Actually may he not be reborn and escape this miserable cycleSarabjit Singh expires, may he be reborn again in India - thanks Sir for all that you have done
he deserves it
MMS on the other hand ....
Actually may he not be reborn and escape this miserable cycleSarabjit Singh expires, may he be reborn again in India - thanks Sir for all that you have done
Now, India has come closer than it ever has before to honouring a secret agent—giving Sarabjeet Singh a state funeral, for unspecified services to the nation. There has long been speculation, which will likely never be officially denied or confirmed, that Singh was an agent for the Research and Analysis Wing. This is a good time to tell the stories of the hundreds of exceptionally courageous Indians who took extraordinary risks for their country—not infrequently at the cost of their lives, and almost never acknowledged,
Like everywhere else in the world, Indian rulers relied on spies from time immemorial. In his book on India’s ancient history, the scholar Sailendra Sen notes that spies were often mentioned in Rigvedic hymns, implored to be “ever true and never bewildered”. Sen’s account states that even Yama, the god of death, had spies—but, probably wisely, rejected their love. Through antiquity, spies helped kings catch criminals, but also generate information on neighbouring rulers and their own subjects. It has been noted that much of the work of the spy dovetails with that of the journalist. News-writers accredited to the great courts of India documented changing contours of influence—and, historian Christopher Bayly wryly records, kept “all India amused for years with a flow of dirty stories”.
It wasn’t until the 19th century, though, that the modern Indian intelligence service began to take shape—spurred by imperial paranoia. In 1825, the veterinary surgeon and explorer William Moorcroft discovered of two European-trained dogs near the Kailash summit in Tibet. He persuaded himself, and others, that the Russian Tsar’s agents had been that way, in search of routes to the Indian ocean’s warm waters. For the epic survey operations that followed, Moorcroft relied for help Indian plains for information and aid, but also, notably, on great commercial networks which stretched east, all the way to central Asia, China and Burma.
Historians now know that the Tsar had no ambitions in India, though secret service officers were despatched into central Asia—among them, the legendary Nikolai Muraviev, who penetrated the kingdom of Khiva in 1819, hoping to secure a commercial relationship for Moscow.
In 1947, as imperial Britain left India, it stripped the cupboards of their skeletons. The senior-most British Indian Police officer in the Intelligence Bureau, Qurban Ali Khan, chose Pakistani citizenship—and left for his new homeland with what few sensitive files departing British officials neglected to destroy. The Intelligence Bureau, Lieutenant-General LP Singh has recorded, was reduced to a “tragi-comic state of helplessness,” possessing nothing but “empty racks and cupboards”. The Military Intelligence Directorate in New Delhi didn’t even have a map of Jammu and Kashmir to make sense of the first radio intercepts signalling the beginning of the war of 1947-1948.
There’s evidence, though, that by 1965, things were back on track. Popular accounts hold that India had no intelligence on the Kutch clashes which preceded the war in Kashmir. In fact, from India’s still-classified—but helpfully online—official war history makes clear this wasn’t true. “Indian intelligence”, it records, did provide information about the movement of Pakistani troops and armour into the Rann. However, the local commanders were not too happy with the intelligence that was provided to them. General JN Chaudhuri admitted in 1971 that he had ‘adequate information regarding the southward move towards the Sindh-Kutch border of some Pakistani military units, thought the official Pakistani story was of movement by Rangers or armed police”.
Much of that information came from cross-border traffickers—colourful entrepreneurs who profited from the markets created prohibition in Pakistan, and restrictions on gold, silver and electronics in India. Banaskantha resident Sagathaji Jagashi Thakur learned the routes through the desert smuggling precious metals and watches into India—paid for with Indian whiskey ported across the border using trained camels, which could find their own way across the sands. In the 1965 war, he was recruited by intelligence services in Gujarat, and set to work guiding troops to the Pakistani town of Nagparkar—which India successfully captured.
Mattaji Surtaji Sodha, who fled Pakistan before the 1971 war, also helped guide soldiers on deep raids into Pakistan through the desert—an effort which cost the lives of many of his comrades.
