Indias Intelligence Culture and Strategic Surprises Spying for South Block 9781032282947 9781032282978 9781003296195 Compress

‘This impressive book adds significantly to the intelligence literature by providing a
detailed analysis of Indian intelligence culture and using this as a framework to explain the
Indian experience with strategic surprise. It is a landmark work that expands the horizons
of academic Intelligence Studies.’
Mark Phythian, Professor of Politics, University of Leicester
‘In recent years, scholars of intelligence have finally started to sail outside of their sea
lane by studying intelligence and security agencies beyond the Anglosphere and
Europe. The latest author to make their mark is Dr Dheeraj Paramesha Chaya. Dr
Chaya's book is a brilliant discussion of India’s foreign intelligence culture from the
colonial era to the present day. Packed with detailed research on the reasons for stra
tegic surprise, the book is an important contribution to the study of intelligence.’
Christopher R. Moran, Professor of US National Security,
University of Warwick
‘Dr Chaya’s volume is an exceptionally important contribution to the scholarship on

intelligence. It provides an exemplar fusion of Western conceptual literature on intelli
gence with both India’s own conceptual traditional precedents on intelligence as well as
that nation’s practical, contemporary experience of intelligence as a core state function
and as a profession. It provides an excellent demonstration of the kind of work that can
be done, and that needs to be done.’
Philip H.J. Davies, Professor, Intelligence Studies and Director, Brunel
Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies (BCISS), Brunel University
‘It is hard to overstate the significance of this book for India, and for all those trying to
understand that crucially important country. It is an unblinking, meticulously resear
ched, in-depth examination of more than two thousand years of India’s under-
appreciated intelligence culture, starting with the seminal Arthashastra - a work of such
sophistication that it makes The Art of War look like a children’s book. This is not
abstract study, it has the intellectual courage to test its finding in some of India’s most
sensitive real-world conflicts. It is a uniquely valuable book that will spawn new fields
of study for years to come.’
Cleo Paskal, Associate Fellow, Chatham House
‘Within the canon of intelligence studies, India’s Intelligence Culture and Strategic Surprises
does two incredibly valuable things. It firstly opens up the black box of the Indian intelli
gence machine, something that has – hitherto – been a significant absence from the intel
ligence studies literature. Secondly it provides an authentic voice on Indian security
concerns. Too often security and intelligence studies rests upon the British or American
voice, or the British and American attempt at taking an Indian viewpoint. Dheeraj engages
with and speaks to the intelligence and security studies field, but does so with authentic
Indian experiences and research material. In doing so he is performing a valuable service in
opening our eyes to a vitally important strategic partner, and a highly capable intelligence
and security power. In these uncertain times, it is a critically important role.’
Robert Dover, Professor of Intelligence and National Security, University of Hull
India’s Intelligence Culture and
Strategic Surprises
This book examines India’s foreign intelligence culture and strategic surprises in
the 20th century.
The work looks at whether there is a distinct way in which India ‘thinks about’
and ‘does’ intelligence and, by extension, whether this affects the prospects of it
being surprised. Drawing on a combination of archival data, secondary source
information and interviews with members of the Indian security and intelligence
community, the book provides a comprehensive analysis of the evolution of
Indian intelligence culture from the ancient period to colonial times and, subse
quently, the post-colonial era. This evolutionary culture has played a significant
role in explaining the India’s foreign intelligence failure during the occurrences of
strategic surprises, such as the 1962 Sino-Indian War and the 1999 Kargil War,
while it successfully prepared for surprise attacks like Operation Chenghiz
Khan by Pakistan in 1971. The result is that the book argues that the stra
tegic culture of a nation and its interplay with intelligence organisations and
operations are important to understanding the conditions for intelligence
failures and strategic surprises.
This book will be of much interest to students of intelligence studies, strategic
studies, Asian politics and international relations.
Dheeraj Paramesha Chaya is Assistant Professor, Department of Geopolitics

and International Relations, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, India. He
has a PhD in Intelligence Studies from the University of Leicester, UK.
Studies in Intelligence
Intelligence Oversight in the Twenty-First Century

Accountability in a Changing World
Edited by Ian Leigh and Njord Wegge
Intelligence Leadership and Governance

Building Effective Intelligence Communities in the 21st Century
Patrick F. Walsh
Intelligence Analysis in the Digital Age

Edited by Stig Stenslie, Lars Haugom, and Brigt H. Vaage
Conflict and Cooperation in Intelligence and Security Organisations

An Institutional Costs Approach
James Thomson
National Security Intelligence and Ethics

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Data Processing and Information Transfer in Secret Services during
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Edited by Rüdiger Bergien, Debora Gerstenberger and Constantin Goschler
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From Cold War Liberalism to Neoconservatism
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India’s Intelligence Culture and Strategic Surprises

Spying for South Block
Dheeraj Paramesha Chaya
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.

com/Studies-in-Intelligence/book-series/SE0788
India’s Intelligence Culture
and Strategic Surprises
Spying for South Block
Dheeraj Paramesha Chaya

First published 2022
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DOI: 10.4324/9781003296195
Typeset in Bembo
by Taylor & Francis Books
Contents
List of illustrations ix
Foreword x
Acknowledgements xiii
Abbreviations xv
Introduction 1
SECTION I
India’s Foreign Intelligence and Strategic Surprises 7
1 Contextualising Intelligence Culture and Strategic Surprises 9
SECTION II
The Evolution of India’s Intelligence Culture 37
2 Kautilya’s Discourse on Secret Intelligence in the Arthashastra 39
3 From the Kautilyan State to the Colonial State: Transmogrification
of the Ideas and Operations of Intelligence 64
4 The Birth of Post-Colonial Indian Intelligence Culture 88
SECTION III
Case Studies of India’s Wars 121
5 The Intelligence Bureau and the Sino-Indian War: Between Mao’s
Deception and Nehru’s Wishful Thinking 123
6 Indian Intelligence and the 1971 Indo-Pak War: The Epic of a
Successful Detection and Counter-Surprise 163
7 Surprise on the Kargil Hilltops: Prognostication of the Irrational 197
viii Contents
SECTION IV
Indian Intelligence Culture in Perspective 227
8 Indian Intelligence Culture: An Articulation 229
9 Culture of Ad hocism: Moving Beyond the Orthodox-Revisionist
Dichotomy 263
Epilogue: Bring Back the Kautilyan State 273
Appendix 277
Index 279
Illustrations
Figures
5.1 India-China Disputed Regions 124
6.1 West Pakistan and East Pakistan (Bangladesh) divided by India 164
6.2 Structure of the Indian civilian intelligence after the 1968 reforms 170
7.1 Jammu and Kashmir region depicting Kargil and the Northern
Areas 198
8.1 Indian Intelligence Culture: The Evolutionary Structure 230
9.1 Intelligence-Policy structure in Western democracies 267
9.2 Intelligence-Policy divide in India 268
Tables
4.1 Cultural change in Indian intelligence from the Kautilyan state to
the post-colonial Indian state 111
5.1 Assumptions versus Outcomes in Indian Military Planning in 1962 147
Foreword
There has been little academic work about Indian intelligence that is also
linked to actual conflicts. Instead, there have been autobiographies of the B.N.
Mullik variety in his book My Years With Nehru, Asoka Raina’s Inside the RAW, B.
Raman’s The Kaoboys of R&AW, Nitin Gokhale’s The Grand Spymaster a biography
of R.N. Kao, the founder of the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), and lately
G.B.S. Sidhu’s book Sikkim-The Truth Behind Sikkim’s Merger With India, which is
about the role of the R&AW in the merger. All these are more about intelligence
operations and partly biographical. Dr Dheeraj’s book India’s Intelligence Culture and
Strategic Surprises is perhaps the first academic work on India’s foreign intelligence
culture. The book succeeds in giving an impartial account of the evolution of
Indian intelligence systems after a very hesitant start with the leadership that was
indifferent and naïve about such requirements for the state; and it would be a
valuable addition to the informed literature on India’s wars and intelligence activ
ities. The book highlights the need to provide the intelligence community a voice
in contemporary India’s security history.
Such studies are beneficial to the Indian intelligence community especially
when there is now a growing public interest in the role and efficacy of intelligence
organisations. Intelligence functioning in a democracy has its own often-debated
issues such as limitations of secrecy and privacy as well as security and openness.
These demands for privacy are now becoming louder, commentary at times irre
sponsible, reportage is competitive and frequent as well as even instant. The
alternative – censorship – appears tempting but is best avoided. What is needed is a
better understanding of each other’s needs and compulsions. Excessive secrecy and
mysterious behaviour lead to conspiracy theories that get embellished as they
gather momentum. Spying for South Block sets the record straight with archival
information and elite interviews.
The book is divided into four parts. Part I relies heavily on Western literature
which is understandable there being very little independent Indian literature on
the theoretical aspect of intelligence’s meaning and collection. It brings out the
Tanham commentary about lack of Indian strategic vision versus Indian strategic
thinkers on the subject. The author is right when he says, “It is necessary to
understand the philosophies and thought processes governing a nation’s national
security processes to ideally locate and understand the role played by its
Foreword xi
intelligence agencies”. Given that this is the first book attempting to make such a
comprehensive analysis of India’s external intelligence, it is inevitable to trace the
ideational evolution of foreign and strategic military intelligence in India’s
national security mechanism. The next part of the book does this.
Part II traces how intelligence evolved from the time of Kautilya in the 3rd
and 2nd centuries BCE and the ethos lasted until the 12th century. Kautilya’s
Arthashastra – valid until the 12th century when the Muslim invasions reduced
intelligence activity to rounding up of conspirators against the monarch.
Translated into English only in 1912, the Arthashastra was rediscovered after
independence, and Kautilya’s tenets remain valid even today. However,
modern intelligence activity in India is an off shoot of British practices during
their rule in India until 1947.
Intelligence during the colonial times was not about policy but keeping the Raj
secure from foreign invasions and later from the growing nationalism within India.
The implication of this colonial legacy on post-independence Indian intelligence
were bound to be strong. However, with the transfer of authority to Indians, the
targets of intelligence suddenly became the consumers of intelligence. Post-inde
pendence, Home Minister Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and Prime Minister Jawaharlal
Nehru did not see situations the same way. For Patel, who saw intelligence as a
necessary requirement for internal security, the organisation of an intelligence
bureaucracy was inevitable. Nehru, however, showed an aversion to matters of
intelligence. External threats were a non-issue. As a result, the author rightly high
lights with sufficient archival evidence and critical analysis, that there was a con
tinuation of the colonial intelligence culture, “one that was internal threat
responsive and mainly determined by the courage and adroitness of the intelligence
managers”. How this troubled and lethargic evolution of foreign intelligence would
affect India’s national security became evident in the 1962 Sino-Indian War.
The author’s analysis of three major security events of 1962, 1971 and 1999
in Part III are indeed truly relevant to assess modern Indian intelligence after
independence. The author asks and answers questions about how and why the
Indians were surprised by the Chinese in 1962. The intelligence aspect, or the
lack of it, and the reasons for this lack leading to the 1962 crisis, are explored in
great and professional detail. The author’s assessment that “the 1962 surprise
was multi-causal, and in that there are much stronger reasons than the failure of
strategic intelligence, which are causally linked to the intelligence culture of the
Nehru days”, is completely accurate. The events leading up to the 1971 war
and the breakup of Pakistan, with the R&AW’s role is what everyone except
Pakistanis love to talk about. The academic aspects and the practical imple
mentation are what the author brings out very clearly. And the generally pro
claimed intelligence failure that Indians talk about – Kargil in 1999. The
background about Pakistani compulsions and expectations, an especially
important aspect of the reasons why this happened at all, has been very well
portrayed. The Indian security establishment underwent a detailed heart and
soul searching and more organisations were created, some by taking away from
the functions of R&AW.
xii Foreword
The narratives then set the stage for examining the root causes for such
intelligence and policy performances in Part IV asserting that intelligence cul
ture is central to the understanding of intelligence-surprise dynamics. This is
the essence of the book. Comprising two chapters, this part is an articulation of
India’s intelligence culture. It argues that the origins of India’s intelligence
culture lie in its strategic culture, which determines the strength of India’s
strategic intelligence organisation, activity and product. It exposes that India’s
intelligence culture is composed of “five interlinked pillars” on which India’s
intelligence-surprise dynamics reside. The five pillars are the various strengths
of - leadership, organisations, covert action, consumer literacy and international
relations. Each aspect matters but quite often consumer illiteracy or indifference
is an important and underrated part of the cycle.
All intelligence agencies go through the familiar problems of poor interagency
co-ordination leading to intelligence bureaucracies in competition rather than
active co-operation; intelligence bureaucracies end up producing numerous
reports of little value to the consumer; lack of funds and cumbersome controls and
procedures have been familiar refrains among intelligence agencies, sometimes
with justification. This is not typical of the Indian system but happens among
almost all agencies functioning in a democratic environment. The more important
aspect is about developing an intelligence culture in India and the need to have it.
It goes beyond just sharing intelligence and joint operations. It is about the security
system, the politician, the media, and understanding and promoting the modern
definition of security and intelligence. It is not about securing the place after the
event but much more about anticipating, about area, language, region and subject
expertise and operational capabilities in the covert aspects of intelligence. Intelli
gence capabilities are best developed in times of peace, such as the capability to
fight a long war. It is wise, therefore, to develop an intelligence culture in the
fullness of time.
Appreciating these factors, the book then ends, quite appropriately, with an
epilogue on reviving the Kautilyan intelligence culture for India’s national
security in the 21st century and the need for continued intelligence studies. The
author is right in arguing that India requires an offensive intelligence capability to
tackle its national security challenges in the new millennium. Sharper offensive
intelligence capabilities, including cyber and artificial intelligence, become
necessary considering the security situation that India faces with two hostile
nuclear powers as neighbours. India’s Intelligence Culture and Strategic Surprises is a
commendable effort in documenting the evolution of India’s intelligence culture
in the 20th century and paving the way for the 21st century.
Looking forward to a sequel to this book.
Vikram Sood
Former Secretary (Research and Analysis Wing)
Government of India, Gurugram
Acknowledgements
The confidence to write a book on the topic of foreign intelligence, especially

of a country renowned for secrecy, could not have been acquired but for the
support and encouragement given by several retired intelligence officers and
security personnel. It was their earnest belief that an academic study on intelli
gence was necessary in the larger interest of the nation and its people that gave
birth to this study. Some of them have been identified by their names in this
book. But many have chosen to remain anonymous, implying that I will never
be able to publicly acknowledge the kind of support I have received from
them. Therefore, my first word of gratitude is owed to these individuals who,
even after spending most of their lives in service of the nation, are still driven
by intellectual curiosity and service mentality.
I would like to wholeheartedly thank my supervisors, Professor Rob Dover
and Professor Mark Phythian. My introduction to academic literature on
Intelligence Studies in 2013 began with consulting their works, which are
considered essential reading in all the intelligence academies that I have known.
Little did I know at that time that I would be fortunate enough to work under
their close supervision. Their curiosity despite several years of specialisation in
the subject, combined with their unbelievable sense of humour, honestly
denied me the much-celebrated stressful part of a PhD life. I can only hope that
at least a part of their work ethic and style has rubbed off on me. I am also
grateful to Dr Andrew Futter, Dr David Stratchan-Morris, Dr Tara McCormack,
Dr Richard Whitaker and Dr Joshua Baker for their constructive comments that
helped me shape some of the arguments made in this thesis.
I would like to thank Ms Cleo Paskal, Dr Saumyajit Ray, Professor Chintamani
Mahapatra, Professor M.D. Nalapat, Professor Arvind Kumar and Dr Nanda
Kishor for their support during my master’s and M. Phil days that helped to shape
this research project. No number of words can capture my gratitude to two
scholars – Dr Bidanda Chengappa and Dr Prem Mahadevan. Dr Chengappa
constantly reminded me that he was seeing his dream in me, which meant that I
did not have to find a better source of motivation. Dr Mahadevan, being the first
and only Indian scholar of Intelligence Studies, patiently read each and every draft
of this book and ensured that many of the anxieties and obstacles that a debutant
would face were somewhat alleviated. I am also thankful to Air Vice-Marshal
xiv Acknowledgements
(Retd) Arjun Subramaniam and Lieutenant General (Retd) K. Surendranath for
being a constant source of encouragement and learning. Towards the closing days
of my research, I had the good fortune of meeting and learning from Dr Avinash
Paliwal who shares an extraordinary interest in the subject.
As I have already mentioned, I began developing an interest in Intelligence
Studies in 2013. Apart from my supervisors, my understanding of the subject
was greatly enhanced by the works of Professor Loch K. Johnson, Dr Mark
M. Lowenthal, Professor Philip H.J. Davies, among several others. I am
thankful to all these scholars, particularly Professor Davies for having shown a keen
interest in my work and sharing with me his work on intelligence in ancient India.
I am also thankful to the librarians and staff of the numerous academies that I
visited for my research work. While some cannot be named, the staff at the
archives of India, the U.S.A. and the U.K. were particularly helpful.
I am extremely grateful to the University of Leicester and the Department of
Politics and International Relations for giving me the opportunity for conducting
research on a topic that I have desired to work on for close to a decade. I am
thankful for the award of the International PGR Excellence Award and the
College of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities Postgraduate Fund Award that
significantly lessened the financial tensions that a researcher from a third world
country would otherwise have suffered.
Finally, I thank my friends and family. They have patiently stood by me
for years. Without their tolerance of my absence, faith in my abilities and
much-needed encouragement, this research could not have been possible.
Abbreviations
ACAS-Int – Assistant Chief of Air Staff- Intelligence

AMIR – Annual Military Intelligence Review
ARC – Aviation Research Centre
BJP – Bharatiya Janata Party
BSF – Border Security Force
CGS – Chief of General Staff
CIA – Central Intelligence Agency
CIRO – Cabinet Intelligence and Research Office
COAS – Chief of Army Staff
COIN – Counterinsurgency
COSC – Chiefs of Staff Committee
CRO – Commonwealth Relations Office
DG ISI – Director General of the Inter-Services Intelligence
DGMI – Director General of Military Intelligence
DGMO – Director General of Military Operations
DGS – Directorate General of Security
DIA – Defence Intelligence Agency
DIB – Director Intelligence Bureau
DIPAC – Defence Imagery Processing and Analysis Centre
EBR – East Bengal Regiment
EMS – Ear-Marking Scheme
EPR – East Pakistan Rifles
FBI – Federal Bureau of Investigation
FCNA – Force Command Northern Areas
FCO – Foreign and Commonwealth Office
FPSC – Federal Public Service Commission
GCHQ – Government Communications Headquarters
GOC-in-C – General Officer Commanding-in-Chief
HBR – Henderson Brooks-Bhagat Report
HUMINT – Human Intelligence
IAF – Indian Air Force
IB – Intelligence Bureau
IC – Intelligence Community
xvi Abbreviations
IDR – Indian Defence Review
IFAS – Indian Frontier Administrative Service
IFS – Indian Foreign Service
INDU – Indian National Defence University
IPS – Indian Police Service
ISI – Inter-Services Intelligence
ITA – Indian Trade Agency
J&K – Jammu and Kashmir
JIC – Joint Intelligence Committee
KCIA – Korean Central Intelligence Agency
KGB – Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti
KHAD – Khadamat-e Aetla’at-e Dawlati
KRC – Kargil Review Committee
LOC – Line of Control
MACV – Military Assistant Command, Vietnam
MEA – Ministry of External Affairs
MHA – Ministry of Home Affairs
MI – Military Intelligence
MI5 – Military Intelligence, Section 5
MINTSD – Military Intelligence Training School and Depot
MoD – Ministry of Defence
MoF – Ministry of Finance
NAI – National Archives of India
NEFA – Northeast Frontier Agency
NIS – National Intelligence Service (Greece)
NLI – Northern Light Infantry
NMML – Nehru Memorial Museum and Library
NSA – National Security Advisor
NTRO – National Technical Research Organisation
ORBAT – Order of Battle
OT – Operation TOPAC
PDNI – Principal Director Naval Intelligence
PIB – Pakistani Intelligence Bureau
PLA – People’s Liberation Army
PME – Professional Military Education
POK – Pakistan Occupied Kashmir
R&AW – Research and Analysis Wing
RAS – Research and Analysis Service
SAM – Surface to Air Missiles
SAS – Special Air Service
SFF – Special Frontier Force
SIGINT – Signals Intelligence
SIS – Secret Intelligence Service
SLO – Security Liaison Officer
SSB – Special Service Bureau
Abbreviations xvii
TECHINT – Technical Intelligence
UK JIC – Joint Intelligence Committee (United Kingdom)
UKNA – National Archives of the United Kingdom
WASO – Winter Air Surveillance Operations
Introduction
What causes intelligence failures? And, why are nations caught off-guard?
These questions have provoked scholarly curiosity over several decades. Starting
with Roberta Wohlstetter’s pioneering work on Pearl Harbor, a huge corpus of
literature has emerged in Western academia that has predominantly focused on
the organisational studies of intelligence. This book examines the utility of
culture as an explanatory facet in intelligence failures and strategic surprises and
enables the movement of Intelligence Studies (IS) beyond the Anglosphere. To
do so, it aims to answer the questions: Is there a distinct way in which India
‘thinks about’ and ‘does’ foreign and strategic military intelligence? What is the
relationship between Indian intelligence culture and surprise attacks? The book
emerged as a project intending to bring India’s wars – the 1962 Sino-Indian
War, the 1971 War of Bangladesh Liberation and the 1999 Kargil War – into
the discipline of IS. This was because contemporary India’s security history has
been studied from various perspectives like political and diplomatic history,
military analysis and so on. However, there is a dearth of serious academic studies
on the intelligence dimensions of these wars, leading to the emergence of some
preconceived notions of intelligence failures that have never been subjected to
scholarly scrutiny. Also, it was found that one of the serious limitations of the
academic discipline of Intelligence Studies was its overwhelming focus on the
American, European and Israeli cases. Thus, combining the two lacunas, it was
amply clear that a project on Indian intelligence was timely and necessary.
In addition to this geographic contribution to IS, the Indian cases are significant
in understanding the nature of intelligence-surprise dynamics. Scholarship on
strategic surprises has suffered from an inability to conduct comparative studies
between peacetime intelligence successes and intelligence failures, thereby,
evading opportunities to develop a normative theory of intelligence. This book
has had the privilege of observing one of the rare instances of intelligence
success – the 1971 war. Through the comparative analysis of the cases of fail
ures and success, this book challenges the traditional arguments on intelligence
failures and strategic surprises by emphasising the importance of culture in
linking the two variables. In so doing, the book argues that it is indispensable to
understand the role of culture in impacting intelligence performances and
causing strategic surprises.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003296195-1
2 India’s Intelligence Culture and Strategic Surprises
By tracing the ideational foundations of Indian intelligence culture and
empirically observing the influence of intelligence culture on the case studies,
the book makes the following contributions:
• It exposes the limitations of adhering to purely organisational level studies

to understand intelligence-surprise dynamics;
• It emphasises the salience of culture as an explanatory factor in intelligence
failures and strategic surprises;
• It challenges some of the conventional wisdom on intelligence like the
Kahn’s Law and the nature of military analysis;
• Finally, it debunks several of the extant arguments of intelligence failures
in the Indian cases by revealing the multicausal nature of strategic surprises.
Structure of the Book

This book is divided into four parts:
• The introductory part is titled India’s Foreign Intelligence and Strategic Surprises;
• The second part is historical in nature and titled The Evolution of Indian
Intelligence Culture;
• The third part consists of the case studies and is titled Case Studies of
India’s Wars;
• The fourth part is the analytical portion of this book, which is titled Indian
Intelligence Culture and Strategic Surprises in Perspective.
The introductory part contains a single chapter that outlines the terminologies
used in the book and engages the literature on intelligence-surprise dynamics in
order to establish the importance of intelligence culture. It offers the survey of
literature in IS and India’s Security Studies to expose the glaring gaps as well as
justify the necessity of this study. It also introduces the definitions of the key
terms used in this research, namely, ‘intelligence’ and ‘surprise’. Finally, the
chapter locates this research within the frameworks of critical theory and critical
empiricism, as it seeks to both provide a space for India in the Western-domi
nated discipline of IS, as well as emancipate the intelligence voices that have
hitherto been submerged under the weight of politico-diplomatic and military
narratives of India’s security history.
Part II aims to inform the reader about the evolutionary process of India’s
intelligence culture and the vital components of it. This part is divided into
three chapters. The first chapter focuses on the ideas of intelligence as espoused
in the ancient Indian text – the Arthashastra. As the chapter shall detail, this
text, written by Kautilya, is the most comprehensive of ancient Indian scholarly
works on statecraft. By culling out the ideas of intelligence from the Artha
shastra, the chapter presents the native ideas of intelligence prior to the arrival of
the colonists. The second chapter then focuses on the colonial period and
observes how the advent of colonialism and British ideas and practices of
Introduction 3
intelligence affected the knowledge and principles of intelligence in the
subcontinent. This chapter is of particular salience, as the modern-day
Indian Intelligence Bureau traces its origins to the colonial period. After having
observed the transformation of ideas of intelligence in the subcontinent from
ancient times to the pre-independence era, the final chapter observes the
interaction of Kautilyan thought and colonialism with the ideas of intelligence
espoused by key individuals in the early independence years. This chapter is
crucial in understanding how modern Indian intelligence culture took shape
around the time of independence. It extracts certain key facets that then form
the basis for reasoning India’s strategic surprises. In effect, this part tries to
inform the reader about the ‘thought processes’ guiding the development and
employment of strategic intelligence in India’s foreign and security policies.
Part III again consists of three chapters. Here, the individual cases are investi
gated to identify the reasons for strategic surprises and/or counter-surprise. The
thick narratives on the evolution of Indian intelligence organisations and the
conduct of intelligence operations during the 20th century offered in these three
chapters serve as a basis for understanding the nature of intelligence-surprise
dynamics in India. The first chapter in this part attempts to understand the causes
of the strategic surprises encountered by India prior to and during the 1962 Sino-
Indian War. Drawing on archival material from India, U.K. and the U.S., and
interviews with retired officials, the chapter makes the first comprehensive assess
ment of the nature of Indian intelligence infrastructure aimed at developing China
related strategic intelligence. It challenges existing perceptions about the nature of
surprise and exposes that analytical failures were partly facilitated by collection
failures, which were a consequence of the neglect of intelligence profession by the
nation’s policymakers. Finally, in assessing the Indian military’s interaction with
strategic intelligence, the chapter concludes that the surprises India encountered in
1962 were a consequence of both intelligence and policy failures.
The second chapter of this part aims to understand the spectacular performance
of the Indian intelligence prior to the outbreak of the 1971 Indo-Pak War. Like
the previous chapter, this also relies on archival material, private papers of key
officials, and interviews with former intelligence officers to examine the reforms
that took place in the post-1962 period to understand the impact of strategic
intelligence on India’s military policy and planning. The chapter argues that the
organisational reforms were a consequence of a change in India’s approach to
national security under a new political leadership. This transformation advanced
both operational and analytical strengths within the Indian intelligence bureau
cracies whilst also improving intelligence-policy relationship. Through the analysis
of the Indian intelligence assessments and operations prior to and during the war,
the chapter concludes that the success of the 1971 war owes in large part to the
successes of both intelligence and policy.
The last chapter of this part aims to explore the causes for the surprise of
1999. Unlike the previous chapters, this chapter does not enjoy the availability
of archival material and hence relies extensively on interviews with Indian
intelligence and security officials to investigate the organisational and
operational dimensions of the events leading to the Kargil War. Examining the
changes that occurred within the Indian intelligence bureaucracies, alongside
the shifts that had occurred in the regional geopolitical environment, the
chapter identifies that these developments indeed had an impact on Indian
intelligence performances. However, on examining other evidence, the chapter
challenges existing perceptions of intelligence failure as the cause of the Kargil
surprise and argues that both intelligence and policy failures were responsible for
the surprise, wherein the latter appears a stronger explanation than the former.
The evidence examined in this chapter reveals that the Pakistani intruders could
have been identified in time as well as the futility of peace overtures towards
Pakistan could have been appreciated if the consumers of intelligence were not
operating on rigid mindsets. Thus, taken together, the three chapters in this part
argue that the surprises of 1962 and 1999, and the counter-surprise of 1971, were
both results of intelligence and policy performances. The narratives then set the
stage for examining the root causes of such intelligence and policy performances
in the next part.
Part IV then engages the central argument of this book that intelligence culture
is central to the understanding of intelligence-surprise dynamics. Comprising of
two chapters, this part firstly provides a comprehensive articulation of India’s
intelligence culture by finding its origins in India’s strategic culture, which in turn
determines the strength of the intelligence organisation, activity and product. The
first chapter in this part traces the origins of the findings of the case studies to
India’s strategic culture. It observes how the trifactorial representation of India’s
strategic culture, i.e. restraint, ambiguity and autonomy, has caused the emergence
of a particular kind of intelligence culture peculiar to India. The exposition of this
intelligence culture is made possible by extracting five key factors which interact
together to cause or avert strategic surprises. The five pillars are:
• Strength of intelligence leadership

• Strength of intelligence organisation
• Strength of covert action capabilities
• Strength of consumer literacy
• Strength of international relations
The argument this chapter makes is that these five factors are deeply
interconnected to each other and directly linked to the occurrences of
strategic surprises. Drawing heavily on interviews with former intelligence
officers, this chapter makes a critical contribution to scholarly understanding
of India’s foreign intelligence culture and strategic surprises.
The final chapter attempts to connect the study of India’s intelligence culture
with the academic literature on intelligence failures and strategic surprises as
traced in Part I to support the argument of this book that cultural level studies
are more promising than organisational level studies. It exposes the limitations
of applying the Western theories of intelligence performances and strategic
surprises on the Indian case. The uniqueness that emerges from the arguments
Introduction 5
made in this chapter pave the way for the thesis that cultural level studies are
better to understand global intelligence than organisational studies. In other
words, the chapter concludes with the argument that how a nation ‘thinks about’
and ‘does’ intelligence is fundamental to understanding its intelligence-surprise
dynamics, which mere organisational level studies cannot reveal.
Section I
India’s Foreign Intelligence
and Strategic Surprises
1 Contextualising Intelligence
Culture and Strategic Surprises
Introduction
The Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) 1998 election manifesto had promised to
revamp the intelligence agencies and enhance the traditional and technical
capabilities of India’s external intelligence agencies.1 Before these electoral
promises could be put to test, the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA)
government was faced with a surprise Pakistani intrusion in the Kargil sector
that led to a brief war to evacuate the occupying forces from the Kargil hilltops.
Subsequently, the government was compelled to organise a high-level review
committee, known as the Kargil Review Committee to review the events lead
ing to the war. The findings of the committee and the allegations of intelligence
failure in public discourses notwithstanding, a performance appraisal on national
security submitted by the then Home Minister Lal Krishna Advani in 2004
observed three critical maladies afflicting the Indian intelligence services at the
end of the 20th century.2 These were:
• Lack of co-ordination between agencies had led to the production of

intelligence, especially operational intelligence, more for record than
substance;
• Intelligence bureaucracies had been producing a plethora of reports, which
they considered vital, but the consumer found barely usable. The system
was intelligence illiterate and the producers were ignorant of consumer
needs; and
• Paucity of funds and cumbersome controls and procedures had crippled
the agencies of resources.
On identification of these issues, the report boasted about the reforms the
regime had undertaken to rectify these maladies. At the apex level, an Intelli
gence Coordination Group was created for co-ordination and oversight of the
intelligence agencies. At the organisational levels, modelled on the United
States’ Defense Intelligence Agency, a Defence Intelligence Agency was created
to co-ordinate the functioning of the service intelligence agencies and act as the
principal intelligence advisor to the Defence Minister and the Chief of Defence
DOI: 10.4324/9781003296195-3
Staff (a post that was created only on 24 December 2019). Again, taking cues
from the US, the National Technical Research Organisation was formed
replicating the National Security Agency. Within the Intelligence Bureau, a
Multi-Agency Centre was created to tackle the problem of terrorism.
Only time will tell if these reforms have cured the maladies identified by L.K.
Advani. Informed analysis will have to await further declassification of
information, mostly on the role these agencies played in subsequent surprises like
the 26/11 Mumbai Attacks and other foreign policy blunders. This book is limited
to the 20th-century experiences of India’s foreign intelligence in averting strategic
surprises. More than addressing the organisational and structural ailments that
Advani alluded to, this book addresses another important point raised in the Home
Minister’s report. The report stated that:
“both the capability of the system to be intelligence literate and of the producers
to gauge consumer’s needs was at fault and there was no institutional
mechanism to correct the distortion [emphasis added]”.3
What does it mean to be “intelligence literate”? And why was there no

institutional mechanism to rectify this illiteracy even half a century after
independence and numerous instances of strategic surprises? The peculiarity
of this finding by the Home Minister clearly suggests that there is something
more than merely organisational weaknesses that causes intelligence failures
and strategic surprises in India. A lot, therefore, depends on how India thinks
about and does intelligence. In other words, the ideational and philosophical
underpinnings of India’s intelligence practices form an influential basis in
understanding its intelligence performances.
Terminology
Intelligence
The definition of intelligence is not an easy task, as different nations, observers,
scholars define the term differently. One of the scholars who believes in the
cultural approach to study intelligence has argued that the Western definitions
of intelligence do not facilitate proper understanding of the term in regions
beyond the Anglosphere, and thus, “intelligence is insight from information
from any means necessary”.4 The problem with such an overarching definition
is that it reeks of vagueness which fits Wilhelm Agrell’s adage that “when
everything is intelligence, nothing is intelligence”.5 A finite definition is,
therefore, required to facilitate an academic study of Indian intelligence. This
section, thus, offers a brief engagement with certain definitions of intelligence
proposed by Western scholars and arrives at a specific definition for usage in
this book. It, firstly, reduces the burden of reinventing the wheel and allows
intellectual appropriation from Western scholars who have pondered exten
sively over the question of defining intelligence. Secondly, the definitions
Contextualising Intelligence Culture and Strategic Surprises 11
employed by scholars, mainly in the U.S. and the U.K., can be considered
liberally in the present study, as Indian intelligence organisations are fashioned
mostly on the British and American intelligence bureaucracies.6 This factor will
also be amply established in the coming chapters.
Definitions by American scholars like Michael Warner, that, “intelligence is
secret state activity to understand and influence foreign entities”, establishes a
visible Washington centric conception of the term.7 Later U.S. scholars criticised
Warner’s definitions for not adequately covering open-source intelligence.8
Eventually, Warner refined his approach to defining intelligence and accepted the
definition offered by Milton Diaz, which was a result of interviews with 66
interviewees from American intelligence, military and academia:
“any process that produces knowledge that might be used in making a

decision, or, influencing the processes, knowledge, or decisions of com
petitors, and, in the face of competitors’ efforts – real or imagined – to
affect one’s own processes, knowledge, or decisions in matters of national
policy”.9
Meanwhile, scholars in the U.K., attempting to look beyond the U.S., defined
intelligence as:
“the mainly secret activities – targeting, collection, analysis, dissemination

and action – intended to enhance security and/or maintain power relative
to competitors by forewarning of threats and opportunities”.10
The above definition is comprehensive as it covers all activities that fall within
the intelligence matrix and also the purpose to which intelligence serves.
However, even this definition falls short of what is intended to be achieved in
this study as it focuses primarily on the activity and product, not so much on
the organisation. To tackle this problem, the book falls back to the age-old
study on strategic intelligence by Sherman Kent, where intelligence is what
“intelligence devotees usually mean when they use the word”, i.e. organisation,
activity and product that results in “the knowledge that our highly placed
civilians and military men must have to safeguard the national welfare”.11
While dealing with an unexplored nation, where one is not sure what
exactly intelligence means – none of the interviewees of this research could offer a
satisfying definition, nor is there an official charter of duties for the Indian intelligence
agencies, except the executive order of Indira Gandhi (see Chapter 6 ), through which
one can deduce a definition – Kent’s definition is the most suitable, as it encom
passes not only the activities enshrined in the intelligence cycle, but also points
to the actors and institutions involved; their organisational objectives, i.e. the
intelligence product; and the larger purpose, i.e. the generation of knowledge
to assist national security policy. Therefore, this book does not concern itself
with counterintelligence and covert action, as long as they do not impact the
development of foreknowledge that is required by policymakers and military
planners to enhance military readiness. What it mainly concerns itself is with
the enemy’s war potential – the intentions and capabilities to attack – and, the
ability of Indian intelligence to produce such knowledge. As are evident, tac
tical aspects are also excluded unless they have a bearing on the intelligence
agencies’ ability to uncover the enemy’s strategic intentions.
A definition that covers all the concerns cited above has been provided by
Adda Bozeman who argued that strategic intelligence should:
“facilitate the steady pursuit of long-range policy objectives even as it

provides guidance in the choice of tactically adroit ad hoc responses to
particular occurrences in foreign policy”.12
Thus, intelligence, as used in this book, is of strategic nature, with tactical and
operational intelligence limited to those having strategic consequences; produced
by central intelligence organisations dedicated to conducting activities that pro
duce such knowledge about the adversary to enable long-term foreign and mili
tary policy and planning, aimed at either averting or adequately engaging a
developing threat.
Surprise
Like intelligence, the term surprise used in this book is also in a strategic sense,
which is an occurrence that has a long-term gestation period and/or a sudden
occurrence that has long-term consequences. It is something that has been thor
oughly ignored and, therefore, resulted in insufficient preparation.13 Strategic sur
prises, in essence, are those events that have a low probability of occurrence but
have a high impact when they do occur. In the national security domain, Ariel
Levite has defined strategic surprise as “the sudden realisation that one has been
operating on an erroneous threat perception”.14 As the threat perception of the
victim of surprise encompasses assumptions at the political, diplomatic, economic
and social levels, it is a broad phenomenon.15 This book does deal with all of these
kinds of surprises, but only to the extent that they manifest in the form of a sudden
military offensive. A “surprise attack” as the phenomenon is known, is the final
manifestation of a “strategic surprise”, which is the focus of this study.
Ephraim Kam’s exposition on the phenomenon of surprise is useful in
determining the meaning of the term for this book:
“On a theoretical scale, we might identify at one end a complete absence of

surprise, where the actual development precisely matches our expectations;
a complete absence of surprise finds us well prepared. At the other end of
the scale is total surprise, in which the event, having never been envisaged,
takes us completely unprepared”.16
Between total surprise and an absence of one, lies the varying degrees of sur
prises that nations experience. Such experiences are a consequence of the
assumptions and beliefs that drive the country’s foreign and military policies.
With regard to surprise attacks, they can manifest from five basic questions
being answered incorrectly: whether an attack will occur, why will the attack
occur, what kind of an attack, and, where and when will the attack occur? A
total surprise occurs when several of the questions have not been answered
correctly, most importantly the questions regarding foreseeing the attack.
However, if the nation had foreseen an attack but was surprised by its nature,
location and time, it is considered a partial surprise.17 The connecting variable
between assumptions and expectations and the occurrence of a surprise attack is
warning intelligence. Successful warning intelligence alerts the nation to the
coming attack and guides military preparedness. The degree of preparedness is,
thence, proportional to the influence of the assumptions and beliefs held prior
to the warning, and the timeliness and clarity with which the warning intelli
gence impacts the pre-crisis preparedness. Therefore, in this book, surprise is
used in a strategic sense that indicates a failure in threat perception, resulting in
inadequate military readiness. In other words, surprise in this book is used in a
negative strategic politico-military sense and an outcome of inadequate military
readiness.18 Tactical or partial surprise is not the central feature of this book.
Literature Review
Why study cultures of intelligence?

The study of intelligence and surprises has traversed through two generations of
scholarship. The first generation addressed the topic using several cases from
World War II and the Cold War.19 The efforts of these scholars were aimed at
developing a normative theory of intelligence. In course of time, several
impediments in the process of successful generation of intelligence and aversion
of surprise attacks were identified. However, in pursuit of a normative theory
of intelligence, scholarship got divided into orthodox and revisionist schools of
thought.20 The former, being the larger group, concluded that intelligence
failures and surprise attacks are inevitable considering the irreparable nature of
the psychological faculties of intelligence analysts and the political dimensions
of decision making.21 Drawing on this conclusion, one senior scholar wrote in
1980 that “the theory of military surprises seems to have reached a point of
diminishing returns”.22 Hence, for this school of thinkers, intelligence reforms
appeared only marginally beneficial.
The revisionist school of thinkers, for their part, believed that a normative
theory of intelligence was indeed achievable. According to them, the orthodox
scholars had failed in reaching a normative theory because of their failure to
study cases of intelligence successes.23 For the revisionists, the psychological and
political constraints were less consequential than the quality of intelligence
collection. Through a comparative analysis of the Pearl Harbor failure and the
success of the Battle of Midway, for instance, Levite concluded that the main
culprit in causing surprise attacks was not the analyst or the policymaker, but
insufficient intelligence collection.24 So, if the orthodox scholars argued that
surprises occurred despite warnings, the revisionists countered that surprises
occurred devoid of warnings.
Notwithstanding the commendable efforts of this generation of scholars in
dissecting numerous cases throughout the period and facilitating a vibrant
debate over the feasibility of having a normative theory of intelligence, there
were serious limitations to what they could achieve. As identified by the revi
sionists, the orthodox scholars failed to study any cases of intelligence success.
However, where the revisionists claim to have studied cases of intelligence
successes, like the Battle of Midway, they have been a case from an ongoing
war. The orthodox scholars have regarded this as a comparison of “peacetime
apples with wartime oranges”.25 Therefore, where the revisionists have rightly
identified a loophole in the orthodox school, they have been unable to con
vincingly fill the gap by studying peacetime cases of intelligence successes. It is
against this backdrop, that one could have agreed with Handel’s proclamation
that the study of surprises had actually reached its end. However, the 9/11
attacks and the birth of transnational terrorism exposed another lacuna in the
study of intelligence, viz. the lack of representation of nations outside the
Anglosphere. A new generation of scholars emerged with an understanding that
cultural studies of intelligence elsewhere is necessary to understand how global
intelligence agencies operate and the kind of results that such diverse operational
methods have achieved.
To be sure, the debate between orthodox and revisionist schools has sustained
even in the post-9/11 scholarship. Even in the context of counterterrorism, some
scholars have argued that intelligence failure and surprises are inevitable and only
marginal improvements in the intelligence product can be achieved through
reforms.26 Similarly, post-9/11 revisionist scholars have countered that improve
ments in intelligence collection can avert surprise attacks.27 However, unsurpris
ingly, these scholars are also focused on American intelligence, and thus, have had
little to offer about the working of intelligence elsewhere. One scholar, Or Honig,
attempted to apply the orthodox-revisionist dichotomy to study the case of the
Yom Kippur War and arrived at a middle-ground suggesting that both the schools
had their own set of drawbacks.28 Although Honig expresses the shortcomings in
both the camps, the fundamental question on the applicability of the orthodox-
revisionist dichotomy on non-American cases remained largely unanswered. His
work did not consider the structural, environmental and organisational differences
between the U.S. and Israel. It is against this backdrop that the new generation of
scholars has begun placing culture at the centre of academic focus.
Even here, it must be noted that the mention of culture in the study of
intelligence is not entirely a 21st-century development. Gerald Hopple had
observed in his analysis of the British failure to predict the Argentine intentions
prior to the Falkland Islands War that “intensity” as a cultural trait that deter
mined Argentinian proactive measures, even when all military and political
factors indicated restraint, was missed by the British analysts.29 In the 1990s,
Adda Bozeman’s seminal work “Strategic Intelligence and Statecraft” had
warned the American policymakers of the cultural diversity in the non-Western
regions that demanded upgradation in American intelligence capabilities.30 Yet,
it took the emergence of transnational terrorism as a national security threat to
the West, alongside the 2003 Iraq war debacle, to provoke systematic cultural
approaches to the study of intelligence. While some scholarly calls for a
‘beyond the Anglosphere’ approach to the study of intelligence seem motivated
by a desire to draw lessons for the U.S. from cultures that have long grappled
with problems of terrorism and so on,31 others have focused on culture to
expand the scope of Intelligence Studies and improve the quality of academic
debates surrounding intelligence failures and surprises.32
The U.S. and the U.K. are the two most prominently represented countries in
Intelligence Studies. This owes in large part to the origins of the discipline in these
countries and also, to the disproportionate availability of governmental data to
support scholarly work than in most other countries. The 2003 Iraqi debacle,
caused by both the U.S. and the U.K., and its subsequent diagnosis by Philip
Davies brought to focus the nuances that Intelligence Studies would have to
embrace and called into question the inadequate focus on cultures of intelli
gence.33 As reflected in the discussion on the meaning of the term intelligence in
different countries, Davies argued that:
“the difference between definitions is not simply a semantic variation.

Rather these definitions reflect, and sometimes even drive, fundamental
differences in how intelligence institutions have taken place in the two
countries”.34
Davies’ work on intelligence failures questions the rationality behind the most
fundamental objective that the first generation of intelligence scholars had sought
to achieve, i.e. theorisation of intelligence. According to him, empirical research
is of greater importance, and the emergent trends and patterns need not neces
sarily become theories. Thus, by comparing the British and American intelli
gence, he concluded that “the development of intelligence theory and the achievement of
intelligence order and coordination are actually inversely corelated” [emphasis original].35
The impetus to theorise intelligence is, in fact, a reflection of the American
political culture that places emphasis on legalities of institutions and formulation
of doctrines and theories.
Although Davies used the recent case of the 2003 Iraq failure, the differences
in operational cultures deriving from differing political cultures of the respective
countries were visible even earlier. For instance, in counterintelligence, the U.S.
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the British Security Service (MI5),
although faced with a common espionage threat by the Germans during World
War II, followed different operational methods. Considering the two major
counterintelligence successes achieved by the FBI in 1941–42 – the uncovering
of German spies William Sebold and George Dasch – it is evident that both the
spies were walk-ins, and provided little counterintelligence advantage to the FBI,
as the latter was “eager to present a solid victory to the public” in line with its
law enforcement outlook.36 On the other hand, MI5 apprehended two agents of
the Nazi intelligence Abwehr, codenamed TATE and SUMMER, and success
fully exploited them as double-agents under the Double-Cross System.37 This
cultural difference would play an important role in determining the degree of the
FBI’s ineffectiveness in counterterrorism several decades later as many of the
characteristics such as distinction between intelligence and investigation, deter
mination of personnel promotions on the basis of law enforcement standards, etc.
began to have negative ramifications on the organisation’s performance.
With such visible differences between Britain and the United States – close
cousins, one can only logically conclude that intelligence in other countries also hold
distinct characteristics. In this context, the exploration of national intelligence cultures
has been projected as the most effective method of enhancing the understanding of
the concept.38 Within the observation of national intelligence cultures, i.e. a complex
set of factors emerging out of ideological, organisational, societal, historic and geo
graphic considerations, the cultural approach to the study of intelligence is a lot more
promising than the approaches of the first generation of intelligence scholars that
stuck mostly to the organisational level.39 As Duyvesteyn argues:
“methodologically, the process of intelligence would lend itself well to a

thorough comparison of the role of culture; since it provides a setting in
which one can realistically expect to see through different implementations
of the common tasks of “doing” intelligence; the role of culture providing
influences, orientations and expectations that cannot be reduced to the
internal logic of those tasks”.40
The cultural approach to the study of intelligence drew heavily from the
experiences of strategic studies where it was found that nations have distinct
ways of thinking about the utility of force in statecraft.41 Mark Phythian,
thus, prescribed a comparative model of study that focused on the evolution
and functioning of national intelligence cultures by taking into account the
nation’s strategic environment and regime type alongside organisational and
societal factors.42 In essence, this approach goes beyond mere organisational
level of analysis to provide a foundational and contextual understanding of
intelligence performances. Put simply, the questions regarding how a nation
does intelligence and why it does so are equally important to understand the
organisational behaviour of the respective intelligence services.
The richness of this approach becomes amply visible when one considers the
comparative analyses of the British and Japanese intelligence during World War
II. According to Douglas Ford, it was the “differences in military culture”
between the British and Japanese armies that determined the structure and
functioning of intelligence, which ultimately gave the former an advantage
over Tokyo.43 These differences were in turn shaped by the historical and
geopolitical experiences of the two armies. Hence, the cultural approach is far
more intellectually stimulating and a viable method of studying intelligence in
comparison to purely organisational studies.
Another example to show how cultural approach serves best to study nations
with diverse historical, geographical, political and strategic facets is a compar
ison between a vast nation with significant international influence like Canada
with a tiny island nation in Oceania like the Kingdom of Tonga. During the
Cold War, the Canadian intelligence community was vastly influenced by the
alliance commitments within the UKUSA alliance framework. This served the
Canadians well, as Ottawa preferred a non-aggressive foreign policy; but being
within the alliance also appealed to the “fiscal and policy conservatives”.44
However, the changing strategic environment in the post-9/11 era, which
witnessed the Canadian military involvement in Afghanistan, exposed the
negative consequences of Canada’s minimalist approach towards intelligence.
According to Brunatti, the challenges faced by the Canadian intelligence are a
result of:
“the noted lack of an ‘intelligence culture’ in Canada, which derives from

a risk-averse approach to defence and security in general…[and] a national
political culture that has traditionally viewed intelligence at best with
apathy, and at worst with suspicion”.45
Tonga, on the other hand, constrained by resources and a lack of significant

influence in global affairs, has chosen not to have an intelligence agency at
all.46 Contrarily, Tonga relies solely on diplomats for information. The cul
tural difference, however, becomes stark when one observes how the diplo
mats are chosen and how they come to serve in intelligence roles better than
their counterparts elsewhere. Unlike countries in the West, as well as in India,
where diplomats are chosen from a diplomatic corps to be posted in other
countries on a rotational basis, in Tonga, the king personally appoints indi
viduals as diplomats. These individuals are chosen at an early age and sent
abroad for education or other purposes with a clear mandate and promise of
diplomatic posting in that particular country.47 On return, the individual has
to appear for an examination and undergo psychological tests before being
inducted into the service. The “cultural explanation” for this difference,
notwithstanding other factors like geography, is best captured in the words of
a senior Tongan diplomat:
“the belief in Tonga is that the king brings stability to the island. What
benefits the king benefits the nation. So, there is an implicit long-term
planning when the king personally chooses the diplomatic community
from people who have an international exposure. Some observers may call
it nepotism, but the constitution says that foreign policy is the king’s pre
rogative and, therefore, the system is solid. Many close associates have been
denied positions for lack of trust, character or personality. So, even if there
is no dedicated intelligence agency, there is sufficient information and
knowledge basis for policy”.48
The opposing narratives of Canada and Tonga presented above, where the
former has a dedicated agency but is governed more by risk aversion and alliance
commitments while the latter despite no dedicated intelligence organisation has
sought knowledge-basis for policymaking, clearly demonstrates the distinction
between how countries ‘think about’ and ‘do’ intelligence. Such thought pro
cesses and behaviours are certainly bound to have a bearing on the nation’s
intelligence-surprise dynamics.
In the recent years, however, even the cultural approach has come under
criticism for its inability to provide a clear cause-effect relationship. In fact,
Duyvesteyn had clearly expressed this limitation by professing that culture must
be seen as a “context for understanding rather than possessing a clear causal and
linear relationship with human behaviour”.49 In order to, therefore, both cri
ticise the cultural approach as well as provide a sobering effect by narrowing its
focus, Matthew Crosston warned against being disillusioned by grand narratives
of culture and history and lose focus on empirical evidence. For instance, while
referring to Chinese intelligence culture, Crosston used the term “Sun-Tzu
syndrome” and added that:
“there should be a challenge in academia for a scholar covering Chinese

security and intelligence to write an article without somehow using a
quote or reference to Sun-Tzu as the catch-all explanation of how to
properly understand the Chinese world view”.50
Crosston regarded this a trap, where:
“we are often left reading diatribes about ancient wisdom and historical
ghosts that can never be exorcised and yet do not seem to reveal very
much empirical insights on actual contemporary intelligence reality within
said countries”.51
Using the cases of China, Russia, North Korea, Turkey, Spain and Romania,
Crosston made a fairly convincing argument that culture can steal the
researcher of his/her focus. Instead, the focus ought to be on ‘conditions’ – a
word he devised to encapsulate the organisational dimension of culture.
On the face of it, Crosston’s warning against falling victim to grand strategy
and cultures is probably well founded. However, the argument that the focus
should be purely on the organisational level is largely disputable. The reason for
this is, notwithstanding his discomfort with the word ‘culture’ and the inno
vative usage of the word ‘condition’, Crosston failed to realise that culture is
not stagnant, but is susceptible to evolution and transformation.52 The degree
of variance from a country’s grand cultural identity and its influence on the
nation’s intelligence is only fathomable by a confluence of a degree of specia
lisation in Intelligence and Area Studies.53 Therefore, to embrace or disregard
the Sun-Tzuvian influence on the Chinese intelligence would require the
coming together of an empirical understanding of modern-day Chinese
intelligence systems, strategies and operations, along with a thorough under
standing of the influence of historical, political, geographical and strategic
factors on China’s grand strategy.
Summing up, therefore, it is clear after observing two generations of scholarship
in Intelligence Studies that the cultural approach is, at present, arguably the most
efficient method of studying the role of intelligence beyond the Anglosphere. In
this regard, this book aims to address this gap by providing the first comprehensive
account of Indian intelligence culture.
What is the state of Indian Intelligence Studies?

In 1992 American political scientist George Tanham penned an essay on Indian
strategic thought and reached a conclusion that India lacked strategic thinking.54
It was India’s geographical, historical and cultural experiences developed by
Hindu philosophical underpinnings that, according to Tanham, forbade India
from establishing strategic institutions and/or facilitating strategic thinking. The
essay unsurprisingly provoked the Indian strategic community, which actually led
to the first comprehensive discussion on India’s strategic culture. Very few scho
lars outrightly rejected Tanham’s thesis. To them, the conception that India
lacked strategic thinking simply because of the absence of white papers on
national security was unacceptable because India had traditionally relied on an
oral culture.55 Most other scholars seem to have had sporadic disagreements with
Tanham over several pointers concerning India’s approaches to national
defence.56 However, K. Subrahmanyam vociferously argued in support of Tan
ham’s thesis.57 Thus, began the soul-searching exercise among Indian academics
and analysts to identify India’s strategic culture. Tanham’s thesis, hence, remains
highly relevant for proponents of India’s absent strategic culture, while critics are
astounded that his work must have such a long shelf life.58
From the viewpoint of this book, it is noteworthy that the debate on India’s
strategic culture has hitherto extended to foreign and defence policy institu
tions. Intelligence, on the other hand, has been virtually left out of the debate.
Throughout the 20th century Subrahmanyam was the only one to write on
intelligence within the context of India’s strategic thought. Predictably, his
assessment was in line with his notion that India lacked a strategic culture.
Hence, he wrote that “intelligence setup [in India] was a victim of the policy of
make do”.59 In 2012 Prem Mahadevan reached a similar conclusion in the
context of counterterrorism intelligence when he wrote that:
“Indian counterterrorism remains defensively oriented, relying on intelligence

agencies to succeed where politicians, diplomats, soldiers and policemen have
failed in the prevention of terrorist attacks”.60
Barring these two examples that provide glimpses of Indian intelligence culture,
there have been no serious academic studies on Indian intelligence. One of the
main reasons for this lacuna could be the unavailability of archival information
to scholars. In fact, one scholar has criticised Subrahmanyam’s attribution of
cultural factors to India’s lack of strategic thinking by pointing out that the real
problem lay in the unavailability of data for scholarly analysis of the past, by
virtue of India’s flimsy declassification practices.61 Coupled with the limits on
opportunities for employment, he argued that Strategic Studies in India has,
thus, remained underdeveloped.62 The same is arguably true of Intelligence
Studies too.
Subrahmanyam, being a civil servant, also the former chairman of the Joint
Intelligence Committee, could integrate his service experience with scholarly
abilities – a luxury enjoyed by few in India. Mahadevan’s work also relied
extensively on police documents and interviews with intelligence personnel,
which might not be easily accessible to other scholars. As a result, apart from
media exposés, the small number of writings on Indian intelligence are limited
to organisational descriptive works devoid of much analytical rigour,63 or per
sonal recollections by practitioners that run the obvious risks of professional
biases.64 Undoubtedly, the latter do provide spectacular insights for scholarly
analysis, but by themselves, they fail to articulate India’s intelligence culture.
This book therefore fills a critical gap in the literature on Security and Strategic
Studies in India by examining the role of intelligence agencies in foreign and
security policies. To do so, however, it is important to understand the themes
that have emerged in the hitherto studies conducted on India’s strategic culture.
Under three broad thematic categorisations – restraint, ambiguity and autonomy,
scholars have debated how Indian strategic culture has affected India’s foreign and
defence policies and planning. It is inevitable to examine these themes in order
to facilitate an understanding of India’s intelligence culture. The roots of the
themes lie in India’s adoption of non-alignment as the guiding principle of for
eign policy, which sought to craft an independent path for India’s international
relations – one that was free from alliance commitments and uncompelled by the
strategic needs of other nations.65
Coming off the clutches of colonialism, India, and Prime Minister Nehru in
particular, wished to adopt a Gandhian model of foreign policy that was averse
to the use of force.66 The immediate victim of this policy was the nation’s
armed forces and defence planning. Defence budgets had been consistently low
and modernisation efforts had, thus, suffered. Similar complaints, owing to the
policy of restraint, have been raised by the foreign service personnel.67 Only in
the aftermath of the 1962 and 1965 wars did the policy of restraint get shaken a
bit. Yet, even in instances when India behaved assertively, like the 1971 war, it
restrained from transforming its battlefield successes into strategic victories.68
Critics of India’s strategic restraint pin its origins to India’s moralism, while the
champions of restraint see pragmatism in India’s decision to restrain from being
unnecessarily assertive.69
The second theme, viz. ambiguity, has found its strongest expression in the
nuclear domain. But, in reality, ‘ambiguity’ spreads across Indian policymaking
process.70 Owing to the democratic nature of Indian polity and the constant
fear of public backlash in a parliamentary system, Indian politicians have
deemed it wisest to maintain ambiguity in policies rather than have clearly
written strategic documents. According to them:
“it is best not to reveal such things, or it would be inflammatory and

counterproductive [and hence India] should not ape the west and their
militant foreign policy”.71
This has, however, left the Indian military frustrating over a lack of clear
direction.72 According to Subrahmanyam, “this strategy of decision making has
no doubt ensured that our adversaries are kept in the dark, but so have our
own bureaucracies and politicians”.73
The third theme, i.e. autonomy, is also a product of the historical experiences
culminating in the form of non-alignment. In a world of power asymmetries,
India’s quest for parity required a degree of autonomy in policymaking. This
aspect is fundamental in understanding India’s international relations, especially
with powerful countries like the United States.74 In theory, non-alignment and
autonomy tend to indicate a certain degree of control, and provision of indepen
dent direction to India’s foreign policy. However, critics of this policy have
argued, through empirical observations, that the pragmatism underlying the notion
of strategic autonomy has been lost in practice.75 Strengthening of institutions and
acquirement of capabilities in order to firmly execute an autonomous foreign
policy has been found wanting, owing mainly to the reactive nature of India’s
strategic culture that fails to take initiative.
In summation, examining the extant literature, one can observe a healthy and
vibrant debate on strategic culture among military and foreign policy scholars.
However, the same vibrancy has not extended to the subject of intelligence. What
do these themes of Indian strategic culture mean to India’s intelligence? This is a
question that has, by and large, escaped scholarly attention. Like Tanham, even
here, the first attempt has been made by a Western scholar Matthew Crosston to
locate Indian intelligence within the larger strategic and political culture. Crosston
has written in conclusion that:
“the preoccupation with urgent and intractable domestic and regional pro
blems occasionally creates a sense among Indian and international observers
that the country lacks effective coordination and is prone to something
derogatorily referred to as “ad hoc-ism” and drift. Discerning India’s strategic
intelligence condition, however, needs to take issue with this criticism. With
nearly a dozen problematic neighbours, while continuing to undergo its own
economic and political transformation, commensurate with higher-level
interactions among greater powers, and nearly 15 separate security priorities
mashing many of these players together in diverse ways, there simply is no
other strategic condition available to India than one that is justifiably “ad hoc”
and allows purposeful drift. To observe this adaptability and malleability of
Indian intelligence and take it as a sign that the country lacks purpose and
planning, and therefore weakness, is a Western bias”.76
By stating this, Crosston has rightly pointed out that India is geopolitically
and strategically situated in an entirely different context in comparison to
the Western nation-states. Thus, the notion that Western conceptions of
intelligence cannot be imposed on India is well founded. However, the
issue in Crosston’s conclusion is that his argument that India’s diverse
national security concerns are somehow misunderstood by the likes of Tanham
and Subrahmanyam, who refer to ad hocism, is not sufficiently convincing. He
fails to make an empirical assessment of how intelligence operates in India and
how the consumers of intelligence use the intelligence bureaucracies to further
national security goals. In other words, differences in national security priorities
might justify differing coping mechanisms, but that does not necessarily surmise
that the adopted mechanism is operationally effective. To arrive at such a conclu
sion, it is necessary to methodically examine the way intelligence operated in cases
of successes and failures. To fill this gap, this book, therefore, makes the first
attempt at a cultural analysis of Indian intelligence using two cases of failures and
one case of success.
Research Framework
The aim of this book being the articulation of Indian intelligence culture, finds
itself situated within the broad fields of Intelligence Studies and Security Studies
and based on the application of critical theory, especially its concept of ‘emanci
pation’, as well as critical empiricist approaches. As this book is the first attempt at
introducing a cultural assessment of Indian intelligence to the global Intelligence
Studies community, it aims to break free from the ethnocentric entrapment that
has led to the study of the concept purely from an Anglo-European lens. Sec
ondly, this book is also the first attempt in providing a voice to the Indian intelli
gence community in India’s security history, which has hitherto been submerged
under the weight of political, military and diplomatic narratives. The emancipation
of these submerged voices in the Indian security literature is also best possible
through a critical approach. To do so, an empiricist research framework is neces
sary to understand how ideas and identities have determined how India ‘thinks
about’ and ‘does’ intelligence.
Critical Theory and Intelligence Culture

Intelligence Studies (IS), at least as far as this book is concerned, can be considered
as a close cousin of International Relations (IR) and Security Studies. The relative
nascency of IS as a cohesive discipline demands borrowing certain theoretical
arguments from the intellectual capital of the latter. IR, as an academic discipline,
was dominated throughout the Cold War by a visible ethnocentrism – American
and Eurocentrism. A realisation had emerged, at the end of the Cold War, that the
“Eurocentric model has been guilty of ignoring the constitutive voices that make a
conversation in IR”.77 Some scholars have even gone as far as questioning the
validity of the term “Cold War”, as it views the world only through the lens of
Washington, Moscow and other European capitals. To them, it is not only
absurd, but also lacks sympathy for Vietnam, Korea, India, Pakistan, Iran,
Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries, where the war was indeed “hot”.78
Against this backdrop, the critical theorists aspired to widen the ambit of IR
and empower the hitherto ignored, by “putting the ‘international’ back” in
IR theory.79 The aim was to uplift the Third World nations and replace
the periphery as the core of security studies.
Ken Booth, explained ethnocentrism as:80
1 A term used to describe feelings of group centrality or superiority;

2 A technical term to describe faulty methodology in social sciences;
3 A synonym for being ‘culture bound’.
Unfortunately, IS has suffered from all the three descriptions of ethnocentrism,

as it is largely a Western-dominated discipline. The first generation of scholars
to engage with the question of intelligence-surprise relationship– orthodox and
revisionist schools of thought – battled each other to arrive at a normative
theory of intelligence. As explained above, none of the schools of thought paid
adequate attention to cases outside Europe, North America and Israel.
The orthodox school is particularly guilty of being ‘culture bound’, i.e. “the
inability to see the world through the eyes of a different national or ethnic
group”. For instance, while arguing that intelligence failures are inevitable,
Richard Betts, was only focusing on the problems of American politicians,
threat perceptions through Washington’s lens, and the numerous agencies only
a rich nation like the U.S. could afford.81 From the Pearl Harbor attack to the
2003 Iraq debacle, the cases under their observation have all been American,
European or Israeli intelligence blunders. The early revisionists were not as
guilty as the orthodox scholars, as at least one scholar thought it prudent to use
an Indian case – the 1962 Sino-Indian war – as a case study.82 Nevertheless,
despite their argument that the shortcomings of the other lies in the failure to
study intelligence successes, they themselves are guilty of not attempting to
study the 1971 Indo-Pak war, which is one of the rare cases of intelligence
successes. There is, therefore, a visible ethnocentrism even in IS.
The IS scholarship appears to be reflective of the statist character of realist IR
scholars who argue that factors like domestic politics, although interesting, are
not necessary to understand a state’s international behaviour.83 Similar arguments
were made by realist scholars of Strategic Studies by claiming that the strategic
theorist’s inability to know the identity and culture of the individual or the
nation means nothing to his/her ability to “know how statesmen behave and
why they behave as they do”.84 The critique of the realists’ statist approach is that
the absence of non-statist analysis is what led to the inability of the realists to
foresee the collapse of the Soviet Union. For them, state is an “abstraction”, and
thus, a state’s foreign policy is a group of individuals advocating and developing
common understandings of interests. Scholarship in IS has also been a victim of a
similar trap where cultural nuances are paid little attention while investigating the
causation of intelligence failures and strategic surprises. There seems to be a
misinformed belief that all states and their intelligence services share similar
characteristics.
Against this backdrop, a pilot project like this book that aims to take IS
beyond the Anglosphere, draws heavily from the critical theory of Security
Studies that has “long called for thinking beyond the Cold War categories that
have restricted our ways of ‘thinking’ about and ‘doing’ security”.85 It flows
from this argument that IS ought to begin embracing different cultures of
intelligence by fundamentally asking how different nations ‘think about’ and
‘do’ intelligence. It is through this framework that this book attempts to answer
its central research question surrounding the distinctiveness of the Indian way
of intelligence. Therefore, the underlying assumption of this book is that the
“emancipation” of intelligence services beyond the Anglosphere is necessary to
“problematise and criticise” the status quo in IS.86
Critical Empiricism and Indian Intelligence: The Missing

Dimension in India’s Security Studies Literature
As traced above, Indian security literature has mostly derived from a realist para
digm with the state being the centre of focus. However, the institutions that are
covered predominantly represent the political, military and diplomatic commu
nities. The ignorance of the intelligence community from the security literature
gives it a subaltern status in the literature on Indian Security Studies. Despite being
an elite institution that contributes directly to policymaking like diplomacy and/or
the military, intelligence’s shadowy character – reinforced by the challenges to
overcome the limitations posed by declassification policies and the Official Secrets
Act – has rendered them powerless in terms of scholarly representation.87 During
the late 1980s, Western scholars regarded this aspect as the “missing dimension” of
political, military and diplomatic history that distorted the meaning and “under
standing of other, accessible dimensions”.88 Therefore, in order to emancipate the
intelligence services and enable better understanding of India’s security history, this
book adopts an empiricist approach to observe the ideational development of
India’s intelligence and its security implications.
To be specific, this book adopts a critical empiricist approach to facilitate the
emancipation of the Indian intelligence community from its present obscurity
in the security literature. Empiricism deals mostly with learning through
observation. As is evident from the literature review on Indian Security Studies
presented above, scholars have hitherto learned from making observations on
India’s military and foreign policies that there exist three predominant themes,
namely, restraint, ambiguity and autonomy. This book aims to further the under
standing of India’s security through the observation of the impact of these themes
on India’s intelligence policies and their interplay with the case studies. An
empiricist framework is, therefore, apt given its facilitation of the development of
newer insights that explain relationships – in this case, between Indian intelligence
and strategic surprises.89
Beyond mere empirical observations, it is important to note that the book
draws heavily from the frameworks offered by critical empiricists. To be cri
tical, writes Whitford:
“research must be directed at discrediting the assumptions underlying the

existing legal order or at expressing the point of view and advancing the
interests of underrepresented groups”.90
The goal of critical empiricism has been to challenge the existing order and
demonstrate “how it favours powerful interests and fails to recognise the interests
of others”.91 Given that the emphasis is on observation and empowerment of
weaker groups, one is unlikely to find a better framework than critical empiricism
to study the missing dimension in India’s Security Studies. Indian security literature
has traditionally been dominated by political narratives. The military has constantly
complained a lack of sufficient role and representation in India’s national security
mechanism. In the recent years, however, there has been an emerging body of
literature on the historic role played by the Indian military in contemporary
Indian history.92 So far as the intelligence community are concerned, there is
neither a historical account nor a debate on its larger role in India’s national
security. Academics involved in analysing and prescribing frameworks for
India’s foreign and security policies have deliberately kept the intelligence
agencies out of their purview. For instance, in 2012, a group of academics and
analysts formulated a foreign and strategic policy framework for India in the
21st century. Although their report covered a host of areas concerning India’s
geopolitics and national security, intelligence was the only security institution
to be left out.93
Therefore, a critical empiricist framework is ideal to re-examine the cases of
the 1962, 1971 and 1999 wars by giving a voice to the intelligence agencies.
By doing so, this book aspires to critically observe several allegations of failures
levelled against the Indian intelligence agencies, which are hitherto taken as
objective truths, but its veracity has never been questioned.
Summary: Study of Intelligence Cultures are Needed for Better

Understanding of Intelligence Performances
Having studied the arguments made by two generations of Intelligence Studies
scholarship, it is the argument of this book that organisational level studies have
their limitations in clearly articulating the dynamics between intelligence fail
ures and strategic surprises. This chapter has identified the overwhelming focus
of scholarly attention on cases from America, Europe and Israel, bereft of
context and environment, which has led to inadequate understandings of
intelligence performances. It is necessary to understand the philosophies and
thought processes governing a nation’s security processes to ideally locate and
understand the role played by its intelligence agencies. Given that this is the
first book attempting to make such a comprehensive analysis of India’s external
intelligence, it is inevitable to trace the ideational evolution of foreign and
strategic military intelligence in India’s national security mechanism. The next
part of the book aims to do this.
Notes
1 ‘BJP Election Manifesto’, Bharatiya Janata Party, 1998, p. 197, available at http://
library.bjp.org/jspui/bitstream/123456789/241/1/BJP%20ELECTION%20MANI
FESTO%201998.pdf, accessed on 2 May 2020.
2 L.K. Advani, ‘The NDA Regime and National Security: A Performance
Appraisal’, Party Document, vol. 9, 2004, p. 3, available at http://library.bjp.org/
jspui/bitstream/123456789/272/1/The%20NDA%20Regime%20and%20National
%20Security%20-%20L%20K%20Adwani.pdf, accessed on 3 May 2020.
3 Ibid.
4 Matthew Crosston, ‘Bringing Non-Western Cultures and Conditions into Com
parative Intelligence Perspectives: India, Russia and China’, International Journal of
Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Vol. 29, No. 1, 2016, p. 128.
5 Wilhelm Agrell. ‘When everything is intelligence – nothing is intelligence’, The Sher
man Kent Center for Intelligence Analysis, Vol. 1, No. 4, October 2002, available at
www.cia.gov/library/kent-center-occasional-papers/vol1no4.htm, accessed on 23
September 2019.
6 Prem Mahadevan, The Politics of Counterterrorism in India, London: I.B. Tauris, 2012,
p. 22; Dheeraj P.C., ‘Seaborne terrorism and counterintelligence in India: challenges
and concerns’, Journal of the Indian Ocean Region, Vol.14, No.3, 2018, p. 13.
7 Michael Warner, ‘Wanted: A Definition of Intelligence’, Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 46,
No. 3, 2002, available at www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-p
ublications/csi-studies/studies/vol46no3/article02.html, accessed on 27 January 2019.
8 Kristian J. Wheaton and Michael T. Beerbower, ‘Towards a New Definition of
Intelligence’, Vol. 17, No. 2, 2006, p. 329.
9 Michael Warner, ‘Theories of Intelligence’, in Robert Dover, Michael S. Goodman
and Claudia Hillebrand, Routledge Companion to Intelligence Studies, London: Rou
tledge, 2014, p. 27.
10 Peter Gill and Mark Phythian, Intelligence in an Insecure World, Oxford: Polity Press, 2012.
11 Sherman Kent, Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy, Princeton University
Press, 1966, pp. vii–ix.
12 Adda Bozeman, Strategic Intelligence and Statecraft: Selected Essays, Washington DC:
Brassey’s, 1992, p. 2.
13 Such surprises are also referred to as Black Swan events that are extremely rare and
almost impossible to predict. Hence, policymakers are suggested to assume the worst
and prepare accordingly. For an exposition on this line of thought, see Nassim
Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, London: Pen
guin Books, 2007. In the field of intelligence analysis, the CIA had identified seven
such events back in 1983, namely, the Sino-Soviet split, the development of ALFA
submarine, the Qaddafi takeover in Libya, the OPEC price increase, the revolu
tionary transformation of Ethiopia, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the
destruction of the Shah’s Iran. These events implied a historic discontinuity and,
hence, in the early stages of the developments, the final outcome seemed highly
unlikely. For more on this, see ‘Report on a Study of Intelligence Judgements
Preceding Significant Historical Failures: The Hazards of Single-Outcome Fore
casting”, Central Intelligence Agency, 16 December 1983, available at www.cia.
gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP86B00269R001100100010-7.pdf, acces
sed on 3 May 2020.
14 Ariel Levite, Intelligence and Strategic Surprises, New York: Columbia University
Press, 1987, p. 1.
15 Uri Bar-Joseph and Rose McDermott, Intelligence Success and Failure: The Human
Factor, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017, p. 9.
16 Ephraim Kam, Surprise Attack: The Victim’s Perspective, Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2004, p. 7.
17 Ibid, p. 8.
18 Bar-Joseph and McDermott, Intelligence Success and Failure, 2017, p. 19.
19 Richard K. Betts, Surprise Attacks: Lessons for Defense Planning, Washington DC:
Brookings Institution, 1982; Abraham Ben-Zvi, ‘The Dynamics of Surprise: The
Defender’s Perspective’, Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 12, No. 4, 1997, pp.
113–144; Steve Chan, ‘The Intelligence of Stupidity: Understanding Failures in
Strategic Warning’, The American Political Science Review, Vol. 73, No. 1, 1979, pp.
171–180.; Robert Jervis, Why Intelligence Fails: Lessons from the Iranian Revolution and
the Iraq War, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010; Kam, Surprise Attack, 2004;
Klaus Knorr, ‘Failures in National Intelligence Estimates: The Case of the Cuban
Missiles’, World Politics, Vol. 16, No. 3, 1964, pp. 455–467; Levite, Intelligence and
Strategic Surprises, 1987; Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision,
California: Stanford University Press, 1962; Michael Handel, ‘Surprise and Change
in International Politics’, International Security, Vol. 4, No. 4, 1980, pp. 57–85.
20 For the origins of the orthodox-revisionist dichotomy, see Richard K. Betts, ‘Surprise,
Scholasticism and Strategy: A Review of Ariel Levite’s Intelligence and Strategic
Surprises’, International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 33, No. 3, 1989, pp. 329–343; Ariel
Levite, ‘Intelligence and Strategic Suprises Revisited: A Response to Richard K.
Betts’s “Surprise, Scholasticism, and Strategy”’, International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 33,
No. 3, 1989, pp. 345–349.
21 The most commonly observed pathologies to accurate intelligence collection and
analysis are as follows: noise-to-signal ratio – relevant information is buried in a load
of irrelevant and inaccurate information. The Pearl Harbor attacks are a case in
point, see Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor, 1962, p. 387; enemy deception – an effort by a
nation to mislead the enemy’s intelligence analysis and guide the latter to act in
accordance with the former’s interests. For example, the Abwehr’s deception to
convince Stalin that Ukraine would be the point of ingress when in reality Hitler
did not want a protracted engagement with the Soviets, see David E. Murphy, What
Stalin Knew: The Enigma of Barbarossa, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005, pp.
173–177; cry-wolf syndrome – a situation in which collective disbelief over one’s
grief occurs owing to repeated bluffs. In 1940, the Dutch policymakers failed to
accept warnings of a German attack despite information being sourced from some
one as reliable as Colonel Hans Oster, German Deputy Chief of Counter
intelligence, because between 12 November 1939 and 10 May 1940, Hitler
postponed the attack 29 times. Each time the Dutch intelligence had raised an
alarm, thereby, reducing consumer receptivity, see Cynthia Grabo, Handbook of
Warning Intelligence: Assessing the Threat to National Security, Maryland: Rowman and
Littlefield Publishers, 2010, p. 246.; other pathologies include information scarcity,
abundance, ambiguity, cognitive factors like biases, beliefs and assumptions, and
finally, politicisation of intelligence. For a discussion on these themes, see Richards
J. Heuer Jr., ‘Psychology of Intelligence Analysis’, Center for the Study of Intelli
gence, available at www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-p
ublications/books-and-monographs/psychology-of-intelligence-analysis/Psycho
fIntelNew.pdf, 27 November 2019; Glenn Hastedt, ‘The Politics of Intelligence and
the Politicization of Intelligence: The American Experience’, Intelligence and National
Security, Vol. 28, No. 1, 2013, pp. 5–31; Stephen Marrin, ‘Evaluating the Quality of
Intelligence Analysis: By What (Mis) Measure?’, Intelligence and National Security, Vol.
17, No. 4, 2012, pp. 655–672.
22 Handel, ‘Surprise and Change in International Politics’, 1980, p. 58.
23 Michael S. Goodman and Robert Dover, ‘Lessons Learned: What the History of
British Intelligence Can Tell Us about the Future’, in Michael S. Goodman and
Robert Dover, Learning from the Secret Past: Cases in British Intelligence History,
Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2011, p. 293.
24 Levite, Intelligence and Strategic Surprises, 1987, p. 178.
25 Betts, ‘Surprise, Scholasticism and Strategy’, 1989, p. 336.
26 Stephen Marrin, ‘Preventing Intelligence Failures by Learning from the Past’,
International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Vol. 17, No. 4, 2004, p. 658.
27 Erik Dahl, Intelligence and Surprise Attack: Failure and Success from Pearl Harbor to 9/11
and Beyond, Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013, p. 28.
28 Or Honig, ‘Surprise Attacks-Are They Inevitable? Moving Beyond the Orthodox-
Revisionist Dichotomy’, Security Studies, Vol. 17, No. 1, 2008, pp. 72–106.
29 Gerald W. Hopple, ‘Intelligence and Warning: Implications and Lessons of the
Falklands Islands War’, World Politics, Vol. 36, No. 3, 1984, p. 349.
30 Adda Bozeman, Strategic Intelligence and Statecraft: Selected Essays, Washington DC:
Brassey’s, 1992, p. vii.
31 Richard J. Aldrich and John Kasaku, ‘Escaping from American Intelligence Culture,
Ethnocentrism and the Anglosphere’, International Affairs, Vol. 88, No. 5, 2012, pp.
1009–1028.
32 Crosston,’ Bringing Non-Western Cultures and Conditions into Comparative
Intelligence Perspectives’, 2016; Philip H.J. Davies, ‘Intelligence culture and intelli
gence failure in Britain and the United States’, Cambridge Review of International
Affairs, Vol. 17, No. 3, 2004, pp. 495–520; Mark Phythian, ‘Cultures of National
Intelligence’ in Michael S. Goodman, Robert Dover and Claudia Hilebrand, Rou
tledge Companion to Intelligence Studies, 2014, pp. 33–41; Joop Van Reijn, ‘Intelli
gence and Strategic Culture: Essays on American and British Praxis since the Second
World War’, Intelligence and National Security, Intelligence and Strategic Culture: Essays
on American and British Praxis since the Second World War, Vol. 26, No. 4, 2011, pp.
441–444; Isabelle Duyvesteyn, ‘Intelligence and Strategic Culture: Some Observa
tions’, Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 26, No. 4, 2011, pp. 521–530.
33 Davies, ‘Intelligence culture and intelligence failure in Britain and the United
States’, 2004. Other important diagnosis of the Iraqi debacle include, John Dum
brell, ‘The Neoconservative Roots of the War in Iraq’, in James P. Pfiffner and
Mark Phythian, Intelligence and National Security Policymaking on Iraq: British and
American Perspectives, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008, pp. 19–40;
Mark Phythian, ‘Still a Matter of Trust: Post-9/11 British Intelligence and Political
Culture’, International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Vol. 18, No. 4,
2005, pp. 653–681.
34 Davies, ‘Intelligence culture and intelligence failure in Britain and the United
States’, 2004, p. 501.
35 Philip H.J. Davies, ‘Theory and Intelligence Reconsidered’, in Mark Phythian,
Stephen Marrin and Peter Gill, Intelligence Theory: Key Questions and Debates,
London: Routledge, 2009, p. 173.
36 Matthew Kalkavage, ‘Counterintelligence in the Kingdom and the States’, Master’s
Thesis Boston University, 14 April 2014, p. 31, available at www.bu.edu/pardeeschool/
files/2014/08/Sample-Research-Paper-2.pdf, accessed on 10 September 2019.
37 Ibid, p. 44.
38 Phythian, ‘Cultures of National Intelligence’, 2014, p. 33.
39 Ibid, p. 41.
40 Duyvesteyn, ‘Intelligence and Strategic Culture’, 2011, p. 524.
41 Edward Lock, ‘Refining strategic culture: return of the second generation’, Review of
International Studies, Vol. 36, 2010, p. 700.
42 Phythian, ‘Cultures of National Intelligence’, 2014, pp. 35–36.
43 Douglas Ford, ‘Strategic Culture, Intelligence Assessment, and the Conduct of the
Pacific War: The British-Indian and the Imperial Japanese Armies in Comparison,
1941–1945’, War in History, Vol. 14, No. 1, 2007, pp. 94–95.
44 Andrew Brunatti, ‘Canada’, in Michael S. Goodman, Robert Dover and Claudia
Hilebrand, Routledge Companion to Intelligence Studies, 2014, p. 154.
45 Ibid.
46 Note that if a study was conducted on Tonga, the definition of intelligence adopted
in this book would be completely inapplicable.
47 Interview with Senior Tongan Diplomat – T1, 20 October 2019.
48 Ibid.
49 Duyvesteyn, ‘Intelligence and Strategic Culture’, 2011, p. 521.
50 Matthew Crosston, ‘Cultures, Conditions, and Cognitive Closure: Breaking Intelli
gence Studies’ Dependence on Security Studies’, Journal of Strategic Security, Vol. 8,
No. 3, 2015, pp. 36–37.
51 Ibid, p. 40.
52 Alexander R. Bentley and Michael J. O’Brien, The Acceleration of Cultural Change:
From Ancestors to Algorithms, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017, pp. 9–12.
53 Louis Morton, ‘National Security and Area Studies: The Intellectual Response to the
Cold War’, The Journal of Higher Education, Vol. 34, No. 3, 1963, pp. 142–147; Zakia
Shiraz and Richard J. Aldrich, ‘Secrecy, Spies and the Global South: Intelligence Stu
dies beyond the ‘Five Eyes’ Alliance’, International Affairs, Vol. 95, No. 6, 2019, p. 1317.
54 George Tanham, ‘Indian Strategic Thought: An Interpretive Essay’ in Kanti Bajpai
and Amitabh Mattoo, Strategic Thought and Practice, New Delhi: Manohar Publishers,
1996, pp. 72–75.
55 Waheguru Pal Singh Sidhu, ‘Of Oral Traditions and Ethnocentric Judgements’, in
Kanti Bajpai and Amitabh Mattoo, Strategic Thought and Practice, New Delhi: Man
ohar Publishers, 1996, pp. 174–190.
56 See essays by Varun Sahni, Rahul Roy-Chaudhury, Kanti Bajpai and Amitabh
Mattoo in Kanti Bajpai and Amitabh Mattoo, Strategic Thought and Practice, New
Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 1996.
57 K. Subrahmanyam, Shedding Shibboleths: India’s Evolving Strategic Outlook, New
Delhi: Wordsmith, 2005.
58 Dhruva Jaishankar, ‘Ep. 85: India’s Strategic Culture’, The Pragati Podcast, 21
February 2019, available at https://ivmpodcasts.com/the-pragati-podcast-episode
list/2019/2/21/ep-85-indias-strategic-culture, accessed on 21 October 2019.
59 Subrahmanyam, Shedding Shibboleths, 2005, p. 73.
60 Mahadevan, The Politics of Counterterrorism in India, 2012, p. 2.
61 Anit Mukherjee, ‘K. Subrahmanyam and Indian Strategic Thought’, Strategic Ana
lysis, Vol. 35, No. 4, 2011, p. 711.
62 Ibid, p. 712.
63 Bhashyam Kasturi, Intelligence Services: Analysis, Organisation and Function, New Delhi:
Lancer Publishers, 1995; P.N. Kathpalia, ‘Intelligence: Problems and Possible Solu
tions’, Indian Defence Review, Vol. 2, No. 1, 1986, pp. 133–135; M.L. Popli, ‘National
Intelligence Assessments and Estimates: Whither our Joint Intelligence Committee’,
Indian Defence Review, October 1991, pp. 23–28; Asoka Raina, Inside RAW: the Story
of India’s Secret Service, New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House Pvt Ltd, 1981; Rahul
Roy-Chaudhury, ‘India’, in Stuart Farson, Peter Gill, Mark Phythian and Shlomo
Shapiro, PSI Handboook of Global Security and Intelligence: National Approaches, Volume I:
The Americas and Asia, Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008, pp. 211–229.
64 K. Sankaran Nair, Inside IB and RAW: The Rolling Stone that Gathered Moss, New
Delhi: Lancer Publishers, 2016; B. Raman, The Kaoboys of R&AW: Down Memory
Lane, New Delhi: Lancer Publishers, 2013; M.K. Dhar, Open Secrets: India’s Intelli
gence Unveiled, New Delhi: Manas Publications, 2012; R.K. Yadav, Mission
R&AW, New Delhi: Manas Publications, 2014.
65 Rudra Chaudhuri, ‘Why Culture Matters: Revisiting the Sino-Indian Border War
of 1962’, Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 32, No. 6, 2009, pp. 847–848.
66 Stephen P. Cohen and Sunil Dasgupta, Arming without Aiming: India’s Military Mod
ernisation, Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 2010, p. 3.
67 Deep K. Datta-Ray, The Making of Indian Diplomacy: A Critique of Eurocentrism,
London: Hurst Publishers, 2015.
68 Cohen and Dasgupta, Arming without Aiming, 2010, p. 9.
69 Sumit Ganguly and Paul S. Kapur, ‘The Myth of Indian Strategic Restraint’, The
National Interest, 18 July 2019, available at https://nationalinterest.org/feature/m
yth-indian-strategic-restraint-63232?page=0%2C2, accessed on 23 September 2019.
70 Harsh Pant, India’s Foreign Policy: Theory and Praxis, Cambridge: Cambridge Uni
versity Press, 2019, p. 4.
71 Peter A. Garretson, ‘Tanham in Retrospect: 18 Years of Evolution in Indian Stra
tegic Culture’, South Asia Journal, 22 January 2013, available at http://southasia
journal.net/tanham-in-retrospect-18-years-of-evolution-in-indian-strategic-culture/
, accessed on 31 October 2019.
72 Interview with Admiral (retd) Arun Prakash, 16 November 2018.
73 Subrahmanyam, Shedding Shibboleths, 2005, p. 13.
74 Guillem Monsonis, ‘India’s Strategic Autonomy and Rapprochement with the US’,
Strategic Analysis, Vol. 34, No. 4, 2010, pp. 611–624.
75 Brahma Chellaney, Securing India’s Future in the New Millennium, New Delhi: Orient
Longman, 1999, p. 144.
76 Crosston, ‘Bringing Non-Western Cultures and Conditions into Comparative
Intelligence Perspectives’, 2016, p. 118.
77 Neil Loughlin, ‘The Benefits and Disadvantages of Post-Positivism in International
Theory’, E-International Relations, 20 January 2012, available www.e-ir.info/2012/
01/20/what-are-the-benefits-and-disadvantages-of-post-positivism-for-internationa
l-theory, accessed on 10 October 2019.
78 Amitav Acharya, ‘Ethnocentrism and Emancipatory IR Theory’, in Marshall J. Beier
and Samantha Arnold, (Dis)placing Security: Critical Re-evaluations of the Boundaries of
Security Studies, York: York University, 2000, p. 4.
79 Loughlin, ‘The Benefits and Disadvantages of Post-Positivism in International
Theory’, 2012.
80 Ken Booth, Strategy and Ethnocentrism, London: Routledge, 2014, pp. 14–15.
81 Richard K. Betts, Enemies of Intelligence: Knowledge and Power in American National
Security, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007, p. 185.
82 Ben-Zvi, ‘The Dynamics of Surprise’, 1997, pp. 125–130.
83 R.W. Jones, Security, Strategy, and Critical Theory, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers,
1999.
84 Colin Gray, ‘New Directions of Strategic Studies? How can Theory help Practice?’,
Security Studies, Vol. 1, No. 4, 1992, p. 627.
85 Pinar Bilgin, ‘Critical Theory’, in Paul D. Williams, Security Studies: An Introduction,
London: Routledge, 2008, p. 89.
86 K.M. Fierke, ‘Critical Theory, Security, and Emancipation’, International Studies,
2010, p. 17, available at https://oxfordre.com/internationalstudies/view/10.1093/a
crefore/9780190846626.001.0001/acrefore-9780190846626-e-138?print=pdf,
accessed on 27 November 2019.
87 Christopher Andrew, ‘Intelligence, International Relations and ‘Under- theorisa
tion’’, Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 19, No. 2, 2004, p. 174.; Simon Wil
metts, ‘The Cultural Turn in Intelligence Studies’, Intelligence and National Security,
Vol. 34, No. 6, 2019, p. 803.
88 Christopher Andrew and D. Dilks, The Missing Dimension: Governments and Intelligence
Communities in the Twentieth Century, London: Macmillan Publishers, 1984, p. 1.
89 William C. Whitford, ‘Critical Empiricism’, Law & Social Inquiry, Vol. 14, No. 1,
1989, pp. 63–64.
90 Ibid, p. 65.
91 Ibid, p. 66.
92 Anit Mukherjee, The Absent Dialogue: Politicians, Bureaucrats, and the Military in India,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019; Arjun Subramaniam, India’s Wars: A Mili
tary History 1947–1971, Noida: Harper Collins Publishers India, 2016.
93 ‘Non-Alignment 2.0: A Foreign and Strategic Policy for India in the Twenty First
Century’, Centre for Policy Research, 29 February 2012, available at www.cprindia.
org/research/reports/nonalignment-20-foreign-and-strategic-policy-india-twenty
first-century, accessed on 22 April 2020.
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Section II
The Evolution of India’s
Intelligence Culture
2 Kautilya’s Discourse on Secret
Intelligence in the Arthashastra
Introduction
On 19 January 2010, the then Vice-President of India, Hamid Ansari, while
delivering the 4th R.N. Kao memorial lecture, said:
“we can go as far back as Kautilya to perceive the importance [of intelligence].
In fact, the methodological sophistication exhibited in Kautilya’s chapters on
secret service and internal security can be read with benefit even today”.1
Throughout the lecture, Kautilya2 unfortunately never reappeared, nor was

the ‘methodological sophistication’ elaborated in any detail. This episodic
reference somewhat captures the state of the art in the study of intelligence in
India. As the secondary literature referenced in this chapter will highlight, a
rhetorical presentation of Kautilya’s Arthashastra as the root of Indian intelli
gence philosophy has never been examined with either ideational or empiri
cal evidence. This chapter makes an attempt to detail the intellectual depth in
Kautilya’s Arthashastra in matters of foreign intelligence. It attempts to answer
the question: how did the Kautilyan state ‘think about’ and ‘do’ intelligence in
support of foreign and military policies? It forms the basis for the observation of
modern-day Indian intelligence culture. The Arthashastra is an ideal starting
point to observe ancient Indian wisdom on intelligence, as the text:
“was in fact the final manifestation of [Indian knowledge], the traces of

which are discernible in the Vedic literature and copiously found in the
epics, puranas and literary works”.3
Most books on Indian intelligence are descriptive works, devoid of analytical

rigour, while invariably beginning from the ancient times where Kautilya figures
predominantly.4 Kautilya’s appearance in these works is unsurprising, as the trans
lated versions of his Sanskrit text ‘Arthashastra’ by scholars R.P. Kangle, R. Sham
sastry and L.N. Rangarajan have the word ‘spies’ used 58, 65 and 59 times
respectively. A cursory glance through the text would give the readers an impres
sion that the entire state was run by spies. This has led one renowned intelligence
DOI: 10.4324/9781003296195-5
scholar to term the Kautilyan state as “the original surveillance state”.5 Therefore,
there is a unanimous appropriation of Kautilya as the guru of intelligence in India,
yet the guru bodhana (teachings) have been either misunderstood or insufficiently
absorbed by students of intelligence.
In order to avoid falling victim to such simplistic reading of the Arthashastra
and interpret the latent meanings of intelligence in the text, a certain degree of
specialisation in Intelligence Studies and knowledge of the civilizational history of
India is important.6 The only scholar to have done this is a German political
scientist, Michael Liebig, who regarded Kautilya “the first theorist in intelli
gence”.7 Liebig, like other scholars, argued that intelligence is a key source of
state power, but did so with a methodical analysis of the text. This chapter takes
forward Liebig’s efforts; but the larger intention is to draw a cultural comparison
to the modern-day external intelligence in India. There is, however, an impor
tant caveat. It is beyond the scope of this book to observe empirically the extent
to which Kautilya’s teachings on intelligence were applied by subsequent king
doms in the subcontinent. The idea is simply to provide an understanding of
how deeply ancient Indians had accepted intelligence as an essential state activity
through the examination of an important text of that time.
Thus, the cultural appraisal of secret foreign and military intelligence in the
Kautilyan state, as presented in this chapter, is desired to act as a foundation to
highlight how the post-independence Indian state and its intelligence services have
been stripped off the Kautilyan character. To do so, the chapter begins by briefly
explaining to the readers why the Arthashastra is an important and appropriate
reference text. It then goes on to establish the basis for foreign intelligence in the
Kautilyan state and then dwells on the methodologies involved in intelligence
collection and analysis, the nature of relationship the Kautilyan intelligence services
shared with the consumers and other international intelligence services, and lastly,
the Kautilyan perspective on intelligence failures and surprises. Finally, the chapter
extracts the key cultural traits that define the character of Kautilyan intelligence,
which then become the elements of comparative analysis in the coming chapters.
Through this exercise, it is the argument of this chapter that intelligence in the
Kautilyan state was a state-driven activity as a consequence of the “knowledge
culture” that was prevalent. From the next chapter onwards, the book reveals how
the “knowledge culture” made way for a “reactive culture”, where intelligence
morphed from being a state-driven activity to an individual-led endeavour.
The Arthashastra as the basis for the study of Indian Intelligence

