Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years Part 9

Or the killing of Hurriyat leader Prof. Abdul Ghani Bhat's brother; this deeply alienated Prof. Bhat from Geelani. Indeed, Geelani began to be called Amir-e-Jehad; some began to call him Bub Jehad. Kashmiris used to call Sheikh Saheb Bub, which translates to Dad.

9.

SPY Vs. SPY

The one person I never met while I was R&AW chief was my Pakistani counterpart, the ISI chief, a position held by two successive people during my tenure: Gen. Ziauddin b.u.t.t and General Mahmud, who was burned by the fact that in 2000 we turned Majid Dar around. It's not that I was overly keen to meet the ISI chief, but it is strange that I met the CIA chief, the Mossad chief, the Russian intelligence service chiefand even the inscrutable head of the Chinese secret service. Meeting other chiefs was a part of the job. One needed to maintain liaison with other services. What didn't make sense was never liaising with the ISI chief. The CIA and the KGB never stopped talking to each other even during the worst days of the Cold War; it is doc.u.mented that during the Cuban missile crisis at the height of the Cold War, US president John F. Kennedy and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev were writing and talking to one another. Whereas we, at the drop of a hat, stop talking to the Pakistanis.

After I left the government altogether I continued to advocate this in the various track two dialogues between India and Pakistan that I joined (these are non-official meetings of retired soldiers, academics, bureaucrats, journalists and others which help in generating out-of-the-box ideas to better bilateral relations that can't otherwise be taken up at official meetings). It wasn't as if a R&AW chief had never met the ISI chiefin the late 1980s, one of my predecessors, A.K. Verma, had two meetings with his counterpart, Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul. Thus it wasn't a heretical idea, and could hold some benefits. I even wrote a paper about it with former ISI chief Lt. Gen. Asad Durrani, whom I often met at meetings of retired intelligence chiefs.

The Pakistanis have been keen to meet. During my tenure at R&AW, we used to forever be getting these messages from friendly intelligence agencies: why don't you meet the Pakistanis, they are keen to meet. Sometimes we would hear it from the Saudis; sometimes from the Iranians; and sometimes from the Sri Lankans. And once, someone even as innocuous as the South Africans said: why don't you and the Pakistanis talk? The thing was, the Americans and the British would stay out of all of this though they were the ones who actually wanted this meeting of the secret services. It must have been one of their ways of trying to get things going.

One day I went and told the national security advisor. 'Sir, yeh messages aate rehte hain,' I said. 'Mil ke toh dekhte hain, isme harz kya hai. Dekh hi le.'

'Nahin-nahin,' Brajesh Mishra responded. 'Abhi time theek nahin hain.'

Perhaps he thought I wasn't hawkish enough to be talking to the Pakistanis.

Eventually, the R&AW chief was dispatched to meet the ISI chief to firm up details for the ceasefire that Pakistan announced in November 2003; C.D. Sahay and Ehsanul Haq met in July August of that year, and according to Sahay, it really helped the situation in Kashmir as infiltration plummeted in October 2003; along with the successful and fair 2002 a.s.sembly election in J&K, it led to the deputy prime minister starting a dialogue with the separatists in January 2004. The ISI also acknowledges that timely intelligence provided by R&AW about a likely Jaish-e-Mohammed attack may have saved President Musharraf's life in 2004. Musharraf himself is said to have acknowledged it. Incidentally, two of the Jaish militants involved were hanged in Pakistan after the attack in a Peshawar school in December 2014. And there was another meeting, between Sahay's successor P.K. Hormis Tharakan and his counterpart Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, who later became the army chief.

Letting the R&AW chief and the ISI chief meet is an idea that makes sense. There's no question of a hidden agenda, and in any case we know each other's agendait is simply each other. From the Pakistani point of view, if the intelligence chiefs meet then the leaders can also meet; the army chiefs could meet and then you could have a summit meeting, for one thing follows another.

Also, if I go by Asad Durrani's way of thinkingwhich is how intelligence people thinkthen intelligence chiefs can do so much for their governments and their leaders which can remain non-attributable. It always helps the political process.

In fact, making one of R&AW's Islamabad posts an open post on a reciprocal basis would be a good idea.

