By way of deception thou shalt do war: Mossad motto
The Black Widows made their appearance in 2003 in the blood-stained hills of Assam and Nagaland as angels of vengeance. One of them was Jewel Garlosa. In the terrorist battleground of the Northeast, where tribal musclemen, leading armed criminal gangs, mowed down countless victims with help from gun runners, scores of rival factions wield power over just a few kilometres of land, criminals and local politicians. April 4, 2003, was a turning point in Jewel’s life. Militants from Hmar’s People’s Convention–Democracy descended on a village in the Chachar district, Assam, dragged away 17 men and killed them. Their widows vowed revenge and called themselves Black Widows. The tribe, which lives in parts of Nagaland and Assam, had been demanding a separate Dimaland: the leitmotif of the Northeast where tribals, who once ruled innumerable fiefdoms, refuse to give up their old independence. Enter Jewel, head of the Dimasa National Security Force (DNSF), which was shut down by the authorities in 1995. He launched Dima Halam Daogah (DHD) and called himself Black Widow.
The violence he unleashed in several districts of Assam made him a wanted man. The police, Army Intelligence, IB and R&AW were searching for him in every godforsaken hamlet and low-budget hotel in the region. A panicked Jewel fled across the border. Indian agents traced him to Nepal. The logistics and efforts needed to arrest a man and snatch him are different. Posing as DHD sympathisers, Indian agents told him that R&AW was closing in on his location and he should flee to Bengaluru, where his trusted lieutenants Partha Nunisa and Samir Dimasa were hiding. When Jewel arrived, a team of Assam and Karnataka Police was waiting for him. For decades, terrorists and militants haunted the Northeast, Kashmir, Karnataka, Kerala, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, murdering civilians and policemen alike, intimidating witnesses, kidnapping businessmen for ransom and executing people they suspected were informers. For decades, the men and women of India’s secret services have been giving or taking no quarter in capturing or eliminating them. Operations at home and abroad are planned and executed with satisfying results.
Whether R&AW agents disguised as Sikhs killed Khalistani radical Hardeep Singh Nijjar will never be irrefutably proved, in spite of a claim by Five Eyes, an intelligence-sharing group comprising the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Ironically, these countries provide safe haven and immigration visas to separatists espousing Khalistan and ‘azadi’ in Kashmir. “The Canadians may not have the necessary proof to establish their allegations, though the Americans perhaps may have more,” says a former R&AW chief on Canadian PM Justin Trudeau’s tirade. Bangladesh foreign minister AK Abdul Momen called Canada a “hub of all the murderers” and that “murderers can go there and take shelter, and they can have a wonderful life while those he killed, their relatives suffer”.
Khandaker Abdur Rashid, the assassin of the founding father of Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, continues to live in Canada. In a British TV interview, he proudly declared, “I have killed Sheikh Mujib. Dare you put me on trial?” A former R&AW officer admits that it has assassination capabilities that are rarely used: rendition is more their style. The few interventions are restricted to the neighbourhood. “We prefer snatch operations. We work with friendly Gulf countries and nab terrorists who go there for holiday or medical treatment from Pakistan. They are nabbed and quietly brought to India for interrogation. The press note mentions they were picked up from the railway station or bus stand.”
The only trials held in the dark world of spies are by spies and the judgment is delivered by guns, bombs or drones. Governments have been conducting covert ops in foreign countries to neutralise threats to their nations from time immemorial; the oldest known classified report is by a spy disguised as a diplomatic envoy at the court of the Babylonian king, Hammurabi. The ancient Egyptians had a spy network, as did Greece and Rome. The war between Queen Elizabeth’s England and Catholic rulers saw espionage activity across Europe and the rise of spymasters such as Sir Francis Walsingham and Robert Cecil. Chanakya was India’s greatest tactician and father of its spycraft. When decolonisation happened in the 20th century, new countries were no strangers to old methods of espionage. The world of intelligence, where spies live and die in the shadows, and enemies of the state die in broad daylight—Bulgarian writer Georgi Markov was stabbed with a poisoned umbrella and Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko tricked into ingesting a lethal dose of polonium-210 by Russian spies—show that murder and treachery is alive and well on earth.
