Open Secrets: The Explosive Memoirs of an Indian Intelligence Officer (9 page)

Much later a
Vaishnaba
(a Hindu stream of worship) saint in Manipur taught me that tolerance wasn’t an anathema to rational thinking. Tolerance rather helped in widening the knowledge base of a person who felt thirst for the truth. He had also warned me to acknowledge that truth wasn’t a fixed object. It was a relative concept. It was, according to him like the layers of an onion. The final truth, he felt was
maya
(eternal void), which appeared to exist and very often appeared non-existent.

This minor indulgence in a stream of Hindu philosophy was prompted by two unforeseen developments.

Chandan Sanyal (name changed), my Calcutta University friend and my colleague in a Calcutta newspaper, had traversed a tortuous ideological terrain and come to the conclusion that political and social changes could only be brought about through the barrel of gun. He had joined the ranks of Charu Majumdar, Kanu Sanyal and Jangal Santhal. A prominent member of the Communist party (Marxist-Leninist) he believed in simultaneous rural and urban
upri
sing. I had met him last in 1966 at the famous College Street coffee house, a favourite rendezvous of the real and budding intellectuals of Calcutta and the most fertile ground of spawning renaissance and revolution.

I received an early morning call from DIG state intelligence branch and faced a critical enquiry.

“I believe you know Chandan Sanyal?”

“Yes sir. We studied and worked together.”

“I want you to spot him in Siliguri and arrest him.”

“That’s not my area sir.”

“You’ve the orders from the IGP.”

“Where do I look for him?”

The DIG shared with me an address somewhere in Bidhan Nagar, an upcoming residential area.

The moment of truth confronted me rather brazenly. I was very close to the RSS and at a later date had fraternised with the Congress. I never felt aroused by the political ideas of the Bengal communists. Chandan was drawn to communist ideology and believed in the Chinese brand of violent movement. But our ideological incompatibility did not stand in the way of our friendship.

I went down to Siliguri all by myself in a hired private car. I did not take the police jeep. Bidhan Nagar wasn’t a big place way back in early 1967. The address was correct but Chandan wasn’t there. I was advised to come after a few days. It was a big disappointment.

My next stop was the ramshackle home of Charu Majumdar, the paternal figure of India’s Left Extremist movement. I had met him thrice, way back in 1966, along with a journalist friend of Darjeeling, who worked as a stringer for the BBC. The contents of only one of my initial meetings with Charu were shared with the SP. I was aware that Haren Banerjee was a close relation of Kanu Sanyal and I did not want him to have any peep into my personal contacts with Charu. I met him more as a student of current history to understand the workings of the minds of the people who wanted to kill for the sake of killing alone. People like Charu were no Che Guevara. He was a believer than a bigoted devotee of a jungle deity. He knew that to change the Indian social system the time wasn’t ripe and he didn’t possess any gun worth the name except the gun of Chinese communist ideology of the day. But I respected Charu for the power of his conviction and the strength of his magnetism.

His daughter, who I believe had later obtained a degree in medicine, unlatched the door. The suave girl demurred unintelligibly but allowed me in. Charu had still not gone underground and was running his political outfit from his home. He was not a good conversationalist. He liked to deliver shrill and loud lecture on class struggle and the inevitable victory of the proletariat. He was an avid believer in violence as a tool of emancipation of the exploited.

Seated in a wooden chair Charu’s face looked glum and sullen. I knew I wasn’t any more welcome to his home.

“What brings you here?”

“Just like that. I thought I’d renew the contact.”

“The contact point between your and my classes is in the battlefield. Get ready with the guns.”

“Can’t you reach your goal through peaceful means? Revolution doesn’t essentially mean war and bloodshed.”

“Don’t be silly. India can only be changed by violence.”

“We achieved independence through non-violent means.”

“You are a fool. Had the British not gone bankrupt they would have retained the colony for another two hundred years. Thanks to Hitler that he initiated the process of decolonisation by destroying the coffers of the colonists. The British simply escaped from India.”