An open post is one where the host country knows you're an intelligence man and that you're there for cooperation and collaboration. As opposed to the open post, of course, is the undercover posting, which is supposed to be secret and unannounced. In New Delhi, the CIA has an open post, as does the British MI6; their representatives interact with our agency people here. We have open posts in Was.h.i.+ngton, DC, in Moscow, in New York and in Paris.

Yes, Paris sounds odd since there isn't much to do there, and there was a move in my time to give it up. We had been asking for more undercover posts, and the geniuses at the Ministry of External Affairs said if you want any new posts you'll have to cut down on existing ones. One of our bright guys suggested we give up Paris. Though I had never served in Paris and was leaving the organisation in six months, I felt Paris should not be lost; it was a good reward for service rendered to the organisation. And now with the current s.h.i.+ft in the global security scenario it would seem the retention of high level intelligence liaison is absolutely essential. However, I was aghast at the suggestion to close down Paris.

Pakistan, on the other hand, is no ball. It's not an easy posting; there is watertight surveillance, much of it open and meant to scare off fellow Pakistanis, even those who just want to socialise. One of our guyswho did good work there mentioned an incident where he invited several Pakistani acquaintances to lunch at a restaurant in Islamabad. It was a fun lunch, but afterwards when the guests came outside, they found a whole bunch of plainclothes men standing beside their motorcycles, waiting for them; and all of them stood in menacing poses with their arms folded. Each of the guests looked deflated, not looking forward to the prospect of being grilled about their meeting with the Indian.

Many diplomats, including some of ours, have even been physically manhandled by their Pakistani hosts. And to top it all, often the posting has been filled arbitrarilyyou just pick somebody and say, go to Islamabad, which led me to suggest that Islamabad should be declared an open post. It would not only make life comfortable for the person posted there but also yield greater output if we were interacting directly with the ISI. Since we don't talk to Pakistan, how can we 'open' anything; the status quo continues. Such is the mindset and obsession with Pakistan that we retract even from so-called ISI agents. This has been an opinion about postings in the recent past, which led me to tell the chief of the moment that the Islamabad posting is a waste and that there should be an open post.

This is something that would be very hard for a lot of people to swallow but let's face it, the most important work R&AW does is in the neighbourhood, besides maintaining its relations.h.i.+ps with Was.h.i.+ngton and Moscow. There is no point in looking at Tokyo or Johannesburg, for instance. And in our neighbourhood our most important relations.h.i.+p, if it were to get started and inst.i.tutionalised, would be the R&AWISI one because it is out of this relations.h.i.+p that you could get positives. Also it would rid us of the 'hauwa' of the ISI. We make it out to be much bigger than it is. As a former militant commander who spent considerable time in Pakistan told me, 'There are some very fine officers in the ISI, but no one of Doval's intellect or C.D. Sahay's operational ac.u.men.' I have found them not very different from us except that they are from the army, which calls the shots in Pakistan, the reason why ISI is called a state within a state. During my visit to Karachi in 2011 a TV channel asked me what I thought of the ISI and I said I would love to be DG ISI.

Other relations.h.i.+ps are merely cosmetic. Take the relations.h.i.+p with the CIA, for instance: you meet them, have a meeting where you follow a script saying this is what we are doing, this is what is happening. And they reciprocate with their worldview. But none of it gets you anywhere, because in the end, every country, every agency has its own agenda.

Hence if both India and Pakistan could get past their cynicism and their huge distrust, there's a lot that the two intelligence agencies could do together.

Such is our mindset and obsession with Pakistan that we shy away even from so-called ISI agents; that's what makes handling Kashmir so much more difficult. Their agents should be first targets. Whatever they could do we could do better. We had the upper hand because Kashmir and Kashmiris were a part of India. Even Kashmiris living across have needed our help. Double agents are the best agents; the business of intelligence is about sinners, not saints. And that is where the ISI scores over us professionally; they never give up on a target even if reckoned to be the most Indian. That was how they a.s.siduously pursued Sajad Lone despite his partic.i.p.ating in the 2000 elections when Geelani wanted his party, the People's Conference, boycotted by the Hurriyat. That was how they got Majid Dar's wife to Pakistan despite killing her husband and maiming her for life.

