A Cascading Series Of Errors

In 2006, the Canadian Government had appointed a Commission of Inquiry headed by former Supreme Court justice John Major to enquire into the crash of an aircraft of Air India named Kanishka on June 23,1985. The crash was caused by an explosive device suspected to have been planted in a piece of unaccompanied baggage by Sikh extremists belonging to the Babbar Khalsa headed by the late Talwinder Singh Parmar of Vancouver, Canada. The report of the Commission was released on June 17, 2010. The Commission has found that a "cascading series of errors" by the Government of Canada, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service allowed the terrorist attack to take place.

Relevant extracts from the report:

The Air India Flight 182 tragedy was the result of a cascading series of failures. The failures were widely distributed across the agencies and institutions whose mandate it was to protect the safety and security of Canadians. There were structural failures and operational failures; policy failures, communications failures and human errors. Each contributed to, but none was the sole cause for, Sikh terrorists being able to place a bomb in the checked baggage loaded aboard Flight 182 without being detected. Some failures came to light almost immediately, but a number have lain undetected, or at least unacknowledged, for decades and have only come to light during the currency of this Commission of Inquiry.

The first question posed by the Terms of Reference of this Inquiry is whether Canadian institutions adequately understood and assessed the threat posed by Sikh extremism.

All of the institutions and agencies were theoretically aware of the potential threat to safety and security posed by terrorism in general. A few had some knowledge of the dangers of its Sikh extremism version in particular. Several were nominally aware of the threat of sabotage to passenger aircraft by means of timed explosive devices in checked baggage, and one agency was even aware of information indicating that Air India might be targeted by this method in June 1985. As a practical matter however, none of the institutions or agencies was adequately prepared for the events of June 22/23, 1985.

Indeed it is impossible to draw any conclusion other than that, almost without exception, the agencies and institutions did not take the threat seriously, and that the few individuals within these institutions who did, were faced with insurmountable obstacles in their efforts to deal with the threat

There are a number of plausible ways to break down the failures that allowed the bombing of Flight 182 to occur. Each of the agencies and institutions that should have had a role in preventing terrorist attacks displayed structural flaws that impaired their performance.

Despite its awareness of the threat and of the identity of the potential protagonists who might carry it out, CSIS appears to have obtained little important new information of its own about the Sikh extremist threat or about the Babbar Khalsa or about Parmar from the fall of 1984 through to March of 1985. The major reason for this gap lay in the state of the warrant approvals process that had been put in place by the CSIS Act in June 1984.

On the ground, CSIS BC investigators were aware of the urgent nature of the threat from Sikh extremism and of the inadequacy of their information resources to deal with it. They simply had no information sources of their own and had been totally unsuccessful in recruiting sources within a Sikh community that was somewhat insular and vulnerable to intimidation by the extremists. They soon concluded that they needed surveillance and electronic intercepts in order to be able to understand and respond to the increasing threat.

The institutional response to the request to approve a warrant to intercept Parmar’s communications demonstrates a fi xation with form over substance and, despite protestations to the contrary at the time – and subsequently, suggests a lack of appreciation of the reality of the threat.

The civilianisation of CSIS was in part a reaction to RCMP Security Service excesses in its investigation of the Front de Libération du Québec (the “FLQ”) and extremist Quebec Separatists. Under the RCMP Security Service, while electronic intercepts had required approval, the process was informal, simply requiring a request to the Solicitor General, the Minister responsible for the RCMP (and later also for CSIS). With the creation of CSIS, as one of the means to protect civil liberties from unjustifi able intrusion by or on behalf of government, a new system of judicial supervision of certain intelligence operations was instituted, including a requirement for judicial approval for intercepting private communications. This new protocol was to apply prospectively but also was intended to cover existing intercepts that had been approved by the Minister. There was an explicit requirement that existing intercepts had to be reviewed internally and approved by the Solicitor General and then by a judge of the Federal Court, all within 6 months of the coming into force of the CSIS Act, i.e. by January 1985.