FEAR AND RESPECT
Though the CIA is the world’s largest and most powerful spy outfit, Mossad is its most respected—feared by both foes and friends. Its adventures are the stuff of legend. Operation Finale was its high point: in May 1960, its agents captured Adolph Eichmann, the Nazi architect of the Holocaust. An extraction team, led by agent Peter Malkin, kidnapped him off a quiet, dark street in Argentina and smuggled him to Israel to stand trial for his crimes. It showed the world that no enemy of Israel was free from retaliation, no matter where they lived.
In 1962, Mossad initiated Operation Damocles against a team of Nazi German rocket scientists hired by Egypt, some of whom had worked in the murderous Schutzstaffel. Operation Wrath of God was Mossad’s most complicated coup: after Palestinian terrorists murdered Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972, Prime Minister Golda Meir sent assassination teams (Kidon) after the perpetrators. Between 1972 and 1988, all the terrorists who had taken refuge in France, Greece, Italy and Lebanon were dead. India is not immunised from the consequences of this conflict. In 2012, the Delhi Police concluded that it was Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that allegedly planted a sticky bomb on an Israeli diplomat’s car earlier that year. Iran had accused Mossad of assassinating four of its top nuclear scientists.
Israel is on top of the hit list by Islamists. After discovering in the late 1970s that the French were aiding Saddam Hussein to develop a nuclear reactor, the Israeli Air Force bombed the reactor near Baghdad in 1981, acting on information from local agents; first, Mossad destroyed two cores, which were waiting shipment to Iraq from France. In 2006, its agents broke into the hotel suite of Ibrahim Othman, the director of the Syrian Atomic Energy Commission, in Vienna and hacked his laptop. They discovered evidence of Syria collaborating with North Korean nuclear scientists and pictures of a nuclear site. On September 6, 2007, IDF (Israeli Defence Forces) fighter jets bombed the reactor.
“The IDF takes any threat against Israelis very seriously, and will operate against any threat to our civilians,” the IDF tweeted. In 2008, in a joint operation with CIA, Mossad agents car-bombed Imad Mugniyeh in Damascus; he had come to dine with Qassem Soleimani, the head of the Iranian Quds force. (Soleimani himself was killed in a CIA drone strike in Iraq.) Mossad’s Enemy No. 1 is Iran now. In 2021, its agents ran a secret operation spanning 18 months, 1,000 technicians to hit Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility. They recruited 10 senior Iranian scientists who were tricked into blowing up their own nuclear plant.
Nearly 90 percent of the centrifuges were destroyed, delaying work on Ayatollah’s bomb. In 2019, Mossad operatives detonated hidden explosives in the materials used to construct the centrifuge. Though Tehran tried its best to keep developments under wraps, two subsequent explosions at Iranian nuclear facilities had the Mossad touch.
INDIA’S NEW DOCTRINE WITH TEETH
Like Israel, India has been attacked, its planes hijacked and missions bombed by separatists, who are well financed by Pakistan’s notorious spy agency Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). India’s own spy agency, which goes under the innocuous name, Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), has its hands full, protecting national interests abroad by identifying, defusing and sometimes bribing radicals. Declassified documents reveal that its agents had successfully infiltrated Khalistani outfits in the 1980s. R&AW set up two counterintelligence teams to act against the terrorists: CIT-X and CIT-J. The first would target Pakistan, and the second, Khalistani militants. Using its contacts in the West, where separatist leaders had taken refuge, the agents outed nearly all Khalistani elements operating in Punjab. R&AW worked with IB and MI in the Northeast to control militancy in the region. Declassified reports revealed that the intelligence agency-funded rebel outfits and pro-democracy parties like the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) to establish a pro-India government in Myanmar.
