Unless someone has the wisdom of a sage, he cannot use spies; unless he is benevolent and righteous, he cannot employ spies; unless he is subtle and perspicacious, he cannot perceive the substance in intelligence reports. It is subtle, subtle, subtle.
– Sun Tzu, The Art of War
This quotation has been cited by Philip Knightley in his book, “The Second Oldest Profession.” The book is about spies and spying in the twentieth century and not necessarily something that is very complimentary to the trade although Knightley also quotes a former CIA counsel, Michael J Barrett who said “Espionage is the world’s second oldest profession and just as honourable as the first.” GC “Gary” Saxena, Chief of the Research and Analysis Wing in the 1980s quoting others used to say that intelligence was a game nations played and that it was a dirty game best played by men of honour.
Espionage is indeed as old as history. Chandragupta ran his espionage service for his Emperor, Ashoka, so did Emperor Akbar where he had his 4000 spies some of who reported to his National Security Council every evening. Delilah, the original honey trap, was a spy for the Philistines but later Mata Hari was a failure; Moses ran his espionage service and, at the time of Queen Elizabeth I, Sir Francis Walsingham ran a security service free of cost to Her Majesty. Yet later in history, major powers went to war without an intelligence service. When the French went to war with Germany in 1870 it had no secret service because it had no money for this sort of activity. Two days after the war started, the French allocated 1 million francs to start an espionage service but Colonel Rollin, the man asked to start this remarked, “It was too late. Such a service cannot be improvised. It must be built up in the leisure of time.”
This is a fundamental truth very often forgotten by political masters. Intelligence is something vague and intangible for a politician to pay too much attention. It is neither a vote catcher, nor can it exhibit success in a way that a politician’s fortunes could soar. It is not like building a bund or a road that every can see. Only those who have a strategic vision and security consciousness understand this game.
The United States went through the Second World War without a formal human intelligence service. In fact it was the last major power to have a formal and proper intelligence service. And when it did have a formal intelligence service it missed out vital clues and could not predict the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union or even Pokhran II or the September 11 attacks. After the War, in pursuit of its global interests, the intelligence set-ups in the US and the Soviet Union expanded phenomenally as they fought their Cold War. US intelligence became known more for its covert actions across the globe and by the end of the 1970s more than 200,000 persons were employed in the business of collection of intelligence US.
The process of intelligence collection and its targets have changed with the revolution in technology, communications and the changing nature of threats. The covert action option is more readily exercised by major powers in protecting or enhancing its state interests. The traditional spy was in Graham Greene’s novels or in those much earlier by John Buchan, where the spy was either a “static” or “stationary” in a foreign country or was an “itinerant” who moved in and out of the target area. The task of such a spy usually was to cover docks, bridges, telegraph lines or whatever, pinch a document if possible and prepare reports with an essentially military objective. Today, with communications and transport revolution the handler no longer has to be in the same place as the agent being run by him. Internet, satellite phones and cell phones have ensured that. Satellite imagery and satellite communication monitoring has meant that all activity in target areas is totally covered - twenty-four hours, seven days a week. Technical espionage with the more glamorous gizmo has burgeoned to overtake human intelligence (HUMINT). Consequently, over time HUMINT considered to be a stodgy poor relation and old fashioned and definitely more difficult, took a back seat creating a vast gap not only in the collection of vital information but also in assessment and analysis.
External and internal intelligence are two essential ingredients of statecraft of any government. The former is the sword and the latter is the shield. Their effectiveness depends on how they are used not just by the government of the day but over a sustained period of time. This in turn depends on whether or not a country and its government have a strategic security concept or is interested merely in keeping crime off the streets, has no regional or other goals and really has no secrets to hide. In such cases all a country needs is a local criminal investigation department to hunt criminals and solve crime. The US did not have a formal internal intelligence service when Sep 11, 2001 happened but that was under the belief that the US was so secure and so immensely popular in the world that it had no internal threat. What it had was an investigation agency in the FBI and the gigantic and super-secret National Security Agency for technological snooping along with a host of other agencies – 19 in all.
