BANGALORE - After the arrest last week of
two Indian army personnel for allegedly handing
over sensitive defense information to agents of
Pakistan's intelligence agency, the Inter-Services
Intelligence, the Indian government has ordered a
probe to unearth a possible spy ring in its armed
forces. While selling of sensitive information by
armed-forces personnel to the ISI or other
intelligence agencies is not new, the frequency of
these leaks has set off alarm bells in Delhi.
Last Friday, Anil Dubey of the Indian army
was allegedly caught
handing over classified
military documents, flash drives and compact discs
regarding movements and deployments to a Pakistani
High Commission employee in New Delhi. The
following day, Ritesh Kumar of the army's signals
unit at Leh (near the Sino-Indian border) was
arrested at Delhi airport en route to Kathmandu,
where he was going to meet his handler. The
information he was allegedly handing over has been
described as highly damaging for the armed forces
on the border.
The arrest of these two men
for espionage comes barely three months after
three men of the Jammu and Kashmir Light Infantry
were found to be extending help to the
Lashkar-e-Toiba, a Pakistan-based terrorist group,
in Jammu and Kashmir's Poonch district.
Reacting to the alleged ISI links of the
two army men arrested in Delhi, former defense
minister Pranab Mukherjee (now foreign minister)
said the ISI "is trying to infiltrate and subvert
the armed forces" of India. The minister's
statement has received considerable play in the
media as if the ISI trying to infiltrate the
Indian armed forces was a new development. It is
not.
There have been several instances of
personnel of the Indian armed forces selling
sensitive information to the ISI and other
intelligence agencies. Over the past two years
alone more than 100 men from the armed forces have
been arrested for links with ISI and other
agencies.
Last year, a retired Indian Air
Force officer and his son - a soldier - were
arrested in Guwahati in northeastern India for
passing on important documents, including minutes
of meetings attended by Indian army chiefs,
documents providing details of weapons upgrades,
redeployment plans of infantry battalions, and
deployment of troops along the border with China.
Last year, Indian National Security Adviser M K
Narayanan alerted the air force regarding possible
infiltration by the Lashkar-e-Toiba.
And
it is not just to the ISI or other foreign
intelligence agencies that classified information
is being sold. In a scandal that came to light
last year, 7,000 documents that were smuggled out
of the Naval War Room on flash drives were leaked
to defense dealers. Three senior navy officers, a
former air force wing commander and a nephew of
navy chief Arun Prakash are among those accused of
selling the sensitive information.
The
information leaked included details of naval
deployments and of joint response by the army,
navy and air force in case of a Pakistani
incursion in the Kutch sector. It also included a
"strategically very sensitive study which is being
taken up by the air force, navy and the army to
identify their vulnerable areas and vulnerable
points, update threat perceptions to the nation
from the point of view of upgrading the
ground-based air-defense weapon system", says the
charge sheet filed by the Central Bureau of
Investigation.
"The armed forces seem to
be leaking sensitive information like a sieve," an
official of the Home Ministry told Asia Times
Online. But officials in the Defense Ministry deny
that this is a problem of the armed forces alone.
They draw attention to the leakage of important
documents by senior staffers of India's National
Security Council Secretariat to an American
diplomat in New Delhi.
Colonel R
Hariharan, a retired officer of Military
Intelligence, observes that the ISI's links in the
Indian armed forces have been mainly with
lower-level functionaries. "This is because it is
more difficult to cultivate contacts at higher
levels without getting noticed," he said.
The Defense Ministry official pointed out:
"Even if it is lower-level defense personnel that
are most often cultivated by the ISI, this is no
reason for relief, as the documents that are being
sold relate to highly classified information."
As an employee of the armed forces' group
insurance directorate, Dubey would not have had
direct access to sensitive documents, but in all
likelihood he was part of a larger chain and
others would have had access to the data.
The ease with which classified information
can be transferred through flash drives and the
Internet has facilitated the leaks. "The
large-scale computerization of the armed forces
and other government departments and the
availability of means such as Pen Drives have made
the task of ensuring departmental security very
difficult," wrote B Raman, former head of
counter-terrorism at India's external intelligence
agency, the Research and Analysis Wing.
But while flash drives might have
facilitated many of the leaks in recent years, the
issue is more rudimentary. "Basic security has
been flawed," said the Defense Ministry official,
drawing attention to the theft in 2003 of hard
drives from the Defense Research and Development
Organization's (DRDO) Scientific Analyses Group
and the Institute for System Studies and Analyses.
These contained stored encryption codes,
algorithms and other vital data on which a large
part of the "secure" telecommunication links of
different government agencies run.
The lax
attitude to securing sensitive information is
evident from the fact that the military operations
directorate used to sell its old computers in the
open market, after deleting all data from the hard
drive. But these data, it was discovered later,
could be retrieved. Computers with sensitive data
have also been sent for repairs and upgrades to
local shops.
In 2002, during Operation
Parakram, when the Indian army was deployed along
the India-Pakistan border, an armored regiment
deployed with the Akhnoor-based 10th Division sent
its computer for an upgrade. Even as the Indian
army was preparing for war, details of the 10th
Division's operational plans were out in the open
in a Jammu market.
Defense officials are
quick to say that such goof-ups are a thing of the
past. But there are loopholes in proposed security
systems as well. For instance, there are
differences within the armed forces on where to
source the software for the proposed Defense
Communication Network (a secure channel for the
three services of the armed forces), says Saikat
Datta, defense correspondent with Outlook
magazine.
"Senior Defense Ministry
officials say the DRDO had put it on record that
it can develop the software in-house, but the
signals directorate wants to outsource it. The
contract, they say, may end up with an
international firm which can introduce 'trapdoors'
within the software's program enabling foreign
intelligence agencies to track information on the
network."
The series of thefts of
classified data from defense-related
establishments has prompted the Indian government
to tighten cyber-security and take measures
against the use of flash drives to download
classified documents, albeit a year after the Navy
War Room leaks came to light.
The Home
Ministry has come out with cyber-security
guidelines that prohibit use of personal laptops,
handheld computers, electronic notebooks and
Internet- or Bluetooth-enabled mobile phones in
government offices. It advocates limited use of
the Internet, which is not to be connected to the
organization network under any circumstances.
The Intelligence Bureau has suggested
guidelines to restrict access to data in
computers. For detecting unauthorized access, for
instance, it has suggested audit-trail
system-event-log features and other
intrusion-detection systems. Biometric-access
control systems are a must for all
classified-application computers.
But even
as the Indian government is slowly moving to get
its high-tech act together to restrict
unauthorized access to sensitive data, it is doing
little to address more fundamental issues such as
tightening of recruitment procedures.
Hariharan says the background verification
of new recruits into the armed forces is not
thorough. The verification is to be done by a
constable from the area where the recruit resides.
More often than not, the constable does not
actually check the background of the recruit.
Hariharan observes that plugging the
intelligence leaks is not the task of the armed
forces, the Defense Ministry or the intelligence
agencies alone. The local police too have an
important role to play "as they have their fingers
on the pulse of the area". But with falling
standards of police personnel, the latter are
playing this role. Coordination and sharing of
information between different intelligence and
security agencies should be improved too, says
Hariharan.
The Pakistani High Commission
official who was caught receiving sensitive
defense documents has been declared persona non
grata by the Indian government and asked to
leave the country. But India will need to plug the
leaks within its own system to address the
espionage issue. The problem lies within.
Sudha Ramachandran is an
independent journalist/researcher based in
Bangalore.
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