MUMBAI, Dec 4: India’s intelligence agencies have descended into “civil war” following the Mumbai attacks that exposed the country’s vulnerability to terrorism, analysts and experts say.

The country’s various security bodies have long refused to communicate and now blame each other for failing to act on information that could have thwarted the terror strikes, they said.

A week after the attacks, and amid mounting public anger, reports are emerging that intelligence agencies knew that India’s financial capital may be targeted by extremists.

India has more than a dozen intelligence agencies that decline to pool information or answer to a central command, said Wilson John, senior fellow at the Observer Research Foundation think tank in New Delhi. The agencies range from the National Security Council Secretariat, headed by a political appointee answerable to the prime minister, down to the military and police.

John said their “reluctance, and even refusal, to share information” that could prevent attacks “sends a message to terrorists that they can breach Indian security, that they can come in here and do anything”. “Ultimately the buck stops nowhere,” he added.

Mumbai is the hub of India’s western naval command and situated near offshore oil rigs and the country’s nuclear installations, he said. “I keep asking who was heading the operation to flush out the terrorists. There was not a single man in charge,” he said.

“The police, paramilitary personnel, firefighters, the coastguard, all were operating in isolation. There was no one in charge which is why 10 guys were able to hold off hundreds of men deployed from the security forces.”

Newspapers said the government’s external intelligence unit, the Research and Analysis Wing, intercepted phone calls as recently as November 18 about plans for assaults on Mumbai hotels.

The calls specifically referred to the luxury Taj Mahal hotel, one of last week’s targets, but the information was not disseminated, the Hindustan Times said.

India’s approach to intelligence was comparable with that in the US before the “9/11” attacks, said a foreign intelligence specialist, referring to the lack of coordination among Washington’s internal and external

agencies. —AFP