SPYING IN SOUTH ASIA

In this first comprehensive history of India’s secret Cold War, Paul M.

McGarr tells the story of Indian politicians, human rights activists, and
journalists as they fought against or collaborated with members of the
British and US intelligence services. The interventions of these agents
have had a significant and enduring impact on the political and social
fabric of South Asia. The spectre of a ‘foreign hand’, or external intelli-
gence activity, real and imagined, has occupied a prominent place in
India’s political discourse, journalism, and cultural production. Spying
in South Asia probes the nexus between intelligence and statecraft in
South Asia and the relationships between agencies and governments
forged to promote democracy. McGarr asks why, in contrast to Western
assumptions about surveillance, South Asians associate intelligence with
covert action, grand conspiracy, and justifications for repression? In doing
so, he uncovers a fifty-year battle for hearts and minds in the Indian
subcontinent.

paul m. mcgarr is Lecturer in Intelligence Studies at King’s College

London and author of The Cold War in South Asia, 1945–1965.
 SPYING IN SOUTH ASIA
Britain, the United States, and India’s Secret Cold War

PAUL M. MCGARR
King’s College London
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 CONTENTS

List of Figures page vii

Acknowledgements viii
A Note on Place Names x
List of Abbreviations xi

Introduction 1
1 Transfer of Power: British Intelligence and the End of Empire
in South Asia 14
2 Silent Partners: Britain, India, and Early Cold War Intelligence
Liaison 32
3 India’s Rasputin: V. K. Krishna Menon and the Spectre of Indian
Communism 52
4 Quiet Americans: The CIA and the Onset of the Cold War in South
Asia 76
5 Confronting China: The Sino-Indian War and Collaborative Covert
Action 100
6 Peddling Propaganda: The Information Research Department
and India 124
7 From Russia with Love: Dissidents and Defectors in Cold War
India 153
8 The Foreign Hand: Indira Gandhi and the Politics
of Intelligence 181
9 Battle of the Books: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Seymour Hersh,
and India’s CIA ‘Agents’ 209

v
vi contents

10 Indian Intelligence and the End of the Cold War 233

Conclusion 257

Notes 267
Bibliography 316
Index 335
 FIGURES

I.1 Communist Party of India rally, New Delhi, c. 1960. page 5

I.2 Allen Welsh Dulles, Director of Central Intelligence (1953–1961). 11
1.1 Sir Percy Sillitoe, Director General of MI5 (1946–1953). 29
2.1 America’s ambassador to India, Chester Bowles, attacks a proliferation
of communist propaganda in the subcontinent, The American Reporter,
26 April 1967. 48
3.1 V. K. Krishna Menon (left) with Indian prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru,
London, 18 April 1949. 54
4.1 Members of the Jan Sangh Party demonstrate outside the Communist Chinese
Embassy in New Delhi over China’s occupation of Tibet,
1 January 1960. 94
5.1 Tibetan refugees after being evacuated from the Sino-Indian border by
the United States Air Force, Pathankot, India, 1962. 112
6.1 The CIA’s pervasiveness in Indian politics represented in Thought magazine,
26 April 1967. 144
7.1 ‘The most sensational defector the United States has ever attracted’:
Svetlana Alliluyeva, daughter of Josef Stalin, smiles for photographers at
a press conference in New York, 26 April 1967. 169
8.1a–d Indian satirist, Laxman, lampooning the nation’s obsession with the CIA
in a selection of cartoons carried by the Times of India. 191
8.2 President Richard Nixon and India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi talk at
the White House, 4 November 1971. 193
8.3 New Age, the newspaper of the Communist Party of India, lambasts the CIA
for its latest, purported, act of subversion in the subcontinent,
22 October 1972. 202
9.1 Morarji Desai, Indian prime minister (1977–1979). 211
10.1 All India Trade Union Congress members demonstrating against ‘American
Imperialism’ in front of the US Embassy, New Delhi,
18 December 1971. 254

vii
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book is the product of an intellectual and emotional interest in India and
its people that stretches back over several decades. Its genesis lies in the AHRC
research project, Landscapes of Secrecy: The Central Intelligence Agency and the
Contested Record of US Foreign Policy, 1947–2001, with which I was fortunate to
be associated. I have accumulated many debts in striving to better understand
and explain the interventions of British and American intelligence services in
Cold War India. The research underpinning this book is based on primary
resources in archives on three continents and would not have been possible
without the generous support of numerous colleagues and institutions.
Funding has come from the British Arts and Humanities Research Council;
the British Academy; the Department of American Studies at the University of
Nottingham; and the Rothermere American Institute at the University of
Oxford. Librarians and archivists in the United Kingdom, the United States,
and India have extended invaluable help with the identification of research
materials.
Without the encouragement of Professor Matthew Jones of the London
School of Economics and Political Science, and Professor Richard J. Aldrich of
the University of Warwick, this project would not have reached fruition.
A number of other scholars have played important parts in bringing this
book to press. In particular, I thank and acknowledge the contributions of
Christopher Andrew, Sarah Ansari, Pauline Blistène, Rudra Chaudhuri,
Christopher Clary, the late Patrick French, Amit Das Gupta, Sunil Khilnani,
Genevieve Lester, Lorenz Lüthi, Tom Maguire, Chris Moran, Eric Pullin,
Sergey Radchenko, Rob Rakove, Jairam Ramesh, Daniela Richterova, Jayita
Sarkar, Ian Talbot, Damien Van Puyvelde, and Simon Willmetts, all of whom
have contributed to making this a better book. The University of Nottingham
is a wonderful place in which to work on the shared histories of Britain, the
United States, and South Asia. At Nottingham, I have been privileged to know
and to learn from Katherine Adeney, Rory Cormac, Tony Hutchison, Chun-Yi
Lee, Stephanie Lewthwaite, Spencer Mawby, Ruth Maxey, Anna Meier, Joe
Merton, Catherine Rottenberg, Maria Ryan, Bevan Sewell, Francesca Silvestri,
Carole Spary, Jeremy Taylor, and Graham Thompson. The late Hugh Tinker,
an acute observer of modern Asia, cautioned fellow authors that, ‘Anyone who
viii
 acknowledgements ix

has the temerity to write about cultures other than his own (however long he
may have tried to get to know them) must expect to be told that he has got
something wrong.’1 I acknowledge sole responsibility for any errors and
omissions that follow.
My family have accepted, mostly cheerfully, the distractions and absences
associated with researching and writing international history. My sons, Robert,
William, and Oliver, continue to endure, if not entirely understand, their
father’s preoccupation with the Indian subcontinent. Minnie, my research
assistant, offered abundant vocal encouragement and companionship as this
book took shape. My wife, Louise was responsible, quite literally, for keeping
the project, and her husband, alive. It is to Louise, with love, that this book is
dedicated.
 A NOTE ON PLACE NAMES

The renaming of States and cities in India started in 1947 after end of British
imperial rule. Changes frequently stirred controversy and not all the alter-
ations proposed were adopted. Many changes came into effect only after
periods of considerable delay. Each change necessitated approval from the
federal Government of the Indian Union. Many of the States, cities, towns, and
streets referenced in the pages that follow retained their British colonial
nomenclatures throughout the Cold War, and often for a considerable period
beyond. Mumbai officially replaced Bombay in 1995; Chennai superseded
Madras in 1996; and Kolkata was adopted in place of Calcutta in 2001. For
practical purposes, and to avoid frequent modifications to verbatim quota-
tions, the chronology associated with official changes to place names in India
has been retained. In consequence, readers will encounter Bombay, Madras,
and Calcutta more often than Mumbai, Chennai, and Kolkata.

x
 ABBREVIATIONS

AID Agency for International Development

BDOHP British Diplomatic Oral History Programme
BIS British Information Service
BJP Bharatiya Janata Party
CAB Cabinet Papers
CCF Congress for Cultural Freedom
CCP Chinese Communist Party
CDS Chief of Defence Staff
CENTO Central Treaty Organisation
CIA Central Intelligence Agency
CPGB Communist Party of Great Britain
CPI Communist Party of India
CRO Commonwealth Relations Office
DIB Delhi Intelligence Bureau also Director Intelligence Bureau
DO Dominions Office
FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation
FO Foreign Office
FRUS Foreign Relations of the United States
GRU Soviet Foreign Military Intelligence
HVA Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (Foreign Intelligence Service of East
German Ministry of State Security – Stasi)
HMG Her Majesty’s Government
IAF Indian Air Force
IB Delhi Intelligence Bureau
ICA International Cooperation Administration
INC Indian National Congress
IPS Indian Police Service
IPI Indian Political Intelligence
IRD Information Research Department
JCS Joint Chiefs of Staff
JIC British Joint Intelligence Committee
JFKL John F. Kennedy Library

xi
xii list of abbreviations

KGB Committee for State Security

LBJL Lyndon B. Johnson Library
MAP Military Assistance Programme
MEA Ministry of External Affairs
MI5 British Security Service
MiG Mikoyan i Gurevich (Soviet fighter aircraft)
MOD Ministry of Defence
NAFEN Near and Far East News
NAI National Archives of India
NEFA North East Frontier Agency
NMML Nehru Museum and Memorial library
NSC National Security Council
OSS Office of Strategic Services
PDB President’s Daily Brief
PIB Press Information Bureau
PLA People’s Liberation Army
PREM Prime Minister’s Office files
PRC People’s Republic of China
R&AW Research and Analysis Wing
RSS Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh
SFF Special Frontier Force
SIS British Secret Intelligence Service or MI6
SLO Security Liaison Officer
SOA Office of South Asian Affairs, Department of State
SOE Special Operations Executive
UKNA United Kingdom National Archive
UNSC United Nations Security Council
USNA United States National Archives, College Park, Maryland
USIS United States Information Service
 u

Introduction

Now, the problems of Asia . . . have to be solved, and great powers and others
should necessarily, because they are great powers, have a great interest in
solving them, but if the great powers think that the problems of Asia can be
solved minus Asia in a sense, or minus the views of Asian countries, then it
does seem to be rather odd . . .
Jawaharlal Nehru (1954)1
This conflict of ideologies, as it is being termed, by the people today – Russian
way and American way – does not interest me much. Nor do I care to bother
about it.
Anand Niwas (1952)2
George Smiley, the eponymous Cold War intelligence officer, immortalised by
the British novelist, John le Carré, first encounters his Soviet nemesis, Karla, in
a stifling Indian prison cell, in the mid-1950s. ‘The Indian authorities arrested
him [Karla] at our request and carted him off to Delhi jail’, Smiley reminisces
to a colleague in the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), or MI6. ‘As far as
I remember we had promised the Indians a piece of the product. I think that
was the deal.’3 The early fiction of le Carré, a body of work that encompasses
bestsellers such as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker, Tailor,
Soldier, Spy,4 has been characterised as framing the Cold War in reductive
terms that position the conflict exclusively as a struggle for global hegemony
between a Socialist East and a Capitalist West.5 In fact, and as George Smiley
intimated, le Carré’s writing reflected the importance of a proliferation in
clandestine North-South interactions as European decolonisation coalesced
with the collapse of the Soviet Union’s alliance with Britain and the United
States at the end of the Second World War.6 The actual collaborative relation-
ships that Western intelligence services forged with their nationalist counter-
parts in the Indian subcontinent were, intriguingly, more complex and
involved than le Carré’s readers can possibly have imagined.
Spying in South Asia provides the first scholarly examination of interven-
tions made by the intelligence and security services of Britain and the United
States in post-colonial India. It probes the nexus between intelligence and

1
2 spying in south asia

statecraft in South Asia, and questions relationships established between

foreign intelligence agencies and South Asian governments for the promotion
of democracy, which evolved into justifications for repression. It asks how
Western societies came to think of intelligence in terms of surveillance and
civil liberty, while today South Asians associate it with covert action and grand
conspiracy. It challenges received wisdom on post-war intelligence by con-
tending that Western clandestine agencies had a transformative political and
socio-cultural impact not in Cold War Europe, but in the developing world.
Paradoxically, between the early 1950s and the mid-1970s, as covert interven-
tions by British and American intelligence services in the internal affairs of
Iran, Guatemala, British Guiana, Indonesia, the Congo, and Chile, amongst
others, were derided by Indian policymakers as unacceptable manifestations of
neo-colonialism, New Delhi quietly consolidated intelligence links with the
West. After 1947, India’s leaders faced competing pressures to safeguard the
national security of a diminished and debilitated post-colonial state while, at
the same time, upholding popular conceptions of sovereignty that privileged
autonomy and abjured foreign alliances. Part of the solution to this conun-
drum identified by India’s leaders, was to work secretly with the intelligence
and security services of Britain and the United States.
Decisions taken by the Indian government during the Cold War in the
intelligence and security sphere produced outcomes that were often messy,
contradictory, and counterproductive. The formation and implementation of
policy was complicated by a national landscape in India within which compet-
ing groups of politicians, human rights activists, businesspeople, lawyers, and
journalists both fought, and facilitated, interventions made by the intelligence
services and covert propaganda agencies of Britain, the United States, and the
Soviet Union. The significance of nonaligned states in the transnational story
of Cold War secret intelligence has been obscured by a tendency on the part of
historians, and producers of popular culture, to view clandestine activity in the
context of a narrow East-West binary.7 Attention given to espionage and
covert action inside the developing world has concentrated on the personal
narratives of prominent individuals, and marginalised or ignored the import-
ance of Asian and African nations.8 Recent studies have sought to correct the
marginalisation of the global South in Cold War history. Important interven-
tions by Paul Thomas Chamberlain and Lorenz Lüthi have gone some way to
recover, and to account for, the extent to which post-colonial nations formed
their own distinct visions of decolonisation, freedom, and sovereignty.9
Nascent states across the global South responded to the Cold War in complex
ways, collaborating with, co-opting, and resisting, superpower encroachment.
The sophisticated manipulation of British, American, and Soviet anxieties
enabled local actors to win support from powerful external forces, and to
influence and disrupt their regional agendas. In India’s case, the year 1947,
as Ramachandra Guha has observed pointedly, did not, as a dearth of historical
 introduction 3

analysis on post-colonial South-Asia might suggest, signal the end of history.10

Indian agency in South Asia’s clandestine Cold War was considerable. Spying
in South Asia breaks new ground by tilting the prevailing East-West axis of
Cold War intelligence studies to examine the conflicts diplomatic and social
impact from a North-South perspective.
An over-arching argument made in this book is that the Cold War inter-
ventions undertaken by British and American intelligence and security agen-
cies in India proved to be misguided and largely self-defeating.11 British and
American policymakers mounted covert (and avowed) intelligence operations
in the subcontinent on the basis of a series of questionable, and often conflict-
ing assumptions: that covert action could steer Indian public opinion in a pro-
Western and anti-communist direction; that popular perceptions of Western
intelligence agencies could be insulated from deep-seated Indian attitudes to
British colonialism and American neo-colonialism; that Western intelligence
support provided to New Delhi would corrode India’s relations with the Soviet
Union; that global controversies surrounding American intelligence practice
would not cut through with the Indian public; that the subcontinent’s politi-
cians would resist leveraging anti-Western sentiment and refrain from
employing the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as a lightning rod for
India’s domestic travails; and, that secret intelligence activity could, ultimately,
help to arrest a decline in British and American influence in the subcontinent.
None of these assumptions proved correct. None of their associated objectives
were realised.
In addition, Spying in South Asia re-periodises Cold War secret intelligence.
To date, intelligence literature has focused predominantly on early Cold War
intelligence events, such as the defections of Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean,
and Kim Philby, members of the so-called of ‘Cambridge Five’ spy ring.12
Much has also been made of espionage activity and covert action in the later
Cold War period, when the process of détente faltered and East-West tensions
intensified in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, in
December 1979, and Ronald Reagan’s elevation to the White House.13 Yet,
in the 1960s, the politics of intelligence in the global South entered a new
temporal and geographic phase. At this time, the numbers of Soviet defections
staged in Europe slowed as border controls between East and West Germany
were tightened and, in 1961, the Berlin Wall went up. Meanwhile, defections at
points of Cold War intersection outside Europe multiplied, and nowhere more
so than in India. In 1967, Svetlana Alliluyeva, Joseph Stalin’s daughter, fled to
the West after evading her Soviet minders, stealing through the streets of
India’s capital, and walking into the US embassy in New Delhi. Before long,
such shifts in the pattern of defections were reflected in popular culture. As
noted, le Carré situated his account of Karla’s would-be defection in Tinker,
Tailor, Soldier, Spy, not in the well-worn literary borderlands between East and
West Germany, but in India, a gateway between Europe and Asia.14
4 spying in south asia

In India, as elsewhere, the process of decolonisation transcended a formal

transfer of constitutional power from the coloniser to the formerly colonised.15
Having shaken off almost two centuries of British hegemony, the post-colonial
state that emerged in India desperately required financial aid to stimulate
a moribund and under-developed economy. India’s leaders also came under
pressure to implement land reform; establish political institutions; frame
a constitution; promote a common sense of national identity; consider health-
care and educational provision; manage poverty; maintain law and order; and
refashion the nation’s armed services and bureaucracy. Maintaining close and
constructive relations with Britain afforded one means of accessing external
support.16 The end of British rule in India did not eradicate informal levers of
colonial control. Economically, socially, culturally, and politically, London
continued to exercise a powerful influence within the subcontinent.
In national security terms, India remained dependent upon the United
Kingdom to supply its armed services with senior leadership, training, and
equipment. A British General, Sir Roy Bucher, served as head of the Indian
army until 1949. Air Marshal Sir Thomas Elmhirst commanded the Indian Air
Force until 1950. The Indian Navy was led by Royal Navy officers until
April 1958. Shielded from public scrutiny, but no less important, was
a decision taken by India’s premier, Jawaharlal Nehru, and members of his
inner cabinet, to sanction India’s establishment of clandestine intelligence
partnerships with Britain and the United States. Pressing strategic concerns
superseded the personal misgivings and political complications that Indian
officials faced when weighing the merits of working with London and
Washington in the intelligence arena. As a state subject to formidable fissipar-
ous pressures, India had much to gain from tapping into British experience
and expertise in counter-subversion and internal security, a good deal of which
was accumulated in the subcontinent prior to 1947. Ensuring that seditious
movements were kept in check, whether of a religious or communal persua-
sion, or on the left or the right of the political spectrum, preoccupied Indian
leaders. In the nominally secular Republic of India, with its significant Muslim
minority, New Delhi was anxious to keep a lid on simmering Hindu
nationalism.17 Likewise, emerging Cold War threats, whether internal, in the
guise of an active and well-supported Communist Party of India (CPI), or
external, in the form of its powerful socialist neighbours, the People’s Republic
of China (PRC) and the Soviet Union, troubled prominent right-wing mem-
bers of the ruling Congress Party, and notably the Home Minister, Vallabhbhai
Patel.18
Nehru voiced concern that India’s intelligence services were overly depend-
ent on the British and had fallen into replicating British colonial methods. His
intelligence chiefs, the Indian premier bemoaned, appeared content merely to
repackage information supplied by London.19 ‘I do not think it necessary or
appropriate’, Nehru confided to one of his closest advisors, ‘that our [India’s]
 introduction 5

political intelligence should function as an annexure to theirs [Britain’s]’.20

Nehru had a point. A tendency was manifest on the part of India’s fledgling
intelligence establishment to valorise and to defer to British colleagues. In
1950, one Indian government report recorded that it was ‘an undoubted fact’
that the ‘deadly effectiveness’ of Britain’s intelligence system had delivered
victory in the First and the Second World Wars.21 Recounting his arrival at
New Delhi’s Tihar jail to interrogate Karla, George Smiley underscored how
everything, and yet seemingly nothing, had changed in India’s intelligence
relationship with Britain. Smiley, ‘. . . saw the iron gateway of the old prison
engulf him, and the perfectly pressed British uniforms of the [Indian] warders
as they waded knee-deep through the prisoners: “This way your honour, sir!
Please be good enough to follow us, your excellency!”’22 The imaginary
representation conjured by le Carré of Indian obsequiousness in the presence
of a British intelligence officer is exaggerated for literary effect. It was not,
however, as Nehru and others bemoaned, entirely incongruous.
Constrained by a lack of alternative options, Indian governments endeav-
oured to resolve a conundrum of balancing security against sovereignty by
secretly consolidating intelligence links with Britain and the United States in
areas as diverse as training, information collection, analysis, and even covert
action.23 From Whitehall’s perspective the cultivation of a strong intelligence
relationship with India retained value as a means of preserving British interests

Figure I.1 Communist Party of India rally, New Delhi, c. 1960. United States
Information Agency collection, US National Archives, College Park, Maryland.
6 spying in south asia

in the subcontinent; keeping India ostensibly aligned with the West; acting as
a barrier to communist penetration of the region; and, not least, demonstrating
to the United States that Britain remained an international partner worth
having.24 The scope, scale, and significance of the intelligence partnership
fashioned between India, the United Kingdom, and the United States passed
largely unnoticed. In the late 1960s, when knowledge of New Delhi’s intelli-
gence partnerships with London and Washington filtered into the public
domain, Indian politicians were exposed to uncomfortable scrutiny by an
incredulous press and an uneasy public. Subsequently, a civil culture in the
subcontinent riven with conspiracism and infused with paranoia, as mediated
by politicians, journalists, social activists, and cultural producers, and
exploited by forces of the left and the right, inside and outside South Asia,
came to occupy an extensive, prominent, and pervasive role in popular Indian
discourse.25
Constructing intelligence alliances with Britain and the United States also
required Indian policymakers to set aside inequities of Western colonialism
that, in the security and intelligence domain, had inflicted deep psychological
scars. Indira Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru’s daughter, and India’s first, and to date
only, female prime minister, attested to the emotional trauma that repression
practiced by Britain’s imperial security agencies inflicted on her family.26 In
December 1921, when her father was arrested by British authorities for dis-
tributing political leaflets on the streets of Allahabad, a four-year-old Gandhi
had perched on her grandfather’s knee to observe Nehru’s appearance in court.
Gandhi was present when a British magistrate sentenced Nehru and her
grandfather to six months in prison and watched as they were hauled off to
Lucknow jail in chains.27 A decade later, having endured several periods in
British custody, Nehru challenged Philip Kerr, the Marquess of Lothian, who
had served as Under-Secretary of State for India, to deny that British rule in
India was not despotic. The British hold on the subcontinent, Nehru charged,
was ‘based on an extreme form of widespread violence and the sanction is
fear . . . . It surrounds itself with a vast army of spies and informers and agents
provocateurs. Is this the atmosphere in which the more democratic institutions
flourish?’28 Bhola Nath (B. N.) Mullik, head of India’s Intelligence Bureau (IB)
in the 1950s, observed that Nehru’s direct and sustained exposure to oppres-
sive colonial security methods had left the Indian leader with a ‘natural’ and
‘strong prejudice’ against foreign intelligence services.29 In other words,
India’s political class had ample reason not to co-operate with London and
Washington in the intelligence field, and only did so by placing pragmatic
security considerations before personal animosities.
More broadly, the political geography of the Cold War all but ensured that
the subcontinent would become a locus of that conflict’s clandestine struggle.
Directly to India’s north lay the communist colossuses of the Soviet Union and
the People’s Republic of China. In 1955, an exchange of state visits between
 introduction 7

Nehru and the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, invigorated Moscow’s mori-
bund relationship with New Delhi. Soviet economic and technical assistance
flooded into India, while politically Moscow courted Nehru’s goodwill by
throwing its weight in the UN Security Council behind New Delhi’s claim on
the disputed state of Kashmir. In 1960, by the end of Dwight
Eisenhower’s second presidential term in the United States, Washington had
become alarmed by the growth of Soviet influence in India and the strength of
indigenous Indian communism. Eisenhower’s efforts to bring India and the
United States closer together, primarily through the provision of American
economic assistance, were amplified by his successor, John F. Kennedy.
Kennedy saw democratic India as a crucial strategic counterweight to the
expansion of Chinese communist influence in Asia.30 Cold War competition
for non-aligned India’s favour drew thousands of diplomats, non-
governmental organisations, technicians, businesspeople, and journalists to
the subcontinent from the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Britain, and the
United States. In turn, this acted as a magnet for foreign intelligence agencies.
By the end of the 1960s, India’s Ministry of External Affairs worried that New
Delhi’s acquisition of an unwelcome reputation as a major Cold War clearing-
house, or the ‘Berlin of the East’, threatened serious harm to the nation’s
international relations.31 The former British SIS officer, and Soviet spy,
George Blake, observed that alongside Berlin, India was seen as especially
important in Western intelligence circles as it offered, ‘the most favourable
conditions . . . for establishing contacts with Soviet citizens’. In New Delhi,
Blake underlined, ‘there was a wider intercourse than elsewhere between Soviet
diplomatic personnel and local politicians and public and it would be easier
therefore for our [SIS] agents to establish contact with them’.32
What applied to SIS, also held good for the CIA, and Soviet intelligence
bodies, such as the Committee for State Security (KGB) and GRU, or foreign
military intelligence. From humble beginnings, the American covert footprint
in India expanded exponentially. As far back as 1827, Josiah Harlan, an
American merchant who travelled to the subcontinent five years earlier in
search of adventure, fortune, and fame, had initiated a campaign of covert
action. Harlan, who the British writer and chronicler of empire, Rudyard
Kipling, used as a model for his short story of intrigue on the North-West
Frontier, The Man Who Would Be King, raised the Stars and Stripes in the city
of Ludhiana, in the Punjab, in India’s northwest, and enlisted a motley band of
local fighters. Intent on fomenting rebellion against Afghanistan’s ruler, Dost
Mohammad Khan, Harlan’s scheming came to nothing. He eventually
returned to the United States, served in the Union army during the
American Civil War, and died of tuberculosis in San Francisco, in 1871,
a forgotten man.33 Following India’s independence, Harlan’s compatriots in
the CIA, having initially operated out of a single ‘station’, or office, in New
Delhi, rapidly extended the geographical scope of the Agency’s activities. The
8 spying in south asia

CIA established a network of out-stations across the subcontinent, in Bombay,

Calcutta, and Madras. One American diplomat, who served in New Delhi at
the height of the Cold War, attested that the Agency’s presence in India was,
‘very large, and very invasive . . . the CIA was deeply involved in the Indian
Government’.34 From the late 1950s, when India’s relations with the PRC came
under strain, Nehru’s governments elected to ‘look the other way’ as CIA
aircraft violated Indian airspace in support of Agency sponsored resistance
activities in Chinese controlled Tibet. In 1959, New Delhi infuriated Beijing by
colluding in a CIA-sponsored operation to spirit the Dalai Lama out of Lhasa
and into asylum in northern India.35 Equally, in the early 1960s, a series of
young and dynamic KGB chairmen, including Alexander Shelepin, Vladimir
Semichastny, and the future Soviet leader, Yuri Andropov, came to see India as
an important component in Moscow’s policy of fermenting wars of national
liberation as a means to undermine Western influence in the global South.
Under Andropov’s direction, Soviet foreign intelligence agencies concentrated
a large proportion of their resources, outside of Europe and North America, on
India.36 Oleg Kalugin, then a rising star in the KGB’s First Chief (Foreign
Intelligence) Directorate, confirmed that, towards the end of the decade, the
KGB ‘had scores of sources throughout the Indian government – in intelli-
gence, counterintelligence, the defense and foreign ministries, and the police.
The entire country was seemingly for sale, and the KGB and the CIA had
deeply penetrated the Indian government’.37
Participants in India’s secret Cold War represented the latest in a long line of
state and non-state actors who, in one form or another, established the Indian
subcontinent as an historic centre in the development of spycraft. A tradition
of using espionage to uphold state security in India can be traced back to the
Vedic period in the late Bronze Age.38 The Arthashastra, a treatise on diplo-
macy attributed to the scholar, Kautilya, and believed to date from the 3rd
century BCE, features chapters on the ‘Establishment of Clandestine
Operations’; ‘Surveillance of People with Secret Income’; and ‘Investigation
through Interrogation and Torture’. Rediscovered and translated into English
in 1905, the Arthashastra is thought to have served as a blueprint for the
expansion of the Mauryan dynasty, the subcontinent’s first, and for many
centuries, largest empire.39 Somewhat later, between the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries, the extension of Mughal power into northern India was
sustained by extensive intelligence networks responsible for monitoring civil
and military functionaries, or mansabdars, and landowners, or zamindars, and
ensuring their fidelity to the imperial state.40 By the eighteenth century, the
arrival of British power in India, in the form of the East India Company, saw
the advent of sophisticated webs of local spies and propagandists. Fortune
tellers, midwives, physicians, and entertainers were employed by the Company
to report on signs of internal revolt and subversive activities of agents working
for France and imperial Russia.41 After 1857, the imposition of formal British
 introduction 9

rule in India brought with it the introduction of a more structured colonial

system of political surveillance and military intelligence, underpinned by
repressive force.42 Reflecting on his experience serving in India at the height
of the British Raj, one military officer recorded that, ‘there can never be any
secrets in India, it is rather like living in an illuminated greenhouse’.43 India,
the jewel in Britain’s imperial crown, operated as an ‘empire of intelligence’,
the preservation of which, hinged on the efficient collection and processing of
information on the social and political lives of its subjects.44
The centrality of intelligence to the British imperial project in India caused
unease amongst many colonial administrators. Officials, from British Viceroys
to district officers, were reluctant to establish permanent secret services. In
part, financial considerations came into play. British India was set up to run on
the cheap and intelligence organisations were expensive. Indian public opinion
was also sensitive to intelligence activity. Colonial rule relied on the acquies-
cence of India’s masses and British bureaucrats were concerned that a heavy-
handed approach to security would invite unrest. Moreover, British society
evinced a wider cultural aversion to spies and intelligence work. Back at home,
espionage was disparaged as ideologically distasteful and at odds with the
British national character. It is notable that the United Kingdom operated
without established foreign intelligence and counter-intelligence services of its
own until 1909.45 India did prove to be a useful place for would-be British
intelligence officers to acquire operational experience. Both SIS and, more
particularly, the British Security Service, MI5, recruited officers who had
served in India. Sir David Petrie, a Scotsman from Perth, who joined the
Indian Police Service (IPS) in 1900 after graduating from Aberdeen
University, headed the Intelligence Bureau between the wars. In 1940, on his
return to Britain, Petrie was appointed Director-General of MI5. Other prom-
inent Indian alumni within MI5 included John ‘Jack’ Curry, who spent over
two decades working for the IPS before joining the Security Service in 1934.
Curry subsequently became a senior officer in MI5’s B Branch, responsible for
monitoring subversive communist and fascist activity. In the interwar period,
several cryptologists working on Russian radio traffic for IB were brought back
from India to work in MI5 and SIS. Two of them, Alistair Denniston and John
Tiltman, became eminent codebreakers at the Government Code and Cypher
School at Bletchley Park.46 Before that, a requirement to expand metropolitan
intelligence capacity occasioned by the First World War prompted large
numbers of British policemen and intelligence officers to quit India and return
to the United Kingdom to take up posts in MI5.47 The movement of intelli-
gence personnel between India and the UK ensured that MI5’s relations with
the DIB were close. So close, in fact, that the DIB’s British arm, Indian Political
Intelligence (IPI), was located inside the Security Service’s London headquar-
ters. Harmonious relations enabled MI5 to work effectively with the DIB to
monitor communists travelling between Britain and the subcontinent. Broader
10 spying in south asia

cooperation between the two intelligence services, however, remained sporadic

and was more limited. With less than a hundred staff on its books, of which
only a quarter were active officers, MI5 was too small to provide wide-ranging
direction and support to colleagues in India.48
In fact, the British colonial intelligence system in the subcontinent was never as
extensive or as effective as its contemporary critics and adversaries claimed.49
One scholar has gone as far as to suggest that the, ‘confidence and self-assertion of
the British in India was in truth illusory, and the vision of absolute control . . . as
imagined in Kipling’s Kim . . . was little more than wishful thinking’.50 Popular
culture, and the work of Kipling, most especially, helped to establish a ‘myth’ of
British omnipotence in India. In 1901 Kipling published his novel Kim, which
immortalised the intelligence war, or ‘Great Game’, fought on India’s northern
border between agents of the British and Russian governments.51 The impression
of a far-sighted and all-knowing colonial state that emerges from Kipling’s
account of Kimball O’Hara, a juvenile Eurasian spy who, along with Hurree
Babu, a native informant, reports to British intelligence, left a deep imprint on
generations of global readers. As late as the 1960s, Kipling’s tale of espionage and
covert action remained recommended reading for British diplomats posted to
South Asia.52 A decade earlier, uncomfortable Cold War echoes of Kipling had
surfaced when the SIS officer, Harold ‘Kim’ Philby, a child of the Raj, who grew
up in Ambala, in northern India, speaking Punjabi as his first language, came
under suspicion as working for Soviet intelligence. Philby was given the nick-
name Kim by his father, St John, an officer in the Indian Civil Service, and Kipling
devotee.53 The influence of Kipling’s South Asian spy fiction extended across the
Atlantic to America’s intelligence community. In his youth, Allen Dulles,
the future Director of Central Intelligence, was captivated by Kim and devoured
the novel on a long steamship journey to India. Five decades later, on his death,
Dulles’ tattered and treasured copy of the book was found lying at his bedside.54
Kermit ‘Kim’ Roosevelt, a CIA officer best known for his involvement in the
Agency-backed coup that removed Mohammad Mossadegh from power in Iran,
in 1953, acquired his sobriquet in a similar manner to Philby. Fond of impressing
his tutor with concocted tales of a childhood spent in the subcontinent, which he
embellished with phrases in pidgin Hindustani, on discovering her son’s deceit,
his mother was reminded of Kipling’s Kim, and the name stuck.55 Roosevelt’s
vicarious relationship with India, mediated through Kipling’s Boy’s Own repre-
sentation of British imperial adventurism, as one scholar of the CIA has noted,
was influential in shaping the mentalities of the Agency towards the Middle East
and South Asia in the period immediately after the Second World War.56
At the same time, a post-war extension of American power across the globe
was interpreted by many Indians, Nehru included, as heralding the arrival of
a new and pernicious form of imperialism. One of the first books to reference
the CIA, and its purportedly nefarious designs on the developing world,
L. Natarajan’s, American Shadow over India, was published in Bombay in
 introduction 11

Figure I.2 Allen Welsh Dulles, Director of Central Intelligence (1953–1961).

Bettmann / Getty Images.

1952.57 The CIA, as the ‘covert’ foreign policy tool of choice for US Presidents
from Harry Truman onwards, quickly acquired an invidious reputation in
South Asia as an anti-democratic socio-political malefactor. Much of the
mistrust and fear that British colonial intelligence and security agencies had
once engendered in the subcontinent was accordingly transferred to the
Agency. Public opprobrium associated with the CIA in India eventually
came to overshadow American diplomatic initiatives designed to win ‘hearts
and minds’. A report produced for the United States Information Service
observed, presciently, that ‘centuries of bitter experience have made the
Hindu dread, above all things, the policeman, the foreigner, the official, the
“420” [a term for British security officials derived from India’s Penal Code]
who rarely in history have done other than exploit them’.58 The CIA’s principal
Cold War opposition in India, the KGB and GRU, worked tirelessly to amplify
Indian conceptions of the Agency as an all-powerful miscreant. In the 1970s
alone, the Soviets covertly bankrolled an Indian press agency, two daily and
eight weekly Indian newspapers, and four popular magazines, in order to feed
India’s media with a stream of salacious CIA stories.59
The socio-political impact of British and American intelligence activity in
India during the Cold War is not reflected in current literature. In the United
Kingdom, the publication of authorised histories of MI5 and SIS have shed
12 spying in south asia

some light on the establishment and operation of intelligence liaison relation-

ships between Britain and its former South Asian empire.60 Path-breaking
though they are, these state-sponsored works seldom stray far beyond the
parochial field of intelligence operations and into the realm of transnational
politics. Significantly, existing intelligence studies have, until very recently,
neglected arguably the most significant clandestine operation mounted by
Britain in post-colonial South Asia, that undertaken by the Foreign Office’s
Information Research Department (IRD).61 The absence of a comprehensive
account of the CIA’s Cold War operations in India and, more precisely, that
organisation’s impact on the United States’ wider relations with South Asia,
represents a lacuna in the voluminous body of scholarship covering the
American intelligence community.62 Accounts of foreign intelligence agencies
in India’s domestic affairs, authentic and otherwise, have long occupied
a prominent place in South Asian political discourse, journalism, and modes
of cultural production. Indian scholarship has nevertheless largely eschewed
serious engagement with the history of post-independence security and intel-
ligence collaboration, and competition, with Britain and the United States.
Indian intelligence literature remains dominated by the self-serving accounts
of former intelligence officers, and sensationalist works in which unsubstanti-
ated conspiracy theories, communal politics, and the spectre of a malevolent
‘foreign hand’, all loom large.63 Spying in South Asia offers an archivally rich,
transnational analysis of a clandestine Cold War that, as recently released
official records in the UK, US, and India affirm, had a deep and enduring
impact in the subcontinent.
Over the past seventy-five years India has confronted myriad threats to its
national security. Indigenous communist movements, communal violence,
a querulous Pakistani neighbour, and a regional rival in the form of the
People’s Republic of China, have all threatened the integrity of the Indian
Union at various times. The nation’s emergence in the twenty-first century as
a nuclear-armed economic and strategic powerhouse has transformed its inter-
national strategic standing. India now matters locally, regionally, and globally.
Scholarship scrutinising the history of India’s association with secret intelligence,
and the interaction of India’s bureaucracy and people with external intelligence
services, has been complicated by a post-colonial socio-political landscape pre-
occupied by intrigue, tinged with anti-Americanism, and obsessed with secrecy.
India’s uneven relationship with covert action, that has manifested periods of
official suspicion and hostility, alongside phases of acceptance and active engage-
ment, is currently in a state of flux. Restrictions imposed by previous Indian
governments on covert operations undertaken by the Research and Analysis
Wing (R&AW), Indian’s foreign intelligence service, have been swept aside by
a new bureaucracy under the leadership of Narendra Modi and the Hindu
nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Under the direction of Modi’s
National Security Advisor, and former Director of the IB, Ajit Doval, India has
 introduction 13

embraced the potentialities of covert action. In 2015, allegations surfaced that the
R&AW had intervened in Sri Lanka’s presidential elections, successfully working
to unite opposition to the pro-China incumbent, Mahinda Rajapaksa, and
replace him with the India-friendly, Maithripala Sirisena.64 The following year,
Doval was rumoured to have authorised special forces to cross the line of control
between India and Pakistan in Kashmir, and conduct ‘surgical strikes’ against
Jaish-e-Muhammad (The Army of Muhammad), a Pakistan-based terrorist
organisation that India held responsible for an assault on one of its military
bases.65 In addition, Doval has been credited with masterminding cross-border
operations by Indian intelligence and special forces against Naga separatists
operating from bases inside Myanmar.66
India’s current leaders, it appears, have priced-in negative consequences of
covert action on the nation’s relations with its neighbours, and have calculated
the associated diplomatic and reputational costs to be acceptable. Given that
two of New Delhi’s regional rivals are nuclear-armed states, the strategic risks
associated with India’s current covert action doctrine have never been greater.
An absence of political and public support for intelligence reform has left the
Indian government, and its intelligence services, dangerously exposed to
calamitous missteps when it comes to covert action. In an observation that
resonates with the crises faced by America’s intelligence community in the
mid-1970s, one national security commentator has noted that the R&AW
would best serve India’s interests, and help to promote stability and prosperity
in Asia, by refocusing on intelligence gathering and analysis, and avoiding
‘pulse-quickening operations built on . . . an anti-terrorism mindset’.67 Absent
a meaningful recalibration of existing and ineffective institutional mechanisms
regulating Indian clandestine activity, Indian policymakers now faces a choice
between sticking with the nation’s twenty-two official languages, or adding ‘a
new language of killing’. India’s emergence as an economic titan, renewed
Sino-Indian tensions, continued regional backwash from a so-called ‘War on
Terror’, and uncertainties surrounding New Delhi’s security policy, have kept
the subcontinent at the forefront of global news headlines. Spying in South Asia
aims, above all, to foster debate on the evolution of South Asia’s relationship
with secret intelligence and to consider its wider global consequences.
Recovering the hidden history of India’s secret Cold War and critically assess-
ing its impact on New Delhi’s international relations has never been more
important as we advance further into an ‘Asian century’.
 1

Transfer of Power: British Intelligence

and the End of Empire in South Asia

In August 1947, Britain hauled down the Union Jack and departed from South
Asia. At the Lucknow Residency, in Uttar Pradesh, a site revered by the Raj as
a symbol of imperial resolve following the events of 1857, elaborate precautions
were taken to ensure that the transfer of power passed off without incident. The
Residency was the only building in the British Empire where the Union Flag was
never lowered. In the run-up to independence some Indians called for the Union
Jack to be replaced by India’s tricolour. Instead, a day before India celebrated
swaraj, or self-rule, the British flag was lowered under the strictest secrecy and its
flagpole removed. Press photographers were banned from the ceremony, and in
its aftermath a temporary police post was established to discourage public
celebration.1 The careful stage management of events at Lucknow underscored
the value Britain placed on formal displays of imperial sovereignty to mediate
the realities of local power. Projection of influence through the manipulation of
images of authority had, by and large, served the British well in India.2 However,
by the end of the Second World War a resurgence in Indian nationalism exposed
British overdependence on reputation and esteem as levers of statecraft. The
previous December, the Viceroy, Archibald Wavell, confided to his diary that,
‘the administration [in India] has declined, and the machine in the Centre is
hardly working at all now . . . while the British are still legally and morally
responsible for what happens in India, we have lost nearly all power to control
events; we are simply running on the momentum of our previous prestige.’3
In contrast to the progressive, if troubled, transfer of political power in the
subcontinent, the handover of intelligence and security responsibilities was
precipitate and problematic. The British left India without bequeathing the
newly independent state an intelligence apparatus that was fit for purpose.
India’s leaders had assumed greater authority over internal policy once the
post-war Labour administration of Clement Attlee had accepted that, in South
Asia at least, Britain lacked the means to suppress the forces of nationalism. In
the intelligence arena, the reassignment of authority from British to Indian
hands occurred on a shorter timescale and a more limited basis. To a degree,
this was unsurprising, given that the colonial intelligence effort in South Asia
had largely been directed at manipulating nationalists prominent in India’s
pre-independence transitional governments.4 It was not until March 1946,

14
 transfer of power 15

when a Cabinet Mission led by the British ministers Stafford Cripps, Lord
Pethick-Lawrence, and A. V. Alexander arrived in the subcontinent, that
Whitehall’s secret agencies recognised that an Indian Home Minister with
responsibility for intelligence could be appointed at any moment.5 That
summer, the Viceroy’s secretary reminded British officials to screen their
files for documents that an incoming nationalist administration might find
useful, ‘as material for anti-British propaganda’.6 Residents of New Delhi were
treated to the spectacle of thick black clouds swirling high into the sky for
weeks on end as reams of records were torched in the courtyard of the IB’s
registry building in the La Qila, or Red Fort. A systematic destruction of
decades of information saw much of the operational history of the Intelligence
Bureau go up in smoke.7
Exposure to the power of the secret colonial state coloured the attitudes of
Indian politicians towards intelligence agencies. Jawaharlal Nehru’s aversion
to intelligence was commonly attributed to the harassment and oppressive
surveillance that Britain’s imperial security apparatus had brought to bear on
Nehru and his family.8 Alex Kellar, MI5’s resident expert on colonial matters,
reasoned that, ‘Nehru’s critical views on “our [Britain’s] intelligence organiza-
tion” are doubtless due in considerable measure to his own personal experi-
ence as a political agitator . . . ’9 Once installed as India’s prime minister, Nehru
expressed reservations that, ‘Indian Intelligence was still dependent on the
British and was following old British methods taught to the Indian Officers in
pre-independence days, and was also dishing out intelligence which the British
continued to supply to it.’10 Into the 1950s, Nehru complained to his friend,
and India’s last Viceroy, Lord Louis Mountbatten, about the product that he
received from India’s Intelligence Bureau. ‘I always read our Intelligence
reports very critically and I am not prepared to accept them as they are’,
Nehru confided. ‘I have had a good deal of experience of the police and of
Intelligence from the other side to be easily taken in by the reports we get.’11
That said, Nehru acknowledged India’s need to develop an effective intelli-
gence service of its own. In November 1947, reflecting on a series of pressing
national security challenges, the Indian leader emphasised to his chief ministers:
. . . the necessity for developing intelligence services. This is very import-
ant, both from the provincial and the central points of view. It is not easy
to develop a good intelligence service suddenly as the men employed must
be carefully chosen. Our old intelligence system has more or less broken
down as it was bound to, because it was meant for other purposes, chiefly
in tracking Congressmen and the like. The new intelligence service will
have to be built differently.12

The intelligence vacuum that developed in India from 1946 was especially
acute given the profusion of urgent problems confronted by Nehru and his
ministers. India’s political leaders were anxious to curtail communal tension
16 spying in south asia

and to reassure the country’s substantial Muslim minority that they could keep
a lid on Hindu nationalism.13 The wrenching effect of Partition, mass migra-
tion, the violent deaths of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of the
subcontinent’s citizens, and the enervating territorial disputes that ensued
between India and Pakistan, not least over the former princely state of
Kashmir, led policymakers to seek timely and accurate intelligence.14 In
addition, Indian officials were concerned to negate a subversive threat posed
by a large and well-supported Communist Party of India (CPI). In the political
tumult that accompanied Britain’s retreat from South Asia, communist sup-
port threatened to gain traction beyond urban centres that accommodated the
industrial working class and evolve into a broader peasant insurgency.
A proliferation of red flags in Indian villages alarmed the British and their
nationalist partners in the Congress Party.15 Moreover, despite assurances
provided to Attlee’s Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, by the Soviet leader,
Joseph Stalin, that Moscow would not interfere in India’s internal affairs, the
British obtained evidence that financial aid was being directed by Moscow to
the CPI.16
Once Attlee’s government responded to dwindling British authority in
India by bringing forward the timetable for independence from June 1948
to August 1947, the flow of intelligence reaching London from the subcon-
tinent dried up. A month after Wavell’s lament that Britain had lost its
capacity to dictate events on the ground, the Joint Intelligence Committee in
London noted that it was, ‘no longer able to advise the Chiefs of Staff fully on
the implications of future developments in that country [India]’.17 Whitehall
planned to retain independent India as a close international ally of the
United Kingdom. The subcontinent’s access to the Middle East’s oilfields,
its proximity to both the Soviet Union and China, its reserves of labour, and
its untapped potential as an industrial base, made it imperative, in the minds
of British military planners, ‘that India should remain closely allied to the
Commonwealth’.18 With the end of British colonialism in India coalescing
with the advent of the Cold War, London came to regard the maintenance of
friendly relations with a nationalist government in New Delhi as sine qua
non to the containment of Soviet power in Asia.
India did not figure as prominently on other nations’ lists of global
priorities. In the aftermath of Indian independence, while Britain’s press
gave blanket coverage to the political drama and social trauma unfolding in
the subcontinent, reports in Soviet newspapers focused on crop yields in the
Ukraine, an upcoming Latvian theatre season, and fawning eulogies of
Stalin. The Soviet newspaper of record, Izvestia, made one brief reference,
on its back page, to India’s transition to independence.19 Under Stalin’s
regime, the USSR’s relationship with India was informed by the Soviet
dictator’s conviction that post-colonial states functioned as imperialist pup-
pets. In 1950, one Indian official bemoaned that the state-controlled Soviet
 transfer of power 17

media was determined to represent India as, ‘a stronghold of reaction,

a persecutor of democratic forces, a hanger-on of the Anglo-American
bloc, and the harbinger of a new Imperialism in the East’.20 In the United
States, American broadsheets reflected upon the termination of Britain’s
200-year presence in South Asia only after discussing soaring domestic food
prices, Soviet meddling in the Greek civil war, the Italian economy, and
a heatwave sweeping the Atlantic seaboard.21 President Harry Truman
evidenced little interest in the momentous events taking place in India. At
the time, Truman, and his Secretary of State, George Marshall, were pre-
occupied by developments in Western Europe, where post-war economic
and social tensions appeared set to sweep communist regimes to power in
Italy, France, and across the Mediterranean littoral. Chester Bowles, who
Truman appointed ambassador to India in 1951, chaffed at the disinterest
senior US officials manifested towards South Asia. Washington’s percep-
tions of the subcontinent, Bowles griped, were filtered through a distorted
and ‘Kiplingesque’ prism. To Americans, the ambassador bemoaned, India
appeared, ‘an ancient land of cobras, maharajahs, monkeys, famines, [and]
polo players, [that was] over-crowded with cows and babies’.22
Absent superpower interest in India, Whitehall was free to leverage its
experience of managing intelligence systems in the subcontinent to influence
the evolution of India’s national security state. Another, and secret transfer of
power, occurred in 1947. Its origins lay in plans hatched by MI5 and SIS to
retain a British intelligence foothold in India. It came to encompass a protracted
struggle for operational paramountcy between Britain’s Security and Secret
Intelligence Services. Bureaucratic turf wars inside Whitehall’s secret world
stirred debates at the highest levels of government over whether the United
Kingdom should undertake covert action in India and, if so, how it should be
conducted, and to what purpose? Decisions taken in London to employ
Britain’s intelligence services to uphold UK national interests in the subcontin-
ent, and advance the West’s wider anti-communist Cold War agenda, dove-
tailed with an Indian requirement for external support in the domestic security
arena. A mutual dependency helped to forge and sustain close relations between
the intelligence and security services of Britain and India during, and after, the
transfer of power in South Asia. In the shadowy realm of secret intelligence, the
transition of authority in India from the coloniser to the colonised was more
complex and contested than has hitherto been acknowledged.

The Other Transfer of Power: The Indianisation of the

Intelligence Bureau
In the autumn of 1946, the impending Indianisation of intelligence in South
Asia unnerved MI5. As the nationalist push for independence gathered
momentum, Guy Liddell, Deputy Director-General of the Security Service,
18 spying in south asia

ruminated on the prospect that, ‘At any moment we might be faced with an
Indian D.I.B. [Director Intelligence Bureau] and an Indian War Minister
through whom any communications on Intelligence matters might pass.’
‘What struck me’, a concerned Liddell recorded, ‘ . . . was that we should
anticipate the worst, namely, a completely chaotic situation over a period of
months, if not years, when all communications [with India] would have
broken down and the Government here would have very little idea about
what was going on’.23 Before the end of the year, MI5’s anxiety that intelligence
from India would dry up appeared all too real. In November, Liddell noted that
the flow of material reaching the Joint Intelligence Committee from India had
slowed to a trickle and Britain’s Chiefs of Staff were no longer receiving
meaningful reports on the security situation in South Asia.24
Apprehension in MI5 that its ability to monitor and react to events unfold-
ing in India was rapidly diminishing was amplified by the uncertain fate of
Indian Political Intelligence (IPI), or the Security Services ‘Indian branch’.
While IPI remained nominally under the control of the Secretary of State for
India, from 1923 it had worked closely with MI5. At the direction of IPI’s chief,
Philip Vickery, MI5 officers kept leading Indian nationalists in the United
Kingdom under surveillance and, on occasions, placed intercepts on their mail
and telephone communications. In return, Vickery’s organisation maintained
intimate relations with the IB and acted as a de facto British clearing house for
the collection, analysis, and dissemination of intelligence related to India from
across the globe.25 Once an interim Indian government took office in New
Delhi, on 2 September 1946, IPI’s days were numbered. Crucially, the Home
Ministry, to whom the IB reported, passed from British control and into the
hands of the nationalist leader, Vallabhbhai Patel. Patel wasted no time in
stamping his authority on India’s intelligence services. Norman Smith, the last
British DIB, was summoned to see India’s new Home Minister and told that
the IB’s operational mandate had changed. Surveillance operations against
Congress Party officials were prohibited, although those targeting radical left-
wing Indian politicians and suspected communists were allowed to continue.
Significantly, Patel removed Smith’s prerogative of direct access to the Viceroy.
Moving forward, all IB reporting was channelled through the Home Ministry.
At a stroke, the British government were cut out of the intelligence loop in
their own colony. In Patel’s mind, it was essential that the colonial security
apparatus was placed in nationalist hands prior to a transfer of constitutional
power. Once stripped of their eyes and ears in India, any last-minute change of
heart on the part of the British would be rendered futile.26
The following spring, as Whitehall began to shut IPI down, British colonial
intelligence officers packed up en masse and either departed for home or took
up positions in alternative imperial outposts. Old Indian hands found that
securing new jobs was problematic. Back in London, a young Enoch Powell,
then working in the Conservative Party’s central office, was approached by
 transfer of power 19

anxious colonial officials for assistance. Gordon Thompson, commander of the

British Indian army in Calcutta, asked Powell for help in securing employment
with SIS. Powell effected an introduction, but Thompson was left disappointed
by SIS’s ‘remarkably unenthusiastic’ response. With the Ministry of Supply
also turning him down, Thompson was reduced to soliciting work from the
Tory Party.27 Others proved more fortunate. By 1950, SIS had found room for
three former British Indian officials on permanent, pensionable terms, and
a further 12 on temporary or contract agreements.28 Treasury objections that
SIS’s Indian recruits had been employed on more generous financial terms
than existing officers, subsequently forced the Service’s chief, Stewart Menzies,
to discharge three of their number and commit to taking ‘on no more new men
from this [Indian] source’.29 Such a regrettable step, SIS grumbled, represented
‘a wicked waster of good potential’.30 The Security Service found less trouble
accommodating British colonial policemen and intelligence officers. Between
the wars, MI5 absorbed several British officials who had served in the subcon-
tinent. Institutional connections forged between MI5 and the IB that were
rooted in imperial security drew colonial officials into the Security Service. In
March 1947, Guy Liddell, Deputy Director-General of MI5, undertook a talent
spotting mission in the subcontinent. With Norman Smith’s assistance, Liddell
interviewed promising British officers in the IB, some of whom were taken on
by the Security Service.31 By 1965, the process of British decolonisation saw
almost two-thirds of MI5’s officers with résumés that included a form of
imperial service.32
Shortly after Liddell’s visit to India, Smith was replaced by the first Indian
Director of the IB, Tirupattur Gangadharam (T. G.) Sanjeevi Pillai. A forty-
nine-year-old policeman from Madras, Sanjeevi had joined the Indian Police
Service in September 1922 and made steady, if unspectacular, progress through
its ranks as the nationalist campaign for swaraj, or independence, gained
impetus. In 1946, following stints in the Madras Special Branch and CID,
Sanjeevi was promoted to the post of Deputy Inspector General of Police.
Within a year, he was posted to New Delhi and, in April 1947, was made chief
of the IB. Writing to Omandur Ramasamy Reddy, premier of the Madras
presidency, Vallabhbhai Patel apologized for ordering Sanjeevi north at a time,
‘ . . . that you can ill-afford to spare him, but it is of paramount necessity that
we should have a first-class officer as Director’.33 Sanjeevi’s colleagues in the IB
found their new boss to be a distant and difficult character. K. Sankaran Nair,
who enjoyed a long and distinguished career in Indian intelligence, admired
Sanjeevi for his intellect and the high professional standards that he demanded
from IB officers. Nair was less impressed by Sanjeevi’s prickly temperament
and an abrasive self-confidence that bordered on hubris.34 A propensity to
lapse into fits of pique would, ultimately, lead Sanjeevi to fall foul of his
political masters and bring his tenure as DIB to an abrupt and premature
end. Guy Liddell questioned Patel’s wisdom in appointing Sanjeevi, ‘a Hindu
20 spying in south asia

policeman from Madras without intelligence experience’. A highly competent

Muslim intelligence officer of long standing, Liddell noted, had been passed
over by Patel. ‘This [Sanjeevi’s appointment] and other incidents’, Liddell
mused, ‘showed a tendency on the part of the [Intelligence] Bureau to degen-
erate into a Hindu Gestapo, whose principal target would be the Moslem
League’. Such an unwelcome development, were it to materialise, Liddell
reflected, was likely to restrict his Service’s interaction with the IB, ‘except on
the subject of Communism, in which the Congress Party were showing
particular interest’.35
The formidable set of challenges, and the inadequate resources, that Sanjeevi
inherited when he assumed charge of the IB would have tested the capabilities
of the most accomplished intelligence officer. In Sanjeevi’s case, his relative
inexperience was quickly and brutally exposed. The IB Director erred in
alienating senior politicians by seeking broad executive powers for his organ-
isation. Powerful figures in the governing Congress Party, Patel included,
considered that Sanjeevi’s grab for power threatened to place the IB beyond
a level of legislative scrutiny appropriate in a democracy. Sanjeevi argued that
his role managing, ‘a very vast intelligence organization with centres flung far
and wide in the country and outside it’, demanded that he should be designated
primes inter pares within India’s intelligence community. In doing so, Sanjeevi
exaggerated his own importance and overplayed his hand.36 A suggestion by
Sanjeevi that his title should be amended from ‘Director, Intelligence Bureau’,
to, ‘Director-General of Intelligence’, met with a frosty response from Indian
civil servants. Rejecting Sanjeevi’s proposal, R. N. Banerjee, the administrative
head of the Home Ministry, observed disapprovingly, ‘I am rather surprised
that such an unsound proposal should have been put up seriously by the
Director, Intelligence Bureau.’37 Sanjeevi’s bid to secure control over all intel-
ligence matters, civil and military, received an equally firm rebuff from India’s
armed forces. Thomas Elmhirst observed that Sanjeevi had courted ‘a certain
amount of trouble’ by seeking to impose his authority over the country’s Joint
Intelligence Committee (JIC). Having proposed to his military colleagues that
he should not only chair the JIC but, ‘control all Intelligence–internal, external,
military, naval and air’, Sanjeevi was left in no doubt that such an idea was
unthinkable, and that instead he should ‘concern himself with internal security
and with the running of a certain number of agents into adjacent territory’.38
The struggle for power in India’s intelligence establishment was mirrored by
a concurrent post-war battle between MI5 and SIS over their respective roles
and responsibilities. At the beginning of 1947, representatives of SIS, MI5, and
IPI held a series of discussions on how to ‘maintain the future flow of intelli-
gence relating to India’. The outcome was distilled into a single joint report, in
which the three secret organisations put forward several recommendations. As
an interim measure, it was suggested that IPI should be incorporated into the
Security Service. A temporary dispensation was also proposed that allowed for
 transfer of power 21

IPI to continue running covert operations in foreign territories. The latter ran
counter to a directive that Clement Attlee had issued in April 1946, which
prohibited the Security Service from engaging in such activity. Authorising
MI5/IPI to mount covert operations abroad was justified as a necessary short-
term expedient, given the exceptional nature of the security situation unfold-
ing in India. Whitehall endorsed the recommendations and, on 1 August 1947,
IPI was officially incorporated into MI5. To assuage concern in SIS that the
Security Service’s charter risked becoming unduly expansive, it was agreed that
IPI activity conducted on foreign soil would only be undertaken in partnership
with SIS.39
In addition, the joint report called for SIS to be granted an operational remit
in India. Attlee’s directive of April 1946 had included a clause prohibiting SIS
activity in British territory overseas, including India. Or, in other words, Attlee
instructed the Security Service to keep out of foreign countries, unless invited
in by a host government, and SIS to stay away from the British Empire. The
three secret services rationalised extending SIS’s mandate to incorporate India
on the basis that, ‘India may be a foreign country before long [and] it seems
justified as an experimental measure.’ Even were a new independent Indian
government willing to exchange security and intelligence information, the
joint report argued, it seemed unlikely that, for reasons of inefficiency or
policy, such an arrangement could furnish all the material required by cus-
tomers in Whitehall. In a memorandum sent by Menzies to William Hayter,
who oversaw intelligence matters at the Foreign Office, the SIS chief made
plain that whatever the nature of the future relationship between the United
Kingdom and India, his organisation could only pick up the slack left by the
Indianisation of the IB by placing its officers on the ground in South Asia. For
SIS to supply Whitehall with intelligence on Indian and foreign nationals in the
subcontinent; to keep abreast of Indian links to individuals and organisations
of interest further afield; and to advise on intelligence matters in countries
adjacent to India; the Service needed an active office or station in the
subcontinent.40 An Indian nationalist government, one FO official underlined,
was certain to be ‘wholly unreliable’ when it came to intelligence sharing, and
could, ‘never be in quite the same category as Canada or Australia’.41 As an
addendum, the joint report recommended the dispatch of a resident MI5
officer to the British High Commission in New Delhi. Patel had previously
indicated that he would be receptive to an exchange of security liaison officers
following the transfer of power, and Whitehall embraced the opportunity this
presented to maintain strong links with the IB.42
The spirit of collective goodwill displayed by Britain’s secret world in respect
of India proved to be short-lived. By early February 1947, senior figures in the
Foreign Office began pressing for a revision of the terms set out in the joint
report, and for SIS to assume primacy in the subcontinent. Writing to MI5’s
Director General, Sir Percy Sillitoe, on 7 February, Sir Orme Sargent,
22 spying in south asia

Permanent Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, declared, ‘ . . . we feel very

strongly that it is undesirable to have two organisations [SIS and MI5] engaged
in covert activities in a foreign country.’ The activities of MI5, Sargent insisted,
‘can in the nature of things never be fully overt’. Allowing two British intelli-
gence services to run side-by-side in India, the FO mandarin insisted, risked
duplication, confusion, and the unwelcome exposure of clandestine activity.
One solution, Sargent ventured, would be to offer SIS officers posted to India
training in MI5 work, and enable them to take on counterintelligence and
security responsibilities.43 At the same time, Sargent approached Sir Terence
Shone, the British High Commissioner in New Delhi, to canvass support for
the establishment of a local SIS station. Given the fluidity and uncertainty of
the political situation in India, Shone was advised that, from an intelligence
standpoint, the Foreign Office ‘thought it best to take two bites at the cherry’.
This, Shone was told, involved planning both to implement an interim intelli-
gence structure in India, along the lines of that envisaged by the MI5-SIS-IPI
joint report, and, concurrently, preparing the ground for a more permanent
arrangement under which SIS would exercise exclusive jurisdiction in the
subcontinent. Acknowledging that SIS had been excluded by Attlee from
operating in Commonwealth territory, Sargent brushed the restriction aside
and expressed confidence that India would soon come to represent foreign
intelligence terrain, making SIS ‘the natural collectors of covert intelligence’.
Accordingly, Shone was asked by Sargent to accommodate an SIS officer in the
British High Commission and to extend the intelligence officer diplomatic
cover.44 Weeks later, in March 1947, Attlee approved the relaxation of restric-
tions on covert action undertaken by MI5 and SIS that had been set out in the
joint report on intelligence in India.45 The scene was now set for a bureaucratic
tussle between MI5 and SIS that, over the coming months, would see the
subcontinent turned into a test case for the post-war delineation of Britain’s
global intelligence responsibilities.

Staying On: British Intelligence and Post-Independent India

Within MI5, Guy Liddell enthusiastically embraced the opportunity to estab-
lish an MI5 liaison office in New Delhi. Liddell’s intention was to broker
a reciprocal arrangement with the Indian government. This envisaged that
MI5 would station one of its officers in Shone’s High Commission and, in
return, Sanjeevi and the IB would attach one of their men to the Indian High
Commission in London.46 During his visit to India, in March 1947, a delighted
Liddell obtained Patel’s agreement to exchange security liaison officers. The
Deputy Director of MI5 was less pleased when Norman Smith suggested to
Patel that, to avoid undue suspicion about the nature of the proposed security
liaison arrangement, MI5’s man in India should have no prior connection to
the IB, Indian Police, or colonial civil service. Appointing an outsider with
 transfer of power 23

limited knowledge of India’s security landscape, Liddell fumed, would be

a mistake and needed to be overturned.47
The individual MI5 selected as its first Security Liaison Officer (SLO) in
India was Lieutenant Kenneth Bourne. A former Chief of Shanghai Police,
Bourne served in India with the Intelligence Corps during the war. Under
the codename BRISTOL, he had run a counter-intelligence unit that func-
tioned as a Chinese section of the Intelligence Bureau. Bourne’s operation
was bankrolled by the Special Operations Executive, but he reported to the
IB, and his remit encompassed domestic Indian security duties that included
monitoring local Chinese agents and watching over the political and crim-
inal activities of Calcutta’s large Chinese community.48 Bourne’s back-
ground contravened Smith’s recommendation that MI5’s SLO should have
no prior association with the IB. Liddell pressed ahead with the appointment
regardless, and Patel acquiesced. Bourne left London on 29 July 1947 to take
up his new post in India.49 Bourne operated from an office in Eastern House,
a building occupied by British information and publicity staff and detached
from the main High Commission. He remained in New Delhi for just six
months before being replaced by Bill U’ren, another former British Indian
police officer who had clocked up twenty years of service in the subcontin-
ent. The experiment posting of an MI5 SLO to India proved successful and it
was soon replicated in neighbouring Pakistan and, as the Cold War
expanded, across the Empire and Commonwealth.50 Over time, the SLO
innovation came to play an important part in the history of British decol-
onisation. In more parochial terms, it also ensured that for decades to come
relations between MI5 and the IB were more intimate and interdependent
than those between any other departments of the British and Indian
governments.51
Over at SIS, Stewart Menzies followed the Security Service’s lead and
recruited an ex-Indian policeman of his own to look after the Service’s interests
in the subcontinent. Vernon Thomas Bayley was born in October 1908 in
Ferozepore, Bengalc, to a family steeped in the history of the British Raj. As far
back as the sixteenth century, his relatives had acted as directors of the East
India Company, worked for the Bengal civil service, sat on the subcontinent’s
judiciary, and served as commissioned officers in the British Indian Army.
Bayley’s grandfather, Sir Steuart Bayley, worked closely with British intelli-
gence while acting as Secretary of the Political and Secret Department at the
India Office. After joining the Indian Police in 1928, Bayley was posted to the
North-West Frontier. In 1937, he relocated to New Delhi and took up
a position with the IB. Bayley was recruited into SIS in 1946. He was married
to the author Viola Powles. Powles enjoyed a successful career writing chil-
dren’s adventure stories under her married name, the locations of which
frequently corresponded with Bayley’s SIS postings. As a junior IB officer,
24 spying in south asia

the often cash-strapped Bayley made ends meet by cultivating his own public
audience and moonlighting as a newsreader on Delhi Radio.52
On 17 September 1947, Bayley arrived in India in the company of two SIS
secretaries. A second SIS officer, and Bayley’s assistant, John Peter May, fol-
lowed in mid-December.53 May was captured by the Japanese following the fall
of Singapore in 1942, and languished for the remainder of the war in a prison
camp in Malaya. Patel and the Intelligence Bureau were not informed of
Whitehall’s decision to reactivate a covert British intelligence presence in
India and the small SIS station operated on an undeclared basis.
A requirement to build-up obsolete agent networks from scratch required
Bayley to travel widely throughout the subcontinent. Accordingly, Menzies
asked Shone to provide his SIS officer with a roving cover role within the UK
high commission and suggested that a nominal designation of Information
Officer or Trade Commissioner would be appropriate.54 Bayley was eventually
given the more amorphous title of ‘Secretary’, primarily out of concern that his
ignorance of economics and public relations might be exposed and attract
unwanted attention. The SIS station was housed in a large, single room in the
High Commission, directly beneath Shone’s private office.55 The High
Commissioner wanted to keep a close eye on his guests.
Shone had opposed an SIS presence in India. In particular, the High
Commissioner expressed reservations that Bayley’s links with the subcontin-
ent were too conspicuous, and that the SIS officer would be viewed with
misgiving by locals. William Hayter agreed, and cautioned Menzies that
Bayley’s employment seemed, ‘. . . an unnecessary risk for you to take’.56
Menzies thought otherwise. Bayley, the Chief of SIS insisted, ‘himself is
convinced of his ability to work in India without detection’. While acknow-
ledging that ‘naturally some suspicion may attach to him when he first arrives’,
Menzies maintained, ‘this suspicion will die down when Bayley carefully lives
his cover’. Moreover, Menzies vouched that Bayley would, ‘confine his activ-
ities, when they start, entirely to handling first-class, trustworthy British head
agents’. It was essential, Menzies submitted, that he was able to utilise an officer
in India with extensive experience of the subcontinent. ‘[N]o-one who has not
had experience of handling Indian agents could possibly direct the British head
agents in such a difficult task’, Menzies informed the Foreign Office.
‘Unpleasant repercussions are far more likely if we put in an inexperienced
officer for this job.’ Whitehall officials remained sceptical that Menzies insist-
ence on appointing Bayley was entirely sound. ‘In short’, one mandarin
summarised, ‘the proposal is to “bluff it out”’.57 In an effort to placate Shone,
the High Commissioner was made aware that Bayley would not be permitted
to run Indian agents directly. In addition, the local SIS station was instructed to
recruit no more than five European cut-outs, or intermediaries, who would,
‘collect . . . information from “unconscious” Indians’. Such ‘unconscious’
Indian contacts were not to know, or were supposed not to know, that they
 transfer of power 25

were ‘being pumped’ for ‘information about Soviet-inspired or Communist

activities in the Dominion’.58 Bayley’s function, Shone was reassured, ‘would
be that of an organiser, the contact with the agents being made by others under
his general direction and guidance’.59 With Menzies refusing to give further
ground, SIS was allowed to have its way and Bayley’s Indian posting was
confirmed.60 In response, a disgruntled Shone fired off a brusque one-line
note to the Foreign Office that stated simply, ‘I am still not happy about this.’61
Shone’s concern over Bayley’s appointment was amplified after the SIS
officer approached High Commission staff about the availability of modern
air conditioning units; solicited advice on purchasing a car, preferably an
American Chevrolet or Ford; and asked to be accommodated in the Cecil
Hotel, in the heart of Old Delhi. The requests were met with dismay and
deemed entirely contrary to the anonymity which Shone had been assured
Bayley would cultivate. It was pointed out to Bayley that air conditioning units
were in notably short supply in the Indian capital; that an imported British
vehicle might provide a less ostentatious form of transport; and that it would
seem odd for the SIS officer and his staff to lodge in Old Delhi, when other
High Commission officials resided in the city’s diplomatic quarter.62 Worse
still, Bayley blotted his copybook with Shone by corresponding with High
Commission staff in his own name rather than a work name or pseudonym.
‘This was noted by a locally recruited [Indian] member of staff who is the wife
of one of the European Deputy Directors of the Intelligence Bureau’, Shone
complained to the Foreign Office. ‘She promptly asked if the letter was from
[Bayley] who her husband had heard (and told her) was coming out soon to
join the staff of the Trade Commissioner.’ ‘Although this is a large country,
people in the higher strata know one another (and what they are doing) from
one end to the other’, Shone made clear to Whitehall. ‘We feel that whatever
cover we might provide Bayley it will be virtually impossible to remove
suspicion from the minds of the large number of intelligent Indians (who are
bound to know his background).’ Pressing the Foreign Office to reconsider
a change of tack before it was too late, Shone implored bluntly that, ‘they [SIS]
may wish to reconsider the question of Bayley’s appointment’.63 The High
Commissioner was overruled. Before landing in India, Bayley had quipped to
British diplomats that, ‘The next year or two should certainly not be dull.’64
The SIS officer’s words were to prove prescient, but for reasons other than he
intended.

Covert Cold War

In part, the urgency surrounding SIS’s efforts to get a station up and running in
India was informed by the perception that post-war Soviet subversive activity
was shifting focus from Europe to Asia. Fragile post-colonial governments,
beset by pressing social and economic problems, it seemed, had been identified
26 spying in south asia

by Moscow as highly susceptible to the lure of communism. In 1948, SIS

watched intently as Calcutta, long a hot bed of radical politics in the subcon-
tinent, played host to a conference of the progressive Youth of Asia and the
Congress of the Communist Party of India.65 In the wake of the Calcutta
meetings, the tactics of communist groups across Asia switched from support
for a united front approach and collaboration with non-communist national-
ists, to a more militant and often violent opposition to state power. Jawaharlal
Nehru’s interim government was itself embroiled in suppressing an armed
communist insurgency centred on the Telangana region of southern India. In
this context, Lenin’s dictum that the decisive battle for world revolution would
be fought and won on the banks of the river Ganges, appeared troublingly
prophetic to SIS officers pondering the inception of the Cold War back at the
Service’s Broadway headquarters.66
Under pressure from customers in Whitehall to demonstrate its utility in
blunting communism’s appeal, SIS implemented a wide range of covert action.
Most of the clandestine activity undertaken by the Service, espionage aside,
centred on black propaganda operations that were combined, when needed,
with the liberal use of bribery or blackmail.67 Black propaganda was designed
to give the impression that it originated with the target it was intended to
discredit. Such propaganda was unattributable and did not identify its source.
The working assumption of Menzies’ organisation was that, in conjunction
with a new Foreign Office propaganda unit, the Information Research
Department (IRD), it would spearhead ‘a comprehensive worldwide political
warfare plan’.68 This envisaged SIS exerting control over news agencies; cov-
ertly controlling newspapers and periodicals, ‘by general subsidy and/or by
bribery of owners and editors’; secretly running broadcast stations; and facili-
tating, ‘the dissemination of rumours, distorted or untrue reports, etc. either
through selected news channels or by pamphlets, posters, etc. or orally’.69
India was amongst the first countries that SIS targeted in its ‘clandestine
propaganda effort’. One estimate, for the years 1948 and 1949, calculated that
SIS expended £350,000 on covert propaganda in India and the Middle East.
The bulk of this money was spent on printing and publishing propaganda
material; bankrolling ‘whispering campaigns’ that aimed to expose local poli-
ticians as being ‘directed’ by the Soviet Union; and operations designed to sow
dissension within local communist parties by planting real or manufactured
evidence pointing to the duplicity or dishonesty of their leaders. More exuber-
ant, but much less common, were operations that sought to effect the ‘framing’
of foreign diplomats ‘in order to effect their removal and possible liquidation’;
the penetration of factories and trade unions; acts of minor sabotage and
intimidation (including the use of stink bombs and microphone interference
to disrupt meetings); the kidnapping of communist leaders or Russian nation-
als to give the appearance of defection; and assassination.70 In March 1948,
when pressed by the Chiefs of Staff to ramp up information warfare activities,
 transfer of power 27

the Foreign Office defended the effectiveness of its black propaganda oper-
ations by pointing to an assertion made by Menzies that, ‘He [Menzies] had
evidence of the usefulness of his machinery in India.’71
Precisely what covert action Vernon Bayley and the SIS station in India had
undertaken remains unclear. However, in October 1947, Kenneth Bourne
warned MI5 headquarters back in London that Indian colleagues in the IB
had become concerned by the actions of his ‘friends’ in SIS.72 The following
March, with gossip swirling around New Delhi about Bayley’s background and
the nature of his mission in India, SIS deemed it prudent to order his recall to
London. Such a drastic step, it was acknowledged, raised ‘the distinct possibil-
ity of his [Bayley] not returning’ to India and the local SIS station being
closed.73 As an interim measure, Orme Sargent recommended that SIS cease
all activity in India and ‘remain entirely inactive’.74 The appointment of
Archibald Nye to replace Terence Shone as High Commissioner later
that year, increased the pressure on SIS to reconsider the merits of retaining
an operational presence in India. On 15 October, Menzies briefed a meeting of
the Joint Intelligence Committee that Nye, in common with his predecessor,
‘had taken exception to even an embryo organisation of S.I.S. being set up in
India and had so informed the Prime Minister’.75
From Menzies perspective, Nye’s conviction that an SIS station was neither
needed nor desirable in India was especially unfortunate. Lieutenant-General
Sir Archibald Nye was stationed in the subcontinent as a young regimental
officer and had risen to serve as Vice-Chief of the Imperial General Staff under
Sir Alan Brooke during the war. A favourite of Winston Churchill, and a loyal
and efficient deputy to Alanbrooke, Nye was lauded by the latter for having, ‘a
first-class brain, great character, courage in his own convictions, [and being a]
quick worker with great vision’.76 In 1946, on retiring from the Army, Nye
returned to India to become Governor of Madras. In the autumn of 1948, when
Nye’s term in Madras came to an end, he received plaudits from Indian
officials for his adroit handling of the transfer of power in southern India,
and his success in quelling labour unrest and a communist-backed peasant
uprising. Significantly, Nye enjoyed the respect and friendship of Jawaharlal
Nehru. ‘It may interest you to know what your premier [of Madras] told me
about you’, Nehru wrote to Nye, in August 1948. ‘He was loud in praise of you
and when I asked him if he had any suggestions about your successor, he said
“send us someone like Nye.” That is praise enough. Unfortunately, we cannot
find Nyes easily.’77 In Archibald Nye, Menzies was confronted with a powerful
and well-connected adversary.
Nye’s objection to SIS activity in India did not reflect a conviction on the
High Commissioner’s part that the subcontinent was peripheral to Britain’s
strategic Cold War interests, or that South Asia was in any way impervious to
communist subversion. Far from it. ‘The importance of a stable India from the
point of resisting Communist infiltration in all that part of the world [Asia]
28 spying in south asia

could not be over-emphasised’, Nye assured Whitehall.78 Rather, Nye con-

cluded that SIS operations in India were likely to yield little useful intelligence
and would run an unwarranted risk of aggravating delicate Indo-British rela-
tions. The Security Service’s declared SLO, Nye judged, could meet Britain’s
substantive intelligence requirements in India, and could do so without alien-
ating Nehru’s government.79 Importantly, Nye’s position was supported by
British officials in India who had been galvanised by Shone’s opposition to SIS
operations in the subcontinent. Senior members of MI5, such as Alex Kellar,
also lined up to question whether undertaking espionage and launching covert
operations in colonial or Commonwealth countries was altogether wise or,
indeed, morally, and ethically sound.80
Menzies and the Foreign Office were not prepared to sanction SIS’s per-
manent retreat from India without putting up a fight. Shutting SIS out of the
subcontinent even temporarily, FO officials speculated, would make it difficult
to, ‘start [intelligence operations] again and we might lose a lot of valuable
information about Communism in the meantime’.81 William Hayter queried
whether, ‘the Chiefs of Staff would feel strongly about a total shut down of
intelligence activities in India’. ‘There is almost no country’, Hayter suggested
implausibly, ‘of which we know so little’.82 It rankled with the Foreign Office
that Nye had used a private meeting with Attlee to convince the prime minister
that SIS could serve no useful purpose in South Asia. ‘Evidently the Prime
Minister has forgotten’, one FO official recorded testily, ‘that he [Attlee]
approved Sir E. Bridges’ minutes of 7th March and 21st July 1947 [authorising
SIS activity in India]’. When it came to convincing Attlee that the Security
Service could uphold British interests in the subcontinent absent SIS, Nye was
pushing against an open door. Attlee had overcome an initial suspicion of the
Security Service and grew to hold Percy Sillitoe and MI5 in high regard.83 With
Shone, Nye, MI5, and Nehru’s government having all expressed unease about
SIS’s in-country presence, Attlee had ample reason to order Menzies organisa-
tion to quit India.
In late October, a dispirited Sargent informed Menzies that, ‘The Prime
Minister is . . . determined on the closing down of covert activities in India and
there is, I am afraid, nothing more that we can do for the time being’. The Chief
of SIS was duly ordered to close his station in New Delhi and confirm his
organisation’s withdrawal from India.84 Attlee’s intervention, set out in the so-
called ‘Attlee Directive’, appears to have taken the form of an oral instruction
and was not put in writing at that time. It may well, in any case, have been moot
in respect of Bayley and SIS’s India station. Sometime after the events of 1948,
as MI5 worked to strengthen its relations with the IB, Alex Kellar noted that
subsequent to the transfer of power the Intelligence Bureau had been, ‘particu-
larly irritated . . . by the activities of M.I.6. [SIS] personnel in India: two were in
fact asked to leave’.85 Whether SIS was forced out of India by Attlee or was
pushed from the subcontinent by Patel and the Indian government, made little
 transfer of power 29

practical difference. Henceforth, the Security Service, through its overt liaison
relationship with the IB, would exercise exclusivity in managing British intel-
ligence interests in India.
The political decision communicated through the ‘Attlee Directive’ to
exclude SIS from India had broader consequences. Sillitoe and MI5 proved
successful in extending the Directives scope beyond India to cover the entirety
of the British Empire and Commonwealth. Menzies organisation was not
merely shut out of India but was also largely precluded from conducting
clandestine operations in swathes of Asia and Africa.86 The imposition of the
Directive made little difference to SIS in respect of the ‘old’ Commonwealth,
where Canada and Australia were in the process of setting up their own foreign
intelligence organisations. Menzies was, however, troubled that, by setting
a precedent that prohibited his organisation from operating in former
British colonies, Whitehall had made it harder for SIS to respond to a global
threat posed by communism.87 The empire and Commonwealth remained
under the sway of the Security Service until well into the 1960s and, thus, was
largely shielded from SIS’s ‘cloak and dagger’ operations.88 In the subcontin-
ent, it was not until 1964 when, in the wake of the Sino-Indian border war the
Indian government reassessed the utility of covert action, that SIS reopened
a station in New Delhi under the direction of Ellis Morgan, a protégé of the
future head of the service, Maurice Oldfield.

Figure 1.1 Sir Percy Sillitoe, Director General of MI5 (1946–1953). Central Press /
Stringer / Hulton Archive / Getty Images.
30 spying in south asia

Security, Sovereignty and Secret Intelligence

By the close of 1948, and after a little local difficulty, a common purpose was
established in London and New Delhi that would define the future intelligence
and security dimensions of Britain’s relationship with India. India’s political
leadership looked to Britain, primarily, to help rebuild an intelligence infra-
structure in the subcontinent that had been created by the former colonial
administration to function as a domestic security service rather than a foreign
intelligence agency. From its inauguration, the Intelligence Bureau’s focus was
on disrupting nationalist conspiracies and preserving the stability and author-
ity of imperial governance. The IB was infused with an insular mentality,
fearful of sedition, ever watchful for rebellion akin to the events of 1857 and,
latterly, preoccupied by the threat posed by communist subversion following
the Russian revolution of 1917. The transfer of power in India in 1947, as
commentators on contemporary Indian intelligence practice have noted,
reinforced as much as reinvented a colonial intelligence culture shaped by
fear and anxiety.89 In the 1970s, Parmeshwar Narayan (P. N.) Haksar, principal
secretary to India’s premier, Indira Gandhi, and a leading architect of India’s
external intelligence service, the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW),
lamented that, in many respects, independence had come to represent
a missed opportunity. ‘Transfer of power meant continuation of elite domin-
ation’, Haksar bemoaned, ‘without any commitment to dismantle the colonial
heritage and restructure the socio-economic relations on equalitarian and truly
democratic lines’.90 Haksar could just as well have been describing the evolu-
tion of India’s intelligence community.
Nehru’s interim Indian government approached secret intelligence in much
the same way as their British colonial antecedents. The IB was conceived by
a new generation of Indian leaders as a safety valve to help relieve internal
pressures, to mitigate the influence of communism and communalism, and to
serve the parochial interests of a domestic political elite. The intelligence
organs of the state were not geared to meeting external threats from India’s
neighbours. It was entirely unsurprising that, given a congruence in attitude
and approach towards intelligence between the former coloniser and the
recently decolonised, Patel and India’s Home Ministry identified merit in
working closely with the British Security Service. In contrast, SIS, with its
expertise in foreign intelligence, espionage, and covert action, as Shone, Nye,
and other British officials cautioned Whitehall, was always likely to be
regarded with suspicion bordering on hostility by a nascent post-colonial
state sensitive to preserving hard-won national sovereignty. Menzies initial
enthusiasm for establishing an SIS presence in India aside, policymakers in
Whitehall were aware that assisting India in building up a foreign intelligence
capability, not least in light of New Delhi’s fractious relationship with Pakistan,
a fellow Commonwealth state, would prove more problematic than aid offered
 transfer of power 31

by MI5 in the security field.91 Tellingly, unburdened by the complication of

having to sustain an appearance of impartiality between India and Pakistan, it
was the United States, and the Central Intelligence Agency, more specifically,
who would support India in the covert action arena in the aftermath of
independence.
It was not until the early 1960s that SIS returned to India. By then, MI5,
through a succession of resident SLOs in New Delhi, had been able to embed
itself firmly into India’s intelligence bureaucracy. Reflecting on the reintroduc-
tion of SIS to the subcontinent, one future Director-General of MI5, Stella
Rimington, who began her career in the Security Service in India, recalled that
the two services offices were located adjacent to each other in the British High
Commission behind security doors, ‘which had a combination lock that habit-
ually stuck in the oppressive Indian climate and whose numbers had to be given
a sharp hit with a shoe to get then to move into place’. Her SIS colleague,
Rimington remembered, was ‘a genial, rather low-profile character, with some
sort of job in the political section, but notable mainly for his performances in
character parts in the plays put on by the British High Commission Amateur
Dramatic Society’.92 A talent for acting, one assumes, proved useful in the
context of the SIS officer’s day job. Senior SIS officers, including a coming
Chief, Maurice Oldfield, went on to establish a productive relationship with
their Indian counterparts. One Indian intelligence officer, who briefly rose to
lead the R&AW, has recounted spending time getting to know Oldfield during
recreational trips to Jaipur and Jaisalmer, in Rajasthan, in Western India.93
Renowned as an engaging storyteller with a playful sense of humour,
Oldfield’s highly developed sense of scepticism when it came to the utility of
covert action was doubtless significant in securing Indian goodwill for SIS. In the
period between the transfer of power in 1947, and the onset of the Sino-Indian
War of 1962, it was not SIS, however, but its British partners and erstwhile rivals
in the Security Service that, thanks to Clement Attlee, determined the course of
Britain’s intelligence relationship with India.
 2

Silent Partners: Britain, India, and Early Cold

War Intelligence Liaison

On 9 September 1965, the RMS Caledonia left Liverpool and headed into the
Irish Sea. The British liner entered service just prior to the end of the Raj, in
March 1947. It was launched by the Marchioness of Linlithgow, whose hus-
band, Victor Hope, exasperated Indian nationalists during his period as
Viceroy, between 1936 and 1943. Plying a colonial route that took in
Gibraltar, Port Said, Aden, and Karachi before terminating at Bombay, the
Caledonia’s voyage to India was conducted in an atmosphere of opulence that
belied Britain’s diminishing global power. One passenger likened travel on the
ship to, ‘sailing slowly in a sort of time capsule to the Orient’.1 Full of
characters from a fading imperial landscape, the Caledonia’s patrons num-
bered tea-planters, missionaries, boxwallahs, or European businessmen, and
British diplomats destined for postings abroad. The latter included John
Rimington, a young official bound for New Delhi and the position of first
secretary at the British High Commission. During his tour, Rimington’s wife,
Stella, a future head of the Security Service, was inducted into the secret world.
Whitehall’s approach to the transfer of power in the subcontinent was
shaped by a desire to remain on friendly terms with India’s nationalist govern-
ment. ‘It is a truism that the unique position of the United Kingdom in this
country places a special responsibility on His Majesty’s Government in hand-
ling western relations with India’, Sir Archibald Nye, Britain’s High
Commissioner in New Delhi, underlined, in May 1951. ‘By virtue of our old
ties and friendships . . . we have opportunities for exerting influence over India
far superior to those of the United States.’ ‘[I]t remains a major interest of
British policy to ensure that India does not drift . . . into the grip of
Communism’, Nye maintained. ‘[I]t is essential to deny India to Russia. The
only way to secure this object is to work patiently for the closest Indian
relationship with the West.’2 By the time Stella Rimington arrived in the
subcontinent change was in the air and Nye’s emphasis on the importance of
cultivating intimate British relations with India had lost much of its currency.
During her stay in New Delhi, which lasted from September 1965 to
February 1969, Stella Rimington reflected that, ‘India crossed a water-shed in
the modern development of that country.’ Historic ties to the United Kingdom
had worn thin and, as the Cold War gathered momentum in South Asia,

32
 silent partners 33

Indians looked to the American and Soviet superpowers for support. A decline
in the UK’s standing in India was hastened when Britain’s premier, Harold
Wilson, infuriated Indians by blaming New Delhi for an outbreak of Indo-
Pakistan hostilities over Kashmir. In the wake of Wilson’s injudicious public
remarks, the Anglophile former Indian High Commissioner in London, Vijaya
Lakshmi Pandit, informed UK ministers that, ‘It would be difficult to exagger-
ate Britain’s unpopularity in India.’3
In another sense, the 1960s also marked an inflection point in relations
between India and Rimington’s service, MI5. Britain’s Security Service estab-
lished close and convivial relations with India’s Intelligence Bureau. In 1957,
B. N. Mullik, India’s then DIB, assured Roger Hollis, the Director-General of
MI5, that, ‘In my talks and discussions [with MI5], I never felt that I was
dealing with any organisation which was not my own.’4 The MI5 Security
Liaison Officer who recruited Rimington as a clerical assistant, in the summer
of 1967, certainly felt at home in India. A larger-than-life individual who
appeared to have stepped from the pages of an Ian Fleming novel, the SLO
was a baronet, and a bachelor, and resided in a spacious house in one of the
more salubrious suburbs of India’s capital. He was well-known for hosting
lavish curry lunches that extended late into the night and cruised around town
at the wheel of large Jaguar car.5 A blurring of lines between intelligence fact
and fiction extended to Rimington herself. An accomplished actress and
stalwart of the British High Commission’s amateur dramatic society, the
coming leader of MI5 entertained Indian guests and the diplomatic commu-
nity with star performances in sell-out stage productions. ‘Stella was an
extremely good actress’, one of her contemporaries in India recalled, ‘which
must have come in very handy’.6
At the point Rimington packed up and headed home from India, the
Security Service’s halcyon days in the subcontinent were over. The reintroduc-
tion of SIS to India in 1964, coupled with swinging cuts to MI5’s international
footprint demanded by an impecunious Whitehall, diluted the Security
Service’s relationship with the Intelligence Bureau. Expertise in internal secur-
ity that had underpinned MI5’s association with the IB, although still valued,
was relegated to a position of peripheral significance by Indian policymakers.
The last MI5 SLO left India not long after Rimington and, in the process,
severed a connection between the Security Service and the IB that stretched
back to the 1920s. Perhaps fittingly, Rimington was unable to return to United
Kingdom on the RMS Caledonia. No longer economically viable in an age of
intercontinental air travel, the British ship was taken out of service before the
end of 1965 and sent to Amsterdam, where it functioned as a floating hostel for
students. Signposts of British retreat from the subcontinent, MI5’s included,
were hard to miss.
The subcontinent’s intelligence landscape had looked very different in the
1940s. With India denuded of an effective intelligence service following
34 spying in south asia

independence, MI5’s sway in South Asia was considerable. In May 1948, Guy
Liddell crowed that, ‘There is no doubt that Nehru, [Vallabhbhai] Patel, and
the Minister of Defence are anxious to maintain [a] British connection. Their
difficulty is to put their former policy of “driving the British out of India” into
reverse without losing face.’7 By fostering contacts with Indian counterparts,
Whitehall was able to sustain a level of influence in Indian governing circles
beyond that justified by Britain’s waning authority. ‘[O]ne must face an
inevitable running down [of British influence in India]’, the CRO conceded,
‘ . . . [but] this could be in a measure arrested if we had greater resources to
apply in India to the maintenance of our links’. The Security Service could not
have agreed more. The success of MI5’s investment in its SLO programme in
India underpinned wider relations between London and New Delhi. When the
last MI5 SLO left the subcontinent, not at India’s behest, but due to economies
forced on the Security Service by the Treasury, Whitehall sundered a valued
connection between the British and Indian intelligence communities. The DIB
at the time, S. P. Verma, voiced incredulity that MI5 had abandoned, ‘the
longstanding contact at a personal level which has proved invaluable to us’.8 In
beating a retreat from India, MI5 terminated a partnership with the IB that,
between the 1940s and the 1960s, represented arguably its most important
foreign liaison relationship outside of Europe and North America.

Our Man in Delhi: MI5’s SLO Programme in India

The Security Service’s SLO concept predated the transfer of power in India.
During the Second World War, MI5 had stationed SLOs and, in the case of
overseas military bases, Defence Security Officers (DSOs), throughout the
British Empire. The SLO’s role was to provide advice and support to local
security agencies and to act as a conduit for the exchange of information
between London and Britain’s imperial outposts. It was not to engage in acts
of subterfuge or espionage. For SLOs to remain effective, the Security Service
felt they needed to retain the trust of their host governments.9 The success of
post-war SLOs in India led to the expansion of the programme across Britain’s
colonies and Commonwealth.10 In October 1949, MI5 documented the func-
tions of SLOs. Their responsibilities were divided into primary and secondary
categories. Within the former, MI5 emphasised the importance of cultivating
a liaison channel between SLO’s and host governments. It was imperative, the
Security Service stipulated, for SLOs, ‘to ensure . . . that all security intelligence
and counter-espionage information flowing into Security Service channels and
bearing in the particular security problems . . . [of the] territory to which he [an
SLO] is accredited, is made available to all appropriate Civil and Service
Authorities in that territory’. An SLO was expected, ‘to volunteer and supply
on request’ assistance to local security services in areas such as preventive
security, vetting, and travel control. Alongside these primary tasks, SLOs were
 silent partners 35

encouraged to win the confidence of intelligence and security colleagues

abroad with a view to obtaining information that might not otherwise be
available. As the Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, Sir Patrick
Dean noted, Whitehall’s belief was that, ‘one of the functions of the Security
Service; [is] to obtain secret intelligence by its own means’.11
It was also an SLO’s responsibility, in Guy Liddell’s words, ‘to keep . . .
[a host country] aware of the wider implications of subversive movements . . . ’12
Or, in India’s case, to ensure that Jawaharlal Nehru’s Congress governments
remained attuned to the threat posed by communism. The first conference of
the Communist Party of India (CPI) was convened in the industrial city of
Kanpur, in the United Provinces of northern India, in December 1925.
Indian nationalists had been attracted by the Bolshevik Revolution in
Russia, and prominent political radicals, such as Manabendra Nath (M. N.)
Roy, benefited from support offered by Lenin and the Comintern. In 1920,
Roy inaugurated an émigré Indian communist organisation at a gathering
convened in the Soviet central Asian city of Tashkent. Between the wars, the
British Indian government prosecuted several high-profile conspiracy cases
that targeted individuals, Roy included, who were alleged to have engaged in
communist-inspired sedition. One of MI5’s first significant imperial inter-
ventions occurred in 1929, when Sir Eric Holt-Wilson, MI5’s deputy director,
was sent to India to assist the Intelligence Bureau in the Meerut Conspiracy
trial.13 British concern at India’s vulnerability to communism, however,
proved largely misplaced. During the struggle waged by nationalists for
independence, and in its immediate aftermath, Marxism-Leninism, as one
senior British official conceded, did ‘not make much ground in India’.14
Active, but relatively small, the CPI concentrated winning support amongst
an amalgam of university students, industrial organisations, and the subcon-
tinent’s peasantry, with mixed results. In practical terms, disorder stoked by
communists in areas such as Kerala, Telangana, and West Bengal, met with
a robust response from the Indian authorities. In November 1951, reflecting on
India’s reaction to communist agitation, Archibald Nye reassured London
that, ‘The Central and all the Provincial Governments have come out whole-
heartedly against communism.’ ‘They have’, Nye added, ‘dealt with the com-
munists with a firmness, indeed one might say with a ruthlessness and brutality,
which we ourselves never at our most difficult times showed in this country’.
British officials were less impressed by what they considered to be an unwar-
ranted sense of complacency on the part of Indian officials in suppressing cheap
CPI propaganda. Indian ministers, Nye bemoaned, ‘are inclined to think that
the Hindu way of life is so contrary to the concept of communism that no one
need worry about the result of communist penetration’.15 After meeting one
Indian journalist, William Haley, editor of The Times, felt equally uneasy at the
indifference with which colleagues in the subcontinent’s press approached
communism. Haley was unpersuaded when his Indian associate pronounced
36 spying in south asia

that communism in South Asia was essentially constitutional in outlook, and

more benign and less threatening than ‘anyone else’s Communism’. ‘One might
almost say that this belief’, a startled Haley recorded in his diary, ‘is the
Communists’ secret weapon’.16
In September 1946, on forming an interim government, Nehru took to the
airwaves to spell out his commitment to a non-aligned foreign policy. ‘We
propose as far as possible to keep away from the power politics of groups,
aligned against one another’, India’s premier stated.17 When it came to the
Soviet Union, Nehru acknowledged the admiration many Indians felt for
a country that had transformed itself from a backward peasant economy into
a global superpower. Moreover, as a neighbour of India’s, Nehru reasoned that
his government, ‘cannot afford to antagonise Russia merely because we think
that this may irritate someone else’.18 Likewise, as one Indian official noted,
Soviet calls for, ‘the end of colonialism and racial discrimination and for
redistribution of world wealth, are by no means disagreeable to India’.19
Under Stalin, India was largely ignored by the Soviet Union. In 1953, the
dictator’s death changed the dynamic of Moscow’s relations with the subcon-
tinent. Andrey Vishinsky, the USSR’s foreign minister, began to attend recep-
tions at the Indian Embassy in Moscow. In New Delhi, the Soviet ambassador
displayed a ‘sudden affability’ towards his Indian hosts. Much of the ‘tenden-
tious propaganda’ that the Soviet Union had directed against India ceased.20
Most significantly, as the Soviets adopted a new foreign policy of courting
friends inside the developing world, in the United Nations, Moscow extended
India its support in the dispute with Pakistan over the state of Kashmir.
Accordingly, Security Service SLOs posted to India were confronted by
a seemingly paradoxical Indian approach to communism. At home, the activ-
ities of the CPI were closely monitored by the IB and, whenever they threat-
ened to disrupt social order or promote violent political dissent, were
ruthlessly suppressed. Abroad, Nehru’s governments sought close relations
with their Soviet neighbours and, in the process, tolerated support funnelled to
communists in the subcontinent from Moscow. Squaring the circle of assisting
the IB in containing indigenous communism, while simultaneously pushing
Indian colleagues to adopt a less benign appreciation of international com-
munism, was never easy for SLOs. The Security Service’s decision to post
officers to India who were both affable and well-disposed towards the country
did, to some extent, mitigate the impact of policy differences between London
and New Delhi. A short but successful SLO tour undertaken by Kenneth
Bourne in 1947, was followed by a series of equally productive secondments
to India completed by Bill U’ren, Eric Kitchen, Walter Bell, and John Allen.
The SLO programme nurtured a sense of familiarity and interdependence
between MI5 and the IB. British SLOs became regular visitors to the IB’s
headquarters in New Delhi and toured the Intelligence Bureau’s outstations
to get to know regional Indian security and intelligence colleagues. In turn,
 silent partners 37

Mullik valued the opportunity that MI5 provided to consult with senior
intelligence officers from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa
at Commonwealth Security conferences held in London. At a lower level,
a steady stream of IB staff made the journey from India to the UK to attend
MI5 tradecraft courses. In practical terms, the Security Service proved useful to
the IB by, amongst other things, tracing covert financial subsidies passing from
Moscow to the CPI.21
Although close and convivial, MI5’s relationship with the IB did encounter
problems. Mullik expressed dissatisfaction that, on occasion, the Security
Service was inclined to short-change his organisation. The DIB objected
when IB officers sent to Singapore to attend British courses in counter-
espionage and observation techniques received only the most basic instruction.
In protest, Mullik suspended the Intelligence Bureau’s participation in the
programme. The DIB was equally put out when MI5 questioned his request to
send IB officers to London for three-months’ coaching in long-term penetra-
tion. The Security Service agreed to provide general training for Mullik’s
officers but insisted that devoting such prolonged attention to a single facet
of security work was impractical. Mullik reacted by making clear that he would
no longer send IB officers to London unless they received appropriate direc-
tion in agent running. ‘Something has obviously got into Mullik’s hair’, Guy
Liddell responded disparagingly, ‘. . . it may well be heat or that he is getting
very mistaken information about our capabilities’. India’s intelligence chief,
Liddell reflected, seemed blissfully unaware that, ‘most of what we [MI5]
achieve is through hard work and a certain amount of luck’.22 While not
always harmonious, the intimacy that MI5 enjoyed with the IB was sufficiently
strong to overcome occasional tensions and periodic diplomatic squalls. In the
mid-1950s, when political relations between India and the UK were strained by
the Suez Crisis, Mullik reassured MI5’s SLO, John Allen, that it was important
to insulate their two services bilateral intelligence association from broader
disagreements between London and New Delhi. Taking care to mask the full
extent of collaboration between the IB and MI5 was one means of doing so.
India’s Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), Mullik assured Allen, would
welcome the opportunity to lobby Nehru for the termination of MI5’s presence
in New Delhi. The Indian premier’s aversion to the work of intelligence
services, Mullik claimed, left Nehru susceptible to entreaties from the MEA
that MI5 should be sent packing from the subcontinent.23 Mullik’s exhort-
ations aside, the Security Service had reasons of its own to obscure its connec-
tions to the IB. Aside from anything else, Whitehall was conscious that their
security and intelligence liaison relationships with foreign governments were
vulnerable to penetration and suspectable to exploitation by Soviet propagand-
ists looking for ways to undermine British diplomacy.24
Nehru’s unease that the Intelligence Bureau risked becoming too close to
MI5 was made abundantly clear when the Indian premier acquiesced,
38 spying in south asia

reluctantly, and with strict conditions, to a request from his intelligence service
to station its officers in India’s High Commission in London. Nehru was
initially unpersuaded that a permanent Indian intelligence presence was
needed in the UK, and asked the resident High Commissioner, Balasaheb
Gangadhar (B. G). Kher, for ‘much greater justification than has been given
to me so far for the establishment of a Security Unit in London’. Subsequent
interventions by the IB and India’s Home Ministry, which was responsible for
intelligence oversight, persuaded Nehru to change his mind. Under an
arrangement that mirrored MI5’s SLO programme, the Intelligence Bureau
was authorised to place officers in London under diplomatic cover and to
declare their presence to the British authorities. Nehru was determined,
however, to ensure that a geographical expansion in the IB’s operations did
not compromise India’s diplomacy, weaken political supervision of intelli-
gence agencies, or lead to excessive and inappropriate monitoring of Indians
abroad. The IB could establish a Security Liaison Unit (SLU) in London, the
prime minister stipulated, only on the understanding that its officers had,
‘absolutely nothing to do with the staff of . . . India House’; the SLU was
answerable to India’s High Commissioner; and, that IB officers abstained
from routine surveillance of India’s student population and wider diaspora
in the UK. On the latter point, Nehru made plain that if the IB felt compelled to
operate outside Indian territory, not least to reduce India’s reliance on infor-
mation furnished by friendly foreign intelligence services advancing their own
parochial agendas, it should do so in the most transparent manner possible.
Here, the Indian premier drew a distinction between MI5’s SLO arrangement
in India, ‘that is not secret so far as we are concerned, and we were told about
it’, and the activities of other, undeclared, foreign intelligence agencies in the
subcontinent. ‘[T]the US has a very widespread Intelligence net’, Nehru noted
pointedly. ‘But they [Washington] have not told us officially anything about it.’
As SIS had discovered to its cost, while India’s premier acknowledged that,
‘many so-called Attaches in every foreign embassy are really intelligence
agents’, his tolerance of covert intelligence activity on India soil had limits.25
Nehru was persuaded to push ahead with the establishment of an Indian
SLU in London, and in a limited number of other locations abroad, chiefly on
the basis that it would promote useful dialogue between the IB and its foreign
counterparts on areas of common concern. London, especially, the Indian
premier rationalised, constituted ‘a clearinghouse of communications . . .
between the Cominform and the Far-Eastern countries, including India’. The
CPI, Nehru noted, was ‘largely guided through London’, as were communists
front organisations such as the Word Federation of Trade Unions, Women’s
International Democratic Federation, and World Federation of Democratic
Youth. Drawing on MI5’s knowledge of transnational communist networks
was clearly in India’s interest. Moreover, Nehru recognised that Indian defi-
ciencies in the ‘technical side of Intelligence’ could best be remedied by
 silent partners 39

leveraging the superior resources and know-how of the Security Service.