Instead, we have to work through others, like the Americans. In chapter two I mentioned the meeting with CIA chief George Tenet, who was easy to get along with; at a dinner the night he arrived held at my official residence, he knocked back a few gla.s.ses of whisky and made a big show of what a pal he was. (He and his wife invited Paran and me to accompany them to the Taj Mahal the next day, in his private jet; we went, but in our own R&AW Gulfstream.) Tenet had come and told me that we needed to check General Musharraf out ourselves, and that Musharraf was somebody with whom you could do business. Remember at that time we still had the bitter aftertaste of Kargil. You could say that this was one of the steps that led to the IndiaPakistan summit the following summer at, by coincidence, Agra.

Similarly, we had another American drop in: the head of the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Centre (CTC), Cofer Black. Black was a veteran CIA hand whom al-Qaeda tried to a.s.sa.s.sinate when he was the head of station in Sudan from 1993 to '95. He was also blamed by the 9/11 Commission for not informing the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of the entry into the US of two of the plane hijackers, who were under CTC surveillance along with other members of al-Qaeda.

Cofer Black had come to India to visit Brajesh Mishra, and he was pa.s.sed along to R&AW. We had a formal meeting with some of my guys, during which he asked for a private one-on- one with me. During this chat, he said that his agency was putting heavy pressure on the ISI to reduce the violence. He then said that we, meaning the Indian agencies, had to reciprocate and not indulge in any violence. So I told him: 'Us? We never do such stuff.'

There were several times, though, when we were frustrated with the violence; particularly when we were working out a relations.h.i.+p with someone in Kashmir, and that person would get b.u.mped off by the ISI. It happened with too many Kashmiris, and in the previous chapters I have mentioned Abdul Majid Dar and Abdul Ghani Lone. Each time someone was killed by the Pakistanis there was huge frustration and there were discussions, at times, of the need for a t.i.t-for-tat policy. But it remained only an informal discussion because no government in Delhi would approve of it. That the 'Bub Jihad' is still alive and kicking despite all the mayhem that he has been responsible for is a tribute to our liberal traditions. Whether or not this helped us in Kashmir is a debatable matter. I am of the firm belief it did because, as Mufti said, making Geelani a martyr would be counterproductive. Farooq would have been quite happy and willing to roll him down the Jhelum.

The issue of retaliation came up also in the context of hara.s.sment of our diplomats in Islamabad. In early 1990 when there was extreme tension in J&K, both MEA and R&AW favoured more aggressive surveillance of Pakistani diplomats in Delhi. But from the counterintelligence viewpoint it would be counterproductive. Following someone when he knows he is being followed may be a crude deterrent but serves no intelligence purpose. For the same reason I believe making public the taped conversations of Musharraf and Aziz Khan during the Kargil war, whatever political purpose it served, was a mistake. It dried up a crucial channel of information.

Even the talk of killing Dawood Ibrahimthe underworld don who is said to have masterminded the 1993 serial bombings in Mumbai, and who subsequently fled Mumbai and is said to be hiding in Pakistanhas taken place outside of the government and has not been sanctioned by any government of the day.

Hence in Kashmir, although counter-insurgency operations have exacted a heavy toll, and though there are many takers for b.u.mping off unsavoury characters, we have not adopted a policy on extra-judicial executions. As Lone Saheb's son Sajad once said to me in a pique, justifying why it was too risky for a Kashmiri to cooperate with India rather than Pakistan: 'What's the most you can do, throw us in jail? The ISI-walas will shoot us dead.'

That brings up the question that if we didn't have a t.i.t-for- tat policy to kill, then how did we get people on our side. And the simple answer is: selling peace through a sustained dialogue. There is no better way. People may find it difficult to believe that the reputed Mossad chief, Efraim Halevy, who incidentally was my contemporary and whom I met in Tel Aviv in 1999, was a firm votary of dialogue. He understood that the Palestinian militant faction, Hamas, could neither be demolished nor cowed down and that talking was the only way out. That is what some sensible people do and that is what we did: talk, talk and talk almost endlessly. In the end it is all about human relations.h.i.+ps; little gestures, like a surprise birthday cake, go a long way in building friends.h.i.+ps. Operations require sensitive human judgement and a feel for the quarry.

