In May, it will be four years since Major Rabinder Singh, a joint secretary at the Research and Analysis Wing, India's external intelligence agency, who was found to have been working for some years as a mole of the Central Intelligence Agency, gave a slip to R&AW's counter-intelligence division, which had placed him under surveillance, and fled to the United States along with his family via Katmandu, Nepal.
L'Affaire Rabinder Singh remains as mysterious today as it was in 2004.
Nobody has an idea of what damage he caused to India's national interests
and national security. In the meanwhile, he and his family reportedly live
comfortably in the US.
There have been instances of the penetration of the National Security
Council Secretariat, which is part of the Prime Minister's Office, by the
CIA after Dr Manmohan Singh became prime minister. Some NSCS staffers were
suspected of having clandestine links with a lady CIA officer posted as a
diplomat in the US embassy in Delhi. Her task was to liaise with the
concerned government departments in connection with the Indo-US Cyber
Security Forum set up jointly by the US and India when Atal Bihari Vajpayee
was prime minister. She utilised this opportunity to allegedly recruit
moles in the NSCS, which coordinates the work of the Indo-US Cyber Security
Forum.
The Indian intelligence community had been penetrated by the CIA at the
middle and senior levels some years ago. In the 1980s, when Rajiv Gandhi was
prime minister, an Indian Police Service officer, who served in R&AW as a
director (one rank below joint secretary) and headed the agency's office in
Chennai, was found to have been working for the CIA for some years.
The Intelligence Bureau office in Chennai detected his clandestine contacts
with a CIA officer who was posted as a consular officer at the US consulate
in Chennai and alerted R&AW. The agency immediately had him detained and
interrogated. He was in preventive custody in New Delhi's Tihar jail for a
year till his interrogation concluded. However, he was not prosecuted.
In the 1990s, when P V Narasimha Rao was prime minister, a very senior
Indian Police Service officer serving in the Intelligence Bureau -- who would
have been in the running for appointment as the director, IB -- was suspected
to have been working for a woman CIA officer (Heidi August), then posted as
a diplomat at the US embassy in Delhi. A junior Intelligence Bureau officer
accidentally discovered that she had a mobile phone, which was registered in
the senior officer's name. Joint enquiries by the IB and R&AW exposed this
officer's suspect links with August; he was sent on premature retirement.
These were the better-known cases of penetration, which received publicity
in the media. There were other cases of penetration of the intelligence
community, which the government of the day managed to keep under wraps.
Penetration of an intelligence agency by a foreign agency is nothing
unusual. It happens often. MI6, the British external intelligence agency,
was famously penetrated by the KGB, the Soviet intelligence agency, through
the India-born Kim Philby, who worked for MI6 under the cover of a
journalist. Philby fled to Moscow aboard a Soviet submarine before he was
exposed and lived there until his death.
There is also the case of Aldrich Ames, a middle-level CIA officer in charge
of counter-intelligence against the Soviet and Russian intelligence
agencies. He was exposed as a mole of Soviet intelligence who unveiled the
identities of many CIA moles in the Soviet and Russian governments to their
intelligence agencies. These moles were later executed. Ames was prosecuted
and now serves a life sentence without parole.
Illustration: Uttam Ghosh
Also read: Did the CIA help Rabinder Singh flee?