When added to the considerable stresses and strains that accompanied the rushed transition to CSIS from the RCMP Security Service, it was entirely foreseeable that this warrant conversion process would be the source of added pressure and potential misadventure. The foreseeability of the problems that might be caused by the requirement to devote considerable resources to the conversion process should have called for added care and attention to ensure that the process would be capable of meeting new needs that would arise and not just of preserving existing arrangements. Instead, the response of CSIS was to prioritise existing warrants and to defer new applications, with the exception of only those deemed most urgent. As CSIS understandably would want to avoid disrupting existing investigations, in theory, this process could be considered a sensible policy; in practice, its eff ectiveness depended on the Service’s ability to respect the new needs that were more urgent.

The evidence before the Commission indicates that, despite the priority afforded to the warrant conversion process, it was possible to secure a warrant in an extremely short timeline to respond to a perceived urgent priority, as occurred in an area other than the threat of Sikh extremism. The protracted wait for the processing of the Parmar warrant application either demonstrates an unthinking application of the concept of priority of existing warrants or, more likely, refl ects the lack of appreciation of the true urgency of the threat of Sikh extremism.

Despite certification by the existing chain of command in BC as well as by the Headquarters counter- terrorism hierarchy, and despite increasingly pointed memoranda from the front lines in BC, the application for the Parmar warrant lay dormant for months while the conversion process went forward. Then, after proceeding through multiple steps in the complicated, and still in fl ux, approval process, it was further delayed for an additional month by what turned out to be an irrelevant issue raised by the Minister’s Office. Although the fi nal steps leading up to the submission of the warrant to, and approval by, the Federal Court proceeded relatively quickly, the total time from the request for a warrant to the date of approval was over fi ve months. This lengthy delay was entirely disproportionate to the heightened threat and the demonstrated lack of intelligence sources available to respond to it.

The subsequent course of the BC investigation confi rms the theme of inadequate resourcing and indicates that execution on the ground was not suffi cient for the seriousness of the threat being dealt with. Eventually the BC investigators did get approval both for electronic intercepts and for physical surveillance coverage on Parmar. As will be seen, the story of neither eff ort is particularly edifying.

The mobile surveillance of Parmar was carried out for 39 of the 72 days: between April 6 to June 16, 1985, including continuously for the fi rst two weeks of June 1985 – an exceptionally long period for what was seen as a very scarce resource. Nevertheless, as has been widely reported, this surveillance was withdrawn on June 17, at precisely the most crucial time in terms of the terrorist preparations for the bombing. The stationary observation post (OP) near Parmar’s residence was also withdrawn on the day of the bombing. The rumour that the OP withdrawal was to allow the investigators to participate in a social event appears to be based on a misunderstanding of the CSIS code name for the operation to which the surveillance team was reassigned. Nevertheless the fact that surveillance was redirected to shadow a counter-espionage target at the moment when the danger of an act of domestic terrorism was at its height, is a telling illustration of how poorly understood the threat was.

No less telling is the way the surveillance was conducted, and especially how it was (or was not) used. The conduct of the surveillance was marked by numerous low lights, with the surveillants unable to keep track of their targets, and often mistaking one traditionally-attired Sikh for another. This apparent inability to tell one Sikh from another continued into the post-bombing era as well. The nadir of ineff ectiveness of CSIS pre-bombing surveillance is arguably the moment of what perhaps might have been its greatest success: the monitoring of the “Duncan Blast.”

On June 4, 1985, a CSIS surveillance team followed Parmar as he travelled with a young man, misidentifi ed by the surveillance team as Parmar’s son Jaswinder, to the BC Ferry Docks. The lead surveillance car narrowly avoided missing the ferry, a fate the second car and its surveillance team was unable to avoid. The lead surveillance team followed Parmar’s car to the Duncan, BC residence of Inderjit Singh Reyat, who would later be convicted of manslaughter for his role in the Narita, Japan, bombing, and would enter a guilty plea in connection with the terrorist attack on Flight 182.

The surveillants followed Parmar’s car from Reyat’s house to a clearing off the highway in the woods near Duncan and saw Reyat and Parmar walk into the woods. Shortly thereafter, they heard a loud explosive sound coming from the woods which they misidentifi ed as a shotgun blast. The team observed Parmar and Reyat emerge from the woods and put something in the trunk of Parmar’s car. They then followed the car to Reyat’s residence where the young man got out of the car and accompanied Reyat into his house.

Although they were on a surveillance mission, the surveillants did not have a camera and so were unable to photograph the unknown young man, who would later be referred to as “Mr. X.” This individual was the subject of a long and unsuccessful search to discover his identity as one of the missing pieces in the Air India narrative. Although they remained on Vancouver Island for the night, the surveillants were, for unknown reasons, unable to secure permission to follow the young man the next day and thus lost a further chance to make the crucial identification.