When I left the government in 2004, once the NDA lost power (I didn't resign due to any political affiliation but due to what I thought was propriety; it will come up later in the book) I was made the villain of the NDA's Kashmir policy by several who thought I was throwing around money too freely, bribing my way through Kashmir. People in the IB, my former organisation, and higher-ups apparently told Kashmiris, 'Dulat has spoilt you.' Maybe. But for more than the last ten years since I left the government, Kashmiri leaders including separatists still visit me regularly when I have little more to offer than tea and sympathy.

Using money to win people over is perhaps the most effective tool at the disposal of intelligence officers not just in Kashmir, and not just all over the subcontinent, but all over the world. Most agents are paid agents. If in Kashmir, for instance, you find someone who is working for the ISI, you just offer a lot more money than it does. Perhaps he will be afraid of getting killed by the ISI but at the very least you have neutralised him. Corrupting a person by giving him money is not only a lot more ethical than killing him, but a lot smarter in the long run. And no one has yet come up with a better way of dealing with Kashmir. Money in Kashmir goes back a long, long way.

The most important R&AW posts, apart from Islamabad, are basically tourist spots in the east and west where money and secrets frequently change hands. On a visit to an important North African country in the summer of 2000, the intelligence chief said that London was the headquarters of international terrorism. I was taken aback but most intelligence agencies recognise that London remains the hub because dissident groups from all over the world have congregated there. To their credit they keep people under strict, if discreet, watch.

Once word of our talking to Kashmiris got out, expatriates also got into the act. The first to arrive were the three from London. There is a story of three Kashmiris in London Abdullah Raina, Khurs.h.i.+d Ha.s.san Drabu and A. Majid Tramboowho came visiting India in January 1994. Drabu and Tramboo were immigration barristers. Tramboo was from a well-known business family in Kashmir and he had married a Pandit girl from Amritsar. Raina was an educationist who had spent twenty-five years teaching at Sopore degree college, where he was a contemporary of Hurriyat leader Prof. Abdul Ghani Bhat and of Saifuddin Soz, previously a courtier of Farooq Abdullah but later a member of the Congress party; when Raina emigrated to London, he and his wife got jobs as teachers. These three men set up in London what was called the Kashmir Council for Human Rights, of which barrister Tramboo was the general secretary. In sync with the general change of mood among Kashmiris in Kashmir and in Pakistan, the diaspora Kashmiris were also concerned about the destructive violence that was going nowhere, and they had also decided that enough was enough; something needed to be done politically.

Raina, Drabu and Tramboo figured it was better to go to Pakistan first and see what the thinking was there, as also seek Pakistani clearance. They landed in Islamabad and stayed at the Holiday Inn, and inevitably met the ISI: Brig. Faisal Dar, the head of the political wing of the Kashmir desk, and the chief, Lt. Gen. Javed Ashraf Qazi. The ISI guys, unsurprisingly, cut to the chase and asked them to be Pakistani agents in London, telling them to do something similar to what Ayub Thakur was doing for the ISI.

Ayub Thakur was a nuclear physicist who was born in Shopian in the Valley, and who had been stripped of Indian citizens.h.i.+p just a few months earlier because he was an ISI agent in London. As a lecturer at Kashmir University in the late 1970s, he was also a leader of the Islami Jamiat-e-Talaba and organised protests against India in 1980 for which he had to spend time in jail. After that he migrated, first to Saudi Arabia, where he taught for six years, then to London. In London he set up the World Kashmir Freedom Movement (WKFM). In the years after 9/11, the USA's FBI would identify Thakur's outfits as being funded by the ISI.

When the ISI suggested that they return to London as its agents, Raina, Drabu and Tramboo declined saying that they were quite clear that they wanted to remain neutral. The three said they only wanted to deal with Kashmir, and that they were not interested in Pakistan and jehad, etc. 'We are agents of the Kashmiri people, not of Pakistan or of India,' they told the ISI. They were simply looking for a breakthrough that would lead to forward movement in Kashmir.

