When Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina resigned under pressure amid mass student protests in August, some of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist supporters were quick to blame—without much evidence—the CIA.
Labeling Hasina’s forced resignation a “color revolution,” these Indian conspiracy theorists suggested that something similar could be attempted in New Delhi. They aimed to discredit India’s political opposition and possible protests against Modi; the alleged role of the United States in destabilizing Hasina’s government made the United States a convenient scapegoat.
This was a throwback to a period during the Cold War when popular discourse in India fixated on the threat of a “foreign hand” in New Delhi. In his latest book, Paul M. McGarr, a lecturer at King’s College London, examines the history of Western intelligence agencies’ work in India and the tough response of the country’s political leadership to threats—both real and imagined.
Spying in South Asia: Britain, the United States, and India’s Secret Cold War brings a fresh perspective to an important subject that has rarely been studied through an academic lens. McGarr argues that Cold War interventions in India by both the British and U.S. agencies proved “largely self-defeating” and actually undermined Western influence, slowed down democracy, and amplified a “national culture of conspiracism and paranoia” in India that still remains.
Discounting the personal biases of narrators and the nationalist impulses of official accounts, McGarr depicts a period in which contradictory impulses guided India’s interaction with Britain and the United States. These tensions are reflected in the Indian political landscape today. A close reading of McGarr’s work would help policymakers in Western capitals realize the limits of close cooperation with New Delhi and perhaps arrive at more nuanced intelligence assessments to craft more achievable political objectives.
After gaining independence from Britain in 1947, India pursued a policy of non-alignment, maintaining friendly ties with major powers and refusing to become a member of either the Soviet-led communist bloc or the so-called free world led by the United States. This made New Delhi the unlikely center of a clandestine struggle between the two sides. McGarr’s book is unique in offering a granular history focused on this struggle in what was then called the Third World.
Some of the most spectacular incidents involving the Soviet and U.S. intelligence agencies happened in New Delhi. In 1967, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, evaded her minders and walked into the U.S. Embassy. The common-law wife of an Indian communist whom she met in Moscow, Alliluyeva traveled to India after his death to scatter his ashes. Her request to stay there—claiming disillusionment with Soviet communism—was denied, and she made an impulsive decision to defect to the United States.
New Delhi even figured in to the fiction of British novelist John le Carré; his principal protagonist, a British intelligence officer, first meets his Soviet adversary in a Delhi prison cell in the mid-1950s.
As border controls tightened and the Iron Curtain drew over Eastern Europe, McGarr writes, India became seen as extremely important in the function of Western intelligence. This is because it offered, in the words of a British spy who defected to Moscow, the “most favourable conditions … for establishing contacts with Soviet citizens.” The same logic attracted Soviet intelligence agencies to New Delhi, even though Moscow had a linguistic disadvantage and did not share a colonial connection.
India’s British rulers did not transfer the institutional memory and mechanisms of intelligence operations to the formerly colonized. The country’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, had spent nearly a decade in colonial prisons; he distrusted the British setup but acknowledged that a new state could learn from its former masters’ expertise. McGarr shows that Nehru justified this skepticism; speaking to his security ministers in 1947, he explained that the colonial intelligence system “has more or less broken down as it was bound to, because it was meant for other purposes … The new intelligence service will have to be built differently.”
However, living with an intelligence vacuum was easier said than done. Overcoming his personal misgivings, Nehru sanctioned the formation of close intelligence partnerships with Britain. He was more wary of working with the United States, even though his intelligence chiefs did form relationships with their U.S. counterparts. Nehru constantly warned his own intelligence officers to temper their blind admiration of Western agents and to develop indigenous capabilities.
In those early years, India’s leaders grappled with the specter of Hindu nationalism, as well as communism. In Nehru’s view, Hindu nationalism presented a major threat to India’s long-term stability as a secular country with a significant religious minority, especially after some of its adherents were indicted in the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. Nehru defeated the forces of the Hindu right in 1952 elections, and their activities moved into the background. (Despite his regular warnings, even Nehru’s own party members were unwilling to confront Hindu nationalism.)
Simultaneously, communism had fueled a massive armed uprising in South India. India’s security forces crushed this revolt, but the rise of the Communist Party of India—with its hold over trade unions and peasants—made some of Nehru’s conservative compatriots nervous. After the Communist Party took power in the state of Kerala, becoming the first democratically elected communist government in the world, distraught Western capitals used the intelligence setup to target the state government, at times in collaboration with Indian agencies.