In India, intelligence at the time of independence symbolised ultimate and secret imperial power that helped its masters hunt Indian nationalists or kept a watch on Indian dissidents. It was a government agency that had been run by the British with Indian employees to serve imperial interests and was therefore viewed as a successor to imperial power. It was something nasty and hateful. Soon after independence and for many years after that, there was suspicion, fear or contempt about intelligence activities.
The main charter in the early days for Indian intelligence was the Communist threat as it was in the British system and Pakistan became the new add-on. The Telengana uprising and the Pakistani misadventures into Kashmir immediately after independence bolstered these two threats. The 1962 and 1965 wars with China and Pakistan eventually led to the creation of the R&AW, just as years later, the Kargil war led to the creation of the Defence Intelligence Agency, the National Technical Facilities (renamed Research) Organisation and several other organisations meant to smoothen intelligence coordination and assessment.
Since the R&AW was born of the IB, in the initial years officers from the IB who were, almost without exception, from the Indian Police, manned it. Like in every service some made superb and successful external intelligence officers and some did not. It was Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and the R&AW’s founding fathers, Rameshwar Nath Kao and Sankaran Nair, who repeatedly stressed that the R&AW should not become just another police organisation, and should have talent from wherever they could find, including other services of the Government of India. Recruitment to what would be a new service began in 1971 and many other lateral entrants later got absorbed in a service that became their new life. The R&AW went through its roller coaster fortunes with Morarji Desai the impractical moralist who single handedly went about denigrating and curtailing an agency barely six years old and a successful one at that. It set back the agency by several years and a restive staff added to their problems. It began to get back into recognition from the mid-80s because the good fortune of both – an able organisational leadership and a political leadership that had a strategic mindset that felt the need for a sharp external service.
Inevitably, as it happens in India, success brings envy and suspicion. We are particularly adept at damaging our own instruments of power and governance. The R&AW was subjected to reviews and committees periodically and the attempt has been to progressively exercise external control. The professionals in the organisation would accept controls and supervision if other professionals exercise it. Instead, the consistent attempt has been to tinker in the name of reform and exercise control. The result has been increasing bureaucratisation of a profession, which, by nature has to be unconventional, and needs imaginative handling far removed from stodgy bureaucrats who feel comfortable working in carefully structured and rigid systems. On the other hand, the head of an intelligence organisation must have the freedom to deploy and re-deploy men and material according to perceived threats. Such agencies must have what they call a “surge capacity”; that is an ability, flexibility and freedom to surge the forces in one direction if need be. Of course, there have to be some checks and balances as it cannot have an intelligence agency out of control like in Pakistan.
Quite often the role of India’s two agencies, the IB and R&AW are considered as having common objectives and methods and therefore assumed that personnel are interchangeable. This is not so. The IB is the internal service, operating within the country also called the Security Service while the R&AW is the external service operating outside the country and often referred to as the Secret Intelligence Service. The former operates within and armed with the law of the country while the latter operates outside the realm of law of the country to which assigned. The Internal service makes patriots out of ordinary and sometimes extraordinary persons; the latter suborns and makes traitors out of ordinary citizens. The former has the protection of law, the latter does not. The former may not need to learn a new language or adjust to alien customs, the latter is useless without this ability. The two professions are similar in that they are secret and relate to security and espionage. But the talent required and the environment is totally different.
The biggest dangers to intelligence services in India are subversion by external forces and the politicisation of the agencies where the internal agency assumes that security of the state is the same thing as the security of the government while the external agency gets policised. The Security Service of the UK (better known as MI 5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI 6) are what their names signify. The former has more police functions, provides security to the State and not to a Government against its domestic political rivals and the latter has no police functions and provides intelligence about the external enemies of the State. Sourcing for recruitment is different.