Nevertheless, Nehru remained adamant that the IB ‘remain apart’ from their
colleagues in MI5 and avoid a blurring of operational boundaries and respon-
sibilities. ‘We do not want any tie-up between our Intelligence and any other
foreign Intelligence, including UK Intelligence’, India’s prime minister
decreed. ‘[A] certain association is often helpful, provided we keep wide
awake . . . [but] we [India] have to be careful so as not to get entangled with
British Intelligence and be exploited by it.’26 The relationship between the IB
and British intelligence was a source of perennial anxiety for Nehru. Writing to
India’s cabinet secretary in October 1956, he expressed incredulity that IB
officers were being sent to London to learn Russian rather than being tutored
in Moscow. ‘It seems to me that our intelligence people cannot get out of the
habit of thinking of two or three countries in the Commonwealth, especially
the UK . . . ’, an exasperated Nehru complained, ‘for any kind of training’.27

Winning Friends and Influencing People: MI5 and India’s Intelligence

Chiefs
Britain’s Security Service invested considerable time and energy fostering
personal connections with India’s intelligence chiefs. In the case of the IB’s
first Indian director, T. G. Sanjeevi, senior MI5 officers encountered little
difficulty in promoting the idea that the UK and India had much to gain
from working together. Having tried, and failed, to wrest additional power and
authority from the Indian government’s bureaucracy, Sanjeevi also had ample
reason to look abroad to bolster his own fortunes and those of the IB. In
November 1948, Sanjeevi welcomed an invitation from MI5’s Director-
General, Sir Percy Sillitoe, to visit the UK for discussions on ‘matters of mutual
interest’.28 Arriving in London on 4 December, the DIB’s talks with MI5
extended over two weeks. To colleagues in India’s Home Ministry, Sanjeevi
represented his encounter with MI5 as, ‘extremely important and urgent’. Its
purpose, the DIB disclosed, was ‘primarily to establish contacts with his
opposite numbers’ in Britain’s Security Service, and ‘to co-ordinate intelli-
gence work’.29 On meeting Sanjeevi, Guy Liddell observed that the DIB was,
‘obviously appalled by the size of his task. He [Sanjeevi] told me pathetically
that the Indian Government expected him to know everything well in
advance.’ Having listened to Sanjeevi’s complaints that political jealousies
within the ruling Congress Party threatened to cripple the effectiveness of IB
as a national intelligence agency, Liddell reflected with surprise that his
counterpart appeared to be seeking ‘almost dictatorial powers’. Political pres-
sure to deliver results beyond the capabilities of IB, Liddell mused, appeared to
have induced Sanjeevi to contemplate the creation of ‘an enormous Gestapo,
which will cost the country a great deal of money and may well be corrupt and
inefficient’.30
40 spying in south asia

Sanjeevi arrived in London with a reputation as a sensitive and capricious

individual who was prone to fits of impetuosity. His wife, who was equally
high-handed, travelled with Sanjeevi to the UK. Sanjeevi was devoted to his
spouse. Having met and become enamoured with his partner when she was
married to another man, Sanjeevi remained a bachelor for many years and,
when his wife’s first husband passed away, married her, and assumed respon-
sibility for a stepson and an extended family.31 A strict Hindu and a vegetarian,
MI5 officers discovered that Mrs Sanjeevi appeared to ‘live largely on eggs’.
With London burdened by post-war rationing, eggs were troublingly hard to
come by. To avert a culinary crisis, the Security Service’s staff were mobilised in
a covert operation to source black market produce. Having failed to secure
a sufficient supply of metropolitan eggs, disaster was narrowly averted when an
enterprising young officer cajoled a relative with a smallholding to send a fresh
batch up from the country. This was just as well, Guy Liddell recorded wryly in
his diary, as, ‘Unless all these things are provided for her, Sanjeevi won’t come
to the office!’32 Dietary dramas aside, Sanjeevi’s visit proved a success in
cementing relations between MI5 and the IB. Liddell ensured that the DIB
went away satisfied that he had been taken into the confidence of the Security
Service on a range of issues, from the operation of Joint Intelligence structures
to more mundane matters such as the control of foreign aliens. During
a farewell lunch in Sanjeevi’s honour, hosted by Sillitoe at the Savoy, Liddell
took satisfaction that the DIB seemed, ‘very pleased with his visit and is going
back [to India] full of ideas’. ‘How far he will be able to put them into practice’,
Liddell questioned, ‘is another mater!’33
From the Security Service’s perspective, Sanjeevi lacked the qualities and
experience necessary to transform the IB into an effective intelligence service.
Scepticism in London that Sanjeevi was up to his job, did not stop the DIB
from acting as an advocate for close ties between his service and MI5. In his
interactions with the Security Service, MI5 officers noted that the DIB wasted,
‘no opportunity of stressing the value which he places on maintaining our
relationship on a professional and personal basis’.34 Contacts between MI5 and
the IB on Sanjeevi’s watch became so amiable that the Security Service
approached India for help in collecting intelligence behind the Iron Curtain.
In July 1949, SIS had come under criticism for its lack of sources inside the
Soviet Union. With a view to improving British intelligence coverage of the
USSR, MI5 approached Sanjeevi to enquire whether the IB would be willing to
run Indian citizens travelling to the Soviet Union as joint-informants.35
Equally, back in October 1948, when the Soviet ambassador in New Delhi
lodged a request with the Indian government to operate a wireless transmitting
and receiving set in his embassy, it was to MI5 that Sanjeevi turned for advice.
Disinclined to sanction the presence of a Soviet transmitter that could be used
to coordinate interference in India’s internal affairs, Sanjeevi was also aware
that a straight refusal would displease Moscow. Rather than rebuff the Soviets,
 silent partners 41

the DIB took the Security Service’s advice to string the Russians along. ‘[W]ith
a view to delaying matters [surrounding the transmitter]’, MI5 counselled
Sanjeevi, ‘the Government of India might ask [the Soviets] for details of the
proposed installation, frequency, wave lengths to be used etc’.36
Collaboration between MI5 and the IB on matters related to Chinese
communism was just as familiar. In June 1949, with the advent of the PRC
a few months away, Sanjeevi disclosed to British officials that, within India’s
national security establishment, ‘there is some anxiety that the Chinese
Communists may turn their attention to Burma and India rather sooner
than was anticipated’. Reports reaching the IB that thousands of Chinese
Communists had infiltrated northern India through Burma and East
Pakistan, perturbed the DIB.37 In an effort to assuage Sanjeevi’s concerns,
MI5 harnessed the SLO system to, ‘do our best to keep D.I.B. informed
regarding the main trends of CCP [Chinese Communist Party] policy’.
Communist documents seized during raids on the South China Bureau of
the CCP, which the British judged to be ‘extremely revealing’, were passed on
to Indian colleagues.38 As greater volumes of Chinese communist propaganda
appeared in bookstores and newsstands across India, MI5 also assisted the IB
in identifying the networks through which Beijing filtered publicity material
into, and across, the subcontinent.39 By the beginning of 1950, interaction
between MI5 and the IB had become so engrained that Liddell was prompted
to crow, ‘India is relying more and more on us [MI5] and they could not do
without our S.L.O. there at all. This is satisfactory.’40
Less pleasing to the British was a reluctance on the part of Sanjeevi to fully
comprehend the magnitude of the communist threat facing India. British
diplomats complained that the DIB had difficulty understanding the danger
communist expansion posed to Asia. To British alarm, Sanjeevi professed that
manifestations of communism in India represented little more, ‘than a radical
and possibly violent Indian political movement, aimed against the present
Congress Government’.41 Having met with Sanjeevi at the beginning of 1948 to
review CPI activity, MI5’s SLO, Kenneth Bourne, was surprised to learn that, in
the DIB’s estimation, ‘Communist influence over the whole of India vis-a-vis
other political parties was about 15%.’ While Sanjeevi conceded that commun-
ist authority was increasing in some areas, notably East and West of Madras,
and in Bombay city, Bourne was advised that, ‘in most other parts of India its
[communist] influence was . . . at a standstill and was possibly decreasing . . . ’.
‘The Party [CPI] could not be regarded as a threat’, Sanjeevi maintained, ‘either
to the Government or to Congress for at least a decade’. Although accepting
that communists had ‘a very strong hold’ over most of India’s trade unions,
Bourne was reassured by the DIB that the Army and the civil service were
relatively free of communist sympathisers. In the latter case, it was not
communism, but a ‘strong affiliation’ within sections of the government
bureaucracy to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a right-wing Hindu
42 spying in south asia

nationalist organisation, that most concerned the IB. On this point, India’s
intelligence services were fully in step with Nehru. For India’s premier, the
forces of communalism represented more of a threat to the nation’s freedoms
than communism. In May 1948, writing to his sister in Moscow, Nehru opined
that although communist violence remained a clear and present danger to the
Indian state, ‘the fact remains that we are looking in the wrong direction’. ‘Of
course, our major problem continues to be some form of communalism and
the narrow communal outlook that has affected large numbers of Hindus’,
India’s prime minister observed. ‘We have by no means killed the spirit of the
Hindu Mahasabha or the RSS.’42
Sanjeevi was equally untroubled by the volume of ‘Russian money’ filtering
into India and funding communist agitation. This, the DIB informed Bourne,
was ‘very small . . . [and] of little consequence’. More cash, Sanjeevi claimed,
was diverted to the CPI by the British Communist Party via Indian students
travelling back and forth between the UK and the subcontinent.43 The British
saw Sanjeevi’s assessment of Indian communism as misguided and overly
sanguine. An uptick in communist support in the subcontinent, in
Whitehall’s view, was ‘exert[ing] a considerable indirect political influence
by swaying Indian outlook towards the left’. Commenting on this difference
in viewpoint, Alexander Symon, Britain’s Deputy High Commissioner in
India, concluded that, ‘. . . [Sanjeevi’s] opinions serve the . . . purpose of
showing us how very far the Director of the Intelligence Bureau has yet to go
in his Communist education’. ‘He [Sanjeevi] seems to regard the movement as
a purely internal nuisance to be classed with any other political body in India’,
Symon grumbled, ‘and he shows no signs of regarding Communism as an
international conspiracy aimed at the Sovietization of Asia and the World. His
views seem to me to be somewhat superficial.’ More specifically, the DIB’s
claim that covert Soviet funding of communist bodies in the subcontinent was
minimal was not seen as credible. ‘I cannot see how he [Sanjeevi] can really say
this unless he were in possession of a great deal more inside knowledge, than he
appears to have, of the party’s [CPI’s] financial and organisational secrets’,
Symon fulminated. ‘From our [British] information we can say the party is well
organised and well financed . . . whenever there is a strike or other agitation led
by the Communists, they manage by one means or another to finance the
movement to some considerable tune.’44
British misgivings that Sanjeevi was too lax when it came to addressing
communist subversion were overtaken by events in New Delhi. In July 1950,
Sanjeevi was sacked as DIB and sent back to the police service in Madras.
Nehru had expressed frustration with the quality of reports produced by the
Intelligence Bureau and wasted few opportunities to make his dissatisfaction
known.45 In October 1948, when responding to an intelligence summary on
communist activity in Hyderabad, the Indian premier noted acerbically that he
had received, ‘a very vague report which does not help very much . . . [it] is not
 silent partners 43

the kind of report which normally intelligence men should send’. Disparaging
a paper that was absent ‘any actual or factual information’, Nehru skewered, ‘a
bad report . . . [that] is apt to mislead and create a wrong impression’. ‘I have
found a tendency to be vague and to judge of events without finding out if they
actually took place’, India’s disgruntled leader complained. ‘The Intelligence
Department should be asked to present facts and not opinions.’46 Three years
into his tenure at India’s intelligence chief, Sanjeevi’s abrasive manner, appetite
for power, and reluctance to overstate the communist threat to India, had also
exhausted the goodwill of his boss at the Home Ministry, Vallabhbhai Patel,
and fatally depleted his standing within the Home Ministry.47 In Sanjeevi’s
place, Patel appointed Mullik as India’s second DIB. Mullik had served as
Deputy Director of the IB since September 1948. Inside India’s intelligence
community, Mullik was regarded as an exceptionally hard-working and indus-
trious individual, someone imbued with firm opinions, and a leader that
evidenced genuine concern for the welfare of subordinates.48 Articulate and
politically astute, Mullik’s rise to the top of Indian intelligence did not pass
without comment or criticism. Yezdezard Dinshaw (Y. D.) Gundevia, India’s
Foreign Secretary, took a dim view of the new DIB, characterising him as
a sycophant incapable or unwilling to speak truth to power.49 Further afield,
Liddell found Mullik to be a less agreeable personality than his opposite
number in Pakistan, Kazim Raza. In Liddell’s judgement, Mullik was also
‘rather shifty’ and less ‘balanced and intelligent’ than his deputy at the IB,
Madan Hooja.50 While he considered Mullik’s personality as ‘not a very
pleasant one’, Liddell attributed the DIB’s asperity, in part, to ‘the fact that as
a rather young man he has been put into a very big job and is a little conscious
of his position’.51 Liddell may not have warmed to Mullik, but a significant
point of continuity between India’s first and second DIBs lay in the field of
foreign intelligence liaison. Mullik continued, and amplified, Sanjeevi’s
emphasis on the IB working in close partnership with MI5.
Under Mullik’s direction, the IB strengthened its position within the Indian
government. One contemporary observer of post-Independent India attrib-
uted the political power accumulated by Mullik to the personal relationship
that the DIB forged with Nehru. ‘Access to, and the confidence of the Prime
Minister, were the prerequisite of influence in the Government in those days’,
it was noted, ‘and Mullik enjoyed them to the full’.52 Politically to the right of
Nehru, the Indian prime minister came to value his spy chief as, ‘able,
conscientious and thoroughly straightforward’.53 Mullik’s control of security
dossiers on many of Nehru’s colleagues and political adversaries, coupled with
the increasingly important role played by intelligence in domestic Indian
politics, ensured that Nehru had good reason to keep the DIB inside his
inner circle. Much as Sanjeevi had before him, Mullik’s accumulation of
bureaucratic authority provoked concern in the senior ranks of India’s
armed forces. A suspicion festered in military circles that the DIB was not
44 spying in south asia

above feeding disinformation to Nehru on purported military plots against the

civil government and, in the process, bolster the IB’s standing at the expense of
the Army.54 Equally, Mullik held a less benign attitude to communism than his
predecessor, and sought to place the IB, rather than the Army, at the forefront
of Indian anti-communist counter-insurgency activity.55 In March 1951, less
than a year after becoming DIB, Mullik authored a report on communist
subversion in the north-eastern state of Tripura. The report cast the CPI as
an existential threat to Indian democracy. Emphasising a ‘phenomenal’ growth
of communist support in Tripura, that was driven by strong party discipline
and a willingness to embrace political violence, Mullik argued that agitation in
the state represented, ‘a serious danger, which therefore threatens the security
of the Indian Union . . . ’ Pushing for the adoption of an aggressive counter-
insurgency policy that mirrored tactics employed by the British against com-
munist irregulars in Malaya, the DIB sought to establish twenty-one armed
police camps in Tripura and to fortify villages that had ‘not yet gone over to the
Communists’. Calling for swift central government action before it was too
late, Mullik declared, ‘There has been enough wastage of time already giving
the Communists sufficient opportunity to build up their strength. . . . The
problem of Tripura should be considered to be an all-India problem.’56
At times, the extent of Mullik’s anti-communist zeal exasperated his polit-
ical masters. In September 1951, Nehru’s reacted with dismay to an IB
a proposal to counter subversive communist activity in the nation’s schools.
Students and their wards, Mullik suggested, should be forced to sign a written
undertaking not to participate in political activities. Some of Nehru’s Chief
Ministers were appalled by what they considered to be an IB charter to spy on
parents and their children. A student activist and political radical in his youth,
Nehru professed himself amazed by ‘the complete lack of intelligence shown
[by the IB] in issuing such a circular’. ‘For our Intelligence service to issue
circulars about guardians of students being asked . . . not to take part in
political activities’, Nehru fumed, ‘appears to me so extraordinary as to be
almost past belief’.57 Complaints lodged by Russian nationals in India regard-
ing excessive IB surveillance elicited a similar reaction from the Indian leader.
Nehru noted that he had repeatedly received intelligence reports on sup-
posedly suspect individuals with whom he was personally familiar. ‘The
conclusions arrived at in such reports were often, to my knowledge, manifestly
wrong’, the Indian premier asserted. Nehru attributed the difficulty that IB
officers encountered in making rational assessments on political issues to the
colonial training in the Indian Police Service that many had undergone before
switching to an intelligence role. ‘It does not often happen that an Intelligence
Officer, however good for his work’, Nehru reasoned, ‘has political flair or an
understanding of basic events’.58 Nehru questioned why the IB kept every
Russian in India under watch. ‘I do not think’, he argued, ‘that we need be
afraid of these Soviet citizens doing much propaganda here or indulging in
 silent partners 45

undesirable activities’. Intelligence Bureau officers were poor watchers in any

case, Nehru reflected, and ‘patent to everybody’ as ‘their face and manners
proclaim them’. ‘I doubt’, he concluded, ‘if [IB surveillance] . . . can do
anything particularly useful’. The IB was instructed by the prime minister to
stop shadowing groups of Russian tourists.59
While Nehru was uncomfortable with Mullik’s uncompromising aversion to
communism, the British Security Service considered the DIB to be an excep-
tionally useful ally and well-positioned inside the Indian government to drive
home the pernicious threat posed by the CPI and its external sponsors. Eric
Kitchen, who succeeded Bill U’ren as MI5’s SLO in New Delhi, in June 1950,
noted that Mullik met with India’s prime minister at least twice every week
and, ‘reinforced by information from ourselves, had . . . succeeded in making
Nehru more aware of the dangers of Communism’.60 The idea that Mullik
could serve a useful purpose by exposing India’s premier to anti-communism
sentiment retained currency amongst British officials until Nehru’s death, in
1964. In August 1960, Morrice James, Britain’s Deputy High Commissioner in
India, pondered whether, ‘we here [in New Delhi] can or should do more vis-
a-vis Nehru himself, or perhaps more promisingly through such senior Indian
officials as Mullik (the D.I.B.) who have access to Mr. Nehru, to put the Soviet
treatment of their nationalities in a somewhat less rosy perspective’. On
reflection, James concluded that having, ‘looked into this . . . [I] am satisfied
we have in fact been making good use vis-a-vis Indian officials, including
Mullik, of the material on this subject [Soviet communism] which has reached
us from various sources’.61 Back in May 1958, when Roger Hollis visited India,
he recorded that the DIB’s appraisal of the danger posed by communism in the
subcontinent was much closer to the British Security Service’s position than
that of the Indian government.62 Mullik’s politics did not go unnoticed by
some of his more progressive Indian colleagues. In June 1972, looking back on
Mullik’s long and influential career in intelligence, P. N. Haksar, a committed
socialist, reminded his boss, and India’s premier, Indira Gandhi, that, ‘the first
head of the Intelligence Bureau [sic], Shri B. N. Mullik, has great passion for
studying what was then fashionable “international communism”. He took
a great deal of personal interest in it.’ ‘Now’, Haksar added witheringly,
‘every intelligent person knows that all these studies of so-called international
communism are not worth the paper on which they are written’.63

Managing Moscow: MI5, the IB, and Soviet Intelligence

Nehru’s scrutiny of the IB’s efforts to contain communist activity in India
frequently frustrated MI5’s counter-subversion officers. The Security Service
became ‘depressed’ as the 1950s progressed and their Indian colleagues in the
IB struggled to respond to an increase in Soviet intelligence activity in the
subcontinent. One MI5 officer grumbled that, when it came to India, ‘in effect
46 spying in south asia

they [the Soviets] are having an almost free run for their money both in the
espionage and subversive fields’.64 In turn, Mullik expressed his irritation to
MI5 over the quality and quantity of information that he received from its
SLO’s on the Soviets regional intentions and capabilities. While sympathetic
with the DIB’s desire for more and better intelligence on Moscow’s thinking,
senior MI5 officers reflected sardonically that they felt much the same. ‘If
Mullik only knew the extent to which we chrystal-gaze[sic] at the J. I. C. on this
subject’, Guy Liddell ruminated, ‘he might not be so insistent in his demands!’
On one occasion, having pressed Bill U’ren for specific details on Soviet
economic policy, Mullik was taken aback when the SLO replied that such
matters were outside his sphere of expertise. ‘But you are an officer of M.I.5’,
the DIB responded incredulously, ‘surely you know these things?’ Liddell
found Mullik’s faith in the Security Service’s omnipotence perplexing and
indicative of the IB’s limited appreciation of the wider intelligence Cold
War. ‘Mullik is obviously reluctant to believe that we have not got agents in
the Kremlin’, the Deputy Director of MI5 observed disdainfully.65
Tensions between MI5 and the IB simmered as Moscow’s efforts to pene-
trate the political, economic, and social fabric of India gathered pace. By 1955,
mounting concern at the extent of Soviet covert interference in India’s internal
affairs prompted Nehru to use the opportunity afforded by the presence in
South Asia of the Soviet leaders, Nikita Khrushchev, and Nikolai Bulganin, to
broach the issue of Moscow’s financial support for the CPI. During talks held
in New Delhi, Nehru warned his guests that Indians would react badly were it
to become apparent that ‘the Soviet Union was directly encouraging the local
Communist Party’. ‘It was commonly believed in India’, Nehru noted, ‘that
large sums of money came to the Communist Party from outside in various
ways’. Brushing aside his hosts insinuation that Moscow was meddling in
India’s affairs, Khrushchev, implausibly, denied any knowledge of the CPI’s
sources of funding. ‘Mr Khrushchev said on his word of honor’, the official
Indian text of his exchange with Nehru recorded, ‘they (the Communist Party
of the Soviet Union) had no connection with the Indian Communist Party’.66
Nehru was less concerned with Khrushchev’s passing acquaintance with the
truth when it came to Soviet funding of the CPI, and more concerned about the
potential for Moscow’s clandestine interference in the subcontinent to com-
promise Indo-Soviet relations were it to become public. The Indian premier
confided to a colleague that he, ‘was not worried about their [the CPI’s]
behaviour very much as we could easily deal with them. They were neither
strong nor very intelligent.’ Rather, Nehru was troubled that, by continuing to
bankroll ‘objectionable’ communist behaviour in India, Moscow would reveal
its hidden hand, and his governments relations with the Soviet Union would
wither. ‘I think my talk produced some effect on them [Khrushchev and
Bulganin]’, the Indian premier concluded optimistically. ‘Though what they
will continue to do about it I cannot say.’67
 silent partners 47

Western diplomats and intelligence officers were less convinced that the
Soviets would turn over a new leaf in India. Khrushchev’s claim that Moscow
had nothing to do with the subcontinent’s communists flew in the face of
evidence that suggested the opposite. As early as 1948, America’s ambassador
in India, Henry Grady, had remarked wryly that, ‘The Soviet ambassador in
Delhi was more preoccupied with opening secret channels to India’s commun-
ists than contacting responsible officials of the Ministry of External Affairs.’68
American intelligence reports validated Grady’s point and concluded that the
exceptionally well-funded CPI was able to operate paid agents at all levels in
India’s state governments, from low-salaried clerks, engaged in routine espi-
onage, to officials working with senior police offers who were privy to national
security policy. The proliferation of cheap Soviet propaganda in India’s cities,
and a willingness among sections of the Indian press to follow a pro-Moscow
line, and benefit from advertising revenue derived from Eastern European
sources, pointed to ‘a marked increase in [covert] Soviet activity regarding
India’. ‘Soviet representatives in India were careful to avoid any impression of
aiding or directing Communist activity in India’, one US intelligence assess-
ment underlined, ‘but they assisted several front organizations in direct and
indirect ways to spread their anti-American propaganda’.69 Chester Bowles,
one of Gray’s successors, confirmed that a surge in communist publicity in the
subcontinent had coincided with Russian officials, including the then ambas-
sador, Kirill Novikov, playing a more prominent role in India’s social and
political milieu. The same could not be said for his Chinese colleagues, Bowles
noted. China’s Army, Air, and Naval attachés in New Delhi lived next door to
Bowles, but conspicuously avoided acknowledging their American neighbour.
‘My daughter Sally has been able to wangle smile from some of the younger
Chinese children’, Bowles informed Washington, ‘but she reports no (repeat
no) progress above age of ten’.70 Moscow’s increasingly convivial relations
with New Delhi allowed Soviet intelligence agencies to channel an increasing
proportion of their resources into India under the guise of trade and cultural
missions.71 By the 1960s, the KGB boasted that it had assets in place at every
strata and in every division of the Indian government.72 At the same time, an
officer from E branch, responsible for MI5’s overseas liaison, was sent to India
to brief the IB on developments in counter-espionage. The officer reported
back that while the Intelligence Bureau had recorded some successes in
disrupting clandestine communist activity, ‘the overall impression of the
Bureau’s work against the huge Soviet Embassy staff is depressing indeed’.73
Stella Rimington was similarly taken aback by the number of Soviet ‘advis-
ers’, or undeclared KGB and GRU officers, that she encountered in India. ‘The
country was overrun with . . . military advisers, agricultural advisers, industrial
advisers, economic advisers and every other kind of adviser you can imagine’,
Rimington remembered. ‘As we toured the country, we kept falling over
them.’74 One aspect of the MI5 SLOs work in New Delhi was to identify
48 spying in south asia

Figure 2.1 America’s ambassador to India, Chester Bowles, attacks a proliferation of

communist propaganda in the subcontinent, The American Reporter, 26 April 1967.

foreign intelligence officers, and to monitor efforts they made to attach them-
selves to British High Commission staff. To Rimington’s amusement, she was
targeted in a recruitment operation mounted by Soviet intelligence. Rimington
and her husband had made the acquaintance of a young lecturer at Delhi
University. Having been entertained by the man and his wife on a few occa-
sions, one evening the future head of MI5 found that two new guests had been
added to their usual dinner party, a Soviet KGB officer, under diplomatic
cover, and his partner. Rimington immediately broke off contact with her
Indian ‘friends’. On a separate occasion, Rimington suspected that she had
been subjected to a crude kompromat operation by the KGB. Some other
Indian ‘friends’ approached Rimington and requested that she carry medicines
 silent partners 49

through customs in the High Commission’s diplomatic bag. The drugs were
unobtainable in India and purportedly needed for a sick child. Doing so would
have breached diplomatic regulations and contravened Indian law. It would
also have left Rimington vulnerable to future coercion from Indian or Soviet
‘friends’ seeking ‘favours’.75 Everything that MI5 was hearing, seeing, and
experiencing on the ground in India, it seemed, pointed to a worrying intensi-
fication in Soviet covert intelligence activity.

Beating A Retreat: Ending MI5’s Indian Experiment

As the Soviet intelligence footprint in India expanded from the late 1950s, MI5
fought a rear-guard action to stave off swinging cuts to its budget demanded by
a Whitehall bureaucracy searching for overseas economies. The sacrifice of
MI5’s entire SLO programme, it seemed, might be necessary to satisfy Treasury
demands for deep cuts in the secret vote. In 1964, the reestablishment of an SIS
station in India added to the pressure on MI5 to justify a continuance of its in-
country presence. Having reluctantly accepted Downing Street’s adoption of
the Attlee Directive, the Foreign Office did its best to ensure that the ‘ban’ on
SIS activity in India remained provisional and was subject to challenge.76 As
the Cold War expanded and intensified, covert action, the preserve of SIS,
became more appealing to British governments as a cost-effective means of
achieving foreign policy goals.77 At the same time, the British Chiefs of Staff
presented an apocalyptic picture of the global threat confronting UK policy-
makers. ‘The free world continues to be menaced everywhere by the threat of
communist subversion and expansion’, military planners declared, ‘which has
world dominion as its ultimate aim’. In placing an emphasis on ‘techniques of
subversion’, backed by the clandestine supply of arms and finance to its allies,
Moscow and Beijing appeared to have seized control of the post-colonial
world. More effective use of Britain’s ‘covert agencies’, the Chiefs of Staff
argued, was needed to ‘wrest the covert initiative from the enemy’.78
Within the CRO, while it remained understood that, ‘the policy . . . has been
that there should be no Secret Service activity in the Commonwealth’, it was
also accepted that SIS had on a ‘few occasions’, and with appropriate authority,
conducted operations in India.79 Moreover, by late 1959, Dick White, Chief of
SIS, with the full support of the Cabinet Secretary, Norman Brook, was
pushing hard for the ban on intelligence collection operations by his service
within the commonwealth to be overturned. ‘“C” [White] was not now sug-
gesting that “carte blanche” should be given for such activities’, a record of one
Cabinet Office meeting noted, ‘he was asking that the general doctrine should
not preclude us from mounting Intelligence operations in the case of
a particular country if this was justified on merits’. Over at MI5, Roger
Hollis took exception to an initiative that threatened to destroy the goodwill
that the Security Service had established with foreign counterparts and on
50 spying in south asia

which the SLO system depended. ‘It was desirable that we should be able to
deal openly with the security organisation in emergent territories’, Hollis
insisted, ‘and so far, we had been able to do so because the United Kingdom
had not carried out clandestine activities in them’. In search of a way forward,
Brook suggested that it appeared ‘preferable’ not to seek a wholesale revision to
the Attlee Directive, but instead to ‘justify specific [SIS] projects [within the
Commonwealth] on their individual merits’.80
Alexander Clutterbuck, who had been born in India to a family of the Raj,
and was then Permanent Under-Secretary at the CRO, reminded Brook that, ‘it
[the Attlee Directive] was a principle by which we set considerable store, since
we considered it was fundamental to our relationship with other
Commonwealth countries’. Nevertheless, Clutterbuck agreed that, in special
circumstances, where the national interest demanded that SIS undertake
covert operations within Commonwealth territory, ‘we [the CRO] would
certainly be prepared to consider the making of an exception and, indeed,
some exceptions had already been made’. As Clutterbuck intimated, and was
no doubt fully aware, SIS had been busy contravening the Attlee Directive in
India for some time.81 In due course, Harold Macmillan formally endorsed
qualifying his predecessor’s blanket prohibition on covert action inside the
Commonwealth. In a meeting of Cabinet principles, held in December 1959,
the British premier confirmed that, ‘. . . while there was no question of revers-
ing the “Attlee Directive” altogether, there might be occasions when the
intelligence to be gained by operations carried out for a specific purpose
might outweigh the general objections and the dangers’. The Indian subcon-
tinent was referenced explicitly at the meeting as a region where such a ‘specific
purpose’ could manifest and would offset ‘objections and dangers’.82
Pressure from the Cabinet Office to revise the Attlee Directive and facilitate
SIS operations in the subcontinent diluted a core rationale underpinning the
local MI5 SLO programme, namely the collection of intelligence that Britain
could not otherwise expect to receive from the Indian government. It was not
the return of SIS in 1964 in the wake of Sino-Indian hostilities, however, that
prompted MI5 to quit India. Rather, the Security Service found it increasingly
difficult to resist demands from the Treasury to trim its costs. In 1965, MI5 was
required to implement annual cost savings of £100,000 on the Secret Vote for
1966/67. In response, the Service’s post-war SLO programme, the genesis of
which lay in India, was effectively wound up. Security Liaison Officers were
recalled from Tanzania, Ghana, Ceylon, and Gibraltar, and preparations made
to shut down MI5 stations in Australia and Malta. Roger Hollis enlisted the
support of John Freeman, Britain’s High Commissioner, in a bid to preserve
his Service’s presence in India. Freeman informed Whitehall that removing
MI5’s SLO would, ‘risk destroying a liaison [with India] which it might be very
difficult if ever to re-establish’. The exercise in diplomatic special pleading left
Brook’s successor at the Cabinet Office, Sir Burke Trend, unmoved. For want
 silent partners 51

of annual savings totalling £8,038, MI5’s twenty-year presence in India was

ended.83 It fell to Hollis’ replacement as MI5’s Director-General, Martin
Furnival Jones, to inform his opposite number at the IB, S. P. Verma, that
the current SLO in New Delhi would not be replaced on completion of his tour.
Reflecting on the wider benefits which had accrued to both sides from their
association, Verma expressed deep regret that by withdrawing from India MI5
would sever, ‘the longstanding contact at a personal level which has proved
invaluable to us’. Concluding a sombre and plaintive exchange with Furnivall-
Jones, the DIB confessed that he, ‘did not know how he [Verma] would
manage [to run the Intelligence Bureau] without it [MI5]’.84
 3

India’s Rasputin: V. K. Krishna Menon

and the Spectre of Indian Communism

On 21 October 1954, Sir Alexander Clutterbuck, Britain’s high commissioner

in India, sat down at his desk in Albuquerque Road, New Delhi, to compose
a private and confidential letter. Clutterbuck’s note was addressed to Joe
Garner, deputy under-secretary of state at the Commonwealth Relations
Office in London. The subject was V. K. Krishna Menon, a native of the
southern Indian state of Kerala who, during the first two decades and more
of India’s post-colonial history, established a reputation as one the most
controversial and divisive figures in international politics. ‘While it is true
that Krishna has helped us [the United Kingdom] on occasion . . . ’,
Clutterbuck cautioned Garner, ‘I nevertheless rate him for my own part as
a thoroughly dangerous man, indeed as Nehru’s evil genius – a born conspir-
ator and intriguer, making mischief wherever he goes, utterly unscrupulous,
determined to mark his mark in the world, and now gradually undermining,
whether deliberately or not . . . the whole conduct of India’s foreign relations.’1
Menon’s political education had begun back in the early 1920s when he
enrolled as a student at Madras Law College. The British theosophist and
political activist, Annie Besant, took Menon under her wing and introduced
him to the Indian Home Rule movement. By the end of the decade, with the
benefit of Besant’s financial support, Menon’s commitment to Indian nation-
alism had been sharpened by a period of study at the London School of
Economics, under the tutelage of the political scientist, and prominent social-
ist, Harold Laski. It was in London, in 1935, that Menon first met Jawaharlal
Nehru. Menon went on to form a close personal and political bond with the
future Indian leader, earning plaudits from Nehru for his service as secretary of
the India League, the principal organisation promoting Indian nationalism in
pre-war Britain.2 Under Nehru’s patronage, Menon experienced a meteoric
rise to political power. In 1947, he was appointed to the prestigious post of
Indian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom. Menon’s abrasive per-
sonality and readiness to listen to and, on occasions, publicly endorse Soviet
and Communist Chinese positions on a range of international questions,
ruffled feathers in London and Washington. In the United States, government
officials shared Clutterbuck’s unflattering assessment of the Indian diplomat.
Menon was described by State Department officials as ‘venomous’, ‘violently

52
 india’s rasputin 53

anti-American’, ‘an unpleasant mischief-maker’, and ‘a tough, poisonous

bastard’.3
During the 1930s, British governments faced increasing pressure to grant
India greater political autonomy. Indian nationalist organisations in the
United Kingdom; Labour politicians such as Stafford Cripps, Aneurin Bevan,
and Michael Foot; and intellectuals, including Bertrand Russell and Harold
Laski, all pressed the case for Indian self-government in some form.4 Menon,
above all others, transformed the British-based campaign for Indian independ-
ence from an uncoordinated and ineffectual movement, into a cohesive and
dynamic political force. Between 1932 and 1947, as Secretary of the India
League, he set the Indian nationalist agenda in Britain. In the process,
Menon’s strident anti-imperial rhetoric and links to the Communist Party of
Great Britain (CPGB) brought him to the attention of MI5, and its sister
organisation, Indian Political Intelligence. Marked out as ‘one of the most
important Indian extremists in the country’,5 Menon’s political activities were
seen as a direct threat to Britain’s colonial rule in South Asia. Following the
transfer of power in 1947, the Attlee government, and its immediate successors
in Whitehall, became convinced that India, and more particularly, Krishna
Menon, constituted a weak link in the Commonwealth security chain.
With the onset of the Cold War, MI5 became fixated with the Indian
government’s vulnerability to communist subversion. Given his connections
to British communism, the Security Service opposed New Delhi’s decision to
appoint Menon to the post of Indian High Commissioner in London.6 The
nature of Menon’s links to British communists convinced senior MI5 officers
that, if not a dyed in the wool Marxist, Menon was nevertheless politically
suspect.7 Moreover, the Indian High Commissioner’s mercurial character and
eccentric behaviour encouraged British and Indian officials alike to question
his emotional stability, reinforcing the perception that Menon was unsound.
‘As long as Menon and his associates remained in the High Commissioner’s
office’, MI5’s Deputy Director-General, Guy Liddell, observed in 1949, ‘there
could be no reasonable guarantee of [Commonwealth] security as far as India
is concerned’.8 At the same time, London sought, in part, to retain Britain’s
status as a global power by preserving strong political, economic, and as far as
possible, intelligence and security links, with India.9 The Attlee government
was conscious that as an intimate of India’s premier, Menon’s position as High
Commissioner carried important implications not only for Dominion security,
but also for Indo-British relations. Post-war British administrations found
themselves attempting to foster close ties with India while simultaneously
containing a threat that New Delhi, and most especially, Krishna Menon,
were deemed to pose to Commonwealth defence.
British disquiet at Menon’s appointment as India’s High Commissioner to
the United Kingdom, and a subsequent alarm surrounding India House’s
susceptibility to communist subversion, led Whitehall to adopt a covert
54 spying in south asia

counter-subversion strategy that encompassed plans to engineer Krishna

Menon’s removal from office. Over subsequent decades, the persistence of
a shared conviction amongst senior British and American officials that
Menon was, at best, a communist fellow-traveller and, at worst, a fully paid-
up agent of the Kremlin, saw Washington and Whitehall revisit various
clandestine schemes to discredit the Indian statesman. Notably, following
India’s humiliation at the hands of China in a brief but bloody border war in
late 1962, Western intelligence agencies, with encouragement from their
political masters, dusted off secret plots to smear Menon by initiating and
amplifying newspaper reports, inside and outside India, that blamed the then
Defence Minister for his nation’s misfortune.10 As late as August 1972, two
years prior to Menon’s death, British officials in India continued to warn
London that the ageing and, by now, former Indian politician remained, ‘one

Figure 3.1 V. K. Krishna Menon (left) with Indian prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru,
London, 18 April 1949. Keystone-France /Gama-Keystone / Getty Images.
 india’s rasputin 55

of the main instruments through which the Russians have worked in India’.
Menon, Whitehall was cautioned, retained ‘very considerable influence’ with
the Indian premier, Indira Gandhi, and ‘through Krishna Menon . . . Mrs
Gandhi has been so imbued with ideas which closely fit Soviet requirements
that no very great effort is needed now to induce her to adopt policies and
attitudes which suit them well enough’.11 Such exaggerated characterisations
of Menon’s power on the part of Western diplomats were commonplace, and
misinterpreted the nature and extent of his authority over Indian government
policy. This miscalculation, as much as Menon’s own bellicose public rhetoric
and acerbic persona, complicated and constrained British and American
relations with India for much of the early cold war period.

‘Near Communist’: Krishna Menon, Congress, and the CPGB

In 1928, Krishna Menon was elected general secretary of the Commonwealth
Group of India. He quickly set about re-organising and rebranding the organ-
isation into the more militant and activist India League. Under Menon’s
leadership, the League’s ‘vicious’ anti-colonial propaganda became a thorn in
the British government’s side.12 By 1932, the League’s call for immediate
Dominion status for India was generating sufficient concern within IPI, for
the Home Office to approve the interception of Menon’s personal mail and
telephone calls, alongside those of India League’s London offices at 146
Strand.13
Within the Indian subcontinent, Menon’s transformation of the India
League was noted by leaders of the Indian National Congress (INC). From
1938, Nehru assumed the role of Menon’s political mentor. Brushing aside
complaints from Britain’s Indian community that Menon’s direction of the
India League was high-handed and authoritarian, in August that year, Nehru
made it clear that he, ‘ . . . would not consider any proposal that might tend to
bring about a cleavage between either Congress or himself and the India
League, and . . . was satisfied with the work done by the League on behalf of
the Indian National Congress in this country’.14 For his part, Menon worked
assiduously to promote the impression within British left-wing circles that he
was ‘Nehru’s right-hand man in London’. He took on the role of Nehru’s
literary agent, and acted as a chaperone to his daughter, Indira, while she
studied at Somerville College, Oxford.15 ‘Menon is very jealous for his own
prestige . . . ’, the IPI noted, ‘He has pointed out that he alone has any authority
to speak for NEHRU and that he is invariably advised by the Congress Socialist
Party on matters of importance’.16
The Security Service’s interest in Menon was piqued once the India League
established links to the CPGB. In October 1931, MI5 had assumed responsi-
bility for investigating domestic communist activity. Up until 1936, however,
there appeared, ‘no evidence of any cooperation worth mentioning between
56 spying in south asia

the [India] League and the Communist Party of Great Britain’. The seeds of
future CPGB-India League collaboration had been sown in the summer of
1935, when the Comintern’s Seventh Congress directed Communists to enter
the anti-imperialist struggle.17 In response, the CPGB offered to work with the
League against the passage of the Government of India Act, which despite
granting India’s provinces greater autonomy fell well short of nationalist
demands for self-government. Concerned that Britain’s Communists would
seek to subvert his control of the League and having previously been subjected
to their barbed criticisms, Menon initially rebuffed the CPGB.18
When the Government of India Act passed on the statute books, Menon
changed tack and resolved to widen the India League’s political base and raise
its public profile. Reaching out to the CPGB, and its 15,000 members, appeared
an obvious means of doing so. As a first step, Menon set about co-opting
leading British communists onto the Indian League’s Executive Committee,
and struck up friendships with the CGPB’s Secretary General, Harry Pollitt,
and Rajani Palme Dutt, its principal theoretician.19 Menon also began to draw
on CPGB support to pack the India League’s hitherto poorly attended meet-
ings, and to supply speakers for its public events. Moreover, the CPGB’s
newspaper, The Daily Worker, with a daily circulation of nearly 40,000, became
an important mouthpiece for the League’s propaganda. By the end of 1936,
collaboration between the India League and the CPGB was sufficiently close
for IPI to suggest that Menon, ‘took no important action of any kind in regard
to the Indian situation without prior consultation with the higher Communist
Party leaders’.20 The following year, IPI went further, arguing at one stage that
Menon’s ultimate goal was the establishment of a ‘soviet system for India’.21
Although not a member of the CPGB himself, to Britain’s security services
Menon appeared well on the way to becoming so. Or, as one intelligence report
put it, Krishna Menon appeared to be a ‘near communist’.22
The Labour Party’s leadership felt much the same way about Menon. From
its inception, the India League had nurtured links with Labour’s left-wing and,
in 1934, Menon was elected as a Labour councillor for the north London
borough of St Pancras. Senior Labour Party figures, however, became increas-
ingly uncomfortable with Menon’s association with British communists. In
November 1939, Menon’s standing in wider the Parliamentary Labour Party
plummeted when, minded of the India League’s reliance on communist
support, he refused to condemn the Soviet Union’s invasion of Finland.23 In
a bid to re-establish his Labour credentials, Menon stood as the prospective
Labour candidate for parliament in Dundee, a city with strong links to India’s
jute industry. Given his association with the CPGB, MI5 found the Dundee
Labour Party’s endorsement of Menon, ‘really rather remarkable’.24 Labour’s
National Executive Committee agreed and, in November 1940, having con-
cluded that Menon held a ‘double loyalty’, he was de-selected, and thrown out
of the Party.25
 india’s rasputin 57

In fact, Menon’s relations with the CPGB were often strained. Rank and file
communists questioned his flaky ideological credentials and disdain for
Marxism.26 To the CPGB’s hierarchy, Menon’s politics were largely immater-
ial. His value lay as a conduit between British communist leaders and the INC
leadership, and more especially, Jawaharlal Nehru. In other words, Menon and
the CPGB were drawn together by political necessity rather than a sense of
shared dogma. In a letter Menon wrote to Minocher Rustom ‘Minoo’ Masani,
a fellow LSE student and Lincoln’s Inn barrister, who was also close to Nehru at
that time, he confided that, ‘while I am a left-wing socialist, a believer in the
almost immediate establishment of a socialist equalitarian society I have little
use for the C. P. [Communist Party] here [London] or in India. I have personal
friends among them and some good ones, but my metaphysics and politics and
economics lead me in a different direction.’27
In the absence of a common strategic purpose, the India League’s relation-
ship with the CPGB began to unravel under the pressure of international
events.28 At one time a ‘frequent visitor’ to its London headquarters at 16
King Street,29 Menon’s association with the CPGB soured following the Nazi
invasion of the USSR in June 1941. Once the Soviets had joined Britain in the
fight against fascism, to Menon’s fury, the CPGB stopped attacking British
colonialism and began emphasising the need for allied unity.30 Simmering
tensions between Menon and Britain’s communists reached a head in
December that year, as the Wehrmacht stood before the gates of Moscow.
Tired of his posturing, in a succession of private exchanges with communist
leaders Menon was taken to task for, ‘behav[ing] as if it [the India League]
existed in a vacuum, seeing everything only from the point of view of its own
immediate advantage’.31 The CPGB’s disenchantment with Menon had little
impact on the India League’s propaganda activities. In early 1942, with Britain
reeling from Axis advances in North Africa and the Far East, the League
redoubled its information effort. Working around the clock, its presses
churned out literature excoriating the British government for its double
standard in professing to fight for the democracy while denying Indians their
freedom. In May 1942, IPI expressed concern that the India League’s activities
were, ‘quite definitely having a slowing-down effect on the war effort amongst
Indians in this country’.32 In response, Roger Hollis, then head of MI5’s F1
section, responsible for communist surveillance, attempted to disrupt its work
by drafting Menon for National Service. Approaching the Ministry of Labour
in January 1942, Hollis enquired whether, as ‘a leading light on the India
League, an organisation with very close affiliations with the Communist Party’,
Menon could be conscripted in some capacity.33 To Hollis’ frustration, his
efforts to register Menon for National Service came to nothing.34
In India, Menon’s activities gave cause for even greater British concern. The
Raj had come under severe pressure in 1942, as the Cripps Mission floundered,
and the INC’s ‘Quit India’ campaign of civil disobedience gathered
58 spying in south asia

momentum. Confronted by an explosive internal situation, India’s Viceroy,

the Marquess of Linlithgow, badgered the India Office to intern Menon.
Writing to the Secretary of State for India, Leo Amery in November,
Linlithgow suggested, ‘ . . . we should take pains to break up Menon and
break up the India League with him. I am certain that so long as he is there,
he will be a focus of discontent and difficulty . . . ’.35
Amery rejected Linlithgow’s appeal, explaining to a fellow conservative MP
that Menon was, ‘very clever and takes good care . . . to keep sufficiently within
the law . . . but between ourselves we are watching him carefully’.36 Unlike
fellow Indian nationalists on the subcontinent, Menon managed to remain one
step ahead of the British for the duration of the war.

‘A Considerable Threat to Commonwealth Security’: India’s High

Commissioner in London
In 1946, as Clement Attlee’s Labour government began to rebuild a nation
exhausted by six years of enervating conflict, Britain’s control over its India
Empire fractured.37 Although committed to an early transfer of power, the
Labour government’s failure to advance a timetable for Indian self-
government produced rumblings of discontent in the subcontinent. In
February, with the illusion of British imperial power crumbling, the Royal
Indian Navy mutinied in Bombay. The following month, with the internal
situation in India threatening to spiral out of control, Attlee dispatched
a Cabinet Mission to the subcontinent to negotiate terms for Britain’s
withdrawal.38 By 2 September, a transitional Indian government was in
place, with Jawaharlal Nehru acting as its premier and foreign minister.39
Eager to initiate contacts between his interim administration and European
governments, Nehru asked Krishna Menon to serve as his unofficial ambassa-
dor-at-large. Acting as Nehru’s emissary, Menon called on foreign ministries
in Paris, Copenhagen, Oslo, and Stockholm.40 It was his meeting with the
Soviet Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, in Paris, in late September 1946,
however, that provoked alarm in official British circles.
Menon’s meeting with Molotov had ostensibly been arranged to negotiate
the sale of Soviet grain surpluses to India. Frederick Pethick Lawrence,
Amery’s successor as Secretary of State for India, suspected Menon’s real
agenda was more sinister. As a fellow traveller, Pethick Lawrence argued,
Menon had seized the first opportunity, ‘to make contact with, express sym-
pathy with, and generally indicate India’s desire to line up in the international
field with, Russia rather than the Western bloc’. The idea that Menon was pro-
Soviet, had come to represent an article of faith within the India Office.
Consequently, it was thrown into a panic late in 1946, when rumours surfaced
on the subcontinent that Menon was manoeuvring to become India’s High
Commissioner to the United Kingdom. Writing to the Viceroy, Viscount
 india’s rasputin 59

Wavell, on 1 November 1946, Pethick Lawrence stressed that Menon, ‘would

not be well received here . . . and if the suggestion [that he become High
Commissioner] were made to you by Nehru or one of his colleagues it might
be as well to warn him’.41 Taking the matter up with Attlee, later that month,
Pethick Lawrence underlined Menon’s ‘disturbing’ propensity to criticise
British foreign policy. He would, Attlee was assured, ‘influence Nehru against
H. M. G. when he comes here’.42
The case against Menon set out by Pethick Lawrence was underpinned with
intelligence furnished by MI5 and SIS. This indicated that Menon had used
a meeting held with Nehru in New Delhi to lobby the interim Indian prime
minister to adopt ‘an entirely pro-Russian line in all international dealings’. In
the Security Services judgment, Menon appeared to have succeeded, ‘in some
degree at any rate’ in winning Nehru ‘over to this point of view’.43 At the same
time, Kumara Padmanabha Sivasankara (K. P. S.) Menon, an Indian civil
servant, and no relation to Krishna Menon, who would later serve as inde-
pendent India’s first Foreign Secretary and ambassador to Moscow, made
Nehru aware of domestic concern surrounding his namesakes purportedly
suspect political loyalties. In a letter sent to Nehru in December 1946,
K. P. S. Menon argued forcefully that, ‘if Krishna Menon had his way, he
would have reduced India in the eyes of the world, to the position of a Soviet
satellite . . . His judgement is warped; he thinks that Russia is always on the side
of the angels.’44
Menon’s job prospects improved in early 1947, after Attlee announced his
decision to install Lord Louis Mountbatten as India’s last Viceroy.
Mountbatten had befriended Menon in pre-war London when the British
establishment treated Indian nationalists as social pariahs. In return, Menon
never forgot Mountbatten’s generosity of spirit.45 As Attlee’s confidence in
Wavell drained away over the course of 1946, it was Menon who championed
Mountbatten as a worthy successor in Congress Party circles.46 When faced
with the formidable challenge of steering India to independence on terms
acceptable to his metropolitan masters, the Congress Party, and Muhammad
Ali Jinnah’s Muslim League, Mountbatten employed Menon as an informal
back channel to Nehru, and other senior Congress Party figures. Menon’s
adroit performance as a political go-between over the spring of 1947 impressed
Mountbatten and, in July, he supported Menon’s bid to become High
Commissioner in London.47 Writing to Attlee on 10 July, Mountbatten played
up the importance of Menon’s connection to Nehru. As one of the few
individuals outside Nehru’s cabinet with a ‘good idea of what is in the minds
of present Congress leaders’, Mountbatten argued, Menon’s presence in
London would prove invaluable in the years to come.48 Nehru made much
the same point the following day, when informing Attlee that, ‘ . . . we have
decided to appoint Krishna Menon to this post [high commissioner]. I feel sure
that with his knowledge of both India and England and the intimate contacts
60 spying in south asia

he has in both countries, he will [be] of great help to us in the new conditions
that we would have to face’.49
Attlee’s decision not to challenge Menon’s appointment drew howls of
protest from the India Office.50 Springing to Menon’s defence, Mountbatten
tartly informed a disgruntled Earl of Listowel, who had replaced Pethick
Lawrence as Secretary of State in April 1947, that while ‘“persona non grata”
in many circles at home’, as someone who enjoyed Nehru’s ‘complete confi-
dence’, Menon would be well placed to advance British interests in New
Delhi.51 MI5’s Director-General, Sir Percy Sillitoe, took a different view.
Having got wind of Menon’s posting through a chance conversation with an
India Office official, Sillitoe’s first reaction was to send Nehru ‘a friendly
warning’ regarding Menon’s links to the CPGB. To Sillitoe’s chagrin, however,
his staff quickly established that Menon’s appointment was a fait accompli, and
he abandoned the idea. Instead, Sillitoe approved a suggestion made by Sir
Philip Vickery, head of the soon to be defunct IPI, for the latter to send
a personal letter to Tirupattur Gangadharam (T. G.) Pillai Sanjeevi, the
director of India’s Intelligence Bureau. By using Vickery to convey in the
starkest possible terms, ‘the full implications of this appointment and its effect
upon our future [intelligence] liaison’, Sillitoe hoped that India’s spy chief
would bring pressure to bear on Nehru to reconsider Menon’s posting.52
Sanjeevi was eager for a declared Indian intelligence officer to be based in
London to facilitate liaison between the IB and MI5. He was informed by the
Security Service that, with Menon in post, doing so ‘would be a waste of time
because we [MI5] could not communicate information to a member of the
High Commissioner’s office’. Conceding MI5’s point, Sanjeevi, who harboured
doubts of his own in respect of Menon’s political loyalties, dropped the idea of
appointing a liaison officer for the time being.53 Not content with the warning
his Service had issued to the IB, an irritated Sillitoe also drafted
a memorandum on Menon for presentation to the Joint Intelligence
Committee (JIC). This emphasised MI5’s disquiet that Britain had been sad-
dled with an Indian High Commissioner who had, ‘close contacts with the
Communist Party leadership in this country’, and, was ‘a warm supporter of
Russia’s foreign policy while equally opposed to that of our own’. In practical
terms, Sillitoe’s paper suggested that the flow of classified British material to
the Indian High Commission be restricted once Menon was in post. ‘Cabinet
Ministers and other government officials with whom he [Menon] is likely to
come into contact with’, the head of MI5 cautioned, ‘will have to be warned
about him’.54
Contrary to British expectations, once in London, Krishna Menon enjoyed
a honeymoon period as India’s High Commissioner.55 Menon played a pivotal
role in negotiations that made it possible for India to remain within the
Commonwealth as a sovereign republic, under the terms of ‘The London
Declaration’.56 ‘It is curious’, Sir Stafford Cripps, Britain’s Chancellor of the
 india’s rasputin 61

Exchequer, wrote to Nehru, in April 1949, ‘ . . . that Krishna the revolutionary,

the anti-British Indian Leaguer, has become one of the chief architects of the
new and invigorated Commonwealth of Nations!’57 Indeed, after a difficult
start, relations between the Attlee and Nehru government improved consider-
ably during the course of 1949. By then, Anglo-Indian friction generated by the
Indo-Pakistani conflict over Kashmir and the ‘police action’ that enforced
Hyderabad’s integration into the Indian Union, had eased somewhat.58
India’s decision to remain in the Commonwealth, and booming bilateral
trade, it seemed, augured well for future British-Indian relations. Writing to
Britain’s High Commissioner to India, Sir Archibald Nye, on 15 March 1949,
Philip Noel-Baker, Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, expressed
satisfaction that, ‘general relations between London and Delhi are improving’.
The perennial dark cloud on an otherwise sunny horizon remained Krishna
Menon. With Menon looking set to stay in London ‘for a considerable time to
come’, British officials fretted over the diplomatic storm that would ensue
were India to discover the full extent of its exclusion from Dominion intelli-
gence sharing arrangements. As Noel-Baker noted, the British continued, ‘not
in the least [to] trust the security or the general working of his [Menon’s]
Office’. The long-term prospects for Anglo-Indian relations would ‘undoubt-
edly’ improve, the British minister mused, if Menon were replaced as India’s
High Commissioner with ‘someone sensible’.59
British misgivings surrounding Menon festered amidst a troubling back-
drop of escalating Cold War tension. In the spring of 1948, Czechoslovakia
came under communist control, the Western allies clashed with the Soviets
over German currency reform and economic liberalisation, and in June the
Berlin Blockade began. The spectre of renewed hostilities in Europe, produced
a groundswell of anti-communist sentiment in Britain. On the domestic front,
the Labour Party prohibited cooperation with domestic communists and
purged several of its more left-wing members. The following year, the
Transport and General Workers Union expelled shop-stewards linked to the
CPGB and barred communists from holding union posts.60 Within Whitehall,
Attlee established a secret cabinet committee, GEN 183, to investigate subver-
sive activity. The introduction of ‘negative vetting’ followed, under which the
names of government officials working in sensitive areas were cross referenced
against MI5’s files.61 Although not comparable with the McCarthyite purges
that occurred subsequently in the United States, British civil servants found to
have communist connections were sacked, forced to resign, or transferred to
non-sensitive posts.62
Back in 1948, when Sanjeevi had travelled to London for talks with the
Security Service, Philip Vickery had taken the opportunity to remind his
Indian colleague of the detrimental effect that Krishna Menon was having on
Anglo-Indian intelligence liaison.63 In due course, Sanjeevi ensured that back
in New Delhi, the Home Ministry was made fully aware that Menon’s claim to
62 spying in south asia

enjoy, ‘the trust and confidence of Mr. Attlee and his colleagues . . . was not
true’.64 Sanjeevi’s interactions with Menon during the DIB’s visit to the UK
proved to be less amicable. In one report of a stormy encounter with the High
Commissioner which Sanjeevi sent to his boss, and India’s Home minister,
Vallabhbhai Patel, the DIB stated that Menon had derided the Indian govern-
ment’s decision to crackdown on communist insurgents, labelling the policy as
‘barbarous and inhuman’. ‘[T]he Government of India could with greater
advantage use the Intelligence Bureau for rounding up black-marketeers and
agents of corruption’, Sanjeevi quoted Menon as saying, ‘instead [of] hounding
and harassing the communists’. In the process of explaining the Intelligence
Bureau’s position on indigenous communism to Menon, Sanjeevi relayed, he
had been interrupted repeatedly by an exercised Menon who alleged that the
DIB was intercepting and opening his mail.65 Responding to evidence offered
by Sanjeevi of atrocities committed by Indian communists, Menon supposedly
retorted, ‘ . . . that it was I [Sanjeevi] who was murdering Communists’.66
A furious Patel complained to Nehru that in challenging government policy,
and maligning the Intelligence Bureau, Menon had grossly exceeded his
authority.67 Nehru agreed that Menon’s behaviour had been ‘totally inexcus-
able’. The high commissioner received a stiff reprimand from the prime
minister for suggesting that the Indian government ‘tolerate’ a ‘virulent and
violent’ campaign of murder and criminality waged by the country’s
communists.68 Menon subsequently apologised to Patel for slandering the
Intelligence Bureau and Home Ministry and the row blew over.69
The persistence of a strong mutual enmity between Menon and the IB was
all too apparent, however, in a series of private and exculpatory letters that the
high commissioner sent to Nehru. Pulling no punches, Menon accused
Sanjeevi of being ‘an agent provocateur’ whose purported attempt to smear
his name ought to be considered, ‘not even fair game in Intelligence work,
unless it is intelligence as applied to enemy nationals when at war’. Denying
that he had any particular concern for the plight of India’s communists,
Menon added that, nevertheless, he was uneasy at ‘the imprisonment of people
[in India] on the basis of secret service information’. During his interview with
Sanjeevi, Menon conceded, he had said, ‘that police reports on political
opinions made, as they must be, by policemen who knew little about these
affairs, placed people at the mercy of the police and the State would become
a police state . . . ’.70 Menon remained bitter that he had, in his estimation, been
the unwitting victim of a ploy orchestrated between MI5 and the Intelligence
Bureau to blot his copybook with Nehru. Whether MI5 and Sanjeevi had
colluded to undermine Menon remains uncertain. Any such operation cer-
tainly proved ineffectual. Writing to Menon, in March 1949, Nehru made clear
where his principal loyalty lay. Characterising Patel as ‘nervous’ and unduly
sensitive to criticism after the censure he had received following Mohandas
Gandhi’s assassination in January 1948, Nehru reassured Menon that, ‘I think
 india’s rasputin 63

I have a fairly full realization of the pinpricks and other difficulties you have to
contend against. I know that there is a small group bent on maligning you and
on pushing you out of India House. This is not only irritating to you, but at
least as much to me.’71
Nehru’s expressions of faith in Menon did not stop MI5 from exploring
ways to cut the high commissioner’s tenure in London short. In May 1949,
having reviewed Menon’s case file, Guy Liddell’s conviction hardened that the
time had come to act decisively against the Indian diplomat.72 Since 1947,
Menon had troubled MI5 by, amongst other things, surreptitiously supporting
the India League’s ongoing anti-colonial activities.73 Of more concern to MI5,
however, was Menon’s long-term affair with Bridget Tunnard, an India League
secretary connected to the CPGB. In Liddell’s judgement, Menon’s relation-
ship with Tunnard guaranteed, ‘that anything of interest that MENON hears
about will reach the Communist Party through her’. With MI5 having categor-
ised India’s high commissioner as a serious security risk, Liddell questioned
whether, ‘if it were at all possible, it would be better to cut our losses and get rid
of MENON’.74 In taking such action, MI5 felt confident that they could rely on
India’s Intelligence Bureau to, ‘try and get some ammunition for us to get
MENON’.75 Likewise, while senior MI5 officers, including Vickery and Dick
White, ruled out the possibility of conducting a formally sanctioned joint
operation with the IB against Menon, the Security Service did point their
Indian colleagues towards a firm of private detectives who began searching
for evidence of illegality and impropriety in Menon’s private life.76 Other MI5
officers saw the aggressive targeting of Menon as counterproductive . Pushing
Menon out of India House, some in the Security Service contended, risked,
‘driv[ing] him back into the Communist fold carrying with him
Commonwealth Defence secrets which he must have acquired as Nehru’s
right-hand man at the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conferences’.77
Sillitoe found Liddell’s argument the more persuasive. While Menon may
have distanced himself from British communists since becoming high com-
missioner, MI5’s Director-General conceded, he remained ‘at least’ a fellow
traveller, and as such, a considerable threat to Commonwealth security.78 In
July that year, when briefing a closed session of the JIC on security in the
Dominions, Liddell confirmed to fellow members of the British intelligence
community, ‘that we [MI5] were doing what we could to get rid of Krishna
MENON’.79

Pushing Regime Change

In March 1950, British security concerns surrounding Menon became public
when the London Daily Graphic broke a story that communists were on the
payroll of India House. ‘M.I.5 are concerned’, the Graphic trumpeted, ‘at [the]
possible leakage of Imperial defence secrets in London through Communist
64 spying in south asia

penetration of the offices of the High Commissioner for India’.80 Fearful of the
political fallout, both at home and abroad, that would follow on from India
House’s exposure as a nest of communist subversion, Whitehall, nevertheless,
dithered over how to respond. It was not until early 1951, with the whiff of the
treachery of British diplomats Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean hanging in
the air, and with the CRO under new leadership, that a decision was made to
tackle the security problem at India House head-on.81 On 17 April 1951,
Patrick Gordon Walker, who had replaced Noel-Baker as Secretary of State
for Commonwealth Relations, met with Sir Percy Sillitoe at the CRO. Sillitoe
brought an MI5 dossier to the meeting that documented Krishna Menon’s
contacts with British communists stretching back to 1936. The dossier
acknowledged that Menon had never been a member of the CPGB. It made
much, nonetheless, of his friendships with leading British communists.82
Furthermore, evidence which suggested that Menon had broken with the
CPGB after becoming Indian high commissioner was downplayed by MI5.
Gordon Walker displayed less interest in Menon’s past, however, than in the
fourteen ‘communists and fellow-travellers’ that Sillitoe listed as working for
India House, one of whom, a certain P. N. Haksar, headed its external affairs
department.83 Haksar had been a communist in his youth. In common with
many Indian, and British, inter-war, left-wing activists, he had turned away
from communism during the Second World War. To MI5, the bona fides of
Haksar’s political evolution remained suspect and the Security Service laid
a heavy emphasis on his former flirtation with Marxism.84
Of even more concern to MI5 than Haksar, was Patsy Pillay. Married to
a South African Indian, Pillay and her husband had been members of the South
African Communist Party. They joined the Brondsbury branch of the CPGB
on their arrival in Britain, in January 1949. ‘Much to the delight of King Street’,
one MI5 officer observed, Pillay had gone on to secure a job in Menon’s private
office.85 There was ‘no doubt’, in MI5’s opinion, that the CPGB would exploit
Pillay’s access to classified information passing through India House, ‘when it
suited them.’ Sillitoe informed Gordon Walker that MI5 had cautioned India’s
Intelligence Bureau that a communist cell was operating inside India House on
three separate occasions, in December 1948, July 1949, and December 1950.
The Indian government had passed the warnings on to Menon and empha-
sised the security risks involved in retaining communists on his staff. It
appeared, Sillitoe added, that Menon had felt unable, or was simply unwilling,
to purge the Indian high commission of communists. ‘Taking everything into
account’, Sillitoe advised Gordon Walker, ‘Menon and the offices of the Indian
High Commission represent a security risk.’86 Sillitoe left the CRO ‘entirely
convinced’ that Gordon Walker had accepted that the security case against
Menon was compelling. The Secretary of State, MI5’s Director-General noted,
now regarded India’s high commissioner ‘as a serious menace to security’ and
wanted ‘to get rid of MENON’.87 Gordon Walker had clashed repeatedly with
 india’s rasputin 65

Menon after taking charge at the CRO and their mutual antipathy undoubt-
edly encouraged the British minister to favour Menon’s removal. At one stage,
Menon’s ‘bitter tirades of personal abuse’ and ‘unprovoked attacks’ on Gordon
Walker prompted the CRO to complain to the Indian government at their high
commissioner’s conduct.88 Common gossip related to Menon’s combustible
personality and lurid rumours surrounding his personal life that circulated
amongst the corridors of Whitehall meant that he was neither liked nor trusted
by British officials, and only marginally more popular back in New Delhi.89 As
Sillitoe was well aware, many people in India shared MI5’s assessment that
Menon was ‘a first class intriguer’ with ‘a bad moral record’ and, as such, would
be content to see the back of him.90
On 1 May, Sillitoe and Gordon Walker met again to discuss the practicalities
of extricating Menon from India House. The option most favoured was to
make a direct appeal to Nehru for Menon’s removal. Three days later, Sillitoe
called at 10 Downing Street to update Attlee on the Menon situation, and to lay
the groundwork for an approach to India’s prime minister. Attlee had clashed
with Menon as far back as 1928, when the future British premier had sat on the
Simon Commission. In 1940, Attlee had been instrumental in Menon’s expul-
sion from the Labour Party.91 In contrast, having previously been suspicious of
the Security Service, Attlee had grown to hold both Sillitoe, and MI5, in high
regard.92 Menon’s bulky MI5 file impressed Attlee. ‘The Prime Minister was
very interested in what I had to say’, Sillitoe recorded after their meeting,
‘especially with regard to the Communists and Fellow Travellers on Menon’s
staff’.93 In the past, Menon’s ‘intimate’ relationship with Nehru had dissuaded
the British from airing their concerns over India House in New Delhi.94
Denouncing a senior Indian official, it was felt, and more so, Menon, might
be interpreted by Nehru as ‘a direct criticism of his own judgement’, and, ‘have
the effect of irritating him and inviting him to take an entrenched position’.95
Moreover, MI5 was conscious that as a consequence of Nehru’s personal
experience as a political agitator who had been branded a communist by the
colonial state, the Indian leader held a ‘critical view’ of intelligence profes-
sionals in general, and British intelligence officers, in particular.96 Tellingly,
when it came to Menon, although perturbed by the Indian high commission-
er’s communist connections, Sanjeevi’s successor, B. N. Mullik, was happy for
MI5 to tackle a thorny security question that threatened to prove politically
toxic.97
Before deciding whether to recommend a British approach to Nehru,
Gordon Walker took the precaution of consulting Sir Archibald Nye in New
Delhi.98 To bring Nye up to speed on Menon, Sillitoe arranged for him to
receive a briefing from Eric Kitchen, who had taken over from Bill U’ren as
MI5’s Indian SLO, in June 1950.99 Nye’s advice, which Gordon Walker
accepted, was not to approach Nehru on such a sensitive matter, and instead,
to raise the issue of India House’s vulnerability to communist subversion with
66 spying in south asia

India’s Minister for Home Affairs, Rajaji Rajagopalachari.100 On 12 June, Nye

secured an interview Rajagopalachari. Having informed the Indian minister
that several of Menon’s staff had connections to the CPGB, Nye suggested that,
henceforth, the British government would prefer to channel sensitive informa-
tion to New Delhi directly through the British high commission, and bypass
India House. To Nye’s disappointment, Rajagopalachari sidestepped his pro-
posal, and merely asked that MI5 forward the names of communists working
for Menon to Mullik.101 News of Nye’s encounter with Rajagopalachari soon
reached Menon. Writing angrily to Nehru, Menon rubbished the charge that
India House was susceptible to communist subversion. The Attlee govern-
ment’s scurrilous accusation, Menon raged, merely reflected its petty frustra-
tion that since 1947 India had proved willing and able to exercise autonomy in
the conduct of its international affairs.102
Discounting Menon’s bluster, MI5 took heart from signs that the timing of
Nye’s intervention had coincided with a groundswell of Indian dissatisfaction
over Menon’s performance in London. A decision that Menon took to bypass
formal channels and purchase jeeps for India’s army from European suppliers
backfired spectacularly. When delivered, the vehicles were declared unusable.
India’s press accused Menon of wasting £3 million, while pocketing a sizable
commission on the jeep deal for himself.103 In July 1951, with Menon fighting
for his political life, Alex Kellar, of MI5’s Overseas (E) branch, reflected
sanguinely that, ‘Something may come of this [Nye’s] approach. Nehru,
although so unpredictable, may in any event feel, and for other reasons, that
a change in High commissioner in London is desirable . . . ’.104 Kellar’s opti-
mism appeared well founded. Cabling London on 8 November, Nye confirmed
that a well-placed source, ‘under an oath of secrecy’, had confided in him that
Menon’s tenure as high commissioner might be about to end.105 Nye’s source
was Mountbatten, who had become close to Nehru during his stint as India’s
last Viceroy. No doubt in collusion with Whitehall, and having obtained
Rajagopalachari’s prior consent, Mountbatten had written privately to
Nehru, on 21 September, and urged him to sack Menon. Skirting around the
security issue, Mountbatten instead used the pretext of Menon’s failing health
to press for his removal. Menon had a long history of physical and psycho-
logical infirmity. Following the death of his father in 1935, and the collapse of
a long-term relationship, Menon had suffered a nervous breakdown and been
hospitalised.106 During the course of his rehabilitation, Menon became
dependent on luminal, a barbiturate based sedative, the side-effects of which
included confusion, loss of consciousness, and paranoia.107 After he had
appeared incoherent in public on several occasions in early 1951, stories
began circulating that Menon had contracted tuberculosis, had a heart condi-
tion, was addicted to drugs, and had experienced a second nervous
breakdown.108 By, in Nye’s words, ‘not telling the truth, the whole truth and
nothing but the truth’, Mountbatten furnished Nehru with a plausible, and
 india’s rasputin 67

politically acceptable, excuse to terminate Menon’s service as India’s high

commissioner.109
Facing pressure in India to recall Menon, in September 1951, Nehru dis-
patched his personal assistant, Mac Mathai, to London, to persuade Menon to
take an extended leave of absence. On reaching India House, Mathai found
Menon to be, ‘terribly under the influence of drugs . . . an ill man . . . almost
mad’.110 Ignoring Mathai’s plea to stand down on the grounds of ill health,
Menon sent Nehru a raft of medical certificates attesting to his excellent
physical and mental condition and, at one point, somewhat incongruously,
threatened suicide were he to be forced from office.111 Commenting on the
unfolding drama, Nye observed to the CRO that, ‘Krishna Menon seems to
have dug his toes in and is fighting a strong rear-guard action to remain in his
present job. I am told that Nehru is rather disgusted with Menon’s attitude.’112
Nehru was unwilling, nevertheless, to risk a public schism with Menon,
particularly with India’s first general election looming. Equally, with the
Conservative Party having been returned to office that October, Nehru worried
that sacking Menon would be interpreted as a sop to Churchill’s
government.113 Consequently, the Indian premier resigned himself to
a gradual transition of power at India House. With Menon’s term as high
commissioner due to expire early the following year, Nye was equally prag-
matic. The prudent course, he suggested to London, was now to sit out
Menon’s final months in office, rather than risk unnecessarily ruffling Indian
feathers.114 The CRO was less eager to let the matter of Menon drop. In the
form of Hastings Ismay, the CRO had a new Secretary of State who maintained
that there was, ‘no shadow of doubt that that K[rishna] M[enon]’s removal
would be in the best interests of both England and India’.115 Ultimately, with
Nehru preoccupied by pressing domestic issues in the first half of 1952, time
ran out on the CRO, and thoughts of a further approach to New Delhi in
respect of Menon were shelved.
At the same time, the Security Service’s began to fret that rather than return
to New Delhi on leaving India House, or accepting another overseas posting,
Menon might remain in London in a private capacity. Such an unwelcome
development, MI5 worried, could see Menon, ‘ . . . openly assume control of
the India League and probably resume his King Street association and friend-
ships’. Given his ‘highly complex and unscrupulous character’, MI5 officers
speculated that, as a free agent, Menon would be tempted to, ‘pass information
acquired during his period in office to the Communists’.116 British unease grew
during the spring of 1952 after Menon rejected Nehru’s offer of a seat in his
cabinet, the Vice-Chancellorship of Delhi University, and the Indian Embassy
in Moscow.117 To MI5’s chagrin, Menon seemed notably reluctant to leave
Britain’s shores. Menon’s successor arrived in London in July. An efficient, if
staid administrator, Bal Gangadhar Kher, was a former Governor of Bombay,
who had not stepped foot in United Kingdom for forty years. Even so, and as
68 spying in south asia

The Times pointedly observed, ‘among officials in London his [Kher’s]

appointment is evidently regarded as most welcome’.118 Substantiating MI5’s
suspicion that he would not ‘sit quiet’, Menon remained in London following
Kher’s arrival, and announced plans to reconstitute the India League.119 By
appearing uninvited at diplomatic receptions, and encouraging the impression
that he continued to speak for Nehru, Menon acted as ‘a constant thorn in the
flesh of his successor’.120 Almost as keen as the British to find him an alterna-
tive form of employment, Nehru finally cajoled Menon into joining the Indian
delegation at the United Nations General Assembly in New York.121 In the
autumn of 1952, to MI5’s considerable relief, Krishna Menon left Britain with
a political whimper, rather than a diplomatic bang.

Éminence grise
On departing from the UK, Menon travelled directly to New York, where he
assumed leadership of India’s UN delegation. Acting as a self-appointed
international mediator during the Korea, Indochina, Suez, and Taiwan
Straits crises in the early 1950s, Menon achieved global renown as
a diplomatic troubleshooter, or, as the then British foreign secretary, Harold
Macmillan, put it, ‘Nehru’s Harry Hopkins’.122 In February 1956, dismissing
misgivings voiced by some his senior ministers, Nehru rewarded Menon’s
efforts by shoehorning him into the Indian cabinet as minister without port-
folio. Elected to the Lok Sabha, the lower house of India’s parliament, for the
constituency of north Bombay the following year, in April 1957 Menon was
promoted again, leapfrogging more established cabinet colleagues to become
India’s defence minister. Along the way, Menon’s intellectual arrogance,
duplicity, and cynical abuse of his relationship with Nehru, antagonised
a sizable cross-section of Indian political opinion. Menon’s militant socialism,
fervent anti-colonialism, and willingness to engage with Soviet and Chinese
Communists, induced a similar reaction amongst British and American pol-
icymakers and their political constituencies. One study of Indo-American
relations undertaken in the United States at the time, underlined Menon’s
status as a pariah. A series of interviews conducted with prominent American
academics, journalists, businessmen, and government officials, revealed the
existence of a deep-seated and almost universal antipathy to Menon.
Respondents labelled the Indian statesman variously as, ‘a devil incarnate’, ‘a
Machiavelli with a swelled head’, and ‘a pro-Communist anti-American black-
mail agent’.123
Personality traits aside, Menon’s relations with British and American offi-
cials continued to be coloured by a common perception that he leaned towards
Moscow. Still, in the absence of a smoking gun implicating Menon in espion-
age activities, the CRO, and their colleagues at the British Foreign Office (FO),
broadly discounted the possibility that Menon was an active Soviet agent.124
 india’s rasputin 69

The same could not be said on the other side of Atlantic. The British may have
concluded that Menon was not a communist stooge but, as Whitehall acknow-
ledged, ‘it was undoubtedly a fact, and a relevant one, that many high-ranking
Americans did hold this view’.125 President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State,
John Foster Dulles, counted as a prominent ‘Menophobe’. As early as
January 1947, when serving as a Republican Party advisor to America’s UN
delegation, Dulles caused a stir by publicly implying that Nehru’s interim
Indian government was under communist influence. Hauled into the State
department to explain his indiscretion, a contrite Dulles insisted that he had
not meant to suggest that India was a Soviet pawn. Rather, his analysis of
Indian politics was based upon observations of India’s UN delegation, and,
more especially, Krishna Menon, whom Dulles described as a ‘confirmed
Marxian’ and a disciple of Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov.126
The Truman administration had taken little interest in Menon.127 In con-
trast, under the Eisenhower government, America’s distaste for Menon inten-
sified dramatically. Fed details of his links to British communists by MI5, and
bitterly critical of his unsolicited intercessions into East-West disputes,
Eisenhower’s administration formed a bad impression of Menon.128 In John
Foster Dulles’ moralistic vision of a binary Cold War world, where good battled
evil, Menon was branded as, ‘a pretty bad fellow’ and a ‘troublemaker’.129 In
turn, Menon bridled at Dulles’ criticism of Indian non-alignment, promotion of
a US-Pakistani alliance, and tolerance of Portuguese colonialism.130 With
a ‘formidable incompatibility of temperament’, adding spice to their political
differences, Dulles and Menon clashed repeatedly in the 1950s.131 In July 1955,
in the aftermath of the first Taiwan straits crisis, one typically prickly exchange
saw Dulles excoriate Menon for acting as a communist Chinese lackey. In
response, Menon made it widely known that he regarded Dulles as the principal
obstacle to peace and stability in Asia. Rather than engage meaningfully with
the substantive international issues of the day, contemporary observes noted
that ‘a great part’ of the diplomatic interplay between Dulles and Menon was
invariably, ‘taken up with the process of getting under each other’s skins’.132
In April 1957, to Washington’s alarm, the New York Times opined that
Nehru’s ‘faintly satanic confidante’ appeared set fair to exert a growing and
malevolent influence over India’s foreign policy.133 Uncomfortably for the
Eisenhower administration, Menon’s rise to political prominence in
the second half of the 1950s coincided with a realisation on the part of the
United States that India’s burgeoning population, untapped economic
resources, latent military power, and democratic credentials represented
a valuable Cold War prize. In January 1961, John F. Kennedy’s arrival in the
White House added additional impetus to the reorientation in American
thinking towards India that had begun under Eisenhower.134 The Kennedy
administration, however, soon found its relationship with India, and Krishna
Menon, under strain. Kennedy was disappointed to find Nehru listless and
70 spying in south asia

disengaged when they met in Washington, in November, and failed to estab-

lish a rapport with the ageing Indian premier.135 Menon too, quickly found
himself on the wrong side of the New Frontier after launching barbed attacks
on Kennedy’s handling of a range of foreign policy issues, from the Congo
crisis to Kashmir. Although irked by Menon’s personal invective, Kennedy’s
overriding concern was that it risked poisoning American public opinion and
would erode congressional support for the appropriation of much-needed US
economic aid to India.136 In December 1961, Kennedy’s broader concern
proved prescient, although, on this occasion, Krishna Menon was, it appeared,
unjustly blamed for undermining bilateral relations. Stung by criticism that his
government had failed to prevent China annexing Indian territory on the
nation’s northern border, Nehru authorised the use of military force to end
Portugal’s 460-year presence in the enclaves of Goa, Daman, and Diu, on
India’s Western coast. The Indian press characterised the Goa ‘police action’ as
‘Krishna Menon’s War’, and Anglo-American officials speculated whether
India’s defence minister had, in fact, orchestrated the military operation.137
Britain’s chief of defence staff, Lord Mountbatten, certainly felt so, observing
bitterly that, ‘I will never believe he [Nehru] cooked [it] up.’138 With a large
Goan community resident in his north Bombay parliamentary constituency,
America’s press were quick to point out that Krishna Menon had a strong
political interest in giving the Portuguese a bloody nose.139 Analysts inside the
CIA concluded otherwise. While many in Washington were only too willing to
point a finger of blame at Menon, Langley’s judgement was that Nehru had
pulled the strings over Goa and allowed his defence minister to be served up to
the international community as a convenient ‘whipping boy’.140
Within India, perceptions of the CIA’s interest in Menon extended beyond
political analysis and into the realms of covert action. While preparing to
launch his campaign for parliament in 1957, Menon had been warned by
Nehru that internal and external forces were determined to compromise his
candidacy. The Indian premier claimed that both the Catholic Church in India,
and the Democratic Research Service, an anti-communist propaganda organ-
isation founded by Minoo Masani, who turned to the right politically in the
1940s, were plotting to ‘work against’ Menon’s election. The Democratic
Research Service, along with the Indian Congress for Cultural Freedom,
where Masani was president, served as ‘front groups’ for clandestine
American propaganda activities. Both received funding, if not direct political
direction, from the CIA. By stating that ‘foreign agencies will also be indirectly
involved’ in attempting to discredit Menon in Bombay, Nehru was alluding to
Langley’s active involvement in India’s internal politics.141 Communist presses
in the subcontinent, with the benefit of generous financial support from
Moscow, picked up and promoted a narrative that American intelligence
agencies had ruthlessly targeted Menon in a protracted and pernicious cam-
paign of disinformation. ‘The CIA methodically went about from one election
 india’s rasputin 71

to another in preparing the ground to remove Menon from the political scene’,
an American official who defected to the Soviet Union later claimed. ‘The
interference of the United States in the elections in northern Bombay, where
Krishna Menon was a candidate, were crude and brutal.’142 According to
one Indian communist publication, Robert Boies, the US consul in Bombay,
made a habit of touring the city in his official car and handing out wads of cash
to returning officers in a bid to inflate the votes of Menon’s political
opponents.143
Nehru was scornful of the ‘devious methods’ employed by supposedly unscru-
pulous political enemies of Menon. Shortly before the Goa crisis broke, the
Executive Committee of the Bombay Pradesh Youth Congress passed
a resolution opposing Menon’s candidature in Bombay. The resolution stated
that, ‘in the case of Shri Krishna Menon, many of us feel that his behaviour on
several questions about the Communist countries and specially the Chinese
aggression and his association with Communists, ex-Communists and fellow
travellers in India has made him suspect in the eyes of youth and other citizens of
India’. ‘If Shri Menon is not pro-Communist’, another Menon critic challenged
Nehru, ‘one wonders why the Communists of India are pro-Menon . . . It is well-
known that the Communists of India do not support anyone unless their
purpose is served in one way of the other.’ Nehru responded to such ad hominem
attacks by doubling down and declaring that he would support Menon, ‘all the
more’. ‘It seems to me that most of the people who are opposing him [Menon]’,
the Indian prime minister informed one detractor, ‘have either no understand-
ing of our policy or deliberately do not like it’.144
Nehru’s unwavering support for Menon unnerved British and American
officials who feared that, either by default or design, a door was being left open
for Krishna Menon to step into his mentor’s shoes. Under the headline ‘Who’s
Next’, in the summer of 1962, Time magazine ran a rule over Nehru’s likely
successors as prime minister. Speculating that the Congress Party favoured
a ‘straw man’ for the top job, Time installed India’s ‘bland’ home minister, Lal
Bahadur Shastri as the frontrunner to become India’s next leader. Morarji
Desai from the conservative wing of the Congress Party, and the Socialist
leader, Jayaprakash Narayan, were also mentioned as potential prime ministers
in waiting. According to Time, however, Nehru’s preferred candidate was
Krishna Menon.145 Intriguingly, as the doyen of Congress’ left-wing, Menon
was also Moscow’s choice to replace Nehru. In May 1962, in a singularly
ineffective covert operation, the Soviet presidium, presumably without
Menon’s knowledge, authorised the KGB residency in New Delhi to bankroll
a pro-Menon leadership drive.146 Menon’s appearance as a runner in the
premiership unnerved the Kennedy administration. Robert Komer, who
covered the India brief in the White House, cautioned his boss, and
Kennedy’s national security advisor, McGeorge Bundy: ‘If there’s even a one
in five chance [of Menon seizing power], we ought to run plenty scared.’147
72 spying in south asia

The possibility that Menon might seize power through unconstitutional

means also entered the minds of Western officials.148 Menon’s political rivals
in India had repeatedly assured the British that he retained the capacity to launch
a coup d’état. In February 1962, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit informed Sir David
Eccles, Britain’s minister of education, that, ‘Krishna Menon had threatened the
Prime Minister with a military coup if Mr. Nehru refused to give the order to
invade [Goa].’ Her brother, Pandit added, had refused to challenge Menon at the
time, judging that his protégé’s growing power over India’s defence establish-
ment made him, ‘capable, in all senses of the word’, of following through on his
threat. Gore-Booth dismissed Pandit’s allegation as overblown. Menon’s political
ambition was indeed palpable, the British high commissioner acknowledged, but
‘he must be aware of his own unpopularity . . . with a considerable proportion of
the Army, and in political circles, which must make him doubt whether a coup
would be successful’. In sum, it appeared to the British that Menon was ‘highly
unlikely’ to consider ‘a naked seizure of power’, not least because with the
outcome so uncertain, ‘Mr. Menon is too clever to run this kind of risk.’149
Nonetheless, rumours that Menon was busy consolidating his grip over India’s
armed forces in preparation for ‘a forcible bid for power’, continued to circulate
in New Delhi throughout the summer of 1962.150
In the autumn of that year, diplomatic gossip was overtaken by a dramatic
and unexpected turn of events. On 20 October, the catalyst for Krishna
Menon’s political downfall appeared when a long simmering border dispute
between India and the PRC erupted into open conflict. Within a week, Indian
forces had been routed by the People’s Liberation Army who occupied large
swathes of northern India. With the nation facing an ignominious defeat, on
26 October, a shell-shocked Nehru qualified his commitment to non-
alignment, and made an unprecedented appeal for international ‘sympathy
and support’.151 Determined to leverage India’s desperate need for military
assistance to bring about a ‘closer understanding’ between India and the West,
American officials were also inclined, ‘to have decently in mind the pounding
we have been taking from Krishna Menon’.152 On 23 October, the US ambas-
sador in New Delhi, John Kenneth Galbraith, candidly informed India’s
foreign secretary, M. J. Desai, that Krishna Menon’s retention of the defence
portfolio represented one of the ‘more serious problems’ standing in the way of
US military aid to India.153 Two days later, on 25 October, Galbraith sent
a private backchannel message to Kennedy through his embassy’s CIA station
in which he reiterated the idea of linking the provision of American military
support to Menon’s, ‘effective elimination from [the Indian] Defense-UN
scene’.154 The next morning, when Kennedy met with India’s ambassador in
Washington, B. K. Nehru, the President remarked pointedly that, ‘We don’t
want to, in any way . . . to have Krishna enter into this . . . he is a disaster and
makes the thing much more complicated. Your judgment is that he will
continue, however, as defense minister?’155 Although emphasising, ‘the
 india’s rasputin 73

importance of avoiding the slightest appearance of U.S. initiative and respon-

sibility in removing Menon’, the White House made it known to Galbraith that
in dealing with the Menon ‘problem’ it was, ‘leaving [the] next steps up to
you’.156
Galbraith responded by hatching a plan with Carl Kaysen, Kennedy’s deputy
national security advisor, to co-opt British support for a covert scheme
designed to discredit Menon. Specifically, it was suggested to the British
government that stories could be planted in European newspapers by intelli-
gence and propaganda agencies that stressed Menon’s culpability for India’s
humiliation at the hands of the Chinese. While agreeing that Menon was
‘somewhat ill in mind’, the British rejected the American approach.157
Attacking Menon in the Western press, Britain’s ambassador in Washington,
David Ormsby Gore, advised Kaysen, was ‘more likely to save Menon than
send him under’.158 Ultimately, Krishna Menon’s fate was sealed not by
clandestine intrigues hatched in Washington or London, but by Indian public
opinion. Exposed to charges that his mismanagement of the defence portfolio
had left India at the mercy of the perfidious Chinese, by the end of
October 1962 Indians were clamouring for Menon’s head.159 His compatriots
took to silencing Menon, the British noted, by sabotaging his microphone at
open-air meetings.160 After a last ditch bid by Nehru to save his friend’s
political career floundered, Menon resigned from the Indian cabinet on
7 November 1962.161

India’s Rasputin?
British and American policymakers never reaped the political dividend of
closer relations with India that they anticipated would follow once Krishna
Menon’s purportedly Machiavellian hold over Nehru had been severed. After
a brief honeymoon period between late 1962 and early 1963, when Britain and
the United States were lauded in New Delhi for furnishing India with diplo-
matic and military support against the Chinese, Western relations with
Nehru’s government came under renewed strain. By the middle of 1963, an
embittered Nehru had grown to resent British and American attempts to
extract a political quid pro quo from his government in return for continued
military assistance. Determined to preserve the appearance, if not the sub-
stance, of Indian non-alignment, Nehru fought an acrimonious, and ultimately
successful, rear-guard action against British and American efforts to negotiate
an air defence pact with India.162 Similarly, having long painted Menon as
a major barrier to an improvement in Indo-Pakistani relations, Britain and the
United States found it no easier to facilitate progress towards a Kashmir
settlement in his absence, despite cajoling India and Pakistan to undertake
six rounds of bilateral talks.163 Indeed, by the end of 1963, frustrated at its
inability to impose external solutions on complex regional problems, and with
74 spying in south asia

a new president in the White House whose focus was increasingly drawn to
events elsewhere in Asia, India slipped down the list of Washington’s global
priorities. In the absence of American support, the British government found
its voice on the Indian subcontinent increasingly marginalised.
All too often in the early Cold War period, officials in London and
Washington attributed the tensions that bedevilled their interaction with
India to Krishna Menon’s malevolence. The inconvenient truth was that
India, Britain, and the United States, held different, and often incompatible
perspectives, on how to tackle the Cold War challenges that confronted the
subcontinent. Invariably, each side preferred to demonise the baleful actions of
individual ‘foreign devils’ rather than face up to an uncomfortable reality.
Looking back on his tumultuous political career, Krishna Menon asserted that
he had been neither, ‘a buffoon nor a Rasputin’.164 The historical record
suggests that he had a point. Krishna Menon was, if anything, more Western
folly, than communist instrument or evil Indian genius. Over the course of
several decades, and in the guises of nationalist activist, Indian diplomat,
international mediator and, latterly, Indian cabinet minister, Menon was cast
as a communist fellow-traveller in hoc to Moscow and Beijing.165 The British
Security Service never wavered in its conviction that, ‘the negative state of our
information and the inference that Menon has dropped his communist con-
tacts does not necessarily mean that the danger of his abusing his potential
position . . . can on that account be ignored’.166 Doubts planted by MI5 in the
minds of British policymakers regarding Menon’s political loyalties encour-
aged Whitehall to view India’s habitual challenges to Western Cold War
orthodoxy in terms of the nefarious influence of one man. In June 1962, the
then Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, Duncan Sandys, was to
be found carping that Indian diplomacy was hamstrung by ‘Mr. Krishna
Menon and the pro-Russian faction’ in Nehru’s cabinet.167,168
The absence of any evidence to substantiate charges that Menon colluded
with Communist governments also failed to dent the conviction of America’s
policymakers and intelligence agencies that Menon was a security threat. Long
after he had ceased to be an Indian minister, the CIA inserted references to the
‘acid mouthed’ Menon in the President’s Daily Brief (PDB), the top-secret
summary of intelligence delivered by the Agency each morning to the Oval
Office. Menon, one PDB from March 1967 stated, remained ‘one of the world’s
bitterest baiters of the US’.169 In reality, following the expansion of Soviet
intelligence operations in India in the early 1960s, KGB attempts to cultivate
Menon met with a conspicuous lack of success. No proof has yet emerged that
links Menon with Soviet intelligence services prior to the 1962. Subsequent
active measures undertaken by the KGB in India did seek to promote Menon’s
political fortunes and, on one occasion, in 1967, encompassed the covert
funding of his election expenses. However, the KGB were simultaneously
attempting to advance the interests of seemingly every significant left-of-
 india’s rasputin 75

centre figure in India’s ruling Congress Party including, amongst others,

Gulzarilal Nanda, Lal Bahadur Shastri, and Indira Gandhi herself. If anything,
the absence of material linking Menon to the KGB tends to confirm his long-
standing ambivalence towards communism.170
Prior to 1947, Britain’s intelligence services were overly influenced by
Krishna Menon’s willingness to collaborate with the CPGB in pursuit of
Indian self-government. Following India’s independence, British and
American intelligence agencies proved unduly dismissive of signs that
Menon had severed connections with former communist collaborators. In
misinterpreting and exaggerating the security case against Menon, London
and Washington ran excessive risks in their relationships with India. To Indian
diplomats, their Western colleague’s antipathy to Menon often appeared
deeply irrational and akin to a ‘neurosis requiring psychiatric treatment’.171
Perhaps fittingly, neither Britain nor the United States was ultimately respon-
sible for Krishna Menon’s political Waterloo. Paradoxically, that distinction,
after Menon was held culpable for India’s ignominious defeat in the Sino-
Indian war of 1962, fell to, of all people, Mao Zedong, and the Chinese
Communist Party.
 4

Quiet Americans: The CIA and the Onset

of the Cold War in South Asia

Howard Imbrey’s career as a CIA field officer began in India. After enlisting in
the United States Army during the Second World War, Imbrey was posted to
South Asia. Talent-spotted by the OSS, Imbrey ended the war running intelli-
gence operations out of India, Ceylon, and Burma. In 1948, he was hired by the
recently inaugurated CIA. Marked down for service in India on account of his
language competencies and experience in the subcontinent, in December
that year, Imbrey arrived in Bombay.1 He was amongst the first CIA officers
to embark upon a well-established path to advancement within the Agency’s
Directorate of Operations, or clandestine service. Some thirty years later,
newly minted CIA officers assigned to the Agency’s Near East Division con-
tinued to be dispatched to India ‘on probation’. In the late 1970s, having been
told that his first operational assignment would be in Madras, in southern
India, one fledgling CIA officer remembered being informed by superiors that,
‘I needed a tour in one of its [the Agency’s] true shit holes to see if I could make
it as a case officer.’ At that time, the CIA rotated its Arabic-speaking recruits
through Sana, in north Yemen. The remainder of the Near East Division’s
annual intake was sent to India, or what became known as ‘the night soil
circuit’. The Agency’s decision to road test recruits in the subcontinent was
driven by a belief that, ‘India was better than most places to get your feet wet in
operations.’ As an early, and outspoken advocate of non-alignment, India
hosted diplomatic and military missions from every corner of the world.
From Langley’s perspective, the presence in India of thousands of Eastern
bloc officials, military officers, technicians, and journalists, presented an allur-
ing intelligence target. Moreover, India’s Intelligence Bureau was regarded as
a worthy adversary against whom CIA officers could hone their tradecraft. The
IB’s ubiquitous counter-surveillance activity ensured that for American intel-
ligence officers, ‘short of Moscow or Peking, India was one of the toughest
operating environments in the world’.2
Back in the 1940s, the resumption of Howard Imbrey’s intelligence career,
nominally as the US Vice Consul in Bombay, but, in actuality, as the head of
the local CIA station, was occasioned by an unfortunate event. Imbrey’s
predecessor in Bombay was Lennox Fogg. The Fogg family were prominent
in Boston society and were the benefactors of Harvard University’s Fogg

76
 quiet americans 77

Museum. Lennox’s career in intelligence was, however, complicated by his

alcoholism. Following one particularly inebriate episode, Fogg became con-
vinced that he had acquired the ability to fly and, having resolved to test his
new powers from the second-floor window of his lodgings, was returned to
reality with a bang. While Fogg survived, his career as a CIA officer in India did
not. The State Department complained that Fogg’s extracurricular exploits
were attracting unwelcome attention from the Indian authorities, and he was
recalled to the United States. With Fogg out of the picture, and with less
interest in the potentialities of unpowered flight, Imbrey set about recruiting
agents within India’s military, police service, political parties, and labour
unions. The CIA’s priority was to acquire reliable information on the strength,
disposition, and intentions of the Communist Party of India.3 At that point,
India’s security and intelligence forces were battling to suppress a violent
communist-led insurrection in Telangana, in the south of the country. With
a global Cold War gathering momentum, American officials were hopeful that
the threat posed by militant communism inside India would foster strategic
cooperation between the two nations.
The CIA’s early attempts to cultivate sources inside the Indian establish-
ment met with mixed results. One senior Indian naval officer was targeted for
recruitment after the Agency discovered that he had an interest in pornog-
raphy. With the approval of Dick Klise, the CIA’s principal officer, or station
chief, in New Delhi, the Agency began supplying the Indian sailor with
pornographic material. In return, Klise received copies of Indian military
intelligence estimates that passed across the naval officer’s desk. The arrange-
ment functioned satisfactorily until Imbrey, on a visit to the Indian capital and
accompanied by his wife, met with Klise, and his spouse, for dinner. On their
way to a restaurant, the four Americans were accosted in the street by an
Indian contact who, brandishing copies of several pornographic magazines,
announced excitedly, ‘Mr Klise, Mr Klise, I have some more for you.’4
Unfortunate impromptu encounters aside, on Klise’s watch the CIA in India
built up a comprehensive network of local agents, or in the Agency’s parlance,
Controlled American Sources (CAS), across a wide spectrum of India’s polit-
ical, economic and security landscape. In doing so, the CIA benefited from the
tacit support of numerous Indian legislators, policemen, labour leaders, jour-
nalists, and intellectuals, who saw varying levels of cooperation with the
Agency as a useful insurance policy against the expansion of indigenous
communism, outbreaks of communalism and, over time, the unwelcome
attention of hostile neighbouring states.5
During the Second World War, the OSS was encouraged by the Roosevelt
administration to keep a close watch on India. Mounting nationalist agitation,
culminating in the Quit India campaign of 1942, led the OSS expand its
footprint in the subcontinent with a view to safeguarding US interests in post-
colonial South Asia.6 In September 1942, in an effort to control OSS activity on
78 spying in south asia

Indian soil, the British colonial authorities brokered an agreement with

Washington. Under the terms of the agreement, American intelligence services
were restricted to a liaison role, and prohibited from engaging in field
operations.7 Determined to override such constraints, the head of OSS,
William Donovan, made it plain to his officers that, while the British may
have tried to close the door on his organisation in India, he expected it to
ignore an embargo on operations and to, ‘come in through the transom’.8
Donovan successfully sidestepped persistent British complaints that ‘uncoor-
dinated’ OSS activity was ‘detrimental’ to the maintenance of colonial author-
ity and had fostered a ‘chaotic’ intelligence environment in India.9 Dismissive
of ‘increasing disquiet’ voiced by British officials that the OSS was running
agents and indulging in propaganda and psychological warfare in India,
Donovan pressed ahead with building up his organisation’s presence in the
subcontinent. From its original office in New Delhi, the OSS eventually grew to
encompass eleven Indian outstations.10 By the end of 1943, the British had
conceded defeat in their battle with Donovan, and effectively gave up trying to
control OSS operations within their Indian empire.11
Once the war ended, and India secured independence, the CIA picked up
where the OSS had left off. The Agency’s assessment of the threat ‘world
communism’ posed to India, and the urgency with which the United States
should act to counter it, ran some way ahead of the State Department’s own
thinking. One CIA report, from September 1951, asserted that the Indian
economy and bureaucracy were in such a parlous state that the country’s
communists might soon be able to ‘seize control of the government’.12
Having been supplied with transcripts by India’s security services of interro-
gations conducted on local communist insurgents, the CIA concluded that
external forces were fomenting unrest. ‘Even the lowliest and most uneducated
Communists’, Agency analysts reasoned, ‘display an intimate knowledge of
Lenin, Stalin and Communist ideology. It is apparent that these . . . [insur-
gents] have not been led blindly by rabble-rousing Communists.’13 Sherman
Kent, Assistant Director of National Estimates at the CIA, subsequently
recorded that the Operations Coordinating Board (OCB), which was estab-
lished to oversee covert operations, became ‘seriously disquieted, if not some-
what alarmed’ by the deteriorating situation in India. The Board’s anxiety was
driven by a calculation that political and economic instability in India threat-
ened to transform it from a ‘friendly’ into an ‘unfriendly’ state.14 With the
passing of Joseph Stalin in March 1953, and the emergence of a new Soviet
leadership that identified value in cultivating India as a Cold War prize,
American officials expressed apprehension that Moscow was now fishing in
troubled India waters. ‘The Kremlin today is using all the propaganda devices
in its possession to make the Indians feel that we are their enemies; that we
represent a new imperialism; that we intend to dominate their economy; that
we are bent on involving the whole world, including India, in a new world war’,
 quiet americans 79

a senior American diplomat observed the following year. ‘We have ample
reason to believe that domination of the Indian sub-continent is a part of the
Soviets objective.’15 The State Department came to share the CIA’s anxiety at
the threat that communism posed in India. Communist gains in Indian
elections alarmed American diplomats, prompting one official to declare,
‘There is no time to lose . . . [conditions in India] are being successfully
exploited by Communist agents . . . [i]f South Asia is subverted it will be
only a matter of time before all of the Asian land-mass and over a billion
people will be under Communist domination, and our national security will
face an unprecedented threat.’16 The scene was set for the CIA to dramatically
expand its role in India’s intelligence Cold War.

Langley’s New Best Friend: The CIA and Indian Intelligence

India’s Intelligence Bureau saw considerable advantage in learning from and,
on occasions, collaborating with, foreign intelligence services. Early in 1949,
the DIB, Sanjeevi Pillai, accepted an invitation from Washington to visit the
United States for talks with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the
CIA. Prior to Sanjeevi’s arrival in North America, Howard Donovan,
Counsellor at the US Embassy in New Delhi, forwarded the State
Department a biographical sketch of the Indian intelligence leader. Sanjeevi,
Donovan noted, was ‘a man of dignified appearance and bearing’, spoke
excellent English and, although a practising Hindu, was not a vegetarian. ‘He
never uses alcohol in any form . . . and he does not smoke’, the US official
added. Sanjeevi’s chief hobbies were gardening and astrology.17 The latter
pastime, one imagines, was more useful to Sanjeevi in his day job. In many
ways, India’s green-fingered spy chief was the antithesis of the stereotypical
caricatures of rugged and swashbuckling Cold War intelligence officers that
prevailed in the West. While Sanjeevi was certainly no James Bond or Jason
Bourne, he did, in American eyes at least, have one important virtue. The DIB
was, the US Embassy in Delhi reported, thought to be, ‘very close to Prime
Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’.18 In fact, Sanjeevi was not nearly as intimate with
the Indian premier as US officials believed. Revealingly, the DIB’s visit to the
United States saw him get on the wrong side of the Nehru family. India’s
ambassador in Washington, and Nehru’s sister, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, took
exception to the intelligence chief’s failure to advise her of his presence in
America, or to take Pandit fully into his confidence. On taking the matter up
with her brother, an irritated Pandit was assured by Nehru that she had been
‘perfectly justified’ in protesting about Sanjeevi’s behaviour. ‘I was greatly
annoyed myself’, Nehru volunteered. ‘As a matter of fact, I saw Sanjeevi before
he went away and laid great stress on his contacting you and keeping in touch
with you throughout his visit.’19
80 spying in south asia

While in the United States, Sanjeevi had been instructed by India’s Home
Ministry to focus on studying the operations and methods of the Federal
Bureau of Investigation.20 Building external intelligence capacity was seen as
a secondary concern next to developing India’s internal security capabilities.
Sanjeevi had formed a small overseas intelligence branch within the IB.
Initially, two officers were detailed to work under diplomatic cover as First
Secretaries in India’s embassies in Paris and Bonn. Although not his main
concern, the DIB hoped to glean useful information from the CIA on running
foreign intelligence operations.21 Ahead of Sanjeevi’s arrival in Washington,
Loy Henderson, America’s ambassador in New Delhi, cautioned US intelli-
gence officials that Sanjeevi’s visit was likely to have ‘wide ramifications in our
over-all relations with India’.22 American diplomats anticipated that the on-
going threat posed by militant communism in southern India would persuade
Sanjeevi to solicit advice and support from experts in the United States. One of
Henderson’s deputies, J. Graham Parsons, confided to colleagues in the State
Department that, ‘We hope for a great deal as a result of his visit . . . [Sanjeevi
is] not only convinced of certain dangers which India faces but . . . ha[s] a large
measure of responsibility for meeting those dangers. In discharging that
responsibility [he] may have increasingly to look beyond India’s borders and
seek to influence policy in regard to dangers from without.’23 In Langley, the
CIA made ready to school Sanjeevi on the insidious subversive threat posed by
international communism.
Whatever the CIA plans, Sanjeevi’s overriding objective was to draw upon
the investigative expertise and counter-espionage experience of the FBI, and its
enigmatic director, J. Edgar Hoover. The Indian intelligence leader confided to
Henderson that he had ‘been looking forward with particular enthusiasm to
meeting and having a heart-to-heart with . . . J. Edgar Hoover’. To Henderson’s
mortification, Sanjeevi subsequently confirmed that he had been left ‘boiling
with resentment’ by the off-hand way that the imperious Hoover had treated
him. Having been palmed off onto Hoover’s deputies, and exposed to an FBI
briefing that was ‘hardly more enlightening than that given to a visiting high
school class’, the DIB griped that Hoover evidently felt he ‘had little to gain by
devoting any personal attention to me’. The ‘deep-seated pique’ that Hoover
engendered in Sanjeevi was evident when the latter made it plain to a shocked
Henderson that, ‘if a liaison was contemplated [between US and Indian
intelligence services] even remotely involving the F.B.I . . .. he [Sanjeevi]
would not only advise against us making such a proposal but would personally
oppose it if it were made’.24 In contrast, the CIA went out of its way to court
India’s spy chief. Having been warmly welcomed, and lavishly entertained, by
senior Agency figures, including Colonel Richard Stilwell, chief of the Agency’s
Far East division, Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt, shortly to achieve notoriety for his
exploits in Iran, and Director of Central Intelligence, Roscoe Hillenkoetter,
Sanjeevi came away from Washington with a notably positive impression of
 quiet americans 81

the Central Intelligence Agency.25 Significantly, and to the CIA’s satisfaction,

the head of IB embraced the Agency’s offer to explore ‘the possibility of
establishing an official liaison on Communist matters’.26 Sanjeevi’s experience
in the United States was to cast a long shadow over Indo-US intelligence liaison
and, more broadly, Washington’s Cold War relationship with New Delhi. The
DIB’s visit to North America ensured that the CIA, and not, as Sanjeevi had
originally intended, the FBI, became India’s Cold War intelligence partner of
choice.27
Winning Sanjeevi’s confidence was seen as a significant coup by US officials.
The DIB, it was noted, had come around to favour the easing of Indian
restrictions on intelligence sharing arrangements with the United States and
Great Britain that New Delhi had imposed as part its commitment to Cold War
non-alignment. Specifically, Washington was optimistic that Sanjeevi would
press to overturn a prohibition on Indian intelligence officers discussing
indigenous communist activity with their British and American counterparts.
Sanjeevi, American colleagues observed approvingly, was ‘understood to have
begun to insist that they [the IB] need the cooperation of other countries
fighting Communism in making their own struggle more effective’.28 In any
case, Sanjeevi made it plain to Dick Klise that, ‘regardless of the official attitude
of his [India’s] government, he would welcome the continuance of our unoffi-
cial contacts’. As a policeman, the DIB added, ‘he frequently had to take
independent action without the knowledge of his government, and . . . he
assumed that . . . [CIA officers] also had a certain freedom of action. Klise
was quick to confirm that this was indeed the case and, moreover, the Agency
would be delighted to work closely with Sanjeevi, if necessary, without the
approval of the Indian intelligence chief’s superiors.29

Ugly Americans: Nehru and the CIA

Indian government officials did become aware of relationships forged between
the Intelligence Bureau and its British and American counterparts.
Nevertheless, Sanjeevi, and subsequently, B. N. Mullik, continued to work
hard to downplay the significance of such links. Were Nehru to get wind of
the scale of India’s partnership with the CIA and MI5, B. N. Mullik once
explained to a British intelligence officer, much of the liaison activity would
have to be curtailed.30 Mullik’s caution was well founded. Nehru repeatedly
counselled Indian officials to treat intelligence received from British and
American sources with an abundance of caution, given the ‘considerable
interest in our internal politics’ evident in London and Washington. ‘I think
our Intelligence . . . should keep wide awake about these matters’, the Indian
premier advised his foreign secretary. ‘We should avoid too close contacts with
the Intelligence people of other Governments.’31 Nehru reacted with irritation
and exasperation whenever the extent of the Intelligence Bureau’s dependency
82 spying in south asia

on Western training and support became apparent. In the mid-1950s, the

Indian prime minister was stunned to learn that his intelligence officers were
being sent to Australia for instruction. Noting caustically that, ‘the general
standard of efficiency of Australians . . . has not been evident to me’, Nehru
wondered precisely how, in the intelligence sphere, ‘the isolated position of
Australia [was] conducive to this [transfer of] wider knowledge and efficiency’.
To Nehru, the arrangement was symptomatic of muddled and hackneyed
thinking. ‘Our intelligence people’, he fulminated, ‘cannot get out of the
habit of thinking of two or three countries in the Commonwealth, especially
the UK, as well as the USA, for any kind of training’. Nehru was equally
dumbfounded on discovering that Indian intelligence officers were not travel-
ling to Moscow to learn the Russian language, but to London.32
The unease that Nehru manifested in relation to intelligence activity was
compounded by the Indian premier’s anxiety that CIA operations were being
undertaken in the subcontinent without the knowledge of his government. In
June 1955, in a speech he made to a gathering of Indian diplomats in Europe,
Nehru observed that he regarded the CIA as an especially invidious threat to
Indian democracy. ‘The United States are carrying on their espionage and
secret service activities [inside India]’, Nehru assured his audience. ‘They have
also been buying up newspapers and spreading a network of publicity
organisations . . . We are more concerned with what the Americans are trying
to do than the others.’33 While the Intelligence Bureau had been tasked with
keeping a ‘watch [on] communist activity’, the Indian premier added, there
had been ‘very little’ external interference in India’s affairs from communist
states. When it came to indigenous communism, he continued, intelligence
suggested that the CPI had been instructed by its sponsors ‘not to embarrass
our government’.34 In a letter he wrote to the Indian academic and member of
parliament, Shriman Narayan, shortly before travelling to Europe, Nehru
voiced concern at unwelcome American intrusions into Indian politics. ‘It
might interest you to know’, he informed Narayan, ‘that some little time ago
I received definite information that the United States were looking for agents
in the Congress Party in India’.35
Evidence from Indian and American sources did suggest that the CIA was
successful in recruiting ‘assets’ inside the Indian government. Notably,
M. O. Mathai, who served as Nehru’s special assistant between the mid-
1940s and the late 1950s, is amongst those reputed to have worked for US
intelligence. According to one authority, parliamentary unease surrounding
Mathai’s inability to account for the accumulation of considerable personal
wealth, prompted an enquiry conducted by India’s Cabinet Secretary. This
concluded that Mathai had ‘without doubt had received money from the
C.I.A. as well as from businessmen in India’.36 Nehru’s most prominent
biographer went as far as to state: ‘It can . . . be safely assumed that, from
1946 to 1959, the CIA had access to every paper passing through Nehru’s
 quiet americans 83

Secretariat.’37 While charges levelled against Mathai remain contentious, for-

mer State Department officers have corroborated claims of collusion between
Indian government officials and the CIA. One American diplomat who served
in India in the early 1960s, recalled how the CIA station in New Delhi openly
boasted that it could obtain a copy of any document produced by the Indian
government. ‘So, I put this to the test once’, the US official claimed, ‘and they
[the CIA] provided it for me’.38
Any animus that Nehru harboured towards the CIA was complicated, in the
minds of US diplomats, by an assumption in Washington that the Indian
leader was intrinsically anti-American. Loy Henderson confided to a friend
that Nehru’s ‘dislike’ for America was, ‘not caused by any specific action that
had been taken by the United States Government’. Rather, Nehru embodied
a ‘Hindi aristocrat[s] . . . contempt for . . . the American people. He [Nehru]
thought that they were a vulgar lot too deeply interested in making money.’39
Characterising India’s left-leaning premier as ‘a non-communist rather than an
anti-communist’, Henderson concluded that Nehru’s disdain for American
political and social institutions suggested that, ‘if he [Nehru] were compelled
to choose between the Soviet and the American way of life he might well choose
the former’.40 The ambassador’s characterisation of Nehru overstated the depth
of the Indian premier’s estrangement from the United States and misinter-
preted its essential character. The Indian premier was frequently and sharply
critical of American policy on issues ranging from colonialism and racial
discrimination to free market capitalism and military containment. Nehru
also repeatedly and publicly emphasised that a community of common values,
centred upon commitments to liberal democracy and individual liberty, meant
that India and the United States had much in common.41 Nehru did baulk at the
inability of US policymakers to face global realities, and to deal with the world
as it was, not how America would like it to have been. The reluctance of
Americans to acknowledge the existence of Communist China, to condemn
the inequities of European imperialism, and get on the right side of history in
a rapidly changing world, inevitably pitched Washington against New Delhi,
and much of the Asian and African world besides.42 As Nehru pointed out to
Lord Mountbatten, who himself rarely missed opportunities to drive a wedge
between India and the United States, many Indians felt, ‘a little tired of the
advice being given to us from time to time in minatory language from the
U.S. . . . they seem to forget that we are not some little Central American
Republic’.43
When it was published, in 1958, Nehru confessed that he had ‘been much
influenced’ by reading the book, The Ugly American, by the US authors,
William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick. An excoriating critique of the gauche
inadequacies of bludgeoning American diplomacy in a fictional South East
Asian country, Nehru, while acknowledging that the work was ‘a little exag-
gerated’, nevertheless, praised the book as ‘essentially correct, as most of us
84 spying in south asia

know’.44 Nehru’s suspicion that the CIA was corrupting India’s political
landscape was tempered, to some degree, by an assessment that the intelligence
agency, and the governments in Washington that it served, was prone to act in
the maladroit and ham-fisted manner portrayed by Lederer and Burdick. In
May 1960, in the aftermath of the U-2 affair, when Washington bungled in
denying that a CIA spy plane had been shot-down over the Soviet Union,
Nehru derided American handling of the intelligence debacle as ‘exceedingly
inept’.45 Aware that the performance of India’s own intelligence agencies left
much to be desired, Nehru nonetheless bridled whenever his ministers implied
that their British and American equivalents were superior. In one exchange
with an official from India’s Ministry of Education, the prime minister
observed scathingly, ‘You refer to the tremendous Intelligence set-ups of
U.S.A. and U.K. Recent information and indeed some previous knowledge
also has shown that the U.S.A. set-up is singularly inept. Both in the case of
Laos and Cuba it has failed miserably.’46
The CIA remained on Nehru’s mind throughout July 1961 when the work-
aholic Indian leader took a short break among the picturesque hills of Kashmir,
his ancestral homeland. It was while on holiday in Kashmir that Nehru
chanced upon an article published in The Nation. The progressive American
political magazine carried a long essay on the CIA written by the investigative
journalist, and Agency critic, Fred Cook.47 Published in the aftermath of the
Bay of Pigs episode, Cook’s polemic took aim at the secretive yet ‘lavishly
financed CIA’ for presiding over the latest in a long line of ‘fiascos’. Recounting
in detail how ‘time and again, CIA has meddled actively in the internal affairs
of foreign governments’, the article called for the Agency to be stripped of its
covert action role and to focus solely on intelligence gathering and analysis.
‘[T]oday we practice the “black” arts on such a far-flung, billion-dollar scale’,
Cook argued, ‘we throw around them such a mantle of spurious patriotic
secrecy, that neither the people nor their watchdogs in Congress have the
faintest idea what is happening until it has happened – until it is too late’. The
consequences of an Agency that was, to Cook’s mind, unaccountable and out
of control, were twofold. ‘Abroad, the CIA destroys our prestige and under-
mines our influence. At home we do not even know what is happening.’48
Having digested Cook’s stinging attack on the CIA, Nehru fired off a note to
his Foreign Secretary, M. J. Desai. Observing that the article was ‘a very
revealing one about the working of the CIA and, consequently, in regard to
many aspects of US foreign policy’, the Indian premier instructed Desai to bulk
order 200 copies from its American publishers. These, Nehru ordered, should
be distributed widely to India’s missions abroad and shared around govern-
ment departments at home.49
Nehru was still brooding over the hatchet-job undertaken on the CIA by the
Nation six months later, when he considered reforming India’s intelligence
system. Writing to Badruddin Tyabji, Special Secretary at the MEA, in
 quiet americans 85

February 1962, the Indian premier suggested that Cook’s article demonstrated
‘what harm a wrongly directed intelligence service can do’. The CIA’s missteps,
Nehru confided, had made him ‘anxious that we [India] should proceed
cautiously in this matter [intelligence reform]’. Reluctant to sanction an
Intelligence Bureau presence beyond countries directly adjoining India, the
prime minister questioned the necessity of employing ‘a large [intelligence]
network’. ‘Normally our foreign missions should be able to supply such
information as may help us’, India’s leader opined.50 Nehru’s responses to
the CIA were not predetermined by misgivings that the Indian premier
evidenced towards Washington’s foreign policymaking. Still, the challenge of
operating in a political climate within the subcontinent in which intelligence
agencies in general, and US intelligence agencies above all, were viewed with
apprehension and suspicion did not make the CIA’s job any easier.

