A Superb Look at Spying on the Subcontinent

BOOK REVIEW: SPYING IN SOUTH ASIA: BRITAIN, THE UNITED STATES AND INDIA’S SECRET COLD WAR

By Paul M. McGarr/Cambridge University Press,

Reviewed by: Tim Willasey-Wilsey

The Reviewer — Tim Willasey-Wilsey is a Visiting Professor at King’s College London and a Cipher Brief Expert.

REVIEW — Spying in South Asia is a truly fascinating book. Paul McGarr is to be congratulated for the depth of his research and the meticulous but readable manner in which he has both narrated and assessed the febrile intelligence relationship between Britian and the United States on the one side and India on the other during the period from independence (and Partition) in 1947 until the mid-1990s.

So compelling is the description of relations that the reader (especially those who have tried to improve bilateral relations over the years) can almost feel the exhaustion as each new initiative was wrecked on the rocks of some unexpected event, scandal or miscalculation. One is left wondering whether there was ever a solution to the problem.

McGarr begins the book with reference to a scene in John Le Carré’s ‘Smiley’s People’ in which George Smiley interviews the Soviet intelligence officer, Karla, in an Indian prison cell and tries to persuade him to defect. This episode was a curious blemish in Le Carré’s novels because, the Indians would not have enabled such an interview, and the British would not have trusted the Indian political hierarchy to facilitate a defection.

Indeed, McGarr tells the gripping story of the moment in March 1967 when Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva walked into the US Embassy in New Delhi and requested asylum. The Americans were caught by surprise. Acting decisively, the US Ambassador sent a FLASH telegram to Washington and arranged for Svetlana to be put on the next flight to Europe before Washington had time to reply. He therefore denied Washington a debate about her asylum request and avoided a standoff with the Indians who would have come under intense pressure from Moscow to return her to the Soviet Union.

So, what was at the root of the problem between India and the two Western powers?

Britain’s colonial legacy was the first problem. Since the mid-1930s Britain had been hanging on to India by its fingertips. The Raj had always been a confidence trick; a subcontinent of 340 million people ‘ruled’ mostly by Indian princes and a smattering of British civil servants and soldiers. Since their departure in 1947 until quite recently, the British were proud of their legacy in India; the great public buildings, railways, irrigation schemes, education, elections and the Indian army. The Intelligence Bureau (IB) was one of those institutions of which London was most satisfied even if Kipling tended (in his novel ‘Kim’) to exaggerate its omniscience. By contrast, the Indians were just pleased to see the British gone.


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One aspect which McGarr does not mention was important here. For over two years (until January 1950) India had Dominion status. Along with Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa they were expected to share intelligence with London. The IB, and particularly its political masters, found this ‘business as usual’ intolerable. For its part MI5 (which was responsible for security in Commonwealth countries) was slow to understand that India was no longer willing to be patronised. The veteran Indian intelligence officer Vappala Balachandran’s book ‘Intelligence over Centuries’ writes about the sense of resentment at finding that, even in 1949, India was not truly independent.

So, the early years after independence were inevitably tetchy. British Prime Minister Clement Attlee did have the sensitivity to issue ‘The Attlee Doctrine’ which prevented MI6 from spying against India. He was determined that India should be a friendly ally of its former colonial master. However, this became increasingly difficult as Prime Minister Nehru sought friendship with the Soviet Union and China.

In the latter case Nehru’s hopes of ‘hindi chini bhai bhai’ (Chinese-Indian brotherhood) were dashed by China’s invasion in 1962 and the ignominious defeat of Indian forces. Washington and London were briefly encouraged when Nehru requested assistance. He asked for no fewer than twelve squadrons of fighter jets and two of bombers. Both countries were quick to furnish support in the intelligence domain, but any Indian appreciation did not last long.

Ever since 1962 India has been wary of China but the relationship with the Soviet Union blossomed. The KGB came to regard India as safe territory from which to mount operations and, in particular, information operations. Seventeen English language news organizations were assessed to be vehicles for Soviet disinformation which included a Stasi operation which accused the CIA of creating the AIDS/HIV virus. At one stage there were said to be 131 Soviet intelligence officers in India. Oleg Kalugin has spoken of the KGB’s “scores” of agents within the Indian government (as mentioned in the Mitrokhin Archive).

Given the breadth and depth of Soviet activity in India there is little wonder that MI6 opened a station in 1964 and the British Foreign Office allowed its Information Research Department (IRD) to try and counter Soviet propaganda in India. Peter Joy who was sent to New Delhi as the local head of IRD was no black propagandist. He believed in ensuring that true stories received a proper airing. However, any small successes were swamped by Soviet active measures. In 1972 alone the KGB claimed to have planted 3,789 articles in the Indian press (again from the Mitrokhin Archive).

