|
BOOK BAZAAR
Of Spies and designsMalladi Rama Rao Books by Indian spy masters are very rare. So two books by two retired espionage chiefs in the same calander year is no more than a bonus for students of contemporary history. Both do not set the Yamuna on fire.There are no damning revelations since A S Daulat and Vikram Sood are not cut in the mode of their CIA counterparts, who take delight in washing dirtylinen post-retirement. Nonetheless, both offer good fodder for thought with their insights into a wide range of issues that include the Pakistani bomb and India-Pakistan relations in which Kashmir has come to play a major role. Sood’s ‘The Unending Game’ is a solo-effort unlike Daulat’s ‘Spy Chronicles: RAW, ISI and the Illusion of Peace’, which was a collaboration with Asad Durrani, a former ISI chief. This book addresses all categories – the believers and the sceptics but is not meant exclusively for intelligence professionals. AS Dulat and Gen Asad Durrani It is not a personal memoir, nor is it about R&AW, for which Sood worked after his transition from the Indian Postal Service. Instead, it seeks to familiarise the reader with the intricacies of espionage and intelligence collection. The reader is transported to the class room to learn about basics like definition of intelligence and how spies work. And the book falls by the way-side.
Indira Gandhi
While on ‘The Asian Playing
Fields’, Vikram Sood does not tell
us beyond the mundane. He writes: “In Pakistan’s case, the ISI is
part of the force that drives the
country’s foreign policy and
determines strategic priorities.
Vikram Sood
What about China? First under
Deng Xiaoping and now under Xi
Jinping, China, in order to keep pace
with its global ambitions, has
spurred its intelligence activities.
This new player on the global scene
has drawn lessons from the US
strength, which also is its Achilles
heel - reliance on technology and
information systems in warfare. So
it has gone in for systematic ability
to hack and steal, and to hunt in the
US for denied technologies. Indira Gandhi created R&AW in 1968 while Major General Walter Joseph Cawthrone, an Australian with the Pakistan Army, helped set up the ISI in 1948. There can be no objective comparison between the ISI and any other intelligence agency operating in a democratic environment, more so after ISI has morphed into a special force that recruits, trains, and equips and sends out jihadis into Afghanistan and Kashmir. In his assessment, India will have to make matching efforts in cyberwarfare and cyber security and R&AW will have to strengthen HUMINT (field network) capacities in China and use all other nondiplomatic means to collect intelligence. This advisory ignores his own reality check that it is difficult to find agents in China who are of Indian ethnicity. There is hardly any non-diplomatic cover available as there are very few Indian companies operating in China. Moreover, the Chinese ensure that Indians have no access to the Tibetans in Tibet. Sood says “The Chinese have interfered in India’s north-east in the past but this interest has been declining in recent years. Their new found interest in Arunachal Pradesh could lead to renewed meddling in the region”. Sood has devoted a long chapter
on ‘State of Surveillance’. In another
chapter, he elaborated on the
triangle between the terrorist, the
criminal and the spy. Both chapters
are a must read. The book deals
with the dilemma the debate about
privacy and freedom has generated
in these days of heightened security
concerns and stepped up
surveillance since “terrorism has
become cheap and unremittingly
lethal”. It also examines in detail the
new dangers the social media has
thrown up in the wake of exposure
of Cambridge Analytica’s tryst with
the American presidential election. Chandraswamy pops up
suddenly in the Sood narrative, and
his games to prop up Rajiv Gandhi,
Chandrasekhar and P V Narasimha
Rao (in that order) make interesting
reading. Surprisingly, the author
throws up no new light and what he
says is mostly in the public domain. Durrani can be said to have already invited the wrath of the Deep State by his comments on a host of issues that matter for the establishment. He angered the powers that be with his confession that he had spent as the ISI chief millions of military dollars to influence the outcome of 1990 elections. The book controversy offered the opening for proceeding against the 77-year old, who was known as Fire Fox during his army days. They met in Istanbul, Bangkok, and Kathmandu and discussed topics like Kashmir and a missed opportunity for peace, Hafiz Saeed and 26/11, Kulbhushan Jadhav, “surgical strikes”, and how violence undermines the attempts of the two countries at negotiations, besides the “deal” for Osama bin Laden and US -Russia factor in the India- Pakistan relations. Their312-page book is the first of its kind wherein the spymasters of the rival agencies worked together on the same assignment. Daulat and Durrani have spoken quite frankly, without spelling any secrets, of course, on leading public figures, military personalities, as well as the spy service personnel on both sides. Expectedly, Vajpayee comes in for
very positive appraisal while Modi,
the Bhuttos, Zardari and Sharif get
negative rating.
On the September 9 surgical
strikes, Durrani’s take reflects the
establishment view. He dubbed the surgical strike as “a modified hot
pursuit”. |