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
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