Spies rule the roost
As he enters the last lap of his first term, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is undertaking a quiet overhaul of the top echelons of India’s security establishment. In a series of moves that could change the character of governance, he is packing the security establishment with former and serving spymasters and generals.
Within R&AW, which is celebrating its 50th year, the deadwood are being removed, and young and fresh minds hired.
“We get critical intelligence about what the Chinese or Pakistanis are up to from [overseas] stations.”-R&AW officer
The National Security Council Secretariat, a fief of former diplomats even when headed by former Intelligence Bureau chief M.K. Narayanan, is now packed with former and serving spymasters. Its budget has been upped 10 times from a paltry Rs33 crore in 2016-17 to Rs334 crore in 2017-18, and rules have been eased so as to make import of security equipment exempt from item-wise licence.
In a signalling gesture, the Sardar Patel Bhavan on Parliament Street has been allotted to the exclusive use of the NSC Secretariat. Other offices in the building—such as part of the cabinet secretariat, and the panchayati raj and statistics and programme implementation ministries—are moving out. In the new security regime, National Security Adviser Ajit Doval, a former Intelligence Bureau chief, will be a virtual security czar with all security agencies and advisers reporting to him. He will be aided by four (earlier there was only one) deputy NSAs—most of them former spymasters—plus a military adviser.
Former R&AW chief Rajinder Khanna and Joint Intelligence Committee chairman R.N. Ravi, who is also the interlocutor for the Naga talks, have been made deputy NSAs. These posts were hitherto held by diplomats whenever the NSA was from the police. The other deputy NSA is Pankaj Saran, a former diplomat. Former Defence Intelligence Agency chief Lt Gen V.G. Khandare will be the new military adviser. With this, the JIC, which analyses intelligence data flowing from the R&AW, IB, Military Intelligence, Naval Intelligence and Air Intelligence, gets subsumed under the NSCS.
The Strategic Policy Group, which had been non-functional since the early days of Manmohan Singh’s second term, is being revived. It will have the chiefs of the armed forces, R&AW and IB, to make recommendations to the National Security Council. Its head will no longer be the cabinet secretary as had been the practice, but the NSA—who also heads the newly set up Defence Planning Committee and the refurbished National Security Advisory Board. The board has been pruned to four members, with P.S. Raghavan, former ambassador to Russia, as its chairman. He is aided by Lt Gen S.L. Narasimhan, a China expert who had commanded a corps on the Tibet border, former R&AW hand A.B. Mathur, and Bimal Patel, an academic.
The next in line to go thus subsumed, sources say, will be the office of the principal scientific adviser, currently held by K. Vijay Raghavan under the cabinet secretariat. Another reform has been the creation of the post of the national cyber security coordinator—currently held by former Computer Emergency Response Team head Gulshan Rai—who reports to the prime minister. This office will also be made part of the NSCS.
Former R&AW hand A.B. Mathur has been made the interlocutor with the ULFA; former IB chief Dineshwar Sharma is interlocutor on Jammu and Kashmir, and another ex-IB boss, Syed Asif Ibrahim, had been special envoy on counter-terrorism in the NSCS till lately. Former R&AW chief Alok Joshi (see interview) recently retired as head of the technical intelligence gathering agency National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO); he has been succeeded by another spymaster S.C. Jha. A former IB special director, Jha was Joshi’s deputy. “It is beneficial to have a specialist on the job,” said Ajit Lal, former JIC chief. “As R&AW chief, Joshi was a consumer of intel gathered by the NTRO. When he became its chairman, he knew exactly what is expected of the NTRO by the IB or R&AW.”
Both R&AW and IB will have new chiefs in two months—K. Ilango, who was station chief in Colombo and was accused by Mahinda Rajapaksa of having managed the 2015 presidential polls in favour of Maithripala Sirisena, is being tipped to head R&AW. All the same, the name of R&AW officer Samant Goel, who has been named in the FIR in the tussle within the CBI, has also been making rounds, as also of Subodh Jaiswal, who is currently Mumbai Police chief. Jaiswal had done a stint in R&AW and had got empanelled to hold a director-general post. In the IB, the front-runners are Arvind Kumar, a 1984 batch Assam cadre IPS officer currently posted as special director, and Maharashtra Police chief Dattatray Padsalgikar. Padsalgikar, who had a long stint in the IB, was to retire in August, but has been given a three-month extension which may be extended till December, when the incumbent Rajiv Jain retires.