Unleashing the CIA: Eisenhower and South Asia

From Washington’s perspective, the 1950s had witnessed the troubling con-
junction of a looming economic crisis in India, a resurgence in popular
support for communist parties in the subcontinent, and burgeoning Soviet
ties to Nehru’s government. In response, the Eisenhower administration feted
Nehru during the India premier’s visit to the United States in December 1956.
The following January, India’s growing importance to America was confirmed
by Eisenhower’s approval of National Security Council report 5701. The NSC
report acknowledged that a strong, non-communist India would challenge
aspects of US foreign policy. By supporting New Delhi, however, Washington
could promote a ‘successful example of an alternative to communism in an
Asian context and would permit the gradual development of the means to
enforce . . . security interests against Communist Chinese expansion into
South and South east Asia’.51 In endorsing NSC 5701, Eisenhower’s
Ambassador in India, Ellsworth Bunker, cautioned that, absent US support,
an economic collapse in India presented ‘a strong possibility of the accession to
power of some kind of extremist government’. In such a scenario, Bunker
underlined, communist elements were likely to profit the most, and the costs to
US security would be ‘even higher than the loss of China to the Free World’.52
Eisenhower’s enthusiasm for bringing India and the United States closer
together, primarily through the provision of generous American economic
aid, would also be embraced by his successor, John F. Kennedy, who saw India
as a key counterweight to Communist Chinese influence in Asia.
Where the White House led, the CIA followed. The Agency quickly came to
embrace Eisenhower’s tilt towards India and ramped up its activities in the
subcontinent. Pushing out from a main base of operations, or station, in New
Delhi, CIA officers intensified work undertaken from smaller out-stations in
Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras. The more active the CIA’s presence in India
86 spying in south asia

the more difficult it was for the Agency to preserve a pretence of anonymity.
Abraham Michael ‘Abe’ Rosenthal, the New York Times correspondent in New
Delhi for much of the 1950s, observed the transformation with interest.
Writing to his editor back in the United States, Rosenthal reflected on the
rising numbers of CIA staff working in India under the guise of Treasury
experts, Air Force contractors, or members of specialised bodies, such as the
Asia Foundation. Agency personnel, Rosenthal revealed, were easily identified
by Indian government officials, and were commonly referred to as, ‘the
Halicrafter boys . . . because whatever their Embassy cover, they all had offices
in the same part of the basement, and all had identical Halicrafter radios’. The
CIA’s focus, Rosenthal reported, appeared to be directed, ‘more than anything
else in getting inside the Congress Party for purposes of information or
influence’.53
American embassy and consular staff in India soon became conscious of
a new sense of activism amongst their CIA colleagues. One diplomatic officer
working out of the Bombay consulate, later observed that ‘my first wake-up
experience with the Agency’ followed on from the local CIA chief ‘press[ing]
hard’ to co-opt his services in the recruitment of an Indian agent. The consular
official had befriended a prominent Indian mathematician cum politician, who
had held a research post at Princeton, the American’s alma mater. The CIA
became interested in the mathematician when he was appointed secretary to an
Indian delegation that toured scientific institutions in the Soviet Union.
Pushed by the Bombay CIA station to question the mathematician on the
specifics of his visit behind the Iron Curtain, the consular officer was ruffled
when his Indian friend snapped back, ‘What is all this about? Who did you get
this from? Did you get this from your CIA?’ Fortunately for the Agency, the
Indian target cooled down, experienced a change of heart, and decided it was
preferable to work for the CIA rather than report his encounter to the Indian
authorities.54 Eugene Rosenfeld, who worked as a USIS officer in New Delhi
around the same time, recounted his experience of a separate, but equally
offbeat, intelligence recruitment incident. A disgruntled Indian journalist
working at the CPI’s headquarters had resolved to sell his services to the
CIA. A walk-in, or individual that unexpectedly and voluntarily offers to act
as an American agent, the journalist, on arriving at US embassy, was directed
to Rosenfeld in the mistaken belief that he wanted to discuss a press-related
issue. Having listened patiently to a lengthy list of the Indians gripes, which
included the CPI’s intimidation and physical mistreatment of his family,
alongside minor complaints surrounding the inequitable allocation of air
conditioning and pay at the communist party’s offices, Rosenfeld realised the
Indian’s purpose, and turned the matter over to the CIA. The journalist proved
to be ‘a hell of a good walk-in’ and, in return for financial compensation,
‘provided inside information of communist party activities from the head-
quarters for at least five years’.55
 quiet americans 87

As the CIA’s field operations in India developed, so did its reputation for
intelligence gathering and astute analysis, at least in a narrow Cold War sense.
Abe Rosenthal found the CIA station in New Delhi to be well supplied with
political specialists and experts on Marxism, the Soviet Union, and Chinese
affairs, many of whom, ‘were extremely knowing in the field of Asian studies’.
The New York Times correspondent was less enamoured with a propensity
amongst the CIA officers to ‘put an American screen over their eyes’ when
considering more parochial Indian matters. Whenever the subject of Nehru, or
Kashmir, or Indo-Pakistan relations cropped up, Rosenthal noted, his CIA
contacts found it difficult to conceive of them outside the ‘reflection of
American interests’. In strictly operational terms, Rosenthal was impressed
by the ‘wide range of high and medium level contacts’ that the Agency
managed to acquire in the subcontinent, and that ensured the CIA were
‘quite up on the minutiae of Indian politics’. The success that came to be
associated with the CIA’s Indian operations was reflected in the close personal
interest they attracted from the Agency’s Director, Allen Dulles. It was on one
of Dulles’s inspection trips to India, that Rosenthal was provided with
a personal highlight of his tour in the subcontinent. The journalist was invited
to meet with Dulles at the US Embassy. On walking out of the temporary office
allocated to the CIA Director, following two hours of discussions, Rosenthal
was delighted to find, ‘every spook in India lined up in the anteroom waiting
and knowing they were looking at me and asking: “Is this one we don’t know
about?”’56
Allen Dulles’s family had a long association with India. Dulles’s great
grandfather, John Welles Dulles, spent five years conducting missionary
work in Madras for the Presbyterian church before ill health forced him to
return to the United States. During his senior year at Princeton, Allen Dulles
followed the family trail to the subcontinent and accepted an offer to teach
English at Ewing Christian College, in Allahabad. Dulles landed in India on
20 July 1914, on the eve of the First World War. A far cry from Princeton,
Ewing College was a small and austere institution with a compliment of
a dozen or so staff. Nehru’s hometown, Allahabad was a hub of incipient
Indian nationalist activity. Displaying a sense of curiosity and activism that
would later serve him well as an intelligence officer, Dulles immersed himself
in local culture and politics, acquired a smattering of Hindi and, with his pupils
vouching for his bona fides as a sympathetic observer, began attending clan-
destine meetings of nationalist groups coordinating resistance to British rule.
Intriguingly, Dulles also struck up friendships within the Nehru family during
his time in Allahabad. As a contemporary of Nehru, and his sister,
Vijayalakshmi Pandit, the young Dulles cultivated what would prove to be
enduring connections with these two future titans of the Indian nationalist
movement.57 Forty years later, in 1953, when Pandit was elected as the first
88 spying in south asia

female president of the United Nations General Assembly, Dulles sent her
a one-line note. It read, ‘Allahabad 1914’.58
Dulles’s exposure to India was cut short by his decision to return to Princeton
and attend graduate school. The brief period that the future CIA Director spent
in the subcontinent, however, left a strong impression. On the steamship that
had carried him to India, Dulles poured over Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, the classic
tale of the great nineteenth-century espionage game waged between the British
and Russian empires astride India’s northern border. Dulles treasured his copy
of Kim, and the well-thumbed tome was discovered lying on his bedside table
following his death.59 In September 1956, when Dulles stopped off in New Delhi
for three days during a round-the-world tour of CIA stations, and provided
Rosenthal with a memory to cherish, he dropped in on Nehru to talk shop and
recall old times. One CIA officer accompanying Dulles on that trip marvelled
that, ‘when we arrived in India, Nehru was giving everyone trouble, but he
stopped everything and had a long talk and kept calling Dulles “Mr. Allen” and
there were these reminiscences about Allahabad so many years before’.60
India’s communists extended a much less warm welcome to Dulles. A front-
page headline in the left-wing newspaper, Blitz, asked its readership to ponder,
‘What’s Behind Allen Dulles’ Mystery Mission to India?’ Alongside a picture
of the CIA Director, entitled, ‘Allen Dulles . . . Cloak and Dagger’, Blitz declared
dramatically, ‘Let Asia beware . . . [the] US intelligence agency!’61
Unfortunately for Dulles, the timing of his stay in New Delhi coincided with
the arrest of an MEA employee who had sold copies of Nehru’s correspondence
with Egypt’s President Nasser on the Suez Canal crisis to a foreign agent. The
IB quickly identified Pakistan as behind the espionage coup. Never a newspaper
to let the truth get in the way of a good story, Blitz’s take on the ‘Delhi Spy
Scandal’ suggested that Pakistani agents had acted in collusion with American
and British intelligence services. Dulles, the newspaper claimed, had been
delighted to receive facsimiles of the stolen documents, ‘from American sources
in Delhi by way of a special gift from American intelligence in India’.62 For the
remainder of his tenure as CIA Director, and beyond, Dulles’s association with
India was targeted by communist propagandists in disinformation operations.
In January 1961, Radio Moscow broadcast allegations that Dulles and his late
brother, John Foster Dulles, had been implicated in a plot to assassinate Nehru
by Indian defendants in a conspiracy trial.63 Five years later, in January 1966,
the then CIA Director, William Raborn, speaking before a Congressional CIA
subcommittee, pointed to the persistence of slurs in the Soviet press that linked
Dulles’s office to purported plans to assassinate Nehru in the 1950s.64

Kerala, the CPI, and the Complexities of Clandestine Collaboration

In 1957, warnings of India’s vulnerability to communist subversion that
Ellsworth Bunker issued from New Delhi, were brought home to
 quiet americans 89

Washington following the results of general elections held between February

and March. Nationwide, India’s electorate handed Nehru’s Congress Party
a clear mandate. Congress candidates secured 371 of the 492 parliamentary
seats available. Regionally, Congress achieved a plurality in eleven of India’s
thirteen state assemblies. Global press coverage of the election, however,
focused overwhelmingly on returns in the southern state of Kerala, where
the Communist Party of India swept to power. ‘This must be the first time in
history’, Malcolm MacDonald, the British High Commissioner in India,
informed Whitehall, ‘that a Communist administration with anything
approaching the jurisdiction and powers of the Kerala Government has been
put into office by wholly democratic means’.65 MacDonald was largely right.
As the Indian Embassy in Washington observed, the State Department had
been surprised and dismayed that, ‘with the insignificant exception of San
Marino’, India’s communists had broken significant new ground by seizing
power via the ballot box rather than the bullet.66
On touring Kerala shortly after the election, Henry Ramsey, America’s
consul-general in Madras, advised the State Department that, ‘Communists
are moving skilfully and non-dramatically within constitutional limitations to
consolidate [their] position.’ Ramsey did not share the sanguine assessment
advanced by Congress Party leaders that the CPI ‘beachhead’ in Kerala would
prove fleeting, and that support for the communists would wither once the
hard economic realities of governing the state became apparent. The ‘lack of
realism’ displayed by Congress Party officials in Kerala, whose mismanage-
ment, graft, and complacency had been exploited by the CPI, alarmed Ramsey.
‘[N]either [the] Kerala Congress nor central [Congress Party] has evolved
a clear strategic line either to displace or replace [the] Communists’, he cabled
to Washington, ‘and in EMS [Namboodiripad, the CPI state leader] and his
Cabinet, Congress is confronted with shrewd, young, zealous, closely-knit
team’.67 To an extent, Malcolm MacDonald shared his American colleague’s
anxieties. With Kerala being openly referred to in some circles as ‘The Indian
Yenan’, the British diplomat felt that, if left unchallenged, the CPI’s intention
of exploiting the State as ‘a shop window’ to showcase the benefits of com-
munism could foster a sense of political momentum which the Congress Party
might find impossible to stop.68 Following the CPI’s success in Kerala,
Washington ensured that US economic aid and development projects in the
subcontinent were redirected, wherever possible, to, ‘bear more directly on the
situation in South India’.69 In addition, Eisenhower authorised the CIA to
initiate a covert operation to subvert the communist state government.
Between 1957 and 1959, by secretly channelling funds to Congress Party
officials and anti-communist labour leaders, including S. K. Patil, a Congress
boss in the neighbouring state of Maharashtra, the Agency fomented industrial
unrest and political turmoil in Kerala. In July 1959, amidst scenes of mounting
violence and disorder, the CPI government was dismissed from office under an
90 spying in south asia

executive order issued by India’s President. Ellsworth Bunker subsequently

justified the CIA operation in Kerala on the basis that his embassy had been in
possession of hard evidence that showed the Soviets were funding local
communist groups. Rationalising the CIA’s actions as reactive and defensive
in character, the US ambassador confirmed that in India, ‘as we [America]
have done elsewhere in the world we’ve come to the assistance of our friends
when we knew and had evidence [of] what the communists were doing,
financially and in other ways’.70
In the run up to the 1957 elections, Nehru, who had long harboured
misgivings over the extent of foreign funding reaching India’s political parties,
explicitly asked the Intelligence Bureau ‘to be vigilant about this matter’. ‘We
have often suspected that the Communist Party in India manages to get some
kind of financial assistance from outside’, the Indian premier informed his
Home Minister, in June 1956. ‘They may not get it from any official sources
abroad but there are many other ways of getting it.’71 Although the decision to
clandestinely fund the Congress Party and its non-communist allies was taken
in Washington, as the man on the spot, Bunker was granted significant
‘discretion as to how it might be done and in what amounts’. In feeding cash
to S. K. Patil and others in the Congress Party, Bunker noted, the CIA had
leveraged its ‘very good and very close’ relationship with India’s intelligence
agencies. Collaboration between the CIA and the IB was such, the American
ambassador recorded, that it was possible to ascertain, with a reasonable
degree of confidence, where US funds were being spent, in what sums, and
to what effect.72
Given the suspicion and concern within Nehru’s Congress Party that sur-
rounded CIA activity, the Indian decision to work covertly with the Agency
was reflective of a genuine anxiety that the CPI in Kerala was functioning as
a Soviet puppet. In April 1957, Mullik presented Nehru with an intelligence
report that indicated senior members of the CPI Politburo planned to visit
Moscow to consult with the Soviets on how the communist government in
Kerala should be run. Alarmed by the prospect of such blatant external
interference in India’s domestic politics, Nehru asked that the Soviet ambassa-
dor, Mikhail Menshikov, be summoned to the MEA. Menshikov, the Indian
prime minister stipulated, should be left under no illusions that were Moscow
to receive a secret delegation of senior CPI officials, New Delhi would be
extremely displeased. ‘Any such approach would be highly improper in our
view’, Nehru reiterated to the MEA, and Moscow should be reminded that,
‘ . . . we are sure that the Soviet Government will not in any way, directly or
indirectly, interfere in our internal affairs’. During their visit to India the
previous year, Khrushchev and Bulganin had been warned off providing the
CPI with clandestine funding. The Soviet leaders had provided assurances to
Nehru that, ‘this kind of thing will not be encouraged in any way and they [the
 quiet americans 91

Soviets] did not wish to interfere in the least with internal matters in India’.
Khrushchev’s word, the Indian premier discovered, could not be trusted.73
Had Nehru been fully aware of the extent of discussions taking place in
Washington over how the United States might reorientate the political land-
scape in Kerala, he might well have instructed the MEA to summon Ellsworth
Bunker for a similar dressing down. In electing to work with the CIA on
occasions, as in Kerala, the Congress Party’s senior leadership was conscious
that it would not be taken entirely into the Agency’s confidence. Nehru was
uneasy about what he knew the CIA to be doing in southern India. The Indian
premier was even more anxious, however, at what he did not know, and was
not being told, in relation to Agency operations conducted on sovereign
Indian territory. At the beginning of 1959, as the CPI government was buffeted
by mounting protests and agitation on the ground, William Fulbright,
Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, had his interest in
southern Indian politics piqued by a letter that he received from Kerala.
Purportedly written by a local Indian man, the letter asked for Fulbright’s
advice and guidance on how ‘newly-independent countries create effective
non-Communist political organizations’. In response, Fulbright turned to
Allen Dulles. ‘What [do] you think we could do in this area’, Fulbright
challenged the CIA Director, ‘that we are not now doing?’74 At a brief meeting
held between the two men on 16 March, Dulles sought to put Fulbright’s mind
at ease. When it came to developing political organisations in the global South
to meet threats posed by international communism, Fulbright was assured, the
CIA had ‘been devoting a great deal of attention over the past years . . . to
develop[ing] certain techniques which I should like to discuss with you
[further] at your convenience’.75
Dulles had indeed been busy. Subsequent to the election of a non-
communist government in Kerala, at the beginning of 1960, the CIA
classified Kerala as a ‘target of opportunity’. The OCB’s Working Group
on South Asia was tasked with exploring covert action that could be taken
in the State to ‘further U.S. interests and those of the free world in
general’.76 A special report submitted by the OCB on 17 February, entitled
‘Exploitation of Kerala Elections’, cautioned against any triumphalism now
that the CPI government had been defeated at the polls. Rather, the OCB
report advocated that ‘discreet encouragement’ be offered to Indian gov-
ernment probes into the CPI administration’s corruption and mismanage-
ment in Kerala, ‘and their results worked into publicity for use inside as
well as outside India’.77 At the same time, the CIA continued to direct
financial subsidies to influential Indians and Indian organisations willing to
advance an anti-communist line. Such activity was not always successful.
David Burgess served as a Labour Attaché at the US embassy in New Delhi
between 1955 and 1960. He secured his posting to India on the recommen-
dation of Walter Reuther, the progressive union leader, and President of the
92 spying in south asia

United Automobile Workers. Burgess was approached by the CIA to act as

a conduit to Indian trades unionists but rejected the Agency’s overtures on
ethical grounds. ‘I refused to be the carrier of money to bribe labor leaders
there [Kerala] during a parliamentary election’, Burgess later recalled. ‘The
CIA chief at the Embassy was not overjoyed with my refusal.’78
Occasional setbacks aside, well into the 1960s, whenever the CPI appeared
on the cusp of making electoral gains in Kerala, Washington invariably turned
to the CIA in an effort to sabotage communist prospects. In March 1964,
Robert Komer, then a National Security Council staffer, pressed the 303
Committee, the executive body under President Johnson responsible for co-
ordinating and approving covert actions, to place Kerala back at the top of the
CIA’s agenda once again. ‘Since the C[ommunist] P[arty] seems to be coming
back in Kerala and may again capture the state in next election, I’ve suggested
to [name redacted] another look at this matter’, Komer advocated. ‘My
thought is of course that the agency [CIA] might want to put a proposition
up to State and the [Special] Group [303 Committee].’79 Agency officers
stationed in southern India at that time have corroborated Washington’s
conviction that the CPI represented a clear danger to Indian democracy.
Duane ‘Dewey’ Clarridge, who went on to head the CIA’s Latin American
division in the 1980s and was a prominent figure in the Iran-Contra affair, was
stationed in southern India as a young intelligence officer. Clarridge noted that
after the events of 1957, the CPI came to be viewed by ‘Washington in general,
not just the CIA . . . as a serious threat to India’s non-aligned status’.
Accordingly, while Clarridge himself saw communist strength in India as
overblown and exaggerated, the CIA continued to invest in ‘an elaborate
network’ of Indian agents. The Agency’s intelligence collection network,
which extended beyond India’s communist heartland in the south and east
to cover much of the remainder of the country, ‘monitored the activities of the
splintered Communist Party factions’ and enjoyed ‘marvellous access to paper,
the documents that all bureaucracies live by and suffer with’.80
British officials in India largely concurred with Clarridge’s assessment that
the potency of Indian communism was to some extent a chimera. Although
relieved that the CPI had suffered a setback in Kerala, Malcolm MacDonald
cautioned London that, ‘the imminence of a really serious Communist menace
in India should not be exaggerated’. In New Delhi, MacDonald was less
exercised by the internal threat posed by the CPI in southern India, and
more worried by, ‘a new and very important element . . . Communist
China’s recent tyrannical conduct in Tibet, and still more the aggressive
incursions of Chinese troops across India’s frontiers . . . ’. An existential threat
to Indian democracy posed by communism, MacDonald suggested, was
unlikely to manifest internally, and more plausibly would arrive via
Himalayan passes in the form of Beijing’s People’s Liberation Army.81
 quiet americans 93

China, Tibet, and India’s Troubled Northern Border

In August 1947, the departing British left India with a contested northern
border. In the eastern Himalayas, India and China claimed sovereignty over
territory roughly approximating to the present Indian state of Arunachal
Pradesh. In the northwest, another Sino-Indian territorial dispute centred on
ownership of the Aksai Chin plateau, a strategically important area of arid
desert nestled between the Indian region of Ladakh, Tibet, and the Chinese
province of Xinjiang. Dormant until the late 1950s, the border dispute between
India and China intensified as relations between the two countries, which had
thrived briefly following the signing of the Panch Sheel accord, or ‘Five
Principles of Peaceful Co-existence’, in 1954, turned rancorous.82
In 1957, New Delhi took exception to Beijing’s construction of a highway
between Xinjiang and Tibet that passed through the Aksai Chin plateau.83 Two
years later, bilateral relations deteriorated further after Nehru granted political
asylum to Tibet’s spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, and thousands of his
supporters, in the aftermath of an abortive Tibetan revolt against Chinese
rule. Enraged that Nehru had furnished Tibetan exiles with a base to conduct
anti-Chinese activity, Beijing resented what it saw as a provocative intrusion by
India into China’s domestic affairs.84 A series of armed clashes between Indian
and Chinese border patrols, prompted increasingly bitter exchanges on the
boundary question between Nehru and Zhou Enlai. As India’s relationship
with the People’s Republic of China deteriorated, the Intelligence Bureau
turned to the CIA for support. As in Kerala, the willingness of Mullik’s IB
and, to a considerable extent, the Indian government, to collaborate with the
CIA against a common Chinese enemy was fraught with political complica-
tions. Not least, Nehru’s government remained wary that the CIA would utilise
only part of its considerable resources in the subcontinent against China. The
question of precisely how, and to what degree, the Agency would leverage
Indian requests for assistance to mask interventions in the country’s internal
political affairs, unsettled Indian policymakers.
Indian intelligence collaboration with the United States in respect of
Communist China had deep roots. In December 1949, a year before Beijing
annexed Tibet, the CIA approached the British Joint Intelligence Committee
with a request for political, economic, and topographical information on the
Himalayan plateau. India’s JIC had recently completed an in-depth study of
Tibet, which it shared with the British. With New Delhi’s blessing, the study
was forwarded on to the CIA. Decades of intelligence cooperation between
New Delhi and Washington, centred on safeguarding the security of India’s
northern border, followed.85 For much of the 1950s, Nehru’s government
maintained a cautious and pragmatic policy on Tibet. Many Indians, as
Nehru acknowledged, felt an affinity for, and harboured ‘sympathy’ towards,
their Tibetan neighbours. Beijing’s decision to assert control over Tibet by
94 spying in south asia

Figure 4.1 Members of the Jan Sangh Party demonstrate outside the Communist
Chinese Embassy in New Delhi over China’s occupation of Tibet, 1 January 1960.
Bettmann / Getty Images.

means of the People’s Liberation Army provoked dismay in India. The Indian
premier recognised, nonetheless, the limitations of New Delhi’s capacity to
influence events beyond its northern border. A ‘policy of encouraging the
Tibetans to oppose Chinese overlordship over Tibet’, Nehru rationalised,
‘would be raising false hopes in the Tibetans which we [India] cannot fulfill
and is likely to react [sic] unfavourably on the Tibetans’. Furthermore, Nehru
concluded that interfering in an issue that China insisted was an internal
matter, would breach the terms of the Panch Sheel agreement and succeed in
alienating Beijing to no obvious purpose. Unwilling to sanction Indian support
for resistance activity inside Tibet, Nehru was more equivocal when it came to
offering succour to Tibetan emigrés based in India. ‘Whatever happens in
Tibet proper is beyond our reach’, the Indian premier stipulated, in June 1954.’
We can neither help nor hinder it. The question is what we do in our own
territory. Do we encourage this or not? It is clear we cannot encourage it. At
best we can tolerate it, provided it is not too obvious or aggressive. A very
delicate balance will have to be kept up.’86
In practice, the Indian government’s policy of ‘looking the other way’ in
respect of Tibet facilitated the transit of CIA aircraft through Indian air-
space in support of Agency-sponsored resistance operations. It also enabled
CIA operatives to spirit the Dalai Lama out of Lhasa, and into northern
 quiet americans 95

India in 1959.87 In turn, India’s northern border towns, and notably,

Kalimpong, in the far east of the country, developed into hubs of espionage.
In June 1954, Nehru complained to the MEA that Kalimpong had become,
‘a nest of intrigues and spies’. The picturesque hill-station, with its juxta-
position of colonial-era churches and Buddhist monasteries, the Indian
premier grumbled, was overrun with a farrago of Tibetan emigrés,
Chinese communists, Chinese nationalists, Americans, White Russians,
Red Russians, Eastern Europeans, Western Europeans, and every other
kind of intelligence agent and operative imaginable. ‘It is a common joke
in Kalimpong’, Nehru wrote to Mountbatten, ‘that there are more spies
there than other folk’.88 Nehru fretted that the Americans, in particular,
were using Kalimpong as a base to encourage the irredentist ambitions of
hot-headed Tibetans. Such machinations, the Indian leader scoffed, were
‘childish and totally unrealistic’. By arming such a ‘petty violent effort’,
Washington would do nothing for Tibet. Rather, Nehru suggested cynically,
the CIA’s operation, ‘can only be thought of in terms of some aggressive
Americans as a diversion from their larger world policy or in case a big war
occurs’. Anxious that the situation in Kalimpong risked getting out of hand
and embarrassing his government, Nehru reinforced to Mullik that the IB
should ensure foreign intelligence activity on Indian’s northern border was
kept as ‘unobtrusive’ as possible. Beijing’s patience could only be expected
to stretch so far. ‘We have to be very careful about our activities in
Kalimpong’, the Indian premier cautioned MEA officials, ‘because of the
espionage and counter-espionage that is continually going on there’.89
Nehru’s call for circumspection failed to impress China. In meetings held
between the Indian prime minister and Zhou Enlai in the spring of 1960, the
Chinese premier excoriated New Delhi for allowing the Dalai Lama and his
followers to freely criticise Beijing from the safety of their sanctuary in India.
The anti-Chinese activity emanating from Kalimpong was singled out by Zhou
as a particular irritant, and an impediment to harmonious Sino-Indian
relations.90 In addition, the Chinese took Nehru to task for failing to stop
CIA overflights of the Sino-Indian border and enabling the Agency’s support
for American-trained guerrillas in eastern Tibet. To Nehru’s discomfort, Zhou
responded to Indian expressions of ignorance in respect of the CIA’s Tibetan
operations by providing a detailed account of the dates of the Agency’s
overflights, the airstrips that they had used, the routes they had taken, and
the cargoes that they had carried. Having captured or killed several Tibetans
trained by the Agency, China’s security services were able to piece together
a comprehensive picture of the CIA’s activities in Tibet. Having done so, Zhou
impressed upon Nehru just how much Beijing knew of the Agency’s Tibetan
operation and, by implication, the degree to which India’s government was
complicit in it.91
96 spying in south asia

The New Frontier: Containing Covert Action?

In January 1961, the transition from the Eisenhower to the Kennedy adminis-
tration in the United States ushered in a new and, it would transpire, seminal
phase in the CIA’s operational history in South Asia. Kennedy placed consid-
erable importance on building India up into an economic and political coun-
terweight to Communist China. It therefore came as little surprise when he
nominated John Kenneth Galbraith as his ambassador to India. A Harvard
economics professor, Galbraith came to public attention as the author of such
left-of-centre polemics as, The Affluent Society, and The Liberal Hour.92 He
first encountered Kennedy in the 1930s, when the President attended Harvard
as an undergraduate. Galbraith subsequently became a prominent figure in
post-war liberal Democratic politics and was installed as Kennedy’s chief
economic advisor during the latter’s bid for the White House.93 Kennedy
admired Galbraith’s intelligence, energy, and acerbic wit.94 Galbraith’s many
detractors decried his propensity for self-promotion, arrogance, and displays
of pique. One member of the US embassy staff in New Delhi characterised the
ambassador as a ‘scold’, who ‘never did anything in his life to minimize his own
importance’.95
Prior to his arrival in India, in April 1961, Galbraith fought a series of
bruising bureaucratic battles with the State Department, the CIA, and the
Pentagon. It fell to Richard M. Bissell Jr., the CIA’s Deputy Director of
Plans, to brief Galbraith on Agency activity in India. To Bissell’s alarm,
Galbraith took exception to the CIA’s interference in the subcontinent’s
politics and made clear his intention to drastically curtail American covert
action in India. In an account of the meeting recorded in his journal, Galbraith
noted that he had been informed, ‘by the CIA . . . on various spooky activities,
some of which I do not like. I shall stop them.’96 Specifically, Galbraith recalled
being ‘appalled and depressed’ to learn of the CIA’s plans to spend a sum, ‘well
into the millions [of dollars]’, to bankroll the election expenses of pro-Western
Indian politicians and subsidise local anti-communist newspapers and maga-
zines. Such activity, Galbraith judged, was unlikely to be decisive in influencing
Indian opinion. It was, however, almost certain to leak into the public domain,
damaging Indo-US relations, and compromising Galbraith’s position in New
Delhi. The ambassador-designate was ‘especially disturbed’ by the CIA’s
‘particularly insane enterprise’ of overflying Indian airspace to ferry arms
and supplies to Tibetan resistance fighters.97 Galbraith proved only partially
successful, at best, in restricting the Agency’s activities. The ambassador’s
aversion to covert action did, nonetheless, lead senior American intelligence
officers to dismiss him as, ‘basically anti-CIA’.98
Once in post, Galbraith quickly became aware of the seemingly ubiquitous
shadow that the Agency had cast over India’s security establishment. Galbraith
was surprised, and faintly amused, when on being introduced to a line of local
 quiet americans 97

dignitaries during a visit to southern India, a man stepped forward and

exclaimed exuberantly, ‘Mr. Ambassador, I am the superintendent of police
here in Madras. I would like to tell you that I have the most satisfactory
relationship with your spies.’99 In a bid to assert his authority over the CIA
station in New Delhi, Galbraith initiated a sweeping review of its operations. ‘I
was not troubled by an open mind’, he later admitted. ‘I was convinced that
most of the [CIA] projects proposed would be useless for their own anti-
Communist purposes and were capable, when known, of doing us [the US]
great damage as well.’100 Galbraith distilled the results of his review into
a caustic memorandum that landed on the desks of senior officials in the
Kennedy administration. The document laid out a case for terminating CIA
covert programmes then underway in India. It also called for the CIA station to
be limited to arms-length political reporting, and to cease providing ‘subsidies
to [political] parties, politicians or papers; [and engage in] no other unneces-
sary undercover activities’. On a trip back to Washington, in May 1961,
Galbraith hammered home his call to scrap covert intelligence operations in
India. In face-to-face meetings with President Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, the
Attorney General, McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy’s National Security Adviser,
and both Bissell and Allen Dulles, the ambassador pulled few punches in
presenting the CIA as part of the problem confronting the United States in
India, rather than the solution.101
Kennedy was still smarting from withering criticism that he had received in
the wake of the Bay of Pigs debacle, after which the CIA retained few friends
the White House. At the same time, the State Department had expressed its
concern that too many of the Agency’s operations were being publicly com-
promised, to the embarrassment of America’s diplomats abroad. Just prior to
the ill-fated events in Cuba, Kennedy’s Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, had
cause to apologise to the premier of Singapore, Lew Kuan Yew, after a clumsy
CIA operation undertaken in the city-state was exposed. Chester Bowles,
a former ambassador to India, and no great fan of the CIA himself, subse-
quently leveraged his position as Under Secretary of State to coax Kennedy
into clarifying the chain of command within ‘country-teams’, which included
the chiefs of all agencies operating in a US post overseas. Under Eisenhower,
a secret order had exempted the CIA from the direct supervision of ambassa-
dors. Kennedy reversed that decision and made clear that ambassadors
retained authority over all agencies operating within their embassies, the
CIA included.102
Galbraith’s proposal to clip the Agency’s wings was, consequently, well-
timed. In the ambassador’s telling, on his watch, clandestine CIA operations in
India, with the exception of Agency airdrops into Tibet, were promptly
terminated. Even the airdrop programme, Galbraith claimed, was eventually
subject to suspension. Between 1957 and 1961, some 500,000 pounds of arms,
ammunition, radios, medical supplies, and other military equipment, was
98 spying in south asia

dropped by the CIA and its proprietary company, Civil Air Transport, to
Tibetan resistance forces.103 Mullik’s Intelligence Bureau had been briefed by
the local CIA station on the overflights of Indian territory. The US embassy in
New Delhi was never entirely sure if the IB passed on details of the airdrops to
Nehru and senior Indian government officials. On balance, the embassy
judged that Mullik had likely kept such knowledge to himself, ‘as private police
information’. For Galbraith, the overflight programme, whether Nehru was
fully aware of it or not, was foolhardy. Aside from one treasure-trove of
classified Chinese documents, the results gleaned from the operation, the
ambassador reasoned, had been ‘negligible’. The political risks involved in its
continuation, however, were considerable. ‘There is always the chance of
a ghastly accident which would expose the whole activity in the manner of
the U-2 [spy plane downed over the USSR in May 1960]’, Galbraith com-
plained to the State Department. ‘For the Communists here [India] and
everywhere it would be a windfall.’ A long-time critic of what he derided as
the adventurism of US foreign policy, Vietnam included, Galbraith argued that
the Tibetan air operation, ‘shows a disturbing American willingness to fish in
troubled waters however far from home’.104 Harry Rositzke, the CIA station
chief in India, subsequently qualified Galbraith’s account of the extent to
which Agency activity in India was pared back. Rositzke maintained that
much of the support that the Agency provided to the Dalai Lama, Tibetan
exiles in India, and guerrilla fighters inside Tibet, remained largely unchanged
under the Kennedy administration.105 During Galbraith’s tenure in India, and
that of his successor, Chester Bowles, the CIA in-country presence remained
(in the eyes of many close observers) as pervasive and powerful as ever. Joseph
Greene, Bowles’s deputy chief of mission, observed ruefully that his boss’s
distaste for covert operations was exacerbated by the nagging sense that
Kennedy’s assertion of the primacy of ambassadors over CIA station chiefs
was simply ignored by the Agency. ‘CIA never really went along with that
[Kennedy’s directive]’, Greene reflected, ‘and were always keeping things from
the front office’.106
American diplomats who worked in New Delhi at the time have corrobor-
ated Greene’s misgivings. Mary Olmstead spent four and a half years working
in the economic section of the US embassy in the 1960s. The CIA, she
observed, ‘was very, very active’ in the country. State Department officials
seconded to India were appalled at the extent of financial incentives offered by
the Agency to attract local agents. Such largesse appeared morally questionable
and, from a purely economic perspective, helped to sustain a national bureau-
cratic culture riven with corruption and graft. India, Olmstead lamented, came
to represent ‘another illustration of CIA having too much money, too many
people’. By adopting a scattergun approach to intelligence collection in the
subcontinent that sought to ‘find out everything that’s going on’, important
material was often obscured in a morass of incidental information.107 Agency
 quiet americans 99

field officers who worked under Rositzke have suggested that the CIA station
in India remained dynamic and aggressive, and anything but the passive and
enervated enterprise depicted by Galbraith. ‘He [Rositzke] wanted us roaming
around the city, getting to know India, and meeting individuals with access to
secret information whom we might recruit’, one CIA officer recalled. Morning
CIA staff meetings, he added, ‘had a certain Dickensian quality, like a colloquy
between Fagin and his young pickpockets’. Rositzke was known to push his
team hard to be proactive, to recruit Indian and Eastern bloc agents, to counter
communist propaganda with disinformation, and to constantly evidence
‘development activity’.108 It is possible that Galbraith overstated his capacity
to bring the CIA to heal in India. Then again, as Bowles suspected, perhaps the
Agency just kept him in the dark.

Opportunity Anew: The Descent to War

In the autumn of 1962, as the Agency adjusted to Galbraith’s ambassadorship,
the CIA’s complex relationship with India’s government took a new and
unexpected turn. In October, the long-simmering border dispute between
India and China erupted into armed conflict. In short order, a succession of
rapid Chinese military advances led some commentators to question whether
India would emerge from the border war as an independent sovereign state.
Speaking to his fellow citizens on 22 October, Nehru characterised China’s
thrust into northern India as ‘the greatest menace that has come to us since
independence’.109 With India’s armed forces in full retreat, a national State of
Emergency was enacted, parliament recalled, sandbags piled around public
buildings, and military recruiting stations flooded with eager volunteers. On
the streets of the nation’s major cities, effigies of Mao Zedong were set
alight.110 A shocked Nehru conceded that his government had been found
wanting and was guilty of drifting along ‘in an artificial atmosphere of our own
creation’.111 India, the nation’s premier announced publicly, was in dire need
of international ‘sympathy and support’.112 From Washington, the Kennedy
administration responded immediately with offers of political and material
aid. Although obscured at the time, the CIA would play a pivotal role in
assisting India during, and subsequent to, the Sino-Indian war of 1962.
A new intelligence partnership between Washington and New Delhi, and
one that would have profound consequences for Indo-US relations throughout
the remainder of the Cold War and beyond, was cemented once waves of
Chinese troops crossed the Himalayan watershed and planted their boots
firmly on Indian soil.
 5

Confronting China: The Sino-Indian War

and Collaborative Covert Action

On 20 October 1962, as the first light of dawn crested the eastern Himalayas,
two flares burst into the sky over the Thag La Ridge, a steep and thickly
wooded ridge commanding the disputed border between India’s North East
Frontier Agency (NEFA) and the Tibet region of China. Taking a cue to
advance, moments later units of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army fell
upon positions occupied by Indian forces in the valley below. Caught
unawares, the Indians were quickly overwhelmed.1 Within forty-eight
hours, Chinese troops had decimated the crack 7th Infantry Brigade and
advanced deep into Indian territory. At the same time, a thousand miles away
in the western Himalayas, another Chinese border incursion, in Ladakh, met
with similar success. In mid-November, following a brief lull in fighting, the
PLA launched a second major offensive. Representing the most significant
show of Chinese force since Beijing sent its armies across the Yalu River into
Korea, in October 1950, Indian defences were swept away and the road to the
nation’s densely populated northern plains left open. In Assam, at Tezpur,
the largest city on the northern bank of the Brahmaputra River, panic took
hold. Any semblance of civil administration collapsed. Prison doors were
thrown open and criminals set free. The district treasury burned Indian
banknotes lest they fall into enemy hands. A local airfield was besieged by
desperate civilians begging to be evacuated to safety. In a matter of hours,
a once bustling metropolis of 50,000 inhabitants was reduced to a ‘ghost
city’.2
In New Delhi, journalists pressed India’s shell-shocked Defence
Minister, Krishna Menon, to confirm when the Chinese invasion would
be checked. ‘The way they [the Chinese] are going’, a dejected Menon
replied, ‘there is not any limit to where they will go’.3 Speaking to
a stunned nation on All India Radio, Jawaharlal Nehru warned his fellow
citizens to prepare themselves for a long and arduous struggle with China.
The outbreak of Sino-Indian hostilities, a disconsolate Nehru cautioned,
represented nothing less than the ‘the greatest menace that has come to us
[India] since independence’.4 An atmosphere of jingoism gripped India.
Citizens committees were convened to coordinate acts of patriotism that
included donating blood and knitting for the jawans, or soldiers.5 India’s

100
 confronting china 101

premier was reluctant to accept that China’s military onslaught might

compel his government to abandon its cherished policy of non-alignment.
In the lead up to the border war, the Indian premier had characterised
other countries acceptance of foreign military aid as akin to, ‘becoming
somebody else’s dependent’. This, Nehru asserted, India would not accept,
‘even if disaster occurs on the frontier’.6 In fact, the scale of the calamity
confronting India forced Nehru to perform a screeching U-turn. Offers of
political support and military aid from the United States and Britain were
readily accepted by a grateful Indian government.7 Shrouded in a cloak of
secrecy at the time, American and British intelligence services played
a vital part in strengthening Indian security during, and after, the conflict.
India’s China war was the catalyst for a profound, if short-lived, period of
intelligence collaboration between Washington, London, and New Delhi
that was to cast a long shadow over Western relations with India for the
remainder of the Cold War.

India’s Intelligence Bureau and Perceptions of ‘Failure’

The origins of the Sino-Indian border conflict are complex and
contested.8 Equally contentious, is the extent to which India’s
intelligence system was later held culpable for failing to anticipate and
respond to China’s military onslaught. India’s Intelligence Bureau had
evolved under its second director, B. N. Mullik, into an essentially
domestic security service with a limited capacity to run foreign intelli-
gence operations. The meagre cross-border capabilities that the IB pos-
sessed were focused preponderantly on countering threats from Pakistan.
Nevertheless, in the months leading up to the border conflict, the IB did
monitor and report on Chinese military dispositions. In May 1962, an IB
source discovered that the Chinese consulate in Calcutta had advised
Indian communists that Beijing intended to occupy contested territory
in Ladakh.9 Evidence of Beijing’s aggressive intent was passed on by
Mullik to Nehru, Krishna Menon, and India’s Home minister, Lal
Bahadur Shastri.10
The Indian government’s ineffectual response to warnings of looming
Chinese aggression have been attributed by historians in the subcontinent
less to a failure of intelligence collection, and more to undue influence wielded
by the IB over intelligence analysis and policy formulation. In contravention
with established intelligence practice, the IB was responsible for gathering
information on Chinese political and military developments and evaluating
likely Chinese intentions. In effect, India’s intelligence agency was guilty of
marking its own homework. Equally, through Mullik, who had ready access to
Nehru and enjoyed the Indian premier’s confidence, the IB was able to estab-
lish a position on the border dispute that few military or civilian officials were
102 spying in south asia

willing, or felt able, to challenge.11 A leading proponent of the ‘forward

policy’, which discounted the possibility that Chinese forces would forcibly
eliminate Indian army outposts straddling the disputed border, Mullik,
abetted by senior political figures close to Nehru, amplified the IB’s influence
over border policy and stifled dissenting voices.12 In May 1961, in responding
to anxiety expressed by one of his own ministers at the effectiveness of Indian
intelligence, Nehru sprang to the IB’s defence. ‘I have no doubt that
Intelligence set-up can be improved’, the Indian premier conceded. ‘But
I think it is true to say that it is a fairly efficient organization even as it is.
The Head of the intelligence Service has full access to me and reports to me
frequently. There is a fair amount of coordination with External Affairs
information and military information . . . I do not think any Intelligence
Service could have done much insofar as Chinese aggression was
concerned.’13
In fairness to Mullik and the IB, they were not alone in misreading
Chinese intentions when it came to India’s northern border. British
officials in northeast India responded to concerns raised by the expatriate
UK community in Darjeeling with an assurance that, ‘Indian intelligence
sources were sufficiently good to rule out the possibility of China launch-
ing a surprise large scale attack on India (even if, which was not the case,
we thought that she intended to do so).’ ‘The build-up on the Chinese
side of the frontier which would be needed’, nervous British residents
were informed, ‘could not possibly be concealed’. Having spoken to
Indian administrators in Assam, British diplomats concluded that inhab-
itants of the border areas had, ‘learned to live with the problem and to
have convinced themselves that China will not launch a military attack on
India’.14
The military debacle that took India by surprise in 1962, saw a narrative of
intelligence failure become embedded in the subcontinent’s political con-
sciousness. In turn, this generated intelligence reforms that came to encompass
the creation of a new and separate external intelligence agency, the Research
and Analysis Wing (R&AW). A perception of intelligence inadequacy occa-
sioned by the Sino-Indian war also created conditions in which New Delhi’s
reluctance to collaborate with Western intelligence agencies was cast aside.15
From Nehru downwards, Indian government officials held a negative view of
American intelligence agencies. In the spring of 1961, following the Bay of Pigs
fiasco, the Indian embassy in Washington dispatched a scathing assessment of
the US intelligence community to the Ministry of External Affairs. Observing
that the CIA ‘seems to have a lurid life of its own’, Indian diplomats expressed
satisfaction that having been dealt a ‘severe blow’ by its adventurism in the
Caribbean, ‘it seemed quite possible that the CIA may lose not only its political
influence, but also some of the [covert action] functions which it had arrogated
to itself’. Although welcoming such a development were it to transpire, the
 confronting china 103

Indian embassy cautioned that any reduction in the CIA’s power and influence
was likely to benefit its institutional rival, the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
This, in turn, would prove problematic. ‘The FBI . . . to put it mildly’, New
Delhi was warned, ‘is a nest of would-be fascists’.16 The border war, and the
existential threat that it presented to the Indian Republic, transformed the
Nehru government’s uneasy relationships with America in the intelligence
sphere. China’s military incursions into the subcontinent in 1962 ushered in
a new, if transient, golden age of clandestine collaboration between India and
the United States.

Covert Cold War Cartography

A secret Sino-Indian border war had been underway for some time prior to
October 1962. One area in which this shadow struggle played out, centred on
historic maps that both challenged and appeared to legitimise the respective
territorial claims advanced by New Delhi and Beijing. Indian government
officials took particular interest in securing access to British colonial maps
that they believed would confirm India’s interpretation of its contested border
with China. In September 1959, under the supervision of Sarvepalli Gopal,
director of the historical division of the MEA, Indian emissaries began to comb
through dusty files in the India Office Library (IOL), at the Commonwealth
Relations Office, in London.17 The Indians’ objective was to procure a facsimile
of a British map of Ladakh, which dated from 1851. The chart, the Indian
government believed, proved beyond doubt that its delineation of the Western
Himalayan border with China was legitimate. Having located the map, Gopal
received special permission from the CRO to remove the original from the IOL
for the purpose of making a photostat copy. In an episode worthy of a John le
Carré spy thriller, an Indian official, K. L. Madan, took possession of the sole
copy of document and boarded a London bus to return to his office at India
House. During the journey, Madan was approached by a fellow passenger, who
he believed to be Chinese, and offered £100 in cash for the map, along with the
promise that a further £100 would be made available to two of his work
colleagues. Having rebuffed the offer, a flustered Madan jumped off the bus
and took flight.18
Alarmed at what appeared to have been a crude operation mounted by
Chinese intelligence agents, the Indian high commission alerted the CRO.
Indian diplomats asked Alexander Clutterbuck, permanent under-secretary at
the CRO, to impose restrictions on public access to maps and documents in
Britain’s possession that were relevant to the border dispute. Clutterbuck
agreed to implement tougher access standards, the effect of which was to
ensure that only British and Indian officials were able to consult politically
sensitive material held by the India Office Library. The Indian high commis-
sion also tightened its own security procedures. Reasoning that Chinese
104 spying in south asia

intelligence operatives had learned of Indian plans to acquire the Ladakh map
by tapping into the high commission’s telephone lines, its staff were instructed
not to discuss any important matters over the telephone.19 Nehru took
a personal interest in what he characterised as the ‘incident of the map’.
Writing to his sister, and India’s high commissioner in the UK, Vijaya
Lakshmi Pandit, the Indian premier observed that the suspected Chinese
intelligence operation conducted in London had ‘put us on our guard’.20
When news of the ‘incident of the map’ was picked up by Indian journalists,
Nehru amplified media interest in the episode by stating unequivocally during
a press conference in New Delhi that ‘Chinese spies’ had sought to purloin
important documents that validated India’s position on the border dispute.21
In October, when Gopal returned to Britain to undertake further research on
the border question, he was afforded protection from the British police in an
effort to forestall further ‘dirty tricks’ on the part of the Chinese.22
Some years earlier, Britain had collaborated indirectly with India in another
intelligence gathering operation related to the border dispute. On this occa-
sion, the drama played out on the ground in the far northwest of the subcon-
tinent. The affair involved a British climber, Sydney Wignall, who was
introduced to officials claiming to represent the Indian high commission in
London by the Himalayan Club, a mountaineering organisation run by former
members of the British Indian Army and civil administration. In fact, Indian
military intelligence had become aware of Wignall’s plans to scale several peaks
in West Nepal, a sensitive area that overlooked PLA installations inside Tibet.
An approach was made to the British climber, and he agreed to spy for India.23
Shortly before Wignall became embroiled in clandestine exploits on the roof of
the world, another British adventurer, James (later, Jan) Morris, the London
Times’ correspondent on the 1953 Everest expedition, had taken note of
unusual Indian activity in the border region. Morris was determined that the
Times would secure a famous global scoop by breaking the story of the first
successful ascent of Everest. On route to Everest, Morris had been delighted to
stumble across a wireless transmitter manned by an Indian police officer in the
remote town of Namche Bazar, in the Khumbu area of northeastern Nepal.
Perplexed ‘that there should be a radio station so deep in the wilds, and in
a region so secluded’, Morris made use of it to ensure the Times’ account of
Norgay Tenzing and Edmund Hillary’s triumph made headlines around the
world and appeared in print on the morning of Queen Elizabeth II’s coron-
ation. The Indian radio post had been established to pass information on
communist infiltration across the Nepalese border back to Indian Army
headquarters in New Delhi. ‘This was one of the ideological frontiers of the
world. There were rumours that the communists were building airbases on the
high Tibetan plateau over the mountains; and this little radio station was a side
show of the cold war’, Morris observed later.24 Side show it may have been, but
for a brief moment in early 1953, India’s covert war in the high Himalayas
 confronting china 105

played a crucial, and unintended part, in one of the greatest news stories of the
twentieth century.
Two years later, when Sydney Wignall arrived in the subcontinent, he was
greeted by Lieutenant Colonel B. N. ‘Baij’ Mehta of the Indian Army. Mehta
would be killed in action, almost exactly seven years later, fighting in the Sino-
Indian war. The Indian officer briefed Wignall on his responsibilities as an
Indian agent and instructed him on the communication protocols he was to
use to convey information to New Delhi on Chinese military activity in the
border region. Wignall was led to believe that Nehru, and like-minded mem-
bers of the Indian cabinet, had prohibited intelligence operations in the border
area on the grounds that they were needlessly provocative. Senior Indian Army
officers, including General Kodandera Subayya ‘Timmy’ Thimayya, a future
Chief of the Army Staff, the British climber was assured, took a different view.
Wignall was informed that he would be acting as one of ‘Timmy’s boys’, or
a select group of covert operatives sent into Nepal and Tibet by Indian military
intelligence to spy on the PLA. On 25 October 1955, while moving through the
border area, Wignall was apprehended by a Chinese patrol. For several weeks,
Wignall, and his climbing partner, John Harrop, were held in ‘a freezing cold,
and rat-infested prison cell in south-west Tibet, accused of being an agent, not
of India, but of the American CIA’.25
Prior to his capture, Wignall claimed to have acquired valuable intelligence
on China’s construction of the strategic highway between Xinjiang and Tibet.
On his release, Wignall’s India Army handlers suggested that his intelligence
had been placed before Nehru and Krishna Menon. Indian’s civilian leadership
had, Wignall was told, judged the information he had obtained as suspect, and
it was discounted. The British Foreign Office, and officers from SIS, who
Wignall alleged debriefed him on his return to London, evidenced greater
interest in a rare instance of eyewitness testimony from an inaccessible corner
of the globe. With precision aerial surveillance of the Himalayas beyond the
capabilities of Britain and India, and satellite imagery still some years away,
utilising civilians for intelligence gathering operations on India’s border
offered the prospect of significant rewards, but also ran significant political
risks. Intriguingly, Wignall’s foray into a modern rendering of South Asia’s
‘Great Game’ would later intersect with another multi-national intelligence
enterprise in the Himalayas that also employed foreign mountaineers. While in
Chinese captivity, Wignall fed his PLA interrogators disinformation. The CIA,
the British climber informed his PLA guards, had placed listening devices on
two Himalayan peaks to monitor military activity across Tibet and into
China.26 A decade later, India would engage in just such an exercise in
partnership with the CIA.27
India’s capacity to respond to Chinese threats developing beyond its imme-
diate borders was more limited. Until 1949, only one desk within the IB was
dedicated to foreign intelligence. Under Sanjeevi’s direction, the IB did post
106 spying in south asia

officers to Indian diplomatic missions in Pakistan and a small number of

European capitals. Plans to expand the Intelligence Bureau’s international
footprint, however, were compromised by Sanjeevi’s removal as DIB, in
July 1950.28 Nehru was sceptical that India needed, and could afford,
a geographically diffuse intelligence infrastructure. ‘I do not think that we
should go in a big way to expand our Intelligence services’, the Indian remier
maintained. ‘That is beyond our capacity.’29 Nehru had a point. The challenge
of gathering reliable and timely information on an effectively closed society in
China had defeated intelligence services that were far larger and better
resourced than the IB. Efforts that were undertaken by the IB to enhance its
coverage of China were hampered by structural and cultural obstacles, as much
as financial considerations. The study of Chinese linguistics, culture, politics,
and history were neglected in the Indian academic system until the middle of
the 1950s. At the time, one study estimated that within the whole of India no
more than half a dozen citizens of non-Chinese origin were capable of reading
and writing Chinese.30 British efforts to establish ‘closer liaison’ with Indian
colleagues ‘over information about Chinese [border] activities’ also failed to
gain much traction. British diplomats in Beijing were reluctant to broach such
a sensitive matter with local Indian colleagues. In December 1954, when
London authorised an approach to the Indian counsellor in Beijing, who had
‘shown signs of wishing to exchange confidences’, the initiative collapsed after
the counsellor was posted away before any information sharing could occur.
The local British mission tried and failed to identify an alternative Indian
conduit ‘suitable and willing’ to share intelligence on China’s domestic politics
and foreign policy.31
In 1957, as Sino-Indian tensions increased, the IB persuaded Nehru to
approve the posting of an intelligence officer to Beijing under diplomatic
cover. In doing so, the Indian premier overrode objections from the MEA
and India’s ambassador in China, Ratan Kumar (R. K.) Nehru. It was agreed
that the intelligence officer sent to Beijing should be a fluent Chinese speaker.
India’s prime minister also stipulated that the IB’s man in China, ‘should be
a trained economist and should also have political training’. ‘Mere intelligence
training’, Nehru reasoned, ‘is very far from adequate for an appraisal of
a [foreign] situation’. Having set the bar for Indian intelligence officers aspir-
ing to serve in China so high, it was unsurprising when plans to station
a second IB officer in Shanghai were later abandoned for a want of suitable
personnel.32 Two years later, in 1959, as Sino-Indian enmity grew, an Indian
academic, and member of the Praja Socialist Party, expressed bemusement to
Nehru that an Indian intelligence and propaganda organisation had yet to be
established in wider Asia. Having recently toured the region, Dr Samar Guha
informed Nehru that he had been struck by the fact that, ‘our [India’s]
Embassies abroad . . . might give greater publicity to our border issues and
India’s viewpoint. There was a great deal of interest in them, but our Embassies
 confronting china 107

were not utilizing this opportunity to publicize our case.’ When it came to the
matter of China, Guha observed pointedly, ‘Hong Kong . . . was an ideal place
for [an] intelligence set-up to find out what was happening in China. But
apparently, we [India] had no such set-up there.’33

Building Intelligence Bridges

When China launched its military offensive against India in the autumn of
1962, it was not only New Delhi that was caught off-guard. As Indians reeled
from the trauma of being pitched unexpectedly into a battle with their north-
ern neighbour, 4,000 miles away in London, John Kenneth Galbraith spent the
evening of 20 October at a West End theatre. Galbraith had stopped off in
Britain while travelling back from New Delhi to Washington. With the con-
clusion of one dramatic performance, the US ambassador stepped into the
London night to be greeted by another, as newsstands proclaimed the outbreak
of hostilities between India and China. Back at his hotel, Galbraith was handed
an urgent message from President Kennedy that ordered him to return to India
on the next available flight. Kennedy’s message made no reference to Sino-
Indian fighting. Galbraith was needed in New Delhi, the President explained,
to brief Nehru on developments taking place in the Caribbean. The CIA had
discovered that the Soviet Union was constructing intermediate range nuclear
missile sites in Cuba, ninety miles off America’s eastern seaboard.34 With
Washington’s focus on events in Cuba, it was not until the end of October
that the Kennedy administration began to devote sustained attention to India’s
plight.35 Kennedy was awake to the wider significance of the clash between
India and China. The President confided to aides that the border war might
well prove as fateful for American global interests as the Cuban Missile Crisis.
By forcing Moscow to side with either India or China; opening a window for
rapprochement between India and Pakistan; and fostering closer military and
intelligence relations between New Delhi and the West; the President specu-
lated that Beijing’s aggression could rebound to Washington’s advantage.36
On 25 October, a humbled Nehru conceded that his government had been
guilty of, ‘getting out of touch with the modern world [and] . . . living in an
artificial atmosphere of our own creation’.37 The next day, India’s premier
issued a call for international ‘sympathy and support’, as barely a week into the
border fighting Indian forces stood on the brink of an ignominious defeat.38
The Kennedy administration responded promptly with pledges of political and
material assistance. Calling a press conference in New Delhi, Galbraith
brushed aside opposition from Washington’s Nationalist Chinese allies and
announced the United States’ formal recognition of India’s border claims.
Having received a direct request from Nehru for military aid, Galbraith
began working closely with the Indian Ministry of Defence, the Pentagon,
and his British counterparts, to expedite the delivery of automatic rifles,
108 spying in south asia

ammunition, and military spares to India.39 On 19 November, a further

Chinese offensive shattered India’s defensive line in the north. Nehru reacted
by confirming to a stunned nation that his government had approached the
United States and Britain for ‘massive’ military support. ‘We are not going to
tolerate this kind of [Chinese] invasion of India’, Nehru proclaimed, ‘ . . . India
is not going to lose this war, however long it lasts and whatever harm it may do
us.’40 Representing his nation’s plight as ‘desperate’, the Indian leader
informed an incredulous Kennedy that only direct American military inter-
vention in the Sino-Indian conflict could avert, ‘nothing short of a catastrophe
for our country’. Twelve squadrons of American supersonic fighters, two
squadrons of bombers, and a mobile radar network, were all needed by
India, Nehru declared, to check the PLA’s advance. Concluding that the
India premier was ‘clearly in a state of panic’, Kennedy questioned whether
the ageing Nehru’s judgement had deserted him.41 Having earlier rejected
charges from the Indian Left that the Kennedy administration was plotting
to coerce New Delhi into becoming a Western ally, Galbraith was dismayed to
find Nehru’s government, ‘pleading for military association’.42
Alarmed by the political and strategic implications of Nehru’s appeal for a de
facto military alliance with the United States, Kennedy determined to cut
through the fog of war by dispatching a high-level fact-finding delegation to
the subcontinent. Modelled on the Taylor mission that had assessed the
military situation in South Vietnam, in October 1961, the American taskforce
was led by the veteran diplomatic envoy, Averell Harriman.43 Simultaneously,
the British government sent its own politico-military team to India, headed by
Duncan Sandys, the Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations.44 Shortly
before midnight on 20 November, with the Harriman and Sandys missions yet
to arrive in New Delhi, the Chinese government stunned the world by
announcing a unilateral ceasefire and the staged withdrawal of its forces
from much of the territory that they had occupied over the previous month.
In practice, by relinquishing China’s hold on territory in the northeast and
asserting its control of Aksai Chin in the west, Beijing imposed on Nehru’s
government a border settlement that it had previously tried, and failed, to
secure diplomatically.45 The timing of the ceasefire, as British officials noted,
was significant, and left India ‘somewhat more committed to the West than
would have been the case had the Chinese acted two days earlier’.46
Once in India, the Harriman and Sandys missions wasted little time in
bringing influence to bear on Nehru’s government. The sizeable American
and British delegations included political advisers, economists, military per-
sonnel, and intelligence officers. Prominent among the latter were Desmond
Fitzgerald, chief of the CIA’s Far Eastern division, James Critchfield, head of
CIA Near East Operations, and John Knaus, who ran the Agency’s Tibetan
Task Force. The mission’s discussions with Indian government officials
spanned a wide range of issues, including the provision of military aid, funding
 confronting china 109

for economic development, and the intractable dispute between India and
Pakistan over Kashmir, and were exhaustively covered by the subcontinent’s
newspapers. Little public comment was made of talks held between the British
and American mission’s intelligence officers and their Indian counterparts.
Strenuous efforts undertaken by the United States and the United Kingdom in
the wake of the Harriman and Sandys missions to bolster India’s military
capabilities, revitalise its moribund economy, and resolve the Kashmir dispute,
came to little. Before the end of the 1960s, India had largely turned its back on
the West and looked increasingly to the Soviet Union for fiscal support and
military supplies. Kashmir remained a sore point in India’s relations with
Pakistan.
In contrast, the Harriman and Sandys missions had a more transformative
and a less transient impact on Indian’s intelligence relationship with Britain
and the United States. Exchanges held between senior CIA officers and their
British colleagues with India’s intelligence leaders paved the way for the
evolution of new and extensive joint covert action capabilities directed pri-
marily at the People’s Republic of China.47 These came to encompass, amongst
other things, the deployment of a clandestine warfare unit to monitor Chinese
military supply routes into Tibet; the development of enhanced photographic
signals and imagery intelligence capabilities; an operation to install nuclear-
powered surveillance equipment on India’s Himalayan peaks to monitor
Chinese atomic tests; and offensive disinformation activity designed to erode
international support for China and burnish India’s global standing.48 The
border war also served as a catalyst for the expansion of British covert oper-
ations in India and the return of SIS to the subcontinent. If the origins of the
‘Attlee Directive’ lay in India in the late 1940s, its effective demise was sealed by
events in the subcontinent in the early 1960s.
Before the United States moved to recalibrate its intelligence relationship
with New Delhi, members of the Harriman mission presented Washington
with a blunt assessment of the deficiencies within India’s intelligence commu-
nity. In a report sent to the Joint Chiefs of Staff by General Paul Adams, the
senior military officer attached to the Harriman mission and head of US Strike
Command, the history of Indian international relations was represented as
‘basically one of passive resistance’. India had, Adams stated, focused too much
attention on a threat posed by Pakistan, while overlooking China’s aggressive
intent. Prior to October 1962, Adams noted, ‘India’s intelligence system was
erroneously considered reasonably efficient.’ Poor intelligence collection,
inadequate information processing, and faulty intelligence estimates had
been exposed by China’s incursion into northern India and had laid bare an
‘inadequate national intelligence effort’.49 Adams suggested that India’s sub-
standard intelligence performance was due to over reliance on organisational
structures and procedures that were outmoded and not fit for purpose. British
colonial practices that dated back to the early decades of the century retained
110 spying in south asia

currency inside the Intelligence Bureau, which wielded an ‘extraordinary

concentration of responsibility for police affairs, internal security, and foreign
intelligence collection . . . ’. Improving the effectiveness of India’s civil and
military intelligence services and addressing weaknesses in intelligence coord-
ination and control across the government of India, Washington was warned,
would not be a quick or an easy fix.
American officials voiced additional concern that New Delhi had been
reluctant in the past to exchange intelligence information with the United
States and, while the border war had changed the intelligence liaison environ-
ment, ‘the Indians continue to resist a freer exchange [of intelligence mater-
ial]’. The fact that Mullik had worked closely with Britain and other
Commonwealth countries on security matters was seen as reassuring, but it
was deemed troubling that the DIB had cultivated ‘no official liaison with other
foreign intelligence services and has avoided official contact with foreign
intelligence agencies’. In part, Mullik’s parochial attitude was attributed to
a sensitivity on the part of senior Indian intelligence officers to New Delhi’s
policy of non-alignment. Equally, members of the Harriman mission sus-
pected that the Indians realised ‘much of their intelligence product is of
a low standard’ and were disinclined to advertise that fact. Whatever the
obstacles restricting intelligence exchange, America’s spooks were eager to
sweep them aside. Given Mullik’s position as ‘a close personal adviser’ to
Nehru, and his broad responsibilities for border intelligence and paramilitary
activity, winning the trust of India’s spy chief was seen as critical to the
evolution of US-Indian intelligence relations. It would be of ‘extreme benefit
to US intelligence interests’, Adams emphasised, to move rapidly in establish-
ing ‘joint intelligence collection projects [with India] designed to insure
mutual exchange of information’.50
For some American diplomats, securing the cooperation of Mullik was no
more important to the progression of US-Indian intelligence relations than
ensuring that the CIA remained under tight bureaucratic control in the
subcontinent. Galbraith was particularly concerned that the presence of
Desmond Fitzgerald on Harriman’s staff signalled the potential for trouble.
Fitzgerald had established a reputation within the Agency’s Directorate of
Plans, or covert operations division, for sponsoring risky clandestine activity
across Asia. He had been a driving force behind the CIA’s Tibetan task force.
Fitzgerald’s involvement in the latter covert action, which Galbraith con-
demned as ill-judged and politically reckless, led the ambassador to character-
ise him as ‘one of the most irresponsible’ officers in Agency’s history.
Suspicious that Fitzgerald would attempt to lure Indians into undertaking
insecure and inappropriate operations, Galbraith had the CIA officer trailed
around Delhi by a trusted embassy official. ‘A spy to watch a spy’, as the
ambassador later noted.51 Meanwhile, the sober and steady figure of James
Critchfield was encouraged by Galbraith to take the lead in Agency discussions
 confronting china 111

with Mullik.52 Galbraith need not have worried. The extensive programme of
joint covert operations that the CIA went on to implement in partnership with
India’s Intelligence Bureau would escape public scrutiny for many years to
come. Paradoxically, it was revelations surrounding illegal CIA involvement
with educational and cultural bodies inside the United States that would
eventually set-off a political firestorm in India. In the immediate aftermath
of the border conflict, however, the focus of America’s intelligence community
in South Asia was directed towards reinvigorating the capabilities of a new
Indian collaborator in Washington’s decades long struggle with Red China.

India’s Clandestine China War

The most significant agreement that James Critchfield reached with the
Intelligence Bureau in November 1962 was to provide CIA support in training
and logistics for a new paramilitary force that Mullik intended to deploy on
India’s northern border. The predominantly Tibetan-manned unit was desig-
nated as the Special Frontier Force (SFF). It was more commonly known as
Establishment 22, a soubriquet acquired from its leader, Major General Sujan
Singh Urban, who had commanded the Twenty-Second Indian Army
Mountain regiment during the Second World War. Modelled on the Green
Berets, or US Army Special Forces, the SSF, who wore distinctive red caps,
eventually came to encompass 12,000 elite troops.53 For CIA officers and their
colleagues in the US Army, the attraction of supporting India’s development of
an unconventional warfare capability lay, primarily, in the impact it was expected
to have relative to the costs involved. Referencing the use that the Soviets had
made of partisan units employed behind German lines on the Eastern front two
decades previously, American officials emphasised that ‘the entire [Indian]
border area is excellent terrain for guerrilla operations’. ‘If advantage is taken of
the opportunity that now exists to train defensive guerrilla forces for operations
behind enemy lines as stay-behind forces in case of invasion’, the Harriman
mission reasoned, ‘the defense of India can be greatly enhanced at small cost’.54
Specifically, Washington was asked to commit the United States to assist India in
building up a defensive guerrilla warfare capability in the border areas adjacent to
Bhutan, Sikkim, and the NEFA. The Kennedy administration was also pressed to
support the Intelligence Bureau’s plans to expand Indian offensive unconven-
tional warfare operations. This scheme envisaged the IB co-opting refugees from
India’s northern frontier and, following appropriate training, sending them back
across the border into Tibet to disrupt Chinese communications and collect
intelligence.55
On 28 November, before the Harriman mission departed from the subcon-
tinent, Critchfield and his military colleagues attended a meeting with Mullik
and senior Indian Army officers at the Ministry of Defence in New Delhi. The
gathering agreed a series of specific actions to take forward the development of
112 spying in south asia

Figure 5.1 Tibetan refugees after being evacuated from the Sino-Indian border by the
United States Air Force, Pathankot, India, 1962. United States Information Agency
collection, US National Archives, College Park, Maryland.

India’s unconventional warfare capabilities. To facilitate the planning and

coordination of ‘a wide spectrum of possible operations’, agreement was
reached to establish a Joint Unconventional Warfare Task Force (JUWTF)
headquarters in New Delhi, that would operate under the auspices of the
American Joint Military Mission to India (AJMMI). In addition, it was decided
to set up a Joint Unconventional Warfare Operations Base (JUWOB) at
Hasimara, a town situated on the banks of the Torsha River in northern
West Bengal, near India’s border with Bhutan. The facility at Hasimara was
earmarked to oversee the training and operational activity of Indian and
refugee guerrilla forces and was to be managed locally by an American
Special Forces team, a US Air Force commando detachment, and four US
Army units. Eight ‘sanitised’ American and Indian aircraft, stripped of all
markings and identification numbers, were allotted to operate out of
Hasimara and provide the guerrilla forces with air mobility. The meeting
between Indian and American intelligence officers ended on ‘a note of
 confronting china 113

enthusiasm’. Given the problematic political optics that surrounded India’s

clandestine joint venture with the United States, both parties to the arrange-
ment were, nevertheless, at pains to stress ‘a very definite desire that the entire
operation be as covert as possible’.56 Less is known about British involvement
in India’s unconventional warfare programme. It is clear, however, that small
numbers of British military personnel and intelligence officers with experience
in guerrilla tactics and stay-behind operations did contribute to the training of
Indian personnel. Mark Scarse-Dickens, who served in Britain’s special forces
in the jungles of Borneo during the Konfrontasi with Indonesia and went on to
enjoy a long and successful career in SIS, completed at least one ‘shadowy’ tour
of India. Scarse-Dickens passed on skills in cross-border ambushes to Indian
recruits in the Himalayas before he was invalided back home. Mercifully, the
curtailment of Scarse-Dickens’ Indian adventure was not brought about by
Chinese action. He was laid low by a bout of jaundice acquired after eating with
a remote group of mountain herders and drove several hundred miles in
a service Land Rover back to a hospital in New Delhi, where he collapsed.57
In the days leading up to Critchfield’s exchange with Mullik, Nehru had
indicated his support for strengthening India’s unconventional warfare cap-
acity. On 25 November, writing to his newly installed Minister of Defence,
Yashwantrao Balwantrao Chavan, the Indian premier applauded the decision
to recruit ‘our tribal people in the Northeast’ for special operations. ‘These
border people are tough and fit’, Nehru noted approvingly, ‘and especially
good at some kind of guerrilla warfare’.58 The sense of personal shock and
betrayal that tormented Nehru following the onset of Sino-Indian hostilities,
prompted something akin to a damascene conversion when it came to uncon-
ventional warfare. During late 1963 and early 1964, Nehru toured the SFF’s
main training camp in the Himalayas. He also visited the secret Charbatia air
base, code-named Oak Tree, an abandoned Second World War airstrip near
Cuttack, in the state of Odisha, in eastern India, that had been converted for
use by Indian and American clandestine forces.59 For a leader who had long
harboured misgivings about the activities undertaken by intelligence agencies
in democratic societies, and those practised by American intelligence agencies
in particular, Nehru’s willingness to embrace covert action following China’s
incursion into northern India represented a remarkable volte face.
Back in Washington, senior officials on the National Security Council
proved to be equally enthusiastic advocates of India’s development of an
unconventional warfare programme. Robert Komer, the resident NSC expert
on South Asia, argued that offering ‘greater [US] backing to India’s U/W
[unconventional warfare] effort makes a great deal of sense’. By 1965, the
$13 million that India had received to fund its secret war against China, Komer
reasoned, represented exceptionally good value for money. By bankrolling
covert operations in India’s northern border areas, he maintained, it was
possible to reassure New Delhi that the United States was ‘serious about
114 spying in south asia

China’. Moreover, ‘being helpful under the table’ where India was concerned,
was seen as useful in counteracting lingering suspicions amongst Indians that
Americans were ‘really Pak[istani]s at heart’.60 The political dividend that
Washington expected to garner from supporting Indian unconventional war-
fare operations, as opposed to the strictly military value of a programme that
was likely to prove little more than an irritant to the Chinese, underpinned
America’s willingness to keep covert action dollars flowing into New Delhi. In
April 1966, Walt Rostow, Lyndon Johnson’s national security adviser,
endorsed a new and larger tranche of funding for Indian clandestine oper-
ations on the basis that, ‘it is a quiet way to build our links with India in the
security field in ways which counter Soviet leverage.’ Utilising Indo-US collab-
oration in covert operations to limit Moscow’s penetration of India’s national
security establishment made good sense to Rostow. Concerns remained in the
White House that American involvement in India’s secret war, were it to
become more widely known, would alienate Pakistan and, more seriously,
‘engage us [the United States], against our will, in an India-China conflict’.
Such risks, Rostow judged, while considerable, were worth taking to keep India
closely aligned with the West, and China tied up in securing its borders. ‘On
balance’, Rostow counselled Johnson, ‘I support this [Indian unconventional
warfare] venture.’61 American’s ambassador in New Delhi, Chester Bowles,
added another voice to those promoting expanded US support for India’s
unconventional warfare capability. Writing to Rostow, in July 1966, Bowles
urged the Johnson administration not to stint on the provision of financial aid.
‘This [unconventional warfare] is a tangible operation which has significant
possibilities from our point of view’, Bowles urged, ‘and at this critical point
I would hate to have the Indians begin to feel that we are losing interest in
them’.62
British defence officials, although little more than interested bystanders in
the evolution of Indian clandestine warfare, harboured anxieties that the rapid
expansion of the Special Frontier Force facilitated by American largesse left it
vulnerable to communist penetration. In talks with General Jayanto Nath
Chaudhuri, the Indian Army’s Chief of Staff, Britain’s Chief of Defence Staff
(CDS), Lord Louis Mountbatten, expressed misgivings that Mullik’s
Intelligence Bureau had recruited large numbers of ‘guerrillas’ from India’s
northeastern border regions. Recommending that Mullik’s recruits were
screened or positively vetted by the Indian Army, Mountbatten emphasised
that ‘experience in the last war showed that it was mainly the people of
Communist outlook or fellow travellers who volunteered to become
guerrillas . . . ’.63 During subsequent exchanges with Britain’s high commis-
sioner in India, John Freeman, Mountbatten reinforced his apprehension that
Mullik and the IB were running undue risks by pressing ahead with the
expansion of the SFF without first implementing a rigorous process of back-
ground checks on its recruits. Mountbatten informed Freeman that India’s
 confronting china 115

President, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, had advised him in confidence that the

Governor of West Bengal had ‘written to him [Radhakrishnan] expressing
fears about the reliability of the guerrillas being raised by Mullick [sic], which
he feared contained a lot of Communists or at least fellow travellers’. The
Indian president, Mountbatten added, had seen fit to raise concerns over the
SFF’s political reliability directly with Nehru’s successor, Lal Bahadur Shastri.64
The British intervention had no discernible effect on the pace with which
Mullik continued to build-up India’s paramilitary border force. Determined
not to be caught out a second time by a surprise Chinese assault in the north,
Mullik prioritised the deployment of SFF forces on the Sino-Indian border and
ignored suspicions that some of his men might not be entirely trustworthy.
Mullik’s conviction that clandestine warfare could help to offset deficiencies
in conventional Indian military power before deliveries of foreign ordnance
and new programmes of indigenous armaments production took effect,
proved important in revitalising the CIA’s covert programme in Tibet.
Having lost impetus before the outbreak of Sino-Indian fighting in the face
of criticism from the Kennedy administration that the programme ran signifi-
cant political risks and yet delivered little in the way of results, the Agency’s
enthusiasm for revisiting unconventional warfare in Tibet was boosted by
Indian support.65 In partnership with New Delhi, the CIA launched a new
Tibetan initiative that encompassed covert political action, propaganda, and
paramilitary activity. Its purpose was to keep the concept of an autonomous
Tibet alive, both inside Tibet and amongst sympathetic foreign states. In the
longer term, the objective was to build a Tibetan resistance movement capable
of exploiting favourable political developments within Communist China,
should they occur. In 1963, the CIA flew 133 Tibetans to its training facility
at Camp Hale in Colorado for instruction in political propaganda and para-
military techniques. The Agency also sent some of the 2,000 or so Nepal-based
Tibetans that had participated in its original resistance operations for retrain-
ing in Indian camps. By early 1964, the total cost of the broad-based Tibetan
operation, including equipping, training, and transporting paramilitary forces,
propaganda activity, and a subsidy of $180,000 paid to the Dalai Lama, had
reached close to $2 million. ‘This [Tibetan] program’, Agency officers cau-
tioned the Special Group, a high-level, inter-departmental body responsible for
directing covert operations, ‘will continue to require fairly large expenditures
over a long period of time to keep the possibility of a non-Communist
government alive to the Tibetan people’.66
Between 1964 and 1967, the CIA infiltrated over two dozen teams of
irregular forces into Tibet. Mullik and the IB played a crucial part in the
operation and helped to guide the insurgent teams safely across the line of
control between India and Tibet. New Delhi had objected to plans to parachute
the teams into Tibet on the grounds that, back in the 1950s, doing so had
proved impossible to conceal, had infuriated Beijing, and would now invite
116 spying in south asia

punitive Chinese retaliation. Disappointingly for the CIA and the IB, the
revived Tibetan operation proved no more effective than its earlier incarna-
tion, elements of which dated back as far as 1956. Although one team sent into
Tibet managed to survive for an extended period, the remainder were quickly
compromised, and their members captured and killed. One CIA assessment
conceded that, ‘Chinese security has shown no signs of deterioration and their
control over Tibet, both political and military, remains as pervasive as ever . . .
a large number of underground [Agency] assets have been uncovered and
neutralized.’67 By the early 1970s, having registered a signal lack of success, and
with the Nixon administration pursuing a rapprochement with Communist
China, the paramilitary programme was disbanded.68
India’s decision to collaborate with the United States in waging a covert war
against China did incite occasional ripostes from Beijing. In March 1967,
a large and vocal public demonstration outside the Chinese embassy in New
Delhi saw protestors shout anti-Chinese slogans, plaster the embassy’s outer
walls with anti-Chinese literature, and, at one point, attempt to storm the
buildings heavily fortified gates. In response, China’s Charge d’affaires issued
a statement lambasting the Indian government for failing to prevent an attack
on Chinese sovereign territory, for sheltering the ‘traitorous Dalai [Lama]
clique’, and ‘fostering and training . . . Tibetan traitor bandits, who are living
in exile in India, in the fond hope that someday they could fight back to Tibet
and restore serfdom there’. Should New Delhi’s anti-China policy persist, and
its interference in China’s internal affairs continue, Beijing warned, India
would ‘be held responsible for the serious consequences arising therefrom’.69
Later that summer, China arrested two Indian diplomats in Beijing, Second
Secretary, K. Raghunath, and the Third Secretary, P. Vijai, and charged them
with spying. Declared persona non grata, the Indians were deported to
Hong Kong and subject to sustained violence and humiliation on their journey
between the Chinese capital and Britain’s crown colony. At Beijing airport,
before boarding a flight to Canton, Raghunath and Vijai were pummelled and
kicked for nearly an hour by hundreds of protestors, one of whom was
a member of the Protocol Department of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign
Affairs. In Canton, Raghunath was paraded through the streets in the back of
an open lorry, forced to wear large dunce’s cap, and beaten with bamboo poles.
By way of retaliation, the Indian government expelled a Chinese diplomat
from New Delhi, placed a police cordon around China’s embassy, and imposed
severe restrictions on the movements of its officials in India. On 16 June, the
Indian police stood by as a riotous crowd burst into the Chinese embassy
compound and assaulted several Chinese officials. The tit-for-tat cycle of
reprisals shifted focus back to Beijing the next day, when Chinese authorities
arranged for a mob to surround the Indian embassy and, over the course of
a three-day siege, smash all its windows.70 The message conveyed by China was
unequivocal. Beijing’s patience with what it perceived to be unwarranted
 confronting china 117

Indian meddling in China’s internal affairs had been exhausted. If New Delhi
persisted in fanning the flames of Sinophobia at home, and offering support to
insurgent forces inside Tibet, China would hit back. Ultimately, India’s effort
to regulate a covert war against China, fought with American support, and
avoid public scrutiny and diplomatic fallout, proved quixotic. A decade or so
later, blowback from the IB’s clandestine Himalayan partnership with the CIA
would generate global headlines and almost spell domestic political disaster for
an embattled Congress Party.

Eyes in the Sky

A more successful legacy of Indian intelligence cooperation with the United
States in the wake of the border war manifested in the field of aerial reconnais-
sance. Prior to Sino-Indian hostilities, the Indian Air Force (IAF) had flown
short-range photographic reconnaissance missions over south-central Tibet,
the NEFA, and Burma using British-supplied Canberra aircraft. The IAF did
not possess the capability to penetrate Chinese airspace regularly and in-
depth.71 In any case, the Indian government was wary of the political conse-
quences of undertaking missions that risked IAF aircraft being lost over
Chinese-controlled territory. In seeking to monitor security threats developing
along its northern border without provoking a further round of fighting with
Beijing, New Delhi turned to the United States for assistance. On 5 May 1963,
at a meeting held between Nehru, Mullik, and Chavan, agreement was reached
to allow American aircraft to use a network of Indian airfields for covert
reconnaissance purposes. Given the sensitivity surrounding the use of sover-
eign Indian territory to launch clandestine air operations over China, Indian
and American policymakers were anxious to obscure the nature of the oper-
ation. Care was taken to ensure that airstrips used by the Americans were not
also used by the IAF, or any other Indian military units.72 In June 1963, the
Aviation Research Centre (ARC) was inaugurated by the Intelligence Bureau
with American support. Initially, the ARC operated eight US-supplied C-46
aircraft and several smaller planes out of the secret Oak Tree air base at
Charbatia. Operations quickly expanded to include ARC aircraft flying out
of Sarsawa in Uttar Pradesh, Doom Dooma in Assam, and the military zone of
Palam airport, in New Delhi. The ARC’s purpose was to supply photographic
and technical intelligence on PLA forces in Tibet and Xinjiang, in Western
China. Over a period of two years, American intelligence officers and techni-
cians worked closely with the IB to transform the ARC into an effective
forward reconnaissance arm of Indian intelligence.73
Concurrently, Nehru’s government approved a request from Washington
to operate high altitude U-2 aircraft out of India. The U-2 had been developed
by the CIA in the mid-1950s to overfly the Soviet Union at flight ceiling that
made it near invulnerable to Russian air defences. On 11 November 1962, as
118 spying in south asia

Sino-Indian hostilities were ongoing, Nehru brokered an agreement with

Galbraith under which U-2’s were permitted to refuel in mid-air within
Indian airspace during missions to monitor Chinese military deployments on
the battlefront. Given Nehru’s previously rigid adherence to the principle of
Cold War non-alignment and steadfast rejection of foreign military aid, the
American ambassador quipped to colleagues that the ‘most improbable con-
versation of the century was Galbraith negotiating with Nehru on U-2
overflights’.74 Later that month, U-2s based in Ta Khli, in Thailand, began
operating over the Sino-Indian border on a flight plan that took the aircraft over
the Bay of Bengal and eastern India. By January 1963, U-2 flights infringing
Chinese airspace were identified by Beijing as having transited through India,
and a formal protest was lodged with New Delhi by the Chinese government.
Nehru inadvertently exacerbated Beijing’s ire when, having received confiden-
tial briefings from American intelligence on the photographic take from U-2
missions, he referenced specific details of Chinese troop movements in
a statement to the Indian parliament. Journalists correctly surmised that infor-
mation within Nehru’s public statement had been based upon information
obtained from U-2 overflights.75 Although irritated by Nehru’s indiscretion,
the CIA were delighted by the Indian prime minister’s fascination with the
striking visual imagery produced by the U-2’s. ‘If this is to be Nehru’s new secret
vice’, senior Agency officers messaged Galbraith, ‘I think we can keep him
provided with “feelthy peectures” from all around the world, so long as he
latches on tight to this particular exercise.’76
Nehru’s indiscretions aside, Washington pushed to expand and consolidate
collaboration with India in the realm of covert aerial reconnaissance for two
reasons. Faced with requests from New Delhi for the United States to under-
write a sweeping overhaul of India’s defence establishment by means of
a $1.6 billion five-year military assistance programme (MAP), the Pentagon
wanted hard evidence to puncture what it regarded as inflated and unjustifiable
Indian plans to guard against future Chinese aggression. Talk within Nehru’s
administration of establishing a twenty-five-division Indian army by 1965 was
dismissed by US Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, as ‘completely
unrealistic on the grounds of finance, manpower and the demands which
their requirements would make of the . . . United States’.77 Equally,
America’s intelligence community saw value in establishing a precedent for
U-2 overflights in India. Such a development, some US officials anticipated,
might lead to more permanent US basing rights in India that would facilitate
missions against the Soviets anti-ballistic missile testing range at Sary Shagan,
in Kazakhstan, and areas of western China that were difficult to reach from U-2
airfields outside the subcontinent. In April 1963, Galbraith and the local CIA
Chief of Station, David Blee, met with Indian officials and formally requested
the provision of base facilities for U-2 aircraft. Within a matter of weeks,
President Kennedy added his weight to the U-2 issue by raising the matter
 confronting china 119

with his Indian counterpart, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. It was following

Kennedy’s intervention that the United States was offered use of the
Charbatia airfield for U-2 operations.78
It was some time before dilapidated facilitates at Charbatia could be made
serviceable and were brought into operation. In the interim, U-2 flights over
Tibet and western China continued to be routed through Thailand. On
24 May 1964, the first U-2 mission was launched from Charbatia. Three days
later, Nehru died suddenly from a heart attack. While a nation grieved, and
a battle to succeed Nehru preoccupied the attention of Indian policymakers,
the Indian U-2 programme was suspended and its American aircraft and
support crews were flown out of the country. Operations resumed at
Charbatia in December, when concern mounted that an increase in tensions
between New Delhi and Beijing might see a resumption in Sino-Indian fight-
ing. Three further U-2 missions were conducted from the Indian airstrip
before the latest crisis in Sino-Indian relations abated. By that time, the
Indian U-2 programme had helped to confirm that that a facility Beijing had
constructed at Lop Nor, in south-eastern Xinjiang, was being developed as
a nuclear test site. Operations at Charbatia were subsequently scaled back and
the airstrip was employed primarily as a forward staging post for U-2 missions
launched from Ta Khli. In July 1967, as relations between Washington and
New Delhi cooled, the Indian phase of the CIA’s U-2 programme at Charbatia
was permanently shut down.79
The fact that Nehru’s government was prepared to sanction U-2 flights from
Indian territory, and accept the considerable political risks this involved,
revealed much about the levels of national anxiety and vulnerability that
Indians felt towards China after 1962. Back in May 1960, Pakistan had become
embroiled in an embarrassing and incendiary Cold War incident when a U-2
aircraft flying out of Peshawar, in northern Pakistan, was downed by a Soviet
air defence missile over the Urals. The ‘May Day’ affair sent US-Soviet relations
into freefall, prompted the cancellation of a major Cold War summit meeting
in Paris, and forced Pakistan to issue a grovelling apology to Moscow.80
Pakistan’s unfortunate experience of playing host to American spy planes
must have weighted heavily on Nehru’s mind as he weighed the merits of
permitting U-2s to operate from Indian soil.

Operation Hat
Later in the decade, joint efforts by India and the United States to keep a watch
on the PRC took in an ambitious scheme to position remotely operated and
nuclear-powered monitoring devices near the highest points of the Nanda
Devi range in the Himalayas. Codenamed Operation Hat, an allusion to the
missions cover story, which linked it to the US Air Force’s High Altitude Test
(HAT) program and, at points, also referred to as Blue Mountain, the
120 spying in south asia

collaborative endeavour between the CIA and the IB used a crack team of
American and Indian mountaineers to haul the monitoring devices into
place.81 The surveillance equipment was designed to harvest technical data
from Chinese nuclear test sites and missile ranges in Xinjiang, 500 miles to the
north. On 16 October 1964, China successfully exploded its first nuclear bomb,
a uranium-235 device, at its Lop Nor test site. With the PRC outstripping India
in industrial capacity, literacy rates and domestic consumption, Western
policymakers worried that a failure to contain a nuclear China would leave
subsequent generations of their citizens facing an unenviable security
dilemma. A year earlier, in August 1963, President Kennedy had publicly
speculated that, left unchecked, the PRC, with 700 million people, nuclear
weapons, a Stalinist internal regime and an expansionist outlook, would pose
the gravest threat to global peace since the end of the Second World War.82
Having been on the receiving end of a brutal demonstration of Chinese
military power, the Indian government sought reassurance from Washington
that in any future clash with Beijing they could count on Western support.
Britain and the United States were concerned that China’s accession to the
atomic club would prompt India to develop its own nuclear capability, divert-
ing precious resources from the country’s economic development and risking
a dangerous regional arms race. Britain’s prime minister, Harold Wilson, had
warned his cabinet that, ‘the watershed of proliferation would be [broken] if
India were compelled to make a nuclear weapon under threat from China’.83
India’s premier, Lal Bahadur Shastri, was known to be against developing an
Indian bomb. Other senior Indian ministers, including Chavan, and the
Minister for Defence Production, Alunkal Mathai Thomas, made it clear to
the British that ‘a growing tide of opinion’ in the Congress Party opposed the
Indian premier’s ‘negative’ policy. Indians were aware, Chavan observed, that
they were, ‘faced by an enemy [China] which believed in the inevitability of
war, and of nuclear war at that’.84 Washington reasoned that one means of
ameliorating Indian apprehension regarding China’s bomb, and strengthening
the position of nuclear dissenters, such as Shastri, would be to work with New
Delhi to obtain accurate intelligence on evolving Chinese nuclear capabilities.
Three Indian premiers, Nehru, Shastri, and Indira Gandhi were briefed on
Operation Hat at various points, and each gave the project their approval.85
A decade or so later, Indian’s then prime minister, Morarji Desai, dispelled
notions that the CIA and Indian’s intelligence services had exceeded their
authority and acted independently when it came to executing the mission.
‘They [the CIA and the IB] were just acting on orders from the highest political
levels’, Desai informed a stunned Indian public, in April 1978.86
Back in 1967, a group of Indian mountaineers, led by Manmohan Singh
Kohli, a celebrated climber and naval officer seconded to the Indo-Tibetan
Border Police, were sent from the subcontinent to Alaska to train with
American colleagues and devise a plan for executing Operation Hat. One
 confronting china 121

monitoring device was subsequently installed by a joint CIA/IB controlled

climbing team near the summit of Nanda Kot, a 22,000-foot mountain, in the
Pithoragarh district of the present-day Indian state of Uttarakhand. The
monitor functioned satisfactorily for a year before it was removed. In 1965,
the installation of an earlier device was compromised by a snowstorm near the
summit of Nanda Devi, an adjacent 25,000-foot peak, and it was lost. Attempts
made to locate and recover the monitor, and its plutonium 238 powerpack,
failed. Extensive ground and aerial searches sponsored by the Indian govern-
ment continued into late 1968 without success. Samples of the headwaters fed
by the Nandi Devi range were analysed until 1970, and water quality remained
under observation for some years afterwards, but no trace of contamination
was ever detected. Indian officials eventually concluded that the lost device had
most likely been buried by an avalanche or carried away into an inaccessible
crevasse.87 In 1969, a final collaborative mission was undertaken by the CIA
and the IB in the Himalayas. This involved the insertion of two monitors,
powered by a combination of gas generators and solar power, on peaks in
Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh, at opposite ends of the Himalayan range.
Named Operation Gemini, the purpose was to intercept Chinese communica-
tions inside Tibet. In 1973, the mission yielded valuable information on
Chinese ballistic missile tests. By then, however, the United States’ satellite
reconnaissance programme was beginning to come into its own, making
ground-based sensors redundant.88
From Washington’s perspective, the programme of joint measurement
and signals intelligence operations undertaken with New Delhi were judged
to have been a partial success. Joseph Greene stated later that the ‘pretty
sophisticated’ joint operation with India directed against China had yielded
useful data and ‘when things went mechanically or scientifically wrong,
they were able to get fixed, or at least concealed without public uproar’.89
Indian governments later had good reason to question Greene’s sanguine
assessment. In May 1978, the investigative American magazine, Outlook,
published an exposé on Operation Hat. Speculation that the nuclear-
powered monitoring devices placed on Nanda Devi and Nanda Kot might
have released radioactive material into India’s sacred Ganges River gener-
ated an uproar in India. Under intense pressure to come clean and reveal
what the Indian government knew about Operation Hat, India’s prime
minister Morarji Desai confirmed publicly, for the first time, that India
had secretly conducted clandestine operations with the CIA during the
1960s. The admission sent shockwaves through the nation’s political
establishment.90 Fallout from the Himalayan spying affair would endure
in Indian politics for years to come, adding to the national sense of
paranoia and suspicion surrounding the CIA, and, in the process, exacting
a heavy personal and professional toll on Morarji Desai.
122 spying in south asia

Implausible Deniability
The unease that Indian and American policymakers felt in relation to the CIA’s
expanded role in the subcontinent following the border war of 1962 was
reflected in the Agency’s resolve to conceal its operational presence in India.
In 1965, shortly after being posted to New Delhi, the New York Times corres-
pondent, Anthony Lukas, noted that in India the CIA did its best to operate,
‘very much on the hush-hush’. In contrast to the more overt presence that it
adopted in other parts of the developing world, such as the Congo, in India,
Lukas found that the Agency went to, ‘great efforts to pretend that it doesn’t
exist’. The Agency’s challenge in disguising the ever-greater numbers of its
officers seconded to the American embassy faintly amused Lukas, who found
little difficulty in identifying US intelligence personnel. The CIA’s determin-
ation to keep its presence in India out of the public spotlight was made
abundantly clear to the American journalist after he published a ‘light yarn’
in his newspaper. Lukas’s report referenced the emergence of a ‘protest move-
ment’ amongst American diplomats, led by an unnamed CIA official, against
plans to cull some ducks that had taken up residence in a pool within the US
embassy compound. Within days of the story’s publication, Lukas was sum-
moned to the embassy by the resident press attaché, and tersely informed that
he had been declared persona non grata by the local CIA station chief. ‘I was
told’, Lukas advised his superiors back in New York, ‘that I had gravely
compromised the agency’s security here’. ‘What, I asked incredulously, had
I done? The answer: I had informed the Indians that the C.I.A. was operating
out of the Embassy.’91
The CIA’s reaction to Lukas’ article was influenced by the fact that India’s
broader relationship with the United States experienced increasing strain as the
1960s progressed. Once Lyndon Johnson entered the White House
in November 1963, America’s focus shifted from the Indian subcontinent
towards Southeast Asia. Consequently, diplomatic tensions between
Washington and New Delhi on issues ranging from the provision of military
assistance, the supply of food aid, and the escalating conflict in Vietnam, were
allowed to fester. Efforts made by Chester Bowles to maintain constructive
diplomatic relations with New Delhi were not helped by a series of revelations
that suggested the CIA had recruited assets, or informers, at the very top levels of
the Indian government. Bowles was particularly uncomfortable, Joseph Greene
noted, with the knowledge that the CIA were working hand-in-glove with Indian
intelligence and, at the same time, running separate operations against Indian
targets without the knowledge of their host government. An ambassador belong-
ing ‘to the school which didn’t want to touch “dirty” things’, Bowles left his
deputy chief of mission to manage the local CIA station.92 Before arriving in
India, Bowles’s well-known aversion to clandestine operations had seen
him excluded from the Kennedy administration’s planning for covert action.
 confronting china 123

Desmond FitzGerald quipped that giving Bowles authority over covert oper-
ations would be akin to, ‘entrusting a ship to a captain who hated the sea’.93
Paradoxically, for an individual deeply uneasy with the secret world, Bowles was
fated to spend an inordinate amount of his time as ambassador in India damping
down the diplomatic fires ignited by CIA activity in the subcontinent, important
facets of which were a legacy of the Sino-Indian War.
 6

Peddling Propaganda: The Information Research

Department and India

In May 1962, a letter from India arrived at Leconfield House, the headquarters
of MI5. The note was from MI5’s resident Security Liaison Officer in New
Delhi and warned of an awkward development in the close relationship that
existed between the Security Service and India’s Intelligence Bureau. The
Intelligence Bureau had approached its local MI5 contact for advice on
a suspicious document circulating in the subcontinent that purported to
originate with the Secretariat of the Chinese People’s Committee for World
Peace. Surfacing at a point when sharp disagreements between Moscow and
Beijing had arisen over the formers campaign of de-Stalinisation, the docu-
ment suggested that the Chinese Committee was about to institute an
International Stalin Peace Prize. Indian officials were aware that a similar
letter, attributed to the Vienna-based International Institute of Peace had
previously been denounced as a hoax. When shown a copy of the ‘Chinese’
document, MI5’s SLO immediately recognised it to be a forgery produced by
the Information Research Department, a shadowy clandestine propaganda
arm of the British Foreign Office with close links to SIS.1 Before being posted
to India the SLO had visited the IRD, seen the document concerned, and been
made aware that it was the work of the department’s forgers. To mask its
origin, the SLO was instructed by the Security Service to ‘deny all knowledge’
of the forged document and, in a remarkable display of bravado, to offer to
examine it for the Intelligence Bureau and furnish an informed, and disin-
genuous, ‘expert opinion’ on its veracity.2 In Whitehall, British officials wor-
ried about the diplomatic repercussions that would follow on from exposure of
covert UK ‘black’ propaganda operations in India. Black propaganda involves
influencing a target audience by means of deception or disinformation. Such
a tactic is politically contentious, ethically questionable and, as the IRD were
aware, risked ‘blowback’, or unintended and negative outcomes. In India, as
elsewhere, the British employed black propaganda less often than more benign
‘white’ or ‘grey’ varieties of information management. All three forms of
propaganda were utilised by the IRD as part of its anti-communist activity in
the subcontinent during the Cold War. Between the outbreak of the Sino-
Indian border war, in late 1962, and India’s fourth general election, in early
1967, IRD operations in South Asia peaked. During this period, they were

124
 peddling propaganda 125

active and extensive. Most controversially, on occasions, they encompassed

collaboration between the Information Research Department and the Indian
government.
The catalyst for Indian collaboration with the United Kingdom in the field
of covert propaganda arrived in October 1962, when India’s long-simmering
border conflict with China suddenly turned hot. An ill-prepared and under
resourced Indian government welcomed British support in waging an infor-
mation war against Communist China. Whitehall’s propagandists supplied
expert advice and material assistance to Indian colleagues. However, joint
operations undertaken between London and New Delhi soon encountered
difficulties. British information officers expressed concern that China’s propa-
gandists were outmanoeuvring their Indian counterparts, whose news man-
agement was seen as muddled and ineffective. At the same time, Britain’s own
information offensive in the subcontinent suffered from a lack of strategic
coherence and cut across the grain of India’s prohibition on anti-Soviet
propaganda. Discord between Moscow and Beijing, which culminated in the
Sino-Soviet split, provided New Delhi with a powerful rationale for courting
the USSR. Consequently, the British Government’s insistence that Soviet
rather than Chinese propaganda posed a greater long-term threat to South
Asia, left its Indian partner feeling unsupported. In this context, the British
found it impossible to implement a consistent and integrated propaganda
strategy in India. Ultimately, London’s plans to leverage the Sino-Indian
border war to discredit Chinese and Soviet communism in South Asia met
strong local resistance and floundered.

Going Grey: The Hidden Hand of IRD

In the aftermath of India’s independence, ‘white’ propaganda distributed by
the British Information Service (BIS) and the British Council formed the
mainstay of the United Kingdom’s information effort in the subcontinent.
Undertaken openly with State support apparent and declared, ‘white’ propa-
ganda seldom incorporates material obtained from covert intelligence sources.
The negative and manipulative associations attached to the term ‘propaganda’,
however, meant that such activity was invariably represented by official British
agencies as publicity work. In global terms, London classified South Asia as
a priority for propaganda operations. When the Commonwealth Relations
Office increased its information and publicity budget in the post-war period,
additional spending was ‘very largely concentrated’ on the newly independent
states of India, Pakistan, and Ceylon.’3 Britain’s high commissioner in India at
the time, Sir Archibald Nye, characterised the BIS as ‘quietly effective’ at
spreading anti-communist and pro-British literature. Nye was similarly
impressed by the ‘good work’ conducted in an equally ‘unobtrusive way’ by
the British Council.4 Senior Indian government officials agreed with Nye’s
126 spying in south asia

laudatory assessment of Britain’s publicity machinery. Sir Girija Shankar

Bajpai, secretary general of India’s Ministry of External Affairs praised the
British for their ‘modest’ and ‘factual’ publicity work. The understated British
approach, Bajpai reflected, contrasted favourably with ‘the extravagant propa-
ganda’ circulated by the United States’ information agencies, which he deemed
to be ‘positively detrimental to the interests of the U.S.A. in India’.5 Keeping
India out of the communist bloc represented a ‘cardinal point’ of post-war
British foreign policy. In pursuit of this objective, overt British information
agencies in the subcontinent, as Nye underlined, came to represent ‘the
spearhead of our [Britain’s] attack on Communism’.6
The IRD maintained close contacts with overt information departments,
such as the BIS. In large part, this intimate relationship was driven by
a realisation that to maximise its impact, the IRD’s anti-communist material
needed to be balanced with pro-Western publicity. In November 1951, the
Cabinet Overseas Information Committee noted, ‘ . . . experience shows that
negative propaganda fails largely of [sic] its effect unless it is accompanied by at
least as great a volume of positive material, that is to say, material showing
what is going on in the Western democracies and what hopes their example
offers to the world’.7 John Edmonds, who later supervised the International
Section of the IRD, emphasised the importance of ensuring that unattributable
propaganda the Department fed to ‘opinion moulders’ overseas remained in
step with the diplomacy practiced by the Foreign Office and its public infor-
mation bodies.8 In India, directors of the BIS, beginning with W. F. King in the
early 1950s, cultivated strong and effective liaison arrangements with IRD
colleagues.9 Equally, having worked hard to establish its reputation as an
organisation ‘remarkably free of the propaganda stigma which attaches to
certain other foreign information agencies’, and the United States
Information Agency, in particular, the BIS was determined not to compromise
its effectiveness by becoming associated with ‘blatant, overt, or covert anti-
Communist propaganda activity’. The BIS was prepared to make ‘effective and
discreet use’ of the IRD’s services. It was acutely aware, nonetheless, of the risks
that working with the IRD entailed. ‘One false move’, British officials acknow-
ledged, ‘could undo the work of years’.10
Use of ‘grey’ propaganda, which constituted the mainstay of IRD activity in
India, focuses on the dissemination of unattributable information and masks
government involvement. The basis for such material was often derived from
‘open sources’, or publicly available information disseminated in newspapers,
journals, books, and the broadcast media. Grey propaganda was largely factual,
although carefully crafted by the IRD to promote a specific political agenda. It
frequently manifested in government officials co-opting journalists and pub-
lishers to replay favourable content. One British grey propaganda operation of
note in the subcontinent occurred towards the end of 1954. Two years previ-
ously, when India’s relations with Stalin’s Soviet Union were far from
 peddling propaganda 127

convivial, Moscow had published a Russian Encyclopaedia. The Encyclopaedia

criticised the Indian nationalist icon, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, for
supporting British imperialism by serving in a medical unit, in South Africa,
during the Boer War. The IRD latched onto the Soviets censure of Gandhi and
fed the story to media outlets inside and outside India.11 The editor of the
influential Madras newspaper, the Hindu, berated the Soviets for promoting
a ‘fantastically tendentious and perverted account of Gandhi’. In the
Manchester Guardian, British journalists suggested that Moscow had ‘made
a grave blunder’ by vilifying Gandhi and prompting a ‘vigorous’ adverse
reaction from a nation that revered the Mahatma. Broadcasts on All-Indian
Radio confirmed that Nehru’s government had protested to the Soviet embassy
in New Delhi about the Encyclopaedia. Peddling ‘such a false’ account of
Gandhi’s life, dismayed Soviet diplomats were informed by Indian officials,
was ‘completely contrary to the professed Soviet friendship and respect for
India’. The Soviets quickly apologised and made clear that the offensive entry
would be removed from future editions of the Encyclopaedia. By then, how-
ever, the damage had been done, and the IRD took satisfaction in exploiting
a Soviet own goal to disrupt Moscow’s relations with New Delhi.12
Black propaganda, as noted, was employed by the British in India, although it
accounted for a relatively small proportion of the IRD’s work in the subcontin-
ent. Between the early 1950s and the mid-1970s, the IRD worked closely with
SIS’s Special Political Action (SPA) section and SPA (Prop) unit which oversaw
operations encompassing bribery, forgery, and covert funding of political
parties.13 Producing effective black propaganda involved considerable time
and effort. Forging a document required meticulous planning, and necessitated
the acquisition of authentic stationary, signatures, and postmarks. Hans Welser,
a Swiss immigrant who rose to prominence in the murky world of post-war
British disinformation, observed that each forgery had to be laboriously crafted
and required ‘a skill which is not very common’.14 In the summer of 1960, in
preparation for a meeting intended to coordinate information operations with
American colleagues, British officials discussed plans for black propaganda
work, including the use of forgery. In suggesting that Britain ‘take the lead’ in
this area, Whitehall revealed not only a willingness to engage in disinformation-
by-forgery, but also fostered the perception that British covert propagandists
were especially proficient in such matters and had a thing or two to teach the
Americans. In reviewing forgery operations mounted against international trade
union organisations with communist connections, including the World
Federation of Trade Unions, British officials enthused that, ‘we should not
hesitate to draw a bow at a [forgery] venture’, that offered, ‘suitable targets’.
‘Even if it [a forgery] achieves nothing else’, the British concluded pragmatically,
‘the [ensuing] investigation by the communists has its own disruptive effects’.15
In several respects, non-aligned India was an ideal environment in which to
conduct black propaganda. An open democracy, with a large, free, and vibrant
128 spying in south asia

press, and a population broadly opposed to entering Cold War alliances of any
ideological stripe, India offered ample, ‘cover for covert political action oper-
ations directed towards the manipulation of groups not otherwise susceptible
to . . . manipulation’.16 In part, the limited scale of black propaganda work
carried out by the IRD in the subcontinent was reflective of the heavy invest-
ment in resources that such activity demanded. The IRD also encountered
considerable resistance from the Commonwealth Relations Office whenever
the subject of conducting covert action in Commonwealth countries reared its
head. To the CRO, India’s importance to the UK diplomatically, economically,
and strategically, suggested that dividends derived from black propaganda
would rarely, if ever, justify the political cost associated with their exposure.
Black propaganda continued to be authorised at the most senior levels of the
British government during the Cold War.17 On occasions, forgeries produced
by the IRD surfaced in the Indian press. In 1963, a year after MI5’s SLO in New
Delhi had been surprised by the appearance of a forged IRD document
attributed to the Chinese Peace Committee, a second counterfeit circular,
nominally from the same source, received prominent coverage in the
Hindustan Times.18 When it came to combatting a Communist threat to
Indian democracy, as one IRD officer who served in New Delhi made clear,
‘ . . . “black” propaganda techniques should not be excluded from our future
planning’.19 That said, it was less hazardous grey propaganda that the British
generally employed as their disinformation weapon of choice in India.

