Showing posts with label Intelligence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Intelligence. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
A China Expert Passes Away
With great regret I am reproducing Mr B Raman's piece on the sudden death of Mr R Swaminathan at New Delhi today. It is personal loss for me as I benefitted from his immense knowledge and experience in intelligence assessment at the macro level and its impact on national decisionmaking.
We will all miss him and his wise counsel.
R Hariharan
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A FORMER LEADING CHINA EXPERT OF R&AW PASSES AWAY
B.RAMAN
Shri R.Swaminathan, a former leading China expert of the Research & Analysis Wing (R&AW), passed away in a New Delhi hospital in the early hours of the morning of December 8,2010, after suffering a heart attack. He was 78. He was the President and Director-General of the New Delhi based International Institute of Security & Safety Management and Vice-President of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. He had gone to Delhi from Chennai where he was living to attend a meeting of the Institute.
2. Shri Swaminathan joined the Indian Police Service ( IPS) in 1954. After his training in the Central Police Training College (CPTC), Mount Abu, he was allotted to the cadre of the then undivided Madras State. He was transferred to the Andhra Pradesh cadre when Madras was divided and Andhra Pradesh was formed.
3. After spending a few years in the State, he joined the Intelligence Bureau (IB) of the Ministry of Home Affairs of the Government of India under the IB's earmarking scheme. Under this scheme, officers who had done exceptionally well during the training at the CPTC were taken permanently into the IB after they had done their district training in their State of allotment. He joined the R&AW after its formation in September,1968.
4. In the IB, he belonged to a small hard core of officers under the leadership of the late R.N.Kao set up by B.N.Mallick, the then Director of the IB (DIB), after the Sino-Indian war of 1962 to revamp the capability of the IB for the collection and analysis of China-related intelligence. He continued to specialise on China after joining the R&AW. Even though he was a generalist officer from the IPS, he acquired a remarkable capability for the collection and analysis of human and technical intelligence relating to China. Technical intelligence was his forte. Kao used him for setting up and supervising the China-related monitoring set-up of the R&AW.
5. There is hardly any specialsed set-up of the R&AW and the Directorate-General of Security (DGS) in which he had not served. He was a highly-regarded expert in the collection of technical intelligence from ground stations as well as aerial platforms. He did the spade work for the visit of Kao to China in October,1984 and subsequently served as the Principal Staff Officer to Shri G.C.Saxena when he headed the R&AW. In 1985-1986, he played a very active and highly-commended role in the negotiations of the Government of India with the Mizo National Front, which ultimately brought peace to Mizoram.
6.He reited in December,1990, as Special Secretary, DG (Security), Cabinet Secretariat, Government of India. After his retirement, he settled down in Bangalore for some years and then shifted to Chennai. He was living alone in Chennai after the death of his wife four years ago.
7. He played an active role in organising the activities of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. The Centre greatly profited from his knowledge of China. He was also associated with other non-governmental organisations based in Chennai such as the Catalyst, focusing on improving governance, the Chennai Chapter of the Observer Research Foundation in which he was a frequent speaker on national security related issues and the Centre For Asian Studies. (8-12-10)
Sunday, September 5, 2010
Learning from Wikileaks
By Col R Hariharan
To those weary of reading all about the Wikileaks -the publication of 92,000 secret military intelligence documents relating to the U.S. war against the Al Qaeda in Afghanistan on the net – I can assure this article is not to ‘advise’ Americans how to conduct the war. This is about what we in India can learn from the leaks relating two key areas – governance and intelligence operations.
Wikileaks has brought about the stark reality of modern environment of war and peace which coexist in nations fighting terrorism and insurgency. Compromise of military operational secrets also questions government policy decisions and applications as President Barack Obama is finding out now. In democracies it is elected members who critically analyse government actions in parliament. But Wikileaks has enlarged arena of debate to public domain where everyman will be questioning the government based on the information from Wikileaks. Such public debates are healthy no doubt; but they could also make governments overcautious to in taking timely decisions. At times it could drive them to the point of inaction.
Wikileaks’ insights on the relationship between governance and conduct of war are revealing. Governance relates to a whole gamut of issues extending from policy prescriptions, to logistics and inept decision making as much as poor generalship and conduct of operations of armed forces.
Wikileaks is not the first large scale leakage of classified papers. The ‘Pentagon Papers’ during the Vietnam War compromised by Daniel Ellsberg who worked for Rand Corporation was another classic case of similar proportions. But the scale and scope of Wikileaks is unprecedented. In fact Wikileaks will be releasing 12,000 more documents relating to Afghan war. Nor Wikileaks will be the last. The reason is simple: the era of right to information and whistle blowers is here to stay. As this is the era of copy cats, we can soon expect our own Indian edition of Wikileaks. So is the government gearing up for such possibility? I have my reservations as our lumbering style of governance has its own method of stymieing any new ideas. And if there is a ‘Delhileak’ of massive proportions there would not be enough fig leaves for the government to hide behind.
And suppressing such leaks is not going to be easy. It may also be politically not prudent to take action under the Official Secrets Act against a whistleblower. Whistleblowers have become modern day Davids fighting the Goliath of mindless governments. Ideally the only way make them inactive is for the rulers to clean up their acts. And that is not going to be easy as ultimately such dirty jobs fall on the laps of bureaucracy. So bureaucracy is likely to end up with this unviable job without supportive policy decisions. This could mean cosy days of bureaucracy taking a snooze and leave the decision making to committees (or in our case groups of ministers) are (hopefully) coming to a close.
Even before Wikileaks hit the headlines, New Delhi has been in a tizzy as our TV channels have frequently displayed documents ‘leaked to them’ on a number of inconvenient issues. Undoubtedly whistleblowers have been doing a splendid job to keep the public informed of the misdeeds of power brokers. The underground ‘political’ response to whistleblowers has resulted in the growing number of unnatural deaths among them. So far the long arm of law had been showing studied reluctance to act even in cases where the identity of the whistleblower was compromised at the highest level. There had been increasing public outrage at this.
Deferring to public opinion, the Union Cabinet has recently given the go ahead for the Public Interest Disclosure and Protection to Persons Making Disclosure Bill 2010 to be introduced in parliament. The Bill provides the Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) the powers of a civil court to enable it to penalise people revealing the identity of whistleblowers. The onus will be on the CVC to protect the identity of citizens who provide information about the misuse of governmental authority and funds. But can the CVC act boldly under the new enactment in the inner sanctums of South or North Block?
As an old MI hand, with the advent of electronic age I find age-old problems of intelligence have morphed into gigantic proportions. With the click of a mouse, Wikileaks has compromised a colossal number of secret documents. Traditionally the enemy eavesdrops on secrets of state by infiltrating an agent to access the secrets. The revolution in electronics and communication has made this job much easier. The agent or source need not be near the operational area any more to unravel the secrets. He could do the same job from another country where he can access the server or elsewhere if the work is farmed out offshore.
Ideally to overcome this problem, the vetting process of those employed on sensitive jobs will have to be constantly upgraded to keep pace with advances in technology. But these are unlikely to stop whistleblowers acting according to their conscience. The FBI has already arrested Bradley Manning, 22-year old IT professional who was horrified at the atrocities committed on Afghan war, for suspected involvement in the leaks. Regardless of merits of the issue, what can security administrator in war or peace do about such whistleblowers? Very little, as our democracy is more condescending to the perpetrator as long as he does not wear a uniform. With individual freedom gaining more space than national interest, and the media vying for exclusive news breaks plugging such leaks will not be easy. This is evident from the follow up on Wikileaks.
Wikileaks has also done a great disservice to intelligence community by giving out the particulars of agents and sources who had been working for law enforcing agencies, government, and armed forces. What will happen to them now as their cover is blown? Who will save them from terror threats to their lives and property? These are open ended questions that must be bothering the American intelligence agencies on the ground in Afghanistan. But it is time we also found answers to these questions as our security enforcement systems are loose and criminal nexus with extremism is rampant. The job of intelligence gatherers is going to be much more difficult. Probably a healthy mix of technology tools and human intelligence would emerge as the answer to problems of intelligence gathering.
At times intelligence agencies carry out double cross operations converting the agent caught in the act to work for them. At the height of Cold War, the British SIS and CIA successfully mounted - Berlin Tunnel - a major operation to tap the underground cable lines between East Berlin to Moscow by digging a tunnel. However, when the KGP came to know of it, it decided to turn it into its favour by deception. Soviets sent a lot of dummy traffic that kept the SIS-CIA sleuths in a wasteful exercise of translating thousands of transcripts, while KGB honchos were tickled to death. Such deception operations to reduce the compromise of sources and information through leaks of the Wikileaks could be the answer. But that is totally a different ball game.
To those weary of reading all about the Wikileaks -the publication of 92,000 secret military intelligence documents relating to the U.S. war against the Al Qaeda in Afghanistan on the net – I can assure this article is not to ‘advise’ Americans how to conduct the war. This is about what we in India can learn from the leaks relating two key areas – governance and intelligence operations.
Wikileaks has brought about the stark reality of modern environment of war and peace which coexist in nations fighting terrorism and insurgency. Compromise of military operational secrets also questions government policy decisions and applications as President Barack Obama is finding out now. In democracies it is elected members who critically analyse government actions in parliament. But Wikileaks has enlarged arena of debate to public domain where everyman will be questioning the government based on the information from Wikileaks. Such public debates are healthy no doubt; but they could also make governments overcautious to in taking timely decisions. At times it could drive them to the point of inaction.
Wikileaks’ insights on the relationship between governance and conduct of war are revealing. Governance relates to a whole gamut of issues extending from policy prescriptions, to logistics and inept decision making as much as poor generalship and conduct of operations of armed forces.
Wikileaks is not the first large scale leakage of classified papers. The ‘Pentagon Papers’ during the Vietnam War compromised by Daniel Ellsberg who worked for Rand Corporation was another classic case of similar proportions. But the scale and scope of Wikileaks is unprecedented. In fact Wikileaks will be releasing 12,000 more documents relating to Afghan war. Nor Wikileaks will be the last. The reason is simple: the era of right to information and whistle blowers is here to stay. As this is the era of copy cats, we can soon expect our own Indian edition of Wikileaks. So is the government gearing up for such possibility? I have my reservations as our lumbering style of governance has its own method of stymieing any new ideas. And if there is a ‘Delhileak’ of massive proportions there would not be enough fig leaves for the government to hide behind.
And suppressing such leaks is not going to be easy. It may also be politically not prudent to take action under the Official Secrets Act against a whistleblower. Whistleblowers have become modern day Davids fighting the Goliath of mindless governments. Ideally the only way make them inactive is for the rulers to clean up their acts. And that is not going to be easy as ultimately such dirty jobs fall on the laps of bureaucracy. So bureaucracy is likely to end up with this unviable job without supportive policy decisions. This could mean cosy days of bureaucracy taking a snooze and leave the decision making to committees (or in our case groups of ministers) are (hopefully) coming to a close.
Even before Wikileaks hit the headlines, New Delhi has been in a tizzy as our TV channels have frequently displayed documents ‘leaked to them’ on a number of inconvenient issues. Undoubtedly whistleblowers have been doing a splendid job to keep the public informed of the misdeeds of power brokers. The underground ‘political’ response to whistleblowers has resulted in the growing number of unnatural deaths among them. So far the long arm of law had been showing studied reluctance to act even in cases where the identity of the whistleblower was compromised at the highest level. There had been increasing public outrage at this.
Deferring to public opinion, the Union Cabinet has recently given the go ahead for the Public Interest Disclosure and Protection to Persons Making Disclosure Bill 2010 to be introduced in parliament. The Bill provides the Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) the powers of a civil court to enable it to penalise people revealing the identity of whistleblowers. The onus will be on the CVC to protect the identity of citizens who provide information about the misuse of governmental authority and funds. But can the CVC act boldly under the new enactment in the inner sanctums of South or North Block?
As an old MI hand, with the advent of electronic age I find age-old problems of intelligence have morphed into gigantic proportions. With the click of a mouse, Wikileaks has compromised a colossal number of secret documents. Traditionally the enemy eavesdrops on secrets of state by infiltrating an agent to access the secrets. The revolution in electronics and communication has made this job much easier. The agent or source need not be near the operational area any more to unravel the secrets. He could do the same job from another country where he can access the server or elsewhere if the work is farmed out offshore.
Ideally to overcome this problem, the vetting process of those employed on sensitive jobs will have to be constantly upgraded to keep pace with advances in technology. But these are unlikely to stop whistleblowers acting according to their conscience. The FBI has already arrested Bradley Manning, 22-year old IT professional who was horrified at the atrocities committed on Afghan war, for suspected involvement in the leaks. Regardless of merits of the issue, what can security administrator in war or peace do about such whistleblowers? Very little, as our democracy is more condescending to the perpetrator as long as he does not wear a uniform. With individual freedom gaining more space than national interest, and the media vying for exclusive news breaks plugging such leaks will not be easy. This is evident from the follow up on Wikileaks.
Wikileaks has also done a great disservice to intelligence community by giving out the particulars of agents and sources who had been working for law enforcing agencies, government, and armed forces. What will happen to them now as their cover is blown? Who will save them from terror threats to their lives and property? These are open ended questions that must be bothering the American intelligence agencies on the ground in Afghanistan. But it is time we also found answers to these questions as our security enforcement systems are loose and criminal nexus with extremism is rampant. The job of intelligence gatherers is going to be much more difficult. Probably a healthy mix of technology tools and human intelligence would emerge as the answer to problems of intelligence gathering.
At times intelligence agencies carry out double cross operations converting the agent caught in the act to work for them. At the height of Cold War, the British SIS and CIA successfully mounted - Berlin Tunnel - a major operation to tap the underground cable lines between East Berlin to Moscow by digging a tunnel. However, when the KGP came to know of it, it decided to turn it into its favour by deception. Soviets sent a lot of dummy traffic that kept the SIS-CIA sleuths in a wasteful exercise of translating thousands of transcripts, while KGB honchos were tickled to death. Such deception operations to reduce the compromise of sources and information through leaks of the Wikileaks could be the answer. But that is totally a different ball game.
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
Of Honey Traps and Intelligence
Historically, from time immemorial sex has been used to entice enemies not only to shed their clothes but also to part with hidden state secrets
by Col R Hariharan
THREE decades ago, Michael J Barrett, assistant general counsel of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), called espionage “the world’s second oldest profession and just as honourable as the first”. This remains true even in this age of permissiveness, and sex continues to be an effective weapon in the armoury of intelligence agencies.
The Old Testament tells us how Philistine spy Delilah used her charms to lure Samson and render him powerless. Our own history has rich tales of spies. Chanakya, the strategic counselor of emperors, considered spying part of state craft. Akbar was credited with having 5,000 spies working for him. They all used courtesans regularly to lure and kill victims, including foreign spies.
Intelligence agencies use three major human weaknesses – wine, women, and money/power – to make those with access to secrets part with information. The use of sex to lure the victim, known in intelligence parlance as a honey trap, is common among intelligence agencies. Particularly after World War II, when Europe had fewer eligible men, use of sex in intelligence gathering operations gained prominence. And the dreaded Soviet secret service, KGB, used honey traps regularly.
The Profumo affair, involving John Profumo, Secretary of State for War in the Macmillan government in Britain, and Christine Keeler, the British showgirl, is probably the most publicized honey trap case. Keeler’s lover, Yevgeni Ivanov, naval attaché at the Soviet embassy in London, probably used her cleverly to get at Profumo and access state secrets though this was never proved. When the scandal broke in 1963, it cost Profumo his job.
The KGB used not only women but also men. It used the homosexual inclinations of William John Vassall, a clerk in the British naval attaché’s office in Moscow. It trapped him with his male partners and threatened to expose the homosexual liaisons, forcing him to work for the Soviet spy agency.
In our own neighbourhood, women have frequently been used as tools for spying. The recent arrest of Madhuri Gupta is a case in point.
So it is not surprising that, in our own neighbourhood, women have frequently been used as tools for spying. The recent arrest of Madhuri Gupta (53), Second Secretary in the Press and Information Wing of the Indian High Commission in Islamabad, is a case in point. According to the media, the Pakistan Intelligence Bureau used her occupational grievance against the Ministry of External Affairs to turn her into a spy for Pakistani intelligence. Perhaps sex was also used as icing on the grievance cake as she had an affair with her Pakistani intelligence pointsman, Jamshed. If the media is to be believed, Jamshed, though a member of the “second oldest profession”, had some honour left as he offered to marry her!
Gupta’s case came close on the heels of another possible honey trap involving Commodore Sukhjinder Singh. The naval officer headed the Indian team overseeing the refit of Admiral Gorshkov, the aircraft carrier the Indian Navy is procuring from Russia. The Commodore is now facing an inquiry on whether his liaison with a Russian woman in 2005-07 in Russia had any connections with the Gorshkov deal, which suffered a steep cost hike.
