Inside India’s ‘secret Cold War’
Paul McGarr, lecturer in Intelligence Studies at King’s College, London, and author, ‘Spying in South Asia’ talks about the extent of the involvement of MI6, CIA and others in post-colonial India and why the considerable contribution of Indian agencies during the Cold War has been largely overlooked
How did you come to work on this complex subject of surveillance and western intelligence agencies, and the extent of their involvement in South Asia?
I fell in love with India and its people when travelling around the country for six months in my early twenties. My PhD was subsequently written on British and American responses to the 1962 Sino-Indian War and this later expanded into a book that recovered the transnational history of Anglo-American relations with South Asia between independence in the late 1940s, and the height of the Cold War in the late 1960s. This was published as The Cold War in South Asia: Britain, the United States and the Indian Subcontinent, 1945-1965 (Cambridge University Press, 2013). While researching this book I came across a large amount of material in archives in India, the UK, and US that told a fascinating story about the hitherto hidden role that secret intelligence agencies (British, American, Soviet, Indian, and others) have played in South Asia’s Cold War. I approached publishers with the idea to write a second book focusing on India’s secret Cold War and, fortunately, received a positive response.
You write that “India’s intelligence counter culture provided and continues to provide a considerable socio-political challenge to foreign intelligence agencies and governments invested in South Asia.” How have western intelligence interventions in South Asia contributed to a stronger push back by Indian intelligence agencies over the decades?
Indian intelligence has always had a complicated liaison relationship with foreign counterparts. Indian policymakers and intelligence officers recognised, pragmatically, that national security depended, to some degree, on effectively harnessing support for external intelligence agencies. That said, Indian leaders faced a perennial challenge of how best to strike an appropriate balance between maintaining national sovereignty and upholding national security with assistance from foreign powers. Nehru and other senior Indian policymakers accepted, albeit reluctantly, a need to co-opt Western and, to some degree Eastern bloc, intelligence support. A suspicion lingered however, not unreasonably, that facilitating some Western intelligence intervention in India in limited and declared forms would encourage additional undeclared Western intelligence activity that Indian policymakers would not be party to and would not approve of. That suspicion was amplified by revelations surrounding CIA covert action in Italy, Iran, Guatemala, the Congo, Cuba and elsewhere in the 1950s and 1960s.
From 1967 onwards, after it became public knowledge that the CIA had secretly funded Indian political organisations and cultural bodies, Indian policymakers began to push back more assertively against what they regarded an unacceptable behaviour on the part of foreign intelligence services. Once the genie of CIA intervention in India was out of the political bottle, the politics of intelligence in India demanded a robust rhetorical response from policymakers who, conveniently, also saw some political advantage in utilising the CIA as a political scapegoat for domestic problems.
What are some of the lessons global policy makers can learn from the record of western secret interventions in India between 1947 and the end of the Cold War in 1989?
Several lessons should be learned. 1. Covert intelligence interventions have a long afterlife. Intelligence operations conducted in the 1950s or 1960s that remained concealed at the time came back to haunt Western governments and destabilise their relations with India decades later. Rarely do intelligence operations remain entirely concealed over the long term. Consequently, such activity should be conducted with extreme caution and with an acceptance that the expected benefit should outweigh the negative consequences of eventual exposure.
2. That the local (Indian) agency can be considerable and highly effective at resisting or co-opting external intelligence intervention for its own, often very different purposes. Notably, Western covert propaganda operations in India did not remake the political weather in the subcontinent and local publishers, journalists, and cultural producers, even if wittingly or otherwise in receipt of external funding, invariably felt no need or obligation to do the bidding of their supposed financial sponsors.
3. Intelligence interventions are often ineffective and/or produce negative and unintended consequences (so-called blowback). Rarely, if ever, are they the magic bullet that policymakers hope that they will be.
4. That external intelligence interventions can have adverse impacts on national political cultures by fuelling conspiracism and paranoia and undermining faith in democracy and the legitimacy of political institutions. The CIA came to be seen in India as a malevolent political actor that had actively sought to subvert Indian democracy and interfere inappropriately in the nation’s internal affairs.