1971 was a high-water mark for India’s covert services. India’s official military history of the Bangladesh war records, in somewhat guarded terms, RAW’s extraordinary efforts in the campaign—which began long before war formally broke out. Led by Brigadier Surjit Singh Uban, RAW covert forces began infiltrating into Bangladesh in July 1971, at Madaripur, destroying tea gardens, riverboats and railway tracks—acts that tied down troops, undermined East Pakistan’s economy and, the history says, destroyed “communications between Dhaka, Comilla and Chittagong”. It also trained Bangladesh irregulars—a staggering 20,000 guerrillas each month by September, 1971, who bravely took on the Pakistan army.
RAW’s cryptanalysts also succeeded in breaking Pakistan’s military cypher—enabling a legendary air force raid on government house in Dhaka, precisely when East Pakistan’s cabinet was meeting to discuss means to defer their army’s surrender.
The 1980s, as Firstpost revealed earlier this month, saw a ferocious RAW campaign of retaliation against Inter-Services Intelligence-backed Khalistan terrorists—setting off bomb for bomb, in an effort experts like B Raman raised the cost of terrorism to a point Pakistan could no longer afford.
This is the man Manish "Goebbels" Tiwari called as a BJP stooge!Perhaps the greatest coup of the period involved Ajit Doval, former director of the intelligence bureau—and the only police officer to ever be decorated with the Kirti Chakra, the peacetime equivalent of the Maha Vir Chakra. In 1989, the story goes, Khalistan terrorists holed up inside the Golden Temple awaited an ISI officer who to rig up the Harimandir Sahib with explosives. He arrived—but when Indian forces surrounded the temple, the bombs didn’t go off. The demoralised terrorists quietly surrendered. The ISI colonel was in fact none other than Doval—though he has consistently refused to discuss the story in public.
There are other great stories of success, too—those of one-time Kashmiri jihadist Usman Majid, who served as an intelligence mole inside the Jammu Kashmir Islamic Front, meeting with Ibrahim ‘Tiger’ Memon; the special forces, intelligence officials and police officers who decimated Kashmir jihadists; the very ordinary women and men who risked their lives to serve as agents in Pakistan, but were left out in the cold, at home or in prison, when their task was done.
Hope they dont end up gathering political intelligence for their master and end up doing routine policing role.Nikhil T wrote:Intelligence Bureau hired over 7000 in last 5 years
CBI believes Pandey "conspired" with some officials of the Intelligence Bureau who "passed" to him an input that Ishrat and three others were Lashkar-e-Tayabba operatives out on a mission to kill Chief Minister Narendra Modi.
"The Ishrat encounter was planned by top officers of the Ahmedabad crime branch following an intelligence input from IB, which was received by the then Ahmedabad police commissioner K R Kaushik, who shared it with Pandey. Pandey, in turn, shared the input with his trusted aide D G Vanzara," a CBI officer said.
The input is said to have been passed by Rajinder Kumar, an IB official then posted in Gujarat.
The CBI official said Vanzara had formed two teams under G L Singhal and N K Amin (both police officers now in CBI custody) to carry out the encounter killing of Ishrat and three others and Pandey had supervised the "logistics" and "communication" with Singhal's help.
- See more at: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/top-c ... 9h0XC.dpuf
Question is were they hacking it to prove a point to sort out security?The Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) has accused the National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO), India's technical intelligence gathering agency, of penetrating/ hacking into the National Informatics Center (NIC) network.
The DeitY has cited a report prepared by its operations division, the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (ICERT), listing specific instances when NTRO reportedly hacked into NIC infrastructure and extracted sensitive data connected to various ministries.
NTRO has rubbished the charges. It is also learnt that NIC refused to give access (logs) to NTRO to conduct "penetrative testing", the purpose of which is to sensitise agencies about cyber threats.
NIC provides internet connectivity to all ministries and its NICNET has institutional linkages with the central government, state governments and union territories. All government officials have email IDs issued by NIC.
According to official sources, J Satyanarayana, Secretary, DeitY, wrote to National Security Advisor Shivshankar Menon in February this year requesting him to examine NTRO's role in hacking these email IDs.
NTRO had earlier warned that NIC's network is penetrable and prone to cyber attacks. As reported by The Indian Express, over 10,000 email addresses of top government officials were hacked on July 12 last year, just days after NTRO issued an alert. The attack was blamed on state actors based in countries inimical to India's interests.
When contacted, Satyanarayana declined to comment on the issue, saying these are internal matters. "Whenever vulnerabilities in cyber security are pointed out, corrective action is taken," he said.