Chinese and US intelligence agencies have also used honey traps to lure Indian officials. Manmohan Sharma, an officer of the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), was dismissed from service after it was discovered that he fell for the charms of his Chinese language teacher during his tenure in Beijing in 2008. The woman was suspected to be an informant of the Chinese government. Three decades ago, there was the notorious case of KV Unnikrishnan, another RAW functionary, who leaked official secrets of India’s role in Sri Lanka to the CIA. His liaison with an American woman was said to have played a part.
GOVERNMENTS in the Indian subcontinent operate with a comparatively low level of technology orientation. This imposes limitations on intelligence agencies in the use of sophisticated electronic gadgetry to collect information. Espionage using human sources, rather than technology tools, will continue to be a preferred option to gather state secrets in South Asia. Sex is a major human weakness, making its use in intelligence gathering indispensable. We can expect Pakistani intelligence to continue to exploit all weaknesses in their potential sources to unravel state secrets just as their Indian counterparts do. So use of human intelligence sources continues to have primacy, as Americans are discovering in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The Profumo affair, involving John Profumo, Secretary of State for War in the Macmillan government in Britain, and Christine Keeler, the British showgirl, is the most publicised honey trap case.
But use of sex for espionage continues to bug the West also. Last year, MI-5, the British counterintelligence agency, distributed a booklet among business and financial institutions on Chinese efforts to use sexual blackmail to unravel business and trade secrets from Western businessmen. It cautioned them about Chinese intelligence services trying to cultivate “long-term relationships” to exploit vulnerabilities such as sexual relationships to force individuals to cooperate with them.
Human intelligence in active military operations has its limitations. As US operations in Afghanistan show, it is being replaced by technology intelligence tools like the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) to provide actionable intelligence in real time. UAVs were extensively used in Sri Lanka’s war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. Coupled with other battlefield sensors and communication intelligence, such tools play an important role in our own operational theatres, including Jammu and Kashmir.
However, human intelligence will continue to be an indispensable tool of state craft. It is also necessary not only to validate technology intelligence but also probe tools of technology intelligence even when they are still on the drawing board. And the use of sex in espionage and counterintelligence operations will probably continue forever.
Courtesy: GFiles magazine, June 2010 issue.
URL: http://www.gfilesindia.com/title.aspx?title_id=132
by Col R Hariharan
THREE decades ago, Michael J Barrett, assistant general counsel of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), called espionage “the world’s second oldest profession and just as honourable as the first”. This remains true even in this age of permissiveness, and sex continues to be an effective weapon in the armoury of intelligence agencies.
The Old Testament tells us how Philistine spy Delilah used her charms to lure Samson and render him powerless. Our own history has rich tales of spies. Chanakya, the strategic counselor of emperors, considered spying part of state craft. Akbar was credited with having 5,000 spies working for him. They all used courtesans regularly to lure and kill victims, including foreign spies.
Intelligence agencies use three major human weaknesses – wine, women, and money/power – to make those with access to secrets part with information. The use of sex to lure the victim, known in intelligence parlance as a honey trap, is common among intelligence agencies. Particularly after World War II, when Europe had fewer eligible men, use of sex in intelligence gathering operations gained prominence. And the dreaded Soviet secret service, KGB, used honey traps regularly.
The Profumo affair, involving John Profumo, Secretary of State for War in the Macmillan government in Britain, and Christine Keeler, the British showgirl, is probably the most publicized honey trap case. Keeler’s lover, Yevgeni Ivanov, naval attaché at the Soviet embassy in London, probably used her cleverly to get at Profumo and access state secrets though this was never proved. When the scandal broke in 1963, it cost Profumo his job.
The KGB used not only women but also men. It used the homosexual inclinations of William John Vassall, a clerk in the British naval attaché’s office in Moscow. It trapped him with his male partners and threatened to expose the homosexual liaisons, forcing him to work for the Soviet spy agency.
In our own neighbourhood, women have frequently been used as tools for spying. The recent arrest of Madhuri Gupta is a case in point.
So it is not surprising that, in our own neighbourhood, women have frequently been used as tools for spying. The recent arrest of Madhuri Gupta (53), Second Secretary in the Press and Information Wing of the Indian High Commission in Islamabad, is a case in point. According to the media, the Pakistan Intelligence Bureau used her occupational grievance against the Ministry of External Affairs to turn her into a spy for Pakistani intelligence. Perhaps sex was also used as icing on the grievance cake as she had an affair with her Pakistani intelligence pointsman, Jamshed. If the media is to be believed, Jamshed, though a member of the “second oldest profession”, had some honour left as he offered to marry her!
Gupta’s case came close on the heels of another possible honey trap involving Commodore Sukhjinder Singh. The naval officer headed the Indian team overseeing the refit of Admiral Gorshkov, the aircraft carrier the Indian Navy is procuring from Russia. The Commodore is now facing an inquiry on whether his liaison with a Russian woman in 2005-07 in Russia had any connections with the Gorshkov deal, which suffered a steep cost hike.
Chinese and US intelligence agencies have also used honey traps to lure Indian officials. Manmohan Sharma, an officer of the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), was dismissed from service after it was discovered that he fell for the charms of his Chinese language teacher during his tenure in Beijing in 2008. The woman was suspected to be an informant of the Chinese government. Three decades ago, there was the notorious case of KV Unnikrishnan, another RAW functionary, who leaked official secrets of India’s role in Sri Lanka to the CIA. His liaison with an American woman was said to have played a part.
GOVERNMENTS in the Indian subcontinent operate with a comparatively low level of technology orientation. This imposes limitations on intelligence agencies in the use of sophisticated electronic gadgetry to collect information. Espionage using human sources, rather than technology tools, will continue to be a preferred option to gather state secrets in South Asia. Sex is a major human weakness, making its use in intelligence gathering indispensable. We can expect Pakistani intelligence to continue to exploit all weaknesses in their potential sources to unravel state secrets just as their Indian counterparts do. So use of human intelligence sources continues to have primacy, as Americans are discovering in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The Profumo affair, involving John Profumo, Secretary of State for War in the Macmillan government in Britain, and Christine Keeler, the British showgirl, is the most publicised honey trap case.
But use of sex for espionage continues to bug the West also. Last year, MI-5, the British counterintelligence agency, distributed a booklet among business and financial institutions on Chinese efforts to use sexual blackmail to unravel business and trade secrets from Western businessmen. It cautioned them about Chinese intelligence services trying to cultivate “long-term relationships” to exploit vulnerabilities such as sexual relationships to force individuals to cooperate with them.
Human intelligence in active military operations has its limitations. As US operations in Afghanistan show, it is being replaced by technology intelligence tools like the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) to provide actionable intelligence in real time. UAVs were extensively used in Sri Lanka’s war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. Coupled with other battlefield sensors and communication intelligence, such tools play an important role in our own operational theatres, including Jammu and Kashmir.
However, human intelligence will continue to be an indispensable tool of state craft. It is also necessary not only to validate technology intelligence but also probe tools of technology intelligence even when they are still on the drawing board. And the use of sex in espionage and counterintelligence operations will probably continue forever.
Courtesy: GFiles magazine, June 2010 issue.
URL: http://www.gfilesindia.com/title.aspx?title_id=132
Friday, May 28, 2010
Intelligence: No More Co-Ordination Czar?
By B. Raman
The “Times of India” has reported (May 28,2010) that the Government of India is contemplating the setting up under the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) of a coordination committee on all matters concerning security and intelligence. This committee will initially comprise the National Security Adviser (NSA), the Cabinet Secretary and the Union Home Secretary.
2. If this proposal is approved and comes into being, it could mean the retention of the co-ordination responsibility in the PMO, but with the NSA, who is part of the PMO, sharing that responsibility with the Cabinet Secretary and the Home Secretary,instead of exercising that responsibility exclusively as has been the practice till now.
3. The Task Force for the Revamping of the Intelligence Apparatus set up in 2000 under the chairmanship of Shri G.C.Saxena, former head of the Research & Analysis Wing (R&AW) and the then Governor of Jammu & Kashmir, had recommended a two-tier mechanism for co-ordination---- the first consisting of all intelligence agencies and the second in respect of technical intelligence. It recommended that the Principal Secretary to the PM, in his concurrent capacity as the NSA, should head both. Shri Brajesh Mishra thus became the Co-ordination Czar of the then Government of Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee.
4. Shri J.N.Dixit, who succeeded Shri Mishra as the NSA in 2004, and Shri M.K. Narayanan, who succeeded Shri Dixit after his death in January 2005, continued to exercise exclusively the responsibility for co-ordination with the Principal Secretary to the PM having no responsibility in the matter. While the intelligence agencies were not quite comfortable with Shri Dixit inheriting this role, they were quite happy with Shri Narayanan, a former head of the Intelligence Bureau and a former Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, exercising this responsibility.
5. Ever since Shri P.Chidambaram took over as the Home Minister after the 26/11 terrorist strikes in Mumbai, there were indications that he was not happy over the marginalization of the role of his Ministry in the co-ordination of the functioning of the intelligence community. It was apparent from his 22nd Intelligence Bureau Centenary Endowment Lecture at New Delhi on December 23, 2009, that he wanted his role and that of his Ministry in matters relating to internal security management to be strengthened. His desire for a more participatory and active role for the MHA in the co-ordination of the functioning of the TECHINT agencies became clear during his intervention in the Lok Sabha at the time of the recent debate over allegations of phone-tapping by the National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO).
6. If Shri Chidambaram has his way it would dilute the role of the PMO in general and the new NSA, Shri Shiv Shankar Menon, in particular in the co-ordination of the functioning of the intelligence and security agencies. If the TOI report is correct, the PMO is trying to find a new mechanism under which the PMO will continue to exercise the co-ordination responsibilities through the NSA, while at the same time partly satisfying the desire of Shri Chidambaram by making the NSA share this responsibility with the Cabinet Secretary and the Home Secretary.
7. Before 2000, the responsibility for co-ordination was being exercised by the Secretaries’ Committee chaired by the Cabinet Secretary and consisting of the Home, Defence and Foreign Secretaries and the Principal Secretary to the PM. This collective responsibility for co-ordination, which was replaced in 2000 by the exclusive responsibility of the NSA, is now sought to be revived in a modified form under which the NSA will still be responsible for co-ordination but with his powers shared with the Home Secretary and the Cabinet Secretary. Shri Menon will not be an intelligence and security Czar as his predecessors were.
8. Nor will Shri Chidambaram be the Co-ordination Czar. He will have a more important role than his predecessors since 2000, but not as important as he would have liked it to be.
9. This may please be read in continuation of my earlier article of December 24, 2009, titled “the Internal Security Czar” (reproduced below).
Courtesy: South Asia Analysis Group, May 28, 2010
URL:http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/%5Cpapers39%5Cpaper3832.html
Revamping of The Internal Security Machinery
By B. Raman
In a detailed interview to Shri Vir Sanghvi, telecast by the CNBC-TV 18 channel, Shri P.Chidambaram, Minister for Home Affairs of the Government of India, has spoken, inter alia, of how in his view the counter-terrorism machinery of the Government of India should work. Relevant extracts from the interview are annexed.
2. Two important points emerge from the interview---- the exclusive responsibility of the Home Minister to exercise political oversight over the internal security machinery and the limited executive role of the National Security Adviser (NSA) in internal security management.
3. The principle of the exclusive responsibility of the Home Minister for internal security management had been observed right from the days of Jawaharlal Nehru as the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister of the day depended on the Home Minister for ensuring that internal security was effectively maintained. For this purpose, the Home Minister had under his administrative and operational control the Intelligence Bureau and the various central police organizations or para-military forces. He also had the responsibility for guiding and co-ordinating the work of the State Police forces.
4. The line of responsibility for political oversight was very clear with no room for doubt till the assassination of Indira Gandhi in October, 1984. After her assassination, this clear line of responsibility got increasingly diluted or blurred due to various reasons such as the following:
• The creation of new agencies for security-related duties such as the Special Protection Group (SPG) for the security of the incumbent and past Prime Ministers and their families and the National Security Guards (NSGs) as a special intervention force against terrorism. Rajiv Gandhi, the then Prime Minister, decided that the SPG and the NSG should work under the political oversight of the Prime Minister and the operational oversight of the Cabinet Secretary.
• Terrorism assuming international dimensions necessitating co-operation with the counter-terrorism and homeland security agencies of other countries. Diplomacy assumed an important role in counter-terrorism particularly against State sponsors of terrorism. The US created a counter-terrorism division in the State Department to deal with these international and diplomatic dimensions. It continues to function even after the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2004. Some other countries followed the US model. Under Shri Atal Behari Vajpayee, this international and diplomatic dimension was given greater importance than under the predecessor Governments. A number of Joint Counter-Terrorism Working Groups with different countries came into existence and joint counter-terrorism exercises were organized with interested countries, including the US and China. While the responsibility for the co-ordination of the international and diplomatic dimensions was given to the Ministry of External Affairs, the Ministry of Defence exercised the co-ordination responsibilities in respect of joint counter-terrorism exercises.
• With terrorist organizations such as Al Qaeda and its associates acquiring or attempting to acquire specialized capabilities for what came to be known as catastrophic terrorism such as terrorism involving the use of weapons of mass destruction material, terrorism in the cyber space to disrupt or destroy critical infrastructure, aviation terrorism, maritime terrorism etc, the need for the State acquiring specialized counter-capabilities was realized. For meeting these needs, the role of the Ministry of Defence, the Armed Forces and the various science and technology institutions naturally got enhanced.
5. The problems we face in India arise from the fact that whereas terrorism has increasingly assumed new dimensions and new frontiers, no attempt has been made to work out a comprehensive approach to deal with terrorism in its classical form, terrorism in its post-9/11 form and likely forms of terrorism of the future as well as with State-sponsors of terrorism such as Pakistan and other States failing to act against terrorism such as Bangladesh. While the threat posed by terrorism of different hues continues to evolve, our concepts to deal with it has not been keeping pace with the threat.
6. In working out a comprehensive approach to internal security management in general and counter-terrorism in particular, the National Security Adviser (NSA) has to play an important role as an ideas man, who looks beyond the day-to-day nuts and bolts aspect of counter-terrorism. Shri Chidambaram is right when he says that the NSA should have little executive role in internal security management. The executive role has to be that of the Home Minister. However, the NSA has to play an active role in evolving concepts which take into account the international and specialized dimensions of the new terrorism of today. He would also be the right person for co-ordinating and supervising the evolving machinery to facilitate India taking advantage of the growing international co-operation against terrorism.
7. The concept of intelligence co-ordination has also been evolving. The role of intelligence in internal security management has many components:
• Intelligence collection within our frontiers.
• Trans-border intelligence collection.
• Intelligence collection in foreign countries.
• Use of technical gadgets for the collection of intelligence specifically required for internal security management.
• Use of technical gadgets for the collection of intelligence of relevance to internal as well as external security.
8. Presently, there is no single Ministry or Department capable of co-ordinating all these roles. Is it necessary to create a single nodal point in the Prime Minister’s office to co-ordinate these roles in the form of a National Intelligence Adviser? This question has been posed by different analysts from time to time since the Kargil conflict of 1999, but has not been addressed seriously. It is time to address it as part of an exercise to revamp our security machinery----internal as well as external.
9. In India, the concept of an intelligence community has not evolved. Similarly, the concept of leadership roles in security-related matters has not received attention. In the US, under the Intelligence Community Act, all agencies are required to function as an organic whole. There is a consolidated intelligence budget for the community as a whole, which is prepared and got approved by the Congress by the Director, National Intelligence. After the Congressional approval, he makes the individual allocations to different agencies. The leadership role in respect of counter-intelligence is with the FBI, in respect of counter-terrorism with the National Counter-Terrorism Centre, in respect of Homeland Security with the Department of Homeland Security and in respect of covert actions with the CIA. The designated leaders coordinate the follow-up action.
10. In Israel, the leadership role in respect of internal security is that of Shin Bet, the security agency, in respect of external security that of Mossad, the external intelligence Agency, and in respect of trans-border security that of the military intelligence agency. We dot not have such clearly-defined leadership roles.
11. From a perusal of Shri Chidambaram’s address of December 23, 2009, in the Intelligence Bureau, and his latest interview to Shri Vir Sanghvi, it is apparent that he has been approaching the exercise for the revamping of our security machinery essentially from the point of view of the Home Ministry. This is a very important aspect, but it is equally important to give the exercise a larger dimension in order to evolve a comprehensive security machinery with clearly laid down concepts, carefully defined leadership roles and a workable co-ordination drill. In such a larger exercise, the NSA has to play an active role not only as an adviser to the Prime Minister, but also to the Cabinet as a whole in matters relating to national security.
