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| Ex-RAW chief says CI ops in India have failed | | ‘Intrusion deep-rooted, law deficient, rulers complacent’ | |
New Delhi, April 19: In a rare admission, a former R&AW chief has said that counter intelligence operations in India have failed to prevent penetration by foreign intelligence agencies and once even a Prime Minister was under the cloud of suspicion.
"The shame lies in the fact that it (counter intelligence) could not prevent foreign penetration even into their senior ranks."
There was "a general belief in the country that the influence of foreign intelligence organisations has reached deep into the civil society.
"Suspicion was cast once even on a Prime Minister," Anand K Verma, former chief of the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) of the Cabinet Secretariat, said without elaborating any further.
In an article in the forthcoming issue of 'Indian Defence Review', he described the performance of counter intelligence as "a mixed bag of successes and shame" and said over the years, it had also unmasked "several" Indian agents of all major intelligence organisations of the world.
He pointed out that technological gadgets meant to get highly accurate intelligence was "very expensive" which resulted in the conversation intercepts between the 26/11 Mumbai attackers and their handlers in Pakistan coming from foreign agencies.
"Imagine, if foreigners had not been the victims of 26/11 carnage, the requisite information in all probability would have remained hidden from Indian authorities." "At no stage in the past did India's collaborating partners disclose to India anything about Pakistan's ongoing nuclear weapon development programme and China's stellar role in it, when it was widely known that this programme directly targetted India," the former R&AW chief said.
Making some major recommendations, he pointed out that the entire range of foreign operations was covered only by executive instructions and not by any legal backing.
"An instruction to operate in a foreign country ipso facto implies a requirement to break the local laws (to spy and steal secrets) but no legal authority exists for issuing such instructions or indemnifying the would-be violator under the laws of the home country," Verma said.
This was "a very serious lacuna" which has not caught the attention of anyone in authority, he said, adding "this state of affairs is reflective of the apathy in which intelligence is held in India."
He recommended that the very first step of reforming intelligence should be to give them "the backing of legislative enactments", making intelligence accountable to the Union Cabinet or the Cabinet Committee on Security and also creating a Parliamentary Committee for oversight.
The law should also provide autonomy on administrative and financial management, pay scales, recruitment and enforcement of discipline, Verma said.
Observing that national security has "never been a hot issue" among the people, he said the country was now facing "a very complex national security environment requiring intelligence to become the first line of defence."
Asserting that high quality intelligence could be produced by making its pursuance "attractive", the former R&AW chief referred to the practices of Britain and the CIA which attracted "the highest number of PhDs from the best schools in its rank as compared to other US organisations", apart from scholars, bankers, scientists and economists.
"In India, unfortunately, it is only the second grade that thinks of gravitating towards intelligence. In recent times, even this category is not offering to look at intelligence as a career," Verma said.
He recommended a "revolving door" policy indicating that intelligence officials could return to their parent fields after some point of time.
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