The House that Kao Built

MOHAN GURUSWAMY:

Not many people in the country would know who Ramnath Kai was and that is the way he probably would have liked it. He was the founder director of India’s foreign intelligence agency, the innocuously named Research and Analysis Wing with the rather misleading and sometimes evocative acronym RAW. In the last few days a lot has been written about what little was known about Kao. I am not about to add my little to it for what I too know is mostly the little already known. But this must be said and that is that he was no ordinary spymaster serving a three-year tenure whispering into the ears of the varied lot who came to rule India. Kao established a rare post independence institution in a tumultuous era. The Cold War was at its highest fury. Pakistan’s hostility was unremitting, as it is now. Chinese hostility matched Pakistan’s and the West was much more suspicious of India and often more inimical to it than now. Kao’s RAW was created in the wake of India’s defeat in 1962 by China, which was mostly about being unable to read that country’s intentions and capabilities. It came into being in 1968 when Indira Gandhi authorized its formation.

By doing so Kao joined a very select club of intelligence professionals who created organizations that bear their distinct imprimatur. Men like Francis Walsingham, Feliks Dzerzhinsky, Allen Dulles and Marcus Wolf. Walsingham was devoted to Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen, and laid the foundations to what became the worlds greatest intelligence apparatus till the Cold War and the new politics of the post war era left it lagging and as a handmaiden to Allen Dulles’ CIA. The CIA was the successor to the USA’s wartime intelligence organization, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which was mostly consisted of imaginative and adventurous Wall Street types keen of doing their bit to help their side win the Second World War. 

Dzerzhinsky was a Pole who founded the Soviet secret service, which eventually became the KGB, the Russian acronym for the Committee for State Security, with its headquarters at Moscow’s Lubyanka Street. Back in the Soviet days a huge statue of Dzerzhinsky looked longingly towards the Lubyanka where his successors plied their trade. Marcus Wolf transformed the East German Stasi into NATO’s most feared and professional adversary. The East German penetration of West Germany was almost total with the number of intelligence agents successfully infiltrated into that country reckoned to be in the hundreds. His greatest success was to place an agent, Günter Guillaume, as Chancellor Willy Brandt’s topmost aide. The unmasking of Guillaume led to the ruination of Willy Brandt’s career. There is much to suggest that Guillaume’s unmasking itself was deliberate so as to destroy Brandt. Karla, George Smiley's diabolical adversary in the John le Carre novels with him as the hero, was closely fashioned after Marcus Wolf. Wolf is presently serving a prison term in West Germany for having succeeded so well against them!

Though the RAW emerged out of the Intelligence Bureau, its true forerunners were the intrepid adventurers drawn from the British Indian Army, men like Captain Arthur Conolly, Col. Charles Stoddart and Lt. Richmond Shakespear (later Capt. & Sir); civilians like Robert Shaw and William Moorcroft; and Survey of India cartographers, the legendary “Pundits” like Sarat Das, Mohammed Ali and Mirza Shuja. These secret agents were the true heroes of “The Great Game” played between Tsarist Russia and Imperial Britain for the domination of Asia, which actually meant the eventual control of India. With the advent of the nationalist movement the focus of the Intelligence Bureau turned inwards, a pre-occupation that continued after independence also. 

This post independence IB, dominated for most of the period by BN Mullick and in keeping with his sycophantic tendencies, focused mostly on threats to the Congress government, most notably entirely fictitious threats from the Indian Army! In the process it miserably failed to warn the Government of India of China’s true capabilities and internal dynamics. It had absolutely no clue of what the Chinese were about and consequently the Government of India misjudged the situation and embarked on a series of foolhardy policy initiatives that finally led to a disastrous military confrontation with China. It would be difficult to conclude if the IB has learnt any lessons or is doing anything very differently?