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com)
ANNEXURE
EXTRACTS FROM THE INTERVIEW OF SHRI P.CHIDAMBARAM, HOME MINISTER OF THE GOVERNMENT OF INDIA, BY SHRI VIR SANGHVI FOR THE CNBC-TV 18 CHANNEL
Vir Sanghvi: The other thing that is said is that the first thing you did apparently when you took over as Home Minister is you instituted a meeting at apparently noon every day at which the chiefs of intelligence agencies came and you had a look at what the situation on the ground was and that the National Security Advisor also started coming to these meetings. There is a suggestion that you were given as part of your brief the job of bringing the security agencies within the ambit of the home ministry, is this accurate?
P Chidambaram: No that is a job I wrote for myself.
Vir Sanghvi: It was completely your own job description?
P Chidambaram: Yes but then when I took over, the Prime Minister graciously said, you will have a free hand because time is very limited, and if there is any problem, come back to me. When I thought about my job that weekend, I said, the first thing is we must bring everybody together, because I had to learn and act and change and deliver all in five months.
Vir Sanghvi: You know the background which is it is being posited by many people that you took away a lot of jobs that Narayanan use to do – your answer is always been look you people are making too much of this we have been friends for years – but let us leave friendship out of this. On purely functional terms you did take over a lot of the job didn’t you?
P Chidambaram: No. I did not take away any of his responsibilities. I did not take over any of his responsibilities. All I said was that whoever is doing whatever, it must be under political oversight. I happened to be the person providing the political oversight and therefore everybody accepted it.
Vir Sanghvi: Which is a departure from what had happened before? In Mr Advani’s time it did not happen, Mr Shivraj Patil’s time it didn’t happen. So in that sense the home ministry did assert itself over the national security advisor.
P Chidambaram: That is how it should be isn’t it.
Vir Sanghvi: I personally agree that is how it should be but it wasn’t how it was?
P Chidambaram: It wasn’t for whatever reason I do not know. But if I was going to be responsible as I was made responsible on that day then I was going to make sure that I knew it was going on. The only way that I could know what was going on what happen and what did not happen was to exercise political oversight over every agency that was concerned with security.
Vir Sanghvi: My question to you therefore is what is the role of national security advisor should he be an intelligence overload to whom the chief of intelligence’s report should he be an advisor to the Prime Minister?
P Chidambaram: Essentially I think he is an advisor to the Prime Minister, advisor to the National Security Council. He heads a very important body, the NSES, the Secretariat, which combines not only intelligence from internal security matters but a number of other things - Diplomatic intelligence, external intelligence, nuclear command authority etc.
So he brings all the strands together and then advises the Prime Minister. Surely he must be in the loop as far as internal security is concerned, who can he not be in the loop, he has to be in the loop. But whether he should have executive responsibility given the pressures of work and time I think is an open question.
My personal view is that he should have very few executive responsibilities as far as internal security is concerned. That should be given to other professionals.
Vir Sanghvi: That leads me to the question of where Research & Analysis Wing (R&AW) reports because R&AW cannot report to the home ministry by definition because it is an external agency, of course you have said that when it comes to terrorism the R&AW chief must be involved because there has to be a nodal point on terrorism. But what happens to R&AW, it is a bit fatherless, isn’t it in the current system?
P Chidambaram: R&AW reports to the Prime Minister now. But I think there is broad agreement that so far as counter terrorism is concerned, I don't think anybody has a serious objection that R&AW would have to report to the Home Minister.
Vir Sanghvi: Let me now go back to 26/11, do you think one of the reasons we were so ill-prepared for what happened was because mechanisms like these were not in place?
P Chidambaram: Yes, of course. There should have been one point where everything converged, all information converged. Today it converges in a group of about six-seven people who meet everyday. That is how it should be which is what the National Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC) will be.
It will be an institutional mechanism rather than an individual-headed mechanism. And the response will be an institutional response rather than an individual driven response.
Vir Sanghvi: You have seen the evidence that there was a fair amount of intelligence pointing to 26/11 which was ignored. Do you think it was inevitable that would have been ignored or if there had been a system like this in place we would have acted on it?
P Chidambaram: The system in this place would have surely connected the dots. There were three separate pieces of information, they were not connected.
Vir Sanghvi: So there was a failure?
P Chidambaram: I said so.
Vir Sanghvi: There were two aspect to 26/11, one was that 26/11 happened without us knowing because we didn’t connect the dots as you said. The second was our response which was surely inadequate and took too long to put together, so would that happen again?
P Chidambaram: I don’t think so. If god forbids anything like 26/11 happens, we will respond in a much swifter passion. We have a much better command and control system here and our people will respond very quickly.
Vir Sanghvi: What about state police forces, one of the problems of 26/11 was that they now know were the problems within the Bombay Police, and it’s the same?
P Chidambaram: That’s not correct, they are getting better every day, the capacity is better, response time is quicker. We have set out SOPs now and when we sent the NSG or the Central Paramilitary force what will be the command and control structure. They can command any plane, why their own plane.
Vir Sanghvi: Which they were allowed to under the NSG act any how?
P Chidambaram: Because no body had been authorized to do that.
Vir Sanghvi: It was as simple as that?
P Chidambaram: I think so. I am not going into the past I didn’t decide that I will issue but I issued authority and they can take over any plane now.
The “Times of India” has reported (May 28,2010) that the Government of India is contemplating the setting up under the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) of a coordination committee on all matters concerning security and intelligence. This committee will initially comprise the National Security Adviser (NSA), the Cabinet Secretary and the Union Home Secretary.
2. If this proposal is approved and comes into being, it could mean the retention of the co-ordination responsibility in the PMO, but with the NSA, who is part of the PMO, sharing that responsibility with the Cabinet Secretary and the Home Secretary,instead of exercising that responsibility exclusively as has been the practice till now.
3. The Task Force for the Revamping of the Intelligence Apparatus set up in 2000 under the chairmanship of Shri G.C.Saxena, former head of the Research & Analysis Wing (R&AW) and the then Governor of Jammu & Kashmir, had recommended a two-tier mechanism for co-ordination---- the first consisting of all intelligence agencies and the second in respect of technical intelligence. It recommended that the Principal Secretary to the PM, in his concurrent capacity as the NSA, should head both. Shri Brajesh Mishra thus became the Co-ordination Czar of the then Government of Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee.
4. Shri J.N.Dixit, who succeeded Shri Mishra as the NSA in 2004, and Shri M.K. Narayanan, who succeeded Shri Dixit after his death in January 2005, continued to exercise exclusively the responsibility for co-ordination with the Principal Secretary to the PM having no responsibility in the matter. While the intelligence agencies were not quite comfortable with Shri Dixit inheriting this role, they were quite happy with Shri Narayanan, a former head of the Intelligence Bureau and a former Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, exercising this responsibility.
5. Ever since Shri P.Chidambaram took over as the Home Minister after the 26/11 terrorist strikes in Mumbai, there were indications that he was not happy over the marginalization of the role of his Ministry in the co-ordination of the functioning of the intelligence community. It was apparent from his 22nd Intelligence Bureau Centenary Endowment Lecture at New Delhi on December 23, 2009, that he wanted his role and that of his Ministry in matters relating to internal security management to be strengthened. His desire for a more participatory and active role for the MHA in the co-ordination of the functioning of the TECHINT agencies became clear during his intervention in the Lok Sabha at the time of the recent debate over allegations of phone-tapping by the National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO).
6. If Shri Chidambaram has his way it would dilute the role of the PMO in general and the new NSA, Shri Shiv Shankar Menon, in particular in the co-ordination of the functioning of the intelligence and security agencies. If the TOI report is correct, the PMO is trying to find a new mechanism under which the PMO will continue to exercise the co-ordination responsibilities through the NSA, while at the same time partly satisfying the desire of Shri Chidambaram by making the NSA share this responsibility with the Cabinet Secretary and the Home Secretary.
7. Before 2000, the responsibility for co-ordination was being exercised by the Secretaries’ Committee chaired by the Cabinet Secretary and consisting of the Home, Defence and Foreign Secretaries and the Principal Secretary to the PM. This collective responsibility for co-ordination, which was replaced in 2000 by the exclusive responsibility of the NSA, is now sought to be revived in a modified form under which the NSA will still be responsible for co-ordination but with his powers shared with the Home Secretary and the Cabinet Secretary. Shri Menon will not be an intelligence and security Czar as his predecessors were.
8. Nor will Shri Chidambaram be the Co-ordination Czar. He will have a more important role than his predecessors since 2000, but not as important as he would have liked it to be.
9. This may please be read in continuation of my earlier article of December 24, 2009, titled “the Internal Security Czar” (reproduced below).
Courtesy: South Asia Analysis Group, May 28, 2010
URL:http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/%5Cpapers39%5Cpaper3832.html
Revamping of The Internal Security Machinery
By B. Raman
In a detailed interview to Shri Vir Sanghvi, telecast by the CNBC-TV 18 channel, Shri P.Chidambaram, Minister for Home Affairs of the Government of India, has spoken, inter alia, of how in his view the counter-terrorism machinery of the Government of India should work. Relevant extracts from the interview are annexed.
2. Two important points emerge from the interview---- the exclusive responsibility of the Home Minister to exercise political oversight over the internal security machinery and the limited executive role of the National Security Adviser (NSA) in internal security management.
3. The principle of the exclusive responsibility of the Home Minister for internal security management had been observed right from the days of Jawaharlal Nehru as the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister of the day depended on the Home Minister for ensuring that internal security was effectively maintained. For this purpose, the Home Minister had under his administrative and operational control the Intelligence Bureau and the various central police organizations or para-military forces. He also had the responsibility for guiding and co-ordinating the work of the State Police forces.
4. The line of responsibility for political oversight was very clear with no room for doubt till the assassination of Indira Gandhi in October, 1984. After her assassination, this clear line of responsibility got increasingly diluted or blurred due to various reasons such as the following:
• The creation of new agencies for security-related duties such as the Special Protection Group (SPG) for the security of the incumbent and past Prime Ministers and their families and the National Security Guards (NSGs) as a special intervention force against terrorism. Rajiv Gandhi, the then Prime Minister, decided that the SPG and the NSG should work under the political oversight of the Prime Minister and the operational oversight of the Cabinet Secretary.
• Terrorism assuming international dimensions necessitating co-operation with the counter-terrorism and homeland security agencies of other countries. Diplomacy assumed an important role in counter-terrorism particularly against State sponsors of terrorism. The US created a counter-terrorism division in the State Department to deal with these international and diplomatic dimensions. It continues to function even after the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2004. Some other countries followed the US model. Under Shri Atal Behari Vajpayee, this international and diplomatic dimension was given greater importance than under the predecessor Governments. A number of Joint Counter-Terrorism Working Groups with different countries came into existence and joint counter-terrorism exercises were organized with interested countries, including the US and China. While the responsibility for the co-ordination of the international and diplomatic dimensions was given to the Ministry of External Affairs, the Ministry of Defence exercised the co-ordination responsibilities in respect of joint counter-terrorism exercises.
• With terrorist organizations such as Al Qaeda and its associates acquiring or attempting to acquire specialized capabilities for what came to be known as catastrophic terrorism such as terrorism involving the use of weapons of mass destruction material, terrorism in the cyber space to disrupt or destroy critical infrastructure, aviation terrorism, maritime terrorism etc, the need for the State acquiring specialized counter-capabilities was realized. For meeting these needs, the role of the Ministry of Defence, the Armed Forces and the various science and technology institutions naturally got enhanced.
5. The problems we face in India arise from the fact that whereas terrorism has increasingly assumed new dimensions and new frontiers, no attempt has been made to work out a comprehensive approach to deal with terrorism in its classical form, terrorism in its post-9/11 form and likely forms of terrorism of the future as well as with State-sponsors of terrorism such as Pakistan and other States failing to act against terrorism such as Bangladesh. While the threat posed by terrorism of different hues continues to evolve, our concepts to deal with it has not been keeping pace with the threat.
6. In working out a comprehensive approach to internal security management in general and counter-terrorism in particular, the National Security Adviser (NSA) has to play an important role as an ideas man, who looks beyond the day-to-day nuts and bolts aspect of counter-terrorism. Shri Chidambaram is right when he says that the NSA should have little executive role in internal security management. The executive role has to be that of the Home Minister. However, the NSA has to play an active role in evolving concepts which take into account the international and specialized dimensions of the new terrorism of today. He would also be the right person for co-ordinating and supervising the evolving machinery to facilitate India taking advantage of the growing international co-operation against terrorism.
7. The concept of intelligence co-ordination has also been evolving. The role of intelligence in internal security management has many components:
• Intelligence collection within our frontiers.
• Trans-border intelligence collection.
• Intelligence collection in foreign countries.
• Use of technical gadgets for the collection of intelligence specifically required for internal security management.
• Use of technical gadgets for the collection of intelligence of relevance to internal as well as external security.
8. Presently, there is no single Ministry or Department capable of co-ordinating all these roles. Is it necessary to create a single nodal point in the Prime Minister’s office to co-ordinate these roles in the form of a National Intelligence Adviser? This question has been posed by different analysts from time to time since the Kargil conflict of 1999, but has not been addressed seriously. It is time to address it as part of an exercise to revamp our security machinery----internal as well as external.
9. In India, the concept of an intelligence community has not evolved. Similarly, the concept of leadership roles in security-related matters has not received attention. In the US, under the Intelligence Community Act, all agencies are required to function as an organic whole. There is a consolidated intelligence budget for the community as a whole, which is prepared and got approved by the Congress by the Director, National Intelligence. After the Congressional approval, he makes the individual allocations to different agencies. The leadership role in respect of counter-intelligence is with the FBI, in respect of counter-terrorism with the National Counter-Terrorism Centre, in respect of Homeland Security with the Department of Homeland Security and in respect of covert actions with the CIA. The designated leaders coordinate the follow-up action.
10. In Israel, the leadership role in respect of internal security is that of Shin Bet, the security agency, in respect of external security that of Mossad, the external intelligence Agency, and in respect of trans-border security that of the military intelligence agency. We dot not have such clearly-defined leadership roles.
11. From a perusal of Shri Chidambaram’s address of December 23, 2009, in the Intelligence Bureau, and his latest interview to Shri Vir Sanghvi, it is apparent that he has been approaching the exercise for the revamping of our security machinery essentially from the point of view of the Home Ministry. This is a very important aspect, but it is equally important to give the exercise a larger dimension in order to evolve a comprehensive security machinery with clearly laid down concepts, carefully defined leadership roles and a workable co-ordination drill. In such a larger exercise, the NSA has to play an active role not only as an adviser to the Prime Minister, but also to the Cabinet as a whole in matters relating to national security.
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com)
ANNEXURE
EXTRACTS FROM THE INTERVIEW OF SHRI P.CHIDAMBARAM, HOME MINISTER OF THE GOVERNMENT OF INDIA, BY SHRI VIR SANGHVI FOR THE CNBC-TV 18 CHANNEL
Vir Sanghvi: The other thing that is said is that the first thing you did apparently when you took over as Home Minister is you instituted a meeting at apparently noon every day at which the chiefs of intelligence agencies came and you had a look at what the situation on the ground was and that the National Security Advisor also started coming to these meetings. There is a suggestion that you were given as part of your brief the job of bringing the security agencies within the ambit of the home ministry, is this accurate?
P Chidambaram: No that is a job I wrote for myself.
Vir Sanghvi: It was completely your own job description?
P Chidambaram: Yes but then when I took over, the Prime Minister graciously said, you will have a free hand because time is very limited, and if there is any problem, come back to me. When I thought about my job that weekend, I said, the first thing is we must bring everybody together, because I had to learn and act and change and deliver all in five months.
Vir Sanghvi: You know the background which is it is being posited by many people that you took away a lot of jobs that Narayanan use to do – your answer is always been look you people are making too much of this we have been friends for years – but let us leave friendship out of this. On purely functional terms you did take over a lot of the job didn’t you?
P Chidambaram: No. I did not take away any of his responsibilities. I did not take over any of his responsibilities. All I said was that whoever is doing whatever, it must be under political oversight. I happened to be the person providing the political oversight and therefore everybody accepted it.
Vir Sanghvi: Which is a departure from what had happened before? In Mr Advani’s time it did not happen, Mr Shivraj Patil’s time it didn’t happen. So in that sense the home ministry did assert itself over the national security advisor.
P Chidambaram: That is how it should be isn’t it.
Vir Sanghvi: I personally agree that is how it should be but it wasn’t how it was?
P Chidambaram: It wasn’t for whatever reason I do not know. But if I was going to be responsible as I was made responsible on that day then I was going to make sure that I knew it was going on. The only way that I could know what was going on what happen and what did not happen was to exercise political oversight over every agency that was concerned with security.
Vir Sanghvi: My question to you therefore is what is the role of national security advisor should he be an intelligence overload to whom the chief of intelligence’s report should he be an advisor to the Prime Minister?
P Chidambaram: Essentially I think he is an advisor to the Prime Minister, advisor to the National Security Council. He heads a very important body, the NSES, the Secretariat, which combines not only intelligence from internal security matters but a number of other things - Diplomatic intelligence, external intelligence, nuclear command authority etc.