MEANWHILE within R&AW, which is celebrating its 50th year, the deadwood are being removed, and young and fresh minds hired. In the largest clean-up drive since the days of Morarji Desai, who sacked a third of his spies, the Modi regime has marked more than 70 senior and mid-level officers for “compulsory retirement.”
The exercise, personally supervised by R&AW chief Anil Dhasmana since last year, will involve giving pink slips on grounds of “non-performance” and “doubtful integrity”. A dozen of those marked, four holding joint secretary rank, have been shown the secret door. If the sack of the 1970s was undertaken with a view to blunting R&AW’s effectiveness by a prime minister who hated covert operations, the present exercise is being undertaken by a gung-ho prime minister who wants to make the agency leaner and sharper. As former R&AW special secretary Pratap Heblikar told THE WEEK, “The years 2007-14 were the agency’s worst with mediocre chiefs, political interference, nepotism and corruption ruling the roost. The period witnessed the demise of R&AW at the hands of a mafia.”
The period also witnessed a most shameful sex scandal when senior officer Nisha Priya Bhatia, who was working in R&AW’s training pad in Gurugram, went to court seeking prosecution of the officers in R&AW’s sexual harassment committee, which, in 2008, found “no proof” for her complaints. The government declared her a person of unsound mind, after she tried to immolate herself in front of the prime minister’s office, but withdrew the statement after a court order. The Supreme Court recently issued notices to the R&AW chief and others.
The Bhatia case was followed by former R&AW hand Major General V.K. Singh’s revelation in a book about misuse of secret funds and corruption in equipment buys—he is now facing prosecution for revealing secrets. Then came former officer R.K. Yadav’s book Mission R&AW which raised corruption and misconduct charges against several former chiefs—particularly Ashok Chaturvedi (2007-2009), who is alleged to have tormented Nisha Bhatia, and S.K. Tripathi (2011-2012) who, Yadav alleges, “eroded the working culture of R&AW and made it an agency of municipality level”.
There was also the case of Brig Ujjal Dasgupta being linked to American spy Rosanna Minchew, and the recall of the Colombo station head who had been honey-trapped by a Chinese woman. The worst stink raised by Yadav is about two officers caught on spy camera in 2013, having sex in the office.
The period also witnessed a series of setbacks and gaffes. The worst was when Pakistan pointed out that the R&AW-made list of wanted terrorists that India had handed over to it contained names of three men who were in Indian custody. India had to eat the humble pie when Pakistanis played the gracious victim—they played it down, apparently in return for an old favour. R&AW had earlier saved the life of president Pervez Musharraf with a timely warning about an assassination plot. Such courtesies are common in the world of spies (see story on page 58).
There are those who argue that during the down period, R&AW’s attention was on the east. As the 2009 fiasco over the Indo-Pak statement in Sharm-el Sheikh revealed, India had, as a matter of policy, scaled down operations in Pakistan. “But, we got ULFA chief Arabinda Rajkhowa during this period,” pointed out an Army officer who had liaised with R&AW in the east. “Our boys [R&AW operatives] in Bangladesh worked on Rajkhowa to surrender to the Bangladesh Police, who handed him over to India.”
THE MAIN PROBLEM that is causing failures or setbacks in the western theatre, R&AW hands admit, is one of legacy. R&AW is facing a shortage of personnel; it needs 9,000 hands, but has only 7,500 to 8,000. The shortage is at the level of joint secretaries, directors and deputy secretaries—about 40 posts at these levels are vacant. There are few on the rolls who can speak Pashto, Khowar or Kohistani, the tribal tongues of Pakistan’s northwest.
Moreover, an Islamophobic mindset that had gripped the security establishment has led to recruitment of too few Muslims. (Asif Ibrahim, who retired as IB chief last year, is India’s first Muslim spymaster.) The result is there are few who can be sent to Pakistan, Azad Kashmir or Afghanistan. Pointed out former R&AW chief A.S. Dulat: “I am a man from the IB, and I feel that nothing can replace human intelligence. The more, the better.’’ Dulat had tried to recruit Muslims—especially after the 1999 Indian Airlines Flight 814 hijack which took place during his term—but found a deep distrust even among instructors. They found it easier to teach Urdu to Sikhs and Hindus, groom them into Muslim aliases and launch them into Pakistan and Azad Kashmir. “The agency needs experts in Persian, Arabic, Dari, Pashto, Urdu and Kashmiri,” said Dulat.