If there is one lesson from September 11, 2001 – and there are many – and that is that one may have innumerable intelligence agencies including the behemoth called the NSA, the world’s largest, most secret, and most advanced spy organisation, no technical input will be enough without humint and interpretation of this technical intelligence. James Bamford describes it best in his book (“The Body of Secrets”) when he says that in Crypto City, scientists work on the largest collection of hyperpowerful computers, there are advanced mathematicians and language experts covering all parts of the globe. Time in Crypto City is measured in femtoseconds – one million billionth of a second. Scientists work in secret to develop computers that will perform more than one septillion operations every second. A septillion is the figure 1 with 24 zeros. Mercifully India does not need such an expensive arrangement as our interests are nowhere near as global as the US. But did all this elaborate arrangement prevent 9/11? Will it in the future? The answer to both is a definite no in the first case and a probable no in the second. The only thing that can be said with certainty is that the chances of detection would improve with a better humint capability.
This brings us to the subject of recruitment and in house maintenance of the intelligence cadres. Recruitment will have to depend on the nature of evolving and existing threats. The technological revolution that the world has witnessed since the 1990s, and there is no knowing where it will lead us in the future, means that the threat has altered considerably from what existed in the 1990s. Cheap and advanced technology is now available virtually on the streets. The threats ahead are technology and nano-technology based; catastrophic terrorism, cyber terrorism, remote control missile attacks and virtual wars are the new threats. International trade and commercial transactions have become faster and more intricate; banking transactions move at the speed of lightning. IT-driven globalisation also covers the criminal world. Interaction between narcotics smugglers, arms merchants, human traffickers and terrorists is much easier, faster and safer. They all have access to sophisticated denial and deception techniques. One is not even talking about radical religious terrorists.
The age of the generalist and the bird of passage is surely over. An officer on deputation comes without area expertise, language skills and does not necessarily have the attitude, time or incentive to acquire these skills during his tenure long or short. The chief motive of such an officer on deputation is to hope for a comfortable foreign assignment without adding much to the experience basket of the organisation. Officers on deputation these days come with additional baggage – most are politicised or unwanted in the states. It is, therefore, a fallacy to assume that salvation of intelligence organisations lies through greater induction from existing services.
An intelligence agency can be effective in its national effort only if it is manned by men and women of talent, ability, commitment and expertise. Unfortunately this talent and expertise or commitment is no longer available in the civil service. The R&AW and the IB need more and more professional intelligence officers who are home grown, who are assisted by a never ending supply of qualified economists, scientists, computer whiz kids, mathematicians, and experts in international banking and finance. Area and subject expertise gets built in-house over a period of time. Such talents do not come cheap; nor do security or preservation and enhancement of the country’s interest. Recruitment has to be from the open market offering competitive remunerations, fast tracks for the efficient and an exit for others. The need is for a thoroughly professional intelligence corps and not one that functions on the basis of its origins, which is normally a recruitment examination passed several years ago or served by those who consider the R&AW to be a temporary safe haven from uncomfortable state cadres.
Recruitment to the civil services is not a selection process but merely an elimination process and not an assessment of merit or aptitude. Besides the wages are not attractive enough nor is career advancement any better. The civil service is no longer the career of first choice for most. The civil service age limit is high, by the time a probationer becomes an officer he is quite often in his late 20s. If he joins the R&AW after three years’ service elsewhere, he is nearly thirty or more; besides being married and father/mother of at least one child. Such a person is just too distracted, too old to be molded into anything new and it is not his/her fault. The esprit de corps required in a secret organisation just does not get cultivated with people who are already set in their ways and lives. In secret organisations, honour and élan are the two most important motivations, especially because there is no public recognition of achievements and there is general public skepticism about such organisations. There is usually envy for the external and fear of the internal service, which is why bashing the external boys is so much easier and appears self-justified.
Speaking of honour, Rabinder Singh and Ujjwal Dasgupta fell because they were not men of honour. They fell because they were weak. One cannot say that men and women disgrace themselves merely because they are in touch with foreigners; external intelligence cannot be collected without access to foreigners. External liaison is legitimate if officially authorised and need not lead to a person being suborned; it is when intelligence liaison is unauthorised that it becomes illicit and dangerous.
We are going to make a grave mistake by adhering to archaic practices just because that has always been the case. There is need to change all this given the new and other enhanced threats. If we do not, we will ultimately have a non-functioning agency that will fail the government and the people every time. We simply must professionalise or perish.
