B.RAMAN
( Based on my remarks at the launching of Amar
Bhushan’s spy fiction “Escape To Nowhere” at the Press Club, New Delhi, on July
23,2012. )
The book has already received
rave notices. I have no doubt it will be one of the best-sellers of this year.
I am sure an exciting movie will follow provided a woman could be introduced
into the film script. One misses the presence of a spooky woman in Amar’s
narrative. There are woman-spooks in the R&AW---some doing very well. Any
spy-fiction has to highlight their role in
Smiley’s World.
2.Amar’s book will have a very high excitement
value. I hope it will also have an equally high educative value. There is an acute shortage of scholarly works
on the craft and profession of intelligence in India. There is an even greater
shortage of works on the craft and profession of counter-intelligence.
3.Some of us, who had served in the intelligence
profession, have come out of the spooky purdah and started sharing with the
public our thoughts and insights on the state of our intelligence in the hope
of better educating the public , but we still hesitate to write freely and
frankly on the state of our counter-intelligence lest we unwittingly play into
the hands of foreign intelligence agencies looking for clues as to how our
counter-intelligence operates. What are their weak and strong points? What are
the techniques employed by our counter-intelligence? It is much more difficult
to write carefully on counter-intelligence than on intelligence without
weakening our armour. Amar has sought to
do this, but some professionals will doubt the advisability of his discussing
the techniques of surveillance employed by the R&AW. A description of the
techniques is exciting for a fiction and a movie, but hazardous and weakening
for a counter-intelligence set-up.
4.Your intelligence capability helps you to collect
information about others that you need for strengthening your national
security. Your counter-intelligence capability enables you to prevent others
from collecting information about you which they could use against you. You may
be able to collect valuable intelligence about others, but if you are not able
to prevent others from collecting intelligence about you, your national
security will remain weak.
5.The best intelligence comes from human and
technical penetration of other governments, intelligence and security agencies,
terrorist and other organizations. In Smiley’s World, there is a demonic competitive
bid to penetrate each other. The more capable you are in penetrating others,
the better the quality of your intelligence.
6.The highest value is attached to the penetration
of foreign intelligence agencies. When you manage to place a mole in a foreign
agency, you are not only able to collect high-grade intelligence, but also
influence the thinking of the political leadership and policy-makers of the
penetrated countries through intelligence officers who are generally very
close to the senior levels of decision-makers. That is why when there is a mole
in an intelligence agency, it is difficult to make a damage assessment when the
mole is discovered. It is comparatively easy to establish what information was
lost through the mole, but it is difficult to establish what wrong decisions
were taken by the political leaders and policy-makers as a result of the use
of a mole by a foreign agency to
influence thinking at the decision-making levels.
7. The likelihood of the penetration of an intelligence
agency by a foreign agency is a constant nightmare for all counter-intelligence
set-ups. The ability of an agency to prevent penetration by a mole depends on
various factors---the personal and professional integrity of its officers, their
security consciousness, their loyalty to the country, their ethical standards,
their ability to withstand temptations, their courage to report to their
seniors any indications of suspicious conduct of their colleagues and even
close friends. When these factors are weak, penetration is facilitated.
8. That is why we as a nation and the R&AW as
an intelligence organization ought to have been worried by the ease with which
the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) penetrated the R&AW twice and managed
to evade detection for a long time .The penetration and the ease with which the
CIA and its moles managed to evade detection spoke poorly of the state of
counter-intelligence in the R&AW.
9. Maj.Rabinder Singh was not only a mole of the
CIA carefully planted deep inside the R&AW, but was also the only mole in
our intelligence set-up who managed to give the slip to our
counter-intelligence and flee to the sanctuary provided by his controlling
agency. Rabinder was India’s Kim Philby, the KGB’s mole in the MI 6, the
British external intelligence.
10.In the years after the Second World War, the KGB
managed to plant in the MI 6 a network of moles believed to have been operated
through Kim Philby. When the network came under suspicion, Philby and two
others managed to escape to Moscow giving the slip to the MI-5, the security
service, which is responsible for counter-intelligence in the UK.
11.After the escape of Kim Philby, there were many
years of agonising debate in the British intelligence establishment on how the
KGB managed to penetrate the MI-6 and what damage was caused to national
security and to the intelligence establishment. The enquiries brought out shocking instances of
ethical permissiveness, lack of integrity and old boys’ network ( I cover you
up, you cover me up) that prevailed in the MI 6 that made the penetration
possible. Did the KGB’s network consist of only Philby and his two associates
who fled to Moscow or were there others who remained undetected? There were
some who believed strongly that there was at least one more----the fourth man---who
remained undetected and continued to cause damage.
12.The Philby enquiries led to a revamp of the
Western counter-intelligence set-ups. Despite this, the KGB managed to
penetrate the CIA through Aldrich Ames, who exposed to the KGB the identities
of some valuable sources of the CIA in the former USSR and Russia, who were
arrested and executed. Weak professional integrity and an old boys’ network in
the CIA were among the factors identified for this fiasco. The
counter-intelligence set-up in the US has since been further strengthened under
the joint leadership of the FBI and the CIA.
13. The Gary Saxena Task Force on Intelligence Revamp set up by the
A.B.Vajpayee Governmet in 2000, of which I was a member, had recommended the
strengthening of the Counter-Intelligence set-up under the leadership of the IB.The
Rabinder Singh episode indicates shortcomings in the implementation of the
recommendations.
14.Amar Bhushan was the chief spy catcher of the
R&AW, the Czar of its counter-intelligence. He has first-hand knowledge of
the sins of commission and omission that prevented the early exposure of
Rabinder and enabled the CIA to whisk him out of India. His book, which is in
the fictional format, throws some light on what went wrong, how and why. It
provides some answers but not all the answers to questions regarding the state
of our counter-intelligence. A fictional format cannot be a scholarly in-depth
format. It is hoped his initiative in writing this book will act as a trigger
for undertaking a more in-depth analysis of the state of our counter-intelligence.
( 23-7-12)
( The writer is Addiotional Secretary (retd),
Cabinet Secretariat, Govt of India, New Delhi
