A former senior Canadian intelligence-service officer has denied there was an "ulterior motive" behind the destruction of taped conversations involving suspected Sikh terrorists in the mid 1980s. James Warren, former director-general of counterterrorism for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, told the Air India inquiry on September 19 that wiretap recordings were "destroyed in accordance with a policy that was our default mode".

He added that the spy service had a policy of erasing tapes. He said that nobody thought to give an order to preserve the recorded conversations of the people who were suspected of blowing up an Air India jet in 1985.

"I can't put myself in the shoes of the people that were responsible for the section when it happened," Warren said. "But certainly from the point of view of someone who had to deal with the aftermath, I wish dearly that they had not been destroyed. I wish–we all would have wished–that they had survived for whatever value they might have had in the subsequent events."

The inquiry's lead counsel, Mark Freiman, later asked Warren on what basis he concluded there was no ulterior motive. Warren replied that it was "hard to prove a negative", and then added, "simply on the basis that I never saw anything that suggested that there had been anything nefarious in that decision".

Warren testified that he was in charge of CSIS's foreign-liaison unit from 1984 to the spring of 1986. At that point, less than a year after Air India Flight 182, outbound from Canada, had exploded off the coast of Ireland killing all 329 people aboard, Warren was transferred to become the head of the counterterrorism branch. He said there were many other issues, such as "problems with the Armenians", pressure from another unnamed country to stop the flow of detonators to the Irish Republican Army, and threats that might arise in Canada from Middle Eastern issues.

"But by far and away the most traumatic event that had happened was Air India," he said. "When I arrived on the scene, the service was gearing up exponentially to deal with Sikh extremism, if you will, at that point in time. That included warrants and it included the issue of, well, put it in the vernacular, what the hell happened with the tapes."

Warren questioned whether these tapes would have had any use in court. "Whether they would have had any evidentiary value is neither here nor there," he testified. "They would have–they might have–had some intelligence value in the future. Um, their evidentiary value was always suspected because they weren't collected by the service on the basis of, with any eye towards, the preservation of evidence."

Warren added that CSIS was not in the business of collecting evidence. "That was a role for the police," he said. "We were in the business of mining intelligence…from the sources that we had, and passing that on to government."

He acknowledged that it was an "oversight" that the tapes weren't preserved. "Nobody gave the order, and things kept rolling along as if nothing had happened," Warren said. "The people who were at very junior levels who were actually in this process of destroying these tapes, in the absence of anything from up above, kept doing what they had always been doing."

On September 18, B.C. Provincial Court Judge James Jardine, a prosecutor in the Air India case in the 1980s and 1990s, testified that he was frustrated by CSIS's reluctance to cooperate with the RCMP and supply evidence following the bombing of Flight 182 and another bombing at Narita Airport in Japan, which killed two baggage handlers. Jardine said that he only learned that CSIS had destroyed taped conversations with the main suspect, Talwinder Singh Parmar, in December 1987.

Warren said that if the tapes had been preserved, it would have removed lingering questions about whether or not there was "anything inculpatory or exculpatory about them that would have aided the defence or the prosecution".

Freiman noted that the RCMP had felt "angst" that they were not given access to taped conversations recorded two days before the Air India bombing. Freiman said that these conversations allegedly included "very worrying information that might have led the RCMP, had they known about it, to take action to prevent the bombing".

"Well, perhaps they would have," Warren said. "But all I can say is it didn't apparently occur to anybody in the service that this forewarned of a plane being bombed out of the sky. And I frankly–in these things I don't see words that would lead inescapably to that kind of a conclusion. I mean sometimes in the intelligence business, there is an innocent explanation for things."

Freiman noted that CSIS translators were under the impression that the tapes had to be destroyed 10 days after the conversations had been intercepted, whereas senior officials stated that the policy was to get rid of tapes 10 days after they had been transcribed, with a holding period of up to 30 days.

Warren said there was never an attempt to mislead people. "I was assured that every tape had been listened to," he added.

In 2000, the Globe and Mail quoted an unnamed former CSIS agent who admitted to burning tapes containing 150 hours of interviews with informants in Vancouver. At the time, the agent stated that if he had given the tapes to the RCMP, his sources could have been required to testify and be publicly identified, which might have led to them being killed.

In 1991, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the Crown has a legal duty to disclose "all relevant information to the defence", regardless of whether or not the Crown has any intention of using this as evidence.

The bomb maker, Inderjit Singh Reyat, was convicted in connection with the Narita Airport explosion, and later pleaded guilty for his role in the bombing of Flight 182. The prime suspect, Parmar, was killed by police in India in 1992 without ever being charged in connection with the terrorist attacks. In 2005, Vancouver businessman Ripudaman Singh Malik and Kamloops millworker Ajaib Singh Bagri were acquitted of any involvement in the Air India bombing.