– Sun Tzu, The Art of War
This quotation has been cited by Philip Knightley in his book, “The Second Oldest Profession.” The book is about spies and spying in the twentieth century and not necessarily something that is very complimentary to the trade although Knightley also quotes a former CIA counsel, Michael J Barrett who said “Espionage is the world’s second oldest profession and just as honourable as the first.” GC “Gary” Saxena, Chief of the Research and Analysis Wing in the 1980s quoting others used to say that intelligence was a game nations played and that it was a dirty game best played by men of honour.
Espionage is indeed as old as history. Chandragupta ran his espionage service for his Emperor, Ashoka, so did Emperor Akbar where he had his 4000 spies some of who reported to his National Security Council every evening. Delilah, the original honey trap, was a spy for the Philistines but later Mata Hari was a failure; Moses ran his espionage service and, at the time of Queen Elizabeth I, Sir Francis Walsingham ran a security service free of cost to Her Majesty. Yet later in history, major powers went to war without an intelligence service. When the French went to war with Germany in 1870 it had no secret service because it had no money for this sort of activity. Two days after the war started, the French allocated 1 million francs to start an espionage service but Colonel Rollin, the man asked to start this remarked, “It was too late. Such a service cannot be improvised. It must be built up in the leisure of time.”
This is a fundamental truth very often forgotten by political masters. Intelligence is something vague and intangible for a politician to pay too much attention. It is neither a vote catcher, nor can it exhibit success in a way that a politician’s fortunes could soar. It is not like building a bund or a road that every can see. Only those who have a strategic vision and security consciousness understand this game.
The United States went through the Second World War without a formal human intelligence service. In fact it was the last major power to have a formal and proper intelligence service. And when it did have a formal intelligence service it missed out vital clues and could not predict the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union or even Pokhran II or the September 11 attacks. After the War, in pursuit of its global interests, the intelligence set-ups in the US and the Soviet Union expanded phenomenally as they fought their Cold War. US intelligence became known more for its covert actions across the globe and by the end of the 1970s more than 200,000 persons were employed in the business of collection of intelligence US.
The process of intelligence collection and its targets have changed with the revolution in technology, communications and the changing nature of threats. The covert action option is more readily exercised by major powers in protecting or enhancing its state interests. The traditional spy was in Graham Greene’s novels or in those much earlier by John Buchan, where the spy was either a “static” or “stationary” in a foreign country or was an “itinerant” who moved in and out of the target area. The task of such a spy usually was to cover docks, bridges, telegraph lines or whatever, pinch a document if possible and prepare reports with an essentially military objective. Today, with communications and transport revolution the handler no longer has to be in the same place as the agent being run by him. Internet, satellite phones and cell phones have ensured that. Satellite imagery and satellite communication monitoring has meant that all activity in target areas is totally covered - twenty-four hours, seven days a week. Technical espionage with the more glamorous gizmo has burgeoned to overtake human intelligence (HUMINT). Consequently, over time HUMINT considered to be a stodgy poor relation and old fashioned and definitely more difficult, took a back seat creating a vast gap not only in the collection of vital information but also in assessment and analysis.
External and internal intelligence are two essential ingredients of statecraft of any government. The former is the sword and the latter is the shield. Their effectiveness depends on how they are used not just by the government of the day but over a sustained period of time. This in turn depends on whether or not a country and its government have a strategic security concept or is interested merely in keeping crime off the streets, has no regional or other goals and really has no secrets to hide. In such cases all a country needs is a local criminal investigation department to hunt criminals and solve crime. The US did not have a formal internal intelligence service when Sep 11, 2001 happened but that was under the belief that the US was so secure and so immensely popular in the world that it had no internal threat. What it had was an investigation agency in the FBI and the gigantic and super-secret National Security Agency for technological snooping along with a host of other agencies – 19 in all.
