Bharat Rakshak

Austin ji - apparently he said another attack and the next war will be to finish TSP. to be fair Pranab did say this publicly too.

Austin ji - apparently he said another attack and the next war will be to finish TSP. to be fair Pranab did say this publicly too.

Austin ji - apparently he said another attack and the next war will be to finish TSP. to be fair Pranab did say this publicly too.

All that is fine but at the time when he was running out from country they should have nabbed him if R&AW knew what he was up too as the former boss writes.

The only time spies fly out is when they know their game is up or are tipped about being under surveillance and make good of their escape that what Rabinder did with CIA help.

I suspect he wrote that to clear his organisation name of any failure in nabbing Rabider and gave a different story to it.

If he is in Florida could he be my neighbor ? Why cant RAW hunt him down in US ?

Must for everybody.

^^ Love the way he uses the words "useful idiots" and "political prostitutes" to describe all our Desi leftists who were under the spell of Moscow.

Sad thing is that as the years have gone by, the number of "useful idiots" in Desh only seems to be multiplying ( with multiple masters like China, US etc to add to only Soviets earlier)

The defection of Rabinder Singh, a joint secretary with RAW looking after the Southeast Asia desk, shocked the agency. Maj Gen Singh now writes, "...lack of leadership at the top was responsible for the major fiasco." The activities of Rabinder Singh, a suspected CIA mole who later defected to the US, had already been brought to the notice of his superiors. A middle-ranking officer, S. Chandrashekhar, alerted special secretary Amar Bhushan. Rabinder was put under surveillance.

So how did Rabinder defect with such ease? The answers perhaps lie in the lax manner in which Bhushan handled the sensitive case. Bhushan, alleges Singh, was too busy appropriating positions for himself to attend to the Rabinder matter. "He (Bhushan) changed his designation from additional secretary (personnel) to special secretary without the approval of the department of personnel and training." Soon Bhushan was also appointed as the head of Aviation Research Centre (ARC), an autonomous outfit under RAW.

Singh feels that the then RAW chief, C.D. Sahay, "did not have the gumption to tell Amar Bhushan to stay out of RAW" and concentrate on his work in the ARC. Instead, Bhushan was allowed to induct N.K Sharma from the central paramilitary forces who had no training in counter- intelligence into RAW to keep a watch on Rabinder. As Sharma blundered along, Rabinder flew out to the US via Kathmandu. He left with top-secret RAW documents, including assessments on Southeast Asia countries as well as information that he had accessed from the reports of other officers. Ironically, Sharma was "rewarded" with a plum foreign posting.

While the Rabinder Singh episode is a stark example of the rot that had set in, Singh goes on to record other examples of professional misconduct. He refers to an additional secretary, who when overlooked for promotion to the rank of special secretary, did not attend office for months. But no disciplinary action was taken against him. "This is unheard of. In the army, anyone away without leave for more than 30 days is declared a deserter," says Singh. This revelation is likely to embarrass a senior serving RAW official. Then again, Singh writes about how a senior officer spent lakhs having a logo designed for the agency. It could never be used for security reasons. Equally shocking is the case of an officer who funded his daughter’s education from the secret funds given to RAW. He had listed his daughter as an informant and paid her for ‘services’ rendered.

Singh feels the lack of accountability and financial auditing is detrimental to RAW’s efficiency. "Coming under the ministry of home affairs, the Intelligence Bureau has a modicum of ministerial control," he writes. But "RAW does not even have this fig leaf of restraint to curb its activities." He says it is strange that our intelligence agencies are exempt from accountability which even the armed forces are subservient to. "If war is too serious a business to be left to generals, should not intelligence be considered too serious a business to be left to spies?" asks Singh.

What a chilling account of deception by KGB! Esp the manipulations in India, Bangladesh, Afghanistan and others! How the "helpful idiots" helped them manipulate Indians..

Apparently there were 57 collaborators

A lot of such chilling account interview by KGB , CIA etc are just empty boasting to gain personal credibility or just pysch-ops to discredit the other agency ...most of it are just half truth or lies take all such interview with the skepticism it deserves.

Intelligence would protect their asset if its important and they would not revel what really matter if some agent has defected from the other side.

If we start believing all that intelligence says then we may just turn up blaming each other as foreign agents because we might have a different POV.