In 1968, Indira Gandhi chartered RN Kao and Shankaran Nair, the IB’s two top foreign intelligence experts, to establish an intelligence agency solely dedicated to external affairs. Unlike the IB which drew its senior officers from the IPS, creating an ever-running conflict between the cadre officials and the visitors, the RAW began by drawing an eclectic bunch from other central services and by directly recruiting, but very privately from among the traditional and trusted circles. In reality this meant from among the children of officialdom and the urban upper classes. The uncharitably inclined called the RAW the relatives and friends welfare agency! 

Soon after its establishment RAW got an opportunity to earn its spurs in East Pakistan and it did it with élan and imagination. With the creation of Bangladesh, RAW had an asset base that gave it rare insights into that country. It was able to correctly predict the plot against Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Mujib did not heed the warning and paid the price for it. But the plotters had to wait for one more RAW hurrah to subside when it’s chosen, Gen. Khalid Musharaff, launched a counter-coup. Musharaff failed and was also killed and Zia-ur-Rehman came to power. His widow Khaleda heads the government in Bangladesh after succeeding Mujib’s daughter Hasina late last year. The animosity of the two ladies can be traced back to the events of 1975.

RAW is not always as prescient about events or its actions. Its involvement in Srilanka is a case in point. The LTTE was trained and provisioned by RAW, to serve to gain what advantage for India is difficult to fathom. The country paid grievously for this leading to the military misadventure and later the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. That the LTTE is what it is today is a perverse testimony to RAW’s abilities. The Srilanka misadventure contributed to another RAW debacle as well. In the mid 1980’s the CIA snared RAW’s station chief in Madras overseeing the Srilanka operations in a classic honey trap by baiting him with an agent masquerading as an airhostess.

But RAW’s great successes have been against Pakistan. It has been able to predict changes in government, including the last coup that saw Nawaz Sharif end up in jail and Parvez Musharaff on the saddle, with monotonous regularity. It has been able to track troop movements with a similarly high degree of success, even though the Subramaniam Committee enquiring into the wake up call given to the sleepwalking Vajpayee government in Kargil, tried to stick the responsibility for the governments failure on the fact that one Pakistani battalion was not correctly identified on “intelligence failure.” Well the RAW chief responsible for the failure got himself a nice sinecure to overcome his retirement blues making you wonder as to who actually failed?

A notable success was that Gen. Musharaff’s conversation with the Kargil operation commander was interdicted and tapes were made available for the world to make up their minds about what the Pakistanis were up to. In the recent months RAW seems to have done notably well in Afghanistan even if we have to wait a while for details to come out. More will come out on what actually happened in Konduz and what tipped the Northern Alliance’s sudden decision to occupy Kabul even as the Americans were planning to install a Taliban Mark II regime.

True the house that Kao built has been a sturdy one that has had its share of victories. But it would still be interesting to speculate what Kao would have now thought of the organization he created. For one he would have noticed far less enthusiasm. Inter-service rivalries between the deputationists and the cadre officers belonging to an inelegantly named RAS, perennial problems with the MEA, and the inevitable bureaucratization has led to the frittering away of energies on the trivial and peripheral. In most missions where there is a RAW contingent the IFS does its best to hamper its activities. I was recently in a foreign capital where the RAW station chief was deliberately provided with housing far below his entitlement. At another place one overheard a slightly tipsy IFS officer loudly telling the RAW “not to forget the tape-recorder” as he was leaving, well within the earshot of foreigners. The present Foreign Minister himself is known to entertain some views about RAW that would place him almost in the league of the late Morarji Desai who as Prime Minister did his damnedest to curb the agency against which he harbored all manner of real and imaginary grievances.

Like all our civil services and government institutions, RAW too has come to be dominated by generalists. There are few area or subject specialists. Most covenanted officers sit in secure and often declared positions protected by diplomatic immunity. Fieldwork, often in hostile territory, is mostly the province of junior staff, like the British use of the “pundits.” Like a career in the Indian Army, service with RAW increasingly does not attract the best and the brightest any more. Kao would have been distressed to spend an evening with many of the newer RAW officers. The house that Kao built might be a great one. But it seems to have seen its glorious days as well. The present chief has his work cut out. 

Mohan Guruswamy