So he brings all the strands together and then advises the Prime Minister. Surely he must be in the loop as far as internal security is concerned, who can he not be in the loop, he has to be in the loop. But whether he should have executive responsibility given the pressures of work and time I think is an open question.
My personal view is that he should have very few executive responsibilities as far as internal security is concerned. That should be given to other professionals.
Vir Sanghvi: That leads me to the question of where Research & Analysis Wing (R&AW) reports because R&AW cannot report to the home ministry by definition because it is an external agency, of course you have said that when it comes to terrorism the R&AW chief must be involved because there has to be a nodal point on terrorism. But what happens to R&AW, it is a bit fatherless, isn’t it in the current system?
P Chidambaram: R&AW reports to the Prime Minister now. But I think there is broad agreement that so far as counter terrorism is concerned, I don't think anybody has a serious objection that R&AW would have to report to the Home Minister.
Vir Sanghvi: Let me now go back to 26/11, do you think one of the reasons we were so ill-prepared for what happened was because mechanisms like these were not in place?
P Chidambaram: Yes, of course. There should have been one point where everything converged, all information converged. Today it converges in a group of about six-seven people who meet everyday. That is how it should be which is what the National Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC) will be.
It will be an institutional mechanism rather than an individual-headed mechanism. And the response will be an institutional response rather than an individual driven response.
Vir Sanghvi: You have seen the evidence that there was a fair amount of intelligence pointing to 26/11 which was ignored. Do you think it was inevitable that would have been ignored or if there had been a system like this in place we would have acted on it?
P Chidambaram: The system in this place would have surely connected the dots. There were three separate pieces of information, they were not connected.
Vir Sanghvi: So there was a failure?
P Chidambaram: I said so.
Vir Sanghvi: There were two aspect to 26/11, one was that 26/11 happened without us knowing because we didn’t connect the dots as you said. The second was our response which was surely inadequate and took too long to put together, so would that happen again?
P Chidambaram: I don’t think so. If god forbids anything like 26/11 happens, we will respond in a much swifter passion. We have a much better command and control system here and our people will respond very quickly.
Vir Sanghvi: What about state police forces, one of the problems of 26/11 was that they now know were the problems within the Bombay Police, and it’s the same?
P Chidambaram: That’s not correct, they are getting better every day, the capacity is better, response time is quicker. We have set out SOPs now and when we sent the NSG or the Central Paramilitary force what will be the command and control structure. They can command any plane, why their own plane.
Vir Sanghvi: Which they were allowed to under the NSG act any how?
P Chidambaram: Because no body had been authorized to do that.
Vir Sanghvi: It was as simple as that?
P Chidambaram: I think so. I am not going into the past I didn’t decide that I will issue but I issued authority and they can take over any plane now.
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Madhuri Gupta - the Pak Mole in IHC Islamabad
Recently the media had been going to town with the news story about Madhuri Gupta, an Urdu translator employed in Indian High Commission in Islamabad. Most of the news reports were ill informed and half baked. On the TV shrill voices substituted analytical reporting. And neither the Ministry of External Affairs nor intelligence agencies covered themselves with glory in handling the matter. I am reproducing here the article by Mr B Raman courtesy www.southasiaanalysis.org. The article lays bare the way we as a nation handle serious security breaches in our typical ham handed way.
The She-Mole's Case: Making an Ass of Ourselves
By B. Raman
1991: Liviu Radu, a Romanian diplomat posted in New Delhi, was kidnapped by some Khalistani terrorists. He was got released as a result of an operation mounted by the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and the Research & Analysis Wing (R&AW). A Western intelligence agency co-operated in the operation. A senior officer of the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) told the media about the identity of the Western agency. It was prominently carried by some sections of the media. The Western country concerned through its Embassy in New Delhi strongly protested against the failure of the MEA officer to protect the identity of its agency.
1993: After the serial blasts in Mumbai in March 1993, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of the US secretly sent a team of its explosive experts to Mumbai to help the investigators of the Mumbai Police. They were put up in a Mumbai hotel under a non-official cover. The leader of the team was surprised to receive a phone call from a journalist of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) then posted in New Delhi, who was aware of their FBI identity. Enquiries revealed that a senior officer of the Mumbai Police had told the journalist about their FBI identity and revealed to him the name of the hotel where they were staying. There was a strong protest from the FBI over the indiscretion of the Mumbai Police officer.
2010: Madhuri Gupta, a Second Secretary working in the Press and Information wing of the Indian High Commission in Islamabad, was arrested on a charge of working for the Pakistani intelligence. While reporting on her arrest and interrogation, sections of the media named another officer of the High Commission and claimed that he was from the Indian intelligence. According to a report carried by a national daily, this was mentioned to the journalists by an officer of the MEA.
It is important to protect the identity of serving intelligence officers posted abroad for three reasons. Firstly, the exposure of his identity will make it impossible for him to perform his intelligence tasks in future. Secondly, it could pose a serious threat to his life from terrorists. And, thirdly, it could create operational problems.
In the 1970s, the revelation of the identity of a serving officer of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) posted in Europe led to his assassination by some terrorists. The Congress passed a law making it a criminal offence for anyone to reveal the identity of a serving intelligence officer. Since then, American officials and media take care not to reveal the identity of a serving intelligence officer even if they come to know of it. Dick Cheney, the Vice-President under George Bush, came under severe criticism for asking one of his aides to brief a journalist about the identity of a serving woman officer of the CIA. Cheney's aide had to face an enquiry for carrying out the request of Cheney, which amounted to a crime.
In other countries too, officials as well as the media take great care to protect the identity of serving intelligence officers posted in foreign countries. In Israel, as in the US, it is a crime to reveal the identity of a serving intelligence officer. In India, we have neither laws nor traditions to protect the identities of serving intelligence officers posted abroad. During the last five years, Indian media has exposed the identities of at least a dozen serving external intelligence officers posted abroad, thereby damaging their utility as intelligence officers and exposing them to likely physical threats from terrorists.
This is highly unwise on the part of the journalists, but how can we blame them when they are tipped off by other officers of the Government, who do not realise the importance of protecting the cover and security of intelligence officers serving abroad. There could be strong opposition from the Indian media to the Government enacting a law similar to the US law to protect the identity of intelligence officers serving abroad, but it should at least ensure that such leakages and disclosures do not take place from the officials of the Government.
The case of Madhuri Gupta has been handled in an unprofessional manner, with almost a leak an hour. If some of these leaks are to be believed, she must be the greatest intelligence agent ever produced in the history of espionage from a diplomatic mission comparable to the legendary Cicero, a Nazi agent in the British Embassy in Ankara. (Please see https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/vol1no4/html/v01i4a06p_0001.html)
If our news channels are to be believed, what all she has done: Exposed the identities of Indian agents in Pakistan; exposed the identities of Indian agents in other countries; gave to the Pakistani intelligence copies of classified documents including what is described as the classified minutes of the Prime Minister's office on India's relations with Pakistan etc etc. If he was alive, Cicero's handling officer would have envied her handling officer in the Pakistani intelligence. There are at least a dozen journalists claiming exclusive access to the results of the interrogation and yet reporting the same unbelievable stories in almost the same language. These dozen journalists are also claiming exclusive access to the interrogation reports. Some of them have even been giving what they claim are quotes from the interrogation reports. I known how interrogation reports are recorded. They are not recorded the way they are shown on some of our TV channels.
Who is Madhuri Gupta? What is her background? She is an Urdu translator posted in Islamabad to monitor the Urdu media. The Press and Information wing in which she was working deals only with open information and handles the Pakistani media. It is not a wing of the mission having access to classified documents. It is the cut and paste from the media wing. And yet our media has been reporting that classified reports passed through her hands. She was not even the head of the wing. She was one of its staff.
I did not know whether to laugh or cry when I saw an anchor criticising Pakistan for not co-operating with India in the investigation of the case. What does he expect Pakistan to do? Admit that she was their agent and tell us the details of what she did for the Pakistani intelligence? The world will be laughing at the kind of reporting that has been going on on our TV channels. Normally, the print media used to be more responsible in reporting. Senior sub-editors used to exercise some check over the exuberance of the reporters and carefully vet their stories before accepting them. Now, even print media journalists are competing with their TV colleagues in being more and more sensational. What is important is not whether one is correct and believable, but whether one's story is sufficiently sensational. The more sensational, the better.
Truth, reliability, balance and restraint in reporting have been the victims of the "breaking news" culture in our TV media. Madhuri Gupta's case is a serious breach of our national security. Even if she had not revealed any classified information to the Pakistani intelligence, the very fact that the Pakistani intelligence succeeded in recruiting her speaks poorly of our counter-intelligence controls. The case deserves to be investigated and analysed in a serious manner on the basis of established facts. Instead, it has been converted into a slapstick serial which will go on until another equally attention-catching serial replaces it.
The Government and our officers who have been talking to the media do not realise the importance of keeping the Pakistani intelligence guessing as to what she has been telling her interrogators. Intelligence agencies worth their salt keep their adversary guessing when they identify and arrest one of its agents. When the KGB, the Soviet intelligence agency, shot down and arrested Francis Gary Powers, the U-2 pilot of the CIA, for quite some time they did not reveal that they had caught him alive. They made an ass of the CIA and then President Dwight Eisenhower by keeping them guessing as to what happened to Powers.
Instead of making an ass of the Pakistani intelligence by keeping it guessing as to what happened to Madhuri Gupta, our intelligence agencies, the MHA and the MEA are making an ass of themselves by vying with one another in leaking out to the media all sorts of stories after revealing prematurely information about her arrest.
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute for Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com)
URL: http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/%5Cpapers38%5Cpaper3785.html
The She-Mole's Case: Making an Ass of Ourselves
By B. Raman
1991: Liviu Radu, a Romanian diplomat posted in New Delhi, was kidnapped by some Khalistani terrorists. He was got released as a result of an operation mounted by the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and the Research & Analysis Wing (R&AW). A Western intelligence agency co-operated in the operation. A senior officer of the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) told the media about the identity of the Western agency. It was prominently carried by some sections of the media. The Western country concerned through its Embassy in New Delhi strongly protested against the failure of the MEA officer to protect the identity of its agency.
1993: After the serial blasts in Mumbai in March 1993, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of the US secretly sent a team of its explosive experts to Mumbai to help the investigators of the Mumbai Police. They were put up in a Mumbai hotel under a non-official cover. The leader of the team was surprised to receive a phone call from a journalist of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) then posted in New Delhi, who was aware of their FBI identity. Enquiries revealed that a senior officer of the Mumbai Police had told the journalist about their FBI identity and revealed to him the name of the hotel where they were staying. There was a strong protest from the FBI over the indiscretion of the Mumbai Police officer.
2010: Madhuri Gupta, a Second Secretary working in the Press and Information wing of the Indian High Commission in Islamabad, was arrested on a charge of working for the Pakistani intelligence. While reporting on her arrest and interrogation, sections of the media named another officer of the High Commission and claimed that he was from the Indian intelligence. According to a report carried by a national daily, this was mentioned to the journalists by an officer of the MEA.
It is important to protect the identity of serving intelligence officers posted abroad for three reasons. Firstly, the exposure of his identity will make it impossible for him to perform his intelligence tasks in future. Secondly, it could pose a serious threat to his life from terrorists. And, thirdly, it could create operational problems.
In the 1970s, the revelation of the identity of a serving officer of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) posted in Europe led to his assassination by some terrorists. The Congress passed a law making it a criminal offence for anyone to reveal the identity of a serving intelligence officer. Since then, American officials and media take care not to reveal the identity of a serving intelligence officer even if they come to know of it. Dick Cheney, the Vice-President under George Bush, came under severe criticism for asking one of his aides to brief a journalist about the identity of a serving woman officer of the CIA. Cheney's aide had to face an enquiry for carrying out the request of Cheney, which amounted to a crime.
In other countries too, officials as well as the media take great care to protect the identity of serving intelligence officers posted in foreign countries. In Israel, as in the US, it is a crime to reveal the identity of a serving intelligence officer. In India, we have neither laws nor traditions to protect the identities of serving intelligence officers posted abroad. During the last five years, Indian media has exposed the identities of at least a dozen serving external intelligence officers posted abroad, thereby damaging their utility as intelligence officers and exposing them to likely physical threats from terrorists.
This is highly unwise on the part of the journalists, but how can we blame them when they are tipped off by other officers of the Government, who do not realise the importance of protecting the cover and security of intelligence officers serving abroad. There could be strong opposition from the Indian media to the Government enacting a law similar to the US law to protect the identity of intelligence officers serving abroad, but it should at least ensure that such leakages and disclosures do not take place from the officials of the Government.
The case of Madhuri Gupta has been handled in an unprofessional manner, with almost a leak an hour. If some of these leaks are to be believed, she must be the greatest intelligence agent ever produced in the history of espionage from a diplomatic mission comparable to the legendary Cicero, a Nazi agent in the British Embassy in Ankara. (Please see https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/vol1no4/html/v01i4a06p_0001.html)
If our news channels are to be believed, what all she has done: Exposed the identities of Indian agents in Pakistan; exposed the identities of Indian agents in other countries; gave to the Pakistani intelligence copies of classified documents including what is described as the classified minutes of the Prime Minister's office on India's relations with Pakistan etc etc. If he was alive, Cicero's handling officer would have envied her handling officer in the Pakistani intelligence. There are at least a dozen journalists claiming exclusive access to the results of the interrogation and yet reporting the same unbelievable stories in almost the same language. These dozen journalists are also claiming exclusive access to the interrogation reports. Some of them have even been giving what they claim are quotes from the interrogation reports. I known how interrogation reports are recorded. They are not recorded the way they are shown on some of our TV channels.
Who is Madhuri Gupta? What is her background? She is an Urdu translator posted in Islamabad to monitor the Urdu media. The Press and Information wing in which she was working deals only with open information and handles the Pakistani media. It is not a wing of the mission having access to classified documents. It is the cut and paste from the media wing. And yet our media has been reporting that classified reports passed through her hands. She was not even the head of the wing. She was one of its staff.
I did not know whether to laugh or cry when I saw an anchor criticising Pakistan for not co-operating with India in the investigation of the case. What does he expect Pakistan to do? Admit that she was their agent and tell us the details of what she did for the Pakistani intelligence? The world will be laughing at the kind of reporting that has been going on on our TV channels. Normally, the print media used to be more responsible in reporting. Senior sub-editors used to exercise some check over the exuberance of the reporters and carefully vet their stories before accepting them. Now, even print media journalists are competing with their TV colleagues in being more and more sensational. What is important is not whether one is correct and believable, but whether one's story is sufficiently sensational. The more sensational, the better.
Truth, reliability, balance and restraint in reporting have been the victims of the "breaking news" culture in our TV media. Madhuri Gupta's case is a serious breach of our national security. Even if she had not revealed any classified information to the Pakistani intelligence, the very fact that the Pakistani intelligence succeeded in recruiting her speaks poorly of our counter-intelligence controls. The case deserves to be investigated and analysed in a serious manner on the basis of established facts. Instead, it has been converted into a slapstick serial which will go on until another equally attention-catching serial replaces it.
The Government and our officers who have been talking to the media do not realise the importance of keeping the Pakistani intelligence guessing as to what she has been telling her interrogators. Intelligence agencies worth their salt keep their adversary guessing when they identify and arrest one of its agents. When the KGB, the Soviet intelligence agency, shot down and arrested Francis Gary Powers, the U-2 pilot of the CIA, for quite some time they did not reveal that they had caught him alive. They made an ass of the CIA and then President Dwight Eisenhower by keeping them guessing as to what happened to Powers.
Instead of making an ass of the Pakistani intelligence by keeping it guessing as to what happened to Madhuri Gupta, our intelligence agencies, the MHA and the MEA are making an ass of themselves by vying with one another in leaking out to the media all sorts of stories after revealing prematurely information about her arrest.
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute for Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com)
URL: http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/%5Cpapers38%5Cpaper3785.html
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Covert Actions
By B. Raman
The strongly-presumed hand of Mossad, the Israeli external intelligence agency, in the successful neutralisation of a Damascus-based leader of the Hamas (Mahmoud al- Mabhouh) while he was on a visit to Dubai in January last has come in the wake of other suspected covert actions of the Mossad in recent months, which were directed against Iranian nuclear scientists, who were reportedly playing a role in the development of the uranium enrichment technology.
2. While all these operations succeeded in eliminating the intended targets who posed a threat to Israel's national security, those directed against the Iranian scientists were copybook examples of covert actions whereas the one against the Hamas leader was not. The Mossad was able to maintain the total deniability of its strikes against the Iranian scientists. Till today, Iranian intelligence officials and police investigators have not been able to find out what happened. Apart from allegations, they have no evidence of the involvement of the Mossad, which has taken care not to leave any trace of its involvement.