The three arrived in Delhi and approached us in the IB's K- group, saying exactly the same thing they said to the Pakistanis: 'We are well-wishers of Kashmir,' they said. 'We are told the government of India is thinking of reviving the political process. Maybe we can help, we know some of these people.'

They wanted permission to meet the separatists who were in jail: Abdul Ghani Lone, Syed Ali Shah Geelani, Yasin Malik and Shabir Shah. We said, sure, go ahead.

Raina, Drabu and Tramboo met Lone and Geelani in Tihar Jail, and both of them suspiciously asked: 'How come you've been allowed to meet us?' They gave some c.o.c.k-and-bull about going as friends, and they all chatted. Then the three met Yasin, who was at the All India Inst.i.tute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) due to his cardiac problem; and they went to Jammu, where Shabir was incarcerated. They also visited Srinagar and talked to a bunch of people.

When they returned, they recommended that Yasin should be released. They said that Yasin and Shabir were positive, but Yasin was extremely positive, that he was reasonable and cooperative. Then they went to Pakistan, where they probably reported what happened here.

Raina, Drabu and Tramboo were back in Delhi that September, by which time Yasin had been released (and Shabir was on the verge of being released). The three said that Yasin needed supportwe'll get to Yasin in detail, later in the book and that he ought to be strengthened. They again visited Srinagar, they talked to people, and when they returned they spoke of money.

As I said, money is an effective tool, but in this case the question of money caused a falling out between the three British Kashmiris. Drabu eventually became an immigration judge, and after retirement he became an advisor to the Muslim Council of Britain, which he had helped found. As for Raina, I met him again in 2014 in London, where the old fellow came looking like Father Christmas, white beard, white hair, white everything.

Gradually, Tramboo went astray as far as we were concerned and crossed over totally to the ISI. He set up a Kashmir Centre in Brussels, doing what Thakur did in London (and what Ghulam Nabi Fai did in Was.h.i.+ngton, DC). Tramboo also eventually became an immigration judge. I heard from him in 2011, when his wife had a bereavement in Amritsar, one of her parents had pa.s.sed away. Tramboo was trying to get a visa and get her home; so out of the blue after so many years, he called me up. I happened to be in London holidaying so I spoke to the high commission there, and I spoke to friends here in Delhi, saying give the lady a visa even if you can't give that b.l.o.o.d.y Tramboo because he's on the blacklist. She didn't get a visa; there's a limit to what you can get done once you're out of the system. Tramboo called me four or five times and I had to stop taking his calls. He sent a message through someone that he never thought Dulat would not take his calls.

Money in Kashmir goes way back, even to Sheikh Abdullah's time. After all, why was Sheikh Abdullah dismissed as prime minister of J&K in 1953? One of the allegations in the Kashmir conspiracy case framed against him and Mirza Afzal Beg and twenty-two others in 1958 was that he was getting money from Pakistan. Obviously much of this case must have been padded up, I don't know how much, but it couldn't have been padded without the germ of truth that the Sher-e-Kashmir had contact with Pakistan, and had money coming in from there. While in jail, Sheikh complained that Kashmir had been corrupted by Delhi bribing people to keep them in power.

Sheikh Saheb was in jail for eleven years and then he was released for 'diplomatic reasons', as the court was told. He and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru reconciled and the latter sent Sheikh Saheb to Pakistan to see if a solution was possible. Nehru died while Sheikh Saheb was in Pakistan and not long after he returned he was again thrown in jail. This time, Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri's government said that Sheikh Abdullah had had contact with the CIA.

Thus, since Sheikh Saheb's time, anybody who's been on the right side of Delhi has been getting money from Delhi. It's as simple as that.

Even the former governor of J&K in the early 1980s, B.K. Nehru, a cousin of then prime minister Indira Gandhi (his grandfather was Motilal Nehru's elder brother), says in his memoir, Nice Guys Finish Second, that when Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah was sacked in 1984 (by B.K. Nehru's successor Jagmohan), the new government was formed by spending a lot of money. G.M. Shah, Farooq's brother-in-law (who sulked when Farooq was made CM after Sheikh Saheb's death because he felt he should inherit the political legacy), needed thirteen defectors from the National Conference. The money went in an IB bag, and was distributed by a big businessman who used to be a Congress MP, Tirath Ram Amla. They used to call each packet of money a 'bullet'. B.K. Nehru says that Shah was forever running out of bullets, and demanded from Mrs Gandhi more and more bullets.

