CSIS wishes Air India tape survived: inquiry

Ottawa: A former top official with Canada's spy agency says he regrets that critical wiretaps of Air India suspects were erased in 1985, igniting more than two decades of controversy.
But James Warren, who retired as deputy director of Canadian Security Intelligence Service, told the Air India inquiry Wednesday that the tapes were innocently erased according to policy without verbatim transcripts ever being made.
"I wish dearly that they had not been destroyed. I think we all wish that they had survived for whatever value they might have had," Mr. Warren told Commissioner John Major.
"It was oversight. Why it happened I don't know. Nobody gave the order."
He said the fledgling agency was keenly aware that it had been formed to separate intelligence gathering from active police work after a royal commission earlier made the recommendation.
"We were not in the business of collecting evidence. That was the role of the police," Mr. Warren said. "We drummed it into our people: 'You may have joined a police force, but as of July 16, 1984, you collect intelligence.'"
But he also said that some of the bugged telephone calls of Air India mastermind Talwinder Singh Parmar may appear sinister in hindsight but were written off as innocent conversations at the time.
"There was not a smoking gun sitting there in the pile waiting to be listened to," he said.
All but 54 of the 210 tapes made of Parmar's calls both before and after the June 23, 1985, bombing were destroyed by junior personnel following a "default" policy, Mr. Warren said.
While Parmar and others were very aware they were being watched and wiretapped, some of the calls should have raised suspicions, Mr. Major was told.
Just before the bombing, Parmar asked suspect Hardial Singh Johal if he had "written the article" and he asked his younger brother "if the work had been done."
There was a more ominous call in April, 1985, when Parmar appeared to discuss with a German contact a plot to kill Rajiv Gandhi, which the RCMP later described as "a paradigm of significant subversive activity."
But Mr. Warren said nothing heard on the any of the tapes directly related to the Air India bombing.
"There was no one in the service who thought this would lead to a plane being blown out of the sky," Mr. Warren said. "Sometimes in intelligence there actually is an innocent explanation for things."
He conceded under cross-examination that the call about killing Gandhi should have raised some suspicions and triggered a response more than two months before Air India Flight 182 was destroyed and 331 died.
"It looks to me as the kind of thing I would have kept," he testified. "I don't know what was going through the minds of the people there at the time."
19/09/07 Kim Bolan/CanWest News Service/National Post, Canada

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Categories: Air India - International Sep 2007, Foreign Sep 2007, Safety Sep 2007