Table Of ContentOPEN SECRETS
Maloy Krishna Dhar
Published by Mainak Dhar
OPEN SECRETS
Maloy Krishna Dhar
Published by Mainak Dhar
Copyright © 2012
All Rights Reserved.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
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CONTENTS
A Note to Readers about Maloy Krishna Dhar
Author’s Note
Prologue
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Twenty-eight
Twenty-nine
Thirty
Thirty-one
Thirty-two
Epilogue
A NOTE TO READERS ABOUT MALOY KRISHNA
DHAR
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On the 19th of May, 2012 at 5:10PM, Maloy Krishna Dhar, bestselling author,
widely regarded strategic expert and commentator, highly decorated police and
intelligence officer, and yes, my father, passed away after a month long battle
that began with a stroke and was compounded by renal and multi-organ failure. I
was with him through all those days and at the end. It is perhaps the way of the
world that we spread our wings and go far from our roots, but the one comfort I
have is that I was able to be with him, to talk to him, to remind him of all he has
done for us, and to thank him for all he has taught me. Most of all, I was able to
tell him what I had never told him—of just how remarkable his journey in life
has been, and of just how proud I feel to be his son.
Many people take such occasions to mourn and cry. I feel the pain, having
now lost both my parents, but Maloy Krishna Dhar is not a man to be mourned
and cried over. His life is one to be celebrated and learned from. Dying is a
biological inevitability, but what matters is what one does with the time one is
allotted. On that count, my father led a life so full and so eventful that his life
itself could make for a bestselling book like the ones he authored.
He began his life on July 13, 1939 in Mymensingh, now in Bangladesh, and
had very happy memories of his childhood. Those were however soon clouded
when his father passes away when he was but a child, and the Partition of the
Indian subcontinent rent apart the world he knew. In his book Train to India, he
recounts how he and his mother had come to India on a train amidst the
communal carnage, him carrying a small pocketknife in his attempt to protect his
mother from the marauding mobs. He saw the worst of man, saw people being
killed in front of him at such a tender age, and arrived in India without much to
his name. Many people in his position could have, and indeed did, settle for what
they assumed to be their lot—harbouring hatred from the bloodshed they saw,
and settling for whatever meager opportunities came their way. That was not the
path Maloy chose. He escaped his harsh surroundings, not physically at first, but
through his quest for knowledge, realizing that an education was the way he
could create a better life for himself and his mother. His love for learning and
letters was apparent in what he chose to learn—he studied Comparative
Literature in College, and would later tell me that reading classics from other
lands opened his mind and inspired him to raise his own game. He started his
working life as a journalist, and could certainly have had a comfortable life
compared to his childhood, but once again, Maloy made the leap that very few
others in his position would have. He appeared for the elite Indian Civil Services
Examination and was selected into the Indian Police Service in 1964.
His early years, spent in Naxal infested areas in East India (an issue we
grapple with today, and on which he had very insightful views) brought out
many aspects of his remarkable character. One, he was absolutely fearless. Many
people try and judge what position or point of view will bring them advantage.
Maloy had a simple inner compass of right and wrong, and would be guided by
it, no matter the consequences. My late maternal grandfather, himself a senior
Police officer, would tell me stories of how he saw the early career of his to be
son-in-law with a mixture of dread and undisguised admiration. Maloy was the
kind of man who once got into a jeep with a driver, and went after a man-eating
tiger that had come loose in the plantations. He once cornered and shot a dreaded
outlaw whom other officers would not touch because of his political
connections. When asked by others whether he realized what he had done, he
said, `I shot the bastard.’ That is the kind of man Maloy was. Second, for all his
hard and uncompromising exterior, he was a man of deep perception. Despite his
mandate being to stamp out Naxalites, he took the time to understand their root
causes and understood and empathized with why many of them chose the route
they did.
His next stage of his career took him into an arena where he was to excel for
almost 30 years. He was appointed to the Intelligence Bureau, the Indian
equivalent of the American FBI, though with some of the external mandates the
CIA has. His early years there, with a newly married wife and young kids were
in the troubled North-East of India, including Nagaland, where I was born. That
region at that time was seeing a violent insurgency against Indian rule, and
Maloy faced the challenge as he did every other challenge in his life—with no
fear, and with the greatest of empathy. That combination made him life-long
friends among those who could have been enemies. He did not talk much about
his work, but growing up in Delhi, I would meet visitors from Nagaland and
Manipur who would tell me that Maloy was the first and perhaps only
government officer they trusted. He would always play it straight, never try and
manipulate them and what endeared him to them was the fact that he was utterly
without fear. I remember a story of how he once supposedly went into a village
known to harbor insurgents, alone and with only his personal sidearm, and drank
the local brew with the headman, trying to understand why they were supporting
them, and how he could help act as a bridge to end the violence.
As I was growing up, my father’s work often played at the center stage of
some of the turbulent times in India’s history, though often I was too young at
that time to realize what was happening. He handled the terrorism desk for years,
handling the Khalistan separatist movement, and later the Pakistan sponsored
terror in Kashmir and beyond. Again, it is amazing the respect he garnered
through his approach to work and life. As he lay critically ill, one of the calls I
got was from a man who was once a Khalistani separatist and later joined the
mainstream political process. He told me about how many people in Punjab
would miss him terribly, because in the midst of a terrible crisis with excesses
committed on both sides, he was a rare officer. A man who was willing to listen
and empathize without shooting first, yet also a man without fear. One story of
my father’s from this period, which he recounted later in one of his books, was
of the terror siege at the Golden Temple that came to known as Operation Black
Thunder. He pleaded to not deploy crushing force that would have led to high
collateral damage but instead had trusted men on the inside whom he wanted to
supply. As a senior IPS officer, he could have delegated the terribly dangerous
task, but he dressed up as a fruit seller, with a basket of fruit on his head
concealing weapons and walked into a complex with hundreds of heavily armed
terrorists to get the weapons to his men.