But the KIA operation went south and Operation Leech was green-lighted. In 1998, six top KIA leaders were shot dead. Reports mention R&AW’s snatch operations of terrorists from foreign countries to bring them home to justice; it has carried out about 400 such operations in Nepal and Bangladesh. It captured terrorists such as Lashkar militants Tariq Mehmood and Abdul Karim Tunda, and Yasin Bhatkal, the founder of Indian Mujahideen. Sheikh Abdul Khwaja, a handler of the 2008 Mumbai attacks, was also captured. Internal squabbles and politics, however, prevented the UPA government from fully exploiting domestic intelligence potential: in fact, the Army’s spy agency TSD, feared by Pakistan’s ISI for its capacity to strike deep inside Pakistan, was dismantled, and its head, Colonel Hunny Bakshi, prosecuted unsuccessfully. In 2008, when the Congress was in power, 58 people were killed and 141 injured when a car bomb went off near the Indian Embassy in Kabul. Western intel services snooping on ISI radio chatter identified Pakistani officers congratulating the plotters.
Then NSA, MK Narayanan, declared, “Talk-talk is better than fight-fight, but it hasn’t worked. I think we need to pay back in the same coin.” “But the political will was poor. After Narendra Modi became PM and Ajit Doval NSA, the mood has changed. Operations now have more teeth,” says a former R&AW chief. Avinash Paliwal, a reader in international relations at SOAS University of London, who has written about R&AW’s foreign operations, took the Doval Doctrine a step forward, telling The Financial Times that “India might just be, or is, the new Israel”. India and Israel have excellent joint intel cooperation. Counter-intelligence works well when domestic and foreign agencies come together to catch traitors. Last week, Uttar Pradesh’s Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) arrested ISI spy Shailesh Kumar Singh who had worked as a temp at Indian Army sites and passed on information and photos about the location and movement of vehicles. In May, a 59-year-old DRDO scientist, who had been honey-trapped by the ISI, was arrested for spying.
TERRORISTS ON THE RUN
The ISI is worried about the sudden spurt in killings of anti-India radicals in Pakistan. This week, Qaiser Farooq, a Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) terrorist who was also the aide of the Mumbai 26/11 mastermind Hafiz Saeed, was shot dead in Karachi. On May 6, 2023, the boss of the banned Khalistan Commando Force, Paramjit Singh Panjwar, was shot dead in Lahore. Harvinder Singh Sandhu, who was named in the 2021 RPG attack on the Punjab Police HQ in Mohali, died in the same city, reportedly of a drug overdose. He was a smuggler of weapons and drugs; the link between gangsters and separatists abroad; and an alleged participant in the Sidhu Moosewala killing.
The despicable obituaries don’t end there. Kupwara-born Bashir Ahmad Peer, a former commander of Hizbul Mujahideen was shot dead in Rawalpindi on February 20; he sent terrorists across the LoC to conduct attacks in India. Syed Khalid Raza, a former commander of Al Badr Mujahideen group, was gunned down outside his Karachi house on February 27.
In March 2022, Zahoor Mistry, who participated in the 1999 hijacking of IC-814 from the Kathmandu airport, was shot dead in Karachi by gunmen on bikes who fled the scene. Zahoor was a high-value target for India: he was behind the 2016 Pathankot airbase assault and the 2019 Pulwama massacre of 40 CRPF soldiers.
R&AW is also keeping a close watch on known radical gangs, often rivals, operating in friendly countries. In Birmingham, the head of the banned Khalistan Liberation Force and bomb-maker, Avtar Singh Khanda, died from ‘unknown causes’ on June 16 this year. He had attacked and removed the Tricolour from the Indian High Commission in London. Canada, a country with liberal visa laws and poor intelligence, lacks the political will to resist the Khalistan movement or Pakistan’s schemes. In December 2020, Karima Baloch, a 37-year-old dissident Pakistani human rights activist who was granted asylum in Canada in 2016, was kidnapped and murdered in Toronto. In spite of global uproar over foul play, the Canadian police ruled the death of Baloch as “non-criminal”. Pakistan’s all-weather ally China is the new power player in global espionage, using brazenly innovative ideas like establishing secret police stations to identify and interrogate anti-Communist Chinese living abroad. The Spain-based NGO, Safeguard Defenders, exposed a Chinese Ministry of Public Security announcement in September 2022 of its “first batch” of “30 overseas police service stations in 25 cities in 21 countries”. By December, Safeguard Defenders located such police stations existing in more than 100 countries, including Canada, Nigeria, Japan, Argentina and Spain.