Charu was like that. His political thesis wasn’t acceptable to me. But he had opened up to me, like Jagadananda Roy, new vistas to the millions of the toiling masses of India. I secretly wished that I could be a revolutionary like them. My discussions that day convinced me that the rumbling thunders of violent agrarian revolution were not very far. They were about to hit us more ferociously than the proverbial cyclones of the Bengal delta.

As I travelled back to Kalimpong I tried to frame the contour of the report I would have to submit to the SP. I wasn’t surprised by the prophetic utterances of Cahru. I knew that behind the frail figure there existed a violent storm that was sure to usher in a new era in Indian political system. He was not irrelevant. He was a vain prophet, who did not live to see his creed succeeding and transforming Indian political and social systems. But he sure had ignited the spark, which I was confident, would transform the hollow socio-economic realities that we inherited from the British Raj and which was being run in feudalistic manner.

But a bigger surprise waited for me at Kalimpong. As I walked into the compound of my Teesta Road residence Dhanbir rushed out to say that my cousin from Calcutta had arrived soon after I left for Siliguri.

It was my turn to be surprised. Chandan was seated cross-legged in the veranda with piles of cigarette butts on the ashtray and a burning one between his fingers.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“This is the safest place. How was your fishing expedition in Siliguri?”

“I don’t do fishing in Siliguri. The nearby Teesta is full of rainbow trout.”

“Trash the rhetoric. I’m here for a day. What do you want to do with me?”

Dhanbir produced a couple of cups of tea and we talked about the golden days back in Calcutta when we chased stories and begged the city editor to give us the third page coverage. We were yet to graduate to front-page banner stories.

“Do you think you have chosen the correct path?”

I asked Chandan, the only son of an affluent physician of Calcutta, as we ate dinner.

“Who knows? Only history can decide if I’m right or wrong. But the struggle is genuine and the revolution I dream of is bound to correct the distorted history of this country.”

“But you’re wanted by the police. They’d prefer to shoot you.”

“I know. Put me in a train at one of the small stations near Siliguri. I want to disappear in Bihar for a while.”

“Why Bihar?”

“I’ve to regroup some of the workers over there.”

“Do you expect me to escort you to Siliguri?”

“Why not? I know you love me.”

That fateful night I encountered one of the toughest wars of my life, the war within. Chandan slept like a log totally unconcerned about his security. I was tossing in the next bed struggling to keep afloat my love and affection over my conscience. I realised that conscience could often generate extreme pain. I decided to be guided by my love for Chandan. That scoundrel squirrel in me finally had its flag unfurled.

I woke him up at 4a.m. and asked Chandan to take the back seat. I drove the police jeep straight to Baghdogra railway station and put him on a local shuttle that was bound for Kishanganj in Bihar.

We shared a cup of tea served in earthen cups and smoked the same cigarette like we used to smoke way back in Calcutta streets as struggling journalists.

The coal fired shuttle chugged out of the dusty platform and I drove back to Kalimpong before Dhanbir was ready with breakfast.

“
SP sahab phone garnu bhakathiya
(the SP had made a telephone call).”

I called the SP back while munching an overcooked omelette.

“Did you call me sir?’

“Where had you been so early in the morning?”

“I’d been to Mal and Odlabari to meet an informer.”

“You’re behaving like an intelligence officer.”

I didn’t know if it was a compliment or a dig at my unusual way of working through human assets who provided useful information on the tea garden dacoits.

“In fact I wanted to share information about Chandan. Some people had seen him travelling towards Kalimpong in a taxi.”

“That’s interesting sir,” I replied, “He wouldn’t like to come to Kalimpong. I’m afraid he may have taken shelter in one of the tea gardens around Mongpu.”

“Possible. Keep your eyes open. Alert all the check points and send me the report on your meeting with the other fellow.”

“Yes sir.”

I finished the breakfast and sat down on the Remington typewriter to compose a report on my Siliguri visit. Those days the office of the SDPO did not enjoy the luxury of a stenographer/typist. Once in a while a typing knowing constable used to help me out in drafting non-sensitive letters. I typed the confidential letters.