If this was happening in 1984, then why would the Congress party itself act so innocent about spending money thirty years later? When I went to Srinagar in May 1988, one of the first things I learnt was about the relations.h.i.+p between Kashmiri leaders and money.

Yet if money is in play, then the corollary is that the agent goes to the highest bidder. Indeed, Kashmiris are a heavily layered people, and it is not out of character for a Kashmiri to be in touch with either India or Pakistan (or even both) at some point of time. It's not easy to decipher the Kashmiri psyche, or even to win Kashmiri confidence: centuries of foreign rule, from the Mughals to the Afghans to the Sikhs, have made them natural agents. By now, it is in their DNA.

When I was posted to Srinagar in 1989, I used to hear stories of the earliest IB guys posted to Kashmir, because of whom, as well as the exploits of long-serving IB chief B.N. Mullik, the IB is made out to be much bigger and more sinister than it actually is; that the IB is the real authority in Kashmir; that it controls everything. When I reached Srinagar, it was something to feel kicked about, but it also weighs heavily on you because n.o.body trusts you. I met Mullik only after I joined the organisation, long after he had retired. He struck me as a saint rather than a spook. Nonetheless, Mullik laid the foundations of the modern- day Intelligence Bureau.

On the other hand Pakistan has always had a lobby in Kashmir; it has always had control over somebody or other in Kashmir. That lobby today is the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, which is a Pakistani creation. The control over the Hurriyat may have loosened a bit when Musharraf and Vajpayee were making tentative steps towards peace but tightened again with insecurity returning to IndiaPakistan relations, and somebody or other getting killed for it.

Our idea as mentioned earlier was to reach out to as much of Kashmir as possible. The irony these days is that Delhi has stopped paying attention to Kashmir despite its importance to us nationally; whereas the Pakistanis, who have frankly realised that they have lost out in Kashmir, still have a.s.sets there who are totally committed to them. There's n.o.body in Kashmir more committed to India than Farooq Abdullah, but there seem to be a lot of people in India who simply don't recognise that and are readily dismissive of him.

The ISI strategy now in Kashmir is very clearit is not going to lose control of the separatists. So it is quite simple: to solve the problem in Kashmir you have to work on the separatists and win them over.

In that the ISI has handed India with several advantages: according to our friend and former militant Firdous Syed, the Kashmiri movement degenerated into a mercenary war due to Pakistan's ill-treatment of Kashmiris, and due to ISI arrogance. Foreigners were used, as were criminals. Kashmiris have suffered. Now it is such that everyone is perceived to be either an ISI agent or an IB/R&AW agent. Kashmiris have learned to adapt; and at times they out-bluff both sides. But at the end of the day, ISI arrogance has been greater than Indian arrogance and this has helped us in Kashmir. That is not to say that we did not have our frustrations or could get done whatever we wanted. As a Kashmiri separatist once said to me, whether in flattery, jest or frustration: 'Aap ne toh badi hamdardi say pechana tha Kashmir ko . . . lekin . . . yahan ki siyasat ka haal na poochiye: ek tawaif hai tamaashbeenon main.' (You demonstrated great empathy in understanding Kashmir . . . but . . . politics in Kashmir is like a nautch girl in the midst of spectators deriving vicarious pleasure from her plight.) On balance, with regard to Pakistan and Kashmir, it was a pretty satisfying stint at R&AW and my time was winding down. It would have been nice to have been a chief like Mullik or R.N. Kao, the first R&AW chief, who was in the saddle for eight years; there is so much that could be done. I had only a year and a half, and it took me six months to get used to the whole thing and for the guys there to get used to me. By the time you settle down and get into the groove, time's up.

The British have a good system, where their MI6 chief has a five-year tenure, and in most cases a knighthood on superannuation. It goes with the job. I met the Spanish amba.s.sador while I was writing this book, and he said their chief also has a five-year tenure. The trouble with our system is that if someone gets five years, what happens to the other guys, of which there are so many, looking at a chance at the top job. So I suppose as a compromise two years isn't bad, particularly if you happen to have grown up in the intelligence community.