If the colonial legacy and Soviet penetration were two sources of grit in the oyster, there were two more. India’s enthusiastic and prominent role in the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) took great delight in chiding the West for its role in the Cold War. The overthrowing of the Mosaddeq government in Iran in 1953, British intervention in Suez in 1956, and the coup against Allende in Chile in 1973 gave India plenty of material. I attended some of the events in the margins of the NAM Foreign Ministerial meeting in Angola in 1985 and India was firmly in the same camp as Cuba and Yugoslavia on a range of very obviously anti-Western issues.

The other factor, of course, was Pakistan. McGarr understandably needed to limit his account to India, but Pakistan is often the elephant in the room. A conspiracy theory has developed in India in recent years that Britain connived at Partition because it wanted Pakistan as an ally against Soviet Central Asia. This is nonsense because Britain was so evidently a reluctant party to Partition, and the Cold War had not really begun in 1947. However, it is true, as Tilak Devasher recounts in his ‘Pakistan Courting the Abyss’, that the British had long used the Muslim League as a counterweight to the Indian National Congress. Furthermore, the Muslim League had cooperated in furnishing troops for the Second World War in stark contrast to Congress. Once independent, Pakistan was always a more agreeable destination for British and American diplomats with far less anti-colonial sentiment and a greater willingness to work against the Soviet Union. This was particularly the case after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, but the US had flown U-2 reconnaissance missions over Soviet territory from Badaber airbase in Pakistan as early as 1958.


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So, there is no mystery about Britian’s awkward relations with India. Even after the end of the Cold War London still regards its relationship with India as ‘underperforming’, although there have always been many aspects of the dialogue which have been positive. It is because India feels instinctively like it should be a close friend which makes that underperformance so perplexing.

The United States is already developing a newly productive relationship with India partly based on a shared concern about Chinese intentions in India. However, India continues to believe in what it now calls its ‘multi-alignment’ (instead of non-alignment) and it still cherishes its close ties to Russia. That the US had such difficulties with India from 1947 to the end of the Cold War is more puzzling. The US did not have the burden of a colonist’s legacy. Washington had, for several decades, been critical of the Raj and many Indian nationalists had found refuge in San Francisco. Somehow Washington was unable to leverage this history in its favour.

The US was quickly lumped with Britain into the imperialist camp. McGarr argues correctly that both London and Washington were inept in conflating Indian communism (which in India was, and still often is, seen as socially positive) with Soviet communism. This immediately put Indians on the defensive.

The various allegations against the CIA in the 1970s whether in Cuba, Chile, Nicaragua or elsewhere tended to feed the idea that it was a malign organisation out of control. There were also some unfortunate operations in India, notably HAT during which some nuclear isotopes (2-3lbs of Plutonium) were lost in the Himalayas (p.212-3). The CIA were not provided with much support by two influential Ambassadors, J.K.Galbraith  and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The latter allegedly wished to abolish the CIA. As for President Richard Nixon he was both anti-India and anti-CIA.

Two important Indian figures served as a constant source of friction in relations. The first was V.K. Krishna Menon, the firebrand leftist who played key roles as High Commissioner in London (1947-1952), India’s representative at the United Nations (1949-1962) and Defence Minister (1957-1962). The other was none other than Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister from 1966 to 1977 and again from 1980 to 1984.

McGarr wonders whether they were KGB agents of influence or mere ‘fellow travelers.’ It is a fruitless debate. The Mitrokhin Archive of KGB papers smuggled out of Russia by MI6 shows that both were seen as willing to give Moscow the benefit of the doubt on most issues. Moscow even tried to blame the CIA for Indira Gandhi’s assassination and for that of her son, Rajiv.

McGarr is withering in his criticism of the British and American governments for their handling of India during these years, which he calls “misdirected, maladroit and counter-productive.”  There were doubtless many missteps, but it is hard to imagine what policy might have cut through all the scar tissue and delivered a trouble-free relationship.

India too is reassessing the history of this period. The ‘Nehru-Gandhi dynasty’ is now subject to much criticism, not always fairly. Many would agree that it was not until the opening-up of India’s economy under Prime Minister Narasimha Rao after 1991 that India began to realise its vast economic potential. For the first four decades of independence (the very years covered by McGurr’s book) India, and its people, were held back by its socialist leaders and its command economy, the notorious Licence Raj.

Paul McGarr may have reached different conclusions, but his superb book will open the whole subject to productive and intense debate.

Spying in South Asia earns a solid 3 out of 4 trench coats

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