A lot of such chilling account interview by KGB , CIA etc are just empty boasting to gain personal credibility or just pysch-ops to discredit the other agency ...most of it are just half truth or lies take all such interview with the skepticism it deserves.

Intelligence would protect their asset if its important and they would not revel what really matter if some agent has defected from the other side.

If we start believing all that intelligence says then we may just turn up blaming each other as foreign agents because we might have a different POV.

Are you serious ? It is not possible that 57 people worked tirelessly to see Rabinder Singh flee the country unless RAW is an Indian subsidiary of CIA.

Most likely when such defection occurs its between the agent and the handler , no one really knows about it except the higher up in the handler like station chief or other .......having more people in loop means certain failure or higher risk of it failing.

Likely Rabinder was tipped off by handler or got alerted he was after all an agent himself and all agents are trained to check if they are under survellence more so if you are spying for some one else you would be double alert.

RAW/IB CI ommision would have been that he survived so long , remain undetected during routine debrefing/lie detector check etc or even if they were suspicious of him they failed to follow up on him .........the recent Russian Spy who defected to US in the infamous Anna Chapman case avoided Lie Detector Test or Promotion something CI in FSB should have followed up but they didnt ........so shit can happen with any agency purely due to human carelessness.

Rabinder was perhaps too important to CIA that they made sure he was told to defect to US even at the risk of bringing the improving Indo-US relation in bitterness over this.

Monday, July 23rd 2012, 05:46 AM

New Delhi, July 23 — Fearing that the CIA might use counter-terrorism meetings to recruit Indian intelligence operatives, New Delhi has restricted agency-to-agency contacts with Washington, says a new book.

Scholar Prem Mahadevan says that unlike the 1970s when India was a virtual socialist state, the hunger for government jobs has fallen considerably since the Indian economy opened up in 1991.

"Today, middle-ranking IB (Intelligence Bureau) and RAW (Research and Analysis Wing) officers are vulnerable to enticement by well-funded foreign intelligence agencies - a factor which has constrained counter-terrorism cooperation post 9/11."

Mahadevan's book, "The Politics of Counterterrorism in India" (I.B. Tauris), says the fears are not altogether unfounded.

It reveals that since 2001, there have been at least two cases of penetration of RAW by the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

"Also, at least nine RAW officers have gone abroad without leave since the agency's creation in 1968. Most defected while posted in Western Europe or North America, in pursuit of a more comfortable lifestyle.

"Subsequent investigations revealed that they had been recruited by Western intelligence agencies prior to their defection and had functioned as agents in place for some time."

The book says that particularly damaging was the defection of Sikander Lal Malik, a personal aide to RAW chief Rameshwar Nath Kao.

"Malik defected during the 1970s while posted to the US and is alleged to have taken extremely sensitive information with him."

Although Indian intelligence agencies have committed blunders, the book says, they are also responsible for some spectacular successes.

Despite official sympathy for the Palestinian cause, the agencies prevented anti-Israeli attacks on Indian soil that became common in Europe in the 1970s.

And in the years after the Iranian revolution of 1979, the IB and RAW together rounded up and deported dozens of Iranian and Iraqi terrorists intent on killing each other in India.

The IB, it says, "deserves credit for its successes in neturalising the threat from foreign intelligence agencies".

It says RAW once tapped the telephone of then Pakistan Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto "but the agency could only hear his end of the conversation and had to guess what the other party was saying".

The book, however, says infiltrating into jehadi networks has become nearly impossible because of the very low number of Muslims in the Indian intelligence.

"The RAW does not have a single Muslim in its 10,000-strong manpower pool while the IB has a small number of Muslims.

"These operatives did a sterling job of raising new informer networks in Jammu and Kashmir during the 1990s... Despite their performance, the IB and RAW remain averse to employing Muslims, preferring to invest in technical collection."

Contrary to public knowledge, Indian intelligence agencies have faced budget cuts, the book says.

The RAW budget was slashed by 10 percent when P.V. Narasimha Rao was prime minister, denying it two badly needed reconnaissance aircraft. Also during Rao's term, a further 20 percent cut hit intelligence operations.

The book accuses then prime minister Morarji Desai of seriously damaging RAW because of his allergy to his predecessor Indira Gandhi, who founded the agency. Desai, it says, forced some of RAW's "most distinguished officers" into retirement, forced it to stop hiring new recruits, cut its strength by a third, and shut down its offices in Jaipur and Chandigarh.

