About the same time that numerous stylish liberals were crusading for
unilateral American and Western disarmament.
Posted on 10/08/2005 4:06:28 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
NEW DELHI: As former KGB spy Vasili Mitrokhin’s revelations continue to shock India, new documents have revealed that the Soviet spy agency tried its best to incite a war between India and Pakistan in 1981. The Soviet agency also toyed with the idea of setting up an Azad Kashmir state independent of Pakistan and India and the formation of a free Balochistan government-in-exile.
The KGB resident in Delhi proposed that another war between India and Pakistan would be advantageous for the Soviet Union and the Babrak Karmal regime in Afghanistan, suggesting that both countries “must be steered in that direction”. These documents were not part of Christopher Andrew’s recently published ‘The Mitrokhin Archive’, but are included in a paper that Mitrokhin presented in 2002 to the Cold War International History Project (CWIH) based in Washington. India’s largest circulated weekly ‘Outlook’ accessed these documents at the CWIH.
According to the paper, the idea behind provoking an India-Pakistan war was to distract international attention from Soviet activities in Afghanistan. The suggestion to work towards precipitating a new war between India and Pakistan was seriously considered, Mitrokhin said. Prokhorov, the KGB resident in Delhi, said to be the working alias of Gennadiy Afanasyevich Vaumin, put the idea forward. Operation ‘Torkham’ was then launched to, among other things, “deepen disagreements between India and Pakistan on existing issues of dispute.”
According to Mitrokhin, another KGB outfit called the Chukhrov Working Group, “also considered the question of creating a new irritant - the setting up an Azad Kashmir independent of Pakistan and India, and the formation of a free Balochistan government-in-exile from Afghanistan.” But this proposal was postponed “in view of the extreme complexity and uncertainty of many aspects of the situation.”
The 2002 Mitrokhin report points to some specific instances of the use of Indian journalists by the KGB. “Through their agents, the KGB residents in Delhi and Colombo established channels for conveying First Chief Directorate Service A (KGB’s foreign intelligence wing) information directly to highly-placed officials in India,” the report says. “In Delhi, agent Vano, who was a journalist, passed information to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. In September 1981, he was sent to Pakistan.”
Mitrokhin claimed that highly confidential papers, which he had access to in the KGB archives, said that “the KGB actively carried out joint measures with the Hungarians, who were in operational contact with a prominent Indian journalist in Vienna. They supplied him with KGB disinformation, which he published in the press under his own name.”
In Colombo, the Mitrokhin report says, “a Sri Lankan journalist had access to the Indian High Commissioner in Sri Lanka, T Sri Abraham. Thus, at a regular meeting on January 10, 1981, the agent passed on to Abraham information on a 20-year US plan to establish its hold in the Indian Ocean. Abraham said he would discuss this information with E Gonsalvez, the secretary of the Indian ministry of foreign affairs, who was due to visit Sri Lanka on 12 January.”
I can't wait to hear about how the Soviet Union never would have dreamed of starting a war with anyone, especially not with pro-democracy freedom lovers like Putin as KGB officers.
For once I wish they'd succeeded in getting that war going.
In 1981, Pak was sans nukes and was defeat-able by conventional means.
O sure, there're so many factors ii'm not considering in blandly stating a 'wish'. Buit yes, the problem that pak represents to the world could have been happily buried by 1982, who knows...
Yes and how pro-Soviet Indians were just looking out for India's best interests against those of the hegemonic imperialist warmonger Americans by supporting a foreign power planning to destroy and partition the Indian nation.
It's sad that so many of us have such a distorted view of the Soviets, they were really just peace loving people engaging in an agricultural experiment.
C'mon. Everyone knows that the Soviets (the people they represented) were kind folks that were simply misunderstood. And their system of government would've worked if we only had given it a chance. /sarc
So, what level of authority and planning was Putin involved in with the KGB back then?
I know he was the East German agent in charge at one time. But, in the 1980's, was he in East Germany or was he making bigger plans?
And I wonder what the world would be like today if we had just let them keep Afghanistan.
"Stasi" Putin was in Germany in the 80's but nobody is sure when he arrived there.
Wow, those KGB guys must've been incompetent. Seems like easiest war to start ever
Pssst!!!! Don't tell the Liberals about this.
They'd say RWR/GHWB planned it that way...RWR/BUSH's Fault Ping. :D
The Soviet stooges in India haven't disappeared though the Soviet ideology has. These stooges still exist in the current Indian Congress-Communist alliance government.
Correction. You mean tolerant, trustworthy, peace-loving, pro-democracy freedom lovers like Putin. Just like Osama bin Laden, Ayatollah Khomeini, Kim Il Sung, Hafez Assad, Fidel Castro...
Also read John Craven's book
THE SILENT WAR
http://www.aloha.com/~craven/silent.html
And
Roger C. Dunham's
Spy Sub
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1557501785/002-6811475-8559262
But what the heck.... LeMay was trying to get something started back in the 50s
And.
Rising Tide
The untold story of the Russian Submarines that fought the cold war
Gary Weir & Walter Boyne
2003
http://www.risingtidebook.com
About the same time that numerous stylish liberals were crusading for
unilateral American and Western disarmament.
Carter: "May I kiss you, Leonid."
Brezhnev: "I was thinking the same thing."
No, you see, communism wasn't done right. Had it been done correctly, the whole world would have desired it and every government would have simply withered away.
At least that's what I've read.
If you want a Google GMail account, FReepmail me.
They're going fast!
KGB must not be very good if it couldn't get these two fighting. Thats like trying and failing to get the Hatfields and McCoys shooting at each other.
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