India’s Information War

The history of British covert propaganda operations in India predated the
Information Research Department. During the Second World War, the
Viceroy of India, the Marquess of Linlithgow, employed the Special
Operations Executive (SOE), a clandestine warfare unit formed in 1940, to
moderate Indian nationalist sentiment by placing unattributable articles
supportive of Britain and the Allied war effort in vernacular newspapers.
‘Had this been done a generation ago’, one official crowed to the British
premier, Winston Churchill, ‘Gandhi would not have had it all his own way.’
The British covert information programme in India, Churchill was assured,
in a memorandum no doubt designed to appeal to the prime minister’s well-
developed sense of Anglo-Saxon superiority, demonstrated how effectively
‘an “unacknowledgeable” organisation can by covert means further the
policy of H.M.G. in presenting the British case to immature peoples, and in
combatting subversive movements among them’.20 In actuality, British
propaganda operations in the subcontinent had little, if any, substantive
effect in suppressing Indian nationalism in the lead-up to nation’s independ-
ence. Once the British had departed from South Asia, officials in Whitehall
expressed concern that in seeking to win ‘hearts and minds’ in India they
 peddling propaganda 129

were ‘working under a heavy handicap’. In contrast to the Soviet Union and
the People’s Republic of China, both of whom made much of communism’s
anti-colonialism, the British fretted that Indians’ ‘deep-rooted antipathy’ to
imperialism, and its associations with racialism, had manifested in an
instinctive mistrust of the West. The British High Commission in Madras,
in southern India, observed ruefully that, ‘anti-imperialism has got mixed up
with racial sentiments; the white race versus the black, and this has not been
helped by the apartheid policy in South Africa, the persecution of Negroes in
the U.S.A., treatment of Blacks in the West Indies, to mention only a few
example’.21 It was against this background that, in February 1948, barely six
months after India had secured self-rule, the Information Research
Department was established.
The British Cabinet directive that inaugurated the IRD stressed that the
threat communism posed to ‘to the whole fabric of western civilisation’
compelled Britain to respond with a new and robust information policy. It
was envisaged that, from an initial European base, the IRD’s work would
quickly assume global proportions and ‘require special application in the
Middle East and Far Eastern countries’.22 Drawing some of its funds from
the Secret Vote, or intelligence and secret services budget, under the leadership
of Ralph Murray, who had served in the Political Warfare Executive during the
Second World War, the IRD rapidly built-up a broad international network of
contacts, or clients, amongst politicians, government officials, journalists, and
trade unionists. The new organisation’s innocuous sounding name was
intended to allay public suspicion that the Foreign Office was operating a ‘lie
Department’.23 In 1951, the IRD formed an ‘English Section’ that concentrated
on combatting communist subversion at home. The department’s primary
focus, however, was on countering communism abroad. In short order, the
IRD’s terms of reference expanded to cover threats posed by Arab nationalism,
and to disrupt political regimes, such as President Sukarno’s in Indonesia, that
endangered British strategic interests.24 In 1949, a regional information office,
located in Singapore, began to harmonise British propaganda efforts across
Asia. At its zenith, in the mid-1960s, the IRD’s London headquarters employed
over 350 staff in geographical sections covering Southeast Asia, China, Africa,
the Middle East, Latin America, and the Soviet Union, and had separate units
dealing with editorial issues and international organisations.25
When it came to India, Ralph Murray was highly critical of a local press that
presented news stories ‘in a Communist way’. The head of IRD attributed this
unwelcome situation to a hangover from, ‘the days when all Indian journalists
could find popular approval by adopting an anti-Imperialist, anti-Colonial and
anti-Capitalist line’.26 The impact in post-colonial India of journalists promot-
ing an anti-Western or pro-communist viewpoint, speaking with an indigen-
ous voice, and being legitimised by mainstream newspapers, was not lost on
the British. The British Information Service echoed Murray’s concern at the
130 spying in south asia

effect on Indian public opinion of the ‘persistent and most dangerous

Communist propaganda’ appearing in leading dailies with links to the ruling
Congress party, such as Amrita Bazar Patrika, the Hindustan Standard, and
the National Herald. Such journalism, the BIS judged, was as pernicious, if not
more so, than Soviet literature distributed in the subcontinent, and as the
Communist Party of India’s newsletter, New Age.27 After 1949, British officials
were also troubled by an unwelcome upsurge in Chinese communist propa-
ganda in India. Mao’s fledgling People’s Republic wasted little time in
strengthening distribution channels for its press briefs, agency reports, radio
broadcasts, and cheap political literature which began to reach the subcontin-
ent in increasing quantity. Chinese propaganda was deemed ‘particularly
effective’ by the British, as it tended to focus on communist successes in
combating problems familiar to most Indians, and chiefly those surrounding
agrarian reform and petty corruption. Moreover, analysis conducted by the
BIS found that Chinese propaganda retained currency and was regarded as
‘widely acceptable’ in India, because it originated from a fellow Asian nation
that was ‘held up as the spearhead of Asian resurgence.’ Beijing’s propagandists
were considered especially adept at ‘deliberately exploiting’ potent racial
themes that touched upon raw nerves in India, and which cast Britain along-
side the United States as exploitative agents of ‘white imperialism’.28
Initially, Whitehall baulked at entering into a propaganda war with
Communist China and held back from disseminating unattributable material
that was overly critical of Beijing. An aggressive information offensive directed
at the People’s Republic of China was ruled out on the grounds that it would
complicate the prospects of reaching a modus vivendi with Mao’s regime and,
in the process, endanger important British interests in Asia and, above all,
those in the crown colony of Hong Kong. Towards the end of 1951, following
the PRC’s entry into the Korean War, rising concern at the volume and
sophistication of Chinese propaganda circulating in the subcontinent
prompted London to change tack. British missions overseas were subsequently
informed that, ‘the prohibition on criticism of the Chinese Government and
the Chinese Communist Party need no longer remain in force’. Given India’s
standing as the preeminent post-colonial and non-communist power in Asia,
the British identified New Delhi as of critical importance when it came to
disrupting Chinese propaganda.29 From the IRD’s perspective, the easing of
restrictions on the use of counterpropaganda aimed at China was well timed.
India’s efforts to cultivate good relations with its powerful communist neigh-
bour had afforded ample opportunity for the Chinese to disseminate propa-
ganda in South Asia. In March 1955, one BIS report grumbled that Indians
appeared to be entirely unconcerned at the influx of communist propaganda
entering the country across their northern border. ‘There continues to be wide
and enthusiastic reception for Chinese propaganda [in India] even at the
 peddling propaganda 131

highest levels’, one exasperated BIS officer observed, ‘and a great deal more at
the lower’.30
It was the increasing inroads made by Soviet propaganda in India, however,
that exercised Whitehall most. Indian nationalist leaders, and not least,
Jawaharlal Nehru, had long appreciated the Soviets’ skill in information
management. In 1927, when attending the Brussels Congress against imperi-
alism, Nehru noted not only the Russians strategic guile, but also their capacity
to galvanise global communist support through the efficient and effective
dissemination of propaganda.31 Following Stalin’s death in 1953, the blossom-
ing of India’s previously sclerotic relationship with the USSR saw bilateral
economic relations invigorated, political cooperation strengthened and, in the
cultural sphere, the initiation of a new era of educational and artistic exchange.
Soviet film festivals became a regular feature of Indian life; troupes of travelling
Russian entertainers criss-crossed the country; the TASS news agency set up
shop in Delhi; and subsidised Soviet literature featured prominently on the
shelves of Indian bookstores.32 British diplomats began to voice alarm at the
extent to which the average Indian appeared, ‘impressed . . . by the skilful
propaganda put out by the Reds in the form of newspapers and pamphlets’.33
Prominent Indians sympathetic to the West, such as the socialist turned
conservative politician, Minocher Rustom ‘Minoo’ Masani, responded by
openly chastising Britain and the United States for doing ‘pathetically little’
to counter a proliferation of ‘fantastically cheap’ Soviet publications being ‘sold
at every [Indian] street corner’. In a single year, the Soviet People’s Publishing
House, which operated out of an office in Bombay, in western India, sold
300,000 heavily discounted copies of the Life of Joseph Stalin. Prohibitively
expensive British or American books on liberal political themes, such as
Arthur Schlesinger’s, Vital Center, struggled to generate any Indian sales.
‘The Soviet Government’, Masani warned an American audience in Detroit,
‘is spending millions of rubles in India today to try and get the mind of the
people on their side’.34 The celebrated Trinidadian writer of Indian heritage,
Vidiadhar Surajprasad (V. S.) Naipaul corroborated Masani’s concern. While
travelling through Kashmir, in northern India, Naipaul was struck by the
‘armfuls’ of Soviet publications that the proprietor of his guest house had
accumulated from the local tourist office. An old writing-table in the sitting
room of his accommodation, Naipaul marvelled, was ‘stuffed with Russian
propaganda’.35
India’s Intelligence Bureau kept a close watch on Soviet-directed propa-
ganda activity. The IB’s analysts reasoned that in drawing primarily on prac-
tical examples of purported social and economic progress achieved under
Marxism, Moscow’s propagandists aimed to secure support from India’s
professional class of scientists, journalists, lawyers, and academics. In contrast,
literature distributed by indigenous communists, led by the Moscow-backed
CPI, tended to focus on common grievances held by broad swathes of Indian
132 spying in south asia

opinion, and address issues ranging from unease over American neo-
colonialism to calls for land reform and the abolition of feudalism.36
Reasonably content with the effectiveness of the Indian government’s ability
to monitor communist propaganda, British officials were less enamoured by
what they perceived as New Delhi’s lassitude in taking concrete steps to
neutralise an insidious pincer movement that was targeting the nation’s social
system from above and below. As early as 1948, Alec Symon, Britain’s deputy
high commissioner, lamented that the IB’s first Indian director, Tirupattur
Gangadharam Pillai Sanjeevi, had ‘very far . . . yet to go in his Communist
education’. Sanjeevi, a concerned Symon reported back to London, ‘seems to
regard the [Communist] movement as purely internal nuisance to be classed
with any other political body in India and he shows no signs of regarding
Communism as an international conspiracy aimed at Sovietization of Asia and
the World. His [Sanjeevi’s] views seem to me to be somewhat superficial.’37
A decade later, Whitehall continued to express anxiety that the Indian govern-
ment’s appreciation of Soviet intentions remained recklessly benign. The
British conceded that Nehru’s administrations had taken a firm line in crack-
ing down on CPI activists suspected of inciting civil disorder, promoting
political violence, or engaging in electoral malpractice. Externally directed
communist subversion, however, seemed of less concern to India’s leadership.
It was the Pandora’s box of religious strife, and the risk that this might fracture
Indian national unity, that most preoccupied Nehru. ‘The danger to India . . . is
not communism’, the Indian premier was fond of reminding his civil servants.
‘It is Hindu right-wing communalism.’38

India Calling: Recalibrating the IRD in South Asia

The IRD’s involvement with India began inauspiciously. From 1947, as South
Asian independence coalesced with the onset of the Cold War, Christopher
Mayhew, Under Secretary of State at the Foreign Office in Attlee’s first adminis-
tration, wartime intelligence officer, and leading actor in the IRD’s creation,
became uneasy that colleagues in the Commonwealth Relations Office had
marginalised the importance of propaganda in South Asia. In November 1948,
Mayhew fired off a tart memo to his counterpart at the CRO, Patrick Gordon
Walker, in which he claimed to be ‘puzzled’ by an apparent reluctance in
Whitehall to utilise the IRD in South Asia. Over the preceding nine months,
the CRO had requested just seven copies of IRD publications for distribution in
India, Pakistan, and Ceylon. Moreover, the CRO had failed to pass on to IRD
requests from BIS officers in the subcontinent for background information on
communist propaganda operations.39 Chastened by Mayhew’s criticism,
Gordon Walker convened a series of planning meetings that brought together
senior officials from the Foreign Office, the IRD, and the CRO. These meetings
energised the British counter-propaganda effort in South Asia and provided it
 peddling propaganda 133

with a new sense of purpose and direction. From early 1949, the CRO began
forwarding increased quantities of IRD material to the British High Commission
in New Delhi and, in return, furnished Murray’s organisation with intelligence
on communist publications circulating in India. In addition, Archibald Nye
quietly arranged for IRD anti-communist literature to be passed directly to
Haravu Venkatanarasimha Varadaraja Iengar, the Indian government’s Home
Secretary, and the senior civil servant responsible for internal security.40
A former stalwart of the pre-independence British Indian administration,
Iengar was deemed by Nye to be ‘one of the ablest and most effective’ operatives
in Nehru’s government and, more importantly, staunchly anti-communist.41
By the early 1950s, IRD literature proliferated in India and had begun to
reach an ever-wider circle of ‘friendly’ contacts inside the Indian government;
the ruling Congress party; the armed forces; the press; and academics working
in prominent research institutions.42 Not all IRD material sent to India hit the
mark. IRD output received by the High Commission in New Delhi was often of
a generic anti-communist type or based on examples of communist repression
and tyranny drawn from Eastern Europe. Unsurprisingly, this proved of
limited relevance to Indian ‘customers’. The arrival of IRD articles decrying
the persecution of the Roman Catholic Church in Bulgaria bemused British
information staff in India. ‘Even the ablest Information Officer’, the CRO was
informed, ‘cannot succeed in making a vital issue [of Bulgarian Catholicism]
amongst his Indian contacts’.43 The propaganda offensive in the subcontinent,
Whitehall was chided, would benefit were IRD to cast ‘a rather more critical
and selective eye’ over the suitability of publications that it sent east of Suez.44
The IRD took note and gradually developed its output from an initial offering
of short, well-documented, and utilitarian briefing notes, or Basic Papers, to
encompass the production and distribution of wide range of materials
designed to pique the interest of opinion formers in different international
markets. The Interpreter, a monthly publication, was devised to influence
national elites. It was offered to senior IRD contacts on the pretext that it
was a British Foreign Service document, and that recipients would be privy to
inside information not usually distributed beyond Whitehall. Notable for its
tight prose and methodical anti-communist analysis, the Interpreter featured
an introduction not dissimilar to that of a broadsheet leader. An extension of
the Interpreter, Asian Analyst focused specifically on developments inside
China, on Soviet and Chinese foreign policy, and the insidious actions of
communist parties across Asia. The Digest pulled together short, punchy anti-
communist stories that were readily quotable, and appeared sufficiently topical
to pass as news. Finally, a Facts About series of books complimented IRD’s
more easily digestible offerings and were designed to serve as reference tools
on a variety of communist topics.45 In keeping with its status as a covert
organisation, none of IRD’s output carried a publisher’s imprint or was
attributed to the British government.
134 spying in south asia

Refinements in IRD output reaped immediate dividends for the British in

India. In a significant coup, the high commission was able to add Indian’s
intelligence chief, B. N. Mullik, to its distribution list for IRD material. Mullik
was regarded as a particularly important British asset on account of his close
relationship with Nehru, and his willingness to provide critical assessments on
the type of IRD material likely to resonate inside the Indian government. One
British official noted that in seeking to refine counter-propaganda for Indian
audiences, he had come to ‘think of the D.I.B. [Mullik] being the perfect point
d’appui’.46 Unattributable research papers produced by the IRD, and the
Foreign Office Research Department (FORD), were channelled through the
IB to other Indian government departments. This process enhanced the cred-
ibility of the literature immeasurably and helped to camouflage its British
origins. ‘There is evidence’, British officials crowed, ‘that much of this [IRD
product] is read by Mr Nehru himself. By Sir N. R. Pillai [Secretary General of
the MEA and Cabinet Secretary] and by the Home Secretary (Mr Pai)’.47 Mullik
himself proved to be an avid consumer of the IRD’s work. The Indian intelli-
gence leader devoured copies of multiple IRD publications, including the
Interpreter, Asian Analyst, Digest, Trends in Communist Propaganda and
Facts About.48
The connection established between the IRD and India’s intelligence service
also proved instrumental in enabling Whitehall to place a steady flow of
unattributable anti-communist material in mainstream Indian newspapers.
In April 1956, the high commission heaped praise on the IB for ensuring that
an IRD account of the ‘Petrov affair’ received widespread play in the Indian
press. Vladimir Petrov, a colonel in the Soviet KGB, or Committee for State
Security, had defected to the West while serving under cover in Australia. In
a dramatic development, worthy of John le Carré, an attempt by armed Soviet
officials to spirit Petrov’s wife, Evodkia, out of the country, was thwarted on the
tarmac of Darwin airport by officers of the Australian Security Intelligence
Organisation. Newspaper articles that attacked communism or communist
theory, the British had learned, went down badly with the Indian public. On
the other hand, human interest stories, such as the ‘Petrov Affair’, that exposed
limitations placed on human rights behind the Iron Curtain, were judged
‘popular’ and could ‘create a desirable impression on the [Indian] reader’.49
More broadly, as the 1950s came to an end, the British high commission
advised London that it was, ‘satisfied we have in fact been making good use
vis-a-vis Indian officials, including Mullik, of the [IRD] material on this subject
which has reached us . . . ’. Whether such material was being digested by Nehru
and his cabinet, and what effect, if any, it might have had on the Indian
leadership’s attitudes to the Soviet Union, and the dangers posed by commun-
ist subversion, was, British officials conceded, ‘much harder to say’.50 In fact,
the answer was, it seemed, not a great deal. In a note Nehru sent to the Ministry
of External Affairs special secretary, Badruddin Tyabji, the Indian premier
 peddling propaganda 135

confirmed that while he received regular reports from Mullik, these ‘were
sometimes useful but very often they do not convey to me any really pertinent
information’. ‘The gathering of Intelligence does not merely depend upon
certain techniques employed’, Nehru added, ‘it depends also on an acute
mind having knowledge of the issues at stake. Often, I have found that the
information supplied [by the DIB], even though detailed, is not helpful.’51
In the late summer of 1960, a change of British leadership in India that saw
Sir Paul Gore-Booth installed as high commissioner, had a transformative
effect on IRD operations. Gore-Booth was struck by the ubiquity of Soviet
propaganda in the subcontinent and became convinced that the IRD should be
employed more aggressively to counteract it. In September, the new high
commissioner asked the IRD to send an officer from its editorial division out
to the subcontinent to review Britain’s counter-propaganda operation.
Between March and April 1961, Josephine O’Connor Howe, who had earned
a formidable reputation within the IRD for efficiency and directness, com-
pleted a root and branch assessment of the Department’s activity in India.52
O’Connor Howe was tasked with addressing perennial concerns that too much
of the IRD literature sent to New Delhi remained overly blunt and strident in
its anti-communism, was too generalist, and took insufficient account of local
socio-political grievances. Gore-Booth stressed that, from his standpoint, the
counter-propaganda picture was by no means entirely negative. Substantial
amounts of material requested from the IRD by his information officers,
O’Connor Howe was reassured, remained ‘valuable’, and had ‘registered
some notable successes’ in the Indian press. Nevertheless, Gore-Booth’s overall
impression was that the IRD ‘could do better’.53 Back in London, the IRD’s
management had arrived at the much the same conclusion, albeit for different
reasons. Douglas Rivett-Carnac, head of the IRD’s Far East and Southeast Asia
section, accepted that greater progress ought to have been achieved in India in
refining and strengthening Britain’s counter-propaganda work. Rivett-Carnac
hailed from a ‘dolphin’ family, a term coined by Rudyard Kipling to denote
British households that served for generation after generation in colonial
India, ‘as dolphins follow in line across the open sea’.54 Scores of Rivett-
Carnac’s had occupied positions in the subcontinent as civil servants, army
officers, and policemen, with one rising to become governor of Bombay in the
early nineteenth century. Local information officials, in Douglas Rivett-
Carnac’s view, were largely culpable for neglecting to put ‘any real effort . . .
into IRD work’. Receptive to Gore-Booth’s invitation to take a more promin-
ent and active role in India, senior IRD officials embraced an opportunity to
demonstrate the Department’s effectiveness in pushing back against Soviet
propaganda when afforded appropriate support.55
The pressure for change coming from inside and outside India ensured that
O’Connor Howe’s recommendations for reforming IRD operations met with
general approval. Placing emphasis on improving cooperation between the
136 spying in south asia

IRD and the BIS, O’Connor Howe underlined the need to balance and coord-
inate the dissemination of the IRD’s anti-communist message with the ‘posi-
tive’ output celebrating liberal democracy and free enterprise that
underpinned the BIS’ work. In other words, taken together, the tone of
Britain’s overt and covert propaganda operations could still sound discordant
rather than harmonious when filtered through an Indian ear. Marrying IRD
and BIS output together more seamlessly, even on a modest scale, represented
a formidable challenge and had occupied the attention of information officers
from the late 1940s. In the circumstances, O’Connor-Howe argued for break-
ing with precedent and deploying an experienced IRD officer to serve in India
alongside BIS colleagues.56
Gore-Booth employed O’Connor-Howe’s report as ammunition to lobby
for the appointment of a permanent IRD officer in New Delhi. The IRD had
been exploring ways of sending ‘field officers’ overseas for some time.
Following a period of relative amity between the United States and the Soviet
Union in the late 1950s, the Cold War had again threatened to turn hot at the
beginning of the 1960s. The downing of an American U-2 reconnaissance
plane over southern Russia, the Kennedy administration’s abortive operation
to ‘liberate’ Cuba, and sabre-rattling between Moscow and Washington over
the status of Berlin, all ratcheted up tensions between East and West. A renewal
in superpower friction saw Whitehall place ‘increasing importance’ on the role
of the IRD in combatting communist subversion. Funding for the IRD
increased, its staff expanded, and for the first time the Department found itself
in a position to station permanent representatives in British diplomatic mis-
sions abroad.57 By the end of 1962, twenty-five IRD field officers had been
dispatched to foreign posts, and an agreement reached with the Treasury to
fund an additional nine field officers. Two years later, the IRD had more than
fifty staff stationed across the globe. Field officers were instructed to spend
much of their time, ‘assessing local communist propaganda in all its forms, and
carrying out unattributable counter-propaganda’. In practice this encom-
passed monitoring and reporting on local communist activity; procuring
examples of communist propaganda; arranging for the local translation and
distribution of IRD literature; and actively cultivating new contacts willing to
receive and disseminate IRD material.58
India’s standing as a British foreign policy priority ensured that the country
was placed at the forefront of the IRD field officer initiative. In January 1962,
the first IRD officer posted to India, Peter Joy, arrived in South Asia. Joy was an
experienced propagandist, politically astute, and had excelled while seconded
to the Central Treaty Organisation (CENTO) headquarters in Ankara. The
Director of IRD, Donald Hopson, championed Joy’s appointment. It was also
enthusiastically endorsed by Hopson’s predecessor, Ralph Murray, who agreed
that Joy ‘would be excellent [in India]’, a posting that the former IRD head
considered ‘more important than CENTO’.59 Operating covertly, and without
 peddling propaganda 137

the knowledge of the Indian government, ostensibly Joy’s role was that of
a publications officer in the BIS.60 Initially, as incidents between Indian and
Chinese forces along the contested Himalayan border increased in frequency,
and New Delhi’s relations with Beijing deteriorated, Joy struggled to expand
IRD’s network of local contacts. Reluctant to compromise its policy of Cold
War non-alignment, and anxious to enlist Soviet support as a means of
deterring Chinese aggression, Nehru’s government shied away from any action
that might be interpreted as overtly anti-communist or likely to antagonise
Moscow. With the assistance of overstretched British information staff located
in Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras, Joy undertook the ‘slow and laborious’ task
of creating a central card index of Indians that had been recruited to dissem-
inate unattributable IRD material on a confidential basis. Following months of
hard work, Joy’s index listed sixty local contacts, with each graded in terms of
their influence and reliability.61

Cold War Propaganda Turns Hot

In October 1962, from the IRD’s perspective, things took a decisive turn for the
better in India after New Delhi and Beijing came to blows in the Himalayas.
British officials were as disconcerted at the ease with which China managed to
outgun India in propaganda terms, as they were with the performance of the
Indian Army on the battlefield. The ‘absolute consistency’ with which Beijing
presented itself to international audiences as a victim of Indian aggression, one
Foreign Office diplomat observed, contrasted unfavourably with New Delhi’s
‘wavering and often self-contradictory’ performance in the publicity sphere.62
In India, the BIS voiced a grudging admiration for the way in which Radio
Peking’s English Service had shown itself to be ‘highly skilled’ in selectively
quoting from the public statements of Indian leaders to portray its adversary as
a belligerent warmonger. In a media operation that ‘out-Goebbels Goebbels’,
Chinese state radio utilised the services of an Irishman ‘slightly reminiscent of
Lord Haw Haw’, to hammer home the theme of Indian aggression, ‘so repeti-
tively that something must certainly stick in the minds of Asian/African
listeners, if not of other peoples also’.63 The British were especially concerned
at the lack of sympathy and understanding that India garnered within the
developing world. An apparent indifference to India’s plight amongst the
nations of Africa and Asia was attributed, in part, to the imperious way that
Nehru’s governments had conducted much of their diplomacy since 1947. Paul
Gore-Booth suggested that the border war had demonstrated to Indians that,
‘if you want goodwill from people in critical moments, you must not spend the
rest of your time either ignoring them or loftily criticising the management of
their affairs’. Gore-Booth was astonished to discover that although Sino-
Indian relations had been deteriorating for some years, ‘no proper briefing
on the [border] dispute had . . . ever been sent to Indian missions abroad [and]
138 spying in south asia

no guidance was available to such Indian Government organs of publicity as

existed at the moment when the crisis broke’. Meanwhile, ‘the Chinese propa-
ganda machine was working flat out on carefully prepared material and
argument’.64
In London, Harold Macmillan’s government came under considerable pres-
sure to offer India assistance, not least, from the almost pathologically
Sinophobe Kennedy administration in the United States. Washington insisted
that Britain’s Commonwealth connection with India obligated the UK to
assume a leading role in the subcontinent’s defence and, crucially, offered
a mechanism by which this could be achieved without comprising Nehruvian
non-alignment. Aware that offering India some degree of support was politic-
ally necessary, Macmillan’s cabinet nevertheless bridled at overcommitting
Britain’s limited economic and military resources to a conflict in faraway South
Asia. Worse still, London was alert to the calamitous prospect that rushing to
India’s side would pose a risk of Britain becoming enmeshed in a shooting war
with China. Such a scenario threatened disaster for important British overseas
interests and, above all, those in Hong Kong. Furnishing India with expertise
and advice in the information realm, Whitehall determined, offered one means
of proffering assistance with a minimum of risk. ‘The propaganda field is one
in which we could significantly help India’, the Foreign Office emphasised in
November 1962. ‘The Indians themselves are doing little and are ill-equipped
for the task.’65 At a meeting held with Nehru, in New Delhi, later that month,
Duncan Sandys, Macmillan’s Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations,
underscored that the United Kingdom was, ‘extremely anxious to help the
Indians in every way in the presentation of their case [on the border war]’.
Noting that the UK had ‘a considerably developed network of Information
Services’, Sandys advised the Indian premier that Britain would ‘be very glad’
to work with his government in countering Chinese propaganda.66
Sandys was pushing against an open door in suggesting that Britain and India
work together on counter-propaganda aimed at China. The Sino-Indian war
found Indian government ministries, journalists, and national research centres,
such as the Indian School of International Studies, clamouring for material on
the inequities of Communist China, which Peter Joy and the IRD were only too
happy to furnish. As a first step, a new Indian government committee for ‘War
Information and Counter-Propaganda’, that included representation from the
IB, Ministry of External Affairs, All India Radio, and the Press Information
Bureau (PIB), sought assistance from the BIS, which continued to act as cover
for the IRD’s undeclared operations in India. Extra copies of the IRD’s stock
publications on Chinese communism, such as China Topics and China Records,
were rushed out to the subcontinent to meet a welcome surge in demand.
A special supplement of the Asian Analyst was also run up to address purported
Chinese treachery in respect of the border conflict. To smooth the flow of British
propaganda reaching India, a twice-weekly airmail service was established
 peddling propaganda 139

between the IRD’s office in London and the high commission in New Delhi.
This allowed IRD analysts to supply timely details of anti-Indian and pro-
Chinese statements made by communist leaders and their governments. It
was also used to ensure that the Nehru’s administration received copies of
disparaging quotations attacking the Indian premier and members of his
cabinet. These were attributed to Beijing but had actually been fed by SIS to
news agencies in the Far East that were covertly funded by London in a classic
black propaganda operation. Not to be left out, the British Ministry of
Defence also got in on the act, sending Peter Joy information for distribution
to his Indian contacts on the mistreatment of British prisoners held by the
Chinese during the Korean War.67
The information expertise that Britain made available to India left the IRD
well positioned to exploit a wave of anti-Chinese feeling that swept across
India. The Indian government was careful, however, to steer popular protest in
an anti-Chinese rather than an anti-communist direction. Direct attacks on
communism made by third parties inside India were proscribed under the so-
called ‘third country rule’ and, more particularly, criticism of the Soviet Union
by foreign missions was actively discouraged.68 The External Publicity
Division of the MEA had, the head of the BIS, Donald Kerr, reminded
colleagues, given the green light for British information officers to support,
‘the appropriate official [Indian] bodies – and indeed to non-official organisa-
tions if we wished’. The only limitation India placed upon what amounted to
an unprecedented invitation to Britain to disseminate counter-propaganda
material inside and outside government channels in the subcontinent, was that
all such work remain confined, ‘to China and Chinese activities in view of the
continued official ban on propaganda against the Soviet Union or
Communism as such’.69 British hopes of exploiting the Sino-Indian war to
turn Indians against communism more broadly, and New Delhi’s Soviet
friend, in particular, was not something the Indian government welcomed or
was prepared to tolerate. To complicate matters further, the IRD’s desire to
dispel Indian distinctions between good Soviet and bad Chinese communism
was complicated when the Moscow-backed CPI placed patriotism above
ideological affinity and publicly denounced Beijing’s aggression.70
In an attempt to resolve the IRD’s dilemma, and under instruction from
London, Peter Joy began running a twin-track propaganda operation in India.
One strand, which was ‘virtually requested by the Indian authorities’, saw Joy
support and develop the Indian government’s counter-propaganda capability
directed against China. In practical terms, this encompassed work that ranged
from providing guidance and advice to Indian colleagues on the format and
content of programming on AIR, to arranging for Indian information officers to
attend propaganda and psychological warfare courses back in the UK. In
December 1963, one Indian official from the PIB, P. M. M. Menon, and another
from AIR, P. S. Bhatia, arrived in London for training in counter-subversion
140 spying in south asia

propaganda. ‘Great care had to be taken not to offend them [Menon and
Bhatia] by our attitude to Russia’, IRD instructors noted, ‘but we did tell them
that it was our policy to combat Russian Communism as well as Chinese
Communism’.71 Links Joy managed to forge with the China Division of the
MEA also began to bear fruit. The MEA asked for British input on semi-
classified Indian government documents related to the border conflict and to
the Sino-Soviet dispute. This development, Joy enthused, had enabled polit-
ical officers within the British high commission, ‘to encourage a dialogue
[with Indian colleagues] on future Chinese and Communist bloc policy
which may in time provide us with opportunities for influencing official
thinking in this field’.72
A second, and unofficial strand of the IRD’s India operation, continued to
disseminate counter-propaganda aimed at the Soviet Union. It operated without
the knowledge and approval of the Indian government. Although frustrated by
the official embargo imposed by Nehru’s government on counter-propaganda
activity with an anti-Soviet tinge, the IRD had little option other than to
acknowledge the boundaries imposed by political realities on the ground.
‘Russia’s position in India excludes our close liaison with the Government in
countering Communist subversion’, a senior IRD officer acknowledged, ‘and
our effort must be concerned primarily with alerting unofficial . . . opinion to the
threat rather than with liaison in countering it’.73 The ‘unofficial’ Soviet element
of IRD activity in India was seen by the Department as ‘much more important’
in the long term than its ‘official’ Chinese programme. Consequently, the ‘main
effort’ undertaken by Peter Joy was concentrated upon the ‘infinitely more
difficult tasks of weaning Indians away from the idea that the Soviet Union’s
dispute with China has transformed it into India’s “guardian angel” in the Sino-
Indian dispute, and that the aims and methods of Soviet Communism are, in
some way, different in kind from those of the Chinese’.74
By prioritising counter-propaganda in India that targeted the Soviet Union,
the IRD took on a momentous challenge. Back in February 1957, having
concluded that the previous year’s Hungarian crisis had shown its propaganda
capabilities to be lagging behind those of the West, the Central Committee of
the Soviet Presidium approved an expansion in the volume and reach of Soviet
propaganda aimed at the developing world. The budget of the Soviet Ministry
of Communications was boosted, and Radio Moscow was provided with new
and more powerful transmitters directed at Asia, Latin America, and Africa.
The quantity of Soviet literature despatched to the Indian subcontinent mush-
roomed. One Soviet publication alone, the fortnightly magazine, Soviet Land,
was distributed in India in fourteen languages, and had a circulation of 300,000
by the early 1960s.75 Moreover, the ‘formidable Communist bloc effort in the
Information field’ in India, manifested in an ever-expanding cultural pro-
gramme of Soviet films, exhibitions, and lectures. The India-Soviet Cultural
Society (ISCUS) operated a national network of branches and affiliates that
 peddling propaganda 141

sponsored communist libraries and reading rooms. Novosti, the Soviets

‘unofficial’ press agency, had an active bureau in New Delhi. A second Soviet
front organisation, Inter-Ads, subsidised communist newspapers by channel-
ling spurious advertising revenue in their direction. Moreover, the aftermath
of the border war witnessed an upsurge in indigenous communist propaganda
carried by left-wing Indian newspapers, such as Blitz, Patriot, Link and
Mainstream, and amongst workers organisations linked to the CPI, such as
the All-India Trade Union Congress.76
The Indian government’s appetite for coordinating counter-propaganda
operations with Britain against China remained strong throughout the
1960s. Frustratingly for the IRD, however, periodic British hints that this
arrangement might be extended to cover Soviet communism met with firm
Indian rebuffs. In June 1963, Whitehall considered declaring to the Indian
government that an IRD officer was operating out of the British high commis-
sion. The proposal met with opposition from Gore-Booth and Joy. Nehru’s
administration, London was reminded, had repeatedly made clear its objection
to any form of broad anti-communist propaganda activity. Dispensing with
Joy’s cover, declaring him as an IRD officer, and explaining the role’s primary
function, was deemed likely to end in his expulsion from India, and the
imposition of new and unwelcome restrictions on the work performed by
the BIS.77 The absence of Indian government support for the IRD’s ‘unofficial’
counter-propaganda effort against the Soviet Union had, in any case, British
officials in the subcontinent pointed out, not stopped Joy from expanding the
scope and scale of IRD operations. Indeed, Joy was eventually able to build up
a network of over 400 Indian contacts, or ‘well placed and influential individ-
uals’, who received IRD material and assisted in its dissemination.78
In 1964, Joy successfully engineered a major breakthrough in IRD activity by
co-opting the support of two Indian publishers, Gopal Mittal, owner of the
National Academy Publishing House in New Delhi, and Ram Singh,
a journalist on the Hindustan Times, editor of the right-wing magazine
Thought, and manager of the Siddharta publishing group. Mittal and Singh
would go on to become mainstays of Britain’s counter-propaganda offensive
against Soviet communism in India. Each covertly distributed IRD literature
under payment of a financial subsidy. On occasions, Singh facilitated black
operations. In one instance, he arranged for publication of a letter, purportedly
written in 1924 from Kanpur prison by S. A. Dange, the chairman of the CPI.
In the letter, which Dange denounced as a forgery, the CPI leader offered to
work covertly for the British colonial government. One British official noted
that the letter’s publication, ‘has done much to damage the pro-Russian faction
of the CPI and has precipitated a split in the party’.79 More generally, Mittal’s
company printed and distributed books with anti-communist themes in
English, Hindi, Urdu, and Tamil editions, the texts of which were supplied
by the IRD. Under the terms of a ‘see-safe’ agreement, the IRD paid Mittal
142 spying in south asia

a subsidy that covered a book’s publication and distribution expenses and

ensured that his business returned a healthy profit from its association with
Britain’s covert propagandists. The scheme, which by the spring of 1967 had
seen 70,000 books gifted to key contacts, or sold at below market prices, cost
the IRD £10,000 per annum.80
Joy later expanded IRD operations to encompass an article redistribution
scheme. In collaboration with Mittal, whose publishing interests included
ownership of a prominent Urdu magazine, Tehreek, Joy arranged for IRD
copy to be translated into a range of vernacular languages and passed on to
journalists working at Indian newspapers and magazines. In theory, the
scheme enabled the IRD to react quickly to breaking news, and to reach
Indian audiences with topical anti-communist material. On average, however,
the scheme placed just two articles a month in Indian newspapers, and at an
annual cost of £1,500. At the time, India’s thousands of newspapers and
periodicals had a combined circulation of 30 million readers.81 The meagre
output of the article redistribution scheme was defended by Joy on the basis
that the news stories it produced invariably resulted in similar copy being
carried by other news organisations and, as such, ‘it seems to us good value for
money.’ The IRD’s inability to quantify precisely how much replay its articles
received in the Indian media suggested that the value for money argument was
based less on hard facts, and more on professional wishful thinking. Other less
structured arrangements were put in place to distribute IRD news items
through alternative Indian publishers, such as Sagar Ahluwalia, editor of
Young Asia Publications, and Professor A. B. Shah, of the Indian Committee
for Cultural Freedom. The network of publishing contacts established in India
by Joy, IRD officers enthused optimistically, enabled the Department, ‘ . . . to
get the right article into the right paper at the right time’.82
The merits of paying financial subsidies to IRD contacts in India provoked
‘prolonged and fairly heated . . . discussion’ inside the British government. The BIS
came out against money being passed to Indians through individuals associated
with the high commission under any circumstances. Donald Kerr objected stri-
dently to, ‘the use of methods which might jeopardise the good name of BIS as an
overt agency of HMG’. In Kerr’s mind, the risks involved in authorising covert
payments to Indians by the IRD were excessive, as there was ‘no fool proof way of
ensuring that they cannot be traced back to their origin’. Peter Joy disagreed. Joy
maintained that the imposition of a ‘blanket veto’ on payments to local ‘friends’
would restrict his ability to ‘increase the placing and plugging of articles, news
items, cartoons etc.’ in the Indian press. The Soviet ‘opposition’ in India, Joy
stressed, had ‘no inhibitions’ whatsoever about using its financial muscle to ensure
that communist propaganda material featured prominently in newspapers and
magazines. A reliance on ‘simple “good-will”’ was insufficient to persuade hard-
pressed Indian publishers, many of whom operated on a commercial shoestring, to
disseminate IRD product.83 A risk-averse British attitude taken to compensating
 peddling propaganda 143

Indians collaborating with IRD, Joy griped, meant that ‘We are fighting with one
hand tied behind our back.’84
By way of a compromise, Joy suggested employing ‘go-betweens’, or cut
outs, to pass funds to the IRD’s contacts. These were trusted individuals, often
within the British expatriate business community in India, who had no direct
association with the high commission, and could act surreptitiously as the
IRD’s paymasters.85 In August 1965, agreement was reached that small sums of
under £50 could be passed by IRD officers to Indian contacts on the under-
standing that the total amount paid to any single individual would not exceed
£300 per annum.86 In order to secure the CRO’s acquiescence, the IRD
undertook that ‘there would be no question of indiscriminate or “scatter-
shot” funding; nor would funds be used in an attempt to “convert” or
“bribe”’. Rather, the Department committed to employ financial incentives
solely to expedite local action when significant counter-propaganda opportun-
ities presented themselves. By way of reassurance, senior IRD officers sug-
gested to their colleagues in the CRO that, ‘All the major missions in New
Delhi (including the British High Commission) were presumed by the Indians
to carry out transactions of this kind, and . . . [doing so] was most unlikely to
effect the “image of purity” which the High Commission was seeking to project
overtly one way or the other.’87 Fortunately for the IRD, John Freeman, who
replaced Paul Gore-Booth as High Commissioner in India in earlier that year,
made plain that he had ‘no objection to cash payments being made locally’. At
the same time, Freeman reminded his resident IRD officer of the principle that
a ‘diplomatic officer of this Mission should not get himself involved in
a transaction which could be represented as a direct bribe’.88 Having been
given a green light by Freeman, the IRD moved immediately to ‘take advan-
tage’ of their new financial freedom and in the process ‘demonstrate to the
sceptical the advantages which can be derived from direct funding’.
Accordingly, IRD’s ‘most reliable contact’, Ram Singh, and his weekly
Thought, became the first recipient of an IRD financial subsidy in the form
of a regular block purchase of advertising space.89
Concurrently, the IRD also increased the use of other incentives aimed at,
‘consolidating existing [Indian] contacts or influencing potentially useful
“waverers” in the right direction’. All expenses paid trips to Britain were
considered an especially ‘fruitful’ means of securing Indian cooperation. An
IRD-funded junket to the UK taken up by D. F. Karaka, editor of the anti-
Communist Bombay weekly, Current, the Department recorded, ‘produced
not only greater immediate usage of our [IRD] material but a fund of good will
on which we should be able to draw in the future’. At the other end of the
political spectrum, H. S. Chhabra, the leftist editor of Africa Diary, was assisted
to attend a conference in Birmingham organised by the African Studies
Association. By ‘leveraging’ Indians that it had sponsored to visit Britain,
IRD was able to develop relations with valuable new contacts, including
144 spying in south asia

Figure 6.1 The CIA’s pervasiveness in Indian politics represented in Thought

magazine, 26 April 1967.

S. R. Mohan Das, labour correspondent of the Economic Times; A. G. Noorani,

correspondent of the Indian Express; Professor P. C. Chakravarty, head of the
department of International Affairs at Jadavpur University, Calcutta; and
N. S. Jagganatahn, an assistant editor of the Hindustan Times, amongst
others.90
The perception inside Whitehall that the IRD was making some headway against
the Soviet information offensive in India enabled Joy to lobby successfully for the
allocation of additional counter-propaganda resources. Joy had long complained
that the IRD operation in India was over-stretched, under-resourced, and, in
 peddling propaganda 145

consequence, ‘dependent on a pathetically small network of reliable contacts

in New Delhi and the [regional British] posts’. In May 1964, protests at the
difficulties in making and ‘nursing’ Indian contacts in a vast country subject
to an increasing weight of Soviet propaganda were addressed, in part, when
a second IRD officer was posted to Delhi. Catherine Allen arrived in India as
a ‘super PA’ to offer Joy much needed administrative support. One of Allen’s
successors, and a future head of MI5, Stella Rimington, would be inducted
into the ‘secret world’ having ‘stuffed envelopes’ for the IRD in India.91
Raised in Kenya, Allen had been recruited by the Department while an
undergraduate at Oxford University, and had previously served in the
IRD’s Africa section. Allen proved to be an exceptionally capable and enter-
prising officer. Even with additional assistance, however, Joy struggled with
the logistical challenges of running a counter-propaganda programme
within a subcontinent renowned for its social, political, ethnic, religious,
and linguistic plurality.
Periodic fieldtrips that Joy undertook outside New Delhi underscored the
enormity of the geographical and functional tasks faced by the Department. In
Ranchi, in eastern India, Joy discovered that one IRD contact, Sen Gupta, the
editor of the local English language daily, New Republic, was, ‘busily engaged in
playing both the Soviet bloc off against the West in his own parish’. A stock
IRD contact, Gupta ran a small newspaper with insufficient staff or time to
devote to sub-editing. As a consequence, Gupta had more use for small
features on topical issues supplied to him by the information department of
the Soviet Embassy in New Delhi, and rather less appetite for relatively long-
winded and abstruse IRD copy. Short one-page Soviet bulletins, written in
plain language, and focusing on basic themes calculated to attract the attention
of rural readers, such as Soviet medical, scientific and agricultural break-
throughs, compared favourably with the ‘far too sophisticated’ fare offered
up by the British propagandists.92 Reliable and effective IRD contacts working
in Indian journalism and publishing were highly prized and, as Joy rued, ‘as
scarce as gold dust!’93 Such, contacts, as Gupta readily acknowledged, invari-
ably felt an indifference to the ideological message contained within British
and Soviet propaganda. Indians were more concerned with parochial issues of
style, human interest and, ultimately, commercial appeal. Recruiting contacts
was one thing, Joy found to his chagrin, having them do your bidding was quite
another, much more difficult, proposition.
British anxiety that the Soviets were stealing a march on the IRD in the
mofussil, or areas outside the subcontinent’s major metropolitan centres, led to
a regional dimension being added to the Department’s Indian armoury.
Jonathan Davidson, a young graduate recruited directly from Cambridge
University, was despatched by the IRD to Calcutta to oversee and expand
counter-propaganda operations in eastern and southern India, hotbeds of
indigenous communist activity. As with Joy, Davidson was not declared to
146 spying in south asia

the Indian government as an IRD officer and worked undercover as third

secretary in the political section of the British mission in Calcutta. Davidson’s
role was that of a mobile contact maker, identifying new outlets for unattrib-
utable IRD material amongst politicians, journalists, publishers, and
academics.94 His area of geographic responsibility was vast. Davidson’s remit
ran from Calcutta, in the north, to Madras, a thousand miles further south, and
took in Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Kerala, hundreds of miles to the west.
Davidson would go on to have a highly distinguished career in the Foreign
Office’s information service and, as an accomplished musician, play first flute
in the Calcutta Symphony Orchestra.95 On Davidson’s watch, and that of his
successor, Ian Knight Smith, who arrived in India in March 1967, the IRD
added a new tranche of Indians to its burgeoning list of contacts. These grew to
encompass members of the opposition Praja Socialist Party, faculty at Calcutta
University, leaders of the tea workers union in Assam, and influential figures in
the state politics of eastern and southern India, such as P. Thimma Reddy,
president of Andhra Pradesh Congress Party committee. As in New Delhi, the
IRD’s regional work ran to subsidising local publishers, such as A. N. Nambiar
and P. V. Thampy, who operated the news services, FABIANS, and Indian
Press Features.96
The diversification of IRD operations to cover eastern and southern India
was viewed with satisfaction by the Department. Senior managers nonetheless
remained aware of a danger in spreading the IRD’s limited resources too thinly
across the subcontinent and, in so doing, sacrificing impact in search of greater
reach. ‘IRD should’, one official had concluded by 1967, ‘concentrate more
than hitherto on the cultivation of influential Congress Ministers, M.P.’s and
senior civil servants’. ‘We have tended’, another IRD officer added critically, ‘to
commit our armour in penny packets against peripheral targets of opportunity
and at greater cost’.97 Or, put another way, the Department was anxious that its
Indian operation had fallen into the trap of recruiting contacts based on their
availability, and had neglected more important but less pliant targets.
Furthermore, IRD field officers began to express reservations that the Indian
operation risked becoming too insular and excessively focused on indigenous
communist influence in the regions. ‘The local [communist] threat is very
much less of a threat to British interests and, for that matter, to the Congress
Party itself’, one cautioned, ‘than that posed by the Soviet Union in particular
and the Soviet bloc in general’.98 All of which, in Whitehall’s view, suggested
the need to rebalance IRD work in India, and to refocus on weakening Soviet
influence at the centre of Indian politics.

Collaboration Curtailed
As the IRD prepared to realign its operation in India, broader political
developments in the subcontinent conspired to throw a spanner in the
 peddling propaganda 147

Department’s works. To a considerable degree, the IRD had benefited from

a reservoir of goodwill towards Britain that had accumulated in India in the
wake of the Sino-Indian War. As early as 1963, however, London’s relations
with New Delhi had hit a bump in the road following an ill-fated and unwel-
come British intervention in the Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan.
Worse still, the Labour government of Harold Wilson, which had come to
power in October 1964, managed to infuriate Indians by charging New Delhi
with unwarranted aggression during the Indo-Pakistan war of 1965. In
a development that would have seemed unthinkable only a few years before,
the peace talks that concluded the 1965 conflict were brokered not by
Whitehall in London, but by Moscow, on Soviet soil, in the central Asian
city of Tashkent. The Tashkent accord was widely interpreted as emblematic of
waning British power and influence in South Asia. ‘How strange and intoler-
able it would have seemed to [Lord] Curzon’, The Times opined in
January 1966, ‘that the affairs of the sub-continent he ruled should be taken
to Tashkent to be discussed under the patronage of a Russian’.99
Equally troubling for the IRD was the sudden and unexpected death during
the Tashkent talks of India’s prime minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, who had
come to power on Nehru’s passing, in May 1964. Nehru’s daughter, Indira
Gandhi, who, unlike her father, had little time for, or interest in, the United
Kingdom, was co-opted to replace Shastri. In New Delhi, officials in the High
Commission soon began to refer to the ‘Gandhi factor’ in Indo-British rela-
tions. The new Indian premier was considered to carry a considerable ‘chip on
the shoulder’ when it came to Britain. With Gandhi at the helm, India’s
diplomatic, economic, and military links with the Soviet Union went from
strength to strength. John Freeman confided to the Labour cabinet minister,
Tony Benn, that Moscow was actively exploiting its enhanced status to sow
Indo-British discord and aggressively pursue a ‘Russian interest . . . to disen-
gage the British from India’.100 Back in London, IRD officials echoed
Freeman’s concern ‘that [the] Russians are now stepping up disinformation
activities’. Much of the Soviet covert propaganda output, the British rued,
evidenced ‘rather an I.R.D. character’, and had taken to employing ‘uncon-
scious or semi-conscious “agents of influence”’, encompassing both journalists
and politicians, who worked within local laws and were frustratingly ‘difficult
to pin anything on’.101 Against a backdrop of diminishing British authority in
the subcontinent, a dispirited Freeman concluded that his mission had little
option other than to, ‘lie low for the time being and leave it to the Russians to
make the running [in India], in the hope of gradually recovering our influence
and eventually making a comeback later’.102 Or, as John Gordon McMinnies,
who, in January 1965, had taken over responsibility for the IRD operation in
India from Peter Joy, put matters, ‘It would be . . . quite unrealistic in the
present post-Tashkent era to expect the Congress Government as such to
peddle any material critical of the Soviet Union.’103
148 spying in south asia

In 1967, the political obstacles confronting the IRD in India increased

further. In the states of Bengal in eastern India, and Kerala, in the west of the
country, electorates returned communist governments to office. Overnight,
IRD contacts in the Congress party that had been nurtured over many years
were cast to the margins of Indian politics. At the same time, allegations
surfaced in the Indian communist press that external interference had taken
place in that year’s national elections. The Indian media fed off reports first
published in the American west-coast magazine, Ramparts, that exposed the
CIA’s long-standing financial relationships with a number of international
educational institutions and cultural bodies, including the Indian Committee
for Cultural Freedom.104 With Indian suspicion of Western intelligence agen-
cies running high, IRD’s representative in New Delhi came under suspicion as
an ‘undeclared friend’, or SIS officer.105 In response, John Freeman ordered the
IRD operation to proceed with ‘particular caution’, and to temporarily curtail
its riskier activities. IRD officers were instructed to avoid seeking new Indian
contacts; suspended meetings with existing ‘assets’; and implement tighter
security measures around the distribution of financial ‘incentives’.106 In
rationalising the decision to ‘pause’ IRD activity, Freeman argued that the
attention that had been focused upon the CIA in India threatened to, ‘unearth
the activities of other Western Missions and perhaps link these with the C.I.A.
Here we [the British] should be an obvious target’. Furthermore, with the
election of regional communist governments, Freeman was conscious that,
‘the spread of communist influence is now likely to enter the field of Indian
domestic politics, and . . . in the process, the ability of the State Governments to
uncover – or fabricate – “foreign influences” is of course increased’.107
Worryingly for the British, Indian officials began to display a heightened
level of interest in the United Kingdom’s intelligence services. At one diplo-
matic reception, Freeman was startled when, Triloki Nath Kaul, India’s
Secretary at the Ministry of External Affairs, directed ‘a sharp question’ in
his direction, asking the High Commissioner pointedly, “What is the British
equivalent of the C.I.A.?”. The same question was repeated by a second Indian
at a lunch hosted by Britain’s Information Counsellor a few days later. ‘We do
not want to read too much into Kaul’s behaviour’, local British officials advised
London, ‘but it certainly shows the way in which his mind, for whatever
practical objectives, tends to work’.108
Freeman’s sense that Western intelligence services faced a rough ride in the
subcontinent proved to be well founded. In an ironic twist, Freeman was
himself subjected to a communist disinformation ploy. In February 1967,
a copy of a forged telegram purportedly sent from the British High
Commission was delivered anonymously to Frank Moraes, a journalist on
the Indian Express. Framed as a secret diplomatic cable written by ‘Sir John
Freeman’ the forgery outlined incidents of American interference in India’s
internal affairs. It named members of the US embassy staff in Delhi and
 peddling propaganda 149

suggested that they were involved in passing covert payments to pro-American

Indian parliamentarians and right-wing political party’s campaigning against
the ruling Congress government in national elections. A former Labour polit-
ician and one-time editor of the New Statesman, Freeman held no truck with
the honours system and had never accepted a knighthood. The forgery, which
at first glance Freeman conceded looked ‘plausible’ and ‘could certainly con-
fuse and probably deceive those who are uninitiated in our professional ways’,
was, on closer inspection, full of clumsy errors. The CRO fulminated against, ‘a
contemptible and unskilful attempt to blacken the name of the United States
and Britain in India’.109 At first, the IRD suspected that the forger was an
Indian communist. British officials were, ‘reluctant to believe that a Soviet
intelligence officer could have been so clumsy’.110 Sir Saville Garner,
Permanent Secretary at the CRO, found the forgery fascinating, but mused
to colleagues why communists, Indian or Soviet, ‘imagine that we [British
diplomats] still write in the style of Gibbon?’111 Intriguingly, American intelli-
gence personnel in India concluded that the forgery was the work of Yuri
Modin, a KGB officer then operating under cover in the Soviet embassy in New
Delhi. In the immediate post-war period, Modin had acted as Soviet controller
of the infamous ‘Cambridge Five’ spy ring, whose British members included
Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and John
Cairncross.112 Eager to avoid placing themselves in the Indian media spotlight,
British diplomats decided to deny the forgery the oxygen of publicity and
ignore coverage it received in the left-leaning Bombay weekly, Blitz. ‘A public
denial’, British officials judged, ‘would merely widen the article’s
readership’.113
Freeman’s American colleagues in India proved less willing to ignore what
they perceived to be a crude Soviet attack on British and American interests.
Some months after the ‘Freeman telegram’ story had broken in Blitz, an essay
appeared in the news magazine, Young India, under the heading, ‘Did KGB
Man Forge Freeman Telegram?’ The exposé noted that ‘a mysterious white
“sahib”’, with short blonde hair, blue eyes, Slavic features, and a command of
Hindi and heavily accented English, had attracted the attention of India’s
Intelligence Bureau. The description closely matched that of Yuri Modin.
Modin had left India abruptly in April 1967, only nine months after arriving
in the subcontinent. This abnormally short tour for a Soviet ‘diplomat’, Young
India asserted, appeared ‘proof, if any were needed, that Modin came to India
only to interfere with the [national] elections’.114 Having read the Young India
exposé, David Lancashire, IRD’s representative in the Indian capital, specu-
lated that its focus on the KGB, and reference to Modin, had been orchestrated
by the local CIA station. The magazine’s editor, Sagar Ahluwalia, Lancashire
reflected, was a shady character, and known to receive financial payments and
titbits of political gossip from the Agency.115 Whether British conjecture
surrounding the CIA’s robust response to Soviet active measures in India
150 spying in south asia

was well-founded or not, the events of 1967 left John Freeman in little doubt
that the relative anonymity British covert activity had enjoyed in the subcon-
tinent up to that point, was now over.

Eyedroppers and Firehoses: IRD in Retreat

The ‘pause’ imposed by John Freeman on IRD work in India lasted only a matter
of months. Further growth in Soviet influence in the subcontinent, however,
exemplified by the signing of an Indo-Soviet treaty of friendship and cooper-
ation, in 1971, ensured that British counter-propaganda efforts remained ham-
strung. In the face of calls from Whitehall for economies in overseas spending,
Freeman’s successor as high commissioner, Terence Garvey, questioned the
need for an IRD presence on his staff. Garvey informed Whitehall that if
financial savings had to be made in India, he was prepared to make do without
an IRD officer, and to transfer counter-propaganda responsibilities to a member
of his chancery.116 It seemed imprudent, the high commissioner argued, to pour
money and manpower into contesting an, ‘immense Russian information effort
[that] consisted mainly of providing second-class material for mass publication
in India’. Overt and semi-autonomous bodies, such as the BIS and the British
Council, Garvey added, could protect British interests in the subcontinent just as
well, if not better, than the IRD.117 In London, IRD officials fought a rear-guard
action to retain a foothold in India. It would be foolhardy, the Department
argued, to denude India of a specialist counter-subversion presence at a time
when, following the outbreak of another Indo-Pakistan war and the emergence
of the new state of Bangladesh, ‘the Soviet Union and China are more closely
involved than ever before in the sub-continent’. Nevertheless, under new terms
of reference, P. H. Roberts, the incumbent IRD representative, was compelled to
undertake ‘straight’ information work alongside the Department’s covert activ-
ities. The IRD’s regional representation in India was phased out.118
More broadly, by 1972, a new and slimmed down version of IRD, or IRD
Mark II, had come into being. This development reflected the consensus in
London that, since its heyday in the 1960s, ‘the [IRD] operation had tended to
get out of hand; IRD became too big, too diffuse and had to be drastically
reorganised’. The department’s complement of staff was halved, and its head-
quarters in London was relocated from a tower block at Riverwalk House,
Millbank, to smaller offices in Great George Street.119 Reductions in IRD’s
presence in South Asia coincided with India’s removal from Whitehall’s list of
information policy priorities. Moving forward, the high commission in New
Delhi was warned by the Foreign Office that should further cuts be contem-
plated in the propaganda budget, ‘India will be one of the first countries at
which we shall have to look.’120 Roberts was subsequently tasked with add-
itional responsibility for IRD operations in Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and
Sri Lanka. Enthusiasm for expanding the IRD’s global role, that had been so
 peddling propaganda 151

evident in Whitehall in the early 1960s, waned as Europe became the primary
centre of British concern. With neither the time nor the funds to sustain the
IRD’s network of South Asian contacts, Roberts found himself confined to
New Delhi. There his administrative support was supplied by the wife of
a British diplomat, whose remit ran to reading seven English-language
Indian newspapers a day and, ‘using her own judgment on matters of IRD
interest’.121
In 1975, IRD imposed a second suspension, or ‘partial embargo’, on its
operations in India. That June, the Allahabad High Court controversially
found Indira Gandhi to be guilty of electoral malpractice. The legal ruling
threatened to invalidate the Indian premier’s status as a member of parliament
and bring down her government. Scenting political blood, Gandhi’s opponents
took to India’s streets and the prime minister responded by declaring a State of
Emergency, suspended civil liberties, and jailed her political opponents. The
IRD’s Indian contacts ran for cover, fearful of being exposed or imprisoned by
an increasingly authoritarian regime that appeared obsessed by threats to the
nation’s sovereignty, real and imagined. In turn, following discussions between
the IRD and the Foreign Office’s South Asia desk, it was agreed that the
circulation of counter-propaganda material in India should be ‘drastically
reduced’. The supply of IRD anti-Soviet literature to ‘unofficial recipients’, or
Indians outside government, stopped altogether. With Gandhi’s administra-
tion intercepting and censoring communications, local mail was no longer
used to deliver IRD copy, further restricting its circulation. Reference to Indian
internal politics was stripped entirely from the Department’s material. Roberts
found himself reduced to servicing a shrinking group of trusted officials in
minor Indian government departments.122
Prior to the IRD’s demise, in 1977, on the initiative of Labour’s foreign
secretary, David Owen, the Department continued to justify its by now ‘penny
packet’ activities in India on the basis that they retained impact. IRD official’s
argued, implausibly, that when it came to counter-propaganda activity in the
subcontinent, the British ‘eye-dropper can continue to be effective where
Russian and American fire hoses may be too indiscriminating always to hit
the target, and the solution this applies may sting more’.123 Pressed for
evidence of its continued utility, the Department was forced to concede that
it was all but, ‘impossible to quantify the effectiveness of information activities,
whether covert or overt’.124 Instead, the IRD asked for the value of its work in
India to be taken as an article of faith. Drawing on an agricultural analogy, the
Department drew a parallel between its labour and the effect of fertiliser. ‘You
cannot really tell how much it has affected a particular crop as opposed, say, to
the weather. But like fertilizer you have to put it on.’ Across Whitehall, where
misunderstanding of the IRD and its responsibilities was commonplace,
British mandarins drew a different, and less flattering interpretation, from
a metaphor that associated the Department with the spreading of manure.125
152 spying in south asia

Ultimately, the IRD proved incapable of making the political weather in New
Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta, or Madras. Broader foreign policy decisions taken in
London, Washington, Moscow, and Beijing dictated Indian responses to the
Soviet Union, and not the actions of a handful of overstretched covert counter-
propaganda officers on the ground in South Asia. British foreign policymaking
and, by association, that of London’s principal ally, the United States, undoubt-
edly handicapped the work of the IRD in India, as elsewhere in the developing
world. Issues surrounding colonialism, racial discrimination, immigration, and
economic exploitation, bedevilled Britain’s propagandists across Africa, Asia,
and the Middle East, and produced reactive and defensive responses.126 Under
such circumstances, selling anti-communism was difficult. Well before the
department’s dissolution the late 1970s, the IRD experiment in India had run
its course.
 7

From Russia with Love: Dissidents and Defectors

in Cold War India

In January 1968, Suman Mulgaokar, editor of the Hindustan Times, published

an editorial entitled, ‘The Right of Asylum’. Mulgaokar’s interest in political
asylum was piqued by a series of high-profile incidents that saw nationals from
behind the Iron Curtain seek to defect to the West through India. Noting the
consternation that this unwelcome development had engendered in Indian
government circles, Mulgaokar observed wryly that:
To have three Russian defections occur in your country within three years is
embarrassing enough. When one of the defectors is Stalin’s daughter, the
matter gets much worse. When the third of the defectors . . . goes about
stating that . . . he had ‘chosen’ India to defect from because visas for India
were relatively easy to obtain, the unusually high colour of Indian Home
and External Affairs Ministry officials becomes easy to understand.1
Less easy to comprehend, in Mulgaokar’s opinion, was an aide memoire that
the Indian Government circulated to diplomatic missions in New Delhi on
30 December 1967. Originating in the Ministry of External Affairs, the note
stated that it was, ‘well established that the affording of asylum is not within the
purposes of a Diplomatic Mission’. Should any foreign mission receive a request
for asylum, the MEA directive added, it should be refused.2 The instruction
backed Indian officials into an awkward corner. Were the American or the
Soviet embassies to take in a defector, Mulgaokar observed, the MEA faced, ‘the
choice of either doing nothing, which would make it look impotent, or of
invading the Embassy premises which would be a violation of the conventions
of courtesy between nations’. In respect of low-level and largely benign political
refugees, the adoption of such a rigid policy appeared unnecessarily punitive and
counterproductive. It made little sense in such cases, Mulgaokar opined, ‘for
India to get into a flap merely because its soil was used to stage the defection’.3
The Indian government’s directive on political asylum was triggered by the
defection of Aziz Saltimovitch Ulug-Zade, a teacher of Hindi at Moscow State
University who had travelled to India as part of a Soviet youth delegation. On
19 December 1967, just hours before he was due to return to the Soviet Union,
Ulug-Zade walked out of the Hotel Ranjit in New Delhi, hailed a taxi, and made
for the British High Commission in the diplomatic enclave of Chanakyapuri.

153
154 spying in south asia

Having been turned away by the British, Ulug-Zade tried his luck at the
American embassy a few hundred yards further down the street. The
Americans proved more welcoming. To the fury of the MEA and the Soviet
embassy, the US ambassador, Chester Bowles, offered Ulug-Zade sanctuary and
agreed to assist his defection to the West.4 In the Indian press, Soviet officials
charged their American counterparts with kidnapping the Russian teacher.
Caught in the middle of a spat involving the United States, Britain, and the
Soviet Union, the Indian government saw its relationships with all three
countries, and its domestic credentials as a haven for victims of political
persecution, come under pressure.5
Over the previous decade, New Delhi had been embroiled in a succession of
diplomatic disputes involving defections from East to West. The Ulug-Zade
case had been preceded a few months earlier by an incident that dominated
global news headlines. In March 1967, Svetlana Iosigovna Alliluyeva, the only
daughter of the former Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin, defected through the US
embassy in New Delhi. Further back, in 1962, concurrent with the Sino-Indian
border war and the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vladislaw Stepanovich Tarasov,
a twenty-five-year-old Soviet merchant seaman, jumped ship in Calcutta.
After a protracted legal wrangle in the Indian courts, the Russian sailor was
deported from the subcontinent and began a new life in the West. The Tarasov
episode came at a point when India was reeling from a humiliating military
defeat inflicted by China, and its national government was actively courting
American and Soviet assistance to stave off what, at one point, appeared
a threat to the India Republic’s very survival.
The significance of non-aligned states and, more specifically, India, in the
transnational story of Cold War asylum has been obscured by a tendency to
frame questions surrounding defection in a narrow East–West context.6
Attention given to such activity inside the developing world has privileged
personal narratives and marginalised the agency of Asian and African
nations.7 Scant emphasis has been given to incidents of defection that
occurred within the context of decolonisation. These placed considerable
strain on the pursuit of Cold War non-alignment as practiced by states
such as India.8 They also acted as an irritant in relations between the Soviet
Union, the United States, and Great Britain, when these countries were
attempting to forge new and more productive ties in the wake of the Cuban
Missile Crisis. The ten-year period between the Sino-Indian border war of
1962, and the Indo-Pakistan conflict of 1971, witnessed India distance itself
from the West and become more reliant on Soviet support. It also saw the
government of India scrambling to contain diplomatic fallout from defec-
tions staged in the subcontinent that threatened to derail its strategic tilt
towards Moscow and undermine New Delhi’s promotion of universal
human rights.9
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Spy Central
By the mid-1950s, a decade into the Cold War, the numbers of Soviet defec-
tions in Europe slowed as border controls between East and West Germany
were tightened and, in 1961, the Berlin Wall went up. Meanwhile, defections
staged at points of Cold War intersection outside Europe multiplied. Appeals
for political asylum increased on the part of ‘non-returnees’ from state-
sponsored Eastern bloc travel and trade groups visiting Asia, and from ‘jump-
ers’, or absconders, on Soviet ships docked in ports across the developing
world.10 The presence in non-aligned India of so many diplomats, non-
governmental organisations, technicians, businesspeople, and journalists
from the Soviet Union, Britain, and the United States provided ample scope
for SIS, the CIA, and the KGB to encourage defections. Official rhetoric in
India and the West that defectors were welcome and would be treated sympa-
thetically as victims of political persecution, belied the fact that national
governments often approached the issue of asylum as an unwanted problem.
Paradoxically, as Western intelligence services hatched plans to stimulate
defections, the politicians that they served recoiled from the diplomatic ten-
sions such activity fostered.11 A majority of the defectors moving from East to
West were of limited value in strict intelligence terms.12 Moreover, the propa-
ganda bonanza associated with parading defectors before the world’s media
was frequently offset in the minds of politicians by the potential such events
carried to upset broader foreign policy objectives.
The mere mention of defection induced neuralgic episodes in British prem-
iers, such as Winston Churchill and Harold Macmillan.13 In 1954, Churchill
expressed alarm that the defection of a KGB officer, Nikolai Khokhlov, would
undermine that year’s Geneva summit, at which Britain, France, China, Russia,
and the United States met to discuss the fate of Indochina, and the wider Cold
War in Asia. Churchill’s ultimately abortive plan to exploit the death of the
hard-line Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin, which had occurred the previous year,
and engineer a thaw in Cold War relations between East and West, led the
prime minister to veto a request from SIS to publicise Khokhlov’s defection.14
The same year, a dramatic escape to the West staged in Australia by Vladimir
Petrov, a colonel in the KGB, and his wife Evdokia, an official in the Soviet
Ministry of Internal Affairs, provoked a schism in Canberra’s relations with
Moscow. It was not until March 1959, that diplomatic contacts were re-
established between Australia and the Soviet Union.15 Although American
governments were generally less squeamish about the pitfalls of embarrassing
Moscow by exploiting defectors for propaganda purposes, US presidents did
occasionally rue the politics of political asylum. In 1975, Gerald Ford became
enmeshed in a damaging domestic controversy involving the Soviet dissident,
and author of the acclaimed Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Wary
of disrupting ongoing US–Soviet détente, Ford found himself excoriated by
156 spying in south asia

both the left and the right wings of American politics when he bowed to
pressure from Moscow and declined to meet with Solzhenitsyn in the United
States.16 In a South Asian context, the appearance of Soviet Cold War defectors
in the subcontinent invariably proved unwelcome in Moscow and Washington.
On their part, Indian leaders found challenges inherent in balancing the
domestic and international dimensions of political asylum to be equally, if not
more, exacting. At home, officials in New Delhi struggled to maintain
a delicate balance between retaining sufficient American goodwill to sustain
valuable economic and humanitarian assistance from the United States, while
simultaneously managing a foreign and security policy that tilted increasingly
towards the Soviet Union. In such circumstances, Cold War defections that
threatened to upset the fragile equilibrium underpinning New Delhi’s relations
with Washington and Moscow troubled policymakers in India, the United
States, and the Soviet Union. With a hardening of the Cold War’s battlelines in
Europe, and an embryonic East–West détente beginning to take shape, it was
in Asia, in the 1960s, that the issue of political asylum coalesced with regional
conflicts and local insurgencies to endanger an uneasy accommodation
between the superpowers. The public scandals, uncomfortable parliamentary
questions, and press scrutiny of security and intelligence activity that habit-
ually accompanied defections staged in Europe in the 1950s would, a decade or
so later, be replicated and amplified in the Indian subcontinent.

Czechs, Chinese, and Clandestine Conflict

While South Asia became a global locus for Cold War defection from the
1960s, the international politics of asylum had occupied the attention of
policymakers in New Delhi from the very beginning of the Indian Republic.
In October 1949, the advent of the People’s Republic of China presented India
with a refugee problem. Political and religious groups opposed to China’s new
communist regime began leaving the western Chinese province of Xinjiang
and streaming into the northern Indian border towns of Srinagar and Leh. In
February 1950, Chinese Muslim leaders, representing hundreds of refugees
who had navigated a perilous journey to India from central Asia, petitioned
New Delhi for asylum.17 Nehru sympathised with the plight of the Chinese
exiles. India’s premier had formed a bond with the Chinese republican leader,
Jiang Jieshi, a fellow Asian nationalist whose Kuomintang administration had
championed Indian independence from British colonial rule. Once the
Chinese Communist Party had defeated the Kuomintang and ended an ener-
vating civil war, however, Nehru put sentiment to one side and swiftly recog-
nised the legitimacy of the PRC. Rationalising his decision to America’s
ambassador in India, Loy Henderson, Nehru observed that India would ‘firmly
oppose’ Chinese attempts to ‘infiltrate India with Communist ideology or with
Communist agents’. Nevertheless, his government, ‘hoped [that] by
 from russia with love 157

maintaining friendly relations with Chinese nationalism to be of service to

China and to assist in extricating that nationalism from the control of
Communism’.18 Nehru respected the way that the CCP, under Mao
Zedong’s direction, had unified and invigorated a nation that had been divided
and exploited by foreign powers.19 The Indian premier had no desire to see
bilateral relations disrupted by the issue of asylum.
Nehru’s stance on the question of asylum was complicated by an affinity
many Indians felt towards political refugees given the nation’s own and very
recent anti-colonial struggle to win basic freedoms and secure fundamental
human rights. That said, wider geo-political considerations and, not least,
Nehru’s policy of non-alignment, influenced the Indian government’s
approach to Cold War asylum. The inconvenient fact that political refugees
arriving in India had overwhelmingly travelled from East to West, made the
issue of defection and asylum awkward in the context of New Delhi’s relation-
ships with Moscow and Beijing. As Indian journalists noted, Chinese refugees
flooding into India recognised that, ‘it will be embarrassing for the authorities
here [India] to be asked for help when they have recognized the Communist
Government of China, but they hope they will nonetheless be able to give them
refuge’.20 Equally, contacts established inside India between Chinese refugee
groups and US diplomatic and intelligence officials left Nehru exposed to
charges that his administration was sheltering enemies of the Chinese state.
Having been appraised by their American colleagues of plans hatched by
Chinese dissidents to smuggle anti-communist literature from India back
into Xinjiang, British diplomats noted with unease that, ‘the request of these
[Chinese] gentlemen for asylum may, quite apart from the activities which they
propose to indulge in, give rise to considerable difficulties for the Government
of India’.21
The Indian government’s attempts to mitigate political tension generated by
the influx of Chinese refugees into the subcontinent failed to impress Beijing.
In October 1950, following the PRC’s occupation of Tibet, the Chinese vice-
minister for foreign affairs, Chang Han-Fu, berated Kavalam Madhava
Panikkar, India’s ambassador in Beijing, over the numbers of asylum seekers
being allowed to cross into Indian-controlled Kashmir from Xinjiang.
Panikkar was left in no doubt that the presence of Chinese political dissidents
in India was seen by Mao’s regime as ‘a threat to national security’.
Characterising the refugees as ‘rebels’, Han-Fu demanded that the Indian
government take steps to prevent its territory from being exploited as a base
for anti-Chinese activity. Chinese diplomatic barbs piled pressure on to an
Indian state under severe logistical and financial strain. Asylum seekers added
to the crushing burden faced by a country grappling with the socio-economic
impact of the subcontinent’s recent partition, and the accompanying crisis
occasioned by one of the largest mass migrations in human history.22 In 1954,
the Panch Sheel accord, or five principles of peaceful co-existence, agreed
158 spying in south asia

between New Delhi and Beijing, ushered in a brief period of Hindee Chinee
bhai-bhai, or Indian Chinese brotherhood. Before the decade was out, how-
ever, bilateral tensions had resurfaced in relation to defection and political
asylum. In 1957, Nehru’s government locked horns with the PRC after Beijing
announced the construction of a highway between Xinjiang and Tibet, part of
which bisected territory claimed by India.23 Two years later, Sino-Indian
relations deteriorated further after India granted political asylum to Tibet’s
spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, and thousands of his supporters, in the
aftermath of an abortive revolt against Chinese rule. Incensed that India had
offered a haven to Tibetan exiles and convinced that the Indian government
was colluding with the CIA to foment unrest inside Tibet, Beijing took a dim
view of what it interpreted as New Delhi’s provocative and unwarranted
intrusion into its affairs.24
In November 1959, a little over six months after the Dalai Lama had
established a Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharamshala, a hillside city
nestled in the cedar forests of the Kangra Valley in the shadow of northern
India’s Dhauladhar mountains, Beijing sent a pointed message to Nehru that
China was prepared to go on the offensive when it came to political asylum.
The warning to Nehru arrived in the form of a remarkable public charge
levelled by China’s consulate-general in Bombay, Chang Chi-ping, that his
American counterpart had arranged to kidnap, intimidate, and extort infor-
mation from a local Chinese official, Chang Chien-yu. In what many observers
interpreted as a Chinese ploy designed to present the United States and India
as co-conspirators in a ‘serious political plot’ involving ‘underhand activities’,
Beijing alleged that Chien-yu had been abducted by American personnel after
entering the US consulate on routine business. American diplomats insisted
that Chien-yu had, in fact, requested political asylum. In a bizarre turn of
events, Chien-yu subsequently engineered an ‘escape’ from American custody
and, in the process, a US marine sergeant, Robert Armstrong, who had been
assigned to chaperone the would-be defector, was himself briefly detained
inside China’s consulate building. A Chinese spokesman claimed that
American consular staff had tried unsuccessfully to ‘turn’ or coerce their
colleague into becoming a US ‘agent and force him to furnish intelligence’.
Municipal Indian authorities appeared bemused by the high drama that played
out on the streets of Bombay. In New Delhi, Nehru was furious that Indian
territory had been abused by China to enact a crude political stunt intended to
embarrass his government. Beijing appeared much more satisfied with the
outcome of the phantom ‘defection’. In a subsequent address to Indian jour-
nalists, Chang Chi-ping made plain that every nation should remember that
under international law no consulate of any country had the right to grant
political asylum to a foreign citizen. It was not difficult to interpret the subtext
that lay behind the Chinese official’s words.25
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The Indian government’s problems with Cold War asylum were not limited
to Communist China. In February 1948, following a Soviet-backed communist
coup in Czechoslovakia, India found itself confronted by a European asylum
issue. The death, in suspicious circumstances, of Czechoslovakia’s pro-
Western foreign minister, Jan Masaryk, unnerved Czech diplomats in the
subcontinent. Having been summoned home at short notice, ostensibly to
receive instructions on a new commercial agreement being contemplated with
New Delhi, the Czech trade commissioner to India mysteriously disappeared.
A second Czech diplomat, based in Bombay, was recalled to Prague on the
understanding that he was being promoted and would be reassigned to differ-
ent foreign post. The official’s name later appeared on a list of individuals sent
to work in Czechoslovakia’s mines.26 The Czech ambassador in India, Jaroslav
Sejnoha, was a close associate of Masaryk. A month after the coup, Sejnoha
approached local British and American officials and confirmed his intention to
denounce the communist regime in Prague and declare himself a ‘resistance
representative’ of Czechoslovakia.27 The British were reluctant to associate
themselves with Sejnoha and run the risk of alienating Nehru’s government.
‘We do not (repeat not)’, Whitehall informed the British High Commission in
Delhi, ‘wish to embarrass Government of India by giving advice or asylum to
representatives accredited to them’.28
While Sejnoha courted support from circumspect Western colleagues, his
staff in India became increasingly alarmed as news filtered through to the
subcontinent of political purges and restrictions on civil liberties back home in
Czechoslovakia.29 Attempting to barter a passage to the West, the counsellor at
the Czech embassy, Dr Alfred Dutka, who had worked as an agent for the
Office of Strategic Services, in Europe, during the Second World War, began
passing confidential documents of ‘considerable importance’ to the CIA sta-
tion in Delhi. Although anxious to appear a loyal servant of the Prague regime,
at least until his close relatives could be spirited out of Eastern Europe, Dutka
was playing a double game and, as he candidly informed his CIA handlers, ‘had
no intention whatever of returning to Czechoslovakia’.30 To the Indian gov-
ernment’s dismay, Sejnoha, and the Czech ambassador’s successor in India,
Dr Bohuslav Kratochvil, also defected to the West through New Delhi. In
February 1949, Sejnoha fled from India after receiving an order from Prague to
return home and was eventually welcomed into the UK. Two years later, and
under similar circumstances, Kratochvil, with assistance from Britain’s intelli-
gence services, absconded from the Indian capital. Having burnt his private
papers, Kratochvil walked out of the Czech embassy, took a train from Delhi to
Bombay, and boarded a steamer bound for England, which, appropriately
enough, was named Jai Azad, or ‘Hail Freedom’.31 Encouraged by ‘friends’
in British intelligence, on the long voyage from India to Europe, Kratochvil
briefed journalists on the ‘evils’ of a Czech communist regime that he had
served faithfully over the preceding three years.32
160 spying in south asia

The Kratochvil affair proved embarrassing for New Delhi. To have one
Eastern bloc ambassador defect to the West in India appeared unfortunate.
Having his successor follow suit led to awkward questions being asked in the
Indian press over the Nehru government’s willingness to look the other way as
British and American intelligence agencies courted communist diplomats.33
The left-wing Indian weekly, Crossroads, claimed that Kratochvil had been
recruited as a British agent in New Delhi, and pointedly enquired what
measures Nehru would take to forestall such Cold War intrigues. In
Bombay, the salacious newssheet, Blitz, alleged that ‘Western imperialism’
had inspired the Czech ambassador’s defection, and demanded a robust
response from the Indian state.34 Nehru confided to his sister, Vijaya
Lakshmi Pandit, that he had been ‘greatly distressed’ by the events in
Czechoslovakia that had culminated in Masaryk’s death. Still, concerned that
the onset of the Cold War had destabilised global politics and threatened
‘explosive possibilities’, the Indian premier determined, as far as possible, to
remain detached from superpower squabbles. ‘We have’, Nehru underlined to
Pandit, ‘to take step[s] carefully to avoid entanglements’.35
Indian press allegations of British collusion in Kratochvil’s defection were
well informed and strained Nehru’s resolve to avoid Cold War ‘entangle-
ments’. British officials in Delhi coached the Czech envoy on how to maximise
the political impact of his flight into exile, ‘in India rather than in
Czechoslovakia or Western Europe, where his name means little’.36
Specifically, Kratochvil was instructed to ensure that his statements to journal-
ists left Indians in no doubt about the ‘communist menace to Asia’.37 Lauding
the ‘effective service’ that Kratochvil performed for the West, Sir Archibald
Nye, Britain’s high commissioner, recorded with satisfaction that the Czech
national had, ‘been able to tell the Prime Minister [Nehru] and others the real
truth about conditions in his own country and behind the iron curtain
generally, which they would be very reluctant to accept if it came from us or
from the Americans or from any Western representatives’.38 Kratochvil was
among the first Eastern bloc defections through India that Britain, and its
American ally, exploited for Cold War political purposes. It would not be the
last.

Vladislav Tarasov and the ‘Other’ Crisis of Autumn 1962

On the evening of 25 November 1962, global tensions were high. The Cold
War superpowers were observing an uneasy truce in the aftermath of the
Cuban Missile Crisis. In India, a shell-shocked nation was licking its wounds
following a humiliating military defeat at the hands of China. Amidst a febrile
international atmosphere, the actions of a young Russian sailor in the subcon-
tinent ignited a political storm, setting off a chain of events that placed India at
the epicentre of worldwide debates on political asylum. Under cover of
 from russia with love 161

darkness, Vladislav Stepanovich Tarasov, a merchant seaman from the

Ukraine, climbed out of a porthole on the Tchernovtei, a Soviet oil tanker
anchored in Calcutta’s King George’s docks, and swam to a nearby American
ship, the SS Steel Surveyor. Once aboard the American vessel, Tarasov, clad
only in a pair of swimming trunks and carrying his identity papers, two Indian
rupees, and a single Soviet banknote, announced that his life was in danger and
asked the ship’s captain for political asylum.39
The Soviet defector subsequently claimed to have become disenchanted
with restrictions on personal freedoms behind the Iron Curtain. In a series
of public statements crafted by America’s Cold War propagandists, Tarasov
asserted that after listening to Voice of America broadcasts and reading copies
of America, a US magazine distributed in the Soviet Union under a cultural
exchange agreement, he had decided to seek a new life in the United States.40 In
truth, the Russian sailor, who had a wife and young child back in the USSR, had
been suffering from depression as a result of his spouse’s infidelity. Tarasov
also had a history of complaining about poor pay and working conditions in
the Soviet merchant fleet and had fallen out with a political commissar
assigned to the Tchernovtei. The discovery in Tarasov’s possession of letters
critical of the Soviet regime, and an accompanying threat made by the com-
missar that the papers would debar him from future voyages abroad, it seems,
provided the catalyst for an impromptu decision to defect.41 In an effort to
thwart Tarasov’s flight to the West, V. Londorev, the Soviet Consul in Calcutta,
informed the Indian authorities that the sailor had stolen the small sum of 700
rupees from his ship before disembarking, was a common criminal, and should
be arrested and extradited back to the USSR. Tarasov’s case was the first of its
kind in India. The Soviets had never previously made a request to the Indian
authorities for the extradition of one of their nationals. On 28 November, after
the Soviets had, somewhat improbably, provided twelve witnesses to Tarasov’s
‘crime’, Indian policemen boarded the SS Steel Surveyor and removed the sailor
to Calcutta’s central prison.42 Acting on instructions from Washington, local
American officials made clear to the Indian administration in West Bengal that
the United States regarded the Tarasov affair as a political matter, that Soviet
allegations of criminality were demonstrably false, and that the defector should
be permitted to seek asylum in the West.43
The Indian government was piqued at being caught in the middle of a Cold
War dispute between the United States and the Soviet Union at a time when
the nation’s very survival appeared to hinge on retaining the support of both
superpowers in its conflict with China. The New York Times reflected that New
Delhi had been thrown into a panic by, ‘a Soviet sailor . . . put[ting] a new
strain on India’s embattled policy of non-alignment in the cold war by
demanding asylum . . . ’.44 On 29 November, the Calcutta daily, Jugantar, or
‘New Era’, noted that, ‘ . . . the Government of India, now caught between the
crossfire of two friendly governments, will not find it easy to take a decision on
162 spying in south asia

the issue. One of them [an Indian government official] remarked, “now it
appears that a Sobolev has appeared in Calcutta’”.45 The allusion to Arkady
Sobolev, Soviet ambassador to the United Nations in the late 1950s, underlined
the concern that Indian officials harboured in relation to the Tarasov case.
Sobolev had been at the centre of a diplomatic furore in America after he was
charged by the US State Department with coercing five Russian sailors who
had defected to the West into returning to the Soviet Union.46
In London, the Information Research Department pressed Whitehall, ‘to
seek to prevent TARASOV’s being handed over to the Soviets for return to the
USSR for trial’. The Soviet national’s return to Russia, the IRD rationalised,
‘would, inter alia, discourage other defections’. The IRD also assumed that
Tarasov would have ‘useful information’ to barter on Soviet economic and
political developments that Western governments could exploit to their advan-
tage. The Russian sailor had been active in Communist Party from a young age,
having joined its youth division, the Komsomol, at sixteen. His father was also
a senior kolkhoz, or collective farm manager, in the southern Ukraine. The best
means of securing Tarasov’s passage to the West, the IRD concluded, was to
mobilise international publicity.47 Shining a light on Tarasov’s plight was
easier said than done. IRD officers noted the absence of reporting on the
case in Indian newspapers and in copy submitted by local Western journalists.
This was attributed to the imposition of de facto press embargo by Nehru’s
government. One British diplomat reflected that in official Indian circles,
‘there is a rather noticeable conspiracy of silence on the [Tarasov] subject’.48
A local Daily Express stringer, Prakash Chandra, confirmed to the IRD that he
and several other foreign correspondents have been trying to file a story on
Tarasov, but had been frustrated by the Indian censor. Tom Brady, the
New York Times’ correspondent in India, did succeed in delivering a report
on Tarasov to his editor, and was promptly threatened with deportation by the
Indian authorities as a result.49
More encouragingly for the IRD, American colleagues made it clear to
Indian officials that the United States would initiate a global media campaign
critical of New Delhi were Tarasov returned to the Soviet Union against his
will.50 In the interim, the IRD arranged for Reuters and BBC correspondents in
India to be briefed on Tarasov’s situation and, in return, secured
a commitment from the former to cover any extradition proceedings should
the case make it to the Indian courts.51 Indian journalists were also fed a stream
of IRD material on Tarasov through nominally independent press agencies
that were under British control, such as Near and Far East News (NAFEN).
After weeks of concentrated effort, the Department was heartened when, in
January 1963, news stories based on its material found their way into right-
wing Indian newspapers, such as Current and The Organiser.52 At the same
time, the IRD worked closely with American propaganda and intelligence
services to explore how best to ‘add any gloss’ to local media coverage of the
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Tarasov affair.53 One means of spicing up press reporting surfaced after it

became apparent that the cultural attaché of the Soviet embassy in New Delhi,
Anton Fedoseev, who had become involved in the Tarasov saga, was an
undeclared officer of the GRU. British and American covert propagandists
agreed to blow Fedossev’s cover and, in consultation with local CIA and MI5
representatives in India, debated the ‘best way of using this information’.54 The
local IRD field office confirmed later that its ‘Fedoseev’ plan had encompassed
tipping off Indian press contacts and spreading rumours on the diplomatic
grapevine in New Delhi that Fedoseev was a Russian hood.55
As it was, the Indian justice system’s reluctance to dispense with due process
and bow to political pressure to expedite Tarasov’s extradition ensured that the
affair descended into a very public form of high farce. Having twice been
refused bail by local Indian magistrates, Tarasov, with American assistance,
took his case to the Indian High Court. On 5 January, as Nehru’s government
came under intense pressure from both the Soviet and American embassies to
intervene in the case, Tarasov was freed on bail by an Indian judge and released
into the custody of Hugh Haight, the US consulate-general in Calcutta.56 Back
in Washington, the State Department poured scorn on Soviet attempts to
portray Tarasov as a common criminal and to deny that his actions were
politically motivated. Referencing previous Soviet attempts to pin spurious
criminal charges on defectors, a State Department spokesman, Lincoln White,
defended Tarasov and reminded journalists pointedly that, ‘we’ve heard of
such charges [from Moscow] before’.57 To Moscow’s consternation, the Soviet
legal case against Tarasov received a setback when Russian officials discovered
that a criminal act committed inside Indian territorial waters did not constitute
grounds for extradition. A new, and more expansive, Indian Extradition Act
had passed through the country’s parliament a few months previously but had
yet to be ratified. In an exchange of diplomatic notes between Indian and
Soviet officials in November and December, the MEA provided the Russians
with a copy of the Extradition Act and, more significantly, indicated the precise
evidence that an Indian magistrate might expect to see before approving an
extradition request.58 By coaching the Soviets in the intricacies of amendments
to India’s asylum laws, the MEA created the impression of having sacrificed its
impartiality in the pursuit of national security. When news of the legal advice
extended by the MEA to the Soviets became public, Indian jurists were highly
critical and lambasted the action as tantamount to, ‘providing the Russians
with a ready-made machine for achieving their object’.59
On 10 January 1963, having finished taking initial evidence, a Calcutta court
dismissed the Soviet extradition motion against Tarasov. Emerging from the
court a free man, Tarasov, in full view of a large contingent of international
reporters, was immediately rearrested by the Indian authorities on the basis of
new information provided by the Soviets. Contrary to previous witness state-
ments, and in line with the MEA’s counsel, the fresh evidence alleged that theft
164 spying in south asia

committed by Tarasov had occurred on the high seas and not in Indian
territorial waters.60 The extradition case, which by now had assumed the
appearance of a cause célèbre in the subcontinent’s media, returned to
India’s courts. Two of the country’s leading criminal lawyers, Jai Gopal Sethi
and Diwan Chaman Lal, the latter a member of the Upper House of India’s
parliament, were engaged by the Soviet and the American embassies in a legal
tussle that, as one Western newspaper noted, had ‘all the nuances of a Cold
War issue’.61 In the background, Soviet and American officials continued to
impress upon the MEA the imperative of concluding legal proceedings swiftly,
before the global media circus surrounding the Tarasov case could do serious
harm to New Delhi’s relations with Moscow, or Washington, and possibly both
superpowers. To the MEA’s frustration, the ponderous wheels of Indian justice
in West Bengal turned slowly. During January and February, a series of open
court hearings saw Tarasov’s defence counsel call a succession of Soviet
officials as witnesses, and pillory each in turn for fabricating documents,
withholding material evidence, and committing acts of perjury. To the amuse-
ment of the public gallery, one unfortunate Soviet diplomat was asked in court
to explain how, precisely, Tarasov could have managed to steal money from his
crewmates, when he had been fished out of Calcutta’s harbour wearing nothing
but a pair of flimsy swimming trunks.62
Following weeks of legal argument, New Delhi’s patience eventually
snapped. At the end of February, in a highly unusual move, a special magis-
trate, N. L. Bakkar, was appointed by the Indian government to rule on the
Soviet case for extradition. Tarasov was put on a Viscount aircraft and flown to
the Indian capital. The denouement to the Tarasov saga played out in a small,
dingy court room close to the national Parliament. The large press corps of
Indian, British, American, and Soviet journalists now covering the case
endured further weeks of tedious legal debate. After a month of testimony,
and four long months since Tarasov had jumped ship, Bakkar dismissed all
charges against the defector, who was swiftly spirited out of the country by
representatives of the American embassy. In a damning verdict, delivered in
a detailed forty-page judgement, Bakkar undoubtedly went much further in
condemning Soviet actions than his own government would have wished,
given India’s ongoing dependence on Moscow to provide a deterrent against
renewed Chinese aggression. Soviet officials, the Indian magistrate concluded,
had ‘manufactured evidence’ against Tarasov, had failed to produce credible
witnesses, and had concocted a case that was ‘wholly inadequate and rife with
contradictions’.63 Shocked by Bakkar’s finding, the Soviets appealed the ruling.
The appeal was heard on 7 March 1963, in the imposing marble chambers of
the Punjab High Court building in Old Delhi. The judge presiding was Chief
Justice Donald Falshaw, a former colonial official who had stayed on in the
subcontinent after Indian independence and was the last British-era judge
serving in India. What faith, if any, the Soviets retained in British administered
 from russia with love 165

Indian justice remains uncertain. Falshaw dismissed the Soviet appeal in less
than an hour and confirmed Tarasov’s right of asylum in the United States.64
To New Delhi’s discomfort, India’s press and, more predictably, its coun-
terparts in the West, represented the outcome of the Tarasov affair in stark,
binary terms. On 30 March, Prem Bhatia, editor of the Indian Express, pro-
nounced in the Guardian that ‘a cold war ended today between the Russian and
American Embassies over a Russian who wanted to live in the West. The
Americans seem to have won.’65 Two days later, Calcutta’s Statesman roundly
condemned ‘Socialist legality’ in an editorial entitled ‘The Ways of Justice’. The
Tarasov case had, the newspaper informed its readership, accentuated funda-
mental differences between India’s appreciation of the rule of law and individ-
ual freedoms and the absence of rights and justice behind the Iron Curtain, ‘a
grim reality of which there have been many reminders in recent years’.66 The
Times of India went further, editorialising that the ‘shocking features’ of the
Tarasov case suggested that ‘even after Mr. Khrushchev’s much publicised de-
Stalinisation campaign . . . the Soviet authorities are still not able to distinguish
between prosecution and persecution’. In taking aim at the MEA, the leading
Indian daily suggested that satisfaction at Tarasov’s acquittal, ‘will be shared by
all who believe that justice is not a matter than can be subordinated to political
expediency’.67

Svetlana Stalin heads West

As the 1960s progressed, the challenges that incidents of Cold War asylum
presented to the Indian government continued to multiply. Most notably, the
defection of Svetlana Alliluyeva, in March 1967, sparked a diplomatic uproar
that succeeded in further straining India’s relations with both the United States
and the Soviet Union. The Alliluyeva drama unfolded early on the evening of
6 March. Taking advantage of the distraction provided by two receptions
inside the Russian embassy, one of which, appropriately enough, was celebrat-
ing Soviet ‘Women’s Day’, a neatly dressed woman carrying a small suitcase
slipped quietly into the streets of India’s capital. Her destination was the
United States’ chancery building. On arrival, speaking in good but heavily
accented English, she informed the marine guard on duty that she was
a Russian citizen and wished to see an embassy officer. Having been shown
to the office of the US deputy chief of mission, Svetlana Alliluyeva confirmed to
stunned American officials that she was the daughter of the former Soviet
dictator Joseph Stalin and his second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva.68 As the
London Economist observed, Alliluyeva was nothing less than ‘the most sensa-
tional defector that the United States has ever attracted’. Reflecting on the
political conundrum that Stalin’s daughter had presented to the American,
Soviet, and Indian governments, the Economist added presciently that
166 spying in south asia

Alliluyeva constituted a surprise package that ‘is plainly marked “Handle with
care”’.69
Alliluyeva was the common law wife of an Indian communist, Brajesh
Singh, who she met while working at the Foreign Languages Publishing
House in Moscow. She had travelled to India following Singh’s death to scatter
his ashes into the Ganges. Claiming to have become disillusioned with com-
munism, Alliluyeva applied to the Soviet ambassador, Ivan Benediktov, for
leave to remain in India. Her request was refused and, under orders to return
to home, Alliluyeva took an impulsive decision to defect. The American
embassy in New Delhi were not aware that Alliluyeva was in India. Chester
Bowles, the US ambassador, later reflected ruefully on a widespread belief
within the subcontinent that America had, ‘this great intelligence network . . .
this idea that we knew what was going on; [it] was nonsense; we didn’t even
know she [Alliluyeva] was there [India]’. Other Americans had encountered
Alliluyeva. Two Peace Corps volunteers came across her in an Indian village.
The young Americans were struck by the incongruous sight of a ‘very attractive
European lady’ in the heart of rural India but had no idea that she was Stalin’s
daughter and failed to report the incident to US officials.70
Having received a written request from Alliluyeva for political asylum,
Bowles took a momentous step. Reasoning that it would be only a matter of
hours before the Soviets discovered that Alliluyeva was missing, the ambassa-
dor sent a flash cable to Washington. The message stated that ‘unless advised to
the contrary’ Bowles would attempt to place Alliluyeva on a commercial
Qantas flight leaving Delhi for Rome that evening. Having served as
Undersecretary of State, Bowles experience told him, correctly, as it transpired,
that Washington was unlikely to react with sufficient speed to countermand
his decision. Shortly after midnight, Alliluyeva was issued with an American
B-2 tourist visa, bundled into an embassy car, and driven to Palam airport in
the company of a Russian-speaking CIA officer, Robert Rayle. Following
a moment of high tension when the Qantas flight was delayed for ninety
minutes due to a mechanical fault, at 2.45 am, on 7 March, Svetlana
Alliluyeva departed from India and into political exile. Significantly,
Alliluyeva’s visa did not permit immediate onward travel to the United
States from Italy, and she was left to kick her heels in Europe.
Bowles decision to facilitate Alliluyeva’s defection was motivated by several
factors. Denying her assistance and directing Alliluyeva back to the Soviet
embassy was ruled out by the ambassador as, ‘completely contrary to our [US]
national tradition’. If it became known that the American government had
turned its back on, ‘an appeal for assistance from the daughter of Joseph
Stalin, the public outcry in the United States and elsewhere would . . . [be]
overwhelming’. Offering Alliluyeva refuge in the US embassy would have seen
the American diplomatic compound surrounded by Indian police and inter-
national journalists, transforming the defection into a public soap opera. As with
 from russia with love 167

Tarasov, Alliluyeva could have taken her case to the Indian courts and was
considered to have a good chance of securing asylum. This outcome, Bowles
recognised, was likely to prove a pyrrhic victory in the sense that it, ‘would upset
the Russians even more against us, because it would be so well publicized . . . ’.
The option of secretly exfiltrating Alliluyeva from India was rejected on the
grounds that such an operation would run, ‘unacceptable and unnecessary risks’.
It was preferable, Bowles concluded, to place Alliluyeva openly and legally on
a commercial flight to the West.71 The fact that Alliluyeva’s Soviet and Indian
documentation was in order, and that she could be demonstrated to have
departed from India of her own volition, provided some protection against
Soviet charges ‘of another CIA plot and against the accusation of kidnapping
her [Alliluyeva] against her will’.72
Initial optimism voiced by Bowles that his embassy had successfully pulled
off a ‘ticklish’ operation by spiriting Alliluyeva out of India, proved
premature.73 On 8 March, India’s foreign secretary, Chandra Shekhar (C. S.)
Jha, informed the American ambassador that the Soviet Embassy was
‘extremely upset’ and had ‘stated to Indian officials that American secret agents
abducted her [Alliluyeva] from India by force’.74 Coming in the wake of recent
failures in the Soviet Soyuz space programme, Alliluyeva’s defection threat-
ened to tarnish Moscow’s long-planned celebrations to mark the fiftieth
anniversary of the Soviet Revolution. One Indian newspaper noted that thou-
sands of books, stage plays, exhibitions, lectures, and press articles lauding the
events of 1917 were already, ‘being churned out in an unending stream by the
official [Soviet] propaganda machine’.75 The Soviets made plain their displeas-
ure with Bowles by breaking off all social contact with American officials in
India. One moment of light relief amid the diplomatic turmoil occurred a week
after Alliluyeva’s departure. At a function in the Indian capital, Bowles literally
bumped into Benediktov. The scowling Soviet ambassador responded by
asking Bowles if it was true that anyone calling at the US embassy could expect
to be issued with a visa and a ticket to America? Quick as a shot, a smiling
Bowles replied, ‘For you, we will’. At which point, the tension was broken and
Benediktov dissolved into fits of laughter.76
The Indian government was less amused by Alliluyeva’s defection. On
9 March, the MEA issued the US embassy with a formal note of protest. The
note complained that Bowles’s decision to act, ‘in such haste, without giving
any inkling to the Ministry of such impending action, is a source of serious
embarrassment to the Government of India in their relations with the Soviet
Union and the United States’. The MEA expressed particular concern that the
Alliluyeva affair could adversely impact the ‘close and friendly relations with
the Soviet Union’ that the Indian government ‘greatly value’. Ending with
a flourish of indignation, the Indian government’s admonition underlined that
it could not but, ‘regret this action of the US Embassy which may put in
jeopardy relations between India and the Soviet Union and may have serious
168 spying in south asia

repercussions on Indo-US relations’.77 Bowles was sufficiently disturbed by the

MEA’s strident tone to fire off a mollifying letter to Jha. Addressing his
palliative to ‘Dear C. S.’, the ambassador disclosed that Alliluyeva had threat-
ened to approach the international press and plead her case in the court of
public opinion should he deny her appeal for asylum. In the circumstances, the
ambassador suggested, he had been left with little option but, ‘to give her a visa
to the United States and help her on her way’. Bowles also hinted that India’s
role in the Alliluyeva story was more complicated than publicly acknowledged.
Specifically, the ambassador stated that Alliluyeva, whose deceased husband’s
nephew, Dinesh Singh, was minister for state at the MEA, claimed to have
requested asylum from the Indian government. Dinesh Singh and colleagues at
the MEA, Alliluyeva told Bowles, had informed her that India would take no
action on the matter of asylum that ran contrary to the wishes of the USSR. Far
better given this state of affairs, Bowles volunteered, for the Indian government
to have been presented with a fait accompli by the Americans.78
Back in Washington, the State Department worried that such a high-profile
defection might dislocate wider US–Soviet relations. The importance of secur-
ing Soviet goodwill on matters ranging from Vietnam and the Middle East to
arms control and consular conventions, ranked higher on the Johnson admin-
istration’s list of priorities than Soviet apostates, no matter how prominent.
Undersecretary of State Foy Kohler, who had served a term as America’s
ambassador to the USSR and was committed to engineering a thaw in US–
Soviet relations, reacted with fury to the news of Alliluyeva’s defection. ‘Tell
them [Bowles’ staff] to throw that woman out of the embassy’, Kohler had
raged, ‘Don’t give her any help at all.’79 One American official confided to
a British colleague that the Johnson administration hoped to remove some of
the political heat from the Alliluyeva affair by denying it the oxygen of
publicity. The defection, the British were advised, was ‘being handled very
restrictively indeed within the [Johnson] Administration and that only three to
four people in the State Department and White House are au courant’.80
Signals coming out of the Soviet Union indicated that Moscow was equally
keen to downplay the Alliluyeva incident. On 21 March, at a meeting with
Indian diplomats, the Soviet deputy foreign minister, Nikolay Firyubin,
adopted a ‘relatively mild’ attitude to Alliluyeva’s defection, at one stage
making light of the fact that, by neglecting to confiscate Alliluyeva’s passport,
Benediktov had unwittingly facilitated her defection. Indian officials subse-
quently indicated to American colleagues that differences between
Benediktov’s belligerent response to the Alliluyeva affair, and Firyubin’s
more relaxed reaction, might reflect the Soviet ambassador’s embarrassment
at not keeping a close watch on his VIP guest.81 This benign assessment of the
Soviets position gained traction when, in April, Benediktov was demoted and
transferred to Yugoslavia. British officials in Moscow broadly concurred, and
advised London that, ‘It is of course assumed here [by the Soviets] that in
 from russia with love 169

deciding not to give Svetlana Alleyuyeva [sic] [immediate] asylum [in

America] the U.S. Government was motivated by the wish not to damage
Soviet-U.S. relations at this important juncture.’82 The Soviets did indicate to
the American embassy in Moscow that their forbearance would last only so
long as the United States continued to display sensitivity to the embarrassing
position in which the USSR had been placed by Alliluyeva’s actions. Notably,
a KGB officer warned American officials that were Alliluyeva afforded asylum
in the US, as opposed to another Western country, the Soviet intelligence
agency would conduct a disinformation campaign, complete with forged
documents, detailing how the CIA had coerced her into defecting.83
Just as the diplomatic storm surrounding Alliluyeva appeared set to sub-
side, the American west coast magazine, Ramparts, broke the story of the
CIA’s relationships with several international educational institutions and
cultural bodies, some of which were based in India. On 20 March, with
Indians exercised by reports from the United States that American intelli-
gence agencies had been busy interfering in their internal affairs, C. S. Jha
summoned Bowles to the MEA to answer an accusation that Benediktov had
made of CIA foul play in the Alliluyeva case. The Soviets, Jha informed
Bowles, claimed to have received, ‘information from U.S. sources that
there had been correspondence between U.S. and Indian officials and that

Figure 7.1 ‘The most sensational defector the United States has ever attracted’:
Svetlana Alliluyeva, daughter of Josef Stalin, smiles for photographers at a press
conference in New York, 26 April 1967. Bettmann / Getty Images.
170 spying in south asia

this had indicated there was some kind of Indo-American complicity [in
Alliluyeva’s defection]’. Bowles dismissed the Soviet charge as nonsense.
Whether the US had, or had not, enticed Alliluyeva to defect, a dispirited
Jha responded, was, in any case, now a moot point. The Soviet embassy, the
American ambassador was instructed, ‘simply cannot believe that Indian
officials did not know that Svetlana was leaving when she did. They have
therefore convinced themselves of Indian duplicity.’84 On March 23, Chagla
bowed to a mounting clamour for government action and confirmed that an
official inquiry would be conducted into CIA activity in the subcontinent.
Indian communist MPs immediately called for the expulsion of several US
embassy officials, including Robert Rayle, who they named as Agency offi-
cers. From his desk in the State Department, Dean Rusk bemoaned that
Chagla’s statement had reignited waning public interest in the defection saga
and placed the United States, ‘under great pressure to amplify . . . [the]
U.S. role in the Svetlana case . . . ’.85
In Whitehall, Sir Paul Gore-Booth, permanent Undersecretary of State at
the foreign office, was a good deal less worried about renewed Indian interest
in the Alliluyeva episode. Gore-Booth praised American colleagues for having
taken the ‘very wise step of not giving the defection what might be called
“routine exploitation”’ and ruffling Soviet feathers. However, the veteran
diplomat, and former British high commissioner in India, suggested that
there were, ‘ways in which, so to speak, the free countries should “exploit
this non-exploitation”’. Arguing that the Alliluyeva defection ‘was of quite
a different order’ from anything the West had seen in recent memory, Gore-
Booth noted that it had been presented to the world as an essentially humani-
tarian matter rather than an action driven by ideology. By encouraging and
amplifying press comment on criticisms that Alliluyeva had levelled at Soviet
constraints on individual liberties, the British mandarin added, the inequities
of the communist system could be highlighted without London or Washington
being accused of crude political point scoring. ‘This [universal human rights]
may not be a new doctrine’, Gore-Booth reasoned, ‘but its relaunching by the
daughter of Stalin, in the fiftieth year of the Communist Revolution in Russia,
is immensely important’.86
The Foreign Office quickly set about putting Gore-Booth’s idea to ‘exploit’
American ‘non-exploitation’ into action. Whitehall’s strategy was to stimulate
contacts in the press ‘not to play this [Alliluyeva’s defection] as a cold-war
operation’, but rather to stress the ‘absence of personal and cultural freedom’
in the Soviet Union that Stalin’s daughter had referenced as fundamental to her
decision to seek exile in the West. Alliluyeva had, the FO noted, lambasted
Moscow’s decisions to proscribe Boris Pasternak’s novel, Doctor Zhivago, and
to sentence the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel to hard labour for
publishing satirical works critical of the Soviet regime.87 In a wider context, by
the mid-1960s it was clear in the Soviet Union that neo-Stalinists were in the
 from russia with love 171

ascendency. Brezhnev had consolidated his grip on power having ousted the
reform-minded Khrushchev. Solzhenitsyn’s work was banned. The poet
Joseph Brodsky was in a labour camp. Yuri Andropov, who had been
appointed Chairman of the KGB in May 1967, took to publicly praising the
Soviet secret police for its ‘implacable struggle against state enemies’. In
response, an underground intellectual and cultural movement emerged, led
by Soviet writers and artists, which in time coalesced into a broad-based
campaign for human rights.88 Exploiting a decision by the United Nations to
declare 1968 as an International Human Rights year, the IRD arranged for
Gopal Mittal, one of its Indian publishing contacts, to circulate condemnations
of the Soviets ‘new attack on fundamental rights’. In an article entitled,
‘Unending Soviet War on intellectuals’, Mittal attacked Moscow for its men-
dacity. ‘With all the talk of Soviet authorities’ keenness to present an image of
tolerance and moderation abroad’, the Indian writer observed, ‘there appears
to be no relaxation. Their main interest is their own political self-preservation.
’89
Journalists from the Sunday Times, which planned to serialise an autobio-
graphical manuscript Alliluyeva had persuaded T. N. Kaul to smuggle out of
Moscow, were encouraged by British officials to keep alive a story that was in
danger of becoming yesterday’s news by playing up its human rights angle.90
Commentators in the press openly speculated that the Kremlin would
‘undoubtedly’ be worried by the impact that an illicitly distributed book
written by Alliluyeva would have inside the Soviet Union. The effect, one
Indian journalist suggested, could be ‘comparable to Khrushchev’s “secret
speech”’, the publication of which by the US State Department in 1956 had
helped to ferment unrest in Poland and Hungary, and contributed to ‘other
political troubles which beset the Soviet empire’.91 At one point, the
Information Research Department proposed having Shirley Williams, the
minister of state for education and science, review Alliluyeva’s memoir on
the flagship BBC Radio 4 programme, Women’s Hour. The proposal was
rejected as too incendiary by senior foreign office officials, ‘because of the
extreme sensitivity of Soviet Government on this matter’.92 Not to be deterred,
the IRD tried a different tack. Alliluyeva’s memoir, Only One Year, which
American propaganda agents in South Asia had declined to circulate, was, IRD
officers observed, ‘practically unobtainable in India . . . as the Indians, at Soviet
insistence . . . were holding up imports’.93 The Department set about boosting
Alliluyeva readership in the subcontinent by distributing copies of her book to
sympathetic Indian politicians and journalists. The department also employed
NAFEN to secure serialisation rights for several Indian national newspapers,
including the New Delhi Indian Express and the Bombay Sunday Standard.94
The IRD also took steps to counteract, ‘a R.I.S. [Russian Intelligence Service]
campaign against Svetlana designed to discredit her as a person and to frighten
her publishers . . . ’.95 As the British discovered, the KGB planned to use assets
172 spying in south asia

inside Fleet Street and the UK publishing industry to expose alleged corres-
pondence between Alliluyeva and her Indian husband that cast her in a bad
light. These letters included photographs showing Alliluyeva relaxing with
Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s murderous secret police chief; the text of speech
critical of Sinyavsky that she had purportedly drafted; and pornographic
material that was intended to blacken her moral character.96 The IRD sus-
pected that the Russians would attempt to have the incriminating material
published in the Sunday Telegraph, Sunday Times, or Observer, ‘who have the
space and the right readership’.97 Consideration was given to suppressing the
documents by purchasing them from an intermediary the Soviets had
employed to peddle them on the international media market. However, that
option, as the IRD noted, remained outside their operational purview, and was
deemed something that their colleagues in SIS might consider.98
Senior officers from the IRD, MI5, and SIS did agree to act collectively
against Soviet agents associated with circulating the documents smearing
Alliluyeva. Articles and news stories were distributed by the IRD that deni-
grated Alexander Flegon, a UK-based Rumanian exile and founder of the
Flegon Press, which reprinted Soviet journals and books, and Victor Louis,
otherwise known as Vitaly Yevgenysvich Lui. Louis, a Soviet citizen, was
married to a British subject, and served as Moscow correspondent for the
London Evening News. He was believed to work for the KGB’s Department ‘D’,
or Disinformation. Department D had been set up in 1959, and busied itself
producing hundreds of pieces of disinformation each year that were designed
to influence the actions or polices of an individual, group, or country in ways
beneficial to the Soviet Union.99 Louis had come to the attention of British
intelligence in 1966, when he coordinated a KGB operation to coerce the
writer, Valeri Tarsis, author of works critical of the Soviet regime, such as
Bluebottle and Ward Seven, into slandering fellow dissident Soviet authors.
The media contacts Louis had cultivated, which enabled him, in the IRD’s
view, ‘to play an important part . . . [in] newspaper smear campaign against
Svetlana’, placed him firmly in the Department’s crosshairs.100 More broadly,
the British intelligence community sought to use the Alliluyeva episode to send
a signal to the KGB that it was no pushover. ‘[I]t would do no harm to show the
KGB that we were capable of making a strong riposte to [text redacted]
operations against the U.K’, a joint meeting of the intelligence and security
services resolved, in August 1967. ‘[T]he discrediting of LOUIS and FLEGON
would be a valuable check.’101
In the United States, the Johnson administration faced criticism from the
American press for its passivity in respect of Alliluyeva. In an article entitled,
‘Svetlana Lost or Found?’, The National Review chided Lyndon Johnson for
ignoring the fact that, ‘ . . . Svetlana Alliluyeva is playing out a momentous role in
history . . . [while Washington had decreed that] Svetlana’s defection must be
neutralized, drained of its large historical meaning . . . so that the image of an
 from russia with love 173

increasingly benign Communist Russia may be permitted to stand

undisturbed’.102 At the same time, the Soviet press lambasted ‘ruling-circles’ in
Washington for indulging in ‘provocations of the highest level’ that were
designed to derail Soviet-American détente.103 A succession of press conferences,
media interviews, and public appearances made by Alliluyeva when she eventu-
ally reached the United States, coupled with the revelation that a tell-all memoir
would shortly be rolling off American presses, shattered Soviet complacency that
an accommodation could be reached with the Johnson administration to min-
imise political fallout from the defection. The fact that George Kennan, a former
US ambassador to the Soviet Union, whom Stalin had declared persona non
grata, and the architect of the American policy of Cold War containment, was
known to be assisting Alliluyeva with her book, did little to assuage Moscow’s
sense of American bad faith.104 On 27 May, Pravda accused the CIA and United
States Information Service of exploiting, ‘the Svetlana affair . . . [to orchestrate]
a massive anti-Soviet propaganda campaign’. ‘In short’, the official newspaper of
the Soviet communist party declared, ‘Washington is stooping to . . .
anything . . . [in] making use of Soviet citizen S. Allelueva [sic].’105
In an ironic twist, following two unhappy decades spent moving between
the United States and the United Kingdom, Alliluyeva eventually returned to
Russia. In late 1984, the year in which year George Orwell had set his dystopian
vision of a future totalitarian state, Svetlana Stalin came home. Anticipating
a dose of their own propaganda medicine, one Western commentator, who
had known Alliluyeva well, observed ruefully that, ‘Naturally, she’ll be
expected and indeed required [in the Soviet Union] to make violently abusive
attacks on America and Britain.’106 The game of Cold War asylum, it seemed,
had turned full circle. The Soviet news agency, TASS, duly carried an interview
with Alliluyeva in which she professed not to have been ‘free there [the West]
for a single day’. The Americans, Stalin’s daughter insisted, had her coerced
into acting as ‘the CIA’s performing dog’.107 Back in the 1960s, the Svetlana
Alliluyeva affair was to have a profound effect on the way the Indian govern-
ment approached the defection of another Soviet citizen, Aziz Saltimovitch
Ulug-Zade. With the political fallout from Alliluyeva’s decision to use New
Delhi as a staging-post for her flight to the West still reverberating through the
corridors of India’s ministry of external affairs, Indira Gandhi’s government
adopted a heavy-handed, legalistic, and ultimately ineffective response to the
increasingly vexing issue of political asylum. In the process, it attracted censure
from domestic critics, and further strained its relations with the United States,
the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union.