In India, intelligence at the time of independence symbolised ultimate and secret imperial power that helped its masters hunt Indian nationalists or kept a watch on Indian dissidents. It was a government agency that had been run by the British with Indian employees to serve imperial interests and was therefore viewed as a successor to imperial power. It was something nasty and hateful. Soon after independence and for many years after that, there was suspicion, fear or contempt about intelligence activities.
The main charter in the early days for Indian intelligence was the Communist threat as it was in the British system and Pakistan became the new add-on. The Telengana uprising and the Pakistani misadventures into Kashmir immediately after independence bolstered these two threats. The 1962 and 1965 wars with China and Pakistan eventually led to the creation of the R&AW, just as years later, the Kargil war led to the creation of the Defence Intelligence Agency, the National Technical Facilities (renamed Research) Organisation and several other organisations meant to smoothen intelligence coordination and assessment.
Since the R&AW was born of the IB, in the initial years officers from the IB who were, almost without exception, from the Indian Police, manned it. Like in every service some made superb and successful external intelligence officers and some did not. It was Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and the R&AW’s founding fathers, Rameshwar Nath Kao and Sankaran Nair, who repeatedly stressed that the R&AW should not become just another police organisation, and should have talent from wherever they could find, including other services of the Government of India. Recruitment to what would be a new service began in 1971 and many other lateral entrants later got absorbed in a service that became their new life. The R&AW went through its roller coaster fortunes with Morarji Desai the impractical moralist who single handedly went about denigrating and curtailing an agency barely six years old and a successful one at that. It set back the agency by several years and a restive staff added to their problems. It began to get back into recognition from the mid-80s because the good fortune of both – an able organisational leadership and a political leadership that had a strategic mindset that felt the need for a sharp external service.
Inevitably, as it happens in India, success brings envy and suspicion. We are particularly adept at damaging our own instruments of power and governance. The R&AW was subjected to reviews and committees periodically and the attempt has been to progressively exercise external control. The professionals in the organisation would accept controls and supervision if other professionals exercise it. Instead, the consistent attempt has been to tinker in the name of reform and exercise control. The result has been increasing bureaucratisation of a profession, which, by nature has to be unconventional, and needs imaginative handling far removed from stodgy bureaucrats who feel comfortable working in carefully structured and rigid systems. On the other hand, the head of an intelligence organisation must have the freedom to deploy and re-deploy men and material according to perceived threats. Such agencies must have what they call a “surge capacity”; that is an ability, flexibility and freedom to surge the forces in one direction if need be. Of course, there have to be some checks and balances as it cannot have an intelligence agency out of control like in Pakistan.
Quite often the role of India’s two agencies, the IB and R&AW are considered as having common objectives and methods and therefore assumed that personnel are interchangeable. This is not so. The IB is the internal service, operating within the country also called the Security Service while the R&AW is the external service operating outside the country and often referred to as the Secret Intelligence Service. The former operates within and armed with the law of the country while the latter operates outside the realm of law of the country to which assigned. The Internal service makes patriots out of ordinary and sometimes extraordinary persons; the latter suborns and makes traitors out of ordinary citizens. The former has the protection of law, the latter does not. The former may not need to learn a new language or adjust to alien customs, the latter is useless without this ability. The two professions are similar in that they are secret and relate to security and espionage. But the talent required and the environment is totally different.
The biggest dangers to intelligence services in India are subversion by external forces and the politicisation of the agencies where the internal agency assumes that security of the state is the same thing as the security of the government while the external agency gets policised. The Security Service of the UK (better known as MI 5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI 6) are what their names signify. The former has more police functions, provides security to the State and not to a Government against its domestic political rivals and the latter has no police functions and provides intelligence about the external enemies of the State. Sourcing for recruitment is different.
If there is one lesson from September 11, 2001 – and there are many – and that is that one may have innumerable intelligence agencies including the behemoth called the NSA, the world’s largest, most secret, and most advanced spy organisation, no technical input will be enough without humint and interpretation of this technical intelligence. James Bamford describes it best in his book (“The Body of Secrets”) when he says that in Crypto City, scientists work on the largest collection of hyperpowerful computers, there are advanced mathematicians and language experts covering all parts of the globe. Time in Crypto City is measured in femtoseconds – one million billionth of a second. Scientists work in secret to develop computers that will perform more than one septillion operations every second. A septillion is the figure 1 with 24 zeros. Mercifully India does not need such an expensive arrangement as our interests are nowhere near as global as the US. But did all this elaborate arrangement prevent 9/11? Will it in the future? The answer to both is a definite no in the first case and a probable no in the second. The only thing that can be said with certainty is that the chances of detection would improve with a better humint capability.
