CSIS wondered whether Parmar could have been Indian agent

Ottawa: Canada's spy agency thought Talwinder Singh Parmar was probably a dangerous terrorist months before the 1985 Air India bombing - but it also toyed with an alternative theory that he could have been an agent provocateur working for the Indian government.
"He was an unknown (at the time)," Ray Kobzey, a former CSIS officer, testified Wednesday. "We needed to clarify what exactly we were dealing with here."
Kobzey wrote at the time that Parmar should be considered "the most radical and potentially dangerous Sikh in the country."
But he also noted, in the material marshalled to support the wiretap warrant, that some sources in the Indo-Canadian community thought he was actually an agent of the Indian government intent on sowing discord.
That wasn't as troubling as the possibility that he was plotting terrorist acts, Kobzey testified. But it was still a threat to Canadian national security.,
If Parmar had been an agent provocateur, he said, the danger would have been that he was "destabilizing the emigre community, creating problems within the community, fomenting unrest."
The suggestion that Parmar was an agent of Indian intelligence, with a hidden agenda to discredit Sikhs, has long since been abandoned by virtually all students of the Air India bombing.
But the evidence at the inquiry shows CSIS hadn't yet discarded the possibility when it began trying to get judicial authorization to tap his phone.
It turned out that it took five months to get the tap in place - not because of any resistance by the courts but because of bureaucratic problems within the security service.
The delay - previously noted by several witnesses - meant CSIS didn't get the pipeline it wanted into Parmar's activities until February 1985, four months before Air India Flight 182 was downed by a terrorist bomb.
24/05/07 Jim Brown/Canadian Press/Canada.com, Canada

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