One of the most authoritative scholars and translators of the Arthashastra to
English, L.N. Rangarajan used the phrase “an imaginary Kautilyan country”.8
The phrase is significant as the text Arthashastra is neither a historical treatise nor
a memoir of Kautilya. It is widely recognised as a guidebook on statecraft; and
the utopian country that emerges in the mind of the author is what Rangarajan
termed ‘the imaginary country’.9 But then, what was the basis for the author’s
imagination? It is here that the Arthashastra stands in fundamental contrast to
Kautilya’s Discourse on Strategic Intelligence 41
other scholars and thinkers like Machiavelli and Sun Tzu. Kautilya’s imaginary
state reflected the author’s identity as a Hindu (not religious identity, but the
identity of a person living in undivided India) and a scholar trained in the Indic
methods of knowledge production. This section briefly expands on both of
these aspects to enable better comprehension of the ideas of intelligence
embedded in the Arthashastra.
Topographically, the Kautilyan country was diverse with a variety of natural
features like rivers, mountains, forests, plains, deserts and so on. Driven by gov
ernance considerations, the economic and social activities took shape around the
natural features and an elaborate system of fortifications and defences also existed
to protect the empire. While these were the geographic and physical features of
the Kautilyan country, what is important is the ideational aspect of the Kautilyan
state that gave birth to the requirement of intelligence. Here, the Kautilyan state
reflected the people that occupied the territory and the philosophy that guided
their lives. The Hindu philosophy of life was guided by the four purusharthas
(goals of human endeavours) – dharma, artha, kama and moksha. The last aspect
being considered the final manifestation of spirituality could only be achieved
through strict adherence of the other three facets. Artha loosely translates into
wealth and kama is synonymous with pleasure, while dharma, the most important
of the purusharthas, was the foundation of all human activity, which translates into
a sense of duty, law, balance and restraint.
The elevation of the purusharthas to the societal and political level is done
under the assumption that order is central to existence and so far as the idea of
national security is concerned, the employment of artha and kama, governed by
dharma, is to ensure “internal well-being and external security”.10 The influence
of these ideational aspects on intelligence in the Kautilyan state will be done in
the next section. However, it is prudent to mention why the choice of the
Arthashastra makes better sense given the availability of a vast number of literary
works in ancient India that dwell on aspects of intelligence and statecraft.
The word Arthashastra translates as ‘the science of wealth’, but the text is a
thesis on governance and statecraft covering the disciplines of political science,
economics and sociology. There are several other texts like the Dharmashastras,
Nitishastras and even epics like Ramayana and Mahabharata that offer rich lessons
in all these disciplines. However, where the Arthashastra stands out in comparison
is the scholarly presentation of arguments by Kautilya. As noted by Kautilya
himself, there were at least ten scholars of the Arthashastra before him.11 Kauti
lya’s Arthashastra, being a normative “how to” text on statecraft, follows a dia
lectic model of articulation and anviksiki (investigative science). Throughout the
text, using a thorough conceptual investigation, Kautilya critically engages the
works of other renowned scholars like Visalaksa, Parasara, Pisuna and Bahudanti,
among others, before drawing his own conclusions. It is this intellectual
engagement and dialectic tone of the text that makes it an ideal source to
understand why and how intelligence was prescribed as an essential state activity,
and what were the civilizational understandings on the theory of intelligence and
surprise. The following sections make a comprehensive attempt in this direction.
The rationale for intelligence in the Kautilyan State
Scholarship on the Arthashastra converge on one particular theme that is
constant in the Kautilyan state – power. The source of this power, never
theless, ignites a host of debates which ranges from the power of the military
and economy (artha) to the power of morality (dharma).12 The strength of the
seven constituent elements of the state (prakritis) – the king (swami/vijigısu),-
the councillors and minister (amatya), the territory and population (janapada),
the fortified towns and cities (durga), the treasury (kosa), the force (danda) and
the allies (mitra) – collectively constitute the power of the Kautilyan state.
Beyond these tangible elements of national power, however, lies the most
fundamental determinant of power, i.e. the power of knowledge, which has
generated little attention.
At the outset, it is important to emphasise that while reading the Arthashastra
for the benefit of the modern times, the king has to be read interchangeably as
the state. The most fundamental of all qualities expected of a king was the
quality of intellect – a desire to learn, listen, grasp, retain, understand thor
oughly and reflect on knowledge.13 The king had to be amenable to guidance
by the councillors/ministers, who in turn were trained in all the arts and sci
ences and possessed the ability to foresee things.14 What is to be noted here is
that, the intellectual prowess of the councillors and ministers, according to
Kautilya, could flow only from the intellectual quality of the king. To translate
this to modern parlance, the strength of the institutions of a state is proportional
to the nation’s strategic culture and the regime’s political culture. Kautilya has
written that:
“whatever character the king has, the other elements also come to have
the same, for they are all dependent on him for their progress or
downfall”.15
The idea of knowledge as power in the Arthashastra has its roots in the notion
of Rajadharma (duty of the king)16. The first dharma (duty) of the king was to
protect his people from enemies. The threefold representation of the king’s
dharma towards his people were rakshana (protection), palana (administration)
and yogakshema (welfare). In order to achieve this, the king had to be supported
by an elaborate system of intelligence; and a huge chunk of the king’s daily
routine was to be spent in tasking and receiving intelligence from secret
agents.17 When not interacting with the spies, the king was to be in the com
pany of elders (read experts) to learn from their experience and cultivate his
intellect.18 Both external and internal security are given equal importance in
the text. However, considering that this book concerns foreign and military
policies, the focus shall be on only external intelligence.
To offer a glimpse of the kind of intelligence the Kautilyan state sought for
foreign and military policymaking, the following passage is drawn from the
work of Liebig:
“with regard to foreign countries, such information is of great importance:
what are the political, economic and military strengths and weaknesses of
other states? Is there unrest among the people, are there conspiracies in the
elite that can be exploited and reinforced? How can an enemy state be
weakened materially and psychologically, including the covert killing of
certain political actors? For Kautilya, intelligence is the indispensable
foundation of foreign policy decision-making”.19
The passage quite succinctly covers both the informational and executional
aspects of secret intelligence that were embedded in the Kautilyan state.
There is a generic perception that the Kautilyan state was built with an
intention of expansion, and hence, his theories fit well with a revisionist state
seeking to overthrow the existing order.20 Kautilya indeed refers to the king as
- – the one desiring to conquer – somewhat denoting that maintenance
vijigısu
of territorial status-quo was never an option. However, expansion of territory
was not the primary motive driving conquests, but it was the expansion of
wealth.21 Nevertheless, seen within the framework of rajadharma, it appears that
the Kautilyan state, even while being expansionist, was fundamentally con
cerned with the defence of its territory and people. Therefore, while observing
the principles of intelligence as embedded in the Arthashastra one should not
commit the mistake of presuming that they are inapplicable in a defensive
nation like India.
In fact, Kautilya’s advice for an offensive derives from achieving the necessary
condition of a strong defence. He cautions that “before a king sets out on an
expedition of conquest, he has to take steps to guard [the state]”.22 According to
Medha Bisht, Kautilya’s policy of non-intervention is a policy which helps in the
undisturbed enjoyment of the results of the past activities”.23 Hence, a defensive
capacity is a requisite condition in the Kautilyan state irrespective of whether it
later intends to attain the character of a status-quoist or a revisionist state. The
oretically speaking, a defensive state, more than an aggressive state, would have
to pay greater attention to intelligence.24 Therein lies the relevance of the power
of knowledge as espoused by Kautilya to present-day India. Kautilya wrote that,
“making enemies is a greater evil than loss of wealth. Loss of wealth endangers
the treasury, making enemies endangers life [state survival]”.25 Therefore, by all
means, intelligence attains centrality in the Kautilyan state.
The knowledge, thus, required for state survival, also known as strategic
intelligence, was the basis for policymaking in the Kautilyan state. According to
him, “a king can reign only with the help of others; one wheel alone does not
move a chariot”. In other words, the king cannot alone govern the state, he
needs an effective intelligence organisation. With the support of an intelligence
organisation and the advice of his ministers, the knowledge-driven statecraft
can produce a unified nation of which the king will be the chakravartin
(emperor/political unifier).26 Ergo, the Kautilyan statecraft was built on the
power of knowledge and advice, aimed at the fulfilment of the political lea
dership’s primary duty, which was the protection of the people. This was the
foundation on which the Kautilyan intelligence organisation stood. Statecraft
without intelligence in the Kautilyan state was simply impractical.
Institution of Spies: Intelligence Modus Operandi in the

Kautilyan State
The Kautilyan intelligence organisation was predominantly composed of
human intelligence (HUMINT) and organised systematically. The roles and
responsibilities were allocated with the motive of guaranteeing informational
advantage and ensuring secrecy. Secrecy was the primary character of the
Kautilyan intelligence organisation, underlying both the intelligence profession
and the decision-making process. A three-tier intelligence system existed in the
Kautilyan state with the king and the chancellor (could also be read as the
Minister for Intelligence) at the apex level followed by the station chiefs/
regional directors under whom a network of agents (collectors) operated. The
intelligence operatives were classified as guda (clandestine/concealed), working
under assumed identities or operational covers. Kautilya prescribes a degree of
flexibility in assuming covers whilst paying attention to the situation. Known as
vyanjanáh (occupational cover), the Arthashastra offers twenty-nine distinct
categories of cover with fifty subcategories. The fundamental point Kautilya
tries to convey through the record of covers is that the occupational cover had
to be determined by the operational environment and mission objectives.27
While the king and the concerned chancellor were the principal recipients of
intelligence reports, there was a system of regional hubs from where kapatika
(intelligence officers) recruited and handled agents, received and assessed the
raw intelligence, and transmitted the product in a cryptic form. The regional
hubs or established offices were known as samstha, which represent subsidiary
bureaus or stations; and the kapatika was the station chief. Despite the king
being the overall driver of the state intelligence machinery, the regional hubs
and the station chiefs were given considerable autonomy, as it was here that the
intelligence and counterintelligence operations were planned and executed.28
The covers given for the station chiefs were that of a monk, householder
(mostly a farmer) or trader. In modern intelligence parlance, the samstha would
be called a ‘station’ in American intelligence or a ‘rezidentura’ in Russian intel
ligence; and, the intelligence covers would be referred to as non-official covers
(NOCs) by the former or an ‘illegal’ by the latter. Kautilya laid particular
emphasis on the psychology and wisdom of the station chiefs in sensitive areas.
He mentions that such officers must be:
“non-seducible but are shown to be impelled by motives for actions that

are associated with seducible parties”.29
The particular choice of the three occupational covers mentioned above

emerges from the twin rationale of maintaining a network of spies and simul
taneously raising finances to sustain operations. Monks, householders and
traders were allowed to easily interact with others from the same profession and
develop an espionage network, while also earning money to supplement the
secret funds.30 A farmer or a trader clearly enjoyed the advantage of finances
whilst a monk enjoyed the privilege of having disciples and students at his
service who could be employed in espionage roles. The bottom-line regarding
station chiefs in the Arthashastra is that the cover should allow for operational
ease and enable self-sufficiency in maintaining the spy nest. Intelligence scholars
have found in Kautilya’s exposition an ideal theory for non-official covers
(NOCs).31 Kautilya does recommend the use of diplomatic personnel in for
eign nations to collect intelligence, recruit sources and participate in covert
actions.32 However, considering the presence of a vast system of NOCs, it is
discernible that he understood the limitations of diplomatic covers.
The agents who reported to the station chiefs, and also the couriers who
transmitted intelligence from the stations to the headquarters, are classified as
“roving spies”. The institution of roving spies served the purpose of both
intelligence collection and covert actions. The former is called sattri (spies) who
collected intelligence for the station chiefs, while the latter included members
of covert action units – tikshna (assassin), rasuda (poisoner), and other specialists
in subversion.33 The roving spies were also important in communicating intel
ligence from the regional hubs to the headquarters. In this regard, Kautilya
emphasises both on cryptology as well as information security. Cryptology was
given particular importance and Kautilya dwells into a series of encryption
techniques and steganographic codes to be employed depending on the cir
cumstances under which the information is being transmitted – some verbal,
some non-verbal.34 With regards to communication, Kautilya understands the
importance of timely and secure communication of intelligence. The agents
responsible for headquarter-to-station communications and station-to-field
communications were unknown to each other in order to ensure information
security.35 With regards to timely dissemination of information, Kautilya
encourages infrastructural development such as the development of trade routes
for quick communication. The importance of this aspect becomes clear in the
chapter on the 1962 war as weak communication infrastructure played a critical
role in India’s dismal performance.
The role of the sattri, i.e. the intelligence collector, is fairly straightforward.
But the covert action part is something that needs elaboration. Considering the
offensive nature of the Kautilyan state, and influenced by a simplistic reading of
the text, there is a tendency to pass off the covert action portion as just para
military and sabotage operations aimed at destroying the enemy. In fact, the
entire Book XII is devoted to the utility of covert action for a weak king faced
with a strong opponent. However, when one carefully observes the extent to
which Kautilya prescribes maintaining covert capabilities, it is impossible to
overlook the simultaneous benefits to strategic intelligence that the covert
action capability brings. Within the methodology of subversive operations,
Kautilya offers a series of positional and psychological factors of the target,
which the intelligence officer must exploit. Psychological factors (vices) to be
exploited include anger, greed, fear, etc. while the positions that are to be tar
geted are as high as the mahamatras (high-level officials) and the defence com
manders.36 With access to the enemy’s strategic leadership and knowledge of
the target’s psychological vulnerabilities, Kautilya’s thesis would undoubtedly
secure a critical position in the HUMINT pedagogical manuals of modern-day
intelligence schools.37 Therefore, Kautilya’s prescription for an effective covert
action network should also be regarded as a potent foundation for intelligence
collection. The case chapters will indeed highlight the critical role the pre
sence/absence of covert action capabilities played in determining India’s
knowledge of the enemy.
As regards recruitment, the system was advised to function on an open market
basis. In fact, a cursory reading of the Arthashastra gives an impression that
everybody is spying on everybody else.38 A meticulous observation, however,
reveals that there are three crucial factors driving recruitment – loyalty to the
king/nation; subject matter expertise; and secrecy. Expertise refers both to an
appropriate occupational cover without raising suspicions as well as knowledge of
the area of operations. In this regard, Kautilya dictates the means to effectively
exploit the varna system of the Hindu society to select the right agent for the
right task. So, a monk could be a station chief/intelligence officer while a
‘wandering nun’ could be employed as a roving spy. To ensure loyalty to the
nation, the chosen monk or nun should, first, pledge loyalty to the king; and,
second, have renounced the practice of religion and assume the occupation only
as a cover for espionage.39
Sudras (the worker community) were one of the most preferred communities
for intelligence operations. Their access to the society made them an ideal
pursuer of intelligence objectives – for both covert operations and counter
intelligence.40 For instance, Kautilya’s prescription of using servants to monitor
the integrity of state officials is closely replicated by several modern-day coun
terintelligence states. N. Narasimhan, a former Indian spymaster, recollected
from his days in China that his domestic help spying on him had made even
free movement difficult. Consequently, official interactions with diplomats of
other countries, especially the Soviets and Vietnamese, had become his only
source of information.41 Thus, Kautilya’s prescriptions for spy recruitment
relied extensively on context, access and ability of the individual. Reflecting
the relevance of Kautilya’s recruitment patterns on modern-day intelligence
systems, Stefano Musco has observed that:
“building a reliable NOC requires a careful reading of the socio-political

milieu in which the intelligence officers are sent, but also more creativity.
Under this perspective, today political analysts, anthropologists and area
experts can make great contribution…yesterday’s roving philosophers and
teachers are today’s professors, researchers and PhD students”.42
Whatever be the professional cover, for Kautilya, integrity and loyalty was
paramount – first to the nation and the intelligence profession, and then to the
occupational cover. While professing how an individual could acquire an
advisory position with the king, Kautilya recommends knowledge of political
science and a subjugation to the eternal principles of dharma (law) and artha
(wealth/economics). The intelligence officers were to swear loyalty to the king,
and to prove this, they had to pass a series of tests based on dharma, artha and
kama. The latter denotes pleasure and enjoyment, which in modern spy-craft
would entail a list of entrapments; the most widely recognised one being the
‘honeytrap’. Kautilya recommends the use of a ‘wandering nun’, who in
today’s world are famed by Soviet intelligence practitioners as ‘swallows’, to
conduct honeytrap tests. In the early 1950s, for instance, at least three Indian
diplomats codenamed PROKHOR, RADAR and ARTUR were known to
have been seduced by Soviet swallows that enabled Moscow to decrypt Indian
diplomatic communications.43 Hence, to avoid such undesirable occurrences
and obtain the best from the intelligence officers, the Arthashastra advocates
integrity, expertise and secrecy as mandatory qualities to seek from the market.
Recruitment of agents was on the basis of legal contracts that ensured relia
bility of the source and enhanced credibility of the information.44 The intelli
gence officers were protected financially through the secret funds both to
sustain themselves as well as the intelligence network. Clandestine agents were
protected within an extra-legal framework. The Kautilyan state had a stringent
judicial mechanism to punish fraudsters and criminals. These laws, however,
did not apply to the clandestine agents; and, any contract with them, irrespec
tive of the intent, was considered valid.45 Nevertheless, to negotiate the hurdles
of misinformation and duplication of intelligence, the mis-doers were usually
rewarded with death. At the same time, Kautilya is judicious with the treat
ment of the spies and intelligence officers, and advises them that, in the event
of the king depriving the personnel of wealth and honour, the officers/agents
might abandon the king.46 This is not to be regarded as a license for treason,
but merely an approval of resignation. The pledge of loyalty to the state,
according to the Arthashastra, shall remain eternal. In fact, Kautilya suggests that
the resigned officials have to make use of the king’s friend/ally to rectify the
defects of the master and then return to the king.47 In today’s terms, this would
probably mean using the legal and judicial means to rectify the ills of the
system, if at all there is provision for such actions.
Finally, notwithstanding the antiquity of the Arthashastra, the text also provides
some pointers that one could juxtapose with the present-day HUMINT versus
TECHINT debate.48 In advising the king to conduct deliberations in secrecy,
Kautilya cautions against the presence of birds and animals in the vicinity. When
reading his words, “secrecy of deliberations has been breached by parrots and
starlings, even by dogs and other animals”, one is reminded of technical gadgets
like bugs, drones, and other signals intelligence devices that are either static or
mobile but serve the purpose of intelligence collection.49 Today, as technical
means are preferred mainly for verifiability, penetration and reduced risk to
human lives, birds and animals were probably chosen to reduce the risk of
double crossing by agents and gain greater access without raising suspicions.
However, as the inherent weaknesses in TECHINT such as its susceptibility to
enemy deception and the exorbitant procurement and maintenance costs make
HUMINT the more preferred means of intelligence collection, Kautilya too
barely shows any interest in such means except as a reminder for the need of
stringent counterintelligence measures.
Production of Knowledge: Intelligence Analysis in the

Kautilyan State
Despite knowledge being the basis of Kautilyan statecraft, it is impossible to
find any direct mention of intelligence analysis in the Arthashastra. While the
exposition on intelligence collection is vast, the text demands a purposeful
reading by an intelligence scholar to fathom the tenets of intelligence analysis.
In so doing, it becomes evident that Kautilya has a colossal body of inputs to
offer on analysis for foreign and military policymaking. An economics scholar
who has devised a statistical equation to calculate power on the basis of the
Arthashastra ranks intelligence analysis as the most important factor in enhancing
national security.50 Analysis, for Kautilya, begins right at the level of the station
chiefs, before the reports are sent to the headquarters for strategic analysis. As
the previous section mentioned, there were legit deterrents against duplication
and misinformation. Yet, Kautilya does not discount the possibility of mis
reporting and enemy deception. He therefore opines that any information that
has been corroborated by three different spies shall be taken to be true.51
At the all-source level of assessment, Kautilya divides the advisory business
into two groups. In the first group, which is mostly about making sense of the
enemy by bringing together intelligence reports from different departments,
Kautilya refrains from putting a ceiling on the number of participants in the all-
source analysis body. He simply says, “according to capacity” (yathásámarthyam).
52
The term ‘capacity’ has to be interpreted as strength commensurate with the
issue at hand. The other group is the core group that deliberates on the action
to be taken; and, here Kautilya limits the membership to precisely four mem
bers. According to the Arthashastra, the king is the chief of the analytical body.
In fact, modern-day American intelligence scholars have only recently begun to
argue that policymakers are also intelligence analysts, and hence, the danger of
the policymaker rejecting professional intelligence analysis is ever-present.53
Kautilya, however, had observed this factor two millennia ago and thus
recommended that the king lead the analytical process. However, he does so
with two underlying premises.
First, the king had to be knowledgeable and well-versed in the sastras [sci
ences], mostly political science. Collocating this recommendation to present
day policymaking would mean that the foreign and military policymakers need
to have expertise on the subjects they are dealing with. However, considering
the unreliability of such utopia, Kautilya makes the second recommendation,
that the king should have the quality of learning, listening, grasping, retaining,
understanding thoroughly and reflecting on knowledge. This he ought to do in the
company of four advisers to avoid the problems of single source persuasion,
groupthink, or an information scarcity/abundance.54 Having done so, Kauti
lya leaves it to the wisdom of the king, who is well versed in the sastras
himself, to either take a decision or consult any other subject matter expert.55
This segment requires greater elaboration and the following paragraphs
attempt to make sense of it.
In essence, the methodology mentioned in the previous para encompasses
Sherman Kent’s description of strategic intelligence as an organisation, activity
and product.56 The qualities ‘learning, listening and grasping’ are the root ideas of
the formation of an intelligence activity. The purpose of Kautilya’s emphasis on
an elaborate system of intelligence collection is to service the learning, listening
and grasping qualities of the king. In other words, the intelligence collectors
operate to inform the decision-making apparatus of the state. The next two
qualities – ‘retaining and understanding thoroughly’ – are qualities that give birth
to analysis and organisation. By retention and comprehension, Kautilya is essen
tially alluding to the importance of strategic analysis and institutional memory.
To use Sherman Kent’s words, this forms what is known as the “descriptive
element” of strategic intelligence.57 The descriptive element is derived only
through knowledgeable people supported by institutional memory, who then
receive the current intelligence inputs provided by the station chiefs. The infor
mation provided by the station chiefs is what Kent terms, the “reportorial
element”.58
The descriptive element is actually where the bulk of the organisational ener
gies are invested. Unlike the mantra of the British intelligence that “intelligence
is about secrets, not mysteries”,59 intelligence activity in the Kautilyan state,
whilst heavily leaning on unearthing secrets, was particularly geared towards sol
ving mysteries for the policymaker.60 Based on the secrets gathered by the secret
agents, the analysts run a strategic assessment based on the theory of sapta-nga
(seven parts/comprehensive national power) – derived from the seven prakriti
[elements] of national power. Kautilya believes an enemy’s intentions can be
fathomed from the assessment of the comprehensive national power, which is the
sum total of the seven elements – the king, minister, people, fortress, treasury,
army and alliances. The credit for identification of this methodology of analysis
must go to Liebig who writes that the “concept of state power as an aggregate of
seven prakritis provides excellent theoretical tools for intelligence analysis” [emphasis
original].61 However, Liebig falls short in exploring strategic culture as an aspect
of intelligence analysis.
Liebig’s exclusion of strategic culture is understandable, as Kautilya, by
default, presumes an aggressive intent on part of the enemy and also the stra
tegic environment in which the Kautilyan state exists is composed of Hindu
societies where patterns of thought and actions are fairly uniform. In the
modern scenario, however, where each nation-state operates on independent
notions of history, tradition and interests, culture forms an important aspect of
decision-making.62 As the case chapters in this book shall reveal, it was this
factor more than anything else that inhibited analysis of the enemy’s intentions.
For Kautilya, nonetheless, knowledge of the enemy’s strategic culture was
crucial. According to the Arthashastra, it is not only important to know the
sapta-nga analysis of the enemy but also how the enemy perceives his own
national power.63
To elaborate, Kautilya suggests that the sapta-nga framework of analysis should
lead to the prediction of the enemy’s actions/policies, which are confined
within sa-dgunya [basic measures of foreign policy]. Although it might seem
simple and clear to draw a correlation between sapta-nga and sa-dgunya, i.e. the
state power and foreign policy choices, Kautilya cautions that there might be
deviations from the norm.
The sa-dgunya (foreign policy choices) that Kautilya offers are:64
1 Samdhi [peace]: the rival state is stronger and will remain so in the fore
seeable future.
2 Vigraha [war]: the rival is vastly inferior in power.
-
3 Asana [neutrality]: the correlation of forces is balanced.
4 Ya-na [war preparation, coercive diplomacy]: one’s own power is rising
vis-à-vis the rival state.
5 Samśraya [alliance building]: the rival state’s power is rising faster than
one’s own.
6 Dvaidh-ıbha-va [diplomatic double game]: the constellation among rivals and
allies is very fluid.
Notwithstanding the logical soundness of the sa-dgunya theory, Kautilya shows

maturity in offering a series of alternatives that recognise the fact that an enemy
need not behave according to the tenets of the sa-dgunya theory. A series of
hypothetical scenarios are built in Book VII, and consequently policy pre
scriptions are presented.65 What this essentially conveys to an analyst is that,
whilst social sciences can offer methodological frameworks for analysis, it is the
empirical observations of the enemy’s strategic culture that allows objective
analysis and production of estimates. That the observation of the enemy’s stra
tegic culture was central to Kautilya’s military policy and planning is an
important factor and is revisited in the later section while discussing the intel
ligence-military relationship. However, before moving there, it is necessary to
briefly examine the analytical models and prescriptions made in the Arthashastra,
that have remained valid to this day.
Kautilya’s reflection on the numerical representation in the all-source analysis
organisation is not merely a quantitative articulation, but a well thought out
strategy against common analytical challenges observed by intelligence scho
lars.66 It appears that Kautilya was clearly aware of the impact of psychological
and structural impediments to analysis and dissemination. The Arthashastra
argues that the decision-making process is on flimsy grounds if the ruler relies
on a single analyst. Similarly, relying on two or three analysts will give rise to
“groupthink” or “conflicting analysis”.67 Kautilya thus warns that, “holding
consultations with two [or three analysts], he [the king] is controlled by [them]
68
if united and ruined by them if at war with each other”. With four analysts,
Kautilya regards such occurrences difficult, but not impossible.69 In order to
caution against such hazards, modern-day scholars of intelligence analysis like
Richards Heuer, Jr. have advocated the use of “devil’s advocacy” and “ana
lysis of competing hypothesis” models to eliminate psychological and mental
constraints to analysis and improve predictability.70 Kautilya does not expli
citly mention any such analytical models, but they are embedded in the
advice he offers to the king while consulting his analysts. Accordingly, the
king must consult the analysts both “individually” and “jointly” and in so
doing must “ascertain their different opinions along with their reasons for
holding them”.71 Therefore, by extension, all theories and hypotheses that
the analysts held were subject to scrutiny by the consumer.
Intelligence-Consumer Relationship in the Kautilyan State

On the basis of the descriptive and reportorial elements, Kautilya has drawn
attention to the last quality, i.e. ‘reflecting on knowledge’. This is what Kent
terms the “speculative element” that essentially goes on to become the intelli
gence product.72 In fact, the sa-dgunya theory is meant to facilitate the produc
tion of intelligence estimates, which are futuristic and predictive by nature.
Nonetheless, the speculative element acquires a unique character, as it is this
segment that interacts with the consumers of intelligence. It is here that the
intelligence cycle approaches a full rotation and meets the consumers. Kautilya
has shown profoundness in giving due importance to both professional intelli
gence analysis and political analysis. The text forbids the king from taking
unilateral decisions. Yet, realising its inevitability, Kautilya warns that such
decisions must remain within the confines of the sastras (sciences) in order to
limit any potential disaster.
It is indeed astonishing how Kautilya’s perspectives on intelligence-consumer
relationship are so closely reflective of modern-day challenges. The Arthashastra
never steered away from analytical objectivity, as it required the analysts to
swear by the nation and pledge adherence to dharma and artha. Based on this
intentional purity, Kautilya has asserted that in matters of national interest the
analysts must speak without procrastination.73 This is an indication that Kauti
lya prioritised objectivity and earnestness over concerns of ‘cry-wolf’ syndrome
affecting consumer receptibility. Politicisation of intelligence was outrightly
unpardonable. Analysts had to refrain from presenting analysis with the purpose
of pleasing the monarch.74 Yet, the analysts were also cautioned about the ills
of upsetting the monarch with unsavoury reports. In these conditions, Kautilya
recommends maintaining silence over reporting something that is unwelcome
and likely to provoke the king. Modern intelligence scholars are likely to dis
agree with this suggestion. However, putting it in the right perspective might
invoke a thought process regarding Kautilya’s perspective on intelligence-con
sumer relationship.
As mentioned earlier, in the Kautilyan state, it was mandatory for the king to
consult the intelligence organisation and his other councillors before taking any
decision. In this multi-agency all-source analytical process, the Kautilyan system
comes to resemble the British Joint Intelligence Committee in structure where
the representatives of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS/MI6), Foreign and
Commonwealth Office, Ministry of Defence, Home Office, HM Treasury,
Cabinet Office and any other department meet on a need basis, discuss and
deliberate and finally submit a consensual report to the political leadership.75
However, in effect, the Kautilyan system operated like the American system
where dissenting voices were also presented to the consumer.76 This happened
both because the monarch was a party to the all-source deliberations as well as
a reviewer of the analysts’ conclusions (mentioned in the previous section).
Notwithstanding the ceiling on membership in the all-source analytical orga
nisation to four people, it was still considered impossible to avert the negative
ramifications of contrarian reports and suggestions on the monarch’s decision-
making faculties. It was against this backdrop that Kautilya advised the analysts
not to present any report that, short of an all-department consensus, was poised
to upset the king. He has written that:
“even competent people may be cast out if they say unwelcome things;
and, undesirable people who know the mind and inclinations of the
monarch may become favourites”.77
The merits of Kautilya’s prescription may, nevertheless, invoke differences

among scholars. But insofar as Kautilya was concerned, intelligence-consumer
relationship was given greater priority over, what would be termed today as,
analytical professionalism.
The other important consumer of intelligence – more so from this book’s
point of view – the military, also figures prominently in the Arthashastra.
According to Kautilya, the commander-in-chief had to be a thorough intel
lectual besides being an operational genius. With relation to intelligence, it was
mandatory that he had a clear knowledge of the capabilities of the enemies, the
allies and the neutral kingdoms; the types of armies – hereditary troops [maula],
hired troops [bhrita] and mercenaries [sreni]; and, the strength of the cavalry,
elephants, weapons and other war equipment.78 Yet, as a policy analyst, he also
had to be aware of the conditions that facilitated a particular military decision.
In other words, the commander-in-chief had to be aware of the enemy’s stra
tegic culture.79
Kautilya has written that the commander-in-chief has to be “trained in the
science of all kinds of fights and weapons”, which suggests a mandatory
requirement of theoretical knowledge on warfare.80 However, he also uses the
term pratyan-ıkam, which signified military planning in accordance with the
military posture of the enemy.81 This meant that the commander-in-chief, not
only required a thorough understanding of warfare in theory, but also a com
prehensive appreciation of the enemy’s understanding and application of the
principles of warfare. Such intellectual pursuit in modern parlance would be
termed ‘professional military education’. In intelligence analysis, however, edu
cation is about possessing two-dimensional knowledge, i.e. theoretical and
empirical, a lack of which is held accountable for “mirror-imaging” – a situation
where the analysts assume that, given the circumstances, the other side is likely to
behave the same way as we would.82 To avoid falling victim to such cognitive
traps, Kautilya has deemed an all-faceted knowledge of the enemy critical. As the
case chapters shall reveal, it was this crucial aspect that was missing in both the
1962 and 1999 wars.
Operational and tactical intelligence aspects are fairly straight-forward and
self-explanatory throughout the text. Therefore, to sum up, according to the
Arthashastra, no war or battle could be conducted without strategic intelligence.
This led the Kautilyan state to function on a vibrant intelligence-consumer
relationship. It was accepted that decision-makers were also analysts, operating
at an extremely crucial stage of policymaking. In this regard, the system desired
a balance by tailoring intelligence reports to suit consumer needs whilst
emphasising on consumer education to avoid intellectually poor decisions that
would invite disasters.
The Role of Intelligence Alliances in the Kautilyan State

International intelligence alliances and co-operation is another area where
Kautilyan thoughts are a clear reflection of the nature of modern-day liaison
networks. The Arthashastra does not make any explicit mention of intelligence
liaisons, but an intelligence scholar cannot escape the temptation to draw
inferences from Kautilya’s exposition on inter-state alliances. Within this fra
mework, he clearly mentions all the challenges and opportunities that today’s
international intelligence alliances face.
The Arthashastra has argued that alliances are built either for consolidation of
power or expansion of the kingdom.83 The moral basis for a state’s actions (rajad
harma), aimed at achieving the welfare of the people (yogakshema), therefore, does
not apply to the conduct of alliances. Kautilya places alliances as the only external
factor in calculating the state power but is realistic in observing the ‘need-based/
self-interest driven’ character of the allies. Applying this character to modern day
intelligence operations, it appears as though he is echoing the age-old intelligence
dictum that ‘there are no friendly secret services, there are only secret services of
friendly states.’ In other words, “clandestine agencies pursue national interests
ruthlessly against friends and foes alike”.84
One intelligence scholar has described this interplay between intelligence and
international politics as “adaptive realism”.85 Accordingly, intelligence allows
‘smart’ states to maximise power and security through creation of effective
strategies, alliances and balancing against adversaries. Hence, intelligence liaisons
cannot be judged on how they operate, rather they ought to be judged on why
they exist. In this regard, both the Kautilyan theory of intelligence as well as
modern western theories of intelligence meet and agree that intelligence
alliances are built solely for the maximisation of one’s own power. Consequently,
states have had to pay careful attention to the intention and the capacity of the
alliance partner.
Theoretically speaking, when several criteria demand close co-operation
between intelligence services, a strategic partnership logically emerges. Tactical
alliances, for their part, are a result of certain interests meeting; and the costs of
strategic partnerships being deemed too high. The criteria for strategic alliances
that Kautilya has laid down are – an ally of the family for a long time (read: ideological
partners), amenable to control, powerful in support, sharing a common interest, ability to
extend reach and is ‘not a man who betrays’. 86 Modern international intelligence
relationships are also built on such ideological characteristics which are of strate
gic nature (the Five-Eyes or the Warsaw Pact intelligence services). These rela
tionships are also crafted on the basis of mutual interests – anti-communism
driven co-operation between the NATO countries; and, tactical arrangements,
for instance between the U.S. and Syria against Sunni extremism.87 Intelligence
co-operation is not only about sharing information and assessments but also
sharing assets and territory, which is what Kautilya called the ‘ability to extend
reach’. The U.S.-Pakistan intelligence liaison through the Cold War and later is a
perfect illustration of this factor.88 Finally, Kautilya’s pointer - ‘not a man who
betrays’ – is what has caused several difficulties and dilemmas in most interna
tional intelligence relationships.89 These concerns cover a range of issues from
source protection to an abidance with the ‘third party rule’ that forbids sharing of
intelligence received from one party with another.
The dilemma in establishing intelligence relationships is aptly reflected in
Kautilya’s words:
“[the gains of alliances] cannot be computed simply as a mathematical

calculation… one should take into account the overall benefit which
includes the immediate gain as well as potential future gain. Sometimes, it
may even be advisable to forgo any apparent benefits”.90
However, from the perspective of weaker nations like India, Kautilya’s pro
phecy needs careful attention. In, what he has termed, ‘exceptionally unequal’
relationships, only one party in the alliance receives disproportionate benefits.91
To be clear, in intelligence it is difficult to measure strength. One agency might
be well-funded, while another might have information dominance in a parti
cular geography pertaining to the former’s interests. Therefore, accepting the
fact that the power balance in intelligence relationships are never constant, one
can learn from the Arthashastra that alliances have to be judged on the basis of
one’s own utility and, thereby, be concluded as “acceptable or hostile” part
nerships.92 For instance, Kautilya has written that, if a stronger state is experi
encing a crisis, it is in the interest of the smaller state to accept the alliance
proposal but make unreliable contributions.93 In the modern world, this is
exactly what Pakistan has been doing with the U.S. post-9/11. Threats of
being bombed back to stone age by Richard Armitage, the then Assistant
Secretary of State, compelled the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)
agency to initiate co-operation with regards to Afghanistan, but as decades have
passed it is only getting clearer that the ISI reaped the benefits of the alliance,
while offering little strategic value to the Central Intelligence Agency.94
Similarly, if a stronger nation seeks the co-operation of a weaker nation in
another instance with much lesser survival stakes, then the weaker nation,
according to Kautilya, can enjoy the liberty of either accepting it or rejecting
the proposal as ‘hostile’.95 This is a condition where the weaker nation gets
lesser than it is entitled to receive by entering into an alliance, but a lot more to
lose by thriving in it. As the later chapters in this book will highlight, this is
exactly how India’s intelligence relationships with the Anglo-American agen
cies have evolved. Thus, the bottom-line for a Kautilyan theory of intelligence
alliances is that a thorough cost-benefit analysis plus a situational assessment
should determine if a particular alliance can assume a strategic, tactical or hostile
character. To conclude this section, a quote from the Arthashastra:
“a friend keeps up his friendship as long as money is forthcoming. Thus,

the determination of the comparative seriousness of the calamities to the
various elements of sovereignty [is inevitable]”.96
Therefore, notwithstanding the security situation and threat perception, the

sovereignty of one’s own turf is more important than upholding the principles
of an intelligence alliance.
Kautilya’s Perspective on Intelligence Failures and Surprises

Intelligence failures and surprises in the Arthashastra are represented as vyasana
[calamities/vices]. Kautilya perceived surprises as occurrences that have a psy
chological effect on the happiness of a person.97 To him, national security was
paramount as the security of the state was the aggregate security of the
people. However, what does the Arthashastra have to say about aversion of
surprises/calamities? Does Kautilya suggest that intelligence is failproof? Kau
tilya does not provide a clear-cut answer to this question but appears to take a
middle path, as he championed an elaborate intelligence system, but at the
same time argued vociferously for military preparedness, which suggests that
he did consider intelligence to have its limitations.
The entire Book VIII of the Arthashastra is dedicated to the understanding and
remedying of the calamities. They could occur in any one of the prakritis (con
stituent elements) and Kautilya has offered remedial measures to fix each and every
one of them. The extensive network of spies working as a counterintelligence
shield was meant specially to overcome the vices of men who were employed as
ministers or personnel in the army or treasury; or even that of an ally. The reme
dial measures addressed both psychological and organisational discrepancies.
Organisational loopholes included corruption, subversion etc. that could be fixed
by counterintelligence measures while psychological shortcomings like greed, lust,
etc. could effectively be tackled through disciplining measures.98
According to Kautilya, maintenance of peace and prosperity, to a large
extent, depended on preparedness. Foresight formed the basis of preparations;
but foresight as a quality was not entirely a derivative of facts and intelligence
alone. One’s intuition also had a great role to play in determining decisions.99
Intuition should not imply that astrology was the basis of decision-making in
the Kautilyan state. In fact, Kautilya argued that:
“wealth will slip away from that childish man who constantly consults the
stars. The only guiding star of wealth is wealth itself; what can the stars of
the sky do?”100
This is also not to suggest that Kautilya did not believe in divine interventions.101
It is just the principle of ‘prevention is better than cure’ that Kautilya was alluding
to. In matters of economy and security, Kautilya relied more on knowledge and
power over astrology and divine dispensation (daiva). Even when he prescribed the
appointment of priests, he demanded that the candidate be:
“thoroughly trained in the Veda with its auxiliary sciences, in divine sci
ence, in omens and in the science of politics and capable of counteracting
divine and human calamities by means of Atharvan remedies.” [emphasis
added]102
Thus, Kautilya argued that intelligence was absolutely necessary to predict the
future. His conviction for intelligence is visible when he asserts that “if the
cause of [the calamity] is knowable, and hence, foreseeable, its origin is
human”.103 In short, it is an intelligence failure. Yet, in matters of national
security, he regards maximisation of defence capabilities as the safest bet.104
Mantrashakti (knowledge/intellectual power) was best exploited alongside prab
havshakti (hard power) and utsahashakti (intangibles like morale, energy, cour
age, spirit).105 Thus, the Kautilyan state was built on the power of knowledge,
but this knowledge has also taught the king that material strength was equally
important in statecraft. In other words, a strong military capability is as impor
tant as intelligence warnings in averting strategic surprises.
Kautilyan Intelligence Culture in Summation

In summary, the Kautilyan state was based on knowledge and foresight. The
latter was a derivative of the former. Simply put, the Kautilyan state was intel
ligence literate. Because of such literacy, intelligence institutions took shape and
the consumers were mandated to engage with the intelligence institutions on a
regular basis. Organisationally, the operational culture was marked by proac
tiveness and vibrancy to cater to the consumers’ needs, while the consumers,
for their part, had to sustain a culture of intellectual curiosity to sufficiently
appreciate the utility and limitations of intelligence. A systemic level of pro
fessionalism existed to reward the meritorious and punish the worthless; and,
international intelligence co-operation was marked by a realistic cost-benefit
analysis. Finally, alongside secret intelligence, other deterrent capabilities were
also given equal importance. Thus, the evolution of the Kautilyan intelligence
culture owes it to the “knowledge culture” of the Kautilyan state. Knowledge
culture by definition entails:
“knowing who we are…the values, beliefs and behavioural norms that

determines the success of knowledge management. [This] ranges from the
highly explicit, visible organisational structures and procedures to those
highly tacit, largely out-of-awareness, deeply imprinted core beliefs that guide
[the states’] behaviour”. [emphasis added]106
As the Kautilyan state firmly believed in knowledge as the basis for survival, the
successful management of knowledge at the organisational and systemic levels
was achieved through intellectualism and operational finesse. It was this
knowledge culture that went missing from the post-independence Indian state
and led to severe weaknesses in the intelligence organisation. As the coming
chapters will expose, the top-down approach of the Kautilyan state escaped the
Indian state, leaving much of the burden on intelligence managers. Far-sight
edness was replaced by myopia; operational courage was replaced by a culture
of risk aversion; and most importantly, the knowledge-based policymaking was
replaced by adhocism. How did this come to happen? What factors intervened
in determining the modern Indian intelligence culture? Understanding the
death of the Kautilyan state and the birth of the modern Indian state requires
investigation of an important intervening variable, i.e. colonialism. In addition,
as post-independence intelligence bureaucracies trace their origins to the colo
nial period, a study of the British legacy on Indian intelligence culture is
inevitable. The following chapter explores this.
Notes
1 Hamid Ansari, ‘Oversight and Accountability’, Outlook, 19 January 2010, available
at www.outlookindia.com/website/story/ensure-oversight-and-accountability/
263861, accessed 1 November 2019.
2 Kautilya, also known as Chanakya and Vishnugupta, was the royal adviser of the
Mauryan Empire and the author of the Arthashastra. Although many believe the
text to be from the 2nd century BCE–3rd century CE, the exact dating of the
text, as with the periodisation of Indian history in general, has been seriously
contested by scholars.
3 S.D. Trivedi, Secret Services in Ancient India: Techniques and Operations, Bombay:
Allied Publishing House, 1988, p. xix.
4 Ibid; Asoka Raina, Inside RAW: The Story of India’s Secret Service, Ghaziabad: Vikas
Publishing House Pvt Ltd, 1981, pp. 2–6; Bhashyam Kasturi, Intelligence Services:
Analysis, Organisation and Function, New Delhi: Lancer Publishers, 1995, pp. 17–
18; Manila Rohatgi, Spy System in Ancient India, Delhi: Kalpaz Publications, 2007.
5 Philip H.J. Davies, ‘The Original Surveillance State: Kautilya’s Arthashastra and
Government by Espionage in Classical India’, in Philip H.J. Davies and Kristian
Gustafson (eds), Intelligence Elsewhere: Spies and Espionage outside the Anglosphere,
Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013, pp. 49–66.
6 K. Gjesdal, ‘Hermeneutics’, Oxford Bibliographies, 21 May 2019, available at www.
oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780195396577/
obo-9780195396577-0054.xml, accessed on 1 November 2019.
7 Michael Liebig, ‘Kautilya’s relevance for India today’, India Quarterly, Vol. 66, No. 2,
2013, p. 103.
8 L.N. Rangarajan, Kautilya: The Arthashastra, Gurgaon: Penguin Random House,
1992, p. 27.
9 For an elaboration on the taxonomies of imagination, see: ‘Imagination’, Stanford
Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, 22 January 2019, available at https://plato.stanford.edu/
entries/imagination, accessed 1 November 2019.
10 Medha Bisht, Kautilya’s Arthashastra: Philosophy of Strategy, London: Routledge,
2019, p. 12.
11 Ibid, p. 24.
12 G. Modelski, ‘Foreign Policy and International System in the Ancient Hindu
World’, The American Political Science Review, Vol. 58, No. 3, 1964, pp. 549–560.
13 R. Shamasastry, Kautilya’s Arthashastra, Mysore: Sri Raghuveer Printing Press, 1951,
pp. 3–212.
14 Ibid, p. 20.
15 Rangarajan, The Arthashastra, 1992, p. 101.
16 The term dharma is a slippery one, with varied meanings, owing to the lack of an
equivalent word in English. Depending on the context, as is the case with this
chapter, dharma means law, duty, morality and righteousness. Rajadharma is the law
of governance which dictates that the king’s action be driven by morality, ethics
and righteousness.
17 Ibid, p. 123.
18 Kautilya, Arthashastra, 1.7.1 (The first number corresponds to the book number in
Kautilya’s Arthashastra. There is a total of 15 books. The second number denotes
the chapter while the final number refers to the particular sutra within the chapter).
Source of English translation: R.P. Kangle, The Kautilya Arthashastra, Bombay:
University of Bombay, 1963.
19 Liebig, Kautilya’s relevance for India today, 2013, pp. 103–104.
20 Shyam Saran, How India Sees the World: Kautilya to the 21st Century, New Delhi:
Juggernaut, 2017, pp. 29–30.
21 Patrick Olivelle, ‘Economy, Ecology, and National Defence in Kautilya’s Artha
sastra’, in P.K. Gautam, Saurabh Mishra and Arvind Gupta, Indigenous Historical
Knowledge: Kautilya and His Vocabulary (Volume III), New Delhi: Pentagon Press,
2016, p. 10.
22 Medha Bisht, ‘Bargaining and Negotiation Analysis: Lessons from Arthashastra’, in
P.K. Gautam, Saurabh Mishra and Arvind Gupta, Indigenous Historical Knowledge:
Kautilya and His Vocabulary (Volume III), New Delhi: Pentagon Press, 2016, p. 105.
23 Ibid, p. 111.
24 George O’Toole, ‘Kahn’s Law: a universal principle of intelligence?’, International
Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, Vol. 4, No. 1, 1990, p. 39.
25 Kautilya, Arthashastra, 8.3.18.
26 Michael Leibig, ‘Statecraft and Intelligence Analysis in the Kautilya-Arthashastra’, in
Kautilya and His Vocabulary (Volume III), New Delhi: Pentagon Press, 2016, p. 42.
27 Kautilya, Arthashastra, 1.11.1–1.12.25.
28 Shamasastry, Kautilya’s Arthashastra, 1951, p. 30.
31 Stefano Musco, ‘The art of meddling: a theoretical, strategic and historical analysis
of non-official covers for clandestine Humint’, Defense and Security Analysis, Vol.
33, No. 4, 2017, pp. 380–394.
32 Leibig, ‘Statecraft and Intelligence Analysis in the Kautilya-Arthashastra’, 2016, p. 38.
35 Ibid.
36 Kautilya systematically directs the spies to look out for individuals in the enemy
kingdom who are victims of misfortune and offended by the king, impoverished,
ambitious, and/or haughty. Such individuals must be then seduced by the spies
(through monetary or amorous means). See: Kautilya, Arthashastra, 1.14.6.; To
appreciate the strategic utility of Kautilya’s prescriptions, it is beneficial to observe
the case of Ashraf Marwan – Israeli spy in Egypt. Marwan’s psychological and
positional profiling plus the strategic gains realised by the Israeli intelligence by
recruiting him offers the reader a validating insight into the Kautilyan philosophy
of intelligence. See: Uri Bar-Joseph, The Angel: The Egyptian Spy who saved Israel,
London: Harper Collins, 2016.
37 ‘Human Intelligence Collector Operations’, Pentagon Library Military Documents, 6
September 2006, available at www.loc.gov/rr/frd/Military_Law/pdf/huma
n-intell-collector-operations.pdf, accessed on 1 November 2019.
38 In the Kautilyan state, every aspect of governmental activity is based on espionage.
So, “Kautilya’s vision is not merely of a counterintelligence state but an untram
melled espionage state”.
40 Kautilya, Arthashastra, 1.12.9.; Shamasastry, Kautilya’s Arthashastra, 1951, p. 28.
41 Interview with former Secretary (Research), N. Narasimhan, 8 November 2018.
42 Musco, ‘The art of meddling: a theoretical, strategic and historical analysis of non
official covers for clandestine Humint’, 2017, p. 389.
43 Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive II: The KGB and
the Wider World, London: Penguin, 2006, pp. 312–313.
45 Ibid
48 Matthew Crosston and Frank Valli, ‘An Intelligence Civil War: “HUMINT’” vs.
“TECHINT”’, Cyber, Intelligence and Security, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2017, pp. 67–82.; for
modern day attempts at training animals in spying, see, Vince Houghton, Nuking
the Moon: And Other Intelligence Schemes and Military Plots left on the Drawing Board,
London: Penguin Books, 2019, pp. 7–15.
50 Balbir Singh Sihag, ‘Kautilya on Far-sight, Foresight and Freedom’, in P. K. Gautam,
Saurabh Mishra and Arvind Gupta, Indigenous Historical Knowledge: Kautilya and His
Vocabulary (Volume III), New Delhi: Pentagon Press, 2016, p. 148.
52 Ibid, 1.15.47–50.
53 Stephen Marrin, ‘Why strategic intelligence analysis has limited influence on
American foreign policy’, Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 32, No. 6, 2017,
pp. 727–728.
55 Ibid.
56 Sherman Kent, Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy, Princeton University
Press, 1966.
57 Ibid, p. 11.
58 Ibid, pp. 7–8.
59 Philip H.J. Davies, ‘Ideas of Intelligence: Divergent National Concepts and Insti
tutions’, Harvard International Review, Vol. 14, No. 3, 2002.
60 It is also this aspect that leads many observers to incorrectly declare several policy
failures (mysteries) as intelligence failures (secrets) – this will be evident in the case
studies section of this book.
62 Anna Derinova, ‘The Role of Social Institutions in Shaping Strategic Culture’, E-
International Relations, 29 April 2013, available at www.e-ir.info/2013/04/29/
the-role-of-social-institutions-in-shaping-strategic-culture, accessed on 10
December 2019.; Alastair I. Johnston, ‘Thinking about Strategic Culture’, Inter
national Security, Vol. 19, No. 4, 1995, pp. 32–64.
66 Ibid, 1.15.36–40.
67 Following the 2003 Iraq debacle, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s
report on the US Intelligence Community’s pre-war assessments noted that the it
“suffered from a collective presumption that Iraq had an active and growing
weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program. This “group think” dynamic led
intelligence community analysts, collectors and managers to both interpret
ambiguous evidence as conclusively indicative of WMD program…”. Such are
the perils of “group think” that Kautilya is cautioning against. For the above
quote, see Richards J. Heuer, Jr., ‘Limits of Intelligence Analysis’, Orbis, Winter
2005, p. 75.
69 Ibid, 1.15.38–39.
70 For a detailed discussion on intelligence analysis see Richards J. Heuer, Jr., ‘Psy
chology of Intelligence Analysis’, Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1999,
available at www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publica
tions/books-and-monographs/psychology-of-intelligence-analysis/Psycho
fIntelNew.pdf, accessed on 27 November 2019.
71 Kautilya, Arthashastra, 1.15.43–44.
72 Kent, Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy, 1966, p. 59.
74 Ibid, pp. 176–177.
75 Philip H.J. Davies, ‘Intelligence culture and intelligence failure in Britain and the
United States’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Vol. 17, No. 3, p. 501.
76 Ibid, p. 502.
78 Kautilya, Arthashastra, 2.33.1–11.
79 Ibid.
80 Ibid, 2.33.9.
81 Ibid, 2.33.10.
82 Heuer, Jr., ‘Psychology of Intelligence Analysis’, 1999, pp. 70–71.
84 Richard J. Aldrich, ‘Dangerous Liaisons: Post-September 11 Intelligence Alli
ances’, Harvard International Review, Vol. 24, No. 3, 2002, p. 50.
85 Jennifer Sims, ‘Defending adaptive realism: intelligence theory comes of age’, in
Peter Gill, Mark Phythian and Stephen Marrin, Intelligence Theory: Key Questions
and Debates, London: Routledge, 2009, p. 158.
86 Bisht, ‘Bargaining and Negotiation Analysis: Lessons from Arthashastra’, 2016, p. 113.
87 Adam D. Svendsen, Understanding the Globalisation of Intelligence, Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2012.
88 For an exposition on the nature of US-Pakistan intelligence co-operation see
Dheeraj P.C., ‘U.S.-Pakistan intelligence liaison in South Asia’s age of terror: a
realist analysis’, Journal of Policing, Intelligence and Counterterrorism, Vol. 12, No. 2,
2017, pp. 142–157.
89 Stephen Lefebvre, ‘The difficulties and dilemmas of international intelligence
cooperation’, International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Vol. 16, No.
4, 2003, pp. 527–542.
91 Ibid, p. 549.
92 Ibid, pp. 551–556.
93 Ibid, p. 555.
94 ‘Bush threatened to bomb Pakistan, says Musharraf’, The Guardian, 22 September
2006, available at www.theguardian.com/world/2006/sep/22/pakistan.usa, accessed
on 27 November 2019.; Dheeraj, ‘U.S.-Pakistan intelligence liaison in South Asia’s
age of terror: a realist analysis’, 2017, pp 152–155.; Robert Johnson, ‘Pakistan’s ISI
and Covert Operations in Afghanistan’, in Philip H.J. Davies and Kristian Gustafson
(eds), Intelligence Elsewhere: Spies and Espionage outside the Anglosphere, Washington DC:
Georgetown University Press, 2013, pp. 115–140.
97 Ibid, p. 467.
98 Rangarajan, The Arthashastra, 1992, pp. 80, 473, 647.
99 Naresh Khatri and Alvin H. Ng, ‘The Role of Intuition in Strategic Decision
Making’, Human Relations, Vol. 53, No. 1, 2000, p. 62.
101 Sachin More, ‘Kautilya on state fragility in contemporary security environment’, in
Kautilya and His Vocabulary (Volume I), New Delhi: Pentagon Press, 2015, p. 16.
104 Sihag, ‘Kautilya on Far-sight, Foresight and Freedom’, 2016, p. 146.
105 G. Adityakiran, ‘Kautilya’s Pioneering Exposition of Comprehensive National
Power in the Arthashastra’, in P.K. Gautam, Saurabh Mishra and Arvind Gupta,
Indigenous Historical Knowledge: Kautilya and His Vocabulary (Volume I), New Delhi:
Pentagon Press, 2015, p. 29.
106 Leo-Paul Dana, Len Korot and George Tovstiga, ‘A Cross-National comparison
of Knowledge Management practices’, International Journal of Manpower, Vol. 26,
No. 1, 2005, p. 10.
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Khatri, Naresh and Alvin H. Ng, ‘The Role of Intuition in Strategic Decision Making’,
Human Relations, Vol. 53, No. 1, 2000.
Lefebvre, Stephen, ‘The difficulties and dilemmas of international intelligence coop
eration’, International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Vol. 16, No. 4,
2003, pp. 527–542.
Liebig, Michael, ‘Statecraft and Intelligence Analysis in the Kautilya-Arthashastra’, in P. K.
Gautam, Saurabh Mishra and Arvind Gupta, Indigenous Historical Knowledge: Kautilya and
His Vocabulary (Volume III), New Delhi: Pentagon Press, 2016.
Liebig, Michael, ‘Kautilya’s relevance for India today’, India Quarterly, Vol. 66, No. 2, 2013.
Marrin, Stephen, ‘Why strategic intelligence analysis has limited influence on American
foreign policy’, Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 32, No. 6, 2017.
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The American Political Science Review, Vol. 58, No. 3, 1964.
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official covers for clandestine Humint’, Defense and Security Analysis, Vol. 33, No. 4, 2017.
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in P. K. Gautam, Saurabh Mishra and Arvind Gupta, Indigenous Historical Knowledge:
Kautilya and His Vocabulary (Volume III), New Delhi: Pentagon Press, 2016.
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nal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, Vol. 4, No. 1, 1990.
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a realist analysis’, Journal of Policing, Intelligence and Counterterrorism, Vol. 12, No. 2, 2017.
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September 2006, available at www.loc.gov/rr/frd/Military_Law/pdf/human-intell-col
lector-operations.pdf, accessed on 1 November 2019.
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House Pvt Ltd, 1981.
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3 From the Kautilyan State to the
Colonial State
Transmogrification of the Ideas and
Operations of Intelligence
Introduction
The previous chapter outlined the intellectual richness of the Kautilyan thought
on intelligence in statecraft. This chapter examines how the idea of strategic
intelligence underwent a significant change with the advent of colonialism in
India. Notwithstanding the antiquity of the Arthashastra, its philosophy
remained the basis for statecraft until the advent of the colonial rule in the
Indian subcontinent. With the Maratha empire controlling significant portion
of the Indian landmass, the knowledge of the Arthashastra had survived, and
Rajadharma, which was the ideational source of Kautilyan intelligence was
prevalent during the Maratha rule. It is primarily for this reason that the British
victory over the Marathas has been described as a “pyrrhic victory”, and Major
General Arthur Wellesley – the famed victor of the Battle of Waterloo –
regarded the 1803 Battle at Assaye against the Marathas as the toughest battle of
his life.1 Gradually as the colonial state spread through the subcontinent, the
ideas of intelligence transformed significantly. Therefore, the question that this
chapter aims to answer is: what were the dynamic changes that occurred in the way the
colonial state ‘thought about’ and ‘did’ intelligence in comparison to the Kautilyan state?
The original Kautilyan state that regarded intelligence as a fundamental
aspect of statecraft was lost to the requirements of the colonial state – the
British East India Company (EIC) at first, and the British Empire later. What
emerged from the 18th century onwards was a reactive intelligence culture,
where intelligence was not seen as an essential part of statecraft. Rather it
became a response to threats that colonial Britain perceived. This chapter traces
the ideational evolution of intelligence under the British, as it was the colonial
intelligence organisations that independent India would inherit. The colonial
legacy would, thereby, have serious implications on how India ‘thought’ about
and ‘did’ intelligence that will be explained in the coming chapters.
Through the observation of the colonial period, this chapter provides three
important signposts for the observation of the Indian intelligence culture post-
independence. The most important factor that this chapter brings out in dif
ferentiating the colonial state from the Kautilyan state is the role of individuals
as opposed to the role of the state in intelligence. While the state in the
DOI: 10.4324/9781003296195-6
From the Kautilyan State to the Security State 65
Arthashastra was the driving force behind intelligence, in a ‘reactive’ system, the
wisdom of the individuals became the driver. The second difference is that the
power centre of the colonial state being elsewhere, the burden of foreign
intelligence was shared between London and colonial India, making the latter
mostly a security concern rather than a policymaking unit. In other words,
policy developments in colonial India were more internal security focused than
external security. Finally, while intelligence was a respectable profession in the
Kautilyan state and spies were held in high regard, the British colonial state
induced a sense of hierarchical discrimination, which has come to have far
reaching consequences on present day Indian intelligence organisations.
Offered below is a chronological narration of the evolution of intelligence
organisations during colonialism that validate this chapter’s argument that
colonial intelligence culture was marked by a “reactive”, “individual-driven”
and “hierarchical” character.
William Henry Sleeman and the Thagi Daftar

When the John Company began expanding in India, its primary interests were
commercial, especially information on South Asian textiles and manufacturers.2
The coincidence of the need for this information with that of the need to
manipulate Indian commerce in its favour compelled the company to under
take military operations against native rulers. Thus, emerged a complex web of
alliances, which enabled the EIC to understand the Indian society better by
making use of the existing intelligence networks in India. It is noted that the
fundamental fear of the coloniser was “his lack of knowledge and ignorance of
the ‘wiles of the natives’”.3 The early colonists, therefore, began to utilise the
native intelligence infrastructure that composed of intelligencers – the societal
intellectuals – and, the runners – intelligence collectors who spread as far as
Central Asia, to allay their ignorance of the Indian society. With the conquer
of each kingdom, beginning with the Battle of Plassey in 1757, the Company
began using the intelligence infrastructure of the occupied kingdom to better
understand its society. The occupied intelligence agents also became the front
runners in the Company’s future conquest. Successive conquests, thus, brought
to the Company’s understanding the diversity of the Indian subcontinent.4 In
fact, evidence suggests that the EIC officials learnt the art of intelligence from
the Indian rulers. In 1770 the Mughal Deputy Governor of Bengal instructed
the EIC to create a formal intelligence practice. He wrote explaining how
previous emperors had based decision-making on a combination of two overt
and one covert source, following which, the EIC appointed the agents he
nominated.5
The hallmark of the EIC’s intelligence efforts until the second decade of the
nineteenth century was an intermingling of the English officers with the locals
with the intention of understanding and seeking co-operation from the latter.
As the British rule was firmly established in India, this relationship began to
weaken, and most importantly, there was no institutionalised mechanism that
developed in the face of an absent threat. The first attempt in setting up an
intelligence organisation was made only in the 1820s with the emergence of
the threat of thugs or stranglers. William Henry Sleeman, the magistrate of
Nursingpur, took this as a serious issue of law and order as the data between
1822 and 1824 revealed the deaths of some 40,000–50,000 every year, as a
result of thugee crimes.6 Sleeman launched a counter-thugee operation which
relied on turning the apprehended thugs as informers on their fellow thugs and
their networks. These informers were called “approvers” and became the
human intelligence (HUMINT) pool of the Thagi and Dakoiti Department,
which Sleeman established in 1829 under Lord William Bentinck.7 Within a
few more years, combining the threat of punishment and the allurement of
pardon, Sleeman’s efforts had completely eradicated the thugee crime.
Despite the success of Sleeman’s intelligence led fight against the thugs, the
failure of the British to foresee the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny highlights the three
important factors that project the weaknesses in the British intelligence culture
in India. Sleeman knew that the company’s success in India was mainly a result
of co-operation with the natives. He was acutely aware that his own success
against the thugee crime owed to the support given by the thugs. Almost a
decade before the mutiny, Sleeman had warned that:
“there was no longer that sympathy between the people and the agents now
employed in these regions by our government. The European officers no
longer showed the courtesy towards the middle and higher classes and the
kindness towards the humbler…, while the native officers rather imitated
and took advantage of this”.8
Therefore, once the British rule was firmly established there no longer seemed
to require intelligence on the subjects. Neither could the British correctly
comprehend the seriousness of the anti-British writings in Indian newspapers
nor could they make sense of the mysterious circulation of chapatis across the
breadth of the subcontinent, which in retrospect, is believed to have carried
some secret meaning.9 Thus, intelligence under the EIC was only in response
to a particular threat, and as a result lacked any centralised control. Third, this
led to another problem, or highlighted another characteristic of the British
intelligence in India, i.e. the role of the individual. Literature about the pre
1857 period synonymously uses Sleeman for intelligence, as the dedicated
improvements in intelligence happened only under his guidance. Summing up
the effects of these three factors, Robert Johnson wrote that:
“in the face of a perceived threat, the British could enlist [Indians] and
breakdown the networks of information that confronted them within
India. Nevertheless, without centralised direction, the system was always in
danger of failing precisely the moment it was needed. If Sleeman’s meth
ods had been a success, it was because he had led by personal example and
he had inspired others with similar zeal. Without an established and
permanent organisation, this dependence on charismatic personnel was
doomed to periodic failure”.10
Sir Francis Tuker also described Sleeman as a police officer who had done:
“more than any man had ever done and more than any man was likely to
do for generations after he had gone”.11
Hence, when the British Crown took over the administration of India from the
EIC, there was no intelligence organisation worth its name conducting either
internal or external intelligence. All that existed until then as an organisation
was Sleeman’s office. Even when the Intelligence Bureau (IB) was established
in 1920, its headquarters in Shimla was popular among the locals as Thagi Daftar
(daftar is an office).12
Lord Curzon and India’s First Intelligence Reform

With India becoming part of the British empire, ideas of intelligence in India
became a mirror-image of the ideas of intelligence in London. In sharp contrast
to the Kautilyan ideals of intelligence-based statecraft, the British brought with
them an aversion to the use of spies for governmental activities.13 Domestic
political espionage had ceased in Britain after 1848, owing to the public’s dis
taste for spying. Foreign espionage activities also suffered, leaving Britain with
no formal intelligence service until 1909.14 Thus, the Thagi department and
the pre-colonial system of intelligence taken together, made India “the only pos
session in the British Empire to have its own intelligence branch”, albeit a decen
tralised one.15 The first real attempt at intelligence reforms in India came only at
the turn of the 20th century. Nevertheless, the fear of a Russian invasion, and the
ensuing Great Game in Central Asia, had, by then, compelled the British autho
rities in India to undertake piecemeal improvements in the military intelligence
infrastructure on the frontier regions.
In the late 1870s, while senior British officials like Lord Northbrook, the
Viceroy of India, and Lord Salisbury of the India Office worried about inade
quate intelligence on the Russians and the need for an organisation for this
purpose, two officers – General Robert Napier and Lieutenant-Colonel Freder
ick Roberts – had set up their own Intelligence Branch at Shimla in October
1874.16 This ad hoc mechanism was crystallised into a permanent Intelligence
Branch by Salisbury in 1878 for collecting intelligence and relaying it to London
for analysis. The targets of intelligence were divided between London and
Shimla. The former covered Russia, Turkey, Siam, China, Japan, Egypt and
Africa; Shimla focused on Arabia, Baluchistan, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Nepal,
Burma, Malaya, Ceylon and non-British colonies in the Indian Ocean.17
The geographical demarcation of responsibilities, however, should not be
construed as a rising acceptance of the intelligence profession by Britons. There
was still an aversion to secret intelligence, and these demarcations were mainly
for relaying information collected from diplomatic and political officers in the
respective territories. According to Christopher Andrew, these efforts had
“little to do with secret intelligence”.18 The British military culture also was
so intensely operations oriented that intelligence personnel and any officer
with an affinity towards intellectualism was regarded as “too bookish”. So,
whenever a chance to partake in a campaign arose, officers of the Intelligence
Branch were more than willing to abandon intelligence tasks.19 As the case
chapters shall reveal, this is one of the dominant cultural traits observable even
in the post-colonial Indian military.
Moving beyond military intelligence, in October 1887 Lord Dufferin took the
first initiative in seeking intelligence on political, social and religious movements
in India. But being aware of the possible adverse reactions from the provincial
governments, Dufferin presented his case to Britain as a requirement for the local
governments. Meanwhile, should any information of central importance arise, he
hoped that it would be shared with the central government. He renamed the
Thagi and Dakoiti Department as the Central Special Branch and had an Addi
tional General Superintendent who drew a monthly salary of 800 rupees. Duf
ferin’s concern was that the central government was receiving little information
from the provinces, especially Punjab and Hyderabad, which he believed to be
exposed to severe political intrigues and dangers.20 London responded positively
and on 23 December 1887 the Central Special Branch was established, which
independent India’s Intelligence Bureau considers its date of birth.21 Never
theless, even this step had little effect on centralising intelligence management in
colonial India.
The turn of the 20th century witnessed the arrival of Lord Curzon, which led
to the first visible reforms in intelligence that provided the organisational roots to
independent India’s intelligence agency. In 1903, owing to the revolution in
communications technology – railways, postal and telegraph – the Thagi and
Dakoiti Department, then Central Special Branch, was abolished, and a Depart
ment of Criminal Intelligence (DCI) was created.22 In theory, the DCI was the
apex body that would be in charge of both internal and external intelligence.
Supported by Criminal Investigation Departments (CIDs) at the provincial levels,
the DCI was supposed to cover both criminal as well as political intelligence. But
in practice, the body differed a lot from what was envisaged. The two aspects
observed earlier, i.e. aversion to espionage in Britain and threat reactive approach,
diluted the purpose for which it was created.
First, British aversion to spying was exacerbated by a prejudice against the
Russian police system, which made intelligence reforms a cautious activity. The
Governor of the United Provinces, in fact, commented that Curzon’s reforms
were transforming the Indian intelligence services into a “centralised secret
Police Bureau such as exists in the Russian Empire”.23 Hence, there was
already a hindrance from several quarters that led to the provinces gaining
greater autonomy in investigation activities, which had a bearing on intelli
gence. Although the DCI was allowed to employ independent sources, they
were only for criminal intelligence purposes. Second, adding to the reservations
against intelligence activities from several quarters, the advocates of intelligence
reforms were faced with a dwindling threat perception that was further
discouraging.
Between 1904 and 1907 the Russians were defeated by the Japanese and the
former had made peace with Britain and France. External intelligence, thus,
lost the priority it previously held while the threat of a Russian invasion
seemed fervent. On the domestic front, the British rule was firmly established,
and the princely states clearly posed no military threat. In addition, the Indian
National Congress (INC) that was established in 1885 was considered less a
threat given its overt functioning and the fact that the early Congress nation
alists had candidly professed loyalty to the British. Hence, even though there
was a feeling that the Congress would turn out to be a threat, it did not qualify
to be a target of secret intelligence. Curzon had stated that:
“the Congress is tottering to its fall, and one of my greatest ambitions

while in India is to assist it to a peaceful demise”.24
Consequently, the DCI continued to focus only on criminal intelligence. As

the reform under Curzon came to an end, the third character of the British
intelligence culture in India also became increasingly evident, i.e. the role of
the individual. If Sleeman was the factor behind the creation and successful
operation of the Thagi department, the DCI also began to depend largely on
the capability of its chief. As this organisation would become the ancestor of
post-independence Indian intelligence organisation, this factor is extremely
crucial and requires elaboration.
The head of the DCI, known as Director Criminal Intelligence, was given
special attention under Curzon’s reforms. More than policing and investigative
skills, it was regarded that the Director had to be an individual with good
administrative and diplomatic skills to negotiate the turf battles between the
local provincial CIDs. Therefore, it was decided that the Director would be a
civilian drawn from the elite Indian Civil Service (ICS).25 This decision would
have a long-term impact, as the elitist background of the intelligence managers
would form a critical factor in independent India’s intelligence culture. Unlike
the pre-1858 British officers like William Sleeman and others, the civil servants
of the British Raj were drawn mostly for monetary benefits and career pro
spects, and much less by the risk-taking abilities required for intelligence
work.26 They rarely mingled with the Indian society that they were sent to
govern. The negative ramifications of social isolation and political biases of the
ICS officers on intelligence analysis was exacerbated by the divide between
Britons and Indians within the intelligence organisation.27
Whilst the Sleeman era intelligence was a result of British and Indians
working alongside each other, the reforms of 1903 solidified a rigid demarca
tion of responsibilities – Indians as intelligence collectors and British as intelli
gence collators and analysts.28 It was proposed that a Hindu and a Muslim
assistant be appointed to assist the Director. However, London shot down the
proposal stating that the Director “ought himself to be qualified in gauging
native feeling and opinion”.29 Ultimately, some scholars have emphasised on
this division of labour and the elitist attitude of the British officers as the reason
for the Raj’s inability to sufficiently appreciate the effects of Congress’ sub
versive movements.30 In the Raj’s intelligence, the structure made it amply
clear that the role of the intelligence chief was paramount in determining the
effectiveness of the organisation. Historian Richard Popplewell’s reflection on
this point is apt:
“the success of the operations of the DCI at this time were thus more
dependent on the officer in command of the DCI than upon the
bureaucratic structure at his disposal. Broadly speaking this situation was
to continue [until 1947]”.31
Ergo, the triumvirate– threat reactive, spying aversive, and individual driven –
factors cumulatively made Curzon’s reforms a difficult affair, while at the same
time giving it an appearance of an incredible accomplishment. The latter emerges
only when one compares Curzon’s reforms with earlier British efforts at reforms
in India. Given solely its criminal focus, the CIDs were only handful in num
bers – some provinces like Madras outnumbered others given the greater crime
rates. In fact, the Madras City Police was the only force to have a detective wing
called the Intelligence Department. Unsurprisingly, T.G. Sanjeevi, the first
intelligence chief of independent India was a former member of this depart
ment.32 Curzon had created the DCI’s headquarters in Shimla, and it worked in
co-operation with the military’s Intelligence Branch. With Curzon’s exit, how
ever, the question was not of reforms or expansion, but whether the DCI should
exist at all. The solution was provided by the rise of revolutionary terrorism that
required special attention. Yet again, threat reaction became the driving force.
Revolutionary Terrorism and Charles Stevenson-Moore’s

Failed Attempts at Reform
Even as Curzon established the DCI and tried to placate the INC and the pro
vincial governors by keeping the former out of intelligence’s focus, his actions of
1905 – partition of Bengal – succeeded in giving the Indian nationalist movement
a violent turn. Hindu youth had begun to grow aggressive and discontented with
the non-violent means of the INC. Political assassinations, bombings and other
terrorist means began to be adopted by these youth. Most importantly, both
material and psychological training was imparted at the India House in London,
under the supervision of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar.33 By 1907 violence had
spread to Punjab – a strategic location for Britain both for defence against foreign
invasion as well as recruitment for the Indian Army – and simultaneously, Indian
revolutionary parties emerged in London, Paris and Vancouver.34 With the revo
lutionary-terrorist threat growing real, the DCI not only survived as an organisa
tion, but also began collecting intelligence on political crime.
The DCI began to submit Weekly Reports under the headings: Afghanistan
and transborder, Native States and Foreign possessions in India, Indian activities
in America and Europe, Muhammadan Affairs, German plot against India,
persons of note, foreigners, politico-religious and racial movements, religious
and social excitement and propagandism, the native press and miscellaneous
subjects.35 What is interesting though is, the DCI reports were merely collation
of information from the press and the CIDs, bereft of interpretation and ana
lysis. In fact, the 1907 report simply relayed the findings of the Bengal CID
stating that Bengal “had no capacity for violence”.36 Also, the headings should
not mislead one to believe that the INC or foreigners in India were any serious
intelligence targets. On the one hand, the British administration in India at that
time was averse to provoking the moderate nationalists, who were poised to be
given extra administrative role within the Raj under the Morley-Minto
reforms.37 On the other hand, the foreigners, mainly French and Russians,
were no more seen as a threat following the Triple Entente. So, the main tar
gets remained criminals, but with the added component of political intentions
of these targets.
Like modern-day transnational terrorism, revolutionary terrorism of the
British Raj era also had a nexus with organised criminal groups. Hence, the
DCI required the support of provincial CIDs in collecting information of this
regard. Charles Stevenson-Moore, who had taken over as Director in 1907,
worked to recruit provincial police officers for this purpose. However, the
DCI was not captivating for the police officers from a career advancement
point of view. With a great deal of effort, Stevenson-Moore managed to fill
up the vacancies in critical divisions like the Financial Department, commer
cial cases and miscellaneous inquiries. These divisions provided vital infor
mation regarding counterfeit currency, drug-smuggling, forgery, and illegal
procurement of weapons.38 By 1909 the tide of violence receded, Savarkar
was apprehended, and political intelligence activities were, thus, called to be
relaxed. Stevenson-Moore, however, did not see wisdom in this decision, and
wished for a separate secret service in India.
Being the Director, Stevenson-Moore had real insights into the threat that
was brewing in the form of sedition both within India and abroad. He had
observed Hindu sadhus (religious hermits) roam the length and breadth of India
spreading anti-British teachings. More so, the revolutionary struggle had begun
in Bengal and expanded internationally moving westwards towards Poona,
Lahore, Paris, New York (Ghadr movement) and Japan.39 He had also per
sonally perused the leaflet written by Savarkar in 1908 titled “Oh Martyrs”,
which glorified the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 and called for a revolution by
1917.40 Taking all of this into account, with the support of his predecessor Sir
Harold Stuart, Stevenson-Moore appealed to the Government of India to
allow the creation of a small secret service. However, such proposals were
rejected immediately. Supported by Minto, Sir Harvey Adamson, the Home
Member of the Viceroy’s Council, wrote to the Home Department:
“I am not convinced of spreading throughout India a body of secret
police…I have seen little result from the work as regards sedition of the
secret agents already employed in a limited degree by the Director,
Criminal Intelligence…they merely submit sensational reports, very little
of which can be believed”.41
Neither the British officers of the Indian Police nor the Indian members of the
Viceroy’s Legislative Council were comfortable with the DCI. It was once
again realised that the “DCI had to have a vigorous intelligence chief in order
to command respect. Yet, if the Director did his job too well, he was bound to
clash with the local governments”.42 Consequently, the DCI continued to
operate as a collator and compiler of intelligence for London until the early
1920s. The only area where there was a modicum of on-field co-operation
with the Scotland Yard was the detection and observation of the movement of
foreigners in India.43 Thus, Stevenson-Moore’s calls for reforms had hit a
deadlock and there was, once again, a requirement for a serious threat to draw
attention to intelligence, which came via communism.
The Threat of Communism and the Birth of the Intelligence

