS says

CSIS has always said that there was nothing of value on the Parmar tapes and that erasing them was routine procedure. At the Air India trial in 2003, defence lawyers forced the government to concede that it was a case of “unacceptable negligence.”

Even so, former CSIS director Reid Morden told the CBC at the time that “there was a policy in place that said, if these don’t have intelligence value, then, at a certain point in time — very short span of time — out they go because, otherwise, they represent prying into the affairs of private Canadian citizens.”

The problem, from the RCMP’s perspective, was that there was, indeed, valuable evidence on those tapes — and the translator’s notes survived to prove it. Two RCMP officers are expected to testify about the tapes on Monday.

A second problem was that there was, indeed, a policy in place at CSIS that governed tapes — but it said they had to be kept, not erased, if they contained any sign of “subversive activity.”

Could have brought ’successful prosecution’: RCMP

“There is a strong likelihood that, had CSIS retained the tapes … a successful prosecution of at least some of the principals … could have been undertaken,” says a 1996 memo by the head of the RCMP’s Air India task force, Insp. Gary Bass, now the force’s deputy commissioner.

Deepak Khandelwal, whose two sisters died in the bombing, in September 2006 asked: “How could anyone think that it was right to erase the tapes, regardless of protocol, unless they were trying to hide something?”

The inquiry was called because the investigation into the Air India bombing was the most costly in Canadian history, yet no one was ever convicted of murder in the case.

The RCMP’s key surviving suspects were acquitted in 2005.

The only person to be convicted was bomb-maker Inderjit Singh Reyat, who pleaded guilty to manslaughter in 2003 and received a five-year sentence.

Another connected bombing killed two luggage handlers at Tokyo’s Narita airport.