Kanishka Disaster --- Salient points of the major commission report -Part Three

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by B.Raman

(June 19, Chennai, Sri Lanka Guardian) 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 Nevertheless, as has been widely reported, this surveillance was withdrawn on June 17, at precisely the most crucial time in terms of the terrorist preparations for the bombing. The stationary observation post (OP) near Parmar’s residence was also withdrawn on the day of the bombing.The rumour that the OP withdrawal was to allow the investigators to participate in a social event appears to be based on a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 traveled 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 identifi cation.

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 dialed from the ferry.

( To be continued)