Bureau as a Counterintelligence Organisation
Until the outbreak of the First World War, the main concerns of British
intelligence in India were the risk of subversion within the Army after the 1857
revolt, criminal activities and some bit of terrorist activities in Bengal. The
period 1914–18 witnessed the targeting of Indian revolutionaries across the
world. During this time, formal structures of intelligence were also beginning
to take shape in Britain with the formation of the MI5. To the credit of two
British officers John Wallinger and Philip Vickery, the intelligence network to
tackle the menace of foreign subversion and terrorism in India also attained a
global character.44 Wallinger created the Indian Political Intelligence (IPI)
within the India Office, while the entry of Vickery allowed the expansion of
networks to several European, Asian and North American countries.
The IPI, the DCI and the MI5 joined hands to fight the Indian revolution
aries, as the latter was building partnerships with the Germans and, later, the
Bolsheviks. According to Richard Popplewell:
“the struggle of the British empire with Indian revolutionaries and their
German allies is possibly the only area of the intelligence history of the First
World War in which human intelligence played a decisive exclusive role”.45
Thus, by the end of the First World War, British Indian intelligence would
attain a global character. However, this also should not be mistaken as the
emergence of a foreign intelligence organisation. On the contrary, what
emerged was a global counterintelligence network. They employed both
defensive and offensive counterintelligence measures leading to frictions and
splits among the revolutionary groups, which eventually led to the British vic
tory.46 Yet again, intelligence under the British had taken shape in reaction to a
particular threat and at the end of the war the recurrent question ‘would the
intelligence system remain’ had reappeared. The response this time around
came in the form of the threat of communism from Soviet Russia following
the Bolsheviks revolution. With Afghanistan being the sole buffer between
Russia and India, the fears of the Great Game re-emerged.47
The threat of communism and terrorism that became the major force
behind the British Indian intelligence, which as the next chapter highlights,
came to have a significant bearing on post-independence Indian intelligence.
The DCI was rechristened as the Intelligence Bureau (IB)/Delhi Intelligence
Bureau (DIB) in 1920. For the next decade, the IB focused mostly on col
lecting intelligence on communist targets in India and passed it to the IPI in
London. Being solely a collecting agency and not an analysing body, the IB
did not have a clear tasking mechanism that levied a huge burden on its col
lection capacities. Bereft of analysis, the IB kept loads of trivial information
flowing to London.48 The adverse effect of this was that the Indian nationalist
movement that was to pose a greater threat to British authority did not get its
due attention. Communist leaders like Manabendra Nath Roy figured far
more prominently in the IPI files than the episodic appearance of Gandhi,
Nehru and Bose.49
Although the focus of this research is foreign intelligence, it is noteworthy
that the IB learnt the right lessons from the failure to curb the nationalist
struggle, which has resulted in the post-independence IB’s focus on strategic
assessments on separatist movements. The result is that no separatist movement
in India has hitherto been successful.50 A cursory glance at the volume of the
IPI records might tempt observers to believe that an elaborate intelligence
coverage was kept on nationalist leaders. However, the IB’s concerted focus on
the nationalist leaders came only from the 1930s onwards, by when the INC
was a political behemoth whose legitimacy among the Indian people could not
be threatened by the British. In 1932 the IB gained its formal structure with
Subsidiary Intelligence Bureaus being established at the provincial levels;
headed by Central Intelligence Officers. Notwithstanding this belated appear
ance of the much-needed structural reform, the challenges of centre-province
co-operation continued unabated.51 Hence, the IB’s capability to tackle the
nationalists’ challenge was fairly limited.
On the question of foreign intelligence, the IB’s focus expanded to Russia
and Central Asia. It was mainly a HUMINT collating agency, although occa
sionally intercepts from the Government Code and Cipher School (GC&CS)
were received.52 Nevertheless, like before, the IB still continued to remain
until India’s independence, an information collating agency. In its capacity as a
counterintelligence organisation, there were a few collection operations. The
agency intercepted mails of Indian nationals in touch with German, Russian,
Austrian and Italian officials. Thick dossiers began to be produced on students
and Indian political activists visiting universities abroad.53 K.V. Krishna Menon,
later India’s defence minister during the 1962 war with China, was one of the
prominent targets (see Chapter 5). It was only closer to World War II that the
IB began to receive a renewed attention and its network began to expand.
World War II and the First Comprehensive Intelligence Reforms

prior to Independence
While focus on hitherto identified targets continued, the threat of German
and Japanese operations in the region placed a renewed demand on coun
terintelligence. In 1938 the DIB John Ewart made a proposal to expand the
IB’s coverage, which was hitherto focused solely on Indian nationals, to
those other areas that were bound to have an implication on Imperial
India’s security in the future. He brought to the notice of the Home
Department how the ramifications of the Russian revolution, the Ghadr
movement and the pan-Islamic movements on India’s security had hitherto
been controlled through personal relations rather than systematic alliances
with international agencies. He wrote:54
“The system on which we depend for forestalling externally directed sub

versive movements has been built up on personal relationships in the
Intelligence field; no compulsion or regulation could replace these rela
tionships. For the purposes of cooperation with other countries…a full
understanding of the administrative methods and legal powers for action of
those countries is essential”.
The DIB proposed to establish a new post of Deputy Director to liaise with
Honk Kong, Singapore and other British possessions in Africa, Far East and
Central Asia. This was probably the first time in colonial India that organised
intelligence was given a thought; and proactivity was visible. It is arguable that
this change in attitude was a consequence of the rejection of the Victorian
aversion and the growth of intelligence organisations in continental Britain. Yet
it is worth mentioning that this was only an experimental drive with a one-year
trial period, and also worth highlighting the centrality of DIB Ewart in moving
the proposal.55
The Home Department was also compelled to take the DIB’s proposals with
seriousness given the changes in the international environment in the preceding
years. It noted that the intelligence dominance that the IB had acquired in the
pre-1938 era in coverage of communism, the Ghadr movement and pan-Isla
mism had ensured that no hostile power existed in the Far East, the U.S.S.R.
was away from the Indian borders, relationship with the Muslim world was
friendly, and Britain had “practically absolute control of North-East Africa and
the Red Sea Littoral”.56 However, in light of the developments of the past few
years, the Home Department reckoned, hostile organisations could find it easier
to develop bases for anti-India operations.
The report noted that the actions of Berlin-Rome axis posed a potential
threat to India and the control of North-East Africa and the Red Sea Lit
torals had severely weakened. Notwithstanding the U.S.S.R.’s lack of a
hostile posture, its presence in Sinkiang was reason for concern. Britain’s
policies in Palestine were also cause for worry with regards to the attitudes
of Muslims and Arab States. Above all, following the Japanese adventures in
China, and its influential spill over as far as Burma, led the Home Depart
ment to estimate that, in the event of a European war, “Japan would be at
best an unfriendly neutral and more possibly an active ally of our ene
mies”.57 The Home Department therefore took the DIB’s proposal seriously
and commented that lacking improvements in the international situation,
the DIB’s suggestions might have to expand beyond the requested one-year
period.
The proposals were prophetic in nature as the Axis subversion efforts had
reached India’s frontiers. In the Far East, the IB procured the help of British
Naval Intelligence in the Pacific. The Commander-in-Chief, China Station,
commenced close co-operation with the IB in covering Japanese subversive
activities in China, Hong Kong and Singapore. An initiative undertaken by the
Indian government 18 months before in Shanghai to monitor Japanese inten
tions began to pay rich dividends.58 Nonetheless, the overall British intelligence
operations in the East were severely undermined by the combined efforts of the
Japanese and the Indian National Army (refer next section). With regards to
German subversion, the British had begun to face an entirely different problem.
Owing to the rising threat of the Indian nationalists who were seeking
inspiration from global developments, the British had passed the “Newspapers
Act” in 1908 and the “Indian Press Law” in 1910 that allowed the colonial
authorities to control the flow of news and information from abroad and
within India.59 Censorships only increased during the First World War. Sub
sequently, closer to the Second World War, the IB realised that the censorship
of international news had in effect cut off news from Britain, which could be
easily censored, while German propaganda still found its way into India.
Reporting on the basis of intelligence collected from Baluchistan in 1939, the
Secretary of State for India was informed that:
“Scarcity of news is causing us some anxiety… [We] are perturbed by the

prevalence of rumours. Moreover, in the absence of news from England,
tendency is to accept German broadcasts as correct…As a result, general
impression is of sweeping enemy successes and inaction on part of Britain
and France”.60
This telegram was drafted three weeks after Britain and France had declared
war on Germany, indicating that there was indeed an information vacuum in
India as far as the war was concerned. Thus, this further added to the IB’s
existing concerns of enemy subversion around the beginning of the Second
World War.
Throughout the Second World War, the IB thus emerged as Imperial India’s
premier counterintelligence agency that had cast its network well beyond the
frontiers of India to include British possessions in Africa and Asia, and also the Dutch
East Indies. At home, from June 1939 onwards the IB tasked every other depart
ment to pass on any information it had on foreign nationals, especially Germans,
Italians and Japanese, or foreign firms considered hostile to British interests.61 Like
before, communism continued to be a focal area of the IB even during the war
period whilst correspondences and communications between Indian freedom
fighters continued to be intercepted.62 However, for all practical purposes, the IB,
despite its expanded format, remained an organisation merely collecting, and mostly
collating intelligence for analysis in London. The collecting work was often con
ducted by low-ranking Indian police personnel while the organisation’s strategic
leadership always remained a British national. Therefore, despite the Second World
War inducing a sense of proactivity, the predominant cultural traits, i.e. individual
driven initiatives, hierarchisation of the intelligence organisation and the sharing of
work responsibilities between London and Simla continued, nevertheless.
Strategic Military Intelligence in British India

As noted earlier, foreign and military intelligence by the end of the 19th cen
tury was divided between London and the Intelligence Branch in Shimla. Until
the outbreak of the Second World War, the Intelligence Branch was primarily
responsible for running agents in India’s periphery. The collected intelligence
was shared with the DCI, and later the IB, which was in turn relayed to
London. However, these were just ad hoc mechanisms. The Intelligence
Branch had not developed into a foreign or strategic military intelligence
organisation worth its name. The 1857 revolt had made monitoring of emo
tions within the military a priority, and later the Intelligence Branch also got
involved in counterintelligence operations assisting the IB. Even here, reflective
of the Raj’s intelligence culture of threat reactiveness, the military intelligence’s
organisation and operations began to take shape only against the threat of
German and Japanese invasion and the fear of the Indian National Army (INA).
During the late 19th century the Intelligence Branch was organised on geo
graphical coverage. The Eastern Section (E) focused on the North-Eastern Fron
tier, Burma, Nepal, Siam, African Coast from Zanzibar northwards, Arabia,
French possessions in the East, Portuguese possessions at Macao, China on Tibet
and Burma frontiers, Dutch colonies in the East, Philippine Islands, and Malaya.
The Western Section focused on Russia in Asia, including Transcaspia, Turkistan,
Bokhara, Siberia, Persia, China on Russian frontier, Kashgaria, Province of
Bagdad, Russian Empire and Turkey in Asia. The North-West Frontier Section
covered Afghanistan, Baluchistan, Kashmir, Chitral, Hunza, Dardistan and the
Pamirs, China on Kashmir and Afghan frontiers, Native States in India. While the
latter was solely the responsibility of the Intelligence Branch, the former two sec
tions shared their responsibilities with the Intelligence Division of the War
Office.63
The Intelligence Branch became an organisation merely responsible for col
lecting and archiving strategic military information in British India. Official
documents of the era note that the:
“duties of the Intelligence Branch are military and not political…will collect,
collate and keep in convenient form, well indexed, and ready for rapid
reference, the fullest information as to the topography, climatic conditions,
general resources, and military strengths of all countries bordering upon
India and also as to the native states in India”.64
The document also added that the Intelligence Branch’s periodical summaries:
“should not contain opinions upon political subjects, but political facts may
be stated, when bearing on the military situation…. whenever the Assistant
Quartermaster-General, Head of the Intelligence Branch considers that the
military situation in any of the countries bordering upon India is abnor
mal…he should submit a memorandum on the subject to the Government
of India. The Foreign Department will give every possible assistance to the
Intelligence Branch in obtaining information on the subjects connected
with its duties and the Intelligence Branch will endeavour to assist the
Foreign Department by at once communicating to it unofficially any
information likely to be of value”.65
In theory, while the above description suggests an elaborate intelligence

structure for collecting and documenting strategic military intelligence, in
practice, the Intelligence Branch failed to live up to its evolutionary
expectations. In the decade following the publication of the above report, it
was observed that there were problems in the Drawing Room of the
Intelligence Branch that employed draughtsmen who produced maps for
expeditions, histories, distribution for troops and so on. The security con
cerns and racial emphasis had given rise to the problem of reconciling the
need to employ British born soldier-draughtsmen, as opposed to native
civilian ones, with the low rates of pay.66 Notwithstanding the intervention
of able leaders like Lord Curzon and Kitchener, and the subsequent rise in
the pay of the draughtsmen from 200–300 rupees to 300–400 rupees, the
British military culture had become a serious impediment in the growth and
functioning of the Intelligence Branch.
Curzon, Kitchener, Raleigh and others intricately involved in the review of
the Intelligence Branch produced a detailed report in 1904 that captured the
cultural flaws in military intelligence. It must be noted here that, as the con
sequent chapters shall reveal, these cultural flaws have existed in India
throughout the 20th century. The report titled “Questions of Improving the
Status, Pay and Prospects of the officers employed in the Intelligence Branch of
the Quartermaster-General’s Department” particularly recorded the difficulty in
retaining men in the department. It noted:
“There is an idea prevalent among officers…that the prospects of an officer
who is appointed to the Intelligence Branch do not compare favourably
with those officers who are appointed to other branches of staff, and that
service in the Intelligence Branch does not lead to further employment on
the general staff of the army in India. An examination of further careers of
officers who have held the junior appointments in the Branch since its
reorganisation in 1892, bears out this impression”.67
The other fallacies noted by the report include shortage of funds, adequate pay
of the staff, and the problem of leadership in the Intelligence Branch. All these
issues were a consequence of the military culture that discriminated intelligence
functions from other operational roles.
Also, the Intelligence Branch, more than any other intelligence organisation,
depicts the racial divide within the colonial security and administrative struc
tures. In 1909 Thompson Capper had raised concerns over the lack of sufficient
training for British officers in intelligence work. He raised serious apprehensions
regarding the utility of the meagre training in intelligence duties that was
imparted in the Staff College. In response, Colonel W. Malleson at the Army
HQ declared:
“it is true that very little has been done in the matter of training officers for
intelligence work…the native must be agent employed…our existing class
is primarily for the instruction of our native agents. To turn it into a class
for the instruction of British officers would be to defeat its purpose”.68
These classes were meant to train only Indian Non-Commissioned Officers in

intelligence methods. At the grassroots level, the martial race theory that was for
mulated in expectation of fidelity and fighting abilities from a select few commu
nities was extended to the intelligence realm too. Punjabis from the frontier areas,
for instance, were regarded as suitable for human intelligence gathering because of
the environmental hardships these men faced at the frontiers.69 It was not until the
outbreak of the Second World War that such discriminations were somewhat
shunned, and the military intelligence organisation was given a serious thought. As
Rob Johnson has noted:
“The Second World War necessitated an expansion of British colonial

forces, which included the recruitment of new peoples to new roles
including intelligence and special operations, far beyond the traditional
geographic and conceptual bounds of the martial race theories”.70
The years 1941–42 represent a watershed moment in the British Indian intel
ligence history. The end of 1941 witnessed Stalingrad being threatened by the
Germans, which gave an indication to the British that India could be attacked
from the west. Early 1942 saw Thailand, Malaya and Singapore fall like dom
inos to the Japanese, thereby making India vulnerable from the east as well.
The Indian Army, at that time, would have been the most potent force to
reckon with a two-front attack. However, the unity and integrity of the Indian
Army was threatened with the rise of the INA. Therefore, in order to maintain
the apolitical character of the army and expand the British intelligence cover in
both the east and the west, an Intelligence Corps was created. Like the IB,
even this organisation was manned mostly by British officials, whilst the Indians
did some public relations work.71 The only campaign in which Indians had a
significant role was the Burma campaign towards the end of the war.
The fall of Burma in 1942 prompted Archibald Wavell to comment that the
“reverses in Burma are striking examples of the penalty a nation has to pay for
neglecting intelligence during peace”. Therefore, the Fourteenth Army of the
South East Asia Command (SEAC) began developing its own intelligence set
up. The first intelligence training school set up in Karachi was regarded inef
fective in sufficing the training needs of the Fourteenth Army, which led to the
establishment of its own intelligence school at Shillong.72 The Indian Army’s
intelligence efforts in the east were strengthened by the arrival of the Special
Operations Executive (SOE). It was decided in 1941 itself that if Burma fell to
the Japanese, then the SOE would operate out of India and not Singapore.73
The SOE, throughout this period, was operating under GHQ India, and had
under its control the British Secret Intelligence Service, as well as the American
Office of Strategic Services.74 It was the SOE’s operations in India against the
Japanese that brought out the complex nature of the intelligence profession.
While the IB was fighting the communists, the SOE found in the communists
an ally to fight the Japanese. In alliance with Stalin’s NKVD, the SOE along
with its Indian agents conducted a series of intelligence and sabotage operations
against the Japanese.75 Together, the SOE and the Fourteenth Army, played an
important role in building an intelligence picture of the enemy in the eastern
theatre.
Similarly, signals intelligence (SIGINT) also had a gradual evolution in India,
only to attain a matured shape during the Second World War. Stations were
established in and around the North-West provinces as well as territories
around Burma. Information of tactical importance was utilised in the field,
while diplomatic and strategic military information was relayed back to London
to be analysed by the GC&CS.76 Indians were employed in large numbers in
operational roles to conduct interceptions. Yet, like other organisations, even
here the top-level leadership was always manned by British officers. With the
end of the war, the number of personnel working on SIGINT collection is
recorded to have reduced significantly.77
Notwithstanding the HUMINT and SIGINT operations of the military
intelligence, the one area where the Military Intelligence was most active was in
prisoner interrogation, especially against the Japanese and the INA. Five Forward
Interrogation Centres were established along the Indo-Burma borders to inter
rogate the Prisoners of War. The centres and their units had limited success
against the Japanese given the latter’s cultural and linguistic distinction.78 The
low-ranking INA soldiers were interrogated immediately after being caught,
whilst the senior ranking officials were handed over to the Director of Military
Intelligence. The SEAC’s military intelligence was clear from the interrogations
that the leadership of Subhas Chandra Bose had played a pivotal role in keeping
the INA intact. They opined that the “prisoners were thoroughly induced by
Bose’s ideas, [and it is] doubtful if they can be rehabilitated as soldiers again”.79
The interrogation process was tougher on the interrogators than on the
captured INA soldiers who were seen to be experts in counterinterrogation
techniques (as a matter of contextual necessity, this aspect will be dealt with
greater detail in the next chapter). The point, therefore, is that, alongside the SOE,
the military intelligence, although belatedly, began to take countersubversion and
counterpropaganda seriously.
Therefore, military intelligence in British India also showed similar char
acteristics like its civilian counterpart. Professional seriousness arose only with
the emergence of a threat. An institutionalised mechanism never took off
seriously until World War II, despite almost a century of British rule. From
this book’s point of view, the military intelligence narrative is crucial because
after the fall of native empires, it was military intelligence alone that had any
role in foreign intelligence. The IB was merely a collator and communicator
of intelligence to London. And above all, as the Interim Government was
formed in 1946, and the IB was handed over to the Indians, military intelli
gence remained the last of the intelligence organisations to remain under the
British control.
Transmogrification of the Ideas of Intelligence from the

Kautilyan State to the Colonial State
In summary, this chapter has highlighted the landmark events in India’s
colonial history that explain both the organisational and cultural evolution
of colonial intelligence. Unlike the Kautilyan state where intelligence
formed the bulk of state activity, and intelligence operatives were con
sidered the eyes and ears of the state, the colonial state had radically dif
ferent ideas that were born from a deep-seated aversion to a reluctant
acceptance of intelligence. Adding to the trouble of ideological differences
came the racial and geographical distances between the Indian people and
the British colonisers. London could not sufficiently understand the impli
cations of its reluctant approach towards intelligence, and when it did, it
did so by keeping Indians in low-ranking jobs. As a result, the entire
strength of the intelligence profession stood on the shoulders of the intelli
gence managers, who more often than not came from elite backgrounds
seeking prospects of career advancement. Consequently, contrary to the
Kautilyan state that held spies and informers in the highest regards, the
colonial state, with minor exceptions, failed to extend to the field opera
tives the same respect that the British intelligence officers received.
The colonial period also brought along the problems of decentralisation and
turf battles. Throughout the colonial period, establishment of a centralised
intelligence unit was the main task that evaded all intelligence chiefs. The
decentralisation of power between the centre and the provinces, alongside the
fear of turning the British Indian state into a Tsarist police state, obstructed
several initiatives by informed British officials to establish a centralised intelligence
setup. Hence, while the theory of statecraft determined the strength of intelli
gence in the Kautilyan state, threat responsiveness drove the evolution of intel
ligence in British India. Subsequently, the king in the Kautilyan state was the
ultimate determiner and beneficiary of the state’s intelligence institution; while in
the colonial state, it required knowledgeable and courageous individuals like
Sleeman, Curzon, Northbrook, Stevenson-Moore and others to develop a threat
appreciation and fight bureaucratic battles to establish ad hoc intelligence
mechanisms that were bound to evaporate once the threat diminished. As the
next chapter onwards shall reveal, the ramifications of these cultural traits like turf
control would become visible in independent India’s foreign intelligence opera
tions as intelligence officials regularly collided with the military and diplomatic
community.
Thus, the two centuries of British colonial rule in India saw an initial
Indianisation of British intelligence, as the latter wanted to understand the
Indian society, politics and economy to be able to expand the EIC’s rule.
Once the rule was firmly established, intelligence slowly began to take a
backseat. After the Crown took control following the Sepoy Mutiny, the
Anglicisation process of Indian intelligence – one defined by the trilogy of
threat reaction, individual centrism and hierarchisation – commenced. The
threats came via crime, subversion, enemy intelligence and communism.
Foreign intelligence for policymaking was never really a structured
mechanism in colonial India. The implication of this colonial legacy on
post-independence Indian intelligence was bound to be strong. However,
with the transfer of authority to Indians, the targets of intelligence suddenly
became its consumers. They brought with them their own ideas, which had
an impact on how independent India would ‘think about’ and ‘do’ intelli
gence. How much of their ideas were influenced by the Kautilyan thought
and colonial experiences? While the consumers were on the opposite sides
of the IB and the Military Intelligence, the organisations shared a culture
from the colonial past. How did these two differing historical experiences
coexist with each other? These are some of the questions that the next
chapter tackles in order to arrive at an articulation of the post-independence
Indian intelligence culture.
Notes
1 Manimugdha S. Sharma, ‘British vs Marathas: Clash of military cultures’, The Times of
India, 29 September 2016, available at https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/pa
rthian-shot/british-vs-marathas-clash-of-military-cultures, accessed on 1 November
2019; Christopher Andrew, The Secret World: A History of Intelligence, London: Penguin,
2018.
2 Rob Wile,’ Bailouts, Bribes and Insider Trading: Here’s What The World’s Leading
Business Looked Like 300 Years Ago’, Business Insider, 21 February 2012, available
at www.businessinsider.com/history-of-british-east-india-company-2013-4?r=US&
IR=T, accessed on 1 November 2019.
3 Christopher Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Commu
nication in India, 1780–1870, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 6.
4 Robert Johnson, Spying for Empire: The Great Game in Central and South-East Asia,
1757–1947, London: Greenhill Books, 2006, pp. 48–49, 69.
London: Hurst Publishers, 2015, p. 183.
6 Johnson, Spying for Empire, 2006, p. 74.
7 K. Wagner, Thuggee: Banditry and the British in Early Nineteenth-Century India,
London: Springer, 2007, p. 211.
8 Sir Francis Tuker, The Yellow Scarf: The Story of the Life of Thuggee Sleeman, London:
J.M. Dent, 1961, p. 124.
9 Rudrangshu Mukherjee, The Year of Blood: Essays on the Revolt of 1857, London:
Routledge, 2018, p. 79; Johnson, Spying for Empire, 2006, p. 77.
11 Vijai Shukul, ‘Sleeman Sahib Ki Jai’, Indian Police Journal, Vol. 59, No. 4, 2012, p. 2.
12 Sir Percival Griffiths, To Guard My People: The History of the Indian Police, London:
Ernest Benn Ltd., 1971, p. 121.
13 Christopher Andrew, Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community,
London: Heinemann, 1985, pp. 1–7.
14 Richard Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence: British Intelligence and the Defence
of the Indian Empire 1904–1924, London: Frank Cass Publishers, 1995, p. 33.
16 Ibid, p. 149.
17 Ibid.
18 Andrew, Secret Service, 1985, p. 22.
20 ‘Dufferin to India Office, London’, 1 October 1887, NAI.
21 ‘Secret Dispatch No. 31’, The Secretary of State for India to The Government of
India, 23 December 1887, NAI.
22 ‘Papers of the Secretary, India Office Political and Secret Department: Secret Ser
vice and intelligence matters’, British Library: Asian and African Studies, available at
https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/ae98d26f-e3ce-4efa
-b929-66340652431d, accessed on 1 November 2019.
23 Patrick French, Liberty or Death: India’s Journey to Independence and Division, London:
Harper Collins, 1997, p. 12.
24 Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence, 1995, p. 44.
25 Ibid, pp. 48–49.
26 Dennis Kincaid, British Social Life in India, 1608–1937, London: Routledge, 2018,
pp. 220–223.
27 Although it was the British police officers who were involved in intelligence work,
they were also increasingly falling under the influence of the ICS’ elitist culture that
segregated them from the locals in India. See Andrew Muldoon, ‘Politics, Intelli
gence and Elections in Late Colonial India: Congress and the Raj in 1937’, Journal of
the Canadian Historical Association, Vol. 20, No. 2, 2009, p. 170.
28 Griffiths, To Guard My People, 1971, p. 346.
29 Ibid, p. 347.
30 Bayly, Empire and Information, 1993, pp. 39–41; Muldoon, ‘Politics, Intelligence
and Elections in Late Colonial India’, 2009, pp. 168–171; Prem Mahadevan, ‘The
Paradoxes of Ethnographic Intelligence A Case Study of British India’, Faultlines,
January 2011, available at www.satp.org/satporgtp/publication/faultlines/volum
e20/Article1.htm, accessed on 30 October 2019.
32 Howard Donovan, ‘Biographic Data: Tirupattur Gangadharam Pillai Sanjevi Pillai’,
Office of South Asian Affairs: India Affairs 1944–57, RG-59, USNA, 16 May 1949.
33 B.N. Pandey, The Indian Nationalist Movement 1885–1947: Select Documents, London:
Macmillan Press, 1979, pp. 25–26.
34 Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence, 1995, p. 59; Johnson, Spying for Empire,
2006, pp. 222–223.
35 This is observed in the numerous weekly reports of the Director, Central Intelligence,
during the late 1900s to early 1920s available at the National Archives of India.
36 Amiya K. Samanta, ‘Growth of Intelligence Institutions in British India’, Indian
Police Journal, Vol. 59, No. 4, 2012, p. 15.
37 Amales Tripathi and Amitava Tripathi, Indian National Congress and the Struggle for
Freedom: 1885–1947, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
38 Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence, 1995, pp. 68–69.
39 Ibid, p. 70.
40 John R Pincince, ‘V.D. Savarkar and the Indian War of Independence: Contrasting
Perspectives of an Emergent Composite State’, in Crispin Bates, Mutiny at the Margins:
New Perspectives on the Indian Uprising of 1857: Volume VI: Perception, Narration and
Reinvention: The Pedagogy and Historiography of the Indian Uprising, London: Sage, 2014.
42 Ibid, p. 78.
43 ‘Proposal of the Director of Criminal Intelligence to import continental detectives
to observe the movement of foreigners arriving in India’, Home Department,
Branch- Police, File No. 32, NAI, 1911, p. 1.
44 French, Liberty or Death, 1997, p. 13; Samanta, ‘Growth of Intelligence Institutions
in British India’, 2012, p. 18.
46 Shabir Ahmad Reshi and Seema Dwivedi, ‘Growth & Development of Intelligence
Apparatus during British Colonial Era in India’, International Journal of Humanities and
Social Science Invention, Vol. 4, No. 4, 2015, p. 17.
47 Alan Sielaf, ‘Soviet Influence in British India: Intelligence and Paranoia within
Imperial Government in the Interwar Years’, University of Colorado Undergraduate
Honors Theses, 2011, p. 4, available at https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e878/
55fbdf8c7d6bc182a3b20b383b7c5629f615.pdf, accessed on 29 November 2019.
48 The weekly reports of the Director, Intelligence Bureau, from 1920 onwards show a
continuation of collation of information like its predecessor DCI. The only change,
however, was a marginal increase in the coverage of Indian political leaders.
49 Sielaf, ‘Soviet Influence in British India’, 2011, pp. 50–51.
pp. 44–45.
51 Reshi and Dwivedi, ‘Growth & Development of Intelligence Apparatus during
British Colonial Era in India’, 2015, p. 18.
53 French, Liberty or Death, 1997, p. 121.
54 ‘Proposal for making provision for cooperation between the Central Intelligence
Bureau and the Intelligence organizations of the British Possessions to the West and
East of India’, Home Department, File No. 125/38, Repository II, NAI, 1938, p. 6.
55 ‘The Director, Intelligence Bureau to The Secretary to the Government of India’,
Home Department, File No. 125/38, Repository II, NAI, 23 December 1938, p. 34.
56 ‘Secret Note by Mr. Puckle’, Home Department, File No. 125/38, Repository II,
NAI, 5 December 1938, p. 12.
57 Ibid, pp. 12–13.
58 ‘Liaison between Indian Government Police and P.N.I.O’, Home Department, File
No. 125/38, Repository II, NAI, 10 May 1938, p. 32.
59 Daniel Headrick, ‘A Double-Edged Sword: Communications and Imperial Control
in British India’, Historical Social Research, Vol. 35, No. 1, 2010, p. 61.
60 ‘Telegram XX, No.1656, From Governor-General (Home Department) Simla to
The Secretary of State for India, London’, Home Department, File No. 176/39,
NAI, 26 September 1939, p. 12.
61 ‘Circular Memorandum, Intelligence Bureau’, Home Department, File No. 59/3/
39, NAI, 5 June 1939, p. 4.
62 ‘D.I.B.‘s survey of communist activity’, Home Department, File No. 7/5/42, NAI,
1942; ‘Important Intercepts supplied by D.I.B.’, Home Department, File No. 51/4/
44, NAI, 1944.
63 ‘Re-organisation of the Intelligence Branch of the Quartermaster-General Department’,
Revenue and Agriculture Department, File No. 16, Repository-II, NAI, 1892, p. 3.
64 Ibid.
65 Ibid.
66 ‘Proposals for the Re-Organisation of the Drawing Office of the Intelligence
Branch of the Quartermaster-General in India and increase of the pay of certain of
its establishments – Recommended to the Secretary of State for India’, Defence,
Branch-A, Repository-I, 1900, p. 5.
67 ‘Questions of Improving the Status, Pay and Prospects of the officers employed in
the Intelligence Branch of the Quartermaster-General’s Department’, Simla Records,
Defence, Branch A, Repository I, File Nos 412–431, 1904, pp. 4–5.
68 Andrew Syk, ‘Command in the Indian Expeditionary Force D: Mesopotamia,
1915–16’, in Kaushik Roy, Indian Army in the Two World Wars: Indian Army in the
Two World Wars, Leiden: Brill, 2012, p. 88.
70 Ibid, p. 162.
71 R.S. Chowdhary, A Short History of the Intelligence Corps, Pune: Military Intelligence
Training School, 1985, pp. 10–11.
72 Ibid, pp. 16–17.
73 Richard Duckett, The Special Operations Executive (SOE) in Burma: Jungle Warfare and
Intelligence Gathering in WW2, London: Bloomsbury, 2017, p. 74.
74 Richard J. Aldrich, Intelligence and the War Against Japan: Britain, America and the
Politics of Secret Service, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 144–145.
75 Ibid, pp. 157–158.
76 Desmond Ball, ‘Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) in South Asia’, Canberra Papers on
Strategy and Defence, No. 117, pp. 6–8, available at http://sdsc.bellschool.anu.edu.
au/sites/default/files/publications/attachments/2016-03/117_Signals_Intelligence_
%28SIGINT%29_in_South_Asia_India_Pakistan_Srilanka_%28Ceylon%29_Desm
ond_Ball_P134.pdf, accessed on 27 November 2019.
77 Ibid, p. 8.
78 Chowdhary, A Short History of the Intelligence Corps, 1985, pp. 23–24.
References
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of Secret Service, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Andrew, Christopher, Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community,
London: Heinemann, 1985.
Andrew, Christopher, The Secret World: A History of Intelligence, London: Penguin, 2018.
Ball, Desmond, ‘Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) in South Asia’, Canberra Papers on Strategy and
Defence No. 117, pp. 6–8, available at http://sdsc.bellschool.anu.edu.au/sites/default/
files/publications/attachments/2016-03/117_Signals_Intelligence_%28SIGINT%29_in_
South_Asia_India_Pakistan_Srilanka_%28Ceylon%29_Desmond_Ball_P134.pdf, accessed
on 27 November 2019.
Bayly, Christopher, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication
in India, 1780–1870, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Branch A, Defence, ‘Proposals for the Re-Organisation of the Drawing Office of the
Intelligence Branch of the Quartermaster-General in India and increase of the pay of
certain of its establishments - Recommended to the Secretary of State for India’,
Repository-I, 1900.
British Library: Asian and African Studies, ‘Papers of the Secretary, India Office Political
and Secret Department: Secret Service and intelligence matters’, available at https://
discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/ae98d26f-e3ce-4efa-b929-66340652431d,
Chowdhary, R.S., A Short History of the Intelligence Corps, Pune: Military Intelligence
Training School, 1985.
Donovan, Howard, ‘Biographic Data: Tirupattur Gangadharam Pillai Sanjevi Pillai’,
Office of South Asian Affairs: India Affairs 1944–57, RG-59, USNA, 16 May 1949.
Duckett, Richard, The Special Operations Executive (SOE) in Burma: Jungle Warfare and
Intelligence Gathering in WW2, London: Bloomsbury, 2017.
French, Patrick, Liberty or Death: India’s Journey to Independence and Division, London:
Harper Collins, 1997.
Griffiths, Sir Percival, To Guard My People: The History of the Indian Police, London:
Ernest Benn Ltd, 1971.
Headrick, Daniel, ‘A Double-Edged Sword: Communications and Imperial Control in
British India’, Historical Social Research, Vol. 35, No. 1, 2010, p. 61.
Home Department, ‘Dufferin to India Office, London’, 1October 1887, NAI.
Home Department, ‘Proposal of the Director of Criminal Intelligence to import
continental detectives to observe the movement of foreigners arriving in India’,
Branch- Police, File No. 32, NAI, 1911.
Home Department, ‘Proposal for making provision for cooperation between the Central
Intelligence Bureau and the Intelligence organizations of the British Possessions to the
West and East of India’, File No. 125/38, Repository II, NAI, 1938.
Home Department, ‘Liaison between Indian Government Police and P.N.I.O’, File No.
125/38, Repository II, NAI, 10 May 1938.
Home Department, ‘Secret Note by Mr. Puckle’, File No. 125/38, Repository II, NAI,
5 December 1938.
Home Department, ‘The Director, Intelligence Bureau to The Secretary to the
Government of India’, File No. 125/38, Repository II, NAI, 23 December 1938.
Home Department, ‘Circular Memorandum, Intelligence Bureau’, File No. 59/3/39,
NAI, 5 June 1939.
Home Department, ‘Telegram XX, No.1656, From Governor-General (Home
Department) Simla to The Secretary of State for India, London’, File No. 176/39,
NAI, 26 September 1939.
Home Department, ‘D.I.B.‘s survey of communist activity’, File No. 7/5/42, NAI,
1942.
Home Department, ‘Important Intercepts supplied by D.I.B.’, File No. 51/4/44, NAI,
1944.
Johnson, Robert, Spying for Empire: The Great Game in Central and South-East Asia,
1757–1947, London: Greenhill Books, 2006.
Mahadevan, Prem, The Politics of Counterterrorism in India, London: I.B. Tauris, 2012,
pp. 44–45.
Mahadevan, Prem, ‘The Paradoxes of Ethnographic Intelligence A Case Study of British
India’, Faultlines, January 2011, available at www.satp.org/satporgtp/publication/fa
ultlines/volume20/Article1.htm, accessed on 30 October 2019.
Mukherjee, Rudrangshu, The Year of Blood: Essays on the Revolt of 1857, London:
Routledge, 2018, p. 79.
Muldoon, Andrew, ‘Politics, Intelligence and Elections in Late Colonial India: Congress
and the Raj in 1937’, Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, Vol. 20, No. 2,
2009, p. 170.
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Macmillan Press, 1979.
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Perspectives of an Emergent Composite State’, in Crispin Bates, Mutiny at the Margins:
New Perspectives on the Indian Uprising of 1857: Volume VI: Perception, Narration and
Reinvention: The Pedagogy and Historiography of the Indian Uprising, London: Sage, 2014.
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the Indian Empire 1904–1924, London: Frank Cass Publishers, 1995.
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the Quartermaster-General Department’, File No. 16, Repository-II, NAI, 1892.
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Secretary of State for India to The Government of India, ‘Secret Dispatch No. 31’, 23
December 1887, NAI.
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Shukul, Vijai, ‘Sleeman Sahib Ki Jai’, Indian Police Journal, Vol. 59, No. 4, 2012.
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Government in the Interwar Years’, University of Colorado Undergraduate Honors
Theses, 2011, p. 4, available at https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e878/
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Simla Records, Defence, ‘Questions of Improving the Status, Pay and Prospects of the
officers employed in the Intelligence Branch of the Quartermaster-General’s Depart
ment’, Branch A, Repository I, File Nos 412–431, 1904.
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4 The Birth of Post-Colonial Indian
Intelligence Culture
Introduction
From the proactive Kautilyan intelligence to the reactive colonial intelligence, the
cultural transformation has been observed in the previous chapter. In the former,
intelligence was state-driven, as it formed the basis of statecraft, while in the latter,
threat perceptions and intelligence managers determined the evolution and opera
tions of intelligence. Above all, colonial India, not being the policymaking unit for
the British Empire, was mostly concerned with counterintelligence than foreign
intelligence. With over two centuries of British rule, there certainly was bound to
be an overwhelming influence of western ideas on Indian statecraft. Yet, the oral
tradition of India had ensured the survival of Kautilya in the Indian psyche. So, the
question that remains is: how was independent India’s intelligence culture influenced by the
conflicting ideas and experiences of the Kautilyan thought and colonialism?
This chapter observes the influences of decolonisation processes and the
partition of the subcontinent on India’s intelligence organisations. It then goes
on to make the first ideational analysis of the evolution of India’s intelligence
by observing the ideas espoused by early political leaders, especially Home
Minister Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Using
available archival information and elite interviews, it exposes that foreign
intelligence as a national security requirement had a troubled evolution. While
Patel was pragmatic and enabled the sustenance of an intelligence organisation,
Nehru showed a near replication of the British era aversion to matters of
intelligence that morphed only with the arrival of a crisis or tactful convincing
by the intelligence managers. The result was the continuation of the colonial
intelligence culture, one that was threat responsive and mainly determined by
the courage and adroitness of the intelligence managers.
The narration in the chapter, therefore, in effect establishes the ideational
difference between the Kautilyan intelligence and modern Indian intelligence.
This fundamental differentiation emerges mainly from the failure of the Indian
political leadership to be sufficiently driven by the “knowledge culture”
espoused in the Arthashastra. Finally, the findings of this chapter will form the
basis for examining the influence of India’s intelligence culture in the case
studies.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003296195-7
The Birth of Post-Colonial Indian Intelligence Culture 89
Decolonisation and the Future of the Colonial Intelligence
Apparatus
Despite the piecemeal advancements made in the field of intelligence during
colonial India, the Intelligence Bureau (IB) was undoubtedly one of Britain’s
most prized possessions in India. By 1945, as the sharing of power with the
Indians became imminent, the British authorities appeared concerned about the
future of the IB. It was initially decided that the Indians could be kept unin
formed of the intelligence activities and reports, much like several British
ministers without security clearances were kept uninformed of the ULTRA
interceptions during the Second World War.1 However, by mid-1945 Denys
Pilditch, the Director of the IB (DIB), had been ordered to sift the IB’s records
into external and internal ones, and transfer the former to London.
By 1946 pressures were mounting on Whitehall to transfer power to Indians,
and the future of the intelligence organisation was called into serious question.
It was ultimately decided that as long as a European remained the DIB,
operations would resume. In the event of an Indian being appointed as the
DIB, Norman Smith, the then DIB, was instructed to make arrangements for
the “security and destruction” of the records. He was also advised to maintain
links with the existing operatives to ensure that they could become contacts for
the British intelligence operations in India in the future.2 As decided, by 2
September 1946 – the date of the formation of the interim government –
sensitive records were either transferred to London or destroyed. The fires
destroying the records in Shimla apparently burned for three days.3
Under the interim government, Sardar Patel secured control of the Home
Department, within which the IB had operated. He is reported to have joked
to Viceroy Wavell that the “DIB had destroyed the most interesting files”.4 As
recorded by Rajmohan Gandhi, Patel’s biographer, Wavell had asked, “How
are you getting on at the DIB?”, to which Patel replied, “quite alright, they
have destroyed all the compromising papers”. Wavell then countered, “Yes, I
told them to make sure of that”, which led both of them to share a laugh.5
Commenting on the closure of sensitive files to the Indian eyes, Patel told the
Le Courrier des Indes, a French weekly, on 29 May 1949 that:
“When I became Home Minister, my dossier and those of all the Congress
members had already been destroyed, for when I attempted to discover
what they thought about me, I found absolutely nothing. They [the Brit
ish] did not give us any information, either with regard to their past
actions, or their manner of procedure, or their secret organizations; in
short, they did not let us know anything”.6
With its diminished institutional memory, the IB that Patel inherited in 1946
was further depleted by partition of the subcontinent. By April 1947 Norman
Smith was asked to hand over the control of the IB entirely to the Indian lea
dership. The question of partition had been settled by then. Under these
circumstances, the senior most native officer in the IB, Anwar Ahmad, chose
Pakistani citizenship.7 Earmarked to serve as the DIB of Pakistan, Ahmad is
reported to have:
“transfer[red] across to Pakistan every file of importance dealing with

intelligence, leaving behind for his counterparts in India the office furni
ture, empty racks and cupboards, and a few innocuous files dealing with
office routine. It is therefore no exaggeration to say that on 15 August,
Pakistan came into being with a well-established Intelligence Service,
while India had only a semblance of one”.8
Thus, on 25 March 1947, after a great deal of searching and scrutinising, Patel
wrote to Ramaswami Reddy, the then Prime Minister of Madras province,
stressing the “paramount necessity” of the DIB and requested the release of
Deputy Superintendent of Police, Rao Bahadur Sanjeevi Pillai, to assume the
position of the DIB.9 The request was duly obliged by Reddy. Meanwhile,
London received a telegram from Smith stating that powers will be handed
over to Sanjeevi on the afternoon of 11 April.10 Together, Patel and Sanjeevi
would have to rebuild the Indian intelligence organisation, although the feeble
structure that remained had some working experience from the colonial days.
Articulating the cultural evolution of this new intelligence set-up in India
requires an examination of how the concerned leaders perceived intelligence.
The following section, thus, explores Patel’s and Nehru’s approaches to
national security and how intelligence fits into those prisms.
Sardar Patel and Jawaharlal Nehru’s Conflicting Ideas of

National Security and Intelligence
Nehru was India’s first Prime Minister, and Patel became India’s first Deputy
Prime Minister and Home Minister. Despite being part of the freedom struggle
against a common enemy, and both being ardent followers of Mahatma
Gandhi, their personalities were poles apart. Their differences were so stark that
one is left surprised that they even shared positions in the same cabinet, which
also speaks for the mutual respect the two shared for each other at a personal
level. Nehru was born in a rich family, educated in England, and believed in
achieving realism through idealism.11 Life and experiences in the West had
significantly alienated him from the Indian civilization.12 Patel, for his part, was
a self-made man, who believed in pragmatism. The end goal for him was ide
alism – the Ram Rajya (ideal state) that Gandhi had aspired for.13 Influenced by
Fabian and Russian socialism, Nehru’s ideas for India were starkly different
from Patel’s, who neither believed in socialism nor any other social ideology.14
With such distinctiveness between the pragmatic Patel and idealist Nehru, dif
fering notions of security and intelligence were bound to exist.
The question of Patel-Nehru differences and the merits of each other’s
arguments is an intense research topic in itself. From this book’s point of view,
the key aspects that are considered are the ones having an impact on intelli
gence and national security. For Patel, a true sense of security could be
achieved only when India achieved internal unity. According to historian
Patrick French:
“[while] Nehru talked lyrically about the community of nations; Patel was
more interested in securing maximum power for Congress as the British
faded from the scene”.15
The problem in implementing these differing ideas was that Patel preferred
institutionalisation of power, which had a long-term benefit, while Nehru was
concerned with concentration of power in his own hands. Patel, being a master
administrator, believed in creation of structures and allocation of roles and
responsibilities.16 Nehru, meanwhile, believed that power was not to be
shared.17 In fact, within few months of independence, Patel had threatened to
resign over this particular difference, which was settled with the interference of
Gandhi. According to historian and Nehru’s biographer Sarvepalli Gopal:
“Nehru believed that…he should intervene in the functioning of every

ministry, though it should be done with tact and with the knowledge of
the minister concerned…But [according to] Patel…it was for each ministry
to implement the decisions of the Cabinet; and the Prime Minister’s
responsibility was merely to see that there was no conflict between minis
ters. To the extent that Nehru was seeking to do more…he was, in Patel’s
view, acting undemocratically”.18
In Nehru’s approach, the need for institutions was replaced by the need to have
favourable individuals. The downside of this approach was that, Nehru was also
known to have a terrible record of judging people. It was Patel who had
shown better knack for choosing the right people.19 According to Rajkumari
Amrit Kaur, an admirer of Nehru:
“[Nehru] is not a good judge of character and is therefore easily deceived.

He is not averse to flattery and there is a conceit in him which makes him
at once intolerant of criticism and may even warp his better judgement”.20
Therefore, for a man like Patel, who was pragmatic and action oriented,
intelligence was central to his decision-making. While Nehru disliked every
aspect of the British that had opposed him and India’s freedom struggle, Patel
was willing to embrace the remnants of the British rule as long as they served
India’s and the Congress’s objectives. This reflected in their views on the civil
service, army and, most importantly, intelligence. With regards to the civil
service, Nehru is reported to have termed it as “neither Indian, nor civil, nor
service”, while Patel saw an all-India bureaucratic service as a “unifying force”,
which was critical for nation-building.21 On matters military, Nehru is noted to
have regarded that India did not need an armed force given its policy of non
violence, and the police were enough to maintain internal order.22 His approach
to national security was defined as ‘defence through diplomacy’.23 Patel, for his
part, had a nuanced and correct reading of Gandhian peace model. Non-violence
was not without qualification and the military and the utility of force in statecraft
was never lost on Patel.24 With regards to intelligence, Nehru was deeply dis
turbed over being targeted by the colonial intelligence. He reflected on his
experience with the British secret service in his book The Discovery of India and
wrote:
“during the last quarter of a century or more I have not written a single
letter…without realising that it would be seen or possibly copied by some
secret service censor. Nor have I spoken on the telephone without
remembering that my conversation was likely to be tapped”.25
Elsewhere, he wrote that colonial India was an “ideal police state…[with] a

vast army of spies and secret agents [covering] the land”..26 These observa
tions should not be seen as mere reflections of his experiences with the
colonists. Nehru made these comments contrasting the behaviour of the
colonial authorities with the openness of his political organisation, the INC.27
He was, hence, nurturing a deep aversion to secret service operations while
upholding transparency. Nehru’s romanticism with openness, reflecting the
Victorian ideas of intelligence, is, therefore, best captured in Henry Stimson’s
famous comment “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.28 Patel, for his
part, had no time for either complaining about British secret service activities
or romanticising western ideals of transparency and openness.
Patel did not want to waste a moment in consolidating power for the INC
after independence. As soon as the formation of the interim government in
1946, he chose the Home Department, as it was there that he could exert real
influence on nation building and national security. In fact, Patel’s reputation as
a master organiser during the freedom struggle owed in large part to his deft
utilisation of covert intelligence. Reflecting back on the grand success of the
Bardoli Satyagraha of 1928, which witnessed the emergence of Patel as one of
the main leaders of Congress, historian Hindol Sengupta has written that:
“it is here that Patel started to perfect an art he would embrace as his very
own—the skill of nurturing, cultivating and deploying a network of
informers deep into the British government system to gather critical intel
ligence which would aid the Congress’s campaigns”.29
Therefore, contrary to Nehru’s perception of the INC being a transparent

organisation, there was a leader who worked covertly to keep the Congress’
machinery functioning. Once taking office as the Interior Minister, Patel only
received the license to own an organised intelligence establishment. Two days
after swearing in, Patel summoned DIB Smith and ordered him to continue
spying on the extremist elements in the INC and the communists. In his
report, Smith wrote that Patel wanted:
“to keep at least a close watch on movements liable to subvert Congress/

Muslim League authority as the previous official governments have kept
on movements calculated to undermine British authority”.30
Philip Vickery also noted that:
“Mr. Patel, who is rabidly anti-Communist, is fully aware of the impor

tance of keeping a very close eye on Communist activities and the
potentially subversive tendencies of extreme left wingers in general”.31
Although the British were relieved by the Sardar’s actions, Patel knew enough to
keep the British government away from the activities of the IB. He blocked all
access between the Viceroy and the DIB and became the sole recipient of intel
ligence.32 Also, the ban on gathering intelligence on the Muslim League did not
last long, as he realised the importance of knowing the inner workings of the
League. Through a source of the IB, he was well informed of the happenings
within the League.33 Finally, with regards to nation building, it is unsurprising
that Patel employed intelligence in the best manner possible to learn the nego
tiating positions of the princely states. For instance, in Hyderabad, a member of
the Nizam’s Executive Council was a spy planted by Patel to provide informa
tion on the developments in the Nizam’s court.34 It is, therefore, appropriate to
conclude that intelligence was central to Patel’s fame as an able administrator.
When India got independence, although much of the intelligence infrastructure
sailed to Pakistan, the presence of Patel was sufficient to commence refurbishing
the intelligence organisation. More importantly, within a short duration of taking
office, he had managed to reform the intelligence system in a way that the British
never could.
Patel’s comments on intelligence, addressing the provincial home ministers
during a lunch meeting on 23 November 1947, indicates that the centralisation of
intelligence that had intensely troubled the British authorities during the colonial
period had finally been achieved. The British intelligence officers had faced severe
obstacles from the provincial governors and police officers whenever an attempt
was made to centralise intelligence. Patel, however, had achieved this in just a
year’s time. Yet, he was still aware of the need for further strengthening of the
capabilities of intelligence in several aspects. The following passage from the
speech denotes how deeply the minister thought about centralisation and
intelligence co-ordination:
“there is no longer any necessity for the reports of the Central Intelligence
Bureau to be sent to the provinces…[they] may be furnished by the
Central Intelligence Bureau with relevant extracts of information derived
from sources in Military Intelligence as well as in States…there should be
complete coordination of all Intelligence Agencies and that efforts should
be made to ensure a higher standard of reliability in the information
obtained. The establishment of a central school and wireless network are
already under consideration…Detailed suggestions for coordination, etc.
should be considered in a conference of Central Intelligence and provincial
CID officers”.35
The excerpt clearly shows that Patel was speaking from practical experience
and professional involvement. He had actively led the IB from 1946 onwards;
and understood the strengths and weaknesses of the intelligence organisation.
This was typical of Patel’s character as an empiricist. In contrast, Nehru’s
bookish knowledge did little to improve the IB after Patel departed from the
scene. In his speech at the IB conference in March 1952, not only did Nehru
not refer to any of the IB’s working aspects or external intelligence functions,
but only made historical references that were marked by errors. For instance,
referring to the British conquest of India, Nehru said:
“on the [Indian] side there was total ignorance…and on the other there
was a highly organised Intelligence System which gave the British infor
mation about every single little corner”.36
There was absolutely no truth in this statement, as the British, as observed in the
previous chapter, were entirely reliant on the native intelligence system to under
stand the subcontinent and conduct their military conquests. On the international
front, Nehru gave no indication of the probable targets of the IB, nor did he talk
of India’s threat perception from abroad. He limited his speech to the threat of
international communism but did not assume a critical tone of it as Patel generally
would. On the contrary, he cautioned the officers “against a negative approach
towards international communism which… [in his opinion] would be wrong and
dangerous”.37 This might have been in light of the IB’s growing apprehensiveness
of China and the letter Patel had written following the Chinese annexation of
Tibet (see Chapter 5). Thus, in contrast to Patel, Nehru had no serious thought or
involvement in the development of India’s intelligence system. This was a direct
derivative of the visible aversion Nehru had shown towards intelligence.
B.N. Mullik, the longest-serving DIB (1950–64) noted at least four instances –
communal trouble 1948–49, railway strike 1949, domestic political situation in
Nepal 1950, the implications of the Nehru-Liaquat Pact on East-Pakistan 1950 –
when Nehru had incorrectly and baselessly challenged the IB’s assessments. In all
these instances, the IB required the intervention of Patel and the Home Secretary
to support their findings. According to Mullik, Nehru was suspicious that:
“the 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”.38
With such inhibitions and prejudices against intelligence, it required the lea
dership of Patel or an equivalent to keep alive the importance of the IB in
policymaking. Mullik has quite candidly expressed in the aftermath of Patel’s
death on 15 December 1950 that, “without [Patel’s] support in the formative
period, it would have been difficult for [the IB] to survive”.39 In most of his
writings on intelligence, Nehru has maintained a steadily condescending tone
towards the intelligence agencies and their reportage. There are repeated usages
of words like ‘misleading’, ‘exaggerated’, ‘trivial’, ‘vague’, ‘off the mark’ and so
on, to either unfairly criticise the agency or to highlight that his own intellect
was superior to the agency’s assessments.40
Against this backdrop, the Nehruvian era Indian intelligence returned to the
colonial culture of intelligence – one that was led by intelligence managers and
driven in response to a threat. The development of foreign intelligence in
support of policymaking was sluggish. According to Mullik, foreign intelligence
received its first attention only in 1952. However, other officials of the era
argue that, even then, foreign intelligence had a reluctant evolution. A former
bureaucrat serving during the Nehru era recollected that:
“as long as we did not feel that China or Britain or the US or Egypt had
any inimical intentions, there was no need for intelligence. So, intelligence
was only growing gradually”.41
It is noteworthy that the assessment that India did not face a threat from the
above said nations was not drawn from an intelligence appreciation or military
analysis, but from Nehru’s weltanschauung that was derived from wishful thinking
(see Chapter 5).
Consequently, like the colonial period, the role of the intelligence leadership
would attain paramountcy, while political interference did more damage than
good. The next section chronicles the efforts of the intelligence managers –
Sanjeevi and Mullik – in developing external intelligence in India, while the
political leadership showed no interest in it.
Evolution of Intelligence–Political Consumer Relationship in

Independent India
The years 1947–50 are the most understudied years in India’s intelligence history,
which, in fact, are the most crucial years to understand India’s intelligence cul
ture. Most narratives on intelligence make only passing references to Sanjeevi as
the first DIB and focus mostly on Mullik’s era. Having served as the DIB for 14
years, Mullik has been called the “Bhishma Pitamaha” of the Indian intelligence
community.42 The brief and abrupt termination of Sanjeevi’s tenure as the DIB
is presumed to have been uneventful. However, a careful scrutiny of the Amer
ican, British and Indian archival evidence indicates that Sanjeevi, Patel and R.N.
Banerjee, the Home Secretary, are the unsung characters who made a significant
contribution to the Indian intelligence organisation. It is extremely important to
be aware of the developments of this period to understand the growth of Indian
intelligence culture in the coming decades. In fact, if Nehru was proven wrong
against the IB’s forecasts on the four occasions mentioned above, between 1948
and 1950, it was due solely to the leadership of Sanjeevi, not Mullik.
As noted earlier, Sanjeevi was handpicked by Patel for the post of DIB. On
taking office, Sanjeevi wanted the IB to be responsible for internal security,
foreign intelligence, military intelligence and also all-source analysis. Never
theless, the latter was handled by the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC),
operating under the Chiefs of Staff Committee and Sanjeevi’s proposal was
vetoed by the other parties.43 After independence, however, the position of the
JIC would be severely weakened, and consequently, the IB became the de
facto strategic intelligence agency of India. The DIB came to be regarded as the
senior most police officer in the country drawing a salary of 3,500 rupees. The
initial years (1946–48) of the IB were spent mostly in internal security duties.
The principal targets were the Muslim League, the princely states, the com
munists, the communal elements, and other internal troublemakers.
The Pakistani invasion of 1947–48 and the assassination of Gandhi further
took away the energies of an intelligence organisation that was still born. The
war indicated that India was not safe from external aggression, but Nehru was
yet to pay adequate attention to the need for foreign intelligence. The partition
and the war had led to an increasing flow of refugees, while at the same time,
New Delhi, as the capital city, was witnessing a mushrooming of a number of
foreign embassies that required monitoring. The urgency for improving intel
ligence work was obvious to the Home Ministry. The Home Secretary,
thereby, wrote:
“I need not stress that our Intelligence Bureau has yet to make up much
leeway in Intelligence work. Our Intelligence organisation and methods
require very radical overhauling. H.M. [Home Minister] will recall specific
cases in which this fact has been brought home to us. I need only mention
the cases about setting up Intelligence organisation on Pakistan border,
security control of Calcutta, DIB establishing special contacts by touring
etc”.44
The SIB’s were directed to focus on the local press, terrorism and underground
activities of various political parties, monitoring communications, communists,
volunteer organisations, and foreign secret activities.45 With the support of
Patel and Banerjee, Sanjeevi was on the forefront in building an organisation to
accomplish these goals. The first obstacle facing Sanjeevi was the depleting
manpower in the face of increasing challenges to India’s security. Deputy
Director P.L. Mehta wrote to the Home Ministry that:
“the Director has personally gone into the matter and considers that it is
essential to fill all the vacancies urgently. Even with a third of the country
going over to Pakistan the commitments of the Bureau have not by any
means decreased and have in fact increased many fold…As a result of
transfer of personnel to Pakistan all the branches are working under great
strain and it is not desirable to allow this state of things to continue any
longer”.46
Notwithstanding the urgency, the civil servants in the Ministry of Home Affairs
(MHA) insisted on waiting for the Federal Public Service Commission to
conduct examinations and select candidates suitable to work in the IB. San
jeevi, nevertheless, devised a mechanism to deal with the issue, which the
MHA approved on a temporary basis. It appears that the IB liaison officer with
the MHA was directed to keep up the pressure on the ministry by highlighting
the deteriorating situation in several key bureaus, while, on a temporary basis,
personnel from the Pakistan based bureaus who chose Indian citizenship were
to be employed in the Indian bureaus.47 For instance, an employee of the IB
previously working for the Lahore bureau was employed in Amritsar. While
informing on this development, the IB report to the MHA also complained
about the increasing pressure on the Lucknow Central Intelligence Officer,
owing to personnel shortages. The pressure of the latter pointer would allow
the MHA to swallow its unease with the former.
In addition to the shortage of manpower, there was also a growing
pressure from the Ministry of Finance with regards to intelligence expen
diture. By 1949–50 Patel and V.P. Menon had almost successfully com
pleted the task of nation building. This called into question the need for
the continued retention of the IB’s network across the country. Once again,
this reflects the civil service’s colonial mentality of being threat responsive.
The persuasion of the DIB was required in order to keep the posts func
tioning. Sanjeevi emphasised that in the interest of the security of the
country, the intelligence centres established in the states should continue to
function.48 In addition, he stressed on the need to establish newer branches
in Punjab, Kashmir, Rajasthan and Bhopal in the aftermath of the 1948
war. While obliging with the requests, the Ministry of Finance demanded
the reduction in the number of personnel to be employed.49 Thus, looking
back to the early post-independence years, the IB had to grapple with a
dwindling workforce, budgetary constraints and an increasing threat per
ception. Amid such a scenario, it was the wisdom and determination of
Sanjeevi that supported the growth of the IB.
On the external intelligence front, it has already been noted that until 1952
Nehru never considered the need for intelligence in foreign policymaking at
all. As far as Patel was concerned, as internal security and national unity was his
priority, external intelligence role for the IB was also conceived within the
framework of internal security. In other words, Patel sought to continue to
build and strengthen the IB as a counterintelligence organisation with a global
reach. The only person in the establishment to think about building an external
intelligence capability for the IB was Sanjeevi. Archival documents of 1949
reveal the complicated origins of foreign intelligence in India.
In May 1949 the MHA authorised the visit of Sanjeevi to several national
capitals for the purpose of understanding the “constitutional and functional”
aspects of the respective intelligence agencies.50 On the constitutional side, the
MHA wanted Sanjeevi to understand the division of powers between the state
and the union police forces. And on the functional side, Sanjeevi was expected
to study the division of labour between intelligence and criminal investigation.
To achieve this, he proceeded on a two months long visit of international cities
covering Geneva, Berne, London, Cairo, New York, Washington DC and
Ottawa.51 The document makes it clear that the MHA was interested only in
intelligence for internal security and division of power between intelligence and
law enforcement authorities. The correspondences between the Ministry of
External Affairs and the Indian embassies abroad clearly express that the purpose
behind Sanjeevi’s visit was:
“[to examine] the working of certain Federal Police systems and also to
familiarise himself with the functioning as well as the technical facilities of
the local Intelligence Organizations”. [emphasis added]52
Clearly, there was no direction for the DIB to pursue a foreign intelligence
project. However, Sanjeevi was interested in foreign intelligence as much as
internal intelligence. Until then, the IB had only one desk dealing with foreign
intelligence, which in the IB was comically known as NGO (Not to Go
Out).53 Even this desk was created on the insistence of the Indian Army fol
lowing Pakistan’s actions in Kashmir since 1947.54 In conducting the visits to
international capitals, Sanjeevi saw an opportunity to develop a credible foreign
intelligence capacity. In his correspondence with one of the secretaries in the
MHA, Mr Iengar, on 24 November 1948 Sanjeevi wrote:
“you will notice that I have shown visits to Paris, Geneva and Cairo, and
these are essential in the interests of Foreign Intelligence, which I am
building up and for which, in the immediate future, some officers will be
deputed…Also, I should like very much to get an idea of the excellent
“Foreigners Control” which the Swiss Intelligence is believed to have in
force”.55
Sanjeevi was, thus, intending to create a foreign intelligence capacity for India,
which was clearly beyond the interests and approval of Nehru, who was also
the Foreign Minister. After this correspondence with Iengar, there is no men
tion of foreign intelligence at all in the documents. Sanjeevi’s visit to Paris,
Geneva and Cairo seem to have borne no fruits on the foreign intelligence
front. By his own initiative, without the knowledge of Nehru, he secretly
posted three officers in Pakistan, France and Germany, respectively.56 Else
where, he also accepted at once that “he frequently had to take independent
action without the knowledge of his government”.57 Therefore, in the absence
of the approval of the Government of India, domestic intelligence and police
work had become the only focus of his visits. In December 1948 Guy Liddell,
MI5 Director of Counterespionage, noted after a meeting with Sanjeevi that
the Indian government expected the IB to play a counterintelligence and
counterespionage role that almost meant having “dictatorial powers”. Liddell
commented that:
“if Sanjeevi is to do what the Indian government want him to do, he will
have to have an enormous Gestapo, which will cost the country a great
deal of money and may well be corrupt and inefficient”.58
Nonetheless, his visit to the United States had an unexpected turn. In under
standing Indian intelligence culture, Sanjeevi’s visit to the U.S. and the out
come of it is an extremely crucial milestone.
The U.S. intelligence had a considerable degree of penetration into the
Indian political system. From a highly reliable source, Washington had pro
cured Sanjeevi’s biographical details, which included his professional history,
dietary habits, information about his wife; and also, the itinerary of his inter
national visits.59 However, one critical error committed by the U.S. intelli
gence gave Sanjeevi an opportunity to work on his foreign intelligence
aspirations. In the correspondence between the U.S. embassy in India and
Washington DC, the latter was informed that:
“[Mr. Sanjeevi] is very close to Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and our
Ambassador in New Delhi is convinced that he can be extremely useful in
aiding to change the Prime Minister’s attitude of neutrality, at least so far as
communism is concerned”.60
However, nothing could have been further from the truth. Sanjeevi was Patel’s
choice, and Nehru’s aversion to intelligence had never allowed any close rela
tionship to emerge between them. Under this misplaced belief, authorities in
Washington were instructed by none less than George Kennan that Sanjeevi be
provided with a cordial reception by the highest officials of the U.S. government.
Sanjeevi’s primary objective in the U.S. was to meet FBI Director, J. Edgar
Hoover, and discuss the technicalities of domestic intelligence. However, after
exchanging a few pleasantries, Hoover instructed his deputies to offer Sanjeevi
a tour of the FBI, and never met with him after that. Sanjeevi described the
tour as “hardly more enlightening than given to a visiting high school class”.
He later reflected on his experience with the FBI with revulsion, but never
informed anybody in the Indian establishment about the ill treatment meted
out to him in Washington. On his return, the MHA, ignorant of the events in
Washington wrote to the U.S. embassy that Sanjeevi:
“has told us of the tremendous friendliness shown to him by the autho

rities…he has come back with a store of knowledge and…real friendship
for the officers of your [FBI]”.61
Sanjeevi later admitted that he had not informed his superiors “for the fear of
injuring relations between India and the USA”.62 Notwithstanding the dis
astrous experience with Hoover, the overall outcome of the U.S. visit was still
fruitful. Considering the instructions of Kennan and the U.S. Embassy in New
Delhi to be cordial to Sanjeevi, on realising Hoover’s disinterest, the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) was directed to host him. Sanjeevi held his experi
ences with the CIA in the highest regards.63 On his return, he drafted a report
on the working of the CIA in order to provide a developmental guide for the
IB. However, shortly after his return, his career as the DIB would end, which
highlights the most important factor in the evolution of Indian intelligence
culture, i.e. political and bureaucratic subservience. This is also a continuation
of the colonial intelligence character that was largely defined by the strength
and influence of the intelligence managers.
During his visit to London, Sanjeevi had met the Indian High Commissioner
Krishna Menon, an ardent communist sympathiser and a close confidant of
Nehru. Following his interactions with the latter, Sanjeevi wrote an honest and
detailed report on Menon’s attitude towards the communist problem in India.
This episode might have not sat well with Nehru (see Chapter 5 for more
detail). On his visit to the U.S., Sanjeevi had managed to irk yet another
member of Nehru’s close circle – Mrs Vijayalakshmi Pandit, Nehru’s sister and
the Indian Ambassador to the U.S. He apparently had failed to follow protocol
and “call at the Embassy”, which angered Mrs. Pandit. Sanjeevi had felt that
technical work did not deserve protocol to be followed.64 At the same time,
differences in opinion were also emerging between Sanjeevi and Banerjee.65
Amid all these personal fissures, Sanjeevi’s report on the CIA was ignored, and
the IB continued to operate as a counterintelligence and internal security
organisation. In effect, the international visit culminated in his rattling of many
individuals close to Nehru that led to his premature departure from the IB and
the promotion of senior Deputy Director B.N. Mullik as DIB in July 1950.
The entire period between 1947–50 is important to understand India’s
intelligence culture because it highlighted three factors:
• Foreign intelligence was never considered as an essential requirement by

the political leadership;
• Like the colonial period, the adroitness and skill of the intelligence man
ager was necessary to keep the agency alive; and
• There were serious limits to what could be achieved in the intelligence
profession without the support of the political leadership.
By 1950, Patel was ageing; his hands were too full to micromanage things.
Banerjee also had a significant degree of influence on both Patel and Nehru,
which made getting rid of Sanjeevi easy. Superseding over 30 senior officers,
B.N. Mullik was selected as the new DIB.66 Mullik’s legend as the “father of
Indian intelligence” is due largely to his learnings from the Sanjeevi era. With
the death of Patel, which was the only deterrent against Nehru’s strongarm
against intelligence, Mullik realised that it would be “difficult for the [IB] to
survive”. The new Home Minister, C. Rajagopalachari, was also a pragmatist
and a supporter of intelligence. But, Mullik arguably was aware that Rajaji
did not enjoy the same degree of influence as Patel. Under these circum
stances, with the help of Rajaji, Mullik managed to secure direct access to the
Prime Minister.
Mullik’s access to Nehru has led many to regard him a “sycophant”.67 The
IB has also come to be described as a “secret police organisation” rather than an
intelligence agency; and Mullik as the “one-man intelligence system in India
during the Nehru years”.68 However, it is arguable that if Mullik exhibited any
instances of sycophancy, it was only because it was a necessary condition during
the Nehru era. Political espionage would become the IB’s main tactic for
organisational survival throughout the 20th century. Throughout his 14 years
tenure, Mullik would go on to provide Nehru with assessments, but never
pushed hard against the latter’s wishes. He had realised that his predecessor’s
uprightness had done no good to the organisation, and hence, believed that
India’s and his organisation’s interests could be best served by taking the poli
tical leadership into greater confidence. Consequently, as described by Major-
General D.K. Palit, the Director-General of Military Operations during the
1962 war:
“except in the presence of Nehru, where he [Mullik] would be deferential

and compliant, he [generally] exuded an aura of self-command and
authority”.69
As the case chapters will show, these became the defining features of Indian
intelligence. Except on occasions under Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi, the
intelligence managers have always been on the forefront in developing foreign
intelligence for India’s national security. However, without political support,
the limits to their accomplishments have been severe. Mullik, enjoying a higher
degree of political acceptance than his predecessor, was able to make amends to
the intelligence organisation with greater ease. Unlike Sanjeevi who had to
secretly post intelligence officials abroad, Mullik could take Nehru into greater
confidence and post intelligence officials in India’s immediate neighbourhood
and the Islamic world from a national security point of view.70
To understand how Mullik’s proximity to Nehru enabled the empowerment
of the IB, a closer observation of the posting of IB officers to the U.K. and
other countries is useful. It has been noted earlier that Sanjeevi had posted
officers in Germany, France and Pakistan without Nehru’s knowledge. Given
Nehru’s repeated warnings to the IB to resist becoming tied up to the British
intelligence, Mullik realised that Nehru’s anxieties could be exploited to
expand the IB’s network. In September 1952 Nehru approved the establish
ment of Security Liaison Units in London and other cities to monitor Pakistani
and other communist activities threatening India. More than any other reason,
the compelling force behind Nehru’s decision was to avoid relying on other
foreign intelligence agencies, especially the British.71 Considering his aversion
to secret intelligence and excessive reliance on diplomacy, it would have been
impossible for any intelligence chief to convince Nehru of the need to expand
India’s intelligence reach without trading on his well-known concerns. It is,
thus, entirely possible that it was the wisdom of Mullik, derived from his close
proximity to Nehru, that enabled such expansive activities.
Another area that benefitted largely from Mullik’s leadership was recruit
ment. Unlike Sanjeevi who relied on piecemeal recruitment of personnel,
Mullik innovated a recruitment style known as the Ear-Marking Scheme
(EMS) that drew the best talent from the Indian Police Service (IPS). Every
year, a copy of the Annual Confidential Report of the IPS officers was sent to
the MHA through which the DIB identified talented officers.72 Having excel
led in their entrance exams and completed a successful four-years career as a
police officer, these officers were given permanent posting in the IB as Class-1
officers. A former officer from the era, recounted that:73
“it was well-known that the level of risk to both life and career was higher
than the routine cop work. Yet, the recruits accepted the offer over a
notional superiority in the eyes of their police comrades and a monetary
incentive of 100 Indian Rupees” [about £5 in 1960].
While the autonomy afforded to the intelligence managers did enable

development of an appreciable system of recruitment like the EMS, the lack
of involvement of the political leadership denied the most essential checks against
the manager’s errors. This was evident in the decision to keep Muslims away from
the intelligence organisation. Immediately after independence, Sanjeevi’s major
concern was to rid the IB of Europeans and Muslims. He wrote that “in an
Intelligence Organisation in India now, there is no place for a European or a
Muslim”.74 The first victim of this policy was Tausifullah Khan, Dy. C.I.O. of
Lucknow, who was replaced by Jai Narayan Sharma. Throughout the period
covered in this book, it was observed that the strength of Muslim personnel in the
IB was negligible while the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) had none,
despite Pakistan and Islamic jihadism being the primary focal areas of the
agencies.75
In addition, lack of political interference in the IB’s personnel policies gave
rise to other problems that in effect reflected some of the issues observed in the
colonial era. This is elaborated in the next section while tracing the British
legacy in Indian intelligence.
Continuation of the British Legacy in Indian Intelligence