This brings us to the subject of recruitment and in house maintenance of the intelligence cadres. Recruitment will have to depend on the nature of evolving and existing threats. The technological revolution that the world has witnessed since the 1990s, and there is no knowing where it will lead us in the future, means that the threat has altered considerably from what existed in the 1990s. Cheap and advanced technology is now available virtually on the streets. The threats ahead are technology and nano-technology based; catastrophic terrorism, cyber terrorism, remote control missile attacks and virtual wars are the new threats. International trade and commercial transactions have become faster and more intricate; banking transactions move at the speed of lightning. IT-driven globalisation also covers the criminal world. Interaction between narcotics smugglers, arms merchants, human traffickers and terrorists is much easier, faster and safer. They all have access to sophisticated denial and deception techniques. One is not even talking about radical religious terrorists.
The age of the generalist and the bird of passage is surely over. An officer on deputation comes without area expertise, language skills and does not necessarily have the attitude, time or incentive to acquire these skills during his tenure long or short. The chief motive of such an officer on deputation is to hope for a comfortable foreign assignment without adding much to the experience basket of the organisation. Officers on deputation these days come with additional baggage – most are politicised or unwanted in the states. It is, therefore, a fallacy to assume that salvation of intelligence organisations lies through greater induction from existing services.
An intelligence agency can be effective in its national effort only if it is manned by men and women of talent, ability, commitment and expertise. Unfortunately this talent and expertise or commitment is no longer available in the civil service. The R&AW and the IB need more and more professional intelligence officers who are home grown, who are assisted by a never ending supply of qualified economists, scientists, computer whiz kids, mathematicians, and experts in international banking and finance. Area and subject expertise gets built in-house over a period of time. Such talents do not come cheap; nor do security or preservation and enhancement of the country’s interest. Recruitment has to be from the open market offering competitive remunerations, fast tracks for the efficient and an exit for others. The need is for a thoroughly professional intelligence corps and not one that functions on the basis of its origins, which is normally a recruitment examination passed several years ago or served by those who consider the R&AW to be a temporary safe haven from uncomfortable state cadres.
Recruitment to the civil services is not a selection process but merely an elimination process and not an assessment of merit or aptitude. Besides the wages are not attractive enough nor is career advancement any better. The civil service is no longer the career of first choice for most. The civil service age limit is high, by the time a probationer becomes an officer he is quite often in his late 20s. If he joins the R&AW after three years’ service elsewhere, he is nearly thirty or more; besides being married and father/mother of at least one child. Such a person is just too distracted, too old to be molded into anything new and it is not his/her fault. The esprit de corps required in a secret organisation just does not get cultivated with people who are already set in their ways and lives. In secret organisations, honour and élan are the two most important motivations, especially because there is no public recognition of achievements and there is general public skepticism about such organisations. There is usually envy for the external and fear of the internal service, which is why bashing the external boys is so much easier and appears self-justified.
Speaking of honour, Rabinder Singh and Ujjwal Dasgupta fell because they were not men of honour. They fell because they were weak. One cannot say that men and women disgrace themselves merely because they are in touch with foreigners; external intelligence cannot be collected without access to foreigners. External liaison is legitimate if officially authorised and need not lead to a person being suborned; it is when intelligence liaison is unauthorised that it becomes illicit and dangerous.
We are going to make a grave mistake by adhering to archaic practices just because that has always been the case. There is need to change all this given the new and other enhanced threats. If we do not, we will ultimately have a non-functioning agency that will fail the government and the people every time. We simply must professionalise or perish.
Vikram Sood
Courtesy : Indian defence review Jul- Sep 2006
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