Posted on 08/21/2007 7:54:38 AM PDT by sukhoi-30mki
India's silent warriors
The Kaoboys of R&AW: Down Memory Lane by B Raman
Reviewed by Sreeram Chaulia
Secrecy and intelligence agencies are synonymous. Very rarely does the general public get a peek into the shadowy world of spooks and their death-defying deeds shrouded behind the iron curtain of state secrets.
In a new offering from India's premier publishing house on strategic affairs, B Raman, the former head of the Counter-Terrorism Division of India's external intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), pries open the black box with hard-hitting scrutiny. The Kaoboys of R&AW is at once a nostalgic tribute to India's silent warriors and an inquisition into what is wrong with their legendary organization.
Raman's opening salvo is fired at the US State Department, which was much hated in R&AW during his 26-year tenure. One State Department official may have passed on to Pakistan Indian intelligence reports on Khalistani terrorists that New Delhi had shared with Washington. In 1992, the State Department threatened to impose economic sanctions on India after it refused permission for US sleuths to go on an aerial-photography mission along the Sino-Indian border. In 1994, it warned New Delhi that if R&AW did not halt covert missions in Pakistan, the United States would "act against India" (p 5).
Intriguingly, R&AW and the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) simultaneously colluded to prevent a possible Chinese takeover of northern Burma. George H W Bush, the director of the CIA from 1975-77, became a personal friend of Kao. Later, when Bush was US vice president, Kao succeeded in persuading him to turn off the aid tap to Khalistani terrorists. Raman comments here that "benevolence and malevolence go side by side in relations between intelligence agencies" (p 42).
(Excerpt) Read more at atimes.com ...
I read the whole article, its an excellent piece.
bump
Smart folks those Indian intel types.
L
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