Rabinder Singh has been able to defeat every effort by the Indian government
to arrest him. In the midst of the high-pitched noises about the strong
India-US relationship, many of his former colleagues believe, Singh lives in
an American sanctuary.
Rabinder Singh's case has been hushed up by the governments of Atal
Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh. It is alleged that the moment R&AW
officers grew suspicious about Singh at the beginning of 2004, it
immediately alerted the Vajpayee government, which did not want it to be
played up to avoid embarrassment during the campaign for the general
election.
The Manmohan Singh government did not want the case to be vigorously pursued
lest it become a hurdle in the way of its policy of developing a new
strategic relationship with the US. Other political parties showed no interest in the case. There was neither a detailed
parliamentary enquiry nor even a token debate in Parliament.
What ominously distinguished the Rabinder Singh case from other past cases
of penetration of Indian intelligence by foreign agencies was that the
moment he came under suspicion, the CIA helped him and his family escape to
the US via Katmandu, allegedly giving them US passports under false names.
This was similar to what the KGB did for Philby. The KGB, in Philby's case,
and the CIA in Singh's issue, went to extraordinary lengths to ensure that
their mole was not arrested and interrogated by helping them escape.
Deniability is an important principle religiously followed by intelligence
agencies all over the world. They refrain from doing things which might
amount to their admitting that a particular officer was their mole. When
their mole comes under suspicion and is about to be arrested, they do not
help him to escape arrest because that would amount to their admitting that
he or she was a mole. They let the mole be arrested and interrogated by
local counter-intelligence and compensate for the hardships suffered by the
mole in jail by looking after his family. This is the unwritten rule of
business in the intelligence game.
Image: Former CIA operative Aldrich Ames (centre) comes out of a US federal court on April 28, 1994, after he pleaded guilty to espionage and tax evasion charges and was sentenced to life in prison.
Photograph: Robert Giroux/AFP/Getty Images
Also read: Remember Rabinder Singh?
