James Bartleman's outstanding foreign service career of more than 35 years never masked his oddness. He fit no one's conventional picture of a diplomat. His colleagues thought him secretive, aloof, unrelentingly serious, an ambitious loner who played his cards close to his chest and was not - as one former diplomat said - "a natural sharer."
Since his stunning testimony last week before the judicial inquiry into the 1985 attack on Air India Flight 182 that killed 329 people, a new word has joined the list of descriptive Bartleman adjectives: bizarre. He has become The Man Who Unbelievably Said Nothing.
Mr. Bartleman, now Ontario's Lieutenant-Governor and at the time of the attack chief of the foreign-affairs department's intelligence and security section, told the inquiry he saw an intelligence document - known as an intercept - giving the time and location of a terrorist attack on an Air India plane matching Flight 182's co-ordinates. He showed it to a senior RCMP officer who he said indicated crossly that the police force was already aware of it, and then for the next 20-odd years, he appears not to have mentioned it to a soul.
He did not tell his superiors in what was then the External Affairs department. He said nothing about it to the government's high-level emergency response team, of which he was a member, and which convened one day after the explosion.
He apparently said nothing about it during the four years he was foreign policy adviser to former prime minister Jean Chrétien, although there were high-level political discussions during that period about whether an inquiry should be held. The Air India bombing is not mentioned in any of his four autobiographical books.
According to the mythology rapidly accumulating around Mr. Bartleman, he mentioned it only during a chance encounter last spring with chief inquiry counsel Mark Freiman as the men walked their dogs.
His testimony has been greeted in the national capital with incredulity and stark disbelief, what his lawyer, Paul Cavaluzzo, described yesterday as a "piling on" by the government.
The Ottawa Citizen published an article suggesting he has experienced false memory syndrome about what he'd actually read 22 years earlier. A Toronto Star columnist, on the other hand, all but outright labelled him guilty of willfully covering up a vital piece of evidence.
And a former senior diplomat who knows him well acknowledged that Mr. Bartleman's actions constituted "an implausible set of behaviours," but then he added: "Except for maybe one guy, and that's Bartleman. Despite the fact the behaviour would have been odd, I can almost see it as plausible."
To understand why Mr. Bartleman likely acted as he did, it is necessary to understand something of the man and to avoid looking at 1985 through the rear-view mirror of 2007.
To begin with, none of the current or former senior foreign-service officials interviewed for this article - all of whom agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity - suggested there was or is anything impaired about Mr. Bartleman's judgment or memory, although he has suffered from long-time depression about which he speaks quite openly.
A couple found some of his actions weird, mysterious and inexplicable, but everyone who knows him saw a rational relationship between the man's actions and his personality.
In June, 1985, he was chief spook in the Department of External Affairs.
In the months preceding the Air India explosion, Canada's intelligence organizations were awash with reports that an Air India plane was targeted for attack by Sikh militants. The airline had made so many requests for extra protection that it was considered a bit of a nuisance. Three days before the explosion on Flight 182, Mr. Bartleman was given an intelligence intercept - basically a wiretap; whether it was licit or illicit is lost somewhere in the details - suggesting an attack was imminent. It was raw data, unaccompanied by any assessment.
In 1985, there was a newness to the concept of intelligence intercepts that made the foreign service uneasy. Hundreds of pages of unassessed documents were being shipped out to busy External Affairs and intelligence experts. The documents' existence, at the same time, was closely protected. How well they were read is a moot point.
But Mr. Bartleman had the reputation as a hyper-methodical and careful man who made almost no mistakes and missed little. He himself analyzed the document he had been handed. Foreign intelligence was his expertise. It was to be the focus of his career for the next 17 years.
Is it conceivable that Mr. Bartleman alone - possibly apart from the RCMP - analyzed the document and recognized its significance? Yes.
In his testimony to the inquiry he said he brought the document to the appropriate senior RCMP officer, who "hissed" at him that he already was familiar with its contents. The officer's response fit with the RCMP's behaviour at the time. Because of the recent creation of CSIS, the Mounties were territorial, unco-operative and testy.
Former and current foreign-service officers who know Mr. Bartleman well say that once he had carried out his responsibilities to let the RCMP know of the document's existence, he was most unlikely to discuss it with anyone else. "The guy was not a natural sort of sharer," said one.
He would not have thought it necessary to take the information to his superiors. He was the head of the department's security and intelligence section. It was his responsibility to assess and deal with intelligence reports. That is what he was paid to do. He was also by nature secretive and aloof. Other officials might have been more gregariously chatty. Not him.
Once the police investigation into the explosion began - immediately after Flight 182 blew up - his responsibility ended. In the culture of Ottawa, the RCMP guard their autonomy closely and make clear they don't like political or civil-service oversight. Mr. Bartleman conceivably would have no knowledge of what the RCMP might have done or not done with the intelligence information he saw.
In the weeks, months and years that followed, people familiar with Mr. Bartleman's thinking say he almost certainly would have concluded that, because the RCMP knew about the intelligence intercept, he had nothing to add.
What finally brought him to speak out, Mr. Cavaluzzo said, was not a chance meeting with the inquiry commission counsel while the two men walked their dogs. Rather it was a recommendation in Bob Rae's report on the Air India bombing that an inquiry should look at what information officials had - and what they did with it - immediately before the bombing.
Shortly afterward, when Mr. Bartleman and his dog ran into Mr. Freiman and his dog, the Lieutenant-Governor informed him of a decision he'd already made.
Bartleman then and now
Christmas Eve, 1939 James Karl Bartleman is born a member of the Mnjikaning First Nation in the Muskoka town of Port Carling, Ont.
1963 Graduates from University of Western Ontario with an honours degree in history and joins the foreign service.
1972 Appointed to his first head of post in Bangladesh, where he opens Canada's High Commission.
1981 Government of Pierre Trudeau appoints him ambassador to Cuba.
1983 Appointed director of security and intelligence for the Foreign Affairs Department, a post he holds on June 23, 1985, when Air India Flight 182 is blown up.
1994 Becomes foreign policy adviser to Prime Minister Jean Chrétien.
1998 Appointed High Commissioner to South Africa.
1999 Is nearly beaten to death by a robber who gains access to his hotel room in Cape Town by posing as a TV repairman.
2002 Becomes Ontario's 27th Lieutenant-Governor.
May 3, 2007 Shocks the country when he tells the Air India judicial inquiry that, days before the explosion, he received an intelligence document warning that an attack was about to occur.
Compiled by Michael Valpy