The British legacy on Indian intelligence on the organisational front is fairly
straightforward. The IB, the Military Intelligence and the JIC trace their origins
to the British era, although the consolidation of their powers and positions in
the Indian policymaking apparatus were due in large part to political patronage
and organisational leadership. The IB was fortunate to have found the able
leadership of Sanjeevi and the political patronage under Patel, while the JIC
and the MI did not enjoy similar privilege. However, the British legacy con
tinued to survive long after the colonists left the subcontinent. The driving
factor behind this legacy was the shared anti-communist proclivities of Patel
and the British, as well as the interpersonal relations developed between the
intelligence managers of Britain and India. The other important facet of Indian
intelligence that can be traced back to the British era is the hierarchical divide
within the organisation. This section elaborates these aspects.
The Patel-Nehru distinction spread even to the question of Anglo-Indian
relations post-independence. The former was a firm supporter of India
remaining within the commonwealth while Nehru wanted to cut all ties with
the commonwealth.76 Patel emphasised that India had to maintain a strong
association with the commonwealth but cautioned that India’s sovereign
status must remain unaffected. As this book will reveal in greater detail, this
has been the compelling factor behind India’s intelligence relationships with
intelligence organisations across the world. Nevertheless, as far as the early
independent days were concerned, Patel’s position as an anti-communist and
commonwealth supporter ensured that connections between Indian and
British intelligence officials continued unabated. Provisions were made to
station a Security Liaison Officer (SLO) of the MI5 in New Delhi, which set
in motion not only a close Anglo-Indian intelligence relationship but also a
commonwealth intelligence culture that occupied all newly independent
British colonies.77
The first two SLOs, Kenneth Bourne and Bill U’ren found a favourable
character in Patel. Moreover, the SLOs as well as the top leadership at the MI5
had prior experience in India that brought them close to New Delhi. U’ren,
for instance, had been a police officer in India for twenty-two years. U’ren’s
successor Eric Kitchin also developed a close relationship with Sanjeevi. Kitchin
reported that Sanjeevi “lost no opportunity in stressing the value which he
places on maintaining our relationship on a professional and personal basis”.78
With the passing of Patel and Sanjeevi from the intelligence scene, the onus of
protecting the Indo-British intelligence ties fell on Mullik.
Being aware of Nehru’s position on intelligence, Mullik requested SLO
Walter Bell, with whom he had developed an excellent relationship, to assume a
fake identity and conduct his business undercover.79 Nehru had always been
wary of British intelligence co-operation with India. In December 1948, con
sidering Sanjeevi’s visit to London, Krishna Menon had expressed concerns over
the inappropriateness of the IB functioning as an annexure to the British intelli
gence.80 Nehru, who was informed by the MHA that the visit was to study the
British intelligence system, advised Sanjeevi against tying himself with the British
intelligence in any way.81 With such cautionary directives, the IB had to entirely
rely on the wisdom of the managers to develop and shape international intelli
gence liaisons. The second SLO John Allen reported to London the delicate
situation in the liaison arrangement that Mullik was handling:
“Mullik has been anxious not to draw the attention of the [MEA]…to
the existence of an SLO here…The fact that neither Mullik nor Pillai
[Secretary-General] have sufficient confidence in the Prime Minister’s
continuing approval of the liaison…is a fair indication of the delicate
path we tread”.82
Allen continued that “if Nehru realised how close collaboration between the
DIB and the MI5 was, he would probably forbid much of it”.83 Nehru defi
nitely knew of the existence of the SLO but was clearly unaware of the nature
of the relationship with the DIB.
The problem with such behind the scenes dealings with superior intelligence
services like Britain, amid the absence of political direction from Nehru, was that
the IB began to gain expertise in areas that were central to Britain’s threat per
ception rather than India’s threat perception. Being an anti-communist organisa
tion throughout the colonial period, the IB’s association with the MI5 led to the
upper ranks of the organisation being filled with experts on communism. Sir
Roger Hollis, the then Deputy Director-General of MI5, was told by Mullik that
the IB was reasonably strong in countersubversion, but counterespionage required
improvement.84 Hollis had felt that Mullik’s views on the communist threat to
India was closer to his own than to those of the Indian government. The focal
point of the MI5 was the activities of the Soviet embassy in New Delhi more than
anything else. Indian security threats from abroad, nevertheless, far transcended
mere communism, which neither received sufficient attention from Nehru nor the
British. Consequently, devoid of political direction, the IB grew under the British
tutelage as a counterintelligence organisation with expertise in communism.85 The
effect of this would come to bear on the 1962 Sino-Indian war. While the agency
was right in perceiving a threat from China, owing to its communist-expansionist
outlook, it failed in rightly gauging the military threat that Mao’s China posed
(explored in detail in the following chapter).
The second critical legacy left behind by the British was the racial divide
within the hierarchical structure of the Indian intelligence. The British era
practice of the white man leading the intelligence organisation and Indians
being merely intelligence collectors continued to operate in a more-or-less
similar vein. The colonial intelligence managers were members of the Indian
Civil Service (ICS), who were replaced post-independence by the Indian
Police Service (IPS). The civilian analysts in the IB could never attain the
higher ranks in the organisation. The question of prestige that was inherent in
the colonial days’ administrative and intelligence setup had percolated into
the post-independence administrative mechanism as well. The British ICS
officers, as observed in the previous chapter, mainly saw India as a prestigious
and comfortable posting for enhanced career prospects. Post-independence,
the Indian civil services continued to operate under similar motivations where
“status” was valued above everything else.86
The IPS’s systemic and organisational control over the intelligence machinery
has caused ruptures in intelligence co-operation and co-ordination, as well as
organisational effectiveness. In the face of growing security threats from across the
borders immediately after independence, the primary concern should have been
the establishment of steady co-operation between the military and civilian intel
ligence services. On the contrary, in 1948 Sanjeevi requested upgrading the rank
of the DIB to “Director-General of Intelligence” to give a superior edge over
the Director of Military Intelligence who then held the rank of a Brigadier. Patel,
fortunately, turned down this ridiculous proposal.87 In the foreign intelligence
sphere, as the coming chapters will highlight, this factor has caused one of the
strongest frictions between the military and the intelligence bureaucracies. The
military’s longstanding lament has been that the foreign intelligence role, which
was its forte prior to independence, was wrongly handed over to the IPS.88
Within the IB, the racial divide between the British officers and Indian collec
tors of the colonial era was replaced by the IPS at the helm and Intelligence
Operatives (IO) at the lower ranks. The IOs have never been able to rise to the
higher ranks because of the dominance of the IPS. This is despite the fact that the
selection criteria for the low-ranking officials is far tougher than the generalist IPS
cadre.89 After the Himmatsinghji Committee (1950) directed strategic military
intelligence as the IB’s responsibility, the civilian analysts of the agency were sent
to the military intelligence training school in Pune. The training was, however,
stopped soon owing to Mullik’s inability to provide the analysts with ranks
equivalent of the commissioned officers, which General Thimmaiah had sought as
a precondition to impart training alongside military officers. Consequently, bereft
of adequate training, in the words of an IB analyst of the era, “the IOs went
around collecting military intelligence as clueless jokers”.90 Thus, the struggle to
maintain primacy of the IPS caused problems both within the intelligence orga
nisation as well as between the intelligence and military, which continues una
bated. During the course of an interview, former spymaster Vikram Sood – the
only non-IPS chief of the R&AW – light-heartedly analogised the IPS dominance
in intelligence to casteism in Indian society.91 In reality, however, it is a product of
the racial divide established by the British.
As a consequence of this, the IB under Mullik, with the support of Rajaji, had
to further strengthen ties with the British intelligence for analytical assistance. In his
book, Mullik cryptically referred to a “friendly nation” that provided foreign
intelligence training.92 British files have revealed that the training agency was the
MI5. With no clear direction from the Prime Minister, and lack of declassified
information revealing the complete nature of the relationship between the IB
and the MI5, it is difficult to estimate the kind of foreign intelligence training
imparted to the IB. Nevertheless, the establishment of close interpersonal
connections between the MI5 and IB officers in effect led to the latter being
disproportionately influenced by the former. The concerns of the MI5 and the
IB could not have been similar considering the differing world views and
geopolitics of their respective nations. Many such details were missed by the
political leadership in India, as a consequence of which, until the wars of 1962
and 1965 underscored the need for foreign intelligence, the British legacy
would strongly continue in India’s intelligence culture.
Metamorphosis of the Kautilyan Intelligence Culture to the
Modern Indian Intelligence Culture
“On the day of independence, history died, and politics was born”, quite aptly
forms the basis for Indian intelligence culture post-independence. The decades
long struggle for independence against the British had made many early Indian
leaders sceptical of everything British and non-Congress. Consolidation of power
for the INC had become the main objective of the nationalist leaders. Patel
achieved this goal with an ironclad intelligence offensive against every form of
threat he envisioned to the Congress’ rise to power. To the extent that the
Congress’ authority and India’s security could be established, he was willing to
engage with any remnants of the British era – intelligence, police and military.
Nehru, for his part, saw all things British with a deep-seated suspicion. Neither
did he have a pragmatic view of India’s security that gave birth to institutions of
its own, nor did he have the gumption of Patel to use British institutions to the
benefit of India’s security. Consequently, the proactive Kautilyan state, which saw
security as the king’s paramount responsibility towards his citizens and intelli
gence as a central aspect of statecraft was replaced by, after Patel’s death, a reactive
Victorian style Nehruvian-Indian state where diplomacy replaced intelligence.
Was Nehru a Kautilyan? This is a question that has a rich research potential
and is certain to draw a divided response from academics and practitioners.
The irony is that there is hardly any evidence pointing to Patel speaking
about Kautilya. Yet, his actions with respect to India’s security were mostly in
tandem with the Kautilyan thought. Nehru mentioned Kautilya on numerous
occasions, but his actions have barely any reflection of the Kautilyan philosophy.
Kautilya’s Arthashastra finds mention in Nehru’s Discovery of India. 93 He even
wrote an article for the Modern Review in 1937 under the pseudonym “Chana
kya” – Kautilya’s another name. Also, during the speech he delivered to the IB
officers in 1952, he made a reference to Kautilya.94 Admirers of Nehru offer
these references to argue that Nehru was Kautilyan in his thought. But empirical
evidence of the Nehruvian era makes this proposition highly contestable. The
question of Kautilyan basis for the Nehruvian thought has received very little
scholarly attention and is beyond the purview of this book. On the question of
intelligence, however, a recent study makes one reference, which is worth
considering.
In a study conducted by Subrata K. Mitra and Michael Liebig, an admirer of
Nehru has commented on the question of Nehru’s Kautilyan behaviour in the
intelligence realm that:
“Nehru did not want publicity about India’s external intelligence cap
ability, but do not underestimate what happened with respect to intelligence during
the Nehru period”. [emphasis original]95
This comment is offered following Mitra and Liebig’s interview with three
intelligence personnel who had stressed in regard to the 1962 war that:
“Indian intelligence agencies had provided sufficient information on the
Chinese preparations…but Nehru and his close advisers ignored or misjudged
the intelligence reports”. [emphasis added]96
Neither does the first commentator elaborate on what happened with respect to
intelligence during the Nehru period, nor does the study provide sufficient attention
to the role Nehru played in the 1962 debacle. However, it is possible to trace
the origins of the comment to two key developments in intelligence during the
Nehru era. One is the creation of the numerous covert organisations by Nehru
that would go on to serve India with great effectiveness in the 1971 war.
Second is the fact that some African countries, mainly Ghana, are known to
have established their intelligence services under Nehru’s auspices. However,
both require careful scrutiny before being accepted as objective truths speaking
for Nehru’s Kautilyan philosophy in matters of intelligence.
Firstly, the creation of the Directorate General of Security (DGS) in 1963
that housed the formidable secret agencies Special Service Bureau, Special
Frontier Force and the Aviation Research Centre is generally credited to
Nehru. However, these organisations do not owe their births to any original
Nehruvian thought on the role of intelligence and covert operations in India’s
national security. Contrarily, these organisations were born after the bitter
experience of the 1962 war. The war had such a humiliating impact that
Nehru had no other alternative but to heed to Mullik’s advice and sanction the
creation of the DGS (see Chapter 6 for more detail). Hence, the creation of the
DGS was typical of the British era practice of developing intelligence organi
sations in reaction to a threat rather than the Kautilyan culture that posits
intelligence and covert action as the fundamental basis for statecraft.
Second, as the Ghanaian intelligence was created by the Indian IB there is a
tendency to misconstrue Nehru’s actions as an enthusiasm for foreign intelli
gence. Here again, careful observation suggests otherwise. Nehru saw India as
the leader of the non-aligned world and shared a good relationship with Gha
naian President Kwame Nkrumah. Suspicious of the British intentions in
Ghana, and holding a vision for pan-Africanism, Nkrumah sought the support
of Nehru to build an independent intelligence agency.97 One officer who vis
ited India for training recalled being instructed by Nkrumah “to learn as much
as possible about communism, which is what he would be dealing with, and of
which Nkrumah did not want anything”.98 Ben Forjoe, another officer who
trained with India, and later in Israel, became Ghana’s renowned counter
intelligence officer.99 The main concern for Nkrumah was to maintain Ghana’s
political independence amid East-West competition that was brewing during
the 1950s and 1960s as well as protect Ghana from the ensuing power struggle
in the African region.100
Nkrumah was deeply suspicious of the police intelligence service, which he
inherited from the British.101 In this he resembled Nehru who had earlier
shown similar suspicions. But unlike Nehru, he decided to act on his suspicions
by creating an independent intelligence organisation for Ghana. The new
organisation was named Foreign Service Research Bureau (FSRB) and placed
under the Foreign Ministry. Therefore, if the FSRB served in any foreign
intelligence capacity assisting Ghanaian foreign policymaking, it was due solely
to Nkrumah’s wishes more than Nehru’s guidance. Thus, the irony was that,
with the help of India, Ghana’s Foreign Ministry received an intelligence ser
vice, even while India’s own Foreign Ministry was either unaware of the IB’s
actions – like the extent of the SLO’s operations in India – or caught in turf
battles – like Ambassador R.K. Nehru’s refusal to accept intelligence officers in
China.102
Therefore, to suggest that Nehru was influenced by Kautilyan philosophy in
the field of foreign intelligence would be a gross exaggeration. Observing his
behaviour in the intelligence realm, this book sides with the general critics of
Nehru who avoid reading too much into his mention of Kautilya on occasions.
According to them:
“whatever Nehru had said affirmatively of Kautilya in the Discovery of India

was not derived from an actual grasp of Kautilyan thought and therefore
was inconsequential…Nehru did not understand the Arthashastra at all—or,
at best, only superficially so”.103
Intellectually, Nehru was mostly affected by the Fabian and Russian socialism
from his lengthy stay in England. According to Tharoor, “the ideas of Fabian
socialism captured an entire generation of English-educated Indians; Nehru was
no exception”.104 After his return from education in England, his intellectual
engagement with Marxist literature continued. The 1930s especially are crucial,
as his writings of the period show steady acceptance of the Marxist ideas, albeit
not entirely.105 Reflecting on the impact of Marxist ideas on security, one
scholar has commented that Marxist “scholars tend to overlook the imperative
need for security before a person can possess and enjoy material wealth”.106
Nehru’s behaviour fits well with this observation, as even those scholars who
reject Nehru as a Kautilyan agree that he prioritised the economy over
security.107
Nehru was blinded by the theory of “defence through diplomacy”108 to see
the wisdom in Patel’s approach to security, or the Kautilyan theory of state
craft. At this juncture, to understand how a proactive and pragmatic leader
would have affected foreign intelligence in independent India, it is beneficial to
attempt a brief counterfactual analysis through comparison with the state of
Israel, which shares several similarities with India. At around the same time,
both countries emerged as a democracy after a struggle for freedom from the
British. The strategic environment that the two nations inherited was also
similar in some ways given that a war ensued with their neighbours and a
prolonged rivalry was clearly visible. A mix of conventional wars and terrorist
attacks by the enemy states was evident within a year of the creation of the two
states. Nehru had termed this an “informal war”.109 Yet, observation of how
the two nations went about structuring and developing their intelligence
services towards the accomplishment of their national security goals destroys the
myth that Nehru was any Kautilyan.
Much like the Indian freedom struggle that had elements of moderates,
extremists and revolutionary terrorists, the Zionist struggle for the creation of
Israel also had similar elements. Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, like
his Indian counterpart Nehru, was a moderate leader of the Zionist freedom
movement. The Zionist military organisation Haganah, which had carried out
a series of targeted killings, was ordered by Ben-Gurion to cease all violent
activities as he was “consistently and steadily against it”.110 Owing to Ben
Gurion’s dismissal of violent means, the Haganah was split into splinter groups
called Irgun and Lehi, which firmly believed in violent means. The latter car
ried out a series of terrorist attacks against the British that Ben-Gurion not only
disapproved, but also went as far as condemning the Irgun as “an enemy of the
Jewish people”.111 By the time of independence, the political differences
between Ben-Gurion and other groups were, thus, stark. Yet, after indepen
dence, on realising the threat Israel faced from terrorists and hostile states alike,
Ben-Gurion sought the support of all the organisations that had fought against
the British. In short, notwithstanding political differences, Ben-Gurion was
willing to join hands with his dissenters for the sake of Israel’s security.
Immediately after independence, Reuven Shiloah, a fellow freedom
fighter and political aide, stressed to Ben-Gurion the need for intelligence as
both a military and political tool during times of war and peace. Without
requiring any persuasion, not only did Ben-Gurion create the Aman –
military intelligence, Shin Bet – internal intelligence, and the Political
Department (later christened the Mossad) – foreign intelligence; but when
the need arose, he did not shy away from reaching out to right-wing
underground groups who he had previously outlawed. According to Ronen
Bergman, Ben-Gurion “considered diplomacy a weak substitute for a strong
military and robust intelligence”.112 Therefore, reflecting the Kautilyan
paradigm, Ben-Gurion neither perceived diplomacy as the frontline of
national security, nor did he allow political differences to take prominence
over national interests.
Nehru, the idealist, accepted the “defence through diplomacy” mantra that
was further solidified by his suspicion of institutions and individuals who
thought otherwise. Amid such an attitude, the only two organisations that had
any inkling of foreign intelligence work from the British era were deliberately
kept out of the national security mechanism. One was the Indian Army, the
other was the Indian National Army (INA). With regards to the slow devel
opment of intelligence in the Indian Army, Major-General R.S. Chowdhary
has written that:
“as the Army in pre-partition days was considered an instrument of the

imperial sustenance in India, the political leadership, during the initial years
of the post-independence era, tended to look particularly at the intelli
gence segment of the Army, with short sighted and tinted vision”.113
Suspicion of the Army and the fear of a coup was predominant in the minds of
Nehru and the later political leaderships.114 In fact, the military chiefs have
been one of the main targets of the IB for anti-subversion.115 Although none
of the Indian military chiefs have ever been proven to have nurtured political
ambitions, the army has consistently been viewed through suspicious lens. The
result was that the only organisation with decades of experience in intelligence
gathering from Central Asia, Afghanistan and Burma were kept out of any
foreign intelligence role by the political leadership. With no political initiative,
the Indian Army created its own Intelligence Corps in 1955. However, because
the army worked on the British culture of respecting operational skills over
intellect, the officers posted in intelligence duties were of “low medical cate
gory and superseded officers”.116
As far as the INA was concerned, it was the only non-British entity to
have had an intelligence organisation of its own. Initially, the INA was
tasked by the Japanese to provide strategic intelligence on the British.
Schools for espionage and special training were established in Rangoon and
Penang, and Subhas Bose created three specialised groups out of the trainees
known as the Bahadur, Intelligence and Reinforcement Groups.117 These
groups were involved in espionage, subversion, sabotage and propaganda
operations behind the enemy lines. After independence, reflecting a lack of
understanding of the Kautilyan philosophy of intelligence that makes pro
vision for employment of agents on operational demands rather than poli
tical agreements, Nehru saw no wisdom in keeping the INA cadres within
the national security fold.
Under the leadership of Bose, the patriotism of the INA soldiers knew no
bounds. The British Military Intelligence report had concluded that the
impact of Bose’s leadership on the INA cadres was so strong that their reha
bilitation was deemed almost impossible.118 During instances, the INA
enjoyed greater support from the people than the moderate INC nationalist
leaders. Moreover, a large portion of the INA soldiers were Sikhs and Punjabi
Muslims, which would have made an ideal intelligence cadre for Pakistan
focused operations.119 Additionally, they were already trained by Bose in
counterinterrogation techniques, which had severely troubled the British
during the war years.120 Foregoing all these factors, in 1948, on the advice of
a civil servant and two military officers, Nehru decided that the INA could
not be reinstated into the Indian Army.121 They were only given some
monetary benefits and unused in any capacity serving India’s national secur
ity.122 The MI also worked hard, alongside the IB, to prevent INA men from
being recruited in the police or “any positions relevant to security more
generally”.123
While there is some sense in the argument that the INA cadres could not be
reinstated into the Indian Army that they had deserted, the fact that they were
completely removed from India’s national security apparatus is truly enigmatic
to a Kautilyan observer. Claude Auchinleck, the last Commander-in-Chief of
the British Indian Army wrote about the INA that:
“it is quite wrong to adopt the attitude that because these men had been in
service in a British controlled Indian Army that therefore their loyalty must
be the same as British soldiers. As I have tried to explain, they had no real
loyalty towards Britain as Briton, not as we understand loyalty”.124
That a highly patriotic community of freedom fighters with a significant intel

ligence experience was left out of the intelligence community does not reflect a
state modelled on Kautilyan philosophy. For a state like Israel, which saw
intelligence as the basis for security, manpower was drawn cutting across poli
tical lines. However, in India, where politics and an idealistic political leader
ship dominated the national security sphere, progress in the intelligence field
was unsurprisingly hard to evolve.
Therefore, in summarising this part that has traced the evolution of Indian
intelligence culture, it is clear that the Indian intelligence of post-independence
was no reflection of the Kautilyan intelligence at any rate (see Table 4.1). The
Kautilyan intelligence was marked by a “knowledge culture” and a top-down
approach, with the king leading the intelligence machinery. Everyone down
the structure, intelligence officers and agents, were regarded honourably, given
their stature as the first line of defence. The intellectual capacity of the Artha
shastra is vast and the inferences for intelligence can be drawn only by an
enthusiast of the profession.
The modern-day Indian state was born out of a struggle against a colonial
power, but its leadership, except Patel, was more influenced by ideas that were
predominantly western than Kautilyan. Consequently, the Nehruvian-Indian
Table 4.1 Cultural change in Indian intelligence from the Kautilyan state to the post-
colonial Indian state
Kautilyan State Colonial State Indian State
Nature Proactive Reactive Reactive/Defensive
Character State (king)-driven Individual driven Individual (intelli
gence manager)
driven
Intelligence-policy Structured Division of labour Proximity of the
relationship between the Raj manager to the poli
and London tical leadership
Composition Market driven White leadership, IPS leadership, lower
native collectors ranks – police and
civilian personnel
Organisation Centralised, but with De-centralised Bureaucratised &
sufficient autonomy rampant turf battles
for station chiefs
Activity Collection, analysis, Collection & col Horizon scanning &
dissemination, coun lation only. Some limited advisory role
terintelligence & wartime covert
covert action action.
state was different from the Kautilyan state, wherein the king no more led the
intelligence machinery. “Knowledge culture” had thoroughly been replaced by
the colonial “reactive culture” that gave birth to ad-hocism. In such a leader
ship vacuum, the intelligence managers assumed primacy. This is the most
important facet of India’s intelligence culture. It is this factor that contributes to
organisational and systemic explanations of India’s intelligence outlook. The
struggle of the intelligence managers in balancing personal, organisational and
national interests, thus, becomes a crucial factor in understanding India’s intel
ligence performances.
In addition, the British legacy of being threat reactive, rather than perceptive
and realistic about external threats to national security, also became an integral
part of the early Indian intelligence culture. Therefore, to repeat what was
mentioned earlier about the facets of Indian intelligence culture:
• Foreign intelligence was never considered as an essential requirement by

the political leadership;
• Like the colonial period, the adroitness and skill of the intelligence man
ager was necessary to keep the agency alive;
• There were serious limits to what could be achieved in the intelligence
profession without the support of the political leadership.
In the next part of this volume, this distinct intelligence culture is examined
through the observation of the three war cases. The cases are meant to facilitate
an observation of how the Indian way of intelligence as observed in this part of
the book affected the Indian intelligence performance in the second half of the
20th century. How far did this evolutionary culture stand against the changing
security dynamics and regime changes? In a recent study on India’s diplomatic
corps, Deep K. Datta-Ray has observed that references to Nehru and Nehruvian
thinking have been dominant in the intellectual development of the pre-2000
diplomats.125 Did the intelligence community also share similar characteristics?
These questions will be approached in the next part while trying to understand
the reasons behind India’s strategic surprises.
Notes
1 Patrick French, Liberty or Death: India’s Journey to Independence and Division,
London: Harper Collins, 1997, pp. 194–195.
2 Ibid, p. 236.
3 Asoka Raina, Inside RAW: The Story of India’s Secret Service, New Delhi: Vikas
Publishing House Pvt Ltd., 1981, p. 7.
5 Rajmohan Gandhi, Patel: A Life, Ahmedabad: Navjivan Publishing House, 1991,
p. 376.
6 ‘The Intelligence Service’, RG 59: General Records of the Department of State,
Entry A1–1303, Office of South Asian Affairs India Affairs, USNA.
7 D.K. Palit, War in High Himalaya: The Indian Army in Crisis, 1962, London: Hurst
and Company, 1991, p. 101.
8 L.P. Sen, Slender Was the Thread: Kashmir Confrontation 1947–48, Bombay: Orient
Longmans, 1969, p. 19.
9 ‘Patel to Reddy’, in Sardar Patel Correspondence 1945–50 Volume V, Ahmedabad:
Navajivan Publishing House, 1947, p. 209 (hereafter written as SPC).
11 Michael Edwardes, Nehru: A Political Biography, London: Penguin, 1971, p. 21.;
Andrew B. Kennedy, ‘Nehru’s Foreign Policy’, in David Malone, C. Raja Mohan
and Srinath Raghavan, The Oxford Handbook of Indian Foreign Policy, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2015, pp. 92–93.
13 Ravindra Kumar, Life and Work of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, New Delhi: Atlantic
Publishers, 1991, p. 32.
14 L.N. Sarin, Sardar Patel, New Delhi: Chand Publications, 1972, p. 10.
16 Kumar, Life and Work of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, 1991, p. 44.
17 M.O. Mathai, Reminisces of the Nehru Age, New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House
Pvt Ltd., 1978, p. 241.
18 Sarvepalli Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography, Volume II (1947–1956), London:
Jonathan Cape, 1979, p. 37.
19 B.K. Ahluwalia and Shashi Ahluwalia, Sardar Patel: Rebel and Ruler, New Delhi:
Akbe Group, 1981, p. 121.
20 Shashi Tharoor, Nehru: The Invention of India, New York: Arcade Publishing,
2003, p. 205.
21 Hindol Sengupta, The Man who Saved India: Sardar Patel and his Idea of India, New
Delhi: Penguin Books, 2018.
22 Steven I. Wilkinson, Army and Nation: The Military and Indian Democracy since
Independence, Washington DC: Harvard University Press, 2015, p. 15.
23 Shrikant Paranjpe, India’s Strategic Culture: The Making of National Security Policy,
New Delhi: Routledge, 2013, p. 58.
24 Sengupta, The Man who Saved India, 2018.
25 Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946,
p. 379.
26 Jawaharlal Nehru, Jawaharlal Nehru: An Autobiography, Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1982, p. 400.
27 Calder Walton, Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of
Empire, New York: The Overlook Press, 2014, p. 131.
28 Michael Herman, Intelligence Services in the Information Age: Theory and Practice,
London: Frank Cass, 2001, p. 213.; It must, however, be noted that Nehru’s
aversion to intelligence did not dissuade him from utilising the intelligence appa
ratus for spying on his political opponents whenever he found it profitable. One
such political target was Subhas Chandra Bose, his comrades and family. See
Sandeep Unnithan, ‘Jawaharlal Nehru spied on Subhas Chandra Bose’s family for
20 years’, India Today, 10 April 2015, available at www.indiatoday.in/india/story/
jawaharlal-nehru-netaji-subash-chandra-bose-spy-exclusive-247945-2015-04-10,
accessed on 30 November 2019.; What is interesting though is that even while he
utilised the IB to spy on political characters, his senior colleagues genuinely
believed that he stuck to his idealism. For instance, in November 1950, Rajago
palachari, Minister without Portfolio, expressed his concerns to Patel over the IB’s
monitoring of cabinet ministers, fearing that Nehru would disapprove of such
actions. However, Rajaji was surprised to learn from Patel that Nehru was already
a firm user of the IB for such purposes. Thus, Nehru’s aversion was mainly
towards national security intelligence, not domestic political espionage. See ‘Patel
to Rajagopalachari’, SPC (10), pp. 462–463.
29 Sengupta, The Man who Saved India, 2018.
30 Walton, Empire of Secrets, 2014, p. 132.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid, pp. 267, 307.
34 Buta Singh, ‘Paramountcy, princes and Sardar Patel (1858–1947)’, Shodhganga: a
Reservoir of Indian Theses, 19 May 2011, p. 104, available at https://sg.inflibnet.ac.
in/handle/10603/2085, accessed 1 December 2019.
35 ‘Home Minister’s Address at the Conference of the Provincial Premiers and
Home Minister held at Delhi on the 22nd, 23rd Nov 1947. Lunch by Home
Minister’, Ministry of Home Affairs, File No. 106/47-P.S., Sardar Patel Papers,
NAI, 1947, p. 27.
36 B.N. Mullik, My Years with Nehru: 1948–1964, Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1972,
p. 70.
37 Ibid, p. 75.
38 Ibid, p. 57.
39 Ibid, p. 59.
40 For a select list of Nehru’s writings on matters concerning intelligence, see ‘To Sri
Krishna Sinha’, 2 September 1948, Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, 2nd series,
Vol. 7, p. 14. (hereafter SWJN); ‘Evan Jenkins’s Record of Interview with Nehru’,
24 May 1947, SWJN, 2(2), p. 310.; ‘Nehru to Foreign Secretary’, 30 October
1957, SWJN, 2(39), p. 303.; ‘Nehru to C. Rajagopalachari’, 1 June 1951, SWJN, 2
(16–1), p. 636.; ‘Nehru to Patel’, 1 December 1950, SPC (10), p. 463.
41 Interview with Former Indian Home Secretary, R.D. Pradhan, 14 November 2018.
42 Bhishma is an important character in the epic Mahabharata who is renowned for
his lifelong service and sacrifice for the survival of the Kuru kingdom. Pitamaha
translates into Grandsire. For evidence of Mullik being considered Bhishma Pita
maha of Indian intelligence, see R. Swaminathan, ‘First, the Navy. Then, the
RAW, Who Next, Prime Minister’, 1999, available at www.angelfire.com/in/ja
lnews/191991.txt, accessed on 1 December 2019.
43 Guy Liddell Diaries, 5 May 1948, KV/4/470, UKNA, p. 90.
44 ‘Proposals for the Reorganisation of the Delhi CID’, Home Department, File
No. 16/50/48-Police, 1948, NAI, p. 5.
45 ‘IB Memorandum No. 8/Police/48’, Home Department, File No. 16/50/48-Police,
3 May 1948, NAI, p. 4.
46 ‘IB Memorandum No. 26/Ests/47(9)’, Home Department, Repository-II, File
No. 70/13/47-Appth., 31 October 1947, NAI, pp. 16–17.
47 ‘IB Memorandum No. 26/Ests/47(7)’ Home Department, Repository-II, File
No. 70/13/47-Appth., 26 November 1947, NAI, pp. 16–17.
48 ‘IB Memorandum No. 30/Est/50 (1)’, Home Department, Repository-II, File
No: 40/36/50, 1950, NAI, p. 1.
49 ‘Continued retention of certain temporary posts in the various organisations under
the Director, Intelligence Bureau’, Home Department, Repository-II, File No:
40/36/50, 21 March 1950, NAI.
50 ‘Deputation of Mr. T.G. Sanjevi I.P. Director, Intelligence Bureau’, Home
Department, Repository-II, File No: 40/21/49, 1949, NAI, p. 9.
51 Ibid, pp. 22–26.
52 Ibid, p. 48.
53 R.N. Kulkarni, Sin of National Conscience, Mysore: Kritagnya Publications, 2004,
p. 368.
Training School, 1985, p. 30.
56 Kulkarni, Sin of National Conscience, 2004, p. 368.
57 Richard W. Klise, ‘Memorandum for the Ambassador’, RG-59, Office of the
South Asian Affairs: India Affairs, 1944–57, 18 April 1950, USNA.
58 Liddell Diaries, 7 December 1948, KV/4/470, UKNA, p. 204.
59 Howard Donovan, ‘Biographic Data: Tirupattur Gangadharam Pillai Sanjevi
Pillai’, RG-59, Office of the South Asian Affairs: India Affairs, 1944–57, 16 May
1949, USNA.
60 ‘J.C. Satterthwaite to James E. Webb’, RG-59, Office of the South Asian Affairs:
India Affairs, 1944–57, 15 June 1949, USNA.
63 Ibid.
66 Mullik, My Years with Nehru, 1972, p. 59.
67 Y.D. Gundevia, Outside the Archives, Bombay: Sangam Books, 1984, p. 212.
68 K.S. Subramanian, Political Violence and the Police in India, London: Sage Publica
tions, 2007, p. 84.; This perception about the IB during Mullik days is still
strongly prevalent in India, mostly among the military.
69 Palit, War in High Himalaya, 1991, p. 163.
70 Raina, Inside RAW, 1981, p. 10.
71 ‘Nehru to B.G. Kher’, 9 September 1952, SWJN, 2(19), p. 633.
72 Interview with former R&AW Special Secretary – R2, 22 September 2018.
73 Interview with former Secretary (R), A.S. Dulat, 18 October 2018.; Dulat retired
as the chief of R&AW. But he was an IB officer for most of his career and one of
the Ear-Marked recruits of the IB.
74 ‘T.G. Sanjeevi to V. Shankar’, File No. 2/108, Sardar Patel Papers, 11 October
1947, p. 1.
75 ‘Muslims and Sikhs need not Apply’, Outlook, 13 November 2006, available at www.
outlookindia.com/magazine/story/muslims-and-sikhs-need-not-apply/233087, acce
ssed on 25 November 2019.
76 Nishu Sharma and Rajeev Kumar, ‘Sardar Patel’s Vision of the Contemporary
World: Ideas on Geopolitical Environment’, Mahatma Gandhi Central University
Journal of Social Sciences, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2019, p. 47.
77 Philip Murphy, ‘Creating a Commonwealth Intelligence Culture: The View
from Central Africa 1945–1965’, Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 17, No. 3,
pp. 135–141.
78 Christopher Andrew, Defence of the Realm: The Authorised History of MI5, London:
Penguin, 2012, pp. 442–443.
79 Walton, Empire of Secrets, 2014, p. 134.
80 ‘Nehru to Krishna Menon’, 2 December 1948, SWJN, 2(8), p. 368.
81 Ibid, p. 369.
82 Andrew, Defence of the Realm, 2012, p. 445.
83 Ibid, p. 446.
84 Ibid, p. 445.
85 Notwithstanding the British influence, Indian officers of the time reason the IB’s
anti-communist posture to India’s poverty and the economic threat that the
communist ideology posed. Interview with former IB Assistant Director R.N.
Kulkarni, 10 January 2020.
86 Datta-Ray, The Making of Indian Diplomacy, 2015, pp. 42, 47, 53.
87 ‘Proposals for the Reorganisation of the Delhi CID’, Home Department,
Repository-II, File No. 16/50/48-Police, 1948, NAI, p. 6.
88 Interview with Military Intelligence Officer – M3, 24 September 2018.
90 Ibid, pp. 97–98.
91 Interview with former Secretary (Research) Vikram Sood, 22 October 2018.
93 Nehru, Discovery of India, 1946, p. 122.
95 Subrata K. Mitra and Michael Liebig, Kautilya’s Arthashastra: An Intellectual Portrait:
The Classical Roots of Modern Politics in India, New Delhi: Rupa, 2017, p. 224.
96 Ibid, p. 223.
Delhi: Manas Publications, 2016, p. 124.; Emmanuel Kwesi Aning, Emma Bir
ikorang and Ernest Ansah Lartey, ‘The Processes and Mechanisms of Developing a
Democratic Intelligence Culture in Ghana’, in Philip H.J. Davies and Krisitan C.
Gustafson, Intelligence Elsewhere: Spies and Espionage Outside the Anglosphere,
Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013.; Johnny Kwadjo, ‘Chan
ging the Intelligence Dynamics in Africa: The Ghana Experience’, in Sandy Africa
and Johnny Kwadjo, Changing Intelligence Dynamics in Africa, 2009, p. 99.
98 Willard Scott Thompson, ‘Ghana’s Foreign Policy, 1957–1966: Diplomacy
Ideology and the New State’, in Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015,
pp. 100–101.
99 ‘Rawlings pays respects to former National Security Chief’, Ghana Web, 9 August
2013, available at www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/Ra
wlings-pays-respects-to-former-National-Security-Chief-281958#, accessed on 1
November 2019.
100 ‘Ghana Episode Tape No. X’, Kao Papers, NMML, 1958, pp. 13–15.
101 Ironically, Nkrumah’s request was relayed by Mullik to London, as Ghana was a
Commonwealth nation. See ‘Ghana Episode Tape No. VIII’, Kao Papers, NMML,
1957, p. 2.; R.N. Kao, future head of the R&AW and the officer selected to assist
the Ghanaians, recalled that despite being unhappy with the arrangement, the
British pretended to like the arrangement and made slight suggestions. See ‘Ghana
Episode Tape No. X’, Kao Papers, NMML, 1958, p. 2.
102 ‘Nehru to the Foreign Secretary’, 30 October 1957, SWJN, 2(39), p. 303.
103 Mitra and Liebig, Kautilya’s Arthashastra, 2017, p. 226.
104 Tharoor, Nehru, 2003, p. 240.
105 S.R. Goyal, “Nehru: His Enchantment and Disillusionment with Marxism”, in
Sobhag Mathur, Spectrum of Nehru’s Thought, New Delhi: Mittal Publications,
1994, pp. 53–56.
106 S.D. Trivedi, Secret Services in Ancient India: Techniques and Operations, Bombay:
Allied Publishing House, 1988, pp. 10–11.
107 Mitra and Liebig, Kautilya’s Arthashastra, 2017, p. 226.
108 For a long time, it was conventional wisdom that Nehru had an aversion towards
the use of force. Scholarship in the last decade has begun to challenge this percep
tion. For a comprehensive work in this regard, see Srinath Raghavan, War and Peace
in Modern India: A Strategic History of the Nehru Years, New Delhi: Permanent Black,
2010, p. 16.; However, this has not led to an overall transformation in the way
Nehru’s national security policies have been accepted by scholars. See Kanti Bajpai,
‘Indian Strategic Culture and the Problem of Pakistan’, in Swarna Rajagopalan,
Security and South Asia: Ideas, Institutions and Initiatives, London: Routledge, 2014,
pp. 61–62.; Andrew Kennedy, The International Ambitions of Mao and Nehru: National
Efficacy Beliefs and the Making of Foreign Policy, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2011, p. 144.; Available evidence still supports the notion that Nehru failed to
pay adequate attention to national security and the next chapter amply establishes
this point.
109 Praveen Swami, India, Pakistan and the Secret Jihad, London: Routledge, 2006, p. 4.
110 Ronen Bergman, Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassi
nations, London: John Murray, 2018, p. 19.
111 Ibid, p. 26.
112 Ibid, p. 34.
113 Chowdhary, A Short History of the Intelligence Corps, 1985, p. 29.
114 Wilkinson, Army and Nation, 2015, pp. 19–26.
115 Rudra Chaudhuri, ‘India’, in Michael Goodman, Robert Dover and Claudia
Hillebrand, Routledge Companion to Intelligence Studies, London: Routledge, 2014,
p. 186.
116 Chowdhary, A Short History of the Intelligence Corps, 1985, p. 31.
117 Eric A. Vas, Subhas Chandra Bose: The Man and His Times, New Delhi: Lancer
Publishers, 2005, p. 152.; Anuradha Kumar, Puffin Lives: Subhas Chandra Bose,
New Delhi: Penguin, 2010, p. 129.
119 Gajendra Singh, ‘The Congress and the INA Trials, 1945–50: A Contest over the
Perception of ‘Nationalist’ Politics’, in Kaushik Roy, Indian Army in the Two World
Wars: Indian Army in the Two World Wars, Leiden: Brill, 2012, p. 499.
120 French, Liberty or Death, 1997, pp. 205–211.
121 J.N. Chaudhuri, ‘Nehru and the Indian Armed Forces’, Cambridge Trust, 5 May
1973, available at www.cambridgetrust.org/assets/documents/Lecture_5.pdf,
accessed on 12 December 2019.
122 Subimal Dutt, Foreign Secretary under Nehru, has written that Nehru took
sympathy on some ex-INA officers and inducted them into the foreign service.
This only reiterates the argument that Nehru’s focus was primarily on diplomacy,
not on intelligence. See Subimal Dutt, With Nehru In the Foreign Office, Calcutta:
Minerva Associates Pvt Ltd., 1977, p. 38.
123 Wilkinson, Army and Nation, 2015, p. 60.
124 Singh, ‘The Congress and the INA Trials, 1945–50’, 2012, p. 518.
125 Datta-Ray, The Making of Indian Diplomacy, 2015, p. 46.
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Section III
Case Studies of India’s Wars
5 The Intelligence Bureau and the
Sino-Indian War
Between Mao’s Deception and Nehru’s
Wishful Thinking
Introduction
In 1960 the Indian Army’s General Officer Commanding-in- Chief (GOC-in-C)
Eastern Command, Lieutenant General Thorat, while addressing a battalion at
Walong, said “you have three years. The Chinese will come down this axis in
October-November 1962. They will definitely come”.1 The warning was
almost prophetic, for the war happened exactly in those two months.
Despite the warning, the Indian Army was hopelessly outnumbered and
overpowered; and, the Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru is said to
have called the war a “stab in the back”.2 In the realist view of interna
tional politics, one might be confused by the usage of terms such as
‘betrayal’ in relation to bilateral relations. However, this is exactly how
Nehru described the Chinese aggression, and his intelligence chief Bhola
Nath Mullik even titled one of his memoirs as ‘the Chinese Betrayal’.3
China had launched a swift, massive offensive on 20 October 1962 and
retreated with equal speed and then launched a fresh offensive on 17
November and decimated the Indian troops that faced the McMahon Line,
before declaring a unilateral ceasefire on 20 November. The entire ordeal
lasted only a month but bore a series of surprises that the Indians were
unprepared for. A massive blow to the pride of the Indian Army, and more
so to Prime Minister Nehru, the Sino-Indian war is now remembered as
India’s biggest “humiliation”.
Why was India surprised by the Chinese offensive? Was the surprise a result of an
intelligence failure? Investigating these questions, this chapter firstly, exposes the
problems faced by the Indian bureaucracy in gathering China related intelli
gence, which has hitherto received little attention leading to sweeping claims
that intelligence failure was the biggest cause of the 1962 surprise. Secondly,
this expose strengthens the chapter’s efforts in debunking the popular myth
held among scholarship that the 1962 debacle was a result of the Intelligence
Bureau (IB) overstretching its mandate. Finally, it reveals that the 1962 sur
prise was multi-causal, and in that there are much stronger reasons than the
failure of strategic intelligence, which are directly linked to the intelligence
culture of the Nehru days.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003296195-9
Background
The Sino-Indian War was a culmination of a long border dispute along two
key areas. In the Northern sector or the Ladakh sector (see Figure 5.1) – the
trijunction of India-Pakistan-China – the dispute was over the Aksai Chin
region that India claimed, but China had occupied. The region had little
immediate strategic significance for India, but of vital importance for China as
the road through Aksai Chin connected Tibet with mainland China. The other
region in dispute was the Eastern sector or the Northeast Frontier Agency
(NEFA), known as the McMahon line, located at the India-Burma-China tri
junction, which was populous and administratively significant for India (see
Figure 5.1). Born around the same time, India and China held similar features
like vast territory and huge population, and ideologically leaned towards
anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism. An era of friendship heralded between
the two that culminated in the signing of the Panchsheel Agreement in April
1954, which set the terms for mutual respect and peaceful co-existence. India’s
Prime Minister Nehru had made several friendly gestures towards China, key
among them being the recognition of China as a legitimate party in the
Korean conflict, and introduction of China to the United Nations and the
Third World countries.
Similar perceptions of China, however, were not shared by many others in
India, key among them being Home Minister Sardar Patel, Foreign Secretary
Figure 5.1 India-China Disputed Regions

Source: Author
The Intelligence Bureau and the Sino-Indian War 125
G.S. Bajpai, the IB and the Indian Army. Ever since China annexed Tibet in
1950, this cautious school of thinkers had been extremely wary of the Chinese
threat to India. Nevertheless, as this chapter will expose, Nehru was joined in
his belief of Chinese friendship by his left-leaning Defence Minister Krishna
Menon and the two would dominate Indian policymaking towards China,
until Menon was sacked after the outbreak of the war. Reflecting on Patel and
the IB’s perception of the Chinese Nehru wrote:
“the idea that communism inevitably means expansion and war, or, to put
it more precisely, that Chinese communism means inevitably an expansion
towards India, is rather naïve”. [emphasis original]4
Looking in retrospect, this chapter will highlight, that friendship with China
was an illusion, as Beijing never perceived India as a friend, and Nehru was,
in Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai’s description – a ‘useful idiot’.5 China had
coined a highly deceptive phrase called Hindi Chini Bhai-Bhai (India and
China are brothers), which meant nothing to the Chinese but was eventually
popularised by Nehru. Hence, the conventional thought in New Delhi was
that China will never attack India, and China’s deception kept reiterating this
point while slowly intruding into Indian territory. Meanwhile, Menon’s
steady directive to the military was to “look west” (Pakistan) and “forget the
north”.6
In 1957 India discovered the Sinkiang-Tibet highway passing through the Aksai
Chin region that opened up hostilities. In 1959 the clash of troops at Longju and
Kongka Passes, the rebellion in Tibet that caused an exodus of Tibetans, and the
Dalai Lama acquiring refuge in India, officially put the Bhai-Bhai era on the
backburner. Henceforth, the Indian Army was made responsible for border
security. Despite shortages in manpower and equipment, and, challenges of ter
rain, weather and logistics, the Indian Army went about planning the defence of
the borders. Meanwhile, China continued advancing into the territory that India
claimed.
In 1960, owing to a combination of intelligence inputs, observation and
wargaming, the Indian Army’s top leadership had concluded that a Chinese
offensive was certain; and accordingly, military planning had commenced.
Nevertheless, leadership changes caused the Army to adopt a new strategy with
advice from Nehru, Menon and Mullik, which has entered scholarly lexicon as
the ‘Forward Policy’.7 The policy expanded the Indian military presence across
the stretch of the border, as opposed to the previous strategy of engaging the
enemy at positions of advantage. This expanding strategy, in effect, crippled the
Indian military’s fighting abilities. From the adoption of the ‘Forward Policy’
until the outbreak of the war two years later, bilateral relations kept plummeting.
But warning signs were consistently ignored and an illusion of friendship with
China as well as confidence in India’s own defence capabilities remained at large.
Nevertheless, by the end of the war, all illusions of Indian defence planning and
preparedness were shattered.
While this is the background to the war, readers must note another important
event that had a bearing on India’s intelligence assessment of the Chinese threat.
Coinciding with the Chinese offensive was the Cuban missile crisis, which had a
critical impact on both India’s intelligence analysis and diplomatic positioning. All
of these will be explored in detail in this chapter. But first, it is essential to
examine the nature of intelligence required to avert the 1962 surprise. This can be
accomplished through an observation of India’s intelligence infrastructure vis-à-vis
Mao’s China.
Taming the Dragon: India’s Intelligence Capabilities vis-à-vis

the Chinese
Strategic Intelligence from Mainland China

As the previous chapter noted, the evolution of Nehru’s enthusiasm for foreign
intelligence was marked with great reluctance. After a rather disturbing rela
tionship with the IB during the early independent years, foreign intelligence
had found governmental approval only in 1952. Despite this approval, the
growth of China related foreign intelligence infrastructure was sluggish and
apathetic. A proposal in 1957 to post an IB officer in Beijing and Shanghai was
stiffly resisted by the R.K. Nehru, Indian Ambassador in Beijing. Although
Nehru acquiesced, permission was granted only for Beijing.8 Nehru also
downplayed the importance of intelligence in this context by stating that:
“in order to judge the situation… the facts… are more or less public, though
occasionally information about some private reports or meetings would, no
doubt, be useful… Intelligence is often far too apt to look at matters from a
much narrower point of view and thus in wrong perspective".9
This indicates Nehru’s preference for diplomacy and his own intellect over
professional intelligence assessments. The weaknesses in diplomatic reporting,
and the consequent need for the strengthening of intelligence reporting, had
actually been visible on several occasions since the 1950s. The Indian diplomat
in Beijing, K.M. Panikkar, had failed to report on the Chinese actions in Tibet
during 1950.10 Chiding the Ambassador, Nehru had written to him:
“we have not even had any information from you regarding the Chinese
government directive to the “Liberation Army” to advance into Tibet. A
full copy of this was transmitted to us by the UK High Commissioner, and
it was embarrassing for us not to have received intimation from our own
Ambassador regarding such serious developments”.11
Despite such failures, Nehru did not find it necessary to strengthen India’s
intelligence coverage of China. On the contrary, whenever a concern about
China was raised by intelligence officers they were regarded as alarmists. For
instance, when B.C. Roy, the Chief Minister of West Bengal wrote to Nehru
about the growing Chinese threat along with an intelligence report attached,
Nehru replied to the letter saying:
“there appears to me, however, a tendency among our officers to get

greatly excited and take an alarmist view of all kinds of dangers, some real,
others imaginary”.12
As a result, the IB had to vastly rely on the ambassador for any information
from Beijing, who restrained by China’s counterintelligence could neither
collect intelligence nor clarify the IB’s queries. For instance, the Indian embassy
in Beijing learnt about the highway construction only after the Chinese news
papers officially reported it. The IB, on the contrary, had some indication of a
road being constructed through one of its agents in Tibet, but was unaware
that it passed through Aksai Chin.13
Where the IB itself relied on media reportage, like the case of Deputy
Director A.K. Dave seeking confirmation from the MEA on the authenticity of
an article on Sino-Soviet relations published in The Washington Post, the MEA
could not produce any credible intelligence, but only reported a certain pro
blem between Khrushchev and Mao on the basis of interactions with students
in Moscow.14 With such sombre state of intelligence, New Delhi’s ignorance
of the Cuban missile crisis, and its impact on Sino-Indian relations, is unsur
prising (see section Mao’s decision to strike India). As things stood closer to the
war, bereft of political support, the IB had made little progress in collecting
human intelligence (HUMINT) from China. However, Mullik had successfully
managed to develop a crop of analysts with expertise on China, mostly political
and economic experts, who would continue to serve with distinction even in
the IB’s successor – Research and Analysis Wing.15
As early as 1949, realising the prevalent politico-diplomatic disinterest in the
agency’s threat perception of China, Sanjeevi and Mullik had begun making ad
hoc arrangements. The bureau’s senior leadership, which was filled with
experts on international communism, was cognisant of the threat India faced as
soon as the communist forces ousted the Kuomintang government.16 It began
to rely on two sources – Chinese nationals settled in India and intelligence
from the frontier region. Both provided some valuable inputs but still bore
several challenges in building a strategic intelligence picture of China. Fol
lowing the victory of the communist forces, many Chinese nationals had
begun infiltrating into India through Burma and Singapore and settling
down in places like Bombay and Calcutta. Unsurprisingly, the anti-communist
IB leadership concluded that China would “assume large proportions” of
their work in the future, which led to a conference of the officers in
Calcutta in February 1949.17 Subsequently, immediate steps were taken to
strengthen the Security Control Organisations and test the loyalty of the
Chinese nationals. Of all the places, Calcutta emerged as the epicentre of
India-China spy games.
Chinese spies were not the sole concern for the IB in Calcutta. The Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) was also using Calcutta as a base for its China related
operations. From the end of World War II, more so after the formation of the
People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, the U.S. had devised a mechanism
to counter communist China by targeting overseas Chinese residents across the
world. Subsequently, Calcutta had become its regional base, which also
received reports on Soviet atomic tests monitored by the CIA station in Sin
kiang.18 However, as John Foster Dulles began taking a hostile position
towards India’s non-aligned policy, the CIA base in Calcutta came in for
increased counterintelligence scrutiny. Similar was the situation in another
place called Kalimpong, close to the frontier with Tibet. Calcutta and Kalimpong,
despite being ideal locations for the IB’s intelligence coverage of China, the pre
sence of foreign intelligence operations added a huge counterintelligence burden
on the agency.
Intelligence from the Frontier Region

Although it seemed promising, intelligence from the frontier region was not
easily acquirable. Both the northern and the eastern sectors had difficult
topographic, demographic and administrative conditions that threatened
intelligence activity. In the north, the IB’s main challenge was weather and
terrain. Before independence, the British had made several futile attempts to
expand their intelligence coverage of the Sinkiang region and, thereby, relied
increasingly on diplomatic reports from Kashgar. Reflecting the dire state, the
then DIB had accepted that, what existed as intelligence arrangement had
proven to be “rather more of a liability than an asset”.19 Post-independence,
the IB identified Sinkiang-Karakoram-Leh as a potential route for Chinese
infiltration, and thus, a Forward Intelligence Post was opened in Leh. This
was the only post – owing to shortage of funds, and logistical and medical
hazards – that was manned jointly by the IB and the Army.20 Medical and
logistical support was provided by the Army; and only a few officers with
medical clearance found postings in Leh. Beyond Leh, vehicular movement
was impossible and mule rides were the only means of logistics.
Similar difficulties were prevalent across the stretch of the borders. Beginning
with a meagre 30 posts and 108 staff members in 1952, the IB had managed to
establish 77 posts with 1590 personnel by 1962.21 These posts were, however,
fraught with severe resource scarcities. An IB officer of the era recalled that:
“before 1962, the IB on the Chinese border operated through their sea
sonal check posts, which were vacated during the winters due to logistic
problems. The presence of the IB was symbolic bereft of capabilities to
gather any intelligence about Chinese tactical and strategic game plan.
When China attacked, the IB check posts personnel simply abandoned
their ground positions in pursuit of self-preservation”.22
According to another officer, “collection of transborder HUMINT entailed a lot
of imagination, innovation and risks”.23 In one instance, an officer named Verma,
famed for his mule riding skills, had travelled too deep into the Chinese territory to
meet a source. Unbeknownst to him, his source had been apprehended by the
Chinese counterintelligence. Before Verma could realise what had happened, he
was being chased by the Chinese soldiers. He quickly galloped towards the Indian
Army and was saved in the nick of time. Following this incident, the senior IB
leadership wanted Verma transferred elsewhere for this act of irresponsibility.
However, Mullik admired the young officer for his courage and apparently gave
the senior officers a piece of his mind for chiding Verma.24 Eventually, Verma’s
name was recommended for a gallantry medal. Such was the level of risk and
daredevilry required of the IB officials operating in the northern areas.
In the east, the situation was different, as the region was better populated
than the mostly uninhabited northern areas. The Indian Frontier Administrative
Service (IFAS) had employed several governance measures with the support of
local tribes. But here again, the Chinese had an advantage, as they were
appealing to the racial similarities of the border tribes and promising them
freedom from India.25 Contrarily, the anglicised demeanour of Indian officials
had weakened India’s position with the tribes. Dr Elwin, Adviser for Tribal
Affairs, NEFA, noted following his visit to the region that:
“on the question on countering Chinese material influence… the Monpas

must… feel they belong to India and that India belongs to them…It is
essential that the Indians… should not look or behave like strangers… The
alien character of our administrative efforts is impressed on the traveller
even before he arrives at Bomdila… All the notice boards are in English…
Hindi is making rapid and encouraging progress among the Monpas… I
would suggest that all notices should be in the local language put into
Devangiri script, or perhaps in both Hindi and Monpa”.26
While the tribes were making an effort to connect with the Indian union by
learning Hindi, English was far too alien for them. Closer to the war, these
differences further expanded, as the Indian Army, which was culturally far
detached from the tribes began to operate in the region. This further eased
China’s intelligence dominance in the region.27
The devastating implications of cultural divergences should have been
obvious to the Indians from an incident as early as 1950. As an Assam Rifles
patrol was moving up the Subansri River, it was lured in by one of the tribes
with food and shelter. Later however, the patrolling party were killed almost to
the last man, leaving 73 riflemen and one civilian dead. Such animosities in
some parts of the region meant that an overwhelming show of force was the
only means of operation.28 Elsewhere, there had been instances indicating that
the Indian Army was absolutely unwelcome. On noticing the Indian Army, the
tribes used to hide at best; while at worst, the troops were subject to poisoning
and sorcery. Subsequent investigations often revealed that the tribes were
suspicious of the troops because of the racial and linguistic differences and
unfamiliar mannerisms, which they perceived as a threat.29
Following the 1959 Tibetan rebellion, a sort of competition emerged
between India and China to woo the frontier population. With generations of
cross border connections, some basic necessities could only be sourced from
across the borders. India’s approach was to limit the movement of people from
NEFA to Tibet by trying to meet the demand for goods domestically. Mean
while, China tried to allure the NEFA tribes with excellent hospitality and
allurement tactics whilst limiting the flow of Tibetan tribes into NEFA.
“Longju [in Tibet] had turned into a large centre for propaganda directed at
NEFA’s inhabitants”, and the people crossing the borders into Tibet were
enticed with riches and presents to elicit information and recruit spies and
informants.30 Above all, the Chinese had exploited the innocence of the
tribes to extract information. The frontier inhabitants did not even suspect
that the innocuous queries, concealed in the tone of beneficence, had
ulterior motives. In one instance, the Chinese collected valuable informa
tion on the Indian troop movements by presenting a .303 rifle to the tribal
population as a valuable piece of wood lost by the Indians, which needed
to be returned. The tribes who had never seen a rifle before were impres
sed with the Chinese façade of honesty and integrity and answered all their
queries.31
Amid all these complexities, the Indian military leadership, was starkly aware of
the importance of the frontier population in engaging China. In 1958, following a
detailed study of Indian capabilities vis-à-vis the Chinese, General Thimmayya had
recommended creating a guerrilla force comprising of the border populace.32 This
would have served the dual purpose of tribal integration as well as establishing a
first line of defence. Nonetheless, the advice fell on deaf ears, and only in the
aftermath of the defeat was a top-secret organisation known as the Special Service
Bureau formed to serve this purpose.
Therefore, the main source of frontier intelligence for the IB was not available
on India’s side of the borders, but mostly in the Tibetan refugees flowing into
India. However, caution was required as numerous Chinese spies also infiltrated
along with the refugees. They had spread all over NEFA and Assam disguised as
shepherds and labourers, hosted and supported in their espionage efforts by
Indian communists. In one recorded case, a Chinese agent operated a wireless set
from a village named Chaku for 18 months before being detected.33 Reflecting
the strength of the Chinese intelligence dominance in the region, the Daily
Mail edition of 5 January 1959 carried a fairly detailed report on the Chinese
intelligence build-up in the Tibetan region. It read:
“organisations like ‘Command Academy’ and ‘Border Affairs Office’ are

really the training schools for agents who infiltrate to the south disguised as
traders. In Lhasa is the headquarters of Command Academy which now
has a special section devoted to civil intelligence…The Border Affairs
Office located in an isolated building near the Chinese Army HQ at Lhasa
has five intelligence officers (working with) the Army, Police to train
young Tibetans as pseudo-traders”.34
The report also traced the training curriculum in these institutes, which inclu
ded language courses in Nepali, Hindi and Bengali, followed by infiltration
training. It is therefore unsurprising that the interpreters who accompanied the
PLA during the war spoke almost all Indian languages.35
Four hours a day were dedicated to intelligence work and the instructors were
Chinese or Russians with an experience of India. Eight classes ran simultaneously,
of which one contained college graduates with English knowledge. Apart from
posing as pseudo-traders, massage parlours were another source of information for
the Chinese, as the Indian Army officers were known to frequent such places. An
Army officer who had once visited a parlour was flattered by the host who said, “by
the looks of your moustache, you must be having at least 100 men under you”.
The ingenuous officer replied, “I have 5000 men!”.36 The most intriguing of all is
the evidence of a Chinese agent serving the Indian corps commander when the
officer had visited NEFA. The agent who spoke fluent Hindi and English made
detailed observations of the conversations between the corps and brigade com
manders and reported them to his handlers the following day.37 Thus, in the race to
establish an intelligence ‘area dominance’ around the frontier region, available evi
dence suggests that the Chinese were far better placed than the Indians.
The IB had only a modest presence in Tibet. The bureau was kept informed
by the Indian Trade Agency in Yatung in the form of Weekly News Reports
and Annual General Reports, and by the Consul General for India in Lhasa
through periodic reports.38 Yet, there were three critical challenges to producing
intelligence through these channels. One, the trouble of language was promi
nent. The IFAS officer posted as the Consul General, 1959–61, spoke Hindi and
Urdu and had “smattering knowledge of Apatani and Abor dialects”.39 As a
result, this agency was seen more as an agency for repatriation of Indians in
Tibet. The second and the most important challenge was the Chinese counter
intelligence by means of constant monitoring and harassment, until the Trade
Agency was completely destroyed after the war.40 While still in operation, the
Trade Agent had already confessed that the quality of information he could
obtain from locals was not strong.41 Lastly, the challenge came in the form of
logistical difficulties owing to harsh weather conditions and the archaic commu
nication systems in place.42
Under such circumstances, two other alternatives could have been
explored – technical intelligence (TECHINT) and covert action. Scarcity of
foreign reserves had severely limited India’s ability to procure the necessary
TECHINT equipment. Even the Army’s signals equipment was outdated. A
week before the war broke out, Defence Minister Krishna Menon had deman
ded the dismissal of the Chief Signals Officer over inefficiency, without realising
that it was the primitive equipment that had delayed communication.43 So far as
the IB was concerned, despite its best efforts, only 50 percent of its border posts
were provided with wireless tele-communication.44 Development of interception
and decryption facilities in an environment of poverty and resource crunch was a
luxury that India could not afford at that time.
Coming to covert action, Nehru’s aversion to secret means led to India
missing a crucial opportunity to establish intelligence advantages against China.
From the early 1950s, the Tibetans had shown a keen interest for covert
operations against the Chinese. However, the Indian position was divided
between Nehru’s reluctance and Mullik’s enthusiasm for such policies. Kalim
pong was home to Gyalo Thondup, brother of the Dalai Lama, who was par
ticularly interested in covert operations, but utterly disappointed with Nehru’s
reluctance to help the Tibetan cause. Even in 1959, Thondup had met Mullik
and requested a training centre for the Tibetan resistance fighters.45 Without
political direction, nothing much moved on this front. By the time the war
broke out, the situation relating to the Tibetan resistance was that the Tibetans
were using Indian territory to partner with the Americans, with some assistance
from Mullik and no approval from Nehru.
Nehru knew about Mullik’s association with Thondup and had encouraged it.
But this encouragement was not with a view of countering China. Instead, it was
to ensure that the Tibetans did not use India as an operational base.46 Nehru had
not only decided against the provision of active support to the Tibetans but also
brought it to the notice of Zhou Enlai that Kalimpong had become a “den of
spies”.47 Mao conveniently used this information to his advantage in information
warfare against the Tibetans. In a speech, he asserted that,
“There is a place in India called Kalimpong where they specialise in

sabotaging Tibet. Nehru himself told the premier [Zhou Enlai] that this
place is a centre for espionage, primarily American and British”.48
Therefore, the IB’s assistance to the Tibetans was negligible, and mostly limited
to secretly training some of the Tibetan cadres.49 Covert action planning is an
excellent means to develop and sustain sources for intelligence. This is some
thing that India would realise in the coming years through its own positive
experience in the 1971 war (see next chapter). Nevertheless, prior to the 1962
war, India’s covert action infrastructure was stillborn. Nehru’s aversion to
covert action notwithstanding, his assertion about Kalimpong was not incor
rect. The place had become an attraction for foreigners from Russia, the UK,
the US, Greece, Denmark, Japan and Mongolia, with most being assigned
espionage roles.50 This further exacerbated the counterintelligence burden on
the IB’s scanty resources. Hence, looking in retrospect, the IB had suffered
numerous challenges to intelligence collection, which was bound to have an
impact on strategic intelligence production on China.
International Intelligence Co-operation

Given the limitations for gathering intelligence from China, the IB naturally
had to rely on its British and American counterparts with whom, as traced in
the previous chapter, it had shared a close relationship. With the British, the
relationship was a bit more formal and institutional than with the US. With
regards to the US, a perception exists that no liaison arrangements emerged
until India’s debacle in 1962. According to Mikel Dunham, following the
war:
“T.M. Subrahmanyam was tapped to serve as the Indian Intelligence Ser

vice’s first liaison officer to the CIA— there was no such contact with
America prior to Nehru being slapped in the face by the Chinese”.51
However, this is not true. There is evidence of Indo-US intelligence co

operation dating back to the Korean War. An IB officer of the era has gone on
record to state that the IB-CIA ties dates back to 1952 during the heights of
the Korean War. The CIA was apparently planning a transborder operation in
the Yunnan province using the remaining Kuomintang troops in North Burma
in order to divert the Chinese troops from Korea.52 Thus, there were signs of
emerging intelligence ties between New Delhi and Washington since the early
1950s. However, New Delhi’s political and foreign policy choices played an
important role in scuttling such ties in the run up to the 1962 war.
The arrival of Krishna Menon as the Defence Minister of India became a
major impediment in intelligence co-operation with the west. While Menon’s
ideas matched that of Nehru’s on non-alignment and issues such as Kashmir, his
sympathies towards communism and unwarranted attacks on Anglo-American
foreign policies had made him averse to authorities in London and Washington.
The earliest report on Menon’s communist leanings was noted in an IB report
drafted by Sanjeevi in 1949, when the former was Indian High Commissioner to
the UK.53 Deriding the IB’s struggle against the communist menace in several
Indian states, Menon had expressed his dislike towards anticommunism repre
senting the common link between India and Britain. He also termed the IB’s
actions against the communists as “barbaric and inhuman”.54 Although this
report caused irritation among several senior Congress leaders like Morarji Desai,
Sardar Patel, Maulana Azad, etc. Nehru defended Menon by suggesting that the
latter’s words were a result of his health condition and mental strain.55 After
Menon’s appointment as Defence Minister in 1957, matters got worse, especially
with respect to how the British and Americans viewed intelligence co-operation
with India.
From the period around independence to his departure from the MoD on 31
October 1962, Menon was an important target of British and American intelli
gence, not least because of his closeness to Nehru. Although they knew that
Nehru did not always accept Menon’s advice, they were confident that Nehru
was “very apt to be swayed by him”.56 In addition, Nehru had held Menon too
dearly for the British and American authorities to express their disapproval of his
appointment to critical positions. This should be less surprising considering that
Indian intelligence officials themselves had found the Nehru-Menon relationship
an impediment to honest expression. Members of India’s Joint Intelligence
Committee (JIC) were aware of the perils of Menon being in control. The JIC
chairman was informally updated by some members of the committee that the
Americans had not forgotten Menon’s “anti-US bias”.57 As the Sino-Indian
relationship was plummeting in the mid-1950s, the JIC members only hoped in
vain that Menon would be “entrusted with another portfolio” instead of
defence.58 Notwithstanding such concerns, Menon was made Defence Minister;
and the result was that intelligence co-operation with the British and Americans
was dealt a severe blow. Nonetheless, this is neither to say that Menon was an
agent of Soviet Union and/or China, nor is it to say that Britain or America
would have been benevolent to India in the absence of Menon.
There is no evidence whatsoever to prove Menon’s contacts with any Soviet
bloc intelligence service. A KGB attempt in 1962 to raise a political campaign in
his favour, without his knowledge, is the only time he seems to have come close
to benefitting from a foreign intelligence agency.59 According to the Russians,
Menon’s anglicised lifestyle did not make him a potent political force in India.
Thus, Britain and America were clearly reading too much into the Menon
threat, while subtly glossing over their own reluctant approach towards India.
The truth is that India was never a viable candidate in the Anglo-American
strategies in South Asia. New Delhi’s policy of non-alignment was perceived as
immoral and hypocritical. In a briefing to the British Prime Minister, the Com
monwealth Relations Office (CRO), wrote a memo which was titled “Indian
Double Standards”.60 The document aptly covers the British thinking on India’s
foreign policy behaviour following Nehru’s condemnation of the British and
French role in the Suez crisis and New Delhi’s several other pro-Soviet actions.
In all this, Menon’s influence was seriously contemplated. All these might seem
to be the reasons for Britain’s restrained intelligence co-operation with India.
Nonetheless, London’s aversion to co-operate with India predates the arrival of
Menon. The MI5’s 1948 grading system to share intelligence placed India in
category B, which had a restricted access to London’s secret intelligence. The
following year, India was dropped to category C, which hardly received any
classified intelligence.61
As for the Americans, before viewing India’s foreign policy as hypocritical,
Washington had a regional strategy for South Asia that envisioned Pakistan as a
critical partner that needed to be strengthened, while India was the trouble
maker that needed to be tamed. A State Department document of 3 April 1950
establishes this thought succinctly,
“Pakistan will emerge after India as the strongest power between

Turkey and Japan on the periphery of Asia. Pakistan’s endeavour to
assume leadership of a Middle East Muslim Bloc, may in time become
desirable critically to review our concept that Pakistan’s destiny is or
should be bound with India… the development of Pakistan-India
entente cordiale appears remote. Moreover, if India’s execution of its
policy [in nation building] may indicate national traits which in time, if
not controlled, could make India Japan’s successor in Asiatic
imperialism. In such a circumstance a strong Muslim Bloc under the
leadership of Pakistan, and friendly to the US, might afford a desirable
balance of power in Asia”.62
Therefore, it is unfair to blame the lack of Anglo-American intelligence co

operation with India solely on Menon. Nevertheless, insofar as sharing of China
related intelligence with India was concerned, Menon’s presence surely had a
detrimental impact. Britain could not share intelligence secured from secret sources
whilst Washington had directed London not to share any sensitive information
with New Delhi. Once Menon was sacked after the first Chinese offensive, British
authorities changed their stance claiming that:
“at the highest levels, India’s security was assessed as good and it should be
possible to get American approval to provide India with certain highly
classified information. The danger was that if the Chinese learnt where
their weaknesses lay they might tighten their security arrangements and
stop this most valuable source of information”.63
Therefore, as a result of Menon’s own ideological and political leanings as

well as the Anglo-American misreading of his influence on India’s policy
making, intelligence liaison as a source of information on China held little
value. Owing to such reserved co-operation between the IB and western
agencies, where relationships mostly catered to the needs of the latter than
the former, the IB fell critically short of intelligence, especially of military
nature. More on the state of military intelligence on China is offered in the
next sub-section.
Military Intelligence
Like the IB, colonialism and partition had a similar impact on military
intelligence in India. The Army’s Intelligence Training School and Depot in
Murree became part of Pakistan. Concerned solely with fighting commun
ism, the British offered no help in organising military intelligence in India.
Further, even the U.S. was directed by the British not to help India in this
regard.64 Indigenous efforts, thus, emerged; and a 1954 study aimed at
establishing a tri-service intelligence wing had set the following objectives:65
• creation of a Defence Intelligence Organisation drawing personnel from all

three services with an initial strength of 30, of which 12 would serve in the
External Intelligence cell of the IB;
• Military Attaches would be drawn from this organisation;
• Incentivise personnel to draw the best talents from the services.
However, all that emerged was an Intelligence Corps for the Army, and
positions of Assistant Chief of Air Staff (ACAS-Int) and Principal Director Naval
Intelligence (PDNI) respectively, which mostly focused on counterintelligence
and security. It was only after the 1962 war that a serious consideration of
re-organisation in the Indian military intelligence setup was made.
While these essential requirements remained unfulfilled, the responsibility for
strategic military intelligence fell on the IB. Before independence, the British
had managed to keep the IB and the Army on opposite sides rather than
complementing each other. Lord Mountbatten, the last viceroy, admitted in
1963 that, before 1947 India was:
“taking over control of the Army and I had to know what was going on,
and for this purpose I had relied on the DIB, wicked Imperialist that I was.
There was therefore no close liaison between the DIB and the GHQ in
my day”.66
Post-independence, the divide continued briefly until the 1951 Himmatsinghji

Committee recommended that strategic military intelligence be made entirely
the IB’s responsibility.67 Subsequently, intelligence analysts from the IB began
to receive training at the Military Intelligence Training School and Depot
(MINTSD) in Pune on a permanent basis. However, this practice was soon
terminated owing to the inability of Mullik to convincingly answer a query
made by General Thimmayya (COAS) regarding the ranking of the analysts. In
Thimmayya’s view, the intelligence analysts had to be allotted ranks equivalent
to commissioned officers if they were to train alongside military officers. Fear
ing a dilution of the IPS dominance within the IB, Mullik tried to evade the
General’s query. Consequently, the IB operatives remained incompetent in
military intelligence collection and analysis.68 Military relevant information like
carrying capacities of roads, fleets, fuel requirements etc. were completely
incomprehensible as the analysts lacked any military knowledge.69
Nevertheless, insofar as production of intelligence on the Chinese ORBAT
was concerned, HUMINT gathered by the IB’s spies, border observation posts
and the Dalai Lama’s contacts was sufficient to produce a more or less accurate
picture. This is evident in the Annual Military Intelligence Reviews produced
by the Army Headquarters, which were largely based on the IB’s reportage.70
The real issue, however, was in military intelligence analysis. The IB’s analysis
of China’s intentions were shaped by its expertise in international communism
rather than a militaristic appreciation of the enemy. Even the 1950 estimate on
the Chinese expansionist tendencies was based largely on Chinese communism
rather than militarism or territorial adventurism.71 The agency completely
lacked any knowledge of China’s military history or elite analysis.
Language was another impediment in estimating China’s intentions. As
observed previously, China had set up intelligence training centres in Tibet that
trained operatives in Indian languages and dialects. The same cannot be said
about India. Training of operatives and analysts in the IB had left much to be
desired, owing to shortages in funds and instructors. With the help of Home
Minster K.N. Katju and Ambassador K.M. Panikkar, Mullik sent a few officers
to be trained abroad, and managed to organise a language training facility
within the IB. The results, however, remained unsatisfactory. Only a modest
20 percent of the intercepted messages could be decoded. With less than half a
dozen Indians capable of understanding Chinese, the coded Chinese messages
remained just as enigmatic even if they were intercepted.72 Similar was the
situation with the Indian Army. A Federal Public Service Commission’s (FPSC)
notification seeking applications for the job of Chinese and Japanese language
trainers for the Armed Forces Academy found no responders. With no Indian
suitably qualified, a Chinese national, Mr. Shiue Lei, was hired for a four-year
term, after the IB approved Mr. Lei’s character.73 Even here, the results
remained far from satisfactory.
Thus, having observed the overall situation with regards to India’s intelligence
prowess against the PRC, it is fathomable that there were significant obstacles to
the production of an accurate intelligence picture of the enemy. With such weak
intelligence penetration of China, the Indian intelligence bureaucracy relied
heavily on the observation of cross-border activities and the study of Chinese
media and propaganda material to draw strategic conclusions. This became the
organisational foundation for the ill-conceived ‘Forward Policy’.
Strategic Intelligence in the Formulation of the ‘Forward Policy’

In 1959, the Bhai-Bhai era had come to an end and the Chinese troops had
begun encroaching upon territory in the Ladakh region, compelling an Indian
response. The 1959 Annual Military Intelligence Review (AMIR) produced by
the Army HQ, on the basis of IB reports, had concluded that China would
hesitate to launch an offensive and limit itself to border incidents.74 The 1960
AMIR assessment indicated significant improvements in Chinese communica
tions and logistics infrastructure that greatly increased the speed of deployment.75
Until this point however, Indian military preparations to face the Chinese threat
were shaped by the 1959 assessments. In the northern sector, where logistical
difficulties were acute, Indian military deployment would be sufficient only to
exhibit presence and stake claims rather than engage the enemy. In the eastern
sector, a three-tier defence system had been in place (explored in detail in the section
on defence preparedness).
The events between 1960 and the outbreak of the war are of greater importance
to understand the role intelligence played in India’s military policy. The AMIR
produced in October 1961 had showed increased Chinese capabilities across the
northern sector. A month earlier, a Chinese post close to the Indian post at Daulat
Beg Oldi in Ladakh was discovered, and the Chinese troops had attempted to
capture the Indian patrol. Considering these developments, Indian policymakers
instructed the IB to produce a report on the Chinese capabilities and intentions.
On 26 September 1961, the IB submitted its report to the government and this
report became the foundation of the ‘Forward Policy’.76
On observation of the Chinese tactics in the preceding years, the IB concluded
that “the Chinese would like to come right up to their claim of 1960 wherever
we ourselves are not in occupation. But where even a dozen men of ours are
present, the Chinese have kept away”.77 Based on this premise, the report
recommended manning the entire stretch of the border. By doing so, beyond
estimating the Chinese strategic capabilities and intentions, the IB’s report had
trespassed into the realm of military tactics and policy prescription. Considering
the IB’s dearth of military knowledge, its tactical recommendations had to be
cautiously approached by the military and the political leadership. Instead, the
political leadership readily accepted the recommendations, while the Indian
Army, led by the Chief of General Staff B.M. Kaul, only put up a token resis
tance by highlighting the logistical difficulties to the Defence Minister. Both the
political and the military leadership were, therefore, confident that the Chinese
would not attack, and the ‘Forward Policy’ as prescribed by the IB went into
being, the operational challenges notwithstanding.
Why did the IB arrive so terribly wrong in its assessment of the Chinese
reaction? Scholars like K. Subrahamanyam and Srinath Raghavan have argued
that the reason for this gross misjudgement lie in the collection agency’s invol
vement in analysis.78 Analysis and assessment of intelligence, according to them,
should have been carried out by the JIC, which had the Military Intelligence
Directorate under it. However, the JIC, for all practical purposes, was a defunct
organisation and its Chairman K.L. Mehta had no prior exposure to intelligence
work.79 The MI Directorate, on the other hand, was merely a counter
intelligence organisation that possessed no foreign intelligence responsibilities.
Commenting on the MI Directorate, in 1963, General J.N. Chaudhri (COAS)
admitted to Lord Mountbatten that,
“intelligence should not only be “inwards” it should look “outwards”. The

main trouble with our intelligence, which, if I may say so, is a British legacy,
is that there is too much of looking inwards [counterintelligence]”.80
Although both Raghavan and Subramanyam accept the dire condition of the
JIC and the MI Directorate, they opine strongly that analysis by collecting
agency led to the misjudgement of China’s reaction. This accusation, however,
has to be observed with caution. In the US, the CIA has both collection and
analytical functions, while, in the UK, the Secret Intelligence Service (also
known as MI6) has only collection responsibilities leaving analysis to the JIC.
Which of the two systems is qualitatively better is a debatable question. But
there is no gainsaying that both the systems have had their own share of suc
cesses and failures. Therefore, it is prudent to ask why the IB failed in rightly
assessing the Chinese reaction, instead of squarely blaming the organisation for
having outstretched its role. Answering this question helps understand why
even if the JIC was functional, the result might not have been different.
The quality of intelligence analysis is in part determined by the quality of
intelligence collected. Insofar as the IB’s conclusion was concerned, it was
based on empirical observation of the Chinese tactics in the recent past.
Hypothetically, if raw intelligence was passed on to the JIC, the JIC might
have come to a similar conclusion or sought further inputs on Chinese inten
tions to predict Beijing’s reaction to India’s ‘Forward Policy’. Given the
absence of credible sources in mainland China, could the JIC have formed any
different conclusions from that of the IB? Quite unlikely. Therefore, it is
arguable that the wrong conclusion drawn by the IB was symptomatic of an
information vacuum, rather than the dual functionality of the IB. That the IB
was drawing its conclusions on the basis of incomplete intelligence was evident
even later, when it made a significant change in its position.
In May 1962, on reception of intelligence from a source in the Chinese
Consulate in Calcutta regarding the possibility of military action in Ladakh, the
IB somewhat rectified its earlier assessment. Mullik considered the intelligence
so authentic and alarming that he personally reported it to Nehru and Menon.81
Even more important was a report on 8 June 1962, in which the IB completely
changed its stance and argued with authority that the Chinese will attack in
September over the border issue. It not only got its prediction on China’s
future course of action right, but also the estimated timing was quite accurate.82
Despite this report, the IB went without recommending the revision of the
‘Forward Policy’. The reason for this blunder, again, was the IB’s reliance on
cross-border observation instead of strategic sources. Based on a reliable source
in Tibet, the IB managed to answer two strategic intelligence questions, i.e.
would there be an attack, and, when would the attack be, correctly.83 But,
other critical questions like what form the attack would take and how it would
be executed remained unanswered. Therefore, significant organisational weak
nesses and analysis on the basis of incomplete information makes the 1962 war
a clear case of ‘intelligence failure’. However, there was also a larger policy
failure emanating out of wishful thinking by the consumers that chiefly led to
the surprise of 1962. Before examining these facets, it is necessary to observe
the parallel developments in Beijing to understand the blunders committed by
the Indian intelligence and decision makers. Therefore, let’s now briefly turn
towards understanding Beijing’s decision for war.
Mao’s Decision to Strike India

Neville Maxwell’s treatise, which was once regarded as the most authoritative
account, squarely fixed the blame on India for provoking the Chinese. In the
final implementation of the ‘Forward Policy’, one border post, known as the
‘Dhola Post’ that appeared north of the McMahon line, was argued as the casus
belli for the Chinese offensive. However, new evidence indicates that Beijing’s
war decision predates the establishment of the Dhola Post. The official PLA
history of the 1962 war alleges an Indian scheme to turn Tibet into a ‘buffer
zone’ as the war trigger. It was this perceived scheme of 1959 that Mao alleged
as Indian betrayal.
In March 1959 a rebellion broke out in Tibet, which was assisted by the
CIA. On 17 March the Dalai Lama had fled Tibet and sought asylum in India,
which deeply angered Mao. The same day, at the politburo meeting, Zhou
concluded an Indian involvement in the rebellion. On 25 March Deng
Xiaoping echoed Zhou’s findings, and insisted that China should not publicly
criticise India, but settle the scores when the time comes.84 From then on, for
starters, China began strengthening relationship with Pakistan and providing
covert support to the Nagas and Mizos – two Northeast Indian tribal groups
fighting a secessionist movement.85
An interesting and noteworthy observation here is that, although Mao was
convinced of an Indian covert hand in Tibet only after the rebellion, suspicions
of Indian maleficence existed among the ranks of the PLA several years before
the rebellion. In 1955 a Welsh mountaineer Sydney Wignall, was recruited by
the Indian Army to spy on Chinese military activities in Tibet. Soon he was
captured and during the course of his interrogation, the Chinese interrogators
repeatedly referred to the Indians as imperialists and American stooges. When
Wignall queried about the 1954 agreement between Zhou and Nehru, the
Chinese interrogators spoke highly of Menon, who was regarded as anti-colo
nialist and anti-imperialist, but condemned Nehru as an agent of the CIA, to be
precise – a ‘Western Fascist Lackey Imperialist Running Dog’.86 Against this
background, it is unsurprising that, following the 1959 rebellion, the Chinese
authorities would have missed the opportunity to accuse India of covert
intervention.
The state controlled Chinese media produced several articles warning India
to change its behaviour. Two articles appeared on 6 May 1959: one, in the
People’s Daily that warned of China’s retribution was personally drafted by
Mao, and the other, written by Zhou in Renmin Ribao, accused Nehru of
harbouring strategic ambitions in Tibet.87 At the same time, the Indian daily
editorials also carried anti-China opinions; but unlike the Chinese media
houses, the Indian newspapers were not state owned, and publications were not
state controlled.88 Hence, China’s conclusions on India’s position on Tibet
were largely shaped by Indian public opinion rather than governmental posi
tion. The Tibetan issue and the Chinese perception of Indian intentions in
Tibet, thus, highlights something peculiar from the 1962 war point of view.
That is, the foundations for the war lay not only in Indian intelligence failure
but also a probable Chinese intelligence failure. Just as the IB had failed to read
the Chinese intentions, Mao might have failed to appreciate Nehru’s true
intentions in Tibet. Mao’s paranoia about India’s alleged colonisation of Tibet
was reinforced and established beyond doubt by his advisors. In reality, how
ever, as observed earlier, India’s role in Tibet was far more nuanced and the
degree of involvement, both preferred and real, changed even at an individual
level.
Nehru had explicitly declared that Tibet was integral to China. Even though
he preferred that the Tibetans held some autonomy, his method of achieving
this was Gandhian – peaceful and non-violent. Therefore, the granting of
asylum to the refugees following the PLA’s crackdown was purely on a
humanitarian basis. In fact, on suspicion of unidentified flights flying in Indian
airspace, the Indian Foreign Secretary Subimal Dutt had warned U.S.
Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker that any flights supporting the Tibetan rebels
passing through Indian airspace would be shot down. Dutt was unambiguously
conveying the Government of India’s position. Though Bunker inferred that
the Indian government was not averse to U.S. support of the rebels, and was
merely concerned about hostile public opinion, there is no evidence to show
Nehru’s active support to the rebels.89 Without political approval, Mullik’s
assistance was merely tactical in nature and not part of a dedicated covert action
strategy.90 Therefore, the Chinese assessment that India/Nehru was running a
covert operation to liberate or colonise Tibet was absolutely baseless, probably
owing to lack of credible intelligence inputs.
By mid-1962 Beijing’s analysis can be summed up in three points:91
• Nehru wished to divert attention from internal issues to some external

trouble;
• In antagonising China, he hoped to win international, especially the US’,
support;
• He hoped to attack China’s prestige in the Third World.
The next section debunks all these claims. In fact, Mao acceptance of these
points arose from his own reflections on the situation. Being a leader of an
authoritarian regime, such considerations seemed acceptable to him, while
democracies functioned differently. Had the IB drawn similar conclusions
about Mao, India would not have been surprised to the same degree when
the Chinese offensive came.
Finally, Mao sought one final intelligence assessment on 16 October that
showed no changes in Indian intentions. By then he had ensured that interna
tional opinion was favourable towards China, and the date of offensive was
fixed on 20 October. The challenge of fighting in the winters at such high
altitudes was accepted for two main reasons. Firstly, the PLA had just engaged
the Tibetan rebels and acclimated for high altitude combat. Secondly, if time
was conceded, India could become better prepared. The PLA intelligence at
that time was aware of the dearth of basic amenities like food and winter
clothing affecting the Indian border troops. In 1958, an eleven member Chi
nese military delegation that had visited India were, on Nehru’s directions,
given a tour of important Indian military establishments by top military leaders
who would take part in the 1962 war.92 Consequently, the PLA had also
become aware that Lieutenant General B.M. Kaul, the commander of the IV
Corps, facing the McMahon line had no combat experience.93 The Chinese
intelligence was also informed about the Indian positions in NEFA through
aerial and ground reconnaissance carried out through Burma. This is one cru
cial aspect that highlights India’s policy failure and needs a bit of examination.
When the PLA troops invaded NEFA on 17 November, they did not invade
from the north as the Indians had expected. They had entered from the east, via
the Yunnan province, passing through the Kachin State of Burma. Since 1961
the IB had reported an increase in Chinese muleteers in the Kachin region,
which did not raise any alarm bells in New Delhi. It was later realised that the
muleteers were Chinese Army and Intelligence personnel in disguise. More
astonishing was the fact that the Chinese Air Force produced high quality
photographs of the Indo-Burma borders, which the Burmese government
permitted only after receiving approval from the Indian government!94 Hence,
while Mao was undertaking every step to teach Nehru a lesson, his pre
paratory efforts seem to have been supported by Nehru’s strong illusions of
Chinese bonhomie.
Hence, in the end, both the Indian and Chinese intelligence agencies had a
fairly clear picture of each other’s capabilities, but grossly miscalculated the
intentions. However, with a stronger military and better planning and
operational conduct, the costs of miscalculation were much lesser on the
Chinese. Where and why exactly did India fail to predict the Chinese
designs? The answer to these lies in four important factors explained in the
next section.
India’s Estimative Blunders and the 1962 Shock

The 8 June report that expressed the Chinese intentions in stark terms – an
attack was imminent in September conditioned on the non-resolution of the
border issue – has been used by Mullik and Dave, the two IB officers to have
recounted the IB’s role in the 1962 war, to emancipate the agency from
accusations of intelligence failure. Why then was the Forward Policy pursued
with such rigour as to provoke the PLA forces? There are four distinct expla
nations to this blunder – Chinese deception and the IB’s outdated analytical
framework; generic challenges to current estimative intelligence magnified by
the IB’s collection failure; wishful thinking and pretence on the part of the
political leadership; and finally, an inept military leadership that surrendered
basic military fundamentals to political coercion. A combination of these factors
contributed to the lack of preparedness and failure of policy. An elaboration is
offered below:
Chinese Deception and the IB’s Outdated Analytical Framework

The IB was operating on an archaic analytical framework that failed to take
into consideration the developments in Beijing, while the latter continued to
feed into the IB’s misconception. When it eventually became clear that hosti
lities were increasing, lack of convincing evidence caused the IB to sustain its
conventional thought that the Chinese would not attack. There were three
premises that sustained the idea of Chinese inaction. First, strains in Sino-
Soviet relations had weakened China significantly; second, the threat of a
U.S.-supported Taiwanese invasion loomed at large and made war with
India highly improbable; and third, the failure of the Great Leap Forward
and the economic distress that had engulfed the Chinese society would
make war a costly affair for Mao.95
China, being cautious about the potential impact of the international climate on
its war aims, had paid sufficient attention to geopolitical developments alongside
assessing Nehru’s intentions. The final intelligence analysis Mao sought on 16
October before declaring war, referred to the perceived U.S.-Soviet-Indian
encirclement that emboldened Nehru’s belief of China’s inaction.96 Mao,
therefore, understood that Nehru’s global stature demanded preparation of a
favourable international climate before launching the offensive. In Decem
ber 1959, the reception received by Dwight D. Eisenhower, the first U.S.
President to visit India, could only be surmised as a reaction to the ongoing
Sino-Indian border dispute. Consequently, thoughts of an India-US-Taiwan
axis began causing anxieties in Beijing. However, such fears were put to
rest by a direct interaction between China and the U.S. In Warsaw, the
Chinese Ambassador Wang Bingnan met U.S. Ambassador Cabot, who
assured the former in clear terms that the U.S. would not support a Tai
wanese attack on mainland China “under any circumstances”.97 By Wang’s
own admission, this factor played a critical role in China’s decision for war
with India.98
Similarly, Mao also ensured that the Soviets were on the Chinese side.
Sino-Soviet differences and Indo-Soviet bonhomie suggested that a Soviet
neutrality in the event of a war was possible. However, the Cuban missile
crisis deterred such a possibility, as Mao tactfully conditioned his support
to the Soviets on the latter’s support in the war against India. Therefore,
Khrushchev told the Chinese Ambassador Liu Xiao on 14 October that
“if China were attacked, it would be an act of betrayal to declare
neutrality”.99
On account of these developments, it is evident that the two main factors
that drove IB’s analysis of China’s intentions had attained complete redundancy
in the months preceding the war. Yet, the IB persisted on these factors because
of the deceptive tactics employed by China. For instance, even after seeking
assurance from the U.S. of non-compliance with Taiwan’s military moves, the
Chinese media repeatedly warned India not to take advantage of Beijing’s
preoccupation with Taiwan to further push forces to Aksai Chin. The IB,
bereft of credible sources in Beijing, was culling out most of its intelligence
from the Chinese media, which deliberately overestimated the Taiwan threat in
Beijing’s threat calculus.100 Reflecting on the IB’s excessive reliance on Chi
nese media, an officer of the era recalled that “we had to read a lot of Chinese
propaganda”.101
The last factor, that economic considerations would compel restraint on
Mao, was again a misreading by the IB because of ‘mirror-imaging’.102 Mao’s
intelligence had declared that Nehru was vying for conflict with China in order
to divert attention from India’s internal troubles, while the IB concluded that
China’s internal troubles would dissuade Mao from making largescale military
moves against India. In effect, the respective agencies were merely reflecting on
what they would have done under the given circumstances. Mao was a firm
believer of uniting people against an external enemy and 1962 was an
opportune time to employ this tactic. He knew well how to use a “heightened
sense of tension to promote collectivisation”.103 Thus, a primary motivator of
aggression was contrarily concluded by the IB as a potential deterrent.
There was one other deception tactic employed by Beijing that led India to
infer that the main offensive, if it came, would be in Aksai Chin/Ladakh, not
NEFA. Expansion of this point requires some background on India’s defence
posture. Hence, this will be explored in the final sub-section on military planning.
IB’s Failure to Develop Current Estimative Intelligence

In drafting intelligence reports, analysts generally rely on indisputable facts that
are represented with a high degree of certainty. Beyond this, owing to a lack of
‘direct or indirect’ evidence, the analysts make use of their expertise to pass
judgements or provide estimates. The language used in provision of these esti
mates vary in the degree of certainty depending on the availability and quality
of information. As most intelligence agencies work to predict futuristic actions
of their targets, much of the reportage is written using estimative language,
which includes words like ‘possible’, ‘probable’, ‘likely’, ‘may’, ‘anticipated’ etc.
giving the consumers an indication of what could happen, but also absolving
the analyst of any responsibility if the event failed to occur. It is acceptable that
such language be used because in many cases the enemy might not have taken
the decision that the intelligence analysts are trying to predict.104 Theoretically,
such is the nature of the intelligence estimating business, and the IB was no
stranger to this.
Since 1950 the IB had been entertaining the possibility of a communist
expansionist threat from China. On 8 June 1962, however, it stated with cer
tainty that an attack was imminent in September, much before Mao had even
decided to attack. This report, based on a highly reliable source in Tibet, was
the sole mention of a Chinese attack with certainty. Nonetheless, until the
outbreak of the war in October, the DIB never brought up this report with
any seriousness. Even as late as 17 September, following the fighting in the
Dhola area, the IB only reported that the fighting might not be a localised affair,
further adding that “the Chinese seemed well set for an offensive action at
Ladakh, Sikkim and NEFA”.105 Lacking sources in Beijing, the IB had main
tained no degree of certainty in its reports. In essence what the IB dealt with
can be termed as ‘bounded uncertainty’, which Brian Greene regards as:
“a circumstance in which relative uncertainty as to the probable origins of

surprise coexists with extreme uncertainty as to how such threats might
manifest themselves, if at all”.106
The ‘extreme uncertainty’ or inability to imagine the ways in which the Chi
nese threat would manifest was born out of the IB’s ignorance of China’s
military history. The lack of knowledge on Chinese military strategy and war
fighting tactics created a vacuum that essentially led to the IB’s failure in
analysing the Chinese intentions. It must, however, be emphasised here that
the ‘bounded uncertainty’ logic applies only to the IB and not the political
leadership. The latter had not an iota of belief in the Chinese surprising India in
any manner. The theory that China and India were friends was firmly rooted
until the PLA offensive came.
Prevalence of Wishful Thinking Consumers

