Open Secrets: The Explosive Memoirs of an Indian Intelligence Officer (2 page)

Open Secrets is dedicated to Sunanda Dhar, my life partner. She had smilingly supported my wild ways of unconventional intelligence production, even in hostile terrains like the North East. She had shown magnanimity in tolerating my battle of conscience and the tantrums of the two quarrelling squirrels inside me, which often pushed us to the precipice of uncertainty and insecurity.

In Open Secrets an intelligence operator has for the first time offered an insight into the working of the prime intelligence organisation of India—the Intelligence Bureau. In India any open writing and pronouncement about the intelligence community is frowned upon as an act of betrayal against the Establishment. Such revelations are aplenty in ‘free democracies’ in the western world, where the intelligence establishment is regularly brought under public scanner, through legal and constitutional means. I have made the first attempt to break the taboo of guarding the intelligence fraternity under the permanent veil. I beg indulgence of my colleagues who lived with my unconventional ways and had given me whole hearted support. I salute these faceless and nameless intelligence operators.

‘Open Secrets’ is not an autobiography. An insignificant person, who just performed the basic human rituals of living a span of life and loving a lady, raising a family and serving the intelligence community to earn bread, cannot stake claim to be a part of the history of his time. Hence, he has no right to burden the world with his story; which is not history. But, I have been, like many other individuals in my position, a carrier wave, through which certain events of history were transmitted from historical persons to non-historical persons; the rulers to the ruled. Certain events had flowed down my stream that I happened to carry to the event horizon, which is called the dustbin of history.

I feel that such carrier waves and such streams have a right to tell what gold-nuggets and garbage of history had flown down to the event horizon through their media. Such media wave, in that tortured logical interpretation, is a part of the history. Hence he can also claim to be a part of the immortal events.

‘Open Secrets’ has arisen out of the Vedic feeling of ‘So
Aham
’—I’m the Him; I’m the part of the Infinite. I hope those who will have time to read this account will be magnanimous enough to pardon a megalomaniac who considers himself as a part of the infinite-history. It is not his-story, it is not his autobiography. It is a part of the History; it is a part of the Infinite.

With this grandiose and quixotic assertion I wish to communicate to the readers that I do not have the temerity of writing a history of the Intelligence fraternity of India. That is a vast and complicated subject, which can better be treated by a scholar.

At worst Open Secret can be treated as the first open confession of an intelligence operative.

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Intelligence apparatus is an integral part of statecraft and governance. It is one of the most ancient tools that has formed the integral part of the evolution of human intelligence in certain portion of the cranium that has endowed the Homo Sapiens with the instinct of survival, fighting against all odds and ascertaining his superiority over his adversaries—elemental, human, animal and all sorts of adversaries. In the crudest sense it has given the insatiable urge to a housewife to ferret out what cooks in a neighbour’s pot and what happens below their quilt.

Intelligence as an attribute of man’s evolution through the process of selection has become synonymous with his quest for knowledge. Intelligence infrastructure as a part of social evolution and statecraft has become synonymous with diplomacy, law and order, stability and welfare of the governed and governing people and a powerful bridge between war and peace.

In internal context it is a perfect tool for repression and welfare, a supreme tool for ensuring law and order and maiming and silencing people’s voice. In external relations it plays complimentary roles to statecraft and diplomacy and takes the front seat when certain objectives are required to be achieved through means other than statecraft and diplomacy and war. Intelligence fraternity can carry out wars through peaceful means, it can wage wars through low intensity attrition and it can play havoc through sabotage and subversion. It can seek out the fault lines of the enemy and cause tectonic explosion under his feet. It is as powerful a weapon as a fusion bomb is. It depends how and in what fashion the intelligence infrastructure is used by the ruling clique against whom and at what point of political evolution of a nation state. It is the strongest defensive weapon that can defend the home front by denying intelligence to the enemy and by sniffing out his illegitimate and undiplomatic activities by using superior intelligence tools.