3. In the case of the Dubai operation, the deniability has been weak and many tell-tale traces left behind by those who participated in the alleged elimination of the Hamas leader have enabled the Dubai Police to reconstruct in a fairly convincing manner what happened. The employment of an unusually large team of agents for carrying out the action and their inability to make the closed circuit TV in the hotel non-functional have enabled the Dubai police to make a break-through in the investigation.
4. The fact that the Mossad agents decided to go ahead with the operation despite their inability to make the CCTV non-functional strongly speaks of local collusion in the covert action. Since the CCTV was presumably functioning, those in the security control room of the hotel who would have been monitoring the CCTV, would have definitely noticed the Mossad agents forcing their way into the room of the Hamas leader. The fact that they did not raise an alarm for hours, which enabled the Mossad agents to flee Dubai without being intercepted, is an indicator of collusion in the hotel.
5. Even when they travel incognito, Hamas leaders are usually accompanied by at least one person from their security set-up who takes up a room opposite the room occupied by the leader so that they could keep a look-out for any attempt to break into the room of the leader. The fact that no one intervened as the Mossad agents forced their way into the room indicates that either there was collusion by Hamas elements too or the Mossad agents had neutralised the security detail of the Hamas leader before attacking him.
6. The entire story of the covert action will never come out. Particulars of any collusion will remain unknown for some time to come.
7. The Dubai operation of the Mossad was not copy-book perfect, but it was a successful operation in the sense that the agency eliminated a worrying threat to Israel's national security and to the lives of Israeli citizens and other Jewish persons. It was an attack carried out in exercise of the right of self-defence of the Israeli nation and people.
8. Laws of all countries---including India---- provide this right of self-defence and this rigt can be exercised by individuals as well as States.
9. Those opposed to covert actions might argue that despite the repeated resort to covert actions against identified enemies of the State of Israel and its people, Israel has not succeeded in eliminating terrorism and in countering effectively States like Iran which are determined to destroy Israel. Another way of looking at it is that but for such covert actions Israel and the Jewish people might have been forced to their knees by now by their enemies. It is such successful covert actions which have enabled the State of Israel to survive and even flourish.
10. The importance of selective covert actions to ensure the security of a State and its people has been recognised by many States----democratic and authoritarian. Some States----such as the US and Israel---admit that they have a covert action capability. Others don't, but they maintain the capability clandestinely. Pakistan is an example of a State in Asia which has over the years maintained an effective covert action capability for use against India. It has followed the model of other rogue States such as North Korea, Libya, Syria, Iraq of Saddam Hussain and Sudan in using terrorism as a way of waging a covert warfare.
11. Since 1997, India has been a pathetic victim of Pakistan's covert actions waged through different terrorist organisations. Pakistan has been using terrorism as a means of covert action against India since 1981.Between 1981 and 1997, India was retaliating in its own limited manner. The policy of covert retaliation was stopped in 1997 and has been totally discarded since then.
12. None of the Indian Prime Ministers in office since 1997 has had the political will to revert to a policy of at least limited retaliation against the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and its terrorist surrogates. The result has been that our national security has been continuously endangered and our people have been dying in their hundreds. When Pakistan, through its intelligence agencies and terrorist surrogates, has been waging a relentless covert warfare against India, we cannot protect the State and the people merely by revamping our counter-terrorism architecture.
13. Unless we create a capability for retaliatory covert actions in a deniable manner and use that capability we will continue to bleed.
14. Between 1981 and 1997, the Prime Ministers in office followed a dual policy of "talk, talk, hit, hit" against Pakistan. They never fought shy of talking to Pakistani leaders and officials. At the same time, they never missed an opportunity to undermine the State of Pakistan covertly in retaliation against its covert actions against India.
15. Since 1997, our policy has been reduced to one of talk, talk and more talk with no retaliation even covertly. Our political leadership and large sections of our bureaucracy have no concept of the importance of covert action in an asymmetric proxy war. That is the tragedy of our country.
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-Mail: seventyone2@gmail.com)
Courtesy: South Asia Analysis Group, Paper No 3675 date: Feb 19, 2010
URL: http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/%5Cpapers37%5Cpaper3675.html
The strongly-presumed hand of Mossad, the Israeli external intelligence agency, in the successful neutralisation of a Damascus-based leader of the Hamas (Mahmoud al- Mabhouh) while he was on a visit to Dubai in January last has come in the wake of other suspected covert actions of the Mossad in recent months, which were directed against Iranian nuclear scientists, who were reportedly playing a role in the development of the uranium enrichment technology.
2. While all these operations succeeded in eliminating the intended targets who posed a threat to Israel's national security, those directed against the Iranian scientists were copybook examples of covert actions whereas the one against the Hamas leader was not. The Mossad was able to maintain the total deniability of its strikes against the Iranian scientists. Till today, Iranian intelligence officials and police investigators have not been able to find out what happened. Apart from allegations, they have no evidence of the involvement of the Mossad, which has taken care not to leave any trace of its involvement.
3. In the case of the Dubai operation, the deniability has been weak and many tell-tale traces left behind by those who participated in the alleged elimination of the Hamas leader have enabled the Dubai Police to reconstruct in a fairly convincing manner what happened. The employment of an unusually large team of agents for carrying out the action and their inability to make the closed circuit TV in the hotel non-functional have enabled the Dubai police to make a break-through in the investigation.
4. The fact that the Mossad agents decided to go ahead with the operation despite their inability to make the CCTV non-functional strongly speaks of local collusion in the covert action. Since the CCTV was presumably functioning, those in the security control room of the hotel who would have been monitoring the CCTV, would have definitely noticed the Mossad agents forcing their way into the room of the Hamas leader. The fact that they did not raise an alarm for hours, which enabled the Mossad agents to flee Dubai without being intercepted, is an indicator of collusion in the hotel.
5. Even when they travel incognito, Hamas leaders are usually accompanied by at least one person from their security set-up who takes up a room opposite the room occupied by the leader so that they could keep a look-out for any attempt to break into the room of the leader. The fact that no one intervened as the Mossad agents forced their way into the room indicates that either there was collusion by Hamas elements too or the Mossad agents had neutralised the security detail of the Hamas leader before attacking him.
6. The entire story of the covert action will never come out. Particulars of any collusion will remain unknown for some time to come.
7. The Dubai operation of the Mossad was not copy-book perfect, but it was a successful operation in the sense that the agency eliminated a worrying threat to Israel's national security and to the lives of Israeli citizens and other Jewish persons. It was an attack carried out in exercise of the right of self-defence of the Israeli nation and people.
8. Laws of all countries---including India---- provide this right of self-defence and this rigt can be exercised by individuals as well as States.
9. Those opposed to covert actions might argue that despite the repeated resort to covert actions against identified enemies of the State of Israel and its people, Israel has not succeeded in eliminating terrorism and in countering effectively States like Iran which are determined to destroy Israel. Another way of looking at it is that but for such covert actions Israel and the Jewish people might have been forced to their knees by now by their enemies. It is such successful covert actions which have enabled the State of Israel to survive and even flourish.
10. The importance of selective covert actions to ensure the security of a State and its people has been recognised by many States----democratic and authoritarian. Some States----such as the US and Israel---admit that they have a covert action capability. Others don't, but they maintain the capability clandestinely. Pakistan is an example of a State in Asia which has over the years maintained an effective covert action capability for use against India. It has followed the model of other rogue States such as North Korea, Libya, Syria, Iraq of Saddam Hussain and Sudan in using terrorism as a way of waging a covert warfare.
11. Since 1997, India has been a pathetic victim of Pakistan's covert actions waged through different terrorist organisations. Pakistan has been using terrorism as a means of covert action against India since 1981.Between 1981 and 1997, India was retaliating in its own limited manner. The policy of covert retaliation was stopped in 1997 and has been totally discarded since then.
12. None of the Indian Prime Ministers in office since 1997 has had the political will to revert to a policy of at least limited retaliation against the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and its terrorist surrogates. The result has been that our national security has been continuously endangered and our people have been dying in their hundreds. When Pakistan, through its intelligence agencies and terrorist surrogates, has been waging a relentless covert warfare against India, we cannot protect the State and the people merely by revamping our counter-terrorism architecture.
13. Unless we create a capability for retaliatory covert actions in a deniable manner and use that capability we will continue to bleed.
14. Between 1981 and 1997, the Prime Ministers in office followed a dual policy of "talk, talk, hit, hit" against Pakistan. They never fought shy of talking to Pakistani leaders and officials. At the same time, they never missed an opportunity to undermine the State of Pakistan covertly in retaliation against its covert actions against India.
15. Since 1997, our policy has been reduced to one of talk, talk and more talk with no retaliation even covertly. Our political leadership and large sections of our bureaucracy have no concept of the importance of covert action in an asymmetric proxy war. That is the tragedy of our country.
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-Mail: seventyone2@gmail.com)
Courtesy: South Asia Analysis Group, Paper No 3675 date: Feb 19, 2010
URL: http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/%5Cpapers37%5Cpaper3675.html
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Changing The Indian Intelligence Culture
[Vice President Hamid Ansari has recently spoken about the need for accountability and parliamentary oversight for Indian intelligence agencies.I have reproduced here the analysis of the Vice President's speech by seasoned expert on the subject B Raman written in his own inimitable style. As an old MI hand, my comments relating to Military Intellgence in the overall scheme of accountability of intelligence agencies would follow. - R Hariharan]
By B. Raman
In his R.N.Kao Memorial lecture delivered at the headquarters of the Research & Analysis Wing (R&AW) on January 19, 2010, Vice-President Hamid Ansari has done well in raising in public issues such as accountability and parliamentary oversight to which the Indian intelligence community is still a stranger.
2. The concept of an accountable and competent intelligence community, which uses the need for secrecy only for protecting its operations and not for covering up its inadequacies and irregularities, has been accepted and implemented by the intelligence agencies of many democracies----parliamentary as well as Presidential types--- of the world during the last three decades. Nobody in those countries has since argued that these concepts have come in the way of the effectiveness of the intelligence process and hence should be re-considered. The overall consensus is that these changes have proved beneficial and hence should be continued and, if necessary, further refined.
3. In India too, these issues have been raised from time to time since the State of Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi in 1975-77, but follow-up action has been avoided either because of resistance from sections of the intelligence community or because of the reluctance of the political leadership to introduce any changes which might dilute the scope for political misuse of the intelligence machinery for partisan purposes or both.
4. Accountability of intelligence agencies demands, firstly, that they should have a legal existence and, secondly, that they should have a formal charter of their functions and responsibilities. Forty-two years after its formation in 1968, the R&AW still does not have a legal existence. It was set up by a brief executive order issued on behalf of Indira Gandhi in September 1968. Till today, this order has not been accorded parliamentary sanctity by having necessary legislation authorising its creation passed by the Parliament. No Government, which has held office since 1968, has considered it necessary to have an Act passed by the Parliament providing legal legitimacy to the R&AW. No one has raised the question as to how the various Governments have been incurring expenditure on the R&AW year after year without having its creation approved by the Parliament.
5. In the 1980s, when Indira Gandhi was the Prime Minister, a law was enacted by the Parliament banning strikes in the intelligence agencies. To my knowledge, that is the only Act of the Indian Parliament in which there is a reference to the R&AW by name. When that law was passed, nobody in the Parliament thought it fit to ask: What is this R&AW about? When was it created? Who created it? Has its creation been approved by the Parliament?
6. It goes to the credit of A.K.Verma, who headed the R&AW from 1987 to 90 that he took the initiative in drawing the attention of the Governments of Rajiv Gandhi and V.P.Singh to the fact that the R&AW had been functioning without a legal cover and a formal charter. He wanted the Government of the day to do something about it, but nothing was done.
7. The fact that the Intelligence Bureau, which was created by the British before 1947, and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which came into existence after 1947, had been functioning without formal charters of their functions and responsibilities, was highlighted by the L.P.Singh Committee, which was set up by the Morarji Desai Government to enquire into the functioning of these two organisations during the State of Emergency. It not only stressed the need for formal charters to prevent their future misuse, but also prepared for the consideration of the Government detailed model charters for adoption. No action was taken on its recommendations by the Indira Gandhi Government which came back to power in 1980 or its successors. The report was consigned to the Archives---seen, but not read and implemented.
8. Shri Atal Behari Vajpayee and Shri Lal Krishna Advani were among those who were in the forefront of those who criticised----- during the election campaign of 1977---- the alleged misuse of the intelligence agencies by the Indira Gandhi Government during the Emergency. When Shri Vajpayee became the Prime Minister and Shri Advani the Home Minister in 1998, one naturally expected them to take the initiative in taking the L.P.Singh Committee report out of the Archives and implement it. The expectations were belied.
9. The Task Force for the revamping of the intelligence apparatus set up by the Vajpayee Government in 2000, which was headed by Shri G.C. Saxena, former head of the R&AW, recommended the acceptance by the Government of the principle of formal charters for the intelligence agencies. To give greater meat to its recommendations, it wanted to have a look at the detailed charters for the IB and the CBI proposed by the L.P.Singh Committee. The Home Ministry, then headed by Shri Advani, avoided making available to the Task Force the entire report of the L.P.Singh Committee. However, the Task Force's recommendation for formal charters was accepted and implemented by the Vajpayee Government. One does not know whether the recommendations of the L.P.Singh Committee were taken into consideration while drafting the charters.
10. The credit for first raising the idea of a parliamentary oversight on the intelligence community should go to Shri Jaswant Singh, who was the Chairman of the Estimates Committee of the Rajya Sabha when Shri V.P.Singh was the Prime Minister. Shri V.P.Singh saw merit in the idea and wanted it to be examined. There was no opposition to the idea from the intelligence professionals then in service including this writer, but when Shri V.P.Singh developed differences with the BJP, he did not pursue it.
11. Since then, none of the political parties has shown interest in making the intelligence agencies accountable for their performance and integrity and in making their professional performance subject to an independent assessment. Secrecy is an important operational principle for an intelligence agency. Unless an intelligence agency is able to ensure the secrecy of its operations, no source or agent will stick his neck out to work for it. Its capability for collecting technical intelligence will also be affected.
12. But secrecy should not be allowed to be used as an excuse for covering inefficiencies in performance and irregularities in functioning and financial management. Irregularities do occur in matters such as the personnel policy and diversion of the resources sanctioned by the Government for operational objectives for non-operational purposes. The public and the Parliament have a right to know to what extent the agencies have been producing results and what are the areas of their non-performance. The Parliament has a right to know what kind of financial controls are in place, who exercises those controls and to what extent they are effective. The Parliament has similarly a right to check whether the principle of secrecy in recruitment is being misused to pack the organisations with unsuitable persons, taken not for their qualifications, but for their connections.
13. It is possible to introduce some of these checks and balances in the functioning of our intelligence community without damaging their operational secrecy. There is reluctance from the political class because it sees the agencies as instruments for partisan exploitation and not for defending national interests. There is reluctance from sections of the intelligence officers themselves because they think that unchecked secrecy gives them an aura of power and influence which they do not want to lose.
14. Ansaris may come and Ansaris may go, but the intelligence agencies will go on functioning in the same manner with the complicity of the political class unless there is sustained public pressure on the political class and the agencies to change the culture of our agencies. I am not very optimistic because I do not see on the horizon any political leader who is genuinely convinced of the need for a change.
15. Every country gets the intelligence community it deserves. We will continue to have the community which we have deserved unless Shri Ansari's call is followed up.
Courtesy: South Asia Analysis Group Paper no. 3616 dated 20-Jan-2010
URL: http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/%5Cpapers37%5Cpaper3616.html
By B. Raman
In his R.N.Kao Memorial lecture delivered at the headquarters of the Research & Analysis Wing (R&AW) on January 19, 2010, Vice-President Hamid Ansari has done well in raising in public issues such as accountability and parliamentary oversight to which the Indian intelligence community is still a stranger.
2. The concept of an accountable and competent intelligence community, which uses the need for secrecy only for protecting its operations and not for covering up its inadequacies and irregularities, has been accepted and implemented by the intelligence agencies of many democracies----parliamentary as well as Presidential types--- of the world during the last three decades. Nobody in those countries has since argued that these concepts have come in the way of the effectiveness of the intelligence process and hence should be re-considered. The overall consensus is that these changes have proved beneficial and hence should be continued and, if necessary, further refined.
3. In India too, these issues have been raised from time to time since the State of Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi in 1975-77, but follow-up action has been avoided either because of resistance from sections of the intelligence community or because of the reluctance of the political leadership to introduce any changes which might dilute the scope for political misuse of the intelligence machinery for partisan purposes or both.
4. Accountability of intelligence agencies demands, firstly, that they should have a legal existence and, secondly, that they should have a formal charter of their functions and responsibilities. Forty-two years after its formation in 1968, the R&AW still does not have a legal existence. It was set up by a brief executive order issued on behalf of Indira Gandhi in September 1968. Till today, this order has not been accorded parliamentary sanctity by having necessary legislation authorising its creation passed by the Parliament. No Government, which has held office since 1968, has considered it necessary to have an Act passed by the Parliament providing legal legitimacy to the R&AW. No one has raised the question as to how the various Governments have been incurring expenditure on the R&AW year after year without having its creation approved by the Parliament.