Islamophobia has also led to a mindset that discourages making use of double agents, a practice that all spy agencies have been following even through the years of classic Russo-American Cold War. “I have seen officers reject the idea of a double agent, saying he works for the ISI or another hostile agency,” said Dulat. “I used to tell them that this was exactly why we needed him. We are not looking for angels.”
Indeed, there are bright boys and girls wanting to serve in intelligence jobs on short-term basis, but they are hampered by the fact that after serving the contract period, they cannot get even an experience certificate. Thus, the agency is forced to recruit, even for short terms, from the armed forces, police, post and telecom. “There is a need to tap the talent which exists in the outside world and create some kind of a certification process for those hired on contract basis,” said Joshi. “Other countries have found ways of employing youngsters. We should look into them.”
The successes in the east also highlight the importance of humint. The agency has enough speakers (Hindus, Buddhists and Christians) of Bengali and the northeastern hill tongues who can penetrate the underground groups. But there are too few Muslims to do the same in the western theatre.
WRANGLES over postings are another problem. Trying to be fair to all, bosses often post techies and crypto-experts to overseas action stations where they prove to be flops, while general duty operatives while away their time pushing files in the office. The foreign service, too, resists R&AW hands coming and occupying posts which they think are theirs, especially in friendly capitals. “They ask what intelligence is to be gathered in Paris or Brussels,” pointed out a R&AW officer. “But we get critical intelligence about what the Chinese or Pakistanis are up to from these stations.”
The best example is how R&AW learnt of Pakistan’s Siachen plans in 1984 when it heard about a bulk order for snow-boots placed by Pakistan with a European manufacturer (see story on page 58). Moreover, stations like Vienna, Paris, London and Brussels are hubs of agents and double agents from all over the world who exchange tips for money or as favour.
Broader policies followed by changing regimes also affect operations. “What is required is a foreign policy that supports and takes forward the organisation, instead of tying its hands,” said Sanjiv Tripathi, the longest serving R&AW chief. “The MEA is handling that part of Kashmir which is occupied by Pakistan, and the home ministry is handling the part which is under India. But is it not a reality that the entire J&K, including Azad Kashmir, is part of India? The population in Azad Kashmir is also ours. R&AW should carry out psychological operations to expose this discrepancy through seminars, articles and discussions.” Tripathi believes that Pakistan’s step-motherly treatment of its minorities, particularly the Pashtuns, Sindhis, Baluchis and Baltis, offers excellent ground for hosting Indian agents. However, very little is being done, except in Azad Kashmir.
There has been some energisation of the western theatre in the recent months. Though the Taliban and its myriad branches are still beyond its reach, R&AW is learnt to have penetrated the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. This has led to the recent successes in getting Indian hostages released, and even foiling of a major terror hit in Delhi last September. R&AW stumbled on the plot when it spotted a suspicious transfer of $50,000 from Dubai to Afghanistan. It tracked the recipient and nabbed him when he landed in Delhi.
The dominance of the police service is a problem that has been plaguing the agency for decades. Non-police officers point out that due to their training and mannerisms, the police types stand out in crowds of diplomats and would be detected. “R.N. Kao’s idea was to make the R&AW a multi-disciplinary body with intake from various services, and not just police,’’ said R. Banerji, former special secretary who headed a task force on intelligence reform in the IDSA, a think tank of the defence ministry.
The exposure of financial and other scams in recent years has made many officers think that the agency needs parliamentary oversight, like in other democracies. “This will ensure that they are covering all the charter of duties assigned to them,” said Tripathi. “It would also ensure proper coordination and prevent corruption from seeping in.”
Parliamentary oversight by no means would entail disclosure of operational details, assured Banerji. “It would be only administrative oversight, making the agency answerable on fulfilling their charter of duties and utilising the resources in the right manner,” he said. Heblikar agrees: “There is need to remove the police leadership. R&AW should have parliamentary approval and be subject to parliamentary oversight.” In 2011, Manish Tewari of the Congress had moved a private member’s bill for providing legal status to IB, R&AW and NTRO. The bill lapsed in 2012.