You argue that the Indian agency in the intelligence cold war was considerable and was largely overlooked. Why is this so?
Again, several reasons. [Since the 1980s], the academic study of intelligence has flourished. The publication of official histories of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, alongside an abundance of work on seemingly every aspect of intelligence, from counter intelligence to covert action and analysis to OSINT (Open Source Intelligence), has brought intelligence in from the cold. And yet, an overwhelming majority of books and articles published in the field are framed in narrow Anglocentric terms. If you want to read a book on British intelligence? No problem. If you want to know more about CIA there is a veritable mountain of literature from which to choose. If you are interested in intelligence in an Asian, African, or Latin American context, until very recently the options for readers were much more limited.
Access to source material has been an issue. Much more material was (and still is) released on British and American intelligence whereas a cloak of official secrecy kept India’s intelligence history hidden. That is slowly changing, and valuable source material is becoming available at the National Archives of India and Nehru Library but still only in frustratingly small amounts.
What were some surprising findings that you came across about the role of British and American intelligence agencies in post-colonial India?
Two of the most surprising findings were:
1) The sheer extent of covert collaboration that took place between the British and American intelligence services and their Indian counterparts between the late 1940s and the later 1960s, with the full knowledge of Indian political leaders. This occurred not only in relation to common internal targets, such as the CPI administration in Kerala in the 1950s, but also externally against Chinese targets after 1962. The scale, scope and depth of the cooperation was surprising. The IB, notably, was heavily dependent on MI5, and to some extent in awe of the British security service, to Nehru’s chagrin, into the 1960s. Likewise, IB drew heavily on CIA training and logistical support against China after 1962. This represented something of a paradox. While Indian leaders publicly excoriated and criticised the US for impropriate covert interventions in the domestic affairs of countries across the developing world, at the same time New Delhi was working closely with British and American intelligence. A case, perhaps, of pragmatism and national security considerations outweighing ideological solidarity and transnational unity inside the global south.
2) The risk UK and American intelligence services were willing to run in conducting extensive covert action operations in India over very considerable periods of time. One example illustrates this. The British Information Research Department, a shadowy covert propaganda service with close links to MI6, ran secret grey and black propaganda activity in India from the 1940s through to the 1970s. This involved passing propaganda to Indian journalists, politicians, military officers, intelligence officers, academics, and other prominent members of Indian society. Some individuals were paid financial subsidies for their ‘services’. Had the operation been ‘blown’, it would have led to serious political repercussions in India and damaged Britian’s diplomatic relations with New Delhi. It was very risky. But the rewards were incredibly meagre. It made little to no difference to India’s political landscape. It was surprising that the British, and on occasions the Americans, were willing to run intelligence operations with potentially incendiary consequences when the likely benefits were negligible.
How have the covert operations carried out by western governments in South Asia in the past influenced its political landscape?
Western intelligence interventions had almost no substantive impact on India’s political landscape. There is simply no evidence that Western intelligence was effective in any meaningful way by, for example, tilting India away from Moscow. In fact, quite the opposite was true from 1971 onwards. Bigger geostrategic factors (Nixon’s move toward China, for instance) were always more influential than secret intelligence interventions in shaping internal Indian politics and external Indian diplomacy. Indian agency was also invariably strong enough to absorb or deflect Western intelligence activity and avoid such activity having a significant impact on Indian politics. Conversely, the spectre of a ‘foreign hand’ or the social and cultural impact on India of its exposure to Western intelligence intervention, real and imagined, can be seen as important and enduring. As noted above, the fear of omnipotent and malevolent Western intelligence influence, which was invariably overstated and exaggerated, created a cycle of enervating conspiracism and paranoia that, in and of itself, adversely impacted Indian political culture. This was a tragedy and perhaps the most consequential legacy of India’s secret Cold War.
Majid Maqbool is an independent journalist based in Kashmir.
Recommended Topics