Page 1 of
2 BOOK
REVIEW India's silent
warriors The Kaoboys of
R&AW: Down Memory Lane by B
Raman
Reviewed by Sreeram Chaulia
Secrecy and intelligence agencies are
synonymous. Very rarely does the general public
get a peek into the shadowy world of spooks and
their death-defying deeds shrouded behind the iron
curtain of state secrets.
In a new
offering from India's premier publishing house on
strategic affairs, B Raman,
the former head of the Counter-Terrorism Division
of India's external intelligence agency, the
Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), pries open
the black box with hard-hitting scrutiny. The
Kaoboys of R&AW is at once a nostalgic
tribute to India's silent warriors and an
inquisition into what is wrong with their
legendary organization.
Raman's opening
salvo is fired at the US State Department, which
was much hated in R&AW during his 26-year
tenure. One State Department official may have
passed on to Pakistan Indian intelligence reports
on Khalistani terrorists that New Delhi had shared
with Washington. In 1992, the State Department
threatened to impose economic sanctions on India
after it refused permission for US sleuths to go
on an aerial-photography mission along the
Sino-Indian border. In 1994, it warned New Delhi
that if R&AW did not halt covert missions in
Pakistan, the United States would "act against
India" (p 5).
Moving back to 1971, Raman
chronicles the decision of India's then-prime
minister Indira Gandhi to deploy the
two-and-half-year-old R&AW into action as the
East Pakistan crisis deepened. R&AW trained
Bengali guerrillas and organized a
psychological-warfare campaign against Pakistani
rulers. Almost every day, Indira had at her
disposal bugged extracts from telephonic
conversations of the Pakistani top brass on the
evolving situation. She did not make a single
decision on the Bangladesh issue without
consulting the R&AW chief, R N Kao.
Between 1969 and 1971, clandestine units
of R&AW disrupted Chinese-backed Naga and Mizo
insurgent traffic, sanctuaries and infrastructure
in Myanmar and East Pakistan. The Richard Nixon
administration in Washington initiated a joint
program with Islamabad to hit back at India by
encouraging a separatist movement among the Sikhs
of Punjab. The US National Security Council, led
by Henry Kissinger, sponsored allegations in the
press and public forums of violations of Sikhs'
human rights. US interest in the Khalistan
insurgency remained firm up to 1984.
Intriguingly, R&AW and the US Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) simultaneously colluded
to prevent a possible Chinese takeover of northern
Burma. George H W Bush, the director of the CIA
from 1975-77, became a personal friend of Kao.
Later, when Bush was US vice president, Kao
succeeded in persuading him to turn off the aid
tap to Khalistani terrorists. Raman comments here
that "benevolence and malevolence go side by side
in relations between intelligence agencies" (p
42).
In the mid-1970s, Kao sensed the
urgency of enabling R&AW to collect
intelligence about US movements in the Indian
Ocean region. He cobbled together a liaison
relationship with the French and Iranian
intelligence agencies to monitor the Americans, an
oddity given that the shah of Iran was among the
closest allies of the United States. To Raman,
R&AW's present capacity to stalk the US
remains weak. He chides the government of Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh for "not seeming to be
unduly concerned about it" (p 48).
Shortly
after R&AW's creation in 1968, Kao arranged a
secret liaison relationship with Israel's Mossad
to "learn from its counter-terrorism techniques"
(p 127). In the early 1980s, Pakistan was
genuinely worried about the chances of a joint
Indo-Israeli operation to destroy its
uranium-enrichment plant at Kahuta. For 12 years,
Mossad officers were posted in New Delhi under the
cover of South American businessmen.
An
interesting development Raman mentions is secret
meetings in the late 1980s between the chiefs of
R&AW and Pakistan's Inter Services
Intelligence (ISI) that were facilitated by Prince
Talal of Jordan. The ISI denied harboring
Khalistani terrorists but, outside media glare, it
did hand over to R&AW some Sikh deserters of
the Indian Army.
Raman favors exchanges of
this sort over inane joint counter-terrorism
mechanisms, so that the top spooks of both
countries meet each other periodically without a
formal agenda and "compare notes on developments
of common interest" (p 234).
Raman
partially blames the lack of objectivity of
R&AW's branch dealing with Bangladesh for the
decline in its performance in India's eastern
frontier after 1975. Witchhunts by politicians,
nepotism, discriminatory internal security checks,
minimal interaction between senior and junior
officers, permissiveness and trade unionism have
added to R&AW's woes over the years.
Persisting frictions over recruitment and
inter-service seniority "come in the way of
R&AW officers developing an esprit de
corps even 39 years after formation of the
organization" (p 133).
K Santanam of
R&AW's science and technology division was the
first to assess that Pakistan was covertly
constructing a uranium-enrichment plant. He
systematically monitored developments relating to
Pakistan's nuclear program, including the
procurement racket of Abdul Qadeer Khan. Raman
reveals that, in an unguarded moment, Indian prime
minister Morarji Desai indiscreetly told Pakistani
dictator Zia ul-Haq that he was aware of
Islamabad's nuclear schemes.
R&AW
trained the intelligence officers of many
independent African countries and assisted the
anti-apartheid struggles in South Africa and
Namibia. Retired R&AW officers were deputed to
work in training institutes of intelligence
agencies of some African states. Raman terms it a
pity that R&AW frittered away its
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
or US sleuths to go
on an aerial-photography mission along the
Sino-Indian border. In 1994, it warned New Delhi
that if R&AW did not halt covert missions in
Pakistan, the United States would "act against
India" (p 5). 
