How did you come to work on this complex topic of surveillance and the extent of Western intelligence agencies and their involvement in South Asia?
I fell in love with India and its people when I traveled around the country for six months at the age of twenty. My PhD was later written on British and American reactions to the Indo-China war of 1962 and later expanded into a book, examining Anglo-American relations with South Asia between the height of independence and the Cold War in the late 1940s. The international history of was exposed. War in the late 1960s. It was published as The Cold War in South Asia: Britain, the United States, and the Indian Subcontinent, 1945–1965 (Cambridge University Press, 2013). While researching this book I came across a large amount of material in the archives of India, Britain and the US, which tells an interesting story about the hitherto hidden role played by secret intelligence agencies (British, American, Soviet, Indian and others) Is. In the Cold War of South Asia. I approached publishers with the idea of ​​writing a second book focusing on India’s secret Cold War and fortunately I received a positive response.
You write that “India’s counterintelligence culture has provided and continues to provide a significant socio-political challenge to foreign intelligence agencies and governments invested in South Asia.” How have decades of Western intelligence interventions in South Asia contributed to a strong push back by Indian intelligence agencies?
Indian intelligence has always had a complex liaison relationship with foreign counterparts. Indian policy makers and intelligence officials pragmatically recognize that national security depends to some extent on effective support from external intelligence agencies. That said, Indian leaders faced the perennial challenge of how to strike an appropriate balance between maintaining national sovereignty and maintaining national security with the assistance of foreign powers. Nehru and other senior Indian policy makers accepted, albeit reluctantly, the need to provide intelligence support to the Western and, to a lesser extent, the Eastern bloc. However, there remains a suspicion, not unreasonable, that facilitating some Western intelligence intervention in India in limited and declared forms would lead to additional undeclared Western intelligence activity to which Indian policy makers would not be party to and would not acknowledge. This suspicion was heightened by revelations of CIA covert operations in Italy, Iran, Guatemala, Congo, Cuba, and elsewhere in the 1950s and 1960s.
Since 1967, when it became public that the CIA secretly funded Indian political organizations and cultural bodies, Indian policy makers began to protest more strongly against the unacceptable behavior of foreign intelligence services. . Once the genie of CIA intervention in India was out of the political bottle, intelligence politics in India demanded a strong rhetorical response from policy makers, who easily saw the CIA as a political scapegoat for domestic problems. Also saw some political benefits in using it.
What can global policymakers learn from the record of Western covert interventions in India between 1947 and the end of the Cold War in 1989?
There are many lessons to be learned. 1. Covert intelligence interventions have a long shelf life. Intelligence operations conducted in the 1950s or 1960s, which remained secret at the time, would come back to haunt Western governments and destabilize their relations with India decades later. Rarely do intelligence operations remain completely hidden for long. As a result, such activity should be conducted with extreme caution and with the acceptance that the expected benefits must ultimately outweigh the negative consequences of the risk.
2. That the local (Indian) agency can be considerable and highly effective in resisting or supporting external intelligence interference for its own, often very different purposes. In particular, Western covert propaganda campaigns in India did not reconstruct the political climate in the subcontinent and local publishers, journalists and cultural producers, whether knowingly or otherwise receiving external funding, always had no requirement or obligation to do their bidding. not realized. Alleged financial sponsor.
3. Intelligence interventions are often ineffective and/or produce negative and unintended consequences (so-called blowback). Rarely, if ever, are they the magic bullet that policymakers hope they will be.
4. External intelligence interference can adversely affect national political cultures by promoting conspiracy and confusion and undermining confidence in democracy and the legitimacy of political institutions. The CIA came to be viewed in India as a malign political actor that actively sought to subvert Indian democracy and inappropriately interfere in the country’s internal affairs.
You argue that the Indian intelligence agency was very important in the Cold War and was largely ignored. Why is it like this?
Again, several reasons. (Since the 1980s), the academic study of intelligence has flourished. As well as the publication of official histories of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, there has been a wealth of work on every aspect of intelligence from counter intelligence to covert action and analysis to OSINT (Open Source Intelligence), providing a comprehensive overview of intelligence. Has been brought out of the bag. And yet, the overwhelming majority of books and articles published in this field are framed in narrow Anglocentric terms. Do you want to read a book on British intelligence? No problem. If you want to learn more about the CIA there is a mountain of literature available from which you can choose. If you are interested in intelligence in an Asian, African or Latin American context, until recently the options for readers were much more limited.
Access to source material has been an issue. Much material on British and American intelligence was (and continues to be) released while India’s intelligence history was kept hidden under the cloak of official secrecy. This is slowly changing, and valuable source material is becoming available in the National Archives of India and the Nehru Library, but still only in disappointingly small quantities.
What surprising findings did you find about the role of British and American intelligence agencies in post-colonial India?
Two of the most surprising findings were:
1) The extensive extent of covert cooperation between the British and American intelligence services and their Indian counterparts between the late 1940s and 1960s, with the full knowledge of Indian political leaders. This occurred not only in relation to common internal targets, such as the CPI administration in Kerala in the 1950s, but also externally against Chinese targets after 1962. The scale, scope and depth of cooperation was astonishing. In particular, in the 1960s the IB was heavily dependent on MI5 and somewhat intimidated by the British Security Service, which angered Nehru. Similarly, the IB exerted heavy pressure on CIA training and logistical support against China after 1962. This represents somewhat of a paradox. While Indian leaders publicly denounced and criticized the US for inappropriate covert interference in the domestic affairs of developing world countries, at the same time New Delhi was working closely with British and American intelligence. Perhaps, matters of pragmatism and national security considerations are outweighing ideological cohesion and international solidarity within the Global South.
2) The British and American intelligence services were willing to take the risk of carrying out extensive covert operations in India for a long time. An example shows this. The British Intelligence Research Department, a secret propaganda service with close ties to MI6, ran covert gray and black propaganda activities in India from the 1940s to the 1970s. This included reaching out to Indian journalists, politicians, military officers, intelligence officers, academics and other prominent members of Indian society. Some individuals were paid financial subsidies for their ‘services’. Had the operation been ‘blown up’, it would have had serious political consequences in India and damage to Britain’s diplomatic relations with New Delhi. It was very risky. But the rewards were incredibly low. This made little or no difference to the political landscape of India. It was surprising that the British, and sometimes the Americans, were willing to conduct intelligence operations with potentially inflammatory consequences when the potential benefits were negligible.
How have covert actions taken by Western governments in South Asia in the past affected its political landscape?
Western intelligence interventions had almost no tangible impact on India’s political landscape. There is no evidence that Western intelligence was effective in any meaningful way, for example, in swaying India away from Moscow. In fact, since 1971 exactly the opposite was true. Larger geostrategic factors (for example, Nixon’s moves toward China) have always been more influential than covert intelligence interventions in shaping internal Indian politics and external Indian diplomacy. The Indian agency was also strong enough to absorb or divert Western intelligence activity and avoid such activity having a significant impact on Indian politics. In contrast, the specter of the ‘foreign hand’ or exposure to Western intelligence interference has had social and cultural impacts on India, real and imagined, that can be seen as significant and enduring. As mentioned above, the fear of omnipotent and malevolent Western intelligence influence, which was always overstated and exaggerated, created a cycle of paranoid conspiracy and paranoia, which adversely affected the self and Indian political culture. It was a tragedy and perhaps the most consequential legacy of India’s secret Cold War.
Majid Maqbool is a freelance journalist based in Kashmir.