On being asked about NIC's refusal to share logs with NTRO, Dr Y K Sharma, DG, NIC said: "We follow government instructions and it is not appropriate to comment on departmental issues. Our network is safe but problems do happen, not only in India but the world over."
Dr Gulshan Rai, DG, ICERT, was unavailable for comment. However, another ICERT official blamed NTRO for creating unnecessary panic.
- See more at: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/ntro- ... Cy0KH.dpuf
When a government that is beset by a new scam and new protests everyday simultaneously steps up hiring of police and intelligence forces (Central Armed Police Forces have grown 300% since 2004), it is quite evident that they are afraid of their own people.Nikhil T wrote:Intelligence Bureau hired over 7000 in last 5 years
Wondering if this is an increase or compensation for attrition?
Only in our country will this news be shown as a indicment of the named officials.CBI believes Pandey "conspired" with some officials of the Intelligence Bureau who "passed" to him an input that Ishrat and three others were Lashkar-e-Tayabba operatives out on a mission to kill Chief Minister Narendra Modi.
"The Ishrat encounter was planned by top officers of the Ahmedabad crime branch following an intelligence input from IB, which was received by the then Ahmedabad police commissioner K R Kaushik, who shared it with Pandey. Pandey, in turn, shared the input with his trusted aide D G Vanzara," a CBI officer said.
Very sad state of affairs.Ranjan Lakhanpal, an activist lawyer instrumental in freeing over 40 spies, both Indian and Pakistani, believes these men have a valid redressal claim. "India disowns them once they are caught and Pakistan tortures them,"
Back in October 2011, Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) issued an official warning to CIA Chief in Moscow Steven Hall. The note of caution said that if provocative recruitment actions on the part of Hall's agency toward FSB's employees continued the FSB would have to reciprocate. With Ryan Fogle's operations in Moscow the CIA 'crossed the line' and FSB made the profound failure of American intelligence public.
So, even when in December 2012 the CIA officer Benjamin Dillon, who worked undercover as the third secretary in the economic department of US Embassy in Moscow, tried to recruit one of FSB agents, Russia's Security Service refrained from any public announcements. In a rather counrteous manner, the spy was declared a 'persona non grata' on January 11, 2013 and within the next four days Mr Dillon quietly left Russia.
However, the "audacity" with which Ryan Fogle acted forced FSB to take reciprocal actions towards its American colleagues. "In this case, the CIA's Fogle crossed the line and we had to respond accordingly" - confirmed FSB spokesman.
"In October 2011, the FSB issued an official warning to the CIA station chief in Moscow that if provocative recruitment actions continued in relation to officers of Russian special services, Russia's FSB would take "mirror" measures in relation to CIA officers," an FSB spokesman said.
"In this statement, the FSB gave the surnames of concrete Russian citizens whom CIA operatives had tried to approach, as well as information about these CIA operatives," he said.
Director of U.S. National Intelligence James Clapper was notified of the situation as well.
Ummm, i was thinking it was the other way round with RAW relying only on embassy folks and not having any NOC type folks/front companies etc operating anywhere!!shyamd wrote:The funny thing is that the CIA is still using diplomatic cover in hostile countries - it just goes to show how outdated the CIA is currently. The president last year asked for an investigation as to why the CIA has missed so many major trends ! Contents are still classified.
Good thing is even RAW doesn't use some of those methods
Russia has accused the CIA of “crossing the red line” in its recruitment zeal targeting the Russian security services. Adding insult to injury Russia has not only made public the arrest and expulsion of a CIA officer working undercover in the U.S. embassy in Moscow, but also revealed the identity of the CIA station chief here.
Third Secretary Ryan Fogle was caught on Tuesday trying to recruit an officer of the Federal Security Service (FSB), Russia’s main counter-espionage agency. The diplomat was paraded on Russian television, wearing a wig and carrying spy gear.
The publicity angered Washington because normally the exposed spies are quietly ordered to leave without identities being revealed.
However, authorities went a step further and disclosed the name of the head of CIA operations in Moscow, Steven Hall, a Counsellor at the U.S. Embassy.
The disclosure was a breach of diplomatic protocol. According to a post-Cold War trust-building tradition, the spy agencies of Russia and the U.S. reveal to each other the identities of their respective station chiefs, but do not publicise them.
An FSB spokesman explained the move saying the CIA had “crossed the red line” ignoring repeated warnings to stop trying to recruit Russian secret services personnel.