With their statist view shaped by their colonial past, India’s intelligence agencies followed suit, obsessing with the threat of communism in India and keeping close watch on Soviet activity in the country. Nehru even instructed India’s Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) to summon the Soviet ambassador and warn him. But as McGarr reminds us, “had Nehru been aware of the extent of discussions taking place in Washington over how the United States might reorientate the political landscape in Kerala, he might have well instructed the MEA to summon [U.S. Ambassador to India] Ellsworth Bunker for a similar dressing down.”
McGarr shows that for a United States gripped by McCarthyism, dealing with the People’s Republic of China was about containing communism; for India, the problem with China was essentially about an intensifying border dispute that had plunged previously friendly relations into violent rancor. For this, India’s Intelligence Bureau sought help from the CIA, which was already keen on leveraging New Delhi to counter Beijing. Nehru’s government was still wary of close cooperation with the CIA, suspecting that the Americans could use Indian requests as a cover for stronger interventions in New Delhi’s internal affairs.
Spying in South Asia cites evidence from both Indian and U.S. sources that suggests that the CIA successfully recruited assets inside the Indian government. The CIA station in New Delhi “openly boasted that it could obtain a copy of any document produced by the Indian government,” McGarr writes. The situation was complicated by the “assumption in Washington that the Indian leader was intrinsically anti-American”—a complete misreading of Nehru’s critique of U.S. policies on colonialism, free-market capitalism, and containment.
Although India conceded China’s sovereignty over Tibet in the early 1950s, New Delhi was dismayed at the use of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army to assert its control over the territory. Nehru acknowledged that India didn’t have the capacity to interfere inside Tibet, although he was willing to help Tibetan refugees. This ambivalence provided the United States with an opportunity that the CIA exploited. CIA aircraft transited through Indian airspace to support resistance operations in Tibet, and U.S. agents helped the Dalai Lama escape from Lhasa in 1959 and walk into India, where Nehru allowed him to stay.
India was thus in the thick of U.S. operations that further attracted spies, agents, and operatives from all over the world to some of its border towns. Kalimpong, an Indian hill town near the border with China, was the most notorious. Nehru wrote that the town had “more spies there than other folk.” He bristled at U.S. agents using Kalimpong as a base for operations in Tibet and worried about provoking China, asking his intelligence chief to ensure that foreign agents’ work there was kept as “unobtrusive” as possible.
The Chinese were indeed outraged with India, principally for hosting the Dalai Lama, but Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai also singled out activities conducted from Kalimpong as a reason for worsening ties. Zhou also raised the issue of the CIA’s overflights of the India-China border and support to armed rebels in Tibet. When Nehru feigned ignorance, Zhou provided a detailed account of the routes taken and cargo carried. It embarrassed Nehru that Beijing knew these details, and more crucially, this information implicated India in cooperating with the United States.
The 1961 posting of John Kenneth Galbraith as the U.S. ambassador to New Delhi under President John F. Kennedy officially curtailed CIA’s clandestine operations inside India and cut down on the overflight operations to support Tibetan rebels, which Galbraith considered “foolhardy,” in McGarr’s characterization. (Still, other accounts suggest that the CIA continued its operations while keeping Galbraith in the dark.)
However, things changed dramatically in October 1962, when Chinese soldiers attacked Indian border posts and made rapid military advances. A panicked Nehru conceded that his country was in dire need of international “sympathy and support.” The United States responded to this request. The extent of the cooperation was kept under wraps, but declassified documents show that the CIA played a pivotal role in supporting India during the 1962 conflict.
This established a new intelligence partnership between the two countries—primarily directed against China. “A perception of intelligence inadequacy occasioned by the Sino-Indian war also created conditions in which New Delhi’s reluctance to collaborate with the Western intelligence agencies was cast aside,” McGarr notes. The military debacle led to a “narrative of intelligence failure” becoming embedded in the Indian political consciousness and triggered major intelligence reforms.
Cooperation with India against China fit with the Kennedy administration’s analysis of geopolitical advantage for the United States. At the time, Washington anticipated that the border conflict would force Moscow to choose between Beijing and New Delhi and open a window for rapprochement between India and Pakistan; instead, by the end of the 1960s, India was dependent on the Soviet Union for military supplies and had gone to war with Pakistan over Kashmir.
But India’s intelligence relationship with the United States, as well as Britain, was transformed. It included the raising of a clandestine Indian warfare unit to monitor Tibet, the use of an abandoned World War II airstrip in the Indian state of Odisha for secret operations, and the operation of high-altitude U-2 aircraft out of India. The U-2 flights helped confirm that China had developed a facility at Lop Nor in Xinjiang as a nuclear test site.
