Why US is touching the RAW nerve

Sandeep Dikshit

In the alleged plot to assassinate Khalistani terrorist Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, officials in India found a startling similarity with an alleged attempt to kill an anti-Iran journalist. In both killings that were to take place in New York but were thwarted by US intelligence agencies, the cutouts who allegedly received the targeting information from the Indian and Iranian governments were arrested in the Czech Republic. “The Czech authorities arrested and detained (Nikhil) Gupta on June 30, 2023, pursuant to the bilateral extradition treaty between the US and the Czech Republic,” reads the US Department of Justice (DoJ) press release on the case that has rocked India-US ties.

Six months earlier, the US DoJ said Polad Omarov, who was allegedly passing on the targeting information from the Iranian government to kill an Iranian-origin journalist in New York, was also arrested in the Czech Republic on January 4, 2023. The Czech connection regularly props up in the US DoJ filings. Suspects wanted in the US for attempted assassinations to wire frauds to child pornography happen to be hauled in by the Czech authorities for quick extradition to the US.

External Intelligence Agency

• Named Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), it was bifurcated from the Intelligence Bureau (IB), which had also looked after external intelligence till 1968.
• About 200 officers from the IB were estimated to have formed the nucleus of RAW, which was first led by the legendary spymaster, Rameshwar Nath Kao.
• It soon saw action in several theatres in the neighbourhood, especially in what was then known as East Pakistan.

The ‘War on Terror’ was the biggest slip of the mask for western democracies. Well-documented accounts narrate how these vanguards of human rights plucked hapless men from third countries on a whiff of their al-Qaeda links. Tortured and broken, many were released years later for want of evidence. Third countries, especially smaller European ones, have been especially pliable for US intelligence and the common country of arrest does not, for some intelligence officials here, appear wholly convincing.

India’s independent stance on the Russia-Ukraine conflict has caused considerable stirring of discomfort in the Langley, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The clear Indian stand also encouraged several other countries to break bread with President Vladimir Putin, which went against the grain of US policy of completely isolating Russia.

India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) had come quickly under the western scanner soon after bifurcation of the Intelligence Bureau. “The newly created department was able to launch two successful operations — liberation of Bangladesh in 1971 and the merger of Sikkim in 1975,” writes former RAW Special Secretary GBS Sidhu in his book, ‘Sikkim: Dawn of Democracy’.

The American opposition to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s approach to Pakistan is open knowledge. Less known is that India’s takeover of Sikkim did not go down well with the West, as it rankled its then recently found ally China. In between these two events, the United States-United Kingdom combine had been left clueless when India conducted the atomic test in 1974.

Indian intelligence operatives, especially from the RAW, came squarely on the West’s radar around the mid-1970s. The three slights — Bangladesh, Sikkim and the nuclear test — spoke of an independent foreign policy mindset. These had been aggravated by India’s signing of the Treaty of Friendship with the arch US enemy, the USSR.

(Major) Ravinder Singh’s defection to the CIA remains the most talked about. But among the many tales of defections (invariably to the West) by RAW officers, one that went under the radar was of Shamsher Singh, an IPS officer of the 1957 batch from the Rajasthan cadre. Insiders in RAW believe he was the invisible shadow that guided the Canadian intelligence in nurturing the first lot of Khalistanis who bombed two Air-India planes, one of them in mid-air, killing over 300.

As narrated by GBS Sidhu in ‘The Khalistan Conspiracy’, the Canadians had not just successfully inveigled Shamsher Singh into switching sides, but they also tried to recruit the author when he landed as his replacement.

“After surrendering his diplomatic passport, Shamsher had apparently obtained an immigration visa on his ordinary passport at the Canadian High Commission in New Delhi. This is something Shamsher would have already arranged for with the concerned Royal Canadian Mounted Police (which at the time did the work now being done by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service) at Ottawa before his departure for New Delhi. It can be safely assumed that in return for such a big favour, Shamsher had compromised his position and shared some crucial information about the Department (R&AW) with the RCMP,” wrote Sidhu in his book.

Another prime reason that led to the targeting of police officer Shamsher Singh was the fact that in 1975, as revealed in former RAW chief Vappala Balachandran’s ‘Intelligence Over Centuries’, Indira Gandhi stopped British intelligence from accessing IB’s records and outstation offices.

The apparent success in recruiting a mole on the other side to sow discord and strife in his own country has been a very frequently deployed CIA-MI6 playbook which was used about a decade after Shamsher Singh’s defection.

India’s operations in Sri Lanka were at a delicate stage when the CIA decided to put in play its double asset, KV Unnikrishnan. By now, the RAW station chief in Sri Lanka directing the operations in the country, Unnikrishnan began conveying the Indian tactics and strategy to the US. Not much is thereafter in public domain, but former officials acknowledge that the damage to Indian interests was substantial. Using this information, the West sought to insert itself in the Lankan ethnic dispute.

Indian intelligence though has been on its toes against penetration from Western agencies right from Independence, largely due to Jawaharlal Nehru’s independent foreign policy stance. In fact, as the RAW’s second chief K Sankaran Nair wrote in his book, ‘Inside IB and RAW’, India remodelled the Ghanian intelligence service after its President Kwame Nkrumah complained to Nehru that the influence of British intelligence services in his country was pervasive. The reason was not too difficult to find — having won his country freedom, Nkrumah was under intensive surveillance from MI5 to find out how and which liberation movements he was supporting. India also sent its brightest — RN Kao — to set up the Foreign Service Research Bureau.

RAW officers have been under no illusions that foreign intelligence collection is a dangerous job. “Unlike the police or the IB, there is no support system abroad. One has to live by one’s wit and be as inconspicuous as possible,” writes Balachandran.

This is a cross RAW will have to bear as India strikes a path that is not completely aligned with the interests of the West. Otherwise, how does America’s repeated insistence, made on a daily basis, for India to cooperate in the probe square up with it itself ignoring hundreds of warrants served on CIA officers by courts of several countries for charges ranging from rape, theft to downright murder?