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As a modern nation state India has inherited a well defined intelligence machinery from the British which had chiselled out a well-greased system of collection of intelligence with the uncanny combination of gathering strategic and tactical intelligence through established machineries in the Central Intelligence Bureau, Intelligence Units in the Armed Forces, Border Scouts, Special Rangers and well-groomed individual agents, besides the finely groomed revenue collectors, village level officials and civil servants. In British India the system was well orchestrated between the Central Intelligence Bureau and the intelligence and criminal investigation departments of the British governed provinces. There was no dearth of coordination between the British Indian territory and the territories governed by the princes and kings, on matters related to the security of the Crown Empire. The Empire was interested in limited areas of activities of the Indian nationalists, a little bit of communal situation, communist infiltration and activities of groups and individuals that threatened the stability of their colony. Its intelligence machinery was also required to tailor its threads with the intelligence machineries at the Home Office and other intelligence gathering machines elsewhere in the Crown Colonies. The British ruled with an iron hand and did not harbour any pretension of following legal niceties when it came to the perceived subversive activities of the nationalists. It suited the Empire to treat its Indian intelligence branch as a ‘bureau’—a subsidiary administrative unit.

No one expected the Empire to restrain its administrative machineries in dealing with the ‘swadeshi rogues.’ The Intelligence departments at the centre and the provinces were as mercilessly used as the police and army were. All spheres of human activities were covered by the agents of the Empire—the academia, the campuses, labour forces, print media, performing arts, government and private offices and even the bedrooms of the suspects. In a limited way the gadgets of technical intelligence were used to intercept mails, communications and dissemination of revolutionary and seditious ideas. In short, the intelligence apparatus gave blanket coverage to all activities inside the country. The intelligence gathering in the neighbouring countries and areas of influence were discharged through diplomatic missions, trade missions, liaison offices and itinerant spies; all accountable to the Viceroy and the Home Office.

The growth of British intelligence system in India and other key colonies was independent of the growth of MI5 and MI6, the internal and external wing of intelligence system of Great Britain. There were frequent interchanges between the intelligence personnel of the colonies and the home-based personnel. But in India the evolution of the Central Intelligence Bureau, the intelligence outfit of the Great Empire had followed the contour of specific requirements of the Empire, in India and in the neighbouring countries, especially China, Russia, Afghanistan, Middle Eastern countries and some countries in the South East Asia.

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The history of the intelligence infrastructure of the countries like the USA, UK, France, and Germany show that each country had fashioned its machineries according to the historic requirements it faced from time to time. They went through an evolutionary process. The USSR had also fashioned its intelligence apparatus in accordance with its needs to build up a closed and captive society in the name of communism. It is the case with China.

In ‘free countries’ like the USA, UK and France the modern versions of the intelligence infrastructure in post-World War scenario amply bear the testimony to the fears and aspirations of the respective nations. However, in accordance with the democratic traditions the USA and the UK have finally opted for adequate legislation to streamline the functioning of their intelligence organisations. There is no doubt that certain ruling cliques of certain period in modern history of these two democratic nations have used the intelligence machineries against its own people and institutions. Even the post-9/11 legislations and activities of the FBI, Homeland Security and the CIA have given rise to certain questions if the USA was not taking away liberty of its people in the name of protecting them. Same questions are being raised elsewhere too.

Such questions are being asked because these countries value democracy as well as liberty enshrined in their respective constitutions and conventions. They are equally apprehensive of the sanctity of their elected democratic system as well as their freedom and liberty. There are inbuilt institutions in the system to ask uncomfortable questions to the ruling cliques and investigate into their actions, including the intelligence gathered by their agencies on internal and external security matters. The CIA and the FBI are accountable to the Congress and the Senate and other statutory bodies. The MI5 and the MI6 cannot get away with intelligence faux pas and every action of the system is zealously scrutinised by the watchdog committees of the Parliament. It is, however, admitted that the intelligence organisations of these ‘free countries’ do give wide coverage to the activities of their citizen in almost all sphere of activities. Their systems keep track of the citizen from the Cradle to the Grave. No other country, except, perhaps the former Soviet Union, has documented their citizen in such exhaustive and comprehensive manner.