Additional examples of such fumbling extended into the post-bombing investigation of the identity of Mr. X. When the RCMP obtained school records placing Parmar’s son Jaswinder in school on the day of the Duncan Blast and began to raise questions with CSIS, CSIS did nothing to verify whether its team had misidentifi ed the person accompanying Parmar and Reyat. In fact, even when one of the CSIS surveillants who had followed Parmar and his associates to Duncan began to work for the RCMP and, having there the opportunity to view Jaswinder at close range, realized with certainty that he was not the person she had seen on June 4th, CSIS still stubbornly maintained that Mr. X was Jaswinder. CSIS did not question the PSU team in light of the RCMP’s expressed concerns. Even a cursory review of its surveillance records pertinent to this issue would have revealed that its surveillance team placed Jaswinder in two places at the same time: on Vancouver Island and at school in Vancouver on the day after the Duncan Blast.

In addition to the failure to identify Mr. X, there were further investigative dead ends resulting from the mis-transmission in the CSIS Report of the telephone number Parmar was seen to have dialled from the ferry. 

Even the most important achievement of the surveillance, hearing the explosion in the woods, was marred by the misinterpretation by the surveillants of what they actually heard. The surveillants thought they heard a shotgun blast, when in fact they heard an explosion intended to test the detonation system for the bombs Parmar was building. Instead of leading to a realization that Parmar was planning to blow something up, the surveillants’ belief that they heard a gunshot supported the mistaken conclusion by the CSIS BC Region that the primary danger from Parmar and the Babbar Khalsa was a possible assassination attempt or armed assault.

But even this misinterpreted information, which at the very least appears to demonstrate that Parmar and his group posed a serious threat to commit a terrorist act, never made it into the formal CSIS threat assessment process. Likewise, a number of other signifi cant pieces of threat information in various hands were also never reported, further compromising the ability of the CSIS HQ threat assessment process to put together the pieces of the puzzle in time to raise an eff ective response to the threat that was to crystallize into the terrorist attack on Flight 182.

The fate of the electronic surveillance on Parmar, fi nally approved in March 1985, was no less problematic, and arguably constituted an even more serious failure because of its consequences for the subsequent investigation of the bombing. In this case too, resource issues were important. While listening devices can record conversations, it takes human resources to transcribe, to translate if necessary, and, ultimately, to analyse and interpret them. Each of these steps proved problematic.

In order to safeguard security, CSIS, like the RCMP Security Service before it, adopted stringent security qualifi cations for its translators, including lengthy periods of Canadian residency as well as Citizenship. As prudent as this may have seemed in the abstract, in practice it meant that there was only a very small pool of potential translators available for recruitment. In BC Region it meant that there were no Punjabi translators available at all.

To cope with this problem, the tapes of the Parmar intercepts were shipped to Ottawa, where they were added to the workload of the already overburdened Punjabi translator at CSIS Headquarters. Delays were inevitable and a serious backlog ensued.

Shipping the tapes across the country meant that there was no meaningful possibility for the BC investigators to interact with the translator, who was essentially left to her own devices to extract, translate and summarize what was related on the tapes. Although a Punjabi translator for the BC Region was eventually recruited and began work on June 8, 1985, a signifi cant backlog of translation work in BC remained throughout the pre-bombing period. There still seems to have been little interaction with the investigators on the ground and there remains some doubt as to how many, if any, of the “transcripts” that were produced were in fact reviewed by the investigators.

The transcripts were prepared by a transcriber who reviewed and summarized what she thought relevant in the English language content, adding material from the Punjabi content based on the translators’ notes. The eff ectiveness of this disjointed process became further impaired by the vacation schedules of the transcriber and one of the investigators. One of the investigators was off duty in the two weeks leading up to the bombing and the transcriber was away just prior to, and for a week after, the bombing. Because the intercept tapes were erased shortly after they were processed, there was no opportunity to go back to the actual tapes for further analysis or to remedy any defi ciencies in the transcription and translation process. Whatever information was not recorded in the transcription notes was lost permanently.