THE KEYBOARD THREAT
Espionage has many dimensions, of which HUMINT— information gained through human sources—is the oldest. The evolution of technology led to the rise of SIGINT (signals intelligence), IMINT (imagery intelligence), MASINT (geospatial intelligence), OSINT (open-source intelligence) and FININT (financial intelligence). Cyber espionage targets political, commercial and military institutions and is favoured by governments, state-sponsored groups and agenda-driven individuals. Destabilising hostile countries, both during war and peace time, is a crucial intelligence function. Hitting the enemy where it hurts the most—the economy—is an established move. The FBI defines economic espionage as “the act of knowingly targeting or acquiring trade secrets to benefit any foreign government, foreign instrumentality or agent”.
The best delivery vehicle is a cyber attack. Cyber threats fall into four categories: Cybercrime, cyber espionage, cyber-terrorism and cyber warfare. Cyber warfare uses computers to target information systems: the Ukranians have unleashed cyber technology against the Russians, causing havoc on the battlefront. The 2019 Situation Report of the Swiss Federal Intelligence Service states, “Cyber espionage is difficult to detect, the perpetrators can hardly be successfully prosecuted… (and) denied based on the lack of provability.” Washington is concerned about Russian trolls, especially after Russian interference in the 2014 US election was proved; type “Putin…” on Google in the US or Canada and the drop-down menu is “awesome” or “a hero”. Google uses AI now to determine site rankings and number of clicks. China hacked Microsoft and accessed emails of senior US State Department diplomats, including the US ambassador in Beijing. It is free for all in the online spy war.
NSA documents taken by Edward Snowden describe a British unit named the Joint Threat Research and Intelligence Group (JTRIG) whose job is to attack its enemies like Iran with the goal to “destroy, deny, degrade (and) disrupt” by “discrediting” them, planting misinformation and shutting down their communications.
China, a relatively new player in cyber intelligence, is being taken by the US seriously after it shot down a Chinese balloon, which had penetrated American and Canadian airspace. China has improved its satellite reconnaissance capabilities, which are its best bet to gather intelligence. The West is persuading other countries to crack down on Chinese communication companies: Xiaomi has been on the Indian government radar for a few years now. American media has outed Chinese agents using sites like LinkedIn to entice potential recruits in intelligence jobs.
The FBI has thousands of ongoing Chinese intelligence investigations. Both China and the US have signed covert intelligence-sharing agreements with other governments and upped the propaganda in crucial cities like Brussels, Abu Dhabi and Singapore to spread influence and recruit agents. In 1978, Morarji Desai gave the list of R&AW assets in Pakistan to General Zia ul-Haq, who promptly had them arrested and executed, setting back India’s intelligence-gathering capabilities by decades. Similarly, all CIA human assets in China were exposed and eliminated by Chinese counter-intelligence. President Xi Jinping is leading the new intelligence dynamics: though he has no spy background like former KGB agent Putin, he has been startlingly effective in expanding and upgrading electronic surveillance. China has developed facial recognition software and an AI programme that detects the gait of individual American spies, thereby limiting their effectiveness to discover Chinese agents trailing them en route to meeting sources.
DIRTY DOZENS
Spy agencies resort to dirty tricks when the situation demands it. A document cleared for release by the CIA in the 1970s defines dirty tricks as: 1. Provide hidden funds to political parties abroad to influence elections; 2. Set up dummy organisations and channel money to organisations that are engaged in scholarships and cultural affairs; 3. Establish private companies, including airlines; 4. Facilitate coups by supporting, training and leading mercenaries in foreign countries; 5. Set up security police organisations abroad. Historical evidence points at the CIA of attempts to kill pro-Soviet prime minister of Congo, Patrice Lumumba, in 1960. Sometimes the images blur; a favourite Russian method to kill dissidents is by delivering poisonous substances to victims. A CIA spy was sent to inject Lumumba with a lethal virus; it was cancelled after his government was dissolved in 1960.