All are agreed that R&AW has had more successes than setbacks. Dulat proudly recalled how ISI chief Asad Durrani told him: “You people are better than us, you are more professional.’’ Durrani also told him about how G.S. Bajpai, who was R&AW chief in 1991-92, had impressed him. “‘I could sense this man was superior to me,’ Durrani told me,” Dulat told THE WEEK.
As former chief Hormis Tharakan, who attempted the first clean-up after the Rabinder Singh and Ujjal Dasgupta episodes, pointed out, “R&AW was created from scratch and went on to reach rare heights. An important factor in that rapid rise was the personality of the founding fathers and the rapport they enjoyed with the political leadership. I think R&AW has adapted itself to changing ground realities admirably.”
Spy games
Hashim Qureshi hijacked an Indian Airlines plane in January 1971 to Lahore, sent the passengers by road to India, and blew up the plane. Since Pakistan foreign minister Z.A. Bhutto had met him during the hostage negotiations, India alleged that the Pakistan government was behind the hijack, and banned overflight by Pakistani aircraft over Indian territory. Pakistan denied the charge, tried Qureshi and sent him to jail. On his release in 1980, he fled to the Netherlands. When he returned to India in 2000, he was arrested. Now, human rights lawyers have contested that a person cannot be tried twice for the same offence. Qureshi is now in Srinagar; the case is pending.
If the 1971 plane hijack was a R&AW operation, it was, perhaps, one of the best executed ones in the history of espionage.
Sources say that R&AW had sent warnings ahead of the 2008 Mumbai attacks, but security agencies failed to act.
Now, R.K. Yadav, a former R&AW officer, has said in his book Mission R&AW that Qureshi was a R&AW agent (Qureshi has denied it and sued Yadav), and that the whole hijack was stage-managed by R&AW’s founder-boss R.N. Kao to find an excuse to ban overflight of Pakistani military cargo planes from West Pakistan to East Pakistan. The ban forced Pakistani pilots to fly all the way around the Indian peninsula via Sri Lanka, thus effectively choking Pakistani military logistic supplies. No wonder, the Indian Army had a walkover in the Bangladesh war 11 months later. If it was a R&AW operation, it was, perhaps, one of the best executed ones in the history of espionage.
Earlier, both internal and external intelligence were handled by the Intelligence Bureau. When Indira Gandhi came to power in 1966 following Lal Bahadur Shastri’s death, she realised that there had been inadequacies in the IB’s intelligence gathering during the 1965 war. So, she set up R&AW on September 21, 1968. As its head she chose Kao who had impressed Chinese Prime Minister Zhou Enlai with his probe into the crash of Air India’s Kashmir Princess in the South China Sea. Zhou was to travel in it with the delegates to the Bandung Conference of 1955, but had cancelled because of a sudden illness.
R&AW played a stellar role in the 1971 war. It trained not only the guerilla force Mukti Bahini to sabotage the Pakistani army’s communication lines and logistic depots, but also a more secret force called Kader Bahini. Its engineer-wizard Brig M.B.K. Nair found ways to penetrate the Pakistani army communication network.
R&AW’s next biggest political coup was the Sikkim operation. As the king (Chogyal), bewitched by his American wife, began to allow the CIA to operate from Sikkim, R&AW is said to have funded and encouraged a pro-democracy movement at the behest of Indira Gandhi. It led to an election, after which the legislature passed a resolution to merge Sikkim with India.
The Bofors gun in action during the Kargil War | Arvind Jain
By the mid-1970s, R&AW had gathered that Pakistan was developing nuclear bomb technology. Chemical analysis of hair samples collected from barber shops near Kahuta nuclear plant by R&AW agents revealed that Pakistan had been able to enrich uranium to weapon-grade. Similarly, an innocuous report about the Pakistan army having ordered thousands of snow-boots from a British firm led R&AW to conclude that it was planning an operation on Siachen. The timely warning helped the Army send a scout under Col Narendra “Bull” Kumar, and there followed a pre-emptive landing of a brigade atop Saltoro Ridge, from where Pakistan has not been able to dislodge them for the last 35 years. A similar report about Pakistan having ordered snow-boots from Austria was said to have been received in 1998, too, yet the analysts failed to read it as preparation for Kargil intrusion.