In 1951 a young Indian Army Captain in Shillong (India’s Northeast) was tasked
to prepare a Guard of Honour for Nehru. During the early hours on the scheduled
day, as Nehru was strolling through the gardens admiring the roses, he noticed a
group of Gorkhas along with their officer. Nehru curiously walked up to the
officer and inquired what was happening. After being told that the preparations
were for his Guard of Honour, Nehru engaged the Captain in further conversa
tion and said “look young man, look to your north [northern borders], China are
our historic friends, we share religious and trade ties…. They will never be our
enemy”. The young Captain, in his typical military mannerism, replied with a
“yes, sir”.107 Nehru had not rectified this false perception even after the 1959
Longju and Kongka Pass skirmishes. He instead interpreted them as local PLA
troops acting out of confusion over the border alignment, without Beijing’s
approval.108
The fact that Nehru and Menon yielded bilateral relations with China greater
importance than the defence of Aksai Chin gave further force to such interpreta
tions. This also explains Nehru’s reluctance to make public the 1959 border inci
dents.109 However, in 1960, when it became clear that the India-China friendship
was now a thing of the past, another wishful thought prevailed, that is – despite
hostilities China would not launch an armed attack. When such was the case, the
‘Forward Policy’ as espoused by Mullik was readily acceptable to Nehru, as it gave
the added benefit of silencing the parliament and public opinion that was fuming
over the government’s inaction.110
In order to understand why the Indian political leadership was bent on
befriending China ignoring all information to the contrary, it is necessary to
reiterate the political leaders’, especially Nehru and Menon’s, thinking on
matters of intelligence, defence and foreign policy towards China. Despite
adopting a defensive security orientation, Nehru had failed to make intelligence
the fundamental basis for decision-making.111 Subrahmanyam reckoned that
the “problem was the slow development of the awareness for the need for
intelligence assessments… in our political leaders who hailed from an idealistic
background”.112 In 1950, prior to the Chinese annexation of Tibet, Patel,
Mullik and Bajpai had cautioned Nehru of an aggressive China on India’s
frontiers. However, Nehru, along with K.M. Pannikar, the Indian Ambassador
to China, grossly dismissed this assessment assuming that the possibility of a world
war would forbid China from making any military moves in Tibet. Even as later
events proved them wrong, there was no change in Nehru’s perception. The IB
was not consulted before the signing of the 1954 Panchsheel Agreement; and the
illusive optimism that escalation to world war would dissuade Mao from military
action was sustained until the eve of the war.113 That Nehru should have treasured
such an assessment is absurd considering that, in October 1954, Mao had explicitly
expressed his disagreement over Nehru’s perception of warfare.114
The IB’s assessment of the outcome of the Panchsheel Agreement on India’s
security was one of disaster.115 The Tibetans living in India also warned Nehru a
full five months after the signing of the Panchsheel Agreement that “if China
succeeded in Tibet today, India would face problems with China tomorrow”.116
Sumal Sinha, the Chargé d’affaires of the Consulate General of Lhasa in Tibet also
sent a stark telegram in 1956, stating “The Chinese have entered Tibet. The
Himalayas have ceased to exist!”. Yet, Nehru continued to “harbour very fond
images of China and India leading Asia forward and, through Asia, the world
forward”.117 Hence, wishful thinking by the Indian Prime Minister was
impermeable to counter-suggestive inputs. The wall of wishful thinking was made
further impervious by Nehru’s temper.118 Nehru’s Foreign Secretary Y.D. Gun
devia has noted that:
“tradition had it that no one was to speak up to Nehru or contradict him

or argue with him. If you did, he would fly into a temper and throw you
out of the room. You risked losing your job”.119
Such instances were recounted even by military officers of the era. Mullik,
thus, understood Nehru’s character well and always remained “deferential and
compliant” with him.120
Menon’s anger was no different from Nehru’s, and his communist views and
tendency to downplay the Chinese threat added to the damage that Nehru was
already causing. The JIC Chairman has noted that Menon dismissed “warn
ings” as “fantasies”, and several members of the committee perceived him as
Nehru’s “blind spot”.121 In 1955 the Indian Army, through a Military Intelli
gence Officer, presented to Nehru and Menon a report on the Chinese threat,
for which Menon reprimanded the officer for “lapping up American CIA
agent-provocateur propaganda”.122 In 1958, when General Thimmayya, the
COAS, pointed out to Menon the immediate need for acquiring weapons and
equipment, Menon angrily retorted, “where are the threats? If it is Pakistan
then you tell me you can handle it, and I say, China will not attack”.123
Thimmayya’s repeated requests to allocate border control to the Army were
rejected, and permission was not granted until August 1959 when strains in
bilateral relations had become serious and a confrontation only too obvious. At
this juncture, the Army suffered serious shortages in equipment and man
power; lack of experience in high-altitude combat, and above all, poor border
infrastructure impacting operations. The IB, falling short on military knowl
edge, was ignorant of the operational impact of these challenges when it pre
scribed the ‘Forward Policy’. That the Army went about implementing it
exposes the most critical aspect of the ‘policy failure’ element of this case,
which is explored in the next sub-section.
Military Planning and Policy as Cause for Surprise
The strategic premises of the Indian planners during the 1962 war were as follows:
Table 5.1 Assumptions versus Outcomes in Indian Military Planning in 1962

Premise Surprise
1. Forward Policy may upset the Chinese 1. China launched an attack on 20
and result in a prolonged border ten- October 1962.
sion, but not war.
2. If China attacks India, it will be a 2. China launched a swift offensive on
long-drawn war that will eventually 20 October, withdrew immediately;
spill over into World War III. launched a massive counterattack on
14 November and declared a uni
lateral ceasefire on 20 November.
3. The Eastern defences were strong 3. The collapse of the Eastern defences
enough to withstand a Chinese assault. came as the biggest surprise of all.
Between the Northern and Eastern sectors, the latter was strategically
important for India, and, New Delhi was confident in its defences. Why then
did the Indian Army fail so terribly in the East? Why did a professional and
respected army that had made its mark in some of the toughest battles of the
World War II and the 1947–48 Indo-Pak War, prepare so terribly to meet the
Chinese threat? On observing the Japanese failure to foresee a strong U.S.
reprisal following the Pearl Harbour attacks, scholars Goldman and Warner
have noted that:
“a suspension of common sense was possible only in Tokyo’s militarised

political climate, in which the army dominated the prime minister, who
could not form a government without the army’s support”124
The converse of this is true when observing the 1962 war. The Indian military
leadership completely compromised common sense and military logic, making
way for the civilians to pronounce decisions that were beyond their expertise. The
failure to display professional behaviour should in no measure be brushed against
the entire Indian Army. Even in defeat, the Indian soldiers had shown exemplary
courage and valour, and the Indian Army, at that time had some knowledgeable
and gallant officers who would go on to display their might in the wars against
Pakistan in 1965 and 1971. However, in 1962, the Indian Army’s top leadership
had been systematically politicised over the years. The acceptance of the ‘Forward
Policy’ by the Indian Army despite running contrary to every military logic should
be observed against this backdrop.
China’s capture of an Indian patrol party in 1958 had caused alarm in the
Indian Army. Assessing that the Chinese were not the friends that New Delhi
assumed them to be, General Thimmayya (COAS) ordered, Lietutenant Gen
eral Kalwant, GOC-in-C Western Command, and Lieutenant General Thorat,
GOC-in-C Eastern Command, to prepare a detailed terrain analysis with the
help of the IB. Known as Exercise Sheel and Exercise Lal Quila, war games
were conducted under the direction of Thimmayya. A pessimistic conclusion
was drawn indicating that with the rate of preparedness at that time, “it was
difficult to contain or even delay aggression by China”.125 The general defence
prowess of India was in a desperate shape in 1958, owing mainly to two rea
sons. Belief in the ideals of non-violence had resulted in strong resistance
against attempts to increase the defence budget, which led to an abysmal pace
of modernisation and manpower augmentation. The second, directly related to
Menon’s preconceived notions about China, as observed previously.
The differing opinions of the intellectual Krishna Menon and the seasoned
General Thimmayya – previously commander of the British Indian Army in
the Arakan during World War II and winner of the British Distinguished
Service Order – had resulted in a coldness between the Army and the Min
istry of Defence. Menon was in favour of indigenisation of Indian military
equipment, while Thimmayya was more pragmatic and time sensitive in
meeting the Chinese threat. A request for additional troops and resources on
27 August 1959, after the Longju incident, had infuriated Menon, who
retorted “you are embroidering the Chinese threat. They have no design to
attack India”.126 In the next couple of days, as personal equations between
the two deteriorated, and irked mainly by the nonchalance of the defence
minister over national security matters and political interference in army
promotions, the General submitted his resignation. Although the resignation
was withdrawn subsequently owing to Nehru’s plea, it is noteworthy that the
threat of resignation was an important deterrent against political interference/
dominance in matters military.
A three-tier defence system had emerged through Exercise Lal Quila,
known as Thorat Plan. The forward tier comprised of symbolic outposts
instead of war capable deployments. The middle tier was the withdrawal
point for the forward troops to create logistical difficulties for the invading
forces. The final tier was the ‘Defence Line’ where the actual Indian offensive
would be launched against the enemy. This plan was laid out considering the
PLA’s capabilities in 1958 and the difficulties posed by the terrain and
weather.127 Therefore, around 1961, although India’s military capabilities had
not increased, planning and deployment was guided by military thought. The
idea was that the defence of the McMahon line would be possible only by
engaging the invading Chinese troops deep inside the Indian territory where
they would be open to a counterattack. The ‘Forward Policy’ adopted in
November 1961 diluted the entire strength of the Thorat plan, and the har
binger to this militarily unsound decision was largely facilitated by the change
of guard in the Army High Command.
General Pran Thapar had replaced Thimmayya as the COAS; and Lieutenant-
General B.M. Kaul, whose promotion had caused much controversy in the Army
was now the Chief of General Staff. Nehru and Menon were much more
comfortable with the new military leadership. According to them, the Thorat
Plan was defeatist as it sacrificed territory, and hence, sought protection of the
entire border – which was how the ‘Forward Policy’ was envisioned. Imple
mentation began in the northern and central sectors, and by the end of July
1962, about 36 new posts had been set up at distances that were impossible of
being supported in the event of hostilities. It also had the reverse effect of
weakening the vital bases in the interiors. In view of this, the Western Com
mand provided an appraisal on 15 August 1962 concluding that “in case of
hostilities we would be defeated in detail”. Its criticism of the policy was
piercing:
“in view of the foregoing, it is imperative that political direction is based

on military means. If the two are not co-related, there is a danger of
creating a situation where we may lose both in the material and the moral
sense…there is no shortcut to military preparedness”.128
Ignorant of the hardships in the Eastern sector, it was assumed that the imple
mentation of the ‘Forward Policy’ in the Western and Central sectors could be
emulated even there. On 8 September, while an army post called the Dhola
post in the NEFA region was surrounded by about 600 PLA troops, an SIB
representative recalled having found a wooden plank a few months earlier at
the Thagla Ridge with writings in Chinese characters that read ‘this is our river
and mountain’.129 On 22 September a critical meeting held in the Defence
Minister’s room took a complete stock of the situation and the COAS indi
cated a probable Chinese retaliation in Ladakh. Even then, Foreign Secretary
M.J. Desai and the prevalent wisdom that the Chinese will not attack, barring
maybe an attempt to capture a post or two, strongly prevailed.130 The COAS
only put up a token resistance by seeking written orders from Government of
India to evict the Chinese from the Dhola post, which was duly obliged.131 On
4 October the newly created IV Corps was placed under the command of
Lieutenant General Kaul, who took it upon himself to fulfil the government’s
wishes of extending the NEFA defences to the forward lines.132
Notwithstanding the repeated ominous cries by the local Brigade commander
that the policy was not based on any military logic and would lead to a disaster,
Kaul stated that “the eviction of the Chinese was imperative in the national
interest and the country was prepared to lose 20,000 lives if necessary”.133 Beneath
this talk of bravado lay the foundational idea that the Chinese would not attack. In
concentrating the 7th Infantry Brigade at Dhola to evict the Chinese, Kaul hoped
that he would satisfy the government that “the Army had done its best to carry out
its orders”.134 Such was the contrast between the previous military leadership that
threatened resignation over disagreements in professional matters and Kaul, who
would work to appease the political leadership.
Kaul’s determination to push the 7th Infantry Brigade to untenable positions
was least surprising because he was specially picked for the task as the previous
commanders were not being quick in implementing the ‘Forward Policy’ – quite
logical considering the logistical challenges. Efforts ensued under Kaul, and on 10
October, the Chinese attacked the 7th Infantry Brigade outnumbering the Indian
soldiers 20:1. Kaul, in utter shock and disbelief, is noted to have remarked to the
Brigadier, “oh my god. You are right, they mean business”.135 Nevertheless, no
withdrawal orders were given as this was also considered a border clash and not a
war, yet. Indian troops gained nothing out of this adventure, while the Chinese
confirmed their numerical and tactical superiority. When the war officially began
on 17 October, the 7th Infantry Brigade was the first in the Chinese line of fire.
Brigade Commander J.P. Dalvi and 200 soldiers were taken prisoners of war. Kaul,
by then, had left to New Delhi, owing to altitude sickness. Therefore, observing
holistically, the lack of professionalism among the Indian Army’s leadership to
stand up to their political bosses as a rationale for India’s surprise has greater force
than that of intelligence failure.
Steven Hoffmann suspects that this slump in defence preparedness in NEFA
was due to a psychological reasoning called ‘shuttling’.136 Nehru and Menon
felt that if there was a Chinese attack, NEFA’s defences were adequate. Yet,
when indicated that the defences were not adequate, the earlier belief that the
Chinese will not attack took prominence. There is also another evidence that
indicates that the possibility of a war with China was not considered with ser
iousness. While the crisis was unfolding in 1962 and the war broke out during
the winter of that year, a strong section of the Indian Army was sent on a
peacekeeping mission to the Democratic Republic of Congo. Major General
Ashok Mehta, who served in Congo during that time, commented that:
“if [Delhi] knew that we were going to go to war with China, why would
they be sending three of India’s highest decorated battalions – 4 Madras, 4
Rajputana Rifles and 2/5 Gorkha – with two Victoria Cross holders to
Congo? Relying entirely on tactical intelligence, I don’t think Delhi had
any strategic thinking at all”.137
Hence, it is clear that while preparations to defend the borders were underway,
the perception that China would not attack was still strong. The 17 October
offensive, therefore, shocked Nehru, Menon and Kaul equally.
For three weeks, from 24 October onwards, the fighting had paused. On 14
November hostilities broke out again at Walong, which resulted in a massive
Chinese counter-offensive in Se-La and Bomdila. Events that transpired from then
on would go on to cause the biggest surprise to the Indians and is cited as the reason
for the 1962 debacle being regarded as a historic ‘humiliation’. During the lull
period, the Indian Army had regrouped and attacked the Chinese at Walong,
giving the Chinese an excuse to launch its second offensive. This particular offen
sive would not have been as devastating for the Indians for two principal reasons.
Firstly, even though the Chinese were numerically stronger than the Indians,
India enjoyed air superiority. The main Chinese airfield at Lhasa was “adequate
for transport aircraft, but not capable of operating jet aircraft”.138 However, the
existing logic that the war would be stretched indefinitely, inviting superpowers’
intervention, withheld deployment of the Indian Air Force.139
Secondly, the failure to defend Se-La was caused by a fainthearted divisional
commander ordering a withdrawal, leading the troops led by Brigadier Hoshiar
Singh into a death trap. The Chinese had by then flanked them and taken positions
at their withdrawing positions.140 The decision-making process that culminated in
the withdrawal orders is clear evidence that the strategic leadership was in massive
confusion and disarray.141 Against these developments, on 19 November, Nehru
panicked and wrote two letters to President John F. Kennedy requesting support
from the U.S. Air Force.142 However, a shock awaited Nehru as the Chinese
quickly declared a unilateral ceasefire on 20 November, marking the final humilia
tion the country’s political leadership and armed forces had to face in a week’s time.
After deciding that war was inevitable, Mao, despite himself being an
experienced military leader, is reported to have met the top political and
military leadership to plan the shape and outcome of the war reflecting a
“participative and inclusive style of decision making”, while Nehru and
Menon, along with the IB, despite lacking military knowledge of any kind,
planned a military strategy “with Kaul acting as their hatchet man”.143 Paki
stan centric planning by Menon, accentuated by IB’s reports of Sino-Pak axis,
had led to the prioritisation of the Western sector over the East. This coin
cided with the IB learning from the Indian communists in Calcutta that
Ladakh was China’s main focus.144 However, this was actually a Chinese
subterfuge to divert India’s attention from NEFA.145 Despite Ladakh being
strategically important, the Chinese were aware of their own logistical and
operational limitations to inflicting a damaging pain on the Indian troops in
Ladakh. Therefore, “a big battle” was required where the Indian forces were
in good numbers, but not sufficient to put up a fight.146
Thus, when the war commenced, the Chinese were banking heavily on the
Indians to react strongly giving them an excuse to launch a massive counter
offensive. The Indian military planners walked straight into the Chinese trap and on
17 November, they were met with the second offensive. Looking in retrospect, the
Chinese had employed a similar allurement strategy against the Americans in Korea
by making a tactical withdrawal.147 As noted by Mahadevan, “an IB analyst with a
sense of military history might have foreseen the possibility of China reusing its
Korean stratagem against India”.148 While this observation on the IB is valid, the
Indian Army cannot be absolved of the blame for inadequately studying and
understanding the Chinese strategies and tactics. Looking back, an article written by
Major General Som Dutt in a defence journal just a month before the war, had
these words written about the Chinese way of fighting:
“Chinese methods have been well-reasoned. They have paid considerable

attention to the realities of life rather than academic approaches to the
methods of conducting warfare”.149
Given the political and military mindset prevalent during 1962, this statement
might have served as an apt caution. Nevertheless, like most instances of surprises,
this is also clear only in hindsight. With the combination of a wishful thinking
political leadership and a politically subservient intelligence and military leadership,
a judicious appreciation of the enemy was simply impossible.
The Sino-Indian War: A Result of Intelligence and

Policy Failures
The 1962 war has presented an apt case study to understand why cultural factors
hold better explanatory capabilities of strategic surprises than organisational ones.
In fact, the organisational weaknesses in the IB had been born out of a culture of
‘political ignorance’ of the foreign intelligence machinery. A lack of security
consciousness among the political leaders, combined with resistance from the
diplomatic corps, resulted in the intelligence managers struggling to develop
adequate intelligence penetration of a counterintelligence state like China. There
were serious limits to what Mullik could achieve in the absence of political
support – indication of the second trait of Indian intelligence culture, i.e. intel
ligence managers driving the intelligence machinery. Despite the IB’s best efforts
to develop strategic intelligence on the Chinese in a remarkably short duration of
time, the PLA intelligence had established an indisputable edge over India. In the
words of Tashi Sonam, an IB agent during that time:
“The Chinese knew everything, Indian deployment almost to the section

and platoon level was known to them. Sometimes they knew what the
Indians were going to do even before the decision was taken”.150
Contrarily, the IB had neither political nor military sources worthy of mention.
With sources in Beijing found wanting, the agency relied mostly on cross-
border intelligence, which at times facilitated the right conclusions, like the 8
June 1962 report, but lacked substantial evidence for comprehensive analysis
and improve consumer receptivity.
When the Indian government, for the first time, sought an assessment in
1961, it was typical of the colonial era practice of turning to intelligence as
a form of ‘threat reaction’. Without proactive encouragement and
strengthening of the IB, the agency could not have been expected to pro
vide an accurate picture of Beijing’s intentions. As a result, while an attack
was predicted, the obsolete deterrent value of the ‘Forward Policy’ could
not be adequately appreciated. While this fits the description of an ‘intelli
gence failure’, two critical features – the weakening of India’s diplomatic
position as a result of the Cuban missiles crisis, and, the rout of the Indian
defences from the Eastern sector – cannot be blamed on intelligence failure.
No intelligence agency in the world could have potentially learnt of these,
much less drawn the right analysis. This is where this war becomes a classic
case of policy failure.
A dominant perception among the political consumers of intelligence –
that India and China are friends; and, that the risk of a Sino-Indian war
spiralling into a world war would deter China from attacking – supressed all
available warning indicators. The other important consumer of intelligence,
viz. the military, remained fully cognizant of the Chinese threat and suitable
measures were being undertaken to meet the threat, despite political non
chalance in the face of a deteriorating security situation. However, a change in
military leadership in 1960 brought the political and military appreciation of
the enemy on the same page. Eventually, as the crisis worsened, a disastrous
combination of the misperception of Beijing’s reaction to the ‘Forward Policy’
and an unprofessional military appreciation of India’s own defence weaknesses
caused the Indians to be taken by surprise.
Therefore, in summation, the 1962 surprise is a multifactorial phenomenon
emerging out of both intelligence and policy failures, which are both directly
linked to the flawed Indian intelligence culture that witnessed years of neglect
of the intelligence profession, and inadequate acceptance of the intelligence
product by the political and military leaderships. The war, thence, provoked a
reform in the existing ideas about intelligence and national security. Merely,
nine years later, with capabilities significantly improved, and better threat
appreciation by the political and military leadership, the 1971 war, like the
1962 war, became another landmark event in contemporary Indian history, but
for the opposite reasons. What were the changes that occurred in the way India
thought about and did intelligence after the 1962 debacle? How did they lead to
the spectacle of 1971? These will be discussed in the next chapter.
Notes
1 Shiv Kunal Verma, 1962: The War that Wasn’t, New Delhi: Aleph Book Company,
2016, p. xiv.
2 J.P. Dalvi, Himalayan Blunder, Dehradun: Natraj Publishers, 2010, p. 364.
3 B.N. Mullik, My Years with Nehru: The Chinese Betrayal, Bombay: Allied Publishers,
1972.
4 Cited in Arun Shourie, Self-Deception: India’s China Policies Origins, Premises, Les
sons, London: Harper Collins, 2013, p. 64.
5 Rajeev Srinivasan, ‘What If India Had Won The 1962 War Against China?’,
Outlook, 23 August 2004, available at www.outlookindia.com/magazine/story/
what-if-india-had-won-the-1962-war-against-china/224864, accessed on 23
March 2019.
6 Chandra B. Khanduri, Thimayya: An Amazing Life, New Delhi: KW Publishers,
2006, p. 251.
7 The term ‘Forward Policy’ was not an official term. It was first used and popu
larised by author and journalist Neville Maxwell, to justify his allegations of Indian
aggression. Neville Maxwell, India’s China War, London: Jonathan Cape Ltd.,
1970.; However, the Indian military posts technically fell in between the old and
new border lines claimed by China. Underequipped to put up any fight with the
Chinese, the posts were just to act as observation posts, which according to Sub
ramanyam should have been better termed as “intensive and continuous surveil
lance policy”. K. Subrahmanyam, ‘Nehru and the India-China Conflict of 1962’
in B.R. Nanda, Indian Foreign Policy: The Nehru Years, Delhi: Vikas Publishing
House, 1976, p. 125.; Hence, the claim that the ‘Forward Policy’ provided the
Chinese the casus belli for invasion is absurd. Mahadevan, in his work, recalled a
senior Indian intelligence officer noting that Maxwell had been personally
cultivated by Zhou as a “political and propaganda asset”. Prem Mahadevan,
‘Intelligence and the Sino-Indian War of 1962’ in Floribert Baudet, Eleni Braat,
Jeoffrey van Woensel and Aad Wever, Perspectives on Military Intelligence from the
First World War to Mali, The Hague: T.M.C. Asser Press, 2017, p. 56.; Whether
this allegation is true or not, the fact is that Maxwell’s treatise was indeed the
reference point for Zhou’s accusation of India’s belligerence during the US-China
rapprochement a decade later. Thus, Maxwell did effectively serve the purpose of
Chinese propaganda. Bruce Riedel, ‘JFK’s Forgotten Crisis: Tibet, the CIA, and
Sino-Indian War’, International Spy Museum, 12 January 2016, available at
https://podtail.com/en/podcast/spycast/author-debriefing-jfk-s-forgotten-crisis
tibe/, accessed on 21 March 2019.
8 ‘Nehru to Foreign Secretary’, 30 October 1957, SWJN, 2(39), p. 303.
9 Ibid.
10 Shourie, Self-Deception, 2013, p. 48.
11 ‘Cable to K.M. Panikkar’, 27 October 1950, SWJN, 2(15–2), p. 333.
12 ‘Nehru to B.C. Roy’, 16 November 1950, SWJN, 2(15–1), p. 342.
13 Mullik, The Chinese Betrayal, 1972, pp. 198–199.
14 ‘Sino-Soviet Relations’, External Affairs, File No. 8(21)EUR(EE)60, NAI, 1960,
pp. 11–14.
15 B. Raman, The Kaoboys of R&AW: Down Memory Lane, New Delhi: Lancer
16 Jairam Ramesh, Intertwined Lives, London: Simon and Schuster, 2018.
17 Mullik, The Chinese Betrayal, 1972, p. 105.
18 John Prados, Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee
Publishers, 2006, pp. 184–185.
19 ‘Copy of Secret Letter No. SA/446, dated Dec 11/13, 1943 from the Director,
Intelligence Bureau, Home Department, Government of India, to M.C. Gillett Esq,
H.B.M.‘s Consul General at Kashgar’, External Affairs, File No. 391 C.A./44, NAI.
21 Ibid, pp. 135–136.
22 Interview with former IB Assistant Director R.N. Kulkarni, 10 January 2020.
23 B. Raman, ‘Leh: Those Magnificent Kaoboys on Mule-Back down the Memory
Lane’, South Asia Analysis Group, 28 April 2013, available at www.southasiaana
lysis.org/node/1255, accessed on 27 April 2019.
24 Ibid.
25 P.B. Sinha and A.A. Aithale, History of the Conflict with China 1962, New Delhi:
History Division, Ministry of Defence, Government of India, 1992, p. 60.
26 ‘Dr. Elwin notes on his visit to Bomdila and Tawang’, External Affairs, File No. 4
(5)-NEFA/56, NAI, pp. 5–18.
27 D.K. Palit, War in High Himalaya: The Indian Army in Crisis, 1962, London: Hurst
28 Maxwell, India’s China War, 1970, p. 74.
29 Interview with former Special Service Bureau (SSB) officer – S1, 26 January 2019.
30 B. Guyot-Réchard, Shadow States: India, China and the Himalayas, 1910–1962,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016, pp. 225–226.
31 This way the Chinese had managed to learn every aspect of the troops’ daily
routine, their strength and the pattern of movement. Interview with former SSB
officer – S1, 26 January 2019.
32 Khanduri, Thimayya, 2006, p. 237.
33 D.R. Mankekar, The Guilty Men of 1962, Bombay: The Tulsi Shah Enterprise,
1968, p. 20.
34 Available in ‘Ghana-Visit of the Prime Minister of Ghana Dr. Kwame Nkrumah,
to India’, External Affairs, File No. 19(45)-AFR, 1957, NAI, pp. 184–186.
35 Verma, 1962, 2016, p. 409.
36 Interview with former SSB officer – S1, 26 January 2019.
37 Verma, 1962, 2016, p. 409.
38 ‘News reports from Indian Trade Agent, Yatung’, Political Affairs, File No. 4(1)-P/
57, 1957, NAI.; ‘Annual General Report of Indian Trade Agent’, Political Affairs,
File No. 9-WT/58, 1958, NAI.
39 ‘Personal Case of P.N. Kaul Consul General for India, Lhasa’, External Affairs, File
No. S/3/L/61, 1961, NAI.
40 Claude Arpi, ‘Where is the Indian Trade Agency?’, 1 December 2018, available at
http://claudearpi.blogspot.com/2018/12/where-indian-trade-agency.html, acces
sed on 3 March 2019.
41 ‘Dairy of Indian Trade Agent during 1959’, Indian Trade Agency, File No. 9(12)
WT/57, 1959, NAI.
43 Dalvi, Himalayan Blunder, 2010, p. 284.
45 Anne F. Thurston and Gyalo Thondup, The Noodle Maker of Kalimpong: The
Untold Story of My Struggle for Tibet, Gurgaon: Random House India, 2016, p. 223.
46 John Kenneth Knaus, Orphans of the Cold War: America and the Tibetan Struggle for
Survival, New York: Public Affairs, 1999, p. 121.
47 Thurston and Thondup, The Noodle Maker of Kalimpong, 2016, p. 168.
48 Tsering Shakya, Dragon in The Land of Snows: The History of Modern Tibet since
1947, New York: Penguin, 1999, p. 159.
49 Subir Bhaumik, Insurgent Crossfire: North-east India, New Delhi: Lancer Publishers,
1996, p. 27.
50 Thurston and Thondup, The Noodle Maker of Kalimpong, 2016, pp. 168–169.
51 Mikel Dunham, Buddha’s Warriors: The Story of the CIA-backed Tibetan Freedom
Fighters, the Chinese Invasion, and the Ultimate Fall of Tibet, New Delhi: Penguin
Books, 2005, p. 360.
52 Bhaumik, Insurgent Crossfire, 1996, p. 25.
53 ‘DIB’s Report on Mr V.K Krishna Menon’, Home Department, File No. DIB
DO 2/49, 1949, NAI.
54 Ibid.
55 ‘Nehru’s Letter to Patel’, Sardar Patel Private Papers, File No. 2/301, 1949, NAI.
56 ‘Krishna Menon - Report from Sir Alexander Clutterback’, Commonwealth
Relations Office, KV 2/2514, 1954, UKNA, p. 13.
57 K.L. Mehta, In Different Worlds: From Haveli to Head Hunters of Tuensang, New
Delhi: Lancer Publishers, 1985, p. 168.
58 Ibid, 169.
59 Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive II: The KGB and
the Wider World, London: Penguin, 2006, p. 314.
60 ‘Indian Double Standards’, Commonwealth Relations Office, DO 196/126, 1961,
UKNA.
61 Calder Walton, Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of
Empire, New York: The Overlook Press, 2014, pp. 141–142.
62 ‘Policy of the United States with respect to Pakistan’, US Department of State, 3
April 1950, available at https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1950v05/
d837, accessed on 22 April 2019.
63 ‘Sino-Indian Hostilities’, DEFE 4/149, Joint Intelligence Committee, UKNA,
1962.
64 ‘Memoranda received unofficially by Sardar Patel, presumably from Indian Military
Officers, at the time of reconstruction of the armed forces on the eve of partition’,
SPC (4), 1947, p. 559.
Training School, 1985, p. 30.
66 ‘Speaking Brief for the Chief of the Defence Staff’, T.T. Krishnamachari Papers,
Subject File No. 27, 1963, p. 11.
67 Also known as the North and North-East Border Committee report, the original
document is unavailable in the MoD. However, that the committee directed the
IB to collect strategic military intelligence remains an undisputed fact. What is
largely unknown, due of the unavailability of the document, is the reason for
handing over strategic military intelligence to the IB. From a reliable source, the
author learnt that the reason lay in the military’s overt presence which was
deemed unhealthy for intelligence operations. Also, the committee considered the
unlikelihood of the Army being able to build trust with the frontier population by
wielding weapons. Hence, the civilian intelligence organisation was entrusted
with the responsibility of military intelligence too. Interview with former SSB
officer – S1, 26 January 2019.
68 R.N. Kulkarni, Sin of National Conscience, Mysore: Kritagnya Publications, 2004,
pp. 97–98.
70 Partially released ‘Henderson Brooks-Bhagat Report’, 1963, available at www.
indiandefencereview.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/TopSecretdocuments2.
pdf, accessed 1 April 2019 (hereafter HBR).
72 Ibid, p. 194.
73 ‘Appointment of Lecturer Chinese in Armed Forces Academy’, Defence, Reposi
tory-II, File No. DEFENCE/B/1950/JUL/7426/7440, 1950, NAI, pp. 1–39.
74 HBR, 1963, p. 5.
75 Ibid, pp. 6, 39.
76 Palit, War in High Himalaya, 1991, pp. 97–98.
77 Ibid, p. 97.
78 It must, however, be noted that one study conducted in 2008 identified that, with
the availability of new information, Subrahmanyam had revised his argument. His
later conviction that there was a failure of intelligence collection in effect matches
with that of this book. Prem Mahadevan, ‘The Failure of Indian Intelligence in the
Sino-Indian Conflict’, Journal of Intelligence History, Vol. 8, No. 1, p. 1.; For Sub
rahmanyam’s earlier views and Raghavan’s arguments, see K. Subrahmanyam,
‘Nehru and the India-China Conflict of 1962’, in B.R. Nanda, Indian Foreign Policy:
The Nehru Years, Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1976, p. 123.; Srinath Raghavan,
War and Peace in Modern India, Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2010, p. 278.
79 Mehta, In Different Worlds, 1958, p. 168.
80 ‘Speaking Brief for the Chief of the Defence Staff’, T.T. Krishnamachari Papers,
Subject File No. 27, 1963, p. 116.
82 Ibid.; A.K. Dave, The Real Story of China’s War on India, 1962, New Delhi:
United Services Institute of India, 2006, p. 14.
84 P.J.S. Sandhu, 1962: A View from the Other Side of the Hill, New Delhi: Vij Books
India Pvt Ltd, 2015, pp. 23–24.
85 Sinha and Aithale, History of the Conflict with China 1962, 1992, p. 32.
86 Sydney Wignall, Spy on the Roof of the World, Edinburgh: Canongate, 2000,
pp. 108, 158.
87 John Garver, ‘China’s Decision for War with India in 1962’, in A.I. Johnston and
R.S. Ross, New Directions in the Study of China’s Foreign Policy, California: Stanford
University Press, 2006, p. 95.
88 For a detailed survey of the public and parliamentary opinions, media coverage
and editorial content emerging out of India on the Tibetan issue, see the chapter
on Public Opinion in the Build Up to the War in Sandhu, 1962, 2015.
89 ‘Telegram from the Embassy in India to the Department of State’, US Department of
State, Vol. XIX, 1958–1960, 16 November 1960, p. 814.
90 Steven A. Hoffman, ‘Rethinking the Linkage between Tibet and the China-
Indian Border Conflict: A Realist Approach’, Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 8,
No. 3, 2006, p. 190.
91 Garver, ‘China’s Decision for War with India in 1962’, 2006, p. 113.
92 B.R. Deepak, India & China, 1904–2004: A Century of Peace and Conflict, New
Delhi: Manak Publications, 2005, p. 177.
93 Garver, ‘China’s Decision for War with India in 1962’, 2006, pp. 117–120.
94 Raman, The Kaoboys of R&AW, 2013, pp. 29–30.
95 Steven Hoffman, ‘Anticipation, Disaster and Victory’, Asian Survey, Vol. 12, No.
11, 1972, p. 1963.
97 ‘Telegram from the Embassy in Poland to the Department of State’, US Depart
ment of State, Volume XXII, 1961–1963, 23 June 1962.
98 Sandhu, 1962, 2015, p. 34.
100 Mahadevan, ‘Intelligence and the Sino-Indian War of 1962’, 2017, p. 69.
101 Interview with former Secretary (Research) N. Narasimhan, 8 November 2018.
102 Mirror-imaging is a condition in which our intelligence analysts try to complete
the gaps in knowledge by assuming that the enemy would behave the same way
as we would behave in the given situation. Richards J. Heuer Jr., ‘Psychology of
Intelligence Analysis’, Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1999, p. 70, available
at www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/
books-and-monographs/psychology-of-intelligence-analysis/PsychofIntelNew.
pdf, accessed on 1 April 2019.
103 Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Cata
strophe, 1958–62, London: Bloomsbury, 2010, p. 45.
104 Sherman Kent, ‘Words of Estimative Probability’, Studies in Intelligence, 1964,
available at www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publica
tions/books-and-monographs/sherman-kent-and-the-board-of-national-estima
tes-collected-essays/6words.html, accessed on 1 April 2019.
106 Brian W. Greene, ‘Rethinking Strategic Surprise’, Centre for Operational
Research and Analysis: Strategic Analysis Section, 2010, p. 8.
107 Interview with Lieutenant General (Retd) Somanna, 24 January 2019.; For
Nehru’s thoughts on China’s threat to India around that time, see ‘The Indian
Mission at Lhasa, Nehru’s Note to Secretary General, Ministry of External Affairs’,
9 July 1949, SWJN, 2(12), p. 410.
109 Maxwell, India’s China War, 1970, p. 130.
110 B.M. Kaul, The Untold Story, Bombay: Allied Publications, 1967, p. 281.
111 ‘Defence Policy and National Development’, 3 February 1947, SWJN, 2(2), p. 364.
112 K Subrahmanyam, Perspectives in Defence Planning, New Delhi: Abhinav Publica
tions, 1972, p. 55.
113 ‘Defence Policy and National Development’, 3 February 1947, SWJN, 2(2), p. 364.;
Verma, 1962, 2016, p. 13.
114 ‘Minutes of Talks with Mao Tse-tung’, 23 October 1954, SWJN, 2(27), pp. 38–39.
115 Mullik, The Chinese Betrayal, 1972, pp. 153–154.
117 A.P. Venkateswaran, ‘Oral History Record of Ambassador A.P. Venkateswaran
Interview conducted by Ambassador Kisan S. Rana’, Indian Council of World
Affairs, 2015, available at https://icwa.in/pdfs/OHPAPVenkateswaran2013.pdf,
accessed on 1 April 2019.
118 Mehta, In Different Worlds, 1985, pp. 151–152.
119 Y.D. Gundevia, Outside the Archives, Bombay: Sangam Books, 1984, p. 199.
120 Palit, War in High Himalaya, 1991, p. 163.
121 Mehta, In Different Worlds, 1985, p. 168.
122 Wignall, Spy on the Roof of the World, 2000, p. 252.
123 Khanduri, Thimayya, 2006, p. 221.
124 Emily O. Goldman and Michael Warner, ‘Why a Digital Pearl Harbor makes
Sense… and is Possible’, in George Perkovich and Ariel E. Levite, Understanding
Cyber Conflict: 14 Analogies, Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2017,
p. 149.
125 Khanduri, Thimayya, 2006, pp. 235–236.
126 Ibid, p. 255.
127 HBR, 1963, p. 38.
128 HBR, 1963, pp. 15–16.
129 Ibid, p. 53.
131 HBR, 1963, p. 61.
132 Ibid, p. 65.
133 Dalvi, The Himalayan Blunder, 2010, pp. 285–286.
134 Ibid.
135 Ibid, pp. 292–296.
136 Hoffman, ‘Anticipation, Disaster and Victory’, 1972, p. 966.
137 Interview with Major General (Retd) Ashok Mehta, 30 October 2018.
138 ‘Sino-Indian Hostilities’, COS (62) 73rd Meeting, DEFE 4/149, UK Joint Intel
ligence Committee, 19 November 1962, UKNA.
139 There was also an aspect of intelligence failure in the IB’s estimate of the PLAAF’s
capabilities and the interpretations of it. However, the fact that the IAF’s leader
ship readily accepted the IB’s estimate without questioning (especially given the
fact that the IB’s military analysis capability was abysmal) is reason to conclude this
aspect also as a policy failure. Verma, 1962, 2016, pp. 381–384.
140 Palit, War in High Himalaya, 1991, pp. 304–335.
141 For a comprehensive account of this particular incident as well as the failure of the
Army’s strategic leadership in the defence of the East, see the chapters ‘When
Generals Fail’ and ‘Fortress Se-La’ in Verma, 1962, 2016, pp. 189–212, 247–272.
142 ‘Indian Prime Minister Nehru’s Letter to JFK on the Sino-Indian War – 11/19/
1962’, History in Pieces, 19 November 1962, available at https://historyinpieces.
com/documents/documents/nehru-letter-jfk-sino-indian-war-2, accessed on 3
April 2019.
143 Arjun Subramaniam, India’s Wars: A Military History 1947–1971, Noida: Harper
Collins, 2016, p. 232.
145 The Chinese Consul-General at Calcutta had organised a dinner at his residence
for the local communist party members. There, he conveyed to the communist
leaders that China would respond with force in Aksai Chin if India did not reverse
the Forward Policy and directed the guests to simultaneously carry out acts of
sabotage. Among the guests was an IB informer who reported the conversations
to his handler. K. Subrahmanyam, Shedding Shibboleths: India’s Evolving Strategic
Outlook, New Delhi: Wordsmith, 2005, p. 32.; Mahadevan, ‘Intelligence and the
Sino-Indian War of 1962’, 2017, p. 19.
146 ‘The Sino-Indian Border Dispute’, Central Intelligence Agency, 19 August 1963,
available at www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/polo-08.pdf, accessed on 3
April 2019.; Graver, China’s Decision for War with India in 1962’, 2006, pp.
118–119.
147 Abraham Ben-Zvi, ‘Hindsight and Foresight: A Conceptual Framework for the
Analysis of Surprise Attacks’, World Politics, Vol. 28, No. 3, 1976, p. 391.
148 Mahadevan, ‘Intelligence and the Sino-Indian War of 1962’, 2017, p. 66.
149 Som Dutt, ‘Chinese Political and Military Thinking on Guerrilla Warfare’, USI
Journal, July-September 1962, p. 228.
150 Quoted in Verma, 1962, 2016, pp. 256–257.
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Mankekar, D.R., The Guilty Men of 1962, Bombay: The Tulsi Shah Enterprise, 1968, p. 20.
Mehta, K.L., In Different Worlds: From Haveli to Head Hunters of Tuensang, New Delhi:
‘Memoranda received unofficially by Sardar Patel, presumably from Indian Military
Officers, at the time of reconstruction of the armed forces on the eve of partition’,
SPC (4), 1947, p. 559.
Ministry of External Affairs, ‘Dr. Elwin notes on his visit to Bomdila and Tawang’, File
No. 4(5)-NEFA/56, NAI.
Ministry of External Affairs, ‘Personal Case of P.N. Kaul Consul General for India,
Lhasa’, File No. S/3/L/61, 1961, NAI.
Ministry of External Affairs, ‘Ghana-Visit of the Prime Minister of Ghana Dr. Kwame
Nkrumah, to India’, File No. 19(45)-AFR, 1957, NAI.
Ministry of External Affairs, ‘Copy of Secret Letter No. SA/446, dated Dec. 11/13, 1943
from the Director, Intelligence Bureau, Home Department, Government of India, to M.
C. Gillett Esq, H.B.M.‘s Consul General at Kashgar’, File No. 391 C.A./44, NAI.
Ministry of External Affairs, ‘Sino-Soviet Relations’, File No. 8(21)EUR(EE)60, NAI,
1960.
Ministry of External Affairs, ‘The Indian Mission at Lhasa, Nehru’s Note to Secretary
General’, 9 July 1949, Selected Works of Jawarharlal Nehru, 2(12), p. 410.
Mullik, B.N., My Years with Nehru: The Chinese Betrayal, Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1972.
‘News reports from Indian Trade Agent, Yatung’, Political Affairs, File No: 4(1)-P/57,
1957, NAI.; ‘Annual General Report of Indian Trade Agent’, Political Affairs, File
No: 9-WT/58, 1958, NAI.
Palit, D.K., War in High Himalaya: The Indian Army in Crisis, 1962, London: Hurst
Publishers, 1991.
Prados, John, Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee
Publishers, 2006.
Raghavan, Srinath, War and Peace in Modern India, Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2010.
Raman, B., ‘Leh: Those Magnificent Kaoboys on Mule-Back down the Memory Lane’,
South Asia Analysis Group, 28 April 2013, available at www.southasiaanalysis.org/
node/1255, accessed on 27 April 2019.
2013.
Ramesh, Jairam, Intertwined Lives, London: Simon and Schuster, 2018.
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tional Spy Museum, 12 January 2016, available at https://podtail.com/en/podcast/sp
ycast/author-debriefing-jfk-s-forgotten-crisis-tibe, accessed on 21 March 2019.
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Pvt Ltd, 2015.
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-had-won-the-1962-war-against-china/224864, accessed on 23 March 2019.
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6 Indian Intelligence and the 1971
Indo-Pak War
The Epic of a Successful Detection and
Counter-Surprise
Introduction
It was the night of 3 December 1971 when the Air Raid Precautions sirens in
New Delhi had begun wailing. Between 1740 and 1745 hours the Pakistani Air
Force (PAF) had simultaneously struck the Indian air bases at Amritsar, Srinagar,
Avantipur, and Pathankot. From 21 November India and Pakistan were engaged
in an undeclared war over the fate of Bangladesh – then known as East Pakistan.
India would not escalate, particularly because it was keen on not projecting itself
as the aggressor. Just three weeks earlier, the British assessment from Dhaka had
recorded that:
“Indian troops will NOT (repeat NOT) participate in forthcoming attacks,

as India [is] anxious to avoid blame for initiating war. If, of course Pakistan
forces carry [the] fight across [the] border into Indian territory, then [the]
story may well be different”.1
On 3 December Pakistan’s President Yahya Khan gave the green signal for
Operation Chengiz Khan, which sought to conduct a 1967 Israeli-style pre
emptive strike to disorient the Indians and achieve quick victory.2 Little did
Yahya know that the Indians were eagerly waiting for the attack, which would
grant them more relief than horror. India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was
informed of the upcoming air strikes by the Research and Analysis Wing
(R&AW) – India’s newly created foreign intelligence agency.3
New Delhi’s plan was to utilise the air strikes as an official declaration of the
1971 Indo-Pak war. Indira was on a plane when the pilot informed her about
the attacks. D.P. Dhar, one of the architects of the Bangladesh Liberation War,
who was accompanying her remarked, “the fool has done exactly what one
had expected”.4 Thus, the war broke out; and, on 16 December, the 13 days
war concluded with Pakistan’s Lieutenant General A.A.K. Niazi surrendering
to Lieutenant General Jagjit Singh Aurora. With 93,000 Pakistani prisoners of
war, India became the first country to use force to create a nation.5
The 1971 war is one of the rare instances of intelligence successes that has
received little examination by intelligence scholars. After the humiliating
DOI: 10.4324/9781003296195-10
surprises and defeat in 1962, how did the Indian intelligence succeed in uncovering the
enemy designs during 1971? Also, considering the spectacular outcome of the war,
how did strategic intelligence assist in India’s military policy and planning? Probing these
questions, this chapter traces the organisational changes to the intelligence
bureaucracy in the post-1962 era and examines their impact on estimating the
enemy’s capabilities and intentions. It also presents a narrative on India’s conduct
of covert operations in support of military planning. Finally, it establishes that the
1971 war is a combination of both intelligence and policy successes.
Background
Prior to the birth of Bangladesh, Pakistan was divided into West and East
Pakistan by the Indian landmass in between (see Figure 6.1). The geographical
Figure 6.1 West Pakistan and East Pakistan (Bangladesh) divided by India
Source: Author
Indian Intelligence and the 1971 Indo-Pak War 165
divide was matched by an equally distant cultural and political divide, which
was disproportionately favouring the West Pakistanis. Purely in economic
terms, the resources for development were sourced from the Bengali speaking
East while the Urdu speaking West reaped the benefits of the produce.6 The
fag end of 1970 is particularly crucial in Pakistan’s modern politics, since the
mishandling of a flood situation in East Pakistan by Islamabad and the dilution
of electoral results caused the alienation of the Bengalis. The Awami League led
by Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, predominantly present in East Pakistan, acquired
a clear majority, but was denied the right to form a government.
The electoral results were a shock to Yahya Khan, who was misinformed by the
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and the Pakistani Intelligence Bureau that a Ben
gali success was impossible.7 Deliberate procrastination in convening the National
Assembly further angered the Bengalis who launched a massive protest on 1 March
1971. When the ensuing political negotiations hit a dead-end, Yahya launched
Operation Searchlight to crackdown the protesters. Since the Bengali soldiers and
officers of the East Pakistan Rifles (EPR) and East Bengal Regiment (EBR)
refused to engage the protesters, troops from West Pakistan were deployed to curb
the protests. The result was a massive exodus of people to neighbouring India,
causing a huge political, economic, and law and order problem.8
[Insert Figure 5.1here NB: the reason this is 5.1 is because the figure 5.1 and
6.1 files supplied were mistakenly transposed]
The refugee crisis was enormous, and India was left alone in tackling this
complex problem. By April public and parliamentary pressure was increasing, and
Indira Gandhi had begun contemplating a military solution. The Chief of Army
Staff, General Sam Manekshaw, offered the Prime Minister a professional assess
ment of the military preparedness and concluded that no action was possible
before six months.9 Between April and December, the Indian government was
constantly updated about Pakistan’s intentions and capabilities by its intelligence
services. On the basis of intelligence inputs, the Indian Armed Forces prepared
and conducted the war with precision. The intelligence groundwork for the
liberation of Bangladesh had, however, earnestly begun in 1968, which will be
explored in detail in this chapter.
The international political climate also played a critical factor during the crisis
period. Like the Cuban missile crisis had unforeseen consequences for India in
1962, the changing geopolitical equation in South Asia emerging out of the
Sino-Soviet split and the US’ covert policy of rapprochement with China was
bearing unpredictable consequences in 1971. The fact that Yahya was the
chosen conduit by President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor
Henry Kissinger to approach Mao’s China had put India in an uncomfortable
position. From his secret trip to Beijing in July 1971, Kissinger concluded that
Washington’s protection of Pakistan in the ongoing crisis with India was Beij
ing’s test of American commitment to an ally.10 Premier Zhou Enlai had
termed India’s action in East Pakistan as subversion and concluded his meeting
with Kissinger by saying “if India commits aggression, we will support Pakistan.
You are also against that”.11 Consequently, India was completely isolated and
the only superpower that could have played a decisive role in tackling the
world’s greatest humanitarian crisis was now on the side of the perpetrators. In
the event, the Soviet Union became India’s newfound friend.
On 8 August 1971 New Delhi signed the Indo-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and
Co-operation, which had a significant impact on India’s intelligence collection and
war preparation. The combined strengths of the Indian intelligence bureaucracies
and the Soviet intelligence assistance became the bedrock of India’s military policy
planning during the 1971 war. To understand how the Indian intelligence and
security services revived their reputation after the humiliating defeat of 1962, let's
first begin by examining the organisational reforms that occurred in the Indian
intelligence following the 1962 debacle.
The 1962 Fiasco and the Birth of the Directorate General of

Security
Although the 1962 war is perceived as a national humiliation in India, a posi
tive outcome of the event was the shunning of Nehruvian aversion to intelli
gence and covert operations. Even as the Indian Army was bearing the brunt of
the second offensive in November 1962, Nehru realised that his pacifist
approaches to security had borne disastrous consequences. On 17 November,
following a breakfast meeting, he decided that the border populace had to be
trained to resist the Chinese. Accordingly, an order was passed to establish an
agency for this purpose.12 B.N. Mullik, the Director of Intelligence Bureau
(DIB), was given a carte blanche to accomplish this task, and thus, was born the
Directorate General of Security (DGS). By September 1963, the DGS with all
its secret agencies – the Special Service Bureau (SSB), Special Frontier Force
(SFF) and the Aviation Research Centre (ARC) – and the Indo-Tibetan
Border Police were formed. While the role of these agencies in the 1971 war
will be explored, it is important to point out here that Mullik had achieved in
nine months what he could not accomplish in the previous 12 years, owing to
Nehru’s aversion to covert means.
The first organisation to emerge out of Mullik’s efforts was the SFF, aka Estab
lishment-22.13 A fifty-one years old artillery officer, General Sujan Singh Uban,
renowned for his unorthodox tactics, was contracted to train the Tibetan refugees
in guerrilla warfare. The conversion of refugees into warriors was a joint pro-
gramme of the IB and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In this regard, the
1962 war heralded a new opportunity in Indo-American intelligence co-operation
and this joint venture was its immediate reflection. The programme was divided
into two separate projects. The first project entailed the training of the Tibetan
commandos in the serene hill villages of Chakrata under the leadership of General
Uban. The CIA offered only financial and instructional support. These guerrillas
emerged as excellent parachutists who could conduct jumps at altitudes up to
15,400 feet. They were to operate behind enemy lines and conduct intelligence
and sabotage operations. The second project was aimed at serving American
interests more than Indian, which was to establish a Tibetan resistance network
inside Tibet. Here, the guerrillas were trained in Colorado while India provided
only limited assistance in infiltration into Tibet.14 Later, the SFF was further aug
mented with the inclusion of 500 Gurkhas in a sub-unit known as ‘G-Group’.15
Gradually, however, as the Indo-U.S. relations plummeted, the Soviet KGB
replaced the CIA in training the SFF commandos.16
The other agency to emerge as India’s first line of defence against the Chi
nese was the SSB. Mullik worked out a plan with the help of political leaders
Y.B. Chavan and Biju Patnaik.17 The latter assisted Mullik in overcoming
other ministerial – especially the Ministries of Defence and Finance – obstacles
in establishing the agency. Finally, nine officers from various services were
selected to train with the British Special Air Service (SAS) at the training
institute established at Mahabaleshwar, a hill station in the Western Ghats.18
The SSB had both a winning hearts and minds (WHAM) as well as a para
military component. The paramilitary units received training in map reading,
rescue operations, weapons and explosives training and intelligence missions
from their British trainers.19
The SSB began to play an important role in uniting and training the border
populace as India’s first line of defence. While their WHAM component worked
towards integrating and unifying the warring tribes, the paramilitary training turned
them into valuable intelligence assets. Being local dwellers, they understood and
navigated the terrain better than outsiders posted on intelligence duties. To
illustrate, those were the days when the threat of a Chinese intrusion into India
were still looming large. The Military Intelligence had received alarming
reports about the presence of Chinese tents on the Indian side. The topographical
and operational difficulties required that confirmation of this input be procured
clandestinely. Quite amazingly, grasping the urgency of the operation, the SSB
accounts officer, who was also trained in the Officer’s General Course, secretly
trekked to the spot, photographed the landscape, and revealed that what appeared
as tents were only dried up bamboo groves.20 Such secret and daring missions
could be performed in effect only by converting the locals into operatives rather
than training outsiders.
In order to secretly airdrop the SFF commandos into Tibet, the ARC was cre
ated with the help of the Americans. The ARC owes its birth in large part to the
efforts of Patnaik and Mullik. Patnaik had trained as a pilot with the Royal Air
Force during World War II. Post-independence, he had founded the Kalinga
Airways that played a vital role in the Indonesian freedom struggle.21 Patnaik
negotiated with Washington while Mullik built the manpower for the ARC,
drawing personnel and aircrew from the IB and the Indian Air Force (IAF). The
agency was headed by an IB officer named Rameshwar Nath Kao. Although
established for clandestine airdrop purposes, by 1964, the ARC began to be
equipped for aerial photography, monitoring of ground signals and electro
magnetic emissions.22 The ELINT aircrafts played an instrumental role in collect
ing Chinese radar signals for translation and analysis. By 1965, however, bilateral
relations were souring, and Washington kept delaying the supply of equipment to
the ARC. In the event, Moscow became the ARC’s new partner.23
Thus, it is arguable that the 1962 debacle provided the necessary impetus
for a major overhaul of India’s border security and intelligence. None
theless, foreign intelligence was still part of the IB, which largely comprised
of anti-communist and internal security expertise. The 1965 Indo-Pak war
brought the nation’s attention to the need for a dedicated foreign intelli
gence service. An in-house review of the 1965 surprise conducted by the
IB concluded that an information abundance was squandered by inadequate
interpretation.24 A parallel review conducted by Brigadier Batra of the Military
Intelligence, directed by Defence Minister Y.B. Chavan (later Home Minister),
established the need for a dedicated foreign intelligence agency. Yet, no action
was taken and the 1967 border incidents with China reiterated this need.
Consequently, in 1968, under the orders of Indira Gandhi, the R&AW was
created.
The Birth of the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) and

Restructuring of India’s National Security Mechanism
Indira Gandhi was diametrically opposed to Nehru in her approach to national
security. Her ideas and approaches to security and foreign policies have been dubbed
as the “Indira Doctrine”, borrowing from the tenets of “Monroe Doctrine” that
establishes security by means of extending influence in the immediate neighbour
hood.25 The 1971 war itself is observed as an outcome of this doctrine. What is
noteworthy here is that, the doctrinal transformation of India’s national security also
led to a comprehensive reform in national security institutions, of which the birth of
the R&AW was one.26 During the Nehru era, Mullik lacked political support
whereas in 1968, Mullik’s subordinate R.N. Kao, who was tasked with the creation
of the R&AW, enjoyed significant political support. Resistance to Kao, however,
came from the IB itself which did not appreciate the idea of an independent foreign
intelligence agency.
The external intelligence desk within the IB became the newly created
R&AW, while the IB became purely an internal security and counter
intelligence organisation. M.M.L. Hooja, who was close to Mullik, had been
elevated as the DIB in 1968 when the decision to create the R&AW was
taken. Hooja offered a stiff opposition to the idea but was overruled by
Indira.27 The separation of the R&AW was, thus, marked by bureaucratic bit
terness. An SSB officer recollected that:
“at first, there was no office space. Kao sent the officers on a 15 days holiday
to go on a countryside tour [frontier regions] and understand the security
aspects”.28
Meanwhile Kao worked on building the R&AW from scratch; in the interim
the responsibility of collecting foreign intelligence was entrusted on the SSB.
The nature of the organisational reforms that ensued under Kao’s leadership is
critical to understand the success of 1971.
Despite deciding to create a dedicated foreign intelligence service, Indira was
unclear about what role this new agency would have in policymaking and how
would it achieve its objectives. Without offering a charter of duties and
imposing watertight functional jurisdictions, Indira created the agency with
merely an executive order. According to a former senior R&AW officer:
“[Indira’s] objectives for the R&AW were to ensure that India should be
able to develop and sustain dominance in the region, recognise threats and
challenges that originate from across the borders in all formats, develop
response systems to negate such threats even before they mature, and, to
this end, maintain influence in the capitals of neighbouring countries”.29
It is clear from this description that Indira envisaged both intelligence and
operational roles for the new organisation. To achieve this overall objective of
strategic intelligence production and covert action, the DGS was transferred to
the R&AW. Like Mullik in 1962, Kao was also given a carte blanche, except
for two conditions. First, Indira insisted that the new agency must comprise
multi-disciplinary expertise, contrary to the police monopoly that had engulfed
the IB. Second, the top two positions of the organisation were to be filled at
the Prime Minister’s discretion, from within the organisation or from outside.30
With these two conditions, it was for Kao to use his skills to raise the R&AW.
In 1968 Kao was a Deputy Director in the IB with significant exposure to
foreign intelligence work. He had liaised with the Chinese intelligence in
investigating the air crash that allegedly was meant to kill Premier Zhou. As
Director ARC, he had also co-operated with the CIA. Along with his collea
gue Sankaran Nair, an expert on Pakistan who would be his deputy in the
R&AW, Kao had also assisted the creation of the Ghanaian intelligence ser
vices.31 In addition to foreign exposure, two other factors helped Kao. First,
until 1975, he enjoyed complete trust of the Prime Minister by virtue of being a
Kashmiri Brahmin and his wife being well connected with the Nehru family.32
Second, Indira’s other advisors – P.N. Haksar being the most important – were
equally enthusiastic about establishing the R&AW.
The foremost challenge in setting up the organisation was its structural pla
cement. The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) was anxious about the role of
the new agency. The Indian Army also nurtured a strong desire to subsume the
R&AW while the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), mostly concerned with
internal security, could not find the new agency under its ambit. Thus, at
inception, the agency found itself in an awkward position. Subsequently, on
advice from Haksar, it was decided to place it within the Cabinet Secretariat
(see Figure 6.2) and the chief was designated as Secretary (R).33
A committee of officials from the MHA and the Department of Personnel
were tasked to build the corps of the agency. The laid down criteria for
recruitment included knowledge of foreign languages, international exposure
either through education or profession, and good articulation skills.34 An officer
who served on the selection board of the R&AW observed that the early
Prime Minister Home Minister
Cabinet Secretariat
Intelligence Bureau
Research and Analysis Joint Intelligence

Wing (R&AW) Committee
Directorate General of
Security - SSB, SFF, ARC
Figure 6.2 Structure of the Indian civilian intelligence after the 1968 reforms
Source: Author
recruits were drawn on the patterns of the CIA and the MI6.35 Universities had
become ideal locations for recruiters to deliver talks and motivate potential
candidates. The new recruits were trained, apart from languages, in guerrilla
warfare courses, explosives handling, driving techniques and counterintelligence
operations.36 Kao had adopted the CIA as a model for emulation and divided
the R&AW into analytical and operational desks.37 However, officers usually
served in both the desks to formally acquaint each other with the analytical
demands and operational limitations.38
In addition, the agency established safe houses and special bureaus across
India’s cities that aided recruitment. Contrary to the misperception that these
were centres for domestic political espionage, they were meant to target
wealthy businessmen, intellectuals and scientists, for both intelligence collec
tion and counterintelligence purposes. These “intelligencers” were a small
group of elite Indians, privileged with international visits, that made them a
prime target for both Indian and foreign intelligence agencies.39 In addition,
Kao was particularly enthusiastic about providing the agency a TECHINT
capability since it was under his supervision, along with the support of G.K.
Handoo, that the 1950s IB had created a “cryptography branch” (C-Branch).
The two officers had personally recruited a pool of mathematicians to occupy
the C-Branch. The C-Branch had been instrumental in estimating the enemy
ORBAT and decoding intercepted messages.40 When the R&AW was
formed, Kao established a Science and Technology Division (S&T) with K.
Santhanam from the Indian Atomic Energy Commission as its head. This
division became crucial in analysing the pieces of TECHINT collected by the
R&AW’s Monitoring Division.41Thus, with individuals from all walks of life
becoming part of the foreign intelligence process, the diversity that Indira
wished for had been accomplished.
There were, however, issues of contention between the intelligence and
other bureaucracies that needed to be addressed. One early issue that Kao had
identified was the lack of sufficient representation from the armed forces in
the strategic intelligence process. He fixed this flaw by creating a Military
Intelligence Liaison Cell within the R&AW headquarters, headed by a Major
General and assisted by three Brigadiers. This cell was conceived to fix targets
and priorities, train the R&AW analysts with specific military knowledge, and
share a mutual understanding of the use and limits of strategic intelligence.42
Similarly, to establish a good working relationship with the MEA, which
would be the first to receive flak if R&AW operatives got exposed, Kao
suggested that an Indian Foreign Service Officer be appointed at the agency’s
HQ to set priorities and convey to the MEA the agency’s operational con
siderations. Kao wrote:
“This is a very delicate task requiring a full understanding on the one hand of
the expertise of foreign intelligence clandestine operations, and on the other,
a fell for the political and diplomatic considerations which weigh with the
[MEA]. The R&AW is now implementing several new operational plans
which involve breaking of fresh ground abroad. In each such operation, it is
necessary to examine carefully any danger of the exposure of the cover of the
R&AW officers and of embarrassment to the [MEA]”.43
Therefore, to reiterate, by 1971, India was equipped with a dedicated foreign

intelligence agency drawing personnel from across all walks of life. It also had a
covert action component – the DGS – that was a few years older to it. With
such organisational reforms, the agency set out to monitor the developments in
East Pakistan. The assessments that the agency provided New Delhi became the
foundation for India’s Pakistan policy from 1968 onwards.
R&AW’s Assessment of the East-Pakistani Crisis

Immediately after its formation, the agency began to undertake measures to
expand its collection and covert action capability in India’s neighbourhood. The
impetus for this was provided by the R&AW’s own assessment of the threat to
India’s territorial integrity from the growing Sino-Pak nexus. The nexus that had
gained momentum after the 1962 war, had taken the shape of joint sponsorship
of insurgencies and Maoist movements in India’s east and north-eastern region.
As visible above (Figure 6.1), a narrow 21-kilometre strip – the Siliguri corri
dor – connected heartland India with the northeast. The R&AW feared that
the Sino-Pak support to insurgents in this region threatened delinking the
corridor in the event of a war, leaving the entire northeast at the mercy of
the enemy. Therefore, through the mid-1960s, Kao and Colonel Menon – the
name by which Sankaran Nair was known to his intelligence sources – began
to establish contacts with several sections of the Bengali politics and society in
East-Pakistan.44
Reflecting on the threat to India’s north-east and the opportunity presented
by the crisis in East Pakistan, P.N. Banerjee, Joint Director of the R&AW, and
a close aide of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, had briefed the agency’s field officers
in Calcutta during August 1971 that:
“either we take the opportunity afforded by the Bengali revolt and break
up Pakistan, and in the bargain create a friendly, secular, pro-Indian state
in the region. Or we miss this chance and allow the Chinese and Pakistanis
to intervene in North-East India”.45
Taking note of the Sino-Pak threat to India’s territory, Banerjee had empha
sised that:
“the only way to get India out of this worst possible predicament, when,
for the first time since independence, she faces a genuine threat to her
territorial integrity, is to organise the guerrilla struggle in East Pakistan
with zeal and carry it to our advantage”.46
Banerjee’s proclamations arose from a series of reports on monitoring the

situation in East Pakistan. In 1969, two years before the crisis broke out, Kao
had forewarned New Delhi that East Pakistan was bound to face a massive
political turmoil and subsequent secession. The April 1969 forecast read:
“the authorities would have to resort to large-scale use of the Army and
other para-military forces in East Pakistan to curb a movement which has
already gained considerable strength. The use of force is likely, in turn, to
lead to a situation where the people of East Pakistan, supported by ele
ments of the East Bengal Rifles (who are known to be sympathetic
towards the secessionist movement as evidenced from the recent East
Pakistan Conspiracy Case), may rise in revolt against the Central Authority
and even declare their independence”.47
The East Pakistan Conspiracy, also known as the Agartala Conspiracy, involved
the apprehension of certain Naval employees, police officers and political acti
vists by Islamabad over allegations of attacks on a Pakistani military armoury.
These Bengali rebels were tortured and one of the sailors was tried to be
coerced into implicating Sheikh Mujibur Rahman as a secessionist.48 After this
incident, Mujib briefly limited interactions with the Indian authorities. How
ever, the R&AW continued to maintain contacts with other influential sections
of the Bengali society and the April 1969 estimate reflects the impact of such
connections.
Besides predicting the future course of events in East-Pakistan, Kao’s advice to
sieze the initiative and prepare to liberate Bangladesh is particularly important. As
the political situation deteriorated in Pakistan, India’s options were confronted
with two set of ideas. Led by the Nehruvian school of thought, the MEA
advocated non-intervention while Kao, on the other hand, argued for preparing
for the eventuality of an independent Bangladesh.49 In January 1971 Colonel
Menon reported that a mass movement was in the offing. By early February Kao
learnt of Mujib’s impatience with the political negotiations and reported that the
latter was considering a popular struggle.50 In the following months, the situation
in East Pakistan further deteriorated, leading to the refugee crisis in India. Kao
spent the months of March and April trying to convince New Delhi that a lib
eration war was the right course of action. Assessing the implications of the
political turmoil in Pakistan, the R&AW reported that the situation:
“would have considerable bearing on the question of the Pakistani threat

to India during 1971… [as] a military confrontation with India or an
infiltration campaign into J[ammu] & K[ashmir] is likely to result in
diverting the attention of the people from the internal political problems
and [acquiesce their support] for continuance of the military rule”.51
Kao also argued from the prism of the Chinese threat to India that:
“the longer the liberation struggle takes to achieve success, greater are the
chances of its control moving into the hands of the extremists and pro-China
communists in Bangla Desh…Therefore, it would be in our interest to give
aid, adequate and quick enough, to ensure early success of the liberation
movement under the control and guidance of the Awami League”.52
Despite calling for proactive measures, the R&AW was acutely aware that the
international conditions were not yet conducive for a military solution. In May
the agency reported that the international public opinion still held that what was
happening in “Bangla Desh is a matter of internal concern”.53 In the same
report, the agency also drew the Prime Minister’s attention to Pakistan’s growing
military capabilities because of Chinese assistance, and noted that the time was
not yet ripe for a formal recognition of Bangladesh as neither the rebels were
capable of sustaining an independent government within East Pakistani territory,
nor was the Indian Army capable of undertaking a militaristic venture to achieve
nationhood. Hence, for the time being, the agency suggested that India should
do “whatever lies within [its] power to sustain the struggle”.54
Under such circumstances, the R&AW was made the nodal agency for
liaising with the Awami leadership. Banerjee was the R&AW station chief in
Calcutta and played a pivotal role in reporting on the interactions between
Indian security forces and the Bengali rebels. The decision to militarily liberate
Bangladesh was taken after a futile world tour by the Indian political and
diplomatic leaders.55 The Indian Army had sought a six-month preparatory
time. In the meantime, the R&AW and the DGS was made responsible for
sustaining the liberation movement in East Pakistan with the help of the Indian
Army and the Border Security Force (BSF). It was this covert action con
ducted by the agency, alongside its reportage on Pakistan’s capabilities and
intentions closer to the war, that allowed the Indian Army to be prepared for
the Pakistani attack on 3 December. The next section, thus, examines the role
strategic intelligence played in support of military planning and policy.
Intelligence Decision-Making and Operations during the

1971 War
The role of India’s intelligence bureaucracies in the 1971 war planning can be
observed in three key areas. First, the role of intelligence in covert action.
Second, in forewarning New Delhi about Pakistan’s military capabilities and
intentions. Third, in providing operational and tactical support to the armed
forces in areas that had strategic consequences.
Role of Covert Action in Military Planning

It is beyond the scope of this book to examine the entire conduct of covert
operations prior to and during the war. This section only endeavours to outline
some of details of covert operations that highlight the impact of organisational
reforms and their consequences on the development of strategic intelligence for
military policy and planning.
The R&AW’s covert role can be explained under two broad umbrellas –
diplomacy and guerrilla operations. On the diplomatic front, the agency was
responsible for liaising with the Pakistan’s Bengali diplomats and civil servants
to support the liberation movement.56 The Bengali diplomats and bureaucrats
became a vital source of information for the agency. In some instances, the
Bengali diplomats had handed over the top-secret cipher codes that the Pakistani
Ambassadors used to communicate.57 Available evidence indicate that these dip
lomatic intercepts allowed the R&AW to monitor the impact of its propaganda
operations. Intercepted communications between the Pakistani Ministry of
Information and National Affairs and its missions abroad convey a deep sense of
frustration and annoyance within Islamabad owing to documentaries and musical
concerts organised in the western cities having an “obvious anti-Pakistan slant”.58
Such intelligence coups notwithstanding, a greater source of military intelli
gence – strategic, operational, and tactical – was the rebels sheltered in India.
These became the fulcrum of the R&AW’s covert action, and it is this part of
the war that needs greater emphasis as it also highlights that the war belonged to
the Bengali rebels as much as it did to the Indian security forces.
Indian documents of the era denote that the guerrilla warfare was planned in
four phases, each setting out to achieve a set objective.59 The first phase was
meant to be purely foundational in nature – establishment of intelligence net
works and clandestine communication lines between the headquarters and the
operational areas; formation of secret entry-exit routes, safe houses and cache
sites; and the establishment of local resource hubs for support during opera
tions. The second phase was titled “unbalancing and weakening the enemy”,
which largely involved offensive counterintelligence and sabotage operations.
Enemy informers and agents were liquidated, and the enemy’s communication,
logistics and resource infrastructures were swiftly and systematically destroyed.
In this phase, key railways, river lines and air bases were destroyed. The third
phase witnessed the actual offensive launched by the guerrillas against the
enemy forces with an intention to collapse the enemy government. This was to
be perfectly timed when the enemy morale and striking capability was at its
lowest owing to the constant harassment meted out in phase two. Here, the
regular forces of the Indian Army were envisaged to play a supportive role.
Finally, the last phase was termed the “consolidation and restoration” phase
where the guerrilla force would be formally converted into a People’s Army
under a legitimate government, and the non-desirous restored back to civil life.
Therefore, as this document exposes, the covert action plan inherently had
both intelligence and paramilitary dimensions.
Given its dual functionality, the agencies involved were the R&AW and
the DGS, the IB, the BSF and the three services of the Indian Armed Forces.
Between them, the agencies shared the responsibility of recruitment and
training the rebel forces called the “Mukti Bahini”, as well as running intel
ligence and counterintelligence operations. All these operations were mana
ged by the R&AW. The contributions of these agencies towards
development of the intelligence picture of the enemy as well as sustaining
India’s war efforts are as follows.
The DGS, which was the operational wing of India’s intelligence, played a key
role in the entire covert action project. The SSB, born as a ‘clandestine resistance
force’, had spread across the sensitive areas bordering East Pakistan. A large
number of village volunteers from the border areas were employed as spies,
informants and observers – their knowledge of the terrain allowed evasion of
arrests while easily crisscrossing the borders. The organisation had about 47
intelligence posts along the East Pakistan border.60 These posts collected vital
tactical intelligence that came in handy for the armed forces when the war broke
out in December. The intelligence posts and the wide network that the SSB had
cast also helped apprehend over 300 Pakistani agents and informers, making it a
key counterespionage and counter-sabotage organisation alongside the IB.61
At the operational level, the SSB was tasked to provide basic administrative
support and instructors for “specialised training in advanced techniques of guerrilla
warfare”. In two main centres, at Haflong and Debendranagar, the SSB trained a
total of 5,290 guerrillas in the use of firearms and explosives; imparted field train
ing in techniques of ambush, sabotage of critical military infrastructure; and also
offered political motivation to sustain the morale of the fighters.62 At one point,
the BSF wished to start an auxiliary unit and sought the SSB’s assistance. The latter
promised to build it in a week and was promptly accomplished.63 Therefore, the
SSB was running both an intelligence operation and a guerrilla campaign in sup
port of the Indian Army’s war efforts.
More interesting is the contribution of the SFF, which, as noted, comprised
largely of Tibetans. The purpose of its creation was purely to secure India from
China, in the event of a repeat of 1962. On a request from Indira Gandhi, the
SFF became the organisation that played a stellar role in tackling several border
irritants that could have severely frustrated India’s war plans. In her letter to the
SFF, Indira had written:
“we cannot compel you to fight a war for us, but the fact is that General
AAK Niazi is treating the people of East Pakistan very badly. India has to
do something about it… It would be appreciated if you could help us fight
the war for liberating the people of Bangladesh”.64
Following this request, orders came from the Central Tibetan Administration in
Dharamsala that stated, “the Indian government is in a very critical situation… and
our participation could help save a lot of Indian lives”.65 A former SFF operative
named Dapon Ratuk Ngawang recounted that:
“We were thoroughly trained in commando warfare to fight the Chinese;

we were requested to use these skills to fight in the Bangladesh war. The
Indian authorities had assured us that the Indian Army would fight with
the Tibetans for the cause of Tibet. Their reasoning was that the Tibetan
soldiers alone could not defeat the Chinese army. That’s why we decided
to join the Bangladesh war. It was in the hope that the Indian Army will
help us militarily one day to fight the Chinese”.66
Under the command of Inspector General Sujan Singh Uban, the SFF played
an instrumental role in organising and training the Bengali rebels to operate
behind enemy lines. In addition, the SFF itself conducted operations around
the Chittagong Hill Tracks – bordering Myanmar and East Pakistan – organised
in three columns. Operating alongside a section of the Mukti Bahini, the SFF
was involved in commando raids and capture of Pakistani posts; most impactful
being the blockade of the Arakan road to deny the enemies an escape route
into Myanmar. The order for this blockade came from General Manekshaw
and is considered as the conclusive move that led to the surrender of General
Niazi.67 As victory was declared and the commandos came out in celebration,
the locals as well as the Indian soldiers at Chittagong were stunned by their
existence. It is reported that they were quickly ordered back into the shadows
and, have ever since earned the title “The Phantoms of Chittagong”.68
The other important reason for employing the SFF was to maintain plausible
deniability. Kao, having headed the ARC during the IB days, was acutely aware of
the ways of covert operations. The advantage that Kao sought in employing
the SFF was that a group of Tibetans, equipped with Bulgarian Kalashnikov
and US-made carbines could easily hide an Indian role.69 Moreover, amidst the
rising chaos, it could be safely assumed that Pakistan would be least bothered
about hunting Tibetan translators and interrogators. Thus, the SFF offered an
operational flexibility and effectiveness like no other organisation.
With regards to the ARC, although nothing is known of its exact role, it is
widely accepted that the agency played an important part in aerial photography
and reconnaissance. Therefore, in toto, the DGS was central to the development
of intelligence coverage of the frontier regions as well as training and operating
the Bengali guerrillas.
The IB contributed to the covert operations by conducting counterintelligence
operations. Posing as refugees, a large contingent of Pakistani intelligence opera
tives had entered India for subversion and sabotage operations. By August 1971 at
least 400 trained agents were nabbed from the states of Assam and Meghalaya
alone.70 The IB was already engaged in the region as the Naga and Meitei rebels in
India’s Northeast were in contact with Pakistani handlers in East Pakistan.71
Therefore, both HUMINT and radio intercept capabilities of the IB, had
already taken roots in the region. Closer to the war, the bureau was tasked with
“intense internal security to prevent the subversive/sabotage elements from
acting”.72 In addition, given the communal nature of the crackdown underway
in East Pakistan, mostly targeting the Hindus, the IB was tasked with mon
itoring communal groups in the eastern states.73 Certain influential individuals
like Altaf Hussain Majumdar, a minister in Assam, were actively encouraging
Muslim youth to join the Mujahid training camps run by Pakistan to counter
the Mukti Bahini.74
Counterintelligence responsibilities also covered monitoring of other foreign
intelligence services operating in the region. Calcutta, being the bastion of com
munist movement in India, was the base for several Soviet and Chinese spies. Also,
Bangladeshi politicians Maulana Bhasani and Khondaker Mushtoq Ahmed were in
touch with the Chinese and American intelligence. The Indian intelligence had, to
the best of its abilities, exploited the knowledge of the politicians’ acquaintanceship
with the foreign services to India’s advantage.75 Thus, while the R&AW and the
DGS trained the Mukti Bahini in intelligence and guerrilla tactics, the IB guaran
teed internal security through counterintelligence operations. This then allowed
the BSF and the Indian Armed Forces to focus on further strengthening the rebels’
fighting capabilities.
The core of the Mukti Bahini’s fighting force was developed by the BSF and
the Indian Armed Forces. Initially the BSF was tasked with training and equipping
the fighters. A gruesome war ensued between the Mukti Bahini and the Pakistani
Razakars/Mujahid. It is noted that, at the beginning, except Europeans, nobody
dared move around in Dacca during the night.76 Anyone moving around was shot
by the Razakars on suspicion that they were the Mukti Bahini, while the Mukti
Bahini shot on suspicion that they were the Razakars. As it became clear to the
Bengalis that the cycle of violence and reprisals would not end, they began taking
the side of the stronger Mukti Bahini. The BSF had also created a special com
mando unit called the “Black Shirts” for ambushing the Pakistani forces in several
locations.77 By May, however, the freedom fighters had started to feel the pain
inflicted by the superior Pakistani forces. At this juncture, the Indian Armed Forces
had to intervene in support of the BSF, resulting in the core of the Mukti Bahini
comprising of the Niamit Bahini – the actual fighting force; Gona Bahini – irre
gular forces and saboteurs; and, Bicchus (scorpions) – female units mostly operating
in intelligence, communications and subversive roles.78
There was also a Mukti Bahini naval wing. Ports were the backbone of East
Pakistan’s economy as well as security, and there were several Bengalis working in
the docks and ports that gave India valuable targets to hit. In addition, as the next
section will illustrate, India had managed to shut the airspace for Pakistani flights
that caused Pakistan to rely extensively on waterways to sustain its war efforts in
the east. Therefore, targeting the ports had a crippling effect on Pakistan’s overall
war efforts. The role and achievements of the Mukti Bahini naval wing as descri
bed by Mihir Roy, India’s Director of Naval Intelligence, is as follows:
“Mukti Bahini frogmen operated in the riverine areas with the aim of
neutralising the main seaports to prevent [military] supplies… and stop the
traditional exports of jute, tea, coir, etc. which earned badly needed for
eign exchange for Pakistan’s military dictators… The frogmen held East
Pakistan in a state of siege in the highest traditions of war at sea and that
too without possessing a single oceangoing vessel”.79
Despite all these developments, there were numerous differences between the
Indian Armed Forces and the Mukti Bahini that was inhibiting the speed of
training and operations. Here, the R&AW Calcutta Station, headed by Joint
Director P.N. Banerjee, became indispensable in both informing New Delhi of
the troubles as well as mending the affairs.80 The first major difference origi
nated from India’s cautious approach in equipping the guerrillas, owing to
concerns about maintaining deniability. As a result, arms had to be siphoned
from a third party, or sparingly distributed only to those cadres who were
confident of perfect execution of operations. Despite the question of deniability
being given prominence, it appears that foreign intelligence agencies, especially
the British, had a fairly clear picture of the training camps.81 Second, at several
instances, the objectives and procedures of the Indian security forces were at
loggerheads with that of the liberation forces. In some instances, the BSF gave
fire support to the guerrillas, while in others, the BSF was actively disarming
the guerrillas for fear of unthoughtful actions by the latter.82
The Indian Army too had its differences with the guerrillas.83 Three brigades
of the Bangladesh Army called Z, K and S forces, comprising of infantry bat
talions and an artillery battery had been raised and deployed under the com
mand of Colonel Osmani, an officer of EBR who had fled Dhaka. Despite
being trained by the Indian Army, Colonel Osmani’s forces were in conflict
with their trainers since the Bangla forces, being remnants of the Pakistani
Army, had distinct operational styles that were incompatible with the Indian
Army. The R&AW’s reports to New Delhi were absolutely candid in covering
all grievances and complaints of the Bengali fighters.
By virtue of long association, the Bengali refugees and liberation forces were
comfortable dealing with the R&AW. Col Menon and Banerjee were regularly
informed about the conditions in the training camps and their requirements.
The July report, sent by Banerjee expressed discontent and dissatisfaction
within the Bangladesh Army, which included limited availability of arms,
medical facilities and payments. The report also enclosed within it the criticisms
of operational interference and heavy-handed approach of the Indian Army
commanders.84 Finally, involvement in covert actions had also made the
R&AW aware of the probable dangers of overly relying on Bengali soldiers
who had previously served in the Pakistan Army. Appreciating the factional
differences in the Bengali camp, the agency had organised another militia
known as “Mujib Bahini” under the leadership of Fazlul Haq Moni, Mujib’s
nephew. This group was trained by General Sujan Singh Uban of the SFF and
played an important role in corroborating the R&AW’s intelligence reportage.
It was Banerjee’s idea to create the Mujib Bahini to offset the emergence of an
“Army lobby” in independent Bangladesh.85
Thus, the Indian intelligence bureaucracies had worked collectively towards
training the Bengali rebels, frustrating Pakistani intelligence operations and
conducting sabotage operations behind the enemy lines. While all these were
in play, the R&AW had not lost sight of its primary role, which was to provide
warning intelligence on the enemy’s capabilities and intentions.
Intelligence Basis for the Preparation and Conduct of the War

