SPIES are not encouraged to write their memoirs. But after a career keeping secrets, many feel the urge to spend their twilight years recounting their heroics. Such accounts should be read with caution. Spooks are no exception to the general rule that autobiographers tend to dwell on the successes and skip over the failures. And when it comes to reading tales of espionage there is an extra reason to be wary. Former intelligence officials are not beyond slipping in the odd misleading fact.

Nevertheless, information in the public domain from spooks and people who work with them should not be dismissed out of hand. And with that in mind here is a brief survey of some recent publications by Indian deep state apparatchiks with special attention paid to their remarks on Pakistan.

Many passages in the books written by former Indian intelligence officials speak of too many competing agencies with overlapping areas of responsibility being consumed by turf wars rather than cooperating to identify threats. Much the same could be written about most national intelligence systems. But there are also specific claims about Pakistan and in particular Kargil and the 2008 attack on Mumbai.

Spooks’ information shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand.

In Re-Energising Indian Intelligence, Manoj Shrivastava who worked in the Military Intelligence Directorate, suggests that RAW did have advance knowledge of the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) attack on Mumbai but the information failed to make its way up to the relevant decisions-makers. In India’s Special Forces, Lt-Gen P.C. Katoch, who for many years worked in India’s Special Forces, confirms the view that India missed opportunities to be better prepared for Mumbai. Specific information in the hands of various parts of the Indian authorities, he says, included reports of an LeT ship leaving Karachi. Both authors say the CIA station chief in Delhi warned RAW that there would be an imminent seaborne attack on Mumbai. Katosh adds that the CIA information originated with intercepts made by its station in Jalalabad in Afghanistan.

In his account of Mumbai, journalist Sandeep Unnithan claims that RAW and India’s Intelligence Bureau (IB) had been warning the Mumbai police about the possibility of an LeT seaborne attack since 2006. In all, there were 26 such warnings, six of which mentioned a seaborne attack. Some of the warnings gave specific dates in 2008, and others listed hotels and government buildings as possible targets.

The information was not entirely ignored — for example, the owners of the Leopold Cafe and the management of the Taj hotel (both of which were attacked) were advised to increase their security, but beyond that few preventative preparations were made.

Intriguingly, Unnithan also writes that on Oct 20, 2008, the combined operations room (bringing together the navy, coast guard, IB, army and border security) in the coastal town of Vadinar in Gujarat flashed an alert to Delhi saying 30 terrorists were crossing for an attack within the next 30 days. Once again the warning got lost in the system.

There are similar remarks about Kargil. Shrivastava claims that in the run up to Kargil, RAW and IB both picked up on increased Pakistani activity at the Line of Control. But the full scale of what India faced only became apparent when, according to journalist Praveen Swami, three shepherds in the spring of 1999 told the Indian authorities they had seen a group of Pathans digging trenches near the LoC. When troops went to the area they were ambushed and subsequent probes into the area met the same fate. It was only then that India realised there had been a significant infiltration.  

More generally, Katoch claims that, when operating in Kash­mir, the Indian military did not rely just on captured militants to obtain information but also had men pose as militants so as to gather intelligence. “Over a period of time most Special Forces operatives could very well merge with terrorists, speaking their language, dressing and living like them. It became a fun game for youngsters like Capt K.P. Singh to meet infiltrating Pakistani terrorists and scalp them.” He also describes a story in which he claims that the son of LeT’s Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi was killed near Srinagar after a Special Forces unit identified a safe house by using handheld thermal imagers hooked up to some TV sets.

In his memoir, Courage and Conviction, former Indian army chief Gen V.K. Singh claims that when he was posted to the town of Samba in 1998 near the LoC he put together “a grid of ex-servicemen and informants who were to be our eyes and ears on the ground. I also knew quite a few Gujjars and Bakarwals who transited through these areas to Naushera in the summer to graze their animals. They too were a valuable source of information.”

Good intelligence gathering and poor assessment capabilities are a common theme of many of these accounts by ex-Indian intelligence officials. The overall impression is that it is rather easier to gather information than it is to work out what to do with it.

The writer is a British journalist and author of Pakistan: Eye of the Storm.

Published in Dawn, May 4th, 2017