As discussed elsewhere , disputes remain as to the actual content of the tapes that were reviewed and of those that were caught in the backlog, as well as about the adequacy and comprehensiveness of the review and analysis. What is beyond doubt is that no material from the Parmar intercepts made its way into the CSIS, or any other, threat assessment process in April – May or June of 1985. 

The central unanswered question that Canadians, and especially the families of the victims of the bombing of Flight 182, have hoped a Public Inquiry might reveal is whether the Government and its institutions had information prior to the bombing that could have allowed the authorities to prevent it.

The answer is complex. There is no evidence that the Government was aware in advance of the details of the events of June 22, 1985. That is the basis for the oft- repeated statement that there was no knowledge of any “specifi c threat” against Flight 182.

To pose the issue in this form is, however, to miss the point. In 1985, “specifi c threat” was a technical term tied to emergency protocols put into place when the authorities received a call-in threat that identified a target, in circumstances where there was not enough time to conduct a proper investigation or assessment of the threat. This sort of “specifi c threat” justified emergency measures because of the magnitude of potential consequences even if it wasn’t possible to assess the likelihood of their occurrence.

It is one thing to say that, had there been such a “specifi c threat,” detailing a time, place and method of a planned attack on Flight 182, emergency measures would have been implemented to hunt down the bomb. It is entirely something else to suggest that, in the absence of such a detailed, precise and “specifi c” threat, nothing further could or should have been done to prevent the bombing.

The claim that there was no “specifi c threat” to the June 22, 1985 departure of Flight 182 is accurate only in a limited and literal sense. No one source provided detailed information to any one agency in one place and at one time about the plan to blow up Flight 182 on June 23, 1985. On the other hand, various agencies of government had extremely important pieces of information that, taken together, would have led a competent analyst to conclude that Flight 182 was in danger of being bombed by known Sikh extremists.

Prior to the bombing, CSIS, the RCMP, the Department of External Aff airs, local police forces and Transport Canada were collectively in possession of the following information about Sikh extremism and threats to Indian interests: 

• A plot to bomb one and possibly two Air India planes was allegedly being hatched by Sikh extremists in British Columbia in the fall of 1984;
• In the fall of 1984, Ajaib Singh Bagri was allegedly nominated to a committee planning the hijacking of an Air India plane;
• Talwinder Singh Parmar’s group, the Babbar Khalsa, was reportedly working on a “highly secret project” in the spring of 1985, and Parmar had been assessed as the greatest threat in Canada to Indian diplomatic missions and personnel;
• In early June, Parmar and associates conducted experiments in the woods involving a loud explosion;
• During a June 12, 1985 meeting, a prominent Sikh extremist stated – in response to questions about the lack of attacks on Indian officials - that something big would happen in two weeks; and
• In late May and early June, Air India warned that sabotage attempts against Air India planes were likely to be made by Sikh extremists using time-delayed devices in registered baggage, that special vigilance was warranted on items like transistor radios, and that police should oversee the loading of registered luggage onto airplanes.

James Bartleman, who at the time he gave his evidence was Lieutenant Governor of Ontario, and in 1985 was Director General (DG) of the Intelligence Analysis and Security Bureau at External Aff airs, testifi ed that shortly prior to the bombing, he saw, as part of the material he received electronically from CSE on a daily basis, information that indicated that Flight 182 would be targeted. He was not able to assess the reliability of the information but thought it important to ensure that the authorities were aware of the information and were dealing with it. When he brought the information to the attention of an RCMP offi cial who was attending a security meeting in the building, he was met with a hostile reception and an indication that the RCMP was aware of the matter and had it in hand. On June 23, 1985, when he was informed of the bombing, he thought immediately that this was the materialization of the threat, and that the authorities had been unable to prevent it.

Counsel from the Department of Justice, on behalf of the Government and all its agencies, approached Bartleman’s evidence as though it was the only pre-bombing indication of the danger to Air India Flight 182. In an entirely misguided approach, Bartleman was aggressively cross-examined and witnesses were called to attempt to call into question the details of his evidence.

Intelligence specialists often observe that an item of information, although apparently insignifi cant in itself, may in fact be the missing piece to a puzzle that helps a foreign or hostile group or agency see a pattern or draw conclusions that have profound intelligence value. This “mosaic effect” metaphor is typically used by intelligence agencies, sometimes excessively, to describe the potentially dangerous consequences that can result from the disclosure of their own information and to justify the need for secrecy. It is an equally apt description of how gathering and sharing information can help an agency’s own intelligence effort.