While there was a lot of resentment when I joined R&AW because I was an outsider and I didn't know anyone save a few (I knew C.D. Sahay from before, for instance, as he had a posting in Jammu and was kind enough once to invite me to dinner when I visited), when I left things seemed to be okay. There was no grievance; quite the opposite, for after I left I was once asked to do a cadre review for R&AW by Brajesh Mishra; C.D. Sahay, chief after Vikram Sood, who had succeeded me, had been pressing for it. 'He's got time,' Brajesh Mishra said about me. 'He'll head the cadre review committee.'

There were two others from R&AW on the committee. We met on and off, discussing things and there were a couple of points we were in disagreement on. Sahay kept pressing me to finish, and I told him it would get done once we arrived at an agreement on those points.

I mentioned in chapter two the root of the problems at R&AW: the mismatch within the agency between people from different backgrounds. R.N. Kao and his deputy K. Sankaran Nair never gave a way to resolve it, and as a result there was all kinds of groupism and demoralisation, mainly between the IPS officers and the non-IPS officers. The cadre review was basically an attempt to work out a compromise to this groupism.

Our report was almost ready but I had not signed it or presented it, and a youngster on the committee, who was from the RAS, said it was not fair. 'I will add a dissenting note,' he said.

'If you want to add it, you're welcome to,' I said. 'But I would advise you not to. It won't take you anywhere and somebody somewhere will one day hold it against you.' And they did.

After Sahay retired, his successor P.K. Hormis Tharakan, asked me to do a review of my cadre. With the change in thinking in the government he wanted a change in my thinking too. More 'balance' as he called it. So I made a few amendments and returned the report to him. The fact is that there was a feeling in R&AW that the RAS was being discriminated against and that a non-IPS officer would never make it to the top. In that sense my successor Vikram Sood (from the Indian Postal Services) brought a breath of fresh air and hope for the RAS even if it was shortlived.

Interestingly, Brajesh Mishra was inclined to bring in another outsider to head the organisation after me. One day, a couple of months before my superannuation, when I was pressing him to decide on my successor, he said, 'How would you react to an outsider?' 'Don't do it, sir,' I said. 'How can you say that? You were an outsider,' he countered. I said, 'Exactly. I know what it is like, that's why I'm saying it. It's not fair either to the officer or the organisation.' Brajesh never raised the matter again and Vicky Sood became chief and a good chief too.

Cabinet Secretary Prabhat k.u.mar once asked me: 'Dulat you have served in both the IB and R&AW, how would you rate the two organisations?' I said to him, 'Inst.i.tutionally there is no comparisonthe IB is far older, more cohesive and solid but man to man, person to person, R&AW is just as good.' This brings me to the larger issue of R&AW's role and existence as an intelligence organisation. What ails the organisation, in my view, is its own inability compounded by the government's ambivalence in charting a clear course for it. Therefore internal debates and bickering continue and inevitably flow into the public domain, confounding the existing confusion. Rajiv Gandhi had once said that intelligence organisations could not be treated like the rest of the bureaucracy. It is time the government settled these issues once and for allwho better to do it than Prime Minister Modi.

The ultimate compliment to R&AW was paid by the former ISI chief, Asad Durrani, at one of our track two meetings when he said, 'R&AW is as good as the ISI if not better,' adding with a chuckle, 'What we do brazenly you achieve by stealth.'

In November, a month before I retired, Brajesh Mishra asked me to accompany him to Beijing for an official visit. He got me an invite to meet my counterpart, whom I had already met once before, during an official visit in May.

The Chinese give a good dinnerBrajesh Mishra and I were taken to a vast, empty restaurant and we were given some vile, horrible paint-remover to drink, which we declinedbut when it comes to talking business they do not answer in a hurry. 'Very good idea,' my Chinese counterpart said to a suggestion I made about Indian-Russian-Chinese intelligence cooperation. 'We need time to think about it.' On everything they said, good idea, let us study it. Except terrorismevery time we mentioned it, the Chinese became tense. It is a growing problem for them.