The most outlandish move was the joint placement of nuclear-powered surveillance equipment on Himalayan peaks along the India-China border to monitor Chinese nuclear tests, codenamed Operation Hat (also known as Blue Mountain). In 1965, one of the devices placed on the Nanda Devi peak was lost in an avalanche; the missing device still feeds conspiracy theories about natural disasters in the region. In 1973, the mission yielded valuable information on Chinese ballistic missile tests—even as ground-based monitoring devices had been replaced with satellite technology.
In McGarr’s retelling, the United States believed that one way to ameliorate Indian apprehension about China’s atomic bomb would be to cooperate “to obtain accurate intelligence on evolving Chinese nuclear capabilities.” The United States was concerned about a regional nuclear arms race; in that way, McGarr finds that Washington considered Operation Hat to be a partial success that “yielded useful data.”
U.S. President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger had decided to establish friendly ties with Mao Zedong’s China by that point, rendering intelligence collaboration with India redundant. A U.S. magazine report revealed this extraordinary project in 1978, sending shockwaves through India’s political landscape.
The U.S. focus soon shifted toward Southeast Asia, raising diplomatic tensions between New Delhi and Washington—including over the legacy of the Sino-Indian War. McGarr examines the propaganda and misinformation missions conducted in India during this period by the Soviet Union on one hand and the United States and Britain on the other. India was interested in opposing China, while the West was focused quite singularly on containing communism—an ideology India no longer had major issues with.
From the late 1960s, U.S. congressional testimonies and journalistic investigations confirmed the role of the CIA in clandestine operations to overthrow regimes abroad—often popular, democratic governments that were friendly toward the Soviet Union. Concurrently, information about India’s collaboration with Western intelligence agencies started becoming public, and misinformation campaigns added to the widespread belief that the Indian system was full of moles and spies working for the CIA and the Soviet KGB.
Paranoia about foreign forces trying to destabilize the country by overthrowing the government became the dominant political narrative. Indian prime ministers certainly raised these questions, while Western countries could never satisfy the Indian public sphere about their role in the country. Intelligence cooperation continued unabated during this period, highlighting the dichotomy between professional effort and domestic politics in India.
At one level, it was “hard-headed pragmatism” at work; at another, Indian apprehensions and the U.S. “trap of projecting [its] own political, cultural, and strategic perceptions and prejudices onto Indians” set rather low limits for this cooperation, McGarr writes. As a result, any effect on the Indian intelligence system was ultimately transient and not transformative.
Washington understands New Delhi much better now than it did during the Cold War, but the lingering specter of the CIA and the gap between U.S. interests and Hindu nationalist rhetoric can raise suspicions in India about U.S. intentions. After his electoral setback in June, Modi blamed “powerful people in the country and abroad” who want to remove him from power. Indian National Security Advisor Ajit Doval is a former intelligence operative who has publicly advocated for covert operations. Indian intelligence agents are currently in trouble for allegedly ordering transnational assassinations of Sikh separatists in North America.
Meanwhile, institutional ties between Indian and U.S. intelligence have never been stronger, as the two countries have become strategic partners. Both U.S. and Indian officials agree that the glue of the contemporary partnership is their common desire to counter the strategic threat from China.
But they could learn a major lesson from the intense intelligence cooperation between New Delhi and Washington in the past: Their interests are currently aligned, but unless rooted in shared values and vision, these calculations can quickly change. History also shows that the United States is not insulated from the vagaries of India’s domestic politics and the popular narrative.
Finally, as India’s intelligence agencies overreach with their overseas operations in friendly Western democracies, they can end up weakening—if not derailing—institutional cooperation between India and the West. Legal cases filed by Sikh groups in the United States have resulted in court summons against Doval and India’s former external intelligence chief. This meant that Doval did not travel with Modi to the United States in September—a first for any foreign tour since Modi took office in 2014.
As India’s intelligence operations come under greater scrutiny, McGarr’s meticulously researched volume is a useful read. A similar book from the Indian perspective would complement this important work, but New Delhi’s penchant for official secrecy no doubt rules out any such possibility.
Spying in South Asia should be read carefully in Western capitals, but it should also be studied by Indian policymakers and commentators, who would do well to help the political establishment treat intelligence operations as a function of governance with checks and balances—and not merely as tools for covert action and justifications for repression.
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