Open Secrets: The Explosive Memoirs of an Indian Intelligence Officer (67 page)

The situation was ideal for godfathers in the technical units to select their serfs and the less favoured serfs bounced from post to pillar in search of newer godfathers. Favouritism, nepotism, groupism and corruption flourished in uncontrolled mutation process creating sadist bosses and saddest subordinates.

In fact, I walked up to the designated floor of the sprawling complex amidst cynical smiles and disinterested looks of outright rejection. The ‘specialised technical officers’ were at a loss to understand whether to greet or boo the rank outsider. They had known me as an intelligence operator but had very little faith in my knowledge about transistors, diodes, carrier waves and analogue and digital transmission modes. Moreover, the groups loyal to godfathers in Narayanan’s coterie were in no doubt that I was pushed out of the mainstream and dumped in the TechInt section for screwing my balls out.

I was determined to deny them this vicious pleasure and to extract out the best out of the suckers and barnacles that had made the TechInt wing as a breeding ground of inefficiency and corruption.

The first few officers to nudge closer to me belonged to two categories: adopted children of the godfathers and the godfather-less orphans. The former conveyed messages of their proximity to A, B, C and D in the organisation and the latter were ready with stories of deficiencies and hints of hidden fault lines.

I preferred to take a tour of the peaks, gullies, furrows and crevices of the sprawling TechInt unit by ordering a presentation by different wings along with complete inventory of men and materials within seven days. That had set off a massive earthquake. The nodal heads failed to come up with the presentation within the stipulated period except YY Bose, a brilliant officer on deputation from the Department of Electronics, and ZZ Kaushik, another officer on deputation from Telecommunication department. The former oversaw the fledgling satellite communication and a little bit of the computer wing that was lorded over by an IPS officer with dubious efficiency in computronics. The latter efficiently handled the telecommunication and related subjects and helped out the computer division.

After the stipulated seventh day I called up the ‘unit heads’ and made it clear that most of them were due for transfer out of Delhi and I proposed to carry out the reshuffle in next ten days. That did the magic. They came up with whatever they lorded over. The findings both shocked and surprised me. I was shocked by the stagnation and morbidity of the vital wings of the TechInt edifice, mismanagement of stores and sordid maintenance. Somewhere putrid smell of corrupt practices nauseated my mind.

To start with I used a scissor to snap the bonds between the godfathers and their favourite siblings and made clear that they had none else but me to look up to. This was resented. Some godfathers even used the restricted area phone to request me to ‘protect’, ‘help’ and ‘to be considerate’ to their loyalists. The process also helped me to free about 18 ‘security assistants’ from the TechInt units from ‘serfdom’ at the residences of some of the godfathers. I reallocated these rescued ‘serfs’ to fieldwork.

The next move was to establish direct contact with the workforce bypassing the sectional satraps. Personal meetings with the lowest level of unit cells helped me to develop rapport with the grassroots level technical hands.

After delivering the initial shiver I prepared a project appraisal paper for my boss outlining the need for accelerated weeding out of the junked inventory, acquisition of modern equipments, upgradation of the R&D facilities, modernisation of the monitoring services, cipher section and the computer Division. Two revolutionary suggestions mooted by me were well received: maximum utilisation of the satellite communication facilities and formation of Joint Scientific Advisory Body of the Intelligence Bureau and the leading scientists in the fields of communication, interception, cipher breaking and fabrication of TechInt gadgets.

A grand conference organised with the presence of the leading scientists of the country and the officers of the Intelligence Bureau offered a unique opportunity to project the need for indigenously manufacturing a number of gadgets required for intelligence generation. The Joint Scientific Advisory Committee functioned well for about two years. The Intelligence Bureau benefited from the experiences of the DRDO, BHEL, DOE and the IIT faculties of Delhi and Chennai. However, the technocrats of the TechInt unit and the supervisory police officers lost interest soon after I demitted charge of the technical wing. The TechInt technocrats were more interested in importing certain sensitive equipments as the deals left fat cuts for them. The supervisory officers, barring one or two, did not develop any interest in indigenising the equipments. Police culture that ran through the veins and capillaries of the agency prevented them from opening the doors to the scientific community.