India has not been able to keep track of its own citizen. The faulty system allows unhindered entry of alien nationals from the neighbouring countries. Periodically some Indian politicians wake up and raise slogans for comprehensive documentation of the citizens of the country. Vote-bank beggars in the right, left and centre of the political spectrum oppose them, because they depend a lot on illegal migrant voters from the neighbouring countries. They also shed crocodile tears in the name of ‘secularism’—an apartheid mechanism devised by the Indian democracy. Once in a while the intelligence and police agencies are whipped up to trace out the illegal settlers. They even violate the rights of the natural citizens.

However, the intelligence institutions of the USA and the UK by and large try to avoid the clumsy ways and means that openly violate the democratic and constitutional rights of the citizen.

The evolutions of the Indian democracy and constitutional liberty have outpaced the growth of systemic accountability of its police and intelligence fraternity. Or one should say that these sectors of state activity have systematically flouted the norm of parallel growth compatible with the growth of the concepts of democracy, liberty, human rights and value system of the democratic society.

These important national institutions continue to suffer from the bane of feudal and imperial curses. Moreover, the so-called institutions of the iron frame, the entire length of the spinal cord of Indian administration, from
Panchayat
(rural self-government) to national level, has been mutilated and subjugated in the name of suborning them to the ‘rule of the people, for the people and by the people’. Several institutions of the country, including the judiciary, have been distorted and subverted to suit the political class.

It is not my intention to write another sterile thesis on the state of Indian administration and judiciary. Such thesis are propounded at regular intervals, several commissions are instituted routinely to examine the system breakdown and several such reports, including reports on police and intelligence reform have been gathering dust if not already eaten up by ants and termites of the system.

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All that I wanted to highlight in Open Secrets is my limited tryst with the intelligence fraternity, peripheral brush with the political system and a little bit experience of the horror-house, which is Indian democracy.

Indian intelligence institutions are multi-layered. The prime intelligence organisation, the Intelligence Bureau, was inherited from the Imperial Intelligence Bureau, popularly known as Central Intelligence Bureau. The post-independence political system has more or less maintained the structural formation of the IB (Intelligence Bureau) with the apex organisation at the Centre (core of the paradoxical Federated Unitary Democracy) and its subsidiary units in various federating (unified with the centre) States (former and reorganised provinces). The very concept of federated unitary system gives rise to several contradictions in the constitution of the country and relationship between the States and the Centre. Some Commissions, including the Sarkaria Commission, had gone into these aspects, which are yet to be resolved to the satisfaction of the aspirations of the people. A Unitary Democracy is incompatible with the concept of a Federated Democracy, whose integrity is ensured by a pragmatic and flexible constitution.

The Intelligence Bureau has a cascading bureaucratic structure with the Director at the top cone of the pyramid. It is a replica of any other ‘ministry’ of the government of India with the exception that it is treated as a ‘Bureau’, an administrative unit under the Union Home Ministry. The definition of Bureau is: “An office for the transaction of business. A name given to the several departments of the executive or administrative branch of government, or their divisions.” (
Black’s Law Dictionary
-Sixth Edition).

From the legal definition it is clear that the Intelligence Bureau is an administrative creation of the Union Government of India, as inherited from British India. The State has the prerogative of creating/establishing organisations, bureaus, and departments for carrying out specific administrative tasks. The IB is one such department, which is administered through normal service rules applied to the IPS officers and government servants of other categories.

However, intelligence cannot be treated as ‘just another department’ under a ministry. While the chief of the Research and Analysis Wing has been endowed with the powers of a full secretary to the Government of India, his counterpart in the IB is still accountable to the Home Secretary. More often than not he is answerable to the Prime Minister and the Union Home Minister. The IB’s accountability ends at the door of its prime consumers.