Ulug-Zade and the Containment of Cold War Asylum

On 21 December 1967, with newsprint barely dry on the acres of paper that
India’s press had devoted to Svetlana Alliluyeva’s defection, New Delhi was
174 spying in south asia

greeted by a raft of unwelcome headlines in the wake of Aziz Ulug-Zade’s

disappearance. On the Times of India’s front page a headline announced
dramatically, ‘Soviet youth vanishes in Delhi and causes Diplomatic sensation’.
The MEA, the Indian daily reported, had taken a ‘very serious view of this
incident, since it does not want India to be turned into a cold war arena by the
Big Powers in their game of international espionage and psychological war-
fare’. Indian government officials were said to be concerned that, coming just
eight months after the Alliluyeva episode, Ulug-Zade’s defection would have
further and ‘wider political repercussions’ for Indo-Soviet relations.108
The Soviet embassy’s reaction to Ulug-Zade’s flight reinforced Indian anx-
ieties that Russian patience on the issue of political asylum had worn thin.
Nikolai Pegov, the Soviet ambassador in New Delhi, stormed into the MEA
and demanded that the youth leader be returned to his custody. Having first
rescinded Ulug-Zade’s passport, Soviet officials informed Indian, American,
and British counterparts that Moscow would consider it an unfriendly act were
another nation to facilitate his defection to the West. Under Soviet pressure,
the MEA instructed Delhi’s police to find Ulug-Zade and ensure that he
remained in India until the facts surrounding his disappearance could be
established. As Indian journalists were quick to point out, however, the extent
to which their government could satisfy Soviet demands in respect of Ulug-
Zade were limited. Under Indian law, and in accordance with international
conventions on political asylum, New Delhi had no authority to compel the
defector to return to the Soviet Union. Having entered the country legally on
a visa issued by the Indian embassy in Moscow, and following the cancellation
of his Soviet passport, Gandhi’s government was empowered only to deport
Ulug-Zade to a country of his choosing.109
Soviet indignation at the latest defection to take place in India was magnified
by a familiar suspicion that the CIA was behind the Ulug-Zade affair. Eastern
bloc diplomats in New Delhi confided to Indian officials that they suspected
the US intelligence agency of plotting to get even following the recent defection
of an American citizen, John Discoe Smith. Before seeking political asylum
behind the Iron Curtain, Smith had served as a communications clerk in the
US embassy in Delhi. The Soviets subsequently arranged for a communist
publishing house in India to release a salacious account of purported CIA
misdeeds in South Asia that appeared under Smith’s name.110 Allegations of
CIA interference in India’s internal affairs had featured prominently in the
Indian national elections that spring and had been amplified by the Agency’s
association with Alliluyeva’s defection. Consequently, fresh rumours of
American intelligence involvement in the Ulug-Zade case were politically
explosive and spread panic inside the Indian government.111 From an Indian
perspective, other worrying echoes of the Alliluyeva case also emerged.
Specifically, the international press began to insinuate that Ulug-Zade had
been motivated to leave the Soviet Union by a denial of freedom of expression,
 from russia with love 175

constraints imposed on fundamental human rights, and the ‘[mis]treatment of

Soviet writers and intellectuals’. The Russian defector, one newspaper empha-
sised pointedly, was the son of a well-known Uzbek poet.112
The diplomatic frenzy sparked by the Ulug-Zade affair, in part, explains the
decision taken by John Freeman, Britain’s high commissioner in India, to turn
the Soviet teacher away when he came calling on the evening of 19 December.
London’s relations with India remained tense following a spat between Harold
Wilson’s government and New Delhi during the Indo-Pakistan war of 1965.
Consequently, Freeman baulked at taking in the Soviet defector and attracting
the Gandhi administration’s ire. Any thoughts that Freeman may have enter-
tained about offering Ulug-Zade sanctuary were further complicated by the
intervention of Nikolai Pegov. Having been alerted by companions of Ulug-
Zade that he might seek sanctuary within the UK high commission, the Soviet
ambassador contacted Freeman directly and made it abundantly clear that
Moscow would react strongly were the British mission to harbour a Soviet
citizen.113 To add to Freeman’s problems, his communication links back to
London had been temporarily compromised. At the time, Stella Rimington
was working as an assistant to the resident MI5 Security Liaison Officer in
India. Rimington recalled how, with a defector standing on their doorstep, the
SLO was unable to locate the duty cypher clerk and dispatch a request to
London for instructions. It later transpired that, anticipating a quiet night at
work, the cypher clerk had slipped off spend the night with a Sikh boyfriend,
and ignored repeated telephone calls and frantic knocks on her door.114
Isolated and under pressure to act, Freeman turned to colleagues at the
American embassy for advice. Although wary that the United States might be
subject to a Soviet deception exercise designed to compromise Washington’s
relations with New Delhi, Chester Bowles agreed to take-in Ulug-Zade while
enquires were made as to his bona fides. One senior US embassy official later
recalled that, ‘the British ducked and he [Ulug-Zade] wound up as
a houseguest in the American Embassy residential compound . . . We wanted
to be more forthcoming than the British so we granted him asylum while we
debated [what to do].’115 Alarmed that Chester Bowles might act precipi-
tately, as in the case of Alliluyeva, the MEA sought an assurance from the US
embassy that Ulug-Zade would ‘not be whisked out of the country without its
knowledge’. With residual political fallout from the Alliluyeva affair having
barely subsided, the last thing that the Johnson administration wanted was
a second defection crisis on its hands. Accordingly, Galen Stone, senior
counsellor at the US embassy, was quick to reassure Indian government
officials that Washington would ensure every ‘effort was made to find
a way out of this tangle without undue embarrassment to either side’.116
Having previously spurned Ulug-Zade, it was the British who, unexpectedly,
offered a solution to the defection standoff. Freeman informed Kaul that the
British government had received, and accepted, an application for political
176 spying in south asia

asylum from Ulug-Zade.117 It remains uncertain what prompted London’s

volte-face. Averting the media spectacle of a second Soviet defector transiting
from the subcontinent to the United States within the same year, may well
have seemed more palatable to Moscow and New Delhi. Ulug-Zade had
initially expressed a preference for relocating to the United Kingdom and
had made the British High Commission his first port of call after deciding to
defect. The British reversal was, therefore, able to be couched in humanitar-
ian terms. Whatever the reason, it seems likely that a form of deal was struck
between Bowles, Freeman, Pegov, and Kaul to recast the Ulug-Zade issue as
something other than a direct confrontation between the US and Soviet
superpowers. The effect, as undoubtedly intended, was to remove much of
the political heat from the defection.
As Christmas approached, it was left to Joseph Greene, Bowles’ Deputy
Chief of Mission, to arrange Ulug-Zade’s handover to Indian authorities on the
understanding that he would not be transferred into Soviet custody against his
wishes. In a scene reminiscent of a Cold War film noir, Greene led the young
Uzbek through an underground tunnel that connected the main American
embassy building to an annex across the street that housed the US Agency for
International Development. After what must have seemed the longest four-
minute walk of his life, Ulug-Zade was met at the tunnel’s exit by an Indian
MEA officer and ushered towards a waiting car. Greene snatched a moment to
shake the defector by the hand, say goodbye, and wish him well. Having to
stand by and watch while Ulug-Zade was driven away into a still uncertain
future, Greene recalled decades later, had been ‘one the most painful
Christmas eves I had ever spent’.118
The endgame of the latest Soviet defection in India did not pass off totally
without incident. As frustrated officials inside the MEA worked to bring the
Ulug-Zade case to a satisfactory conclusion, opponents of the Gandhi admin-
istration attempted to exploit the country’s latest defection drama. On
22 December, during a three-hour foreign affairs debate in the Lok Sabha,
Indira Gandhi was repeatedly thrown on the defensive. Minocher Rustom
‘Minoo’ Masani, a leading figure in the conservative Swatantra Party, baited
the Indian premier over her government’s failure to confirm that Ulug-Zade
would be allowed full freedom to determine his own destiny. Linking the Ulug-
Zade case to a recent agreement reached by the Indian government with the
Soviet news agency, Novosti, which had links to Russian intelligence services,
Masani lambasted Gandhi’s tendency to ‘lean over backwards to please the
Soviet Government’. Masani subsequently coordinated the publication of an
open letter of support for Ulug-Zade. Signed by Koka Subba Rao, a former
Chief Justice of India, G. L. Mehta, a former Indian ambassador to the US, and
several other prominent citizens, the letter appealed to India’s prime minister,
‘on the grounds of fundamental human rights embodied in our Constitution
and in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to which India is a signatory
 from russia with love 177

to allow Aziz [Ulug-Zade] to go to the United Kingdom without further delay

and in accordance with his choice’. Asserting that it would be a ‘disgrace’ to
India were the Soviet defector coerced into returning home, the letter sug-
gested that any impression Gandhi’s government had succumbed to pressure
from Moscow over the case, ‘would injure India’s international prestige’.119
The Ulug-Zade affair touched an especially sensitive nerve inside the MEA.
As one Indian newspaper noted, the country’s diplomats resented ‘allow[ing]
Indian soil to be used for cold war propaganda and thereby embarrass itself in
its relations with other friendly [Eastern bloc] countries’.120 Some of Gandhi’s
own MPs, such as Arjun Arora, lamented that, ‘India was becoming a Cold
War arena’. The time had come, Arora stated bluntly, to put an end to foreign
powers abusing India’s goodwill and using the country to score cheap propa-
ganda points at the expense of India’s wider political and economic
interests.121 However, as Indian lawyers advising Ulug-Zade made perfectly
clear, should New Delhi proceed with returning defectors to the Soviet Union,
the MEA could expect legal challenges in Indian courts. Gandhi’s government
was reminded that the State had come off badly when the issue of defectors
rights had last been placed before the country’s judiciary in the Tarasov case.122
Still, piqued by what it regarded as an abuse of freedoms prevailing in India by
three Soviet defectors over the previous five-years, the MEA formally notified
all diplomatic and consular missions in the country that it did not recognise
their right to grant asylum. ‘The Government of India do not recognize the
right of . . . Missions to give asylum to any person or persons within their
premises’, a directive drafted by the MEA’s Legal and Nationality department
stated bluntly. Insisting that it was, ‘well established international practice’,
that, ‘the affording of asylum is not within the purposes of a Diplomatic
Mission’, foreign diplomats were warned not to grant, ‘any request for asylum,
or temporary shelter, or refuge’.123
In a private discussion with Freeman, Kaul went further, and confirmed that
New Delhi was seeking to amend existing legislation with a view to making the
sheltering of defectors an offence under Indian law.124 British and American
officials in India concluded that the MEA’s threat was unenforceable and
agreed to ignore it. In London and Washington, policymakers concurred
that, ‘the main purpose of the Indian circular was to discourage other would-
be defectors from using India as their take-off point’. The terms of the 1961
Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, it was noted, enshrined asylum
on humanitarian grounds. Accordingly, British diplomats in New Delhi were
instructed, ‘not in any way to concede to the Indian authorities that asylum
may not be granted on this ground’. Although ‘anxious to promote friendly
relations’ with India, and ‘willing to accommodate the Indian Government as
far as possible’, the British stopped short of publicly qualifying their support
for Cold War asylum.125 Embarrassingly for Indira Gandhi, some months later
during a debate in the Lok Sabha, the Indian premier was forced to admit that
178 spying in south asia

the MEA had not received a single formal reply to its circular on asylum from
any foreign mission in New Delhi.126 The noise generated by the Indian
government on political asylum resulted in the international diplomatic com-
munity turning a collective deaf ear.
The British, as with the Tarasov and Alliluyeva defections, proved more
active in formulating a covert response to the Ulug-Zade episode. The question
of how best to exploit Indian criticisms of the Gandhi government’s position
on Ulug-Zade occupied the attention of the IRD. The Department debated
passing unattributable material to Indian contacts in the press that highlighted
growing political dissent amongst Soviet youth, noted resistance to Moscow’s
rule within the Soviet Central Asian Republics, and revisited elements of the
Tarasov and Svetlana defections. In some quarters of the British intelligence
community, Ulug-Zade’s intellectual credentials were seen to offer up an
excellent opportunity for publicising the suffocating cultural constraints
imposed by the Soviet regime on its citizens. A senior MI5 officer categorised
Ulug-Zade as, ‘a man of great intelligence – in fact the most intelligent defector
with whom he had ever had contact’. It was Ulug-Zade’s ‘intellectual penetra-
tion’, the Security Service concluded, ‘which had made him no longer content
to endure the various shame imposed on him in the Soviet Union and so led
him to defect’.127
Within India, additional effort from the IRD to capitalise on the theme of
Soviet persecution of writers and intellectuals was dismissed by local
Department representatives as unwise on two grounds. Firstly, bringing add-
itional pressure to bear on Indira Gandhi and her ministers, it was reasoned,
risked damaging delicate bilateral relations, and making the Ulug-Zade imbro-
glio ‘harder to solve’ by ‘provoking those inside and outside the [Indian]
Government who stand to lose most by Ulug-Zade’s unwavering preference
for Britain’. Secondly, Indians appeared to be doing an excellent job by
themselves of holding their government to account. ‘[T]he facts of the case
have been sufficient’, the resident IRD officer in New Delhi informed London,
‘both to provide a condemnation of Communism and to place the Indian
authorities in a position where they would risk compromising themselves and
their democratic freedoms if they had refused to accede to Ulug-Zade’s wish
[to resettle in the UK]’.128 In the circumstances, the IRD was content to bide its
time and delay public exploitation of Ulug-Zade’s defection until after the
Soviet national had departed from the subcontinent. As the chairman of the
British Joint Intelligence Committee reasoned, while ‘it would be quite normal
for Mr. Ulugzade [sic] to give modest publicity to his experience . . . we would
not want to mount an operation on his behalf. He is not our answer to [Kim]
Philby . . . & the K.G.B.’.129 The British did not have long to wait. On
30 December, the Indian government announced that the Soviet defector
was free to travel to the United Kingdom. Three days later, Ulug-Zade was
met at London’s Heathrow airport by British security officers. Following an
 from russia with love 179

intelligence debriefing that stretched over several weeks, the IRD arranged for
Ulug-Zade to take up employment in the BBC’s Russian section. From the
BBC, he worked with Britain’s intelligence services publicising the plight of
dissidents behind the Iron Curtain.130
Ultimately, although sympathetic towards the Gandhi government’s con-
cern at the unwelcome diplomatic tensions that accompanied defections
staged on Indian soil, Indians questioned the wisdom of New Delhi’s attempts
to constrain a fundamental human right. An editorial in the Hindustan Times,
cautioned the government that the problem of defection could not simply ‘be
wished away’, and would remain an inevitable and ‘continuing, human off-
shoot of the cold war’. Given India’s non-alignment and close relations with
both Cold War blocs, the newspaper underlined, it would continue to be an
attractive ‘jumping off place for potential defectors’. While regrettable, such
a state of affairs was not reason enough for the Indian government to com-
promise a long-established national commitment ‘to honour individual rights
and freedoms’. It was ‘unnecessary’, the Hindustan Times argued, for the MEA
to have sought to overturn the principle that foreign missions could grant
asylum. Governments elsewhere, the newspaper reflected, had defended that
right ‘in far more difficult circumstances’.131 A letter written to Times of India
by one of its readers reinforced a general impression that Gandhi’s government
had panicked and erred in its approach to the thorny question of defection. In
seeking to proscribe the right to political asylum on Indian territory, the MEA
had, one citizen opined, ‘taken . . . [a] hasty and possibly ill-considered step to
cover its embarrassment over the defection of three Soviet citizens in a short
period of time’.132

Failing to Square the Asylum Circle

India assumed a prominent role in the high drama of defection as the Cold
War spread from Europe into Asia. The Indian government’s engagement with
the diplomatic problem posed by political asylum exposed the existence of
deep fault lines between Indian domestic sentiment, which broadly favoured
a liberal and compassionate policy on defection, and New Delhi’s conviction
that the nation’s wider interests were best served by an uncompromising and
legalistic response to political refugees originating from the Eastern bloc.
Indian officials invariably found themselves squeezed by seemingly contradict-
ory demands to defend New Delhi’s post-independence commitments to
freedom of political expression, individual liberty, and universal human rights,
while, simultaneously, pursuing national security interests that hinged on the
maintenance of constructive relationships with the Cold War superpowers.
The use of India by Eastern bloc defectors as a convenient route to the West
continued to inject tension into bilateral relations between India and the Soviet
Union beyond the 1960s. In February 1970, a year prior to the conclusion of an
180 spying in south asia

Indo-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation, a fourth Soviet citizen,

Youri Bezemenov, slipped quietly out of India and into political exile in the
West. An official posted to the USSR’s Information Centre, Bezemenov had,
appropriately enough, spent his last evening in the subcontinent watching an
American film in a Connaught Place cinema, before vanishing into the Indian
night.133 By 1972, the Times of India had become blasé in reporting the latest
Soviet national to abscond on Indian soil. Informing its readership that
Mr. A. V. Tereshkov, a Russian engineer working at the Bokaro steel plant,
in the east of the country, had disappeared with his family, the newspaper
reflected ruefully that a nationwide alert and stringent checks placed on
airports and border posts had failed to turn up the Russians. ‘It is believed’,
the newspaper added, ‘that they [the Tereshkov family] had already left India
with the help of a foreign mission’.134
Indian domestic politics ensured that the issue of political asylum persisted
as a choleric component of North–South dialogue. In June 1975, having come
under investigation for electoral malpractice, and with protestors having taken
to India’s streets in almost equal numbers both to support and denounce her
government, Indira Gandhi declared a national State of Emergency, suspended
civil liberties, censured the press, and jailed political opponents. The large-
scale and arbitrary detention of opposition politicians and activists, including
the former deputy prime minister, Morarji Desai, prompted Amnesty
International to categorise the Indian government’s action as, ‘perhaps the
most significant event of the year in terms of human rights in Asia’.135 The
British and American governments found themselves inundated with applica-
tions for political asylum from Indian critics of Gandhi’s government who had
managed to evade arrest. In turn, the sympathetic line taken in London and
Washington to requests from Indian citizens for refuge garnered New Delhi’s
disapprobation.136 If the Indian government’s campaign to inhibit Cold War
defections in the subcontinent failed to yield tangible results in the long 1960s,
it nevertheless represented a significant international event. The MEA’s
actions at the time are suggestive of a democratic government reinterpreting
international law to suit diplomatic exigencies; and, taken together with
ubiquitous and active covert foreign intelligence operations in India, it
reinforces the scale of the Cold War’s impact on South Asia. Once enmeshed
in the politics of Cold War asylum, New Delhi attempted to actively discourage
and disrupt defections on Indian soil while simultaneously working to minim-
ise any adverse impact on its relationship with Moscow. In the process, Indian
officials floundered in the face of competing local demands, domestic political
rivalries, and external pressure. The politics of Cold War asylum represented
a problem to which India could find no satisfactory solution.
 8

The Foreign Hand: Indira Gandhi

and the Politics of Intelligence

In spring 1967, senior officials from the Central Intelligence Agency were
horrified when the American west coast magazine, Ramparts, exposed the
US intelligence organisation‘s long-standing financial relationships with
a number of international educational institutions and cultural bodies.1 In
a series of damning articles, which were reproduced in the New York Times and
the Washington Post, Ramparts documented the CIA’s provision of covert
funding to, amongst others, the National Students Association, Asia
Foundation, and Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF).2 In India, an outpour-
ing of public indignation ensued when it became clear that the Indian
Committee for Cultural Freedom, a local offshoot of the CCF, had accepted
money from the CIA. Chester Bowles, the US ambassador in New Delhi,
lamented that the fallout from the Ramparts furore was likely to prove par-
ticularly damaging to United States’ standing in India, a nation with whom it
had fostered close academic contacts. The global spotlight that America’s press
cast on some of the CIA’s more questionable activities was to have a profound
and enduring impact upon Indian perceptions of America and its intelligence
services. In the wake of the Ramparts scandal, the CIA came to occupy
a prominent place in mainstream Indo-US cultural and political discourse.
Blanket exposure given by the world’s press to CIA indiscretions, exemplified
by the international media circus that developed around Congressional probes
into the US intelligence community in the mid-1970s, made a deep psycho-
logical impression in India. Having publicly catalogued the CIA’s involvement
in a series of plots to assassinate national leaders and subvert foreign govern-
ments, the chairman of one influential investigative committee, Senator Frank
Church, famously characterised the Agency’s behaviour as akin to, ‘a rogue
elephant on a rampage’.3
Remarkably, some reference to the CIA and its purportedly nefarious activ-
ities in the subcontinent intruded into almost every significant exchange that
occurred between Indian and American diplomats during the premierships of
Indira Gandhi, between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s. During the latter half
of the Cold War, what some commentators have referenced as an Indian
national ‘paranoia’ towards the CIA and its clandestine activities, came to
represent a constant and frustrating impediment whenever US policymakers

181
182 spying in south asia

sought to forge closer and more constructive relations with India.4 In public and
privately, Indian leaders complained that the malevolent hand of the CIA lay
behind many of the country’s problems, foreign and domestic. Explaining away
India’s national ills in terms of the machinations of a ‘foreign hand’ was
electorally expedient for Indira Gandhi. The Indian prime minister’s vilification
of the CIA, however, exacted a heavy and enduring toll on New Delhi’s relations
with Washington.

1967: India’s Year of Intelligence

The year 1967 started badly for the CIA in India. In January, New Age, the
weekly newspaper of the Communist Party of India, ran a series of articles in
which it purported to name the CIA station chief in New Delhi, reveal the
location of the station premises at Nyaya Marg, a quiet street behind the main
US embassy building in Chanakyapuri, and expose the Agency’s subversion of
Indian democracy.5 Concurrently, foreign missions in the Indian capital were
struck by ‘the intensity of the Soviet press and radio propaganda concerning
India’ that manifested in the run up to a general election in February. The
British High Commission noted with concern an unusually high volume of
‘bitter’ anti-American vitriol emanating from Soviet publications and local
communist weeklies. In part, the British attributed this unsettling develop-
ment to ‘exaggerated fears in Russian minds about the extent of American
influence in India’. The US embassy, while remaining ‘commendably thick-
skinned’ in the face of communist slanders had, the British observed, started to
lose patience with baseless allegations levelled at specific American officials,
and repeated references to ‘mythical’ plots hatched in Washington.6
Prominent among the latter, was the extensive Indian press coverage given
to ‘Project Brahmaputra’, a supposed CIA conspiracy to stimulate discontent
among tribal communities in northeastern India.7
Communist attacks on the CIA were complicated by the unwelcome and
unexpected appearance of ghosts from the Agency’s past. A public interven-
tion by John Kenneth Galbraith was met with astonishment and feelings of
cold anger inside the CIA’s Langley headquarters. Writing in the Washington
Post on 12 March, Galbraith derided the CIA, with no little irony, as, ‘a secret
agency . . . with an excellent instinct for headlines’. The former ambassador
publicly laid bare his interactions with the CIA in South Asia, and claimed that
the Agency’s, ‘activities were generally known to, and involved no conflict
with, local [Indian government] authorities’.8 Infuriated by Galbraith’s indis-
cretion, CIA Director, Richard Helms, fumed that Galbraith had succeeded in,
‘rais[ing] unshirted hell in India and [had] . . . provided the central point of an
acrimonious debate in the Lok Sabha’.9 At the same time, a pamphlet appeared
in India allegedly authored by the American defector, and former code clerk at
the US embassy in New Delhi, John Disco Smith. First serialised in Moscow’s
 the foreign hand 183

Literaturnaya Gazeta, Smith’s scurrilous tract, I was a CIA Agent in India,

detailed apparent Agency plots to subvert the Indian government. Derided as
a ludicrous fabrication by Western officials, Smith’s book nevertheless ampli-
fied many Indians’ misgivings surrounding US encroachment into the sub-
continent’s political affairs.10
Groups on the left of India’s political spectrum represented the combination
of Galbraith’s indiscretion and Smith’s allegations as confirmation that the
CIA had been actively subverting democracy in South Asia. Fresh from the
campaign hustings, India’s parliamentarians fed off rumour and suspicion
surrounding America’s foreign intelligence service and competed eagerly
with each other to exhibit the toughest and most populist anti-CIA line
possible. The general election returned the Congress Party to power, but
with a weakened mandate and, for the first time since 1947, India’s dominant
political machine was left vulnerable to opposition MPs determined to hold
ministers to account.11 Congress’s foreign minister, M. C. Chagla, came under
pressure in parliament from George Fernandes, an MP for the Samyukta
Socialist Party, to reveal what the government knew of CIA operations in
India, and to confirm which Indian organisations were known, or suspected, to
have received Agency funding. In response, an evasive Chagla parried
Fernandes’s enquiries and sought to reassure MPs that government ministers
were alert to the dangers posed by a ‘foreign hand’. ‘By their very nature,
activities such as those now attributed to the CIA are carried out secretly and
such activities are not normally capable of verification’, the foreign minister
emphasised. ‘[The] Government are, however, constantly vigilant to protect
the national interest. Whenever possible they take action against subversive
and intelligence activities.’12
In briefing ministers on how best to deflect a flood of parliamentary ques-
tions on the CIA that surfaced post-Ramparts, officials from the Americas
Division of the Ministry of External Affairs recommended adopting
a pragmatic line. ‘The fact is that all Governments carry out intelligence
activities; it is an unfortunate but inescapable fact of international life’,
Indian officials stressed. ‘When a State finds that the activities of foreign
intelligence agents are affecting its interests, it takes whatever action it can to
stop these activities.’ The CIA had acquired an especially invidious inter-
national reputation for indulging in covert action, as opposed to intelligence
gathering. But Indian ministers were reminded, ‘No such activities have come
to light in respect of India . . . [although the] Government are naturally vigilant
and will remain so.’ In addition, Chagla and his colleagues were informed by
the Intelligence Bureau that the source of suspected CIA funding accepted by
Indian organisations, including the Asian Student Press Bureau, International
Confederation of Free Trade Unions, and Congress for Cultural Freedom, had
been hidden from the recipients, and utilised for largely benign purposes.
Indian beneficiaries of Agency cash, the MEA emphasised, ‘have an apparently
184 spying in south asia

worthy purpose and no known links with the CIA; like other beneficiaries of
funds originating with the CIA, but passed on through innocent looking
conduits, the Indian organisations appear to have been ignorant of the CIA’s
role’.13
Indian officials drew some solace from Galbraith’s Washington Post article,
which New Delhi, rather generously, interpreted as confirming, ‘not that
G[overnment].O[f].I[ndia]. acquiesced in C.I.A. activities but that these activ-
ities were ineffectual’. Highlighting a prominent case in point, MEA officials
observed that US press reports had identified M. J. Desai, India’s former
foreign secretary and de facto head of the MEA, as a recipient of CIA funding.
After retiring from the Indian civil service in 1964, Desai had taken up
a temporary teaching post at the University of Hawaii’s East-West Centre.
Between June and August 1965, he embarked on a speaking tour of the United
States, that subsequently expanded to cover appearances in Australia, Japan,
Malaysia, and Thailand. The tour was financed by a private charitable founda-
tion, the Granary Fund, which it later transpired was bankrolled by the CIA.
On being informed by the MEA of his inadvertent connection with American
intelligence, Desai ‘pointed out that the tour enabled him to put across Indian
views on various problems and it is a strange irony that the C.I.A. should now
appear to have contributed to his spreading good-will and understanding on
behalf of India!’14
During a raucous parliamentary session on 23 March, communist and
socialist MPs returned to the attack and rounded on the government for
being complacent while, ‘the CIA has penetrated into all walks of Indian life
with sinister effects, especially on our elections, and undermining our sover-
eignty’. Rejecting charges that the government had proved passive and inactive
in the face of external intelligence activity openly conducted on Indian soil,
Ministers defended the IB’s counter-intelligence record and alluded to recent
successes in uncovering foreign espionage rings. The Intelligence Bureau, MPs
were promised, had been, ‘alert and active . . . [and] constantly vigilant’. It was
a ‘misrepresentation’, Ministers insisted, to assert that individual Indians, or
Indian organisations, that had unwittingly benefited from funding traced back
to the CIA had knowingly or materially advanced the Agency’s interests.15 Still,
unable to silence government critics, Chagla bowed to pressure for more
robust action and announced that a ‘thorough’ official inquiry would be
conducted by his colleagues in the Home Ministry to ascertain whether exter-
nal agents had interfered in Indian politics. ‘We cannot permit foreigners or
foreign governments to dictate to us what sort of a government we should have
or what sort of people should be elected’, Chagla asserted. ‘We will unearth any
activity that is objectionable, that is against the national interests.’16
In June, an Indian news magazine pre-empted the government, and released
a sensational story detailing foreign interference in the nation’s electoral
politics. Young India published allegations that covert financial support had
 the foreign hand 185

been provided to Indian politicians by the Soviet KGB. India’s Home Ministry,
the magazine claimed, had been obfuscating and ‘sitting on the biggest story of
the decade’. According to Young India, Chavan, was in possession of the
eagerly awaited report on foreign intelligence agencies and, ‘if made public
[it] would blow “friendly” Indo-Soviet Relations” sky high!’ The scoop claimed
that a ‘staggering’ number of Indian legislators had been bankrolled by the
KGB during that year’s general election. The scale of Soviet subversion, it
added, had come to light by accident, ‘during [the] Home Ministry’s much
highlighted and much publicized investigation of the nefarious activities of the
KGB’s arch-rival, the dreaded CIA!’ In total, India’s security services were said
to have established ‘firm cases’ that linked KGB money to forty national and
eighty-nine regional political candidates that stood for office in constituencies
across India. The individuals were associated not only with India’s communist
parties, but also to Indira Gandhi’s ruling Congress faction and the Hindu
nationalist, Jan Sangh.17 David Lancashire, Britain’s IRD representative in
New Delhi, speculated that the Young India exposé had been orchestrated by
the CIA. The magazine’s editor, Sagar Ahluwalia, Lancashire observed, was ‘a
man of few scruples’ who had come to rely heavily on secret American
financial subsidies and scraps of political gossip passed his way by the
Agency.18 Lancashire’s suspicions were later confirmed by Ahluwalia. In
conversation with a colleague of Lancashire’s at reception hosted by the
British High Commission, the editor, ‘true to his reputation’, confessed that,
‘he and his co-editors had made up the whole article on KGB involvement’.
‘What he [Ahluwalia] probably meant, but would not admit’, Lancashire
informed his superiors back in London, ‘was that it had been concocted, as
we thought originally, by the Americans’.19
The Home Ministry’s official report on foreign interference in Indian polit-
ics eventually leaked to the New York Times. Its contents implicated the CIA,
along with West German, Israeli, and Eastern bloc intelligence services, in the
covert funding of Indian political parties. On the right of the political spec-
trum, the Jan Sangh, or People’s Party, and the Swatantra Party, were judged to
have been major recipients of CIA cash. Likewise, left-wing candidates from
both the Congress Party and the Praja Socialist Party were also confirmed as
having benefited from secret American financial support. However, and some-
what conveniently for the CIA, given the vehicle through which the leaked
report was disseminated, it also concluded that the amounts of money chan-
nelled through Communist embassies in New Delhi to Indian politicians from
both the Communist Party of India and the Congress Party, comfortably
outstripped America’s covert investment in the 1967 elections.20 The Times
story was the subject of a heated debate in the Lok Sabha. On 15 June, faced
with a barrage of criticism, a flustered Chavan conceded that the government
had received a report on political funding from the Central Bureau of
Investigation. Somewhat incredulously, the minister added that he had not
186 spying in south asia

yet found the time to read it. Rebutting charges that the government was
engaged in a cover up, Chavan insisted that the report’s broad conclusions
would be placed before parliament once ministers had fully digested its
contents. Pressed by disgruntled MPs to confirm when that might be,
Chavan declined to provide a timeline for publication and suggested that
further enquiries would be necessary to establish the veracity of some of the
report’s findings. Angry calls from Minoo Masani, the Swatantra leader, for the
establishment of a judicial enquiry, were met with stony silence on the govern-
ment benches. To the delight of his colleagues, one Communist MP wrapped
up the debate by pointing out to an uncomfortable Chavan that for years the
CPI had been accused by Congress of being funded by a foreign government.
‘Now the shoe had begun pinch’, the MP added mischievously, ‘and all parties
realized that such charges should not be bandied about lightly’.21
It later became clear that the KGB had employed an extensive variety of
‘active measures’ to smear the CIA during the 1967 general election. Several of
these utilised fabricated American documents drafted by Service A of the
KGB’s First Chief Directorate, which specialised in disinformation. In one
instance, a Soviet agent inside the American Embassy in New Delhi was able to
pass templates of official US documents and sample signatures to the KGB.
These were then used by Service A to forge a letter nominally from the US
consul-general in Bombay, in which it was suggested that the CIA had been
channelling large sums of money to right-wing Congress politicians.22 By
passing a steady stream of counterfeit letters to the Indian press, the KGB
was able to keep the CIA firmly in the public spotlight. The Soviet disinforma-
tion campaign in India was assisted by an estimated seventeen English lan-
guage Indian broadsheets, and a far greater number of vernacular newspapers,
that were regarded as, ‘fundamentally in sympathy with the Communist
line’.23 One Soviet intelligence officer, who served in the KGB residency, or
station, in New Delhi, confirmed that in seeking to blacken the CIA’s reputa-
tion in the subcontinent, the KGB had made full use of, ‘extensive contacts
within political parties, among journalists and public organizations. All were
enthusiastically brought into play.’24 British officials in India fretted that the
‘very heavy Soviet reliance on the Soviet clandestine service in the sub-
continent’, threatened to undermine the bedrock of Indian democracy.25
Moscow’s concern at the weight of evidence accumulated by India’s security
service relating to KGB interference in the 1967 election was such that the
Soviet embassy pressured Gandhi’s government to suppress publication of the
Home Ministry’s report.26
There was little expectation that India’s ‘year of intelligence’ would lead to
a reduction in the covert activities of foreign states in the subcontinent. In
December, as a tumultuous phase in Indian politics ended, C. P. Ramachandran,
the Observer’s correspondent in New Delhi, penned an article entitled, ‘Where “I
spy” is a national industry.’ Reflecting on a period that had seen foreign intelligence
 the foreign hand 187

services in India subject to intense and unfamiliar public and political

examination, Ramachandran observed that, in the end, not that much had
changed. ‘There is no doubt at all about extensive activity by the CIA among
the English-educated elite who run the administration of the country, man
the top posts in the defence services and have influence in politics’, the writer
noted. ‘The affluence of some comparatively low-paid journalists is also
attributable to some easy money gained by giving information to foreign
missions.’ India remained, the Observer columnist determined, very much
a nexus of Cold War intelligence competition. ‘If there is anything that
functions efficiently in India’, Ramachandran concluded, ‘it is the intelli-
gence organisations of foreign missions and India’s own huge intelligence
set-up that taps most telephones, opens letters, prepares dossiers and keeps
a large if fuzzy eye on what is going on’.27 Eight years later, in 1975,
Ramachandran’s musings on the extent to which Cold War espionage had
penetrated the social fabric of India remained valid. To the consternation of
British officials in the Indian capital, local politicians continued to look upon
foreign intelligence services as a useful source of ready cash. One representa-
tive of the Socialist Party of India, on presenting himself at the doors of the
British High Commission, enquired of an incredulous consular officer,
‘whether I could let him have the name of a CIA agent at the American
Embassy, since the Indian Socialists were short of money and wanted the aid
of the CIA’.28

Charpoys and Neem Trees: Indira Gandhi and the CIA

The psychological writing had been on the wall for Indo-US relations from the
moment that Indira Gandhi became India’s prime minister, in January 1966.
Having assumed leadership of the world’s largest democracy in her late forties,
as one contemporary biographical sketch of Gandhi noted, years spent acting
as Jawaharlal Nehru’s consort had afforded her, ‘a wealth of theoretical
knowledge . . . [but] limited practical experience [for] the enormous task of
coping with India’s problems over the coming years’. Raised in a household
‘bubbling with political ideas, agitation, and tension’, the future prime minister
endured a lonely adolescence and grew up quickly within an environment
where, as Gandhi herself noted, ‘childhood games were political ones’. India-
watchers in the State Department characterised Gandhi as intensely patriotic
and deeply committed to the well-being of the Indian people. She was also,
America’s diplomatic service judged, handicapped by a ‘proud temper and
impatience, as well as much of the aristocratic manner of her distinguished
forebear’. Reserved and socially awkward, Gandhi lacked her father’s emo-
tional connection with India’s masses. Of impeccable political pedigree, yet
largely untested amongst the cut and thrust of public affairs, few commenta-
tors expected much from Indira Gandhi.29 Gandhi proved her many detractors
188 spying in south asia

wrong. Nehru had frequently reminded his daughter that the year of her birth,
1917, was also the year of the Russian Revolution.30 The historical correlation
sat lightly with Gandhi. She would go on to become the most transformative
and controversial leader in modern Indian history.
Chester Bowles, who first encountered Gandhi in the 1940s, counselled
Washington that derisory newspaper profiles that characterised the new
Indian premier as the ‘woolly minded daughter of a famous father’, were wide
of the mark. Less accurate was the American ambassador’s assessment that he
would, ‘be able to work closely with her [Gandhi] and generally exert
a constructive influence’.31 In relatively short order, disillusioned American
officials found cause to lament that, ‘left-of-centre Indian officials, including
Mrs. Gandhi, have long held a conspiratorial view of U.S. activities in India
which has been a smouldering source of resentment against the United States’.32
Western diplomats took to disparaging Gandhi as ‘vain’, ‘emotional’, ‘authori-
tarian’, and prone to ‘irrational’ fits of pique when events turned against her.33
Of particular concern were undertones of anti-Americanism evident in Gandhi’s
actions and utterances, a character trait that she was perceived to have inherited
from Nehru.34 In October 1970, following one bruising encounter with Gandhi,
US Secretary of State, William Rogers, complained that although the Nixon
administration had, ‘been in office only 20 months’, the Indian premier was,
‘holding against us a paranoia going back to John Foster Dulles’.35 An avid
consumer of literature with a strong CIA theme, in 1974 alone, Gandhi devoured
Victor Marchetti and John Marks’, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, Antony
Sampson’s, The Sovereign State: The Secret History of ITT, and David
Halberstam’s, The Best and the Brightest. ‘The picture she would have [drawn
of the CIA] from this selection [of books]’, the American Embassy in New Delhi
bemoaned, ‘ . . . would hardly be objective’.36 One American intelligence officer
who served in the subcontinent later recalled that, ‘CIA agents . . . were to be
found according to Madame Gandhi, beneath every charpoy and behind every
neem tree.’37
Equally, as one of Nixon’s ambassadors to India, Daniel Patrick Moynihan,
pointed out, Gandhi had few qualms about cooperating with foreign intelli-
gence agencies, including those of the United States, when it suited her
interests to do so. In his 1978 memoir, A Dangerous Place, Moynihan con-
firmed that to his knowledge the CIA had twice intervened in Indian politics.
On both occasions the Agency had funnelled money to the ruling Congress
Party in a bid to head off the election of communist governments in Kerala and
West Bengal. In one instance, the ambassador charged, CIA money had been
passed directly to Gandhi in her capacity as Congress Party President.38
Having served as Nehru’s political confidante and, after 1964, a cabinet minis-
ter in her own right, it is hard to conceive that Gandhi was unaware of, if not
complicit in, joint initiatives with the CIA that were sanctioned by the Indian
government. In 1975, Gandhi’s links to the CIA would come back to haunt her
 the foreign hand 189

when, in the midst of a crusade against the Agency’s subversive practices, the
Hindustan Times began to publish details of the history of the Indian govern-
ment’s relationship with American intelligence. In response, Indira Gandhi
affected an awkward, and none too convincing case of prime ministerial
amnesia.39
Back in 1969, Gandhi had fallen out with the Congress Party’s elder states-
man, known as the Syndicate, after shifting to the political left. In July that year,
Gandhi nationalised fourteen of India’s commercial banks, and sacked her
conservative finance minister, and bitter political rival, Morarji Desai. The
Syndicate reacted by expelling Gandhi from the Congress Party. In response,
she formed a new breakaway group, Congress (R). In February 1971, India
held its fifth general election, and Gandhi’s reconstituted party, which drew on
support from the Moscow-sponsored wing of the CPI, was returned to power
on the back of the slogan, Garibi Hatao, or abolish poverty. The CPI subse-
quently piled pressure on its Congress (R) partner to adopt a radical socialist
agenda, and organised demonstrations of civil disobedience, or ‘mass satya-
graha’, in support of land reform, full employment, and wealth redistribution.
In the autumn of 1972, when confronted with communist-orchestrated pro-
tests against rampant inflation, food shortages, and rising unemployment,
Gandhi and senior Congress officials elected not to admonish the CPI, but
instead to implicate the CIA and the Agency’s Indian ‘accomplices’ with
fomenting unrest. The Congress president, Shankar Dayal Sharma, who was
handpicked by Gandhi for his loyalty rather than political aptitude, delivered
a string of public speeches in which he accused the CIA of scheming to ‘throttle
the Indian economy’. Sharma’s transformation from a previously mild-
mannered and largely anonymous Congress functionary, into a prominent
anti-American firebrand, puzzled many observers. Noted for his good nature
and jovial disposition, in the past Sharma had expressed admiration for the
United States, where he had spent time researching constitutional law as
a Brandeis fellow at Harvard. Having reinvented himself as a benevolent
Indian leader locked in a desperate battle with the CIA, Sharma faced ridicule
from India’s press. The US Embassy in New Delhi regarded Sharma as
anything but a dolt. The Congress president, American journalists were
assured privately by diplomats, knew exactly what he was doing by utilising
the Agency as a lighting-rod to explain away India’s social and economic
problems.40
Gandhi was not above adding her voice to the chorus of anti-CIA rhetoric.
On 9 October, on the eve of a national Congress convention in Gujarat, the
Indian premier asserted that, ‘ . . . elements in India, who had always been
voicing opposition to the Government’s political economic and foreign pol-
icies, were receiving encouragement from foreign sources’.41 British officials in
India, and much of the country’s English language press, dismissed the allega-
tions levelled by Gandhi at the CIA, as a ‘barefaced political stunt’. The British
190 spying in south asia

High Commission in New Delhi reasoned that the ‘CPI have plainly been up to
their necks in recent agitation’, while, ‘Indian security professionals do not put
down [the] agitation to [a] CIA conspiracy’.42 The right-wing Indian period-
ical, Thought, noted sardonically that Gandhi had chosen to deliver her anti-
CIA polemic in the state where Mahatma Gandhi’s autobiography,
Experiments with Truth, had played out. In a scathing editorial, Calcutta’s
Statesman, added that Gandhi’s implication that India’s economic difficulties
were ‘due to CIA “machinations”’, was simply ‘too infantile to be considered
seriously’.43 Casting a satirical, if equally damning eye on the CIA rumpus, the
Indian Express printed a cartoon on its front page that depicted Sharma
advising Gandhi that, ‘This week’s CIA activities include four price-rise dem-
onstrations, seven buses hijacked by students, plus one cyclone in Orissa.’44
Gandhi’s willingness to conflate political opportunism and the CIA was in
evidence in June 1975, when the Allahabad High Court found the Indian
premier guilty of electoral malpractice during the 1971 general election.
Justice Jagmohanlal Sinha, who handed down the decision, had effigies of
him burned by Gandhi’s supporters and placards brandished proclaiming “Is
Mr. Sinha a CIA Agent?”45
Later that month, with her political opponents scenting blood, Gandhi
declared a State of Emergency. ‘Indira Gandhi’, one US government report
noted at the time, ‘has become the constitutional dictator of India’.46 In an
ironic twist, Indian film censors later banned the Alan Pakula Hollywood
movie, All the President’s Men, based on a 1974 book of the same name written
by the investigative journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward about the
Watergate affair. Indian cinema audiences, the censor feared, might link the
films biting critique of Richard Nixon’s assault on democracy with Indira
Gandhi’s actions.47 Congress Party figures loyal to Gandhi suggested that
unrest preceding the imposition of martial law had been directed by
a ‘foreign hand’.48 Members of India’s political opposition that avoided impris-
onment during the Emergency mocked the idea that external forces had been
plotting to subvert the government. One Indian MP took to wearing a badge
that proclaimed, ‘I am a CIA agent’, and made a tidy profit by selling copies to
his parliamentary colleagues.49
Actions undertaken in the name of the United States government by the CIA
in the early 1970s did play some part in reinforcing the negative perception of
America’s foreign intelligence service held by Indians in general, and by Indira
Gandhi in particular. Circumstantial evidence linking the United States with
those responsible for the assassination of Bangladesh’s premier, Sheikh
Mujibur Rahman, in August 1975, and exposés in the New York Times
claiming that the CIA had run an agent inside Gandhi’s cabinet during the
1971 Indo-Pakistan War, unnerved the Indian premier.50 Still, to many obser-
vers, Gandhi’s apprehension that US-sponsored regime change in India might
figure on Washington’s agenda appeared fanciful. Shortly after the declaration
 the foreign hand 191

(a) (b)

(c) (d)

Figure 8.1a-d Indian satirist, Laxman, lampooning the nation’s obsession with the CIA
in a selection of cartoons carried by the Times of India. Reproduced with permission of
Times of India.
192 spying in south asia

of a State of Emergency, the State Department discounted the possibility that

Gandhi could be removed in a putsch. ‘A surprise overthrow without prior
disorders or other warning indicators seems unlikely’, US officials reasoned,
‘the [Indian] intelligence services have extensive resources, and it is hard to see
how a conspiracy on the necessary scale could remain undetected for very
long’.51 Nevertheless, well into the 1980s, Gandhi continued to suspect that
elements within the CIA were actively plotting her demise. Maloy Krishna
Dhar, who later rose to become joint director of India’s Intelligence Bureau,
vividly recalled the suffocating paranoia that permeated India’s bureaucracy
under Gandhi. ‘Those were the days of the CIA ghosts lurking in every nook
and corner of the psyche of the scared politicians’, Dhar remembered. Much
like his prime minister, the young Dhar and colleagues within the IB, had
‘started believing that the CIA was only a few steps away from breaking the
country into pieces’.52

The Nixon Administration and the Politics of Intelligence

On entering the White House in January 1969, Richard Nixon quickly con-
cluded that peace and stability in South Asia could best be maintained by
furnishing India’s rival, Pakistan, with sufficient American economic and
military assistance to counterbalance New Delhi’s preponderant regional
power. Nixon interpreted the politics of the Global South through
a reductive framework of superpower competition. Early on in his presidency,
he instructed senior officials not to fritter away time on the problems affecting
the developing nations. ‘[W]hat happens in those parts of the world is not, in
the final analysis’, Nixon intoned, ‘going to have any significant effect on the
success of our foreign policy in the foreseeable future’.53 With South Asia rated
as less important to the United States than Western Europe or the Pacific, the
State Department’s ambitions for the subcontinent encompassed little more
than averting ‘regional destabilization’, and its attendant economic and polit-
ical disruption.54 As India’s embassy in Washington made plain to New Delhi,
‘ . . . in the list of countries and regions of interest to the President’s [Nixon’s]
concept of foreign policy, India is well near the bottom’.55
During the 1950s, Nixon earned India’s disfavour by enthusiastically
endorsing the Eisenhower administration’s decision to enter into an alliance
with Pakistan. At the time, Vice-President Nixon had failed to warm to Nehru,
whom he considered cold, aloof, and bent on consolidating India’s dominant
influence not only in South Asia, but across the Middle East and Africa.
Nixon’s National Security Advisor, and latterly Secretary of State, Henry
Kissinger, reflected that the President always felt more comfortable dealing
with the ‘bluff, direct military chiefs of Pakistan . . . than the complex and
apparently haughty Brahmin leaders of India’.56 On a visit to New Delhi in
1961, while he languished in the political wilderness, Nixon was snubbed by
 the foreign hand 193

Figure 8.2 President Richard Nixon and India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi talk at
the White House, 4 November 1971. Walter McNamee / Corbis Historical / Getty
Images.

India’s leaders. At the sole official function held in his honour, hosted by the
Indian finance minister, Morarji Desai, Nixon groused at being presented with
an indifferent vegetarian meal and lectured on the shortcomings of a US
partnership with Pakistan that he had helped to broker. A second visit to the
Indian capital, in 1967, proved equally unfortunate. Nixon did manage to
secure a meeting with Indira Gandhi, but the encounter was kept short, and
conversation proved stilted and awkward. One observer recorded that Gandhi
could ‘scarcely conceal her boredom’ and, following twenty minutes of ‘desul-
tory chat’, she beckoned over the Indian Foreign Officer escorting Nixon and
asked in Hindi how much longer the interview would last.57 The Director of
the American desk at India’s Ministry of External Affairs, Katyayani Shankar
Bajpai, noted with relief that Nixon’s discussions with other Indian ministers,
on topics including China, Kashmir, and Indo-Pakistan relations, were more
productive. Nevertheless, while conceding that Nixon was ‘obviously clever’,
Bajpai judged that, ‘he [Nixon] looks so patently untrustworthy, that I am
surprised that he has got as far as he has’.58 Nixon’s problematic relationship
with India was not helped by the disdain that Kissinger evidenced towards its
policymakers. In August 1971, in conversation with Richard Helms, Kissinger
responded to the CIA Directors assertion that emotions frequently outran
good judgement in the subcontinent, by commenting acidly, ‘Passions don’t
have to run very far to do that in India.’59
In December 1971, to Gandhi’s fury, Nixon ‘tilted’ decisively towards
Pakistan following the outbreak of Indo-Pakistan hostilities. In turn, having
194 spying in south asia

frustrated his effort to prevent East Pakistan’s transformation into the inde-
pendent nation state of Bangladesh, Nixon returned Gandhi’s animus with
interest.60 That month, during talks with the British premier, Edward Heath, in
Bermuda, Nixon railed against supposed Indian ingratitude for American aid.
‘The United States had received nothing from India except a kick in the teeth,
in exchange for $3/4 billion last year’, the President grumbled. ‘Was the Indian
attitude that . . . the white nations had no choice but to come in and bail India
out?’ At one point during the bilateral discussions, British ministers became so
alarmed at the strength of Nixon’s anti-Indian invective that they felt com-
pelled to reiterate the Western self-interest in supporting India. ‘The Indians
were admittedly intolerably high-minded in relation to other people’s affairs,
and rather smug’, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, Britain’s foreign secretary reassured
Nixon. ‘But there was an important common interest in preserving Indian
independence from Soviet and Chinese domination.’61 An atmosphere of deep
mutual distrust pervaded Washington’s interactions with New Delhi after
1971. Strained bilateral relations were aggravated by differences over India’s
ties to the Soviet Union; the ongoing war in Vietnam; an outstanding debt
which India had accumulated purchasing US grain shipments in 1960s; and
the Gandhi government’s fledgling nuclear weapons programme. Within the
confines of Nixon’s Oval Office, Indians were characterised as ‘bastards’, and ‘a
slippery, treacherous people’ who deserved to experience ‘mass famine’.
Gandhi was derided by the President as an ‘old witch’ and a ‘bitch’.62
The CIA ran India close in the disapprobation that it attracted from Nixon.
One prominent historian of the Agency has observed that, ‘No government
institution elicited Nixon’s sullen suspicion more than the CIA.’ In Nixon’s
view, America’s intelligence community was overstaffed, under supervised, and
too expensive. It was also, the President frequently protested, incapable of
furnishing him with information that he hadn’t read first on the wire services.
Thousands of people, Nixon was fond of quipping, appeared busily employed in
Langley reading the New York Times and Washington Post.63 Personal acrimony
also shaped Nixon’s adverse attitude towards the Agency. He harboured
a festering grudge against the CIA that was rooted in John F. Kennedy’s triumph
in the 1960 presidential election. Nixon blamed the CIA for Kennedy’s narrow
victory, claiming that the Agency had allowed the Democratic ticket to exploit
a so-called ‘missile gap’, or disparity in American and Soviet ballistic rockets, by
withholding evidence that the ‘gap’ was illusory. Once in the White House,
events conspired to reinforce Nixon’s conviction that the CIA was not to be
trusted. In 1972, Richard Helms infuriated Richard Nixon by refusing to
embroil the Agency in his administration’s efforts to cover up the Watergate
scandal.64 Nixon later confided to his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, that the
CIA was, ‘ . . . primarily an Ivy League and Georgetown set, rather than the type
of people we get in the services and the FBI. I want . . . to [know] how many
people in CIA could be removed by Presidential action.’65
 the foreign hand 195

India’s prominence as a Cold War intelligence hub posed particular challenges

for the Nixon administration given its uneasy relationships with both New Delhi
and the CIA. The close collaborative links that had were forged between
American and Indian intelligence services from the early 1960s, continued to
be valued by US policymakers a decade later. In March 1970, in assessing the
state of Washington’s relationship with India, the State Department emphasised
that, ‘an important area of our security relationship with India arises through
liaison in the intelligence field’.66 Strong channels of communication that con-
tinued to function between the CIA and R&AW, despite the vituperation heaped
on the Agency by Indian politicians and sections of the country’s press, proved
their worth during the Indo-Pakistan war of 1971. Richard Viets, then a junior
US political officer in India, who would subsequently serve stints as US ambas-
sador to Tanzania and Jordan, recalled that, ‘ . . . our CIA liaison with the Indians
was of the highest order at that point [1971] . . . I think it played a critical role in
ending the war . . . Our Station chief could . . . [go to] his intelligence opposite
numbers at the top and they in turn could go to their political masters.’67
Moreover, India’s standing within the non-aligned movement, and increasingly
close connections with the Soviet Union, ensured that the subcontinent
remained important and contested ground for Cold War propagandists. When
it came to India, as one US official noted, ‘ . . . our [bilateral] relationships are
affected by a variety of overt and covert information programs designed to
project a sympathetic understanding of American policies and a favourable
image of cultural developments in the United States and to discredit our
international adversaries’.68 Or, as one officer serving in the US Embassy in
New Delhi noted at that time, ‘We had a huge intelligence representation in
India . . . We spent an awful lot of time monitoring what the Soviets were doing,
and they spent an awful lot of time monitoring what we were doing.’69
Given the Nixon administration’s uneasy relations with India, it was no
surprise when the president nominated Kenneth Keating as his ambassador in
New Delhi. A former senator for New York and appeals court judge, Keating had
served in the US Army in India during the Second World War. By the time he
returned to the subcontinent a quarter of a century later, to some US officials
Keating seemed out of touch and out of sympathy with his host nation. Howard
Schaffer, who accumulated decades of experience as a foreign service officer
specialising in South Asia, briefed Keating before he left for India. Schaffer
surmised that Keating was less than thrilled with his posting and would have
preferred Nixon to have sent him to Israel, where he eventually served as
ambassador. Schaffer found Keating to be ‘vain’, with ‘a very well-developed
self-esteem and self-importance’, and someone who, ‘considered himself God’s
gift to women’. The ambassador’s misapprehension that his ‘masculine charms’
would impress Indira Gandhi, alarmed Schaffer. The relationship between
Gandhi and Keating would, as Schaffer feared, prove to be distant and
difficult.70
196 spying in south asia

In New Delhi, the director of the US Agency for International Development

(AID), Leonard Saccio, mirrored Schaffer’s concern at Nixon’s pick for ambas-
sador. Saccio concluded that Keating had ‘no know-how or understanding of
India’. The ambassador’s predecessor, Chester Bowles, had sought to correct
stereotypical Indian conceptions of brash and superior Americans. Bowles had
come in for ridicule in some quarters for riding a bicycle around the capital and
encouraging his family to wear traditional Indian clothing. Keating adopted
a different approach. ‘I want you people [US officials] to get dressed as
Americans’, the ambassador announced on his arrival at the Roosevelt
House embassy compound, ‘ . . . no sandals. And I don’t like beards.’71
Keating’s old-school conservatism quickly came into conflict with the political
realities of 1970s India. Shortly after his arrival, Keating blanched at a speech
that Gandhi gave in southern India which intimated that various US aid
agencies were employed by the CIA to conduct espionage. Uncomfortable
with the secret world of intelligence, at a meeting for senior embassy staff, the
disturbed ambassador asked an Agency officer, ‘What do I say if they [Indians]
say we have CIA?’ An awkward silence ensued while the local CIA station chief
pondered precisely how to respond to a question whose naivety stunned the
American officials present. ‘He [Keating] was adrift, you see’, a witness to the
encounter later reflected. ‘Nobody had briefed him, and he didn’t have sense
enough to realize everybody knows that we have [CIA] agents all over the
place. But in those days, you would cover here, cover there. It was a lot of
nonsense. But any rate, he had a real rough time.’72
Keating soon discovered how difficult it would be to overcome a suspicion
of the CIA that was deeply engrained in India’s political culture. In
February 1971, as the country prepared to go to the polls in India’s fifth
general election, well-known American Indophiles pitched up in the subcon-
tinent, including former ambassadors John Sherman Cooper, John Kenneth
Galbraith, and Chester Bowles. India’s communist press, abetted by broad-
casts beamed into South Asia by Radio Moscow, implied that the American
dignitaries’ appearance had a malign purpose. ‘There are grounds to believe
that the arrival of prominent American politicians is connected with new
plans to interfere in India’s internal affairs’, one Radio Moscow transmission
charged. ‘Public organisations in India are alarmed at these visits and calling
upon the public at large to be more vigilant.’73 Writing to Galbraith ahead of
his arrival, Keating cautioned his predecessor that he would undoubtedly
join a long list of American visitors whom, according to sections of the
Indian press, ‘have been here seeking to overthrow Mrs. Gandhi and install
in power Swatantra, Jana Sangh, and the Opposition Congress . . . ’. Joking
that he could not guarantee to provide the towering Galbraith with a super-
length bed, Keating added, ‘I will try to do so through the CIA which,
according to the Indian papers, is the most important arm of the United
States Government in India.’74
 the foreign hand 197

Before the end of the year, Keating had become disenchanted with, ‘misrep-
resentations and falsehoods published and republished in the Indian press
[about the CIA]’, and a ‘build-up of anti-U.S. passions’ that these stimulated.
British officials in the Indian capital sympathised with Keating’s frustration at
the upsurge in anti-American sentiment that had overshadowed his time in
India. It appeared that ‘no charge was too absurd and no imputation too
scandalous to be laid at the door of the United States’, Britain’s high commis-
sioner, Terence Garvey, reflected. Keating and his embassy were forced to
endure an ever more ‘puerile’ campaign waged by senior Congress party
figures, abetted by Indira Gandhi, ‘to hold the hated CIA responsible for all
of India’s ills’. India’s leadership, it seemed, had determined that the United
States, and the CIA, above all, were ideally suited to assume the role of ‘1972’s
whipping boy’.75 When the opportunity arose to leave India and return to the
United States to manage Nixon’s re-election campaign, a dispirited Keating
jumped at the chance.
On meeting his American colleague prior to his departure, Garvey found
Keating to be depressed and downbeat. The United States’ relationship with
India had been ‘pretty good’ at the beginning of his tenure, Keating lamented,
but had steadily deteriorated ever since. Back in 1969, Keating noted, polls
conducted by the Indian Institute of Public Opinion had ranked
America second, behind the Japanese, in terms of nationwide appeal. Recent
surveys had seen the Soviets top the Indian popularity stakes, while the United
States languished in last place. Keating had no doubt that the reversal in
America’s fortunes was attributable in large part to the ‘strongly prejudiced’
view of the United States held by Gandhi and her followers. ‘She [Gandhi] was
far too ready to entertain the fabricated and malevolent stories which the
Russians and their spokesman put out about the United States’, Keating
fulminated. ‘These people were always going on about the CIA.’ The ambassa-
dor’s exasperation was compounded by his certainty that the Soviet smear
stories targeting the Agency, to which Gandhi lent credence, were baseless.
Keating assured Garvey that, ‘He had told his government that this kind of
thing had to stop and he made it his business to know pretty well what the CIA
were up to . . . in connexion to India.’76
Keating’s vexation at the parlous state of Indo-US relations failed to prepare
him for the ire that Indira Gandhi directed towards the United States when he
paid a farewell call on the Indian premier. Keating had expected that his
valedictory interview with Gandhi would prove awkward. Over the course of
a thirty-minute audience with the Indian leader, the ambassador was, none-
theless, left dumbfounded by his host’s ‘emotional and distorted’ assault on the
Nixon administration and the purportedly heinous operations of the CIA.
‘Everything the U.S. does’, a rattled Keating was informed by Gandhi, ‘is
against India’. Forces inside the American government, she assured the
incredulous ambassador, were ‘working against us in India’; ‘cooperating
198 spying in south asia

with communist extremists’ to destabilise her administration; and encouraging

‘a lot of American professors . . . to engage in improper activities injurious to
India’. Keating’s insistence that the $10 billion dollars of aid which the United
States had allocated to her country in the past could hardly be considered ‘anti-
Indian’, was dismissed by Gandhi in a ‘manner [that] was arrogantly confident,
ready to believe the worst about the U.S., closed to any explanation, and
thoroughly obnoxious’. ‘Incredible!’ a stunned Keating cabled back to
Washington, ‘My successor has an even tougher task ahead than I anticipated.’77

‘The Paranoia Out Here is Thicker than the Dust’: Moynihan and South
Asia
Richard Nixon’s decision to send Daniel Patrick Moynihan to India as
Kenneth Keating’s replacement blindsided many Washington insiders.
Moynihan’s reputation had been forged in domestic policymaking, with
a focus on urban affairs, inner city deprivation, and race relations. A history
PhD, Moynihan kick-started his political career as Assistant Secretary of Labor
in the Kennedy administration, before transitioning to serve in the Nixon
White House as an advisor and counsellor to the President. He had no previous
diplomatic experience or expertise in international relations. Admired for his
intellectual range and inquisitive mind, Moynihan embraced difficult chal-
lenges with alacrity, and came to earn Nixon’s confidence. Intriguingly,
Moynihan had anticipated that Nixon would turn to him when, during the
president’s second term, the White House sought to normalise its relationship
with India. In 1972, in conversation with his wife, Liz, and against the back-
drop of George McGovern’s nomination as the Democrat’s presidential can-
didate, Moynihan predicted that, ‘Nixon will win [re-election] and he’ll ask me
to go to India.’78 Commentators applauded Nixon’s move as an unconven-
tional but inspired play. Writing in the New York Times, Tom Wicker observed
mischievously that, ‘ . . . sending this imaginative and energetic Irishman as
ambassador to India may be the best idea president Nixon has had;
Mrs. Gandhi had best look to her neutralism and her wine cellar.’79 In contrast,
Moynihan’s friends and colleagues were unsure whether his appointment
merited celebration or commiseration. In a letter sent to Moynihan in
December 1972, Theodore Barreaux, deputy director of the Securities and
Exchange Commission, noted simply, ‘India? Well, congratulations anyway.’80
In the subcontinent, Moynihan’s arrival was eagerly anticipated. The Times
of India predicted that he would carry, ‘the process of thawing Indo-American
relations one step further’. ‘As a leading liberal intellectual, first associated with
the Kennedy administration’, the Indian daily noted, ‘he [Moynihan] should
find no difficulty in making friends in New Delhi’.81 Columnists in the Indian
Express concurred. ‘It would be a fair presumption that President Nixon would
not have appointed Mr Moynihan’, the Express concluded, ‘if he was not
 the foreign hand 199

desirous of restoring some of the old warmth in the relations between the two
countries’.82 Other Indians evidenced less enthusiasm for Moynihan. The left-
leaning Indian daily, Blitz, pronounced scathingly that ‘Tricky Dick’ Nixon
could, ‘not have chosen a trickier person . . . as US Ambassador to India’.
Disparaging Moynihan’s reputation as a liberal scholar in sympathy with
India, the Indian newspaper labelled the ambassador designate as, ‘a double-
thinking, double-talking and double-crossing politician [who] has no place in
socialist, non-aligned India . . . ’.83
Moynihan characterised the troubled twenty-three-month period that he
spent as US ambassador in New Delhi as ‘the plague years’. From the outset, he
resolved to maintain a low public profile in India.84 In part, Moynihan’s
determination to work in the political shadows reflected his conviction that
an ambassador should implement policy rather than make it. Emphasising his
willingness to faithfully follow Washington’s line, whatever that might be,
Moynihan assured Kissinger that, ‘my fixed principle . . . has been to convey
what I have thought policy was, and not what I might have wished it were’.85 By
the time he had completed a year in post, Moynihan had delivered only one set
speech and made a total of three public appearances. ‘I have tried to keep my
head down out of a conviction that we [the United States] have previously been
far too much in evidence and are still thought, by Indians, to be omnipresent’,
the ambassador explained to a friend.86 ‘We are not here to tell them how to
run India’, Moynihan subsequently reflected, ‘That is all over.’87 Moynihan
appreciated that the failure of the United States to cultivate harmonious and
productive relations with India had, ‘been a central feature of Asian politics for
a quarter century, and that by 1972 things had got about as bad as they could
get’.88 In the circumstances, an approach based on quiet diplomacy appeared
a more likely means of burying political hatchets and placing bilateral relations
on a positive footing. Moynihan’s circumspection drew plaudits in India. In
April 1973, writing in the Hindu, the prominent Indian journalist, G. K. Reddy,
expressed satisfaction that, ‘for the first time in recent years, there is an
American ambassador in New Delhi who knows his mind, the limitations of
his brief . . . and the pitfalls of attempting to do too much in too short a time’.89
Equally, Moynihan was conscious of the toxic psychological prism of suspi-
cion, fear, and loathing through which many Indians had come to view the
United States. The noisy and intrinsically insecure covert operations mounted
by the CIA across the developing world after 1947, which from the 1960s
garnered headlines in the international media, left their mark in India. On
arrival, Moynihan echoed the sentiments articulated previously by Keating,
informing Kissinger that, ‘the paranoia out here is thicker than the dust’. ‘Stop
sending India poisoned wheat’, Moynihan quipped to Nixon’s national secur-
ity adviser, ‘the Prime Minister is on to you’.90 After three months in New
Delhi, Moynihan was happy enough to be ‘getting on very well’ with Indian
officials. The ambassador’s one concern was a ‘tremendous campaign
200 spying in south asia

mounting on the subject of U.S. spies’. The local press, Moynihan complained,
appeared set on ‘fingering one man after another’ as a CIA agent. Some Indian
government officers, the ambassador observed, had ‘gone along’ with the
espionage game, and ‘informally’ accused a member of the US consulate in
Calcutta, Peter Burleigh, of stoking civil unrest. Bridling at charges levelled
against an American who had ‘done nothing’, Moynihan informed Indian
officials that they were free to call for the expulsion of the diplomat, ‘but they
should understand that I will be going home on the same plane’.91
Moynihan had no personal axe to grind with the CIA. The ambassador liked
and respected the Agency’s station chief in New Delhi, a Dryden scholar and
fellow academic from Cornell. Yet, in practical terms, Moynihan found the
CIA to be moribund. Specifically, the Agency’s officers in India appeared
intellectually hidebound and ineffective. ‘[I]n a year of trying to get them
[CIA] to think about Indian Communism for me, they have not been able to
do so’, he griped. Furthermore, in a wider regional context, Moynihan
lamented that the CIA’s public profile and operational ineptitude had come
to represent serious and growing impediments to US diplomacy. In
January 1974, the ambassador observed that:
They [CIA] have just mercilessly fouled up in Thailand: with a student
government which had denounced the new American ambassador as a CIA
agent before he even arrived last month, some clown dreams up a letter to
the Prime Minister offering a cease fire from the Communist insurgents in
the North . . . Alas, the illiterate youth who was given the letter to mail
registered it with the home address of the agent who had given it to him.
Result, black wreaths hung on the Embassy gates, apologies, silences . . . .92
A few months later Moynihan was taken aback when Indian government
officials made public demands for the expulsion of US embassy personnel on
charges of espionage and, at the same time, privately requested closer Indo-
U.S. intelligence liaison. The head of the Indian prime minister’s secretariat,
Prithvi Nath Dhar, and the chief of India’s external intelligence service,
Rameshwar Nath Kao, quietly approached Moynihan to inquire whether
CIA director, William Colby, would consider visiting India. ‘The two [intelli-
gence] services had worked together so well, and on so many important
matters’, Kao assured Moynihan. ‘The training Indians had received in the
United States was of such quality. The Director of C.I.A. would be so welcome.’
Following his encounter with Kao and Dhar, a bemused Moynihan was left
pondering, ‘What is one to do?’ Having earlier pressed the State Department to
pull the CIA out of India altogether to keep the Agency off the front pages of
India’s newspapers, following his meeting with Dhar and Kao, Moynihan
rescinded his request. ‘They [the Indian government] want us’, the ambassador
advised Lawrence Eagleburger, Executive Assistant to Kissinger. ‘Possibly they
want even more of us.’93
 the foreign hand 201

Moynihan later confirmed that American intelligence collaboration with

India that focused on the People’s Republic of China was unaffected by Indo-
US tensions or Gandhi’s opportunistic public attacks on the CIA. ‘Suffice that
while Mrs. Gandhi was off making speeches about the ever present danger of
subversion, and her Foreign Secretary was assuring reporters that a hapless
young foreign service officer in our Calcutta consulate was indeed a dangerous
provocateur and spy’, Moynihan reflected ruefully, ‘I was meeting with the
director of the Indian intelligence service, and our subject was China.’ Having
‘been hard’ on the Agency during his time in India and, like Keating, having
conducted his own enquiries into its activities in the subcontinent, Moynihan
‘ended satisfied that they [CIA] had been up to very little, save those things
they did with the Indians’.94 Nevertheless, as Moynihan discovered, his efforts
to neutralise the impact of the CIA on bilateral relations, and recalibrate affairs
between two nations that, in the words of one contemporary observer, had
become ‘locked in a corrosive limbo’, proved elusive.95

Delhi is not Chile: The CIA and Subversion in the Global South
In September 1973, 10,000 miles from New Delhi, a bloody rightwing coup in
Chile toppled the socialist government of Salvador Allende. The CIA’s compli-
city in Allende’s death, and his administrations replacement by a repressive
military junta, led by Augusto Pinochet, sent shockwaves through India’s polit-
ical establishment. At the United Nations, Swaran Singh, India’s Minister for
External Affairs, denounced the coup and the assault on democracy in Chile.96
Horrified by the speed and brutality with which Allende was swept from power,
Indira Gandhi was concerned that she would be the next left-wing leader
targeted by Richard Nixon for regime change.97 The Indian premier privately
fretted that ‘big external forces’ would combine with ‘internal vested interests’ to
topple her government.98 The news from Chile reached Gandhi during a dinner
she was hosting for the Cuban leader, Fidel Castro. Given the many and varied
plots that the CIA had hatched to liquidate Castro, it was unsurprising that
discussion between the two leaders included the subject of American-
orchestrated extra-judicial killing. Following Gandhi’s assassination, in
October 1984, Castro contributed to a commemorative volume celebrating her
life. ‘At that dramatic moment [back in 1973]’, Castro wrote, ‘Indira Gandhi, in
a proof of her intimacy and confidence, said to me: ‘What they have done to
Allende they want to do to me also. There are people here, connected with the
same foreign forces that acted in Chile, who would like to eliminate me.’99
Gandhi expressed similar concerns to the Soviets, instructing India’s ambassa-
dor in Moscow to ensure that Leonid Brezhnev was made aware that the CIA
was ‘aiming at killing her’.100 An encounter, in New Delhi, in April 1974,
between Gandhi and Allende’s widow, Hortensia Bussi, one imagines, did little
to ameliorate the India’s premier’s sense of foreboding.101
202 spying in south asia

Figure 8.3 New Age, the newspaper of the Communist Party of India, lambasts the CIA
for its latest, purported, act of subversion in the subcontinent, 22 October 1972. FCO95/
1388, United Kingdom National Archives (UKNA).
 the foreign hand 203

The Indian leaders concern for her personal safety was well-founded. In 1975
alone, Gandhi was subject to several failed assassination attempts. A week before
the murder of Mujibur Rahman in neighbouring Bangladesh, a former Indian
army captain, Dhaja Ram Sangwan, was apprehended with a telescopic rifle and
was believed to have the Indian premier in his sights. On 2 October, another
attempt on Gandhi’s life was made at a prayer meeting held at Raj Ghat,
Mahatma Gandhi’s memorial, in New Delhi. In the midst of a commemoration
ceremony, a knife-wielding assassin breached Gandhi’s security perimeter and
was almost upon the prime minister before being intercepted by Shafi Qureshi,
India’s minister of state for railways. Earlier, in March, an assassin, wielding
a twelve-bore shotgun, was detained outside the Allahabad High Court where
Gandhi was testifying. No evidence emerged to link the assassination plots to
external actors, CIA or otherwise.102 At the time, senior Congress party figures
declared defiantly that events in South America would not be repeated in the
subcontinent. At a meeting of the All-India Congress Committee, one British
observer reported, ‘speaker after speaker condemned the CIA for putting the
Chilean Army up to dethroning Allende’.103 Gandhi had only recently returned
to India from the fourth Conference of Non-Aligned Countries in Algiers where,
in an address to the meetings plenary session, she noted Allende’s absence and
exclaimed, ‘We miss President Allende of Chile who is fighting a battle which is
common to us . . . Each of our countries has a surfeit of its own domestic
problems . . . To these are added the problems created by external forces.’104
Bellicose Indian leaders subsequently made a habit of reassuring the nation’s
public that they, ‘would not allow Delhi to be turned into Chile’.105 Gandhi too,
would frequently return in her public statements to the events of September 1973.
In an interview reproduced in the Congress newssheet, Socialist Weekly, nearly
two years after Allende’s downfall, Gandhi asked pointedly, ‘Have these several
Western countries not given full moral and material support to the most authori-
tarian regimes of Africa and Asia? Have we so soon forgotten what happened to
Chile?’106
Not all Indians were as convinced as Gandhi that her government was in the
CIA’s crosshairs. Writing in the Times of India, the journalist, Girilal Jain,
dismissed the notion that Allende’s ouster would have any bearing on the
politics of the subcontinent. ‘Whatever the nature of the evidence of CIA
involvement in the Chilean coup, one would be naïve to believe that it had
not taken a hand at all in toppling President Allende’, Jain opined. ‘But one
must be even more naïve to believe that the CIA could have brought down the
regime with the co-operation of the giant multi-national corporation like the
ITT and the so-called Chilean vested interests . . . ’. The chaotic economic
problems and civil disorder that had plagued Chile prior to the coup d’état,
Jain pointed out, had sealed Allende’s fate, and those conditions did not yet
prevail in India. ‘[I]t serves no useful purpose to draw a parallel between Chile
and India’, the journalist concluded. ‘There does not exist so fundamental
204 spying in south asia

a clash of interest between Washington and New Delhi as to warrant the

conclusion that the CIA is hell bent on bringing down Mrs. Gandhi’s
government.’107
The circumspection called for by some Indian commentators was under-
mined by an ill-judged American effort to convince the Indian premier that the
Nixon administration wished her no harm. During the course of an interview
with Gandhi, the US deputy chief of mission in New Delhi stated categorically,
‘that of course the US had not’ meddled in Chilean domestic politics.108
Gandhi later witnessed the CIA’s director, William Colby, testify before a US
congressional committee that, between 1970 and 1973, the Agency had, in fact,
spent more than $8 million in an effort to destabilise the Allende
government.109 Following Colby’s testimony, a disconsolate Moynihan com-
plained that, by handling the Chile question in such an inept manner,
Washington had done a first-rate job of shooting itself in the foot. On
10 September 1974, the ambassador grumbled to Kissinger that Gandhi was
now certain:
that we would be content to see her overthrown, as we have, to her mind,
been content to see others like her overthrown. She knows full well that we
have done our share and more of bloody and dishonourable deeds. This as
such is not her concern. She knows all too much of such matters. It is
precisely because she is not innocent, not squeamish, and not a moralizer
that her concern about American intentions is real and immediate. And of
course, the news from the United States, as printed in the Indian press,
repeatedly confirms her worst suspicions and genuine fears.110
Moynihan’s gloom deepened when the investigative journalist, Seymour
Hersh, obtained a copy of his message to Kissinger, and splashed the ambassa-
dor’s insights over the front page of the New York Times.111 Unable to resist
ribbing Moynihan, John Kenneth Galbraith sent him a note stating that, ‘your
observations on Chile were highly to the point. I hope the new diplomatic
practice of releasing telegrams on receipt did not cause you undue hardship
with the Prime Minister.’112 It was not only Gandhi that Moynihan had to
worry about. To Kissinger’s discomfort, the US Senate Committee on Foreign
Relations grilled the Secretary of State over the ‘very widespread publicity’
Moynihan’s cable had generated, and ‘the fact there was concern by the Prime
Minister of India that the CIA might become involved in some covert activity
in India’. In response, Kissinger quipped that Moynihan was, ‘given to flights
of eloquence . . . I think his dispatches, which are frequent and extensive, are
always a joy to read . . . Most of the time I get them first.’ More substantively,
the Committee were assured by Kissinger that he had, ‘told the Government of
India . . . that if they find any American official or any other American, over
whom we have any control at all, engaging in political activities in India, they
should let us have the name and he would be removed from India within
 the foreign hand 205

24 hours’. ‘We are not’, the Secretary of State emphasised pointedly, ‘involved
in the domestic politics of India in any manner . . . ’.113
Moynihan’s mood darkened further when Colby compounded Gandhi’s
anxiety that the CIA was out to get her by launching into a spirited public
defence of American covert action. On 13 September 1974, Colby addressed
the annual conference of the Fund for Peace, a Washington DC based non-
profit institution concerned with security and development in the Global
South. Speaking in the context of a post-Watergate political climate laden
with conspiracy and suspicion, Colby surprised his audience by making a case
for greater ‘openness’ and transparency on the part of the Central Intelligence
Agency. Alluding to CIA-led interventions stretching back to the late 1940s,
that had sought to effect regime change in Italy, Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia,
the Congo, and Cuba, amongst others, Colby acknowledged the Agency’s
record in, ‘assist[ing] America’s friends against her adversaries in their contest
for control of a foreign nation’s political direction’. Remarkably, America’s
spymaster went on to openly endorse the utility of CIA interference in the
internal affairs of independent sovereign states. ‘I . . . would think it mistaken
to deprive our nation of the possibility of some moderate covert action
response to a foreign problem’, Colby volunteered, ‘and leave us with nothing
between a diplomatic protest and sending in the Marines’.114
On 2 December, Colby underlined his views on covert action in an interview
published by US News & World Report. After being replayed in the Indian press,
the interview had the effect, in Moynihan’s words, of whipping up a ‘wholly
predictable storm’ in the subcontinent. ‘No one [should] have any illusions as to
how bad it has been’, Moynihan cabled back to Washington, ‘or that it [the CIA
issue] will go away’. The bemused ambassador was left ‘groping’ for an answer
as to why Colby had considered it wise to publicly debate the merits and morals
of CIA clandestine operations. The KGB, Moynihan noted dolefully, felt no
compulsion to air its dirty intelligence laundry in public. On 3 December, in
a bitter cable to Kissinger, Moynihan asked candidly, ‘It is out of the question
that some thought might be given in Washington to the effect in India of
statements such as the Director has made? It is that nobody knows? Or is it that
nobody cares?’115 In his private journal, Moynihan added that Colby had
behaved ‘incredibly’ and ‘criminally’ in talking out of turn to journalists.
‘What can he [Colby] think he is doing’, Moynihan raged, ‘Is there nothing to
which bureaucracy will not lead a man.’116
Daniel Patrick Moynihan departed from India, in January 1975, in a state of
despondency. Two years earlier, the ambassador had been attracted to the
subcontinent by the formidable challenge of recalibrating the troubled relation-
ship between America and India, a land in which, he declared, Asian ‘liberty
resides’. An essential element in Moynihan’s plan to reinvigorate Indo-US rela-
tions was predicated on quiet diplomacy. The United States had, in his estima-
tion, alienated opinion within the developing world through a combination of
206 spying in south asia

overbearing rhetoric and the pursuit of an unnecessarily interventionist foreign

policy. ‘I have not overburdened either the Indian or American pubic with
commentary or advice’, Moynihan stated proudly on the occasion of his last
public appearance in India. ‘I have spoken in public only four times in two years,
and two of these occasions took place a fortnight ago. I have not until this
moment given a press conference.’ Moynihan was acutely aware, however, that
his diplomatic taciturnity had been compromised by a toxic legacy of CIA
misdemeanours, past and present. ‘Both the United States and India have far
closer and more cooperative relations with the totalitarian powers of the world,
than we have with one another’, a dispirited Moynihan reflected as he prepared to
leave New Delhi. ‘Indeed, it is from one another that we are increasingly
isolated.’117

No Nearer Normalisation: The CIA Conundrum

Indira Gandhi’s repeated assertion that the malevolent hand of the CIA lay
behind most of India’s problems, whether genuinely held or not, undermined
Washington’s efforts to normalise Indo-US relations for much of the latter
Cold War period. Despite the assurances provided to Gandhi by Moynihan,
and his successor, Bill Saxbe, that they would resign if evidence emerged of
CIA interference in Indian domestic affairs, Indian politicians and sections of
the country’s media continued to accuse the CIA of acts of subversion
throughout the 1970s, and beyond.118 For his part, Saxbe, a former attorney
general and Republican senator from Ohio, saw little reason to depart from the
policy of quiet diplomacy practiced by Moynihan. Noted for his candour and
‘off-beat’ character, Saxbe introduced himself to his staff in New Delhi by
taking to the stage during an embassy variety show wearing judicial robes, and
singing an aria from Fiorello, a popular musical about New York City mayor,
Fiorello LaGuardia. Fond of whiling away days at the Delhi Golf Club, Saxbe
favoured meetings with Indian businessmen over journalists and politicians. If
the Indian government wanted to improve relations with the United States,
Saxbe was reported to have stated, ‘They know where I am.’ Having asserted
what had become, by now, a standard and tired public refrain on the part of
American ambassadors that, ‘there is no agency of the U.S. government that is
in any way interfering in India’, Saxbe was content to sit back and wait for
Indira Gandhi’s government to, ‘decide the nature of the relationship that they
want with Washington’. On being asked by an Indian newspaper editor why
Saxbe had not initiated contact with the subcontinent’s media, the US embassy
press office responded curtly that the ambassador, ‘had little to say, on or off
the record’.119 On the rare occasions that Saxbe did feel inclined to comment
on Indo-US affairs, he made it abundantly clear that an improvement in
relations, ‘just cannot take place while the Prime Minister and other high
Indian leaders continue to poke away at the US’.120
 the foreign hand 207

Having disregarded numerous private warnings from the State Department

to desist from publicly criticising the CIA’s alleged activities in the subcontin-
ent, the Ford administration eventually lost patience with Gandhi and decided
to punish New Delhi. In Washington, India’s ambassador, Triloki Nath Kaul,
was frozen out by the White House and denied access to Ford and Kissinger. In
January 1976, the State Department ratcheted up pressure on Gandhi by
announcing the curtailment of a range of joint Indo-US scientific and educa-
tional programmes, and the postponement plans to resume developmental
assistance to India, which had been halted back in 1971 during the Indo-
Pakistan War. Given India’s continuing financial problems, the latter measure
was expected to hit Gandhi’s government particularly hard. Between 1965 and
1971, India had received $4.2 billion in American economic aid, $1.5 billion of
which had been appropriated during the early years of the Nixon administra-
tion. In rationalising the United States’ punitive policy to India’s Foreign
Minister, Y. B. Chavan, Saxbe confirmed that the United States had simply
run out of road when it came to Gandhi and her government. ‘[We have]
reach[ed] a point’, Saxbe informed Chavan, ‘at which we don’t feel can
continue to cooperate if [these] attacks [on the CIA] continue. We have said
repeatedly that if the G[overnment] O[f] I[ndia] has any evidence of US
interference we will act to eliminate it. I would resign.’121 Reaffirming the
Ford Administration’s resolve, Brazil Brown, India desk officer at the State
Department, confirmed to British officials that a policy review conducted on
US-Indian relations had concluded, ‘that there was probably no prospect of
sustaining smooth, friendly relations with India so long as the suspicious Mrs
Gandhi remained in charge’.122
The State Department’s analysis was prescient. For the remainder of her life,
Indira Gandhi informed sceptical foreign interlocuters that the CIA was up to
no good in India. On meeting Denis Greenhill, a former head of the British
diplomatic service, in New Delhi, in September 1980, the seasoned official was
taken aback by Gandhi’s insistence that the CIA was passing tens of millions of
dollars through Thailand to subvert Indian rule in Assam. When Greenhill
enquired how her government could be so sure the CIA was behind unrest in
northeastern India, Gandhi astonished the British mandarin by responding
that the ‘trouble makers’ in Assam had ‘a mastery of the English language
which was certainly not justified by their own capabilities’.123 Likewise, the
persistence of insinuations made by Gandhi, in public and private, that the
Agency was supporting a successionist movement in the western Indian state
of Punjab, maddened senior officials within the Reagan administration,
including the vice president and one time CIA director, George H. W. Bush.124
In truth, the scope and effectiveness of CIA covert operations in India had
declined after the late 1960s. Symptomatically, in 1975, British diplomats in
New Delhi got wind of a spat between consular officers in the US embassy and
their CIA colleagues over the role played by Gandhi’s son, Sanjay, in the State
208 spying in south asia

of Emergency that had been declared earlier that year. A relative, Kuldip
Narang, was believed to have supplied Sanjay Gandhi with a blueprint for
the censorship guidelines and administrative rules used during the State of
Emergency, and which were based on martial laws enacted by the Marcos
regime in the Philippines. Sanjay Gandhi admired Marcos’s authoritarian
regime and looked to it for inspiration. Not a noted a bibliophile, one of the
few books that occupied Sanjay’s bookshelf was Democratic Revolution in the
Philippines by Ferdinand Marcos. Marcos had presented the book to Indira
Gandhi as gift. A copy of the specific martial law ordnances used by Marcos
was passed to Narang by contacts that he maintained in the US Embassy in
New Delhi.125 Agency officers subsequently employed a highly questionable
source to discredit their own embassy’s political reporting of the Emergency.
‘It strikes me as quite astonishing that the CIA should make use of this sort of
material’, one British official observed. ‘After all, their resources are legendary
(if not mythological). To use the unattributed opinion of an unidentified
diplomat, quoted at second-hand by a non-specialist journalist, to cast doubt
on a US Embassy report, strikes me as remarkably shoddy work.’126 It is salient,
in this context, that the CIA failed to anticipate nuclear tests conducted by
India in 1974 and 1998. Towards the end of the Cold War, the Agency had
become anything but the all-seeing and all-powerful force in South Asia that its
detractors claimed.127
Indira Gandhi’s death, in November 1984, at the hands of her Sikh body-
guards and not, as she had feared, due of the machinations of the CIA, failed to
free her from the Agency’s embrace. Disinclined to let a good disinformation
opportunity pass them by, the Soviets ensured the world was made aware that,
in Moscow’s view, the CIA had been culpable for Gandhi’s demise. The ‘black
army of the American knights of the cloak and dagger’, or the Agency, in Soviet
parlance, had after all, TASS trumpeted, been linked to a litany of political
assassinations, from Patrice Lumumba in the Congo to Maurice Bishop in
Grenada.128 It is arguable whether Gandhi would have given credence to
indignant denials issued by the State Department, and which lambasted the
Soviets for indulging in ‘disgusting’ and demonstrably false assertions, ‘that the
US, and specifically the CIA, were involved in, or inspired, this action of
political terrorism’.129 Perhaps the fallen Indian premier would have taken
some solace from the knowledge that, with the Agency’s assistance, witting or
otherwise, she remained capable of disrupting superpower relations.
 9

Battle of the Books: Daniel Patrick Moynihan,

Seymour Hersh, and India’s CIA ‘Agents’

In November 1978, Daniel Patrick Moynihan released a memoir, A Dangerous

Place.1 Controversially, the book included revelations about historic CIA
activity in India. Six months previously, the investigate journalist, Howard
Kohn, had published an exposé, in Outside magazine, that laid bare details of
‘Operation Hat’, the joint covert endeavour that the Agency had conducted
with India’s Intelligence Bureau, in the 1960s.2 The following year, the Pulitzer
Prize-winning author, Thomas Powers, brought out The Man Who Kept the
Secrets, a biography of former CIA director, Richard Helms. Indian opinion
was outraged by the assertion in Powers’ book, first aired in the American press
back in 1971, that the CIA had run an agent inside Indira Gandhi’s cabinet
during that years’ war between India and Pakistan.3 All three publications
appeared at a time when Gandhi was out of office, having been defeated at the
polls by a Janata coalition led by Morarji Desai, a former Congress Party
stalwart. To the right of Gandhi politically, and notable for his pro-business
outlook and friendly disposition towards the United States, Desai hoped to
reset strained Indo-US relations. By lobbing literary hand grenades into what
one Western official described as a ‘cauldron of Indian politics [that] never
ceases to seethe’, Moynihan, Kohn, and Powers, invigorated Indian animus for
the CIA and, in the process, complicated Desai’s efforts to recalibrate New
Delhi’s relationship with Washington.4 Moreover, the subsequent appearance
of a vituperative assault on Henry Kissinger penned by the American investi-
gative journalist, Seymour Hersh, raised additional uncomfortable questions
about CIA operations in India. Hersh’s book, The Price of Power, named
Morarji Desai as the CIA asset in the Indian cabinet in 1971.5 The incendiary
accusation levelled by Hersh prompted Desai to sue the journalist for defam-
ation in an American court. The legal case developed into a media cause célèbre
as the pedestrian wheels of US civil justice ground slowly to a conclusion
during the 1980s. The press in India and the United States ensured that the
defamation case’s more dramatic moments received blanket coverage. At one
stage, journalists were treated to the spectacle of a notably reluctant Kissinger,
accompanied by two bodyguards, taking the stand in a Chicago courtroom
having been subpoenaed as a witness by Desai’s legal team.6 The Hersh–Desai
libel case represented the apogee of a drawn out and destabilising drama in

209
210 spying in south asia

Indo-US relations that, towards the end of the Cold War, saw the CIA’s
interventions in the subcontinent pilloried in a slew of memoirs, books, and
articles. The corrosive impact of such publications on the Agency’s reputation
saw competing state and non-state actors, in India and the United States,
embark upon opposing campaigns designed to amplify and to suppress unoffi-
cial accounts of CIA history. Paradoxically, as the Cold War limped to
a denouement, and Agency operations in India were scaled back, Langley’s
public profile in South Asia mushroomed. Caught up in a media frenzy, the
CIA found itself assailed by detractors determined to exploit and to magnify
the Agency’s malignant reputation in South Asia.

Blowback: Secret Missions and Perilous Publications

On 17 April 1978, India’s prime minister, Morarji Desai rose to speak in the
Lok Sabha. Desai began his address by conceding that Indians were ‘quite
understandably exercised’ by press reports that, a decade earlier, the United
States had conducted a clandestine operation to install a nuclear-powered
device on the second-highest peak in the Indian Himalayas, Nanda Devi. To
audible gasps from packed parliamentary benches, Desai confirmed that
enquires made by the governments of India and the United States had deter-
mined that the Nanda Devi operation was sanctioned at the highest levels in
Washington and New Delhi. The joint Indo-American mission, India’s prem-
ier revealed, was launched to obtain information on China’s long-range missile
capabilities. Desai reminded fellow MPs of the ‘critical situation’ that India had
faced following its humiliation in the Sino-Indian border war. In the national
climate of ‘concern, apprehension and anxiety’ that had prevailed at that time,
he added, India’s leaders felt compelled to take ‘precautionary’ action to better
‘identify the various threats’ the country faced from its enemies. The genesis of
the covert operation, Desai disclosed, stretched back to the early part of 1964,
and it had come to involve three prime ministers, Jawaharlal Nehru, Lal
Bahadur Shastri, and Indira Gandhi. Calling for understanding rather than
condemnation, India’s premier nevertheless took the opportunity to drive
home the serious implications, both political and environmental, of
Operation Hat. Unable to resist making a barbed moral point about his
personal objection to nuclear arms, Desai noted, ‘Why do I say that I have
nothing to do with atomic weapons and nothing to do with making atomic
weapons? It is because of these hazards.’ More significantly, an intervention by
the Janata government’s minister for External Affairs, Atal Bihari Vajpayee,
disregarded Desai’s admonition to avoid apportioning blame. Referring to
press interviews that he had given prior to the debate, Vajpayee reiterated
that he regarded the Nanda Devi revelation as a nothing less than a ‘bombshell,
because Mrs. Gandhi, who has been accusing America and the CIA and
accusing us [Janata] also of joining hands with America before and during
 battle of the books 211

Figure 9.1 Morarji Desai, Indian prime minister (1977–1979). Jacob Sutton / Gammo-
Rapho / Getty Images.

the Emergency, herself joined hands with America when the situation
demanded’.7
Howard Kohn, the journalist behind the Nanda Devi story, came to national
prominence in the United States in March 1975, when he published a story in
Rolling Stone on the Karen Silkwood case. Silkwood was killed in an automo-
bile accident while travelling to meet a reporter from the New York Times. She
had planned to hand over documents that laid bare shoddy safety practices at
a nuclear fuel fabrication site where she worked in Cimarron City, Oklahoma.
Almost exactly three years later, in April 1978, Kohn’s second scoop involving
possible plutonium contamination, entitled, ‘The Nanda Devi Caper’, sent
shock waves through the corridors of power in Washington and New Delhi.
Kohn’s article contained several factual inaccuracies. The Central Bureau of
Investigation was highlighted as the Indian agency that oversaw the Nanda
Devi operation, when it had been coordinated by the Intelligence Bureau. The
piece in Outside also claimed that Gandhi had been deliberately kept in the
dark by India’s intelligence services at the behest of the CIA who, Kohn alleged,
retained ‘absolute authority over the project’.8 Although impossible to dis-
prove while the archives of Indian’s intelligence services remained closed, the
notion that the Intelligence Bureau would ‘go rogue’ and conduct a major
domestic covert operation, in collaboration with the CIA, and absent political
approval, appears fanciful. Such a scenario was directly and explicitly contra-
dicted by Morarji Desai in his statement to the Indian parliament. The
substance of Kohn’s account, however, was correct. India had undertaken
a highly secret joint mission with the CIA to place nuclear-powered
212 spying in south asia

monitoring devices in the Himalayas; one device had been lost on Nanda Devi;
and it did pose an ongoing environmental threat.
In the United States, Outside had barely hit the newsstands when letters
from concerned members of Congress landed on President Jimmy Carter’s
desk. Writing to Carter on 12 April, the liberal Democrat, John Dingell,
Representative for Michigan’s 16th congressional district, and Richard
Ottinger, Representative for New York’s 24th district, expressed alarm that
Kohn’s article, ‘raises serious allegations about a CIA operation in India during
the 1960s – apparently carried out without the knowledge of the Indian
Government’. ‘If the [Kohn] article is in fact accurate’, Carter was urged by
his fellow Democrats, ‘we strongly urge that the Nation take whatever steps
may be necessary to resolve this serious and embarrassing situation’.9 At the
same time, Dingell and Ottinger appealed to Nani Palkhivala, India’s ambas-
sador in Washington, to share any information with them that New Delhi
possessed on the Nanda Devi episode.10 With American national broadcasters,
including NBC’s iconic Today Show, having picked up the Nanda Devi story,
and with it splashed prominently over the front pages of the international
press, Carter was left in no doubt that Kohn’s revelations had the potential to
wreck his administration’s relationship with India.11
At ten o’clock the following morning, Carter’s ambassador to India, Robert
Goheen, found himself sitting opposite Indian’s foreign secretary, Jagat Singh
Mehta, in the Ministry of External Affairs, in the central secretariat’s South
Block, atop Raisina Hill, in the heart of New Delhi. India’s most senior
diplomat had summoned Goheen in the hope that the American ambassador
would be able to shed light on an article that had appeared in that morning’s
Indian Express. Under the headline, ‘CIA planted device may pollute Ganga’,
the Indian Express story rehashed a condensed version of Kohn’s copy. Getting
straight to the point, Mehta informed Goheen, ‘that the article was bound to
cause very grave concern in the Indian Government, Parliament and elsewhere
and that there could well be a furore in Parliament’. ‘It was, therefore, neces-
sary’, the foreign secretary emphasised, ‘to know what the truth was as early as
possible’. Goheen confirmed that the State Department were aware that the
story had appeared in a ‘radical left magazine’ in the United States and were
investigating its accuracy as a matter of urgency. Should the story prove true,
Mehta stressed, public opinion in India would demand to know if any leakage
of radioactive material into the Ganges headwaters had occurred and, if not,
what measures could be taken to ensure that the monitoring device remained
secure and presented no risk of future contamination. Until such assurances
were forthcoming, Goheen was advised, ‘there was bound to be a great deal of
alarm all over the country’. Responding flippantly that ‘one can hardly believe
everything that newspapers said’, the ambassador left a perplexed Mehta and
rushed back to his embassy in search of further instructions from
Washington.12
 battle of the books 213

Mehta’s next meeting that day was with Shiv Narain Mathur, director of the
Intelligence Bureau. The DIB was instructed by Mehta to look into the
background of the Nanda Devi operation with all possible speed. ‘In view of
the extremely sensitive and indeed explosive nature of the allegations made in
the article’, Mehta underlined to Mathur, ‘I would be grateful if you could
ascertain whatever details are possible, including the alleged involvement of
our own intelligence agencies in the affair.’13 At the same time, Indian officials
moved to head off rising public anger in the subcontinent by briefing the press
that Goheen had met with Mehta and had been left in no doubt that the Nanda
Dev issue was of, ‘great concern to the Indian government, the Indian parlia-
ment and the Indian people’. It was regrettable, Vajpayee confirmed to one
journalist that, if true, the revelations surrounding collaborative IB-CIA oper-
ations in the Himalayas would damage US-Indian relations, which had under-
gone something of a renaissance under Desai and Carter. In an unusually
caustic editorial, the nation’s newspaper of record, the Times of India, largely
absolved the country’s former leaders of any blame and directed its ire squarely
at the CIA. ‘If it [the Nanda Devi operation] is so, no words can be too strong to
condemn the CIA’, the Times of India opined. ‘It [CIA] has been guilty of
a most dastardly act which can play havoc with the lives of millions of people
for no one knows how long.’14 Approached for his view of the unfolding drama
in India, CIA director, Stansfield Turner, responded with a curt, ‘no
comment’.15
Back in Washington, Carter was informed by national security aides that
press stories covering the CIA’s involvement in placing two nuclear-powered
monitoring devices in the Indian Himalayas were ‘correct in major respects’.
In the 1960s, an American plutonium-powered device placed on Nanda Devi
to eavesdrop on the Chinese had been lost in an avalanche while being hauled
into position. A second unit, positioned on an adjacent peak, Nanda Kot,
operated successfully for several years before it was removed. The Indian
government, Carter was assured, had known of, and approved, the CIA
operation. The fact that Desai’s Janata government had been blindsided by
the publication of Kohn’s expose was deemed unfortunate. India’s intelligence
services and bureaucracy had, however, been complicit, the president was
reminded by US officials, both in facilitating the operation and keeping it
secret. Privately, the State Department sought to soothe Indian concerns by
passing on to New Delhi the findings of a 1967 study conducted by the Atomic
Energy Commission. This had concluded that there were no obvious environ-
mental dangers associated with the loss of the Nanda Devi device, which
contained two to three pounds of plutonium-238. Publicly, Foggy Bottom
adopted its standard position of not commenting on intelligence related
matters.16 Desai subsequently announced the establishment of an Indian
scientific committee to confirm whether radioactive contamination had
occurred as a result of the Nanda Devi mishap. Water samples were
214 spying in south asia

subsequently taken from the surrounding area over a number of years and
flown for analysis to India’s Atomic Research Centre at Trombay, in Bombay’s
eastern suburbs. To the Indian government’s intense relief, no evidence of
contamination was uncovered.17
The decision taken by Desai to come clean with India’s public in his address
to parliament on 17 April was welcomed by Robert Goheen. Advising
Washington that the reaction to Desai’s exercise in candour had been broadly
positive, the American ambassador applauded India’s premier for having,
‘effectively defused what was becoming an increasingly emotional issue here
[India] and one that might have had long-lasting reverberations’. The State
Department had urged the Indian government not to comment on the Nanda
Devi story. In ignoring the Carter administration counsel, Goheen conceded
that Desai had made the correct call. ‘[T]he manner in which he [Desai]
presented the matter not only was judicious and sound in the context of
internal Indian politics’, the ambassador judged, ‘but . . . it also projects and
reinforces the attitudes of cooperativeness and credibility which he seeks to
have characterize the relationship between his government and ours’.
Crucially, from Washington’s perspective, Desai refrained from employing
the CIA as a convenient domestic scapegoat once an intelligence operation
that had been sanctioned by several of his predecessors became known. Carter
might, Goheen suggested, wish to personally congratulate Desai on ‘the judi-
cious and effective’ way that the Indian premier had handled an awkward
diplomatic problem. Desai’s deft political footwork, Goheen emphasised, had
‘made it [the Nanda Devi episode] work to build a stronger acceptance of close
Indo-U.S. relations when it might have been instead a cause of festering
distrust’.18
The Indian embassy in Washington concurred with Goheen’s assess-
ment, noting with satisfaction that coverage of Desai’s statement in the
American media had dwelt on the ‘great care’ that India’s prime minister
had taken to avoid offending the United States. Writing in the Baltimore
Sun, Fran Sabarwal informed the newspapers readers how, ‘Opposition
members of [India’s] parliament who were hoping to cash in on CIA
involvement to embarrass the [Desai] government were dumbfounded as
Mr. Desai told them of the collaboration [between India and the United
States].’19 Likewise, the Chicago Tribune, a publication noted for its long-
standing hostility to Indian governments and their adherence to Cold War
non-alignment, heaped praise on Desai for refusing to hang the CIA out to
dry. In taking early and decisive action to address the Nanda Devi revela-
tions in a direct, and, in respect of a sensitive covert intelligence oper-
ation, unusually candid manner, Desai extracted the political sting from
an incident that had threatened to undercut his own administration and
compromise Indo-US relations.
 battle of the books 215

‘A Serious Affair’: A Dangerous Place and the Covert Funding of Indian

Politics
Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s life and work could hardly have been more eclectic.
From humble origins in poverty-stricken Oklahoma, via Manhattan’s pre-war
Hell’s Kitchen ghetto, Ivy League academia, service in four presidential admin-
istrations, from John F. Kennedy to Gerald Ford, and election as US Senator
for New York, Moynihan acquired a reputation as a hard-driving polymath. In
1973, Richard Nixon’s unexpected decision to appoint Moynihan as America’s
ambassador to India was, in a sense, entirely appropriate. It was while serving
in India, that Moynihan acquired what would become a lifelong scepticism of
the utility of intelligence agencies and the merits of state secrecy.20 Following
his elevation to the Senate, in 1977, Moynihan became known for his criticism
of the CIA. In April 1984, he stood down as vice chairman of the Senate
Intelligence Committee in protest at the CIA’s failure to ‘properly’ consult
Congress on the mining of Nicaraguan harbours.21 Having received a personal
apology from CIA Director, William ‘Bill’ Casey, Moynihan resumed his post
on the Intelligence Committee. Relations between the Senator and the Agency,
however, remained uneasy. Back in the 1970s, after returning from India,
Moynihan had disparaged inflated CIA estimates of Soviet power, dismissing
as nonsense dire warnings from Langley that the United States risked being left
behind by Moscow’s planned economy.22 As ‘the quintessential liberal anti-
Communist’, Moynihan continued to use his political authority to challenge
the institutional guardians of America’s secret world.23 In May 1991, in an op-
ed written for the New York Times, Moynihan announced his intention to
legislate for the abolition of the CIA, and to transfer of the Agency’s intelli-
gence functions to the State Department.24 Four year later, Moynihan renewed
his call for the Agency to be scrapped. ‘Secrecy is a disease’, he proclaimed. ‘It
causes hardening of the arteries of the mind. It hinders true scholarship and
hides mistakes . . . The State Department must function as the primary agency
in formulating and conducting foreign policy.’25 Such radical prescriptions for
intelligence reform unnerved conservative legislators, and Moynihan’s pro-
posed reforms stalled.
Between January 1995 and December 1996, Moynihan chaired a bipartisan
commission on reducing government secrecy. This undertook a wide-ranging
review of the US intelligence community. The commission’s findings, which
appeared early in 1997, were brought to a wider public audience the
following year with the publication of Moynihan’s book, Secrecy: The
American Experience. In Secrecy, Moynihan depicted the CIA as an informa-
tion-gathering organisation that had lost its way and succumbed to the lure of
audacious, but often disastrous, covert operations. Secrecy confirmed that the
genesis of Moynihan’s interest in the interplay between intelligence, secrecy,
and diplomacy, were not distilled in the cool, marble chambers of Capitol Hill,
216 spying in south asia

but in the fierce political heat of India.26 The two years he spent in New Delhi
as US ambassador, between February 1973 and January 1975, proved crucial in
shaping Moynihan’s attitudes, actions, and utterances in respect of the CIA. He
had become exasperated in India by the local CIA station chiefs’ habit of
rushing excitedly into his office with special folders containing supposedly top-
secret intelligence gleaned from sources inside the Indian government.
Invariably, these turned out to be inaccurate or misleading. In an Indian
context, as one historian of the Agency has noted, ‘it was clear to him
[Moynihan] that the CIA was missing a great deal’.27 Shortly after leaving
India, the debilitating impact of seemingly endless CIA scandals in the sub-
continent was evident in Moynihan’s thinking. In March 1975, writing in
Commentary magazine, he made the case for placing less reliance on the
dubious merits of secret operations, and more emphasis on open and honest
dialogue with the United States’ global partners. Anticipating the furore that
A Dangerous Place would generate in India, Moynihan argued that American
representatives overseas, ‘should come to be feared in international forums for
the truths he might tell’.28
One truth that Moynihan felt compelled to share in A Dangerous Place was
that, while ambassador in New Delhi, he had ordered an enquiry into the
history of CIA operations in India. Having resolved to establish ‘just what we
[America] had been up to’, Moynihan claimed that over a period stretching
back three decades, the CIA had twice, but only twice, interfered directly in
India’s domestic affairs by covertly channelling money to political parties. On
both occasions, Moynihan claimed, once in the western Indian state of Kerala,
and once in the eastern province of West Bengal, CIA funds had been given to
the ruling Congress Party. In one instance, he added, Agency funds had been
accepted personally by Indira Gandhi. Moynihan went on to speculate that the
CIA’s record of covert political funding may have fuelled Gandhi’s paranoiac
attitude towards the Agency when, on his watch, ‘we were no longer giving any
money to her’. Stark discrepancies between the marginal electoral benefit
attributed to covert interference in India’s internal affairs, and the considerable
political risks such interventions carried, Moynihan argued, suggested that this
was ‘not a practice to be encouraged’.29 In a first, and unpublished draft, of
A Dangerous Place, Moynihan went further and suggested that he had ‘been
hard on the C.I.A.’ in demanding a candid appraisal of ‘what they [CIA] had
really been up to in India’. The response, which Moynihan accepted as accur-
ate, was not that much. Aside from clandestine payments made to Gandhi’s
Congress Party, the Agency had collaborated with Indian intelligence agencies
in joint operations against China. The latter were not mentioned in
A Dangerous Place but would, Moynihan speculated presciently, ‘no doubt
one day . . . make a great scandal in the Indian press’.30
In India, the appearance of A Dangerous Place was met with furious rebut-
tals from Gandhi and her supporters. The former Indian premier denied ever
 battle of the books 217

receiving money from the US government, and decried Moynihan’s accusa-

tions as ‘baseless’, ‘mischievous’, and ‘part of a conspiracy to defame me’.
When pressed for further comment, Gandhi snapped angrily at reporters,
‘All lies. They [Washington] are against me.’ Kamlapati Tripathi, leader of
Gandhi’s Congress (I) party in the Rajya Sabha, or upper house of India’s
parliament, characterised Moynihan’s claims as ‘shocking’, ‘absurd’, and
a ‘blatant lie’ intended to damage Gandhi. ‘Even making allowances for the
fact that Mr Moynihan is a known “rabid Zionist” and has a grievance against
Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, Mrs Indira Gandhi, and the Indian National
Congress for their consistent support to the just Arab cause’, Tripathi stated,
‘one would have expected of him [Moynihan] not to stoop to falsehood’.31
Tripathi’s Congress (I) counterpart in the Lok Sabha, Chembakassery Mathai
(C. M.) Stephen, held a press conference in which he denounced Moynihan’s
book as an ‘outrageous interference’ in India’s affairs and ‘part of a CIA
conspiracy’. The former ambassador, Stephen asserted, was a ‘CIA agent’
and a Zionist who hated India for its pro-Arab policies. If the US Embassy in
New Delhi did not immediately disassociate itself from Moynihan’s smear,
Stephen fulminated, ‘it deserves to be closed’.32
Outside the capital, in Jaipur, in northwestern India, pictures of Jimmy
Carter were publicly set on fire in protest at what Congress supporters charac-
terised as the American government’s complicity in an unwarranted attack on
Gandhi’s integrity. In the east, exercised members of South Calcutta’s
Congress youth organisation marched on the local US consulate and delivered
a letter of protest addressed to Carter. Moynihan, the letter claimed, had
indulged in an ‘ugly’ political attack on Gandhi that ‘may ultimately create
severe bitterness between the people of these two countries’. India’s left-wing
tabloid press, led by lurid publications such as Wave and Blitz, ran banner
headlines proclaiming, ‘Moynihan a Zionist, Racist Scorpion’, and ‘Liar
Moynihan’s Accusations are a Cover-Up for Real CIA Lobby’. One indignant
Indian citizen, Mohinder Singh, saw fit to file a defamation case in the Indian
courts against Moynihan on Gandhi’s behalf.33 The strength of the backlash
against Moynihan from within the Congress Party was reflective, one leading
Indian newspaper suggested, of the ‘embarrassment’ its members felt that,
‘Mrs Gandhi had been making the same allegation – that the CIA financed all
Opposition parties when she was the Prime Minister.’34 Seizing on Gandhi’s
apparent hypocrisy, Madhukar Dattatraya (Balasaheb) Deoras, head of the
RSS, noted that Gandhi had accused her opponents of being on the CIA’s
payroll and had challenged them to prove otherwise. ‘Now that the US Senator
and former Ambassador to India, Mr Daniel Moynihan, has disclosed that CIA
money was given to her [Gandhi]’, Deoras maintained, ‘she should abide by
her own views’.35
Indian commentators agreed that Moynihan’s intervention had given
Gandhi’s opponents a potent line of attack at a point when the former premier
218 spying in south asia

was politically vulnerable. Gandhi was still reeling from a public backlash that
accompanied her imposition of a twenty-one-month State of Emergency,
between June 1975 and March 1977, and a subsequent electoral rout.
‘Gandhi’s stock is low’, one prominent Indian daily observed, ‘and
Moynihan’s charges have sent it lower’.36 Uncomfortably for Gandhi, India’s
mainstream press proved less willing than the Congress Party faithful to
discount Moynihan’s claims. In an editorial entitled, ‘A Serious Affair’, the
respected Calcutta newspaper, The Statesman, insisted that, ‘ . . . the allegation
cannot be dismissed as a casual remark or a bit of political gossip . . . Unless
Washington comes out with an official explanation, Indians will find it difficult
to believe that the practice of [America] financing political parties has really
ended.’37 Figures from within the ruling Janata Party, including its general-
secretary, Madhu Limaye, began to call for the disclosure of government
records relating to foreign funding of the nation’s political parties. Looking
back to controversies surrounding external intervention in the Indian general
election of 1967, Limaye urged that a Central Bureau of Investigation report
completed at the time was made public. ‘We should find out whether the then
government of India was aware of the “financial hand out” to Mrs Indira
Gandhi . . . by the U.S. government’, Limaye declared.38 One Congress (I) MP
threatened to retaliate if attempts were made to ‘unmask’ his colleagues as CIA
agents, and to use parliamentary privilege to name Janata members whose
relationships with the Agency had been exposed in Inside the Company: CIA
Diary, a work published by the former CIA officer, turned Agency critic, Philip
Agee.39 With MPs from both sides of the Lok Sabha seemingly compromised
by links to the CIA, Limaye’s appeal for transparency was met with an
awkward official silence.
The British High Commission in India kept a close watch on the political
drama surrounding A Dangerous Place. Its officials noted that Gandhi had ‘not
very convincingly’ denied receiving covert funds from the United States while
president of the Congress Party. In citing Washington’s satisfaction at her
electoral defeat in 1977 as evidence that she could not have benefited from CIA
funds, the British observed that Gandhi was ‘conveniently forgetting that
things were rather different in the 1960s’. It seemed doubtful to UK diplomats
that definitive evidence would emerge to condemn Gandhi or to establish her
innocence. ‘[S]o often in India these scandal stories are surprisingly not
followed through by parliament . . . ’, the high commission reminded
Whitehall. Moynihan’s book was nevertheless significant, the British reasoned,
in landing a powerful blow on Gandhi when her popularity was at a nadir.
‘[T]his is another turn in the present downward spiral of Mrs Gandhi’s
fortunes’, British diplomats concluded. ‘Her [Gandhi’s] supporters are still
trying to put a brave face on things . . . But they fail to convince. The
[Congress] party seems to be in disarray in a number of states . . . ’.40
 battle of the books 219

At the end of April 1979, in a meeting with press correspondents in his

Senate Office on Capitol Hill, Moynihan robustly defended A Dangerous Place.
Volunteering that he had been asked to speak to the media by India’s foreign
minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who was visiting the United States, Moynihan
reiterated his claim that Gandhi and the Congress Party had received CIA
funds on two occasions. Crucially, Moynihan also retracted his assertion that
Gandhi had herself been given CIA cash. ‘[H]e did not mean to give the
impression that the money was put in a bag on one occasion and personally
given to Mrs Gandhi by an American official’, Moynihan informed journalists.
Rather, he confirmed sheepishly, ‘what he meant was that “Mrs Gandhi knew
this” as the president of the [Congress] party when the money as passed over’.
More broadly, Moynihan insisted that, ‘What we [the United States] did was
perfectly legitimate according to the standards of the time.’ ‘Today I would say
“don’t do it”. Looking back, obviously that [CIA activity in India] caused us
trouble. There was constant and incessant insinuation of some massive activity
on our part which never existed . . . .’ In the final analysis, Moynihan empha-
sised, the CIA had not foisted money onto the subcontinent’s politicians, but
that ‘A democratic [Congress Party] regime asked for it [CIA money].’ For
Gandhi to deny the facts, and to claim that the Agency had engaged in activity
designed to subvert Indian democracy was, Moynihan contended, an exercise
in ‘false, self-serving fantasy’. Every member of the Agency’s station in New
Delhi was known to the Indian government, Moynihan added, and the CIA
had long enjoyed a close and collaborative relationship with India’s
Intelligence Bureau.41 Indian and American diplomats were unimpressed by
Moynihan’s attempt at hedging his accusation against Gandhi. One State
Department official expressed unease to British colleagues that Moynihan
now appeared, ‘in a muddle and simply cannot remember who took delivery
of the [CIA] payments [to the Congress Party]’. India’s press counsellor in
Washington, Gopalaswami Parthasarathy, went further, and suggested to
Western counterparts that Moynihan had erred badly by ‘making a complete
ass of himself’ and not being able to substantiate his specific allegation against
the former Indian premier.42
In the wake of Moynihan’s press conference, the Carter administration
became concerned that should India’s parliamentarians be whipped into
a frenzy of indignation over references to CIA interference in the subcontin-
ent, a formal request might be made by the Indian government for the release
of US records related to Gandhi’s contacts with the Agency. Any such request
would be refused, the British were assured by American colleagues, and
enemies of constructive relations between New Delhi and Washington
would then be gifted an opportunity to sabotage Carter’s agenda for repairing
brittle Indo-US ties.43 Ahead of a parliamentary question tabled in the Lok
Sabha on the ‘Moynihan affair’, Warren Christopher, Carter’s Deputy
Secretary of State, briefed Nani Ardeshir Palkhivala, India’s ambassador in
220 spying in south asia

Washington, that the US government had found no evidence of any payment

made by the CIA to Gandhi. Christopher was careful, British diplomats took
note, not to discount payments that the Agency may have made to other
officials in the Congress Party. If necessary, Palkhivala was advised, New
Delhi was free to use the information passed on by Christopher should it
encounter difficulties during what was expected to prove a fractious parlia-
mentary debate between the Janata government and its Congress opposition.44
The climax of the Dangerous Place imbroglio played out on the evening of
7 May. During a stormy four-hour session in the Lok Sabha, Congress MPs
heaped abuse on Moynihan, while critics of Gandhi pressed the Indian gov-
ernment to appoint a commission of inquiry. Observing events from inside the
parliamentary chamber, American diplomats watched the Congress leader,
C. M. Stephens, launch a series of ‘histrionic, vitriolic attacks on Sen.
Moynihan [and] the CIA . . . [both of] which he claimed were part of an
“RSS/Zionist conspiracy”’. Senior figures in the Janata government, including
Vajpayee, were also singled out by Stephen, and accused of cultivating links
with the CIA through the RSS. Communist MPs piled further pressure on the
government by demanding details of the Agency’s relationship with India’s
Intelligence Bureau. ‘We suspect’, American officials remarked ruefully, ‘that
the Soviet embassy may have inspired the . . . MPs to pursue this line’. The
debate concluded with India’s embattled Home Minister refusing to sanction
an official inquiry, but assuring agitated colleagues that the government would
take action to address irregularities in the funding of political parties and, ‘try
to plug as many loopholes as possible to stop the influx of illegal foreign
money’. To prevent the political fallout from Moynihan’s book spiralling out
of control, both the US embassy in New Delhi and the State Department back
in Washington declined all invitations from Indian journalists to comment on
Moynihan’s disclosures. Meanwhile, in India’s cities, mobs of Congress sup-
porters seized copies of A Dangerous Place from bookshops and burned them
in the streets alongside effigies of Moynihan.45
The tumult in India that surrounded the publication of A Dangerous Place
had two important consequences. Firstly, it entrenched attitudes on the utility
of intelligence agencies and state secrecy held by Moynihan which had first
germinated during his ambassadorship in the subcontinent, earlier in the
decade. The Agency’s capacity to act as a disruptive socio-political force in
South Asia left a deep impression on Moynihan. In January 1974, from his
vantage point in India, he had observed privately that the, ‘CIA is not dead, but
dying, I should think . . . Too much white shoe fun in an unfunny world.’46 The
paradox that, having scaled back its covert operations in India, the Agency
could still, years later, have a toxic impact on Indian perceptions of the United
States, and its intelligence services, was brought home to Moynihan by the
uproar that accompanied the release of his book. Moynihan’s subsequent
assault on the CIA would lead him to lobby relentlessly for reform of
 battle of the books 221

America’s intelligence community and against pervasive official secrecy.