I did not mention the Chandan affair. Not that I suffered from amnesia. Chandan was a bright student and I believed that he was guided by a genuine faith in the ideology of ‘power to the proletariat through bloody revolution’. I suffered the pain of being untrue to my profession but I allowed my conscience and my affection to get the better of my training.

It wasn’t our last meeting. Chandan had managed to survive the ‘great Naksal killing in Calcutta, Barahnagar and other suburban towns’ by the then chief minister Siddhartha Shankar Ray’s police in 1970-71. He had reorganised the Naksal groups in Bihar and certain urban pockets of West Bengal.

We happened to meet again in 1974 again in Calcutta at the Neemtala cremation ground. Chandan was there, incognito of course, to cremate his mother. I was just transferred out of Kohima, the capital of Nagaland, and was being tossed from one chair to the other by my station boss.

THE BRAVE NEW WORLD

It is only intellect that keeps me sane; perhaps this makes me overvalue intellect against feeling.

Bertrand Russell.

It was virtually an entry to a new world when I marked my presence at the South Block office of the Intelligence Bureau on July 1, 1968. The name sounded a new world charm and some of its achievements that I came to hear from informed and uninformed sources made me fearful and curious. This was supposed to be the hub of dreaded activities by an agency of the spooks. The sprawling but barely furnished rooms, crammed cubicles and the shanty corridor huts impressed me a lot. More impressive were the impassive faces and impersonal looks of most of the senior officers. The Director, an IP officer of the Bengal Cadre, lapped me up with a boring look and one and a half sentences of welcome. He wasn’t interested to know the person, the persona and me. He was not interested to know my proclivities and views on the world of crime and intelligence and if I was at all suitable for the specialised job in the Bureau. To him I was simply another head of cattle. I was too raw a material to talk about ideas and inclinations. I was just another piece of ‘ear marked’ officer who was yet to be initiated to the voodoo rituals of the cloak and dagger realm.

The Indian Intelligence Bureau is perhaps the only spy organisation that treated the senior echelons drafted from the Indian Police Service as holy cows. They were supposed to know all and do all creatures, who did not require proper evaluation and grilling before the inner vaults were opened to them. My bookish knowledge of the KGB, CIA and the Mossad had left an impression that the IB would also make me walk over the fires and accept only if I emerged unscathed. But, there I was, a drifting raw material, who did know very little about the intelligence trade and the consumers they served. The first impact did not impress me. I was no better or worse off than a senior scale police officer.

I had imagined a picture about screw eyed, bushy browed gaunt faces that would tear me down with piercing questions. Nothing of that sort happened. My fantasy about the first meeting misfired. It was so disappointing! Here was a master who was not interested in knowing about the hand he just hired and to whom he was about to entrust a few important keys of his treasure vault! I came out of his room with my tail tugged in and a sense of frustration. He looked so impersonal and tormented a person! His name was Madan Mohan Lal Hooja, a direct disciple of the deified intelligence operator, B. N. Mallick.

The other two senior officers, one from Orissa, whose gaze was permanently locked at certain uncharted corner of the ceiling and the other a Punjabi with a hearing aid didn’t impress me either. They appeared to be more bored with themselves than the red faced monkeys in the corridors and staircases of the South Block. There was nothing to be encouraged by the boring looks and callous unconcern of the senior officers. The rituals of cold-shouldering a new comer, I discovered later, had become a part of the culture of the organisation.

It was not a part of the British tradition. The British generally received all new comers with warmth. The initiation process was both tough and humorous. But the new breed of Indian intelligence technocrats had transformed themselves to cast iron cookies. They looked impressive but in reality they were miserable human assets. The ambience of frozen impersonal unconcern often made me to think if the Marxist hawks in Calcutta were not better than the gaunt faced zombies I faced in the South Block!

However two officers, K. N. Prasad, a middle aged person from Bihar, and M. K. Narayanan, an all-white dressed vibrant officer from Kerala, impressed me a lot. They inspired confidence.