It has been noted earlier that the idea to exploit the crisis in East Pakistan towards
the liberation of Bangladesh was mooted by the R&AW. Joint Director Banerjee,
seizing the opportunity, had briefed his subordinates that India should teach
Pakistan a “lesson it would never forget”.86 To accomplish this, the R&AW
would have to keep New Delhi regularly updated with strategic intelligence on
Pakistan. To do so, the agency had to undertake one final, yet spectacular,
operation before the war. This operation not only frustrated the Pakistan Army’s
war preparations, but also allowed the agency to monitor the enemy preparations
with relative ease.
Jammu & Kashmir (J&K), an Indian state bordering West Pakistan, had been
an important area of concern in Indo-Pak relations. Two failed attempts to
militarily occupy the state had parallelly led Pakistan to mount subversive
operations that gradually took the shape of terrorism. It was against this backdrop
that the R&AW had assessed that a diversionary attack or infiltration in J&K was
a distinct possibility.87 In January 1971, as Colonel Menon’s report predicted a
mass rebellion in East Bengal, a security development in J&K provided an
opportunity for the R&AW to conduct an operation that would in effect kill
two birds with one stone. First, it would allow the agency to delink West and
East Pakistan, which would make military preparations difficult for Pakistan.
Second, although Mujib was co-operating with India, the R&AW was yet to
assess his stance on Kashmir. The situation developing in Kashmir presented the
agency with an opportunity to make this assessment.
An infiltrator from Pakistan Occupied Kashmir was captured by the Border
Security Force (BSF), which revealed a plan hatched by a Pakistan-sponsored
terrorist group called the National Liberation Front to hijack an Indian flight.
On 30 January 1971, notwithstanding the revelation, an Indian Airlines flight
from Srinagar – capital of J&K – was hijacked by Hashim Qureshi and his
cousin Ashraf Qureshi and forced to land in Lahore.88 The 26 hostages on
board were released, but the flight was burnt down after the hijackers were met
and greeted by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto as freedom fighters. Mujib, however, chose
to condemn the attack, which gave the Indian agencies a positive indication of
his stance on Kashmir.
Two days later, a livid G.M. Sadiq – Chief Minister of J&K – wrote to Mrs.
Gandhi terming the incident a horrible case of intelligence failure as Hashim, a
Pakistani agent and hijacker, had worked in the BSF as a sub-inspector.89 Sadiq
accused that, as a sub-inspector, Hashim had gathered vital intelligence for his
bosses in Islamabad, which had enabled the hijacking. The truth, however, was
that Hashim was working for India.90 He was initially an agent of the Pakistani
intelligence sent to hijack the plane when it would be piloted by Rajiv Gandhi.91
On being caught, instead of punishing him, the R&AW and the BSF, with the
approval of Indira, turned him into an Indian agent in return for clemency. The
flight that was hijacked and set ablaze was an old decommissioned flight called
Ganga, which was specifically chosen by the R&AW. The hijackers were briefly
hailed as heroes in Pakistan, but later imprisoned for lengthy terms on realisation of
the Indian plot. In addition to learning Mujib’s intentions on Kashmir, the
operation was an intelligence coup achieved by Kao with the intention of
throwing international spotlight on Pakistan’s sponsorship of terrorism.92
New Delhi immediately ordered the closure of Indian airspace for Pakistani
flights, which meant that the sole connectivity between West and East Pakistan
would be by sea, around the southern coast of India and stopping over at Sri
Lanka for refuelling. In pursuance of the ‘Indira Doctrine’, however, the
R&AW had already established a strong presence in Sri Lanka.93 Every Pakis
tani ship entering the Colombo harbour and aircraft refuelling at the Bandar
anaike Airport was monitored and reported by the agency’s station in
Colombo.94 Therefore, the R&AW had managed to not only frustrate Paki
stan’s logistic capability but also did so in a manner that facilitated monitoring
of troop and material movements from the West to East Pakistan.
Similarly, India had made another breakthrough in collecting intelligence
from China since Pakistan’s increasing military capability was in part facilitated
by Chinese assistance. In 1964, under the auspices of Gyalo Thondup, brother
of the Dalai Lama, Mr Wang, the Deputy Director of Taiwanese national
security had visited New Delhi, met DIB Mullik and established formal intel
ligence ties between India and Taiwan.95 This gave the IB a vital source of
intelligence on China, which the R&AW later inherited. Nevertheless, the
overall Indian intelligence coverage on Pakistan and China was made difficult
by the respective nation’s counterintelligence.
In Pakistan, diplomatic cover guaranteed no immunity as officers were
“beaten and administered electric shocks” on suspicion of espionage by the
ISI.96 In China, as recalled by an R&AW officer of the era, racial differences
made diplomatic cover the main way of espionage, but “a diplomat’s life in
Beijing was tantamount to house arrest, with even the domestic help spying on
us. The only source of information, thus, was the diplomatic community of
friendly countries, especially the Soviets and Vietnamese”.97 Hence, the
R&AW was forced to expand its network globally to source intelligence on
Pakistan and China. A number of stations were, thence, established. Some
important ones with their objectives are stated below:98
• Paris and Bonn: China was Pakistan’s most reliable defence supplier, and
the R&AW had learnt that China was trying to acquire military techno
logical know-how from West Germany, while Pakistan was trying to
equip its Air Force and Navy with French mirage aircraft and submarines,
respectively. The agency had also received reports of Pakistani negotiations
with West Germany and other European nations to buy tanks. Therefore,
the Paris and Bonn stations were to collect such intelligence.
• Istanbul: This station was granted the greatest importance of all and sought
to be supervised by a senior officer, as Turkey and Pakistan shared the
closest military relations as members of the Baghdad Pact. The Turkish
Defence College and numerous other defence installations were situated in
Istanbul, where Pakistani military personnel were trained. Turkish officers
had even been visiting Pakistan for various purposes, which had made
Istanbul an important unit for the R&AW.
• Hanoi and Phnom Penh: Hanoi provided the agency an ideal location to
establish a listening post to monitor both the Chinese and Pakistani
movements in the Bay of Bengal. Phnom Penh was considered critical to
study the Chinese intentions.
• Mauritius, Fiji and Trinidad: The three archipelagos that spread from the
Indian to the Pacific Oceans, were home to a large diaspora of Indians.
The R&AW’s logic for the establishment of these units were to use them
“as listening posts as well as jumping boards for launching clandestine
operations and servicing them”.
Thus, having established its network globally, the R&AW reported an

improvement in Rawalpindi’s military capabilities since the 1965 war and
estimated that a war fighting capacity of 90–150 days was existent.99
New Delhi was informed that Pakistan was supplied with helicopters,
torpedoes, missiles and Daphne class submarines from Paris. There were
some discrepancies in the estimates drawn on the wireless equipment and
tanks sourced from Beijing, which became clear only after the war from the
interrogation of prisoners. The U.S. had supplied fighter planes through third
parties to maintain secrecy and avoid domestic backlash.100 To balance the
growing Pakistani capabilities, Indian defence planners were able to source
weapons and equipment from the Soviet Union and Israel. While the Soviet
Union had an obligation under the treaty of friendship and co-operation, the
case of Israeli assistance is relevant from India’s intelligence point of view. India
and Israel had no formal relations until 1992; and, Israel was an ally of the U.
S. – an ally of Pakistan. P.N. Haksar, however, managed to establish covert
links with the Jewish state, and through an arms manufacturer called Shlomo
Zabludowicz, mortars and ammunition were clandestinely procured. In all this,
the R&AW had acted as an important intermediary.101
Despite such war preparations moving in earnestness, the Indian government
was still keen on avoiding war if liberation could be achieved without military
involvement. Moreover, even in the eventuality of a war, India did not want
to be seen as the aggressor. Ergo, the Indian military mobilisations in the east
had to be a well-guarded secret. Knowing the slow-paced mobilisation of the
forces, Manekshaw disagreed and called for complete mobilisation to the bor
ders. It was finally decided that the troops will be moved, but not till the
borders, and will assume the cover of counterinsurgency and anti-Maoist
operations. The R&AW was tasked with conducting deception operations to
mislead the Americans into believing that the Indian Army was still unprepared
for war. This it did by convincing Khondaker Mushtoq Ahmed – a Banglade
shi politician and an alleged American intelligence source – of the Indian
military commitment towards anti-Maoist and counterinsurgent operations,
forbidding war preparations.102
Once the Indian Army was ready, New Delhi had expected Pakistan to
attack in the west to compel diversion of the Indian troop build-up from the
east. The perception was spot on as the thinking in Islamabad was that, “the
defence of East Pakistan lay in West Pakistan”.103 Therefore, India required
two things at this moment – precise intelligence on Pakistan’s intentions in the
west; and, a quick conclusion to the war in the east, after it had begun. Against
this backdrop, the D-day was fixed for 4 December 1971. However, on 29
November Pakistan planned a 1967 Israeli style pre-emptive strike on the IAF
bases in the west. On 30 November the Australian Military Attaché in New
Delhi rang up Major General Inder Gill and informed him of the evacuation of
the families of diplomats from Islamabad, which was a clear indication that war
was approaching.104 Yet, at that point India was only psychologically prepared
for a strike from the West. Questions about the place, time and nature of the
attack still loomed large.
On 3 December India was struck by the PAF and war was officially declared
one day before India had planned to take the initiative. In reality, the air strikes
caused more damage to Pakistan than India, as the former was now officially the
aggressor. India, notwithstanding its psychological readiness for a Pakistani strike in
the west, also had credible intelligence about the upcoming air strikes. Col Menon
received a secret wireless communication from an informant operating in Karachi
that the PAF was preparing for an attack on 1 December.105 The information was
passed on to Air Vice-Marshal Lalu Grewal, Director of Air Intelligence, and the
IAF was put on high alert. The IAF expressed its agitation when the strikes did not
come until 2 December. However, on request from Col Menon, the IAF exten
ded the state of high alertness until dawn of 4 December. On 3 December the
PAF launched its pre-emptive strikes and were caught by surprise. Later, investi
gation revealed that the information was accurate, but the analysts at the R&AW
had erred in “receiving the Morse transmission and decoding it”.106 Thus, when
the attacks came, it was more of a relief than a surprise to New Delhi as it gave the
much-desired casus belli to declare war.107
The final strategic intelligence requirement during the war was the probable
role the U.S. and China would play, being allies of Pakistan. It was here that
India sought the assistance of the Soviets to augment its intelligence capabilities.
A member of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) from that time has stated
that “the Soviets had put up a special dedicated satellite” for gathering intelli
gence of interest to India.108 Also, under the command of Brigadier M.B.K.
Nair, the R&AW’s own signals intelligence (SIGINT) penetrated Pakistan
Army communications. On 10 December the agency intercepted an American
message that indicated that the 7th fleet had reached Sri Lanka from Viet
nam.109 The same day, Soviet intelligence learnt of a British naval group led by
aircraft carrier HMS Eagle approaching Indian territorial waters. In response,
they dispatched a nuclear armed flotilla from Vladivostok.110 On 15 December,
a day before the surrender of Pakistan, the R&AW observed the USS Enter
prise’s movement past Thailand. Admiral Kruglyakov of the Soviet Navy recalls
that his orders were to surface “the submarines when the Americans appear”,
and the events in the seas went as per the Soviet plan. Shortly thereafter, an
intercepted message from Admiral Gordon, commander of the British fleet, to
the 7th fleet commander said, “Sir, we are too late. There are the Russian
atomic submarines here, and a big collection of battleships”.111
With regards to China, three theories have emerged to explain Chinese inaction
during the war, despite Beijing’s insistence during Kissinger’s visit that Pakistan be
protected. One theory is that the domestic political complexities emerging out of
challenges to Mao’s authority within the Politburo dissuaded him from making
military moves against India. Chinese diplomatic communications with foreign
diplomats hoping that India and Pakistan will exercise restraint is seen in this
light.112 The second theory, largely expressed by Indian military officers who have
written on the war, is that the snow-clad winters made Chinese intervention
impossible – a subtle appreciation of their own wisdom as planners, as this was a
factor considered while planning. However, one has to only look back to realise
that these were precisely the considerations Mao made before the 1962 war. In fact,
while planning for the 1971 war, despite the weather considerations, Indian mili
tary planners had considered the possibility of a Chinese intervention. It was against
this backdrop that the Bangladesh operations had called for a speedy conclusion, so
that “the borrowed formations from the north could revert in time to meet the
likely Chinese reaction”. This sort of a plan called for a close co-ordination
between intelligence agencies and operational planners, which Major-General
Sukhwant Singh termed as “something hitherto unpractised in India”.113 In the
worst-case scenario, the Indo-Soviet treaty would come to India’s rescue, which
actually forms the basis of the third theory that is held by some quarters in India.
According to this theory, the Chinese tried to mobilise troops to the NEFA
border following an SOS by Pakistan, which was picked up by the R&AW’s
SIGINT facility.114 Following through with the Indo-Soviet treaty, the Soviets
mobilised along the Sino-Soviet border, prompting the People’s Liberation Army
(PLA) troops to fall back, well behind their positions against NEFA. Another Indian
Intelligence Studies scholar Prem Mahadevan, citing an authoritative source who
had served on the General Officer Commanding-in-Chief Eastern Command,
Lieutenant General Jagjit Singh Aurora’s staff, confirmed these details, while adding
that Moscow had mobilised 47 divisions.115 Also, General Manekshaw had,
interestingly, shown a calculated restraint in withdrawing troops from the
China borders for East Pakistan operations until 8 December – his subordinates
could not understand why, and were considerably irritated.116
Looking in retrospect, a RAND Corporation study conducted in 1982
asserted that the deterrent value against China observed by the Soviet military
planners during the 1971 war formed the basis for Soviet military planning in
the Siberian and far-east region for the next decade. Most notably, the logic
behind signing the November 1978 treaty with Vietnam – where it could take
weeks for the Soviet ground forces to arrive – was based on the deterrence
achieved in 1971.117 There is, therefore, some force to what the proponents of
the third theory have to say. The only anxiety the Soviets had was regarding
India’s intentions in West Pakistan, which New Delhi allayed via P.N. Dhar’s
visit to Moscow, where India assured that it had no territorial ambitions in the
west. With this anxiety settled, PM Gandhi could threaten the Chinese of
Soviet action in the Sinkiang region in the event of a PLA mobilisation.118
Therefore, the R&AW had provided an overall strategic intelligence picture
of the enemy that India was facing in 1971, and wherever required, it also
played an important role in augmenting Indian capabilities through liaison
channels with friendly nations like the USSR and Israel. Finally, beyond stra
tegic intelligence, the agency also provided the armed forces with operational
and tactical intelligence, which had strategic consequences. These will be
explored in the next sub-section.
R&AW’s Provision of Operational and Tactical Intelligence

The R&AW played a stellar role in even providing tactical and operational intel
ligence during the war. This needs examination not to highlight the agency’s
prowess, but to understand a precedent that it set up, which would have far-
reaching implications on later instances of surprises like the 1999 Kargil War,
which will be discussed in the next chapter. A distinction between what was
within the realm of strategic intelligence and what went beyond was lost on the
consumers who felt that every bit of information on the enemy had to come from
the R&AW. This is an aspect that will be dealt with in detail in the next chapter,
this section – with a few examples – provides the basis for it by narrating the role
the agency played at operational and tactical levels leading to strategic outcomes.
The R&AW’s coverage of East Pakistan was excellent owing to its own
TECHINT capabilities and the HUMINT generated by the DGS and the
Bengali rebels. The rebels who were former soldiers of the EBR and EPR
were extremely familiar with East Pakistani terrain and society. With the
agency training them for intelligence operations, information flow from within
the enemy territory was almost flawless. The Bengali cadres were also helpful in
weeding out Pakistani spies and detecting any misinformation. With such
intelligence coverage of the region, when the IAF struck the Governor’s house
in Dhaka, which interrupted an important meeting of key individuals and in
effect caused the surrender of Niazi, the R&AW was unsurprisingly the pri
mary driver of the action. As a closely guarded secret meeting, the information
from the agency reached the IAF only 45 minutes before commencement. But,
as the IAF got airborne, fresh intelligence inputs showed a shift in the venue to
a congested neighbourhood.119 The agency picked up this information through
a HUMINT source, and an agent pinpointed the exact building where the
meeting was being held.120 This was one such instance where operational
intelligence had strategic ramifications, which was produced mainly because of
the in-depth intelligence dominance the R&AW had achieved in the east.
There were, however, significant challenges to intelligence-military co-operation
in the east. Calcutta station chief Banerjee was uncomfortable with General
Manekshaw’s request for sharing war bulletins between the Indian Army and
the Bangladesh Army. In his opinion, that was tantamount to making the
R&AW a “courier of the Eastern Command” and raised the issue with Kao.
Kao persuaded Banerjee to undertake this role, personally or through a field
officer, so that R&AW could be better informed about the developments in
the two armies.121 There were also issues over what intelligence could be
shared with the Indian Army. Bearing in mind the operational considerations
of the Indian Army, Kao directed Banerjee to share with General Aurora por
tions of the R&AW reports dealing with the eastern sector. Sharing of any
information concerning West Pakistan was categorically denied.
In the western theatre, there were both intelligence success and failure stories,
which raised both praises and complaints from the Army. However, the fact that
the war was won by India failed to generate sufficient attention to the complaints.
One success story in the west was the provision of the co-ordinates of the vital
Karachi port to the IAF. The R&AW Kochi station had managed to procure the
precise location of the port on the basis of the nautical information provided by a
German ship that had reached the Kochi port after departing from Kar
achi.122 This information was sent to New Delhi, which was then shared
with the armed forces. Such success stories notwithstanding, there were a
few operational intelligence errors that brought criticisms against the agency.
The official history of the 1971 war as recorded by the Indian Ministry of
Defence points to two failed instances and makes an important observation.
Owing to a late October reorganisation of Pakistan’s ORBAT, the R&AW lost
track of some offensive formations in the West, especially the 7th Infantry Divi
sion. It came to be renowned as the “Phantom Division” because of its alleged
appearance at several locations across the border.123 Citing two other similar
instances, where the agency had missed a road or presence of troops in a parti
cular location causing harm to the advancing Indian troops, the official history
noted that at the tactical level, “intelligence proved far from satisfactory”.124
However, it ended its analysis of the war commenting that:
“it should be noted that combat intelligence in the battle zone is basically
the concern of the field commander”.
The Army, nonetheless, raised complaints over the R&AW’s inefficiency in

producing such tactical level intelligence while failing to realise that certain
informational gaps remained unfulfilled due to the failure of the Army to share
its intelligence with the R&AW. Information procured through prisoner
interrogation, for instance, did not reach the central agencies that could have
made better sense of the information.125 Hence, such allegations of failure,
which are a consequence of an ‘end-user’ syndrome, had to be critically asses
sed (see next chapter for more on this aspect).
The Bangladesh Liberation War: A Result of Intelligence and

Policy Successes
So far, the chapter has highlighted the impressive accomplishments of Indian
intelligence bureaucracies in informing India’s military planning and policy prior
to and during the 1971 war. The previous chapter had observed that the IB had
also provided sufficient warnings to the political and military leaderships about
China’s nefarious designs. On observation of the inputs provided by the IB and the
decisions taken by New Delhi, it was concluded that the 1962 Sino-Indian war
was a consequence of both intelligence and policy failures. What about the 1971
war? Was it just an intelligence success that caused India’s exceptional handling of
the East-Pakistani crisis and clinical performance during the war? Even here, the
outcome was a consequence of both intelligence and policy successes.
The birth of the R&AW is owed in large part to the ‘Indira Doctrine’, which
sought to extend India’s influence in the immediate neighbourhood. Therefore,
the emergence of the agency was a result of a policy decision aimed at devising a
security strategy for India. In the words of scholar Zorawar Daulet Singh:
“Indira Gandhi’s decision to create a dedicated external intelligence arm,

[the R&AW], headed by one of her most trusted advisors, Kao, underscored
an outlook that India needed to develop ‘the instruments of statecraft’ to
pursue its strategic interests in South Asia”.126
Since the creation of the agency was itself a policy decision with a clear goal of
upholding national interests in India’s neighbourhood, there was bound to be
improved acceptance of its inputs. Thus, when in 1969 the agency reported
that the liberation of Bangladesh was inevitable and India must prepare for it,
the political leadership readily accepted the assessment. From its inception to
the conclusion of the 1971 war, the R&AW saw active involvement of the
political leadership in the intelligence process. Such involvement did not entail
interference in operational matters where the intelligence managers held sig
nificant autonomy. On the contrary, political involvement was to facilitate
organisational development and enhance interagency co-operation.
For instance, Indira placed the R&AW in the Cabinet Secretariat primarily
to sustain its foreign policy focus as well as maintain proximity with the deci
sion-making apparatus in New Delhi. The proximity enabled periodic tasking,
review and feedback of the agency’s working and products. Indira’s closest aide
and Principal Secretary P.N. Haksar, was closely involved in reviewing and
improving the working of the intelligence agencies. In one of the review
meetings, he reflected that:
“urgent measures were called for to make the whole intelligence set-up
more dynamic and responsive to the requirements of the Government’s
policies and priorities…while each organisation should be complete in itself,
and develop according to the tasks given to it, at the highest levels of control
and command, there should be a clearer perception of the Government’s
policies and their requirements and an identical commitment to and under
standing of them. This would be facilitated by some scope for lateral
movement at that level and inter-changeability. The present system, which
in some way, is a hang-over of the pattern as it existed before independence,
does not permit this, because of some arbitrary inequalities”.127
With such high-level involvement in the intelligence-policy processes, many of

the structural flaws impeding intelligence effectiveness were weeded out. For
instance, it was realised that the DGS held an annual budget of 17 crore rupees
in the fiscal year 1970/71. The annual review, however, indicated that inputs
of the DGS matched that of the R&AW, which was leading to unnecessary
duplication of intelligence. In light of this, it was decided that if the DGS was
“more closely meshed with the R&AW and the available number of posts be
better utilised eschewing all duplication” an estimated 25 percent of the project
outlay could be saved.128 Therefore, political involvement in the intelligence
business ensured both improvement in capabilities as well as reception of the
intelligence product.
Similarly, the other major consumer of strategic intelligence, i.e. the military,
also showed equal enthusiasm for intelligence-led-policymaking. Since the JIC
continued with its defunct reputation, the Chiefs of Staff Committee
(COSC) under the directorship of General Sam Manekshaw emerged as the
de facto all-source assessment body supporting military policy and planning.
The R&AW had itself emerged as an all-source assessment body since Kao
had employed a military and foreign service adviser to task and set prio
rities.129 But, Manekshaw’s previous experience with intelligence agencies
compelled him to demand a degree of control over the intelligence process and
product. In 1969, while engaged in counterinsurgency duties, the R&AW and the
IB had reported that some 2,000 hostile Naga had crossed over the Burmese bor
ders into the Yunnan province. The Military Intelligence, however, placed the
estimate at about 450. Several months later, interrogation of captured insurgents
by Indian and Burmese armies revealed that the Military Intelligence’s estimates
were right.130 Manekshaw had, thus, come to believe that the civilian agencies
tended to over-estimate threats. Consequently, co-ordinated assessment of threats
were sought to supplant such errors.
Manekshaw and Kao also shared an amicable personal relationship, which
helped ease some of the obstacles to intelligence-military relationship and
maintained a steady feedback channel. For instance, when the R&AW sent
reports on occasions that were generic, Manekshaw wrote to R.N. Kao that,
“while facts were important, what he needed was an assessment based on those
facts that would enable him to take a decision”.131 Thus, under Manekshaw,
the COSC became a point of interaction for the representatives of the R&AW,
the IB, the BSF and the service intelligence directors to meet on a daily basis
and assess intelligence requirements. The Prime Minister and her advisors were
also updated on the key findings of these meetings, which became part of their
political and economic analyses of the adversary.132 Therefore, the overall
decision-making apparatus, both at political and military levels, during the 1971
war was a clear reflection of exemplary intelligence performances that were
made possible and meaningful by adroit policy choices. This makes the 1971
war a case of both intelligence and policy success.
Nonetheless, as witnessed in the section on operational and tactical intelligence,
there were some complaints raised by the consumers about the quality of the
intelligence product. This emerged mainly by a misguided perception about the
role of strategic intelligence agencies. Logically, post-event analysis should have
triggered a debate around this issue. Instead, the glory of victory in war closed
all avenues for introspection. After the war, the Indian Army sent a word of
appreciation for the R&AW’s contribution. Indira Gandhi, however, is
reported to have remarked that:
“R&AW officers should not allow this praise to go to their head. The
Army is generous in praising the R&AW because it won the war”.133
Prophetic were these words, for this is exactly what happened in 1999. In the
next chapter, we shall examine this and many other factors that led to the
surprise on the Kargil hilltops.
Notes
1 ‘Special Assessments of the Situation between India and Pakistan (Guerrilla
Activities)’, FCO 37/919, 20 October 1971, UKNA.
2 David J. Gibson, ‘Shock and Awe: A Sufficient Condition for Victory?’, Naval
War College Dissertation, 5 February 2001, pp. 9–10, available at https://apps.dtic.
mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a389508.pdf, accessed on 27 June 2019.
3 Interestingly, even the British were misled into believing that India lacked prior
information on Pakistan’s plans. The British reported that “there was little or no
warning of attack and in consequence air and ground defences were kept con
tinuously at a high state of readiness”. The reporting official also added that, “I was
told that with little or no warning and the high speed of attack – up to 600 knots –
the Gunners barely had the time to elevate their guns before the attack was over”.
The reasons for these will be explored later in this chapter, but for now, it is
noteworthy that a newly created Indian intelligence agency had managed to achieve
such a significant intelligence coup. ‘British High Commission, New Delhi to
Ministry of Defence, London’, FCO 37/1166, 24 January 1972, UKNA.
4 Cited in Srinath Raghavan, 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh,
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013, p. 234.
5 Ibid, p. 267.
6 ‘Some Economic Consequences of Two Pakistans’, Central Intelligence
Agency, May 1971, available at www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/
CIA-RDP85T00875R001700010032-4.pdf, accessed on 28 June 2019.
7 ‘Political Crisis in East Pakistan’, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, FCO37/892,
1971, p. 1, UKNA; Owen L. Sirrs, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate:
Covert Action and Internal Operations, London: Routledge, 2016, p. 72.
8 ‘Chronology of principal events in Bangladesh’, External Affairs, File No. WII/
105/16/71, NAI.
9 Arvindar Singh, Myths and Realities of Security and Public Affairs, New Delhi: Ocean
Books, 2011, p. 91.
10 Gary J. Bass, The Blood Telegram: India’s Secret War in East Pakistan, Noida:
Random House Publishers, 2013, p. 173.
11 Ibid.
13 Establishment-22 was the original name given to the organisation in recognition
of Uban’s service, who was from the Twenty-Second Artillery Regiment. It was
rechristened as the SFF in 1966. M.S. Kohli and Kenneth Conboy, Spies in the
Himalayas: Secret Missions and Perilous Climbs, Kansas: University Press of Kansas,
2002, p. 139.
14 Ibid, p. 16.
15 Ibid, p. 220.
16 Carole McGranahan, Arrested Histories: Tibet, the CIA, and Memories of a Forgotten
War, Durham: Duke University Press, 2010, p. 139.
17 Although the British SAS trained the SSB, the latter soon realised that the Pakistani
Army special forces unit Special Services Group had received similar training from the
American special forces, who had earlier been trained by the SAS. Consequently, the
SSB had to improvise and customise its training curriculum to match its operational
requirements. Interview with former SSB officer – S1, 24 January 2019.
18 Ibid.
19 Kohli and Conboy, Spies in the Himalayas, 2002, p. 19.
22 B. Raman, Intelligence: Past, Present and Future, New Delhi: Lancer Publishers,
2002, p. 63.
Delhi: Manas Publications, 2016, p. 153.
25 C. Raja Mohan, ‘Foreign Policy after 1990’, in David Malone, C. Raja Mohan
and Srinath Raghavan, The Oxford Handbook of Indian Foreign Policy, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2015, p. 138.
26 Notwithstanding the Indira Doctrine driving the need for a dedicated foreign intel
ligence service, there is a school of thought that believes that the political situation in
India during the Indira years was marked by an unprecedented consolidation of
power by the prime minister. She was particularly wary of the political challenge
posed by Home Minister Chavan. In order to weaken Chavan’s capabilities, it is
believed that Indira created the R&AW by bifurcating the IB, which was under the
Home Ministry. Several other bureaucracies like the Central Bureau of Investigation
(CBI) and the Department of Personnel were also transferred from the Home
Ministry to the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO). Nair, Inside IB and RAW, 2016, p.
154.; One officer from the era has also commented that Indira hated the IB, but “she
just about tolerated” the R&AW, suggesting that the R&AW was just another
bureaucracy as far as Indira was concerned. Vappala Balachandran, National Security
and Intelligence Management, New Delhi: Indus Source Books, 2014, p. 112.
28 Interview with former SSB officer – S1, 24 January 2019. In the interim, it was
the DGS that functioned as India’s foreign intelligence service.
29 Interview with former R&AW Special Secretary – R1, 19 August 2018.
30 Nair, Inside IB and RAW, 2016, pp. 154–155.
31 For a biographical account of R.N. Kao, see Nitin A. Gokhale, R.N Kao: Gentleman
Spymaster, New Delhi: Bloomsbury India, 2019.
32 ‘Rameshwar Nath Kao, Secretary, Cabinet Secretariat and Director of General
Security’, Leading Personalities in India, FCO 37/1923, 1977, UKNA.
33 Jairam Ramesh, Intertwined Lives: P.N. Haksar & Indira Gandhi, London: Simon
and Schuster, 2018.; Interview with former Home Secretary of India, R.D.
Pradhan, 14 November 2018.
34 Interview with former Home Secretary of India, R.D. Pradhan, 14 November 2018.
37 Nair, Inside IB and RAW, 2016, p. 155.
38 Interview with former R&AW Senior Field Officer – F1, 27 January 2019.
39 Michael Herman, Intelligence in Peace and War, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999, p. 9.
40 B.N. Mullik, My Years with Nehru: 1948–1964, Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1972,
p. 212.
41 Raman, The Kaoboys of R&AW, 2013, p. 87.
42 ‘Creation of the post of a Foreign Service Adviser at the Hqrs of the Research and
Analysis Wing for maintaining liaison with the Ministry of External Affairs’,
Haksar Papers-III Instalment, Subject File 227, 1970, NMML.
43 Ibid.
44 Gokhale, R.N. Kao, 2019.
45 Subir Bhaumik, Insurgent Crossfire: North-east India, New Delhi: Lancer Publishers,
1996, p. 32.
46 Ibid.
47 Chandrashekhar Dasgupta, ‘The Decision to Intervene: First Steps in India’s
Grand Strategy in the 1971 War’, Strategic Analysis, Vol. 40, No. 4, 2016, p. 322.
48 ‘Arshad Hussain’s Allegation’, Ministry of External Affairs, Haksar Papers-III
Instalment, Subject File 227, 1969, NMML.
49 Dasgupta, ‘The Decision to Intervene’, 2016, p. 323.
50 Ibid, p. 325.
51 ‘Threat of a Military Attack or Infiltration Campaign by Pakistan’, Haksar Papers
III Instalment, Subject File 220, 1971, NMML. Kao’s assessment that China
would be the ultimate beneficiary from the crisis in East Pakistan was later shared
by the British intelligence on learning from a secret source that the guerrilla
campaign was soon moving towards the Maoist control. The source was a former
Muslim League worker, who considered Sheikh Mujib Rahman as a “second
rater” who did not qualify to hold a senior position. ‘Political Crisis in East
Pakistan’, FCO 37/894, 15 October 1971, UKNA.
52 Ibid.
53 ‘Points which P.M. might consider making at the meeting of the Opposition
Leaders, to be held on Friday, May 7, to consider the situation in Bangla Desh.’,
Haksar Papers III Instalment, Subject File 220, 1971, NMML.
54 Ibid.
55 Bass, The Blood Telegram, 2013, pp. 136–141.
57 Natwar Singh, One Life is Not Enough: An Autobiography, New Delhi: Rupa &
Co., 2014, p. 153.
58 ‘Ministry of Information and National Affairs, External Publicity Wing, Government
of India’, Haksar Papers III Instalment, Subject File 220, 1 October 1971, NMML.
59 ‘Haksar to Gandhi’, Haksar Papers III Instalment, Subject File 227, 1971, NMML.
60 ‘SSB and Bangladesh’, Haksar Papers III Instalment, Subject File 220, 1971,
NMML.
61 Ibid.
62 Ibid.
64 Prabir Barua Chowdhury, ‘Phantoms in The Hills’, The Daily Star, 8 May 2019,
available at www.thedailystar.net/wide-angle/phantoms-the-hills-168325, acces
sed on 8 May 2019.
65 Claude Arpi, ‘The Tibetans who Fought the 1971 War’, Tibet Sun, 10 January
2012, available at www.tibetsun.com/interviews/2012/01/10/the-tibetans-who
fought-the-1971-war, accessed on 8 May 2019.
66 Ibid.
67 Chowdhury, ‘Phantoms in The Hills’, 2019.
68 Ibid.
69 Praveen Swami, India, Pakistan and the Secret Jihad, London: Routledge, 2006, p.
120.
70 Kapil Kak, ‘Revisiting the 1971 War and the IAF’s Role: India’s Interests and
Compulsions’, in Jasjit Singh, Role of Indian Air Force in 1971 War, New Delhi:
KW Publishers, 2013, p. 62.
71 M.K. Dhar, Open Secrets: India’s Intelligence Unveiled, New Delhi: Manas Publica
tions, 2012, p. 217.
72 Interview with former IB Assistant Director, R.N. Kulkarni, 10 January 2020.
73 ‘Letter from Habibur Rehman to Indira Gandhi’, Haksar Papers III Instalment,
Subject File 220, 1 November 1971, NMML.
74 Ibid.
75 K.F. Rustamji, The British, the Bandits and the Bordermen, New Delhi: Wisdom
Tree, 2009, p. 321.
76 ‘Political Crisis in East Pakistan’, FCO 37/894, 16 November 1971, UKNA. By
the end of August, it was clear to the British intelligence that the aim of the
Mukti Bahini’s tactics was to “disrupt the economy and hamstring the Army”.
However, in the Chittagong region, the British intelligence reported that “the
‘Naxalites’ with automatic weapons were out-gunning the Mukti Bahini and the
latter have sent a plea to their headquarters in India”. ‘Political Crisis in East
Pakistan’, FCO 37/893, October 1971, UKNA.; The overall assessment of the
British JIC at the end of August 1971 was that the Mukti Bahini would be unable
to effectively challenge the Pakistani Army. ‘The Guerrillas and the Internal
Political Situation’, FCO 37/920, 1 October 1971, UKNA.
77 S. Prasad, Official History of the 1971 India-Pakistan War, New Delhi: Ministry of
Defence, 1992, pp. 179–203.
78 Mihir K. Roy, War in the Indian Ocean, New Delhi: Lancer Publishers, 1995, p.
148.
79 Ibid, pp. 148–149, 174. For an updated version of the covert role played by the
Indian Navy, see M.N.R. Samant and Sandeep Unnithan, Operation-X: The
Untold Story of India’s Covert War in Bangladesh, New Delhi: Harper Collins, 2019.
80 ‘Report from the Joint Director R&AW’, Haksar Papers III Instalment, Subject
File 227, 3 July 1971, NMML.
81 ‘Special Assessments of Situation between India and Pakistan (Guerilla Activities)’,
FCO 37/919, 1971, UKNA.; The weak security around India’s covert operations
could have also been New Delhi’s way of pacifying public opinion that was
demanding some action in support of the Bengalis.
83 ‘Political Crisis in East Pakistan’, FCO 37/891, 1971, UKNA, p. 998.
85 Bhaumik, Insurgent Crossfire, 1996, p. 37.
86 Ibid, p. 146.
III Instalment, Subject File 220, 1971, NMML.
88 Swami, India, Pakistan and the Secret Jihad, 2006, pp. 112–113.
89 ‘Sadiq to Gandhi’, Haksar Papers III Instalment, Subject File 220, 1971, NMML.
90 Braj Mohan Sinha, The Samba Spying Case, New Delhi: Vikas, 1981, pp. 21–23.
91 Ibid.
92 Sinha, The Samba Spying Case, 1981, pp. 21–23.; Alistair Lamb, Kashmir: A
Disputed Legacy, 1846–1990, Hertingfordbury: Roxford Books, 1991, p. 293.
93 Sri Lanka had been an important intelligence target since the days of the IB.
When Mullik took over leadership in July 1950, his first reform was to rectify his
predecessor’s pattern of posting for intelligence officers in European capitals to
make India’s “limitrophe countries” the main targets. Sri Lanka, along with
Burma, China and Sikkim, had become the main targets. R.N. Kulkarni, Sin of
National Conscience, Mysore: Kritagnya Publications, 20014, p. 368.; Nair, Inside IB
and RAW, 2016, p. 94.
95 Anne F. Thurston and Gyalo Thondup, The Noodle Maker of Kalimpong: The
Untold Story of My Struggle for Tibet, Gurgaon: Random House India, 2016, p. 225.
98 ‘Opening of New Units of the R&AW in our Diplomatic Missions Abroad’,
Haksar Papers III Instalment, Sub File No. 227, 23 June 1970, NMML.
100 ‘Jordan sent Jets to Pakistan despite Ban, U.S. confirms’, Central Intelligence
Agency, 19 April 1972, available at accessed www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/
docs/CIA-RDP80-01601R000300210006-3.pdf, on 21 August 2019.
101 ‘Kao to Haksar’, Haksar Papers III Instalment, Subject File 220, 4 August 1971,
NMML.
102 Subir Bhaumik, ‘The Ghosts of RAW’, News in Asia, 18 March 2017, available at
https://newsin.asia/the-ghosts-of-raw, accessed on 15 August 2019.; In its 23 July
1971 report, the British High Commission had speculated that the reason for not
using the Indian Army in training the guerrillas was “probably to maintain a state
of readiness against a desperate Pakistani attack”. Bereft of credible intelligence
inputs this assessment was wide of the mark. ‘Indian Support for the East Pakistan
Guerrillas’, FCO 37/919, 23 July 1971, UKNA.
103 Hakeem Arshad Qureshi, The 1971 Indo-Pak War: A Soldier’s Narrative, Oxford:
104 Behram M. Panthaki and Zenobia Panthaki, Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw: The
Man and His Times, New Delhi: Niyogi Books, 2014, p. 114.
105 B. Raman, an intelligence officer who served during the war, has written that Col
Menon was running an agent in the office of General Yahya who informed about
the impending attacks in the last week of November. Raman, The Kaoboys of
R&AW, 2013, p. 72.; However, Col Menon (Nair) in his book mentions that it
was a Karachi based informant. This book has adopted the latter’s version of the
story while noting that his book mentions the date wrong – January 1972 instead
of December 1971. Nair, Inside IB and RAW, 2016, p. 165.
107 There is an interesting aspect to the targets chosen by Pakistan. In late October
1971, a Pakistani spy with a radio transmitter had been apprehended near the
Adampur Air Base. The IB and the IAF used the apprehended spy to relay false
information to his handler back in Pakistan. One such misleading information
mentioned the presence of impregnable air defence weapons networks in and
around the Adampur base. Subsequently, when the PAF air strikes came on 3
December, the Adampur air base was spared despite being within its immediate
reach. Interview with Air Marshal (retd) Narayan Menon, 20 July 2018.; Instead,
that night the PAF targeted IAF bases in Agra, Jodhpur, and others. The British
analysts in New Delhi could not make sense of the PAF’s choice of Agra. In their
report to London, they comically wrote, “we were puzzled to understand their
[PAF’s] insistence on this [Agra] airfield and came to the conclusion that it could
only be that the pilots wanted to see the Taj Mahal by moonlight”. ‘British High
Commission, New Delhi to Ministry of Defence, London’, FCO 37/1166, 24
January 1972, UKNA.; If this was indeed the case, the PAF pilots would have
been disappointed since the Taj was covered with “twigs and leaves so that its
marble would not glow in the moonlight and draw attention”. T.V. Rajeswar,
India: The Crucial Years, New Delhi: Harper Collins, 2015, p. 110.
108 ‘Interview of Ambassador Eric Gonsalves by Ambassador Kishan S. Rana’, 2010,
p. 51, available at www.icwa.in/WriteReadData/RTF1984/1497424125.pdf,
accessed on 21 August 2019.
109 Asif Mahfuz, ‘US Fleet in Bay of Bengal: A Game of Deception’, The Daily Star,
16 December 2013, www.thedailystar.net/news/us-fleet-in-bay-of-bengal-a-game
of-deception, accessed on 21 August 2019.
110 Ibid.
111 Ibid.
112 Raghavan, 1971, 2013, pp. 200–202.
113 Sukhwant Singh, India’s Wars since Independence: The Liberation of Bangladesh, New
Delhi: Lancer Publishers, 1980, p. 27.
114 A similar mobilisation and offering of an ultimatum were seen even during the
1965 Indo-Pak war. Ibid, p. 39.
115 Interview with Intelligence Studies Scholar, Dr. Prem Mahadevan, 27 February
2019.
116 J.F.R. Jacob, An Odyssey in War and Peace, New Delhi: Roli Books, 2011, pp.
71–81.
117 Harry Gelman, ‘The Soviet Far East Buildup and Soviet Risk-Taking Against
China’, RAND Corporation, 1982, pp. 64, 84, available at https://apps.dtic.mil/
dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a123838.pdf, accessed on 21 August 2019.
118 ‘Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s Briefing on the Indo-Pakistan War’, US
Department of State, Foreign Relations 1969–1976, Volume E-7, South Asia, 13
December 1971.
119 A.K. Tiwary, ‘1971 Air War: Battle for Air Supremacy’, Indian Defence Review, 15
November 2017, available at www.indiandefencereview.com/spotlights/1971-a
ir-war-battle-for-air-supremacy, accessed on 22 August 2019.
120 Interview with former R&AW Additional Secretary – A1, 25 October 2018.
121 Gokhale, Gentleman Spymaster, 2019.
122 Interview with former R&AW Additional Secretary – A1, 25 October 2018.
123 Prasad, Official History of the 1971 India-Pakistan War, 1992, p. 289.
124 Ibid, pp. 797–798.
125 Ibid.
126 Zorawar Daulet Singh, Power and Diplomacy: India’s Foreign Policies during the Cold
War, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019, p. 221.
127 ‘Rationalisation of the Intelligence and Security Set-up’, Haksar Papers III Instal
ment, Sub File No. 170, August 1971, NMML.
128 Ibid.
129 ‘Creation of the post of a Foreign Service Adviser at the Hqrs of the Research and
Analysis Wing for maintaining liaison with the Ministry of External Affairs’,
Haksar Papers III Instalment, Subject File 227, 1970, NMML.
131 Depinder Singh, Indian Peacekeeping Force in Sri Lanka 1987–1989, Dehradun:
Natraj Publishers, 2001, p. 163.
132 Roy, War in the Indian Ocean, 1995, p. 70.
133 Raman, Intelligence, 2002, p. 72.
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7 Surprise on the Kargil Hilltops
Prognostication of the Irrational
Introduction
On 2 May 1999 Tashi Namgyal, a Buddhist shepherd, had gone hunting for
his missing yak. As he viewed through his binoculars, he noticed groups of men
digging bunkers along the Jubbar Langpa, a stream that runs down from the
glaciers along the Line of Control (LOC) towards Batalik, a town in Ladakh.
Strange, it seemed to him. There were no footprints leading to the spot. That is
when their Pathan suits and camouflage outfit began to ignite suspicions of an
enemy ‘intrusion’. He promptly reported to the local Indian Army post and
later guided about 20–25 Indian soldiers to the spot.1 It took time for the
Indian Army to understand the exact magnitude of the intrusion. In eight days,
a limited war broke out between India and Pakistan. Although India emerged
victorious on 26 July, the fact that India was caught off-guard was not lost on
the public. The question: was it an intelligence failure that caught India by surprise?
Unlike the 1962 and the 1971 wars, the Kargil War was not preceded by a
crisis period. A series of political and security developments had taken place in
the subcontinent in the decades preceding the Kargil war, which had led the
Indian political and military leadership to rule out the possibility of a war with
Pakistan. In 1998 both India and Pakistan had tested their nuclear weapons. For
the political leadership, the nuclear tests gave an opportunity to initiate dialo
gue with Pakistan. Consequently, Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee,
terming the nuclear weapons as ‘weapons of peace’, proposed to his Pakistani
counterpart a diplomatic peace initiative, which became renowned known as
‘Lahore Bus Diplomacy’. In February 1999 Vajpayee became the first Indian
Prime Minister to travel to Pakistan by bus, thereby officially inaugurating the
bus service between Amritsar and Lahore. These political developments had
generated a huge public euphoria in both countries. The Indian Army too
coincidentally had ruled out war with Pakistan owing to a predictive assessment
model named Operation TOPAC. This aspect will be examined in detail later.
For now, we shall briefly try to understand the ‘irrationality’ aspect in Pakistan’s
actions that forms the centrepiece of the 1999 surprise.
The Kargil hilltops were critical from an Indian security point of view as
they overlooked the National Highway 1‑A that connected Srinagar with Leh
DOI: 10.4324/9781003296195-11
(Figure 7.1). This road, being the sole lifeline for Indian troops posted to the
north, was previously subject to Pakistani artillery shelling. However, given the
strategic significance of the road to India and a concern that any military
adventurism in this region could spiral into an all-out war, Pakistan had made
no attempts to physically capture the road. Likewise, India had also believed
that the high mountain terrain would not allow such an attempt to succeed.
Therefore, in effect, both from an Indian and Pakistani point of view, med
dling with the status quo in Kargil appeared ‘irrational’. This perception had led
to a habitual withdrawal of Indian troops from Kargil during the winters to
avoid weather related casualties, which was known to the civilian and military
leaderships of both countries. In 1999, nevertheless, the ‘irrational’ was
attempted and it was precisely the winter withdrawal that Pakistan exploited to
occupy the Kargil heights.
In this chapter, we shall begin by understanding the consumer’s mindset and the
reasons for the prevailing cognitive traps. It came in the form of an analytical/
predictive model known as Operation TOPAC. We shall first examine how the
Figure 7.1 Jammu and Kashmir region depicting Kargil and the Northern Areas
Source: Author
Surprise on the Kargil Hilltops 199
Indian Army came to accept this predictive model, which requires an examination
of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence’s (ISI) covert action policies in Afgha
nistan and India. This foundation should then enable us to examine the role of the
Indian intelligence agencies in estimating Pakistan’s intentions. Like the previous
two chapters, this chapter also argues that the surprise was an outcome of both
intelligence and policy failures.
The Soviet-Afghan War and the ISI’s Role in Pakistan’s Foreign

Policy towards India
The 1970s witnessed the emergence of the ISI in South Asian affairs like never
before. On the one hand, Pakistani leaders like Zulfikar Ali Bhutto empowered
the agency towards clandestine procurement of nuclear weapons in the aftermath
of the 1971 defeat.2 Bhutto’s successor General Zia-ul Haq further strengthened
the ISI’s role in domestic politics and foreign policy.3 On the other hand, regional
geopolitical shifts caused by the Iranian revolution and Soviet invasion of Afgha
nistan made Pakistan the U.S.’s frontline ally in Afghanistan. Under such circum
stances, with the support of the Americans, the ISI began to master the art of
covert action.4 The net effect of these changes, most importantly ISI’s covert war
in Afghanistan, began to significantly influence Indian assessments of Pakistan.
The Soviet-Afghan War (1979–89) originated as a covert war authorised by
President Jimmy Carter, and later pursued by Ronald Reagan. The key role
played by American political personalities like Senator Charlie Wilson is well
recorded.5 The purpose of the war was to weaken the Soviet-Afghan com
munist party alliance by inflicting a heavy toll on the Soviet resources and
capabilities. Although several U.S. allies participated in this covert war,
Washington chose Pakistan as the key partner, owing to the latter’s proximity
and direct interests in Afghan affairs. Together, the ISI and the CIA, enabled
the Mujahideen to successfully defeat the Red Army in 1989. However, owing
to the disproportionate influence of Pakistan in shaping American strategies in
Afghanistan, some observers have termed the Soviet-Afghan War as “Zia’s
War”.6 On instructions from Zia, the ISI chief Lieutenant General Akhtar
Abdul Rahman had strategized the Afghan War, which was proposed to, and
accepted by, the U.S. According to Steve Coll:
“Zia told Akhtar that it was his job to draw the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) in and hold them at bay… No American – CIA or otherwise – would
be allowed to cross the border into Afghanistan”.7
It was the impact of this pivotal position of the ISI in the Afghan War that
shaped the security affairs of the subcontinent from 1979 onwards. Most
importantly, it impacted the Indian Army’s assessment of the Pakistani threat.
The first important benefit the ISI reaped from its involvement in the
Afghan War was an invaluable experience and resources to sustain a covert
campaign. These factors were simultaneously put to use against India in the
provinces of Punjab and Kashmir where domestic political discrepancies had
given rise to secessionist movements.8 Exploitation of India’s political and
communal faultlines was integral to Pakistan’s foreign and security policies since
its inception in 1947. Born as a doctrine developed by the Director of Paki
stan’s Intelligence Bureau (IB), Qurban Ali, Pakistan believed that a sub-con
ventional offensive was the best way to ensure defence against India. The
works of Christine Fair also indicate that Pakistani military journals are rife with
articles that sustain and promote this line of thought.9
India, given its diversity, was mired by a host of economic and political
problems, which resulted in separatist movements in Kashmir and the North-
East. These fault lines presented numerous opportunities for Pakistan to test its
strategy of sub-conventional offensive, which was termed “an informal war” by
Prime Minster Nehru.10 However, its results were far from satisfactory, and the
loss of territory in 1971 further curtailed Pakistan’s ability to conduct covert
operations in India. Hence, for a nation frustrated by failed covert actions, the
Afghan War served as a valuable training ground. The lessons learnt in the
Afghan theatre were immediately employed in India’s Punjab and Kashmir
provinces.
The second factor critical to the ISI’s emergence during the Afghan War was
the monetary benefits. An informal channel known as the “Afghan Pipeline”
was established between the CIA and the ISI through which money and
weapons were supplied to the Mujahideen. The proceeds from this pipeline
were diversified by the ISI to equip militants in Punjab and Kashmir.11 While
the financial benefits from the Afghan Pipeline were significant by themselves,
the ISI had also found another source of revenue generation in narcotics.12
Narcotics cultivation, and its illicit trade, was critical for the ISI since it facili
tated the procurement of nuclear material.13 The U.S. had deliberately turned a
blind eye towards the ISI’s narcotics trade since the drugs were affecting the
Soviet troops in Afghanistan. Nonetheless, the impact of the narcotics trade was
felt on India too.14 Punjab became the hub of drug trade, which has had a
destructive impact on the economy of the state.15 Indian intelligence was aware
of the impact of the “Golden Crescent” region, with efforts to check cross-
border smuggling of drugs commencing along the porous borders between
India and Pakistan.16
The third and related impact of the financial benefits of the Afghan War to
the ISI was the emergence of Pakistan Army as a potent force in Pakistan’s
political economy. From 1981 onwards, the Pakistan Army’s influence on for
eign and security policymaking had been predominant, while some direct and
indirect interference in economic policies have also been observed.17 Also, the
involvement of Pakistani Army officers in the narcotics trade led to rampant
allegations of corruption, which the Army could brush aside as the Martial Law
was in place.18 Although the situation tightened for the Army after Zia’s death
in 1988, when Benazir Bhutto was sworn in as the Prime Minister, the power
and position occupied in the preceding decade gave the ISI and the Army
unhindered influence over policies. Immediately on taking office, rifts emerged
between Benazir and the Army on several issues, mainly nuclear and economic
policies. Such differences led to internecine battles between the military and
civilian intelligence organisations.19 Eventually the civilian leadership had to
concede control over foreign and security policies, to an extent economic
policy too, to the Army. This is why it is described that Islamabad is the poli
tical capital of Pakistan, while foreign and security policies – especially towards
Afghanistan and India – are formulated in Rawalpindi.20
As a result of these developments, the ISI’s covert war in Kashmir continued
even under civilian leaders. Above all, towards the final phases of the Afghan
war, the ISI was able to borrow a small number of the fighters from the Afghan
theatre and provide battlefield experience to several Pakistan based terrorist
cadres of the Lashkar-e-Toiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed for deployment in
Kashmir.21 While these developments were underway, India was engaged in
preparation of a framework for analysing the threat posed by Pakistan. New
Delhi had spent about a decade fighting Pakistan sponsored militancy in Punjab
and was now starring at a deteriorating situation in Kashmir. On the basis of
the aspects observed in this section regarding the ISI’s evolution as a covert
action agency, Indian military analysts were developing a model of assessment
to predict Pakistan’s future behaviour. The Research and Analysis Wing
(R&AW), meanwhile, procured a vital piece of intelligence that further shaped
the military analysts’ predictive assessment model. This model was Operation
TOPAC, which was to have a direct impact on the Kargil surprise.
Operation TOPAC: The Indian Army’s Framework for Analysis

By the early 90s, India had sufficiently understood Pakistan’s reliance on covert
operations as a matter of foreign policy. Punjab had witnessed high levels of
violence, which eventually led to the assassination of Indira Gandhi. A combi
nation of political and security policies helped New Delhi curtail militancy in
Punjab.22 However, the centre of gravity was beginning to shift towards
Kashmir. In 1987, the first batch of Kashmiri youth had crossed over the LOC
into Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (POK) and received arms training that gave
birth to a long war of attrition with the Indian security forces. In April 1988
President Zia had called a top-level meeting to discuss Pakistan’s Kashmir
strategy – the details of which were procured by the R&AW. Combined with
this intelligence report, a war game conducted by the analysts of the Indian
Defence Review produced a threat assessment report titled Operation
TOPAC.23
The analysts drafting the assessment framework under Operation TOPAC
held that covert operations in Kashmir would be inspired by the successes in
Afghanistan against the Red Army. Yet, Pakistan would be cautioned by the
experiences of the 1965 Indo-Pak War. In 1965, Pakistan had launched an ill-
planned offensive against India under the assumption that the Kashmiris were
disgruntled with the Indian state and would, thus, welcome the invaders.24
However, the Kashmiris sided entirely with India, which left Pakistan with
none of its war objectives accomplished. Therefore, as per Operation TOPAC,
Zia had planned to execute the occupation of Kashmir in three phases.
Phase 1 was envisaged to be a preparatory stage aimed at subverting the
population and key state government institutions.25 Operatives in this phase
were cautioned to minimise violence to tolerable levels in order to deter New
Delhi from taking over the state administration.
Phase II was predicted to involve the infiltration of Afghan mercenaries from
POK to conduct sabotage operations and diversionary attacks. The 1965 war had
taught Pakistan that the locals were unreliable, and hence, Afghan mercenaries
needed to be trained to carry out focused missions. In this phase, operations were
planned even in Punjab and adjacent areas of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) to stretch
the Indian forces across different theatres.26 However, it should be noted that, in
reality, Pakistan did not use Afghans in J&K. The infiltrating militants were mostly
composed of Pakistani Punjabis and Pashtuns from the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa
region of Pakistan who were called mehmaan mujahideen (guest mujahideen).27
The final stage, Phase 3, envisaged the “liberation of the Kashmir Valley and
the establishment of an independent Islamic state”.28 It was only in this phase
that any direct military offensive was envisaged by the Pakistan Army. It was
nonetheless conditioned upon significant weakening of the Indian Army,
owing to counter-insurgency (COIN) responsibilities, reserves bogged down in
Sri Lanka – on a peacekeeping mission – and, China tying down Indian troops
on the Sino-Indian border. In the worst-case scenario, Pakistan expected China
and other friends to intervene militarily to at least ensure a stalemate, if not
victory.29 Therefore, as per the Operation TOPAC assessment framework,
‘infiltration’ of mercenaries in pursuit of a covert proxy war was definite and
underway, while ‘invasion/intrusion’ still seemed distant.
An IB report of 1994 on the ISI’s activities also indicated that events were
well within the purview of Operation TOPAC. On the basis of interrogations
of captured militants and seized documents in Punjab, Kashmir and the
Northeast, the IB had concluded that Pakistan was providing sanctuary, weap
ons and training to sustain a proxy war in Kashmir.30 Even international
observers of the Indo-Pak security situation have concluded that prior to the
Kargil War, Pakistan’s involvement in Kashmir was thought to be based on a
degree of plausible deniability to sustain favourable international opinion.31
Hence, the predictive assessment model devised under Operation TOPAC held
that unless the situation on the ground was absolutely conducive for an ‘intru
sion’, the ISI would be used to conduct ‘infiltration’ of militants for terrorism
in Kashmir, and events until 1998 had proven this premise to be correct. The
1998 nuclear tests further emboldened the political and military leadership’s
faith in the validity of Operation TOPAC.
Despite such theoretical as well as empirical soundness of Operation
TOPAC, there was one major flaw in it. That is, it worked on a strong
assumption of ‘rationality’. Before we examine how this had an impact on
India’s decision making prior to the war, let us first observe why and how
Pakistan attempted the ‘irrational’.
Pakistan’s raison d’être for the Kargil Misadventure
To discover the roots of the Kargil War, it is essential to recall the divergence
between Islamabad and Rawalpindi as demonstrated in one of the earlier sec
tions. Following the demise of Zia, the differences between the Army and the
civilian leadership had become more pronounced. More than policy differ
ences, the gulf was accentuated by their personal experiences that shaped their
perception of India. The Pakistani Army’s perception as the protector of the
Islamic ideology and the two-nation theory that gave birth to Pakistan, forms
the basis for its policies towards India.32 With every defeat against India, it was
this status as a protector that was perceivably questioned. Hence, the frustration
in the aftermath of the 1971 defeat explains Pakistan’s quest for nuclear weap
ons. After 1971, the next event that humiliated the Pakistani Army, especially
in the eyes of the civilian politicians, was the Indian pre-emptive capture of the
Siachen glacier in 1984. The capture of the Siachen glacier coinciding with the
Pakistan Army’s tussle with Benazir Bhutto had provoked the latter to taunt the
Army as “fit only to fight its own citizens”.33
General Zia’s high-level meeting organised in 1985 to consider probable
responses to the Indian action in Siachen witnessed the first mention of Kargil as
a potential area of operation.34 The National Highway 1-A that connected Sri
nagar to Leh was the sole artery sustaining the Indian troops in Siachen. Hence,
Pakistani military planners in that meeting proposed several means of choking the
highway in order to make way for a ground assault on Siachen. The noteworthy
aspect of this meeting was the caution expressed by the pre-1965 war officers, as
opposed to the enthusiasm of the post-1965 officers.35 The old guards were
opposed to the idea as they were certain that any action in Kargil would lead to
an all-out war with India. Hence, Zia discarded the plans. Since no approval was
given until his death in 1988, covert operations continued over the next decade
without any real attempts made to capture territory.
In October 1998, General Parvez Musharraf, one of the post-1965 officers
who had shown enthusiasm for the Kargil plan during the 1985 meeting, was
appointed as the Chief of Army Staff.36 Like divergences in policy priorities
between the Army and the civilian leadership, the implications of the nuclear
tests were also expressed differently by Islamabad and Rawalpindi. While the
tests made way for initiation of a peace dialogue for the civilians, Musharraf saw
them as guarantors against an Indian response to Pakistani military adventur
ism.37 By mid-November 1998, Lieutenant General Mahmud Ahmed, the ten
Corps Commander, presented to Musharraf a plan for Kargil in the presence of
the Chief of General Staff Lieutenant General Mohammed Aziz. The com
mander of the division sized Force Command Northern Areas, Major General
Javed Hassan, was later brought in on the plan. Thereon, the entire Kargil plan,
christened as Operation Koh-e-Paima/Badr, was conducted in extreme secrecy
by these four officers. By December Prime Minister Sharif was informally
briefed on the plan, but the briefing was in English and loaded with military
jargon that Sharif could make no sense of its escalatory probabilities.38
Therefore, while a historic peace dialogue was underway, a small group of
officers – the core group – were operating in its direct contravention, and soon
its ‘irrationality’ was obvious to the other services.
To understand why such an irrational possibility could not have appealed to
the Indian military minds, an expansion of this matter is in order. It is here that
the Kargil War is actually comparable to the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Interest
ingly, even the Egyptian attack of 1973 was also termed “Operation Badr”.39
Reflecting on the Arab surprise, Henry Kissinger noted that “our definition of
rationality did not take seriously the notion of starting an unwinnable war to
restore self-respect”.40 For the Pakistani Army, especially Musharraf, the loss of
Siachen was seen in emotional terms and the Kargil operation was partly meant
to redeem its honour.41 Therefore, the Kargil operation emerged largely from
an emotional basis rather than military logic. The ‘military logic’ part of this
assertion that actually establishes the ‘irrationality’ part of the war needs further
elaboration and is presented below.
The Kargil region was, neither demographically nor topographically, conducive
for any Pakistani military action. As observed earlier, it was absolutely essential for
the Pakistan Army to be ensured of local support to undertake any offensive action
in Kashmir. The Kargil region, however, could never have fulfilled this condition
as the local populace was largely Shia Muslims who had never supported the
Kashmiri separatist movement, which was mostly led by the Sunnis.42 This meant
that the Pakistani forces invading Kargil were on their own, and the mammoth
preparations to this end would invariably be discovered by the Indian intelligence.
Topographically, the region was a victim of harsh weather conditions, espe
cially in the winters. This had led to a habitual winter withdrawal by the Indian
Army and repositioning in the summers. The Indian assumption that Pakistan
would not risk the winters to occupy the Kargil heights bears resemblance with
the World War II British Imperial Army’s assumption that the Malayan jungles
forbade tank warfare. The arrival of the Japanese tanks surprised the British,
which eventually led to the surrender of 130,000 well-equipped British, Aus
tralian and Indian soldiers to just 35,000 Japanese soldiers.43 Unlike the British
assumption which was heavily invested on geographical challenges, the Indian
assumption of ‘irrationality’ was also supported by a past experience. In 1993 a
similar attempt to scale the Kargil heights by Pakistan during the winters had
resulted in 27 casualties and no attempt had been made ever since.44 Hence,
with neither demographic nor topographic feasibility, Musharraf launched a
militarily impossible operation that was bound to fail.
Other than the emotional motivations over the loss of Siachen, there was
one other factor driving the Kargil misadventure. The Pakistani Army has
regularly suffered from a deep-seated superiority complex that has historically
led it to undertake one futile operation after another since 1947. The roots of
this superiority complex lie in the ‘martial race theory’ developed by the British
in colonial India to which both the Indian and Pakistani armies trace their
DNA. The martial race theory served the British well since classification of the
uneducated peasantry as martials allowed them to be employed as loyal soldiers,
while the categorisation of the educated Indians as non-martials allowed them
to justify ‘British only’ representation in officer ranks.45 As the post-colonial
states developed their armies, the Indian Army tried to “demythologise the
concept of martial races”, while Pakistan continued with the practice.46
Under Ayub Khan, the first military ruler of Pakistan, the idea of martial
superiority gained a religious expression. The Indian Army, which was referred
as Hindu Army, was perceived as the weaker one since Muslim soldiers were
considered to be stronger fighters. Hence, the 1965 war that Pakistan lost to
India was based on Ayub’s assumption that “the Hindu morale would not stand
more than a couple of hard blows delivered at the right time and place”.47
Even during the 1971 war, when Kissinger inquired with Yahya how he
planned to tackle India’s superior capabilities, the latter, along with his leading
Generals, pointed to the historic superiority of Muslim fighters.48 The experi
ences of 1965 had imbibed a sense of rationality among some officers. How
ever, even this was relegated by the comprehensive Islamisation process that
took place under General Zia since the early 1980s. Alongside the rampant
belief in this alleged superiority over the Hindu, operational planning had also
begun to hinge on ostensible divine interference.
Observing the army’s failure in the proxy war in Kashmir, Pakistani security
analyst Shuja Nawaz has observed that, owing to the effects of Zia’s Islamic
teachings on the military, “cold military logic had been replaced by Islamic
slogans and prayers”.49 In the early 1990s induction of the Mujahideen into
Kashmir was barely scrutinised from an operational perspective. Rather the
briefings were prefaced by phrases like, “by the grace of God, we will put
10,000 rounds over there and Inshallah the enemy will be routed”.50 Given the
scale of Indian Army’s manpower, it is impossible to either believe that 10,000
rounds would rout them, or that the Mujahideen’s purported superior fighting
abilities could win a war of attrition. Consequently, when the inevitable
occurred, conclusions were that “god’s grace” cannot be quantified and the
dead were lucky to have embraced shahadat (martyrdom).51
The planning of the Kargil operation was no different. Whenever the field
commanders raised concerns over possible Indian reactions, the core group
convinced them that “the timid Indians will never fight the battle”, “Hindustani
kadi jang nahi laray ga” (“The Indians will not fight back”).52 Therefore, the
foundations of the Kargil plan stood on the emotions of Siachen’s loss and a
supposed martial superiority of the Pakistanis. In such a scenario, the core
group needed resistance from other sections of the Pakistani armed forces and
civil society who would have probably thought that military operations in
Kargil were suicidal. However, the war preparations were conducted in utmost
secrecy with no objective scrutiny of the operational plans.
Given that the diplomatic peace process was underway, Musharraf had to
plan and execute the Kargil operation away from both public scrutiny as well as
his own professional peers. Intelligence basis for the operation was also weak
since Lieutenant-General Ziauddin Butt, Director-General of the ISI, was
considered to be close to Prime Minister Sharif.53 The implications of such
fractures in Pakistan’s politics at that time on India’s assessments will be
observed in the next section. Suffice here to mention that the operational
plans had little advice from outside the core group. The entire operation
was to be conducted by troops already posted on the borders, with support
from the Northern Light Infantry (NLI) – a paramilitary force operationally
under the army. All discussions regarding the operation were secretly held
defying the standard operational procedures. The secret meetings and troop
movements in the borders were explained to suspecting peers as innocuous
exercises aimed at probing the maintenance of summer troop levels in the
winters.54
Even the other services were kept out of the Kargil plan. In March 1999 the
Pakistan Air Force (PAF) was contacted for the first time for some classified
information concerning the fuel storage capacity at Skardu, radar coverage and
so on. Although the Army covered up these requests as “part of routine con
tingency planning”, the PAF still conducted its own investigation and con
cluded that “something big is imminent”.55 During the official briefing on 12
May, the PAF raised several questions regarding the feasibility of the Army’s
plan in Kargil with the limited employability sought of the PAF. Lt-Gen.
Mahmud Ahmed reportedly rebuffed the probing questions of the PAF and
commented that:
“Come October, we shall walk into Siachen – to mop up the dead bodies
of hundreds of Indians left hungry, out in the cold”.56
With nothing substantial emerging from the PAF’s probing questions, Group
Captain Kaiser Tufail, then Director of Operations in the PAF, recalled Air
Commodore Abid Rao, Assistant Chief of Air Staff - Operations, quip as they
left the briefing room that, “after this operation, it’s going to be either a Court
Martial or Martial Law!”57
A deception plan was also in place, which catered to both the Indian intel
ligence as well as the Pakistani political leadership. The NLI troops across the
Kargil sector spoke in Pashtu, Balti, Shina and other local dialects in order to
convince Indian radio interceptors as well as Islamabad that the parties operat
ing in the sector were the Mujahideen.58 That the Indian troops were to be
deceived is naturally understandable, what is also interesting is how the idea of
the Mujahideen was sold to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. As the Kargil plan
was revealed to Sharif in March 1999, Musharraf enticed the former into
believing that the Mujahideen occupying the Kargil heights were in a position
to liberate Kashmir and that history would hail Sharif as the “liberator of
Kashmir”, making him the most important figure in Pakistan after Mohammed
Ali Jinnah.59 An impressionable Sharif needed no more assurances of the plan’s
success. Thus, against the veil of deception, a promising diplomatic peace
initiative, and an ‘irrational’ operational planning, the Indian defence planners,
who were relying on a ‘rational’ predictive framework, were in effect expecting
the Indian intelligence agencies to uncover the Kargil plot.
A final point that would establish the heights of ‘irrationality’ employed in the
Kargil operation involves the number of posts established on the hilltops. The
original plan was to establish 10–12 posts in one sector of Kargil. However, once
the operations commenced, lured by the vacancy of unmanned territory, the
number of posts transformed into 140 posts in the Dras, Mushkoh, Kaksar,
Batalik and Chorbat La sectors of Kargil, spreading across 65 miles in depth and
5–6 miles in width.60 There seems to have been no thought extended to
defending these positions once the superior Indian Army brought its force to
bear. Presenting fixed targets was neither an operationally adept strategy nor
could it sustain the Mujahideen cover story since infiltrators/militants were
known for ‘hit and run’ tactics, not positional warfare. Ergo, military logic had
been surrendered to territorial greed under a false hope of fait accompli. With this
background, we shall now examine where the Indian intelligence faltered in
predicting the Kargil operation.
Indian Intelligence Estimates of Pakistan’s Intentions

From the above description, it is clear that there were two aspects to the events
unfolding in 1999. One was political – the failure of the diplomatic peace
process. The other was military – the occupation of the Kargil hilltops. We
shall first observe the Indian intelligence assessment of the bus diplomacy, fol
lowed by the intelligence inputs on Pakistan’s military plans.
Indian Intelligence Assessment of the Bus Diplomacy

To understand the degree of expectations prevalent on the intelligence agen
cies, especially the R&AW, to produce political intelligence on Pakistan, it is
critical to examine the true impact of the diplomatic peace process on the
Indian policymakers. This will lay the foundation for comprehending the
intelligence-policy relationship and debunk the commonly held myth that the
R&AW failed to correctly estimate Pakistan’s intentions. The nuclearization of the
subcontinent had instilled within the Indian politico-strategic community a strong
sense of optimism over the peace process. For instance, K. Subrahmanyam, who
had been an advocate of breaking up Pakistan in 1971, calling it the “opportunity
of the century”, had remarked on the eve of Vajpayee’s visit to Pakistan that India
should learn to live with Pakistan’s “Kashmir rhetoric” because, “(when) nuclear
weapon states decide to live as equal sovereign states in a mutually beneficial eco
nomic and security framework, there are endless possibilities of progress for
both”.61 Vajpayee himself had described the atomic bombs as “weapons of peace”.
Amid such euphoria and optimism, the pre-existing perception that the Pakistani
Punjabi mindset posed a perennial threat to India was lost on the nation’s
intelligentsia.62
Even Indian journalists who covered the opinions of Pakistani strategic
community had arrived at similar conclusions. It is important to note here that
both the Indian and Pakistani agencies regularly use journalists for influence
operations; although the latter is far less tolerant of reportage that is critical of
Pakistan’s policies.63 Nonetheless, one Indian journalist, Sushant Sareen, who vis
ited Pakistan during that time, had met with former ISI officials like Hamid Gul
and Assad Durrani – renowned for active sponsorship of terrorism in India during
their tenures. The conclusion Sareen drew from his meetings was that “there
would never be war between India and Pakistan” and the period of animosity had
passed.64 Looking back, given that none outside Musharraf’s clique had an inkling
of the Kargil plan, the euphoria shared by the Pakistani strategic community can
be deemed genuine. Thus, the collective feeling in the subcontinent regarding the
peace process was generally exultant. The Indian intelligence community, how
ever, did not exhibit similar naivete. However, their scepticism required hard
evidence to convince the policymakers of the same.
The strength of evidence required for the Indian intelligence to convince the
political leadership of the futility of the peace process can only be understood
by someone who understands the nature of Indian politics. In a democratic
system like India, where national security issues like Pakistan are a potent force
in electoral politics, the euphoric reaction to the diplomatic process was a
welcome move for the ruling dispensation. On examination of the evidence
procured from the Kargil Review Committee (KRC) report as well as personal
interviews with intelligence officers, it appears that there were indicators that
raised doubts over the peace initiative, but nothing was conclusive to expose
the developments in Kargil. In the narrative offered below to illustrate the
nature of Indian intelligence reporting on Pakistan’s intentions, concomitant
explanations on the position of the R&AW prior to the Kargil War also follow
in order to better interpret the failure. This shows a marked return from the
1971 case to 1962 case at both operational and policy levels.
Right from its inception, Pakistan and China were the R&AW’s top priorities,
reflecting India’s major national security concerns. The previous chapter had
explained how the creation of R&AW had eliminated several constraints that
were evident during the 1962 war. However, owing to a series of political and
strategic changes in the years after 1971, the R&AW’s capabilities had somewhat
returned to the pre-1971 situation. A political decision by Prime Minister Indira
Gandhi to declare a state of emergency (1975–77) – considered one of the
darkest hours of Indian democracy – had bitter ramifications on foreign intelli
gence. The generic perception was that the R&AW, which was Indira’s creation,
was employed as her secret police to monitor political opponents during the
emergency.65 This was far from the truth. In fact, contrary to the popular per
ceptions of all-weather friendship between Indira and Kao – the first chief of
R&AW – Indira was ruffled over Kao’s disagreement to advise her regarding the
emergency. When she returned to power in 1980, it took the persuasion of
persuasion of A.C.N. Nambiar, during her visit to Zurich, to reinstate Kao as
security advisor.66 Nevertheless, the Janata Government that came to power in
1977 suspected an R&AW hand in the emergency and, therefore, drastically cut
short the organisation’s capabilities. Despite not finding any evidence of the
agency’s involvement in domestic political intelligence, the chief’s designation
was downgraded from Secretary to Director, which resulted in the then chief
Sankaran Nair’s resignation. Simultaneously, drastic budget cuts resulted in the
closure of several stations and the dismissal of 600 operatives.67
With the agency’s top leadership engaged in a battle for survival, from 1977
onwards there were unfortunate reports of personnel defection, misbehaviour
and indiscipline by senior officers posted abroad that further damaged the
agency’s reputation. Improper personnel management also led to a strike in
1980, organised by a union within the agency, that was quelled with the help
of the Delhi police.68 These instances resulted in recruitment being stopped for
seven years, and many talented personnel being shown the door.69 Hence, by
the time the Kargil war broke out, it is important to note that the R&AW was
resembling the 1962 ‘low resources-high expectations’ IB.
By the early 90s, while the agency’s responsibilities included the enemy’s poli
tical, economic and military intelligence as well as counterterrorism, its resources
kept crippling as the Indian economy was in a sombre state. Provision of loans by
the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were conditional on
structural adjustments, which compelled the Indian intelligence agencies to prac
tice fiscal austerity in the generic climate of budget tightening.70 Therefore, by
1999, organisationally, the R&AW had suffered severe cutbacks that were bound
to have operational ramifications. Yet, considering Pakistan to be the agency’s top
priority, important human and technical assets were focused on Pakistan, and
political and economic assessments were arguably satisfactory.71
When the diplomatic peace process was underway, the Indian intelligence
treaded a cautious step, being careful not to be carried away by public euphoria.
A senior R&AW officer at the Pakistan desk during that time recalled that the
agency had acquired certain indicators, which reiterated the longstanding differ
ences between the civilian and military leadership in Pakistan; a hint that the
peace process was not viewed equally by both parties.72 In February 1999 the
agency reported that senior army officers in the General Headquarters still
believed that a favourable deal with India can be attained only from a position of
strength.73 This analysis was not drawn on the basis of any specific intelligence
but a regular assessment of Pakistan’s polity.74 Nevertheless, the assessment was
shared with the secretaries of all key departments, the National Security Council
Secretariat (NSCS) and the IB.75
The R&AW’s argument that Pakistan Army’s strategic leadership did not
view the nuclearization of the subcontinent and the ensuing peace process
positively was consistent since 1998; and it is this aspect that reflects the flawed
intelligence-policy relationship and connects with the cultural argument of this
book. To better understand this aspect, it is also to be noted that similar
warnings were given by the IB and the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC).
The IB had reported to Home Minister L.K. Advani that unusual activities –
described in the next section – around the LOC were not in consonance with
the government’s views.76 The JIC, notwithstanding its limited influence in the
system, noted in its February 1999 report that “the euphoria about the PM’s
visit to Lahore notwithstanding”, no change was visible in Pakistan’s attitude
towards “India or the Kashmir issue”.77 Therefore, despite visible reductions in
the capabilities of the R&AW, sufficient warning was provided by the Indian
intelligence agencies to cast aspersions on the peace process.
The fact that these reports had no influence on policy is reflective of the
issues with intelligence-policy relationship in India. Both Vajpayee and Advani
were ministers from the 1977 Janata era that had suspected an R&AW hand in
the emergency. Sankaran Nair, the then R&AW chief had struggled to win the
confidence of the two ministers. Vajpayee, the then Minister of External
Affairs, had accused the R&AW chief of fabricating reports concerning Nepal.
The matter was settled only when Nair revealed that the information was
procured through SIGINT, which could not be fabricated.78 After similar
encounters with several other officers, Vajpayee gradually began appreciating
the work of the agency.79 Likewise, Advani had also come in with prejudices
against the R&AW, which Nair had to get rid of. Advani later thanked Nair
and said:
“I was told by my party people and others that your organisation was Mrs.
Gandhi’s secret police in the country. You have educated me and I accept
that R&AW is essential to keep the Government posted with developments
abroad regarding the activities of unfriendly countries”.80
Thus, by 1999 there was a marked change in Vajpayee and Advani’s attitude
towards intelligence. This is captured by the following statements made by A.
S. Dulat and Vikram Sood, two R&AW chiefs, who served during that era.
According to them, Vajpayee, Advani and George Fernandes – the three
senior leaders of the time – met every day, showed keen interest in intelli
gence briefings and tasked the agencies in line with their requirements. Yet,
when it came to the question of assessing the implications of the nuclear tests
and the subsequent diplomatic peace initiative, decision making was largely
arbitrary.81 Vikram Sood recalled that the R&AW was neither consulted
before embarking on the Bus Diplomacy, nor was the agency, in the interim,
asked to produce an assessment of Pakistan’s intentions.82 The officers further
emphasised that “there is no one to stop them from taking decisions without
consulting you [the intelligence agencies]”. These comments, alongside the
evidence produced earlier regarding the intelligence community’s scepticism
over the peace process, highlights the failure of the policymakers to pay
attention to strategic intelligence.
Therefore, the twin factors of political and public euphoria over the peace
process, combined with the political leadership’s arbitrary consultation of stra
tegic intelligence, ensured that the intelligence reportage casting suspicions on
Pakistan’s intentions fell on deaf ears. Against this backdrop, what the Indian
intelligence required to avert the Kargil surprise was military intelligence. The
next sub-section thus investigates the state of strategic military intelligence prior
to the Kargil War.
Strategic Intelligence and Defence Planning in the Kargil Sector
While the political leadership’s failure to accept strategic intelligence is fairly
straightforward, the question of military surprise at Kargil is quite a challenging
puzzle to solve. In 1998, after Musharraf became the Pakistan Army chief, a
report was produced by a senior Indian Army officer for the Director-General of
Military Intelligence (DGMI) which predicted military adventurism. The officer
was tasked to produce the report since he had been Musharraf’s colleague for a
year at the Royal College for Defence Studies in London; and his assessments
were based in large part on some of the candid observations Musharraf had made
on the 1965 and 1971 wars.83 Therefore, the Indian Army’s strategic leadership
was arguably well aware that Musharraf’s psychological profile denoted a threat
to India. The question, however, was how would the threat manifest itself?
Deployed in Kashmir within a COIN framework, the Indian Army was
largely operating under the predictive assessment model of Operation TOPAC.
Accordingly, an ‘infiltration’ by militants was certain, while ‘intrusion’ by reg
ular Pakistani forces was regarded impossible. This explains the winter with
drawal and summer repositioning in the Kargil sector. In such a scenario, the
Indian Army’s preparedness to tackle the Pakistani threat in Kargil would have
required early warning with sufficient preparation time. Since, nominally, the
R&AW is supposed to provide a 15-day early warning of an enemy attack, the
agency has been criticised by the Army for the failure and the strategic sur
prise.84 Is this criticism valid? Were the inputs that the R&AW provided
insufficient to warn the Army against the winter withdrawal?
First, because the R&AW was responsible for providing strategic warnings of
an attack in Kargil, it is prudent to examine the agency’s capabilities for intelli
gence collection in the Northern Areas. The budget cuts during 1977 witnessed
the closure of several stations, of which the Kargil station was one. Only a small
outpost with inadequate staff and technological capability, reported to the Leh
Special Bureau – a bureau that was not focused on Kargil.85 Also, owing to
terrain difficulties and absence of human traffic, the entire Northern Areas were
accorded ‘low priority’.86 For most human intelligence (HUMINT) on activities
in the POK region, the R&AW had relied extensively on the Mirpuri diaspora
living in the Middle-East, Europe and North America.87 The challenge here was
that the Mirpuris had barely any presence in the Northern Areas. In addition, the
Mirpuris, who had mostly served the Indian intelligence in influence operations,
were of limited value from a military intelligence point of view.88 Therefore,
both the organisational presence in the region and HUMINT coverage of the
Northern Areas were significantly weak. The only indication of unusual activity
across the borders, thus, came from shepherds in September 1998, which was not
given adequate weightage.
While these gaps originated mainly from organisational constraints, there were
other operational challenges to producing strategic intelligence. Since the Kashmir
valley was facing an insurgency since 1987, by 1999 there were the Indian Army,
the Border Security Force (BSF) and the J&K police, all trying to generate
intelligence for COIN operations. This created a unique problem for HUMINT
production. COIN operations, unlike traditional foreign intelligence operations,
requires an aggressive approach. The BSF, especially, is known for its active intel
ligence gathering operations, explaining which, a former G-Branch (BSF’s intelli
gence wing) officer, claimed that “we don’t wait for intelligence to come to us, we
go and get it”.89 While this multi-agency involvement in intelligence collection
fetched positive results in COIN operations, it had a contrary effect on the
development of strategic foreign intelligence.
The high demand on intelligence resulted in the agencies relying on the
same sources, mostly smugglers and drug traffickers with access to the other side
of the LOC. Duplication of intelligence notwithstanding, the lure of large
money and temptation of clemency tended to lead these sources to share fake
information at several instances. Considering these factors, the R&AW had
made it a point to not take any information of strategic significance seriously,
unless it was corroborated by technical means. However, owing to financial
constraints, TECHINT devices for border monitoring were focused on China
where HUMINT coverage was more difficult.90 China, being a closed society,
posed a significant HUMINT challenge in comparison to Pakistan’s fractured
society, and hence, TECHINT had been the main source of intelligence.91
Against this backdrop, while the Indian Army stuck to the tenets of Opera
tion TOPAC that ‘infiltration’ was possible but not ‘intrusion’, the R&AW in
its October 1998 report had claimed that “a limited swift offensive threat with
possible support of alliance partners cannot be ruled out”.92 Although the
available evidence does not reveal how the agency came to this conclusion,
what is known is that the Army, reflecting its strong faith in nuclear deterrence,
criticised the report.93 The agency’s representative apparently did not stand his
ground and withdrew in the face of constant questioning.94 Following the
Army’s criticism, the R&AW was compelled to exercise more caution in its
reporting. In fact, closer to the crisis, one HUMINT source reported that an
offensive was being prepared, which was discarded owing to reliability concerns
and inadequate corroboration. A senior R&AW officer noted that, “we were
using nebulous sources, which were not highly reliable, and that leads to the
Army questioning the credibility of the agency’s reports”.95 This problem
became more pronounced once the war commenced and the agency failed to
produce the kind of intelligence required by the Army. The officer recounted:
“there was immense requirement for furnishing data about movement of

units to the forward locations. We just didn’t have any HUMINT sources
to cater to these requirements. So, we were using some inputs from neb
ulous sources, who had previously given reliable information. But the
information required now was beyond the reach of the informer. But,
since we had used his intelligence successfully earlier, we were taking
whatever he said as the gospel truth. He reported a certain number of units
being mobilised, which was passed on to the Army. The Army regarded
them as bunkum reports since visual observation clearly suggested
otherwise. Hence, the respect and the scale of credibility of the agency had
dropped with the Army”.96
Therefore, evidently, from the submission of the October 1998 report that
predicted a “limited swift offensive” to the wartime provision of operational
intelligence, the R&AW repeatedly risked losing its reputation with its
consumer.
From January 1999 onwards, the agency returned to simply reporting
developments rather than drawing inferences. In January, it reported Pakistan’s
interest in buying 500 pairs of military boots from Finland for use in extreme
cold conditions.97 In February, although it cast aspersions on Pakistan’s com
mitment to the peace process, an ‘offensive’ was not indicated. In March, it
reported the existence of underground bunkers and road widening activities
across the borders. More importantly, while noting the troop build-up and
artillery deployment in POK, it concluded that waging a war in the immediate
future would not seem to be a rational decision from Pakistan’s point of view.98
Given the limitations in HUMINT coverage, and the Army’s commitment to
nuclear deterrence, the agency had fallen back to political and economic ana
lysis. From an economic point of view, Pakistan surely could not sustain a war
at that time.99 The problem, however, was that the Kargil operation was never
intended by its planners to develop into a war. Musharraf only wanted to pre
sent a fait accompli before international interference would forbid war between
the two nuclear powers. Hence, the R&AW’s conclusion from a political and
economic perspective, that war would not be a ‘rational’ decision for Pakistan,
was not entirely incorrect.
On the TECHINT front, as observed earlier, Indian assets were focused on
China. In addition, there were two other reasons that impeded TECHINT from
being a viable source to produce military intelligence. One was the secrecy
employed by the Musharraf clique that gave little room for information leakage
through communication intercepts. Second, what was required here was tactical
intelligence, and in this area, Pakistan had moved to more advanced modes of
tactical communication that was obtained from the Americans.100 In this context,
even the then Indian DGMI argued that lack of TECHINT was the main reason
for the surprise at Kargil.101 Therefore, the R&AW’s TECHINT capability that
rose to fame after the commencement of hostilities, through the interception of
conversations between General Musharraf in Beijing and Lieutenant General
Mohammed Aziz in Pakistan, could not be used to produce tactically relevant
intelligence.102 Even this strategic capability was, however, lost quickly as the
political leadership decided to reveal the tapes to buy American support, despite
the resistance put up by the then R&AW chief.103
From the narrative offered so far, it appears that the Army’s commitment to
Operation TOPAC was vastly an outcome of the organisational and opera
tional weaknesses of the R&AW. Nevertheless, before squarely fixing the
blame on the agency for failing to forewarn the Army about Pakistan’s inten
tions, it is necessary to question what the Army knew about the developments
across the Kargil sector from its own sources as well as the IB. The IB was specially
tasked to monitor the cross-border activities of Pakistan in the aftermath of the
nuclear tests. A young IB officer, Chandra Sen Singh, had generated several
reports on Pakistani troop activities across the border, which alarmed the agency’s
higher leadership.104 The IB’s Srinagar station shared the reports with the then
deputy chief A.S. Dulat. Finally, the contents of the report were considered so
sensitive that the Director of IB, Shyamal Dutta, produced a personally signed note
for the government of India. While a personally signed report by the DIB was
supposed to set in motion a detailed follow-up action as per protocol, neither the
Home Ministry nor the Army made much of it.105 It must, however, be noted
that the one-upmanship sought by the IB cost the R&AW a valuable opportunity
to verify the input through its own sources.106
In the lead up to the war, the IB had produced 40 reports, of which nine
were concerning Kargil.107 Many more vital inputs, of tactical nature, were
shared directly with the Brigade commander verbally. Nevertheless, the Army
had assessed all these inputs to be well within the pattern of increased militancy
anticipated in the aftermath of the nuclear tests.108 Therefore, it is further clear
that the Indian Army’s faith in its predictive framework had further crystallised
following the nuclear tests.
Notwithstanding the reports by the R&AW and the IB, the Military intelli
gence (MI) had 23 of the 45 important reports109 generated prior to the war,
which were not passed on to the civilian agencies as the practice was that the
end user did not have to share intelligence collected by it.110 Since August
1998, despite being informed of the construction of an all-weather road from
Gultari, and alerted by the locals towards increased Pakistani queries about
Indian troop deployment in the region, the commander of 3 Infantry Division
did not hesitate to divert the 70 Infantry Brigade from the Batalik sector to the
Kashmir Valley for COIN operations. Between November 1998 and February
1999 the Northern Command also reported an increase in troop movement
and blasting activities across the Kargil sector.111 It is against this collective
reportage by the R&AW, the IB and the MI that the accusations of intelligence
failure as a causal factor in the Kargil surprise needs to be examined.
The Army’s criticism of the R&AW is that the latter’s reports “showed no
accretion in force levels of the FCNA”.112 Owing to the shortcomings in
R&AW’s cross-border intelligence collection as chronicled above, and the
Mujahideen cover employed by the Pakistani troops, the agency fell short in
reading the Pakistani ORBAT by 10 percent. This led a former chief of
R&AW to retort that:
“a correct reading of 90% of the ORBAT is considered a first-rate per

formance in the intelligence world. A judgement going by mere statistics
does not therefore constitute a valid finding”.113
It is quite clear that both the Army and the R&AW chief were defending their
professional turfs. But purely in terms of deterring Pakistan from undertaking
the Kargil adventure, the Army’s accusation does not stand the test of evidence.
The number of indicators and reports cited until now should have caused suf
ficient alarm in the Army to reconsider the winter withdrawal or undertake
other measures to monitor the Kargil sector. In fact, some officers in the Army
were genuinely concerned about a probable Pakistani intrusion in Kargil.
However, these were mid ranking officers, incapable of convincing the higher
command of their forecasts.
Owing in large part to the predictive components of Operation TOPAC,
the border troops that were supposed to conduct patrols and submit ‘route
reports’ for future planning, had avoided the high-ridges since they were not
conducive for ‘infiltration’ of militants. According to some reliable accounts,
the brigade commander had foreseen a possibility of ‘intrusion’ and requested
additional troops.114 The Army high command had ridiculed the officer, and
hence, as winter approached, the brigade commander withheld reconnaissance
patrols to avoid weather related casualties.115 In another instance, a war game
conducted in February 1999 had also ruled out possibilities of cross-border
intrusion, and an officer who had hypothesised an offensive, under the cir
cumstances, was also ridiculed.116 Therefore, the predictive pattern, as espoused
under Operation TOPAC, was too strongly ensconced in the minds of the
Army’s senior leadership. Hence, whatever indicators were provided by the
civilian or military intelligence were either interpreted as fitting within the
Operation TOPAC framework or discarded when it did not do so.
Finally, in order to judge whether the surprise at Kargil was a cause of
intelligence failure or policy failure, it is inevitable to reiterate that the Kargil
War was not a full-fledged war, nor was it intended to be. Neither was Paki
stan’s economic situation supportive of a largescale offensive nor was the poli
tical condition demanding a military onslaught. It was a localised affair carried
out by a small group of officers, succeeded mainly because of an opportunity
created by the Indian Army themselves abandoning their positions.117 There
fore, insofar as preventing a surprise was concerned, the Indian intelligence had
to only provide intelligence sufficient to convince the political leadership of
Pakistan’s lack of commitment towards the peace process, and the military
leadership that the winter withdrawal might not be an ideal move. The
R&AW had done both of these. While the former was expressed explicitly, the
latter was conveyed through several inputs, which the Army swept it all under
Operation TOPAC.
One school of thought sympathetic to the responders, has argued that only a
“worst-case scenario” analysis, that places a premium on all possibilities, would
have averted the surprise. According to this line of thought, such an analysis
might seem rational in theory but absurd in practice as it would inflict high
costs on human life and the state exchequer.118 However, these scholars miss
the point that, if the Army had taken the warnings seriously, which were suf
ficient enough to reconsider withdrawal, there were a number of other options
available at its disposal, short of manually holding the Kargil heights. The
option of aerial reconnaissance never seems to have been used to its full
potential. Guided by the predictive framework, the Army Aviation Corps con
ducted the Winter Air Surveillance Operations only over ravines and riverbeds
looking for infiltration. The KRC Report has given the benefit of the doubt to
the Army by explaining that the approaching helicopters might have alerted the
intruders to camouflage their positions.119 Given that an approaching helicopter is
audible only at a distance of 7 miles, which the helicopter covers in a few minutes,
and that the occupying troops were assisted by mules, informed practitioners and
scholars have cast their doubts on this explanation.120
Even if the committee’s explanation is taken at face value, the Indian Army
should have been aware of the challenges to aerial reconnaissance and sought
the help of the Aviation Research Centre (ARC) or the Indian Air Force
(IAF), which flew better equipped aircrafts. Close to a year before the war,
owing to complaints raised by the Army and the Navy over inadequate intel
ligence flow, Arvind Dave, the then chief of R&AW had directed R.S. Bedi,
the head of ARC, to cut down transmission time, which led to intelligence
being shared in real-time. While operational details of this arrangement are
unknown, according to Air Marshal Ashok Goel, Bedi initiated “user-friendly
steps, and a mission could be launched within hours. Analytical reports were
delivered ASAP, within hours if required”.121
In fact, after the war, the Army had sent a word of appreciation to the ARC
for its commendable support in the conduct of the war, while prior to the war
the Army had expressed gratitude for the ARC’s clandestine photo-
reconnaissance missions in support of COIN operations. Over Kargil, the ARC
had flown in September-October 1998, and the next flight was only in May
1999 following a request from the DGMI, long after the intruders had taken
their positions. The ARC provided the R&AW with eight detailed intrusion
maps in the Kargil sector.122 Besides the lack of timely requests from the Army,
the ARC by itself did not conduct reconnaissance missions because of a poli
tical direction given to the intelligence agencies to maintain a low profile to
avoid jeopardising the peace process.123 Hence, in effect, the failure to use the
ARC was a result of the political leadership’s and the military’s misreading of
the implications of the nuclear tests on the enemy’s intentions.
Adding to the Army’s lack of motivation to consider patrolling the high
ridges was the inter-service rivalry that further curtailed the use of the IAF for
surveillance and reconnaissance purposes. For instance, back in late 1998, when
there were reports of terrorists acquiring Surface to Air Missiles, the Army had
turned down the IAF chief’s offer to deploy the Jaguar aircrafts fitted with a
photoreconnaissance kit for surveillance.124 Trifling turf considerations with
held requests from the Army, and the first request came only in May 1999 after
the intruders had fired upon the Indian Army’s reconnaissance mission. Air
Marshal Narayan Menon recalled that these requests were also frivolous, seek
ing only “two attack helicopters” to eliminate “a few people”.125 According to
Menon, the Army was still operating on a COIN mindset believing that the
intruders were militants.126 Thus, valuable time in discovering and tackling the
intruders was sacrificed to inter-service feuds. At one instance after the war
began, among the targets that the IAF received to bomb was an Indian Brigade
HQ! The blunder was averted by some field operative accidently taking notice
of it.127 Such was the state of interservice co-operation and co-ordination in
contrast to the exemplary results achieved in 1971.
Therefore, neither had the Army shared intelligence with the civilian intelli
gence agencies towards completing the strategic intelligence picture of the enemy,
nor did it critically analyse the numerous indicators provided by the civilian intel
ligence agencies and its own mid-level officers. The predictive framework under
Operation TOPAC had so deeply engulfed its leadership that none of the options
available at its disposal to secure the Kargil heights seemed employable.
The 1999 Kargil Surprise: A Result of Intelligence and Policy

