Talwinder Singh Parmar was a leader of Babbar Khalsa, an organization so deeply infiltrated by the Indian government that it was effectively under its control. (Remember, India Today reported that it was the Indian government itself that created the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.)
http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2007/05/23/4202844-cp.html
CSIS wondered if Parmar was an Indian agent
By JIM BROWN
OTTAWA (CP) - Canada’s spy agency thought Talwinder Singh Parmar was probably a dangerous terrorist months before the 1985 Air India bombing - but it also toyed with an alternative theory that he could have been an agent provocateur working for the Indian government.
“He was an unknown (at the time),” Ray Kobzey, a former CSIS officer, testified Wednesday. “We needed to clarify what exactly we were dealing with here.”
Documents previously tabled at the inquiry headed by retired judge John Major show the Canadian Security Intelligence Service started trying in the fall of 1984 to get a wiretap warrant against Parmar, then head of the militant Babar Khalsa movement that preached armed struggle to win a homeland for Sikhs in northern India.
In support of the warrant application, CSIS pointed to inflammatory public speeches Parmar had made, threatening to kill “50,000 Hindus” and appealing to Sikhs to unite in the battle for independence.
Kobzey wrote at the time that Parmar should be considered “the most radical and potentially dangerous Sikh in the country.”
But he also noted, in the material marshalled to support the wiretap warrant, that some sources in the Indo-Canadian community thought he was actually an agent of the Indian government intent on sowing discord.
That wasn’t as troubling as the possibility that he was plotting terrorist acts, Kobzey testified. But it was still a threat to Canadian national security.,
If Parmar had been an agent provocateur, he said, the danger would have been that he was “destabilizing the emigre community, creating problems within the community, fomenting unrest.”
The suggestion that Parmar was an agent of Indian intelligence, with a hidden agenda to discredit Sikhs, has long since been abandoned by virtually all students of the Air India bombing.
But the evidence at the inquiry shows CSIS hadn’t yet discarded the possibility when it began trying to get judicial authorization to tap his phone.
It turned out that it took five months to get the tap in place - not because of any resistance by the courts but because of bureaucratic problems within the security service.
The delay - previously noted by several witnesses - meant CSIS didn’t get the pipeline it wanted into Parmar’s activities until February 1985, four months before Air India Flight 182 was downed by a terrorist bomb.
It’s been an open question ever since whether speedier action to obtain the wiretap could have averted the tragedy.
Major observed Wednesday that there’s no way of knowing, but it could have given CSIS “a better chance of finding out at least what the gossip in that community was.
“Exactly” replied Kobzey. “It’s something that I’ve reflected on numerous times - the loss of that data, what did that mean in terms of the investigation and where it could have gone.”
Parmar, believed to have been the ringleader behind the bombing, left Canada after the attack and was never prosecuted. He was shot dead by police in India in 1992.
Which he was.