5. In the 1980s, when Indira Gandhi was the Prime Minister, a law was enacted by the Parliament banning strikes in the intelligence agencies. To my knowledge, that is the only Act of the Indian Parliament in which there is a reference to the R&AW by name. When that law was passed, nobody in the Parliament thought it fit to ask: What is this R&AW about? When was it created? Who created it? Has its creation been approved by the Parliament?
6. It goes to the credit of A.K.Verma, who headed the R&AW from 1987 to 90 that he took the initiative in drawing the attention of the Governments of Rajiv Gandhi and V.P.Singh to the fact that the R&AW had been functioning without a legal cover and a formal charter. He wanted the Government of the day to do something about it, but nothing was done.
7. The fact that the Intelligence Bureau, which was created by the British before 1947, and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which came into existence after 1947, had been functioning without formal charters of their functions and responsibilities, was highlighted by the L.P.Singh Committee, which was set up by the Morarji Desai Government to enquire into the functioning of these two organisations during the State of Emergency. It not only stressed the need for formal charters to prevent their future misuse, but also prepared for the consideration of the Government detailed model charters for adoption. No action was taken on its recommendations by the Indira Gandhi Government which came back to power in 1980 or its successors. The report was consigned to the Archives---seen, but not read and implemented.
8. Shri Atal Behari Vajpayee and Shri Lal Krishna Advani were among those who were in the forefront of those who criticised----- during the election campaign of 1977---- the alleged misuse of the intelligence agencies by the Indira Gandhi Government during the Emergency. When Shri Vajpayee became the Prime Minister and Shri Advani the Home Minister in 1998, one naturally expected them to take the initiative in taking the L.P.Singh Committee report out of the Archives and implement it. The expectations were belied.
9. The Task Force for the revamping of the intelligence apparatus set up by the Vajpayee Government in 2000, which was headed by Shri G.C. Saxena, former head of the R&AW, recommended the acceptance by the Government of the principle of formal charters for the intelligence agencies. To give greater meat to its recommendations, it wanted to have a look at the detailed charters for the IB and the CBI proposed by the L.P.Singh Committee. The Home Ministry, then headed by Shri Advani, avoided making available to the Task Force the entire report of the L.P.Singh Committee. However, the Task Force's recommendation for formal charters was accepted and implemented by the Vajpayee Government. One does not know whether the recommendations of the L.P.Singh Committee were taken into consideration while drafting the charters.
10. The credit for first raising the idea of a parliamentary oversight on the intelligence community should go to Shri Jaswant Singh, who was the Chairman of the Estimates Committee of the Rajya Sabha when Shri V.P.Singh was the Prime Minister. Shri V.P.Singh saw merit in the idea and wanted it to be examined. There was no opposition to the idea from the intelligence professionals then in service including this writer, but when Shri V.P.Singh developed differences with the BJP, he did not pursue it.
11. Since then, none of the political parties has shown interest in making the intelligence agencies accountable for their performance and integrity and in making their professional performance subject to an independent assessment. Secrecy is an important operational principle for an intelligence agency. Unless an intelligence agency is able to ensure the secrecy of its operations, no source or agent will stick his neck out to work for it. Its capability for collecting technical intelligence will also be affected.
12. But secrecy should not be allowed to be used as an excuse for covering inefficiencies in performance and irregularities in functioning and financial management. Irregularities do occur in matters such as the personnel policy and diversion of the resources sanctioned by the Government for operational objectives for non-operational purposes. The public and the Parliament have a right to know to what extent the agencies have been producing results and what are the areas of their non-performance. The Parliament has a right to know what kind of financial controls are in place, who exercises those controls and to what extent they are effective. The Parliament has similarly a right to check whether the principle of secrecy in recruitment is being misused to pack the organisations with unsuitable persons, taken not for their qualifications, but for their connections.
13. It is possible to introduce some of these checks and balances in the functioning of our intelligence community without damaging their operational secrecy. There is reluctance from the political class because it sees the agencies as instruments for partisan exploitation and not for defending national interests. There is reluctance from sections of the intelligence officers themselves because they think that unchecked secrecy gives them an aura of power and influence which they do not want to lose.
14. Ansaris may come and Ansaris may go, but the intelligence agencies will go on functioning in the same manner with the complicity of the political class unless there is sustained public pressure on the political class and the agencies to change the culture of our agencies. I am not very optimistic because I do not see on the horizon any political leader who is genuinely convinced of the need for a change.
15. Every country gets the intelligence community it deserves. We will continue to have the community which we have deserved unless Shri Ansari's call is followed up.
Courtesy: South Asia Analysis Group Paper no. 3616 dated 20-Jan-2010
URL: http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/%5Cpapers37%5Cpaper3616.html
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Investigating Kargil - Indian Style
Vice Admiral Taj M Khattak(retired), former Vice Chief of Staff, Pakistan Navy has written an interesting and insightful article "Investigating Kargil" on General Musharraff's misadventure in Kargil that caused almost a nuclear confrontation between Pakistan and India ten years ago. In that piece published in the www.thenews.com.pk on July 2, he has stressed the need for investigating the Kargil fiasco when the actors who directed and organised it are alive. So true.
In June 2004 I wrote an article "Learning from Kargil" (reproduced below) on the lack of follow up action on the K Subrahmanyam Committee report that investigated Kargil war. I had raised a few issues in the article which would impact on the nation's strategic security. In particular there are three issues K Subrahmanyam Committee had raised on which I still have strong doubts about any progress at all. Now that we have a government that has set about with a little more determination than the earlier one, will it enlighten the public on the progress? Will the under-worked parliament get to tackle such gut issues rather than waste time on frivolous 'walk-outs'? The three issues are:
1. Inadequate coordination at the ground level among Army intelligence and other agencies.
2. The nuclear posture adopted by successive Prime Ministers thus put the Indian Army at a disadvantage vis-Ã -vis its Pakistani counterpart. While the former was in the dark about India's nuclear capability, the latter as the custodian of Pakistani nuclear weaponry was fully aware of its own capability.
3. It is necessary to evolve a long-term strategy to reduce the involvement of the Army in counterinsurgency and devise more cost-effective means of dealing with the problem.
LEARNING FROM KARGIL: A Soldier's View
By Col R. Hariharan(retd.) June 12, 2004
http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/%5Cpapers11%5Cpaper1025.html
Never learn to do anything: if you don’t learn, you will always find someone else to do it for you. – Mark Twain
A new Lok Sabha was in session; but its old cacophony had not changed. Members have shouted their slogans, showed their loyalties to their icons by jumping and thumping, collected their entitlements and that’s it. Parliament’s inaugural session has ended. Has it achieved anything? The American English word “zilch” sums it up. But among the few foils that came in handy in the sad and sordid drama of Indian politics was Kargil and who goofed it up. The newspapers say the Kargil issue was brought up as a counter to the opposition’s vociferous objection to a few criminals accused of mundane crimes like rape, kidnapping and plotting to murder and elected as M.P.s becoming ministers. It is sad to see a possible security lapse in Kargil being equated with the issue of some smart, but criminally inclined fellows getting elected and ending up as ministers with full police protection!
Everyone, including the cynical but docile public, knows from past experience how this charade will be gone through. There will be a lot of finger pointing and talks of our jawans and Army being second to none; but nothing will come out of it. After all it is five years since K Subrahmanyam Committee on Kargil presented its reports. Now, we find the Defence Minister is keen to follow up and ensure its findings are implemented. Five years is a long time for the troops serving in these troubled areas. They and their families (including me) would like to know how this issue did not figure all these years in the scheme of things of parties currently ruling the country (many of them were members of the outgoing government also!)
Its five years since hundreds like young Lt Saurabh Kalia died in the Kargil War. Many more are still dying in these frontiers unsung, unheard with only their families to mourn. As an old soldier who fought the wars in 1965, 1971 and lastly in Sri Lanka as part of the IPKF, I wonder now whether the few thousands of my comrades who died for this country (and continue to do so, on and off) for notions of patriotism, loyalty and Izzat had done so in vain. The sheer callousness of our people in power shocks me.
Take for instance the case of 22 Border Security Force jawans and their families including women and children killed by militants in a mine blast in J and K. The State Chief Minister had no time to send even a condolence message. Was it because his party was busy probing for human rights violations in the fight against armed insurgents who are waging war on lawful government? Every time a jawan salutes him will he remember him for all the good he is going to do?
There is a tendency by bureaucrats, including those of the Armed Forces, to use the Official Secrets Act as a convenient cloak to cover all inefficiency, incompetence and deficiencies in the planning and handling of vital issues of national security and defence. I think the best memorial for those who died in Kargil would be not to allow another Kargil to happen. Even if it happens, the soldiers should go to war there confidently that they would not go like their predecessors did – taken by surprise, handled by ineptness, and lastly killed by sheer lack of timely decision making. It is time the Parliament debated the issues of defence seriously on matters more urgent than the number of orderlies Army officers use.. A whole list of issues is there in K Subrahmanyam Committee’s Report that needs to be followed up (and not to score political brownie points). These points need to be accounted for to the public at large as part of good governance. Here are some (findings of the Report given in italics):
* Inadequate border surveillance: Has the surveillance been beefed up in J and K, as the Committee found the intruders avoided detection because our Winter Air Surveillance Operations (WASO) by helicopters was of negligible effect? Israel was supposed to supply special surveillance helicopters for use in this sector. As in the new dispensation Israel appears to have become a bad word in South Block, has an alternate source been found? Or are still the files are being “processed”?
* The report states that there was inadequate coordination at the ground level among Army intelligence and other agencies. Has it improved now? If so, how.
* Holding of special (glacial) clothing for extreme cold climates was inadequate. Can we now say this problem has been overcome?
* Though the new light rifle (5.56 mm INSA) has been inducted into service, most troops are yet to be equipped with light rifles. Adequate attention has not been paid to lightening the load on infantry soldiers deployed at high altitudes. In broader terms, increasing the firepower and combat efficiency of infantrymen has also suffered, as has the modernisation process as a whole. This needs to be speedily rectified. (This light rifle was introduced when I left the Army 13 years back. It’s a big joke that combat troops in high altitudes are still saddled with old rifles! I am not too optimistic things will change on this count). Can we hope for improvement?
* Nuclear weapons programme: For reasons of security, none of these Prime Ministers took anyone other than Chairmen of the Atomic Energy Commission (not all), and the Scientific Adviser to the Defence Minister into confidence. The Chiefs of Staff, senior Cabinet Ministers and senior civil servants were kept out of the loop. The nuclear posture adopted by successive Prime Ministers thus put the Indian Army at a disadvantage vis-Ã -vis its Pakistani counterpart. While the former was in the dark about India's nuclear capability, the latter as the custodian of Pakistani nuclear weaponry was fully aware of its own capability. Three former Indian Chiefs of Army Staff expressed unhappiness about this asymmetric situation. Are the Service Chiefs still in the dark about their own nuclear capabilities? (I remember Johnson’s “Ignorance is bliss when it is folly to be wise” in this context). Is this major issue going to be brushed aside as “directly not pertaining to Kargil War”?
* Comprehensive manpower policy: Pakistan has ruthlessly employed terrorism in Punjab, J& K and the Northeast to involve the Indian Army in Counterinsurgency operations and neutralise its conventional superiority. Having partially achieved this objective, it has also persuaded itself that nuclear blackmail against India has succeeded on three occasions. A coherent counterstrategy to deal with Pakistan's terrorist-nuclear blackmail and the conventional threat has to be thought through. The Committee believes that a comprehensive manpower policy is required to deal with this problem. In the present international security environment, proxy war…. it is necessary to evolve a long-term strategy to reduce the involvement of the Army in counterinsurgency and devise more cost-effective means of dealing with the problem. Has any thought been given to sort out the role of Army and evolution of a long-tem strategy for counter-insurgency? Or is it going to be deferred to the next government?
I saw a report saying that each parliament member costs the exchequer Rs 22 lacs. If they deliver the goods I don’t mind that expenditure at all. After all India is shining, (though the shine has been successfully tarnished a bit now) and why shouldn’t the parliament? But if the money is to become an investment, we would like them to be really people’s representatives. We want them to sit debate and improve the situation, lest the ghosts of those dead heroes of Kargil haunt us forever.
This is my learning from Kargil.
In June 2004 I wrote an article "Learning from Kargil" (reproduced below) on the lack of follow up action on the K Subrahmanyam Committee report that investigated Kargil war. I had raised a few issues in the article which would impact on the nation's strategic security. In particular there are three issues K Subrahmanyam Committee had raised on which I still have strong doubts about any progress at all. Now that we have a government that has set about with a little more determination than the earlier one, will it enlighten the public on the progress? Will the under-worked parliament get to tackle such gut issues rather than waste time on frivolous 'walk-outs'? The three issues are:
1. Inadequate coordination at the ground level among Army intelligence and other agencies.
2. The nuclear posture adopted by successive Prime Ministers thus put the Indian Army at a disadvantage vis-Ã -vis its Pakistani counterpart. While the former was in the dark about India's nuclear capability, the latter as the custodian of Pakistani nuclear weaponry was fully aware of its own capability.
3. It is necessary to evolve a long-term strategy to reduce the involvement of the Army in counterinsurgency and devise more cost-effective means of dealing with the problem.
LEARNING FROM KARGIL: A Soldier's View
By Col R. Hariharan(retd.) June 12, 2004
http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/%5Cpapers11%5Cpaper1025.html
Never learn to do anything: if you don’t learn, you will always find someone else to do it for you. – Mark Twain
A new Lok Sabha was in session; but its old cacophony had not changed. Members have shouted their slogans, showed their loyalties to their icons by jumping and thumping, collected their entitlements and that’s it. Parliament’s inaugural session has ended. Has it achieved anything? The American English word “zilch” sums it up. But among the few foils that came in handy in the sad and sordid drama of Indian politics was Kargil and who goofed it up. The newspapers say the Kargil issue was brought up as a counter to the opposition’s vociferous objection to a few criminals accused of mundane crimes like rape, kidnapping and plotting to murder and elected as M.P.s becoming ministers. It is sad to see a possible security lapse in Kargil being equated with the issue of some smart, but criminally inclined fellows getting elected and ending up as ministers with full police protection!
Everyone, including the cynical but docile public, knows from past experience how this charade will be gone through. There will be a lot of finger pointing and talks of our jawans and Army being second to none; but nothing will come out of it. After all it is five years since K Subrahmanyam Committee on Kargil presented its reports. Now, we find the Defence Minister is keen to follow up and ensure its findings are implemented. Five years is a long time for the troops serving in these troubled areas. They and their families (including me) would like to know how this issue did not figure all these years in the scheme of things of parties currently ruling the country (many of them were members of the outgoing government also!)
Its five years since hundreds like young Lt Saurabh Kalia died in the Kargil War. Many more are still dying in these frontiers unsung, unheard with only their families to mourn. As an old soldier who fought the wars in 1965, 1971 and lastly in Sri Lanka as part of the IPKF, I wonder now whether the few thousands of my comrades who died for this country (and continue to do so, on and off) for notions of patriotism, loyalty and Izzat had done so in vain. The sheer callousness of our people in power shocks me.
Take for instance the case of 22 Border Security Force jawans and their families including women and children killed by militants in a mine blast in J and K. The State Chief Minister had no time to send even a condolence message. Was it because his party was busy probing for human rights violations in the fight against armed insurgents who are waging war on lawful government? Every time a jawan salutes him will he remember him for all the good he is going to do?
There is a tendency by bureaucrats, including those of the Armed Forces, to use the Official Secrets Act as a convenient cloak to cover all inefficiency, incompetence and deficiencies in the planning and handling of vital issues of national security and defence. I think the best memorial for those who died in Kargil would be not to allow another Kargil to happen. Even if it happens, the soldiers should go to war there confidently that they would not go like their predecessors did – taken by surprise, handled by ineptness, and lastly killed by sheer lack of timely decision making. It is time the Parliament debated the issues of defence seriously on matters more urgent than the number of orderlies Army officers use.. A whole list of issues is there in K Subrahmanyam Committee’s Report that needs to be followed up (and not to score political brownie points). These points need to be accounted for to the public at large as part of good governance. Here are some (findings of the Report given in italics):
* Inadequate border surveillance: Has the surveillance been beefed up in J and K, as the Committee found the intruders avoided detection because our Winter Air Surveillance Operations (WASO) by helicopters was of negligible effect? Israel was supposed to supply special surveillance helicopters for use in this sector. As in the new dispensation Israel appears to have become a bad word in South Block, has an alternate source been found? Or are still the files are being “processed”?
* The report states that there was inadequate coordination at the ground level among Army intelligence and other agencies. Has it improved now? If so, how.
* Holding of special (glacial) clothing for extreme cold climates was inadequate. Can we now say this problem has been overcome?