Failures
After the spectacular performances in 1971, the 1999 Indian intelligence per
formances somewhat returned to the 1962 levels. These were marked by
organisational weaknesses and informational gaps that failed to completely
uncover the enemy intentions. However, these lacunae were a consequence of
the resistance posed by the intelligence consumers to warnings. Unlike the
purposefulness with which the R&AW functioned during 1971, the 1999
intelligence-policy relationship had largely resembled 1962, where policy pre
ceded intelligence. As a result, the R&AW was presented with a fait accompli
in the form of the Bus Diplomacy. In addition, the implications of the nuclear
tests on the subcontinental security dynamics were not subject to intelligence
scrutiny. Rather they were interpreted by the political leadership as a guarantor
of peace while the military leadership interpreted them as reason for continua
tion of state-sponsored terrorism by Pakistan.
Like in 1962, the intelligence consumers in 1999 were operating under a
wishful thought about the enemy’s actions. The tenets of Operation TOPAC
and the belief in nuclear deterrence forbade adequate attention to strategic
intelligence estimates. Observing this factor, one scholar has commented that:
“when strong minded consumers, such as the military officials, develop

fixed ideas about how the enemy will behave, intelligence analysts might
end up internalising these ideas. The result is that intelligence producers
fail to warn of threats which their consumers do not believe exist”.128
If the consumers are incapable of comprehending the true implications of their

actions or have built up strong mindsets that either misinterpret or discard
incoming information, then the cause for the surprise is more policy than
intelligence.129 This also led to the consumers not sharing several tactical inputs
with the strategic intelligence agency, which could have aided in analysis.
Therefore, it is the argument of this chapter that the 1999 surprise was multi-
factorial emerging out of both intelligence and policy failures, wherein the
latter significantly induced as well as accentuated the former.
In summation, this part of the book has examined the cases of the 1962, 1971
and 1999 wars and concluded that the failures of 1962 and 1999, and the success
of 1971, had their origins in both intelligence and policy performances. We have
observed how organisational changes and policymaking methods have impacted
the occurrence, or not, of strategic surprises. However, the main question that
remains is, what explains the lack of uniformity in Indian intelligence perfor
mances? In other words, despite the success of 1971, why were the right lessons
in averting strategic surprises not learnt? Answering these questions requires
contextualisation of Indian intelligence within India’s national security set-up. It
essentially requires an observation of the key inferences from these cases through
the conceptual lens of intelligence culture. This would enable the establishment of
the central argument of this book, i.e. how India ‘thinks about’ and ‘does’
intelligence is fundamental to understanding its intelligence-surprise dynamics.
We shall do this in the next part.
Notes
1 ‘Meet forgotten Kargil hero Tashi Namgyal - the Local Shepherd who saw Pak
getting Ready’, DNA, 26 July 2019, available at www.dnaindia.com/india/inter
view-meet-forgotten-kargil-hero-tashi-namgyal-the-local-shepherd-who-saw-pa
k-getting-ready-27758, accessed on 15 August 2019.
2 Stanley Wolpert, Zulfi Bhutto of Pakistan: His Life and Times, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1993, p. 279.
3 Hein Kiessling, Faith, Unity, Discipline: The Inter-Service-Intelligence (ISI) of Pakistan,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, p. 23.
4 Mark Adkin and Mohammad Yousaf, Afghanistan – the Bear Trap: The Defeat of a
Superpower, Pennsylvania: Casemate Publishers, 2001; Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The
Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, New York: Penguin, 2004;
‘Part-IV: Adrift’, in Owen L. Sirrs, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate:
Covert Action and Internal Operations, London: Routledge, 2016.
5 Bruce Riedel, What We Won: America’s Secret War in Afghanistan, 1979–89,
Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2014, p. x; George Crile, Charlie
Wilson’s War: The Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History: The Arming of the
Mujahideen by the CIA, London: Atlantic Books, 2015.
6 Riedel, What We Won, 2014, p. xii.
7 Coll, Ghost Wars, 2004, p. 66.
8 S.K. Ghosh, Pakistan’s ISI: Network of Terror in India, New Delhi: A.P.H.
Publishing Corporation, 2000, p. 7; Kiessling, Faith, Unity, Discipline, 2016, p. 88.
9 Christine Fair, In Their Own Words: Understanding Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2018; Christine Fair, Fighting to the End: Pakistan Army’s
Way of War, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
10 Praveen Swami, India, Pakistan and the Secret Jihad, London: Routledge, 2006, p. 48.
11 Suneel Kumar, ‘Sikh Ethnic Uprising in India and Involvement of Foreign
Powers’, Faultlines, 18 January 2007, available at www.satp.org/satporgtp/publica
tion/faultlines/volume18/Article4.htm, accessed on 10 September 2019.
12 Peter Dale Scott, The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia and Indochina, Maryland:
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003, p. 48.
13 Gretchen Peters, Seeds of Terror: How Heroin is Bankrolling the Taliban and the al-Qaeda,
New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2009, p. 66.
14 ‘Pakistan’s Nuclear Weapons Program’, Central Intelligence Agency, 4 September
1984, available at www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP86M00886R0
00800100026-8.pdf, accessed on 10 September 2019; Gordon Corera, Shopping for
Bombs: Nuclear Proliferation, Global Insecurity, and the Rise and Fall of the A.Q. Khan
Network, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 54.
15 Ranjan Pal, ‘Political Economy of Drugs and Insurgency: The Case of Punjab’,
MA Thesis: Naval Postgraduate School, March 2017, available at www.hsdl.org/?
view&did=800982, accessed on 10 September 2019.
16 Interview with former Inspector General BSF (G-Branch) Srinivasan, 17 October
2018.
17 Ayesha Siddiqa-Agha, ‘Political Economy of National Security’, Economic and
Political Weekly, Vol. 37, No. 44/45, 2002, p. 4548.
18 The complex nexus of the ISI-Islamic Militants-Narcotics Traffickers is a loaded
topic that is beyond the purview of this book to be explained in detail. The 9/11
attacks provided the impetus for investigations into this nexus. As a result, several
studies have exposed the Pakistan Army and the ISI’s involvement in narcotics
trade and sponsorship of terror. A dossier prepared by Paul Thompson provides a
thorough detailing of this theme from 1979 to 2003. Paul Thompson, ‘Pakistani
ISI and/or Drug Connections’, 2003, available at https://911timeline.s3.amazona
ws.com/main/AAisidrugs.html, accessed on 10 September 2019; Peters, Seeds of
Terror, 2009, p. 38.
19 Bidanda Chengappa, ‘The ISI Role in Pakistan’s Politics’, Strategic Analysis, Vol.
23, No. 11, 2000, p. 1876; Kiessling, Faith, Unity, Discipline, 2016, pp. 75–85.
20 Aqil Shah, The Army and Democracy, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press,
2014, p. 203.
21 Stephen Tankel, Storming the World Stage: The Story of Lashkar-e-Taiba, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2013, p. 107; Fair, In Their Own Words, 2018, p. 59.
22 Prem Mahadevan, ‘The Gill Doctrine: A Model for 21st Century Counter-ter
rorism?’, Faultlines, Vol. 19, 19 April 2008, available at www.satp.org/satporgtp/p
ublication/faultlines/volume19/Article1.htm, accessed on 12 September 2019.
23 K. Subrahmanyam, K.K. Hazari, B.G. Verghese and Satish Chandra, From Surprise
to Reckoning: The Kargil Review Committee Report, New Delhi: Sage, 2000, p. 117
(Hereon KRC Report).
24 Victoria Schofield, Kashmir in Conflict: India, Pakistan and the Unending War,
London: I.B. Tauris, 2003, pp. 109–112.
25 ‘OP TOPAC: The Kashmir Imbroglio – I’, Indian Defence Review, July-December
1989, available at www.indiandefencereview.com/spotlights/op-topac-the-kashm
ir-imbroglio-i, accessed on 23 September 2019.
26 Ibid.
27 There were militants from elsewhere in the world who had fought in Afghanistan,
but were not Afghan nationals.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid.
30 KRC Report, 2000, p. 70.
31 Ashley J. Tellis, Christine C. Fair and Jamison Jo Medby, Limited Conflicts Under
the Nuclear Umbrella: Indian and Pakistani Lessons from the Kargil Crisis, RAND
Corporation, 2001, available at www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/
MR1450.html#download, accessed on 23 September 2019.
32 Fair, Fighting to the End, 2016, p. 10.
33 Nitin A. Gokhale, Beyond NJ 9842: The Siachen Saga, New Delhi: Bloomsbury
India, 2014, p. iii.
34 Nasim Zehra, From Kargil to the Coup: Events that Shook Pakistan, Lahore: Sang-e-
Meel Publications, 2018, p. 38.
35 Ibid, p. 42.
36 Ibid.
37 Peter R. Lavoy, ‘Introduction: The Importance of the Kargil Conflict’, in Peter
R. Lavoy, Asymmetric Warfare in South Asia: The Causes and Consequences of the
Kargil Conflict, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 11.
38 Fair, Fighting to the End, 2016, p. 152; Zehra, From Kargil to the Coup, 2018, p. 101.
39 Uri Bar-Joseph, The Angel: The Egyptian Spy Who Saved Israel, London: Harper
Collins, 2016, p. 179.
40 Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1982, p. 465.
41 Sumit Ganguly and Paul S. Kapur, India, Pakistan and the Bomb: Debating Nuclear
Stability in South Asia, New York: Columbia University Press, 2012, p. 50.
42 KRC Report, 2000, p. 38.
43 Robert M. Clark, Intelligence Analysis, London: Sage, 2012, p. xix.
44 KRC Report, 2000, p. 238.
45 Jeffrey Greenhut, ‘Sahib and Sepoy: An Inquiry into the Relationship between
the British Officers and Native Soldiers of the British Indian Army’, Military
Affairs, Vol. 48, No. 1, 1984, p. 16.
46 The ‘martial race theory’ also explains the dismal representation of Bengalis from
East Pakistan in the pre-1971 Pakistan Army. Rebecca L. Schiff, The Military and
Domestic Politics: A Concordance Theory of Civil-Military Relations, London: Routle
dge, p. 87.
47 Brian Cloughley, A History of Pakistan Army: Wars and Insurrections, New Delhi:
Lancer Publishers, 2002, p. 71; Wolpert, Zulfi Bhutto of Pakistan, 1993, p. 92.
48 Tilak Devasher, Pakistan: At the Helm, New Delhi: Harper Collins, 2018.
49 Shuja Nawaz, Crossed Swords: Pakistan, its Army, and the Wars Within, Oxford:
50 Ibid.
51 Ibid.
52 Zehra, From Kargil to the Coup, 2018, pp. 124, 131.
53 Sharif removed Musharraf after a phone call: Gen Butt, Dawn, 12 October 2010,
available at www.dawn.com/news/848878, accessed on 24 September 2019.
54 Zehra, From Kargil to the Coup, 2018, p. 96.
55 Kaiser Tufail, ‘Kargil Conflict and Pakistan Air Force’, Aeronaut, 28 January 2009,
available at http://kaiser-aeronaut.blogspot.com/2009/01/kargil-conflict-and-pa
kistan-air-force.html, accessed on 24 September 2019.
56 Ibid.
57 Ibid.
58 Christine Fair, ‘Militants in the Kargil conflict: myths, realities, and impacts’, in
Peter R. Lavoy, Asymmetric Warfare in South Asia: The Causes and the Consequences
of the Kargil Conflict, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 233.
59 ‘Najam Sethi - Kargil War – Part 2’, YouTube, 14 May 2012, available at www.
youtube.com/watch?v=V6QFHb5PRVQ&t=21s, accessed on 24 September 2019.
60 Lavoy, ‘Introduction’, 2009, p. 20; Zehra, From Kargil to the Coup, 2018, p. 100.
61 V.N. Khanna, Foreign Policy of India, New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 2018, p. 103.
62 Ryan French, ‘Deterrence Adrift?: Mapping Conflict and Escalation in South
Asia’, Strategic Studies Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 1, p. 114.
63 Evidence of Pakistan’s intolerance of reporters and scholars with a contrarian
viewpoint emerged with the murder of Daniel Pearl, a journalist with The Wall
Street Journal, in 2002. Sirrs, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate,
2016, p. 225; Since then, western journalists and scholars have begun to accept
that visas to Pakistan, and safety of visitors, are subject to the nature of reportage
and opinions. Christine Fair, ‘Pakistan’s War on Scholars’, Huffpost, 24 February
2016, available at: www.huffpost.com/entry/pakistans-war-on-scholars_b_
9286542, accessed on 21 September 2019; It is against this backdrop that I con
cluded that fieldwork in Pakistan would be audacious.
64 Interview with Pakistan Studies expert Sushant Sareen, 26 October 2018.
65 Pupul Jayakar, Indira Gandhi: A Biography, New Delhi: Penguin, 1995, p. 313.
66 Interview with former R&AW Special Secretary Vappala Balachandran, 16
September 2018.
67 ‘Home Minister Charan Singh determined to cut RAW down to size’, India
Today, 15 September 1977, available at www.indiatoday.in/magazine/special-rep
ort/story/19770915-home-minister-charan-singh-determined-to-cut-raw-down
to-size-823884-2014-09-04, accessed on 23 September 2019.
70 Interview with Intelligence Studies Scholar Dr. Prem Mahadevan, 27 February
2019.
71 KRC Report, 2000; Interview with former R&AW Special Secretary – R3, 30
October 2018.
72 Interview with former R&AW Special Secretary – R3, 30 October 2018.
73 KRC Report, 2000, p. 132.
75 The Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) was then part of the NSCS, which was
responsible for all-source assessments.
76 Interview with former Secretary (Research) A.S. Dulat, 18 October 2018.
77 KRC Report, 2000, p. 142.
Delhi: Manas Publications, 2016, p. 174.
79 Raman, The Kaoboys of R&AW, 2013, pp. 79–81.
81 Interview with former Secretary (Research) A.S. Dulat, 18 October 2018; Inter
view with former Secretary (Research) Vikram Sood, 22 October 2018.
83 Interview with Lieutenant General (Retd) B.S. Malik, 14 December 2018.
84 Ashok Mehta, ‘Coping with the Unexpected’, Rediff, 30 August 1999, available at
www.rediff.com/news/1999/aug/30mehta.htm, accessed on 25 September 2019.
85 KRC Report, 2000, p. 159.
86 Ibid, p. 233.
87 B. Raman, ‘Was there an intelligence failure?', Frontline, 17–30 July 1999, avail
able at https://frontline.thehindu.com/static/html/fl1615/16151170.htm, acces
sed on 25 September 2019.
89 The officer used the analogy of Pambu Putthu (snake hole in Tamil language),
which implies that one would have to drag the snake out of the hole rather than
wait for it to emerge. Interview with former Inspector General BSF (G-Branch)
Srinivasan, 17 October 2018.
90 B Raman, ‘Should we believe General Malik?', Rediff, 5 May 2006, available at
www.rediff.com/news/2006/may/05raman.htm, accessed on 25 September 2019.
91 Interview with Military Intelligence officer – M2, 23 September 2018.
92 KRC Report, 2000, p. 127.
93 Prem Mahadevan, ‘The Perils of Prediction: Indian Intelligence and the Kargil
Crisis’, Manekshaw Paper, No. 29, 2011, p. 12, available at www.claws.in/publica
tion/the-perils-of-prediction-indian-intelligence-and-the-kargil-crisis/, accessed on
25 September 2019.
96 Ibid.
97 KRC Report, 2000, p. 132.
98 V.P. Malik, ‘The Kargil War: Some Reflections’, CLAWS Journal, 2009, p. 3.
99 Shreedhar, ‘Pakistan’s Economic Dilemma’, Strategic Analysis, Vol. 22, No. 3, p. 457.
101 Interview with former DGMI, Lieutenant General (Retd) R.K. Sawhney, 17
December 2018.
102 Jaswant Singh, In Service of Emergent India: A Call to Honor, Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 2007, pp. 180–187.
103 A.S. Dulat, Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years, New Delhi: Harper Collins, 2015, p. 46.
104 Rajesh Ahuja, ‘Medal for intelligence official who sent first Kargil alert on Pak
troops’, The Hindustan Times, 15 August 2016, available at www.hindustantimes.
com/nation-newspaper/medal-for-ib-man-who-sent-first-kargil-alert/story
PsniUhLae9jE6eJ, accessed on 25 September 2019.
105 Dulat, Kashmir, 2015, p. 89.
106 Interview with former R&AW Special Secretary – R3, 30 October 2018; KRC
Report, 2000, p. 119.
107 KRC Report, 2000, p. 148.
108 Ibid.
109 Eight by the Brigade Intelligence Teams (121 Infantry Brigade); two from the
Intelligence and Field Surveillance Unit (IFSU); two from the 3 Infantry Division;
one from the 15 Corps; and ten from the Northern Command.
110 KRC Report, 2000, p. 132; Raman, ‘Should we believe General Malik?’, 2006.
111 KRC Report, 2000, pp. 128–132
112 V.P. Malik, Kargil: From Surprise to Victory, New Delhi: Harper Collins, 2010,
p. 86.
113 A.K. Verma, ‘Kargil Committee Report and Intelligence’, South Asia Analysis
Group, 16 May 2000, available at www.southasiaanalysis.org/note91, accessed on
25 September 2019.
114 Former senior Military Intelligence officer – M1, 11 July 2018.
115 Praveen Swami, ‘The Kargil Story’, Frontline, 2000, available at https://frontline.
thehindu.com/static/html/fl1722/17220240.htm, accessed on 27 September 2019.
116 Rahul Bedi, ‘A Dismal Failure’, in Sankarshan Thakur, Guns and Yellow Roses:
Essays on the Kargil War, New Delhi: Harper Collins, 1999, p.141.
117 James J. Wirtz and Surinder Rana, ‘Surprise at the top of the world: India’s sys
temic and intelligence failure’, in Peter R. Lavoy, Asymmetric Warfare in South
Asia: The Causes and Consequences of the Kargil Conflict, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2009, pp. 219–220.
118 Srinath Raghavan, ‘Intelligence Failures and Reforms’, 2009, available at www.india
-seminar.com/2009/599/599_srinath_raghavan.htm, accessed on 27 September
2019.
119 KRC Report, 2000, p. 86.
120 M.P. Acosta, ‘High Altitude Warfare: The Kargil Conflict and the Future’, Naval
Postgraduate School, 2003, available at https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a
417318.pdf, accessed on 27 October 2019.
121 Ashok Goel, ‘The 1999 Kargil War: Not a Generals’ Victory’, India Strategic,
January 2009, available at www.indiastrategic.in/topstories252.htm, accessed on
27 September 2019.
123 ‘For 7 Months, We Weren’t Told To Fly Any Mission’, Outlook, 22 May 2006,
available at www.outlookindia.com/magazine/story/for-7-months-we-wer
ent-told-to-fly-any-mission/231327, accessed on 21 September 2019.
124 It is interesting to note that the information about the arrival of SAMs, although
deemed as misinformation later, was an indication that the nuclear tests actually
provided an opportunity for Pakistan to escalate tensions under the umbrella of
nuclear deterrence. Yet, the Indian political leadership persisted with optimism
over the peace process. Praveen Swami, ‘The Bungle in Kargil’, Frontline, June-
July 1999, Frontline, available at https://frontline.thehindu.com/static/html/
fl1613/16130040.htm, accessed on 27 September 2019.
125 Interview with Air Marshal (Retd) Narayan Menon, 20 July 2018.
126 In contrast, the Army’s version of the events states that the IAF turned down
initial requests over fears of escalation. Harwant Singh, ‘Kargil Controversy: Mis
management of Higher Defence’, Indian Defence Review, October-December
2009, available at www.indiandefencereview.com/spotlights/kargil-controversy-m
ismanagement-of-higher-defence, accessed on 27 September 2019.
127 Interview with Air Marshal (Retd) Narayan Menon, 20 July 2018.
128 Mahadevan, ‘The Perils of Prediction’, 2011, p. 18.
129 Stephen Marrin, ‘Why Strategic Intelligence Analysis has Limited Influence on
American Foreign Policy’, Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 32, No. 6, 2017, p.727.
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Section IV
Indian Intelligence Culture in
Perspective
8 Indian Intelligence Culture
An Articulation
Introduction
India’s experience with the 1962 and 1999 wars suggests that the strategic surprises
were multicausal; in that, ‘policy failures’ were more credible explanations than
‘intelligence failures’. Now, we revisit the main argument of this book, i.e. intel
ligence culture serves as a better explanation of intelligence-surprise dynamics than
organisational level analyses of intelligence failures. In other words, it is essential to
identify how a nation ‘thinks about’ and ‘does’ intelligence in order to better
understand why organisational pathologies exist. In Part-II of this book, an
attempt had been made to explore the evolution of ideas of intelligence in India,
which served as the bedrock for understanding the post-independence Indian
intelligence activities and performances. It was observed that a Kautilyan philoso
phy of proactive intelligence and national security was sacrificed to a reserved
approach in colonial and post-independence India. In this chapter, we shall
examine how the Indian intelligence culture connects to the strategic surprises that
were observed in Part III. This chapter identifies five key determinants that make
India’s intelligence culture a catalyst for strategic surprises; the roots of which are
found in India’s strategic culture.
Articulation of a Distinctive Intelligence Culture

The main constraint in making a documentary analysis of India’s intelligence cul
ture is the lack of a written charter or legal framework. It is, in fact, the lack of
white papers and strategic doctrines/documents that has compelled Security Stu
dies scholars to debate the nature and character of India’s strategic culture.
Empirical observations, in this regard, have formed the basis for scholarly identifi
cation of ideational clues on India’s national security. The case studies in this book
have amply shown that there was a visible change in how the respective political
leaders approached national security, which had an impact on the functioning of
the intelligence agencies. Thus, it is prudent to argue that Indian intelligence cul
ture heavily derives its shape and content from India’s strategic culture. In other
words, the strength of India’s intelligence organisation, activity and product is
determined by the strength of its strategic culture (see Figure 8.1).
DOI: 10.4324/9781003296195-13
Strategic
Intelligence
Product
Strategic
Intelligence
Activity
Strategic
Intelligence
Organisation
Strategic
Culture
Figure 8.1 Indian Intelligence Culture: The Evolutionary Structure

Source: Author
Whenever there was a visible change in strategic culture, as seen most

predominantly in the 1971 case, transformations in intelligence perfor
mances have followed. In the three sub-sections below, namely, restraint,
ambiguity and autonomy, we shall briefly observe the elements of India’s
strategic culture as the basis for India’s intelligence culture before moving
on to examining its individual components.
Restraint
From being proactive and integral in the Kautilyan statecraft to becoming
reactive from the colonial period onwards, modern India’s intelligence culture
clearly fits the restraint factor of India’s strategic culture. This restraint has flown
in large part from the nation’s overall outlook as a Gandhian-Moralist nation
and has been etched in the policy of Nehruvian non-alignment. Reflecting on
India’s military policy and planning, scholars Stephen Cohen and Sunil Das
gupta have asserted that there is a certain disconnect between India’s strategic
purpose and military planning, which is a consequence of its strategic restraint.1
The argument has been that the non-violent guiding principles of India’s for
eign policy have not allowed sufficient accommodation of military power. A
similar argument can be made with regards to intelligence too.
The earliest indications of restraint in intelligence came up during the
Nehruvian era, which led to a lethargic development of intelligence bureau
cracies in the decade following independence. To reiterate an important point
mentioned in the introductory chapter, a revised foreign and strategic policy
Indian Intelligence Culture 231
document drafted in 2012 that sought to revive the Nehruvian idea of non
alignment in its new version – Non-Alignment 2.0 – also had no real
expression for the role of strategic intelligence.2 It was only during Indira
Gandhi’s tenure that India truly began to shun its posture of restraint in line
with the Indira Doctrine and provided the intelligence services a proactive
role in India’s foreign policy. From then on, throughout the 20th century,
India’s foreign policy oscillated between Nehru’s policy of restraint and
Indira’s policy of proactiveness.3 Therefore, the effects of this dominant trait
of India’s strategic culture have percolated down to its national security
institutions, including the intelligence services.
Ambiguity
The second prominent factor in India’s strategic culture is a remarked
‘ambiguity’ in national goals. Considering the lack of White Papers or
Prime Ministerial doctrines, India is often dubbed as “an ambiguous rising
power”.4 Such ambiguities are rationalised as a consequence of the “democratic
‘noise’ of India’s domestic politics” in which revelation of national objectives
might incur unwanted domestic backlashes.5 Nevertheless, as Subrahmanyam has
argued, such ambiguities have had a confusing effect on Indian politicians and
bureaucracies as well.6 Consequently, the intelligence bureaucracies are left with
considerable haziness about their roles, which has impacted their operations as well
as organisational evolution.
As the preceding chapters have noted, the functions of the Intelligence
Bureau (IB) post-independence kept evolving in response to evolving threats.
Similarly, the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), despite its birth as a
dedicated foreign intelligence agency, was born of an executive order bereft of
a legal charter. This has led to occasional ambiguities over its role and func
tions.7 Thus, ambiguity as a strategic cultural trait has played a foundational role
in shaping India’s intelligence organisations, roles and operations.
Autonomy
Autonomy has been the basis for India’s international relations since 1947. During
the Cold War, the policy of non-alignment was born out of a desire to maintain
an autonomous decision-making ability that was not bogged down by alliance
commitments. In the post-Cold War world, “strategic autonomy” has become the
defining feature of India’s foreign policy.8 This facet is based largely on the premise
that the power asymmetries within alliances will eventually consume the freedom
of the weaker nation. The impact of this autonomy factor has been consistently
visible on India’s international intelligence co-operation.
Therefore, at the root of understanding India’s intelligence culture is its strategic
culture and its key elements – restraint, ambiguity and autonomy. From this stra
tegic culture has evolved the quality of India’s strategic intelligence organisation,
activity and product. This collective Indian intelligence culture, i.e. how India
‘thinks about’ and ‘does’ intelligence, comprises of five interconnected variables.
These can be termed the ‘five pillars of strength’ that connect India’s intelligence
culture with its strategic surprises.
Indian Intelligence Culture and the 1962, 1971 and 1999 Wars:
An Assessment
The multifactorial causation of strategic surprises in India finds its origins in
India’s distinct intelligence culture. Arising out of the characteristics of its strategic
culture as observed above are five key variables that have determined India’s
intelligence-surprise dynamics during the 20th century. These are:
• Strength of intelligence leadership;

• Strength of intelligence organisation;
• Strength of covert action capabilities;
• Strength of consumer literacy;
• Strength of international relations.
The five determining factors are closely interrelated to one another. An

expansion of each of them in relation to the three cases observed in this book is
offered below.
Strength of Intelligence Leadership

Throughout this book, the dominant role played by the intelligence leadership
in guiding intelligence activities has been fairly consistent. Especially given
India’s restraining and ambiguous character, with an insistence on autonomy,
the role of leadership had been critical. During the 1950s the question facing
the Indian intelligence leadership was not how to shape the intelligence
bureaucracy. Rather it was how to ensure its survival. T.G. Sanjeevi, the first
IB chief had failed to bring about foreign intelligence reforms despite his best
intentions, owing mainly to his outspoken attitude in a culture that demanded
subservience.9 It is in this context that one must observe Mullik’s emergence as
the strongest intelligence chief of India. Both Sanjeevi and Mullik had a clear
understanding that the development of foreign intelligence capabilities in India
was impossible if reliance was laid on the political leadership. Sanjeevi had
conveyed to the Americans that:
“regardless of the official attitude of his government, he would welcome

the continuance of unofficial contacts… as a policeman he frequently had
to take independent action without the knowledge of his government”.10
Mullik also continued similar methods for organisational and professional

development, in the absence of political support. The key difference in
understanding why Mullik was able to achieve a lot more than Sanjeevi did,
lies in his assessment of the Indian political system where proximity and influ
ence was unquestionably an essential condition to get things moving. One
direct benefit of such proximity was that the intelligence reports promptly
reached the highest levels of policymaking. On the downside, however, was
the fact that the intelligence chiefs learnt the political mindset well enough to
realise the limits to the influence they could assert on the decision-making
process. It is in this context that the 1962 war becomes crucial.
Until the outbreak of the war, Mullik had successfully played on Nehru’s
fears of the IB being tied up with the British intelligence services, which helped
develop the IB’s capabilities. However, such manoeuvres could not facilitate
the development of capabilities required to maintain an intelligence advantage
over China. Overcoming the innate aversion to secret means and covert action
that Nehru had nurtured required a shock therapy like the 1962 offensive.11
Hence, when today’s intelligence officers regard Mullik as the ‘Father of Indian
Intelligence’ who did more for their profession than anybody else, they are
mostly referring to the developments that took place post the 1962 war when
Nehru had shed his restraining approach. Reflecting on the pace and quality of
Mullik’s work during that period, a Special Service Bureau (SSB) officer
recollected:
“as an organisation, we were born in May 1963. However, the official

records show that volunteers were ready and put for training at Sarang in
December 1962 – much before the organisation was even born. That’s B.N.
Mullik!”12
If presented with suitable opportunities and political support, it is only plausible

that Mullik could have achieved a lot more in developing India’s intelligence
prowess in the decade he spent manoeuvring against Nehru’s reluctance. After
Mullik, the only other intelligence chief to share a reputation for making
unprecedented contributions to Indian intelligence is R.N. Kao. Like Mullik of
1963–64, Kao’s influence was also elevated only following the debacles of 1965
and 1967 against Pakistan and China, respectively. With unrestricted support
from Indira Gandhi, Kao as the chief of the R&AW could outmanoeuvre
bureaucratic opposition, while his own experience in foreign intelligence from
the IB days allowed the development of a robust intelligence service that could
predict the events in East Pakistan between 1968 and 1971 with pin-point
accuracy. Kao, in this regard, was more fortunate than Mullik, to have
received political patronage and guidance. Indira was not only clear about
what kind of an agency India required, but was also actively involved in
improving intelligence-policy relationship through her trusted aides.
To illustrate, in 1971 P.N. Haksar, Indira’s Principal Secretary, realised that
position and pay in bureaucracies were an important determinant of influence.
Subsequently, Kao, was provided with the rank of an Additional Secretary to
avoid bureaucratic tussle. Further, New Delhi also realised that the pay gap
between the IB chief –considered the senior most police officer in India – and
the other intelligence managers was becoming an impediment in effective
intelligence functioning. Thus, assessing the workload of the R&AW, the
Central Bureau of Investigation and the Border Security Force, Haksar argued
that equalising the pays of the Heads of all these organisations would bring in
uniformity and much needed flexibility in the intelligence and security com
munity.13 With such levels of intelligence-policy interactions, organisational
capabilities also received a significant boost. Even when Indira returned to
power in 1980, her first priority was to restructure the intelligence-policy
relationship that her predecessors Morarji Desai and Charan Singh had wea
kened. She sought:
“as a first priority, to rationalise the activities of [R&AW] and other units
of the Indian intelligence machine. Kao had been brought out of retire
ment to take charge of this exercise…[It was identified that] the next
priority was to create a single organisation whose task it would be to bring
together the product of intelligence effort and the policy advice submitted
by central ministries and convert them into agreed policy recommenda
tions for the Prime Minister and her Cabinet”.14
Such measures were deemed necessary especially against the backdrop of the
diminishing intelligence-policy relationship in the interim as a consequence of
antagonistic posture adopted by the intervening political leadership towards the
intelligence agencies. In 1977 the R&AW’s leadership received its first sig
nificant blow, when Sankaran Nair, the agency’s top Pakistan analyst and a key
player in the Bangladesh liberation episode was humiliated by the political
leadership owing to suspicions that the agency had been involved in domestic
political espionage under Indira Gandhi.15 To this day, former intelligence
officials dread revisiting the Morarji era.
Similar was the situation under his successor Charan Singh, where there
were instances when the agencies had to demonstrate their prowess to ensure
survivability. In one instance, Charan Singh wanted the SSB, which mostly
comprised of villagers and countryside women, to be disbanded on suspicions
that the cadres were being used to spy on politicians. The chief of the agency
resisted and tried to explain to Singh the nature of the SSB’s work and its
capabilities. Although the briefing did not change Singh’s opinion, it com
pelled him to test the chief’s claims regarding the SSB’s capabilities. A female
volunteer was chosen and tasked to infiltrate a well-guarded compound and
produce a warning note that read “the Chinese have encircled us”. In about
an hour, despite tight security control, the note reached the SSB commandant
accompanying Singh in a box of rotis. Following a couple of more demon
strations that established the agency’s prowess beyond doubt, the Prime
Minister chose not to disturb the SSB for the rest of his tenure.16 Such
instances highlight that the survival of the agencies in the face of uninformed
political leadership depended heavily on the adroitness of the intelligence
chiefs.
The 1980s saw a revival of the power and position of the intelligence lea
dership with the return of Indira Gandhi. The agency enjoyed similar support
and influence under Indira’s successor Rajiv Gandhi. While the Morarji era is
much dreaded, the Rajiv tenure is the most fondly remembered era by former
intelligence officers. But even here, there were cases when the strength of the
intelligence leadership in determining intelligence-policy relationship became
visible. An R&AW officer of the era observed that:
“S.E. Joshi, [R&AW chief under Rajiv] always held the belief that it is not
the job of the R&AW to formulate policies. Its job is to give intelligence
to others to formulate policy”.17
This observation was made in the context of the 1987 Indo-Sri Lanka Peace
Accord that was signed without sufficient intelligence basis and led to disastrous
consequences. Thus, the proximity of the intelligence leadership to the political
leadership notwithstanding, the former has not always been able to influence
the latter, which reinforces the argument that the strength of the leadership is
absolutely crucial.
After Rajiv, the decade leading to the Kargil crisis witnessed six regime changes
in New Delhi. Each regime change also caused a change in intelligence leadership,
which is commonly regarded as the ‘predecessor syndrome’; aimed at undoing
whatever was done under the previous regime. Also, by 1999 the strength of the
intelligence leadership was further weakened with the creation of the position of
National Security Adviser (NSA). Brajesh Mishra, the first NSA, with no prior
intelligence experience simultaneously served as the Principal Secretary to the
Prime Minister, thereby, channelling all intelligence through him. Arvind Dave,
despite wearing two hats as the chief of both the R&AW and the JIC, was not as
influential as Mullik or Kao, to shape the intelligence-policy relationship in any
meaningful way.18 In such a scenario, the agency’s doubts over Pakistan’s com
mitment towards peace following the nuclear tests and Bus Diplomacy could not
be imposed on unwilling consumers.
Hence, by the end of the 20th century, the strength of the intelligence
leadership was arguably one of the key factors of Indian intelligence culture
determining its intelligence-surprise dynamics. This factor reached its peak
during the early 1970s, when concomitant improvements in intelligence
performances were observed. Where the strength of the intelligence leader
ship has been exiguous, leading to strategic surprises (1962 and 1999), policies
have largely been formulated bereft of strategic intelligence foundations.
Closely connected to this factor is the strength of the intelligence organisation
that forms the next determinant of the intelligence-surprise dynamics.
Strength of Intelligence Organisation

The organisational strengths and weaknesses reflected in personnel selection,
manpower management and institutional capacity to produce strategic
assessments form the second key determinant of strategic surprises in India.
Across the world, this factor garners more attention in investigations of
intelligence failures and surprises. However, in India, the role of the intelli
gence managers is far-reaching. The divergent experiences of the intelligence
leadership with political leaders, as elaborated above, forms the bedrock in
determining the organisational prowess of Indian intelligence.
Under Mullik, the Ear Marking Scheme (EMS) devised for recruitment drew
the best talent from the Indian Police Service (IPS). Although the EMS gave
the IB a sense of homogeneity, the downside was that the IPS came to
monopolise the intelligence business. The failure to correctly assess the Chinese
intentions in 1962 can partly be attributed to the police dominance. Trained
mostly in internal security duties and holding expertise in aspects of interna
tional communism, the IB was more informed than any other institution in
India about the Chinese threat. However, devoid of a multidimensional view
of the enemy, the bureau was unable to understand the nature of the military
threat posed by China. In short, the IB correctly assessed the ideological
expansionism of China, but not its military dimension. To rectify this fallacy,
Indira Gandhi had specifically instructed the R&AW to not replicate a central
police organisation.
For the first time, with the birth of R&AW in 1968, India gained an external
intelligence agency that was diverse and suited for the intelligence profession.
Unlike the IB, where talented policemen were trained in areas of interest, the
R&AW sought to directly recruit individuals with specific areas of expertise.
Training was more to amplify the operational skills required for intelligence
work. Technical capabilities also improved, which further strengthened the
quality of the strategic intelligence product. For instance, by 1972 the R&AW’s
SIGINT facility was capable of overhearing hours of conversation between
Pakistan’s Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and “his Paris based French friend
with a Greek name”, which gave India complete knowledge of Pakistan’s
nuclear programme.19 Therefore, observing the 1971 case, although it cannot be
authoritatively established, owing to lack of sufficient evidence, that the diversity
of cadre played a direct role in liberating Bangladesh, there is no gainsaying that
the diversity had eradicated several cognitive barriers and pathologies that came
with a single service dominance.
The irony after 1977 was that the insistence on cadre diversity that gave the
organisation its strength became its biggest challenge. This aspect once again
reiterates why the role of leadership was profound in Indian intelligence culture.
Under Kao, the R&AW had emerged as one of the most desirable organisations
for educated Indians. While risk-taking and a flair for intelligence profession
naturally attracted talented individuals, there was the added advantage that the
R&AW analyst was one of the most well-paid employees in the country, even
competing with some in the private sector.20 All this gave the agency an excel
lent pool of talented individuals, which was known as the Research and Analysis
Service that could be used in both operational and analytical roles. However, the
issue that became belatedly evident was that – attaining optimum benefits from
the existing recruitment strategy depended entirely on the direction and
oversight by the agency’s leadership. The ramifications of not having clearly
established methods of recruitment only began to emerge after the Morarji
government decided to oust several of the agency’s employees.
The open-market recruitment system that had operated under the supervision
of Kao and his lieutenants was discontinued in 1977. When Kao returned in
1980 as an adviser to the Prime Minister, the agency realised the need to
replenish its lost cadres. In the mid-1980s an attempt was made to formalise
recruitment and training criteria under G.C. Saxena that focused on operational
and psychological conditioning.21 The second phase of recruitment continued
from 1985 to 1992. Between 1985 and 1987 direct examinations and interviews
were conducted, and from 1987 onwards the Union Public Service Commission
(UPSC) became the examining body.22 A task force organised by the Institute of
Defence Studies and Analysis noted that:
“the quality was much better in the second phase of recruitment, with the
new entrants displaying greater confidence in their own abilities and
acquiring expertise over a period of time”.23
The task force also observed that the UPSC route for recruitment had not
borne rich dividends considering that the top scorers in the UPSC examina
tions seldom preferred to join the R&AW.
The reason for the R&AW’s poor manpower management is often
blamed on the alleged nepotism that drove direct recruitment to the
agency. The open market recruitment drive had resulted in close relatives
and associates of senior bureaucrats, politicians and military personnel being
absorbed into the agency, which gave birth to a popular epithet known as
the ‘Relatives and Associates Wing’.24 It has almost become ritualistic for all
open source material on the R&AW to make references to this aspect. A.S.
Dulat, a former chief of R&AW, who had spent three decades working in
the IB, commented that:
“Mr. Kao had great ideas, but somehow it didn’t work like that. For the
problems that the R&AW faces, I blame the founding fathers. Mullik
ensured that the IB was largely homogenous. What truly ails the R&AW is
its own inability compounded by government’s ambivalence in charting a
clear course for it”.25
Even some R&AW officers believe that Kao should have somehow avoided
this. Yet, they also admit that there was no other alternative since it was a
question of ‘trust’. A relative of a known official was considered more trust
worthy than some unknown person being picked up from the open market.26
This handicap had indeed allowed a certain degree of nepotism to flourish in
the agency, where in one instance, a single family was known to have had 24
members working for the agency.27 Nevertheless, on close scrutiny, it is also
arguable that criticisms of this particular factor has actually been blown out of
proportion, much to the detriment of the agency’s progress.
Although the recommendation for candidates came from persons of
importance, recruitment to the agency was not guaranteed merely on the
basis of their influential backgrounds. The candidates were subject to scrupulous
psychological and intellectual tests, and in one instance, from a group of 300 such
recommended candidates, only six were selected.28 After selection, the training
curriculum was also not an easy walk. As a consequence of intensive training and
experience, many such recruits rose up to the ranks of Additional and Special
Secretaries. That they did not become Secretary is more a reflection of the IPS’s
domination rather than their own professional shortcomings. Even independent
observers have concluded that since the lateral entrants have had to survive in an
environment dominated by top bureaucrats, they have shown greater motivation
and enthusiasm to excel in their craft.29 Thus, there was certainly a method to
this madness that had enabled the sustenance of a diverse cadre while not making
compromises on quality. On the contrary, termination of open-market recruit
ment on the assumption of rectifying the ills of nepotism gave rise to far greater
challenges in the following years.
The 1990s began with a simultaneous repudiation of direct recruitment
alongside the privatisation of Indian economy that opened up several other
avenues for employment. As the R&AW’s areas of concern expanded to
include transnational terrorism and organised crime in the early 1990s, its
resources kept crippling, owing to the sombre state of the Indian economy.
Provision of loans by international financial institutions were conditioned on
structural adjustments, which had a crippling effect on intelligence budgets.30
Amid these developments, what replaced the direct recruitment has, in fact,
caused more damage than the supposedly nepotistic model of recruitment. The
agency resorted to deputation from other services with the sole motive of
minimising the influence of the IPS. While the IPS continued to maintain its
clout in the agency, the deputationists have significantly damaged the agency’s
collection and analysis capabilities.
An officer who had spent a considerable number of years as a China analyst and,
thereby, been closely acquainted with the challenges posed by the deputation
system on intelligence analysis observed that:
“intelligence profession needs fresh blood. You don’t need people from
other services who have already been coached to think in a certain way.
Coming after years of service [elsewhere, they] are not willing to learn”.31
When pressed hard, the deputationists have always enjoyed the privilege of
untimely return to their parent services.32 Owing to these changes, the R&AW
began to resemble any other bureaucracy muddled with internal tussles
between direct recruits and deputationists. In the absence of able leaders like
Kao or political patronage as received under Indira, organisational challenges
continued to persist. Therefore, by the turn of the new millennium, the
R&AW had been significantly weakened in comparison to the agency that
operated during 1971. The failure of 1999 can partly be linked to the shrinking
manpower capabilities since the agency’s Kargil station lacked adequate staff
and technological capability. But more importantly, the chaotic human
resource management had caused difficulties in other activities of knowledge
production, most importantly, covert action, which forms the third factor in
India’s intelligence culture determining the occurrence of strategic surprises.
Strength of Covert Action Capabilities

Covert actions involve a wide range of activities like propaganda and psychological
operations, political and economic actions, and paramilitary action. What is less
appreciated is the fact that covert action requires the development and main
tenance of an infrastructure in the target country that provides an excellent source
for intelligence collection.33 Countries that have relied extensively on technical
platforms at the cost of HUMINT networks have suffered in the conduct of
covert actions. Todd Stiefler, for instance, concluded after studying the patterns
and effects of U.S. covert action that:
“there is a compelling reason to question the impact of changing technolo

gical capabilities on CIA preferences: the abundance of intelligence failures
that occurred after the advent of more advanced collection systems”.34
Hence, given that covert actions demand the sustenance of a human network,
the strength of a nation’s covert action capability in its target nation becomes a
strong determinant of the strength of its intelligence coverage of that nation.
In both 1962 and 1999 the intelligence agencies had clear instructions to not
exhibit any behaviour, overtly or covertly, that would derail the peace initia
tives. These time specific decisions notwithstanding; the agencies’ covert action
capabilities were systematically crippled in the decades preceding the events.
Nehru’s aversion to secret means resulted in India missing a crucial opportunity
to establish intelligence advantage over China. From the early 1950s the
Tibetans had shown a keen interest in covert operations against the Chinese.
However, the Indian position was divided between Nehru’s reluctance and
Mullik’s enthusiasm. Kalimpong was home to Gyalo Thondup, brother of the
Dalai Lama, who was particularly interested in covert operations, but utterly
disappointed with Nehru’s reluctance to help the Tibetan cause. Even in 1959
Thondup had met Mullik and requested a training centre for the Tibetan
resistance fighters, which never materialised.35 The unofficial assistance that the
IB provided was insufficient for the Tibetans to act as India’s first line of
defence against China. Sangey, a Special Frontier Force (SFF) commando, who
was trained for this purpose after the 1962 war commented that “we would not
have left Tibet if we had these weapons and training at that time”.36 With such
high levels of reluctance towards covert operations, the IB efforts to develop a
source base in Tibet were significantly stymied.
By 1971 Indira Gandhi’s directive to create the R&AW specifically sought a
covert action component. Subsequently, the DGS – created post-1962 – was
subsumed under the R&AW and became its covert operations wing. The
agency’s strategic leadership had, since its inception, begun developing contacts
with important sections of the Bengali society in East Pakistan to serve as
covert operatives. It was this human infrastructure, in addition to the ‘behind
enemy lines’ operations conducted by the DGS, that gave the agency a com
plete strategic intelligence picture of the enemy. An R&AW officer, who later
perused the classified files in the agency’s archives in Calcutta, thus, exclaimed:
“I was astounded, terribly astounded, when I read those old records. Our
penetration into East Pakistan was so deep. P.N. Banerjee was a personal
friend of Sheikh Mujib, and we had pinpoint intelligence up to battalion
level. What more would New Delhi want?”37
Throughout the 1970s until the early 1990s the R&AW maintained a strong
covert action component, which was in no small measure driven by the suc
cesses of 1971.38 However, organisational weaknesses, especially emerging
out of flawed recruitment policies, began to present a critical challenge to the
R&AW’s covert action capabilities. The risk-aversion that the recruitment
system brought in became a huge barrier in deploying deep penetration
agents in the enemy’s territory. In order to facilitate better understanding of
this factor, it is essential to understand the operational and organisational
structures of the R&AW.
When Kao created the R&AW, although structural inspiration was drawn
from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the agency was divided into
operational and analytical desks, the demarcation was not watertight. Officers
served both on operational and analytical desks to formally acquaint each other
with the demands and limitations of each other’s crafts.39 This meant that an
intelligence officer would be thoroughly immersed in all facets of spy-craft as
well as the concerned subject matter, which would in turn facilitate improved
source development and analysis.40 Gradually, however, owing to the flawed
deputation-driven recruitment system, field postings became arbitrary and wor
sened the capability of the officers to maintain informer networks. As former
spymaster Vikram Sood explained, “we don’t pick up a man because he is a
Pakistan expert with significant knowledge… we don’t have that system”.41 The
generalist cadre was subject to constant rotation between desks, where a brief
“familiarisation process” was initiated, following which the lessons had to be
picked up on the field.42 The inherent lack of subject matter expertise, along
with the agency’s rotational policies, were bound to have negative consequences.
Adding to this was the agency’s posting format, which directly impacted certain
core functions such as maintaining a healthy handler-agent relationship.
Foreign postings became increasingly disconnected from the mission objec
tives. Western capitals like Washington, Rome, Paris, etc. being classified as ‘A’
postings were high-pay, low-risk destinations. These posts were given priority
over the ‘B’ postings which were deemed risky destinations but were of immediate
consequence to India.43 “Everyone wants to go to Brussels, nobody wants to go to
Kandahar”, said former spymaster Vikram Sood.44 As a result, to a country like
Pakistan, “often posting has been arbitrary—you just pick up somebody and say,
go to Islamabad”, noted A.S. Dulat, another spy chief.45 The combined ills of
rotational policies, generalist cadre and arbitrary postings were further accentuated
by the genuinely required policies such as compartmentalisation. The R&AW has
had a highly compartmentalised structure with “need to know” patterns of func
tioning. Only when certain cases require collaborations – as in the case of tracking
Pakistan’s nuclear programme – have analysts and operatives cutting across desks
come together.46 Thus, the combined challenge posed by the desire for strong
intelligence leadership, chaotic organisational and manpower management, and
decrepit covert action capability, had begun to impact the strategic intelligence
product by the 1990s.
In the run-up to Kargil, not just the R&AW, the DGS, which was created
specifically for covert operations, had become embroiled in allegations of several
forms of corruption. The Aviation Research Centre (ARC), for instance, had a
budget larger than the R&AW’s operations budget. However, the ARC was
being used as “unofficial air taxi service for senior government officials”.47 Much
worse, media reports of the time indicated that the ARC flights were also used
to ferry smuggled goods, since their aircrafts were outside the purview of normal
customs and airport checks.48 Similarly, the SFF had also been accused of illegal
ferrying of timber.49 The most significant damage to the force’s morale came
during the early 1980s when a scandal involving nearly 500 female personnel
indicated that its headquarters at Chakrata had become more of a bordello than a
secret intelligence outfit. Media reports derided the force as “Sexual Freedom
Force”.50 Subsequently, both Indian Army officers and Tibetans had developed a
deep-seated reluctance to be associated with the SFF.
Therefore, by the time of the 1999 war, the organisational capacity of the
R&AW and the DGS to sustain covert action capabilities of the 1970s and
1980s fame was seriously diminished. Furthermore, in 1996 Prime Minister I.K.
Gujral, in pursuance of a policy based on non-reciprocity, had ordered the
closure of the R&AW’s covert action units engaged in counterterrorism in
Pakistan.51 Thus, although the R&AW’s analysts had assessed Pakistan’s beha
viour in the aftermath of the nuclear tests quite accurately, only a stronger
organisational setup supported by a time-tested covert action infrastructure
could have possibly revealed the developments across Kargil. In its absence, as
the case chapter noted, the agency was heavily reliant on untrustworthy and
nebulous sources for strategic information. Therefore, the failure of the IB and
the R&AW to maintain an advantage in intelligence collection on China and
Pakistan in 1962 and 1999, respectively, is owed in large part to the agencies’
feeble covert action infrastructure.
One of the main reasons for weak covert action capabilities is the political
leadership’s lack of understanding of the intelligence tradecraft. This, as well as
the fact that available warnings in the 1962 and 1999 cases were not given
sufficient attention, reflect the consumer’s misplaced methodology in using
intelligence for decision-making. This forms the fourth factor in India’s intelli
gence culture determining the intelligence-surprise dynamics – explored below.
Strength of Consumer Literacy

Here, literacy refers to intelligence literacy, not generic literacy.52 In fact, when
Indian intelligence consumers have had overconfidence in their generic lit
eracy, their intelligence literacy has paradoxically been observed to shrink. The
three main consumers of India’s foreign intelligence – the political leadership,
the diplomats and the military – have had varied evolutionary experiences from
the colonial period that have shaped their knowledge and application of the
intelligence profession.
Political Consumers
So far as the political leadership is concerned, it has been observed in Part II
that Nehru was caught in a dilemma between fulfilling India’s national security
objectives through peaceful means and not using the British era intelligence
institutions in support of his peace agendas. Nehru’s writings on intelligence
have a huge potential to mislead the reader into believing that his thoughts on
intelligence were driven by critical thinking and intellectualism. However,
careful scrutiny exposes the condescension in his tone when referring to the
intelligence profession. Numerous baseless allegations that were levelled against
the intelligence agencies are a clear reflection of Nehru’s limited understanding
of the intelligence profession.53 From the time of the Nehru years, until the
end of the 20th century, barring the years of Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi,
there had been a general tendency for the political leadership to either display
intellectual superiority over the agency’s assessments or a disinterest towards the
intelligence profession.
One of the best starting points for observing the relationship between political
consumers and the intelligence services is to identify the tasking mechanisms.
Principally, there are two ways of tasking – demand driven tasking (pull) from
the consumer end, supply driven tasking (push) wherein the tasking procedures
emerge at the levels of the intelligence managers and analysts.54 Given that the
U.K. follows a ‘demand driven tasking’ system, and that Indian intelligence
organisations trace their roots to the colonial period, it would seem that India too
followed a similar path. However, this is only in theory. In practice, decision
making throughout the 20th century had been arbitrary – led by the intellect of
the political leader – and tasking from the political consumers, whenever it hap
pened, happened only belatedly. The list of a few key decisions taken arbitrarily
leading to strategically disastrous consequences are as follows:
• Nehru’s signing of the Panchsheel Agreement;

• Indira Gandhi’s declaration of ceasefire and ending the 1971 war;
• Rajiv Gandhi’s signing of the Indo-Sri Lanka Peace Accord; and
• Vajpayee’s signing of the Lahore Declaration.
In the period between Rajiv and Vajpayee, P.V. Narasimha Rao (1991–96),
was the only leader to complete his five-year tenure. Like Nehru, even he
considered his intellectualism and diplomatic methods of conflict resolution
superior to intelligence means. His spy chief, Narasimhan, tactfully com
mented that “Rao had his own perceptions about things, but never imposed
his thoughts”.55 Other intelligence officers, however, have been candid in
accepting that Rao gave more prominence to his own intellectualism than
intelligence assessments.56 Likewise, I.K. Gujaral, the most intellectual prime
minister since Nehru saw no issue in winding up the R&AW’s operations
under the false belief that benevolence as the foundation of foreign policy
would be similarly reciprocated by other nations. Thus, wherever the political
leadership has enjoyed a certain degree of intellectualism and foreign expo
sure, the tendency to downplay the importance of intelligence agencies has
been great.
Such lack of interest and involvement by the political leadership in the intel
ligence processes can be cited as the main reason for the emphasis laid on the role
of intelligence leadership in India’s intelligence culture. While avoidance of
politicisation of intelligence demands that the intelligence services and their
political consumers maintain a certain distance between each other, some areas
that demand close co-operation had largely gone unaddressed, owing to the lack
of consumer literacy. For instance, many of the organisational shortcomings in
the form of recruitment noted earlier could have been rectified with better
interference from the political leadership. Left to the intelligence leaders alone,
emergent crises within the organisation had been managed but not rectified.
The apparent lack of political interest in strategic intelligence becomes stark
when we observe the fate of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC). One of
the oldest serving organisations, the JIC has only been a “talking shop” for
representatives of various agencies, and often a “parking space” for unwanted
bureaucrats.57 Operationally, it shares a consensual-collegiate culture with its
British counterpart, but the final product in India has never attained the sig
nificance it has in the British system.58 The strength of the organisation has
been entirely dependent on the ability of the Chairman JIC to influence other
agencies and build consensus. Unfortunately, this has been credible only when
K. Subrahmanyam held the position.59
The following excerpt from the IDSA task force report perfectly connects
the insignificant clout of the JIC to the lack of intelligence education among
the political leadership:
“The JIC, as an evaluator and coordinator of intelligence, was marginalised.

Its product rarely received the attention it deserved. It had not political sup
port and was not nurtured to play its required role. Accordingly, it had no
clout within the system. It is no surprise, therefore, that the intelligence
agencies tended to bypass the JIC in their keenness to be seen as being the first
to provide important information at the highest level”.60
In all the three cases observed in this book, the JIC played a less than significant
role. Only during 1971, when the consumers had a better appreciation for
strategic intelligence, did all-source assessment become central to policymaking,
albeit produced by the Chiefs of Staff Committee. The dire position of the JIC
in the Indian system is, therefore, a direct consequence of consumer illiteracy in
matters of intelligence exacerbated by overconfidence in their own intellectual
faculties.61
Diplomatic Consumers
With regards to the diplomatic community, the 1962 war has exposed the
earliest instance of a diplomat obstructing the posting of an intelligence officer.
Similar restraining actions had been shown by the diplomatic community in the
later decades as well.62 Arguably, one of the main reasons for this is the
Gandhian-Nehruvian principles adopted by the diplomatic community. As
articulated by a scholar of Indian diplomacy:
“Lacking formal training in the rationality that makes requisite the art-
of-politics, the MEA keeps to Gandhi’s example in the manner of rote
learning as opposed to the instinct of logic. Indian diplomacy therefore
became practically Gandhian, but by being purely principled, opened
itself to an unanswerable challenge: why choose this principle over
that? And yet, Gandhi’s rationale as principled Nehruvian diplomacy
persisted”.63
Seen through this prism, intelligence illiteracy among Indian diplomats was
an extension of the aversion to secret means that the political leadership had
installed in them. This has caused considerable challenges to the intelligence
agencies since they relied heavily on diplomatic covers for officers posted
abroad.64 Adoption of an official/diplomatic cover for intelligence work
naturally means that the intelligence officer’s movement in the target
country remains by and large restricted. Besides, the Nehruvian principles of
transparency lay in direct contravention to the secretive nature of the
intelligence tradecraft. Thus, in the worst-case scenarios, lacking sufficient
security consciousness, the diplomats have harmed the intelligence interests
by going as far as revealing the identity of the intelligence officers to their
counterparts.65
One such notable illustration was found in the records of the British Foreign
and Commonwealth Office. In May 1982 Indian diplomat A.K. Damodaran
was in conversation with British diplomats Christopher Mallaby and Alan
Bailey. His revelations on Indian intelligence matters had taken the British
completely by surprise. The latter noted:
“[Damodaran] was surprisingly open and frank…He seemed quite unaware
that the attitudes towards things British, particularly in South Block, had
undergone a sea change… V.B. Soni, who took copious notes throughout,
was visibly discomfited by a number of Damodaran’s observations about
the organisation of the Indian intelligence services, but could do little but
grin and bear it”.66
Similarly, lack of security consciousness is even found among the families of the
diplomats posted abroad who do not identify intelligence officers as one of
their own. An intelligence officer is cited in the media stating that:
“when he was posted to the US, diplomats’ wives would make clear, and
snobbish, statements that IB officers were not “one of us”. This naturally
makes people suspicious. It destroys our credibility. Nor are our names
ever included in diplomatic lists. So, when we go abroad, we are trained to
operate as though the opposition knows who we are”.67
Notwithstanding numerous such examples, there have been a few exceptions

that reinforce the argument that individuals with better intelligence literacy are
the true drivers of India’s foreign intelligence machinery.
For instance, during the R&AW’s formative years, the resistance put up by
diplomats against the posting of intelligence officers owed to the perception
that the Indian Foreign Service was superior to the IPS. This problem was
resolved temporarily through the interference of T.N. Kaul, the then Foreign
Secretary, with whom Kao shared a good rapport.68 Even at operational levels,
episodic co-operation between select individuals from the diplomatic and
intelligence communities has yielded positive results. Former diplomat and later
Deputy NSA, Latha Reddy recollected how political reports to New Delhi
were significantly enriched by the inputs offered by the R&AW officer posted
in the diplomatic mission.69 She added that brainstorming and close working
relationship was the order of the day. Such collaborations, according to her, have
enabled the diplomats to better comprehend the capabilities and requirements of
the intelligence personnel. Subsequent to Latha Reddy’s efforts, B. Raman, a
former R&AW officer, highlighted the commendable role played by Reddy in
supporting the agency’s counterterrorism efforts during her tenure in Portugal, and
also the TECHINT improvements made during her tenure as deputy NSA.70
Nevertheless, reflecting on the primacy of individuals and their interpersonal
relationships, Latha Reddy also admitted that:
“a lot depends on the ambassador and how he/she treats the R&AW. I
think if it is skilfully managed it is very advantageous to have an intelli
gence man there”.71
The IDSA task force report on intelligence reform noted that intelligence-
diplomacy relationship could be improved through periodic meetings between
the Foreign Secretary and the Secretary (R) – designation of the R&AW chief – to
discuss and develop “joint plans of action for the quarter, half-year or year”.72 In
the past, this formula has worked in a few instances. One former spymaster indeed
acknowledged that this is what happened during his time. In his words:
“tasking is personality based and not institutional. During my time, the

Foreign Secretary and I would sit and discuss short-term and long-term
plans. Then terrorism came and made it even shorter since the govern
ments just wanted to know when the next attack was coming. They were
least interested in strategically important matters”.73
Therefore, it is evident that the evolution of intelligence literacy among the

diplomatic community in 20th century India had been troubled and offered
mixed results.74 Yet, it must be noted that in comparison to the political and
military consumers, the intelligence officers tend to hold the diplomats in a
more favourable light.
Military Consumers
With respect to the military, a similar illiteracy as that of the political leadership
was visible throughout the 20th century. Although the military’s low-grading
of the intelligence profession dates back to the colonial period, it is noteworthy
that there had been no political interference to improve such matters, which is
supposed to be the bedrock of civil-military relations in a democracy. On the
contrary, political interference had only weakened the military intelligence
setup as part of the strategy of “coup proofing”.75 After the debacle of 1962, a
review of the military intelligence setup in India resulted in the formation of a
three-tier system focused on intelligence acquisition, counterintelligence and
security. Functioning under the Director-General of Military Intelligence
(DGMI) were the Intelligence Field Security Units (IFSU), which gathered
operational level foreign intelligence. The reviewers had advised that the
DGMI should be from the intelligence corps. But, invariably most of the offi
cers occupying the position have been operational officers. The Indian Army’s
rationale for appointing an operational officer as the DGMI was that, being the
end-user, it allowed for better tasking of the intelligence apparatus.76 Even the
officers who moved to the IFSU have largely been motivated by perks, rather
than penchant for the job.77 Therefore, as a cultural attribute, the operational
officers in the army have held greater respect than their intelligence colleagues,
thereby, making the intelligence profession less attractive. Two renowned
Army officers Karim and Bhaduri have made an intriguing observation in this
regard:
“The Indian Army’s record of not using available intelligence at the plan
ning level is legendary. In the mid-eighties particularly, it had become a
favourite excuse at operational levels”.78
In this regard, it has been observed that the intelligence corps has largely been a
‘dumping ground’ or ‘refugee corps’.79 The situation was much worse in the
other two services where the necessity of an intelligence corps had been
replaced by an individual officer assuming the positions of Assistant Chief of Air
Staff and Principal Director Naval Intelligence respectively.80
The other recommendation made by the post-1962 review committee was
to draw military attaches from the intelligence corps. However, the appoint
ment of attaches remained largely ad hoc. Similarly, the selection of military
advisers to Indian diplomatic missions abroad has also been erratic. Only a
handful of countries like Tajikistan and Afghanistan, to name a few, have had
military advisors belonging to the intelligence corps. This is not to assert that
drawing personnel from the intelligence corps would have had a qualitative
impact on the functioning of the advisors. Given that the cultural antipathy
towards intelligence had denied the deputation of the best talent to the
intelligence corps, some of the necessary skills were naturally found outside
the intelligence corps. For instance, in the mid-1990s the military advisor
posted in China was unable to translate to the Army Chief the conversations
of a Chinese delegate during a party. The reason was that the military advisor
was unacquainted with the dialect spoken by the Chinese delegate. Subse
quently, it was decided that officers occupying such crucial positions would
be drawn from outside the intelligence corps where aspects such as linguistic
capabilities were relatively stronger.81
Like the military’s reserved approach to service intelligence officers, rela
tionship between the military and civilian intelligence services also remained
chaotic. As observed in Chapter 5, the earliest friction between the military and
the IB came over the question of rank allocation to the IB’s civilian analysts
who were sent to the military intelligence training school. This problem of
rank disparity was later inherited by the R&AW. Army officers of the rank of
Major General were given an equivalent of Joint Secretary rank in the R&AW.
Sometimes officers with about 25 years of experience in the armed forces were
given ranks as per civil service norms on deputation. Consequently, better
career prospects in the armed forces forbade officers from deputation to the
agency.82 Most of the officers who were deputed to the R&AW were mostly
on the verge of retirement or deemed unfit for active duty.83 In such a sce
nario, the system required a flexible ranking model. A former R&AW officer,
while in service, had argued vehemently in favour of the idea, but it was turned
down by the Department of Personnel.84 As a result, throughout the 20th
century, the R&AW’s 21 military postings had either been inadequately filled
by tri-service officers or filled by officers of questionable competency. In the
event, the military was seen constantly complaining about the quality of intel
ligence furbished by the R&AW.
In addition, the military’s insufficient literacy in matters of intelligence had
led to unnecessary wastage of resources. A steady demand for technical intelli
gence capabilities was maintained while the training required to optimally
exploit the existing technologies had left much to be desired. The origins of
this quest for technical solutions owes in large part to the military’s aversion
to intellectual solutions. One particular area where this factor emerges
strongly is the military’s constant desire for better communications intercep
tion facilities while concomitant efforts to improve linguistic capabilities to
decipher the intercepted messages is found wanting. Prior to the Kargil War,
the MI had a budget and manpower bigger than that of the R&AW; and, a
signals intelligence (SIGINT) component comparable to the U.S. National
Security Agency or the British Government Communications Head
quarters.85 The 1962 defeat had given birth to a tri-service SIGINT Direc
torate; whose head rose to the rank of Major General in 1983. Once satellites
came into play, the armed forces widened the ambit of SIGINT analysis and a
new organisation – Defence Imagery Processing and Analysis Centre– was
formed to analyse the imagery intelligence. The SIGINT Directorate mostly
relied on terrestrial assets to intercept electromagnetic and communication
waves. The organisation is an extremely secretive one, little has been written
about it, but its effectiveness is widely acknowledged.86 However, what is
remarkable is that its collection capability was offset by weaknesses in
decryption capabilities – a problem largely attributable to the lack of linguists
in the military.87
To understand the Army’s penchant for technological procurement over
improving intellectual capabilities, it is important to observe the larger
phenomenon of professional military education in India. Professional intel
ligence education and professional military education, although different in
purposes, they do meet in terms of equipping the analysts towards better
understanding the enemy.88 Education in the military, as opposed to train
ing, is meant to intellectually prepare military officers for an uncertain
future. In the 1962 case, the surprise was more a result of flawed military
planning than the fact that a surprise offensive occurred. Even the best
intelligence agency in the world could not have picked up the ongoing
Cuban Missile Crisis, much less analysed its implications for India’s national
security.89 However, a professional Army High-Command could have
vetoed an irrational military plan that eventually led to the rout of the IV
Infantry Division. This could have possibly been averted if the Indian Army
had a historic appreciation of Chinese military tactics. In retrospect, it
appears that, what China was doing was significant only in relation to what
India’s own forces were doing or planning to do.90 Hence, the Indian
military planning, vis-à-vis the Chinese military threat, comprised an action-
reaction cycle that could only be controlled through a holistic under
standing the People’s Liberation Army’s modus operandi. As observed in
the 1962 case chapter, the Chinese replayed the allurement tactics that were
employed against the Americans in Korea, to which the Indians had paid
no attention.
Although this is an argument in retrospect, such findings cement the view
that education in the military was shorthanded. Anit Mukherjee, writing 55
years later, commented:
“an unfortunate by-product of leaving curricula development to the mili
tary has been the neglect of military history… As a result, war colleges do
not cultivate or engage with military historians”.91
Mukherjee’s conclusions have been echoed by senior Army Officers like

Major General P.K. Mallick, who have written that officers in higher ranks
are selected on the basis of “job performance rather than for the excellencies
of their intellect”, and subjects “that are necessary to gain a deeper under
standing of the nature and character of war, military history along with war
games, military psychology and leadership are often overlooked”.92 In none
of the war colleges, were civilians admitted as faculty members. Between 1971
and 1972 a “Higher Command Course” was introduced, most probably after the
1962 and 1965 blunders; but a proposal to induct three civilian professors for
International Affairs, Applied Economics and Defence Management was turned
down by the Chiefs of Staff Committee.93 Military officers usually served as
faculty, focusing on tactical level studies rather than higher direction of war and
strategy. This largely obstructed innovative thinking in consonance with the
changing strategic environment.94
Hence, if lack of open market recruitment created a generalist class of ana
lysts in the R&AW, the military too had fallen short on critical thinking. The
Kargil War was thus a surprise in the sense that the number of possibilities
available to Pakistan post the nuclear tests remained incomprehensible to the
military that operated solely on its deterrent value and focused on terrorism.
This led the Indian Army to plan and prepare from a counterterrorism and
counterinsurgency perspective, unaware that a limited war was in the offing.
Therefore, the lack of intelligence literacy among the political and military
consumers in India has placed India in defiance of two predominant theories
observed in Intelligence Studies:
• First, India thoroughly defies the “Kahn’s Law” that posits that intelligence
is the key component of the defensive power while offensive parties tend
to focus mostly on counterintelligence.95 It is logical that a defensive
power would be in constant pursuit of accurate and reliable intelligence
because the entire deterrence strategy has to reside on such foreknowledge.
However, given that the Indian political leadership has relied heavily on its
own intellectualism and power of diplomacy, India, despite being a
defensive power, stands in total defiance of the Kahn’s Law.
• Second, both the 1962 and 1999 cases, as well as the arguments presented
above, have highlighted that the Indian military had vastly invested in
operational knowledge at the cost of intelligence. Consequently, intelli
gence had mostly been a causality in post-mortems of failures instead of a
component in planning. In this, the Indian case runs counter to the pro
minent belief held by Western intelligence scholarship that “military
intelligence inclines toward ‘worst-case’ analysis in planning, and toward
‘best-case’ analysis in operational evaluation”.96 Both the 1962 and 1999
failures denote that one of the causes of surprise was the Indian military’s
planning for the ‘best-case’ scenario while the intelligence agencies had
warned otherwise.
Strength of International Relations

