Open Secrets: The Explosive Memoirs of an Indian Intelligence Officer (10 page)

The pyramidal hierarchy in Delhi was supplemented by the collation and analysis desks, often tailored to specific subjects, say communism, communalism, and units mostly catering to the geographical zones of the country. Different desks catered to different regions of the country.

The basic Delhi outfit is buffeted by counter intelligence units, which detect, identify and neutralise intelligence operations of other countries on Indian soil. The Technical Intelligence (TechInt), Signal Intelligence (SigInt) and Electronic Intelligence (ElInt) needs are supported by specialised units that have achieved a little bit of maturity and acquired some respectable gadgetry over years. But they lag seriously behind the prime intelligence organisations of the developed countries and even countries like Pakistan, Korea and Israel etc.

The counter terrorist units received very little attention till terrorism in Punjab blew up on the face of its creators. The Operations Cells, specialised in combating indigenous terrorism, were put on the rails around 1986, after Operation Blue Star and the assassination of Indira Gandhi. Specialised cells to combat ISI operations in India and Pakistan sponsored Islamist terrorism had taken shape only after the Bombay serial bomb blasts in 1993. The political infrastructure and its intelligence edifices responded very slowly to the emerging geopolitical needs.

The Intelligence Bureau has its units in the States. These units are known as Subsidiary Intelligence Bureaus (SIB) and the offices of the Central Intelligence Officer (CIO). The SIB units cascade down to district and in some cases sub-divisional levels. The positioning of the subsidiary intelligence generating units depends on the exigency of situation. However, the IB has been maintaining Border Check Posts (BCP) since early fifties along the international borders with China, Pakistan and Myanmar. Some of these posts were later taken over by the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) of the Cabinet Secretariat. But IB’s low-key presence along the international borders continues as a part of its counter intelligence and anti-terrorist agenda.

IB’s recruitment policy has been traditionally restricted to two basic levels: the Assistant Intelligence Officer, Grade II (equivalent to police sub-inspector) and Constable, later renamed Security Assistant. The ACIO II rank is subdivided to the ‘General’ and ‘Technical’ streams. The General boys are trained as intelligence operators while the Technical boys slog it out as support elements. The Security Assistants are often used as field intelligence generating tools. But mostly this category is used as ‘servicing’ elements, often discharging duties assigned to office peons, personal orderlies, cooks and attendants. There exists an elaborate arrangement for training the ACIOs; however, the Security Assistants are exposed to very little training in intelligence tradecraft. Besides directly recruiting officer grade materials from open market under cover of the Ministry of Home Affairs a substantive number of officers are taken on ‘deputation’ from the State police and now the Central Para-Military Forces.

The senior echelons of the IB are manned by the officers of the Indian Police Service (IPS) and very few direct recruit officers who manage to rise through the ranks from ACIO II. The IB has maintained its police character from the day of inception and has resisted lateral induction of talents from other specialised fields. It is, in fact, a Central Police Organisation that dons a different fleece. The rationale behind maintaining police exclusivism is rather obscurantist and to some extent occultist. Arguments in favour of tapping vast specialised talents from different fields of activities haven’t been encouraged by the politicians either. The police character of the IB suits their political objectives and the perception of accountability only to the immediate political masters gives them ample opportunity to misuse these agencies.

Before bifurcation of the IB by Indira Gandhi in 1968 and creation of a separate foreign intelligence outfit—the Research & Analysis Wing (R&AW), the IB was also entrusted with the delicate task of gathering external intelligence and some of its officers were assigned to the Indian Missions abroad.

The Counter-Intelligence units were designed to cover the activities of the foreign Missions in India. Certain units dealing with the Soviet Block, USA, China and Pakistan attracted the crème `d la crème of the corps of officers. These were coveted units too as the officers had under their command fleet of vehicles. These units were supplemented by units, which helped in monitoring of mails, telephone traffic and other electronic communication system.

Way back in 1968 the IB was a small outfit. It did not have any specialised mechanism to cover the vast land and sea borders. It had no access to the activities inside the Armed Forces of the nation, though certain counter-intelligence coups were staged by some of its enterprising officers. It did not have any expert field unit to cover the vast areas of industrial activities, industrial security, aviation security and many other fields of national activities, though nominal Industrial and Aviation security units existed in advisory capacity. These branches often dashed out advisories to concerned units and a few officers often went on lecture tour to industrial units. The organisation had started gathering expertise in these fields much later in the day.

The IB maintained liaison with the state police intelligence through the regional SIBs. But such liaison was inadequate and in many of the states the concept of gathering intelligence in a processed scientific manner did not exist. They were not tuned to the needs of the day and did not anticipate new inputs from external resources. IB, therefore, played the Big Brother, as long as the Indian National Congress (offshoot of the independence movement with the same name) governments ruled both in the Centre and the States. With the change in the political scenario, like in Kerala and West Bengal, the boss’ role was drastically curtailed. The State Governments often hesitated to share intelligence with the Central Government, which was looked upon as an enemy entity.

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It’s time to return to the mount joy and the training facility of the IB where I was deputed to restructure myself as an intelligence officer. I was supposed to go through the Basic Course that was designed to teach the tools of gathering and denying intelligence.

The Basic Course, as they termed the initiation ritual, didn’t excite much imagination. A few of my course mates were fairly senior to me. The rest of my course mates came from the ranks of the Intelligence Bureau, the directly recruited Assistant Central Intelligence Officer Grade II and some middle level promoted officers.