The Sixties was a decade of political murders: Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, president Sukarno of Indonesia and President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam were targeted. In 1973, Chile’s Leftist president, Salvador Allende, was overthrown in a CIA-backed coup. Western intelligence agencies are often accused of colluding with powerful corporations. Documents discovered in an abandoned Libyan government office after the fall of Muammar Gaddafi showed that two leading Libyan dissidents were abducted and taken to Tripoli with their families, with the help of MI6: after Gaddafi reached an understanding with the UK and US, he abandoned his WMD programme and gave Western firms approval to start oil and gas explorations in Libya.
Intimidating dissidents living abroad is a favourite weapon of authoritarian countries like China, Russia, Pakistan and Iran. Two years ago, Ayesha Siddiqa, a London-based Pakistani commentator, received a “threat to life” notice—known as an Osman warning—from the Metropolitan police. Gul Bukhari, a British-Pakistani YouTuber and columnist who openly criticised the military, fled to the UK after being abducted and held by security forces in Lahore in 2018. In 2022, Pakistani hitman Muhammad Gohir Khan was convicted for conspiring to murder Pakistani blogger and political activist, Ahmad Waqass Goraya living in Rotterdam. The British Police has warned Pakistani critics of the omniscient military that their lives are in danger. Other global intelligence services have warned of ISI attacks on Pakistani dissidents from Balochistan, ethnic Pashtun activists and journalists.
If diplomacy is war by other means, espionage is the means to the end. Where the long arm of the law cannot reach, the short arm of a spy does the job. Mossad or R&AW, CIA or MI6, terrorists can expect no mercy. The Canadians are just finding that out to their discomfort.
CHANAKYA—FATHER OF INDIA’S SPYCRAFT
The story goes that young Chanakya assassinated King Porus after striking a bargain with his ally to defeat the arrogant King Dhanananda in return for half of the Nanda kingdom. Subsequently, Chanakya dispatched vishakanyas—female seductress fed on poison— to assassinate Porus. True or not, Chanakya was also a great spymaster whose treatise on statecraft Arthashastra has details about the craft of espionage. His dream was to make Chandragupta the emperor and make the Magadha Empire greater. And he did, ruthlessly eliminating anyone who stood in its way—insiders and outsiders. Killing enemies of the state is an ancient practice. In India it is as old as time, with references to espionage in Rigveda, Yajurveda, Samaveda, Atharaveda, Shukaraniti, Kamndaka-Nitisara and Mudrarakshasa by Vishakhadatta. Ancient Indian spies were called chara who were employed by the Chara Sangthan, which reported to the ruler or his trusted associate. Espionage is a historical component of South Asian statecraft in order to strategise on diplomatic conduct. Chanakya used a complicated process to select spies—they had to be physically and mentally fit, loyal and patriotic. There is a separate department of spies who specialise in assassination and infiltration. The Arthashastra has four kinds of espionage strategies (upayas) that concern domestic and foreign spy operations: sama (conciliation); dama (buying loyality with bribes); danda (force, punishment or torture) and bheda (divide and rule).
CULTURE VULTURES
Intelligence wars were not fought in dark alleys and on missile sites alone. Culture is an open terrain for propagandists to influence opinion in foreign countries and at home. Both the CIA and Soviets used films, books, magazines and cultural centres to glorify their history and lifestyle. The CIA produced Hollywood movies such as 1984 and Animal Farm, based on George Orwell’s novels, to expose the ‘evil’ USSR. It took writers and poets on junkets and courted embittered pro-Russian intellectuals in the West with gifts and free holidays. “The CIA’s influence was not always, or often, reactionary and sinister,” wrote America’s liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger. “In my experience, its leadership was politically enlightened and sophisticated.” Both the CIA and KGB owned airlines, radio stations, newspapers, insurance companies and real estate across the world. The CIA spent $500,000 to launch the magazine Perspectives to discredit non-Communist Leftist intellectuals in France, England, Italy and Germany in their own languages.