Prasad, a tough taskmaster and a known tongue lasher, displayed the mercy of talking to me about my education, service experience and my infantile and bookish views on the world of intelligence. I know he was amused with my propensity to take a bull by the horns, but politely reminded me that in the larger canvas of IB I should not charge my targets like Don Quixote. He emphasised on the needs for mastering the tradecraft of the intelligence game and to approach the targets with strategic planning and tactical spadework. I’m indeed grateful to the rough hewn but efficient officer. I should say that he was one of the gurus who made me to walk over the fire and taught me the tricks of survival. His rough appearance discouraged many to discover the gem of a professional in him.

M.K. Narayanan liked to dress in white trousers and white half sleeve shirts. Seated in his South Block corridor shack he explained to me some of the ingredients that went in making a good intelligence operative and analyst out of an insensitive cop like me. He emphasised more on the analytical capability of an intelligence officer. I found him to be a perfectionist and a serious believer in the final finished product than the raw nuggets produced by the field operatives. He was not an operations man, but his analytical capability impressed me. Intellectually he was head above a couple of other officers I happened to encounter in my initial outings.

The initial impression gave me a feeling of having landed myself in a super police organisation, which was not less regimented than the police forces back in the state. Here the regimentation did not end with the uniform and obeying orders. IB’s regimentation aimed at changing the molecular personality of its officers that often generated a hallucination of total loyalty to the trade and the immediate commanders. This kind of loyalty emerged from fear factor. The situation was like a Hindu worshipping any God he thought would grant him the desired boon,

Very often the impact of regimentation and loyalty to a person degenerated into tunnel vision and abject transformation. Some of the junior officers that I encountered during my initial tenure in Delhi behaved as if they were bonded labourers. A good number of them were mere ‘
bandobast
’ men (fixers), who attended to the needs of the senior officers. A few of them specialised in cultivating doctors and others gained admiration for befriending cutting edge level officers in other government departments. They combined the tradition of police orderly constables and sleek corridor operators.

The Intelligence Bureau was and still continues to be a police organisation. The Director, Intelligence Bureau, is accepted as the top cop of the nation. My first few days in the corridors gave me an impression that the policemen turned ‘intelligence officers’ of the IB still exuded the raw smell of the men in uniform. Regimentation and not indoctrination was valued more. The docile Japanese bow, automatic clicking on the heels and the inevitable ‘yes sir’ exhibited the firm rooting of the officers and men in police culture.

I had nurtured different ideas about a mammoth intelligence organisation like the IB. I expected more informality, more openness and free ambience where ideas could be freely exchanged. Here, I found expression of opinion and views were equated with leaking out secrets. Barring M. K. Narayanan, K. P. Medhekar and R. K. Khandelwal etc, I did not find the general rung of officers open to ideas and discussion. They hadn’t yet understood the value of ‘brainstorming’, which was introduced in the IB for the first time by Narayanan much later in 1987-88.

I decided to go by the advice of K. N. Prasad and stored my impressions in a safe corner of my cranium. I refused to babble out fearing that my impressions could as well be described as sacrilegious and ultra vires to the Official Secrets Act.

On the fateful seventh day, I was instructed by a senior clerk to report for training at the IB’s training facility at Anand Parvat (Mount Joy) somewhere near Karol Bagh. No one took care to explain to me the organisational structure of the IB and what I was supposed to do and expect. The concept of supplying the new entrants at my level with basic information kit and verbal briefing and debriefing by the senior officers did not exist. I was supposed to move from one building to the other, meet the senior officers and listen to them about what they were permitted to say or cared to say about their work. Fortunately one officer from my state helped me out.

The officer who guided me through the dark alleys of the IB was Gopal Dutta. Way back in 1946 he was SP of Mymensingh district in undivided Bengal and knew my undivided family. He was a colleague of my uncle, an IP officer in Bengal. Dutta had trained my father in law in police work way back in 1949. He took an immediate liking for Sunanda and me. In his inimitable way he explained the basic functioning of the IB and the intricate makeup of some of the senior officers.

P.N. Banerjee, a stalwart of the IB and later of the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), was a course mate of my father in law. He was a man of very few words. But his briefings had left deep impressions in me. He was the first officer to advise me to forget my police identity and to don on the new identity of an
intelligence operator-and not an officer
. In his view a policeman was entitled to the ‘officer’ suffix. But for men in the intelligence community the ‘operator’ suffix was more honourable. But in the Indian feudal ambience and police traditions in which the intelligence trade was rooted had never allowed the ‘officer’ label to be washed off.