Though pushed out from the mainstream of intelligence generation and analysis I revived the proposal to allow reputed academics to assist the IB in the fields of back up research on fault lines inside India and the fault lines in the neighbouring countries. This proposal was also shot down. I was of the view that open market talents should be inducted into the organisation to head certain analysis desks encompassing socio-economic fields and trans-national security parameters covering the geopolitical arch beyond South East Asia (SEA), Pakistan, Afghanistan, Central Asian Republics and some of the Middle Eastern Islamic countries. The vested interests in the IB, which suffered (continue to suffer) from the stranglehold of police culture, did never agree to the proposals for lateral hiring of talents from the academia, media and the scientific community. I would like to comment on this in the concluding chapters.

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After establishing my credentials as an honest jack and a work-termite I succeeded in overcoming the prejudices and reservations of the senior formations of the TechInt wing and some of their mentors. That offered an opportunity to overhaul the Jurassic Caesar’s Wife of the Intelligence Bureau. Major progress was made in the field of procuring compact and versatile High Frequency and Very High Frequency trans-receivers from external sources. A few ultramodern sets were procured to augment the SigInt section.

A B Bose and some other enterprising colleagues helped in developing indigenous Direction Finders, which were deftly used in Punjab and Kashmir. It may be mentioned that the entire SigInt division of the IB was taken over by the R&AW in 1969. My efforts at revamping the SigInt operations along Indo-Pak land borders and other sensitive fault lines in the North East and Tamil Nadu produced encouraging results.

The Indian ether space was crammed with open and clandestine and enclair and cipher traffic from radio stations operated by the Afghan mujaheedins, ISI supported Islamist groups and Russian controlled stations located in the Central Asian Republics. The Intelligence Bureau had no access to this vast pool of intelligence. The R&AW and the Directorate of Military Intelligence hardly shared SigInt materials of real time value. The IB did have a cipher section, which managed the in house cipher usage and acted as the custodian of cipher materials. It had no capability to decode intercepted messages, which were sent either to R&AW and the Joint Cipher Bureau for decryption. In 99% cases they reacted after months and with negative nods.

The pitiable condition of cipher breaking capability was exemplified by challenges posed by the LTTE cipher traffic between the island nation and Tamil Nadu. Some Tamil knowing officers laboured exclusively to decipher the traffic in Tamil. But they were incapable of deciphering alphanumeric, numeric and alphabetic and sign ciphers. Much crucial cipher traffic between the LTTE high command and its safe houses in the Southern Peninsula remained unbroken for months together, being tossed over between the IB, R&AW and the JCB.

The precious life of Rajiv Gandhi could have perhaps been saved had the intelligence organisations acquired the capability of breaking LTTE ciphers. Both the IB and the R&AW did not have powerful first generation computers and required software to break enemy codes. My plea to seek collaboration from Israel, Germany and the USA for commercially obtaining computers and software was rejected by the Home Ministry mandarins after prolonged consultations with the Finance and External Affairs Ministry. My attempt to procure digital auto-encryption/decryption modules from Germany was also frustrated by the mandarins of the ministry. It was another example of the baboos getting the better of the technical experts and intelligence operators.

However, against vehement objections of some of the higher formation I located HF interception stations in Delhi, Ahmedabad, Jodhpur, Ganganagar and Amritsar. This was followed by total overhauling and revamping of the cipher units of the IB. I would like to comment on the cipher matters a little later.

The ISI had supplied Japanese and Taiwanese HF/VHF communication and monitoring equipments to the Punjab militants, which enabled them to monitor voice transmission by Punjab police and the paramilitary forces. The rural telephony system also depended on Local Area Radio Transmission (LART). The sophisticated equipments offered the militant groups easy access to telephone calls between Amritsar and local police and civil administration detachments.