Moynihan’s evangelical fervour in championing a more open intelligence
bureaucracy, which came to incorporate the drafting of a Congressional bill;
the chairmanship of a bi-partisan commission on government secrecy; the
publication of a book; and innumerable speeches and articles; had its genesis in
the political turmoil of the 1970s when he was afforded ample opportunity to
gauge the CIA’s deleterious impact on American diplomacy. Secondly, the
‘Moynihan affair’ of 1979 underlined the difficulty that the Carter administra-
tion faced in reframing Washington’s relationship with New Delhi. Moving on
from a troubled and discordant era of bilateral relations under Richard Nixon
and Gerald Ford would clearly not be easy. As Jimmy Carter discovered to his
chagrin, the Central Intelligence Agency had an unfortunate and, for a secret
intelligence service, incongruous habit, of becoming an unwelcome point of
public contention between India and the United States.

The Man Who Spilled the Secrets

Barely a year elapsed between Morarji Desai’s efforts to extinguish the
Dangerous Place CIA scandal and the eruption of another Agency-related
furore in the subcontinent. In November 1979, a further political rumpus
involving the CIA gripped the attention of India’s press and public. In this
instance, the release of Thomas Powers’ biography of Richard Helms, The Man
Who Kept the Secrets, attracted Indian ire. Powers’ book revisited claims, first
aired in the New York Times back in August 1971, that as tensions between
India and Pakistan rose following moves by East Pakistan to secede and
establish the nation state of Bangladesh, a CIA agent inside Indira Gandhi’s
cabinet had fed Washington highly sensitive material on official Indian think-
ing. In December that year, after hostilities erupted between India and
Pakistan, it was alleged that the CIA’s asset warned Washington that
Gandhi’s government was planning to escalate the conflict by engaging
Pakistan’s forces in the West of the subcontinent, as well as in the East.
Richard Nixon later cited the intelligence that the White House received
from the inner sanctum of Gandhi’s administration as one of the rare occa-
sions that the CIA furnished him with useful information. Unfortunately for
Nixon and the Agency, the existence of a CIA mole in Gandhi’s cabinet leaked
to the press and was widely publicised by the syndicated columnist, Jack
Anderson. According to the CIA’s then Deputy Director of Plans, or head of
clandestine operations, Thomas Karamessines, the Indian mole reacted to
their exposure by ending the association with the Agency, and ‘told us [CIA]
to go to hell’.47
After becoming India’s prime minister in 1966, Gandhi’s predisposition to
employ the CIA as an expedient political distraction for her government’s
failings had strained, but not yet broken, the Agency’s relationships with the
222 spying in south asia

Intelligence Bureau and Research and Analysis Wing. One American diplo-
mat, who served in New Delhi during the Indo-Pakistan war of 1971, recalled
that liaison relations between local American intelligence officers and their
Indian counterparts could hardly have been closer.48 The revelation that the
CIA had run an asset at the heart of Gandhi’s government saw much of the
cooperation between Indian and American intelligence services curtailed, at
least temporarily. In Washington, officials at the British embassy counselled
London that American colleagues were having a particularly hard time main-
taining their policy of not commenting on intelligence-related matters
because, ‘Anderson’s revelations sound authentic.’ ‘Our CIA contacts’, the
British noted, ‘have been uninformative or embarrassed when asked about
them’.49
Ahead of a meeting between Nixon and Edward Heath in Bermuda in late
December 1971, the UK’s ambassador in Washington, George Baring, the Earl
of Cromer, questioned whether Henry Kissinger had purposefully misinter-
preted intelligence on India passed to the White House by the CIA. Nixon’s
then National Security Adviser, Cromer observed bitingly to the British
Foreign Secretary, Alec Douglas-Home, had ‘personally been running the
United States policy in this [the Indo-Pakistan conflict] as if he were
a latter day Metternich’. Kissinger had been passed intelligence, Douglas-
Home was advised, ‘which has consistently supported his worst suspicions
that the Indians in one way or another wished to see the total collapse of
Pakistan, East and West’. ‘What these sources of intelligence are I do not
know’, Cromer confided, ‘but I have been shown extracts of them purporting
to report discussions in the Indian Cabinet confirming Kissinger’s fears’. From
the UK Embassy’s own contacts with the CIA, the ambassador added tellingly,
‘we have reason to believe that the CIA assessments do not confirm these
reports [of aggressive Indian intent]’.50 In contrast, when Nixon met with
Heath on the tiny speck of British Overseas Territory in the North Atlantic,
Kissinger made a point of emphasising his unwavering confidence in the CIA’s
Indian mole. ‘The President had accurate information that the Indian
Government at the highest level, including Mrs. Gandhi’, Kissinger assured
Douglas-Home, ‘had been planning, in addition to the separation of East
Pakistan, the break-up of West Pakistan . . . ’.51
Eight years later, when Powers’ book appeared in print, India’s press and
political class, absent the distraction of a sizeable regional war, leapt on the
apparent confirmation that the CIA had run an agent in Gandhi’s cabinet.52
Raj Narain, recently India’s Minister for Health, and a long-term opponent of
Gandhi, wasted little time in suggesting that Jagjivan Ram, who served as
Gandhi’s Minister of Defence in 1971, had been the CIA’s man. An indignant
Ram dismissed the notion that he had been a CIA agent as patent nonsense.
Unable to provide convincing evidence to substantiate his claim against Ram,
Narain’s accusation was also rubbished by the president of Janata, Chandra
 battle of the books 223

Shekhar, as, ‘the type of irresponsible statement that only deserves contempt.
Does it deserve any comment? Nobody takes Raj Narain seriously.’53 In an
editorial entitled, ‘From Bad to Worse’, the Times of India joined those
castigating Narain. ‘[I]t speaks to the depth to which our politics has sunk’,
the Times lamented, ‘that he [Narain] should name the leader of a major party
[Ram] as having been a CIA agent in Mrs Gandhi’s Cabinet’. Politicians from
both sides of the Indian political spectrum, from the then caretaker Indian
premier, Charan Singh, to Gandhi herself, the Times opined, deserved to be
censured for seeking to gain advantage from the uproar in the subcontinent
that accompanied the publication of Powers’ book. Gandhi, in particular, was
excoriated for ‘yielding to the temptation of making use of what an American
author has written out of context’ to attack her opponents and, in the process,
risk destabilising national politics. ‘After all’, the Times reminded its reader-
ship, ‘she [Gandhi] herself has been a victim of this kind of writing by no less
distinguished an American that Mr. Patrick Moynihan’.54
In the United States, with an Indian general election scheduled for
January 1980, the American press observed how the commotion surrounding
Powers’ book represented merely the latest example of an intelligence scandal
coming to dominate the subcontinent’s electoral politics. ‘Allegations of
involvement by United States and Soviet secret services in Indian political
life are part of the campaign ritual here’, the New York Times noted, ‘and cries
of “foreign money!” and “foreign interest!” often have the same impact as
repeated cries of wolf’. It had been Indira Gandhi herself who, during
a campaign stop in Kanpur on 9 November, had first brought Powers’ book
to the attention of the Indian public. At that point, Indian publishers had yet to
release The Man Who Kept the Secrets. In an exchange with journalists, Gandhi
quoted excerpts from Powers’ biography of Helms that she claimed had been
mailed to her from abroad, and which corroborated information that Kissinger
had previously divulged to her in private. Reporters were perplexed that
Gandhi had chosen to spotlight a story of a spy in her cabinet which, on the
face of things, reflected poorly on her leadership. Several foreign diplomats
suggested that Gandhi might have calculated that with a number of her former
cabinet colleagues now political adversaries, including Janata’s deputy prime
minister, Y. B. Chavan, and minister for education, Karan Singh, any fallout
from the cabinet affair would reflect equally badly on those standing against
her in the January poll.55
In London, the Times echoed its sister publication across the Atlantic by
remarking, somewhat wearily, that although not yet officially underway,
India’s election had already acquired a seemingly obligatory CIA scandal.
The British newspaper found it illuminating that Charan Singh, who Ram
was expected to challenge for the premiership in January, had instigated
a formal investigation into the claims made by Powers. It appeared conveni-
ent, some sceptics suggested, for Charan Singh to entangle one of his
224 spying in south asia

principle political rivals in a high-profile enquiry charged with rooting out

a CIA-sponsored traitor at the epicentre of India’s political establishment. As the
Times observed caustically, ‘The reference to India and the alleged CIA agent in
the Cabinet [in Powers’ book] is only brief but is more than enough to lend
Indian politicians the kind of emotional material they evidently prefer to
presenting rival programmes to the electorate for tackling India’s immense
development problems.’56 For much of the remainder of 1979, the pernicious
legacy associated with espionage that the CIA may, or may not, have undertaken
in India at the beginning of the decade, remained, according to one press report,
‘the hottest political issue in India these days . . . ’. While the Agency had been
‘used routinely as a whipping boy in Indian elections’, American journalists
familiar with the subcontinent expressed a wry disbelief that, on this occasion,
‘the ammunition was handed to Gandhi on a silver platter in the form of
a biography by Thomas Powers . . . ’.57
Intriguingly, contemporaneous Indian accounts of the events of 1971 lent
credence to the British suspicion that Nixon’s administration had exaggerated
the credibility and significance of intelligence acquired by a CIA mole in
Gandhi’s cabinet. In early 1972, India’s ambassador in Washington, Lakshmi
Kant (L. K.) Jha, informed P. N. Haksar that a trusted American source had
confided to him that, as fighting had raged between India and Pakistan the
previous year, the CIA received conflicting reports on India’s intentions
regarding West Pakistan. A consolidated intelligence assessment presented
to Nixon and Kissinger marginalised the likelihood of aggressive Indian action
against West Pakistan. ‘The reason why it [the idea of aggressive Indian intent]
is being played up’, Jha suggested to Haksar, ‘is to find support and justification
for the policy which the President has pursued. The [intelligence] report does
not provide the rationale of the policy, though it is being used as a method of
rationalizing the policy.’ An indignant Gandhi instructed Haksar to make it
abundantly clear to Jha that if a CIA agent been operating in her cabinet, the
information they provided to Langley had been fabricated. In a handwritten
note scrawled on Jha’s cable, the Indian premier recorded, ‘that at NO time
have I ever made such a statement [on action against West Pakistan]. Besides
such a discussion had not taken place at my Cab[inet] Meeting.’ In Haksar’s
response to Jha, sent on 3 March 1972, he duly emphasised that, ‘While it is
interesting to learn about the vagaries of the C.I.A., I should like you to know
that at no time [has the] Prime Minister ever made a statement even remotely
resembling what the C.I.A. agents have reported.’ Gandhi’s cabinet had been
given no opportunity to discuss taking the 1971 war to West Pakistan, Jha was
assured. The Political Affairs Committee of Gandhi’s Cabinet did meet on
16 December, and a full Cabinet meeting had followed later that day but,
Haksar confirmed, at no point had consideration been given to extending or
expanding hostilities with Pakistan. ‘The C.I.A. having led President Kennedy
up the garden path’, Haksar informed Jha, ‘has done it again’.58 Whether the
 battle of the books 225

CIA misled Nixon and Kissinger, as Haksar intimated, or the President and his
national security adviser saw fit to manipulate intelligence to better suit their
political agenda in the subcontinent, as Jha and British officials suspected,
remains unclear. More certain, is that in seeking to extract political advantage
from activity associated with the CIA in South Asia the early 1970s, Indian and
American leaders bequeathed to their successors a toxic diplomatic legacy that
poisoned bilateral relations.

‘A Sheer Mad Story’: Morarji Desai, Seymour Hersh and the CIA on Trial
In June 1983, Morarji Desai, who had recently turned eighty-seven years of
age, was enjoying political retirement in Bombay. After stepping down as
India’s prime minister, in July 1979, Desai campaigned for the Janata Party
in the following year’s general election but did not contest a seat in the Lok
Sabha. With Indira Gandhi and the Congress Party back in power, Desai
seemed set to while away his remaining years in public obscurity.
A respected, if not universally popular elder statesman of Indian politics,
Desai’s solitude was interrupted by an unexpected telephone call from New
Jersey, in the United States. To Desai’s surprise, he discovered an American
stringer from the United Press News Agency was on the other end of the line.
Struggling to be heard over a muffled international connection, the reporter
asked Desai for a reaction to allegations made by the journalist and author,
Seymour Hersh, in his recently published book, The Price of Power: Kissinger in
the Nixon White House. Hersh had claimed, an incredulous Desai was
informed, that the former Indian premier worked for the CIA as a paid
agent during the Johnson and Nixon administrations. In return for an annual
retainer of $20,000, Hersh asserted, Desai passed on highly sensitive intelli-
gence to the Agency from within Indira Gandhi’s cabinets. It was Desai, Hersh
declared sensationally, who had been the CIA’s mole and supplied the Agency
with the information that convinced Nixon and Kissinger that India was
poised to attack West Pakistan in December 1971. Stunned by the charges
levelled against him, Desai dismissed Hersh’s smear as a ‘sheer mad story’.
‘Madness is the basis, what else?’, Desai asked his American caller. ‘Can I be
bought? Has anyone tried to do so earlier? Do you believe the story?’59
In Seymour Hersh, Morarji Desai faced a formidable adversary. Then in his
mid-forties, Hersh came to global prominence by reporting on the My Lai
massacre in the Vietnam War, for which he received a Pulitzer Prize in 1970.
During the seventies, Hersh worked on the Washington bureau of the
New York Times, where he focused on exposing some of the more dubious
activities carried out by the CIA. Known for his irascibility and profanity,
Harrison Salisbury, a colleague at the Times, characterised Hersh as
a ‘Vesuvius of a reporter’. To Henry Kissinger he was simply an ‘extortionist’.
One of the most influential investigative reporters of the late Cold War,
226 spying in south asia

Hersh’s determination to secure scoops occasionally led him astray. He would

later run into trouble for the use of hearsay, anonymous sources, and docu-
ments that turned out to be forgeries, when advancing several controversial
claims in a book on John F. Kennedy, The Dark Side of Camelot.60 The 700-
page work that Hersh produced on Kissinger was, the author claimed, based on
interviews conducted with 1,000 people over a four-year period. The prodi-
gious research Hersh invested in his Kissinger book, however, failed to prevent
him from making some basic errors and relying on unsubstantiated claims in
constructing what many Indian commentators decried as a flimsy and unper-
suasive case against Desai. On 4 June, under the front-page headline, ‘Blatant
holes in charges against Desai’, the Times of India took Hersh to task for
including ‘obvious mistakes’ in his book. Hersh asserted that Desai was
‘undoubtedly’ a paid CIA informer and ‘could only have been’ the source
that tipped off Nixon and Kissinger about Gandhi’s alleged plan to attack West
Pakistan.61 But Hersh had erred, the newspaper noted, in stating that Desai
had remained in Gandhi’s cabinet after being relieved of the finance portfolio,
in July 1969. In fact, Desai had left Gandhi’s cabinet and effectively remained in
the political wilderness during the two years leading up to Indo-Pakistan
hostilities. How then, the Times asked, could Desai have then been privy to
the inner-most thoughts of India’s premier and his one of his bitterest political
rivals?62 Hersh’s admission that, after 1970, his supposedly impeccable sources
on Desai, ‘were no longer in a position to see his reports’, was also deemed
problematic.63 ‘[I]f Mr. Hersh’s sources dry up in respect of events beyond
that year [1970], as he himself admits’, the newspaper wondered, ‘how does he
write so much about what happened in 1971? On the basis of conjecture?’64
In the face of Indian criticism, Hersh doubled down on his charge that Desai
was the Agency’s mole inside Gandhi’s administrations. ‘[H]e [Desai] has been
an informant for [the CIA] many years’, Hersh reiterated to Indian journalists
in Washington. ‘He was a long-time informant, even before [the] Johnson
administration. He was the key man. There may have been others also. I only
write about what I know. I talked to people about his role, and I saw
documents . . . It [Desai’s] has been a long-standing relationship with the
CIA.’ Pressed that he had been mistaken in claiming that Desai served in
Gandhi’s cabinet in 1971, Hersh lambasted his Indian detractors for splitting
hairs. ‘Mr. Morarji Desai was not in the government [in 1971]’, Hersh con-
ceded. ‘He was only a member of parliament. All the same, he was a man with
immense contacts. He had contacts in the ministries. He was not a cabinet
informant but a cabinet-level informant. He was the informant in 1971 as he
had been before that. I was terribly careful about checking that.’ When
reminded that Desai was renowned for ‘his moral stature in Indian life’, and
that accusations that he had spied for the CIA would ‘shock the Indian nation’,
Hersh appeared ‘visibly peeved’. Desai’s aversion to communism and affinity
for the United States, combined with the enticement that, if backed by
 battle of the books 227

Washington, he could engineer a political comeback and displace Gandhi,

might, Hersh reasoned, explain the decision to work for the CIA. ‘I am not in
the business of running him [Desai] down’, Hersh declared. ‘It is painful for
me to have to write about him.’65
In New Delhi, members of the Janata Party called on Indira Gandhi to
distance herself from the claim that Hersh had made against Desai. Speaking in
the Lok Sabha, the economist and Janata MP, Subramaniam Swamy, declared,
‘The allegation that a prime minister of India was in the pay of the C.I.A. is an
insult to the nation and it is the duty of the government to protect the fair name
of the country.’66 A slew of prominent Americans with intimate knowledge of
India’s relations with the United States also lined up to dismiss the idea that
Desai could have worked for the CIA. Moynihan proclaimed that ‘the charge
was simply untrue’. From his position as vice-chair of the Senate Intelligence
Committee, the former ambassador to India assured reporters, he had ordered,
‘the agency (CIA) to go through the records and tell me. The agency informs
me that whatever Mr. Hersh says about Mr. Desai in his book is simply not
true.’ Kissinger added to the chorus of disbelief, and declared publicly that, ‘To
the best of my knowledge the allegation is not true. I had never heard of the
allegation before till I heard it in Mr. Hersh’s writings.’ A former NSC staffer
and assistant Secretary of State, Harold Saunders, who had specialised in South
Asian affairs for over a decade between 1961 and 1974, also went on record to
confirm that he had, ‘no knowledge of any relationship between Mr. Desai and
CIA. Having checked with former colleagues, I believe the allegation is not
true.’ Unusually, former Agency officers also sprang to Desai’s defence. Russell
Jack Smith, who served with the CIA in India in the early 1970s, insisted that
Desai had not worked for the Agency. ‘The allegation [by Hersh]’, Smith
volunteered, ‘is not true’.67
Unwilling to see Hersh’s assault on Desai’s reputation go unchallenged,
a Chicago-based organisation, Indians for Truth Abroad, lodged a case against
the American author in the US District Court of Northern Illinois. Following
some initial equivocation, Desai was persuaded to support the legal action. On
17 June 1983, Hersh and his publishers, Summit Books, were named in a civil
suit for ‘wrongfully, maliciously and with intent to defame and injure [Desai]’
including ‘untrue, defamatory, libellous, and accusatory statements’ in The
Price of Power. Desai’s lawyers argued that Hersh had subjected the former
Indian premier to ‘public hatred, ridicule and contempt’, by knowingly pub-
lishing false statements, ‘with reckless regard for the truth’. The court was
asked to award libel damages of $50 million against both Hersh and his
publisher.68 In a written submission of evidence, Desai declared, ‘What greater
damage can there be than being stamped as a traitor of a country by this false
and baseless charge [of being a CIA agent]? It is a matter of common sense for
anybody to see that these serious charges are very deniable.’69 At the same time,
Desai was granted a temporary injunction by the Bombay High Court to
228 spying in south asia

prevent the import, distribution, marketing, and sale of Hersh’s book in India,
although this was later overturned on appeal.70 Desai was, nevertheless, able to
draw some satisfaction from the appeal court’s decision that every copy of
Hersh’s book sold in the subcontinent should include a disclaimer stating that
its distributers had no reason to believe that the claim Desai was a CIA agent
was true.71 In Washington, Hersh stood by his story and prepared to contest
the case. The CIA’s star agent in India, he insisted to American reporters, ‘was
not his uncle, brother, or cousin, it was Morarji Desai’.72
News that Desai’s dispute with Hersh was going to trial reignited public
interest in the United States and India in the CIA’s clandestine activities.
Subramaniam Swamy’s plea that politicians resist the temptation to exploit
the affair for narrow partisan purposes proved futile. Addressing Indian
journalists, Vajpayee, who following the collapse of the Janata Party had
become President of the new Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 1980, mischiev-
ously questioned why neither the State Department nor India’s government
had exonerated Desai. Claiming to be ‘intrigued’ by the silence of Gandhi’s
administration, Vajpayee asked, ‘Why is it silent? If the allegation is true, what
was the Prime Minister doing when her deputy prime minister was on the
payroll of the CIA? Was there no security arrangement? The country would
like to be assured that there are no KGB or CIA agents in the present cabinet.’ It
seemed equally odd, the BJP leader claimed, that the State department had
elected to keep its own counsel. ‘After all the (U.S.) state department cannot
take the formal position that it does not comment on intelligence-related
matters’, Vajpayee noted. ‘This is a special case. Mr. Desai is no ordinary
person. He is the former prime minister of a friendly country.’73 Responding
for Gandhi’s government, C. M. Stephen pointed reporters to the close links
that he claimed Vajpayee maintained with US officials. ‘Mr Vajpayee seemed
to revel’, the Congress Party luminary bit back, ‘in the company of people with
CIA trappings’. Perhaps, Stephens added, Vajpayee should spend less time
clamouring for the government to intervene in the Desai case, and expend
more effort, ‘remind[ing] Mr. Desai of the “vulgar jubilation” his men had
indulged in when Mr. Moynihan “dished out the [CIA] story against
Mrs. Indira Gandhi.”’74
With political tensions running high in India, opposition MPs persuaded
the Lok Sabha’s speaker to grant time for a debate on the Desai affair.75 On
26 August, in a ‘tumultuous’ atmosphere and amid ‘prolonged noisy scenes’,
the minister for external affairs, Pamulaparthi Venkata (P. V.) Narasimha Rao,
was repeatedly berated by opposition members for refusing to comment on the
specific charge that Desai had been a CIA agent. It was impossible, Rao
maintained, to confirm the government’s position while the matter remained
subject to litigation in the United States.76 Ratansinh Rajda, a Janata Party MP
for Bombay South, reminded Rao that Hersh’s book had been greeted in India
with, ‘fulminating fury . . . from the masses, from the press, and the people
 battle of the books 229

alike’. It was regrettable, Rajda continued, that Gandhi’s administration had

disregarded public sentiment. ‘I would have wished very much if [sic]
Government had risen up to the occasion.’ It was incumbent on every Indian
politician, it was suggested to Rao, to confront ‘any outsider or foreign power’
that ‘charge[d] leaders of one party or the other as CIA agents’. Such an
accusation, Rajda insisted, ‘militates against our self-respect and national
grain, and we must oppose it unitedly. Unfortunately, that is not being
done . . . ’. More generally, fractious parliamentary exchanges over India’s
response to the Hersh–Desai affair stoked a perennial debate in Indian politics
over the ubiquity of external subversion and an insidious foreign hand. ‘May
I know’, an excised Rajda demanded of Rao, ‘whether our Cabinet secrets are
being leaked out even at present? May I know whether Government has taken
any precaution to see that no CIA or any other foreign agency works to the
detriment of the interests of this country? . . . Will you make a fool proof
system in the Cabinet so that either CIA or KGB or any other agency will not be
able to pounce upon, or have access to our national secrets?’77
Uncomfortably for Gandhi’s administration, in Chicago Hersh’s attorneys
set about constructing their defence against Desai’s lawsuit by seeking to
establish a pattern of close links between the CIA and India’s post-
independence governments. As it had in the subcontinent, the focus of atten-
tion in the Chicago court room shifted away from the specific accusation made
against Desai, and on to a more expansive range of questions involving the
nature of interactions between US and Indian intelligence services.78 To many
of his compatriots, Hersh appeared to have acted in the wider public interest by
shining a light on American covert activities abroad. In late 1987, an offer
Hersh made to bring closure to a libel action that was then entering its
fourth year, and that would have compensated Desai to the tune of $600,000,
and seen him receive an apology for the inconvenience caused by the allega-
tions printed in The Price of Power, was rebuffed.79 Desai’s insistence that
Hersh unconditionally retract the allegation that he had been a CIA agent, and
excise any mention of it from future editions of his book, appeared to many
Americans as maladroit and, given the difficulty in making libel suits stick in
US civil courts, reckless.
Having alienated American public opinion, Desai’s lawyers irritated
Washington’s national security establishment by compelling the CIA’s deputy
director of operations, Claire George, to seek an injunction from a Federal
Court excusing former Agency officers from appearing as witnesses. Desai’s
legal team had sought permission to question Russell Jack Smith, who they
believed had acted as the Agency’s station chief in New Delhi in the early
1970s. Citing Section 6 of the Central Intelligence Act of 1949, George suc-
cessfully argued that ‘The CIA cannot be placed in a position of having to
confirm or deny a relationship with Mr. Desai or discuss it in any manner . . . .’
The Federal Court concurred that, ‘Any disclosure of Mr. Smith’s CIA
230 spying in south asia

employment would necessarily reveal intelligence methods . . . [and] in order

to accomplish its mission, the CIA must be able to protect the identity of its
intelligence sources.’80 The judge presiding over the Desai case, Charles
R. Norgle Sr., reinforced the Federal court ruling by determining that while
Hersh must testify in general terms about the nature of his sources, he need not
identify them. By compelling other high-profile individuals, and notably,
Henry Kissinger, to take the stand in Chicago, Desai’s attorneys guaranteed
that the CIA would garner yet more unhelpful press headlines. Kissinger
proved a decidedly reluctant witness who tried, and failed, to evade
a subpoena to testify on the spurious grounds that he was too busy to travel
to Chicago. Having swept into the windy city in the company of a phalanx of
bodyguards, a team of personal attorneys, and attendant news crews, the
former Secretary of State volunteered that to his knowledge Desai had not
been an CIA asset. Under cross-examination from Hersh’s lawyers, Kissinger
begrudgingly conceded that, as he was never informed of the identities of
intelligence sources in India or elsewhere, he could not definitively state that
Desai had no connection with the CIA. ‘I had nothing to do with getting the
[intelligence] information’, Kissinger confirmed. ‘I had only to do with the end
product.’ Ultimately, during the course of testimony that stretched to over
three-and-an-half hours, Kissinger generated more heat than light in respect of
the CIA’s activities in the subcontinent.81
Towards the end of 1989, as Desai’s libel action limped towards
a conclusion, the New York Times reflected that that the meandering and
seemingly interminable proceedings had encompassed testimony that, ‘ranged
from American foreign policy during the India-Pakistan war of 1971 to the
ideals of the Bhagavad Gita to the methodology of an investigative reporter to
spy jargon like “cryptos” and “assets”’.82 That October, a jury of eight, having
deliberated for just six hours, concluded that the prosecution had not demon-
strated that Hersh had knowingly libelled the former Indian premier, or had
acted out of malice in asserting that Desai had been a CIA agent. The verdict
had taken six-and-a-half years to arrive. ‘What this court said today’,
a triumphant Hersh exclaimed following the ruling, ‘is that a reporter like
me can write a story based on confidential sources – even to the effect that
a former Prime Minister of India had been a C.I.A. asset . . . ’.83 In India,
citizens in the subcontinent reacted with a mix of bewilderment and anger to
the news from Chicago. While empathetic with Indians conviction that Desai
had been wronged by the US justice system, one of the country’s leading
lawyers, the supreme court advocate, Anil Divan, suggested that the former
premier had been poorly advised. Given the burden of proof that US courts
demanded, Divan stressed, it was virtually impossible for a public figure to win
a libel case.84 In the final analysis, a combination of Desai’s obstinacy in
refusing to accept an olive branch extended by Hersh, and legal counsel that,
at best, served the former Indian premier badly, saw him become embroiled in
 battle of the books 231

an enervating process of litigation in US courts that ended in bitter disappoint-

ment. More broadly, the Desai-Hersh saga ensured that, to Washington’s
vexation, the CIA remained a conspicuous and corrosive feature of the
United States’ relationship with India, and one that the subcontinent’s politi-
cians seemed unable to resist exploiting for partisan purposes.

The ‘Truth’ Will Out

Two decades after the conclusion of Morarji Desai’s libel case against Seymour
Hersh, the tangled politics behind the American journalist’s accusation that
Desai had been a CIA agent continued to occupy the attention of the subcon-
tinent’s press and public. On 8 November 2011, Indian national newspapers
ran with headlines that Rao had misled parliament back in August 1983 when
he stated that Hersh had not been in contact with any government official prior
to publishing The Price of Power. Documents released by the National Archives
of India revealed that Indian diplomats in Washington had met with Hersh
and had offered him advice of aspects of his then unpublished manuscript. It
was pointed out to Hersh at the time, that his claim that Desai was a member of
Indira Gandhi’s cabinet during the Indo-Pakistan war in 1971 was false. For
reasons unknown, Hersh ignored the Indian embassy in Washington and
neglected to correct the error before his book was released. Hersh was also
revealed to have shared copies of classified US papers with Indian officials that
contained references to Desai.85 Desai’s lawyers picked up on an assertion
made by Hersh during the libel trial that he had run relevant sections of his
book past the Indian embassy in Washington. A copy of the chapter featuring
Desai, annotated with handwritten notes and comments was, it seems, passed
back to Hersh by a member of the embassy’s staff. Efforts by Desai’s legal team
to access the annotated manuscript proved unsuccessful. Approaches made to
Indian officials that had worked in Washington at the time were similarly
rebuffed. The Ministry of External Affairs, Desai’s attorneys concluded, had no
interest in establishing whether an Indian official had assisted Hersh in the
production of his book and, if so, who that official might be.86
The connection between Hersh and Indian diplomats, it turned out, was
facilitated by Jack Mitchell, who acted as Jack Anderson’s managing editor.
Gopalaswami Parthasarathy, the Indian embassy’s press and information
counsellor, had wanted to counter the impact of Kissinger’s recently released
memoir, The White House Years, that the Indian official considered to be ‘pro-
Pakistani’ propaganda. Having learnt that Hersh was working on, ‘an
expose . . . [that was] particularly critical of Kissinger’s support for right-
wing dictatorships’, including that of Yahya Khan in Pakistan, Parthasarathy
arranged to have lunch with the American author. During their meeting,
Parthasarathy offered to help Hersh with his project. In addition to sharing
Indian documents on the 1971 war, for which Hersh was ‘particularly
232 spying in south asia

thankful’, Parthasarathy obtained an assurance from his new American friend

that he would, ‘let me have a look at the chapter as soon as it is completed.’ ‘I
am keeping in touch with him [Hersh]’, Parthasarathy informed Jyotindra
Nath (J. N.) Dixit, Joint secretary in the External Publicity division of the MEA,
‘to give him any suitable published material of details he may ask for’.87 In part,
at least, the reluctance of the MEA to spring to Morarji Desai’s defence after he
was labelled a CIA asset was the result of an earlier decision taken by the Indian
government to cooperate with Hersh in the production of his book.
Amplifying the impact of Hersh’s anti-Kissinger tome, New Delhi reasoned,
offered a useful means of counteracting a tide of anti-Indian sentiment that
Kissinger’s memoir was expected to generate.
Whether Morarji Desai was a CIA agent is likely to remain a matter of
contention. Shortly after the libel trial in Chicago concluded, a Bombay daily,
the Independent, speculated that Hersh may have got his wires crossed in
naming Desai as the CIA’s mole. Sources in the US, Hersh had noted, informed
him that the Agency’s agent had served as Chief Minister of Maharashtra,
Finance Minister of India, and, briefly, Deputy Prime Minister. Desai ticked all
those boxes. But so did Yashwantrao Balwantrao Chavan. In the early 1960s,
when Chavan was in charge in Maharashtra, he was believed to have had an
intimate relationship with Jane Abel, an official in the American Consul in
Bombay. In 1964, Chavan moved to New Delhi to become India’s Defence
Minister. At the same time, Abel was transferred to the US embassy in the
Indian capital. Coincidentally, a private secretary working for Chavan was later
arrested by the Intelligence Bureau for passing classified information to the
CIA.88 Others have suggested that Anand Kumar (A. K.) Verma, who became
head of the R&AW, and who was stationed in Washington while Hersh was
working on his book, may have had a malevolent reason to implicate Desai as
the CIA’s man. Verma was associated with repressive activity during India’s
Emergency and had been sidelined once Desai’s Janata government came to
power.89 More certain, and paradoxical, is the powerful and pervasive influ-
ence that American literature exercised on Indian perceptions of the CIA, and
its supposedly malevolent foreign hand, as the Cold War stuttered to
a conclusion. Absent official history (Indian or American) covering the work
of intelligence services, and in a period where actual covert CIA activity in
India was at an historic low, memoir and biography addressing controversial
episodes in Washington’s relations with New Delhi excited political and public
passions in the subcontinent. Such literature also ensured that the Agency
remained firmly, as it had since the late 1960s, at the epicentre of Indo-US
diplomatic discourse.
 10

Indian Intelligence and the End of the Cold War

In April 1984, Rameshwar Nath Kao, former head of the R&AW, and Indira
Gandhi’s Director General of Security, sent a ‘personal message’ to George
H. W. Bush, Ronald Reagan’s vice president. Bush was due to visit India the
following month for the first and, as it transpired, only time. Kao had got to
know and like Bush when he served as the CIA’s director, between
January 1976 and January 1977. Having learnt from the CIA’s station chief
in New Delhi that R&AW officers had acquired the sobriquet ‘Kaoboys’, Bush
presented Kao with a small bronze statue of a cowboy, during one of the Indian
intelligence leaders visits to Langley. A keen amateur sculptor, Kao, having
presumably swept the statue for bugs, afforded it pride of place on a table in his
office. Kao later commissioned the noted Indian artist, Sadiq, to cast a large
replica, and had it installed in the foyer of the R&AW’s headquarters building.1
Artistic sensitivities aside, the two men shared a reciprocal respect for the
others professionalism and discretion and operated a long-standing and
unofficial backchannel between Washington and New Delhi. Bush reminded
Kao on one occasion just how mutually beneficial it had been to, ‘have used our
personal communications in the past to pass informal information between
our two governments’.2 Drawing on their association as former intelligence
chiefs, Kao asked to meet privately with Bush during his brief stay in New
Delhi. Acknowledging the ‘problems and misunderstandings’ that had plagued
the United States’ relationship with India for much of the previous decade, Kao
worked hard to put a positive spin on the prospects for productive bilateral
cooperation. ‘We speak the same language . . . We share a common political
culture. We both have a federal structure’, Kao emphasised. ‘It should thus be
easier for us to understand the political problems that arise not only internally
but also externally. While we strive for maintenance and development of
friendship, it should be possible for us to live with our differences.’3 The
‘differences’ and ‘difficulties’ that Kao sought to raise directly with Bush,
centred on threats to the Indian Union emanating from successionist move-
ments in Kashmir and the Punjab. Elements within Gandhi’s government
suspected that the CIA were, if not actively abetting, then turning a blind eye
to, actions by state and non-state actors that endangered Indian national
security.4

233
234 spying in south asia

Much of the four days in May that George Bush spent in India, was taken up
by an abduction episode involving US nationals that had been staged to focus
international publicity on the CIA’s purportedly subversive activities in the
subcontinent. Forty-eight hours before Bush landed in India, an American
couple from Ohio, Stanley Bryson Allen, and his wife Mary, were seized in
neighbouring Sri Lanka by a rebel group, the Eelam People’s Revolutionary
Liberation Front (EPRLF). The rebels accused Allen, who was working in
Jaffna, in northern Sri Lanka, on a water resource project funded by the US
Agency for International Development, of being an agent of the CIA. In
exchange for the Americans return, the EPRLF demanded the release of twenty
political prisoners held by the Sri Lankan government and a payment in gold of
$50 million. The abduction had been planned, a spokesperson for the EPRLF
claimed, to highlight the CIA’s collaboration with Sri Lankan government
forces in the repression of the island’s minority Tamil community. As the
senior US official on the spot, Bush coordinated Washington’s response to the
crisis. Working closely with Indira Gandhi and the R&AW, who had estab-
lished links to the rebels through southern India’s Tamil community, Bush
helped to secure the Allen’s release before leaving New Delhi.5
When not preoccupied with his side hustle as a hostage negotiator, Bush
held a series of constructive meetings with Gandhi and Kao. ‘I wanted to let
you know’, the vice president wrote to India’s intelligence chief on his return to
Washington, ‘how valuable I thought our conversations were during my recent
visit to New Delhi’.6 It was all the more disappointing, Bush felt compelled to
add, that Indian government officials had again seen fit to imply that his
former employer in Langley was interfering in India’s internal affairs.
Specifically, the CIA had been linked by members of Gandhi’s government
to militant Sikh organisations that were waging a violent insurgency in the
Punjab. Weeks after Bush returned from India, an ill-judged and bloody
counter-terrorist operation conducted by Indian special forces to oust mili-
tants from the Golden Temple in Amritsar, one of Sikhism holiest sites, left
hundreds dead and wounded, the temple complex heavily damaged, and
India’s domestic and diasporic Sikh communities enraged. Faced with intense
international pressure to justify the botched operation, codenamed Blue Star,
which had exacerbated rather than quelled the Punjab insurgency, some
figures close to Gandhi found it impossible to resist suggesting that
a familiar ‘foreign hand’ lay behind India’s troubles. ‘I must frankly express
to you’, a peeved Bush informed Kao, ‘how taken aback I was to hear of recent
Indian accusations concerning alleged CIA involvement in the Punjab. Media
articles and statements by government officials linking CIA operations with
occurrences in Amritsar are completely contrary to the fact and quite distress-
ing.’ Bush was particularly irritated that, having personally and publicly
reassured Indians that the Reagan administration respected ‘the unity and
integrity of India’, and after privately reinforcing the point in private talks with
 indian intelligence and the end of the cold war 235

Gandhi, the CIA had been employed by senior figures in the Congress Party as
a political scapegoat. Ending his message to Kao with a characteristically
understated, but no less withering, diplomatic rebuke, Bush asked his Indian
colleague to ‘express my concern with these accusations to the Prime Minister
at your earliest opportunity’.7
Kao’s reply to Bush was uncharacteristically defensive and impolitic. Falling
back on a habit Indian officials exhibited to draw historical analogies that,
intentionally or not, grated with American counterparts, Kao expressed confi-
dence that ‘painful’ though the decision had been to send the Indian army into
Amritsar, ‘I am sure that our friends in U.S.A. would appreciate it if they recall
the history of their own civil war to safeguard the unity and integrity of the
country.’ John F. Kennedy had bridled when Jawaharlal Nehru lectured the
Catholic Irish-American President on the inequities of colonialism. ‘ . . . I can
claim the company of most historians’, Kennedy had snapped back at Nehru,
‘in saying that the colonialism to which my immediate ancestors were subject
was more sterile, oppressive, and even cruel than that of India. The legacy of
Clive was on the whole more tolerable than that of Cromwell.’8 Having
presented Bush with a lesson in American history, Kao went on to assure the
vice president that Indian intelligence was in possession of ‘information’ which
confirmed, ‘that this [the Punjab insurgency] was a deep-seated conspiracy for
secession’. It was unfortunate, Kao continued, that allegations had been made
in the subcontinent’s media linking the CIA with Sikh militants. Sidestepping
Gandhi’s muzzling of newspapers during the Emergency, Bush was reminded,
with no little sense of irony, that the Indian government was powerless to
control the nation’s free press. Back in 1975, the Bombay edition of the Times
of India had felt otherwise. In creative show of resistance to Gandhi’s impos-
ition of press restrictions, the Times had listed on its obituary page,
‘D’Ocracy – D.E.M, beloved husband of T. Ruth, loving father of L.I. Bertie,
brother of Faith, Hope, Justice, expired 26th June’.9 Still, Kao insisted to Bush
that Gandhi’s administration had refrained from suggesting that the CIA was
behind trouble in the Punjab. The prime minister herself, Bush was reminded,
had used a television interview, aired in the United Kingdom, on the BBC’s
Panorama programme, to deny that she had privately accused the Agency of
continuing to meddle in India’s internal affairs. ‘We accept your Government’s
statement’, Kao stressed to Bush, ‘[and] particularly yours, in this matter [CIA
activity]’.10
Denials from within Gandhi’s administration that it had reverted to using
the CIA as a patsy for India’s domestic woes made little impression on
American legislators. One Congressional report noted that a process of Sino-
American rapprochement, and a concurrent strengthening of Indo-Soviet
collaboration, epitomised by Gandhi’s reluctance to openly condemn
Moscow’s occupation of Afghanistan, had corroded the United States’ rela-
tionship with India. Caustic public diplomacy emanating from the
236 spying in south asia

subcontinent and that targeted the CIA, ‘provided grist for further congres-
sional dissatisfaction with New Delhi’. ‘Mrs. Gandhi’s periodic swipes at the
U.S. for interference in Indian internal affairs’, the White House was cau-
tioned, ‘infuriate Congressmen and staffers alike’.11 From an Indian viewpoint,
one former R&AW officer, who served in senior intelligence positions
throughout the 1980s, has asserted that Gandhi had good reason to question
the Agency’s bona fides when it came to covert activity. Gandhi herself, if the
Indian intelligence officer is to be believed, was subject to a protracted psycho-
logical warfare operation that, up until her death in October 1984, co-opted
pliant journalists into spreading disinformation designed to undermine popu-
lar support for the prime minister by characterising her as a Soviet stooge.12
Whether Gandhi was, or was not, a victim of CIA dirty tricks, is uncertain.
Beyond doubt, is the remarkable degree to which the CIA remained a fixture at
the heart of Indian civil debate throughout the 1980s. To the very end of the
Cold War, the political fortunes of Indira Gandhi, and her son, and successor,
Rajiv Gandhi, were intertwined with a series of espionage scandals in which,
almost inevitably, the CIA figured prominently.

A Pink-Tinted Country
Bill Casey, Ronald Reagan’s Director of Central Intelligence, was a fan of visual
analysis. Early in his tenure at the CIA, Casey asked the Agency’s Office for
Global Issues, in the Directorate of Intelligence, to run up a chart detailing
Moscow’s international footprint. A world map was produced that depicted
countries in different shades of red to denote varying levels of Soviet influence.
Eight countries considered to be under direct Soviet control were inked in dark
red. Six Soviet proxies appeared in crimson, and a further eighteen nations
deemed under strong Soviet sway were marked in maroon. Towards the end of
the communist colour chart, were a selection of salmon pink states that had
entered into treaties of friendship and cooperation with Moscow. In
August 1971, with trouble brewing between India and Pakistan, and with the
latter having found favour in Washington and Beijing, Indira Gandhi signed
a twenty-year treaty of mutual strategic support with the Soviet Union. On Bill
Casey’s world atlas, India was a pink-tinted country.13 In intelligence terms,
Soviet clandestine services had played an increasingly important part in
Moscow’s interventions in the subcontinent after 1971. In May 1973,
a British assessment of covert Soviet operations in South Asia estimated that
of the 600 Soviet diplomats posted to the region, 131 had been identified as
intelligence officers. Remarkably, in India, 100 per cent of the Soviets Defence
attachés, military personnel, and press and information staff had backgrounds
in intelligence. Overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of undeclared Soviet
spooks roaming India, local British intelligence officers took comfort from
the close relations they had cultivated with Indian colleagues, ‘who were
 indian intelligence and the end of the cold war 237

relatively efficient and passed us a great deal of useful information’.

Nonetheless, faced with a glaring disparity in clandestine resources, British
diplomats acknowledged that they could not hope to compete in a covert
conflict with the Soviets, or for that matter, their American allies. ‘Our best
hope of success’, one Foreign Office official observed meekly, ‘was in working
with these [Indian intelligence] organisations in order both to make them
more efficient and derive better information from them’.14
The British high commissioner in New Delhi, Sir Terence Garvey, cautioned
against exaggerating Soviet designs on India. Moscow’s approach, Garvey
argued, was ‘not to establish any kind of socialist system but to extend their
influence by small pushes at specific points’. Soviet economists were chary of
being caught ‘holding the Indian economic baby’ and it was far from certain
how far communism had gained traction in India’s armed services. The
Eastern bloc, however, continued to invest heavily in a propaganda offensive
in the subcontinent and British officials worried that, ‘the Congress Party had
been infiltrated to a certain extent by Communists and left-wing ideas’. Large
numbers of Communist Party members had defected to the Congress, some of
whom had risen to high office. Nevertheless, in comparison to Maoist,
Trotskyist, and other radical left-wing groups operating in the country,
Garvey regarded the Communist Party of India as relatively benign and
‘almost part of the establishment.’ Given the extensive political, economic,
military, and interpersonal connections between India and the United
Kingdom, Garvey reminded Whitehall, ‘If the Kremlin Research Department
had a penchant for the conspiracy theory of history, they could certainly be
able to make out a good case by using the figures for United Kingdom-India
[interaction].’15 Colleagues in the British Ministry of Defence (MOD) held
a less sanguine view of the threat posed by growing Soviet influence in India.
One MOD paper, prepared in 1977 for an interdepartmental working group on
India, placed strong emphasis on the ‘suspected penetration of Indian
Government Departments and to a lesser extent the Armed Services by the
Russian Intelligence Service’.16
Early in the Reagan administration, the State Department resolved to actively
counter what officials perceived as an alarming and unacceptable expansion in
Soviet subversive activities. In April 1981, Lawrence Eagleburger, Assistant
Secretary of State for European Affairs, Ronald Spiers, director of the Bureau
of Intelligence and Research, and Paul Wolfowitz, director of the Policy
Planning Staff, composed a joint memorandum to Secretary of State,
Alexander Haig. Calling for a more aggressive approach to counter rising
Soviet Bloc subversion, the memorandum identified a need to ‘better fix’ the
success Soviet intelligence had garnered from penetrating foreign intellectual
movements, trade unions, and peace groups. Haig was asked to approve the
production and distribution of materials highlighting, ‘how the Soviets have
worked over the years to achieve influence sufficient to manipulate the internal
238 spying in south asia

affairs of certain nations on key issues’. The CIA, Haig was informed, ‘is doing
some of this already, but they could use encouragement from us to do more’.
India was referenced specifically as a country where examples of KGB and GRU
operations could be usefully exposed. A carefully calibrated American effort to
encourage governments, including that in New Delhi, to monitor Soviet intelli-
gence activity more closely, place greater constraints on the movements of
suspected intelligence officers, and trim back their numbers, where possible,
was contemplated. This strategy looked to coordinate State Department, CIA,
and International Communication Agency (ICA) resources in a mutually
reinforcing diplomatic, intelligence, and public relations offensive to push
back against Soviet covert action. Haig welcomed the initiative and gave
a green light to its implementation.17
Within India, influential voices counselled Indira Gandhi not to expect
much in the way of genuine cooperation or support from the Reagan adminis-
tration. In July 1982, writing to the prime minister ahead of her first visit to the
United States in over a decade, P. N. Haksar suggested that ‘Reagan is belea-
guered and besieged’.18 Haksar had long considered India’s relations with the
Soviet Union to be of ‘cardinal importance’. He had also questioned whether
Washington could ever be, ‘compelled to accept as part of their working
hypothesis that they cannot affect India except on the basis of equality and co-
operation’.19 Even so, Haksar’s disdain for the American president was striking.
‘Of course, it is always possible to have conversations seeking to understand
how Reagan’s mind works’, he suggested to Gandhi, ‘assuming, of course, that
Reagan has a mind. In America itself, respectable journalists are talking about
his lack of I.Q.’ It was disturbing, Haksar went on, that Reagan had intimated,
‘he knew how to deal with Brezhnev because he had dealt with Hollywood
Communists during the days of MaCarthy [sic]’. ‘He [Reagan] is a prisoner of
an ideology which is in desperate search for viable domestic and foreign
policies’, the Indian premier was advised. ‘And since the neo-conservative
ideology is based on frustration of American power, it can lead to serious
miscalculations and fiascos.’20 In conversations with American visitors, includ-
ing the scholar and journalist, Selig Harrison, Gandhi revealed that she felt
misunderstood and maligned by the current American administration. ‘You
think we are against you [the United States]’, Gandhi complained to Harrison,
‘whereas in fact we are closer to you than to the Soviet Union’. ‘I can say
anything I want to your Government or to President Reagan’, the Indian leader
clarified. ‘But I can’t do that with the Soviets. They have set patterns and can’t
understand anything outside. To Khrushchev, perhaps, I could say what I liked,
and he also responded that way, but not with any of the others.’ It was
unfortunate, the Indian leader continued, that ‘America (whether it was
Reagan himself or [the] CIA or [the] Pentagon) seemed to think that Indira
Gandhi should be countered, and India kept under pressure.’ In a telling aside
to Harrison, as his encounter with Gandhi concluded, the American was
 indian intelligence and the end of the cold war 239

surprised to be asked for his impression of Harry G. Barnes, Reagan’s ambassa-

dor to India. She had wondered, Gandhi confessed to a startled Harrison,
‘whether he [Barnes] was in the C.I.A.’.21

Persona Non Grata

Gandhi’s suspicions where the CIA was concerned was not entirely misplaced.
In January 1981, less than a week before his inauguration, Reagan, Casey, and
Bush met with the outgoing CIA Director, Stansfield Turner, in a private room
in Blair House, just across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House.
Turner had requested the meeting to ensure that the new administration was
up to speed on the Agency’s clandestine operations. Turner began by apprais-
ing Reagan and his team of the CIA’s ongoing support for resistance move-
ments fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, and the latest developments in the
US hostage situation in Iran. He moved on to explain that ‘the really dicey
operations’ being conducted by the Agency did not involve covert actions, but
rather sensitive intelligence collection efforts. Prominent among the latter was
the work of a senior official within the Indian government who had been
recruited as a CIA asset. The Indian, Turner revealed, was providing the
Agency with invaluable material on Soviet weapon systems supplied to New
Delhi and, specifically, those concerned with air defence.22 Awkward
American attempts to cajole India’s Intelligence Bureau into pooling informa-
tion on the Soviets had proved unsuccessful and had served to irritate New
Delhi. The IB did maintain an open channel of communication with the CIA.
Senior IB officers visited the Agency’s Langley headquarters regularly and
received CIA assistance in areas such as VIP protection. Still, Indian intelli-
gence officers experienced difficulty in building relationships with their
American colleagues. In the early 1980s, Thangavelu (T. V.) Rajeswar, the
IB’s Director, found his interactions with Bill Casey to be more bemusing than
beguiling. On one occasion, having been invited to lunch with Casey and
a group of senior Agency officers, Rajeswar was mystified when he was asked
to comment on the Soviets recourse to chemical warfare in countries ranging
from Cambodia to Canada. On checking that Casey was referring to the so-
called ‘yellow rain’ phenomenon, which independent observers had dis-
counted as being linked to Soviet use of biological or chemical weapons,
Rajeswar was taken aback when Casey insisted that there was no question
that Moscow’s use of chemical agents had precipitated ‘yellow rain’. Rajeswar
was equally troubled by requests from the CIA to furnish information on
Soviet dignitaries visiting India, and suggestions that his service turn a blind
eye to American technical surveillance of Eastern bloc embassies in New Delhi
in return for access to the Agency’s latest eavesdropping technology.23 By
seeking to inaugurate a new and more aggressive phase in the subcontinent’s
clandestine Cold War, Casey and the CIA won few friends in India.
240 spying in south asia

It did not take long for simmering tensions between India and the United
States in the intelligence field to burst out into the open. In September 1981,
nine months into Reagan’s presidency, in a move the State Department
slammed as ‘unprecedented’, Gandhi’s administration refused to accredit
a senior American diplomat that Washington planned to send to New Delhi.
As prospective political counsellor, George Griffin was earmarked to take up
the third most senior post in the US Embassy. While questions were occasion-
ally raised in government circles about the suitably of ambassadors selected for
foreign posts, it was rare for a host nation to veto the appointment of lower-
level diplomatic staff. In Griffin’s case, the State Department was infuriated at
what it interpreted as India’s craven response to an obvious attempt by the
Soviets to besmirch the American diplomat through the crude use of disinfor-
mation. Back in December 1980, The Patriot, a left-leaning Indian newspaper
that Moscow had been secretly funding since the late 1950s, accused Griffin of
meddling in the internal affairs of Afghanistan, where he was working in the
US Embassy in Kabul. In a classic disinformation ploy, the Soviet news agency,
TASS, picked up the story, which had likely been passed to the Indian
newspaper by the KGB, and it was reported back into the subcontinent via
Radio Moscow. The following May, a story carried by the pro-Soviet Bombay
tabloid, Blitz, claimed that Griffin had orchestrated covert CIA operations
against the Afghan government and, sensationally, had been party to an
attempt to sabotage an Air India plane used by Indira Gandhi on a foreign
visit. ‘Now his bosses are sending him [Griffin] to a new sector of work’, Blitz
alleged, ‘which will signify a broadening of diversionary and spy activities of
the C.I.A. in India’.24
Washington responded by taking the usual step of denying that the experi-
enced foreign service officer, who had completed tours in Sri Lanka and
Pakistan, as well as Afghanistan and India, had ever worked for the CIA. In
1968, Griffin’s name appeared in a bogus directory of American intelligence
officers circulated by the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (HVA), the external
arm of East Germany’s Ministry of State Security, or Stasi. The US foreign
service officer may have blotted his copy book with the KGB by attempting, and
failing, to persuade a Soviet couple to defect to the West during his time in Sri
Lanka. In late July 1981, just weeks before Griffin was due to take up his
assignment in India, Gandhi’s government reacted to the swirl of falsehoods
and innuendo surrounding the diplomat and informed the State Department
that he was persona non grata. The Reagan administration responded by
declaring that an Indian diplomat of equal rank, T. Prabhakar Menon, who
was due to take up a post in Washington, was no longer welcome in the United
States.25 The Griffin incident added to tensions between Reagan’s and Gandhi’s
governments, which had bubbled to the surface following a decision by
Washington to supply India’s regional rival, Pakistan, with $3 billion dollars
of cutting-edge weapons, including advanced F-16 fighter aircraft.
 indian intelligence and the end of the cold war 241

Implausibly, the Indian government defended its action as a sensible pre-

ventative measure that would avoid Indo-US ties becoming, ‘further embit-
tered’. Addressing the Lok Sabha, Narasimha Rao, Gandhi’s minister for
external affairs, claimed that the Indian government had acted to avoid
a ‘much more undesirable state of affairs coming into being’. ‘We have exer-
cised our judgment and felt it was not proper to have Mr Griffin here on
account of the activities this person was likely to indulge in.’ Contrary to media
reports, Rao insisted, Soviet disinformation had played no part in the govern-
ment’s decision to object to Griffin’s posting. ‘[W]e have not been influenced by
books, by newspapers, by what any other country has stated’, the minister
emphasised. Rao’s circumspection did not stop members of his own party
from speculating on Griffin’s supposedly dubious past. Somanahalli
Mallaiah (S. M.) Krishna, a Congress MP from Karnataka, in southwest India,
reminded his fellow parliamentarians, ‘that India does not have anything like
the CIA with its tentacles spread to almost every nook and corner of the world’.
Evidence from American sources, Krishna continued, including Henry
Kissinger’s memoirs, and studies conducted by the American journalist,
Lawrence Lifschultz, had exposed covert efforts made by US officials in 1971
to persuade representatives of Bangladesh’s pro-independence Awami League
to reach an accommodation with Pakistan.26 At the time, Griffin was serving as
a consular officer in Calcutta, in eastern India, where the Awami League had
established a government in exile. ‘He [Griffin] was very vitally connected
with . . . the CIA’, Krishna charged, and had worked against the interests of
India and Bangladesh to advance the Nixon administration’s pro-Pakistan
agenda.27 By stirring up yet more CIA conspiracism, the Guardian’s corres-
pondent in New Delhi, Peter Niesewand, reasoned, Gandhi’s government had
incensed local American officials. ‘ . . . Indo-American relations are now’, the
British journalist judged, ‘as sour as they have ever been, and Mr Rao’s
parliamentary statement yesterday has done nothing to improve matters’.28
A positive encounter between Reagan and Gandhi at the North–South
summit in Cancun, Mexico, later that year, and a productive visit that the
India premier made to the United States in July, where notable agreements
were reached on scientific exchange and India’s civil nuclear programme,
helped to reset Indo-US relations. Almost as soon as dialogue between
Washington and New Delhi had taken a constructive turn, however, another
spy scandal surfaced in India and dissipated much of the goodwill that the
Reagan administration had banked with Gandhi. In December 1983, reports
emerged in the press that three retired Indian military officers had been
arrested, taken to New Delhi’s Tihar jail, and charged with passing sensitive
defence material to a foreign power in contravention of the Official Secrets Act.
Rumours quickly spread in the Indian capital that the CIA was implicated in
the subcontinent’s latest espionage affair. Details of the alleged spy ring
surfaced first in the Indian Express. The newspaper reported that Indian Air
242 spying in south asia

Vice Marshal Ken Larkins, his elder brother, Major General Frank Larkins,
Lieutenant Colonel Jasbir Singh, of the Indian Army, and a civilian, Jaspal Singh
Gill, had been taken into custody. Two diplomats from the US embassy in New
Delhi, the Express added, were under investigation on suspicion of receiving
classified information related to Indian military equipment.29 With the story
out in the open, India’s Defence Minister, Ramaswamy Venkataraman, rushed
to parliament and made a brief statement confirming that four arrests had been
made on national security grounds, and that these were linked to activities
involving a foreign power. Within twenty-four hours, a first secretary at the US
embassy, Harry Wetherbee, had been declared persona non grata and put on
a plane back to Washington. Nominally responsible for policy planning, in
reality, Wetherbee was an intelligence officer in the local CIA station. India’s
Intelligence Bureau, reports suggested, had stumbled upon the espionage oper-
ation after one of its members had erred in making a cold approach to
a patriotic air force officer. Instead of passing on operating manuals for
Soviet MiG fighters in exchange for cash, as intended, the officer went straight
to the IB. Opposition politicians, including the Janata Party’s, Madhu
Dandavate, claimed that the spy ring had provided the CIA with key technical
details of the $1.5 billion military assistance programme that the Soviet Union
had in place with India. Other sources confirmed that the espionage activity had
targeted Indian air force bases and obtained blueprints of Soviet aircraft and air
defence systems operated by the IAF.30
British officials in New Delhi noted the ‘predictably wide coverage’ that the
Larkins affair generated in the Indian press. ‘There is no doubt that the Indians
have been very embarrassed by the incident’, the High Commission reported
to London. ‘The main tenor of . . . debate [in India] was concern that senior
officers had been willing to betray their country for money.’ That America’s
intelligence establishment was singled out for particular public criticism came
as no surprise to British diplomats. A more troubling development was the
extent to which the latest spy scandal to rock India had encouraged local
commentators to question the activities of other external intelligence services
in the subcontinent, including that of the United Kingdom. ‘The wickedness of
the CIA was naturally mentioned [by India’s press and politicians]’, Whitehall
was advised, ‘but some speakers also referred generally to the espionage
activities of diplomatic missions, as well as of other agencies, including the
KGB and the British Secret Service’. While the British acknowledged that
‘Indo-US relations will clearly suffer most’, they also fretted that, as
a consequence of the Larkins affair, ‘there may well be some effect on countries
believed to be associated with the United States’. Whatever adverse conse-
quences might accrue for British intelligence in India, it seemed certain, ‘that
the Indians will be generally more security conscious, particularly over
defence’. Espionage operations targeting the Indian government were expected
to become more challenging as well as politically risky. The British Defence
 indian intelligence and the end of the cold war 243

Adviser and his staff in the High Commission, it was recorded ruefully, were
no longer permitted to meet singularly with Indian colleagues.31
Conjecture on what the Larkins affair might reveal about foreign intelli-
gence activity in India persisted into 1985, as the Indian justice system con-
ducted seemingly interminable closed-court hearings that were subject to
a strict reporting embargo. In July 1985, more than eighteen months after
their arrest, the suspects in the case were convicted of selling classified infor-
mation related to Soviet military systems operated by India to representatives
of the United States government. In ruling on the case, High Court Judge,
K. B. Andley, sentenced the three former military officers, Frank Larkins, Ken
Larkins, and Jasbir Singh, to 10 years each in prison. The civilian member of
the spy ring, Jaspal Singh Gill, received a two-year prison sentence. Faced with
a long period of incarceration, a shocked Frank Larkins declared that he felt ‘a
little weak in the knees’.32 Much the same sensation would afflict Indian and
American government officials as, over the course of the 1980s an unparalleled
Soviet disinformation campaign centred on India, in conjunction with
a succession of further espionage cases involving the United States, saw
Washington’s relations with New Delhi remain under severe strain.

Soviet Active Measures: From Assam to AIDS

In October 1981, the US State Department called a press conference in
Washington. Its purpose was to brief journalists on the latest special report
produced by the Bureau of Public Affairs. The report’s subject was Soviet
‘Active Measures’, or aktivnyye meropriyatiya. Distinct from espionage or
counterintelligence activity, the State Department defined Soviet active meas-
ures as encompassing written or spoken disinformation; efforts to control
media in foreign countries; use of Communist parties; clandestine radio broad-
casting; blackmail; and political influence operations. Active measures did not,
American officials stressed to assembled journalists, include press releases,
open public broadcasting, or information disseminated through cultural
exchange programmes. ‘Soviet active measures are frequently undertaken
secretly’, the State Department report noted, ‘sometimes violate the laws of
other nations, and often involve threats, blackmail, bribes, and exploitation of
individuals and groups’. Moscow’s engagement with active measures, it added,
‘remain a major, if little understood, element of Soviet foreign policy’. In
seeking to manipulate the press in foreign countries, the Soviets had, it was
alleged, employed a broad spectrum of techniques from the forgery of docu-
ments to the exploitation of front organisations. Initiated at the highest levels of
the Soviet state and sanctioned by the Politburo and Communist Party Central
Committee, active measures were designed and executed by Service A of the
KGB’s First Chief Directorate, or in the parlance of some journalists, the ‘KGB’s
dirty-tricks squad’. They drew on support from official and quasi-official Soviet
244 spying in south asia

representatives, including academics, students, and journalists. A tendency

existed in Western and developing world countries, the State Department
asserted, to ‘ignore or downplay Soviet active measures until Soviet blunders
lead to well-publicised expulsions of diplomats, journalists or others’.
A reluctance to pre-empt Soviet interference in a nation’s domestic politics,
the report stressed, had helped to facilitate Moscow’s efforts to disrupt relations
between states, smear critics of the Soviet Union, and corrode trust in foreign
leaders, institutions, and democratic values.33
India was represented as an epicentre of Soviet active measures in the State
Department report. Dozens of Indian journalists, it was claimed, had been co-
opted to plant stories favourable to the USSR in the subcontinent’s press. The
salacious weekly Blitz, in particular, was singled out as a willing Soviet vehicle
for the reproduction of forged documents and spurious articles that falsely
labelled American officials and citizens as CIA officers or agents. A marked
proliferation of sophisticated political influence operations, many involving
forgery, had troubled American diplomats. By the beginning of the 1980s,
disinformation directed by Service A was believed to occupy the attention of
fifty full-time personnel and consume an annual budget of $ 50 million dollars.
In India, Moscow’s insistence, back in May 1976, that India alter the exchange
rate applied on the import of Soviet goods, from Rs 8.33 to the rouble to Rs. 10
to the rouble, was a boon to KGB’s propagandists. The manipulation of India’s
currency had no direct impact on bilateral trade, as this was dominated in
rupees. It did allow the Soviets to amass a considerable war chest of local
Indian currency that the KGB rezidentura in New Delhi put to use expanding
its campaign against Mrs Gandhi’s ‘enemies’, and the CIA above all.34 More
generally, Moscow was estimated to be spending $ 3 billion on its global
propaganda operations, overt and covert.35 ‘On the basis of the historical
record’, Washington warned, ‘there is every reason to believe that the Soviet
leadership will continue to make heavy investments of money and manpower
in meddlesome and disruptive operations around the world’.36
Soviet policymakers did not disappoint. Prior to the seventh summit of the
Non-Aligned Movement, held in New Delhi, in March 1983, left-wing news-
papers in India published a forged document that was attributed to the US
ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick. The bogus text outlined
plans for a covert American operation designed to Balkanise India and sow
division in the developing world. Surfacing first in January, in The Patriot,
which drew substantial advertising revenue from the Soviet embassy’s
Information Department, the forgery was later picked up and replayed by
other sympathetic Indian dailies and by tabloids outside the subcontinent. It
alleged that having toured South Asia in August 1981, Kirkpatrick had circu-
lated a top-secret report within the US government that focused on an upsurge
in separatist movements in India. An opportunity existed, the counterfeit paper
stated, to destabilise the Indian Union, destroy its influence in the Non-Aligned
 indian intelligence and the end of the cold war 245

Movement, and wreck Soviets efforts to use neutralist New Delhi as a wedge to
weaken Western influence in the developing world. In a statement issued
the day after the Patriot article appeared, Kirkpatrick lambasted the newspaper
for peddling ‘pure and malicious disinformation’ based on a ‘total fabrication’.
‘I have never’, the ambassador shot back indignantly, ‘written a paper on
“Balkanization” or any even remotely related subject’. Ignoring Kirkpatrick’s
denial, TASS duly reported the original Patriot piece as an established fact, and
it was referenced by communist newspapers worldwide.37
The kernel of the Patriot story featured in a spate of newspaper reports in
New Delhi, Calcutta, and Madras that had surfaced in the months preceding its
appearance. Each of these were carried initially in Soviet publications. Most
focused on fictious reports that the CIA had meddled in elections in Andhra
Pradesh and Karnataka, in southern India; was aiding separatist movements in
Assam, in the northeast, and the Punjab, in the northwest; that Washington
was bent on fomenting chaos in the Global South; and that the Pentagon was
secretly building up military forces in Pakistan, on India’s doorstep. The
Moscow daily, Moskovskiy Komsomolets, ran a series of stories on the so-
called ‘Brahmaputra Plan’, a plot supposedly hatched by the CIA to exploit
religious and economic tensions in northeast India and tie up New Delhi’s
resources in counter-insurgency operations.38 Other Soviet tabloids, including
the youth newspaper, Komsomolskaya Pravda, amplified the narrative of
American intrigue in India by accusing the CIA of assisting secessionist
activities of militants in the Punjab who were fighting for the establishment
of an independent Sikh state of Khalistan. Soviet propagandists ensured that
printed disinformation was afforded additional impact by broadcasting press
stories, in Hindi, into the subcontinent via Radio Moscow.39
Later in 1983, a major Stasi operation reaffirmed India’s status as a global
hub of communist propaganda activity. At the time, Americans were con-
cerned with the spread of a new retrovirus, HIV/AIDS. With infections and
fatalities linked to HIV/AIDS increasing rapidly in the United States, and the
virus’s cause still unknown, officers from the Stasi’s disinformation unit,
Department X, observed that American national hysteria associated with the
condition was proliferating faster than HIV/AIDS itself. In India, stories
appeared in the press that linked the emergence of HIV/AIDS to scientific
research carried out by the US government. On 16 July, the front-page of The
Patriot proclaimed sensationally, ‘AIDS may invade India: mystery disease
caused by U.S. lab experiments’. The Indian newspaper reproduced a letter
from an unnamed American scientist that, one academic authority on disin-
formation has estimated, comprised 20 per cent fiction and 80 per cent fact.
The letter combined half-truths and outright falsehoods in a superficially
authoritative and engaging manner that encouraged readers to draw their
own conclusions on the consequences of Washington’s irresponsible behav-
iour. ‘AIDS, the deadly mysterious disease which has caused havoc in the
246 spying in south asia

U.S.’, Patriot trumpeted, ‘is believed to be the result of the Pentagon’s experi-
ments to develop new and dangerous biological weapons’. It emphasised,
accurately, the World Health Organisation’s concern at an unexplained dis-
ease, which appeared highly transmissible, and was sweeping through elem-
ents of America’s immigrant, gay, and narcotic consuming communities.
Quoting selectively from official records that had been released years earlier
by the CIA and the Department of Defence, Indian readers were informed that
US government agencies had ‘tested new types of biological weapons in the
densely populated areas of the U.S. and Canada, such as New York,
Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Winnipeg’. Medical trials conducted by the
American military and the Agency, most notably the controversial MKULTRA
investigations into mind-control, the Patriot added, had been proven to have
exposed unwitting ‘guinea pigs’, including drug users and convicts, to psycho-
tropic agents and communicable diseases.40
In this instance, the practitioners of disinformation in the Stasi and KGB
blundered, and the attempt to harness Indian newspapers as a launchpad for
the global dissemination of stories attributing the appearance of HIV/AIDS to
Washington’s reckless clinical experimentation, fell flat. Anxiety surrounding
HIV/AIDS had yet to reach the subcontinent. Despite its exemplary use of
propaganda techniques to craft a compelling and effective narrative, Indians
largely ignored the Patriot exposé. Having failed to gain traction in the
subcontinent, the report fizzled out and went unnoticed in North America
and Europe.41 British officials in India had previously observed that the
subcontinent constituted something of an experimental laboratory in which
Soviet covert propaganda techniques were trialled and honed before being
deployed across the developing world. ‘The Russians have, of course’, one IRD
officer mused, ‘used their experiences in India in many ways as a model for
penetration of other countries and indeed their connexions with India as
a direct instrument’.42 Over time, the KGB, and its Eastern European collab-
orators, discerned that the effectiveness of active measures, including forgery,
hinged less on whether they resonated with reality, and more on their capacity
to affect emotions, or the collective outlook of a target audience. Moscow
learnt that disinformation likely to sharpen existing tensions and prejudices or,
in the terminology employed by Cold War propagandists, which amplified
prevailing contradictions, worked best.43 Indians evidenced an ambivalence to
concocted accounts of America’s role in exposing the world to HIV/AIDS,
however unconscionable Washington’s actions were made to appear. Such
considerations resonated little with the lived experience of most South Asians.
It was a lesson that the KGB was quick to absorb. As the 1980s progressed, and
a new, more belligerent phase of the Cold War developed, the Reagan admin-
istration became irritated and, ultimately, infuriated, by the Soviets return to
a disinformation theme that animated Indians more than any other, that of the
American foreign hand and its subversive agenda in the subcontinent.
 indian intelligence and the end of the cold war 247

Rajiv Gandhi and the Politics of Intelligence: Plus ça change,

plus c’est la même chose?
Indira Gandhi’s interactions with successive American administrations were
complicated by the Indian premier’s byzantine relationship with the Central
Intelligence Agency. Following her assassination in October 1984, US officials
hoped that her son, and successor, Rajiv Gandhi, would seek to improve
relations with the United States. A technocrat, who studied engineering at
Cambridge University and Imperial College, London, and later joined Indian
Airlines as a pilot, Rajiv was seen as a pragmatist. It was believed that he
favoured reducing India’s dependence on Soviet financial and military support
and increasing the role of private enterprise in the country’s moribund econ-
omy. A relative political novice, Rajiv had rejected a legislative role in his
youth, and it was only following the unexpected death of his younger and
electorally ambitious brother, Sanjay, that the elder Gandhi sibling gravitated
towards the family business. Recalibrating established Indian diplomacy rep-
resented a daunting challenge for the most adroit and experienced of politi-
cians, and Rajiv Gandhi was neither. Still, as American observers noted,
Gandhi had the good sense to recognise a need to move ahead cautiously
with reforms. ‘[P]ro-Soviet elements within his Congress Party and the bur-
eaucracy, aided by the Soviet propaganda machine’, the US embassy in New
Delhi reported to Washington, ‘could conceivably seriously threaten his
[Gandhi’s] political position unless he institutes policy changes slowly’. ‘This
“institutionalized” Soviet influence within India’, American diplomats added,
‘could be decisive in blocking – through private, party or parliamentary
pressure – government decisions which are perceived as diluting the special
relationship or threatening other Soviet interests in India’.44
It was not only ‘institutionalised’ Soviet influence in India that sought to
stymie improved relations between Washington and New Delhi. In Moscow,
the KGB’s disinformation officers set to work producing a series of forged
documents, the release of which was intended to reinforce a well-worn narra-
tive that a perfidious America could not be trusted. In August 1987, a notable
forgery featured in two successive issues of Blitz. The document took the form
of a letter, allegedly sent in December 1986, from Bill Casey to Edwin Feulner,
director of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think-tank. In
the text, Casey, who had passed away back in May 1987, thanked Feulner for
overseeing a Heritage Foundation study that recommended ways of fuelling
animosity within Indian opposition parties with a view to ousting Gandhi from
office. ‘So, we have it straight from William Casey, the late CIA Director’, Blitz
proclaimed, ‘as to who masterminded the current “turmoil” in India designed
to pull down the Rajiv government and cut India down to the status of pariah
nation in the world’. ‘The Heritage–CIA gang has been hatching one plot after
another to destabilise and balkanise India since the eighties’, the Indian
248 spying in south asia

newspaper exclaimed.45 A week later, Blitz ran a second story on the forgery
which, apparently without irony, quoted TASS as confirming the veracity of
the Casey letter. ‘So, ours was a “total and complete” forgery, was it Mr. Ugly
America??!!’ the tabloid crowed excitedly.46 In reality, the ‘Casey’ letter did
represent a crude and obvious fabrication. A State Department report on
Soviet influence activity pointed out that the letter published in Blitz contained
a blurred image of the CIA’s logo, which was also off-centre, suggesting that
the emblem had been cut-out from another document and transposed on to
blank letterheaded using a photocopying technique. The language and style of
the letter’s text was also awry. Casey had known Feulner for over twenty years.
The former’s correspondence to Feulner always began with the salutation,
‘Dear Ed’ and not, as the published letter stated, ‘Dear Edwin’. Even Casey’s
signature was inauthentic. The letter had not, as was Casey’s unfailing habit,
been signed using a felt tip pen.47
The Soviet disinformation campaign connecting the CIA with plots to
undermine Gandhi and his government was abetted by left-wing Indian
politicians who persisted in perpetuating the hackneyed notion that the
American government was subverting democracy in the subcontinent. In
October 1987, during a brief visit Rajiv Gandhi paid to Washington, the
topic of CIA machinations in India dominated media coverage of the Indian
premier’s talks with Reagan administration officials. Pressed by journalists to
clarify remarks he had made that alluded to CIA interference in India,
a defensive Gandhi replied, ‘That’s not what I said. What I have said was
not just Western nations, but most nations have [intelligence] operations
functioning in most developing countries and it is our job to see that they
remain within limits. It is not possible to totally get rid of such organiza-
tions.’ Somewhat incongruously, Gandhi went on to volunteer that he had
broached the specific question of CIA activity with Vice President George
Bush. In an exchange that echoed the correspondence that R. N. Kao had
conducted with Bush on behalf of Gandhi’s mother, three years earlier, the
Indian prime minister confirmed that, ‘He’s [Bush] assured me there is no
such [CIA] action or intervention [in India], certainly not at the highest
levels, and I take his word for it . . . I think what Vice President Bush told me
about the CIA is accurate.’48 During an appearance on NBC’s Today pro-
gramme the following morning, Gandhi felt compelled to revisit the CIA
chimera. Brushing over substantive issues in Indo-US relations, the Indian
premier reiterated the assurance that Bush had offered that the CIA was not
engaged in subversive activity in the subcontinent. Dismissing the concept of
a ‘foreign hand’ as an unhelpful ‘newspaper term’, Gandhi nonetheless
spurned the opportunity to reassure Americans that his government rejected
the politics of conspiracism favoured by his mother. ‘[To] say there is no
involvement of foreign agencies in India’, Gandhi asserted on US national
television, ‘would be absolutely wrong’.49
 indian intelligence and the end of the cold war 249

In domestic terms, Rajiv Gandhi’s capacity to move on from enervating

debates surrounding the actions of foreign intelligence services, and to
expend greater political time and energy on pressing issues, such as economic
reform, were constrained by events on the ground in India. In February 1985,
with Gandhi having been in office barely three months, the Intelligence
Bureau uncovered what commentators dubbed ‘the biggest spy ring in
Indian history’.50 Senior officials in the personal secretariats of Gandhi and
the President of India, as well as bureaucrats from the ministries of defence,
commerce, and the planning commission, were found to have passed classi-
fied information to a group of Indian businessmen over a number of years.
Chittur Venkat Narayan, who operated under the alias Coomer Narain, acted
as the ringleader. Narain was found to have handed over sensitive strategy
papers on defence, foreign, and economic policy, to three European embas-
sies in exchange for cash. Nineteen individuals were implicated in what came
to be known as the ‘Photocopy Spy Case’. Secret documents, it transpired,
had been smuggled out of government premises and photocopied in a local
Xerox shop. Three of the officials accused worked in the prime minister’s
office, one of whom, T. N. Kher, was a personal assistant to Padinjarethalakal
Cherian (P. C.) Alexander, Gandhi’s principal secretary.51 A chastened
Gandhi was forced to make a statement to the Indian parliament confirming
that government employees in ‘sensitive positions’ had engaged in ‘activities
detrimental to the national interest’. India’s press compounded Gandhi’s
discomfort by affording blanket coverage to ‘one of the most serious spy
scandals since partition’. Gossip abounded in India’s capital over the identity
of the foreign states that Narain had served. Although the Indian government
remained coy, the involvement of Pakistan, the KGB, and the CIA, was
mooted. New Delhi’s summary expulsion of a French deputy military
attaché, Lt. Col. Alain Bolley, added to an air of mystery over which countries
had been privy to some of India’s most closely guarded secrets. Serge
Boidevaix, the French ambassador, soon followed Bolley out of New Delhi
and into diplomatic exile.52
Unofficially, sources inside the US government denied any association in the
Narain affair. ‘New Delhi has found no evidence of US involvement in the recent
spy scandal’, a CIA report observed, ‘but is trying to find a US connection’.53 For
members of the Communist Party of India, who paraded outside the American
Embassy adjacent to Shantipath in the capital’s Chanakyapuri diplomatic quar-
ter, American complicity was never in doubt. While waving placards declaring,
‘Smash Reagan plans to dismember India’, and, ‘Stop CIA-French espionage’,
the communists kept up steady chants of ‘End CIA activities in India’,
and, ‘Down with the imperialist conspiracy against India’. Declining to
take Washington at its word, the Press Trust of India, along with
several national newspapers, alleged that Bolley and the French government
had shared the secrets obtained from Narain with the CIA.54 In contrast,
250 spying in south asia

Western journalists quoted intelligence sources as sceptical that the French had
cooperated with the Americans. Paris had harvested commercially valuable
security information from the Indian espionage operation that was of benefit
to its own arms industry. Few experts saw good reason why this would have been
shared with Langley. ‘For all of its traditional paranoia about the U.S. Central
Intelligence Agency’, one American writer noted, it was telling that ‘the Indian
government had yet to point a finger at Washington’. The CIA concluded that
reports emerging of Polish, East German, and Soviet roles in the espionage
scandal had likely tempered the KGB’s enthusiasm for ‘fan[ing] suspicions of the
US within the Indian government’. ‘If Moscow’s involvement is publicized’,
analysts back in Langley surmised, ‘Soviet efforts to stir up anti-American
sentiments with the Indian public probably would be undercut as well.’55
Gandhi was deeply affected by the Narain case. He spent long hours poring
over incriminating material seized by the IB, which included highly sensitive
papers on laser weaponry, nuclear research projects, counterintelligence, and
cabinet minutes on India’s troubled relations with Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
Narain had even provided the French with copies of India’s diplomatic ciphers.
As a consequence of the unprecedented security lapse, Gandhi took a much
closer interest in intelligence matters. In the final years of his premiership,
Gandhi spent more time meeting with India’s spy chiefs than any previous, or
subsequent, Indian leader.56
Rajiv Gandhi’s interest in intelligence and security issues ensured that he
was kept busy. Within a year, another pseudo-espionage case surfaced in New
Delhi that, on this occasion, did implicate Washington in snooping on the
India state. In January 1986, reports emerged in the press that Rama Swarup,
the Indian representative of a quasi-official Taiwan trade promotion body, had
assisted government bureaucrats in passing secret documents to officials in the
US embassy. The local CIA station, journalists reported, had paid Swarup for
confidential material on Indian-operated Soviet arms and to stage protests in
the Indian capital against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Government
papers lodged in an Indian court alleged that West German and Taiwanese
diplomats collaborated with Swarup in an American-led operation to cultivate
members of the Indian parliament as sources of information. Two senior
Indian ministers and a state commission chairman named in the court papers
resigned. Public interest in the case in India was fuelled by the release of a 200-
page ‘charge sheet’ that listed the contacts Swarup had established with MPs,
lawyers, journalists, and diplomats stretching back to the 1950s. ‘At some later
point Swarup is alleged to have become an agent for the Americans and the
Germans’, a British official reported back to London, ‘cultivating on their
behalf such people as the Supreme Court Lawyer Lekhi . . . the Ministers and
former Ministers Singh Deo, Chandrakar, Sanjeevi Rao and Arvind Netam,
former Prime Minister Morarji Desai, leader of the Telugu Desam Party,
P. Upendra and numerous others’.57
 indian intelligence and the end of the cold war 251

Seven American diplomats and one German colleague left India unexpect-
edly in the wake of the Swarup revelations. The foreign officials, speculation
suggested, had fed Swarup material on Indira Gandhi’s assassination which
subsequently found its way into the national press. Swarup was also believed to
have played an important intermediary role in introducing Western contacts
to Indian MPs and bureaucrats and in passing information to his ‘handlers’ on
official Indian thinking in relation to foreign and domestic policy. The extent
to which Swarup’s activities were illegal, or merely stretched the boundaries of
India’s opaque laws governing interaction between foreign nationals and
policymakers, was unclear. No charges were brought against prominent
Indians identified as part of Swarup’s network. Gandhi’s government
remained uncomfortable, nevertheless, that the Swarup affair had reinforced
an impression that India’s secrets were up for sale. ‘The immediate fall-out
from the publicity [surrounding the Swarup case]’, the British High
Commission informed Whitehall, ‘is likely to be a [further] tightening of the
rules concerning contacts between MPs and officials and diplomats and
middlemen’.58 Gandhi duly cautioned his MPs that in future they should
avoid private meetings with small groups of foreign representatives. ‘It was
pointed out [by the prime minister to Congress members]’, one Indian news-
paper reported, ‘that on such occasions, foreigners try to engage guests in
conversations and get information from them or try to put across their own
point of view’.59 British diplomats in New Delhi subsequently complained of
‘difficulty in getting appointments in various Ministries’.60
The diplomatic community in New Delhi was not alone in griping that
Gandhi’s government had overreacted to the Swarup situation. In the Lok
Sabha, Brigadier Kamakhya Prasad Singh Deo, who stood down as Minister of
Food and Civil Supplies after being named as a contact of the Indian lobbyist,
used his resignation speech to assert that his conscience was clear and that he
had not compromised Indian national interests in any way. Taking a none too
subtle swipe at Gandhi for failing to support Congress figures linked to
Swarup, Singh Deo declared that ‘[P]ublic men should be saved from the
insinuations and slander of unscrupulous people who tried to implicate the
innocent.’61 In an editorial entitled, ‘Govt Must Explain’, the Times of India
offered Singh Deo support that his own government had failed to extend. On
the face of things, the newspaper observed, India’s intelligence agencies had
launched an investigation into an alleged espionage ring operated by Swarup
and compiled a charge sheet of suspects on which Singh Deo’s name featured.
In consequence, the minister had felt compelled to resign. ‘But things were not
so simple’, the Times noted. ‘Indian intelligence agencies are not known either
for their efficiency or integrity; on every critical occasion they have fallen in
[sic] their faces; it is common knowledge that they have manipulated evidence
to suit them or their political masters.’ ‘But the Rama Swarup case fell into
a category of its own’, the newspaper opined. Specifically, intelligence officers
252 spying in south asia

had not interviewed Singh Deo, or other prominent public individuals listed as
suspects, ‘before smearing them’. The Intelligence Bureau, it appeared, was ‘so
keen to publicise its “great achievement” [in wrapping up the Swarup network]
that it had taken care to provide copies of the chargesheet to newspapers’. It
appeared inconceivable to the Times of India that the IB had not shown the
chargesheet featuring Deo Singh to Gandhi and, instead, had acted on its own
initiative in a matter involving two government ministers. In which case, the
newspaper fulminated, the prime minster had ‘failed to do his duty’. ‘This duty
was to ensure that no one was maligned and made to suffer for crimes he had
not committed’, the editorial thundered. ‘A democracy does not survive in an
atmosphere of character assassination.’62
Much as Gandhi may have wished to distance his administration and party
from politically debilitating intelligence imbroglios, espionage ghosts from the
past continued to resurface and impinge upon the prime minister’s policy
agenda. In October 1986, another spy scandal returned to feed the seemingly
insatiable preoccupation with subversion and sedition in the Indian media.
Back in 1977, six officials from the US embassy in New Delhi, along with
a Soviet diplomat stationed in the Indian capital, were declared persona non
grata following an Intelligence Bureau enquiry into leaks of classified informa-
tion relating to India’s defence, foreign affairs, and petro-chemical interests,
that stretched back over fifteen years. After a tortuous eight-year trial, Indian
participants in the spy ring – which was directed by a businessman,
P. E. Mehta, and included K. K. Screen, a director in the state planning
Commission – were convicted of espionage and jailed. Confirmation that
another tranche of Indian bureaucrats had been induced to sell the nation’s
secrets to the CIA and KGB strained New Delhi’s relations with Washington
and Moscow, and raised further questions over India’s competency when it
came to safeguarding national security. The release of court transcripts that
detailed the actions of officials who had routinely passed highly classified
documents to foreign intelligence officers in the public toilet of New Delhi’s
Oberoi Intercontinental Hotel in return for wads of cash, did little to inspire
public confidence in the nation’s security and intelligence establishment.63
Towards the end of the decade as the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War’s
denouement began to play out, India’s press continued to feature a slew of
allegations that the CIA was conspiring to subvert Rajiv Gandhi’s government
and the Congress Party. In November 1989, on the eve of a general election in
India in which Gandhi was expected to face a tough fight to secure a further term
in office, the pro-government Hindustan Times claimed that a $1million-dollar
grant had been funnelled by the CIA to the prime minister’s political rival,
Vishwanath Pratap Singh. Accompanied by photostats of purportedly official
documents originating from the US embassy in India, the State Department, and
the CIA, the news report was dismissed by American officials as ‘mischievous’,
based upon ‘patent forgery’, and ‘designed to damage Indian-American relations
 indian intelligence and the end of the cold war 253

at a critical time’.64 Daniel Patrick Moynihan attacked the Indian newspaper

revelations as baseless, and informed by, ‘a painful – dare I say, pathetic –
forgery’.65 Forgery or not, as the New York Times noted, ‘In India’s highly
charged political atmosphere, accusations of involvement with American intel-
ligence agencies can be extremely damaging, with or without evidence, because
they are widely circulated.’ Singh had previously charged Gandhi’s Government
with operating its own ‘department of forgeries’ that manufactured spurious
allegations intended to destroy its political enemies. By way of evidence, Singh
pointed to bogus stories offered to Indian and foreign newspapers by mysterious
sources that, accompanied by counterfeit documentation, suggested Singh’s son,
Ajeya, operated bank accounts in the Caribbean nation of St Kitts and Nevis
worth tens of millions of dollars.66 In Washington, the latest forgeries implicat-
ing the CIA with subversive activity in the subcontinent were not thought to
have originated with Gandhi’s administration. Pressed for comment by US
journalists, an anonymous Bush administration source observed that, ‘The
Soviets and the communist bloc are the only ones who systematically engage
in this [forgery]. We have no knowledge that the Indian government has done it
in the past.’ The fact that Blitz had published a series of additional allegations
linked to the original Hindustan Times scoop, the source added, all but con-
firmed Moscow as the originator of the Singh smear.67
In 1992, revelations in the Indian press suggested that Soviet support for
Gandhi extended beyond the realm of disinformation. Quoting from Izvestia,
the Soviet newspaper of record, Indian journalists reported that documents had
been discovered in the KGB archives which detailed payments made by the
Soviet intelligence service to fund Gandhi’s political activities. According to
Russian sources, letters sent by the former KGB chief, Viktor Chebrikov, to
the central committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, confirmed
that Gandhi had expressed ‘deep gratitude’ for financial subsidies secretly
channelled to members of his family over many years via commercial transac-
tions between an Indian company and Soviet foreign trade organisations. In
response, an indignant denial issued by the All-India Congress Committee
(AICC) dismissed the revelation as ‘preposterous’. ‘In normal circumstances’,
the AICC statement declared, ‘we would not have considered that it [Soviet
claims of Gandhi’s KGB links] merited a denial . . . but Mr. Rajiv Gandhi is dead,
and the Congress party cannot allow his name to be sullied’.68 Two years later, in
1994, a book written by the Russian investigative journalist, Yevgenia Albats,
and American human rights activist, Catherine Fitzpatrick, entitled The State
Within a State: The KGB and Its Hold on Russia, Past and Present, reproduced
portions of the letter in which Chebrikov had outlined KGB support extended to
Gandhi.69 If Russian sources are to be believed, clandestine payments allegedly
made to Gandhi’s political opponents by Western intelligence agencies, were
more than likely offset by covert financial subsidies, not to mention KGB
disinformation operations, that Moscow used to support the Congress Party.
254 spying in south asia

Figure 10.1 All India Trade Union Congress members demonstrating against
‘American Imperialism’ in front of the US Embassy, New Delhi, 18 December 1971.
Keystone / Stringer / Hulton Archive / Getty Images.