The fifth pillar in Indian intelligence culture influencing its intelligence-surprise
dynamics is the strength of India’s foreign policies and international relations.
The self-interest-driven nature of international politics has the potential to
impact the development of strategic intelligence in mixed ways. Where inter
ests meet, there is a tendency for nations to co-operate on intelligence matters.
However, maximisation of power and security being the key objective of
international relations, international intelligence liaison has always rested on a
complex cost-benefit analysis.97 In the case of India, this aspect has been rather
complicated; owing largely to India’s desire for strategic autonomy. This desire
has also instilled in the Indian intelligence agencies a deep-seated concern for
security, which has had implications on intelligence production. For a civilisa
tional state like India that has been historically devoid of natural friends, this
security concern has been absolutely valid.98 Thus, the strength of India’s
international relations, although observed as a vital component in determining
its intelligence-surprise dynamics, is placed as the last factor because the degree
of reliance on foreign agencies is determined by the strength of the previous
four factors. Most importantly, even here, the strength of the leadership
becomes amply evident.
India’s earliest experience with the complexities of foreign intelligence
co-operation came during the early Cold War period. It has been observed
how both the British and Americans refused to co-operate owing to the presence
of Krishna Menon. The western agencies had developed a close relationship with
DIB Mullik, but those interpersonal relationships had failed to convert into stra
tegic partnerships given the policy choices made by their respective political lea
ders. In the aftermath of the 1962 war, an era of unprecedented level of Indo-U.S.
intelligence co-operation emerged. India relied heavily on Washington for
TECHINT equipment and training while the U.S. intelligence vastly benefitted
from using Indian territory to conduct operations against the Soviets and the
Chinese.99 The one sidedness and the perils of a weak nation like India entering
into an intelligence alliance with a strong nation with complex regional strategies
soon dawned on the Indians.
The U.S. had installed a TECHINT equipment on the Sino-Indian border
to spy on the Chinese. The arrangement was that the equipment would be
handled by the Americans while the data would be shared with the Indians. By
1966, as the Indo-U.S. relationship kept weakening, U.S.-Pakistani relationship
was on an upward trajectory. During this time, India discovered to its utter
shock that the CIA was using the same equipment to monitor Indian ORBAT
and shared this information with Pakistan, which the latter then forwarded to
China with whom it shared a close relationship. An irate Indira Gandhi
subsequently ordered the Director of SSB at Gwaldam to get rid of the
equipment.100 The fact that the U.S. had set conditions on India to not use the
equipment to spy on Pakistan while they themselves were involved in such
chicanery further irked the Indians.101
Looking in retrospect, the decades of 1950s and 1960s left a profound impact
on Indian international intelligence relationships. This was mainly because of a
divergent trend in India’s overt policies and covert policies that would continue
more or less until the end of the Cold War.
For example, owing to India’s policy of appeasement towards China since
the Nehruvian era, relations between India and Taiwan had remained strained
until the end of the Cold War. India overtly accepted a ‘One China’ policy
and in 1971 supported the PRC’s membership to the UN Security Council.102
This had negative ramifications on Indian-Taiwanese relations. However, in
the secret world, the relationship between the Indian and Taiwanese agencies
had been established in the immediate aftermath of the 1962 war owing to
mutual security concerns.103 Similarly, Indo-Israeli relations had not been for
mally established until 1992. Owing to domestic political compulsions and
international considerations, mainly that of “offending the sentiments” of Arab
countries, India had not formally recognised the state of Israel.104 However, the
R&AW had maintained covert ties with Mossad using Geneva as rendezvous
during the first decade, followed by the establishment of a Mossad station in
New Delhi under a business cover.105
The argument that the divergences between India’s overt and covert policies
have impacted intelligence activity becomes further evident when one revisits
the 1960s, when India’s foreign policy had begun to drift towards the Soviet
Union. Owing to national interests compulsions, New Delhi had the luxury to
steer India’s foreign policy from a strict adherence to non-alignment towards
developing stronger ties with the Soviet Union. Caught uncomfortably in this
transition was the Indian intelligence that had spent decades co-operating with
the Americans and British. The first glimpses of discomfort became visible
when Gyalo Thondup, brother of the Dalai Lama, had realised that the
Americans were only using “the Tibetans to sow discord between China and
India”, and hence, wanted to reach out to the Russians for help.106 While the
MEA as an executive wing of the government was supportive of the idea, Kao
is reported to have said, “Mr. Thondup, for heaven’s sake, don’t collaborate
with the Russians. Don’t listen to them”.107 For the early Indian intelligence
officers who were trained anti-communists and shared close relationships with
the western agencies, co-operating with the Russians was plausibly an awkward
idea. It was only in the 1970s that the U.S.’s support of Pakistan against India
drove the Indian intelligence bureaucracies away from the British and Amer
ican intelligence agencies.108 Concomitantly, the intelligence ties that emerged
with the Soviets and Israelis in the 1970s granted India significant autonomy that
became the bedrock of its strategic intelligence partnerships.109
New Delhi’s policy oscillations and reliance on strategic autonomy had
placed the intelligence leadership and their interpersonal relations as the
centrepiece of India’s intelligence liaisons, which resulted in mixed outcomes.
The example of France is interesting in this regard. The entry of the USS
Enterprise into the Bay of Bengal during the 1971 war triggered a concern for
India’s security in the Indian Ocean Region. Close interpersonal relations
between Kao and Alexandre de Marenches, the French intelligence chief,
enabled the creation of a TECHINT programme to monitor U.S. activities in
the region. On de Marenches’ suggestion, Iran’s SAVAK secret police and
intelligence agency was brought on board to fund the project, while France
provided the technology and the R&AW provided the manpower.110 Such
intelligence co-operation emerged mainly due to the efforts of the intelligence
leadership and also upheld the principles of autonomy sought by India. Subse
quently, France became an important partner in building the R&AW. The
agency’s earliest surveillance aircraft equipment and radio equipment were also
sourced from France.111
Therefore, throughout the Cold War period, India’s intelligence relationships
spread across the globe, but the results acquired were largely imbalanced. The
excerpts from interviews with Indian intelligence officers who liaised with
foreign intelligence agencies, testify that autonomy and security were central
to India’s foreign intelligence co-operation. In the words of a former R&AW
chief, who served in the IB prior to the creation of the R&AW and who
interacted extensively with the British and Americans agencies, “the British
and Americans gave you what they think you need, not what you want”.112
China was the only area where interests between India and the U.S. collided,
and “even there they were extremely careful about what they shared”.113
During the 1980s co-operation with the west remerged owing to common
concerns around terrorism. However, even here co-operation was limited.
According to former spymaster A.S. Dulat:
“the Brits were willing to help on Khalistan question; but they were never
helpful with Kashmir because the US didn’t want to”.114
Thus, Anglo-American relationship with India on the intelligence front has

been described by another R&AW chief as “high on rhetoric, but low on
delivery”.115
Finally, emphasising the requirement of autonomy and highlighting the
“security-concerned” approach of India’s international intelligence relations,
Balachandran, a former senior R&AW officer who liaised with Israel and
Afghanistan commented that:
“Afghanistan, at one point, allowed India to carry out operations in Pakistan

through their territory when they desperately needed us. Israel too had shown
great enthusiasm before their embassy was established in 1992. So, the ques
tion is who wants whom? We have to answer these questions properly first,
and when all other options have dried up, only then intelligence liaison
should be given priority”.116
Balachandran’s comments are matched by almost all the officers interviewed
for this research. International intelligence liaison is considered by them as
“a dicey thing” not as a matter of theoretical expression, but an empirical
observation. Balachandran’s further addition that “through it [liaison] they
will try to penetrate you” is an aspect that requires particular emphasis.
Given the one-sidedness of the intelligence arrangements with rich western
intelligence agencies, repeated defections of Indian intelligence personnel to
Western capitals and constant attempts by western intelligence agencies to
penetrate the Indian agencies have all caused the Indians to be characteristically
sceptical about interacting with their western counterparts.117
By the time of Kargil, it is safe to say that India neither had friends like
the Soviet Union or Israel of 1971, nor was its foreign and security policies
aligned with the U.S. and the U.K. to procure early warning or support
against Pakistan. It was only after India released the Musharraf tapes and
attained psychological victory over Pakistan, did the U.S. intelligence
community inform President Bill Clinton that Pakistan was “flirting with
nuclear war”.118 Therefore, despite weak international intelligence liaison
playing a significant role in leaving informational gaps unfulfilled in 1962
and 1999, the nature of India’s intelligence culture that desired high levels
of autonomy implied that the impact of liaisons on intelligence-surprise
dynamics depended heavily on the cumulative strengths of India’s intelli
gence leadership, organisation, covert action and consumer literacy. Thus, in
summation, the five determinants of India’s intelligence culture, finding
their roots in India’s strategic culture, are closely interrelated and have
played a vital role in determining the occurrence of strategic surprises, or
lack thereof.
Notes
1 Stephen Cohen and Sunil Dasgupta, Arming without Aiming: India’s Military Mod
ernisation, Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 2010, p. 13.
2 ‘Non-Alignment 2.0’, Centre for Policy Research, 2012, available at www.cprindia.
first-century, accessed on 10 October 2019.
3 David Scott, ‘India and Regional Integration’, in David Scott, Handbook of India’s
International Relations, London: Routledge, 2011, pp. 120–121.
4 Deepa M. Ollapally and Rajesh Rajagopalan, ‘India: Foreign Policy Perspectives
of an Ambiguous Power’, Henry R. Nau and Deepa M. Ollapally, Worldviews of
Aspiring Powers: Domestic Foreign Policy Debates in China, India, Iran, Japan and
Russia, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 73.
5 Subrata K. Mitra and Jivanta Schottli, ‘The New Dynamics of Indian Foreign
Policy and its Ambiguities’, Irish Studies in International Affairs, Vol. 18. No. 1,
2007, p. 20.
Delhi: Wordsmith, 2005, p. 13.
7 R. Swaminathan, ‘First, the Navy. Then, the RAW, Who Next, Prime Minister’,
1999, available at www.angelfire.com/in/jalnews/191991.txt, accessed on 10
October 2019.
8 Rajendra M. Abhyankar, Indian Diplomacy: Beyond Strategic Autonomy, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2018.
9 Dheeraj Paramesha Chaya, ‘Proximity or Sycophancy? The Relationship between
Intelligence and Policy in the Nehruvian Era, 1947–64’, South Asia: Journal of
South Asian Studies, 2022.
13 ‘Rationalisation of the Intelligence and Security Set-up’, Haksar Papers III Instal
ment, Sub File 170, August 1971, NMML.
14 ‘Visit of Mr. A.K. Damodaran’, FCO 37/2815, 25 May 1982, UKNA.
15 Nair, Inside IB and RAW, 2016, pp. 169–170.
18 Observation made by several intelligence personnel who served during that era.
19 Vappala Balachandran, ‘Struggling to Preserve the ‘Kaoboys’ Legacy’, The Tribune,
25 September 2018, available at www.tribuneindia.com/news/archive/comment/
struggling-to-preserve-kaoboys-legacy-658199, accessed on 10 October 2019.
20 ‘RAW: India’s most dreaded secret service’, India Today, 15 April 1977, available at
www.indiatoday.in/magazine/indiascope/story/19770415-raw-indias-most-drea
ded-secret-service-823652-2014-08-04, accessed on 10 October 2019.
21 ‘A Case for Intelligence Reforms in India’, IDSA Task Force Report, 2012, p. 43,
available at https://idsa.in/system/files/book/book_IntellegenceReform.pdf, acces
sed on 10 October 2019.
22 Ibid.; Vikram Sood, The Unending Game: A Former R&AW Chief’s Insights into
Espionage, New Delhi: Penguin Random House, 2018, pp. 252–253.
23 Ibid.
24 The epithet was largely born out of bureaucratic jealousy which could not tolerate
the emergence of an organisation capable of drawing salaries equivalent to that of
other senior bureaucracies (like the Indian Foreign Service) while maintaining a direct
recruitment channel. The term was subsequently popularised by sections in the
media. However, none of the critics who employ this epithet actually make an effort
to objectively assess the damage caused by this recruitment pattern nor do they offer
an alternative method. What they fail to realise is that the question of trust was central
to intelligence recruitment, and India was not alone in choosing this format of
recruitment. In post-war Britain, the MI6 had also “recruited incestuously from
within small circles in the tight-knit British elite”. That such a recruitment drive
would give rise to characters such as Kim Philby was a consequence of lax security
screening than the recruitment pattern itself. Gordon Corera, MI6: Life and Death in
the British Secret Service, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2012, pp. 71–73.; Similarly,
even the CIA had, for a long time, recruited mostly from the White Anglo-Saxon
Protestant, East Coast Americans as a “protective mechanism against betrayal”. Milo
Jones and Philippe Silberzahn, Constructing Cassandra: Reframing Intelligence Failure at
the CIA, 1947–2001, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013, p. 38.
It must be noted that even this officer underscored the importance of “trust”
factor in recruiting intelligence officials which had given rise to the abovesaid
recruitment pattern.
29 Interview with Defence Analyst Dr Bidanda Chengappa, 18 August 2018.
30 Interview with Intelligence Studies Scholar Dr Prem Mahadevan, 27 February 2019.
31 Interview with former R&AW Additional Secretary, Jayadeva Ranade, 24 Octo
ber 2018.; Another area that has lost focus, owing to reliance on deputationists is
the challenge of language training and proficiency. The R&AW officers believe
that the MEA has a better foreign language expertise which the agency can tap
from time to time. However, this arrangement might not have borne rich divi
dends as the MEA has had similar personnel management and training issues,
affecting its linguistic proficiency. Interview with former Deputy National Secur
ity Advisor Latha Reddy, 3 August 2018.
33 The Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) is more renowned as a covert action
agency than as an intelligence agency. Over the years, it has maintained a web of
covert operatives across India in pursuit of paramilitary activities. In addition, however,
these operatives have also provided the ISI an intelligence advantage vis-à-vis India
since their primary objectives have also included espionage on India’s military instal
lations and capabilities. Jaideep Saikia, ‘The ISI Reaches East Anatomy of a Con
spiracy’, Faultlines, August 2000, available at www.satp.org/satporgtp/publication/fa
ultlines/volume6/Fault6-JSaikia-F.htm#_ftn10, accessed on 10 October 2019.
34 Todd Stiefler, ‘CIA’s Leadership and Major Covert Operations: Rogue Elephants
or Risk-Averse Bureaucrats?’, Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 19, No. 4,
2004, p. 647.
35 Anne F. Thurston and Gyalo Thondup, The Noodle Maker of Kalimpong: The Untold
Story of My Struggle for Tibet, Gurgaon: Random House Publishers, 2016, p. 223.
36 Kallol Bhattacherjee, ‘They Came, They Fought, They Stayed’, The Hindu, 17
March 2017, available at www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/they-cam
e-they-fought-they-stayed/article17443356.ece, accessed on 12 October 2019.
38 Some of the agency’s well-known covert actions include the merger of Sikkim as the
22nd state of India, containment of a coup against Mauritian Prime Minister Anerood
Jugnauth in 1983 under Operation Lal Dora, training of Tamil militants in Sri Lanka,
and finally, covert operations in support of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency
operations targeting training camps and cadres in Pakistan and Myanmar. Liberation
movements in African countries like Namibia and South Africa have also received
support from the R&AW. During the 1970s the agency had maintained a strong
covert action infrastructure in Afghanistan too, which extended to maintaining links
with the Baluchi society in Pakistan. D. Brewster, India’s Ocean: The Story of India’s
Bid for Regional Leadership, London: Routledge, 2014, p. 73.; Vikram Sood, ‘The
Indian Intelligence System’, in Harsh V. Pant, Handbook of Indian Defence Policy:
Themes, Structures and Doctrines, London: Routledge, 2015, p. 345.; Avinash Paliwal,
My Enemy’s Enemy: India in Afghanistan from Soviet Invasion to US Withdrawal, Oxford:
39 Interview with former R&AW Senior Field Officer – F1, 27 January 2019.; The
British MI6, on the other hand, has three categories of intelligence officers. Case
officers to run agents; targeting officers and reports officers for analysis. The
demarcation is because the British believe that the case officers are “experts on
intelligence techniques (and enthusiasts for them)” while the others are experts on
intelligence subjects. Michael Herman, Intelligence and Peace and War, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 43.
40 Despite drawing inspiration from the CIA, the Indianisation of operational pro
cedures in the R&AW was probably due to the influence of the IB’s working
culture. Kao, himself being a former IB officer, definitely knew how Mullik had
developed through the EMS an “elite core, extremely efficient, confident, and
excelling both in operations and analysis”. It is entirely possible that Kao aspired
to develop a similar permanent cadre of intelligence personnel, albeit from the
open market. A.K. Verma, ‘Intelligence Reform without a Cultural Shift in
Approach will be a Non Starter’, South Asia Analysis Group, Paper No. 4353, 28
February 2011.
43 ‘Nair Committee recommends setting up of third agency over and above RAW
and IB’, India Today, 15 March 1984, available at www.indiatoday.in/magazine/
investigation/story/19840315-nair-committee-recommends-setting-up-of-third-a
gency-over-and-above-raw-and-ib-802847-1984-03-15, accessed on 12 October
2019.; V.K. Singh, India’s External Intelligence: Secrets of Research and Analysis Wing
(RAW), New Delhi: Manas Publications, 2015, p. 48.
45 A.S. Dulat, Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years, New Delhi: Harper Collins, 2015, p. 167.
47 ‘What’s Wrong with our Intelligence?’, India Today, 1 July 2002, available at
www.outlookindia.com/magazine/story/whats-wrong-with-our-intelligence/
216296, accessed on 12 October 2019.
48 ‘Special Frontier Force: School for Scandal’, India Today, 15 May 1982, available at
www.indiatoday.in/magazine/indiascope/story/19820515-special-frontier-force-sch
ool-for-scandal-771792-2013-10-16, accessed on 12 October 2019.
49 Ibid.
50 ‘SFF: Sexy Spooks’, India Today, 15 March 1981, available at www.indiatoday.in/maga
zine/investigation/story/19810315-large-majority-of-special-frontier-force-officers-in
volved-in-messy-sex-scandal-772750-2013-11-26, accessed on 12 October 2019.
51 As part of the Gujral Doctrine that sought to position India as an altruistic big
brother in the South Asian region, the R&AW’s Counterintelligence Team X and
Counterintelligence Team J that focused on the Khalistani terrorists and Pakistan,
respectively, were ordered to be shut. Although this impacted the agency’s covert
action capabilities, senior R&AW officers of the era have hinted that public per
ception of the damage far outweighs the actual ones. Interview with former
Secretary (Research) Vikram Sood, 22 October 2018.; Interview with former
R&AW Special Secretary Vappala Balachandran, 16 September 2018.; Interview
with former R&AW Special Secretary – R3, 30 October 2018.
52 Loch K Johnson, ‘Preface to a Theory of Strategic Intelligence’, International Journal of
Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Vol. 16, No. 4, 2011, p. 640.
53 See Chapter 3 in Part II of this volume.
54 Philip H.J. Davies, MI6 and the Machinery of Spying: Structure and Process in Britain’s
Secret Intelligence, London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2005, pp. 13–15.
56 All the other intelligence officers interviewed for this research held this view.
United States’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Vol. 17, No. 3, 2004, p.
498.; Interview with former Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) Chairman – J1,
24 October 2018.
59 Interview with former Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) Chairman – J1, 24
October 2018.
60 IDSA Task Force Report, 2012, p. 85.
61 Subrahmanyam, Shedding Shibboleths, p. 13.
62 Asoka Raina, Inside RAW: The Story of India’s Secret Service, New Delhi: Vikas
Publishing House Pvt Ltd, 1981, p. 30.
64 Interview with former R&AW Special Secretary Vappala Balachandran, 16
September 2018.
65 Besides security consciousness, enemy counterintelligence tactics like physical
harassment, especially in countries like Pakistan, have also motivated diplomats to
reveal the identity of intelligence officers. B. Raman, The Kaoboys of R&AW:
Down Memory Lane, New Delhi: Lancer Publishers, 2013, p. 231.
66 ‘Visit of Mr. A.K. Damodaran’, FCO 37/2815, 25 May 1982, UKNA.
67 ‘Spies Left Out in the Cold’, Outlook, 7 February 1996, available at www.out
lookindia.com/magazine/story/spies-left-out-in-the-cold/200758 accessed on 12
October 2019.
68 Raina, Inside RAW, 1981, p. 93.
69 Interview with former Deputy National Security Advisor Latha Reddy, 3 August
2018.
70 B. Raman, ‘Shri Nehchal Sandhu IPS to Join NSCS’, South Asia Analysis Group,
20 December 2012, available at www.southasiaanalysis.org/node/1096, accessed
on 12 October 2019.
71 Interview with former Deputy National Security Advisor Latha Reddy, 3 August
2018.
72 IDSA Task Force Report, 2012, p. 81.
74 Almost all the intelligence officers interviewed for this research asserted that
they had varied experiences with the diplomatic community depending on the
individual. The generic consensus was that the diplomatic community as a
consumer of intelligence was far more co-operative than the political and
military consumers.
75 Wilkinson, Army and Nation, 2015, p. 106.
76 Interview with former Director General of Military Intelligence (DGMI), Lieu
tenant General (Retd) R.K. Sawhney, 17 December 2018.
77 Interview with former Military Intelligence (MI) Officer – M1, 11 July 2018.
78 Shankar Badhuri and Asif Karim, The Sri Lankan Crisis, New Delhi: Lancer Interna
tional, 1990, p. 45.; Interestingly, this observation is made during the tenure of
General Krishnaswamy Sundarji who is renowned for his intellect as well as his ten
dency to use intelligence failures as an excuse to cover up weak operational plans.
Examples are the 1984 Operation Bluestar and 1987 Operation Pawan.
79 Bidanda Chengappa, ‘Indian Military Intelligence: A Case for Change’, Indian
Defence Review, July 1992, p. 106.; This particular observation is not exclusive to
the Indian military. To quote Colonel John Hughes-Wilson, “In many an army,
navy or air force, the intelligence staff is often a Cinderella Organisation. The
problem is that the path to military glory invariably lies in the field of ‘opera
tions’”. John Hughes-Wilson, Military Intelligence Blunders, Massachusetts: Da Capo
Press, 2000, p. 4.
80 Interview with former Principal Director Naval Intelligence – P1, 28 August
2018.; Interview with Air Marshal (Retd) S.Y. Savur, 14 July 2018.
81 Interview with Defence Analyst Dr Bidanda Chengappa, 18 August 2018.
82 Interview with former Principal Director Naval Intelligence – P1, 28 August
2018.
85 B. Raman, Intelligence: Past, Present and Future, New Delhi: Lancer Publishers,
2002, pp. 65–66.
86 V.A. Subrahmanyam, The Signals: A History of the Corps of Signals, New Delhi:
Directorate General of Signals, Army HQ, 1986, p. 101.
87 Interview with former Deputy Directorate General (Signals) – D1, 22 July 2018.
88 Joe Devanny, et al., ‘Why the British Government Must Invest in the Next
Generation of Intelligence Analysts”, The RUSI Journal, Vol. 163, No. 6, 2018,
pp.82–85.
89 K. Subrahmanyam, ‘Nehru’s Concept of Indian Defence’, Strategic Analysis, Vol.
32, No. 6, 2008, p. 1189.
90 Michael Handel, Intelligence and Military Operations, London: Routledge, 2013, p. 1.
91 Anit Mukherjee, ‘Educating the Professional Military: Civil–Military Relations
and Professional Military Education in India’, Armed Forces & Society, Vol. 44, No.
3, 2017, p. 14.
92 P.K. Mallick, ‘Professional Military Education: Agenda for Reform’, Gurmeet
Kanwal and Neha Kohli, Defence Reforms: A National Imperative, New Delhi:
Pentagon Press, 2018, p. 205.
93 Mukherjee, ‘Educating the Professional Military’, 2017, p. 10.
94 Prakash Menon, ‘Military Education in India: Missing the Forests for the Trees’,
Journal of Defence Studies, Vol. 9, No. 4, 2015, p. 49.
95 George O’Toole, ‘Kahn’s law: A universal principle of intelligence?', International
Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Vol. 4, No. 1, 1990, pp. 39–41.; Kahn’s
observation was made in his treatise on Hitler’s intelligence in World War II,
where he observed that because of Britain’s sea power and defensive orientation,
she needed intelligence whereas Germany, a continental power, in an offensive
posture did not require intelligence. David Kahn, Hitler’s Spies: German Military
Intelligence in World War II, Massachusetts: Da Capo Press, 2000, p. 513.
96 Richard K. Betts, ‘Analysis, War and Decision: Why Intelligence Failures are
Inevitable’, World Politics, Vol. 31, No. 1, 1978, p. 65.
97 The best example in this regard is the Five Eyes Alliance that was formed to col
lect and share SIGINT between the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia and New
Zealand. The alliance emerged at the end of World War II between the U.K. and
the U.S. to monitor Soviet communications. In 1955 the other three nations were
added. Considering the growing capabilities, global outreach and mutual security
concerns, propositions are now being made to include France, Germany and
South Korea within the alliance, while calling into question the utility of New
Zealand considering its strained intelligence sharing practices between 1986 and
2009. Corey Pfluke, ‘A History of the Five Eyes Alliance: Possibility for Reform
and Additions’, Comparative Strategy, Vol. 38, No. 4, 2019, pp. 302–315.
98 Interview with Intelligence Studies Scholar Dr Prem Mahadevan, 27 February 2019.
99 The U.S. detachment that arrived in India to operate the U2 spy planes from Charbatia
stayed until 1967. ‘U.S. Planes use Indian Air Base to Snoop on China’, The Hindu, 16
August 2013, available at www.thehindu.com/news/national/us-planes-used-indian-a
irbase-to-snoop-on-china/article5028660.ece, accessed on 15 October 2019.
101 Frankly speaking, even the Indians had violated the American terms and conditions
and used an equipment provided by Washington to spy on Pakistan. However,
interpersonal relations between R.N. Kao and the CIA officials had caused the latter
to request Kao to exhibit caution lest the State Department got wind of it. Although
these trickeries are common in the intelligence world, the weaker nations tend to
suffer a lot more than the stronger ones, when terms and conditions guiding the
partnerships are violated. Raman, The Kaoboys of R&AW, 2013, p. 294.
102 Joe Thomas Karackattu, ‘The Case for a Pragmatic India-Taiwan Relationship’, Car
negie India, 22 April 2019, available at https://carnegieindia.org/2019/04/22/ca
se-for-pragmatic-india-taiwan-partnership-pub-78855, accessed on 15 October 2019.
104 P.R. Kumaraswamy, ‘India’s Recognition of Israel, September 1950’, Middle
Eastern Studies, Vol. 31, No. 1, 1995, p. 129. Notwithstanding India’s overtly
friendly policies towards the Islamic nations of the Middle East, intelligence assis
tance from these nations has been negligible in comparison to Israel.
107 Ibid, p. 231.
108 Among officers who served during these times and were privy to the double
crossing of the U.S. to support Pakistan, the distrust of British and American
intelligence agencies has been the deepest. Interview with former R&AW Special
Secretary – R2, 22 September 2018.
109 India received technical assistance from both the Soviets and the Israelis. How
ever, the fact that India and Israel were not tied in an overt policy of friendship
had meant that co-operation would hinge heavily on Israel’s security calculus. The
co-operation offered during the 1971 war was in the hope that India would for
mally recognise Israel. ‘Golda Meir to Shlomo Zabludowicz’, Haksar Papers III
Instalment, Subject File 220, 23 August 1971, NMML. Until the change in the
geopolitics of South Asia and the Middle East in 1979, Israel was highly interested
in co-operating with India in thwarting Pakistan’s nuclear programme. However,
the Soviet-Afghan War provided Pakistan with an opportunity to establish covert
ties with the Israelis which dampened Tel Aviv’s enthusiasm towards co-operating
with Indian intelligence. Once the Israeli embassy was established in New Delhi,
intelligence co-operation reduced further. Interview with former R&AW Special
Secretary Vappala Balachandran, 16 September 2018. It was only after the killing
of an Israeli student in Kashmir by Pak-sponsored terrorists in the early 1990s that
counterterrorism allowed a revival of Indo-Israeli intelligence co-operation.
111 Interview with Senior Journalist and Security Analyst Praveen Swami, 29 October
2018.
113 Interview with former R&AW Additional Secretary Jayadeva Ranade, 24 Octo
ber 2018.
115 Vikram Sood, The Unending Game: A Former R&AW Chief’s Insights into Espionage,
New Delhi: Penguin Random House, 2018, p. 65.
116 Interview with former R&AW Special Secretary Vappala Balachandran, 16 Sep
tember 2018.
117 ‘The List of Indian Officials and Spying Cases’, Deccan Herald, 28 April 2010,
available at www.deccanherald.com/content/66461/list-indian-officials-spying-ca
ses.html, accessed on 15 October 2019.; An interesting observation here is the
virtual lack of concern about the Soviets. One reason could be that the Soviets,
notwithstanding their penetration of Indian polity and society, were never seen to
penetrate the Indian intelligence services.
118 Bruce Riedel, ‘How the 1999 Kargil Conflict Redefined US-India Ties’, Brookings
Institution, 24 July 2019, available at www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/
2019/07/24/how-the-1999-kargil-conflict-redefined-us-india-ties, accessed on 15
October 2019.
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9 Culture of Ad hocism
Moving Beyond the Orthodox-Revisionist
Dichotomy
Introduction
To recap from Part I, the literature on intelligence-surprise dynamics has been
divided into orthodox and revisionist schools of thought. Orthodox scholars are
inherently pessimistic about fixing intelligence failures and averting strategic sur
prises; thereby, concluding that “failures and surprises are inevitable”. Revisionist
scholars, on the other hand, are optimists who believe that bureaucratic and
organisational changes can help avert surprises. While the orthodox school
accused the revisionist school of unwarranted optimism, the latter shot back that:
“undue pessimism is no less dangerous as a policy guide than unwarranted

optimism. While the latter inspires over-confidence and complacency, the
former breeds either fatalism and apathy or worst-case analysis and
overreaction—neither of which is conducive to national and international
security”.1
Nevertheless, the orthodox school persisted with the pessimistic attitude since it
believed that surprise was a complex phenomenon; and merely relying on
organisational reforms can divert attention from other aspects of the pro
blem.2 The issue with the revisionists was that they were heavily focused on
intelligence warnings alone and discarded systemic and individual factors that
forbade accurate analysis and receptivity of intelligence. In other words,
orthodox scholars focused on the enemy’s intentions while revisionists argued
that consumer’s receptivity of warning intelligence was directly linked to the
production of reliable/tactical intelligence on the enemy’s capabilities.3
Similarly, with regards to analysis, the orthodox school posited that metho
dological professionalism is a fantasy since “error is inherent in the nature of
the job” whereas revisionists tend to levy large premiums on the power of
methodological professionalism and analytical tools.4
So, where does India fall between the orthodox-revisionist schools of
thought? Having observed the three cases, one of which is an intelligence
success, it is the argument of this book that both the schools are equally correct,
but wholly insufficient. Since this book has studied intelligence culture as the
DOI: 10.4324/9781003296195-14
foundational element in India’s intelligence-surprise dynamics, it has proved
that scholars studying intelligence failures and strategic surprises elsewhere will
have to go down to the root causes that lie in cultural levels of analysis. Also,
scholars studying Indian cases will have to exercise caution in directly applying
the orthodox-revisionist models of analysis. Expansion on this is as follows.
If one were to observe just the 1971 case, it would be easy to conclude that
the revisionist arguments hold greater credibility because a series of intelligence
reforms had been undertaken in the aftermath of the 1962 failure, which
eventually led to the successful prediction of Pakistan’s intentions and cap
abilities in 1971. Even when considering the 1962 and 1999 cases, the principal
argument of the revisionists, that attention to tactical indicators and analytical
professionalism improves the chances of accurate prediction, might seem valid.
In other words, if Indian intelligence analysts had subjected the available indi
cators in 1962 and 1999 to social science methods of analysis like devil’s
advocacy or analysis of competing hypothesis, there could have been a greater
chance of predicting the actions of the enemy. In fact, Indian observers, who
would broadly fall under the revisionist school, have argued that a lack of social
science methods of analysis is a major impediment in Indian intelligence. For
instance, Praveen Swami, a senior journalist and security analyst opined that:
“[useful data on the intentions of the enemy is not gathered because]

somebody with a social science background would want to know these
things. For police officers these are not germane questions. Therefore,
assessments are not made with a scientific basis, since desk heads are unable
to task adequately”.5
Generally speaking, this observation about the Indian intelligence is accurate.

However, emphasising this aspect denies sufficient appreciation of the strength
of the analytical behaviour of the Indian intelligence agencies. From the time of
independence until the end of the 20th century, Indian intelligence agencies
had been overwhelmingly reliant on empirical knowledge rather than social sci
ence methods. This is both by design and by default. By design, the agencies
were shaped to study the enemy for what it was rather than subjecting
Incoming information to varied social science methods of analysis.6 For
instance, the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) was the only organisation
to doubt the legitimacy of Pakistan’s claim to peace in the aftermath of the
nuclear tests. This scepticism was not born out of a consultation of social sci
ence theories or models of analysis to assess Pakistan’s behaviour; instead, the
agency relied on empirical details (as traced in the 1999 case chapter) to
understand the civil-military divide and analyse its implications on bilateral
relations. A senior R&AW officer proclaimed that, “no R&AW officer would
ever believe that Pakistan has ever reformed because we have been seeing them
from close quarters”.7 Thus, it is arguable that empirical knowledge had placed
them in a better position to understand their enemy than social science
methods would allow.
Culture of Ad hocism 265
If this was by design, by default, the Indian intelligence agencies had to rely on
empirics because the system as it functioned could never have accepted assess
ments if they were born out of social science methods. In fact, the consumers of
Indian intelligence generally wished for facts that spoke for themselves rather
than intelligence estimates. Looking back at the 1962 case, the Intelligence
Bureau’s (IB) prediction, as early as 1950, that Mao’s China would pose a threat
to India was born out of a theoretical assessment of the expansionist behaviour of
a communist nation. Yet, it could not convince the political leadership about its
assessment because the consumers were seeking unambiguous and irrefutable
evidence of it. On 8 June 1962, combined with its inherent suspicion of Com
munist China and a reliable piece of intelligence from a source in Tibet, the IB
predicted an offensive. Both this report and the subsequent reports on the cap
abilities build up across the Sino-Indian border were discarded by the Director of
Military Intelligence at the Joint Intelligence Committee since they were not
evidentially strong to reshape the consumer’s analysis.8
Similarly, the R&AW’s October 1998 assessment that predicted a limited
offensive was also resisted by its military consumers. The reason for such lack of
consumer receptivity in both cases was precisely the lack of univocal evidence
of the coming offensives. Thus, in theory, even though social science methods
could have improved tasking and analytical processes, in practice, it was unli
kely to have generated receptivity among evidence seeking consumers. In such
a scenario, analytical rigour was limited to establishing the “reliability” of the
source and “credibility” of information.9 A ranking system had been used to
grade the quality of the source and the information procured that in turn
informed analysis. For instance, a good piece of input from a highly reliable
source would be graded A1 – ‘A’ being the grade of the source and ‘1’ being
the grade of the input – while D4 would represent the opposite end of the
spectrum.
This brings us to the second aspect of the revisionist argument that tactical/
actionable intelligence was required to improve consumer receptivity. To
understand the futility of this factor in the Indian context, the emphasis should
not be on the kind of intelligence that was required to increase consumer
receptivity. Rather, it ought to be on the strength of the consumer’s mindset
that was resistant to warning indicators. Doing so highlights that, in this regard,
orthodox scholars are better placed to explain the failures of 1962 and 1999
than the revisionists. According to Richard Betts:
“because knowledge is a combination of facts and beliefs intermingled in

the minds of decisionmakers and implementers, ideology and intelligence
often prove hard to disentangle”.10
Understanding the misperceptions of the consumers of intelligence would

determine the quality of tactical indicators required to serve as warnings, which
in turn would reveal if such indicators are acquirable or not. In both the 1962
and 1999 cases, it has already been observed how strong minded the Indian
consumers were. Elimination of these mental barriers required tactical
intelligence of absolutely high quality, which could not have been acquired
by the central intelligence agencies. In both the cases, the tactical indicators
pointing towards the coming apocalypse were available with the Indian
Army – the warnings provided by the Brigade level officers in both cases –
which the high command had disregarded. Thus, where the failure to collect
tactical intelligence to dispel consumer’s mindset is in question, it is a failure of
policy not intelligence.
The argument that methodological professionalism and tactical indicators
are not absolute necessities to enable military preparedness is also borne out
by the 1971 case. The agency was manned by officers like R.N. Kao, San
karan Nair and P.N. Banerjee who had a thorough empirical knowledge of
East Pakistani society and polity that had enabled them to predict its secession
in 1969 itself. In addition, Indian military preparedness to meet the Pakistani
military threat hinged on strategic analysis and not merely tactical inputs. In
fact, many of the complaints raised by the army with regard to inadequate
tactical and operational intelligence were beyond the purview of the central
intelligence agencies.11 Thus, even where a successful aversion of surprise and an
intelligence-led conduct of warfare was concerned, methodological professional
ism as a factor had little influence while emphasis on tactical intelligence unne
cessarily shifted the blame on the intelligence agencies, which is both unfair and
ineradicable.
Rather than tactical intelligence, the focus ought to be on strategic human
intelligence (HUMINT). Studies elsewhere have also emphasised this aspect
since the best warnings have emerged from human sources. The numerous
warnings received by Stalin until the eve of Operation Barbarossa in 1941 is
one such example. Other examples include the case of Ashraf Marwan, the
son-in-law of Gamal Abdel Nasser, playing an important role in informing
the Israelis prior to the 1973 Yom Kippur War;12 and the U.S.’s successful
management of the Cuban missile crisis owing to the presence of Colonel
Oleg Penkovsky, a Central Intelligence Agency/MI6 informant in Kremlin.13
Theoretically speaking, the development of strategic informants is extremely
difficult and requires time, patience, expertise and secrecy.14 Even the 1971
case observed in this book emphasises the dedication required to develop
strategic sources and also validates the argument that strategic HUMINT,
more than tactical intelligence has greater impact on averting surprises.
However, the lack of it in 1962 and 1999 had kept New Delhi completely
unaware of the enemy’s intentions.
Therefore, so far as India is concerned, both the revisionists and orthodox
schools have some arguments that are applicable. At face value, the 1971 case
reiterates that reforms work, and thus, the revisionist scholars are correct.
However, their obsession with accurate/tactical intelligence and their tendency
to regard intelligence useless if the policymakers fail to make use of it, is highly
problematic.15 Such arguments tend to project the intelligence product as a
market commodity that needs to be packaged and advertised well for the
consumers. While there can certainly be suggestions to improve the intelligence
product to enhance consumer comprehension, perceiving the consumers as
“customers” to whom the product has to be marketed carries potential dangers.16
Even in their failures, the Indian intelligence agencies have hitherto been
untarnished by allegations of politicisation of intelligence. Suggestions such as
marketing the intelligence product has the potential to spoil objectivity, although
some expression of policy preferences by the consumers could lead to better
tasking procedures. Hence, both the revisionists and orthodox scholars have some
relevance in shedding light on India’s intelligence-surprise dynamics. However,
there are significant insufficiencies in their explanatory capabilities that can be
fixed only by looking at intelligence culture as an explanatory variable.
Although the revisionists have identified the lack of methodological pro
fessionalism and tactical indicators as causes for surprise, and the orthodox
scholars have regarded the inherent psychological and systemic barriers as nat
ural obstacles in averting surprises, neither have been able to explain the reason
for the existence of such pathologies. There is a tendency to assume that the
intelligence cycle operates uniformly across the world, with the inference that
these pathologies are present world over for similar reasons. Unfortunately, this
is not the case, and the Indian example is telling in this regard. Hitherto scho
lars of intelligence have assumed that, across the world, a clear structure exists
where the intelligence services are involved in intelligence collection and ana
lysis and a communication link is maintained with the consumers through dis
semination of the intelligence product and reception of feedback (see Figure 9.1).
However, the Indian intelligence setup does not resemble this structure. In reality,
there is a significant distance between the intelligence process and the decision-
making body. The latter is largely a functionary of ad hocism and not entirely
based on strategic intelligence.
As established in this book, intelligence-policy relationship in India is not
subject to an established national security structure but to the proximity of the
intelligence chief to the political and military leadership. In theory, although a
structure exists, which closely resembles the American and British model of
national security policymaking, practically, ad hocism has been the order of the
Intelligence Policymaking
Collection D&F and Military
and Analysis Readiness
Figure 9.1 Intelligence-Policy structure in Western democracies

Source: Author
day whenever India has encountered a strategic surprise. Hence, the intelli
gence-policy divide in India is too prominent to allow direct application of the
orthodox-revisionist model of analysis (see Figure 9.2).
The biggest challenge in India has been to eliminate this ‘ad hocism’ in
policymaking and enable greater embrace of strategic intelligence as the legit
imate basis for decision-making. While the 1962 and 1999 cases were policies
of ad hocism, in 1971 ad hocism was replaced by systematism, which led to
differences in outcome. Against this backdrop, revisionist scholars might suggest
legislations mandating an intelligence basis for policymaking and provision of
legal charters to the intelligence services – an aspect what the orthodox scholars
term as “wishful formalism”.17 The desire for formal legal and legislative
backing has been high, even among Indian intelligence observers.18 Never
theless, seldom have such arguments been geared towards improving intelli
gence performances. Much of the demands for legislative and legal frameworks
have been motivated by a desire to abide by democratic norms and limit the
misuse of intelligence by politicians. There is neither reason to believe that this
would have improved the intelligence product, nor that consumer receptivity
would have been enhanced. Yet, the 1971 case highlights that accountability of
a certain kind can indeed improve intelligence performances.
As Jennifer Sims has argued:
“the best indicators of good anticipatory intelligence are independence for

the service, and ironically, effective oversight. The latter should build trust
and, thus, sufficient independence for the service to explore threats and
opportunities”.19
In the success of the 1971 case, it has been observed that there was neither legal
nor legislative basis to ensure effectiveness. Rather it was periodic reviews by
the Prime Minister’s Principal Secretary and Cabinet Secretary. Through the
interference of these knowledgeable individuals budgetary and bureaucratic
constraints were overcome, which ultimately improved effectiveness. This
implies that oversight as an end in itself is of limited value in improving
Foreign &
Strategic
Security Intelligence
Policy
Figure 9.2 Intelligence-Policy divide in India

Source: Author
intelligence performances if it is not guided by a strategic framework and led by
knowledgeable individuals.
Closely connected to the above point is that the revisionists’ suggestion for
legislations and legal foundations originates from an assumption that policymakers
have lost confidence in the intelligence agencies on the basis of past experiences.
The possibility of an innate reticence towards intelligence, which cannot be fixed
by legislations, is squarely disregarded. The former, i.e. ignorance of intelligence
owing to past performances and loss of confidence is evident in western
democracies and Israel, while the latter is characteristic of India.20 The successful
episode of intelligence driven military policy and planning in 1971 was due lar
gely to a cultural change in India that restructured the policymaking process
whose primary casualty was the ‘ad hocism’. Where the enthusiasm to disregard
strategic intelligence and undertake ad hoc decisions had been high, there is no
reason to believe that legislations and legal charters could have altered political
and military analyses. Supporting this argument, is another study on Indian
intelligence in counterterrorism that argued that high rates of intelligence per
formances leading to successful operational outcomes occurred when the political
leadership was invested in the entire process rather than taking ad hoc decisions,
mostly based on electoral calculus.21
Therefore, like Philip Davies had exposed that different models of national
intelligence cultures exist in the U.S. and U.K., despite their shared common
alities, this book posits that, regardless of the colonial ancestry of Indian intel
ligence agencies and the shared democratic ideals, India’s overall approach to
national security has not allowed its agencies to operate like their western
counterparts.22 This is a factor that scholars studying intelligence performances
and strategic surprises in different countries will need to bear in mind. Moving
beyond observations at organisational and structural levels, scholars are likely to
be better served by transcending to cultural levels to further understand why
the given organisational and structural fallacies exist. In saying this, this book
borrows the following passage from a recent study on intelligence failures that
points to the problem of cultures by highlighting the individual factor:
““cultural disease” that is highly relevant to the topic of our study is the
insufficient research both the US intelligence community and academia
undertake regarding intelligence [failures]…outside the Anglo-Saxon
world… Given that the theory of surprise attack and warning failures might
have universal application… other similar cases need to be incorporated into
the main corpus of intelligence studies in order to specify the conditions under
which individual personality factors come to the fore in intelligence failures
[emphasis added]”.23
India is one such nation where its intelligence culture posits that individual per
sonality factors come to the fore in determining both intelligence performances and
policy outcomes. The single biggest influential factor in India’s intelligence
culture identified in this book is the proximity of the intelligence managers to
the consumers of intelligence, especially given that the former were the actual
drivers of the intelligence machinery. Professionalism on part of the intelligence
managers and their positive influence on policymakers were essential conditions
to improve intelligence performances and control the outcomes. However, to
borrow the words of K. Subrahmanyam:
“in the Sultanate that is India, the tendency with some exceptions is to
man most of the top posts with sycophants, careerists and yes-man”.24
The 1971 war was the only case where strong individuals with high profes
sional integrity had challenged this rule. This is not to suggest that intelligence
managers prior to and after 1971 were incompetent. The point is that the
Indian system demanded a high degree of political subservience, barring which
the managers’ careers as well as their organisational survival were at risk. For
example, the resignation of Sankaran Nair in protest against humiliation by the
political leadership in 1977 validates the need for political subservience whilst
Mullik’s closeness to Nehru in order to protect the IB is testimony to organi
sational survival and growth hinging on greater proximity. Hence, the ‘lack of
professional integrity’ is only to the extent that the intelligence managers have
not aggressively pushed forward their agency’s assessments and have instead
chosen to maintain a ‘speak only when asked to’ attitude. In the event, what
ails Indian intelligence is expressed in the words of a young state police intel
ligence officer – “Indian intelligence is documentation oriented, not result
oriented”.25 Given the risks, it might seem unfair to expect the intelligence
managers to eschew this attitude. Nonetheless, so far as the study of strategic
surprises in India is concerned, this was one of the main causal factors, both in
1962 and 1999.
To sum up, “so long as we had a good chief and a government that listened, it
was all fine”.26 These were the words of former spymaster Vikram Sood, which
despite its simplicity, summarises the two main factors on which India’s intelli
gence-surprise dynamics have depended – intelligence leadership and consumer
literacy. Thus, in summation, the central thesis of this book, i.e. how a nation
‘thinks about’ and ‘does’ intelligence is fundamental to understanding its intelli
gence-surprise dynamics, which mere organisational level studies cannot reveal.
Notes
1 Ariel Levite, ‘Intelligence and Strategic Surprises Revisited: A Response to Richard
K. Betts’s “Surprise, Scholasticism and Strategy”’, International Security Studies Quar
terly, Vol. 33, No. 3, 1989, p. 349.
2 Richard K. Betts, Surprise Attack, Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 1982, p. 17.
3 Abraham Ben-Zvi, ‘The Dynamics of Surprise: The Defender’s Perspective’, Intelli
gence and National Security, Vol. 12, No. 4, 1997, p. 140.
4 Or Honig, ‘Surprise Attacks—Are They Inevitable? Moving Beyond the Orthodox-
Revisionist Dichotomy’, Security Studies, Vol. 17, No. 1, 2008, p. 87.
5 Interview with Senior Journalist and Security Analyst Praveen Swami, 29 October
2018.
6 This is not to suggest that there is no room for diverse, independent and creative
thinking in the agencies. For instance, within the R&AW it has been commonplace
for analysts to arrive at diverse assessments on a particular issue. When this happens,
the chief of the agency, during the Friday meetings, takes charge of reviewing the
factual details and analytical methodology to finalise the assessment. Interview with
former R&AW Special Secretary – R2, 22 September 2018.
7 Ibid. This is not just the claim of this officer alone. Even former R&AW chief
Vikram Sood pointed that the R&AW’s opinion prior to the nuclear tests was that
“Pakistan is not going to change. If you make a bomb, they will make it too. It will
not bring you eternal peace”. Interview with former Secretary (Research) Vikram
Sood, 22 October 2018. Later assessments presented in the Kargil Review Com
mittee Report also hint at the agency’s scepticism about the peace initiative.
8 A.K. Dave, The Real Story of China’s War on India, 1962, New Delhi: United Services
Institute of India, 2006, p. 14.
9 Interview with former Military Intelligence (MI) Officer – M1, 11 July 2018.
10 Richard K. Betts, Enemies of Intelligence: Knowledge and Power in American National
Security, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007, p. 15.
11 The fact that this aspect was not realised throughout the 20th century reflects the
lack of institutional memory in India’s intelligence and national security organisa
tions. The pedagogical structure in the Indian intelligence academies is not shaped
to undertake “lessons learned exercises”, which is unsurprising considering the
agency’s lack of a permanent cadre. Deputationists who come for a brief period
have no compulsions to acquaint themselves with organisational history or past
operational knowledge. Interview with Senior Journalist and Security Analyst
Praveen Swami, 29 October 2018. Interview with former R&AW Additional
Secretary Jayadeva Ranade, 24 October 2018.
13 ‘The Capture and Execution of Colonel Penkovsky, 1963’, Central Intelligence
Agency, 30 April 2013, available at www.cia.gov/news-information/featured
story-archive/2010-featured-story-archive/colonel-penkovsky.html, accessed on 27
November 2019.
14 Cullen G. Nutt, ‘The CIA’s mole in the Viet Cong: Learning from a Rare Success’,
Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 34, No. 7, 2019, pp. 11–12.
15 Eric Dahl, Intelligence and Surprise Attack: Failure and Success from Pearl Harbor to 9/11
and Beyond, Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013, p. 20.
16 Michael Herman, Intelligence Power in Peace and War, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996, p. 45.
17 Richard K. Betts, ‘Analysis, War and Decision: Why Intelligence Failures are
Inevitable’, World Politics, Vol. 31, No. 1, 1978, p. 68.
18 IDSA Task Force report, 2012, p. 33.
19 Jennifer Sims, ’The Theory and Philosophy of Intelligence’, in Robert Dover,
Michael S. Goodman and Claudia Hillebrand, Routledge Companion to Intelligence
Studies, 2014, p. 47.
20 Shay Hershkovitz and David Siman-Tov, ‘Collaboration Between Intelligence and
Decisionmakers: The Israeli Perspective’, International Journal of Intelligence and Counter
intelligence, Vol. 31, No. 3, 2018, p. 588. Betts, ‘Analysis, War and Decision’, p. 68.
pp. 75, 105.
United States’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Vol. 17, No. 3, 2004, p. 495.
23 Bar-Joseph and McDermott, Intelligence Success and Failure, 2017, p. 243. Although
their thesis misses embracing strategic culture as a component in causing strategic
surprises, it is rich in its assessment of the impact of psychological factors of impor
tant leaders during instances of surprises. A similar study on India might unravel
valuable insights into the understanding of intelligence failures and strategic surprises.
Delhi: Wordsmith, 2005, p. 28.
25 Interview with Karnataka State Police Intelligence Officer, K1, 12 January 2019.
References
Ben-Zvi, Abraham, ‘The Dynamics of Surprise: The Defender’s Perspective’, Intelligence
and National Security, Vol. 12, No. 4, 1997.
Betts, Richard K., ‘Analysis, War and Decision: Why Intelligence Failures are Inevitable’,
World Politics, Vol. 31, No. 1, 1978.
Betts, Richard K., Surprise Attack, Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 1982.
Betts, Richard K., Enemies of Intelligence: Knowledge and Power in American National
Security, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.
Central Intelligence Agency, ‘The Capture and Execution of Colonel Penkovsky,
1963’, 30 April 2013, available at www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-a
rchive/2010-featured-story-archive/colonel-penkovsky.html, accessed on 27
November 2019.
Dahl, Eric, Intelligence and Surprise Attack: Failure and Success from Pearl Harbor to 9/11 and
Beyond, Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013.
Dave, A.K., The Real Story of China’s War on India, 1962, New Delhi: United Services
Institute of India, 2006.
Davies, Philip H.J., ‘Intelligence culture and intelligence failure in Britain and the
United States’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Vol. 17, No. 3, 2004.
Herman, Michael, Intelligence Power in Peace and War, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996.
Hershkovitz, Shay and David Siman-Tov, ‘Collaboration Between Intelligence and
Decisionmakers: The Israeli Perspective’, International Journal of Intelligence and
Counterintelligence, Vol. 31, No. 3, 2018.
Honig, Or, ‘Surprise Attacks—Are They Inevitable? Moving Beyond the Orthodox-
Revisionist Dichotomy’, Security Studies, Vol. 17, No. 1, 2008.
Levite, Ariel, ‘Intelligence and Strategic Surprises Revisited: A Response to Richard K.
Betts’s “Surprise, Scholasticism and Strategy”’, International Security Studies Quarterly,
Vol. 33, No. 3, 1989.
Mahadevan, Prem, The Politics of Counterterrorism in India, London: I.B. Tauris, 2012.
Nutt, Cullen G., ‘The CIA’s mole in the Viet Cong: Learning from a Rare Success’,
Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 34, No. 7, 2019.
Sims, Jennifer, ‘The Theory and Philosophy of Intelligence’, in Robert Dover, Michael
S. Goodman and Claudia Hillebrand, Routledge Companion to Intelligence Studies,
Abingdon: Routledge, 2014.
Wordsmith, 2005.
Epilogue
Bring Back the Kautilyan State
This book has assessed India’s intelligence culture of both ancient and modern
times. It has exposed that there had been a significant transformation from the
Kautilyan period to the 20th century. The proactive Kautilyan state was sacrificed
to the colonial powers who, on the one hand, were oppressive of the colonial
subjects but, on the other hand, were guided by certain ideas that forbade the
evolution of a coherent intelligence set-up. To make matters worse, the fact that
foreign policy was formulated in distant London further obstructed the evolution
of a foreign intelligence organisation in India. Therefore, the modern Indian state
was born with no foreign intelligence experience worth its name. This could have
been a blessing in disguise if only India’s political leaders were motivated by the
Kautilyan principles of statecraft and enabled the evolution of native security
institutions. Alas, that did not happen.
But why this insistence on Kautilya and the Arthashastra? To quote scholar
Medha Bisht:
“while an ancient classic should not be considered as a template for the

present as it is situated and articulated with a certain context, culture and
tradition in mind, the ideational and philosophical underpinnings need to
be recognised, as they can be considered as a source for epistemic practices
for underlining the intellectual legacy and contours of strategic thinking in
classical India”.1
The rich philosophical and ideational utility of the Arthashastra for foreign and
strategic military intelligence has been well established in this book. Its applicability
to modern-day India should have been obvious both from the point of view of a
civilizational state as well as a defensive power. One of the biggest failures of Prime
Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was in not realising that a defensive foreign and security
policy hinged on an offensive intelligence capability. An offensive intelligence
capability lay at the core of Kautilyan statecraft since national security and policy
making rested on the pillars of a knowledge culture. Post-independence, India
sacrificed this knowledge culture to ad hocism with a blind belief that national
security would follow as a consequence of good intentions. The biggest lesson
from the success of 1971 is that the security of India is directly dependent on the
DOI: 10.4324/9781003296195-15
offensive capacity of her intelligence services and the knowledge base created
thereof. It is noteworthy that even during 1971 India was still a defensive power
that nurtured no expansionist or irredentist policies; but there was a realisation that
such defensive policy framework could only be sustained by an offensive intelli
gence posture.
By the close of the century, however, knowledge culture and offensive
intelligence posture had once again been replaced by culture of ad-hocism. Put
simply, the model Kautilyan state that had emerged in the 1970s saw a revival
of the typical Indian state by the 90s. Inevitably, the leaders of the state did not
bother empowering the intelligence agencies to verify the legitimacy of the
peace initiatives that were planned. What followed was the surprise of 1999.
Therefore, the Indian state’s defensive posture, whatever be its merits, is a
compelling reason to develop and maintain a robust offensive intelligence cap
ability. When former Home Minister, Lal Krishna Advani, wrote that the
Indian system had stopped being “intelligence literate”, one would have hoped
that this is what he meant. However, the security developments in the 21st
century fail to convince observers that India has revived its Kautilyan character.
The 2008 Mumbai attacks and several other foreign and security policy
blunders of the 21st century will probably have to wait for academic scrutiny
supported by declassification of documents to assess the real change in India’s
intelligence culture. However, sporadic studies conducted by the minimal
Intelligence Studies footprint that India has hitherto been able to afford, do not
invoke confidence. There has been a tendency to ritualistically ape the west
and add on bureaucracies in the name of reform, bereft of contextual and cul
tural understandings. These organisational reforms are meaningless at best, and
counterproductive at worst, if they are not guided by a coherent national
security strategy, reflecting the native requirements. To put in perspective the
perils of piecemeal changes to the intelligence system and drive home the need
for an overall cultural change, the following observations made by Ariel Levite,
an Israeli intelligence scholar, are apt:
“the strength of a chain is equivalent to the strength of its weakest link.

When significant weaknesses exist in all or most of its links, improvements
in only some of them, as drastic as they may be, will not result in any
significant difference in the strength of the chain as a whole. Improve
ments are required across the board”.2
In short, the entire Indian intelligence culture requires amplification to ensure

that its individual components are significantly improved. Only when such a
holistic improvement happens can one expect the five pillars of Indian intelli
gence culture – the leadership, organisation, covert action, consumer literacy
and international relations – to come together towards the fulfilment of India’s
aspirations and security.
To facilitate this, 21st-century India will require substantial public involvement
and discussions on matters of intelligence policy. This is in no small measure
Epilogue 275
driven by the fact that manpower in Indian intelligence is fast shrinking alongside
a rising threat environment. There is, however, hope given that a sense of mis
sion and nationalism is high among the nation’s populace. How to harness this
emotion to fulfil the nation’s intelligence mission is a question that will require
positive transformations in both the public as well as the intelligence bureau
cracies. To give an example, the strength of the R&AW during the 1970s
derived in large part from its open market recruitment cutting across all walks of
life. Simultaneously, there was both money and status acquired by working for
the agency. As the economy grew and private avenues for employment expan
ded, the R&AW failed to transform with time. In this context, a former R&AW
officer argued that:
“a structured bureaucracy is a very wrong thing for an intelligence service.

There are no incentives and motivations for people to work. The new
crop of IT people is not really worried about status. So, just give them
money”.3
This implies that as the nature of employment and opportunities for skill
projection improved elsewhere, the agency was stuck in yesteryear’s bureau
cratic muddles. Likewise, the public has also been short on developing skills
that are critical for intelligence missions. Picking on just one of the several
skills required by an intelligence organisation, a former intelligence chief
commented that:
“our main problem has been that we don’t have enough language experts.
Not just the R&AW—the country doesn’t produce them. Nobody wants to
learn languages because it is not profitable. The linguists that our universities
produce are mostly experts on ancient literature like the old Persian that is
not in use anymore”.4
Such comments indicate that there is a fundamental incapability of the civil

society to meet the intelligence services’ requirements in the new age threat
environment; its desire to contribute notwithstanding.
Hence, there is no gainsaying that there is an urgent need to revive the
knowledge culture that is essential to nurture and develop a robust national
security architecture. This can be facilitated by educating the Indian people
about the ideal role and nature of foreign intelligence in India’s national
security. Once the underlying principles of intelligence and national security
are well articulated, the nation can deliberate on how to navigate the chal
lenges and opportunities presented by the system. In this regard, knowing the
past is important to understand what went wrong and how to rectify them.
Through writing this book and narrating how India has ‘thought about’ and
‘done’ intelligence in the 20th century, an attempt has been made to pave the
way for an effective public dialogue. India has rich lessons to draw from
the philosophical and ideational expositions made in the Arthashastra as well as
the mistakes and accomplishments in its contemporary intelligence history.
Should we fail to pay adequate attention to these histories even as we prepare
for the challenges of the 21st century, one can only be reminded of Alexis de
Tocqueville’s quote – “when the past no longer illuminates the future, the
spirit walks in darkness”.
Notes
1 Medha Bisht, Kautilya’s Arthashastra: Philosophy and Strategy, London: Routledge,
2020, p. 2.
2 Ariel Levite, Intelligence and Strategic Surprises, New York: Columbia University Press,
1987, pp. 171–172.
3 Interview with former R&AW Special Secretary Vappala Balachandran, 16 Septem
ber 2018.
Appendix:
Interviews (in chronological order)
Note: some of the interviewees have wished to remain anonymous. Their

names are coded with an alphanumeric character.
Former Military Intelligence Officer – M1, 11 July 2018
Air Marshal (Retired) Bijoy Krishna Pandey, 13 July 2018
Air Marshal (Retired) Sharad Yeshwant Savur, 14 July 2018
Lieutenant-General (Retired) K. Surendranath, 15 July 2018
Wing Commander (Retired) K.T. Sebastian, 15 July 2018
Defence Analyst Dr Bidanda Chengappa, 18 August 2018
Air Marshal (Retired) Narayanan Menon, 20 July 2018
Former Deputy Directorate-General (Signals) – D1, 22 July 2018
Former Deputy National Security Advisor Latha Reddy, 3 August 2018
Former R&AW Special Secretary – R1, 19 August 2018
Former Principal Director Naval Intelligence – P1, 28 August 2018
Former R&AW Special Secretary V. Balachandran, 16 September 2018
Former R&AW Special Secretary – R2, 22 September 2018
Military Intelligence Officer – M2, 23 September 2018
Military Intelligence Officer – M3, 24 September 2018
Defence Analyst Dr Bhashyam Kasturi, 16 October 2018
Former Inspector-General, Border Security Force (G-Branch), K. Srinivasan, 17
October 2018
Former Secretary (Research) A.S. Dulat, 18 October 2018
Former Secretary (Research) Vikram Sood, 22 October 2018
Former R&AW Additional Secretary Jayadev Ranade, 24 October 2018
Former Joint Intelligence Committee Chairman – J1, 24 October 2018
Former R&AW Additional Secretary – A1, 25 October 2018
Pakistan studies expert Sushant Sareen, 26 October 2018
Senior journalist and security analyst Praveen Swami, 29 October 2018
Former R&AW Special Secretary – R3, 30 October 2018
Major-General (Retired) Ashok Mehta, 30 October 2018
Former Secretary (Research) Narasimhan, 8 November 2018
Former Indian Home Secretary R.D. Pradhan, 14 November 2018
Admiral (Retired) Arun Prakash, 16 November 2018
Colonel (Retired) Ramani Hariharan, 1 December 2018
278 Appendix: Interviews (in chronological order)
Commodore (Retired) R.S. Vasan, 1 December 2018
Brigadier Gurmeet Kanwal, 12 December 2018
Lieutenant-General (Retired) B.S. Malik, 14 December 2018
Lieutenant-General (Retired) R.K. Sawhney, 17 December 2018
Karnataka State Police Intelligence Officer – K1, 12 January 2019
Lieutenant-General (Retired) C.N. Somanna, 24 January 2019
Former Special Service Bureau Officer S1, 26 January 2019
Former R&AW Senior Field Officer F1, 29 January 2019
Intelligence studies scholar Dr Prem Mahadevan, 27 February 2019
Index
locators in italic and bold refer to figures and tables respectively.
Adamson, Harvey 71 Annual Military Intelligence Review

adaptive realism 53 (AMIR) 137
ad hocism 273; 1962 case, IB prediction Ansari, Hamid 39
265; consumer receptivity, lack of 265; anviksiki (investigative science) 41
cultural change, India 269; empirical ARC see Aviation Research Centre (ARC)
knowledge, Indian intelligence 264; Armitage, Richard 54
HUMINT 266; individual personality Arthashastra, the 2, 273, 275; alliances
factors 269; intelligence managers 270; 53–55; imaginary country 40–41;
intelligence-policy divide, India 268, intelligence analysis 48–51;
268; intelligence-policy structure, intelligence-consumer relationship
Western democracies 267, 267; 51–53; intelligence failures and
legislations and legal foundations 269; surprises 55–56; purusharthas, life 41;
methodological professionalism 266; rationale for intelligence, Kautilyan
political subservience 270; strategic -
State 42–44; sadgunya theory 50, 51;
intelligence 268; tactical/actionable -
saptanga analysis 50; spies 44–48; see also
intelligence 265–266; wishful Kautilyan State and intelligence
formalism 268 Assam Rifles patrol 130
Advani, L.K. 209, 210, 274 Auchinleck, Claude 110
Afghan Pipeline 200 Aurora, Jagjit Singh 163, 183
Agartala Conspiracy, the 172 autonomy 21, 231–232
Agrell, Wilhelm 10 Aviation Research Centre (ARC) 166,
Ahmad, Anwar 90 167, 241
Ahmad, Khondaker Mostaq 177, 182 Awami League, The 164
Ahmed, Mahmud 203 Azad, Maulana 133
Aksai Chin region 124, 125, 127, 143–145
Ali, Qurban 200 Bailey, Alan 244
Allen, John 103, 104 Bajpai, G.S. 125, 145
alliances, international intelligence: Balachandran, Vappala 252, 253
adaptive realism 53; power balance, Banerjee, P.N. 171, 172, 178, 240, 266
intelligence relationships 54–55; Banerjee, R.N. 95, 100
strategic 54 Bangladesh Liberation War, the:
Aman – military intelligence 109 COSC 187, 188; DGS 187;
ambiguity 20–21, 231 intelligence-led-policymaking 187;
AMIR see Annual Military Intelligence military intelligence 187; political
Review (AMIR) leadership, intelligence process
analysis of competing hypothesis 51, 264 186–187; R&AW 186, 187; strategic
Andrew, Christopher 68 intelligence 187
280 Index
Bardoli Satyagraha of 1928 92 Sleeman and the Thagi Daftar 65–67;
Battle of Assaye, 1803 64 strategic military intelligence 76–80;
Battle of Plassey, 1757 65 World War II and intelligence reforms
Battle of Waterloo 64 74–76
Bell, Walter 103 Commonwealth Relations Office
Ben-Gurion 109 (CRO) 134
Berlin-Rome axis 75 communal trouble 1948–49 94
Betts, Richard 23, 265 communism, threat of 72–74
Bhasani, Maulana 177 consumer literacy: diplomatic consumers
Bhishma Pitamaha, Indian intelligence 243–246; military consumers 246–250;
community 95 political consumers 242–243
Bhutto, Benazir 200, 201, 203 COSC see Chiefs of Staff Committee
Bhutto, Zulfikar Ali 179, 199, 236 (COSC)
Bingnan, Wang 143 counter-insurgency (COIN) 202, 211,
Bisht, Medha 43 212, 214, 216
Black Shirts, the 177 covert action 132; DGS 240, 241; foreign
Booth, Ken 23 postings 240–241; human network
Border Security Force (BSF) 173, 175, 239; infrastructure, target country 239;
177–180, 188, 211, 212 ISI 199; military planning, Indo-Pak
Bose, Subhas Chandra 73, 80, 110 war 174–179; operational and
Bourne, Kenneth 103 analytical desks, CIA 240; Tibet 239;
Bozeman, Adda 12, 14 U.S. 239; weak 241–242
British Joint Intelligence Committee 52 Criminal Investigation Departments
British Security Service (MI5) 15, 16, 72, (CIDs) 68, 70, 94
103, 104 critical empiricism and Indian intelligence
Brunatti, Andrew 17 24–25
BSF see Border Security Force (BSF) CRO see Commonwealth Relations
Bunker, Ellsworth 141 Office (CRO)
Bus Diplomacy 207–210, 235 Crosston, Matthew 18, 21, 22
Butt, Ziauddin 205 cryptology 45
cry-wolf syndrome 51
Capper, Thompson 78 Cuban missile crisis, the 127, 165, 248, 266
Carter, Jimmy 199 culture, intelligence: Canada and Tonga
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 100, 17–18; and critical theory 22–24;
128, 133, 166 ethnocentrism 23; and intelligence
Chaudhri, J.N. 138 performances 25–26; IR 22, 23; IS
Chavan, Y.B. 166, 167 22–24; orthodox and revisionist schools
Chiefs of Staff Committee (COSC) 13–14; security literature 24–25; U.S.
187, 188 and the U.K 15; see also Indian
Chowdhary, R.S. 109 intelligence culture
CIA see Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
CIDs see Criminal Investigation Daily Mail 131
Departments (CIDs) Dalvi, J.P. 150
clandestine agents 47 Damodaran, A.K. 244, 245
COIN see counter-insurgency (COIN) Dasch, George 15
Coll, Steve 199 Datta-Ray, Deep K. 112
colonial intelligence: communism, threat Dave, A.K. 127, 142, 235
of 72–74; hierarchical discrimination Davies, Philip 15, 269
65; IB/DIB 73–74; individuals, role DCI see Department of Criminal
of 64–65; Lord Curzon and first Intelligence (DCI)
intelligence reform 67–70; policy decolonisation: activities and reports 89;
developments 65; pyrrhic victory 64; Director position, IB 89, 90; interim
reactive intelligence culture 64; government 89; security and
revolutionary terrorism 70–72; destruction, records 89
Index 281
defence through diplomacy 92, 108, 109 Forward Policy, Sino-Indian War 126,
Delhi Intelligence Bureau (DIB) 73 148, 149; AMIR assessment 137–138;
demand driven tasking system 242 incomplete information 139; JIC
de Marenches, Alexandre 252 138; manning, border 138; MI
Department of Criminal Intelligence Directorate 138
(DCI) 68–70 French, Patrick 91
Desai, M.J. 149 frontier intelligence, Sino-Indian War:
Desai, Morarji 133, 234 Assam Rifles patrol 130; Chinese
devil’s advocacy 51, 264 intelligence dominance 131;
DGMI see Director-General of Military counterintelligence, Chinese 131;
Intelligence (DGMI) covert action 132; hospitality and
DGS see Directorate General of Security allurement tactics, China 130; IFAS
(DGS) 129; language 131; local tribes 129;
Dhar, D.P. 163 logistical difficulties 131; mule rides
Dhar, P.N. 184 128, 129; Sinkiang-Karakoram-Leh
Dharmashastras 41 128; TECHINT 132; vehicular
Diaz, Milton 11 movement 128
DIB see Delhi Intelligence Bureau (DIB) FSRB see Foreign Service Research
Directorate General of Security (DGS) Bureau (FSRB)
107, 166–168, 187
Director Criminal Intelligence 69, 72 Gandhi, Indira 11, 101, 163, 165,
Director-General of Military Intelligence 168–170, 175, 180, 186, 188, 201,
(DGMI) 211, 246 208, 231, 233–236, 238, 240, 242, 250
Discovery of India, The (Nehru, Jawaharlal) Gandhi, Mahatma 90
92, 106, 108 Gandhi, Rajiv 101, 180, 235, 242
domestic political situation, Nepal 1950 94 Gandhi, Rajmohan 89
Double-Cross System 16 GC&CS see Government Code and
Dulat, A.S. 237, 241, 252 Cipher School (GC&CS)
Dulles, John Foster 128 Ghadr movement, the 74
Dunham, Mikel 133 Gopal, Sarvepalli 91
Dutt, Subimal 141 Government Code and Cipher School
Duyvesteyn, Isabelle 16, 18 (GC&CS) 73
guda 44
Ear-Marking Scheme (EMS) 102, 236 Gujral, I.K. 241, 243
East Pakistan Conspiracy, the 172 Gundevia, Y.D. 146
Eisenhower, Dwight D. 143
empirical knowledge, Indian Haganah, Zionist military organisation 109
intelligence 264 Haksar, P.N. 169, 186, 233, 234
EMS see Ear-Marking Scheme (EMS) Handoo, G.K. 170
Enlai, Zhou 125, 140, 165 Haq, Zia-ul 199, 201–203, 205
ethnocentrism 23 Heuer, Richards Jr. 51
Ewart, John 74 Himmatsinghji Committee 105, 136
Exercise Lal Quila 148 Hindi Chini Bhai-Bhai 125, 137
Exercise Sheel 148 Hollis, Roger 104
honeytrap 47
Fabian socialism 108 Honig, Or 14
FBI see Federal Bureau of Investigation Hooja, M.M.L. 168
(FBI) Hoover, J. Edgar 99, 100
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Hopple, Gerald 14
15, 16 human intelligence (HUMINT) 44, 46,
Ford, Douglas 16 66, 79; HUMINT vs. TECHINT
Foreign Service Research Bureau 47–48; POK region 211; Sino-Indian
(FSRB) 108 relations 127; strategic 266;
Forjoe, Ben 107 transborder 129
282 Index
HUMINT see human intelligence Indo-Pak war, 1971 23; air strikes 163;
(HUMINT) ARC 167; Awami League, The 164;
civilian intelligence, India 170; covert
IB see Intelligence Bureau (IB) action, military planning 174–179;
ICS see Indian Civil Service (ICS) DGS 166–168; East-Pakistani crisis,
idealism 90 R&AW assessment 171–173; electoral
IFAS see Indian Frontier Administrative results 165; ELINT aircrafts 167; fiasco,
Service (IFAS) 1962 166–168; intelligence basis
IFSU see Intelligence Field Security Units 179–184; intelligence decision-making
(IFSU) and operations 173–179; international
INA see Indian National Army (INA) political climate 165; military
Indian Airlines flight, hijack of 179 intelligence 167; official declaration
Indian Civil Service (ICS) 69, 104 163; operational and tactical
Indian Frontier Administrative Service intelligence, R&AW 184–186;
(IFAS) 129, 131 Operation Searchlight 165; R&AW
Indian intelligence: ad hoc-ism 21, 22; 168–171; refugee crisis 165; SFF 166,
ambiguity, policies 20–21; autonomy 176; SSB 166–167; West and East
21; British legacy, continuation of Pakistan 164, 164
102–105; counterterrorism 19; cultural Indo-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and
change 111; empirical knowledge 264; Co-operation 165
Kautilyan to modern 106–112; policy Indo-Sri Lanka Peace Accord, 1987
of restraint 20; political patronage 235, 243
102–103; racial divide 104, 105; social Institute of Defence Studies and
science methods of analysis, lack of Analysis 237
264; strategic thinking, lack of 19, 20; intelligence: co-operation 54; cultures of
see also post-colonial Indian intelligence 13–19; definition 10–11; failures and
culture surprises 55–56; intelligence-consumer
Indian intelligence culture: 1962, 1971 relationship 51–53; leadership, strength
and 1999 wars 232; ambiguity 231; of 232–235; organisation, strength of
autonomy 231–232; consumer literacy 235–239; orthodox-revisionist
242–250; covert action capabilities dichotomy 13–14; strategic 12; see also
239–242; empirical observations 229; culture, intelligence; Kautilyan State
evolutionary structure 230; intelligence and intelligence; secret intelligence,
leadership 232–235; intelligence Arthashastra
organisation 235–239; international intelligence analysis: conflicting analysis
relations 250–253; restraint factor 50; descriptive element, strategic
230–231; strategic surprises 232 intelligence 49; Kautilyan state 48–51
Indian National Army (INA) Intelligence Bureau (IB) 67; association,
109, 110 MI5 104; birth of 72–74; class-1
Indian Police Service (IPS) 102, 104, officers 102; cryptography branch 170;
236, 238 Director position, decolonisation 89,
Indian Press Law, 1910 75 90; external intelligence front 97;
Indian Security Studies 24–25 foreign intelligence 98; formal structure
India’s first intelligence reform and Lord 73; Forward Policy, Sino-Indian War
Curzon 77; ad hoc mechanism 67; 137–139; Ghanaian intelligence 107;
Central Special Branch, the 68; CIDs intelligence coverage, China 128;
68, 70; DCI 68–70; domestic political intelligence dominance 75; Japanese
espionage 67; ICS officers 69; subversive activities, China 75; Muslim
Intelligence Department, the 70; personnel, strength of 102; outdated
piecemeal improvements, military analytical framework, Sino-Indian War
intelligence 67; secret intelligence, 142–144; political espionage 101;
aversion to 67–68; spying, British Second World War 76
aversion 67, 68 intelligence-consumer relationship 51–53
Indira Doctrine 168, 186 Intelligence Corps 79, 110, 136, 246, 247
Index 283
intelligence failure 1, 4, 9, 13–15, 23–25, Kautilyan State and intelligence: alliances
55–56, 139, 179, 215, 229, 236, 239, 53–55; analysis 48–51; culture 56–57;
269; see also Sino-Indian War foresight 56; guda 44; intelligence-
Intelligence Field Security Units consumer relationship 51–53; kapatika
(IFSU) 246 44; king, qualities of 42; knowledge,
Intelligence Operatives (IO) 105 power of 42, 43, 56; modus operandi
intelligence–political consumer 44–48; operational covers 44; policy
relationship, independent India: DIB, of non-intervention 43; power 42;
post of 96, 100–101; external rationale for 42–44; sa-dgunya theory
intelligence front 97; foreign 50, 51; samstha 44; sapta-nga analysis,
intelligence 96, 98, 100; intelligence enemy 50; sattri 45; spies 44–48; sudras
managers 100–102; JIC 96; manpower, 46; three-tier intelligence system 44
shortage of 97; Mullik, B.N. 100–101; Kautilyan State to the Colonial State:
political espionage, IB 101; recruitment communism, threat of 72–74;
102; U.S. visit, Sanjeevi 99–100 hierarchical discrimination 65; IB/DIB
Intelligence Studies (IS) 22; scholarship 73–74; individuals, role of 64–65; Lord
23–24; U.S. and the U.K. 15 Curzon and first intelligence reform
international intelligence co-operation 67–70; policy developments 65;
133–135 pyrrhic victory 64; reactive intelligence
International Relations (IR) 22, 23, culture 64; revolutionary terrorism
250–253 70–72; Sleeman and the Thagi Daftar
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) 55, 65–67; strategic military intelligence
199–201 76–80; World War II and intelligence
IO see Intelligence Operatives (IO) reforms 74–76
IR see International Relations (IR) Kautilyan to modern intelligence culture,
Iraq war debacle, 2003 15, 23 metamorphosis: consolidation of
IS see Intelligence Studies (IS) power, INC 106; defence through
ISI see Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) diplomacy 108, 109; DGS, creation of
107; Fabian socialism 108; foreign
Jaish-e-Mohammed 201 intelligence 112; FSRB 108; Ghanaian
JIC see Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) intelligence 107; INA 109–110; Israel
Johnson, Robert 66 comparison 108–109; knowledge
Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) 96, culture 111; Nehru, Kautilyan
102, 134, 138, 182, 243 philosophy 106, 108
Kennan, George 99, 100
Kahn’s Law 249 Kennedy, John F. 151
Kao, R.N. 39, 167–173, 176, 180, Kent, Sherman 11, 49
185–188, 208, 233–238, 240, 245, 251, Khan, Tausifullah 102
252, 266 Khan, Yahya 163, 165
kapatika (intelligence officers) 44 Kissinger, Henry 165, 183, 204, 205
Kargil Review Committee (KRC) 208 Kitchener 77
Kargil War, 1999 1, 4, 197; Bus Kitchin, Eric 103
Diplomacy 197, 207–210; COIN 202, Kongka Pass 125, 145
211, 212, 214, 216; intrusion 197; KRC see Kargil Review Committee
Jammu and Kashmir region 198; (KRC)
operation TOPAC 201–202; Pakistan’s
Foreign Policy 199–201; raison d’être, Lahore Bus Diplomacy 207–210, 235
Pakistan 203–207; strategic intelligence Lahore Declaration 243
and defence planning 211–217 Lama, Dalai 125, 136, 140, 239, 251
Katju, K.N. 137 Lashkar-e-Toiba 201
Kaul, B.M. 138, 149, 150 leadership, intelligence 232–235
Kaul, T.N. 245 Le Courrier des Indes, French weekly 89
Kaur, Amrit 91 Lei, Shiue 137
Kautilya 2, 39–56, 88, 106, 108, 273 Liddell, Guy 99
284 Index
Liebig, Michael 40, 42, 49, 106 Moni, Fazlul Haq 178
Longju incident 148 Monroe Doctrine 168
Longju Pass 125, 130, 145 Morley-Minto reforms 70
Lord Curzon 67–70, 77, 81 Mujib Bahini 178
Lord Dufferin 68 Mukti Bahini 175–177
Lord Mountbatten 136, 138 Mullik, B.N. 94–96, 100–105, 107, 123,
Lord Northbrook 67 126, 127, 129, 132, 136, 137, 139,
Lord Salisbury 67 141, 142, 145, 146, 152, 166–169,
180, 232, 233, 235–237, 239, 250, 270
Mahabharata 41 Mumbai attacks, 2008 274
Mahadevan, Prem 19, 20, 151 Musharraf, Parvez 203
Mallaby, Christopher 244
Manekshaw, Sam 165, 176, 181, 183, Nair, M.B.K. 182
187, 188 Nair, Sankaran 209, 234, 266, 270
Mao 104, 123–153, 165, 183, 265 Nambiar, A.C.N. 208
Marwan, Ashraf 266 Namgyal, Tashi 197
McMahon line 124, 142, 148 Napier, Robert 67
MEA see Ministry of External Affairs Narasimhan, N. 46
(MEA) Narasimha Rao, P.V. 243
mehmaan mujahideen 202 Nasser, Gamal Abdel 266
Mehta, Ashok 150 National Liberation Front, the 179
Mehta, K.L. 138 National Security Adviser (NSA) 235, 245
Mehta, P.L. 96 national security and intelligence, Patel
Menon, Krishna 73, 100, 103, 125, 126, and Nehru’s conflicting ideas:
132–135, 139, 140, 145, 146, 148–151, centralisation, intelligence 93; civil
172, 250 service 91; defence through diplomacy
Menon, V.P. 97 92; foreign intelligence 95; INC 92;
methodological professionalism 263, internal unity 91; Muslim League, the
266, 267 93; policymaking, IB 95; power,
MHA see Ministry of Home Affairs institutionalisation of 91; spy,
(MHA) Nizam’s court 93
MI5 see British Security Service (MI5) National Security Council Secretariat
MI6 see Secret Intelligence Service (NSCS) 209
(SIS/MI6) NEFA see Northeast Frontier Agency
military intelligence, Sino-Indian War: (NEFA)
border observation posts 136; Nehru, Jawaharlal 20, 73, 88, 90–112,
counterintelligence and security 136; 123–153, 166, 168, 169, 200, 231,
language impediment 137; MINTSD 233, 239, 242, 243, 270, 273
136; tri-service intelligence wing 135 Nehru, R.K. 126
Military Intelligence Training School and Nehru-Liaquat Pact on East-Pakistan
Depot (MINTSD) 136 1950 94
military planning, Sino-Indian War: Newspapers Act, 1908 75
assumptions vs. outcomes 147; Forward Ngawang, Dapon Ratuk 176
Policy 148, 149; Indian Army, the 147, Niazi, A.A.K. 163, 175
148; terrain analysis 148; Thorat Plan Nitishastras 41
148, 149 Nkrumah, Kwame 107
Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) 169 NLI see Northern Light Infantry (NLI)
Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) 97, 98, NOCs see non-official covers (NOCs)
102, 169, 170 non-official covers (NOCs) 44, 45
MINTSD see Military Intelligence Northeast Frontier Agency (NEFA) 124, 130
Training School and Depot Northern Light Infantry (NLI) 206
(MINTSD) NSA see National Security Adviser (NSA)
Mitra, Subrata K. 106 NSCS see National Security Council
Modern Review 106 Secretariat (NSCS)
Index 285
Official Secrets Act 24 Ram Rajya, the 90
Operation Barbarossa, 1941 266 RAND Corporation study 184
Operation Chengiz Khan 163 Rangarajan, L.N. 40
Operation Koh-e-Paima/Badr 203, 204 rasuda (poisoner) 45
Operation Searchlight 165 R&AW see Research and Analysis Wing
Operation TOPAC 201–202 (R&AW)
organisational strength 235–239 Reagan, Ronald 199
Reddy, Latha 245
Palit, D.K. 101 Reddy, Ramaswami 90
pan-Africanism 107 Red Sea Littoral 74, 75
Panchsheel Agreement, April 1954 125, Rehman, Mujibur 164
146, 242 Renmin Ribao (Zhou) 140
Pandit, Vijayalakshmi 100 Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW)
Panikkar, K.M. 127, 137, 145 163, 264; birth of 168–171; covert
Patel, Sardar Vallabhbhai 88–97, 99–101, role, Indo-Pak War 174–179;
103, 105, 106, 108, 111, 125, 133, 145 East-Pakistani crisis, assessment of
Patnaik, Biju 166, 167 171–173; Military Intelligence Liaison
PDNI see Principal Director Naval Cell 170; operational and tactical
Intelligence (PDNI) intelligence 184–186; Operation
Pearl Harbor attack 23, 147 TOPAC 201–202; recruitment 170;
Penkovsky, Oleg 266 stations 180–181; structural placement
People’s Daily 140 169; TECHINT 170
People’s Liberation Army (PLA) 183 revolutionary terrorism: British Raj era
Phantoms of Chittagong, the 176 71; DCI 71, 72; political assassinations
Pilditch, Denys 89 70; provincial police officers 71
Pillai, Rao Bahadur Sanjeevi 90, 94–100, Roberts, Frederick 67
127, 133 roving spies 45
PLA see People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Roy, Mihir 177
political subservience 270
Popplewell, Richard 72 -
sadgunya theory 50, 51
post-colonial Indian intelligence culture: Sadiq, G.M. 179
continuation, British legacy 102–105; samstha 44
decolonisation 89–90; metamorphosis Sanjeevi, T.G. 70, 232
106–112; Patel and Nehru’s conflicting -
saptanga analysis 50
ideas 90–95; political consumer SAS see Special Air Service (SAS)
relationship, independent India 95–102 sattri (spies) 45
pragmatism 90 Savarkar, Vinayak Damodar 70
-
pratyanıkam 52 Saxena, G.C. 237
predecessor syndrome 235 SEAC see South East Asia Command
Principal Director Naval Intelligence (SEAC)
(PDNI) 136 Sebold, William 15
purusharthas, life 41 secret intelligence, Arthashastra:
pyrrhic victory 64 clandestine agents 47; covert action
part 45–46; descriptive element,
Qureshi, Ashraf 179 strategic intelligence 49; HUMINT vs.
Qureshi, Hashim 179, 180 TECHINT 47–48; institution of spies
44–48; integrity and loyalty 46–47;
racial divide, Indian intelligence 104 intelligence analysis 48–51; knowledge,
Raghavan, Srinath 138 production of 48–51; power, Kautilyan
Rahman, Akhtar Abdul 199 state 42–43; spy recruitment 46;
Rahman, Mujibur 171, 172 worker community 46
railway strike 1949 94 Secret Intelligence Service (SIS/MI6) 52
Rajadharma 42, 43, 64 Security Liaison Officer (SLO) 103
Ramayana 41
286 Index
Security Liaison Units, London 101 SOE see Special Operations Executive
Sengupta, Hindol 92 (SOE)
Sepoy Mutiny, 1857 66, 71 Soni, V.B. 245
SFF see Special Frontier Force (SFF) Sood, Vikram 105, 240, 241, 270
Sharif, Nawaz 203, 205, 206 South East Asia Command (SEAC) 79
Sharma, Jai Narayan 102 Soviet-Afghan War, the 199–201
Shiloah, Reuven 109 Special Air Service (SAS) 167
SIGINT see signals intelligence (SIGINT) Special Frontier Force (SFF) 166, 176
signals intelligence (SIGINT) 79, 182, Special Operations Executive (SOE) 79
183, 236 Special Service Bureau (SSB) 130,
Sims, Jennifer 268 166–167, 233, 234
Singh, Charan 234 SSB see Special Service Bureau (SSB)
Singh, Hoshiar 151 Stevenson-Moore, Charles 70–72
Singh, Zorawar Daulet 186 Stiefler, Todd 239
Sinha, Sumal 146 Stimson, Henry 92
Sinkiang-Karakoram-Leh, Chinese strategic alliance criteria, Kautilya 54
infiltration 128 strategic autonomy 21, 231, 250, 251
Sinkiang-Tibet highway 125 strategic intelligence: Bangladesh
Sino-Indian war, 1962 1, 23, 104; Aksai Liberation War, the 187; descriptive
Chin region 124, 125, 145; Beijing’s element 49; forward policy,
analysis 141; Chinese Betrayal, the 123; Sino-Indian War 126, 137–139; Kargil
Chinese communism 125; deception, sector, the 211–217
China 142–144; Dhola Post 140, 149; strategic military intelligence, British
disputed regions 124; estimative India: cultural flaws 77; Forward
blunders and 1962 shock 142–144; Interrogation Centres 79; geographical
foreign intelligence 126; forward coverage, Intelligence Branch 76–77;
policy, strategic intelligence 126, Intelligence Corps 79; meagre training
137–139; friendship, China 125; 78; prisoner interrogation 79–80;
frontier region, intelligence from professional seriousness 80; SIGINT
128–133; historic humiliation 150; IB’s 79; SOE 79
failure 144–145; intelligence coverage, strategic surprise: definition 12; surprise
China 126–127; international attack 12
intelligence co-operation 133–135; Stuart, Harold 71
Mao’s decision, strike India 139–142; Subrahmanyam, K. 19–22, 138, 145, 207,
military intelligence 135–137; military 231, 270
planning 126, 147–152; NEFA 124; Sun-Tzu syndrome 18
outdated analytical framework, IB surprise: definition 12; methodological
142–144; PLA troops 141–142; professionalism and tactical indicators,
strategic intelligence, mainland China lack of 267; total 12–13; warning
126–128; Tibetan rebellion 130, 140; intelligence 13; see also Kargil War,
unilateral ceasefire 151; wishful 1999; strategic surprise
thinking consumers, prevalence of Swami, Praveen 264
145–147 systematism 268
SIS see Secret Intelligence Service
(SIS/MI6) Tanham, George 19, 21, 22
Sleeman, William Henry 65–67, 69, 81 technical intelligence (TECHINT) 132
Sleeman and Thagi Daftar: approvers 66; Thagi Daftar 65–67
intelligence, EIC 66–67; military Thapar, Pran 149
operations, native rulers 65; native Tharoor, Shashi 108
intelligence infrastructure 65; Thimmayya 130, 136, 146, 148, 149
occupied intelligence agents 65; thugee Thondup, Gyalo 132, 239, 251
crimes 66 Thorat 123, 148
SLO see Security Liaison Officer (SLO) Thorat Plan 148, 149
Smith, Norman 89, 92, 93 thugee crimes 66
Index 287
Tibetan rebellion, 1959 130, 140 Vajpayee, Atal Bihari 197, 207, 210, 243
tikshna (assassin) 45 Vickery, Philip 72, 93
transmogrification, ideas and intelligence vyanjanáh (occupational cover) 44
operations: communism, threat of
72–74; hierarchical discrimination 65; Wallinger, John 72
IB/DIB 73–74; individuals, role of Warner, Michael 11
64–65; Lord Curzon and first warning intelligence 13
intelligence reform 67–70; policy War of Bangladesh Liberation, 1971 1
developments 65; pyrrhic victory 64; Washington Post, The 127
reactive intelligence culture 64; Wavell, Archibald 79, 89
revolutionary terrorism 70–72; Wellesley, Arthur 64
Sleeman and the Thagi Daftar 65–67; WHAM see winning hearts and minds
strategic military intelligence 76–80; (WHAM)
World War II and intelligence reforms Wignall, Sydney 140
74–76 Wilson, Charlie 199
Tuker, Francis 67 winning hearts and minds (WHAM) 167
Tzu, Sun 41 wishful formalism 268
World War II and intelligence reforms
Uban, Sujan Singh 176, 178 74–76
Union Public Service Commission
(UPSC) 237 Yom Kippur War, 1973 204, 266
UPSC see Union Public Service
Commission (UPSC) Zia’s War 199
U’ren, Bill 103 Zionist freedom movement 109

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‘This impressive book adds signiﬁcantly to the intelligence literature by providing a

‘Dr Chaya’s volume is an exceptionally important contribution to the scholarship on

Dheeraj Paramesha Chaya is Assistant Professor, Department of Geopolitics

Intelligence Oversight in the Twenty-First Century

Intelligence Leadership and Governance

Intelligence Analysis in the Digital Age

Conﬂict and Cooperation in Intelligence and Security Organisations

National Security Intelligence and Ethics

Intelligence Agencies, Technology and Knowledge Production

State-Private Networks and Intelligence Theory

India’s Intelligence Culture and Strategic Surprises

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.

Dheeraj Paramesha Chaya

ISBN: 978-1-032-28294-7 (hbk)

The conﬁdence to write a book on the topic of foreign intelligence, especially

ACAS-Int – Assistant Chief of Air Staﬀ- Intelligence

• It exposes the limitations of adhering to purely organisational level studies

Structure of the Book

• Strength of intelligence leadership

• Lack of co-ordination between agencies had led to the production of

What does it mean to be “intelligence literate”? And why was there no

“any process that produces knowledge that might be used in making a

“the mainly secret activities – targeting, collection, analysis, dissemination

“facilitate the steady pursuit of long-range policy objectives even as it

“On a theoretical scale, we might identify at one end a complete absence of

Why study cultures of intelligence?

“the diﬀerence between deﬁnitions is not simply a semantic variation.

“methodologically, the process of intelligence would lend itself well to a

“the noted lack of an ‘intelligence culture’ in Canada, which derives from

Tonga, on the other hand, constrained by resources and a lack of signiﬁcant

“there should be a challenge in academia for a scholar covering Chinese

Crosston regarded this a trap, where:

What is the state of Indian Intelligence Studies?

“Indian counterterrorism remains defensively oriented, relying on intelligence

“it is best not to reveal such things, or it would be inﬂammatory and

Critical Theory and Intelligence Culture

1 A term used to describe feelings of group centrality or superiority;

Unfortunately, IS has suﬀered from all the three descriptions of ethnocentrism,

Critical Empiricism and Indian Intelligence: The Missing

“research must be directed at discrediting the assumptions underlying the

Summary: Study of Intelligence Cultures are Needed for Better

Throughout the lecture, Kautilya2 unfortunately never reappeared, nor was

“was in fact the ﬁnal manifestation of [Indian knowledge], the traces of

Most books on Indian intelligence are descriptive works, devoid of analytical

The Arthashastra as the basis for the study of Indian Intelligence

Institution of Spies: Intelligence Modus Operandi in the

“non-seducible but are shown to be impelled by motives for actions that

The particular choice of the three occupational covers mentioned above

“building a reliable NOC requires a careful reading of the socio-political

Production of Knowledge: Intelligence Analysis in the

Notwithstanding the logical soundness of the sa-dgunya theory, Kautilya shows

Intelligence-Consumer Relationship in the Kautilyan State

The merits of Kautilya’s prescription may, nevertheless, invoke diﬀerences

The Role of Intelligence Alliances in the Kautilyan State

“[the gains of alliances] cannot be computed simply as a mathematical

“a friend keeps up his friendship as long as money is forthcoming. Thus,

Therefore, notwithstanding the security situation and threat perception, the

Kautilya’s Perspective on Intelligence Failures and Surprises

Kautilyan Intelligence Culture in Summation

“The system on which we depend for forestalling externally directed sub

“Mr. Patel, who is rabidly anti-Communist, is fully aware of the impor

“has told us of the tremendous friendliness shown to him by the autho

That a highly patriotic community of freedom ﬁghters with a signiﬁcant intel

“T.M. Subrahmanyam was tapped to serve as the Indian Intelligence Ser

However, this is not true. There is evidence of Indo-US intelligence co

Therefore, it is unfair to blame the lack of Anglo-American intelligence co