*

Located in the triangle of Karol Bagh, Rohtak Road and Najafgarh Road, Anand Parvat represented the Jurassic remnants of the Shivalik hills that were not yet flattened by the hungry colonisers and unauthorised slum dwellers. Whoever had assigned the name to this rocky strip had immense sense of humour. There was no
anand
in Anand Parvat.

However, the joyless joyous barren hillock offered a mixed bag. It housed the ‘manufacturing lines’ of the IB’s training facility in sections of a dilapidated building owned by the Ramjas Trust and once used by the Allied Army during the Second World War. Another landmark of the joyous place was Kamal, an infamous restaurant, which catered cabaret dance and some kind of under the wrap flesh trade. A secondary school and a roaring brothel covered the other flanks of the training facility. The queer stellar configuration was amusing and ridiculous. But this was possible only in India, where the social pundits were ever eager to perform a purifying
yagna
(sacrifice) and close their eyes to the most heinous social evil.

So, I was ensconced by all kinds of pleasure around me at the appropriately named mount joy.

But I did not dislike the thinner than film ‘cover edifice’ of the IB. The shanty lane that lead to the abandoned ghost house, abundantly littered by human faeces, pigeon stool and pig droppings from the nearby
valmiki
(a caste) colony was no less romantic than the open sesame tunnel to the storehouse of hidden wealth. The mount joy training facility, however, had in its store a different kind of wealth, the tools of intelligence gathering and denying. I hated the gruelling climb but enjoyed the ambience of the haunted-house-look of the mossy and damp building that was declared unsafe for human use about a decade back.

Before I give a conducted but restricted tour of the training facility I owe it to the readers to tell something about the Intelligence Bureau.

M. K. Narayanan had a brilliant idea to observe the 100th year of the birth of IB in 1987. According to material researched out by his officers, the IB could trace its genesis back to 1887, when a formal intelligence unit was started by the government of Her Royal Highness the Queen Empress of India, Maharani Victoria. It had reportedly evolved out of the vintage ‘Thuggy’ department of Colonel Sleeman to a criminal and political intelligence catering ‘department’ of the ‘Central Government.’

We all were elated to know that the IB was one of the oldest intelligence units that had efficiently served the Empire to consolidate its occupation and to suppress the nationalist movement. It was no mean an achievement. It was more gratifying to know that the Central Intelligence Bureau had worked in tandem with the mandarins of the Home Office and the Viceroy’s Council to create two or more nations in India and to perpetuate the caste divisions with a view to permanently fragmenting the Indian society. Trained by the British, the IB as also the politicians, who succeeded the fleeing British masters, had not forgotten the noble trades of dividing and butchering the people.

The IB in post-independent India was not allowed to grow out of the kitchen pot of the governing class. However, the professionals had succeeded in sharpening and widening the tools of its trade to combat ethnic insurgency, communal holocaust, terrorism and other aspects of national security. The pioneers of the post-independence IB must be saluted for giving the country an efficient tool of national security in spite of the fact that the ruling class generally tried to use it for protecting and promoting their elite club. They never thought it fit to adopt a constitutionally validated Act to govern the IB and its sister organisations. The IB and the R&AW etc are the only organs of the government that are not accountable to any elected constitutional body of India and are not governed by any Act of the Parliament. They are subsidiary bureaus and departments.

Anyway, I wouldn’t like to engage in a debate on an obvious issue that should have attracted attention of the intellectuals, the opinion makers and the champions of democracy and constitutional liberty.

The Central Intelligence Bureau is not a mammoth organisation. Way back in 1968 it had an approximate strength of 8000, all ranks included. But the actual intelligence generating elements were less than 4000. The rest included supporting and ‘
bandobast
’ staff. I understand that over the years the IB has accrued some additional manpower and acquired a little bit of marginally improved Technical Intelligence gadgetry. The present intelligence generating strength is yet to catch up with the awesome human assets of the CIA, the former KGB and the neighbouring Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) of Pakistan.