New Wars and Familiar Narratives

In common with his mother, even in death Rajiv Gandhi found it impossible to
evade the clutches of the Central Intelligence Agency. On 21 May 1991, Gandhi
was on the campaign trail supporting Congress candidates in southern India.
Towards the end of a long day, at a final public meeting held in the village of
Sriperumbudur, a stone’s throw from Madras, a lone women emerged from
a throng of onlookers and headed towards Gandhi. In the process of bending
down to touch the former Indian premier’s feet, Thenmozhi Rajaratnam,
a member of the Black Tiger suicide brigade of the Liberation Tigers of
Tamil Eelam, detonated a belt laden with RDX explosives that was concealed
beneath her sari. Gandhi was killed instantly, along with fourteen bystanders.
Leading figures in India’s political establishment wasted little time in airing
suspicions, verbally and in print, that the CIA had been behind a plot to
assassinate Gandhi. Western journalists in the subcontinent were struck by
the strength of a knee-jerk reaction in India to Gandhi’s murder that appeared
both visceral and irrational. Writing in the Washington Post, the newspapers
South Asia correspondent, Steve Coll, noted, ‘The view that the CIA wanted
Gandhi dead is pervasive even among those Indian politicians, bureaucrats,
 indian intelligence and the end of the cold war 255

academics and journalists who have lived or travelled in the West.’ ‘It is
a difficult opinion to explain or refute’, Coll added, ‘since it seems to arise
not from evidence or even coherent speculation, but from a deep-seated
emotional conviction’. While acknowledging the Agency’s murky past and
the particular imprint made by Congressional hearings in the 1970s that had
exposed CIA complicity in murder plots in the global South, the American
journalist nevertheless observed that in the case of India, a widespread belief
that Langley was somehow involved in Gandhi’s demise was not rooted in
‘tangible history’ but rather ‘a different kind of thinking’.70
The connection that many South Asians drew between conspiracy, subver-
sion, and political assassination was epitomised by a 2,000-word article pub-
lished by the communist commentator and politician, Sudheendra Kulkarni,
in the Sunday Observer. Under the banner, ‘Days of the Jackal’, an allusion to
the bestselling novel by the English author, Frederick Forsyth, that recounted
a fictional attempt on the life of French president, Charles de Gaulle, Kulkarni
detailed the history of political assassination in the subcontinent since the
Second World War. A common thread linking all the extra-judicial killings, he
asserted, was a determination on the part of the West, and more especially, the
United States, to keep India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh in a state of poverty,
instability, and dependency.71 Such theories resonated with many well-
educated Indians who interpreted Gandhi’s violent death as confirmation
that the CIA was not prepared to tolerate a strong leader with an agenda to
transform India into a vibrant, modern, and technologically advanced nation
capable of challenging American global hegemony. Throughout the Cold War,
Eastern bloc propaganda had promoted a narrative of the CIA as a malevolent
and destructive force operating beyond the control of elected politicians.
India’s left-wing intelligentsia, who generally baulked at reductive Western
characterisations of the Soviet Union as an evil empire, harboured an intrinsic
enmity towards the Agency that Moscow’s disinformation operatives worked
hard to amplify. Troublingly for Washington, in a post-Cold War landscape
absent communist ideological adversaries, the CIA found it impossible to
shake off an impression in the subcontinent that it had pivoted away from
combatting communism and towards neutralising Third World threats to
a new unipolar American world order.
In Gandhi’s case, the Bush administration found allegations that the CIA
had been behind the Indian premier’s murder to be particularly puzzling.
Some foreign policy disagreements aside, Washington had enthusiastically
endorsed Gandhi’s determination to bring radical, free-market reform to
India’s economy. Moreover, as a technocrat who shared Washington’s
emphasis on the promotion of regional stability in South Asia, Gandhi was
seen as someone with whom the United States could do business. American
officials had become resigned during the Cold War to the CIA being employed
as a convenient scapegoat in India for the country’s ills. Exaggerated accounts
256 spying in south asia

of the Agency’s supposed omniscience, as well as periodic exposures of its

more questionable covert operations, unnerved India’s political and business
elites and provided a rationale for a protectionist trade policy designed to
exclude corporate America from the subcontinent. Gandhi’s assassination had
the unfortunate effect of rekindling and enlarging deep-seated fears of CIA
machinations in the imaginations of Indians. One contemporary American
observer ruminated that, in the wake of Gandhi’s assassination, ‘The agency is
blamed for nothing less than robbing India of its future.’ In a post-Cold War
context where Hindu nationalism was resurgent, corruption rampant, and
political violence endemic, national powerbrokers, it seemed, remained unable
to resist urging Indians to ‘look the other way’ and ask whether the foreign
hand of the CIA was not responsible for the country’s plight?72
 u

Conclusion

. . . despite the end of the Cold War, the importance of intelligence has not
diminished.
R. N. Kao (1998)1
The thing is old boy – between ourselves, don’t tell the trainees or you’ll lose
your pension – we didn’t do much to alter the course of human history, did
we?
SIS officer in John le Carré, Silverview (2021)2
Secret intelligence loomed large in India’s relationships with Britain and the
United States at the turn of the millennium. The end of the Cold War, and the
beginning of another global conflict following the terrorist strikes launched
against the United States, on 11 September 2001, inaugurated a new and
intense phase in the Indian subcontinent’s perennial intelligence ‘Great
Game’. Less than a month after Washington and New York had come under
attack, Britain’s prime minister, Tony Blair, arrived in India for talks with his
opposite number, Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Blair stopped off in Pakistan on his
way to New Delhi. In Pakistan, Blair, whose entourage included Richard
Dearlove, the chief of SIS, was focused on securing Islamabad’s cooperation
in a campaign against Al Qaeda and the organisation’s base of operations in
Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Disconcertingly for the British, policymakers
in Pakistan and India were more concerned with discussing the status of
Kashmir than in providing unconditional backing for a Washington-led
‘War on Terror’. On 1 October, shortly before Blair reached South Asia,
a Pakistani-based terrorist group, Jaish-e-Mohammed, killed thirty-one people
in a suicide attack on the Jammu and Kashmir State Legislature. With Vajpayee
under domestic pressure to respond to the terrorist incident, British diplomats
fretted that the proxy war nuclear-armed India and Pakistan had waged over
Kashmir since the late 1940s, risked spiralling out of control with disastrous
consequences. ‘I think all of us [in the British delegation]’, Alistair Campbell,
the British premier’s director of communications, confided to his diary, ‘ . . .
had been a bit taken aback at just how much Kashmir defined their relations
and just how deep the mutual hatred and obsession was’.3 Decades earlier,

257
258 spying in south asia

during the Cold War, Britain and the United States had been slow to compre-
hend, and to accommodate, ambivalence within the subcontinent towards an
ideological conflict between East and West that had seemingly little to do with
the economic, social, and security challenges confronting the region. The
extension of another global conflagration into South Asia manifested familiar
tensions between the roles and obligations that Western nations expected
partners in India and Pakistan to assume, and the opportunities that those
partners identified to leverage offers of assistance to further their own, often
very different, local agendas.
In intelligence terms, Blair’s visit to India confirmed that the Cold War
pattern of competitive cooperation between the clandestine services of India,
the United Kingdom, and the United States, remained essentially unchanged.
On landing at Indira Gandhi International Airport just before midnight on
5 October, a weary Blair was shepherded from an ageing Royal Air Force VC-
10 transport aircraft and whisked into the Indian capital at high speed. As
Blair’s motorcade headed north on national highway 48 towards the centre of
New Delhi, the prime minister motioned silently to Britain’s high commis-
sioner to India, Rob Young. Was the limousine laid on by the Indians bugged,
Blair signalled. Not likely, the diplomat responded. Blair’s circumspection in
the company of Britain’s Indian friends proved well-advised. At the hotel set
aside for the British visitors, Blair’s travelling Security Service team swept his
rooms for eavesdropping devices. Two bugs were identified in Blair’s bedroom,
neither of which could be removed without drilling through walls. To avoid
embarrassing his hosts, the British prime minister said nothing and swapped
rooms with a junior member of his staff.4 For the remainder of Blair’s stay in
India, the purpose of over-attentive Indian ‘valets’ assigned to each of his
senior advisers became a running joke. India’s intelligence services it appeared,
were keen to ensure that their British guests were never short of company.
Alistair Campbell’s valet, an indefatigable young man with the work-name,
Sunil, drew the short straw and was tasked with shadowing the notoriously
combative communications officer. Wherever Campbell went, Sunil followed.
On being told by Campbell, in characteristically robust fashion, to disappear,
Sunil would fade into the background, only to reappear minutes later by the
exasperated official’s side.5
The ubiquitous surveillance coverage that Blair and his party were subjected
to by Indian intelligence provoked black humour amongst the prime minister’s
team. Campbell, and the politically adroit Dearlove, ‘had a great laugh’ about
the name of India’s external intelligence service, the Research and Analysis
Wing (R&AW). Campbell joked about dividing Downing Street’s research and
information unit into ‘RAW domestic’ and ‘RAW international’. The most
sensitive material passing through Downing Street, Blair’s advisor quipped,
could be handled by a small and elite team of trusted personnel, known as
‘RAW hide’.6 The allusion Campbell drew between a popular American
 conclusion 259

television series from the early 1960s, that followed the exploits of upright
cowboys battling bandits and murderers on a lawless and inhospitable frontier,
and India’s foreign intelligence service, was likely more apt than he intended.
With the strategic landscape on the subcontinent having been turned upside
down by the events of September 11, the Kaoboys of R&AW were poised to
play an outsized role in the latest version of an enduring covert conflict on the
contested borders of India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. An equally familiar, and
similarly timeless, aspect of Britain’s relationship with South Asia also reared
its head during Blair’s whistle-stop trip. London had long entertained a conceit
that it knew how the subcontinent worked and what was best for it. In the field
of Cold War secret intelligence, as with most other aspects of Britain’s relations
with India, New Delhi was thought to have much still to learn from London.
When appraised of the enervating impact of the Kashmir dispute and its
intractable nature, Blair conformed to type in expressing confidence that his
experience of brokering the Good Friday Agreement in Ireland left him well
positioned to succeed where so many others had tried and failed in South Asia.
The United Kingdom remained, the prime minister insisted to sceptical Indian
audiences, a ‘pivotal’ player in the region.7 The unfortunate history of British
and American post-1947 interventions in the affairs of the subcontinent,
intelligence and otherwise, one assumes, had been omitted from Blair’s
Foreign Office brief.
Other continuities between a covert Cold War that had been consigned to
history and contemporary clandestine operations proved uncomfortable for
the Indian government. During the Cold War, exposure of British and
American intelligence activity in the Indian press had disrupted London’s
and Washington’s diplomacy. The ham-fisted attempt by India’s intelligence
services to eavesdrop on Blair suggested that lessons remained unlearned when
it came to striking a balance between the risks and rewards associated with
inherently insecure and high-profile covert operations. Once details of the
abortive bugging operation against Blair had filtered into the public domain,
India’s media excoriated Vajpayee and ridiculed the nation’s intelligence
services. Under the front-page headline, ‘Delhi clumsily bugged Blair’s
room’, the Times of India wondered how the country’s spooks had managed
to bungle so badly and fail to conceal ‘dirty tricks’ that exposed their political
masters to ‘embarrassing and deeply incriminating’ charges of bad faith.8 In
response, both the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Indian government
scrambled to issue denials that the British had been targeted in a state-
sponsored espionage operation. ‘No such thing was done. It’s a false accus-
ation’, a BJP spokesman insisted. ‘These charges are baseless’, added the former
BJP finance minister, Yashwant Sinha. ‘The charge has been made by
a discredited officer.’9 Quite what Alistair Campbell made of being labelled
‘discredited’ is unrecorded. With Blair having left Downing Street weeks
earlier, and the transition to a new British Labour government under
260 spying in south asia

Gordon Brown underway, it is reasonable to assume, nonetheless, that neither

London nor New Delhi welcomed the timing of ‘blowback’ from an historic
and ill-judged intelligence enterprise.
Clearly, interest within the subcontinent’s press for reporting on the more
salacious and sensational aspects of secret intelligence persisted beyond the
Cold War. This was unsurprising and hardly novel. Scandal sells newspapers,
after all. The preoccupation, verging on a national paranoia, evidenced by
India’s fourth estate and political class towards threats posed by foreign
subversion was, nevertheless, marked. In the summer of 2006, Vir Sanghvi,
a prominent Indian journalist, and broadcaster, conceded to readers of his
popular column in the Hindustan Times that he was, ‘utterly and completely
fascinated by the extent to which foreign intelligence services have penetrated
the Indian establishment’. Sanghvi was raised in a prosperous, middle-class,
left-wing, Mumbai family. His father was a successful barrister and his mother
worked as an industrial psychologist. The young Sanghvi was educated in
Britain at Mill Hill School and Brasenose College, Oxford. In adolescence, he
had ‘learnt to laugh’ and ‘giggle’ at Indira Gandhi’s incessant invocations of
a foreign hand. Yet, in adulthood, the effect of growing up in a ‘progressive’
family that reasoned ‘anybody who supports American interests in the formu-
lation of Indian foreign policy is necessarily a CIA agent’, coupled with
revelations surrounding Soviet and American interventions in the subcontin-
ent contained in the Mitrokhin Archive, and books by former Agency officer,
Robert Baer, altered Sanghvi’s thinking.10
Sanghvi was too reasoned and discriminating to adhere to the absolutist
position espoused by his parents, who discerned direct lines between Indians
sympathetic to America and CIA agents. Sanghvi recognised, however, that he
was a ‘product of my background’. He came to believe that an Indian policy-
maker, ‘who supports US interests blindly when it comes to Indian foreign
policy has been compromised in some way’. Indian civil servants, journalists,
military officers, and politicians, Sanghvi concluded, should be considered, ‘a
CIA asset, if he follows policies that serve US interests over ours – unless he can
prove otherwise’. In retrospect, ubiquitous rumours that Agency moles had
penetrated the heart of India’s government from the very beginning of the
Republic, the journalist argued, appeared compelling and credible and could
not simply be dismissed as ‘anti-US hysteria’. India after all, he observed, was
one of the world’s most important countries. ‘Why wouldn’t the CIA want to
suborn our government?’11 Sanghvi’s epiphany in respect of foreign intelli-
gence agencies resonated with fellow Indians who had been exposed to decades
of domestic media output that sensitised them to a looming menace posed by
external actors. The journalist’s observations reflected a tendency on the part
of India’s press to engage in confirmation bias, reinforcing rather than refuting
an innate suspicion of foreign intelligence services in general, and the Central
 conclusion 261

Intelligence Agency, in particular. The subcontinent remained hostile terrain

for post-Cold War British and American spooks.
A measure of the widespread suspicion and fear felt by Indians towards
Britain and the United States was a legacy of London’s and Washington’s
repeated involvement in covert regime change after 1945. In Iran in 1953,
during the Suez crisis of 1956, when it came to Chile in 1973, and elsewhere
across the global South, a hidden British or American hand had been complicit
in coup d’états against nationalist leaders who, often as not, enjoyed a strong
popular or electoral mandate. The Suez Crisis irrevocably tarnished Britain’s
reputation in the Middle East, not least because London insisted on maintain-
ing the fiction in exchanges with regional allies that it had not colluded with the
French and the Israelis against Nasser.12 The United States made a near identi-
cal blunder two decades later when American diplomats assured Indira Gandhi,
in several face-to-face meetings, that the CIA had played no role whatsoever in
the murder of Salvador Allende, and the replacement of his socialist adminis-
tration in Chile with a repressive military regime. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan
emphasised to Henry Kissinger at the time, it was difficult to imagine a more
effective means by which the Nixon administration could have alienated
Gandhi and convinced her compatriots that India’s premier, and the nation’s
democratic system, might be next on Washington’s hit-list. India’s intelligence
counter-culture provided, and continues to provide, a considerable socio-
political challenge to foreign intelligence agencies and governments invested
in South Asia. Its strength and resilience were nourished by ill-judged Western
intelligence interventions in the subcontinent, and farther afield, after 1947.
A domestic environment in the subcontinent that was predisposed to view
intelligence services and their activities with unease, if not hostility, ensured
that the clandestine Cold War relationships forged between Britain, the United
States, and India were often fraught and proved difficult to manage. For the
most part, British and American intelligence agencies worked discretely and
effectively with Indian counterparts and senior political figures in the ruling
Congress Party. That changed towards the end of the 1960s when revelations
surrounding CIA transgressions, within India and abroad, saw the Agency
swept up in a political maelstrom that, while varying in intensity, remained
a constant irritant in Washington’s relationship with New Delhi. In the 1980s,
American diplomats continued to bristle at jibes from Indian leaders who,
while willing to engage privately with the CIA, publicly accused the United
States of undermining Indian democracy.13 While by no means exempt from
local scrutiny, British intelligence activity in India attracted far less criticism
from local politicians and went largely unreported in the media. This reflected,
no doubt, Britain’s declining importance to India and London’s waning global
significance. While Washington’s relations with India experienced increasing
strain from the early 1970s onwards, Whitehall was content for the CIA to
function as a lightning rod for populist anti-Western sentiment.
262 spying in south asia

For their part, Indian politicians proved to be adept at co-opting potent and
pernicious symbolism associated with the CIA and harnessing it as an instru-
ment to consolidate state power and strengthen post-colonial nation-building.
The success which Indian policymakers evidenced in manipulating British and
American intelligence interlocuters challenges ideas that nations inside the
developing world were hapless victims of asymmetric Western power. Local
agency, in the Indian subcontinent, at least, was important in directing the
course and the outcome of South Asia’s intelligence Cold War. It was only once
the Cold War had ended, the Soviet Union’s relationship with India had
faltered, and the stranglehold exercised by the Nehru/Gandhi family on
Indian politics loosened, that the CIA became less of a defining element in
India’s relationship with the United States. The Agency’s seemingly boundless
capacity to complicate American diplomacy represented an enduring source of
frustration to US government officials in the latter Cold War period. Indira
Gandhi, in common with manifold other leaders in the Global South, was
anything but a passive bystander buffeted by external ideological and material
pressures. Rather, the Indian prime minister was an active agent of history,
willing and able to manipulate superpowers to further India’s own regional
ambitions and local interests.14
Frequently, interventions by British and American intelligence agencies in
India were misdirected, maladroit, and counterproductive. The operations
underpinning such activity were formulated on the basis of misapprehensions
in London and Washington that covert actions and clandestine propaganda
could turn Indian opinion against communism; that the taint of repression
associated with Western intelligence practice would not adversely colour
Indian attitudes; that the provision of intelligence support would undercut
New Delhi’s relations with Moscow; that salacious Congressional interroga-
tion of CIA misdeeds would not alienate Indians; and, above all, that their
intelligence services could stem, if not reverse, an erosion in British and
American influence in the subcontinent. Such expectations were unrealistic
and were never realised.
At times, and most especially in the early Cold War period, Britain and India
worked closely together in the intelligence field. Invariably, however, ideo-
logical differences and political tensions between London and New Delhi
inhibited effective joint action. British and Indian spooks conspired against
each other almost as much as they operated in unison. Reporting to London
shortly after the Indo-Pakistan war of 1965, when British influence in the
subcontinent was at ‘a low ebb’, one official from the UK High Commission
regretted that it had been reduced to feeding Indian colleagues intelligence,
‘without get[ting] much of value in return’, simply to avoid being ignored.15
Arguments elucidated elsewhere that Britain ‘punched far above its weight’ in
global intelligence terms throughout the Cold War are not supported in
a South Asian context.16 In common with studies that have addressed the
 conclusion 263

consequences of British intelligence interventions in the Middle East after

1945, there is little evidence that MI5, SIS, or the IRD, played a material role
in propping up British influence in post-independent India.17 If anything, by
ushering the intelligence Cold War into South Asia, Britain and the United
States inadvertently encouraged and advanced a diminution of their power in
the subcontinent by inviting a Soviet riposte, and by corroding Indian trust in
the good faith of Western intelligence agencies and their political masters.
Long after the Cold War had been consigned to the dustbin of history, a legacy
of mistrust and paranoia engendered by intelligence activity in India remained.
In May 2011, an Indian journalist was covering state elections in a remote
corner of West Bengal, some hundred miles or so outside Kolkata. Stopping in
a small village that had witnessed a clash between Indian security forces and
Naxalite insurgents, the journalist was surprised to come across a lone British
writer sitting in the shade of a Banyan tree. The ‘unlikely’ encounter in the
midst of the Indian mofussil raised the Indian journalist’s eyebrows and
perplexed a group of his colleagues. Dismissing the British writer’s claims
that he was researching a book on Naxalites, the Indians concurred that their
foreign ‘friend’ had been engaged in ‘some kind of MI6 [SIS] intelligence-
gathering operation’.18
Equally, ideological blind-spots in Britain’s intelligence community, or an
inability to appreciate and respond appropriately to myriad complexities and
contradictions in India’s byzantine political milieu, hampered its operational
effectiveness. In 1968, Labour’s Minister of Technology, Tony Benn, whose
father had been a Secretary of State for India, was amused and confounded by
MI5’s antiquarian approach to the subcontinent’s politics. Benn had arranged
to meet with India’s high commissioner in London, Apa Pant. A career diplo-
mat who had spent much of his professional life in Africa, Pant was also
educated at Brasenose College, Oxford, and had practised for a time as
a barrister after studying for the bar at Lincoln’s Inn. Prior to his interview
with Pant, Benn received a note from the Security Service. In it, MI5 identified
India’s high commissioner as a ‘suspect person’, ‘anti-British’, and someone
who should be treated with ‘circumspection’. Following an entirely innocuous
encounter, in which Pant expressed his commitment to religious education
and lauded the value of India’s public school system, Benn was left to ponder
the basis on which MI5 judged an ‘innocent . . . ageing aristocratic Indian
parlour pink’ to be a security risk.19 A predisposition on part of the Security
Service to conflate left-wing nationalism with communism, and to draw
a direct line between sources of covert funding channelled to politicians,
publishers, and journalists, and their underlying loyalties, was replicated
within the CIA. The case of Krishna Menon perhaps best illuminates the
capacity within British and American intelligence services to fashion monsters
of their own making. The excessive weight attached by MI5 and the CIA to
security concerns surrounding Menon are difficult to explain in purely
264 spying in south asia

rationale terms and, in hindsight, they appear overblown. The damage that an
engrained, visceral, and widespread antipathy towards Menon on the part of
British and American officials inflicted upon New Delhi’s relations with
London and Washington was significant. It was damage that better, less partial,
and more nuanced British and American intelligence assessments of Menon
and his political objectives could, and should, have avoided.
It was only after the Cold War had ended that the United States was able to
exercise a degree of hegemonic power in the Indian subcontinent. By then new
threats were emerging, chiefly in the form of nuclear proliferation and Islamist
terrorism. South Asia was on the way to becoming categorised, in the words of
Bill Clinton and, later, Barack Obama, as ‘the most dangerous place in the
world’.20 In May 1998, a decision taken by Atal Bihari Vajpayee and his BJP
government to test nuclear weapons and, in the process, Washington’s
patience, placed the intelligence communities of India and the United States
at loggerheads once again.21 George Fernandes, India’s Minister of Defence at
the time, was kept in the dark about the decision to test and reassured
American counterparts that India would not do so.22 Concurrently, India’s
intelligence agencies were implementing a sophisticated deception plan that
circumvented efforts by the United States to anticipate New Delhi’s prepar-
ations to go nuclear.23 The tests triggered a crisis in New Delhi’s relations with
Washington. They also weakened trust between politicians and their intelli-
gence services in both countries. Fernandes, and other senior Indian ministers,
were furious that they had been kept in the dark by Vajpayee and the nation’s
spooks. Clinton administration officials demanded to know why the CIA had
let itself be out manoeuvred and embarrassed by the R&AW.24 George Tenet,
the director of central intelligence, subsequently offered an insightful assess-
ment of how another intelligence-related incident had been allowed to disrupt
the United States’ relations with India. The problem, Tenet argued, lay not
with deficiencies in America’s intelligence collection capability. The issue,
instead, was one of analysis, or the inability to adequately interpret and to
understand what motivated India’s political class and drove its policymaking
process. ‘We did not sufficiently expect’, Tenet acknowledged, ‘that Indian
politicians might do what they had openly promised’.25 Or, in other words, and
much as Tony Benn had found with MI5 and Apa Pant, Americans had fallen
into the trap of projecting their own political, cultural, and strategic percep-
tions and prejudices onto Indians. Salient lessons from secret India’s Cold
War, that illuminated the pitfalls of Western hubris and cultural myopia, had,
Tenet’s assessment implied, remained unlearnt.
The record of Western clandestine interventions in India between 1947 and
the end of the Cold War in 1989, offers up important lessons for contemporary
global policymakers as they confront a diverse range of threats, from state-
sanctioned disinformation and influence operations to non-state transnational
terrorism, all of which have an extended history in the subcontinent. Rarely
 conclusion 265

effective, and often characterised by long-lasting and deleterious conse-

quences, British and American intelligence operations in India illustrate how
external actors stoking inflated fears of nebulous threats can have a profound
psychological impact upon a nations sense of security. In an earlier age, the
British Empire spent much of its time fretting about safeguarding India from
an expansive and acquisitive Russian rival, whose designs on the subcontinent,
whatever they might have been, remained largely confined to the imaginations
of czarist officials in St Petersburg. In the wake of the Second World War,
feverish anxiety over the inroads that the Soviet Union and People’s Republic
of China were making in the developing world, and the danger that this posed
to Western interests, prompted Britain and the United States to undertake
covert action in the subcontinent, both with and without the knowledge and
support of Indian governments. As elsewhere in Asia, Africa, and the Middle
East, the United States and its British ally discovered that nascent post-colonial
states could prove unexpectedly resistant to external influence and foreign
direction. Popular conceptions of power and potency attributed to American
and, to a lesser extent, British security and intelligence agencies appeared
hollow and wildly overstated when confronted by Indian nationalism.
Having paid a high price to secure independence and assert national sover-
eignty, Indians were reluctant to barter away autonomy in return for protec-
tion from states, including the Soviet Union, and ideologies, such as
communism, that they interpreted as largely benign and unthreatening.
Indian manipulation of British, American, and Soviet anxieties often enabled
local actors to pitch foreign states against each other, and to influence and
disrupt their regional agendas. Indian agency in the intelligence Cold War was
considerable and has been largely overlooked.
The overt policy objectives and interests of British and American govern-
ments in India were not materially advanced by the prosecution of a secret
Cold War in the subcontinent. Instead, Western intelligence agencies suc-
ceeded in disturbing the region’s political equilibrium; undermining British
and American influence; amplifying a national culture of conspiracism and
paranoia; retarding democracy; and, paradoxically, facilitating the very expan-
sion of communist power that secret intelligence interventions were intended
to arrest. Viewed from the perspective of recent events, London and
Washington have absorbed few, if any, lessons from previous Western intelli-
gence interventions in South Asia. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the
United States and Britain have strived, and failed, to shape stable and pro-
Western states, questions surrounding the hubris and the limitations of
Western power remain as pertinent today as ever. In the summer of 2010,
India’s then premier, Manmohan Singh, committed to fostering constructive
dialogue with neighbouring Pakistan. Stung by a series of bomb attacks against
Indian targets in Afghanistan that were traced back to Pakistan, the R&AW
advocated retaliating in kind against Islamabad. Reasoning that India’s
266 spying in south asia

involvement in such action would be impossible to conceal and would per-

petuate a retaliatory cycle of violence and public recrimination that could
spiral out of control, Singh’s national security adviser, Shivshankar Menon,
instructed the R&AW to, ‘Keep your hands in your pockets.’26 Fatefully, such
hard-headed pragmatism was absent in London and Washington a generation
or more before as British and American spooks turned India’s Secret Cold War
hot.
 NOTES

Acknowledgements
1. Hugh Tinker, The Banyan Tree: Overseas Emigrants from India, Pakistan, and
Bangladesh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. x.

Introduction
1. Reply to debate on President’s Address, 22 February 1954, Parliamentary Debates
(House of the People), Official Report, 1954, vol. 1, part II, cols. 431–34 (New
Delhi: Parliament Secretariat, 1954).
2. Anand Niwas, a resident of Bombay, expressed ambivalence to the Cold War in
a letter sent to US Supreme Court Justice, William O. Douglas in 1952. Douglas was
an inveterate traveller who visited the subcontinent several times and published
best-selling accounts of his experiences. Niwas to Douglas, 31 January 1952,
William O. Douglas Papers, Box 1714 Folder 7 Indian 1951–52 (1 of 2), Library
of Congress, Manuscripts Division, Washington DC. See also, William O. Douglas,
Strange Lands and Friendly People (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951); Beyond
the High Himalayas (New York: Doubleday, 1952); and Exploring the Himalaya
(New York: Random House, 1958).
3. John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1974),
p. 232. For an analysis of India’s centrality to le Carré’s Cold War spy fiction, see,
Paul M. McGarr, ‘The Neo-Imperialism of Decolonisation: John le Carré and
Cold War India’, Intelligence & National Security (38, 2) (2023), pp. 271–84.
4. John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor; The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (London:
Gollancz, 1963).
5. Toby Manning John le Carré and the Cold War (London: Bloomsbury Academic,
2018).
6. See, Daniela Richterova and Natalia Telepneva (eds.), ‘The Secret Struggle for the
Global South: Espionage, Military Assistance and State Security in the Cold War’,
The International History Review 43, no. 1, (2021), pp. 1–5.
7. Exceptions include, Philip Davies and Kristian Gustafson (eds.), Intelligence
Elsewhere: Spies and Espionage Outside the Anglosphere (Washington, DC:
Georgetown University Press, 2013); and, in an Indian context, Bruce Vaughn,
‘The Use and Abuse of Intelligence Services in India’, Intelligence & National
Security, 8 (1) (January 1993), pp. 1–22; and, Ryan Shaffer, ‘Indian Intelligence
Revealed: An Examination of Operations, Failures and Transformations,
Intelligence and National Security, 33:4, (2018), pp. 598–610.
8. Scholarship addressing India’s Cold War has largely ignored secret intelligence.
The otherwise authoritative account of US-Indian relations by former American

267
268 notes to pages 2–6

diplomat, Denis Kux, avoids the issue entirely. See, Denis Kux, India and the
United States: Estranged Democracies, 1941–1991 (Washington, DC: National
Defense University Press, 1993).
9. Paul Thomas Chamberlin, The Cold War’s Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace
(New York: HarperCollins, 2018); Lorenz M. Lüthi. Cold Wars: Asia, the Middle
East, Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
10. Ramchandra Guha, India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy
(New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2007), p. vi; Manu Bhagavan, The Peacemakers: India and
the Quest for One World (New Delhi: Harper Collins, 2012), p. ix.
11. Other studies have corroborated the limitations of Western covert action
undertaken in the developing world during the Cold War. See, for example, the
analysis of British clandestine interventions in the Middle East in, Rory Cormac.
Disrupt and Deny: Spies, Special Forces, and the Secret Pursuit of British Foreign
Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
12. Susan L. Carruthers, Cold War Captives: Imprisonment, Escape and Brainwashing
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).
13. For instance, Victor Cherkashin, Spy Handler: Memoir of a KGB Officer – The True
Story of the Man Who Recruited Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames (London: Basic
Books, 2005); Bob Woodward, Veil: The Secret Wars of CIA 1981–1987 (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1987).
14. le Carré, Tinker, Tailor.
15. Simon Faulkner and Anandi Ramamurthy, eds., Visual Culture and Decolonisation
in Britain, eds. (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2006), p. 1.
16. Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the
Remaking of Asia (London: Allen Lane, 2012), p. 304.
17. Y. D. Gundevia, Outside the Archives (New Delhi: Sangam Books, 1983), pp. 208–9.
18. ‘Reds Hinder Nation’s Advance, Says Nehru’, Hindustan Times, 13 January 1960.
19. B. N. Mullik, My Years with Nehru, 1948–1964 (New Delhi: Allied Publishers,
1972), p. 57.
20. Nehru to Krishna Menon, 2 December 1948, Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru
(SWJN) 2nd Series, vol. 8, ed. S. Gopal, (New Delhi, OUP, 1989), f. 2, pp. 368–70.
21. ‘Intelligence Reports, 1950’, Private Papers of Sardar Patel, Indian National
Archives, New Delhi (INA).
22. John le Carré, Smiley’s People (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2011) (First
Published London, 1979), p. 1314.
23. B. Raman, The Kaoboys of R&AW: Down Memory Lane (New Delhi; Lancer, 2007),
pp. 42–43.
24. Paul M. McGarr, Cold War in South Asia: Britain, the United States and the Indian
Subcontinent, 1945–1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 27–28.
25. See, ‘Conspiracy Theories’, Hindustan Times, 1 October 2005. On Indian literature
and the ‘foreign hand’, see Pauly V. Parakal, CIA Dagger against India (New Delhi:
D. P. Sinha for Communist Party of India, 1973); Kunhanandan Nair, Devil and His
Dart: How the CIA Is Plotting in the Third World (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers,
1986); Satish Kumar, CIA and the Third World: A Study in Crypto-Diplomacy
(London: Zed Press, 1981); and Rustem Galiullin, The CIA in Asia: Covert
Operations against India and Afghanistan (Moscow: Progress, 1988). Insightful
observations on civil conspiratorial mindsets, in an Iranian context, can be found
in, Robert Jervis, Why Intelligence Fails: Lessons from the Iranian Revolution and the
Iraq War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), p. 32; p. 49.
 notes to pages 6–10 269

26. Indira Gandhi, ‘Women on the March’, September 1963, in India: The Speeches and
Reminiscences of Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister of India (London: Hodder and
Stoughton, 1975), p. 17.
27. Alex Von Tunzelmann. Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire
(London: Simon & Schuster, 2007), p. 64.
28. Shashi Tharoor, Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India (London: Hurst
and Company, 2017), p. 89.
29. Mullik, Years with Nehru, p. 57. For an American perspective on this issue, see
‘Nehru’s Political Personality’, 18 June 1956, RG59, Lot 59 D 75 folder 1956, United
States National Archives, College Park, Maryland (USNA).
30. McGarr, Cold War in South Asia, pp. 85–88.
31. A. R. Wic, ‘The Ulug-Zade affair’, Weekend Review (2, 5), 6 January 1968, pp. 6–7.
32. George Blake, No Other Choice: An Autobiography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1990),
p. 67.
33. Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Man Who Would be King’ in The Phantom ‘Rickshaw and
Other Tales (Allahabad: A. H. Wheeler & Co., 1888); See also, Josiah Harlan,
A Memoir of India and Afghanistan (Philadelphia: J Dobson, 1842); and
Ben Macintyre, Josiah the Great: The True Story of the Man Who Would Be King
(London: Harper Press, 2004).
34. Mary Olmsted, 8 April 1992, Foreign Affairs Oral History Project (FAOHP),
Library of Congress, Washington DC, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collec
tions/diplomacy/
35. Kenneth Conboy and James Morrison, The CIA’s Secret War in Tibet (Lawrence:
University of Kansas Press, 2002).
36. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive II: The KGB and
the Wider World (London: Aleen Lane, 2005), pp. 9–10 and pp. 312–14.
37. Oleg Kalugin, Spymaster: My Thirty-Two Years in Intelligence and Espionage
against the West (New York, 2009), p. 141.
38. Manila Rohtagi, Spy System in Ancient India from Vedic Period to Gupta Period
(Delhi: Kalpaz Publications, 2007), p. 274.
39. Sunil Khilnani. Incarnations: A History of India in 50 Lives (London: Allen Lane,
2016), pp. 24–30.
40. Richard J. Popplewell, British Intelligence and the Defence of the Indian Empire,
1904–1924 (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 9.
41. C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication
in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
42. James Manor. Politics and State-Society Relations in India (London: Hurst &
Company, 2017), pp. 29–30; See also, Patrick French, Liberty or Death: India’s
Journey to Independence and Division (London: HarperCollins, 1997).
43. Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart, Happy Odyssey: The Memoirs of Lieutenant-General
Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart (London: Jonathan Cape, 1950), p. 131.
44. See, Martin Thomas, Empires of Intelligence (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2008).
45. Popplewell, British Intelligence, p. 33.
46. Ibid., p. 81; Calder Walton, Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and
the Twilight of Empire (London: Harper Press, 2013), pp. 26–27.
47. Popplewell, British Intelligence, p. 219.
48. Christopher Andrew. The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5
(London: Allen Lane, 2009), p. 137.
270 notes to pages 10–12

49. Bayly, Empire and Information, p. 1; Jon Wilson, India Conquered: Britain’s Raj
and the Chaos of Empire (London: Simon & Schuster, 2016), pp. 293–94.
50. Kim A. Wagner, Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), p. 16.
51. Rudyard Kipling, Kim (London: Macmillan, 1901). India’s lure as the backdrop to great
power rivalry, sedition, and intrigue proved irresistible to subsequent British authors.
See Somerset Maugham, Ashenden: Or the Secret Agent (London: Heinemann, 1928);
and, John Buchan, Greenmantle (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1916).
52. ‘Notes for Newcomers to India’, undated, c. 1960, DO 35/2644, UKNA; Paul Gore-
Booth, With Great Truth and Respect (London: Constable, 1974), p. 264.
53. Ben Macintyre, A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal (London:
Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 34.
54. Stephen Kinzer, The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles and Their Secret
World War (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2013), pp. 19–20.
55. Kermit Roosevelt, A Sentimental Safari (New York: Knopf, 1963), p. xiii.
56. Hugh Wilford. America’s Great Game: The CIA’s Secret Arabists and the Shaping of
the Modern Middle East (New York: Basic Books, 2013), p. 17.
57. L. Natarajan, American Shadow over India (Bombay: People’s Publishing House, 1952).
58. Goodfriend to Timberlake, 15 February 1951, FO 1110/418, UKNA.
59. Andrew and Mitrokhin, KGB and the Wider World, p. 324.
60. See, Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5
(London: Allen Lane, 2009); Keith Jeffery, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence
Service, 1909–1949 (London: Bloomsbury, 2010). Also, Calder Walton, Empire of
Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire (London:
Harper Press, 2013).
61. See, Paul M. McGarr, ‘The Information Research Department, British Covert
Propaganda, and the Sino-Indian War of 1962: Combating Communism and
Courting Failure?’, The International History Review, (41:1), (2019), pp. 130–56.
62. Standard accounts of the Agency largely overlook CIA activity in India. See, for
example, Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1974); John Ranelagh, The Agency: The Rise and Decline of
the CIA (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986); and, Timothy Weiner, Legacy of
Ashes: The History of the CIA (London: Allen Lane, 2007). The memoirs of Agency
directors, such as Richard Helms, A Look Over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central
Intelligence Agency (New York: Random House, 2003); and, George Tenet, At the
Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA (London: Harper Press, 2007), mention
India only sparingly. The former CIA officer, Duane R. Clarridge, provides some
insights into the work undertaken by the Agency in Cold War India in, A Spy for All
Seasons: My Life in the CIA (New York: Scribner, 1997). In addition, records of
ambassadorial tours offer brief glimpses into CIA activity in the subcontinent. See,
John Kenneth Galbraith, A Life in Our Times: Memoirs (London: Andre Deutsch,
1981); Chester Bowles, Promises to Keep: My Years in Public Life, 1941–1969
(New York: Harper and Row, 1971); and Daniel P. Moynihan, A Dangerous Place
(Boston: Little Brown, 1978). For the most recent survey of CIA interventions in
India since 1947, see Paul M. McGarr, ‘“Quiet Americans in India”: The Central
Intelligence Agency and the Politics of Intelligence in Cold War South Asia’.
Diplomatic History, 38 (5), (November 2014), pp. 1046–82.
63. Mullik, Years with Nehru; T. V. Rajeswar, India: The Crucial Years. (Noida: Harper
Collins India, 2015); Raman, Kaoboys of R&AW; K. Sankaran Nair, Inside IB and
 notes to pages 13–16 271

RAW: The Rolling Stone that Gathered Moss (New Delhi: Manas Publications,
2007); and, Vikram Sood, The Unending Game: A Former R&AW Chief’s Insights
into Espionage (Gurgaon: Penguin Viking, 2018). Notable exceptions, which
provide important insights into India’s intelligence operations and culture are
Vappala Balachandran, National Security and Intelligence Management: A New
Paradigm (Mumbai: Indus Source Books, 2014); A. S. Dulat and Aditya Sinha.
Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years (Noida: Harper Collins India, 2015); and A. S. Dulat,
Aditya Sinha and Asad Durrani, The Spy Chronicles: RAW, ISI and the Illusion of
Peace (Noida (India): HarperCollins India, 2018).
64. Nicolas Groffman, ‘Indian and Chinese Espionage’, Defense & Security Analysis,
32:2 (2016), p. 9.
65. ‘Surgical strikes’, Indian Express, 3 October 2016.
66. Sharma, Aman, ‘Blow-by-blow account: How PM Modi, Ajit Doval & Army chief
planned covert strike against militant’, Economic Times, 11 July 2018.
67. Groffman, ‘Indian and Chinese Espionage’, p. 12.

1 Transfer of Power: British Intelligence and the End of Empire

in South Asia
1. ‘Union Jack at Lucknow Residency Hauled Down’, Statesman, 29 August 1947.
2. Jon Wilson, India Conquered: Britain’s Raj and the Chaos of Empire (London:
Simon & Schuster, 2016), p. 471.
3. Wavell: The Viceroy’s Journal, ed. Pendrel Moon (London: Oxford University
Press, 1973), 31 December 1946, p. 402.
4. R. K. Yadav, Mission R&AW (New Delhi: Manas Publications, 2014), p. 24.
5. Patrick French, Liberty or Death: India’s Journey to Independence and Division
(London: HarperCollins, 1997), p. 235.
6. ‘Disposal of old records in the External Affairs, Political, and Home Departments’,
File 1299/2/GG/43, IOR/R/3/1/149, July 1946–August 1947, India Office Records
(IOR), British Library (BL).
7. Richard J. Aldrich, ‘American Intelligence and the British Raj: The OSS, the SSU
and India, 1942–1947’, Intelligence and National Security, 13: 1 (Spring 1998), pp.
148–9.
8. B. N. Mullik, My Years with Nehru, 1948–1964 (New Delhi: Allied Publishers,
1972), p. 57.
9. Kellar Minute, 2 July 1951, KV/2/2512/4, United Kingdom National Archives,
Kew, London (UKNA).
10. Mullik, Years with Nehru, p. 57.
11. Nehru to Mountbatten, 18 September 1954, Selected Writings of Jawaharlal Nehru
(SWJN), vol. 26, eds. Ravinder Kumar and H. Y. Sharada Prasad (New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 221–23.
12. Nehru to Chief Ministers, 2 November 1947, Letters to Chief Ministers, 1947–1964,
Volume 1, 1947–1949, ed. G. Parthasarathi (New Delhi, Oxford University Press:
1985), pp. 10–11.
13. Nehru to Pandit, 5 May 1948, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit Papers, Instalment, Subject
File 54, Nehru Museum and Memorial Library (NMML).
14. Y. D. Gundevia, Outside the Archives (New Delhi: Sangam Books, 1984), pp. 208–9.
15. Wilson, India Conquered, p. 472.
272 notes to pages 16–23

16. Pethick-Lawrence to Mountbatten, 12 April 1947, The Transfer of Power, 1942–47,

vol. X, ed. Nicholas Mansergh (London: HMSO, 1970–83), p. 219; Attlee to George
VI, 15 March 1947, PS/GVI/C 337/08, Royal Archives, Windsor.
17. JIC (47) 2 (0) (Final), ‘India – Organisation for Intelligence’, 4 January 1947, L/WS/
1/1050, IOBL.
18. ‘Strategic position of the British Commonwealth’, 2 April 1946, CAB 131/2 DO
(46) 47, UKNA.
19. David C. Engerman, The Price of Aid: The Economic Cold War in India
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), p. 21.
20. ‘India’s Foreign Policy’, 1950, Speeches & Writings File No. 35, K. P. S. Menon
Collection, NMML.
21. New York Times, 15 August 1947, p. 1.
22. Chester Bowles, ‘American and Russia’, Foreign Affairs, 49 (July 1971), pp. 636–51.
23. 7 August 1946, Liddell Diaries, p. 284, KV/4/467, UKNA.
24. 11 December 1946, Liddell Diaries, p. 104, KV/4/468, UKNA.
25. French, Liberty or Death, pp. 97–101.
26. Ibid., pp 257–59.
27. Thompson to Powell, 21 May and 12 June 1947, POLL 3/1/5, Enoch Powell Papers,
Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College Cambridge.
28. Minute to Trend, 4 December 1950, CAB 301/112, UKNA.
29. Minute to Crombie, 3 November 1950, CAB 301/112, UKNA.
30. Minute from Hodges to Rampton and Harris, 13 November 1950, CAB 301/112,
UKNA.
31. 28 February and 3 March 1947, Liddell Diaries, pp. 162–63, KV/4/468, UKNA.
32. Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5
(London: Allen Lane, 2009), pp. 137, 333.
33. Bhashyam Kasturi, Intelligence Services: Analysis, Organisation and Functions
(New Delhi: Lancer Publishers, 1995), p. 26.
34. K. Sankaran Nair, Inside IB and RAW: The Rolling Stone that Gathered Moss (New
Delhi: Manas Publications, 2013), p. 90.
35. ‘Liddell Visit to the Middle East’, J.I.C./532/47, J.I.C (47) 33rd Meeting (C),
4 June 1947, CAB 159/1, UKNA.
36. DIB to Ministry of Home Affairs, 3 May 1948, File No. 16/50/48-Police, National
Archives of India (NAI).
37. ‘Proposals for the Reorganisation of the Delhi C.I.D.’, Banerjee, 29 May 1948, File
No. 16/50/48-Police, NAI.
38. 5 May 1948, Liddell Diaries, pp. 90-92, KV/4/470, UKNA.
39. ‘Future of Indian Intelligence Liaison’, 29 January 1947, FO 1093/359, UKNA.
40. ‘C’ (Menzies) to Hayter, 17 January 1947, FO 1093/359, UKNA.
41. Halford to Hayter, 22 January 1947, FO 1093/359, UKNA.
42. ‘Future of Indian Intelligence Liaison’, 29 January 1947, FO 1093/359, UKNA.
43. Sargent to Sillitoe, 7 February 1947, FO 1093/363, UKNA.
44. Sargent to Shone, 8 February 1947, FO 1093/359, UKNA.
45. Bridges to Monteath, 10 March 1947, FO 1093/439, UKNA.
46. 13 January 1947, Liddell Diaries, pp. 120–21, KV/4/468, UKNA.
47. ‘Liddell Visit to the Middle East’, J.I.C./532/47, J.I.C (47) 33rd Meeting (C),
4 June 1947, CAB 159/1, UKNA; 16 May 1947, Liddell Diaries, pp. 1-2, KV/4/469,
UKNA.
 notes to pages 23–27 273

48. Bourne to Guild, 7 August 1945, HS8/888, UKNA. See also, Christopher J. Murphy,
‘“Constituting a Problem in Themselves”: Countering Covert Chinese Activity in
India: The Life and Death of the Chinese Intelligence Section, 1944–46’, Journal of
Imperial and Commonwealth History, 44:6 (2016), pp. 928–51.
49. 29 July 1947, Liddell Diaries, p. 41, KV/4/469, UKNA.
50. ‘Security Service Representative in Pakistan’, J.I.C. (47) 75th Meeting (O), 5
Nov. 1947, CAB 159/2, UKNA.
51. Andrew, Defence of the Realm, p. 442.
52. David Gilmour, The British in India: Three Centuries of Ambition and Experience
(London: Allen Lane, 2018), p. 205; Viola Bayley, Memoir of Life in India, 1933–46:
One Woman’s Raj (Unpublished manuscript, 1975/76), Microfilm no.57, Viola
Bayley Papers, Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge.
53. Garvey to Halford, 16 November 1947, FO 1093/359, UKNA.
54. C (Menzies) to Hayter, 15 March 1947, FO 1093/359, UKNA.
55. Shone to Halford, 16 April 1947, FO 1093/359, UKNA.
56. Hayter to C (Menzies), 29 April 1947, FO 1093/359, UKNA.
57. Menzies to Hayter and handwritten note from Halford, 2 May 1947, ‘India’, FO
1093/359, UKNA.
58. Street to Halford, 13 October 1948, FO 1093/439, UKNA.
59. Hayter to Shone, 9 May 1947, FO 1093/359; Hayter to Sargent, 16 October 1948,
FO 1093/439, UKNA.
60. C (Menzies) to Halford, 23 April 1947, FO 1093/359, UKNA; Hayter to C,
29 April 1947, FO 1093/359, UKNA.
61. Shone to Hayter, 23 May 1947, FO 1093/359, UKNA.
62. SIS Officer to Symon, 7 April 1947, FO 1093/359, UKNA.
63. Shone to Halford, 16 April 1947, FO 1093/359, UKNA.
64. SIS Officer to Symon, 7 April 1947, FO 1093/359, UKNA.
65. Stephen Dorril, MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations (London: Fourth Estate,
2000), p. 87.
66. Ibid., p. 87.
67. Sargent to Stapleton, 9 January 1948, FO 1093/375; Menzies ‘The Capabilities of the
Secret Service in Support of an Overall political Plan’, 20 January 1948, FO 1093/
375, UKNA.
68. ‘Special Operations’, J. P. (47) 118 (Final), 17 December 1947, FO 1093/375,
UKNA.
69. ‘Capabilities of S.S. in Peace in Support of an Overall Political Plan’,
20 January 1948, FO 1093/375, UKNA.
70. Ibid.
71. ‘Cold War Organisation’, COS 36th Mtg, COS 409/8/3/8, 10 March 1948, FO 1093/
375, UKNA.
72. 20 October 1947, Liddell Diaries, pp. 92–93, KV/4/469, UKNA.
73. Keith Jeffrey, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service, 1909–1949
(London: Bloomsbury, 2010), p. 638.
74. Sargent Minute, 7 October 1948, FO 1093/439, UKNA.
75. 15 October 1948, Liddell Diaries, p. 176, KV/4/470, UKNA.
76. War Diaries, 1939–1945: Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, (eds.) Alex Danchev and
Daniel Todman (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2001), 13 November 1941
and retrospective entry, pp. 198–200.
274 notes to pages 27–34

77. Nehru to Nye, 4 August 1948, SWJN 2nd series, vol. 7, ed. S. Gopal, (New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 578.
78. ‘Measures for the provision of economic aid to India’, 20 July 1949, DO 35/2921,
UKNA.
79. Jeffrey, MI6, p. 639.
80. Andrew, Defence of the Realm, p. 479.
81. Halford minute, 13 October 1948, FO 1093/439, UKNA.
82. Hayter to Sargent, 13 October 1948, FO 1093/439, UKNA.
83. Sir Percy Sillitoe, Cloak without Dagger (London: Cassell, 1955), p. 176; Andrew,
Defence of the Realm, p. 333.
84. Sargent to ‘C’, 21 October 1948, FO 1093/439, UKNA.
85. Kellar Minute, 2 July 1951, KV/2/2512/4, UKNA.
86. Andrew, Defence of the Realm, p. 442. In 1952, an annexe to the Maxwell Fyfe
Directive to the Director General of MI5 allowed for a more flexible interpretation
of the Attlee Directive. Under this, SIS was, ‘in certain circumstances’, and on the
understanding that MI5 would be kept informed, permitted to undertake
operations in Commonwealth and Colonial territory. ‘Report of Enquiry into the
Security Service by Sir Findlater Stewart’, PREM 8/1520, UKNA.
87. Jeffrey, MI6, p. 639.
88. Andrew, Defence of the Realm, p. 442.
89. Prem Mahadevan, ‘The Failure of Indian Intelligence in the Sino- Indian Conflict’,
Journal of Intelligence History, 8:1 (2008).
90. Notes on India post-independence, Undated, P. N. Haksar Papers, III Instalment,
Subject File Other Papers 7, NMML.
91. Richard J. Aldrich, ‘“The Value of Residual Empire”: Anglo-American Intelligence
Co-operation in Asia after 1945’ in Intelligence, Defence and Diplomacy: British
Policy in the Post-war World, eds. Richard J. Aldrich and Michael F. Hopkins
(London: Frank Cass, 1994).
92. Stella Rimington, Open Secret: The Autobiography of the Former Director-General
of MI5 (London: Arrow Books, 2002), p. 69.
93. K. Sankaran Nair, Inside IB and RAW: The Rolling Stone that Gathered Moss (New
Delhi: Manas Publications, 2013), p. 117.

2 Silent Partners: Britain, India, and Early Cold War Intelligence

Liaison
1. Stella Rimington, Open Secret: The Autobiography of the Former Director-General
of MI5 (London: Arrow Books, 2002), p. 54.
2. Nye to CRO, 17 May & 20 November 1951, FO 371/92870, UKNA.
3. Freeman to Bottomley, 16 September 1965, PREM 13/394, UKNA; Foot/ Pandit
talk, 26 November 1965, PREM 13/2160, UKNA.
4. Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5
(London: Allen Lane, 2009), p. 445.
5. Andrew, Defence of the Realm, p. 67.
6. Peter Hall, BDOHP, www.chu.cam.ac.uk/archives/collections/BDOHP/Hall.pdf
7. 5 May 1948, Liddell Diaries, pp. 90–92, KV/4/470, UKNA.
8. Andrew, Defence of the Realm, p. 481.
 notes to pages 34–41 275

9. Philip Murphy, ‘Creating a Commonwealth Intelligence Culture: The View from

Central Africa, 1945–1965’, Intelligence and National Security 17(3) (2002),
pp.107–8; pp. 136–37.
10. ‘Security Service Representative in Pakistan’, J.I.C. (47) 75th Meeting (O),
5 November 1947, CAB 159/2, UKNA; Philip Murphy, ‘Intelligence and
Decolonization: The Life and Death of the Federal Intelligence and Security
Bureau, 1954–63’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 29(2) (2001),
pp. 101–30.
11. Dean to Foreign Secretary, 16 December 1955, cited in Chikara Hashimoto, Twilight
of the British Empire: British Intelligence and Counter-Subversion in the Middle East,
1948–68 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), p. 26.
12. 23 January 1953, Liddell Diaries, p. 21, KV/4/475, UKNA.
13. Andrew, Defence of the Realm, p. 137.
14. Nye to CRO, 20 November 1951, FO 371/92870, UKNA.
15. Ibid.
16. ‘Times’ Diaries, 16 October 1958, GBR/0014/HALY/15/1, Churchill Archives
Centre, Churchill College Cambridge.
17. Hindustan Times, 8 September 1946.
18. Nehru to Asaf Ali and K .P. S. Menon, 22 January 1947, SWJN 2nd series, vol. 1, ed.
S. Gopal (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 575–76.
19. ‘India’s Foreign Policy’, K. P. S. Menon Papers, Nehru Museum and Memorial
Library, New Delhi (NMML).
20. P. N. Kaul, ‘Trade Relations with U.S.S.R.’ 1954, Ministry of External Affairs,
D/3042/Europe, National Archives of India, New Delhi (NAI).
21. Andrew, Defence of the Realm, pp. 444–46.
22. 29 December 1952, Liddell Diaries, pp. 190–93, KV/4/474, UKNA.
23. Andrew, Defence of the Realm, pp. 444–46.
24. Strang Minute, 9 February 1950, FO 371/82314, UKNA.
25. Nehru to Kher, 9 September 1952, SWJN 2nd series, vol. 19, ed. S. Gopal, (New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 632–34.
26. Ibid.
27. Nehru to Cabinet Secretary, 9 October 1956, SWJN, vol. 35, ed. Mushirul Hasan,
H. Y. Sharad Prasad, A. K. Damodaran (New Delhi: Oxford University Press:
2005), p. 207.
28. Iengar to Menon, 19 November 1948, File No. 40/21/49, Police II, Home Ministry
Records, NAI.
29. Gopal Minute, 27 November 1948, File No. 40/21/49, Police II, Home Ministry
Records, NAI.
30. 7 December 1948, Liddell Diaries, p. 204, KV/4/470, UKNA.
31. T. V. Rajeswar, India: The Crucial Years (Noida, UP: Harper Collins India, 2015),
p. 166.
32. 7 December 1948, Liddell Diaries, p. 204, KV/4/470, UKNA.
33. 21 December 1948, Liddell Diaries, p. 209, KV/4/470, UKNA.
34. Andrew, Defence of the Realm, p. 443.
35. 6 July 1949, Liddell Diaries, p. 141, KV/4/471, UKNA.
36. Shattock to Rumbold 29 October 1948, FO 371/69738B, UKNA.
37. ‘Information received orally from Mr. Sanjevi [sic]’, June 1949’, DO 231/3, UKNA.
38. ‘Infiltration of Chinese Communists into India’, February 1949, DO 231/3, UKNA.
39. Condon to Harrison, 12 May 1950, DO 133/132, UKNA.
276 notes to pages 41–47

40. 23 May 1950, Liddell Diaries, p. 91, KV/4/472, UKNA.

41. Masterman to Symon, 2 March 1948, FCO 37/521, UKNA.
42. Nehru to Pandit, 5 May 1948, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit Papers, Instalment, Subject
File 54, NMML.
43. ‘Communist and Left-Wing Movements in India’, 27 January 1948, DO 133/128,
UKNA.
44. Symon to Patrick, 14 February 1948, DO 133/128, UKNA.
45. Bhashyam Kasturi, Intelligence Services: Analysis, Organisation and Functions
(New Delhi: Lancer Publishers, 1995), p. 27.
46. Nehru to Reddiar, 2 October 1948, SWJN 2nd series, vol. 7, ed. S. Gopal, (New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 274.
47. K. Shankaran Nair, Inside IB and RAW: The Rolling Stone that Gathered Moss (New
Delhi: Manas Publications, 2013), p. 90.
48. Ibid., p. 95.
49. Y. D. Gundevia, Outside the Archives (New Delhi: Sangam Books, 1984), pp. 211–
12.
50. 11 May 1951 & 3 August 1951, Liddell Diaries, p. 60 & p. 135, KV/4/473, UKNA.
51. 17 May 1951, Liddell Diaries, p. 73, KV/4/473, UKNA.
52. Neville Maxwell, India’s China War (London: Cape, 1970), p. 335.
53. Nehru to Krishnamachari, 2 November 1962, T. T. Krishnamachari Papers,
NMML.
54. Nair, Inside IB and RAW, p. 98.
55. Ibid., p. 8.
56. Mullik, ‘Report on Tripura’, 14 March 1951, File No. 21 (32)-PA/ 51, Ministry of
States, Political Branch, NAI.
57. Nehru to Rajagopalachari, 11 September 1951, New Delhi, SWJN 2nd series,
vol. 16, part 2, ed. S. Gopal, (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp.
469–70.
58. Nehru to Home Minister, 1 June 1951, SWJN 2nd series, vol. 16, part 1, ed.
S. Gopal, (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 636.
59. Nehru to Foreign Secretary, 29 September 1956, SWJN, vol. 35, ed. Mushirul
Hasan, H. Y Sharad Prasad, A. K. Damodaran (New Delhi: Oxford University
Press: 2005), pp. 525–36.
60. 13 June 1952, Liddell Diaries, p. 97, KV/4/474, UKNA.
61. James to Belcher, 31 August 1960, FO 371/152546, UKNA.
62. Andrew, Defence of the Realm, pp. 445–46.
63. Haksar to Gandhi, 19 June 1972, cited in Jairam Ramesh, Intertwined Lives:
P. N. Haksar and Indira Gandhi (New Delhi: Simon & Schuster India, 2018), pp.
123–24.
64. Quoted in Andrew, Defence of the Realm, p. 446.
65. 29 December 1952, Liddell Diaries, pp. 190–93, KV/4/474, UKNA.
66. Bulganin and Khrushchev talks, New Delhi, 12 December 1955, SWJN, vol. 31, ed.
H. Y. Sharad Prasad and A. K. Damodaran (New Delhi: Oxford University Press:
2002), pp. 339–44.
67. Nehru to Sampurnanand, 12 February 1956, SWJN, vol. 32, ed. H. Y. Sharad Prasad
and A. K. Damodaran (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 264–65.
68. Grady to Secretary of State, 18 March 1948, FRUS 1948 vol. 5, pt. 1, pp. 497–98.
 notes to pages 47–53 277

69. ‘Communist Penetration in India’, 8 March, 1951, Department of State Office of

Intelligence Research, Office of Strategic Services (OSS)-State Department
Intelligence and Research Reports, NARA.
70. Bowles to Secretary of State, No. 3310, 10 February 1953, CIA-RDP65-
00756R000600030099-5, CIA FOIA Electronic Reading Room, www.foia.cia.gov.
71. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive II: The KGB and
the Wider World (London: Aleen Lane, 2005), pp. 9–10 and pp. 312–14.
72. Oleg Kalugin, Spymaster: My Thirty-Two Years in Intelligence and Espionage
against the West (New York: 2009), p. 141.
73. Quoted in Andrew, Defence of the Realm, p. 446.
74. Rimington, Open Secret, p. 71.
75. Ibid., p. 72; p. 75.
76. Name Redacted to Costley White, 17 November 1951, DO 231/40, UKNA.
77. Macmillan to Eden, 19 October 1955, PREM 11/1582, UKNA.
78. Memorandum by the Chiefs of Staff, C.O.S. (55) 262, 12 October 1955, CO 1035/
16, UKNA.
79. Costley-White to Scott, 24 July 1958, DO 231/110, UKNA.
80. Note for Record, 30 September 1959, CAB 301/126, UKNA; ‘Intelligence Activities
Concerning Commonwealth Countries (Note by ‘C’)’, October 1959, CAB 301/126,
UKNA.
81. Walker to Costley-White, 10 November 1959, DO 231/40, UKNA.
82. ‘Intelligence and intelligence Targets’, December 1959, CAB 301/126, UKNA.
83. Hollis to Burke Trend, 13 November 1965, CO 1035/171, UKNA.
84. Andrew, Defence of the Realm, p. 481.

3 India’s Rasputin: V. K. Krishna Menon and the Spectre of Indian

Communism
1. Clutterbuck to Garner, 21 October 1954, KV 2/2514-3, United Kingdom National
Archives, Kew, London (UKNA).
2. Sarvepalli Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography, vol.1, 1889–1947, (London:
Jonathan Cape, 1975), p. 202.
3. Arthur W. Hummel, Jr. Oral History, 13 July 1989, Foreign Affairs Oral History
Project, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
4. See K. C. Arora, Indian Nationalist Movement in Britain,1930–1949 (New Delhi:
South Asia Books, 1993); and Nicholas Owen, British Left and India: Metropolitan
Anti-Imperialism, 1885–1947 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
5. ‘Krishna Menon’, 15 May 1945, MEPO 38/107, UKNA.
6. The post of Indian High Commissioner in London was created in 1920. Menon is,
however, commonly referred to as India’s ‘first’ High Commissioner to the United
Kingdom. Joe Garner, The Commonwealth Office (London: Heinemann, 1978), p.
306.
7. Sillitoe to Chief Constable, County Durham, 24 February 1950, KV/2/2512-18,
UKNA.
8. Liddell note, 18 June 1949, KV 2/2512-1, UKNA.
9. Attlee, Sir Stafford Cripps, his Chancellor of the Exchequer, and India’s Last Viceroy,
Lord Mountbatten, amongst others, argued that the retention of strong politico-
military ties with India would secure Britain’s status as a global power. Anita
278 notes to pages 54–57

Inder Singh, The Limits of British Influence: South Asia and the Anglo-American
Relationship, 1947–1956 (London: St Martin’s press, 1993), p. 47; John Darwin,
Britain and Decolonisation: The Retreat from Empire in the Post-War World
(London: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 152–53, pp. 302–3.
10. New Delhi to Sandys, 14 November 1962, DO 196/172, UKNA.
11. Norris minute, 22 August 1972, FCO 37/1096, UKNA.
12. K. C. Arora, V. K. Menon: A Biography (New Delhi: Sanchar Publishing House,
1998), p. 27.
13. ‘Vengalil Krishnan Krishna MENON’, 23 September 1932, KV/2/2509-11; ‘K.
Menon’, 20 November 1932, MEPO 38/107, UKNA.
14. Scotland Yard report No. 122, 10 August 1938, File 295/1926 Pt2, P&J (J) 295/26,
Jawaharlal Nehru, Indian Political Intelligence Files, British Library (BL JN).
15. ‘V. K. Krishna Menon’, 18 July 1939, KV/2/2509-7, UKNA.
16. ‘V. K. Menon’s views on the Political Situation in India’, 1 February 1937, P&J (S)
79, Krishna Menon, Indian Political Intelligence Files, British Library (BL KM).
17. Owen, British Left and India, p. 240.
18. Suhash Chakravarty, Crusader Extraordinary: Krishna Menon and the India
League, 1932–1936 (New Delhi: India Research Press, 2006), p. 646.
19. Menon to Pollitt, 14 November 1939, Harry Pollitt Papers, CP/IND/POL,
Correspondence, Misc., Communist Party of Great Britain Archive, Labour
History Archives and Study Centre, Manchester (CPA LHASC), ‘V. K. Krishna
Menon’, 10 June 1940, P&J (S) 1363, BL KM.
20. ‘V. K. Krishna Menon’, 10 June 1940, P&J (S) 1363, BL KM.
21. ‘V. K. Krishna Menon’, 1 February 1937, P&J (S) 79 1937, BL KM.
22. ‘V. K. Krishna Menon’, 29 November 1938, MEPO 38/107; ‘V. K. Krishna
Menon’, 1 November 1939, KV/2/2509-7; IPI note on Menon, 13 June 1940
P&J (S) 1363/40, f.126, BL KM.
23. ‘Menon’s plan to celebrate Indian Independence Day’, 17 January 1940, P&J (S)
138, BL KM; Owen, British Left and India, p. 257.
24. DVW to Hollis, 16 December 1939, KV/2/2509-6, UNKA.
25. ‘National Agent’s Opinion on the Parliamentary Candidature of Mr. Krishna
Menon’, 27 November 1940, ID/IND/1/13, Labour Party Archive, Labour
History Archives and Study Centre, Manchester (LPA LHASC). Arora, Menon,
pp. 38-40.
26. ‘V. K. Krishna Menon’, 10 June 1940, P&J (S) 1363, BL KM.
27. Menon to Masani, 13 April 1934, cited in Jairam Ramesh, A Chequered Brilliance:
The Many Lives of V. K. Krishna Menon (Gurgaon, India: Penguin Random House
India, 2019), p. 89.
28. Owen, British Left and India, p. 258.
29. ‘COMMUNIST ACTIVITY’, 11 April 1941, KV/2/2509-3, UKNA.
30. John Curry, The Security Service, 1908–1945: The Official History (London: PRO,
1999), p. 349.
31. ‘V. K. Krishna Menon’s Activities’, 5 August 1941; ‘Reactions to the release of
NEHRU, AZAD, and others of the Indian Political Prisoners’, 9 December 1941,
P&J (S) 49/25, BL KM.
32. IPI note to Fulford, 18 May 1942, KV/2/2510-5, UKNA.
33. Hollis to Ball, 2 January 1942, KV/2/2510-8, UKNA.
34. Ball to Fulford, 30 May 1942, KV/2/2510-5, UKNA.
 notes to pages 58–62 279

35. Linlithgow to Amery, 30 November 1942, in Nicholas Mansergh, Transfer of

Power 1942–1947 (TOP), vol. III (London: HMSO, 1971), p. 325.
36. Amery to Robertson, 12 November 1942, POL (S) 2409 1942, BL, KM.
37. Kenneth O. Morgan, Labour in Power, 1945–1951 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1984), pp. 193–94; R. J. Moore, Escape from Empire: The Attlee Government and
the Indian Problem (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), p. 338.
38. Gopal, Nehru, 1889–1947, p. 311.
39. Michael Brecher, Nehru: A Political Biography (London: Oxford University Press,
1961), p. 122.
40. Arora, Menon, p. 71.
41. Pethick Lawrence to Wavell, 1 November 1946, TOP, vol. VIII, pp. 858-9.
42. Pethick Lawrence to Attlee, 30 November 1946, TOP, vol. IX, p. 233.
43. 1 October 1946, Liddell Diaries, pp. 7-8, KV/4/468; 24 October 1946, Liddell
Diaries, p. 34, KV/4/468, UKNA.
44. K. P. S. Menon to Nehru, 9 December 1946, Nehru Papers, Second Instalment,
File 185, Nehru Museum and Memorial Library, New Delhi (hereafter NMML).
See also, K.P.S. Menon, Many Worlds Revisited (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya
Bhavan, 1965).
45. Mountbatten to Listowel, 25 July 1947, TOP, vol. XII, p. 331.
46. Philip Ziegler, Mountbatten: The Official Biography (London: Guild Publishing,
1985), p. 354.
47. ‘Report on the Last Viceroyalty, Part F, 25 July–15 August 1947’, DO 142/364,
UKNA; ‘Minutes of Viceroy’s Thirty Ninth staff meeting’, 6 June 1947, TOP, vol.
XI; Alan Campbell-Johnson, Mission with Mountbatten (London: Hamish
Hamilton, 1985), p. 88.
48. Mountbatten to Attlee, 10 July 1947, PREM 8/545, UKNA.
49. Nehru to Attlee, 11 July 1947, PREM 8/545, UKNA.
50. Attlee to Nehru, 17 July 1947, TOP, vol. XII, pp. 214–5.
51. Mountbatten to Listowel, 25 July 1947, TOP, vol. XII, p. 331.
52. 31 July 1947, Liddell Diaries, p. 42, KV/4/469, UKNA.
53. 12 May 1948, Liddell Diaries, pp. 97–8, KV/4/470, UKNA.
54. ‘Statement to be made by D. G. at J. I. C. meeting’, 1 August 1947, KV/2/2512-20,
UKNA.
55. Sarvepalli Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography, 1947–1956, vol. 2 (London:
Jonathan Cape, 1979), pp. 140–41.
56. ‘India’s Relations with the Commonwealth’, 10 November 1948, CAB 129/30,
UKNA.
57. Cripps to Nehru, 28 April 1949, CAB 127/43, UKNA.
58. Gopal, Nehru: 1947–1956, pp. 47–48.
59. Noel-Baker to Nye, 15 March 1949, DO 121/71, UKNA.
60. Lawrence Black, ‘“The Bitterest Enemies of Communism”: Labour Revisionists,
Atlanticism and the Cold War’, Contemporary British History (15, 3) (2001), p. 44.
61. Richard J. Aldrich, The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret
Intelligence (London: John Murray, 2001), p. 116.
62. ‘Civil Service: Exclusion of Communists and Fascists from Certain Branches’,
25 March 1948, CAB 128/12, UKNA.
63. ‘Inner Circle’, 19 January 1949, DO 142/363, UKNA.
64. Sanjeevi to Iengar, 6 January 1949, DIB D.O.2(i)/49, File No. 2/301, Private Papers
of Sardar Patel, (PSP), National Archives of India (NAI).
280 notes to pages 62–66

65. Sanjeevi to Iengar, 4 January 1949, DIB D.O.2/49, File No. 2/301, PSP, NAI.
66. Sanjeevi to Iengar, 6 January 1949, DIB D.O.2(i)/49, File No. 2/301, PSP, NAI.
67. Patel to Nehru, 6 January 1949, File No. 2/301, PSP, NAI.
68. Nehru to Patel, 6 January 1949, File No. 2/301, PSP, NAI; Nehru to Menon,
11 January 1949, cited in Ramesh, Chequered Brilliance, pp. 339–41.
69. Menon to Patel, 30 January 1949, File No. 2/301, PSP, NAI.
70. Menon to Nehru, 16–20 January 1949, cited in Ramesh, Chequered Brilliance,
pp. 342–43.
71. Nehru to Menon, New Deli, 21 March 1949, Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru
(SWJN) 2nd series, vol. 10, ed. S. Gopal, (New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1990), pp. 23–28.
72. Liddell note, 31 May 1949, KV/2/2512-1, UKNA.
73. ‘The India League’, 30 May 1949, KV/2/2512-20, UKNA.
74. Liddell note, 31 May 1949, KV/2/2512-1, UKNA.
75. 31 May 1949, Liddell Diaries, pp. 115–16, KV/4/471, UKNA.
76. See Liddell Diaries, entries for 14 June 1949, p. 127; 27 June 1949, p. 135;
29 June 1949, p. 137; 21 and July 1949, p. 155, KV/4/471, UKNA.
77. ‘The India League’, 30 May 1949, KV/2/2512-20, UKNA.
78. Sillitoe to Chief Constable, County Durham, 24 February 1950, KV/2/2512-18,
UKNA.
79. 22 July 1949, Liddell Diaries, p. 157, KV/4/471, UKNA.
80. ‘V. K. Krishna Menon’, 10 March 1950, KV/2/2512-18, UKNA.
81. Costley-White to Shaw, 14 March 1951, KV/2/2512-16, UKNA.
82. For an insight into MI5’s opinion of Dutt, see Thurlow, ‘British Communism and
State Surveillance’, pp. 1–21.
83. A note on a conversation between Sillitoe and Gordon Walker, 17 April 1951,
KV/2/2512-15/16, UKNA.
84. Jairam Ramesh, Intertwined Lives: P. N. Haksar and Indira Gandhi (New Delhi:
Simon & Schuster India, 2018), pp. 38–39.
85. U’ren note, 2 April 1951, KV/2/2512-2/3, UKNA.
86. Conversation between Sillitoe and Gordon Walker, 17 April 1951, KV/2/2512-15/
16, UKNA.
87. Ibid.
88. Garner, Commonwealth Office, p. 299.
89. Clutterbuck, to Saville Garner, 21 October 1954, KV/2/2514-3, UKNA.
90. ‘Statement made by D. G. of MI5 at JIC meeting, 1 August 1947’, KV/2/2512-20.,
UKNA.
91. T. J. S. George, Krishna Menon: A Biography (London: Cape, 1964), p. 155.
92. Sir Percy Sillitoe, Cloak without Dagger (London: Cassell, 1955), p. 176; Andrew,
Defence of the Realm, p. 333.
93. Conversation between Sillitoe and Attlee, 7 May 1951, KV/2/2512-13, UKNA.
94. ‘The India League’, 30 May 1949, KV/2/2512-20, UKNA.
95. Nye to Liesching, 28 December 1950, FO 371/92925, UKNA.
96. Kellar note, 2 July 1951 KV/2/2512-4, UKNA.
97. A. J. Kellar minute, 2 July 1951, KV/2/2512-4, UKNA.
98. Garner, Commonwealth Office, p. 310.
99. Shaw to SLO New Delhi, 2 May 1951, KV/2/2512-13; Shaw to Sillitoe,
25 April 1951, KV/2/2512-3, UKNA.
100. U’ren to SLO New Delhi, 28 May 1951, KV/2/2512-10, UKNA.
 notes to pages 66–69 281

101. U’ren note, 28 June 1951, KV/2/2512-4, UKNA.

102. Gopal, Nehru, 1947–1956, p. 142.
103. U’ren note, 2 April 1951, KV/2/2512-2/3; ‘Inside Information’, Daily Graphic,
3 April 1951, KV/2/2512-16; Conversation between Sillitoe and Gordon Walker,
17 April 1951, KV/2/2512-15/16, UKNA.
104. Kellar note, 2 July 1951, KV/2/2512-4, UKNA.
105. Nye to Liesching, 8 November 1951, KV/2/2513-10, UKNA.
106. Liesching to Nye, 1 January 1952, KV/2/2513-10, UKNA.
107. Patrick Gordon Walker, Political Diaries, 1932–1971 (London: The Historians
Press, 1991), p. 241.
108. Spooner note, 24 January 1951, KV/2/2512-16, UKNA; Judith M. Brown, Nehru:
A Political Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 248.
109. Nye to Liesching, 8 November 1951, KV/2/2513-10, UKNA.
110. M. O. Mathai, Reminiscences of the Nehru Age (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing,
1978), p. 165.
111. U’ren note, 11 December 1951, KV/2/2513-10, UKNA.
112. Nye to Liesching, 8 November 1951, KV/2/2513-10, UKNA.
113. Gopal, Nehru, 1947–1956, pp. 141-43.
114. Nye to Liesching, 8 November 1951, KV/2/2513-10, UKNA.
115. Liesching to Nye, 1 January 1952, KV/2/2513-10, UKNA.
116. U’ren note, 2 April 1951, KV/2/2512-2/3, UKNA.
117. Saville Garner monthly letter No. 16, 8 July 1952, DO 133/56, UKNA; Gopal,
Nehru, 1947–1956, p. 144; Arora, Menon, p. 111.
118. ‘Mr. Kher in London’, 14 July 1952, Times, p. 6.
119. Spooner note, 8 July 1952, KV/2/2513-8; ‘The Present Position and Views of
Krishna Menon’, 19 July 1952, KV/2/2513-5, UKNA.
120. U’ren to Costley-White, 29 May 1953, KV/2/2514-8; Saville Garner to Combie,
9 February 1954, DO 35/9014, UKNA.
121. Gopal, Nehru, 1947–1956, p. 144.
122. ‘Current Intelligence Weekly Summary’, 16 June 1955, CIA-RDP79
-0927A000500110001-6, CIA Records Search Tool, USNA.
123. Harold R. Issacs, Scratches On Our Minds: America Images of China and India
(New York: John Day Company, 1958), pp. 313–4.
124. Garner to Clutterbuck, 11 October 1954, KV 2/2514-5; Roberts to Garner,
11 October 1954, FO 371/112194, UKNA.
125. Roberts to Garner, 11 October 1954, FO 371/112194, UKNA.
126. Kurt Stiegler, ‘Communism and “Colonial Evolution”: John Foster Dulles’ Vision
of India and Pakistan’, Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, 12
(Winter 1991), pp. 74–75.
127. US Embassy to Curry, 5 August 1947, KV/2/2511-2; MI5 to US Embassy,
15 August 1947, KV/2/2511-2, UKNA.
128. SLO Washington to DG MI5, 7 December 1954, KV/2/2514-2; DG to SLO
Washington, 9 December 1954, KV/2/2514-2, UKNA.
129. 198th Meeting of the National Security Council, Thursday 20 May 1954, Foreign
Relations of the United States (FRUS), 1952–54, Volume XII (USGPO:
Washington, DC, 1984), p. 497; Allen to State Department, 31 March 1954,
FRUS, 1952–1954, Volume XIII (USGPO: Washington, DC, 1982), pp. 1193–94.
130. Sarvepalli Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography, vol. 3, 1956–1964 (London,
1984), p. 46.
282 notes to pages 69–73

131. Mathai, Nehru Age, p. 55.

132. ‘Dulles-Menon Talks’, 13 July 1955, CIA-RDP79R00904A000200030007-9,
CREST, NARA; Extract from Economist, 5 July 1955, FO 371/115054, UKNA.
133. New York Times, 7 April 1957, p. 216.
134. John Kenneth Galbraith, A Life in Our Times, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981),
p. 407.
135. Phillips Talbot Oral History, 27 July 1965, Oral Histories, John F. Kennedy
Library (JFKL).
136. New York Times, 22 November 1961, p. 35.
137. Gore-Booth to Sandys, 29 December 1961, PREM 11/3837, UKNA.
138. Mountbatten to Gore-Booth, 20 December 1961 MSS.Gorebooth 85, Paul Gore-
Booth Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford.
139. Time, 29 December 1961; Gore-Booth to Sandys, 29 December 1961, PREM
11/3837, UKNA.
140. CIA Report, ‘Afterthoughts’, 16 January 1962, Box 106 A, National Security File,
JFKL.
141. Nehru to Menon, 12 January 1957, cited in Ramesh, Chequered Brilliance, p. 473.
142. Transcript of Moscow Radio Peace and Progress Broadcast to India,
11 February 1971, Box 10, Folder Miscellaneous Items, RG 84, Ambassador
Keating Subject Files, 1968–1972, USNA.
143. Ibid. See also, John D. Smith. I Was a CIA Agent in India (New Delhi: New Age
Printing Press, 1967); Pauly V. Parakal. CIA Dagger against India (New Delhi:
New Age Press, 1973).
144. Nehru to Ramakrishna Bajaj, 21 November 1961, SWJN Volume 72, ed.
Madhavan K. Palat (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 202–3;
Ramakrishna Bajaj to Nehru, 26 December 1961, SWJN Volume 73, ed.
Madhavan K. Palat (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 657–58.
145. Time, 24 August 1962.
146. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive II: The KGB
and the Wider World, (London: Penguin, 2006), pp. 314–15.
147. Komer to McGeorge Bundy, 16 July 1962, Box 441, National Security File, JFKL.
148. New Delhi to CRO, 3 July 1962, DO 133/151, USNA.
149. Gore-Booth to Saville Garner, 3 February 1962, DO 196/209, UKNA.
150. Belcher to Sandys, 25 August 1962, DO 196/127, UKNA.
151. Gore-Booth to Saville Garner, 26 October 1962, DO 196/75, UKNA
152. CRO to Delhi and Karachi, 15 November 1962, FO 371/164929, UKNA;
Roger Hilsman, To Move a Nation: The Politics of Foreign Policy in the
Administration of John F. Kennedy (New York: Doubleday, 1967), pp. 331–32;
Chester Bowles, Promises to Keep: My Years in Public Life, 1941–1969, (New York:
HarperCollins, 1971), p. 437; Entry for 23 October 1962, John Kenneth Galbraith,
Ambassador’s Journal: A Personal Account of the Kennedy Years (London: Hamish
Hamilton, 1969), pp. 428–31.
153. Entry for 23 October 1962, Galbraith, Ambassador’s, p. 431; Galbraith to Rusk,
21 October 1962, Box 107A, National Security File, JFKL.
154. Galbraith to Kennedy, 25 October 1962, NSF, Countries Series, India, General,
9/27/62-10/5/62, JFKL.
155. B. K. Nehru Meeting, 26 October 1962, Meetings Recordings, Tape No. 40, JFKL.
156. Kaysen to Galbraith, 27 October 1962, NSF, Countries Series, India, Ambassador
Galbraith, Special File, JFKL.
 notes to pages 73–77 283

157. New Delhi to Sandys, 14 November 1962, DO 196/172, UKNA.

158. Ormsby Gore to FO, No. 2717, 29 October 1962, DO 196/166, UKNA.
159. New York Times, 1 November 1962, p. 30.
160. Gore-Booth to Saville Garner, 7 November 1962, DO 196/75, UKNA.
161. Sir Paul Gore-Booth, With Great Truth and Respect (London: Constable, 1974), p.
295; Gopal, Nehru: 1956–1964, p. 13; Steven Hoffmann, India and the China
Crisis, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 203–6.
162. G. Parthasarathi, (ed.), Jawaharlal Nehru: Letters to Chief Ministers, vol. 5, 1958–
1964 (London, 1989), p. 571; 58th meeting of the U.S./Australian/British/
Canadian co-ordinating group, 19 December 1963, DO 164/72, UKNA.
163. Delhi to CRO, 19 August 1963, DO 196/154, UKNA; Rusk to Karachi,
Washington, 28 August 1963, FRUS, 1961–1963, Volume XIX, Document #326
(Washington, DC: USGPO, 1996).
164. Michael Brecher, India and World Politics: Krishna Menon’s View of the World
(London: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 289.
165. Saville Garner to Clutterbuck, 11 October 1954, KV/2/2514-5; Roberts to Saville
Garner, 11 October 1954, FO 371/112194, UKNA.
166. Costley-White to Kitchin, 19 October 1954, KV/2/2514-5; Kitchin note,
25 October 1954, KV/2/2514-1, UKNA.
167. Snelling to Saville Garner, 25 June 1962, DO 189/371, UKNA.
168. Eric Norris minute, 22 August 1972, FCO 37/1096, UKNA.
169. ‘The President’s Daily Brief’, 8 March 1967, DOC_0005968824, CIA FOIA
Electronic Reading Room, www.foia.cia.gov.
170. Andrew and Mitrokhin, Mitrokhin Archive II, pp. 314–22; and Arthur Stein, India
and the Soviet Union: The Nehru Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1969), p. 237.
171. Washington Embassy Fortnightly Political Report, 1–15 May 1962, MEA Records,
WWII/101(S)/61, NAI.

4 Quiet Americans: The CIA and the Onset of the Cold War in South
Asia
1. Howard Imbrey, 21 June 2001, Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection, Library of
Congress (hereafter FAOHC).
2. Robert Baer, See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA’s War on
Terrorism (London: Penguin Random House, 2002), pp. 67–70.
3. Imbrey, FAOHC.
4. Ibid.
5. One of the first books to document CIA activity was published in India,
L. Natarajan’s, American Shadow over India (Bombay: People’s Publishing
House, 1952). From the 1960s, communist publishing houses in the
subcontinent joined in uncovering alleged Agency misdeeds. See, John
D. Smith, I Was a CIA Agent in India (New Delhi: New Age Printing Press,
1967); Pauly V. Parakal, CIA Dagger against India (New Delhi: New Age Press,
1973); and Kunhanandan Nair, Devil and His Dart: How the CIA is Plotting in the
Third World (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1986). The CIA’s operations in
India remain largely absent from intelligence literature. See, for example,
Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence
284 notes to pages 77–79

(London: Jonathan Cape, 1974); John Ranelagh, The Agency: The Rise and Decline
of the CIA (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986); Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, The
CIA and American Democracy (London: Yale University Press, 1998); or,
Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, (London: Allen Lane,
2007). Exceptions include Kenneth Conboy and James Morrison. The CIA’s
Secret War in Tibet (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2002). The memoirs
of former CIA Directors mostly omit reference to India. See, Richard Helms,
A Look Over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (New York:
Random House, 2003); and George Tenet, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at
the CIA, (London: Harper Press, 2007). Some senior CIA officers have reflected on
India in print. See, Duane R. Clarridge, A Spy for All Seasons: My Life in the CIA
(New York: Scribner, 1997); and Baer, See No Evil. Accounts of ambassadorial
tours in the subcontinent also provide glimpses of CIA activity. See, John
Kenneth Galbraith, Ambassador’s Journal: A Personal Account of the Kennedy
Years, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), and A Life in Our Times: Memoirs
(London: Andre Deutsch, 1981); Chester Bowles, Promises to Keep: My Years in
Public Life, 1941–1969 (New York: Harper and Row, 1971); and Daniel
Patrick Moynihan, A Dangerous Place (Boston: Little Brown, 1978).
6. Richard J. Aldrich, ‘American Intelligence and the British Raj: The OSS, the SSU
and India, 1942–1947’, Intelligence and National Security, 13: 1, (Spring 1998), pp.
132–64.
7. ‘O.S.S. Organization in India’, 8 April 1943, CAB 122/1589, United Kingdom
National Archives, Kew, London (UKNA).
8. Elizabeth P. MacDonald, Undercover Girl (New York: Macmillan, 1947), p. 18.
9. ‘American Penetration in INDIA’, 3 May 1943, CAB 122/1589, UKNA; India
Office to Wavell, No. 226, 14 May 1943, CAB 122/1589, UKNA.
10. Cawthorn to Wavell, ‘American Intelligence and Cognate Activities in India’,
17 May 1943, CAB 122/1589, UKNA; Aldrich, ‘American Intelligence’, pp. 132–64.
11. Deane to Donovan, 13 September 1943, CIA-RDP13X00001R000100290006-7,
CIA FOIA.
12. US Central Intelligence Agency, NIE-23: ‘India’s Position in East-West Conflict’,
4 September 1951, FRUS, 6:2174-5, p. 2179.
13. ‘Communist Activities in India’, 3 January 1950, CIA-RDP82-00457R004000330003-
2, CIA FOIA.
14. Sherman Kent to Deputy Director/Intelligence, ‘Situation in India’,
17 December 1953, CREST, CIA-RDP79R00904A000100040004.
15. John D. Jernegan, Address to American Academy of Political and Social Science,
Philadelphia, 3 April 1954, DL/10345/7, FO 371/112212, UKNA.
16. Berry to Matthews, 8 February 1952, FRUS 1952–54, vol. 11, part 2, p. 1634.
17. Donovan, ‘Biographical document on Sanjeevi’, 16 May 1949, RG59, Lot file
57D373, Box 2, Folder Memorandum to the Secretary 1949, USNA.
18. Satterthwaite to Webb, 15 June 1949, RG59, Lot file 57D373, Box 2, Folder
Memorandum to the Secretary 1949, USNA.
19. Nehru to Pandit, 20 May 1949, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit Papers (hereafter VLPP),
Subject File 60, Nehru Museum and Memorial Library New Delhi (hereafter
NMML); Nehru to Pandit, June 22, 1949, VLPP, Subject File 60, NMML; Iengar
to Sanjeevi, 25 June 1949, File No. 40/21/49, Police II, Home Ministry Records,
National Archives of India (hereafter NAI).
 notes to pages 80–83 285

20. ‘Deputation of Mr T. G. Sanjeevi, I. B. Director’, 12 May 1949, File No. 40/21/49,

Police II, Home Ministry Records, NAI.
21. Bhashyam Kastur, Intelligence Services: Analysis, Organisation and Functions
(New Delhi: Lancer Publishers, 1995), p. 27.
22. Satterthwaite to Webb, 15 June 1949, RG 59, Lot file 57D373, Box 2, Folder
Memorandum to the Secretary 1949, USNA.
23. Parsons to Sparks, 24 May 1949, Box 1, Folder 26, Georgetown University Library
Special Collections Research Center, Washington, DC.
24. Henderson to Sparks, 17 April 1950, and Klise to Henderson, 18 April 1950,
RG59, Lot file 57D373, Box 2, Folder Official informal Jan–May 1950, USNA.
25. Sparks to Henderson, 8 July 1949, RG59, Lot file 57D373, Box 2, Folder Official
Informal July 1949, USNA.
26. Henderson to Sparks, 17 April 1950, and Klise to Henderson, 18 April 1950,
RG59, Lot file 57D373, Box 2, Folder Official informal Jan–May 1950, USNA.
27. Satterthwaite to Webb, 15 June 1949, RG59, Lot file 57D373, Box 2, Folder
Memorandum to the Secretary 1949, USNA. Periodic attempts were
subsequently made by the FBI to establish a liaison presence in India. These
fell on fallow ground until 2000. In the autumn of 1971, for example, the US
Embassy in New Delhi rejected a proposal from the FBI Director to establish
a permanent presence in India. Kenneth Keating noted at the time that, ‘All-in
-all, I believe we [the US Embassy] presently have the facilities and contacts to
respond positively and productively to FBI requests for investigations in India
and Nepal.’ See, Stone to Secretary of State, ‘FBI Proposal to Establish
Additional Liaison’, No, 16789, 28 October 1971, Box 5, Folder FBI, RG 84,
Ambassador Keating Subject Files, 1968–1972, USNA.
28. Satterthwaite to Webb, 15 June 1949, RG59, Lot file 57D373, Box 2, Folder
Memorandum to the Secretary 1949, USNA.
29. Klise to Henderson, 18 April 1950, RG59, Lot file 57D373, Box 2, Folder Official
informal Jan–May 1950, USNA.
30. Christopher Andrew. The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5
(London: Allen Lane, 2009), pp. 445–46.
31. Nehru to Foreign Secretary, 4 February 1951, File No. 41-6/51-AMS, MEA, INA.
32. Nehru to Cabinet Secretary, 9 October 1956, Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru
(hereafter SWJN), vol. 35 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 207.
33. Nehru speech to heads of Indian Missions in Europe, Salzburg, Austria, 28–
30 June 1955, SWJN, vol. 29 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 257.
See also, Subimal Dutt, With Nehru in the Foreign Office (Calcutta: Minerva
Associates, 1977) p. 241.
34. Nehru speech to heads of Indian Missions in Europe, Salzburg, Austria, 28–
30 June 1955, SWJN, vol. 29 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press: 2001), p. 257.
35. Nehru to Shriman Narayan, 24 May 1955, New Delhi, SWJN, vol. 28 (New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 284–86, f. 10.
36. Sahay to Radhakrishnan, 17 February and 31 October 1966, Radhakrishnan
Papers, NMML, quoted in Sarvepalli Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography,
Vol. 3, 1956–1964 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1984), p. 122.
37. Gopal, Nehru, 1956–1964, p. 122. A biographer of Nehru’s, who received privileged
access to his private papers, found no evidence linking Mathai to the CIA. See, Judith
M. Brown, Nehru: A Political Life (London: Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 382–83.
While maintaining his innocence, Mathai admitted to circumventing Indian
286 notes to pages 83–88

government security protocols by keeping, ‘a spare copy of everything Nehru wrote

and also copies of important telegrams and documents’. M. O. Mathai, Reminiscences
of the Nehru Age, (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House 1978), p. 249.
38. Mary Olmsted, 8 April 1992, FAOHC.
39. Henderson to Field, 7 June 1978, Loy W. Henderson Papers (hereafter LWHP),
Library of Congress, Manuscripts Division, Box 8, India Misc folder.
40. Henderson memorandum ‘Jawaharlal Nehru’, undated, Box 8, India Misc folder,
LWHP.
41. Nehru/Henderson talk, New Delhi, 15 September 1951, SWJN, vol. 16 (New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 627.
42. Nehru to Birla, 6 February 1956, SWJN, vol. 32 (New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 2003), pp. 481–82; Interview with Attwood, Look correspondent, New
Delhi, 31 August 1954, SWJN, vol. 26, (New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
2000), pp. 310–16.
43. Nehru to Mountbatten, New Delhi, 30 July 1951, SWJN, vol. 16 (New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 336–41.
44. Nehru to Pillai and Dutt, 27 May 1960, SWJN, vol. 61 (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2015), pp. 625–26.
45. Nehru to R. K. Nehru, 27 May 1960, SWJN, vol. 61 (New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 2015), pp. 482–83.
46. Nehru to J. K. Bhonsle, 13 May 1961, SWJN, vol. 69 (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2016), pp. 349–40.
47. Fred J. Cook, ‘The CIA’, The Nation, 192,25 (26 June 1961), pp. 439–572.
48. Cook, ‘The CIA’, pp. 439–572.
49. Nehru to M. J. Desai, 17 July 1961, SWJN, vol. 70 (New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 2017), p. 589.
50. Nehru to Tyabji, ‘Intelligence Policy’, 26 February 1962, SWJN vol. 75, ed.
Madhavan K. Palat (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 507–8.
51. National Security Council Report 5701, FRUS 1955–1957 vol. 8, 10 January 1957,
pp. 29–43.
52. ‘Indian Financial Problems’, 4 June 1957, 891.00/6-457, USNA; Bunker to John
Foster Dulles, 19 November 1957, 791.5 MSP/11-1957, USNA.
53. Rosenthal to Salisbury, undated, Box 159, CIA Series 1965–66, Raw Data,
Harrison Salisbury Papers, Butler Library, Columbia University (hereafter HSP).
54. Albert Lakeland Jr., 27 July 1992, FAOHC.
55. Eugene Rosenfeld, 28 November 1989, FAOHC.
56. Rosenthal to Salisbury, undated, Box 159 CIA Series 1965–66 Raw Data, HSP.
57. James Strodes, Allen Dulles: Master of Spies (Washington DC: Regnery
Publishing, 1999), pp. 11–12, pp. 35–38; See also, Stephen Kinzer, The Brothers:
John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles and Their Secret World War (New York:
St. Martin’s Griffin, 2013), p. 8, p. 16.
58. Leonard Mosley, Dulles: A Biography of Eleanor, Allen, and John Foster Dulles and
their Family Network (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1978), p. 34.
59. Kinzer, The Brothers, pp. 19–20.
60. Strodes, Master of Spies, p. 489.
61. ‘What’s Behind Allen Dulles’ Mystery Mission to India? Let Asia Beware of Us
Intelligence agency!’ Blitz, 29 September 1956.
62. ‘Delhi Spy Scandal’, Blitz, 29 September 1956.
 notes to pages 88–93 287

63. Radio Moscow, 11 January 1961, Folder Central Intelligence Agency vol. II [1
of 2], Oct 1965–Feb 1966, NSF, LBJL.
64. ‘India: CIA planned assassination of Nehru, 10 January 1966, Komsomolskaya
Pravda’, Folder Central Intelligence Agency Vol. II [1 of 2], Oct 1965–Feb 1966,
NSF, LBJL.
65. MacDonald to Home, ‘India: General Elections, 1957’, 30 April 1957, DO 35/
3167, UKNA.
66. Indian Embassy, Washington to Foreign Secretary, ‘Fortnightly Political
Report for the period February 1–15, 1957’, File 48-1-AMS-57, Americas
Division, MEA, NAI.
67. Ramsey to State Department, no. 347, 1 May 1957, RG59, Lot 57D373, Box 8,
Folder Kerala Aug–Dec 1957, USNA.
68. MacDonald to Macmillan, ‘Communism in Kerala’, 28 September 1957, DO 201/
8, UKNA.
69. Simons to Adams, 21 November 1957, RG59, Lot file 57D373, Box 8, Folder
Kerala Aug–Dec 1957, USNA.
70. See, Ellsworth Bunker, Oral History, 18 June and 17 July 1979, Butler Library,
Columbia University, New York, pp. 67–68. Other US officials, such as David
S. Burgess, have corroborated Bunker’s revelation. See, David. S. Burgess,
7 April 1991, FAOHC. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, US Ambassador to India in
the early 1970s, also confirmed that the CIA was used to fund Congress Party
campaigns against the CPI in Kerala and West Bengal. See, Moynihan, Dangerous
Place, p. 41.
71. Nehru to Home Minister, 19 June 1956, SWJN, vol. 33 (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2005), pp. 251–52.
72. Ellsworth Bunker, Oral History, 18 June and 17 July 1979, Butler Library,
Columbia University, New York, pp. 67–68.
73. Nehru to Secretary General and Foreign Secretary, 28 April 1957, SWJN, vol. 37
(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 339.
74. Fulbright to Allen Dulles, 18 February 1959, CIA-RDP80R01731R000100070040-0,
CIA FOIA, www.foia.cia.gov.
75. Allen Dulles to Fulbright, 27 February 1959, CIA-RDP80R01731R000100070040-0,
CIA FOIA, www.foia.cia.gov.
76. Allen Dulles, ‘Resume of OCB Luncheon Meeting, 3 February 1960’,
10 February 1960, CIA-RDP80B01676R002700020051-7, CIA FOIA, www.foia
.cia.gov.
77. ‘Special Report: Exploitation of Kerala Elections’, OCB,17 February 1960, FRUS,
1958–1960, vol. XV, document 254, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocu
ments/frus1958-60v15/d254
78. David S. Burgess, 7 April 1991, FAOHC.
79. Komer to Jessup, 20 March 1964, NSF, Robert W. Komer Files, Box 23, Folder 1
India – December 1963–1964 [1 of 4], LBJL.
80. Clarridge, Spy for All Seasons, pp. 91–92.
81. MacDonald to CRO, ‘India: Communist Rule in Kerala’, 24 October 1959, DO
201/10, UKNA.
82. The ‘Panch Sheel’ or ‘Five Principles of Peaceful Co-existence’ were incorporated
into the 1954 Sino-Indian Treaty on Trade and Intercourse with Tibet. These
encompassed commitments to mutual non-aggression and respect for national
sovereignty. The slogan and policy of Hindee Chinee bhai-bhai, or Indian-Chinese
288 notes to pages 93–98

brotherhood, was popularised in India following the Treaty. See, A. Appadorai

(ed.), Select Documents on India’s Foreign Policy and Relations, 1947–1972, vol. 1
(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 459–66.
83. William J. Barnds, India, Pakistan and the Great Powers (London: Pall Mall Press,
1972), p. 143; Dennis Kux, India and the United States: Estranged Democracies,
1941–1991 (Washington DC: National Defense University Press, 1993), pp. 161–
62.
84. ‘Chinese Intentions against India’, JIC report, 22 November 1962, CAB 158/47,
UKNA. See also, Gopal, Nehru 1956–1964, p. 81 and p. 89, and Robert
J. McMahon, ‘U.S. Policy toward South Asia and Tibet during the Early Cold
War’, Journal of Cold War Studies, 8, 3 (Summer 2006), p. 141. For a Chinese
perspective on Sino-Indian relations, see Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold
War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), pp. 78–79.
85. ‘Tibet’, J. I. C. (49) 131st Meeting, 16 December 1949, CAB 159/6 Part 2, UKNA.
86. Nehru to Pillai, 18 June 1954, ‘Prime Minister’s Secretariat’, Top Secret, Nehru for
Pillai, R. K. Nehru, ‘Tibet – escape of the Dalai Lama’, Subject File No. 6, Subimal
Dutt Papers, NMML.
87. See, Conboy and Morrison, Secret War in Tibet; and John Kenneth Knaus,
Orphans of the Cold War: America and the Tibetan Struggle for Survival
(New York: Public Affairs, 1999).
88. Nehru to Mountbatten, 18 September 1954, New Delhi, SWJN, vol. 26 (New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 221–23.
89. Nehru to Pillai, 18 June 1954, ‘Tibet – escape of the Dalai Lama’, Subject File
No. 6, Subimal Dutt Papers, NMML.
90. Nehru talks with Chou Enlai, 20 April 1960, New Delhi, P. N. Haksar Papers, III
Instalment, Subject File 24; and, Conversation between R. K. Nehru and Chou
Enlai, 21 April 1960, P. N. Haksar Papers, III Instalment, Subject File 26, NMML.
91. Nehru talks with Chou Enlai, 25 April 1960, New Delhi, P. N. Haksar Papers, III
Instalment, Subject File 24, NMML.
92. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (London: Penguin Books, 1958),
and The Liberal Hour (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1960).
93. Richard Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), pp. 324–25.
94. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House
(Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1965), p. 523.
95. Hagerty to Schaffer, 26 September 1967, RG 59, Box 4, India 1967, M. C. Chagla,
USNA.
96. Galbraith, Ambassador’s Journal, 29 March 1961, Washington, p. 51.
97. Galbraith, Life in Our Times, pp. 394–96.
98. Clarridge, Spy for All Seasons, p. 84.
99. ‘The Year of the Spy (in a Manner of Speaking)’, New York Times, 5 January 1986,
p. E19.
100. Galbraith, Life in Our Times, p. 396.
101. Ibid., p. 396.
102. Jeffreys-Jones, CIA and American Democracy, p. 128. See also, Marchetti and
Marks, Cult of Intelligence, p. 340.
103. Knaus, Orphans of the Cold War, pp. 146–47.
 notes to pages 98–101 289

104. Galbraith to Harriman, Ball and McGhee, 30 November 1961, Box 463, Folder
J. K. Galbraith 1 of 2, Averell Harriman Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of
Congress, Washington DC.
105. Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith, p. 354. See also, Steven B. Hoffman, ‘Rethinking
the Linkage between. Tibet and the China-India Border Conflict: A Realist
Approach’, Journal of Cold War Studies 8 (Summer 2006), pp. 179–81;
Prem Mahadevan, ‘The Failure of Indian Intelligence in the Sino- Indian
Conflict’, Journal of Intelligence History, 8:1 (2008), pp. 11–12.
106. Joseph Greene, JR., 12 March 1993, FAOHC,
107. Mary Olmsted, 8 April 1992, FAOHC.
108. Clarridge, Spy for All Seasons, p. 78.
109. Times, 23 October 1962, p. 10; and FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. XIX (Washington, DC:
Government Printing Office, 1996), Galbraith to State Department, 18
October 1962, pp. 346–47.
110. Gore-Booth to Saville Garner, 26 October 1962, DO 196/75, UKNA;
Neville Maxwell, India’s China War (London: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 414;
and, CIA Daily Intelligence Bulletin, 28 October 1962, USNA.
111. Gopal, Nehru, 1956–1964, p. 223.
112. Gore-Booth to Saville Garner, 26 October 1962, DO 196/75, UKNA.

5 Confronting China: The Sino-Indian War and Collaborative Covert

Action
1. D. K. Palit, War in High Himalaya: The Indian Army in Crisis, 1962 (London:
Hurst, 1991), p. 240; Neville Maxwell, India’s China War (London: Cape, 1970), pp.
388–89
2. S. N. Prasad et al (eds.), History of the Conflict with China, 1962 (New Delhi:
History Division, Ministry of Defence, 1992), p. 372. Available through Parallel
History Project on Cooperative Security, Zurich, www.php.isn.ethz.ch/collections/
coll_india/SecretHistory.cfm?navinfo=96318
3. Times, 22 October 1962, p. 10.
4. Times, 23 October 1962, p. 10.
5. Prasad, Conflict with China, p. 386; Gore-Booth to Saville Garner, 26 October 1962,
DO 196/75, UKNA.
6. Maxwell, India’s China War, p. 392 and p. 411.
7. Gore-Booth to Saville Garner, 26 October 1962, DO 196/75, UKNA.
8. See Maxwell’s, India’s China War; Yaccov Vertzberger, ‘India’s Border Conflict
with China: A Perceptual Analysis’, Journal of Contemporary History, 17, 4,
(October 1982), pp. 607–31; Michael Brecher, ‘Non-Alignment Under Stress: The
West and the India-China Border War’, Pacific Affairs, 52, 4 (Winter 1979–80), pp.
612–30; and John Garver, Protracted Contest: Sino-Indian Rivalry in the Twentieth
Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), pp. 58–62.
9. Yaacov Vertzberger, ‘Bureaucratic-Organizational Politics and Information
Processing in a Developing State’, International Studies Quarterly 28, 1 (March
1984), p. 76.
10. Mullik dismissed criticism of the IB’s ‘alleged failure of intelligence’ as ill-informed.
B. N. Mullik, My Years with Nehru: The Chinese Betrayal (Bombay: Allied
Publishers, 1971), p. 497. Other senior IB officers rejected Mullik’s defence and
290 notes to pages 102–6

argued that the spy chief had ‘let down’ Nehru by furnishing India’s premier with
‘erroneous assessment[s] of Chinese military strength, claims and consequent
designs on our border territories in 1961 and 1962’. K. Sankaran Nair, Inside IB
and RAW: The Rolling Stone that Gathered Moss (New Delhi: Manas Publications,
2013), p. 98.
11. Y. D. Gundevia, Outside the Archives (New Delhi: Sangam Books, 1984), pp. 211–
12; Prem Mahadevan, ‘The Failure of Indian Intelligence in the Sino-Indian
Conflict’, Journal of Intelligence History, 8, 1 (2008), p. 23.
12. Manoj Shrivastava, Re-Energising Indian Intelligence (New Delhi: Vij Books, 2013),
p. 55; K. S. Subramanian, Political Violence and the Police in India (New Delhi:
Sage, 2007), pp. 84–86.
13. Nehru to Bhonsle, ‘Intelligence is Satisfactory’, 13 May 1961, SWJN vol. 69, ed.
Madhavan K. Palat (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 349–40.
14. Whitehead (Calcutta) to Smedly, undated, c. February 1960, DO 133/148, UKNA.
15. Srinath Raghavan, War and Peace in Modern India: A Strategic History of the Nehru
Years (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2009), pp. 91–97.
16. Embassy of India, Washington to Foreign Secretary, MEA, ‘Fortnightly Political
Report for the period April 16–30, 1960’, No. FR-8/61, 4 May 1961, File 48-1-AMS-
57, Americas Division, Ministry of External Affairs, National Archives of India.
17. Delhi to CRO, 9 January 1960, DO 133/148, UKNA.
18. Pandit to Nehru, 1 October 1959, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit Papers, Subject File 62, 1st
Instalment, Nehru Museum and Memorial Library (NMML).
19. Ibid.
20. Nehru to Pandit, ‘Researching Maps at the India Office’, 6 October 1959, SWJN
vol. 53, ed. Madhavan K. Palat (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 488.
21. ‘Whitehall Says Briton Did Not Contact Gopal’, Hindustan Times,
26 February 1960.
22. Dobbs to Anderson, 26 February 1960, DO 133/48, UKNA.
23. Sydney Wignall, Spy on the Roof of the World (Edinburgh: Canongate Books,
1996). See also, Francine R. Frankel, When Nehru Looked East: Origins of India-
US Suspicion and India-China Rivalry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020),
p. 252; and Chandra B. Khandur, Thimayya: An Amazing Life (New Delhi:
Knowledge World International, 2007), p. 206.
24. Jan Morris, Coronation Everest (London: Faber & Faber, 2003), p. 31, p. 44.
25. Wignall, Roof of the World, p. viii.
26. Wignall, Roof of the World, pp. 256–67.
27. A more detailed account of this episode is provided in Chapter 9, ‘Battle of the
Books’.
28. Sanjeevi to Iengar, 24 November 1948, DIB D.O. 336/48, File No. 40/21/49, Police
II, Home Ministry Records, National Archives of India.
29. Nehru to Lal Bahadur Shastri, 17 May 1961, SWJN vol. 69, ed. Madhavan K. Palat
(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 405.
30. Herbert Passin, ‘Sino-Indian Cultural Relations’, The China Quarterly 7 (July–
September 1961), pp. 85–100.
31. CRO to Gautrey, 4 May 1956, FO 371/120992, UKNA.
32. Nehru to Foreign Secretary, ‘Intelligence for Foreign countries’, 30 October 1957,
SWJN vol. 39, ed. Mushirul Hasan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp.
302–3.
 notes to pages 107–11 291

33. Nehru to Pillai, Dutt and Desai, 2 December 1959, SWJN vol. 55, ed. Madhavan
K. Palat (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 365–66.
34. John Kenneth Galbraith, A Life in Our Times: Memoirs (London: Andre Deutsch,
1981), pp. 427–28.
35. John Kenneth Galbraith, Ambassador’s Journal: A Personal Account of the Kennedy
Years (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 26 October 1962, pp. 435–36.
36. Noam Kochavi, A Conflict Perpetuated: China Policy during the Kennedy Years
(London: Praeger, 2002), pp. 148–50.
37. Sarvepalli Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography, vol. 3: 1956–1964 (London:
Jonathan Cape, 1984), p. 223.
38. Gore-Booth to Saville Garner, 26 October 1962, DO 196/75, UKNA.
39. Galbraith, Ambassador’s Journal, 26 and 29 October 1962, New Delhi, p. 440 and
p. 447; Delhi to CRO, No. 1629, 21 October 1962, FO 371/164914, UKNA; Ormsby
Gore to FO, No. 2723, 29 October1962, FO 371/164880, UKNA.
40. New York Times, 20 November 1962, p. 1.
41. Ormsby Gore to Macmillan, 20 November 1962, DO 196/168, UKNA.
42. Galbraith, Ambassador’s Journal, 19 November 1962, New Delhi, p. 486; Galbraith
to Rusk, 20 November 1962, NSF, Box 108, JFKL.
43. Sino-Indian War’, 19 November 1962, Meetings Recordings, Tape No. 62, JFKL;
Kennedy to Harriman and Galbraith, 23 November 1962, FRUS, 1961–1963, vol.
XIX, p. 405, and Galbraith to Washington, 24 November 1962, FRUS, 1961–1963,
vol. XIX, p. 405.
44. Ormsby Gore to FO, 19 November 1962, FO 371/164929, and Ormsby Gore to FO,
20 November 1962 FC1063/16 (C), UKNA; Sandys to Macmillan,
13 November 1962, DSDN 8/12, Duncan Sandys Papers (DSP), Churchill
College, Cambridge.
45. Ledward to McKenzie-Johnston, 24 November 1962, FO 371/164930, UKNA.
46. Sino-Indian Conflict: policy Situation’, 22 November 1962, DO 196/172, UKNA.
47. Nitin A. Gokhale. R. N. Kao: Gentleman Spymaster (New Delhi: Bloomsbury,
2019), p. 105.
48. See, Komer to McGeorge Bundy, 14 October 1965, LBJL, NSF, Robert W. Komer
Papers, Box 13, Folder 6 Bundy, McG – Decisions 1965–66; and Rostow to
Johnson, 30 April 1966, LBJL, NSF, Intelligence File, Box 2, Folder India’s
Unconventional Warfare Force; M. S. Kohli and Kenneth Conboy, Spies in the
Himalayas: Secret Missions and Perilous Climbs (Lawrence: University Press of
Kansas, 2003); and John Kenneth Knaus, Orphans of the Cold War: America and
the Tibetan Struggle for Survival (New York: Public Affairs, 2000), pp. 265–76.
49. ‘Report to the Joint Chiefs of Staff by General Paul D. Adams on Indian
Military Situation, 3 December 1962 [‘Adams Report’]’, Folder India: Military
Situation, Box 112, NSF, 1961–1963, Asia and the Pacific, First Supplement,
JFKL.
50. ‘Adams Report’, Enclosures I: Appraisal of the Indian Intelligence System and K:
Survey of Special Warfare requirements, Folder India: Military Situation, Box 112,
NSF, 1961–1963, Asia and the Pacific, First Supplement, JFKL.
51. Galbraith, Life in Our Times, p. 436.
52. Knaus, Orphans of the Cold War, pp. 264–65.
53. Ibid., pp. 265–66; 271–72.
292 notes to pages 111–17

54. ‘Adams Report’, Folder India: Military Situation: A Report by General Paul Adams,
3 December 1962’, Box 112, NSF, 1961–1963, Asia and the Pacific, First
Supplement, JFKL.
55. ‘Adams Report’, Enclosure I: ‘Appraisal of the Indian Intelligence System’, Box 112,
NSF, 1961–1963, Asia and the Pacific, First Supplement, JFKL.
56. ‘Adams Report’, Enclosure K: ‘Survey of Special Warfare requirements’, Folder
India: Military Situation, Box 112, NSF, 1961–1963, Asia and the Pacific, First
Supplement, JFKL.
57. ‘Mark Scrase-Dickens’, Times, 23 March 2003, p. 55.
58. Nehru to Chavan, 25 November 1962, SWJN vol. 79, ed. Madhavan K. Palat (New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 575–76.
59. Gokhale, Gentleman Spymaster, p. 106.
60. Komer to McGeorge Bundy, 14 October 1965, NSF, Robert W. Komer Files,
Box 13, Folder 6 Bundy, McG – Decisions 1965–66, LBJL.
61. Rostow to Johnson, 30 April 1966, NSF, Intelligence File, Box 2, Folder India’s
Unconventional Warfare Force, LBJL.
62. Bowles to Rostow, 26 July 1966, NSF, Walt W. Rostow Files, Box 15, Folder 3,
[Non-Vietnam July–September 1966] [1 of 2], LBJL.
63. Mountbatten to Chaudhuri, 7 May 1965, Mountbatten Papers, MB1/J507 Visit to
India, May 1965, MBP.
64. Mountbatten to Freeman, 7 May 1965, Mountbatten Papers, MB1/J507 Visit to
India, May 1965, MBP.
65. ‘Adams Report’, Enclosure K: ‘Survey of Special Warfare requirements’,
Folder India: Military Situation: A Report by General Paul Adams,
3 December 1962’, Box 112, NSF, 1961–1963, Asia and the Pacific, First
Supplement, JFKL.
66. Memorandum for the Special Group, Washington, 9 January 1964, ‘Review of
Tibetan Operations’, FRUS, 1964–1968, vol. XXX, China, Document 337, https://
history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v30/d337
67. Memorandum for the 303 Committee, Washington, 26 January 1968, ‘Status Report
on Tibetan Operations’, FRUS, 1964–1968, vol. XXX, China, document 342
https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v30/d342.
68. Memorandum Prepared for the 40 Committee, Washington, 11 January 1971, ‘Status
Report on Support to the Dalai Lama and Tibetan Operations’, FRUS, 1969–1976, vol.
xvii, China, 1969–1972, Document 278. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/
frus1969-76v17/d278; ‘US Suspends spy forays into southern China’, Guardian,
4 October 1971.
69. ‘Chinese Foreign Ministry Protests Against Indian Government’s use of
Chinese Tibetan Traitors for Anti-China Activity’, 29 March 1967, FCO
21/72, UKNA.
70. Hopson to Brown, ‘China: Chinese Actions Against the Indian Embassy in Peking’,
26 June 1967, FCO 21/72, UKNA.
71. ‘Adams Report’, Enclosure I: ‘Appraisal of the Indian Intelligence System’, Folder
India: Military Situation: A Report by General Paul Adams, 3 December 1962’,
Box 112, NSF, 1961–1963, Asia and the Pacific, First Supplement, JFKL.
72. Nehru to Chavan, ‘Airfields for American Use’, 5 May 1963, SWJN vol. 82, ed.
Madhavan K. Palat (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019), p. 775. See also,
Desai conversation McNamara, May 1963, T. T. Krishnamachari Papers, NMML;
Krishnamachari to Nehru, 20 May 1963, T. T. Krishnamachari Papers, NMML.
 notes to pages 117–22 293

73. Gokhale, Gentleman Spymaster, pp. 101–2.

74. ‘State-JCS Meeting on 14 December 1962 at 1130’, 14 December 1962, CIA-
RDP80R01580R001603320006-3, CIA FOIA Electronic Reading Room, www
.foia.cia.gov.
75. Gregory W. Pedlow and Donald E. Welzenbach, ‘The Central Intelligence
Agency and Overhead Reconnaissance: The U-2 and OXCART Programs,
1954–1974’ (History Staff, Central Intelligence Agency, Washington, DC,
1992), pp. 231–32.
76. CIA [Officials name redacted] to Galbraith, 11 January 1963, CIA-
RDP78B04558A001800010014-7, CIA FOIA Electronic Reading Room, www
.foia.cia.gov.
77. Harriman conversation with Senator William J. Fulbright, 4 December 1962,
Box 537, Folder 1, Harriman Papers, Library of Congress, Washington DC.
78. Gregory W. Pedlow and Donald E. Welzenbach, ‘The Central Intelligence Agency
and Overhead Reconnaissance: The U-2 and OXCART Programs, 1954–1974’
(History Staff, Central Intelligence Agency, Washington, DC, 1992), pp. 231–32.
79. Gregory W. Pedlow and Donald E. Welzenbach, ‘The Central Intelligence Agency
and Overhead Reconnaissance: The U-2 and OXCART Programs, 1954–1974’
(History Staff, Central Intelligence Agency, Washington, DC, 1992), pp. 231–32.
80. Ibid., pp. 174–76; Michael Beschloss, May Day: Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and the
U-2 Affair (New York: Faber & Faber, 1986).
81. Howard Kohn, ‘The Nanda Devi Caper: How the CIA used American
mountaineers to plant a nuclear-powered spy station in the Himalaya’, Outside
Magazine (May 1978).
82. ‘President Kennedy News Conference 59’, Washington DC, 1 August 1963, Public
Papers of the President of the United States (hereafter PPP-US), John F. Kennedy,
1963, American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/.
83. Entry for 11 December 1964, Crossman, Minister of Housing 1964–66, p. 94.
84. Zuckerman to Wilson, 15 March 1965, ‘India and the Bomb’, PREM 13/973,
UKNA.
85. ‘On Reported Planting of a Nuclear Device by the CIA in the Nanda Devi’,
17 April 1978, Session IV, Lok Sabha Debates (New Delhi: Government of India,
1978).
86. Goheen to State Department, 17 April 1978, FRUS, 1977–1980, vol. XIX, South
Asia (Washington DC: GPO, 2019), p. 261.
87. ‘CIA Put Nuclear Spy Devices in Himalayas’, Washington Post, 13 April 1978,
p. A3.
88. Kohli and Conboy, Spies in the Himalayas.
89. Joseph N. Greene interview, 13 March 1993, Foreign Affairs Oral History
Collection, Library of Congress, https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/mss/
mfdip/2004/2004gre09/2004gre09.pdf
90. Christopher to Carter, 14 April 1978, FRUS, 1977–1980, vol. XIX, South Asia
(Washington DC: GPO, 2019), 260; ‘On Reported Planting of a Nuclear Device
by the CIA in the Nanda Devi’, 17 April 1978, Session IV. Lok Sabha Debates (New
Delhi: Lok Sabha Secretariat, 1978); ‘CIA Mischief in Himalayas?’ Times of India,
14 April 1978, p. 8.
91. Lukas to Wicker, 18 October 1965, Box 159 CIA Series 1965–66 Raw Data, HSP.
See also, ‘Ducks Reprieved at a U.S. Embassy’, New York Times, 6 June 1965, p. 8.
294 notes to pages 122–29

92. Joseph N. Greene interview 13 March 1993, Foreign Affairs Oral History
Collection, Library of Congress, https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/mss/
mfdip/2004/2004gre09/2004gre09.pdf
93. Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), p. 169.

