The Unending Game

Title: The Unending Game – A Former R&AW Chief’s Insights into Espionage

Author: Vikram Sood

Publisher: Penguin Viking, 2018 (First)

ISBN: 9780670091508

Pages: 282

The need for a state to keep track of what its neighbours are up to was recognized in the ancient world itself, as crystallized in Kautilya’s Arthashastra and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. At least in this regard, India need not go anywhere for directions, we may think. This is too far from the truth. The drastic changes that are coming in each year, the apathy of the political establishment and the suffocation generally felt in a bureaucratic setup are affecting our intelligence infrastructure in a corrosive manner. The greatest threat in international relations is the emergence of non-state actors, like Islamic terrorism which gets clandestine support from rogue states like Pakistan. Espionage is indispensable in such a scenario to get information on the targets and plans of the terrorists while it is still on the drawing board. This requires planting moles in those organizations and monitoring communications between them. In a democracy, this is easier said than done as the state have to mind the voice of civil society while putting up surveillance measures on telephone conversations and intercepting internet data. The painful question of how much is enough is not going to be settled any time soon. All of these create immense challenges to the intelligence-gathering machinery. This book is an attempt to codify the effort used in the past and needed in the future to smoothen the path of India into the league of world powers in the next few decades to come. Vikram Sood is elegantly suited for this job, since he was a former boss of the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW – though it commonly goes by an acronym without the ampersand), India’s equivalent of the CIA. He was a career intelligence officer for 31 years and is currently serving as adviser at the Observer Research Foundation, a public policy think tank based in New Delhi. He writes regularly on security, foreign relations and strategic issues.

The US is undoubtedly the fulcrum of the uni-polar world. It reached this pivotal position not by its financial muscle alone. Economic supremacy needed other kinds of domination to protect its interests. This may percolate to the ideological, military, technological and psychological fields too. All are to be accompanied by heightened espionage activities, which involve collection of data of different kinds, its conversion into useful information, processing it into knowledge and the final honing as intelligence to the consumers, which is often the political leadership. Sood makes a fine case for the requirement of intelligence gathering – or espionage, if you are so particular. The targets are to be identified first. Probably judging from experience, he asserts that the targets are easier to penetrate in a state entity than a terrorist organization, because those entities are more easily identifiable and definable and are also loosely controlled.

Having established the need for spying, the author makes an analysis of the tools of the trade, always watchful not to make a complete show of the cards for obvious reasons. The semantic differences between covert, special and clandestine operations are elucidated. The reliability of the sources of information makes or mars the whole operation. Sources which work for money are the steadiest as compared to ideologically motivated ones. The handlers should be careful in dealing with them. Tight purse strings are unattractive, bargaining is ugly but misplaced generosity is a cardinal sin. The book includes many such statements combining several criteria with increasingly strident tone of the adjectives! Deception is a major part of the intelligence game. It is neither ugly nor immoral. By this, the author seems to mean that it is applicable to the public also. They never get to know of a good spy and reads only about botched operations. He who performs invaluable work assigned to him in a hostile country and then retires gracefully to live a quiet, normal life is the perfect spy.

A survey of the premier spy agencies in the global arena is made in the book, which includes those of the US, Russia and China. As in the Cold War era, the leaders manage things so cleverly that a direct confrontation between them does not take place and espionage battles will be waged in neutral countries. Their modus operandi overlaps into domestic monitoring as well, to detect impending threats. The Department of Homeland Security in the US has massively invested in infrastructure for eavesdropping. It was a great blow to them when the exposures of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden came to light. Privacy advocates were stung into action on the realization of the scale of monitoring that was taking place. However, the author makes a note of warning here that the debates about privacy and freedom should be counterbalanced by the dire needs for security and surveillance in view of terror attacks as brutal as 9/11 in the US and 26/11 in Mumbai.

The book presents a skewed picture of things when it attempts to discuss about non-state international groups of industrialists, academics and politicians who are influential in swaying state policy of their respective nations. Sood assigns them great powers and finds them responsible in shaping events that changed the course of history such as the collapse of communism. One such organization is the Piney Circle. Hope you have not heard of it before? Neither do I. It is a right-wing group of politicians and secret agents linked to the Catholic Opus Dei. Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Konrad Adenauer and many other heads of state were its members. It worked from 1951 to 1991, battling communism. He claims that Comte Alexandre de Marenches, head of the French secret service and a member of the Piney Circle, advised Reagan in 1980 on how to dismantle the Soviet Union within eight years! There are other organisations that share the credit, such as the Bilderbergers who conceived of a world containing only the rich and the poor by obliterating the middle class. It proposed to do this by birth control through famines and wars. This chapter is an unfortunate one as it looked something amateurish. Secret societies possessing powers to change regimes are what we encounter in a Dan Brown novel, rather than in a non-fiction work by a former chief of the nation’s secret service.

The Russian and American spy agencies vied with each other for space in India during the cold war. Sood mentions a few facts in which Indian politicians received favours from them. Morarji Desai, former prime minister, is said to have accepted a sum of $20,000 each year. Kabir, an organisation run by Aam Admi Party leaders Arvind Kejriwal and Manish Sisodia, is alleged to have received $400,000 from the Ford Foundation which is a cover for the CIA. The veracity of these claims cannot be verified, in view of the R&AW’s hostility towards Desai who tried to clip its wings when he was the premier. Kalugin, a former heavyweight of the KGB who defected, had written that it looked as if India was for sale during the Indira-Rajiv era. As a result, neither the Soviets nor the Americans were enthusiastic on entrusting sensitive information to Indians.

The book assumes a categorically hostile position against Pakistan. It has always been an enemy and will continue to remain so in the foreseeable future. It plots and supports extremist activity with an eye on provoking violence and anarchy in India. Glib talk about a joint fight with Pakistan against terror is meaningless. It is as ridiculous as investigating a murder with the help of the murderer. Even if the Pakistani government by any chance decides to stop its support for terrorists, the country would still be most attractive to the extremists on account of the lack of good governance, weak regulations, absence of rule of law and weak financial institutions and legislation. This makes it a fertile ground for production and export of terrorists to all parts of the world. It is to be remembered that Pakistan appeared in one form or the other in the investigations on each and every terrorist attack that killed innocent people in Europe, America and India.

Readers expecting interesting anecdotes and tasteful case studies from the author’s rich repertoire as the chief of the apex spy body of India are in for a rude shock and disappointment. Probably because of non-disclosure rules, Sood remains mute on them. If secrecy demands silence from the author, he could have stopped from bringing out this book too. ‘No book’ seems to be a better option than an uninspiring one, which does not contribute anything to the reader’s awareness that cannot be gleaned from newspaper columns or current magazine articles. This book is a long collection of platitudes and homilies on the urgent need to change the priorities and practices of a spy organisation to meet the challenges posed by a technologically advanced world.

The book is recommended only to serious readers of international relations.

Rating: 3 Star