Intelligence failures behind Air India saga: expert

Ottawa: Canada's national security agencies, by coming so close to success, suffered the worst kind of intelligence failure prior to the 1985 Air India bombings, an inquiry into Canada's deadliest terrorist incident heard Monday.
"The rub here is that we probably got close to success, but not close enough," said Wesley Wark, an expert on national security issues at the University of Toronto's Munk Centre for International Studies.
"And those are the worst kinds of intelligence failure, when you see the possibilities of success and you just can't get there."
The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), created a year earlier and made up mostly of former RCMP intelligence officers, had been tracking and wiretapping alleged Air India terrorist mastermind Talwinder Singh Parmar, a B.C. resident who was killed in a 1992 gun battle.
"We were onto them. We were onto a sense of conspiracy, we understood the threat and the danger. We just couldn't translate that sufficiently through an intelligence-collection program into a policy of pre-emption or prevention or doing something that could lock the conspiracy in time," Wark told commissioner John Major, the former Supreme Court of Canada justice heading the inquiry.
He said the government failed to learn its lesson from the two bombings that left dead 331 people, most of them Canadians of Indian descent.
06/03/07 Peter O'Neil, CanWest News Service/Canada.com, Canada

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Categories: Air India Mar 2007, Foreign Mar 2007, Safety Mar 2007