(The Russians, on the other hand, where the trilateral cooperation suggestion originated, are filled with bonhomie. When I visited Moscow, my counterpart landed up at my guest-house in the morning with a bottle of vodka.) Anyway, it was a good visit and I knew Brajesh Mishra enjoyed the trip. More than once he told M.K. Narayanan that while the agencies were doing well R&AW was more productive than the IB, and Narayanan of course complimented me though I'm not sure he was happy at R&AW being rated higher than the IB. Despite this tide of goodwill from the national security advisor, I was totally unprepared for what happened on 24 December 2000 (remember, on my previous Christmas Eve as R&AW chief, IC-814 was hijacked).

That afternoon I got a call from Ashok Saikia, the establishment officer in the Prime Minister's Office, saying that he had to fix my contract.

'Contract for what?' I said.

'Contract for joining the PMO,' he replied. 'I can't believe you don't know.'

I knew nothing of the sort, so it was all the more reason, he pointed out, that I go over and meet him.

There was nothing extraordinary in the contract, and it was the same as Brajesh Mishra's, in that unlike other government servants who serve at the pleasure of the president, we were to serve at the pleasure of the prime minister. (This is why I decided to quit after the government fell.) Apparently, my induction had been discussed by the prime minister and his princ.i.p.al secretary three months earlier, in September, when Vajpayee was in Mumbai for his knee operation.

'I just met Brajesh Mishra yesterday and he didn't say a word to me,' I said.

Just then Brajesh walked into the room.

'Thanks for the job,' I said. 'I was just telling Ashok that you didn't tell me about it even yesterday.'

He had a good laugh.

I was surprised, because I was looking forward to retirement, to be free of all of this, to just chilling out. Instead, come 1 January 2001, I was going to be working from the PMO.

10.

FROM COLD WAR TO HIGH POLITICS.

Less than a week after joining the PMO I received a call on the RAX, which is the government's secure phone line for senior officials and ministers. On the other end was a woman's voice; the call display showed it was coming from the prime minister's residence, at 7 Race Course Road (RCR). I was foxed. 'Welcome to the family,' she said.

It was Namita Bhattacharya, known by her nickname Gunu, and she was the prime minister's adopted daughter.

'Now that you're here, we're rea.s.sured,' Gunu continued. 'Please look after the two old men. They're your responsibility.'

She was not only referring to her 76-year-old father but also to his 72-year-old princ.i.p.al secretary and national security advisor, Brajesh Mishra; but in any case, what she said was not as important as the mere fact of her reaching out to me. I was touched, and thanked her for calling.

The PMO in Vajpayee's time was one big happy family, and had a relaxed atmosphere. Of course, part of it was the kindness that the prime minister showed me in the five and a half years that I was with himtwo in R&AW, and three and a half in the PMObut it was also his family who made me feel like one of their own.

In this, Gunu was the anchor as she was the hostess of the house, and she always met me and my wife warmly. The same went for her husband Ranjan: he was an obviously smart fellow who was said to have wielded enormous clout though up close he came across as humble. He and I got along well and occasionally played golf together, just the two of us.

In fact, it was Ranjan who once told me: 'Brajeshji trusts and relies on you more than even Shyamal,' he said, referring to my old batchmate Shyamal Datta, DIB, who was widely known to have freer access to the top and was much closer to the family. Shyamal was the one who got me to R&AW and had me appointed chief. In any case, at least five to seven of us had a nice, comfortable relations.h.i.+p even with the family.

Vajpayee would, at least once in six months, invite all the families from the PMO for a meal or a dinner. You would get good food and a good drink: it was a supremely relaxed affair.

The first PMO lunch that I attended, though, was not the prime minister's but Brajesh Mishra's at his residence in Safdarjung Lane. It was soon after I joined R&AW and I wondered who would be at the princ.i.p.al secretary's lunch. I was expecting thirty people or so but when I reached there were 150 people including the prime minister. 'b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l,' I thought, seeing the politicians in attendance and thinking this was to be a formal affair. It turned out to be like any garden party: drinks were served freely, there was no hypocrisy. Unfortunately, for reasons I never understood, Brajesh Mishra never had a party after that. But the prime minister's parties for the PMO continued regularly.