What surprised me most was the behavioural pattern of the direct recruit officers of the IB. This most important workforce was recruited through the Union Public Service Commission under cover of sub-inspectors of police for the Union Home Ministry. They were trained at Mount Abu police training college, alongside the direct recruit IPS officers. Much later the IB had started its own training facility somewhere north of the Vindhyas. Trained rigorously as policemen, the direct recruit officers were required to undergo basic intelligence courses, attachment to police stations, mountaineering training and other assorted training courses before they were pushed to the border check posts. They spent the first five to eight years in the remote border posts in NEFA, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram and Jammu & Kashmir and at locations along the Indo-China borders.

The robust and intelligent corps of officers received their training well but they displayed abject submissiveness characteristic only of the men in uniform, who were recruited from lesser-qualified human resources. There was something wrong in the training, I thought, that had robbed them of the initiative and measured aggressiveness required by the intelligence operatives. I was surprised to see that the men requiring the spirit of innovation—both in human intelligence and technical intelligence were being moulded as a queer hybrid of police and intelligence officers. They were not trained as intelligence operatives and technocrats. They were rather groomed up more as ordinary career chasing government servants on whose shoulders reposed the most important pinions of intelligence and security machineries of the country. Perhaps, the Intelligence Bureau manned essentially by senior policemen, had not thought of fabricating a differently trained and chiselled crops of officers who would cease to be mere government employees and would emerge as an elite work force unfettered by the police culture. I would like to share more observations on this aspect as I proceed with my reflections.

There were three distinct categories of trainers at the Anand Parvat facility. The desk officers and analysts formed the crème of the trainers. They lectured on the political movements and parties and the growth of the Indian political system since independence. No one could miss the extra emphasis on the Communist movement, both international and domestic and the functioning methodologies of the Indian Communist parties. Next in priority came the Hindu and the Muslim communal parties, like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, Jan Sangh, Hindu Mahasabha, Anand Marg, Jamat-e-Islami, the Muslim League and other assorted Islamic organisations. The study of Pan-Islamism formed a vital part of the course. But the trainers did not emphasise on the aspects of the emerging clashes between the Pan-Islamist forces and the non-Islamic civilisations like the Christianity, Judaism and Hinduism. Islam as an ideology of unique civilisational value, which tended to collapse within rather than expanding and assimilating, was not studied at that point of time, in correct perspective.

My training course was more engrossed with the hangover of the post independence trauma of Hindu and Muslim communalism. However, a few talks were directed at mapping the communal situation in the country and the linkages of the sub-continental Muslim forces with the Pan-Islamic forces of the Middle East and Africa. These talks were shallow and abstract.

Some pathetic efforts were made by a few desk analysts to apprise the class of the intricate international relations with China and Pakistan. I do not recall having been taught the intricate war of sabotage and subversion waged by Pakistan in the Indian North East, Kashmir and elsewhere in the country. The Naga and Mizo rebellions were painted as ethnic insurgencies in which the complicity of the Christian Church was highlighted. No effort was made to explain the damning fault lines that India had inherited from the British and failure of the government to repair those fault lines through administrative and political actions. I do not recall having been told about the complicity of the ISI and the State Security Bureau of China with the North East insurgents.

Manifestation of discontentment and agitation among other aboriginal tribals elsewhere in India was also ascribed to the Christian Church and machinations of the foreign missionaries. No one in the IB had bothered to study and project the underlying economic, political and social imbalances, which haunted the tribal people. That the less privileged tribals were being exploited by the advanced Hindu communities were never projected. A little later in my career I was surprised by the similarity of perception prevailing in the IB and in the RSS. To blame the Church for all the ills in the tribal entities, I thought, was as wild a logic as the flight of the crow and unexpected fall of a ripe coconut on the head of the farmer sleeping below the tree. These gaping fault lines were simply explained away as acts of conspiracy by the international Christian brotherhood. To me it appeared to be the height of Indian ingeniousness: find a bad dog, holler about it and invent a philosophy to support the faulty reasoning. Shooting of the imaginary bad dog was taken up as a political tool by certain segments of the Hindutwa protagonists after 1990.

The ruling Indian National Congress did not receive adequate attention of our trainers. The talks were rudimentary and an avid reader of the national history that I was, could discern that the analysts were reluctant to talk freely on the ruling party. The communists and communalists were the fiercest ghosts to the intelligence community and their political masters. The ruling party was treated as Caesar’s Wife.

The country had just started experiencing the Chinese inspired Extremist Left Communist movement, the Naksalbari Movement, shortened as Naxal Movement. But our trainers did not have much to share with us except some oblique references to the Telengana Movement and general activities of sabotage and subversion by the Communists. The politicians had no time to study the root causes of the Naxal Movement and other agrarian movements in the country. It was generally treated as another Chinese thrust through an organised group of ideological saboteurs. That strange social engineering experimentation had started from the grassroots level had escaped the attention of the IB analysts, state police authorities and the politicians in the federating states and the Union Government. It was not surprising that no one thought of acquainting the class with latest trends of the Left Extremist movement. It was treated as a law and order problem to be dealt with by the administration and the police. I was appalled by the brazen attitude towards the most important movement that aimed at transforming the social, economic and political contours of India. We are yet to witness a structured national response to the violent Left Extremist movement that has been waging a struggle for achieving social and economic justice.

Very little was taught about International Terrorism, ideological insurgency, and urban guerrilla warfare. The IB, way back in 1968, was simply not equipped to address these subjects. India’s fascination with Palestinian movement and bonhomie with the Muslim regimes in the Middle East was anchored in the wharf of neutralism and third world diplomacy. International Terrorism was considered as an exportable item by the Soviet Union. Urban guerrilla movements in Europe were simply mentioned but no cogent explanation was given for the strange phenomena.