The Unending Game: A Former R&AW Chief’s Insights into Espionage

136 Pages·2018·1.13 MB·English

by  Vikram Sood

VIKRAM SOOD
THE UNENDING GAME
A Former R&AW Chief’s Insights into Espionage
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
Prologue
PART I: TRADECRAFT
1. Indispensable Intelligence
2. How Spies Work
3. Spy against Spy or Spy with Spy
4. The Asian Playing Fields
PART II: INSIDE INTELLIGENCE
5. State of Surveillance
6. Intelligence Smoke and Mirrors
7. The Triangle: The Terrorist, the Criminal and the Spy
8. Controlling the Narrative
PART III: WHAT LIES AHEAD
9. The Other Side of Technology
10. Known by Their Failures
11. Keeping Intelligence Relevant
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Notes
Follow Penguin
Copyright
To
my father, who taught me the right values,
and Gary Saxena, who moulded me
‘A king shall have his agents in the courts of the enemy,
the ally, the middle and the neutral kings to spy on
the kings as well as eighteen types of high officials’
Kautilya’s Arthashastra
Prologue
‘WAR IS HELL. SPYING IS MUCH, MUCH WORSE. WARS YOU CAN WIN. BUT IN ESPIONAGE THERE
ARE NO WINNERS BECAUSE IT NEVER ENDS’ —Intel Wars: The Secret History of the Fight
against Terror , Matthew Aid
Café du Trocadero, Paris, November 1978
‘Forget chasing the plutonium route. Uranium is the real McCoy,’ he said to the
other man. The two had met for coffee that Sunday morning and then drifted
away together towards Avenue Poincaré to their cars. As one of them unlocked
his car, the other slipped him an envelope.
It had taken years of a furious hunt all over Europe to lay hands on any
evidence of Pakistan’s pursuit of nuclearization as the agile Pakistanis moved
from Germany to the Netherlands, then to Belgium, France, Switzerland and the
UK, shopping for bomb-making equipment. The envelope contained a document
that clearly indicated that Pakistan had obtained twenty high-frequency inverters
essential for enriching uranium. The first order had been placed through a West
German firm—Team Industries. Siddique Ahmed Butt of the Pakistan Embassy
had contacted Ernest Piffl, the owner, in 1977 saying that the inverters were
required for a textile plant. Piffl placed the order via Weargate, a front company
in the UK. Weargate, in turn, placed the order with a subsidiary of Emerson
Industrial Controls, a British subsidiary of the US giant Emerson Electricals. The
inverters were shipped to Special Works Organization in Rawalpindi in August
1978. The supplies were clearly meant for the Pakistani Army, which was by
then in charge of Project 706, initiated by the now-imprisoned Zulfiqar Ali
Bhutto. Project 706 was the code name for the country’s clandestine nuclear
programme.
A hunt that began six years ago was now beginning to show results.
Unearthing Pakistan’s nuclear programme was one of the toughest challenges
faced by the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) in its initial years.
Dhaka, 16 December 1971
General A.A.K. Niazi, who was commanding Pakistan’s forces in what was till
then East Pakistan, surrendered to Lieutenant General J.S. Aurora. All of India
celebrated. The nation of Bangladesh came into being. It was a proud moment
celebrated. The nation of Bangladesh came into being. It was a proud moment
for the armed forces and for all those who fought that war—Bangladeshi and
Indian alike. Some of the tar of India’s defeat in the 1962 Sino-Indian War was
washed away. Pakistan had been taught yet another lesson, soon after 1965, and
it was hoped that it would settle into the changed geopolitics of the subcontinent,
with its Two-Nation Theory drowned in the bloody aftermath of the Dhaka
uprising.
Eternal peace was now at hand, some naively thought.
The R&AW had plenty to celebrate too, after its significant contribution to a
major success so soon after its creation in 1968. But there were no victory
parades, and no one would light a lamp for the unknown agents, their handlers
and their supervisors who had helped in the war. Honours and quiet citations
would come later, wrapped in the usual cloaks. For most, that was enough. They
had stories to tell their grandchildren. Many in the organization did not even
know if the R&AW was involved in the Bangladesh Liberation Struggle, such
was the level of restrictive security in those early days.
For Rameshwar Nath Kao, the man who led the R&AW to this fabulous
success, and his close advisers, it was business as usual. They had other worries,
other peaks to conquer, other battles to win. Soon enough, every station brief of
the R&AW would have Pakistan’s nuclear plans as the first item of interest.
Multan, 20 January 1972
Barely five weeks after the Dhaka surrender and one month after he took over as
President of Pakistan, Zulfiqar Bhutto called for a secret meeting under a grand
shamiana in Multan. An estimated 400 people were present, including some
foreigners. Originally scheduled to be held in Quetta, the venue of the meeting
had to be changed because of the rebellious Baloch. Typical of the feudal
showman that Bhutto was, everything had to be done in style, even when it was
an occasion to ask his nuclear scientists, advisers and supporters, ‘How soon can
I have the Bomb?’
‘Five years,’ some promised. ‘Too late,’ Bhutto would say with a snigger. Till
one eager young scientist claimed it could be done in three years. Satisfied,
Bhutto took off for Libya to meet his new friend Muammar Qaddafi and cajole
him for funds for the Bomb. Bhutto also visited a dozen West Asian countries,
including Iran and Saudi Arabia, as well as Egypt, where he played the Islamic
card. Obviously, he was preparing for a future where he would be the leader of
Pakistan, which in turn would be the leader of the Muslim world, with its own
nuclear bomb.
Those who were opposed to the nuclear weapon or supported it only