* Though the new light rifle (5.56 mm INSA) has been inducted into service, most troops are yet to be equipped with light rifles. Adequate attention has not been paid to lightening the load on infantry soldiers deployed at high altitudes. In broader terms, increasing the firepower and combat efficiency of infantrymen has also suffered, as has the modernisation process as a whole. This needs to be speedily rectified. (This light rifle was introduced when I left the Army 13 years back. It’s a big joke that combat troops in high altitudes are still saddled with old rifles! I am not too optimistic things will change on this count). Can we hope for improvement?
* Nuclear weapons programme: For reasons of security, none of these Prime Ministers took anyone other than Chairmen of the Atomic Energy Commission (not all), and the Scientific Adviser to the Defence Minister into confidence. The Chiefs of Staff, senior Cabinet Ministers and senior civil servants were kept out of the loop. The nuclear posture adopted by successive Prime Ministers thus put the Indian Army at a disadvantage vis-Ã -vis its Pakistani counterpart. While the former was in the dark about India's nuclear capability, the latter as the custodian of Pakistani nuclear weaponry was fully aware of its own capability. Three former Indian Chiefs of Army Staff expressed unhappiness about this asymmetric situation. Are the Service Chiefs still in the dark about their own nuclear capabilities? (I remember Johnson’s “Ignorance is bliss when it is folly to be wise” in this context). Is this major issue going to be brushed aside as “directly not pertaining to Kargil War”?
* Comprehensive manpower policy: Pakistan has ruthlessly employed terrorism in Punjab, J& K and the Northeast to involve the Indian Army in Counterinsurgency operations and neutralise its conventional superiority. Having partially achieved this objective, it has also persuaded itself that nuclear blackmail against India has succeeded on three occasions. A coherent counterstrategy to deal with Pakistan's terrorist-nuclear blackmail and the conventional threat has to be thought through. The Committee believes that a comprehensive manpower policy is required to deal with this problem. In the present international security environment, proxy war…. it is necessary to evolve a long-term strategy to reduce the involvement of the Army in counterinsurgency and devise more cost-effective means of dealing with the problem. Has any thought been given to sort out the role of Army and evolution of a long-tem strategy for counter-insurgency? Or is it going to be deferred to the next government?
I saw a report saying that each parliament member costs the exchequer Rs 22 lacs. If they deliver the goods I don’t mind that expenditure at all. After all India is shining, (though the shine has been successfully tarnished a bit now) and why shouldn’t the parliament? But if the money is to become an investment, we would like them to be really people’s representatives. We want them to sit debate and improve the situation, lest the ghosts of those dead heroes of Kargil haunt us forever.
This is my learning from Kargil.
Monday, December 22, 2008
The Clear and Present Danger From 6th Pay Commission
by Adm. Arun Prakash (Retd)
The "blame-game" which has inevitably reared its ugly head in the aftermath of the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks instantly reminded me of the fervent appeals of three successive Chiefs of R&AW to Naval HQ, in recent years, to loan them naval officers for analysis of maritime intelligence. They were seriously concerned that they did not have the necessary in-house expertise available to draw the right conclusions and inferences from the mass of information the agency collected from open, human and technical sources. And very correctly they approached the Navy.
Lack of maritime intelligence has also been the Navy's bane for years, so we understood the handicap R&AW worked under, fully shared their concern, and felt that it was the navy's duty to help. I recall (as the Chief of Personnel) having personally selected some officers for deputation to R&AW, but to my consternation, I learnt within a few months that most wanted to return to the navy. Before I go any further, let me just say that this piece is not about intelligence failure. It is about a failure on a larger scale which represents an equal degree of danger to the nation.
The naval officers deputed to R&AW did not wish to continue with their deputation and I learnt that this was not a new phenomenon) because when they were assigned their desks in the Cabinet Secretariat they found to their dismay that they had been placed under officers who were many years their junior in terms of service. Having taken this stoically, they then found that they were deprived of things like telephones, stenographers and transport because the "status" assigned to them did not entitle them to these utilities.
The R&AW authorities were most sympathetic but pleaded that the they were not in a position to alter the equivalences, apparently "laid down" by a Kafkaesque Department of Personnel. Neither pay-scales nor years of service nor any logic seem to guide this fixation of relativities of Armed Forces officers with civilian counterparts. It was not that we had not experienced such discrimination earlier - the Service HQ have always been chary of sending their officers on deputation - but one felt that intelligence was an issue of national importance and certainly worth undergoing some inconvenience. But we found that naval officers would accept such assignments only with the utmost reluctance.
I have used this example, only because it is symptomatic of a larger malaise: the lack of coordination between organs of the Government of India (GoI) which has contributed to the recent Mumbai fiasco. This should not come as a surprise because the GoI seems so laissez faire in its approach that it will not intervene to eliminate inter-agency inequity even when it clearly results in crippling disfunctionality, as mentioned above. On the contrary, by its acts of omission as well as commission the GoI has been contributing to steady erosion of the locus standi of the Armed Forces in the national security matrix.
In a seemingly illogical and self-destructive continuum, the GoI has progressively and with great deliberation proceeded to marginalize, downgrade and degrade its own Armed Forces, thus undermining the security of the Indian State as surely as the nation's worst enemy. This is a process that has been underway since independence, and at the risk of sounding hyperbolic, I would venture to state that the proverbial last straw may have been added by the 6th Central Pay Commission (CPC).
Today, there is a distinct impression that the CPC has erred grievously on many issues relating to the Armed Forces because they were not represented in the commission, and its recommendations have spread confusion and consternation. One of the most serious consequences (whether intended or not) is the sudden and arbitrary alteration of relativities between the Armed Forces and their civilian counterparts, to the detriment of the former. The resulting change in relationships between the Armed Forces and para-militaries has grave operational implications which do not seem to have been understood at all at the political level.
The ex-Servicemen (ESM) are completely stunned to see the number of anomalies thrown up by the CPC. This confusion has been further compounded by different interpretations being put out in successive letters by the Controller of Defence Accounts. To take just one example: no one understands by what logic a Lieutenant-General, Major-General and Brigadier are going to be paid exactly the same pension, and a Colonel (with half the service) will receive just one hundred rupees less.
The GoI has yet again rejected the "one rank on pension" demand, but not even a feeble attempt has been made to bridge the yawning gap between today's and yesterday's pensioners of the same rank. There is also a distinct impression that the CPC recommendations have been fiddled with, and even changed by the bureaucracy, without due authorization at the political level. Such is the level of discontent and strength of feelings that one hears of planned hunger strikes by ESM; something that would have earlier been unthinkable in the Armed Forces ethos.
The most logical way to avoid this confusion and the resultant sense of grievance in the armed forces and the ESM would have been to place a Service representative, if not in the CPC, then in the Review Committee. Either the committee would have convinced this representative of the appropriateness of the issues or the other way round; thus avoiding controversy, speculation and unhappiness. A few retired Service Chiefs (including this writer) had written to the PM to accord this concession but the appeal remained unanswered.
What people have either not understood, or are imprudently ignoring, is the fact that the CPC recommendations (and subsequent developments) are causing deep resentment, because they strike, not at the monetary status of the Services and the ESM, but at their standing relative to the other services. The Armed Forces just cannot understand (nor has anyone explained to them) why it was necessary to cut them down, yet again, a few notches relative to the police or the civil services at this particular junction. This severe blow to their "izzat" appears illogical and incomprehensible.
If there is indeed a sound rationale for the down-gradation of the Armed Forces, the Government must share it with them, and with the nation. Most importantly, the impression that this is the result of machinations of the bureaucracy, must be dispelled, if untrue; and it must be made amply clear that this decision emanates from the GoI.
Spreading unhappiness and confusion amongst the nation's Armed Forces or demoralizing them, and the 2-3 million strong ESM community does not serve anyone's interest. Should someone in authority not sit up and take notice?
The "blame-game" which has inevitably reared its ugly head in the aftermath of the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks instantly reminded me of the fervent appeals of three successive Chiefs of R&AW to Naval HQ, in recent years, to loan them naval officers for analysis of maritime intelligence. They were seriously concerned that they did not have the necessary in-house expertise available to draw the right conclusions and inferences from the mass of information the agency collected from open, human and technical sources. And very correctly they approached the Navy.
Lack of maritime intelligence has also been the Navy's bane for years, so we understood the handicap R&AW worked under, fully shared their concern, and felt that it was the navy's duty to help. I recall (as the Chief of Personnel) having personally selected some officers for deputation to R&AW, but to my consternation, I learnt within a few months that most wanted to return to the navy. Before I go any further, let me just say that this piece is not about intelligence failure. It is about a failure on a larger scale which represents an equal degree of danger to the nation.
The naval officers deputed to R&AW did not wish to continue with their deputation and I learnt that this was not a new phenomenon) because when they were assigned their desks in the Cabinet Secretariat they found to their dismay that they had been placed under officers who were many years their junior in terms of service. Having taken this stoically, they then found that they were deprived of things like telephones, stenographers and transport because the "status" assigned to them did not entitle them to these utilities.
The R&AW authorities were most sympathetic but pleaded that the they were not in a position to alter the equivalences, apparently "laid down" by a Kafkaesque Department of Personnel. Neither pay-scales nor years of service nor any logic seem to guide this fixation of relativities of Armed Forces officers with civilian counterparts. It was not that we had not experienced such discrimination earlier - the Service HQ have always been chary of sending their officers on deputation - but one felt that intelligence was an issue of national importance and certainly worth undergoing some inconvenience. But we found that naval officers would accept such assignments only with the utmost reluctance.
I have used this example, only because it is symptomatic of a larger malaise: the lack of coordination between organs of the Government of India (GoI) which has contributed to the recent Mumbai fiasco. This should not come as a surprise because the GoI seems so laissez faire in its approach that it will not intervene to eliminate inter-agency inequity even when it clearly results in crippling disfunctionality, as mentioned above. On the contrary, by its acts of omission as well as commission the GoI has been contributing to steady erosion of the locus standi of the Armed Forces in the national security matrix.
In a seemingly illogical and self-destructive continuum, the GoI has progressively and with great deliberation proceeded to marginalize, downgrade and degrade its own Armed Forces, thus undermining the security of the Indian State as surely as the nation's worst enemy. This is a process that has been underway since independence, and at the risk of sounding hyperbolic, I would venture to state that the proverbial last straw may have been added by the 6th Central Pay Commission (CPC).
Today, there is a distinct impression that the CPC has erred grievously on many issues relating to the Armed Forces because they were not represented in the commission, and its recommendations have spread confusion and consternation. One of the most serious consequences (whether intended or not) is the sudden and arbitrary alteration of relativities between the Armed Forces and their civilian counterparts, to the detriment of the former. The resulting change in relationships between the Armed Forces and para-militaries has grave operational implications which do not seem to have been understood at all at the political level.
The ex-Servicemen (ESM) are completely stunned to see the number of anomalies thrown up by the CPC. This confusion has been further compounded by different interpretations being put out in successive letters by the Controller of Defence Accounts. To take just one example: no one understands by what logic a Lieutenant-General, Major-General and Brigadier are going to be paid exactly the same pension, and a Colonel (with half the service) will receive just one hundred rupees less.
The GoI has yet again rejected the "one rank on pension" demand, but not even a feeble attempt has been made to bridge the yawning gap between today's and yesterday's pensioners of the same rank. There is also a distinct impression that the CPC recommendations have been fiddled with, and even changed by the bureaucracy, without due authorization at the political level. Such is the level of discontent and strength of feelings that one hears of planned hunger strikes by ESM; something that would have earlier been unthinkable in the Armed Forces ethos.
The most logical way to avoid this confusion and the resultant sense of grievance in the armed forces and the ESM would have been to place a Service representative, if not in the CPC, then in the Review Committee. Either the committee would have convinced this representative of the appropriateness of the issues or the other way round; thus avoiding controversy, speculation and unhappiness. A few retired Service Chiefs (including this writer) had written to the PM to accord this concession but the appeal remained unanswered.
What people have either not understood, or are imprudently ignoring, is the fact that the CPC recommendations (and subsequent developments) are causing deep resentment, because they strike, not at the monetary status of the Services and the ESM, but at their standing relative to the other services. The Armed Forces just cannot understand (nor has anyone explained to them) why it was necessary to cut them down, yet again, a few notches relative to the police or the civil services at this particular junction. This severe blow to their "izzat" appears illogical and incomprehensible.
If there is indeed a sound rationale for the down-gradation of the Armed Forces, the Government must share it with them, and with the nation. Most importantly, the impression that this is the result of machinations of the bureaucracy, must be dispelled, if untrue; and it must be made amply clear that this decision emanates from the GoI.
Spreading unhappiness and confusion amongst the nation's Armed Forces or demoralizing them, and the 2-3 million strong ESM community does not serve anyone's interest. Should someone in authority not sit up and take notice?
Friday, December 12, 2008
Unless you sacrifice, you can't fight terror
Colonel R Hariharan is a specialist on South Asia military intelligence. He served as the head of intelligence for the Indian Peace Keeping Force in Sri Lanka between 1987 and 1990. He is associated with the South Asia Analysis Group and the Chennai Centre for China Studies.
Colonel Hariharan spoke to rediff.com's Shobha Warrier about what needs to be done to avoid terror attacks like the one in Mumbai terror attacks.
Media reports say that the Indian intelligence agencies had prior information about the Mumbai terror attacks. After every terror attack, we hear reports that intelligence agencies had prior information about it. Where is it going wrong then? Do you call this an intelligence failure?
I have no hesitation in saying that it was intelligence failure that led to the attacks. Today's terrorists are more tech savvy than the establishment. Intelligence failure is not only the failure of intelligence agencies. They have to process the information and make an assessment.
There are more than 12 agencies like the Customs, the Enforcement Directorate etc which collect intelligence information, and this excludes the state police.
Firstly, the quality of intelligence collected has to be validated. No agency shares the information with everybody because they want to score brownie points.
What we need is a central control room where intelligence information is shared and immediate action is taken. We don't have a culture of centralised control rooms. I know the Intelligence Bureau has enough intelligent officers, but they don't process intelligence information properly because they are in a hurry to push it so that the responsibility does not fall on them.
How important is processing the information?
It is the most important part of intelligence gathering. You may say, a terror strike is coming from the coast. But from where? Which coast? From whom? When? These questions are never answered. In military intelligence, we don't accept this kind of nonsense.
The Americans failed in processing the information before the 9/11 attacks. We told them a year earlier that Islamic militant guys are being trained in flying. We had told Australia that they are being trained in Australian flying schools. They passed it on to the Americans but nobody took action because they had too much information.
We have to have management in our information systems. Technology is rudimentary in India. We are a lazy nation as far as the governing system is concerned. So, why blame the intelligence agencies alone? You should blame the government, the various departments and ourselves.
Do you think the current attacks will ring alarm bells and something concrete will happen?
I am not an optimist. I expect some more strikes to come. Will just changing the Union home minister solve the problem?
I am not seeing any action now. There will be more strikes. Something like what is happening in Bangkok has to happen in India too. Everything has to be stopped to make the government act. People have to take to the streets. Only that works.
The ordinary people of India feel that after the 9/11 attacks, the US could stop any further attack while in India, every month, there is a terror strike...
Are we prepared to sacrifice some of our fundamental rights? That is the bottom line. The US has sacrificed part of their fundamental rights. US laws are very stringent. We didn't want POTA which guarantees witness protection.
Where should the overhaul start?
It has to be there everywhere; from the grass-roots to the middle level to the structural level.
Three things are important. At the state level, they must read and process the information themselves. The central agencies and state agencies should share information all the time. Today, they don't do that. The culture of sharing of information should come. In Assam, I have seen only army guys in the meetings; the state guys won't even turn up. Some sort of commitment has to come within the states.
Two, the country must learn to sacrifice some rights to fight terror. While fighting terror, you cannot have the same freedom. Unless you sacrifice, you can't fight terror.
Three, our laws will not hold today's times. You catch two out of 15 terrorists, but you cannot prosecute them. Human rights fellows will make a noise; courts will give them bail even if they are murderers. That is why so many Maoists are not being prosecuted. So, you require a special law.
The coast of India is controlled by many departments, and do you feel it is high time the coast comes under one agency, say the Coast Guard?
There are 12 agencies involved in the coastal security of India. In this country, nobody will give up power. Port security is under the ministry of shipping! What does it know of security?
In the US, when a ship comes to the sea, it comes under the Coast Guard. It is responsible for the coast. Here, it is not. The land is under police, the coastal police have become a big joke. The policemen do not know how to swim. They don't have a sea orientation. Why should you have the same policemen doing the coastal job? You require marine police who should look after coastal and port security.
The Coast Guard has got huge deficiencies like the armed forces. They must make up the deficiency right now. Marine security must come under central authority and the Coast Guard is the best arm. It comes under the navy both in the US and here.
Create internal security separately as a ministry. The time has come.