The essence of good intelligence analysis is that it pulls together disparate facts and information from diverse sources to assemble a pattern in which one can have confidence. Once enough information has been assembled, even seemingly insignificant new additions can lead to new insights and deeper understanding.

However startling and important Bartleman’s testimony may be, it is not, as the blistering assault on his credibility by some Government witnesses and the Attorney General of Canada’s submissions would imply, the only evidence that suggests that the Government had enough knowledge of the threat to Flight 182 to warrant a different security response.

Even without the document that Bartleman described, there was more than enough disparate pieces of information that, had they been assembled in one place, would have not only pointed to the nature of the threat, but would have provided corroboration for the seriousness of that threat, thereby highlighting the need to implement measures aimed specifi cally at responding to the possibility of sabotage by means of explosive devices concealed in checked baggage. Bartleman’s evidence is best understood as simply one more piece in the mosaic.

In 1985, the institutional arrangements in place and the prevailing practices of Canadian information-gathering agencies were wholly defi cient in terms of allowing the mosaic of the threat of Sikh extremism to be pieced together so as to make visible the pattern that clearly pointed to the high risk of a bombing of The consequence of these defi cient arrangements was that CSIS, the government agency that was given the primary responsibility for threat assessment, did not have suffi cient access to facts about the threat of Sikh extremism. Lacking good access to sources of its own within the Sikh community, CSIS was heavily dependant on other agencies, both foreign and domestic, for the information it needed to understand the threat.

CSIS had an abundance of threat information from the Indian government about the situation in India and about what was going on in the Sikh community in Canada, but it was unable to corroborate it. Without corroborating information, however, the large volume of information from the Government of India gave the impression that it was “crying wolf.” 

In terms of the most important information regarding threats to Air India in the year leading up to the bombings, CSIS appears to have been provided with very few of the essential pieces of the mosaic possessed by other government agencies.

One of the most striking instances of the impairment of CSIS’s ability to benefi t from the mosaic effect is the June 1st Telex.

On June 1, 1985, Air India’s Chief Vigilance and Security Manager in Bombay sent a telex to Air India offi ces worldwide, warning of “…the likelihood of sabotage attempts being undertaken by Sikh extremists by placing time/delay devices etc. in the aircraft or registered baggage.” The telex went on to set out specifi c security precautions to be implemented. These precautions included “explosive sniff ers and bio-sensors [dogs]” as well as physical random checks of registered baggage, at least until June 30, 1985.

Air India forwarded the telex to the RCMP Offi cer in Charge at Pearson airport in Toronto, who sent it on to the Acting Offi cer in Charge in the RCMP HQ Airport Policing Branch, requesting instructions on how to respond. The A/OIC sent a telex to CSIS, asking for an updated threat assessment in relation to Air India. CSIS responded with a threat assessment indicating that it was unaware of any “specifi c threats” against Air India at the time.

In its submissions to the Honourable Bob Rae, the RCMP indicated that it had forwarded the June 1st Telex to CSIS along with its request for an updated threat assessment. The RCMP also told Rae that the heightened security measures it implemented included the use of explosives-sniffi ng dogs to check the passenger section of the aircraft prior to departure. Both of these statements were incorrect.

The June 1st Telex not only was not sent to CSIS, it appears not to have been sent anywhere other than to HQ Airport Policing. It was not even sent to RCMP NCIB, the branch in charge of internal RCMP threat assessments.

The June 1st 1985 Telex was a key piece of the mosaic that never reached CSIS and was never integrated into the threat assessment process about Sikh extremism. The failure to forward the telex to CSIS eliminated any opportunity for CSIS to consider the information it contained about the threat of imminent attack in light of other information CSIS had received.

In his testimony, the former CSIS investigator in charge of the pre-bombing BC investigation into Sikh extremism stated that knowledge of the June 1st Telex would have given him a better understanding of the signifi cance of the “loud noise” reported by CSIS surveillants when they followed Parmar, Reyat and an unknown person into the woods near Duncan on June 4, 1985. A Toronto CSIS investigator made precisely that connection shortly after the bombing when he zeroed in on the Duncan Blast surveillance report and identifi ed the noise referred to as almost certainly being a test explosion rather than, as previously thought, a shotgun blast.

