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OTTAWA — Federal officials received an intelligence report days before the Air-India bombing that one of the airline's flights out of Canada would be targeted by Sikh terrorists that weekend, Ontario Lieutenant-Governor James Bartleman said yesterday.
In startling testimony at a public inquiry, Mr. Bartleman — director of security and intelligence for the foreign service at the time — said he saw a classified document recording an electronic intercept to the effect that Air-India would be hit the weekend of June 22-23, 1985.
“In the week of June 18, the week of the bombing which took place on the 23rd, I was going through the daily intercept package from CSE,” Mr. Bartleman told the inquiry. “And I saw in there a document which indicated that Air-India was being targeted that weekend — specifically the weekend of the 22nd and 23rd.”
His account contradicts Ottawa's assertion it had no specific advance warning of the June 23, 1985, attack that killed all 329 people aboard Flight 182. It was the deadliest terrorist attack and mass murder in Canadian history.
Ontario Lieutenant-Governor James Bartleman listens to a question while testifying before the Air-India inquiry in Ottawa on Thursday. (Chris Wattie/Reuters)
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The Lieutenant-Governor's testimony — and the fact he apparently told no one about the warning for nearly 22 years — astonished Gordon Smith, his former boss. At no time did Mr. Bartleman tell him about the intelligence report, even after the plane went down, Mr. Smith said in an interview. (Mr. Smith is expected to testify at the inquiry next week.)
In his testimony yesterday, Mr. Bartleman said he took the raw intelligence report from the Communications Security Establishment, Canada's top-secret electronic eavesdropping agency, to an RCMP security officer who, he said, “Hissed at me” that of course the RCMP had seen the report and had taken appropriate action.
Nobody has been able to locate the intelligence report in government archives, lawyers for the commission of inquiry said yesterday.
But Mr. Bartleman said he is clear in his recollection. “There are certain things you never forget,” he said.
Mr. Bartleman's introduction to the shadowy world of intelligence and counterterrorism came as a junior diplomatic official assigned to the federal task force handling the 1970 October Crisis. He advanced to become director-general of the intelligence analysis and security branch of the then Department of External Affairs two years before the Air-India bombing.
He said the government intelligence community, including the RCMP, had been concerned about generalized Sikh extremist threats to Indian diplomats and commercial interests throughout the spring of 1985.
Indian government officials had told Canadian officials they feared attacks on Air-India flights out of Canada around the time of the first anniversary of the Indian army's assault on the Sikh Golden Temple in Amritsar.
Security was beefed up despite concerns by the RCMP as to who would foot the bill, Mr. Bartleman said.
The government assembled an ad hoc working group on terrorism that included Mounties, members of the fledgling Canadian Security Intelligence Service and foreign-service officers. That group met in the operations centre at the Department of External Affairs a few days before the bombing.
Mr. Bartleman said he was in his office on another floor at the time, going through intelligence reports from around the world when he saw the CSE report. It used the word “target” in relation to Air-India, but did not mention bombs, he said.
Nevertheless, he was so impressed with the report that he put it into a security folder and walked it down to the operations centre where he showed it to a Mountie. He said he cannot remember the man's name or rank, but he remembers his reaction: “He flushed and told me that of course he had seen it and that he didn't need me to tell him how to do his job.”
“He was defending his turf very vigorously,” Mr. Bartleman said. “I had never in my career, up to that date, never been talked to that way, that someone would sort of hiss at me to mind my own business.”
Mr. Bartleman hand-delivered the report to the Mountie because, he said, “I didn't want anything to fall between the cracks.”
The brush-off by the Mountie led him to believe the police were on top of the threat and were doing everything they could to protect Air-India flights, he said.
“It was raw, unevaluated information. There had been so many alarms raised over the previous year about potential attacks … that I suppose it would be possible for someone to say this is just another one of these cry-wolf events,” Mr. Bartleman said.
Mr. Bartleman, who later served as the foreign-policy adviser to former prime minister Jean Chrétien, said that on the morning of June 23 he was heading off on a family vacation – his family was already in the station wagon – when the home phone rang. A colleague informed him of the Air-India bombing.
Mr. Bartleman said he thought to himself the terrorists had succeeded “despite all of our best efforts.” He immediately returned to the office.
He said he never mentioned the intelligence report to anyone else in the immediate aftermath of the bombing. Remembering the Mountie officer's stinging rebuke a few days earlier, he didn't want to seem like he was interfering with a police investigation.
Mr. Bartleman said he only saw the intelligence report that one day. He assumed “it was sent in due course to be shredded or taken back to CSE or whatever else they do with these things.”
Within a few months, he was off to a diplomatic posting – as ambassador to Israel and then to NATO headquarters in Brussels. He didn't work in Ottawa again for nine years. He could follow developments in the Air-India case only from afar, and he didn't learn many details, Mr. Bartleman said.
Mr. Bartleman's recollection of the intelligence report was challenged by federal government lawyer Barney Brucker.
The lawyer said it has always been the federal government's view that there was no specific advance warning that could have averted the bomb plot. That is still the government's position, Mr. Brucker said.
Mr. Brucker said an intensive search of CSE and other government archives could not produce a copy of the document or any reference to it. Mr. Bartleman said he was not surprised that it was lost in the millions of pieces of paper produced by CSE every year.
Liberal MP Ujjal Dosanjh said Mr. Bartleman's testimony should bring an end to the federal government's position that there were no specific warnings.
“I don't know a politician in this country that, in full knowledge of the facts before him or her, would say what they've been saying,” he said.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper said yesterday he would not comment directly on the Air-India revelations because the judicial inquiry is still under way.
With a report from Bill Curry in Ottawa