R&AW came under a cloud when the Janata Party accused it of having snooped on opposition leaders during the Emergency. Kao denied the charge and left, followed four months later by his equally illustrious successor K. Sankaran Nair. It is said, prime minister Morarji Desai even told Pakistan ruler Zia-ul-Haq that he knew about Pakistan’s bomb programme. An alert Zia got the Kahuta neighbourhood swept, thus depriving R&AW of valuable information.
The agency got back its spurs after the return of Indira in 1980. The third chief, N.F. Suntook, vanished with his wife on March 30, a day before he was to retire, leading to media reports that he had been a CIA agent and had defected to the US fearing exposure by his successor. A fortnight later he reappeared, and retired. He had gone to save Mauritius Prime Minister Anerood Jugnauth from a CIA-inspired coup plot. That was the kind of reach that the agency had in its heyday.
Neighbour trouble: LTTE members in north Sri Lanka in 2006 | Reuters
In the 1980s, as the ISI started arming, funding and training Khalistani militants, R&AW set up two hit squads called CIT-X and CIT-J in a tit-for-tat operation. Using border smugglers as conduits for arms, they carried out blasts in Pakistani Punjab and Sindh. Finally, Jordanian Prince Hassan bin-Talal, a friend of India but married to a Pakistani, arranged a rendezvous in a Swiss town between the dreaded ISI boss Hamid Gul and R&AW’s A.K. Verma. They made a peace deal.
Despite having had ‘assets’ in Pakistan’s northwest since the days of Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan, aka Frontier Gandhi, R&AW kept a low profile in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation in the 1980s. But, as the Soviet withdrawal became imminent, and a US-backed Pakistan was readying to take control of Afghanistan through the Mujahideen, R&AW undertook a highly intellectual operation. It got thousands of copies of Afghan history books—ethno-histories of the Pathans by the likes of Sir Olaf Caroe, books on Sir Aurel Stein’s archaeological expeditions in the region and memoirs of the Anglo-Afghan wars—printed in Delhi’s Daryaganj, and got them distributed in Afghanistan, as well as in embassies and universities across Europe and America. The operation unnerved Pakistan; for the books suddenly reminded the Pathans and the world that the 100-year lease of the Pathan territories to British India by Afghanistan was ending by 1990, and that Afghanistan would be historically and legally justified in seeking return of the frontier region to Afghanistan.
But as India, constrained by the economic crunch of the early 1990s, could not complement the academic operation, there was no attempt at wooing the Pathans with money or guns. So Pakistan, flush with American money and guns, launched the Taliban which finally ousted the India-friendly Najibullah regime from Kabul. R&AW and India failed to save him from being lynched and hanged from a Kabul lamppost.
Hashim Qureshi in New Delhi in 2006 | PTI
Such failures and setbacks have been several. Having handled the LTTE brilliantly during the Indira Gandhi days, R&AW failed in advising Rajiv Gandhi against his Indian Peace Keeping Force misadventure. It failed in warning about a coup in the Maldives, though R&AW’s terrain knowledge helped the Indian military to launch a lightning operation to crush the coup.
R&AW failed to warn about Pakistan army’s Kargil bid in 1999, but made up for the loss of face by bugging Pakistani army chief Pervez Musharraf’s secret phone talk from Beijing with his chief of staff in Rawalpindi. But in an act of misplaced bravado, the Indian foreign office boastfully played the tape before media—much against the advice of defence minister George Fernandes—leading to compromise of R&AW’s sources.
As Pakistan began using Nepal as snooping grounds against India and for pumping fake rupees, R&AW launched aggressive countermeasures. Its station head in Nepal, Hormis Tharakan, got several ISI agents in Nepal exposed, and expelled.
The biggest setbacks in terms of putting its own house in order were the discovery of K.V. Unnikrishnan, R&AW’s Chennai office chief who was handling the LTTE, as a CIA agent, and the mysterious vanishing act and defection to the US of senior officer Rabinder Singh in 2004.
Perhaps the biggest blow in recent times was the failure to warn about the 2008 Mumbai attacks; but sources say that R&AW had sent warnings, even hours before it, but the security agencies failed to act. And, perhaps, the biggest success in recent times is the ‘management’ of the Sri Lankan elections, by which an India-friendly regime was established in Colombo.
Front line story in The Hindu