There is a kind of fear and insecurity in the mind of the people of India.
It can happen in Chennai too. Are you sure it will not happen in the other coasts? In Maharashtra, it will change now just like it changed in Gujarat. Gujarat has a dynamic chief minister and he knows his job. He wanted a law which is similar to what Mumbai is having, but he is not being allowed based on party politics. The Centre also won't bring the law and he also won't be allowed to have a law, and he is asked to control terrorism. What are we afraid of?
When you were gathering intelligence as a military intelligence officer, what were the difficulties you faced?
The major problem is of access to other intelligence agencies. There is no sharing of information. That is the biggest hurdle.
In Sri Lanka, that was what happened. The Research and Analysis Wing was involved in training the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) but it is so compartmentalised that when we went in, the guy from R&AW who was helping us did not have the figures because it was under some other department. So, we must take some hard decisions on sharing information.
Every month there is a terror strike. Will Indians have to learn to live with terror attacks?
Do you know such attacks are happening regularly in the north-east? This is the 8th terror attack this year. I am sure it will continue.
• Unless we must have a transparent policy that will guide the structural framework.
• Unless the media acts conscientiously. You give more prominence to Arundhati Roy for defending a guy who attacked our Parliament.
• Unless the structural mechanism involves states and becomes federal in character.
• Unless decision making is done by experts and not politicians.
• Unless you make up the deficiencies of all the counter-terror mechanisms with modern technology.
• Unless policy making, intelligence and execution work in tandem.
There are politicians in the US and the UK too, but they could manage to stop terror attacks.
Because they are Americans, and we are Indians, I am sorry to say. We have no commitment. Did people react the same way when the Mumbai local trains were attacked? They did not because the rich and VIPs were not involved. Because five star hotels were not involved. Only poor guys, who travelled by train suffered. Did you see the same candles then?
December 12, 2008 | 11:46 IST
Courtesy:
http://www.rediff.com///news/2008/dec/12mumterror-unless-you-sacrifice-you-cant-fight-terror.htm
Colonel Hariharan spoke to rediff.com's Shobha Warrier about what needs to be done to avoid terror attacks like the one in Mumbai terror attacks.
Media reports say that the Indian intelligence agencies had prior information about the Mumbai terror attacks. After every terror attack, we hear reports that intelligence agencies had prior information about it. Where is it going wrong then? Do you call this an intelligence failure?
I have no hesitation in saying that it was intelligence failure that led to the attacks. Today's terrorists are more tech savvy than the establishment. Intelligence failure is not only the failure of intelligence agencies. They have to process the information and make an assessment.
There are more than 12 agencies like the Customs, the Enforcement Directorate etc which collect intelligence information, and this excludes the state police.
Firstly, the quality of intelligence collected has to be validated. No agency shares the information with everybody because they want to score brownie points.
What we need is a central control room where intelligence information is shared and immediate action is taken. We don't have a culture of centralised control rooms. I know the Intelligence Bureau has enough intelligent officers, but they don't process intelligence information properly because they are in a hurry to push it so that the responsibility does not fall on them.
How important is processing the information?
It is the most important part of intelligence gathering. You may say, a terror strike is coming from the coast. But from where? Which coast? From whom? When? These questions are never answered. In military intelligence, we don't accept this kind of nonsense.
The Americans failed in processing the information before the 9/11 attacks. We told them a year earlier that Islamic militant guys are being trained in flying. We had told Australia that they are being trained in Australian flying schools. They passed it on to the Americans but nobody took action because they had too much information.
We have to have management in our information systems. Technology is rudimentary in India. We are a lazy nation as far as the governing system is concerned. So, why blame the intelligence agencies alone? You should blame the government, the various departments and ourselves.
Do you think the current attacks will ring alarm bells and something concrete will happen?
I am not an optimist. I expect some more strikes to come. Will just changing the Union home minister solve the problem?
I am not seeing any action now. There will be more strikes. Something like what is happening in Bangkok has to happen in India too. Everything has to be stopped to make the government act. People have to take to the streets. Only that works.
The ordinary people of India feel that after the 9/11 attacks, the US could stop any further attack while in India, every month, there is a terror strike...
Are we prepared to sacrifice some of our fundamental rights? That is the bottom line. The US has sacrificed part of their fundamental rights. US laws are very stringent. We didn't want POTA which guarantees witness protection.
Where should the overhaul start?
It has to be there everywhere; from the grass-roots to the middle level to the structural level.
Three things are important. At the state level, they must read and process the information themselves. The central agencies and state agencies should share information all the time. Today, they don't do that. The culture of sharing of information should come. In Assam, I have seen only army guys in the meetings; the state guys won't even turn up. Some sort of commitment has to come within the states.
Two, the country must learn to sacrifice some rights to fight terror. While fighting terror, you cannot have the same freedom. Unless you sacrifice, you can't fight terror.
Three, our laws will not hold today's times. You catch two out of 15 terrorists, but you cannot prosecute them. Human rights fellows will make a noise; courts will give them bail even if they are murderers. That is why so many Maoists are not being prosecuted. So, you require a special law.
The coast of India is controlled by many departments, and do you feel it is high time the coast comes under one agency, say the Coast Guard?
There are 12 agencies involved in the coastal security of India. In this country, nobody will give up power. Port security is under the ministry of shipping! What does it know of security?
In the US, when a ship comes to the sea, it comes under the Coast Guard. It is responsible for the coast. Here, it is not. The land is under police, the coastal police have become a big joke. The policemen do not know how to swim. They don't have a sea orientation. Why should you have the same policemen doing the coastal job? You require marine police who should look after coastal and port security.
The Coast Guard has got huge deficiencies like the armed forces. They must make up the deficiency right now. Marine security must come under central authority and the Coast Guard is the best arm. It comes under the navy both in the US and here.
Create internal security separately as a ministry. The time has come.
There is a kind of fear and insecurity in the mind of the people of India.
It can happen in Chennai too. Are you sure it will not happen in the other coasts? In Maharashtra, it will change now just like it changed in Gujarat. Gujarat has a dynamic chief minister and he knows his job. He wanted a law which is similar to what Mumbai is having, but he is not being allowed based on party politics. The Centre also won't bring the law and he also won't be allowed to have a law, and he is asked to control terrorism. What are we afraid of?
When you were gathering intelligence as a military intelligence officer, what were the difficulties you faced?
The major problem is of access to other intelligence agencies. There is no sharing of information. That is the biggest hurdle.
In Sri Lanka, that was what happened. The Research and Analysis Wing was involved in training the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) but it is so compartmentalised that when we went in, the guy from R&AW who was helping us did not have the figures because it was under some other department. So, we must take some hard decisions on sharing information.
Every month there is a terror strike. Will Indians have to learn to live with terror attacks?
Do you know such attacks are happening regularly in the north-east? This is the 8th terror attack this year. I am sure it will continue.
• Unless we must have a transparent policy that will guide the structural framework.
• Unless the media acts conscientiously. You give more prominence to Arundhati Roy for defending a guy who attacked our Parliament.
• Unless the structural mechanism involves states and becomes federal in character.
• Unless decision making is done by experts and not politicians.
• Unless you make up the deficiencies of all the counter-terror mechanisms with modern technology.
• Unless policy making, intelligence and execution work in tandem.
There are politicians in the US and the UK too, but they could manage to stop terror attacks.
Because they are Americans, and we are Indians, I am sorry to say. We have no commitment. Did people react the same way when the Mumbai local trains were attacked? They did not because the rich and VIPs were not involved. Because five star hotels were not involved. Only poor guys, who travelled by train suffered. Did you see the same candles then?
December 12, 2008 | 11:46 IST
Courtesy:
http://www.rediff.com///news/2008/dec/12mumterror-unless-you-sacrifice-you-cant-fight-terror.htm
Friday, December 5, 2008
Accountability of Intelligence Agencies
By B. Raman
The Intelligence Bureau (IB) and the Research & Analysis Wing (R&AW) have mounted a damage-control exercise by sharing with senior journalists details of technical intelligence (TECHINT) collected by them, which clearly indicated that the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET), the Pakistani terrorist organisation, which is a member of Osama bin Laden's International Islamic Front (IIF) For Jihad Against the Crusaders and the Jewish People, was planning to carry out sea-borne terrorist strikes against hotels on Mumbai's coast, one of the hotels being the Taj Mahal hotel, which was actually attacked and occupied by some terrorists on the night of November 26, 2008. This intelligence was disseminated by them to those responsible for physical security. It seems to be the contention of the IB and the R&AW that what happened in Mumbai was a serious instance of physical security failure and failure to act on available intelligence and not an instance of intelligence failure.
2. Other independent reports indicate that the reports were acted upon by the Mumbai Police and the security authorities of the Taj Mahal Hotel. It was not as if they ignored them. The Mumbai Police alerted the hotels mentioned in the R&AW report and advised them on the need to strengthen security. The Mumbai Police also set up a security barrier at a point near the sea where , in their assessment, clandestine landings might take place.
3. The two specific reports of the R&AW based on intercepts were disseminated in September. There was no follow-up report for nearly five weeks, either from the IB or the R&AW. As a result, the Mumbai Police and hotels downgraded the security alert. The Taj Mahal Hotel removed a security barrier, which they had erected, and the Mumbai Police removed the security barrier which they had set up to prevent clandestine landings. The terrorists from Pakistan seem to have landed at this very point, where the Mumbai Police had erected the security barrier on the receipt of the alert from the R&AW.
4. The R&AW and the IB have their offices in Mumbai headed by senior officers to interact closely with the local police and the Armed Forces units. All of them are members of special co-ordination committees. How come the IB and the R&AW officers did not come to know that the security alert had been downgraded following the non-receipt of any follow-up reports from the R&AW? Did the R&AW immediately advise the Mumbai Police, the Navy and the hotel authorities that the alert should be continued till they receive information that the LET has abandoned its plans?
5. While the intercepts of September speak well of the interception capability of the R&AW, it does not necessarily speak well of its capability for analysis, assessment and follow-up action. Many questions are relevant in this regard: In what form did it report the intelligence? Did it tone it down while reporting the intercepts in a paraphrased form? Did it tell the persons to whom it sent the two reports of September that the intelligence was based on intercepts of telephone conversations of an LET operative based in Pakistan? If it did not do so on grounds of operational security, how come it is now sharing them with journalists? This only strengthens the suspicion that the IB and the R&AW show a greater readiness to share sensitive intelligence with journalists to protect themselves than with each other to protect the nation and its people. To which Ministries and departments were the reports sent and at what level?
6. Unless one looks into all these questions, one cannot say where the failures occurred, which made the terrorist strikes possible. In 1987, the R&AW received a human intelligence report about a Khalistani plot to kill Rajiv Gandhi, then Prime Minister, during his visit to Rajghat on Mahatma Gandhi's birthday. The R&AW officer----of the rank of Director, one rank below a Joint Secretary--- conveyed the information in a written note to a Joint Secretary in the Home Ministry and the Delhi Police. He did not alert other senior officers.
7. The report proved to be accurate. Rajiv Gandhi narrowly escaped the assassination attempt. T. N. Seshan, who was then co-ordinating the security arrangements for Rajiv Gandhi, was asked to enquire into this. He held both the Delhi Police and the R&AW responsible for omissions, which could have led to a national tragedy. He blamed the Delhi Police for inaction on the R&AW report and the R&AW for not realising the gravity of the information when it was received and for disseminating it at a lower level without alerting the senior officers responsible for Rajiv's security.
8. A report in the "Hindustan Times" of December 2, 2008, quotes an unnamed officer of the R&AW as saying that its job in the Mumbai case was over with sending the report to the concerned quarters in the National Security Council Secretariat (NSCS) and that it had no other responsibility since it does not operate in Indian territory.
9. This is a highly irresponsible mindset, which needs to be checked. B. N. Mallick and R. N. Kao, the founding fathers of the Indian intelligence, used to stress on their officers that the responsibility of an intelligence officer does not stop with his sending a memo or a note about intelligence of a serious nature collected. It is equally their responsibility to ensure that the intelligence receives the attention it deserves in the ministries and departments concerned and that the necessary follow-up action is taken. In respect of terrorism, the role and responsibility of an intelligence officer starts from the moment he collects a piece of intelligence and continues till it is acted upon and the act of terrorism thwarted.
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Government of India, New Delhi, and presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com)
December 3, 2008
http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/%5Cpapers30%5Cpaper2958.html
The Intelligence Bureau (IB) and the Research & Analysis Wing (R&AW) have mounted a damage-control exercise by sharing with senior journalists details of technical intelligence (TECHINT) collected by them, which clearly indicated that the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET), the Pakistani terrorist organisation, which is a member of Osama bin Laden's International Islamic Front (IIF) For Jihad Against the Crusaders and the Jewish People, was planning to carry out sea-borne terrorist strikes against hotels on Mumbai's coast, one of the hotels being the Taj Mahal hotel, which was actually attacked and occupied by some terrorists on the night of November 26, 2008. This intelligence was disseminated by them to those responsible for physical security. It seems to be the contention of the IB and the R&AW that what happened in Mumbai was a serious instance of physical security failure and failure to act on available intelligence and not an instance of intelligence failure.
2. Other independent reports indicate that the reports were acted upon by the Mumbai Police and the security authorities of the Taj Mahal Hotel. It was not as if they ignored them. The Mumbai Police alerted the hotels mentioned in the R&AW report and advised them on the need to strengthen security. The Mumbai Police also set up a security barrier at a point near the sea where , in their assessment, clandestine landings might take place.
3. The two specific reports of the R&AW based on intercepts were disseminated in September. There was no follow-up report for nearly five weeks, either from the IB or the R&AW. As a result, the Mumbai Police and hotels downgraded the security alert. The Taj Mahal Hotel removed a security barrier, which they had erected, and the Mumbai Police removed the security barrier which they had set up to prevent clandestine landings. The terrorists from Pakistan seem to have landed at this very point, where the Mumbai Police had erected the security barrier on the receipt of the alert from the R&AW.
4. The R&AW and the IB have their offices in Mumbai headed by senior officers to interact closely with the local police and the Armed Forces units. All of them are members of special co-ordination committees. How come the IB and the R&AW officers did not come to know that the security alert had been downgraded following the non-receipt of any follow-up reports from the R&AW? Did the R&AW immediately advise the Mumbai Police, the Navy and the hotel authorities that the alert should be continued till they receive information that the LET has abandoned its plans?
5. While the intercepts of September speak well of the interception capability of the R&AW, it does not necessarily speak well of its capability for analysis, assessment and follow-up action. Many questions are relevant in this regard: In what form did it report the intelligence? Did it tone it down while reporting the intercepts in a paraphrased form? Did it tell the persons to whom it sent the two reports of September that the intelligence was based on intercepts of telephone conversations of an LET operative based in Pakistan? If it did not do so on grounds of operational security, how come it is now sharing them with journalists? This only strengthens the suspicion that the IB and the R&AW show a greater readiness to share sensitive intelligence with journalists to protect themselves than with each other to protect the nation and its people. To which Ministries and departments were the reports sent and at what level?
6. Unless one looks into all these questions, one cannot say where the failures occurred, which made the terrorist strikes possible. In 1987, the R&AW received a human intelligence report about a Khalistani plot to kill Rajiv Gandhi, then Prime Minister, during his visit to Rajghat on Mahatma Gandhi's birthday. The R&AW officer----of the rank of Director, one rank below a Joint Secretary--- conveyed the information in a written note to a Joint Secretary in the Home Ministry and the Delhi Police. He did not alert other senior officers.
7. The report proved to be accurate. Rajiv Gandhi narrowly escaped the assassination attempt. T. N. Seshan, who was then co-ordinating the security arrangements for Rajiv Gandhi, was asked to enquire into this. He held both the Delhi Police and the R&AW responsible for omissions, which could have led to a national tragedy. He blamed the Delhi Police for inaction on the R&AW report and the R&AW for not realising the gravity of the information when it was received and for disseminating it at a lower level without alerting the senior officers responsible for Rajiv's security.
8. A report in the "Hindustan Times" of December 2, 2008, quotes an unnamed officer of the R&AW as saying that its job in the Mumbai case was over with sending the report to the concerned quarters in the National Security Council Secretariat (NSCS) and that it had no other responsibility since it does not operate in Indian territory.
9. This is a highly irresponsible mindset, which needs to be checked. B. N. Mallick and R. N. Kao, the founding fathers of the Indian intelligence, used to stress on their officers that the responsibility of an intelligence officer does not stop with his sending a memo or a note about intelligence of a serious nature collected. It is equally their responsibility to ensure that the intelligence receives the attention it deserves in the ministries and departments concerned and that the necessary follow-up action is taken. In respect of terrorism, the role and responsibility of an intelligence officer starts from the moment he collects a piece of intelligence and continues till it is acted upon and the act of terrorism thwarted.
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Government of India, New Delhi, and presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com)
December 3, 2008
http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/%5Cpapers30%5Cpaper2958.html
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