When the Dalai Lama turned 70 a few years back, a Delhi journalist quietly worked on his Tibetan friends for an appointment. But soon after the chat with the Tibetan leader, he got a call from a contact in the Chinese embassy.
“How did the interview go?’’ the diplomat asked. He sounded desperate.
Though the interview was to published soon, he pleaded for a copy of the transcript, and additional information. “How is his health?’’ he asked. When the Dalai Lama is hospitalised, the Chinese are known to fish around for the name of the doctor who is in charge.
Had the journalist cooperated, it would have made a great diplomatic cable — and got the embassy some brownie points back home.
Among the many things that governments pay their diplomats for, is to keep tabs on developments in the host country: only the Americans were clumsy enough to be embarrassed by WikiLeaks.
“It didn’t strike me as odd because these questions are asked all the time,’’ a staffer at a western diplomatic mission says. FAQs from their sources are those that relate to the stability of the government, the possible outcome of an election and unrest of any kind. Apart from hacks, other targets they cultivate are of course Indian diplomats, bureaucrats, businessmen and politicians.
Politicians are pampered according to hierarchy: a low-level political operator, Nachiketa Kapur was allegedly managed by a junior American female diplomat in Delhi. The children of as many 12 bureaucrats in the External Affairs Ministry — some of them quite legitimately, too — study in the USA. Scholarships and seats at prestigious universities, as well as a promise of lucrative corporate jobs for babukids, are powerful motivations to share information with friends. The American style of functioning is quite rigid — contacts are passed on from the envoy to his successor.
Young politicians are much in demand — many current leaders have been to the US on Youth Leadership Programmes.
Mostly, an embassy gets information through ordinary, legitimate means. You lunch with a senior journalist who has access to South Block. You seek a one-on-one meeting with the Joint Secretary in-charge of your region at the Indian Foreign Office. You could be invited to a sit-down dinner (Wouldn’t it be nice to sit next to Rahul Gandhi, and send home a cable on what the Nehru-Gandhi scion feels about nepotism in the Congress the next day?). Or you could be yawning through a debate you have been assigned to watch from Lok Sabha’s diplomatic gallery.
Whoever gets the information or puts a spin on it, the cables are usually sent out by the ambassador or diplomats a rung or two below. The US State Departm ent has a huge staff — mostly contract workers numbering thousands — whose job is to go through miles and miles of cable.
According to a RAW source who had worked in Washington, random cables are picked up and condensed into three line briefs for the President to read. “That’s why most information is shoddy,” he says Most big missions have a press section that scans the Delhi papers every morning.
In some embassies, a short meeting is chaired by a senior diplomat to make sense of the news. Almost every embassy cultivates journalists, businessmen and academics.
They help make sense of the country, if nothing else. The day Express talked to Srikanth Kondapalli, China expert at JNU, he had earlier received the Political Counsellor from a western embassy seeking his opinion on the impact of the Dalai Lama’s decision to give up political power. Diplomats come to academics like him, not because they get any secret information but for an assessment of impact of events, the professor argues. “We are a one-stop shop for ideas.’’ Networking is the information mantra and free foreign travel the big bait; Delhibased think-tanks invite foreign diplomats to their seminars; the embassies in turn facilitate return trips for Indians.
Retired Indian diplomats and military officials are much in demand. Spy scandals involving senior defence officers caught in honey traps — Navy officer Commodore Sukhjinder Singh with a Russian woman for example — reveal the variety of methods used by foreign intelligence agencies. According to diplomatic sources, attractive Eastern European and Chinese female spies are adept at this art. Sometimes the embassies overreach. The Taiwanese mission in Delhi — which goes by the name of Taipei Economic and Cultural Centre because of India’s deference to Beijing’s One China policy — got ticked off by the External Affairs Ministry when it tried to organise a seminar on security issues, where India-China issues would most likely have been discussed.
The Taiwanese too were just doing their job. For them being in Delhi doesn’t mean just keeping an eye on Delhi, but also on Beijing. They too have cables to send home.
— ashwanitalwar@expressbuzz.com
Desi cloak and dagger
Diplomat Madhuri Gupta was arrested of spying for Pakistan, as an act of revenge. Her contact was an ISI officer to whom she passed on at least six sensitive e-mails.
Commodore Sukhjinder Singh got into trouble when compromising pictures of him and a woman identified as an alleged Russian intelligence operative surfaced. Between 2005 and 2007 he was posted in Russia to oversee the refitting of Admiral Gorshkov.
In May 2008, a senior RAW official Manmohan Sharma posted in Beijing was recalled to New Delhi after being ensnared in a Chinese honey trap. In October 2007, a 1975 batch Research and Analysis Service (RAS) operative Ravi Nair was recalled from Hong Kong for his ‘friendship’ with a Chinese woman spy and inexplicably posted to Colombo. He was caught living with the same woman who had followed him to Sri Lanka.
Ex-armyman Rabinder Singh became a CIA mole and defected to the US escaping RAW surveillance in 2004 when he came under suspicion. In 2006 a scandal surfaced about a CIA mole having penetrated India’s National Security Council Secretariat, a part of the Prime Minister’s Office.
Ashok Sathe is believed to have defected to the US. Indian intelligence blames Sathe for burning down a RAW office in Iran.
In the early 90s, an Indian Naval attache posted in Islamabad reportedly had an affair with a Pakistani woman working in the Military Nursing Service in Karachi. Investigations revealed that the official, who claimed he recruited her as a spy, was being blackmailed by the ISI. In the early 1980s, a senior RAW operative who was an Indian diplomat in Kathmandu disappeared in London. A personal assistant to a very senior RAW official also disappeared in London in the early 90s.
On January 17, 1985, the Delhi police arrested Coomar Narain, regional manager of a firm supplying marine engines for passing on secrets to foreign firms. Between August 24, 1978 and January 23, 1979, 50-odd soldiers of the 168 Infantry Brigade at Samba were arrested as Pakistani spies.
Subba Row, a naval scientist was arrested for allegedly trying to secrets on the Indian submarine project secrets to the West. On November 18, 1983, FD Larkins and Lt-Colonel (retired) Jasbir Singh and arms dealer Jaspal Singh Gill were caught passing military documents to an American.
The oldest case of ‘honey trapping’ was when Jawaharlal Nehru was prime minister; an Indian diplomat was entrapped by a Russian girl in Moscow. When KGB released compromising pictures to the Indian ambassador, Nehru laughed it off, warning the young diplomat to be more careful in future.