Georgia Straight, Canada

News Features

CSIS retiree: nothing "nefarious" with tapes

News Features By Charlie Smith
Publish Date: September 20, 2007

Not the real Air India tapes, which CSIS destroyed during the 1980s.

A former senior Canadian intelligence-service officer has denied there
was an "ulterior motive" behind the destruction of taped conversations
involving suspected Sikh terrorists in the mid 1980s. James Warren,
former director-general of counterterrorism for the Canadian Security
Intelligence Service, told the Air India inquiry on September 19 that
wiretap recordings were "destroyed in accordance with a policy that
was our default mode".

He added that the spy service had a policy of erasing tapes. He said
that nobody thought to give an order to preserve the recorded
conversations of the people who were suspected of blowing up an Air
India jet in 1985.

"I can’t put myself in the shoes of the people that were responsible
for the section when it happened," Warren said. "But certainly from
the point of view of someone who had to deal with the aftermath, I
wish dearly that they had not been destroyed. I wish-we all would have
wished-that they had survived for whatever value they might have had
in the subsequent events."

The inquiry’s lead counsel, Mark Freiman, later asked Warren on what
basis he concluded there was no ulterior motive. Warren replied that
it was "hard to prove a negative", and then added, "simply on the
basis that I never saw anything that suggested that there had been
anything nefarious in that decision".

Warren testified that he was in charge of CSIS’s foreign-liaison unit
from 1984 to the spring of 1986. At that point, less than a year
after Air India Flight 182, outbound from Canada, had exploded off the
coast of Ireland killing all 329 people aboard, Warren was transferred
to become the head of the counterterrorism branch. He said there were
many other issues, such as "problems with the Armenians", pressure
from another unnamed country to stop the flow of detonators to the
Irish Republican Army, and threats that might arise in Canada from
Middle Eastern issues.

"But by far and away the most traumatic event that had happened was
Air India," he said. "When I arrived on the scene, the service was
gearing up exponentially to deal with Sikh extremism, if you will, at
that point in time. That included warrants and it included the issue
of, well, put it in the vernacular, what the hell happened with the
tapes."

Warren questioned whether these tapes would have had any use in
court. "Whether they would have had any evidentiary value is neither
here nor there," he testified. "They would have-they might have-had
some intelligence value in the future. Um, their evidentiary value was
always suspected because they weren’t collected by the service on the
basis of, with any eye towards, the preservation of evidence."

Warren added that CSIS was not in the business of collecting
evidence. "That was a role for the police," he said. "We were in the
business of mining intelligence…from the sources that we had, and
passing that on to government."

He acknowledged that it was an "oversight" that the tapes weren’t
preserved. "Nobody gave the order, and things kept rolling along as if
nothing had happened," Warren said. "The people who were at very
junior levels who were actually in this process of destroying these
tapes, in the absence of anything from up above, kept doing what they
had always been doing."

On September 18, B.C. Provincial Court Judge James Jardine, a
prosecutor in the Air India case in the 1980s and 1990s, testified
that he was frustrated by CSIS’s reluctance to cooperate with the RCMP
and supply evidence following the bombing of Flight 182 and another
bombing at Narita Airport in Japan, which killed two baggage
handlers. Jardine said that he only learned that CSIS had destroyed
taped conversations with the main suspect, Talwinder Singh Parmar, in
December 1987.

Warren said that if the tapes had been preserved, it would have
removed lingering questions about whether or not there was "anything
inculpatory or exculpatory about them that would have aided the
defence or the prosecution".

Freiman noted that the RCMP had felt "angst" that they were not given
access to taped conversations recorded two days before the Air India
bombing. Freiman said that these conversations allegedly included
"very worrying information that might have led the RCMP, had they
known about it, to take action to prevent the bombing".

"Well, perhaps they would have," Warren said. "But all I can say is it
didn’t apparently occur to anybody in the service that this forewarned
of a plane being bombed out of the sky. And I frankly-in these things
I don’t see words that would lead inescapably to that kind of a
conclusion. I mean sometimes in the intelligence business, there is an
innocent explanation for things."

Freiman noted that CSIS translators were under the impression that the
tapes had to be destroyed 10 days after the conversations had been
intercepted, whereas senior officials stated that the policy was to
get rid of tapes 10 days after they had been transcribed, with a
holding period of up to 30 days.

Warren said there was never an attempt to mislead people. "I was
assured that every tape had been listened to," he added.

In 2000, the Globe and Mail quoted an unnamed former CSIS agent who
admitted to burning tapes containing 150 hours of interviews with
informants in Vancouver. At the time, the agent stated that if he had
given the tapes to the RCMP, his sources could have been required to
testify and be publicly identified, which might have led to them being
killed.

In 1991, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the Crown has a legal
duty to disclose "all relevant information to the defence", regardless
of whether or not the Crown has any intention of using this as
evidence.

The bomb maker, Inderjit Singh Reyat, was convicted in connection with
the Narita Airport explosion, and later pleaded guilty for his role in
the bombing of Flight 182. The prime suspect, Parmar, was killed by
police in India in 1992 without ever being charged in connection with
the terrorist attacks. In 2005, Vancouver businessman Ripudaman Singh
Malik and Kamloops millworker Ajaib Singh Bagri were acquitted of any
involvement in the Air India bombing.