While the telephone authorities were appraised of the peril of the rural telephony system the VHF interception sets deployed in Amritsar, Tarn Taran, Khemkaran, Makhu and other border posts in Punjab provided invaluable leads to the intelligence and security fraternity. Interception range of the sets was enhanced by improvising intermediate relay stations which enabled a TechInt operator located at Amritsar to intercept voice transmission from Dera Baba Nanak on Pakistan border and even from Pakistani locations at Kasur, Rampura, Bhasin, Padhana, Uppal and Qadiwind etc. One of such SigInt inputs from Qadiwind, etc had helped the security forces to intercept a militant gang infiltrating from Pakistan under cover of firing from the Pakistani Rangers.

I understand that my colleagues have improved upon the facilities and have added new dimensions to communication interception protocol. Signal interception has become the daily salt of security operations in respect of internal security.

Around 1990-91 we did not have access to equipment to monitor the communication channels that used fax, telex and Internet media. We laboured for a couple of months and came up with an indigenous solution to intercept suspect fax communication. Some such fax intercepts between Delhi and Islamabad helped the Ministry of External Affairs and the Union Home Ministry in reorienting their strategic approaches. One such intercept related to a long assessment on the likely fall out of the Ramjanmbhoomi stir by the BJP and other tentacles of the Sangh Parivar.

Sophisticated imported equipments have now replaced these rudimentary contraptions. However, back in 1991 our boys performed a miracle and offered a new tool of intelligence gathering to the IB. This breakthrough was supplemented by fabrication and installation of equipment that enabled the IB to intercept targeted telex transmissions of the foreign Missions; Delhi based foreign correspondents and corporate houses having business links with targeted countries.

Another menace that gnawed at our face was the sudden proliferation of ISD and STD facilities all over the country. The installed capacity of the IB to monitor local and overseas calls was pitiably limited. The terrorist groups in Punjab, Kashmir, North East and their collaborators used ISD facilities with impunity. The PSTN hubs in the metropolitan cities were not difficult to tackle as the monitors were supplied with target lists and numbers.

The outgoing and incoming overseas calls were routed through the Gateways in Mumbai, Dehradun and Jullandhar. The Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited (VSNL) was not readily agreeable to give IB access to its hubs. Moreover, neither the VSNL nor the IB had any software to identify the numbers of calling and called parties. After a prolonged negotiation a crude methodology was devised to place special consoles in the Gateway hubs to intercept identified target numbers and to obtain print out of the numbers in the target local area exchanges. It was a modest beginning and it worked as best as it could. I understand that my colleagues have vastly improved upon the crude beginning and have now procured faster computers and efficient software. They have also attained the capability of intercepting mobile and satellite telephone systems.

I was not trained in the use of alphanumeric, numeric and alphabetic ciphers. I did not know anything about the intricate mathematical exercises that involved in deciphering coded messages. However, while in the North East I had learnt the tricks of ciphering and deciphering based on pads supplied by the Intelligence Bureau and the JCB. Some of the technical officers helped me out in understanding the basic characteristics of cipher traffic and their logarithms. The officers in the Cipher Unit (CU) of the IB were surprised when I ordered an inspection of the unit. I discovered to my horror that the ‘experts’ in the CU were not at all equipped to break even the low-grade ciphers used by the Pakistani Rangers and police forces. The entire traffic was sent to the R&AW and the JCB, who sat over the piles for months before conveying their inability. I considered it a national shame and decided to carry out some home cleaning operations and adding new values to the CU.

In the face of rejection of my suggestion to depute officers to the MI6, CIA and the Mossad for training in cryptography and importation of fast computers and software I opted for the next best I could lay hands on. A group of young TechInt boys with strong background in mathematics was selected and made to undergo crash courses in computer operations. They were also trained in handling cryptographic logarithms, permutation, combination and alphanumeric substitution techniques. Very soon we were rewarded with the capability of breaking low grade ciphers originated by the Sind and Pakistan Rangers and police formations in Sialkot, Lahore, Multan, Bahawalpur, Rahimyar Khan, Sukkur and Hyderabad, etc. However, we could not make any breakthrough in breaking high-grade codes.