'KGB moles infiltrated Indira's PMO' (India)

LONDON: Indira Gandhi's India was awash with KGB spies, a Left-leaning bought-up media, wild, well paid-for rumours about CIA conspiracies to foment trouble in Assam and Punjab, millions of Soviet roubles pumped into the governing Congress party and remarkably successful Soviet plots to use honey traps and 'swallows' to seduce Indian diplomats, one of the world's leading Cold War historians has told TOI .

The astonishing revelation, totally undreamt of in scale, ambition and detail, says India was the only country outside the Soviet bloc to be most successfully penetrated by the KGB, right up to the office of the prime minister. The man who has seen the KGB files and written a book about them is Cambridge University professor Christopher Andrew.

On Saturday, he told TOI that his astonishing account of "the secret history of the 20th century, including the extent to which the KGB was so good at intelligence-gathering and so bad at interpreting it", was important to have a full picture of our world today.

On Monday, Andrew publishes the second volume of the astonishingly detailed KGB files brought to the West by disaffected former KGB agent, the late Vasily Mitrokhin. The 'Mitrokin Archive II', which goes on sale in India on October 15, deals with the KGB's attempts to 'communise', 'Sovietise', make friends and influence people in the developing world.

It includes, Andrew told TOI, a remarkable account by the KGB's main India and South Asia specialist in Delhi, Leonid Shebarshin, telling the story of how, in one instance, he paid a midnight visit to Delhi's corridors of power, "bringing two million rupees around as a gift from the Politburo to Congress (R)".

'The Mitrokhin Archive II' is the sequel to a whistle-blowing volume that set the western world aflutter six years ago because of the authoritativeness, quality, minutae and detail of the information copied from thousands of KGB files by Mitrokhin, who defected to Britain after the USSR collapsed in 1992.

'The Mitrokhin Archive', based on six large containers of top secret KGB documents copied by one of its senior agents in a 12-year period, has been described by the FBI as "the most complete and extensive intelligence ever received from any source".

The British government, which was initially knocked askew some years ago by the details and revelations of the papers, officially described the material in September 1999 as "a major intelligence coup of enormous significance to the UK and its allies—provid(ing) a large number of leads to KGB activities in a period of at least 40 years before Mitrokhin's retirement in 1985".

The second volume, says Andrew, underlines the extent to which India was the red hot theatre of the Cold War game of intelligence-gathering and propaganda wars through the media.

The Soviet embassy in Delhi was upgraded to the status of the KGB's "main residency", he says, "which may be a boring title but it's the equivalent of getting a knighthood". The KGB files, reproduced in 'The Mitrokhin Archive II', show that ten Indian newspapers as well as one press agency were on the Soviet payroll. In 1972, the KGB claimed to have planted more than 3,500 articles in Indian newspapers.

Andrew refused for legal reasons to name the newspapers, but indicated they were reasonably influential.

The KGB funnelled 10.6 million roubles (roughly 10 million pounds, according to old exchange rates) into Indira Gandhi's India, mainly through her pudgy, double-chinned party fund-raiser Lalit Narayan Mishra, who accepted "suitcases" of money for Congress without thinking to inform the prime minister.

But Andrew, who insisted the "India chapter had been written and finished before the last Indian election and before Congress returned to power", emphasised to this paper that the Indian prime minister herself had "a frugal lifestyle" and did not partake of Soviet goodies.

He said Ms Gandhi did not know that material passed on to her by the then Sri Lankan leader Sirimavo Bandarnaike comprised, in fact, forged documents purporting to be from the CIA.

The forged CIA documents, said Andrew, were put about by the KGB and they were meant to foment suspicion and hostility in India about American intelligence's presumed role in fuelling insurgency in Assam and the north-east.

The legacy, he says, went so deep that, even after Ms Gandhi was no more and her son was at the helm, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi could make a statement identifying "definitive interference from the US in the Punjab situation". But Andrew said that even though the KGB was more successful in penetrating the highest reaches of Indian government, media and decision-making, his revelations also "underline how very bad it was at using it".

He said the KGB totally misunderstood and "got horrendously wrong" the strength of India's democracy. Therefore, it miscalculated the post-Emergency election of 1977 and failed to factor in the possibility Indira Gandhi losing by a landslide to the KGB's bete noire Morarji Desai.

He said his revelations underline the extent to which Soviet intelligence set out to exploit the corruption that became endemic under Indira Gandhi's regime. He claimed that he was merely substantiating, fleshing out and highlighting previous allegations about India's place in the KGB's global sphere, made by senior KGB agents themselves, including the 1975 account of Oleg Kalugin, once the youngest general in Soviet intelligence and Shebarshin in 1990.

"No one has ever paid much attention to these claims," says Andrew and Delhi has previously ignored or brushed them aside. But, the history of our world would be much poorer by keeping it one-sided, "just like only one hand clapping", says Andrew. "With this book, I have done what I can to produce the sound of two hands clapping."

Mitrokhin, who died in the UK last year, copied KGB files ranging in time from the immediate aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution to the eve of the Gorbachev era in the late 1980s. The documents contained details of KGB operations in most countries of the world. Mitrokhin had access even to the holy of holies in the foreign intelligence archives—the files that revealed the real identities of the elite corps of KGB "illegals" living under deep cover abroad, disguised as foreign nationals.

No surprises there. For all practical purposes, "Non-aligned" = "environmentally conscious" = "progressive" = "anti-war" = "useful idiot". And the list goes on.

Alas, if they ever told how much money the KGB passed around in the USA, and whose offices they penetrated, history might really be different. . .

Today, China and Russia continues to do the same, spread conspiracy and create anti-Americanism throughout the world. At least Indians were smarter than some others like the Euroliberals easily brainwashed by the conspiracies. However, the leftist parties of India having their seats makes me question about how much the influence of China's and USSR's operation were to motivate Indians to vote for these parties in the elections.

You know its not a big surprise. My dad was in the IB (Intelligence Bureau) during the 70s and 80s and he was pretty sure that PMO was riddled not just the KGB but the CIA and Mossad :).

When he was in Punjab during the 80s with the BSF (on deputation) there were times the BSF wouldnt inform the Home Minister(Buta Singh at that time)- (For americans Home Minister is equivalent to Secretary of State in India.) of certain operations into Pakistani territory because they were certain that it would be leaked to the other side.

Oh by the way do you think that current Government does not have any spies from different countries. You would be naive if you did. Thats the way things work in this world.

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