We have found the track of 32 men and three donkeys
Ancient Egyptian intelligence report from the border with Nubia, circa 2000 BC, cited in John Keegan’s Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to Al-Qaeda
Though they are said to be everywhere, we seldom see them, except on television, being led away in handcuffs by burly cops in plain clothes, from car to courtroom.
Real spies may not capture the public’s imagination, but fake ones certainly do. And when they don’t India’s spy-busting counter-intelligence agencies, with the uniformed police as the front, force them on us. Every spy caught is invariably found working for Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), most of them, when produced before television cameras, are attired in bedraggled lungis and soiled singlets, and most also sing like canaries.
On almost all occasions the “secrets” that they share with their unknown handlers are maps of some army cantonment or an obscure air base or ship-building yard. In some cases in the past the same map (for instance, of the Meerut cantonment) was “seized” from two different spies caught years apart. The clincher, of course, is to throw in a line or two on how the ISI-run spies and/or Lashkar-e-Toiba operatives had sinister plans to assassinate the Prime Minister (no less!) and you have the media happily lapping up the stories without posing a single difficult question to our law enforcement agencies.
Espionage Cases
Over the last one month or so, a number of ISI “spies” have been nabbed in Kolkata, Kashmir, Meerut with the latest being a lowly Indian Air Force officer who was picked up by Delhi Police “sleuths” from Bhatinda in Punjab. Notice the timing of the arrests: year-end, when it is time to move recommendations in the Intelligence Bureau and Delhi Police for medals for officers in the spy-catching business.
The Delhi Police, among all police forces in India, has developed particular skills in spy-catching. It is spy season for Delhi Police which appears to have cast its net far and wide to ensnare ISI agents. It has suddenly become seized with finding the “the enemy within.”
Zero Prosecution
The sudden spurt in the arrest of fifth columnists alerts us to another startling fact: while all the spies are charged under the Official Secrets Act and Sections 121 (waging war or attempt to wage war), 121A (conspiracy to commit offences punishable under Section 121), 122 (collecting arms to wage war against the state) and 123 (concealing with intent to facilitate design to wage war), almost none of the cases reach trial. Consequently, there is zero prosecution which is handicapped by shoddy post-arrest investigation and lack of evidence.
What About the ‘Big Fish’?
Our law enforcement agencies have particular expertise to catch these “lowly placed spies” that the Pak ISI recruits from time to time, but are wholly inept when it comes to nabbing the “big fish”. The most celebrated of such a “big fish” was Ravinder Singh, a joint secretary in India’s external intelligence agency, Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), who defected to the US after he was successfully pulled into Nepal by his CIA handler in May 2004.
Singh was kept under surveillance by the RAW’s counter-intelligence section for at least a month, but he successfully evaded his watchers and gave them the slip, before crossing over to Nepal where his CIA case officer guided and moved him safely to the US.
ISI’s Targets
It’s the most wretched of “spies” who are labelled traitors when they are “caught”. The price for which they allegedly sell India’s secrets ranges from as little as Rs 5,000 to as high as Rs 30,000. A former senior intelligence officer revealed the ISI does not quite tire picking potential recruits from the lower ranks of the army and the Border Security Force, though it targets penetrating the upper echelons of the three services and the bureaucracy too.
Between 2001 and 2003, one of India’s security agencies intercepted over 2,500 calls that originated from Pakistan. Most of the phone calls were to lower level officers in the BSF or non-commissioned officers in the army. In certain cases, the ISI handlers would call up the spouses of some officers and offer sympathy for the hard time their husbands would face in tough postings, all with the aim of turning their husbands around.
No Action
The retired officer disclosed something even more shocking. Nearly 50 per cent of the potential recruits or those already being run by the ISI were identified and their profiles shared with the ministries of Home and Defence which took no follow-up action. In other words, neither of the two regulatory ministries informed the police to go ahead and make arrests.
Suddenly, ISI spies have much cachet with the Delhi Police which does not even reinvent them to match with the times that they practice their dark acts. We know that intelligence agencies have consistently displayed a bureaucratic desire to create or exaggerate largely imaginary foreign threats because of a simple organisational desire to justify and expand their own budgetary and political roles, not to mention individual officers seeking promotional laurels.
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