6 Peddling Propaganda: The Information Research Department

and India
1. For insights into the British approach to Cold War propaganda, see A. Defty,
Britain, America, and Anti-Communist Propaganda, 1945–53: The Information
Research Department (Abingdon: Routledge, 2003); John Jenks, British
Propaganda and News Media in the Cold War (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2006); and Gary Rawnsley (ed.), Cold-War Propaganda in the
1950s (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999).
2. SLO Letter, undated and unsigned, c May 1962; Williamson to Welser,
8 May 1962; and Welser to Williamson, 10 May 1962, FCO 168/430, United
Kingdom National Archives, Kew, London (UKNA).
3. Ralph Murray, 7 January 1949, FO 1110/22, UKNA.
4. Nye to CRO, 5 May 1951, FO 371/92864, UKNA.
5. Joyce to CRO, 15 January 1952, DO 35/2657, UKNA.
6. Nye to CRO, 15 January 1952, DO 35/2657, UKNA.
7. FO memorandum, 17 November 1951, FO 953/1051, UKNA.
8. John Christopher Edmonds interview, 21 May 2009, British Diplomatic Oral
History Project, pp. 7–8, www.chu.cam.ac.uk/media/uploads/files/Edmonds.pdf.
9. King to Joyce, 2 February 1950, FO 1110/293, UKNA.
10. Bennett to Glass, 25 January 1962, FO 1110/1560, UKNA.
11. Hoghton note, 3 November 1954, FO 371/112211, UKNA.
12. ‘Vilification of Gandhi: Soviet Blunder in India’, Manchester Guardian,
20 October 1954; BBC Monitoring report, 4 December 1954, FO 371/112211,
UKNA.
13. ‘Counter-Subversion Structure: Annex D – Interdepartmental Review
Committee’, 27 July 1966, DEFE 28/146, UKNA; Paul Lashmar and
James Oliver, Britain’s Secret Propaganda War: Foreign Office and the Cold
War, 1948–77 (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1998), pp. 140–41.
14. Hans Welser, handwritten note, 11 February 1966, FCO 168/2386, UKNA.
15. ‘United States-United Kingdom Information Working Group Meetings: United
Kingdom Brief’, June 1960, FCO 168/19, UKNA.
16. ‘Clandestine Subversive Activities by Sino-Soviet Bloc Representatives in Public
Information Media’, December 1958, CIA-RDP78-00915R001000360002-9, CIA
FOIA.
17. Glass, minute, 30 December 1964, FCO 168/1992; Üre to Glass, 19 January 1965,
FCO 168/1992, UKNA.
18. ‘Chinese Peace Committee Letters’, undated, FO 1110/2363, UKNA.
19. Peter Joy, ‘I.R.D. Work in India (1964)’, FCO 168/1161, UKNA.
20. Selborne to Churchill, 23 October 1944, CAB 301/11, UKNA.
21. Borron minute, 23 April 1952, DO 133/134, UKNA.
22. Minute by Murray, 28 March 1950 CAB143/3, UKNA.
 notes to pages 129–36 295

23. ‘Meeting of the Chiefs of Staff: Cold War Organisation’, 10 March 1948, FO 1093/
375, UKNA.
24. ‘Information Research Department’, c. 1970, FCO 79/182, UKNA.
25. Lawson to Stephens, 23 August 1965, Declassified Documents Reference System-
295501-i1-14.
26. Murray to Joyce, 7 January 1948, FO 1110/44, UKNA.
27. King to Joyce, 27 November 1948, FO 1110/44, UKNA.
28. Hughes note, 11 August 1951, DO 133/116, UKNA.
29. Nicholls to MacDonald, 21 November 1951, DO 133/116, UKNA.
30. Hughes to Cockram, 25 March 1955, FO 1110/818, UKNA.
31. Michele L. Louro, Comrades Against Imperialism: Nehru, India, and Interwar
Internationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 12.
32. Nye to CRO, 5 May 1951, FO 371/92864; Hughes to Cockram, 25 March 1955, FO
1110/818, UKNA.
33. Borron, 23 April 1952, DO 133/134, UKNA.
34. ‘Minoo Masani speech to Detroit Economic Club’, 13 November 1951, DO 133/
134, UKNA.
35. V. S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness: A Discovery of India (New York: Vintage
Books, 2002), p. 113.
36. Young to Kitchin, 18 March 1952, DO 133/134, UKNA.
37. Symon to Patrick, 14 February 1948, DO 133/128, UKNA.
38. Y. D. Gundevia, Outside the Archives (New Delhi: Sangam Books, 1984), pp. 208–
9.
39. Mayhew to Gordon Walker, 22 November 1948, FO 1110/22, UKNA.
40. Murray minute, 22 July 1948, FO 1110/22, UKNA.
41. Nye to CRO, 5 May 1951, FO 371/92864, UKNA.
42. Bozman minute, 28 March 1956, FO 1110/929, UKNA.
43. Hughes to Cockram, 25 March 1955, FO 1110/818, UKNA.
44. Cole to Bozman, 22 June 1956, FO 1110/929, UKNA.
45. Jenks, British Propaganda, pp. 67–69.
46. Bozman to Cole, 28 June 1956, FO 1110/929, UKNA.
47. Meeting between Bozman, Costley-White, Middleton, 28 March 1956, FO 1110/
929, UKNA.
48. Martin to Bozman, 7 October 1953, FO 1110/603; Bozman minute, 15 April 1955,
FO 1110/818, UKNA.
49. Cole to Bozman, 23 April 1956, FO 1110/929, UKNA.
50. James to Belcher, 31 August 1960, FO 371/152546, UKNA.
51. Nehru to Tyabji, ‘Intelligence Policy’, 26 February 1962, SWJN vol. 75, ed.
Madhavan K. Palat (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 507–8.
52. ‘India’, 5 December 1967, FCO 95/290, UKNA.
53. Bennett to Glass, 25 January 1962, FO 1110/1560, UKNA.
54. The phrase ‘dolphin’ families appeared in a Kipling short story, ‘The Tombs of His
Ancestors’, Pearson’s Magazine (December 1897). See also, David Gilmour, The
British in India: Three Centuries of Ambition and Experience (London: Allen Lane,
2018), p. 72.
55. Rivett-Carnac Minute, 6 February 1962, FO 1110/1560, UKNA.
56. Bennett to Glass, 25 January 1962, FO 1110/1560, UKNA.
57. COS (62) 9th Meeting, 6 February 1962, DEFE 32/7, UKNA.
58. COS (62) 75th Meeting, 27 November 1962, DEFE 32/7, UKNA.
296 notes to pages 136–46

59. Hopson minute 13 May 1961, FCO/168/255; Murray minute, 15 May 1961, FCO/
168/255, UKNA.
60. ‘India’, 5 December 1967, FCO95/290; Bennett to Glass, 25 January 1962, FO
1110/1560, UKNA.
61. Joy minute, 18 November 1963, FO 1110/1698, UKNA.
62. Norton minute, 23 April 1963, FO 371/170671, UKNA.
63. Kerr to Bishop, 30 October 1962, DO 191/99; Drinkall minute, 14 November 1962,
DO 191/99, UKNA.
64. Gore-Booth to CRO, 28 December 1962, FO 371/170669, UKNA.
65. Foreign Office Note, 23 November 1962, DO 191/99, UKNA.
66. Sandys talk with Nehru, 26 November 1962, DO 196/199, UKNA.
67. Drinkall minute, 14 November 1962, DO 191/99, UKNA.
68. Joy minute, 18 November 1963, FO 1110/1698, UKNA.
69. Kerr to Bishop, 19 December 1962, DO 191/99, UKNA.
70. ‘India’, 5 December 1967, FCO95/290, UKNA.
71. ‘India’, 5 December 1967, FCO 95/290, UKNA.
72. Joy minute, 18 November 1963, FO 1110/1698, UKNA.
73. ‘India’, December 1967, FCO 95/290, UKNA.
74. Joy minute, 18 November 1963, FO 1110/1698, UKNA.
75. Kristin Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time: How the Soviet Union Built the Media
Empire that Lost the Cultural Cold War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2011), pp. 153–56.
76. Joy minute, 18 November 1963, FO 1110/1698, UKNA.
77. The question of declaring IRD’s field officer to the Indian government was raised
again in February 1964 and July 1967. Continued opposition from the British high
commission quashed the idea. ‘India’, 5 December 1967, FCO95/290; Allen to
Costley-White, 22 May 1963, FO 1110/1685, UKNA.
78. ‘India’, 5 December 1967, FCO95/290, UKNA.
79. Stephenson minute, 20 April 1964; Joy to Barclay, 9 April 1964, FO 1110/1829,
UKNA.
80. ‘India’, 5 December 1967, FCO 95/290, UKNA.
81. Miles to Brinson, 28 July 1972, FCO 95/1278, UKNA.
82. ‘India’, 5 December 1967, FCO 95/290, UKNA.
83. Joy to Tucker, 9 September 1963, FO 1110/1698, UKNA
84. Peter Joy, ‘I.R.D. Work in India (1964)’, FCO 168/1161, UKNA.
85. Joy to Tucker, 9 September 1963, FO 1110/1698, UKNA.
86. ‘India’, 5 December 1967, FCO 95/290, UKNA.
87. Joy to Barclay, 21 June 1965, FCO 168/1161, UKNA.
88. Scott to Costley-White, 23 July 1965, FCO 168/1161; McMinnies to Drinkall,
24 July 1965, FCO 168/1161, UKNA.
89. Joy to Bowman, 30 July 1965, FCO 168/1161, UKNA.
90. Peter Joy, ‘I.R.D. Work in India (1964)’, FCO 168/1161, UKNA.
91. Stella Rimington, Open Secret: The Autobiography of the Former Director-General
of MI5 (London: Hutchinson, 2002), p. 75.
92. Joy minute, 18 May 1963, FO 1110/1698, UKNA.
93. Joy to Duke, 6 February 1964, FO 1110/1829, UKNA.
94. Joy to Norris, 10 December 1964, FO 1110/1830, UKNA.
95. Jonathan Davidson interview, Washington DC, June 2013.
 notes to pages 146–54 297

96. McMinnies to Stephenson, 2 March 1966, FO 1110/2081; Tucker to McMinnies,

18 April 1966, FO 1110/2081, UKNA.
97. ‘India’, 5 December 1967, FCO95/290, UKNA.
98. McMinnies to Stephenson, 23 March 1966, FO 1110/2081, UKNA.
99. Times, 3 January 1966, p. 9.
100. Tony Benn, Out of the Wilderness: Diaries 1963–67 (London: Hutchinson, 1987),
pp. 375–76; Waterfield to Duff, 14 August 1968, FCO 168/3215, UKNA.
101. Barclay minute, 22 June 1966, FCO 168/2246, UKNA.
102. Meeting between James and Freeman, Karachi, 1 and 2 February 1966, FO 371/
186952, UKNA.
103. McMinnies to Stephenson, 23 March 1966, FO 1110/2081, UKNA.
104. Chester Bowles, Promises to Keep: My Years in Public Life, 1941–1969 (New York:
Harper, 1971), p. 544.
105. Crook to Joy, 4 July 1967, FCO 95/290, UKNA.
106. ‘India’, 5 December 1967, FCO 95/290, UKNA.
107. Freeman to Saville Garner, 11 April 1967, FCO 95/290, UKNA.
108. Waterfield to Duff, 31 March 1967, FCO 168/2649, UKNA.
109. Commonwealth Office to New Delhi, 10 February 1967, FCO 37/74, UKNA.
110. Duff to Johnston, 15 February 1967, FCO 37/74, UKNA.
111. Saville Garner to Johnston, 17 February 1967, FCO 37/74, UKNA.
112. Waterfield to Duff, 2 March 1967, FCO 37/74, UKNA.
113. Freeman to Commonwealth Office, 18 February 1967, FCO 37/74.
114. ‘Did KGB Man Forge Freeman Telegram?’ Young India, pp. 11–13, January 1968.
115. Lancashire to Joy, 16 June 1967, FCO 37/36, UKNA.
116. Garvey to Wright, 29 December 1971, FCO 95/1278, UKNA.
117. ‘South Asian Heads of Mission Conference – Information Work’, 3 May 1973,
FCO 37/1213, UKNA.
118. Barker to Sutherland, 5 January 1972, FCO 95/1278, UKNA.
119. Kerr to Cortazzi, 14 July 1976, FCO 84/52, UKNA.
120. Brinson to Hennings, 14 January 1972, FCO 95/1278, UKNA.
121. ‘IRD Work’, c. February 1975, FCO 95/1768, UKNA.
122. Hum to Seaward, 15 October 1975, FCO 37/1595, UKNA.
123. ‘Annual Report of IRD in India, 1967–1968’, FCO 37/43, UKNA.
124. Kerr to Cortazzi, 14 July 1976, FCO 84/52, UKNA.
125. Ibid.
126. Susan L. Carruthers, Winning Hearts and Minds: British Governments, the Media
and Colonial Counter-Insurgency, 1944–60, (Leicester: Leicester University Press,
1995), pp. 266, 269.

7 From Russia with Love: Dissidents and Defectors in Cold War India
1. S. Mulgaokar, ‘The Right of Asylum’, Weekend Review, II, 5 (6 January 1968), pp.
3–4.
2. Cole to Hunt, 5 January 1968, FCO 37/62, United Kingdom National Archives,
Kew, London (UKNA).
3. Mulgaokar, ‘Right of Asylum’, pp. 3–4.
4. Times of India, 21 December 1967, p. 1.
5. A. R. Wic, ‘The Ulug-Zade affair’, Weekend Review, II, 5 (6 January 1968), pp. 6–7.
298 notes to pages 154–56

6. See, Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of
MI5 (London: Allen Lane, 2009); Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, Cloak and Dollar:
A History of American Secret Intelligence (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2003. Some works have engaged with the intelligence Cold War from
a broader global perspective, notably, Philip Davies and Kristian Gustafson
(eds.), Intelligence Elsewhere: Spies and Espionage Outside the Anglosphere
(Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013).
7. Scholarship addressing India’s Cold War relations invariably elides the issue of
political asylum. See, for example, Dennis Kux, India and the United States:
Estranged Democracies, 1941–1991 (Washington, DC: National Defense
University Press, 1993). Howard Schaffer provides a brief account of the
Alliluyeva episode in Chester Bowles: New Dealer in the Cold War (Cambridge
MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). Rosemary Sullivan also offers insightful
analysis of Alliluyeva’s defection in, Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and
Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Stalin (London: Fourth Estate, 2015). See also,
Svetlana Alliluyeva’s own account of her defection in, Only One Year
(New York: HarperCollins, 1969).
8. Scholarship addressing the secret intelligence dimension of South Asia’s Cold
War has typically excluded consideration of defection and political asylum. See,
Eric D. Pullin, ‘Money Does Not Make Any Difference to the Opinions That We
Hold’: India, the CIA, and the Congress for Cultural Freedom, 1951–58,
Intelligence and National Security, 26 (2–3), (2011), pp. 377–98; P. M. McGarr,
‘“Quiet Americans in India”: The Central Intelligence Agency and the Politics of
Intelligence in Cold War South Asia’, Diplomatic History, 38 (5), (2014).
9. On the centrality of human rights in Indian foreign policymaking, see
Manu Bhagavan, The Peacemakers; India and the Quest for One World (New
Delhi: Harper Collins, 2012).
10. Vladislav Krasnov, Soviet Defectors: The KGB Wanted List (Stanford, CA: Hoover
Institution Press, 1986), p. 116.
11. ‘Working Party on Russian and Satellite Defectors and Refugees’, CAB 301/136,
UKNA.
12. Donaldson, 4 August 1950, CAB 301/136, UKNA. See, also, Jeffrey Richelson, The
US Intelligence Community (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2008), pp. 328–32.
13. Alistair Horne, Macmillan, 1957–1986: Vol. 2 of the Official Biography (London:
Macmillan, 1989), p. 457; and, D. R. Thorpe, Supermac: The Life of Harold
Macmillan (London: Pimlico, 2011), p. 310.
14. Meeting between Churchill, Nutting, Rennie and Kirkpatrick, 1 May 1954, PREM
11/773, UKNA. A fictional rendering of SIS’s enthusiasm for extracting
propaganda value from Soviet defectors, that bears resemblance to the
Khokhlov case, appears in John le Carrè’s, Secret Pilgrim (London: Hodder &
Stoughton, 1991), p. 152.
15. ‘Petrov Defection Policy’, The Royal Commission on Espionage, 1954–55, Series
Number A4940, C926, National Archives of Australia, Canberra. See also,
Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov, Empire of Fear (London: Andre Deutsch, 1956).
16. Cheney to Rumsfeld, ‘Solzhenitsyn’, 8 July 1975, Box 10, folder “Solzhenitsyn,
Alexander,” Richard B. Cheney Files, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library (GFPL).
17. Hutchinson to Foreign Office, 15 November 1950, FO 371/92207, UKNA;
‘Sinkiang Refugees’ Leaders in Delhi’, Statesman, 5 February 1950; ‘Chinese
Fugitive Governor in Delhi’, Hindustan Times, 6 February 1950.
 notes to pages 157–61 299

18. ‘Discussion with Prime Minister on Indian Foreign Policy’, February 1950, Box 8,
India Misc. folder, Loy W. Henderson Papers, Manuscripts Division, Library of
Congress.
19. Allen to Jones, 6 August 1955, RG59, Lot 59 D 75, folder India 1955, US National
Archives, College Park, Maryland (USNA).
20. ‘Sinkiang Refugees’ Leaders in Delhi’, Statesman, 5 February 1950.
21. Selby to Maclennan, 7 February 1950, FO 371/84261, UKNA.
22. Lamb to Scott, 12 October 1951, FO 317/92897, UKNA. See also, Justin M. Jacobs,
‘Exile Island: Xinjiang Refugees and the “One China” Policy in Nationalist
Taiwan, 1949–1971’, Journal of Cold War Studies, 18, 1 (Winter 2016), pp.
188–218.
23. William J. Barnds, India, Pakistan and the Great Powers (London: Pall Mall Press,
1972), p. 143.
24. Nehru to Apa B. Pant, 11 July 1958, Subject File 6, 1st Instalment, Apa B. Pant Papers,
Nehru Museum and Memorial Library, New Delhi (NMML); ‘Chinese Intentions
against India’, Joint Intelligence Committee report, 22 November 1962, CAB 158/47,
UKNA.
25. Hindustan Times, 13 January 1960; Times of India, 13 January 1960, p. 1.
26. ‘Czechs in Bombay’, 25 May 1950, CIA-RDP82-00457R004900500003-4, CIA
FOIA Electronic Reading Room, www.foia.cia.gov.
27. New Delhi to CRO, 13 March 1948, DO 133/1, UKNA.
28. CRO to New Delhi, 18 March 1948, DO 133/1, UKNA.
29. Shone to Noel-Baker, 27 April 1948, DO 133/1, UKNA; Shone to Noel-Baker,
8 May 1948, DO 133/1, UKNA.
30. Selby to Shattock, 4 August 1948, DO 133/1, UKNA; Cables WN#2305827 and
WN#23155, 27 April 1945 and 14 May 1945, RG 226, Entry 211, 250/64/32/1, CIA
Accession: 85-0215R, Box 7, USNA.
31. Prague to FO, 7 March 1951, FO 371/94540, UKNA; Daily Mail, 5 March 1951,
p. 1.
32. Daily Mail, 13 March 1951; Times, 6 March 1951, p. 4.
33. ‘Notes on Communism in India, Pakistan and Ceylon No. 24 for the period
January/March 1951’, FO 371/92864, UKNA.
34. Ibid.
35. Nehru to Pandit, 12 March 1948, SWJN 2nd series, vol. 5, ed. S. Gopal, (New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 546.
36. Pierson to Roberts 24 October 1950, DO 133/2, UKNA.
37. Cumming-Bruce to Roberts, 3 November 1950, DO 133/2, UKNA.
38. Nye to Liesching, 24 November 1950, DO 133/2, UKNA.
39. US House of Representatives, ‘Defection of a Russian Seaman: testimony of
Vladislaw Stepanovich Tarasov’, Eighty-Eight Congress, First Session,
19 September 1963 (Washington DC: GPO, 1963), p. 790.
40. ‘Russian Defector Gives Witness to the Effectiveness of the Voice of America’,
Congressional Record, A5978, 23 September 1963, CIA FOIA CIA-RDP65B00
383R000100050038-7.
41. US House of Representatives, ‘Defection of a Russian Seaman’, p. 790.
42. C. L. Sareen, Bid for Freedom: USSR vs. Tarasov (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice
Hall, 1966), pp. 13–16.
43. New York Times, 22 December 1962, p. 2.
44. New York Times, 20 December 1962, p. 4.
300 notes to pages 162–67

45. Jugantar, 29 November 1962.

46. Eastland to Lodge, 1 May 1956, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1955–1957,
United Nations and General International Matters, Volume XI, Document 23
https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1955-57v11/d23. See also, Life,
7 May 1956, pp. 45–46.
47. ‘Vladimir Stepanovich Tarasov’, 20 December 1962, FCO 168/911, UKNA.
48. Ormerod to Allen, 29 December 1962, FCO 168/911, UKNA.
49. Delhi to IRD, 27 December 1962, FCO 168/911, UKNA.
50. Allen to Norris, 24 December 1962, FCO 168/911, UKNA.
51. Delhi to IRD, 24 December 1962, FCO 168/911, UKNA.
52. Joy to Welser, 18 January 1963, 18 January 1963, FCO 168/912, UKNA.
53. Joy to IRD, 27 December 1962, FCO 168/911; Welser to American Embassy,
London, 24 January 1963, FCO 168/912, UKNA.
54. Rayner to Joy, 7 February 1963, FCO 168/913, UKNA.
55. Joy to Rayner, 18 February 1963, FCO 168/913, UKNA.
56. Times of India, 7 January 1963, p. 7.
57. Washington Post, 5 January 1963, p. A6.
58. See, Soviet Embassy to MEA, 30 November 1962; MEA to Soviet Embassy,
30 November 1962; and MEA to Soviet Embassy, 29 December 1962, National
Archives of India, New Delhi (NAI).
59. G. D. Khosla, ex-Chief Justice, Punjab High Court, foreword in Sareen, Bid for
Freedom, pp. iii–iv.
60. Times of India, 11 January 1963, p. 8.
61. Guardian, 11 January 1963, p. 9.
62. New York Times, 31 January 1963, p. 2.
63. Times of India, 4 March 1963, p. 3.
64. Sareen, Bid for Freedom, pp. 153–54.
65. Guardian, 30 March 1963, p. 7.
66. Statesman, 1 April 1963.
67. Times of India, 1 April 1963, p. 6.
68. Bowles, ‘Defection of Svetlana Alliloueva, [sic]’, 15 March 1967, N[ational]
S[security] F[ile] Box 3, Folder Svetlana Alliluyeva (Stalin), Lyndon Baines
Johnson Library, Austin, Texas (LBJL).
69. Economist, 29 April 1967, p. 465.
70. Chester Bowles interview, 11 November 1969, Foreign Affairs Oral History
Collection (FAOHP), Library of Congress, https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/
service/mss/mfdip/2004/2004bow05/2004bow05.pdf
71. Bowles to Rostow, 18 March 1967, NSF, Box 3, Folder Svetlana Alliluyeva (Stalin),
LBJL.
72. Bowles, ‘Defection of Svetlana Alliloueva, [sic]’, 15 March 1967, NSF, Box 3,
Folder Svetlana Alliluyeva (Stalin), LBJL; Chester Bowles interview
11 November 1969, FAOHP.
73. Bowles to Rostow, 18 March 1967, NSF, Box 3, Folder Svetlana Alliluyeva (Stalin),
LBJL.
74. Delhi to Washington, 8 March 1967, NSF, Box 3, Folder Svetlana Alliluyeva
(Stalin), LBJL.
75. Times of India, 7 June 1967, p. 8.
76. Schaffer, Chester Bowles, p. 301.
 notes to pages 168–74 301

77. Delhi to Washington, 9 March 1967, NSF, Box 3, Folder Svetlana Alliluyeva
(Stalin), LBJL.
78. Bowles to Jha, 10 March 1967, see also ‘Defection of Svetlana Alliluyeva’,
15 March 1967, Box 326, Bowles Papers, Yale University Library.
79. Sullivan, Stalin’s Daughter, p. 9.
80. Bendall to Smith, 17 March 1967, FCO 28/397, UKNA; Trench to Duff,
31 March 1967, FCO 37/76, UKNA.
81. Thompson to Rusk, 21 March 1967, NSF, Box 3, Folder Svetlana Alliluyeva
(Stalin), LBJL.
82. Maxey to Clift, 17 March 1967, FCO 28/397, UKNA.
83. Thompson to Rusk, 21 March 1967, NSF, Box 3, Folder Svetlana Alliluyeva
(Stalin), LBJL.
84. Bowles to Rusk, 20 March 1967, NSF, Box 3, Folder Svetlana Alliluyeva (Stalin),
LBJL.
85. Rusk to Bowles, 21 March 1967, NSF, Box 3, Folder Svetlana Alliluyeva (Stalin),
LBJL.
86. Gore-Booth to Lord Hood, 27 April 1967, FO 95/14, UKNA.
87. Memorandum, ‘Svetlana’, undated, FO 95/14, UKNA.
88. Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps (London: Allen Lane,
2003), pp. 476–77; Mark Hopkins, Russia’s Underground Press: The Chronicle of
Current Events (New York: Praeger, 1983), pp. 1–14.
89. Mittal, ‘Unending Soviet War on Intellectuals’, undated, FCO 168/3402, UKNA.
90. Greenhill to P.U.S., 28 April 1967, FO 95/14, UKNA.
91. Times of India, 7 June 1967, p. 8.
92. Giffard to Greenhill, 20 September 1967, FCO 28/397; Day to Stewart,
22 September 1967, FCO 28/397, UKNA.
93. McMinnies minute, 20 October 1969, FCO 37/375, UKNA.
94. ‘Svetlana Letter’, 18 August 1967, FCO 168/2847, UKNA.
95. Welser to Clive, 28 July 1967, FCO 168/2847, UKNA.
96. Thomas to Bayne, 19 July 1967, FCO 168/2847, UKNA.
97. Welser minute, 20 July 1967, FCO 168/2847, UKNA.
98. Bayne to Welser, 19 July 1967, FCO 168/2847, UKNA.
99. KGB Department (‘DEZINFORMATSIYA’), undated. August 1967, FCO 168/
2847, UKNA.
100. ‘Victor Louis’, undated. August 1967, FCO 168/2847, UKNA.
101. ‘Svetlana STALIN’s Memoirs’, 9 August 1967, FCO 168/2847; Memorandum to
Crook, 31 August 1967, FCO 168/2847, UKNA.
102. National Review, 19 (18), 9 May 1967, p. 1.
103. Times of India, 7 June 1967, p. 8.
104. Intriguingly, John le Carré’s Swiss publishers attempted sometime later to
persuade the British author to co-write a work of ‘philosophical non-fiction’
with Alliluyeva. Alliluyeva was keen, le Carré was not, and the project proved
abortive. le Carré to Sir Alec Guinness, 27 January 1982 in Tim Cornwell (ed.).
A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré (London; Viking, 2022), p. 241.
105. Harrison to FO, 27 May 1967, FCO 28/397, UKNA.
106. Daily Mail, 3 November 1984.
107. Alliluyeva Press Conference, 16 November 1984, FCO 168/2847, UKNA.
108. Times of India, 21 December 1967, p. 1.
109. Ibid.
302 notes to pages 174–82

110. See John D. Smith, I Was a CIA Agent in India (New Delhi: New Age Printing
Press, 1967).
111. Times of India, 21 December 1967, p. 1.
112. Times, 22 December 1967, p. 1.
113. Times of India, 21 December 1967, p. 1.
114. Stella Rimington, Open Secret: The Autobiography of the Former Director-General
of MI5 (London: Arrow Books, 2002), p. 74.
115. Greene interview, 12 March 1993, FAOHP.
116. Times of India, 22 December 1967, p. 1.
117. Ibid.
118. Greene interview, FAOHP.
119. Times of India, 27 December 1967, p. 9.
120. Ibid. p. 1.
121. Times of India, 28 December 1967, p. 12.
122. Times of India, 29 December 1967, p. 5.
123. MEA to Diplomatic Missions in New Delhi, 30 December 1967, FCO 37/62,
UKNA.
124. Cole to Hunt, 5 January 1968, FCO 37/62, UKNA.
125. Hunt to Cole, 4 March 1968, FCO 37/62, UKNA.
126. Lok Sabha, Unstarred Question No. 360, 14 February 1968.
127. Clive to Jackson, 5 January 1968; Payne to Welser and Clive, 8 January 1968, FCO
168/2850, UKNA.
128. McMinnies to Lancashire, 22 December 1968; Lancashire to McMinnies,
4 January 1968, FCO 168/2850, UKNA.
129. Peck to Greenhill, 12 February 1968, FCO 168/ 2850, UKNA.
130. Tucker to Hamilton, 20 February 1968; O’Connor Howe to Bayne,
29 November 1968, FCO 168/2850, UKNA.
131. Hindustan Times, 3 January 1968.
132. Times of India, 4 January 1968, p. 8.
133. Times of India, 10 February 1970, p. 1.
134. Times of India, 21 June 1972, p. 1.
135. Hunting, ‘Amnesty International Report 1975/1976: Section on India’,
29 November 1976, FCO 37/1933, UKNA.
136. Vance to Embassy Delhi, 4 February 1977, Document no. 1977STATE025389,
USNA.

8 The Foreign Hand: Indira Gandhi and the Politics of Intelligence

1. Sol Stern, ‘An Expose: The CIA and the National Students Association’, Ramparts,
5, 7 (March 1967), pp. 29–38.
2. See, Neil Sheehan, ‘A Student Group Concedes It Took Funds from the
CIA’, New York Times, 14 February 1967, p. 1; Walter Lippmann, ‘The CIA
Affair’, Washington Post, 21 February 1967, p. A21.
3. Frank Church, 25 September 1975, Select Committee to Study Governmental
Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Washington D. C.INTERNET,
www.aarclibrary.org/publib/church/reports/vol2/pdf/ChurchV2_3_Brennan.pdf
4. Richard J. Aldrich, ‘“The Value of Residual Empire”: Anglo-American
Intelligence Co-operation in Asia after 1945’ in Intelligence, Defence and
 notes to pages 182–87 303

Diplomacy: British Policy in the Post-War World, eds., Richard J. Aldrich and
Michael F. Hopkins (London: Frank Cass, 1994), p. 246.
5. Pauly V. Parakal, CIA Dagger against India (New Delhi: New Age Press, 1973), pp.
53–54.
6. Lancashire to Joy, 10 and 21 February 1967, FCO 37/35, UKNA.
7. A. Maslennlkov, Pravda, ‘The Long Arms of the C.I.A.’, 31 January 1967.
8. John Kenneth Galbraith, ‘CIA Needs a Tug on Its Purse Strings’, Washington Post,
12 March 1967, p. B1.
9. Helms to Lyndon Johnson, 28 March 1967, Box 9, Folder CIA vol. 3 [1 of 2],
N[ational] S[ecurity] F[ile], Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, Austin, Texas
(hereafter LBJL). See also, Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA
Played America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 241.
10. John D. Smith, I Was a CIA Agent in India (New Delhi: New Age Printing Press,
1967). See also, Eric D. Pullin, ‘“Money Does Not Make Any Difference to the
Opinions That We Hold”: India, the CIA, and the Congress for Cultural Freedom,
1951–58’, Intelligence and National Security, 26, 2–3 (2011), pp. 377–98.
11. Simons to Purcell, ‘The Indian General Election’, 13 March 1967, FCO 37/36,
UKNA.
12. Lok Sabha Starred Question No. 1, George Fernandes regarding activities of CIA,
20 March 1967, WII/125/11/76 P&I, AMS Division, Ministry of External Affairs
(MEA), National Archives of India (hereafter NAI).
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. ‘Half hour discussion in. Lok Sabha on C.I.A.’, 23 March 1967, WII/125/11/76
P&I, AMS Division, MEA, NAI.
16. ‘India to Conduct Inquiry on C.I.A.’, New York Times, 24 March 1967, p. 1.
17. ‘What has been the extent of K.G.B.’s involvement in India’s fourth General
Election? Soviet KGB Support 129 Candidates’, Young India, June 1967, pp. 5–
8, p. 45.
18. Lancashire to Joy, ‘Allegations of CIA and Communist Financial Involvement in
Indian General Elections’, 16 June 1967, FCO 37/36, UKNA.
19. Lancashire to McMinnies, ‘Alleged KGB Involvement in Indian General
Elections’, 18 October 1967, FCO 37/36, UKNA.
20. ‘New Delhi Report Says C.I.A. Helped Rightists in Elections’, New York Times,
13 June 1967, p. 6.
21. ‘Inquiry ordered into “leakage” of CIB report: Chavan’, Hindustan Times,
16 June 1967.
22. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive II: The KGB
and the Wider World (London: Penguin, 2005), pp. 317–18. See also, John Barron,
KGB Today: The Hidden Hand (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1984).
23. ‘India’, 15 November 1967, FCO95/290, UKNA.
24. Leonid Shebarshin, Ruka Moskvy (Moscow: Tsentr-100, 1992), cited in Andrew
and Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive II, pp. 317–18.
25. ‘South Asian Heads of Mission Conference – The Communist Powers and South
Asia’, 2 May 1973, FCO 37/1213, UKNA.
26. ‘Brief Progress Report on IRD work in India, 1 January–30 June 1967’, and ‘India’,
15 November 1967, FCO 95/290, UKNA.
27. ‘Where “I spy” is a national industry’, The Observer, 3 December 1967.
28. McNally to Weston, 20 August 1975, FCO 37/1593, UKNA.
304 notes to pages 187–92

29. Biographical Sketch of Indira Gandhi, 23 March 1966, NSF, Country File, India,
Box 133, Folder 4 Prime Minister Gandhi Briefing Book 3-27–4-1–66, LBJL.
30. Krishna Bhatia, Indira: A Biography of Prime Minister Gandhi (London: Angus &
Robertson, 1974), p. 21.
31. Bowles to Johnson, No. 1820, 16 January 1966, NSF Country File, India, Box 130,
Folder 1 India Cables [1 of 3] vol. VI 9-65 to 1-66, LBJL.
32. ‘National Intelligence Survey: India September 1973’, CIA-RDP01
-00707000200070032-3, CREST.
33. ‘Mrs. Indira Gandhi’, 15 January 1964, RG59, Lot 68D207, Box 5, USNA.
34. Moynihan to Kissinger, No. 3458, ‘Mrs Gandhi on the Hustings’, 27 March 1973,
RG 59, Central Foreign Policy Files, Electronic Telegrams, 1/1/1973-21/31/1973,
USNA.
35. Telecon between Rogers and Kissinger, Washington, 24 October 1970, Foreign
Relations of the United, 1969–1976 Volume E–7, Documents on South Asia,
1969–1972, Document 89, INTERNET, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocu
ments/frus1969-76ve07/d89
36. Saxbe to Secretary of State, No. 03530, ‘Prime Minister Gandhi Comments on CIA
Activity’, 13 March 1975, RG59, Central Foreign Policy Files, Electronic
Telegrams, 1/1/1975-21/31/1975, USNA.
37. Russell Jack Smith, The Unknown CIA: CIA: My Three Decades with the Agency
(New York: Berkley Books, 1992), p. 13.
38. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, A Dangerous Place (Boston: Little Brown, 1978), p. 41.
39. Saxbe to Secretary of State, No. 03530, ‘Prime Minister Gandhi Comments on CIA
Activity’, 13 March 1975, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy Files, Electronic
Telegrams, 1/1/1975-21/31/1975; Saxbe to Secretary of State, No. 03606, ‘Indo-
US Intelligence Cooperation Reported in Press’, 14 March 1975, RG 59, Central
Foreign Policy Files, Electronic Telegrams, 1/1/1975-21/31/1975, USNA.
40. ‘India Party Chief Leads New Anti-CIA Drive’, Los Angeles Times,
5 October 1972, p. A21.
41. Roberts to Martin, ‘The Poodle Not House-Trained’, 19 October 1972, FCO 95/
1347, UKNA.
42. Garvey to FCO, No. 2595, 23 October 1972, FCO 95/1388, UKNA.
43. ‘Hitting Out Wildly’, Statesman, 12 October 1972.
44. USIS Media Reaction Report, New Delhi, 26 September 1972, FCO 95/1388,
UKNA.
45. Christophe Jaffrelot and Pratinav Anil, India’s First Dictatorship: The Emergency,
1975–1977 (London: Hurst, 2020), p. 10.
46. India Issues Paper, 9 July 1975, RG 59, Lot file 77D389, Box 26, Folder General
1973, USNA.
47. Jaffrelot and Anil, India’s First Dictatorship, p. 61.
48. Schneider to Secretary of State, No. 07903, 16 June 1975, RG 59, CFP, Electronic
Telegrams, 1/1/1975-21/31/1975, USNA.
49. Schneider to Secretary of State, No. 08067, 19 June 1975, CFP, Electronic
Telegrams, 1/1/1975-21/31/1975, RG 59, USNA; and, Moynihan (1978), p. 150.
50. Kissinger to Moynihan, No. 242175, 10 December 1973, CFP, Electronic
Telegrams, 1/1/1973-21/31/1973, RG 59, USNA.
51. India Issues Paper, 9 July 1975, RG 59, Lot file 77D389, Box 26, Folder General
1973, USNA.
 notes to pages 192–97 305

52. Maloy Krishna Dhar, Open Secrets: India’s Intelligence Unveiled (New Delhi:
Manas Publications, 2012), p. 245.
53. Nixon to Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Kissinger, 2 March 1970, FRUS 1969–1976,
I, 61.
54. ‘Indo-American Relations 1970’, 2 March 1970, RG59, Lot file 74D17, Box 14,
USNA.
55. R. N. Kao to Indira Gandhi, 3 December 1972, P. N. Haksar Papers, III
Instalment, Subject File 265, NMML.
56. Richard Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1978), p. 131; Henry Kissinger, The White House Years (London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 1979), p. 849.
57. Krishna Bhatia, Indira: A Biography of Prime Minister Gandhi (London: Angus &
Robertson, 1974), p. 250.
58. Bajpai to Banerjee, No, 1382-D(AMS)/67, 27 April 1967, File No. WII/102 (II)/76,
Volume 1, American Division, MEA, NAI.
59. Summary of Conclusions, Washington Special Actions Group Meeting, ‘India
and Pakistan’, 17 August 1971, LOC-HAK-559-30–10-7, CIA FOIA Electronic
Reading Room, www.foia.cia.gov.
60. Nixon, RN, pp. 526–31.
61. ‘Discussion between Richard Nixon and Edward Heath’, Bermuda,
21 December 1971, FCO 82/21, UKNA.
62. Conversation between President Nixon and Kissinger, 26 May 1971; Conversation
between Nixon, Kissinger, and Haldeman, 5 November 1971, Foreign Relations of the
United States, 1969–1976, vol. E–7, Documents on South Asia, 1969–1972,
Documents 135 and 150, INTERNET http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/
frus1969-76ve07; Memorandum on NSC meeting, 16 July 1971, FRUS 1971, pp. 264–
67; and, Kissinger, White House Years, p. 848.
63. Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), pp. 255–56.
64. George Carver interview with Harold Ford, Washington DC, 12 February 1987,
cited in Ford, William E. Colby, p. 16.
65. Nixon to Haldeman, 18 May 1972, cited in Bruce Oudes, ed., From the President:
Richard Nixon’s Secret Files (New York: Andre Deutsch, 1998), p. 448.
66. ‘Indo-American Relations 1970’, 2 March 1970, RG59, Lot file 74D17, Box 14,
USNA.
67. Richard N. Viets, 6 April 1990, FAOHC.
68. ‘Indo-American Relations 1970’, 2 March 1970, RG59, Lot file 74D17, Box 14,
USNA.
69. Viets, FAOHC.
70. Howard B. Schaffer, 10 March 1997, FAOHC.
71. Leonard J. Saccio, 30 September 1990, FAOHC.
72. Ibid.
73. Transcript of Moscow Radio Broadcast to India, 2 February 1971, RG 84, Box 10,
Folder Miscellaneous Items, USNA.
74. Keating to Galbraith, 25 February 1971, RG 84, Box 5, Folder Galbraith, USNA.
75. Garvey to Douglas-Home, ‘Annual Review 1972’, 3 January 1972, FCO 37/1281,
UKNA.
76. Garvey to Appleyard, ‘Indo/US Relations’, 19 July 1972, FCO 37/1097, UKNA.
306 notes to pages 198–203

77. Keating to Secretary of State, No. 9257, 25 July 1972, RG 84, Box 28, Folder
Gandhi, Prime Minister Indira, Miscellaneous Cables, USNA.
78. Bernard Weinraub, ‘Daniel Moynihan’s Passage to India’, New York Times
Magazine, 31 (March 1974), p. 256.
79. Tom Wicker, ‘Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire’, New York Times News Service,
1972, Box I-352, Folder India Correspondence B7 1973–1975, Daniel Patrick
Moynihan Papers, Library of Congress (DPMP).
80. Barreaux to Moynihan, 13 December 1972, Box I-352, Folder India
Correspondence Congratulatory 2, DPMP.
81. ‘Current Topics’, Times of India, 12 December 1972.
82. ‘A New Ambassador’, Indian Express, 18 December 1972.
83. ‘Tricky Dick’s Ayaram!’ Blitz, 6 January 1973.
84. Draft Manuscript for ‘A Dangerous Place’, I-350 Speeches and Writings File
Folder A, DPMP; Moynihan, Dangerous Place, p. 16.
85. Moynihan to Kissinger, 22 November 1973, Box 370, DPMP.
86. Moynihan to Professor Lockwood, 29 July 1974, Box 361, DPMP.
87. Moynihan notes, 20 February 1974, Box 361, DPMP.
88. Moynihan to Davis, 19 June 1974, Box 361, DPMP.
89. G. K. Reddy, ‘United States, India and Moynihan’, The Hindu, 18 April 1973.
90. Moynihan to Kissinger, 10 March 1973, Box I-377 Folder India Subject File White
House 1973, DPMP.
91. Moynihan to Galbraith, 10 May 1973, Box I-377 Folder India Subject File Soviet
Union 1973–74, DPMP.
92. Steven R. Weisman (ed.), A Portrait in Letters (Public Affairs: New York, 2010),
Moynihan diary entry 7 January 1974, pp. 323–24.
93. Weisman, A Portrait in Letters, Moynihan diary entries 6 August and
5 September 1974, pp. 346 and 351–52.
94. First draft manuscript for ‘A Dangerous Place’, III-4, I-348 Speeches and Writings
File Folder A, DPMP.
95. Bernard Weinraub, ‘Daniel Moynihan’s Passage to India’, New York Times
Magazine, 31 March 1974, p. 256.
96. Swaran Singh Statement at UN Assembly, MEA Press Relations Section,
3 October 1973, WII/101/20/73, NAI.
97. See P. N. Dhar, Indira Gandhi, the ‘Emergency’ and Indian Democracy (New
Delhi: Oxford University Press 2000); Katherine Frank, Indira: The Life of
Indira Nehru Gandhi (London: Harper Collins, 2002); and Inder Malhotra,
Indira Gandhi: A Personal and Political Biography (London: Hodder &
Stoughton, 1989).
98. S. K. Singh to Indian Delegation in New York, 17 September 1973, MEA, WII/
101/20/73, NAI.
99. Fidel Castro, ‘Brave Calmness of a Dedicated Leader’ in G. Parthasarathi and
H. Y. Sharada Prasad (eds.), Indira Gandhi: Statesmen, Scholars, Scientists, and
Friends Remember (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing, 1985), p. 103.
100. J. K. Gujral, Matters of Discretion: An Autobiography (New Delhi: Hay House,
2011), p. 85.
101. Socialist India, 13 April 1974, p. 31.
102. Kuldip Nayar, The Judgement: Inside Story of the Emergency in India (New Delhi:
Vikas, 1977), p. 83.
 notes to pages 203–8 307

103. Appleyard to Seward, ‘Indo/American Relations’, 20 September 1973, FCO

37/1287, UKNA.
104. ‘Address to the plenary session of the fourth Summit conference of the Non-
aligned countries’, Algiers, 6 September 1973, in Indira Gandhi, Selected Speeches
and Writings of Indira Gandhi, Volume II, September 1972–March 1977 (New
Delhi: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting Government of India, 1984), pp.
668–72.
105. Schneider to Secretary of State, No. 07903, 16 June 1975, RG 59, CFP, Electronic
Telegrams, 1/1/1975-12/31/1975, USNA.
106. Socialist Weekly, 15 August 1975.
107. Girilal Jain, ‘Where India has Faltered: No Parallel with Chile’, Times of India,
19 September 1973.
108. Moynihan to Secretary of State, No. 12063, 10 September 1974, RG 59, CFP,
Electronic Telegrams 1/1/1974-12/31/1974, USNA.
109. See, Patriot and Times of India, 9 September 1974.
110. Moynihan to Secretary of State, No. 12063, 10 September 1974, CFP, Electronic
Telegrams, 1/1/1974-12/31/1974, RG 59, USNA.
111. ‘Concern by India on C.I.A. Related’, New York Times, 13 September 13, 1974, p. 11.
112. Galbraith to Moynihan, 26 September 1974, I-354, Folder India Galbraith, John
Kenneth, 1973-74, DPMP.
113. ‘United States Relations with Communist Countries’, United States Senate,
Committee on Foreign Relations, 19 September 1974, ‘Foreign Policy of USA’,
FCO 82/423, UKNA.
114. William E. Colby, ‘The View from Langley’, address to the Fund for Peace
Conference on ‘The CIA and Covert Actions’, 13 September 1974, Box I: 371,
Folder India: Central Intelligence Agency, DPMP.
115. Moynihan to Kissinger, No. 16066, 3 December 1974, Box I-371, Folder India:
Central Intelligence Agency, DPMP.
116. Weisman, Portrait in Letters, diary entry 27 November 1974, p. 360.
117. Last press conference in India, I-352 Folder India Correspondence B7, 1973–
1975, DPMP; Moynihan, Dangerous Place, p. 16.
118. Saxbe to Secretary of State, No. 09951, 24 July 1975, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy
Files, Electronic Telegrams, 1/1/1975-21/31/1975, USNA.
119. ‘Charges of CIA Meddling in India Draw Saxbe’s Ire’, Los Angeles Times,
12 August 1975, p. A1.; Bernard Weintraub, ‘Saxbe Follows an Off-Beat, Aloof
Course as American Ambassador in India’, New York Times, 27 May 1975, p. 9.
120. Saxbe to the Department of State, No. 1767 5 February 1976, Presidential Country
Files for Middle East and South Asia, Box 12, India, State Telegrams to Secretary
of State NODIS (3), Gerald Ford Presidential Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan
(hereafter GFPL).
121. Saxbe to the Department of State, No. 787, 15 January 1976, ‘Mrs. Gandhi’s
Attacks on US’, Presidential Country Files Middle East and South Asia, Box 12,
India, State to Sec State NODIS (3), GPFL.
122. Millington to Hum, ‘Indo-US Relations’, 23 February 1976, FCO 37/1724 UKNA.
123. Greenhill to Prime Minister, ‘Meeting with Mrs Gandhi on 1 September’,
1 September 1980, FCO 37/2321 UKNA.
124. Kao to Bush, 30 June 1984, Country File India 1984 [3] [OA-ID 19779], GWBL.
125. Jaffrelot and Anil, India’s First Dictatorship, p. 54.
308 notes to pages 208–15

126. Hum to Christopher, ‘Sanjay Gandhi’, 11 December 1975, FCO 37/1597, UKNA.
127. ‘C.I.A. Study Details Failures; Scouring of System Is Urged’, New York Times,
3 June 1998, p. A1.; ‘CIA Faces Heavy Fallout over India Nuclear Tests’, Wall
Street Journal, 13 May 1998.
128. ‘Moscow’s anger grows: Role of the CIA condemned’, Times, 2 November 1984,
p. 5.
129. ‘Superpower clash: Blaming of CIA arouses US fury’, Times, 3 November 1984,
p. 5.

9 Battle of the Books: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Seymour Hersh,

and India’s CIA ‘Agents’
1. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, A Dangerous Place (Boston: Little Brown, 1978).
2. Howard Kohn, ‘The Nanda Devi Caper’, Outside Magazine (May 1978).
3. Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), p. 262; ‘CIA talked of spy in Indira govt’,
Times of India, 15 November 1979, p. 9.
4. Thomson to White, 28 May 1979, FCO 37/2151, United Kingdom National
Archives, Kew (UKNA).
5. Seymour Hersh, The Price of Power: Henry Kissinger in the Nixon White House
(New York: Faber & Faber, 1983).
6. ‘Kissinger Takes The Stand’, Washington Post, 3 October 1989, p. D1.
7. ‘On Reported Planting of a Nuclear Device by the CIA in the Nanda Devi’,
17 April 1978, Session IV, Lok Sabha Debates (New Delhi: Lok Sabha Secretariat,
1978).
8. Howard Kohn, ‘The Nanda Devi Caper’, Outside (May 1978).
9. Dingell and Ottinger to Carter, 12 April 1978, CIA-RDP81M00980R001200070
033-6, CIA FOIA Electronic Reading Room, www.foia.cia.gov (CIA FOIA).
10. Dingell and Ottinger to Palkhivala 12 April 1978, CIA-RDP81M00980R00
1200070033-6, CIA FOIA.
11. ‘CIA planted device may pollute Ganga’, Indian Express, 13 April 1978.
12. Asrani minute, 13 April 1978, File No. WII/504/7/78, Ministry of External Affairs
(MEA), National Archives of India (NAI).
13. Mehta to Mathur, undated. c. 13 April 1978, File No. WII/504/7/78, MEA, NAI.
14. ‘CIA Mischief in Himalayas?’ Times of India, 14 April 1978, p. 8.
15. Associated Press, New Delhi, 13 April 1978.
16. Evening Reports, April 1978, Box 20, Subject File Brzezinski Material, National
Security Affairs, Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, Atlanta, Georgia.
17. Note for Supplementaries, Rajya Sabha, undated, c. April 1978, File No. WII/504/7/
78, MEA, NAI.
18. Goheen to State Department, 17 April 1978, Foreign Relations of the United States,
1977–1980, vol. XIX, South Asia (Washington DC: GPO, 2019), p. 261.
19. Balasubramani to Joint Secretary, 20 April 1978, File No. WII/504/7/78, MEA,
NAI.
20. Moynihan’s time in India is represented as a political and intellectual interregnum in,
Godfrey Hodgson, The Gentleman from New York: Daniel Patrick Moynihan –
A Biography (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000); Steven R. Weisman ed., Daniel
Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary (New York: Public
 notes to pages 215–22 309

Affairs, 2010); Robert Katzmann (ed.), Daniel Patrick Moynihan: The Intellectual in
Public Life (Washington DC: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); and, Gil Troy,
Moynihan’s Moment: America’s Fight Against Zionism as Racism (New York: Oxford
University Press US, 2013).
21. ‘Moynihan to Quit Senate Panel Post in Dispute on CIA’, New York Times,
6 April 1984, p. A1.
22. Moynihan, ‘Will Russia Blow Up?’ Newsweek, 19 November 1979, pp. 36–39.
23. Richard Gid Powers, ‘Introduction’ in Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Secrecy: The
American Experience (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 4.
24. Moynihan, ‘Do We still Need the C.I.A.?’ New York Times, 19 May 1991, p. E17.
25. Moynihan, ‘The Central Intelligence Agency Abolition Act of 1995’, Congressional
Record, vol. 141, no. 1, 4 January 1995 (Washington DC: USGPO, 1995).
26. Moynihan, Secrecy, p. 3.
27. Bob Woodward, Veil: The Secret Wars of CIA 1981–1987 (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1987), p. 51.
28. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, ‘The United States in Opposition’, Commentary,
March 1975, p. 42.
29. Moynihan, Dangerous Place, p. 41; Draft manuscript for ‘A Dangerous Place’, Box
I-348, Folder A, Daniel Patrick Moynihan Papers, Library of Congress (DPMP).
30. Draft manuscript for ‘A Dangerous Place’, Box I-348, Folder A, DPMP.
31. ‘Moynihan’s charges baseless: Mrs Gandhi’, Indian Express, 12 April 1979, p. 1.
32. ‘Gandhi Alleges Close Ties between Moynihan, Militant Hindus’, 25 April 1979,
Box II-2965, Folder ‘A Dangerous Place’ India’s Reaction, DPMP.
33. New Delhi to Secretary of State, ‘Further Reaction to “A Dangerous Place”’,
20 April 1979, Box II-2965, Folder ‘A Dangerous Place’ India’s Reaction, DPMP.
34. ‘Congress (I) Leaders Embarrassed’, The Statesman, 12 April 1979.
35. ‘Deoras wants Mrs Gandhi to prove innocence’, Indian Express, 16 April 1979.
36. ‘Congress (I) Leaders Embarrassed’,The Statesman, 12 April 1979.
37. ‘A Serious Affair’, Statesman, 14 April 1979.
38. ‘Patel urged to disclose CBI report’, Times of India, 14 April 1979.
39. New Delhi to Secretary of State, ‘Further Reaction to “A Dangerous Place”’,
20 April 1979, Box II-2965, Folder ‘A Dangerous Place’ India’s Reaction, DPMP.
40. Binns to Pearce, ‘Internal Politics: Congress Parties’, 19 April 1979, FCO 37/2151,
UKNA.
41. ‘CIA and CIB worked together: Moynihan’, Indian Express, 28 April 1979.
42. Fortescue to Binns, ‘CIA and Mrs Gandhi’, 10 May 1979, FCO 37/2160, UKNA.
43. Jay to FCO, 1 May 1979, FCO 37/2160. UKNA.
44. Fortescue to Binns, ‘CIA and Mrs Gandhi’, 10 May 1979, FCO 37/2160, UKNA.
45. Goheen to State Department, ‘Stormy Debate on Moynihan’s Disclosures’,
10 May 1979, Box II-2965, Folder ‘A Dangerous Place India’s Reaction
May 1979’, DPMP.
46. Weisman, Portrait in Letters, diary entry 7 January 1974, pp. 323–24.
47. Powers, Man Who Kept the Secrets, pp. 262–63; Tad Szulc, ‘Soviet Move to Avert
War Is Seen in Pact with India’, New York Times, 13 August 1971, p. 1; President’s
Daily Briefs, Dec 1–Dec 16, 1971, Nixon Presidential Materials, NSC Files, Box 37,
USNA.
48. Richard Viets interview, 6 April 1990, FAOHP.
49. Simons to Secretary JICS, 21 December 1971, FCO 37/755, UKNA.
50. Cromer to Douglas-Home, 17 December 1971, FCO 37/754, UKNA.
310 notes to pages 222–30

51. Conversation between Home and Kissinger, Bermuda, 20 December 1971, FCO
37/754, UKNA.
52. ‘CIA talked of spy in Indira govt.’, Times of India, 15 November 1979, p. 9.
53. ‘Raj Narain say J. Ram may have been CIA Agent’, Indian Express,
19 November 1979, p. 1.
54. ‘From Bad to Worse’, Times of India, 20 November 1979, p. 8.
55. ‘C.I.A. Issue Injected into Indian Election’, New York Times, 20 November 1979,
p. A7.
56. ‘Indian election campaign gathers momentum’, Times, 20 November 1979, p. 10.
57. ‘Report of High CIA Tipster Stirs Furor in India’, Washington Post,
22 November 1979, p. A33.
58. Haksar/Jha correspondence quoted in Jairam Ramesh, Intertwined Lives:
P. N. Haksar and Indira Gandhi (New Delhi: Simon & Schuster India, 2018), pp.
250–51.
59. ‘Desai Calls It a “Sheer Mad Story,”’ UP, New Delhi 2 June 1983; Seymour Hersh,
The Price of Power, Henry Kissinger in the Nixon White House (New York: Faber &
Faber, 1983), pp. 449–50; pp. 459–60.
60. Seymour Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot (Boston: Little Brown & Company,
1997); Lloyd Grove, ‘Was the Writing on the Wall?’ Washington Post,
27 October 1997, p. C1; Edward Jay Epstein, ‘Recovered Memories’, Los Angeles
Times, 28 December 1997, p. F6; Ramesh Chandran, ‘Letter from America’, Times
of India, 23 November 1997, p. 11.
61. Hersh, Price of Power, p. 450; pp. 459–60.
62. ‘Blatant holes in charge against Desai’, Times of India, 4 June 1983, p. 1.
63. Hersh, Price of Power, p. 450.
64. ‘Blatant holes in charge against Desai’, Times of India, 4 June 1983, p. 1.
65. ‘Hersh sticks to charge’, Times of India, 5 June 1983, p. 9.
66. ‘U.S. may have referred to another Desai’, Times of India, 5 June 1983, p. 9.
67. ‘Morarji may file suit against Hersh’, Times of India, 18 June 1983, p. 1.
68. Mehta, ‘Complaint Law’, 17 June 1983, Folder 1, Box 55, Desai v Hersh 1983, Elmer
Gertz Papers, Library of Congress, Manuscripts Division (EGP).
69. ‘Remarks as to motion concerning interrogatories’, Folder 1, Box 55, Desai v Hersh
1983, EGP.
70. ‘Around the World’, New York Times, 14 July 1983, p. A5.
71. ‘Morarji’s plea for stay rejected’, Times of India, 4 August 1983, p. 1.
72. Reuters report, New Delhi, 19 June 1983.
73. ‘US silence on Hersh charge queried’, Times of India, 17 July 1983, p. 9.
74. ‘Stephen hits out at Vajpayee’, Times of India, 19 July 1983, p. 9.
75. ‘Plea for discussion on Hersh’s charge’, Times of India, 29 July 1983, p. 5.
76. ‘Morarji’s “CIA link’, Times of India, 27 August 1983, p. 1.
77. ‘Allegations by Mr Seymour Hersh against Shri Morarji Desai’, 26 August 1983,
Session XII, Lok Sabha Debates (New Delhi: Lok Sabha Secretariat, 1983).
78. ‘Secrecy ordered in Morarji case’, Times of India, 26 May 1984, p. 1.
79. ‘Morarji Desai rejects Hersh offer’, Times of India, 13 October 1987, p. 1.
80. ‘CIA sticks to usual “no” in Desai case’, Times of India, 11 May 1985, p. 9.
81. ‘Kissinger Takes The Stand’, Washington Post, 3 October 1989, p. D1; ‘Desai an
honest man: Kissinger’, Times of India, 4 October 1989, p. 15.
82. ‘Indian’s Libel Case Nearing Decision’, New York Times, 3 October 1989. p. A19.
 notes to pages 230–38 311

83. ‘U.S. Journalist Cleared of Libel Charge by Indian’, New York Times,
7 October 1989, p. 24.
84. ‘People angry over verdict’, Times of India, 8 October 1989, p. 11.
85. ‘P. V. Narasimha Rao misled Parliament on help to writer Seymour Hersh who
called Morarji Desai a CIA mole’, Times of India, 8 November 2011, p. 1.
86. R. K. Yadav, Mission R&AW (New Delhi: Manas Publications, 2014), p. 360.
87. Parthasarathy to Dixit, 16 November 1979, No. WAS/ISI/303/1/79, File WII/103/6/
79, AMS, MEA, NAI.
88. Associated Press, New Delhi, 28 February 1977.
89. Yadav, Mission R&AW, p. 361; See also Christophe Jaffrelot and Pratinav Anil,
India’s First Dictatorship: The Emergency, 1975–1977 (London: Hurst, 2020), p. 11.

10 Indian Intelligence and the End of the Cold War

1. Bahukutumbi Raman, The Kaoboys of R&AW: Down Memory Lane (New Delhi:
Lancer, 2007), p. 23.
2. Bush to Kao, 19 June 1984, Country File India 1984 [1] [OA-ID 19779], George
W. Bush Library, College Station, Texas (GWBL).
3. Kao to Bush, 13 April 1984, Country File India 1984 [3] [OA-ID 19779], GWBL.
4. Gregg and Doran to Bush, ‘Comments on Meetings between Indian Foreign
Secretary Rasgotra and Pakistani Foreign Secretary Naik’, 13 June 1984, Country
File India 1984 [1] [OA-ID 19779], GWBL.
5. ‘When a kidnap marred George H. W. Bush’s only India visit’, Hindu,
1 December 2018, www.thehindu.com/news/national/when-a-kidnap-marred-
george-hw-bushs-only-india-visit/article62020680.ece
6. Bush to Kao, 19 June 1984, Country File India 1984 [1] [OA-ID 19779], GWBL.
7. Ibid.
8. Kennedy to Nehru, 18 January 1962, National Security Files, Countries Series,
India, Nehru Correspondence, 1/15/62-3/31/62, John. F. Kennedy Library, Boston,
Massachusetts (JFKL).
9. Times of India, 28 June 1975, p. 2.
10. Kao to Bush, 30 June 1984, Country File India 1984 [3] [OA-ID 19779], GWBL.
11. ‘US Congressional Perspectives of India’, Twenty-Sixth Session, 1983–84, United
States Department of State, Foreign Service Institute, Country File India 1985 [3]
[OA-ID 19797], GWBL.
12. Raman, Kaoboys of R&AW, p. 43.
13. Joseph E. Persico, Casey: From the OSS to the CIA (New York: Viking, 1990), p. 313.
14. ‘South Asian Heads of Mission Conference – The Communist Powers and South
Asia’, 2 May 1973, FCO 37/1213, United Kingdom National Archives, Kew,
London (UKNA).
15. Ibid.
16. ‘MOD Paper for Sir Clive Rose’s Working Group on Policy Towards India: Defence
Relations with India’, 2 March 1977, FCO 37/1935, UKNA.
17. Eagleburger, Spiers, Wolfowitz to Haig, 13 April 1981, ‘Countering Soviet Covert
Action and Propaganda’, Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), 1981–1988,
vol. III, doc. 41, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1981-88v03/d41
18. Haksar to Gandhi, 9 July 1982, Subject File 287, Instalment III, P. N. Haksar Papers,
Nehru Museum and Memorial Library (NMML).
312 notes to pages 238–46

19. Haksar to Gandhi, 19 November 1974, P. N. Haksar Papers, III Instalment, Subject
File 269, NMML.
20. Haksar to Gandhi, 9 July 1982, Subject File 287, Instalment III, P. N. Haksar Papers,
NMML.
21. ‘P. M’s Meeting with Selig Harrison, 22 March 1984, Parliament House’, Polish
Intelligence Files, IPN BU 0 449/5t. 62, Central Military Archive, Military
Historical Office, Warsaw.
22. Bob Woodward, Veil: The Secret Wars of CIA 1981–1987 (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1987), p. 56.
23. T. V. Rajeswar, India: The Crucial Years (Noida, UP: Harper Collins India, 2015),
pp. 139–40.
24. Blitz quoted in New York Times, 2 September 1981, p. A-10.
25. ‘India Bars Senior U.S. Diplomat, Stirring a Dispute’, New York Times,
2 September 1981, p. A-10.
26. See, Henry Kissinger, The White House Years (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
1979); and Lawrence Lifschultz, Bangladesh: The Unfinished Revolution (London:
Zed Press, 1979).
27. ‘Reported Indo-United States difference over posting of diplomats’, Cols. 287-300,
8 September 1981, Lok Sabha Debates, Seventh Series, no. 17 (New Delhi: Lok
Sabha Secretariat, 1981).
28. ‘Indians explain rejection of envoy’, Guardian, 9 September 1981.
29. Associated Press, New Delhi, 6 December 1983.
30. ‘U.S. diplomat ousted from India’, United Press International, 8 December 1983.
31. Williams to James, 21 December 1983, FCO 37/3229, UKNA.
32. ‘India: 3 Spied for U.S.’, New York Daily News, 25 July 1985, p. C-8.
33. ‘Soviet “Active Measures”: Forgery, Disinformation, Political Operations’, Special
Report No. 88, October 1981, United States Department of State, Bureau of Public
Affairs (Washington, DC: USGPO, 1981).
34. Christophe Jaffrelot and Pratinav Anil, India’s First Dictatorship: The Emergency,
1975–1977 (London: Hurst, 2020), p. 414.
35. Melinda Beck and David C. Martin, ‘The Soviets’ Dirty-Tricks Squad’, Newsweek,
98,21 (23 November 1981), pp. 52–53.
36. Soviet ‘Active Measures’: Forgery, Disinformation, Political Operations’, Special
Report No. 88, October 1981, United States Department of State, Bureau of Public
Affairs (Washington, DC: USGPO, 1981).
37. ‘Pro-Soviet Press in India Mounts Propaganda Drive Against U.S.’, Washington
Post, 17 February 1983, p. A33.
38. BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, Radio Moscow, 29 March 1983, ‘“Destructive
Acts” of CIA in Indian North-East’, GB898 BBC/PUB/SWB, BBC Written Archives
Centre, Caversham Park, Reading (BBC). Soviet propaganda had publicised alleged
CIA operations in northeast India from the 1950s. See, John D. Smith. I Was a CIA
Agent in India (New Delhi: New Age Printing Press, 1967), pp. 20–21;
Rustem Galiullin, The CIA in Asia: Covert Operations against India and
Afghanistan (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1988), pp. 83–85.
39. BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, Radio Moscow, 17 August 1983,
‘“Komsomolskaya Pravda” on CIA Support for Indian Separatists’, GB898 BBC/
PUB/SWB, BBC.
40. The Patriot, ‘AIDS may invade India: mystery disease caused by U.S. lab
experiments’, 16 July 1983, p. 1. See also, Thomas Rid, Active Measures: The
 notes to pages 246–53 313

Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare (London: Profile Books,

2020), pp. 302–4.
41. Rid, Active Measures, p. 304.
42. Robert to Stephenson, 12 September 1968, FCO 168/3215, UKNA.
43. Rid, Active Measures, p. 428.
44. Dean to Secretary of State, ‘The Indo-Soviet Relationship’, No. 15164, 21 June 1986,
Digital National Security Archive (DNSA), https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/dnsa-
collections
45. ‘CIA Dagger Behind Plot to Oust Rajiv’, Blitz, 1 August 1987, p. 1.
46. ‘Forgery? Here’s Final Proof’, Blitz, 8 August 1987, p. 1.
47. Soviet Influence Activities: A Report on Active Measures and Propaganda, 1987–
1988, United States Department of State (Washington DC: USGPO, 1989).
48. ‘Gandhi Accepts Assurance of CIA Non-Interference’, Associated Press,
21 October 1987.
49. ‘Gandhi Reports Bush Assurance On CIA Activity’, Washington Post,
22 October 1987, p. A33.
50. ‘CBI Could have handled it better’, Times of India, 17 December 2015, p. 1.
51. ‘24 arrests in Delhi spy ring case’, Times, 21 January 1985, p. 1.
52. Harry Anderson and Sudip Mazumdar, ‘Cleaning Out a Nest of Spies’, Newsweek,
105, 4 (28 January 1985), p. 43; ‘Envoy quits Delhi after spy scandal’, Times,
2 February 1985, p. 5.
53. ‘India-USSR-US: Placing Blame in Spy Scandal’, 31 January 1985, DOC_0000263061,
CIA FOIA Electronic Reading Room, www.foia.cia.gov
54. United Press International, New Delhi, 30 January 1985.
55. ‘Towards an Even-handed Foreign Policy’, 4 February 1985, DOC_0000263067,
CIA FOIA Electronic Reading Room, www.foia.cia.gov; ‘The Indian Spy Scandal:
Soviet bloc contacts are ordered out’, Times, 6 February 1985, p. 7.
56. ‘Intelligible Intelligence’, Times of India, 21 September 2000, p. 10; ‘A Spy Ring at
the Center’, Newsweek, 105, 5 (4 February 1985), p. 35.
57. Hall to Dickinson, ‘India: Rama Swarup Espionage Case’, 31 January 1986, FCO 37/
4442, UKNA.
58. Ibid.
59. ‘PM warns MPs against shady invitations’, Indian Express, 21 February 1986.
60. Broomfield to Wilson, 27 February 1986, FCO 37/4442, UKNA.
61. Hall to Dickinson, ‘India: Rama Swarup Espionage Case’, 7 March 1986, FCO
37/4442, UKNA.
62. ‘Govt Must Explain’, Times of India, 7 March 1986, p. 8.
63. Wade-Gery to Evans, 14 November 1986, FCO 37/4442, UKNA; ‘In Secret Trial,
India Sentences 6 for Spying for U.S.’, New York Times, 30 October 1986, p. A 5.
64. ‘Foe of Gandhi Stung by Accusations of C.I.A. Role’, New York Times,
19 November 1989.
65. ‘Moynihan Assails India – C.I.A. charge’, New York Times, 21 November 1989.
66. ‘Foe of Gandhi Stung by Accusations of C.I.A. Role’, New York Times,
19 November 1989.
67. ‘Forgeries blamed on Soviets’, Washington Times, 23 November 1989.
68. ‘Rajiv got Soviet funds: daily’, Times of India, 29 June 1992, p. 1.
69. Yevgenia Albats and Catherine Fitzpatrick, The State Within a State: The KGB and
Its Hold on Russia, Past and Present (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1994),
p. 223.
314 notes to pages 255–62

70. ‘India’s Search for Villains Finds Old Culprit: The CIA’, Washington Post,
14 June 1991, p. A19.
71. Sudheendra Kulkarni, ‘Days of the Jackal’, Sunday Observer, 9 July 1991; ‘India’s
Search for Villains Finds Old Culprit: The CIA’, Washington Post, 14 June 1991,
p. A19.
72. ‘India’s Search for Villains Finds Old Culprit: The CIA’, Washington Post,
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Conclusion
1. R. N. Kao to Vappala Balachandran, 12 May 1998, cited in Vappala Balachandran,
National Security and Intelligence Management: A New Paradigm (Mumbai: Indus
Source Books, 2014), p. 312.
2. John le Carré, Silverview (London: Viking, 2021), pp. 110–11.
3. Alistair Campbell and Bill Hagerty (eds.), The Alistair Campbell Diaries: Volume 4:
The Burden of Power, Countdown to Iraq, (London: Arrow Books, 2013),
5 October 2001, p. 39.
4. The Blair Years: Extracts from the Alastair Campbell Diaries, ed. Alastair Campbell
and Richard Stott (London: Hutchinson, 2007), p. 577.
5. Ibid., pp. 577–78.
6. Campbell and Hagerty, Campbell Diaries: Volume 4, 5 October 2001, p. 39.
For insights into Dearlove’s political perspicacity see, Richard J. Aldrich and
Rory Cormac, The Black Door: Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime
Ministers (London: William Collins, 2016), p. 418.
7. Campbell and Hagerty, Campbell Diaries: Volume 4, 2 & 5 January 2002, pp. 125–
26; p. 129.
8. ‘Delhi clumsily bugged Blair’s room’, Times of India, 30 July 2007 https://time
sofindia.indiatimes.com/world/uk/delhi-clumsily-bugged-blairs-room/article
show/2243144.cms See also, Rashmee Roshan Lall, ‘Blair’s spin doctor spills the
beans: View from London’, Times of India, 30 July 2007, p. 21.
9. ‘Vajpayee govt tried to bug Blair’s bedroom in Delhi, IBNlive.com, 20 July 2007,
https://web.archive.org/web/20120929145020/http://ibnlive.in.com/news/vaj
payee-govt-tried-to-bug-blairs-bedroom-in-delhi/45265-2.html
10. Vir Sanghvi, ‘The Foreign Hands’, Hindustan Times, 23 July 2006 www.hindustan
times.com/india/the-foreign-hands/story-otQJcwNAIiDGZrdUBc4F9L.html
11. Ibid.
12. For insights into the role of Suez in fuelling Middle Eastern conspiracism, see,
M. Zonis, and C. M. Joseph, ‘Conspiracy Thinking in the Middle East’, Political
Psychology 15, 3 (1994), pp. 443–59; and, M. Gray, ‘Explaining Conspiracy
Theories in Modern Arab Middle Eastern Political Discourse: Some Problems
and Limitations of the Literature’, Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies 17, 2
(2008), pp. 155–74.
13. ‘US Congressional Perspectives of India’, Country File India 1985 [3] [OA-ID
19797], George W. Bush Library, College Station Texas.
14. For an illuminating reassessment of the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, in
this context, see Roham Alvandi, Nixon, Kissinger and the Shah: The United States
and Iran in the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
 notes to pages 262–66 315

15. O’Brien to Duff, ‘Sino-Indian Relations’, 3 March 1966, FO 371/186998, United

Kingdom National Archives, Kew (UKNA).
16. Calder Walton, Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight
of Empire (London: Harper Press, 2013), p. 304.
17. Chikara Hashimoto, Twilight of the British Empire: British Intelligence and
Counter-Subversion in the Middle East, 1948–68 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2017), p. 176.
18. Ruchir Sharma, Democracy on the Road: A 25-Year Journey through India (London:
Allen Lane, 2019), p. 202.
19. Tony Benn. Office Without Power: Diaries, Papers, 1968–1972 (ed.) Ruth Winstone
(London: Hutchinson, 1988), Thursday 7 March 1968, p. 40.
20. Bill Clinton, ‘Remarks at the One America Meeting with Religious Leaders’,
9 March 2000, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-the-one-america-
meeting-with-religious-leaders; Barak Obama, ‘Remarks on United States Military
and Diplomatic Strategies for Afghanistan and Pakistan’, 27 March 2009, www
.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-united-states-military-and-diplomatic-
strategies-for-afghanistan-and-pakistan-0
21. For an overview of India’s nuclear history, encompassing the 1998 tests, see George
N. Perkovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb: The Impact of Global Proliferation (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999).
22. ‘India: BJP Flexing Muscles, But How Far Will It Go?’ CIA Intelligence Report,
29 May 1998, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB187/index.htm
23. Manoj Shrivastava, Re-Energising Indian Intelligence (New Delhi: Vij Books, 2013),
p. 51.
24. ‘N-tests baffle CIA officials’, Times of India, 13 May 1998, p. 9.
25. George Tenet, At the Centre of the Storm: My Years at the CIA (New York: Harper
Collins, 2007), p. 69.
26. Praveen Swami, ‘India’s new language of killing’, The Hindu, 1 May 2014, www
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 INDEX

A Dangerous Place, 188, 209, 216, 218, All-India Trade Union Congress
219 (AITUC), 141
Abel, Jane, 232 American Shadow over India, 10
Adams, General Paul, 109 Amery, Leo, 58
Afghanistan, 3, 7, 235, 239, 240, 250, Amnesty International, 180
257, 259, 265 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 130
Soviet invasion 1979, 3 Amritsar, 234, 235
Agee, Philip, 218 Anderson, Jack, 221, 231
Ahluwalia, Sagar, 142, 149, 185 Andhra Pradesh, 146, 245
Air India, 240 Andley, K. B., 243
Aksai Chin, 93, 101, 108 Andropov, Yuri, 8, 171
Al Qaeda, 257 Arthashastra, 8
Alanbrooke, Lord, 27 Arunachal Pradesh, 93, 101, 121
Albats, Yevgenia, 253 Asia Foundation, 86, 181
Alexander, A. V., 15 Assam, 100, 102, 117, 146, 207, 245
Alexander, Padinjarethalakal Cherian Attlee, Clement, 22, 31
(P. C.), 249 Attlee Directive on intelligence, 21
All India Radio (AIR), 138, 139 transfer of power in India, 14
All the President’s Men, 190 Australia, 21, 134, 184
Allahabad, 6 foreign intelligence organisation, 29
Allen Dulles, 87–88 intelligence liaison, 37
High Court, 151, 190, 203 MI5 station, 50
Allen, Catherine, 145 Petrov defection, 155
Allen, John training of Indian intelligence
MI5 SLO, 36, 37 officers, 82
Allen, Mary, 234 Australian Security Intelligence
Allen, Stanley Bryson, 234 Organisation (ASIO), 134
Allende, Salvador Aviation Research Centre (ARC), 117
CIA denials of complicity in death, Awami League, 241
261
CIA efforts to destabilise Baer, Robert, 260
government, 204 Bajpai, Katyayani Shankar (K. S.), 193
Indian reaction to death, 201–4 Bajpai, Sir Girija Shankar, 126
Alliluyeva, Svetlana Iosigovna, 3, 154, 165 Bakkar, N. L
defection to West through India, 165 Tarasov defection, 164
All-India Congress Committee (AICC), Baltimore Sun, 214
253 Banerjee, R. N., 20

335
336 index

Bangalore, 146 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA),

Bangladesh, 150, 194, 203, 255 97, 98, 99, 122–23
India-Pakistan war (1971), communist propaganda, 47
221, 241 Indira Gandhi, 188
Sheikh Mujibur Rahman Indo-US relations, 17, 196
assassination, 190 Ramparts, 181
Barnes, Harry G., 239 Svetlana Alliluyeva defection, 166
Barreaux, Theodore, 198 Ulug-Zade defection, 154, 175
Bay of Pigs (1961), 84, 97, 102 US support for Indian
Bayley, Vernon Thomas, 24 unconventional warfare, 114
SIS officer in India, 23 Brady, Tom, 162
Bell, Walter Brasenose College, Oxford, 260, 263
MI5 SLO, 36 British Council, 125–26, 150
Benediktov, Ivan, 166, 167 British Foreign Office Research
Benn, Anthony Wedgwood ‘Tony’, 147, Department (FORD), 134
263, 264 British Guiana, 2
Beria, Lavrentiy, 172 British India
Berlin, 7, 136 destruction of colonial intelligence
Berlin Blockade, 61 records, 15
Berlin Wall, 3, 155, 252 empire of intelligence, 9
Bernstein, Carl, 190 intelligence focus on nationalism, 14
Besant, Annie, 52 British Information Service (BIS), 125,
Bevan, Aneurin, 53 129
Bevin, Ernest, 16 British Joint Intelligence Committee
Bezemenov, Youri, 180 (JIC), 16, 18, 35, 60, 93
Bhagavad Gita, 230 Ulug-Zade defection, 178
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), 228 British Ministry of Defence (MOD),
Bhatia, Prem, 165 139
Bhutan, 111, 112 British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS
Bissell Jr., Richard M., 96 or MI6), 1, 7, 10, 19, 31, 263
Blair, Tony authorised history, 11
bugged by Indian intelligence bid to secure primacy over MI5 in
services, 258 India, 21
Kashmir dispute, 259 black propaganda, 127, 139
Blake, George, 7 British India, 9
Blee, David, 118 closure of SIS station in India, 27
Blitz, 88, 141, 149, 199, 217, 240, 244, covert operations in India, 109
247, 253 covert propaganda in India, 26
anti-CIA propaganda, 88 liaison with IB on China, 106
Blunt, Anthony, 149 operations in post-independent
Boidevaix, Serge, 249 India, 17
Boies, Robert, 71 reintroduction to India in 1964, 33
Bolley, Alain, 249 Sino-Indian border, 105
Bombay, 8, 10, 32, 41, 58, 67, 68, 70, 76, Special Political Action (SPA), 127
137, 214 Whitehall debate over role in India,
Bourne, Kenneth, 36 20
MI5 SLO in India, 23 British Security Service (MI5), 9, 18
Bowles, Chester, 196 Attlee Directive, 49
 index 337

authorised history, 11 Castro, Fidel

British India, 9 CIA assassination plots, 201
concern at Soviet penetration in Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 3, 7,
India, 45 11, 12, 31
financial pressure, 49 Church committee revelations, 181
impact of Attlee Directive, 29 concern at Soviet penetration of
MI5 concern over SIS operations in India, 47
India, 27 coup in Iran (1953), 10
MI5 SLO in India, 31 covert action in Kerala, 89
operations in post-independent covert action in Tibet, 94
India, 17 cultivation of T. G. Sanjeevi, 80
plots against Krishna Menon, 63 Dalai Lama, 115
Security Liaison Officer (SLO) Indian accusations of interference in
system, 34 Punjab, 234
Ulug-Zade defection, 178 Indian trades unions, 92
Whitehall debate over role in India, 20 presence in India, 7
Brook, Norman, 49 Project Brahmaputra, 182
Bucher, General Sir Roy, 4 Tibet, 95, 97, 115
Bulganin, Nikolai, 46 Tibetan Task Force, 108
Bundy, McGeorge, 71, 97 Western-centric, 87
Bunker, Ellsworth, 85 Ceylon, 125
CPI victory in Kerala (1957), 88 IRD publications, 132
Burdick, Eugene, 83, 84 OSS operations, 76
Burgess, David, 91 Security Liaison Officer (SLO), 50
Burgess, Guy, 3, 64, 149 Chagla, Mohammadali Carim (M. C.),
Burma, 41, 117 183
OSS operations, 76 Chamberlain, Paul Thomas, 2
Bush, George H. W., 207, 234 Chandra, Prakash, 162
criticism of India accusations against Charbatia air base, 113
CIA, 234 Chaudhuri, General Jayanto Nath, 114
Bussi, Hortensia, 201 Chavan, Yashwantrao Balwantrao
(Y. B.), 113
Cabinet Mission (1946), 15 Chebrikov, Viktor, 253
Cairncross, John, 149 Chile, 2
Calcutta, 8, 26, 101, 137, 146, 163, 218 Allende government, 261
Cambodia, 239 coup (1973), 201, 261
Cambridge Five spy ring, 3, 149 Indian reaction to 1973 coup, 201–5
Campbell, Alistair, 257 Christopher, Warren, 219
Research and Analysis Wing, 258 Church, Senator Frank, 181
Canada, 21, 239, 246 Churchill, Sir Winston, 27, 128, 155
foreign intelligence organisation, 29 Clarridge, Duane ‘Dewey’, 92
intelligence liaison, 37 Clinton, William Jefferson ‘Bill’, 264
Cancun, 241 Clive, Robert, 235
Carter, James Earl ‘Jimmy’, 212, 221 Clutterbuck, Sir Alexander, 52, 103
Nanda Kot, 213 Attlee Directive, 50
Casey, William ‘Bill’, 215, 236, 247 opinion of Krishna Menon, 52
target of communist forgery in India, Colby, William, 200
247 Congressional testimony on CIA and
view of India, 236 Chile, 204
338 index

Colonialism, 6 accusation of acting as CIA agent, 209

Communist Party of Great Britain Indo-US relations, 209
(CPGB), 53 libel case against Seymour Hersh,
support for Krishna Menon and 227
India League, 56 libel trial, 209
Communist Party of India (CPI), 4, 16, Operation Hat, 120, 121, 210
35, 77, 185 Dhar, Maloy Krishna, 192
Russian funding, 42, 46 Dhar, Prithvi Nath (P. N.), 200
Congo, 2, 70, 122, 205, 208 Dharamshala, 158
Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), Dick White
181, 183 V. K. Krishna Menon, 63
Congress Party, 4, 16, 18, 20, 39, 59, 89, Dingell, John, 212
117, 120, 146, 185, 209, 218 Dixit, Jyotindra Nath (J. N.), 232
Conservative Party, 18 Doctor Zhivago, 170
Cook, Fred, 84 Donovan, Howard, 79
Cripps Mission, 57 Donovan, William ‘Wild Bill’, 78
Cripps, Sir Stafford, 15, 53, 60 Douglas-Home, Sir Alec, 222
Critchfield, James, 108, 110 Doval, Ajit
US support for Indian paramilitary covert action, 12–13
force, 111 Dulles, Allen, 10
Cuba, 84, 97, 107, 136, 205 affinity for Kipling, 88
Cuban Missile Crisis, 107, 154, 160 Dulles family connection with India,
Current, 143 87
Curry, John ‘Jack’, 9 Ewing Christian College, Allahabad,
Curzon, Lord, 147 87
Czechoslovakia, 159 friendship with Nehru family, 87
coup (1948), 61, 159 trips to India, 87
Kratochvil defection, 159–60 Dulles, John Foster, 88, 188
Krishna Menon, 69
Daily Express, 162 Dutt, Rajani Palme, 56
Dalai Lama
CIA and flight to India, 8 Eagleburger, Lawrence, 200, 237
exile in India, 158 East Germany, 240
Dange, S. A., 141 East India Company
Darjeeling, 102 intelligence operations, 8
Davidson, Jonathan East Pakistan, 41, 221
Calcutta Symphony Orchestra, 146 Eccles, Sir David, 72
IRD officer in Calcutta, 145 Economic Times, 144
de Gaulle, Charles, 255 Economist, 165
Dean, Sir Patrick, 35 Eelam People’s Revolutionary
Dearlove, Richard Liberation Front (EPRLF), 234
Research and Analysis Wing, 258 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 7
Secret Intelligence Service, 257 Indo-US relations, 7
Defections, 3 Elmhirst, Air Marshal Sir Thomas, 4, 20
Denniston, Alistair, 9 Enlai, Zhou
Desai, M. J., 72, 84 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA),
accused of receiving CIA funds, 184 95
Desai, Morarji, 180, 209, 225 Dalai Lama, 95
accusation of acting as a CIA agent, 225 Sino-Indian border, 93
 index 339

Falshaw, Chief Justice Donald, 164 relations with Salvador Allende, 203
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), State Department view on, 187
79, 103 suspicion of CIA, 190
Fedoseev, Anton Ulug-Zade defection, 176
Tarasov defection, 163 Gandhi, Mohandas
Fernandes, George, 183, 264 assassination (1948), 62
First war of Indian independence or IRD propaganda, 127
Indian mutiny (1857), 8, 14, 30 Gandhi, Rajiv, 236, 247
Firyubin, Nikolay, 168 accusations of CIA involvement in
Fitzgerald, Desmond, 110 assassination, 254
Chester Bowles and covert action, impact of Coomer Narain scandal,
123 250
Fleming, Ian, 33 receipt of funding from Soviet
Fogg, Lennox, 76 Union, 253
Foot, Michael, 53 view of CIA, 248
Ford, Gerald, 215, 221 Gandhi, Sanjay, 208
Forsyth, Frederick, 255 Garner, Sir Saville ‘Joe’, 52
Freeman, John, 114 Freeman forgery, 149
importance of MI5 SLO in India, 50 Garvey, Sir Terence
IRD in India, 143 Indian use of CIA to vilify US, 197
victim of communist disinformation questions need for IRD in India, 150
ploy in India, 148 Soviet penetration of India, 237
Fulbright, William, 91 George, Claire
Furnival Jones, Martin, 51 Desai libel trial, 229
Ghana
Galbraith, John Kenneth MI5 SLO, 50
blowback from CIA operations, 97 Gibraltar, 50
dismissal of Krishna Menon, 72 Goa crisis (1961)
nomination as US ambassador to Krishna Menon, 70
India, 96 Goheen, Robert
opposition to CIA activity in India, Operation Hat, 212, 214
96 Gopal, Sarvepalli
Gandhi, Indira, 147 Sino-Indian border dispute, 103
assassination attempts against, 203 Gordon Walker, Patrick, 64, 132
bank nationalisation, 189 Gore-Booth, Sir Paul
British intelligence, 6 support for Information Research
charge that CIA subverting Indian Department, 135
democracy, 190 Svetlana Alliluyeva defection, 170
CIA agent in cabinet, 209, 221 Government Code and Cypher School
criticism of CIA, 236 (Bletchley Park), 9
death (1984), 208 Grady, Henry, 47
fear of US backed coup, 201 Great Game, The, 10, 105, 257
forms Congress (R), 189 Greene, Joseph, 121, 122
Indo-British relations, 147 Chester Bowles distaste for covert
Indo-US relations, 238 action, 98
installed as Indian prime minister Ulug-Zade defection, 176
(1966), 187 Greenhill, Denis, 207
Operation Hat, 210, 211 Griffin, George
purported anti-Americanism, 188 India declares persona non grata, 240
340 index

GRU (Soviet foreign military Hollis, Roger, 33, 45, 50

intelligence), 7, 11, 47, 163 Krishna Menon, 57
Guardian, 127, 241 opposition to SIS activity in India,
Tarasov defection, 165 49
Guatemala, 2, 205 Holt-Wilson, Sir Eric, 35
Guha, Ramachandra, 2 Hong Kong, 107, 116, 130, 138
Gulag Archipelago, 155 Hoover, J. Edgar, 80
Gundevia, Yezdezard Dinshaw (Y. D.), Hopson, Donald, 136
43 Hyderabad, 42, 61, 146

Haig, Alexander, 237 I was a CIA Agent in India, 183

Haight, Hugh Iengar, Haravu Venkatanarasimha
Tarasov defection, 163 Varadaraja, 133
Haksar, Parmeshwar Narayan (P. N.), Imbrey, Howard, 76
64 India
view of Ronald Reagan, 238 State of Emergency, 151, 180, 190,
formation of Research & Analysis 208, 218
Wing (R&AW), 30 India League, 52, 53, 55
opinion of B. N. Mullik, 45 India Office Library (IOL), 103
Haldeman, H. R., 194 Indian Air Force (IAF), 4, 117
Haley, William, 35 Indian Atomic Research Centre, 214
Han-Fu, Chang, 157 Indian Committee for Cultural
Harlan, Josiah, 7 Freedom, 142, 181
Harriman Mission Indian Congress for Cultural Freedom,
limited Indian intelligence exchange 70
with US, 110 Indian Express, 144, 148, 198, 212
US report on Indian intelligence, 109 Tarasov defection, 165
Harriman, Averell, 108 Indian Intelligence Bureau (IB)
Harrison, Selig, 238 overseas stations, 105
Harrop, John, 105 Indian Intelligence Bureau (IB), 9, 12,
Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (HVA) 15, 30, 35
or Stasi, 240 collaboration with US, 219
Hayter, William, 21, 24 knowledge of CIA covert action in
support for SIS station in India, 28 Tibet, 98
Heath, Edward, 222 limited coverage of China, 106
Helms, Richard, 182, 193, 209 limited external operational capacity,
Watergate, 194 101
Henderson, Loy, 156 London station, 37
Nehru as anti-American, 83 posting of officer to Beijing, 106
T. G. Sanjeevi, 80 relations with CIA, 222
Hersh, Seymour, 204, 209, 225 Security Liaison Unit (SLU), 38
allegation Morarji Desai acted as CIA Soviet propaganda in India, 131
agent, 225 unconventional warfare operations,
Hillary, Edmund, 104 111
Hillenkoetter, Roscoe, 80 US use of Indian airfields, 117
Hindustan Times, 128, 141, 144, 153, working with British intelligence to
179, 189, 252, 253, 260 target Soviet Union, 40
HIV/AIDS Indian Joint Intelligence Committee
Stasi disinformation and India, 245 (JIC), 20
 index 341

Indian Ministry of External Affairs Iran, 2, 80, 205, 239

(MEA), 7, 37, 47, 102, 126, 134, 138, coup (1953), 10, 261
148, 153, 173, 183, 193, 212, 231 Iran-Contra affair, 92
Indian National Congress (INC), 55 Izvestia, 16, 253
Indian Police Service (IPS), 9
Indian Political Intelligence (IPI), 18, Jaipur, 31
20, 60 Jaisalmer, 31
Krishna Menon, 53 Jaish-e-Muhammad, 13
relations with MI5, 9 James, Morrice, 45
Indian Press Information Bureau (PIB), Jan Sangh, 185
138 Janata Party, 218, 225, 227, 242
Indians for Truth Abroad, 227 Japan, 24, 184, 197
India-Pakistan war (1965), 262 Jha, Chandra Shekhar (C. S.), 167
India-Pakistan war (1971), 150, 190, Svetlana Alliluyeva defection, 168
195, 207, 209, 222, 224, 226, 230, Jha, Lakshmi Kant (L. K.), 224
231 Jieshi, Jiang, 156
India-Soviet Cultural Society (ISCUS), Jinnah, Muhammad, 59
140 Johnson, Lyndon B., 122
Indochina, 68, 155 Joint Unconventional Warfare Task
Indonesia, 2, 113, 129, 205 Force (JUWTF), 112
Indo-US Joint Unconventional Joy, Peter, 138, 147
Warfare Operations Base first IRD field officer in India, 136
(JUWOB), 112
Information Research Department Kabul, 240
(IRD), 12, 26, 124 Kalimpong
Asian Analyst, 133 base for international espionage, 95
Basic Papers, 133 Kalugin, Oleg, 8
black propaganda, 124 Kao, Rameshwar Nath (R. N.), 200
China Records, 138 relations with CIA, 233
China Topics, 138 relations with George H. W. Bush,
counter propaganda aimed at the 233
Soviet Union, 140 Karaka, D. F., 143
field officer programme, 136 Karamessines, Thomas, 221
financial payments to Indian Karnataka, 241, 245
contacts, 142 Kaul, Triloki Nath (T. N.), 148, 207
Indian article redistribution scheme, Kautilya, 8
142 Kaysen, Carl, 73
Indian counter-subversion Keating, Kenneth, 195
propaganda training, 140 attitude to CIA, 196
Indian field officer linked to SIS, 148 Indian misperceptions of CIA, 196
Interpreter, 133 Indo-US relations, 197
material fed to B. N. Mullik, 134 valedictory interview with Indira
support for India during Sino-Indian Gandhi, 197
border war, 138 Kellar, Alex, 15, 28, 66
suspension of IRD activities in India, Kennan, George, 173
148 Kennedy, John F., 69, 215, 226
Tarasov defection, 162 Bay of Pigs (1961), 97
use of Indian publishers, 141 competition between India and
Inside the Company: CIA Diary, 218 China, 7, 85
342 index

Kennedy, Robert, 97 Korea, 68, 100

Kent, Sherman, 78 Korean War, 130, 139
Kerala, 35, 52, 146, 148 Kratochvil, Dr. Bohuslav
Kerr, Donald, 139, 142 defection to West through India,
Kerr, Philip Marquess of Lothian, 6 159
KGB (Soviet Committee for State Kulkarni, Sudheendra, 255
Security), 7, 8, 11, 47 Kuomintang, 156
active measures in India, 243
penetration of Indian government, 8, Ladakh, 101, 103
47 Lal, Diwan Chaman, 164
smears CIA during 1967 Indian Lancashire, David, 149, 185
elections, 186 Laos, 84
Svetlana Alliluyeva defection, 169, Larkins, Air Vice Marshal Ken, 242
171 Larkins, Major General Frank, 242
Khan, Dost Mohamed, 7 Laski, Harold, 52, 53
Khan, Yahya, 231 le Carré, John, 1, 3, 103
Kher, Bal Gangadhar, 67 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, 35
Kher, Balasaheb Gangadhar (B. G)., 38 Lhasa, 8
Khokhlov, Nikolai, 155 Liddell, Guy, 37
Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeyevich, 46, Indian dependence on British
165 intelligence, 34
Indo-Soviet relations, 7 intelligence transfer of power in
secret speech (1956), 171 India, 17
Kim, 10 Krishna Menon as a security threat,
Allen Dulles, 88 53
King, W. F., 126 MI5 employment of British Indian
Kipling, Rudyard, 7, 10, 17, 135 intelligence officers, 19
Allen Dulles a devotee of, 10 MI5 SLO in India, 22
impact on post-war US intelligence, 10 opinion of B. N. Mullik, 43
link to Harold ‘Kim’ Philby, 10 opinion of T. G. Sanjeevi, 19, 39
required reading for British surprise at B. N. Mullik’s assessment
diplomats, 10 of British intelligence, 46
Kirkpatrick, Jeanne Lifschultz, Lawrence, 241
subject to communist Lincoln’s Inn, 57, 263
disinformation in India, 244 Link, 141
Kissinger, Henry, 192, 209, 222, 241, Linlithgow, Marquess of, 58
261 London School of Economics (LSE), 52,
criticism of India, 193 57
Morarji Desai libel trial, 230 Lucknow, 6, 14
Kitchen, Eric Ludhiana, 7
MI5 SLO, 36, 45, 65 Lukas, Anthony, 122
Klise, Dick, 77, 81 Lüthi, Lorenz, 2
Knaus, John, 108
Knight Smith, Ian, 146 MacDonald, Malcolm
Kohler, Foy, 168 CPI victory in Kerala (1957), 89
Kohn, Howard, 209 Maclean, Donald, 3, 64, 149
Komer, Robert, 71, 92 Macmillan, Harold, 155
US support for Indian Attlee Directive, 50
unconventional warfare, 113 Krishna Menon, 68
 index 343

Madan, K. L. establishment of SIS station in India,

subject to Chinese espionage 23
operation, 103 insistence on SIS station in India, 24
Madras, 8, 27, 41, 52, 76, 89, 97, 129, Mexico, 241
137, 146 Mittal, Gopal, 141
Maharashtra, 89 Modi, Narendra, 12
Mainstream, 141 Modin, Yuri
Malaya, 24, 44 Freeman forgery, 149
Malaysia, 184 Molotov, Vyacheslav, 58, 69
Marshall, George, 17 Moraes, Frank, 148
Masani, Minocher Rustom ‘Minoo’, 57, Morgan, Ellis, 29
176 Morris, James (later, Jan), 104–5
Krishna Menon, 70 Mosaddegh, Mohammad, 10
Soviet propaganda in India, 131 Mountbatten, Lord Louis, 15, 59, 83
Masaryk, Jan, 159 Indian unconventional warfare, 114
Mathai, M. O. Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 209, 215,
accusation of being CIA agent, 82 261
Mathur, Shiv Narain allegation of CIA funding of
Operation Hat, 213 Congress Party, 188, 216
May, John Peter appointment as US ambassador to
SIS officer in India, 24 India, 198
Mayhew, Christopher, 132 criticism of CIA, 215, 220
McMinnies, John Gordon, 147 criticism of Colby public comments
McNamara, Robert on covert action, 205
Indian military aid programme, 118 departure from India, 205
Meerut Conspiracy, 35 fractious Indo-US relations, 199
Mehta, Jagat Singh, 212 impact of CIA revelations on Chile
Mehta, Lieutenant Colonel B. N. ‘Baij’, on Indira Gandhi, 204
105 Indian request for intelligence
Menon, Kumara Padmanabha cooperation with US, 200
Sivasankara (K. P. S.) Indira Gandhi and intelligence
view of Krishna Menon, 59 agencies, 188
Menon, Shivshankar, 266 Indira Gandhi receipt of CIA funds,
Menon, V. K. Krishna, 52 216, 219
appointed Indian High low public profile in India, 199
Commissioner to UK, 52 Peter Burleigh incident, 200
departure from Indian cabinet, 73 rebuffs charge Morarji Desai was
first meeting with Nehru, 52 CIA agent, 227
ill-health, 66 relations with CIA in India, 200
Labour Party, 56 Mulgaokar, Suman, 153
relations with Nehru, 55 Mullik, Bhola Nath (B. N.)
Secretary of India League, 53 anti-communism, 44
Sino-Indian border war (1962), 100 appointment as DIB, 43
Soviet attempts to cultivate, 74 dissatisfaction with British
Soviet funding, 71 intelligence, 37
touted as sucessor to Nehru, 71 Krishna Menon, 65
Menshikov, Mikhail, 90 Nehru’s view of intelligence, 6
Menzies, Stewart, 19 relations with MI5, 33
closure of SIS station in India, 27, 28 relationship with Nehru, 43, 102
344 index

Murray, Ralph Nixon, Richard, 215, 221

Information Research Department animus for India and Indira Gandhi,
(IRD), 129 193
Muslim League, 59 criticism of CIA, 194
My Lai massacre, 225 misogyny directed at Indira Gandhi,
194
Naipaul, Vidiadhar Surajprasad (V. S.) tilt to Pakistan, 192
Soviet propaganda in India, 131 Noel-Baker, Philip, 61
Nair, K. Sankaran North-Eastern Frontier Agency
opinion of T. G. Sanjeevi, 19 (NEFA), 100, 117
Nanda Devi, 119, 121, 210 Novikov, Kirill, 47
Nanda Kot, 121, 213 Novosti, 141, 176
Narain, Coomer Nye, Lieutenant-General Sir Archibald,
espionage scandal, 249 27, 32, 61
Narain, Raj, 222 British propaganda, 125
Narasimha Rao, Pamulaparthi Venkata feeding anti-communist propaganda
(P. V.), 228 to Indian government, 133
Natarajan, L., 10 friendship with Jawaharlal Nehru, 27
Nation, 84 Indian communism, 35
Near and Far East News (NAFEN), 162 Kratochvil defection, 160
Nehru, Braj Kumar, 72 Krishna Menon, 65
Nehru, Jawaharlal, 6, 7, 10, 35, 37 opposition to SIS station in India, 27
aversion to secret intelligence, 15
British colonial intelligence, 6 O’Connor Howe, Josephine
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), review of IRD operations in India, 135
38, 82, 84 Obama, Barack, 264
CIA operations in Tibet, 95 Observer, 172
death (1964), 45, 119 Office of Strategic Services (OSS), 76,
frustration with performance of IB, 77, 159
42 Oldfield, Maurice, 29, 31
Hindu nationalism, 15 Olmstead, Mary
Indian non-aligned foreign policy, 36 scale of CIA operation in India, 98
Indian reliance on British Operation Blue Star, 234
intelligence, 4, 15 Operation Hat, 119, 120, 121, 209, 210
Indo-Soviet relations, 36 Operations Coordinating Board
intelligence cooperation with UK (OCB), 78
and US, 4, 81 Ormsby Gore, David, 73
Soviet propaganda in India, 131 Orwell, George, 173
threat posed by communalism, 42 Ottinger, Richard, 212
wary of links between IB and MI5, 39 Owen, David, 151
Nehru, Ratan Kumar (R. K.), 106
Nepal, 104, 105, 115, 150 Pakistan, 12, 13, 30, 31, 43, 73, 88, 101,
New Age, 130, 182 106, 107, 109, 114, 125, 150, 192,
New Delhi, 8 193, 236, 240, 241, 245, 249, 250,
New York Times, 69, 86, 87, 122, 161, 255, 257, 259, 265
162, 181, 185, 190, 194, 198, 204, India-Pakistan relations, 73, 193
211, 215, 221, 223, 225, 230, 253 IRD publications, 132
New Zealand Kashmir dispute, 16, 33, 36, 61, 109,
intelligence liaison, 37 147, 257
 index 345

MI5 SLO, 23 Radio Moscow, 88

terrorism, 257 Raghunath, K., 116
U-2 incident, 119 Rajagopalachari, Rajaji, 66
US-Pakistan relations, 69, 192 Rajasthan, 31
Palkhivala, Nani Rajeswar, Thangavelu (T. V.)
Operation Hat, 212 view of Bill Casey, 239
Palkhivala, Nani Ardeshir, 219 Ram, Jagjivan
Panch Sheel, 94, 157 allegation of being CIA agent, 222
Pandit, Vijaya Lakshmi, 160, 217 Ramparts, 148, 169, 181
British-India relations, 33 Ramsey, Henry, 89
Chinese intelligence, 104 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS),
V. K. Krishna Menon, 72 41
Panikkar, Kavalam Madhava (K. M.), Rayle, Robert, 166, 170
157 Reagan, Ronald, 3, 233
Pant, Apa, 264 meeting with Indira Gandhi in
MI5 target, 263 Cancun, 241
Parsons, J. Graham, 80 Reddy, P. Thimma, 146
Parthasarathy, Gopalaswami, 231 Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW),
Pasternak, Boris, 170 12, 30
Patel, Vallabhbhai, 4, 19, 30, 43 covert action, 13, 265
intelligence transfer of power, 18 India nuclear test (1998), 264
Patil, S. K., 89 relations with CIA, 222
Patriot, 141 Sri Lanka, 234
Pegov, Nikolai, 175 Reuther, Walter, 91
People’s Liberation Army (PLA), 72, Richard Helms, 221
94, 100, 105 Rimington, John, 32
People’s Republic of China (PRC), 4, 6, Rimington, Stella, 31, 32
12, 16, 41, 109, 129, 130 expansion of Cold War in India, 32
Sino-Indian relations, 8 Soviet penetration of India, 47
Pethick-Lawrence, Frederick, 15, 58 target of Soviet intelligence
Petrie, Sir David, 9 operation in India, 48
Petrov, Vladimir, 134, 155 Ulug-Zade defection, 175
Philby, Harold ‘Kim’, 3, 10, 149, 178 work for IRD in India, 145
Philby, St John, 10 Rivett-Carnac, Douglas, 135
Pillay, Patsy, 64 RMS Caledonia, 32
Pinochet, Augusto, 201 Roberts, P. H., 150
Pollitt, Harry, 56 Rogers, William
Powell, Enoch, 18 view of Indira Gandhi, 188
Powers, Thomas, 209, 221 Roosevelt, Kermit ‘Kim’, 10, 80
The Man Who Kept the Secrets, 222 Rosenfeld, Eugene, 86
Powles, Viola, 23 Rosenthal, Abraham Michael ‘Abe’, 86
Praja Socialist Party, 106, 146, 185 Rositzke, Harry
Pravda, 173 CIA operations in India, 98
Punjab, 7, 164 CIA operations in Tibet, 98
proactive approach to CIA
Quit India (1942), 57, 77 operations in India, 99
Rostow, Walt
Raborn, William, 88 US support for Indian
Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli, 115, 119 unconventional warfare, 114
346 index

Roy, Manabendra Nath (M. N.), 35 covert action, 21

Royal Indian Navy mutiny, 58 Indian Intelligence Bureau (IB), 64
Royal Navy, 4 MI5 efforts to remove Krishna
Rusk, Dean, 97 Menon, 64
Russell, Bertrand, 53 relations with Clement Attlee, 28, 65
Russian revolution (1917), 30 T. G. Sanjeevi, 39
V. K. Krishna Menon, 60, 63, 64
Salisbury, Harrison, 225 Simon Commission, 65
Samyukta Socialist Party, 183 Singapore, 37, 97, 129
Sandys, Duncan, 74, 108, 138 Japanese occupation (1942), 24
Sanjeevi Pillai, Tirupattur Singh Deo, Brigadier Kamakhya
Gangadharam (T. G.), 19, 39 Prasad, 250, 251, 252
animus for J. Edgar Hoover, 80 Singh Gill, Jaspal, 242, 243
British concern over attitude to Singh Kohli, Manmohan, 120
communist subversion, 41 Singh, Ajeya, 253
clash with Krishna Menon, 62 Singh, Brajesh, 166
dismissal as DIB, 42, 106 Singh, Dinesh, 168
first Indian Director of IB, 19 Singh, Jasbir, 243
inexperience as an intelligence Singh, Karan, 223
officer, 20 Singh, Lieutenant Colonel Jasbir, 242
London visit (1948), 39 Singh, Manmohan, 265
visit to Washington (1949), 79 Singh, Ram, 141, 143
Sargent, Sir Orme, 21, 27 Singh, Swaran, 201
Saxbe, William ‘Bill’, 206 Singh, Vishwanath Pratap, 252, 253
Indian attacks on CIA and Indo-US Sinha, Justice Jagmohanlal, 190
relations, 207 Sinha, Yashwant, 259
Scarse-Dickens, Mark Sino-Indian border war (1962), 29, 31, 50,
British support for Indian 54, 72, 75, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103,
unconventional warfare, 113 105, 107, 108, 113, 115, 117, 118,
Schaffer, Howard, 195 123, 124, 125, 138, 139, 147, 154, 210
Schlesinger, Arthur, 131 British aid for India, 138
Sejnoha, Jaroslav impact of Chinese propaganda, 138
defection in India, 159 Indian intelligence failure, 102
Semichastny, Vladimir, 8 lack of Indian propaganda, 138
Sethi, Jai Gopal, 164 Sinyavsky, Andrei, 170, 172
Sharma, Shankar Dayal, 189, 190 Sirisena, Maithripala, 13
Shastri, Lal Bahadur, 71, 75, 101, 115, Smiley, George, 1, 5
120, 147, 210 Smith, John Discoe, 174, 182
Shelepin, Alexander, 8 Smith, Norman, 18, 19, 22
Shone, Sir Terence Smith, Russell Jack, 227, 229
concern at SIS profile in India, 25 Sobolev, Arkady, 162
debate over MI5 or SIS primacy in Socialist Weekly, 203
India, 22 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 155–56, 171
opposition to SIS station in India, 24 Somerville College, Oxford, 55
Sikhism, 234 South Africa, 127
Sikkim, 111 Commonwealth security
Silkwood, Karen, 211 conferences, 37
Sillitoe, Sir Percy, 40 Communist Party, 64
Attlee Directive, 29 Indian response to apartheid, 129
 index 347

South Vietnam, 108 The Man Who Would Be King, 7

Soviet Union, 4, 6, 7, 16, 129 The Price of Power, 209
economic aid to India, 7 The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, 1
Indo-Soviet relations, 16 The Ugly American, 83
Kashmir dispute, 7 The White House Years, 231
propaganda in India, 131, 140 Thimayya, General Kodandera Subayya
Special Frontier Force (SFF), 111, 113, ‘Timmy’, 105
114 Thomas, Alunkal Mathai, 120
Special Operations Executive (SOE), 128 Thompson, Gordon, 19
Spiers, Ronald, 237 Thought, 141, 143
Sri Lanka, 13, 150, 234, 240, 250 Tibet, 101, 104, 105, 117
St Kitts and Nevis, 253 CIA operations, 8
Stalin, Joseph, 3, 16, 131, 153, 154, 165, Indian policy, 93
166, 170, 172, 173 Tihar jail, 5, 241
death, 78, 131, 155 Tiltman, John, 9
Indo-Soviet relations, 36, 126 Times, 35, 68, 104, 147, 223
Stasi, 246, See Hauptverwaltung Times of India, 165, 174, 179, 180,
Aufklärung (HVA) 198, 203, 213, 223, 226, 251,
Statesman 252, 259
Tarasov defection, 165 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, 1, 3
Stephen, Chembakassery Mathai Today Show (NBC), 212, 248
(C. M.), 217 Trade Unions, 26, 38, 41, 127, 183, 237
Stilwell, Colonel Richard, 80 Trend, Sir Burke, 50
Suez crisis (1956), 37, 68, 88, 261 Tripathi, Kamlapati, 217
Sunday Telegraph, 172 Tripura
Sunday Times, 171, 172 communist subversion, 44
Swarup, Rama Trombay, India atomic research centre,
espionage scandal, 250 214
Swatantra Party, 176, 185 Truman, Harry S., 11
Symon, Alec, 132 disinterest in India, 17
V. K. Krishna Menon, 69
Taiwan, 250 Tunnard, Bridget, 63
Taiwan straits crises, 68, 69 Turner, Stansfield, 239
Tanzania, 50 CIA agents within the Indian
Tarasov, Vladislav Stepanovich government, 239
defection, 160–65 Operation Hat, 213
Tashkent, 35, 147 Senior Indian official operating as
TASS, 131, 173, 208, 240, CIA agent, 239
245, 248 Tyabji, Badruddin, 84, 134
Telangana, 26, 35, 77
Tenet, George, 264 U’ren, William (Bill)
Indian nuclear test (1998), 264 Indian intelligence and MI5, 46
Tenzing, Norgay, 104 MI5 SLO, 23, 36, 45, 65
Tereshkov, A. V., 180 U-2 aerial reconnaissance, 136
Tezpur, 100 Indian programme, 117
Thailand, 118, 119, 184, 200, 207 May 1960 incident, 98
The Affluent Society, 96 Ukraine, 16
The Liberal Hour, 96 Ulug-Zade, Aziz Saltimovitch
The Man Who Kept the Secrets, 209, 223 defection, 153–54, 173–79
348 index

United Kingdom, 7 Vietnam War, 98, 168

intelligence relations with India, 5 Viets, Richard
postcolonial relations with India, 4 CIA in India, 195
transfer of power in India, 14 Vijai, P., 116
United Nations, 68, 88, 162, 201, 244 Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit
human rights, 171 Allen Dulles, 87
Kashmir dispute, 36 T. G. Sanjeevi Pillai, 79
United Nations Security Council Vishinsky, Andrey, 36
(UNSC) Vladislaw Stepanovich Tarasov, 154
Kashmir dispute, 7
United States, 7, 31 Washington Post, 182, 184, 194
United States Information Agency CIA and Indira Gandhi
(USIA), 126 assassination, 254
United States Information Service Ramparts, 181
(USIS), 11, 173 Wave, 217
Urban, Major General Sujan Singh, 111 Wavell, Field Marshal Archibald, 16, 59
US Agency for International transfer of power, 14, 59
Development (USAID), 176, 196, Welser, Hans
234 Information Research Department,
US Atomic Energy Commission, 213 127
US State Department, 52, 69, 77, 78, 79, West Bengal, 35, 112, 115, 161, 164,
80, 83, 89, 96, 97, 98, 162, 163, 168, 188, 216, 263
170, 171, 187, 192, 195, 200, 207, West Germany, 3, 155
208, 212, 213, 214, 215, 219, 220, Wetherbee, Harry, 242
228, 237, 238, 240, 243, 244, 248, 252 White, Lincoln, 163
view of Krishna Menon, 52 White, Sir Dick
Uttar Pradesh, 14, 117 Attlee Directive, 49
Wicker, Tom, 198
Vajpayee, Atal Bihari Wignall, Sydney
India nuclear tests (1998), 264 Indian covert action, 105
Indian intelligence services, 259 Indian military intelligence, 104
Indira Gandhi and CIA, 219 Williams, Shirley, 171
Janata links to CIA, 220 Wilson, Harold
Morarji Desai and CIA, 228 British-Indian relations, 33
Operation Hat, 210, 213 India-Pakistan war (1965), 147, 175
talks with Tony Blair, 257 nuclear proliferation, 120
terrorism, 257 Wolfowitz, Paul, 237
Vallabhbhai Patel Woodward, Bob, 190
Krishna Menon, 62 World Health Organisation (WHO), 246
MI5 SLO in India, 21
Venkataraman, Ramaswamy, 242 Xinjiang, 93, 101, 105, 117, 119, 120,
Verma, Anand Kumar (A. K.), 232 156, 157, 158
Verma, S. P., 34
MI5 SLO system, 51 Yew, Lew Yuan, 97
Vickery, Philip Young, Sir John Robertson ‘Rob’, 258
Indian Political Intelligence (IPI), 18
V. K. Krishna Menon, 60, 61, 63 Zedong, Mao, 99, 130, 157
Vietnam political dissidents, 157
My Lai, 225 Sino-Indian border war (1962), 75