The Soviets too weaponised cinema and books more effectively in South Asia where available reading and viewing was of Western products. Joseph Stalin is quoted saying, “The production of souls is more important than the production of tanks.” Between 1946 and 1954, the Soviet Union unleashed the Central United Film Studios and the Committee on Cinema Affairs to attack the West. Soviet soft power in Asia used the publications Soviet Land, Soviet Woman, Soviet Sports, Soviet Literature to attract Indians, both in English and vernacular languages. Philip Knightley, author of The Second Oldest Profession: Spies and Spying in the Twentieth Century, and managing editor of the Bombay-based magazine Imprint, was told by Harry Rositzke, former chief of the CIA’s Soviet Bloc division in Washington, that the journal was one of his little operations when he was CIA station chief in New Delhi.
Like the CIA, the Soviets paid for authors to travel to and live in Russia to work as translators; some even stayed on. Children and youth were a desirable propaganda demographic. A children’s magazine My Weekly Reader published by the CIA in the 60s and 70s highlighted the horrors of Soviet totalitarian society. Beautifully illustrated Soviet books, fairy tales, nursery rhymes and children’s stories were distributed by the KGB to attract young minds to its cause in South Asia, where the agency even owned bookshops. The CIA smuggled works of pro-democracy authors into Russia in food cans and Tampax boxes: one million books were disseminated to readers over 15 years.
Soft power includes beauty contests, too. Spy agencies held regular beauty contests during the Cold War. Back in 1990, 23-year-old Soviet beauty Katya Mayorova, became the first crowned Miss KGB, and title-holder of ‘Security Services Beauty.’ Her photo, wearing pearls and holding a pistol was splashed in the front page of Komsomolskaya Pravda; the accompanying article said Mayorova wore her bulletproof vest with “exquisite softness, like a Pierre Cardin model”. Starting in 1958, America’s NSA held beauty pageants throughout the Cold War. Fifteen spy ‘Princesses’ were selected for the Fall Festival pageant, with crowns starting from Queen to runner-up Maid of Honour. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police Security Service (RCMP SS) held its beauty contest in the early 1950s, with winner chosen for 10 points each for hair, face, figure, dress, poise and personality.
HIDE & SEEK TOP COVERT OPERATIONS
The Red Orchestra: It was a network of communist spies operating across Germany during WW II. It provided intelligence to the Soviet government and acted as a resistance organisation against Nazis.
Operation Mincemeat: In April 1943, the corpse of a tramp was dressed as a British Royal Marine and sent floating off the coast of Spain with an attaché case chained to the wrist, which contained a letter outlining a secret Allied scheme to stage an invasion of Sardinia and Greece. Duped by the bogus intelligence, Hitler diverted forces to Greece, and in July 1943, the Allies invaded Sicily and Italy.
Operation Wrath of God: In the aftermath of the 1972 Munich Massacre, Mossad assassinated those responsible for the attack. It continued for years and Ali Hassan Salameh, the mastermind of the massacre, was killed in 1979.
Glomar/AZORIAN:
In 1974, CIA built a ship called the Glomar Explorer to snatch a wrecked Soviet submarine from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean—one of the greatest intel successes of the Cold War.
Argo: On November 4, 1979, militant Islamic students took 66 US personnel hostage inside the US Embassy in Tehran. Six US State Department employees avoided capture by taking refuge in the homes of Canadian Embassy officers. The CIA team created a dummy film production company to rescue the ‘Canadian Six’. They were exfiltrated on January 28, 1980.
Operation Farewell: It was a CIA campaign of computer sabotage during the Cold War in 1981. A high-level KGB officer, Colonel Vladimir Vetrov, decided to switch sides. He provided the Farewell dossier, exposing how the Soviets were stealing or buying advanced technology from the West. To counter it, the CIA planted flawed designs for technology that planted doubts in Soviet minds about the reliability of technology from the West.
Jawbreaker: In the aftermath of the 9/11 attack, George W Bush ordered the CIA to launch operations against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Within 15 days, Operation Jawbreaker was collecting real-time, actionable intelligence in its battle against terror.
Abbottabad Mission: On May 1, 2011, the US military launched a surgical raid on an al-Qaeda compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, to kill Osama bin Laden, America’s most-wanted terrorist.