Because of Desai, RAW's agent networks inside Pakistan, including those in Pakistani Kashmir, were deactivated "and were never rebuilt".

"During a conversation with the Pakistani president in 1978, he let slip that RAW had penetrated the Pakistani nuclear plant at Kahuta. The Indian agent on-site was identified and eliminated."

IANS

57 is the number I am told, God knows the real figure. A contender for the next RAW chief role comes under a cloud as he was involved in the rabinder Singh defection controversy.

As for the “agent’s collaborators”, says the writer, 57 employees who shared information regularly with ‘Ravi’, continue to serve RAW. While 26 of them were never asked for an explanation, 31 who actively colluded and shared extensive operational details were posted abroad.

....He left with top-secret RAW documents, including assessments on Southeast Asia countries as well as information that he had accessed from the reports of other officers....

The latest work of fiction on RAW, authored by a former officer of the country’s external intelligence, authored is about intense rivalry among intelligence and enforcement agencies for sending their men abroad in embassies for liaison ending up in exposing exposing assets and covert ops.

The novel - “Escape To Nowhere” - written by former RAW special secretary Amar Bhushan based on the true story of his colleague Rabinder Singh fleeing to the US in 2004 -- contains interesting nuggets of inside information that that should nudge the intelligence apparatus into some self-correction.

Bhusahn prefers to call the RAW he served as “the Agency” and tells through fictional characters the real counter-intelligence operation placing his own former joint secretary Rabinder Singh under surveillance. Singh is introduced as “Mr Ravi Mohan”, a senior analyst of the far-eastern branch of the Agency. The US intelligence agency, the CIA, had managed to compromise Singh in order to ferret out highly classified information from the RAW.

And when Singh-Ravi Mohan is exposed by preying eyes of his own colleagues, they plan his great escape, obviously with the tacit connivance of some US moles at the top echelons in the NDA government.

Bhushan is critical of some previous RAW chiefs, whom he describes as “expatriats” since they were not drawn form the agencies’ own cadre, for what he claims of “turning the security environment within upside down by expanding the liaison network indiscriminately”.

Over the period of time more “exotic locations” were added for posting undercover operative in high commissions and embassies though the intelligence outfits of those foreign countries had little to contribute to expanding or securing national interests.

Surprisingly, the decisions were taken to accommodate increasing clamouring for foreign travel by agency officials and their wives, the book remarks. “In the process, a large number of officers were exposed to the suborning overtures of foreign intelligence operatives, for whom it became much easier to identify Agency’s officers and track down footprints of their sensitive operations,” Bhushan writes. Such “glasnost” also paved way for officers, who are willing to be recruited as agents to satisfy their “weakness for money, gifts, scholarships and good time”.

Though the RAW remains the espionage organisation authorised to interact with their foreign counterparts, the glamour and fat pay and perks that come with liaison exploits has been the envy for other government agencies. The Intelligence Bureau, CBI, Enforcement Directorate Ministry of External Affairs, Home Ministry and the defence intelligence agencies started interacting with foreign spys without being trained to handle complex, shady, dark underbelly of the world of espionage.

The book implies that the RAW opposed tooth and nail FBI’s opening office in New Delhi and Indian agencies going to foreign stations and attend sub-standard courses and seminars offered by intelligence agencies off shore.

ShyamD



What would be so important about Indian views on South East Asia that he gets sanctuary from US which is ready to jeopardize the so called relationship?

Are those really India's "Look East" policy specifics?

Over the period of time more “exotic locations” were added for posting undercover operative in high commissions and embassies though the intelligence outfits of those foreign countries had little to contribute to expanding or securing national interests.

Surprisingly, the decisions were taken to accommodate increasing clamouring for foreign travel by agency officials and their wives, the book remarks. “In the process, a large number of officers were exposed to the suborning overtures of foreign intelligence operatives, for whom it became much easier to identify Agency’s officers and track down footprints of their sensitive operations,” Bhushan writes. Such “glasnost” also paved way for officers, who are willing to be recruited as agents to satisfy their “weakness for money, gifts, scholarships and good time”.

Yes, it reflects his experience in giving speeches.