CSIS KNEW OF THREAT: WITNESSES
Hamilton Spectator, Canada
The Canadian Press
May 18 2007
Lawyer Michael Anne MacDonald, above, was reduced to tears yesterday as
she recalled hearing about the 1985 Air India bombing only days after
learning that Canada’s spy agency had advance knowledge of the threat.
Then a lawyer with Ontario’s Ministry of the Attorney General, she
said she had little confidence in the Canadian Security Intelligence
Service (CSIS) based on her dealings with the agency.
"I was extremely distressed," she said yesterday in testimony to an
inquiry into the bombing. "My immediate reaction was: Even when they
know something is going to happen they can’t stop it."
She was one of two witnesses who recalled being told a week before
the bombing that CSIS was worried about Sikh extremists in Vancouver.
Graham Pinos, right, a former Justice Department lawyer, said
the warning came from Mel Deschenes, then director general of
counter-terrorism for the CSIS.
All three were in California for court proceedings related to the
shooting of a Turkish diplomat three years earlier by Armenian
terrorists in Ottawa. Canadian and U.S. authorities had been
collaborating in tracking Armenian extremists.
Pinos said Deschenes told him that Armenians were far from the worst
worry for the spy service.
"The real problem is something else," Pinos quoted the CSIS man as
saying over drinks beside a hotel swimming pool in Los Angeles.
Pinos said Deschenes went on to describe the more serious threat as
"an element of Sikhs" operating in Canada. "He perceived them as
being dangerous, and that likely they would bring a plane down."
"I have an absolutely clear recollection of the event and the
circumstances," Pinos said of the discussion that took place June 19,
1985. "It was something that shocked me."
Four days later, Air India Flight 182, en route to New Delhi and Bombay
from Toronto and Montreal, was downed off the coast of Ireland by a
terrorist bomb with the loss of 329 lives.
Deschenes, for his part, made a written statement in 1988 in which
he adamantly denied he had any advance tips about an imminent attack.
Now elderly and facing health and memory difficulties, he is not
expected to testify at the inquiry.