IN DEPTH: AIR INDIA
Crime Files: What did CSIS know?
CBC News Online | Updated August 27, 2003
In the Air India mystery, the questions about what Canada's spy agency, CSIS, really knew about the conspiracy keep coming back.
The opposition pounced on the government on June 2, demanding an inquiry into allegations swirling around the case.
The solicitor general, who is in charge of the RCMP, dismissed RCMP claims that CSIS covered up its knowledge of the Air India plot.
"To suggest that CSIS, for any reason, would pull back from an ongoing counter-terrorism investigation and jeopardize the lives of Canadians and others, Mr. Speaker, is absolutely absurd," Solicitor General Wayne Easter told the Commons.
But senior officers of the RCMP suggested exactly that in long secret internal documents now released as part of the Air India case. At issue is the fact that the suspects were under surveillance by CSIS before the bombing.
150 wiretaps were then erased. CSIS has always said they had no value. But the RCMP was furious.
In an internal 1996 report marked "Secret," Inspector Gary Bass, now assistant commissioner of the RCMP, said, "Numerous intercepts of high probative value between several of the co-conspirators leading up to the bombing were destroyed. There is a strong likelihood that had CSIS retained the tapes…that a successful prosecution against at least some of the principals in both bombings could have been undertaken. Had CSIS co-operated fully from June 23rd onward, this case would have been solved at that time."
The head of CSIS back in 1985, Ted Finn, lost his job over the Air India file, but his successor, Reid Morden, still says CSIS was right to erase the tapes.
"It was judged that they had no intelligence value, which is the reason that the judge gave CSIS the wiretap authorization in the first place," Morton told CBC News.
The solicitor general claimed that all of these issues were settled by a Commons committee report in 1991. However, Assistant Commissioner Bass called that report "grossly inaccurate." Easter also claimed that the same report settled the question of the alleged CSIS mole. In fact, nobody knew about the mole at that time, and the report did not address the question at all.
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Excerpt from a 2001 RCMP interview with Inderjit Singh Reyat. The RCMP played back part of a tape of an October 29, 2000 interview with Ripudaman Singh Malik, who is now on trial for murder.
» PDF document
"DA" is RCMP Staff Sergeant Don Adam.
"RM" is Ripudaman Singh Malik, on trial for murder.
They both refer to the 156 wiretap tapes of the key suspect, Talwinder Singh Parmar, who was killed by Indian police in 1992. The tapes were later were erased by CSIS.
ADAM: "And why would they do that? ... if you were a policeman, why would a government agency destroy the very tapes that would, you know, of Parmar's ... Perhaps if your agent was right in the middle of it, and then it happened and now you were all going to look horrible, you might have a reason to cover that up, wouldn't you?
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