The November 1984 Plot is a similar instance of a pre-bombing failure to integrate important information into the mosaic of threats. In September 1984, the RCMP learned, through “Person 1,” that Sikh extremists were organizing to bomb an Air India plane but failed to share this information with its own HQ, with CSIS or with other agencies. CSIS did not learn of the existence of this plot until late October 1984, when the Vancouver Police Department received essentially the same information from “Person 2”, which it then shared with CSIS and with the RCMP. The RCMP, however, failed to inform CSIS that this information constituted corroboration of earlier information from another independent source, Person 1.

CSIS was aware of several threats against Air India during the month of October 1984 and, prior to learning of Person 2’s information, issued a threat assessment noting that an attack in Canada was remote but could not be ruled out.

After receiving Person 2’s information, CSIS updated its assessment to a “real possibility” that Sikhs would damage an Air India plane.

It was not until March 1986, when the RCMP performed a post-bombing fi le review, that Person 1’s statement to police in September 1984 about a man in Duncan who could manufacture “nitro” for blowing up an Air India fl ight come to light. If CSIS had received this information in the pre-bombing period, the signifi cance of the excursion by Parmar and Duncan resident Inderjit Singh Reyat into the woods near Duncan would have undoubtedly been assessed in a more sinister light.

This chain of events dramatically illustrates the role that corroborating information can have on the threat assessment process. It also highlights how a lack of all relevant information can result in a serious potential threat being disregarded.

Quite aside from the information provided by Bartleman and intelligence about the June 1st Telex and the November Plot, there were other key pieces of the mosaic in the possession of government agencies that CSIS never received and therefore couldn’t use in its threat assessment.

After the close of the hearings, the Commission became aware of relevant information in the possession of the Communications Security Establishment. CSE information is subject to rigorous National Security Confi dentiality requirements, and little detail can be revealed about this information except that the information indicated that specifi c security measures, substantially similar to those listed in the June 1st Telex, were to be undertaken inside and outside of India for Air India fl ights due to threats of sabotage and hijacking by Sikh extremists. Furthermore, Indian airports were undertaking security audits in response to the threats and the Government of India had shown an increased interest in the security of airports against the Sikh terrorist threat in the month of June 1985. This latter fact would have clearly called into question RCMP and Transport Canada officials’ view that threats, such as the June 1st Telex, were provided by Air India solely as a means to obtain additional security for free.

This additional information might, in itself, seem unremarkable, but in the context of the June 1st Telex, as well as other information known to agencies of the Canadian government in June 1985, it should have suggested a signifi cant risk of a bomb attack on an Air India fl ight in June 1985. There is no record of the CSE information being provided to CSIS.

The June 1st Telex and the CSE information were more than enough, had they been assembled in one place and assessed by a skilled analyst, to have mandated an upgrading of security and the implementation of responsive measures at Pearson and Mirabel airports and, arguably, at airports with connecting fl ights to Air India, so as to respond to a high threat of sabotage by bombs concealed in checked baggage. The Commission accepts the expert evidence given at the Inquiry that, even on its own, the June 1st Telex clearly should have led to this upgrade in security. 

Bartleman’s evidence is not essential to arrive at the conclusion that the Government knew enough about the pre-bombing threat to make its failure to implement responsive security measures inexcusable. However, the prominence given to the testimony of Bartleman by the Government makes it necessary to conduct an evaluation of his evidence. With an understanding of what was known by the Government in the pre-bombing period, Bartleman’s evidence can now be assessed in its proper context.

Despite the aggressive insistence of the Government to the contrary, there is nothing implausible about the existence and subsequent disappearance of a document referring to a threat directed against a Canadian Air India fl ight. It is possible that the passage of over two decades may have blurred some details in Bartleman’s recollection, but the essence of his testimony is credible. The Commission, applying the elements of common law assessment of evidence, fi nds him a credible witness. He had nothing to gain from coming forward with his evidence and he was fully aware that his evidence would be vigorously attacked.

The Commission accepts the possibility that a document such as that described by Bartleman would have been ignored and then subsequently could have gone missing from the Government’s documentary holdings because:

• The documentary holdings for the pre-bombing period are incomplete.
• Archives have been purged with no index of destroyed documents.
• CSIS, as a matter of policy, destroyed source documentation once it had been reviewed and any intelligence reports had been written.

Despite statements made in documents before the Commission and in corroborating testimony at the hearings that asserts that in the pre-bombing period the RCMP was in receipt of a large volume of threats to Air India forwarded by Air India itself, the number of RCMP documents produced to the Commission falls well short of that description.

The state of CSE documentary holdings from the pre-bombing period is unclear and the holdings themselves almost certainly incomplete.

Various government witnesses claimed that information about a threat against an Air India fl ight would have made an impression on them and that they would have raised an alarm immediately. This assertion, however, is inconsistent with what is known about the reaction to threat information received by the Government of Canada in the spring of 1985 for which documentary evidence remains. Such threat information, including the June 1st Telex, received little if any reaction.

A government witness who stated that he would have remembered and reacted to any bomb threat concerning Air India had to be reminded of the existence of an April 1985 threat against an inbound Air India flight. He defended his lack of response in that case on the basis that there were no security precautions necessary to deal with a threat against an inbound flight. Nevertheless, the failure to raise an alarm and the absence of documentary reference to this threat in any other material from the pre-bombing and post-bombing periods parallels what happened to the June 1st Telex.

A CSE witness who attempted to attack Bartleman’s credibility asserted that he would have warned the Government of any threat against an Air India flight, as he had done months earlier when he saw a reference to the November Plot. He apparently was unaware, however, of the existence of the CSE information about security measures being mandated for Air India operations, inside and outside of India in response to threats of sabotage by Sikh extremists and information that Indian airports were conducting security audits in light of these threats. This is information whose relevance to the Air India bombings the Government disputes to this day. The very fact that the relevance of the CSE documents is disputed is illustrative. If past and current CSE offi cials cannot, even in hindsight, make the connection between this information and the threat to Flight 182, it should hardly be surprising that its relevance was unappreciated in 1985.

It remains unknown how accurate the threat information seen by Bartleman may have been. As he freely admitted, the information he saw merely suggested the existence of a threat and he had no way to assess its seriousness or credibility. The RCMP witness who testifi ed that the Force received threats to Air India before every fl ight used that fact as justifi cation for the RCMP’s view of these threats as “floaters” – sent by Air India in the hopes that the Canadian Government would provide additional security without additional cost.

This account of the RCMP’s view of the credibility of threats to Air India issued at the time is consistent with Bartleman’s account of the dismissive and even hostile reception he received when he sought to bring the information to the attention of the Force. It is also consistent with notations in earlier documentation about a seeming annoyance on the part of the RCMP with being “second-guessed” on security decisions by a member of External Aff airs.

Even if Bartleman saw nothing more than what was contained in the CSE information unearthed by the Commission, it is likely that it would have been enough, given his knowledge of Sikh extremism in Canada, to convince him that the threat needed follow-up. The fact that Canada had the largest Sikh diaspora in the world, that June was a time when there was a very high risk that some action would be carried out against Government of India interests and that Air India was a possible symbolic target, all would lead anyone with his knowledge and experience in the area to raise questions about what precautions had been taken. This was precisely what Bartleman did. 

Prior to the bombing, the Government as a whole had the following information relevant to the risk that Sikh extremists could successfully carry out the bombing of an Air India plane:

It was aware that Sikh extremists were serious about a terrorist attack during June 1985 against a symbol of the Government of India. It knew the identity of the extremists likely to be involved in such an attack.

It was aware that Air India’s fl ights were likely to be a target of Sikh extremists and that a likely means for such a terrorist attack was a time-delayed explosive concealed in checked baggage.

It was aware that the most serious threat to civil aviation was no longer hijacking, but sabotage.

It knew that Transport Canada’s regulatory regime was inadequate to deal with this sort of threat and that the specifi c security measures currently instituted by Air India were inadequate and were based on unreliable technology and untrained screeners.

It was aware of rules and procedures that could have been prescribed by Regulation, and that would have been more eff ective in responding to security risks posed by interlined baggage and by baggage checked-in by passengers who did not show up for their fl ights.

It was also aware of more eff ective procedures, such as passenger-baggage reconciliation, and practices for screening baggage and identifying potential risks.

Nevertheless, because the Government did not address what was, by its own evaluation, a security regime wholly inadequate to identify and respond to known serious threats, it failed to prevent the bombing of Air India Flight 182.

To be continued