The twilight of his career was mirrored by personal tragedy as my mother,
Sunanda, was diagnosed with Cancer and passed away in 2001 after a five-year
battle. Maloy stood by her, shared her pain and her triumphs. He had once told
me that my mother had been his first and only love. He perhaps never really
recovered from her loss and today; my one consolation is that the two of them
are reunited. For a man whom many saw as a hard-nosed officer, he kept every
single letter my mother wrote to him and left them for me in a large bundle, with
instructions to burn with him at his cremation. He loved as he lived, fully and
sparing nothing of himself.
In his final days in service, his inner compass and values were tested as
perhaps never before. In investigating the espionage case affecting India’s Space
Programme, he had leads pointing in uncomfortable directions for the powers
that be. He was under huge pressure to ignore the evidence, and since I was
grown up, he explained the situation to me along with my mother, and told me
that `Son, I may suffer and you and your mother may also have some
inconvenience, but I cannot do what is not right.’ He persisted, faced a lot of
pressure and retired one step shy of the top job in the Intelligence Bureau, but
never buckled under the pressure he faced or recanted the evidence he had. A lot
of it he later wrote about in his books. Interestingly enough, nobody has come
forth to challenge those facts.
With his career ending on a bitter-sweet note, and devastated by the death of
my mother, Maloy could have settled for the retirement that most other senior
officers do. Evenings at clubs, meet old friends, try and wrangle for some
government junket. Instead he went back to his original love of literature and
continued his fight for what he believed in by reinventing himself as a writer.
His first novel, Bitter Harvest, chronicled the tough times he saw in Punjab
during the insurgency and was highly praised for the sensitive portrayal of what
common people went through, often tormented by policemen and terrorists alike.
His biggest bestseller came in the from of Open Secrets—a first of its kind—a
no-holds barred chronicle of his career as an Intelligence Officer, laying bare the
political machinations that often prevent our forces from doing what is right. It
sparked intense debate with its plea to free our intelligence services from their
political masters and to truly empower them to serve and protect the people, not
the politicians in power. It was as fearless a salvo, if not more, than the one he
fired as a young officer to fell the politically connected outlaw. He laid out what
he believed in, not hesitating to name names, and challenged those who disputed
the facts to engage in debate. Suffice to say, nobody took him up on it. Open
Secrets remained the #1 Non-Fiction bestseller in India for many months and
still is regarded as a seminal work, the first of its kind in India. His later work
covered other aspects of his work, some in fictional garb like Operation XXX,
the story of a deep cover agent, We The People, a brutal expose of our electoral
politics, and some that will act as a guidebook for future intelligence operatives
such as his work on Intelligence Tradecraft.
He started his website, maloykrishnadhar.com, which I will maintain and
continue, where he posted typically brutally incisive views on the state of our
nation and politics. A man like him got respect from everyone, admiration from
many, and brickbats from some who didn’t like his direct and uncompromising
approach. He shrugged off all those brickbats and just kept doing and writing
what he believed to be right and just. His expertise and views were widely
sought after and we used to often joke about his celebrity status with new
channels vying to interview him.
In his last years, his writing turned more introspective and he wrote Train to
India, published by Penguin India, where he chronicled his early life and through
the eyes of a young boy, the cataclysmic changes Bengal saw during and after
Partition. He has an unfinished book on his computer, which I have promised
that I will see through, an expose of the human trafficking that plagues the
subcontinent, often with the active connivance of people in positions of power.
Till he was conscious in hospital, his mind was sharp and active. He would ask
me to send updates to his friends on Facebook, asking me if he could Facetime
with Aadi (oh yes, that was another aspect of his reinvention—he was more tech
savvy than most people a third his age) or Twitter. He was perhaps not the most
demonstrative of men, but in his final days, as we often chatted, he told me that
he was proud of the man I had become. Coming from my father, I needed no
fancy prose or declarations of love—that was the ultimate accolade I could have
ever hoped to earn—to be a fraction of the man he was.
73 years cannot be summed up in one note, and a man like my father cannot
be reduced to one eulogy, but as a writer, perhaps this is the best tribute I can pay
to him. When a man like him passes, I don’t want legions of crying and babbling
people (no matter how good their intentions). In many ways, Maloy was a man
born in the wrong century. His courage, his strict code of honour, his sense of
what was right and wrong and acting on that irrespective of the cost or risk,
would have made him right at home in the company of legendary warriors of
yore like the Norsemen or Mongols. When one of their mighty warriors passed,
people did not cry, but they celebrated their life, their battles won, and their
legend lived on in song and in the heart of future generations. I was lucky to
have been a part of his journey and his legend will live on in my heart and my
words and in what I in turn pass on to my son.
Maloy Krishna Dhar wore many hats—journalist, policeman, spy, author,
husband, father—but the simple summation of my father Maloy was that he was
a real man—the sort we should all be lucky enough to have in our lives.
The book you hold in his hand is part of his remarkable legacy that I am
trying to share with readers around the world.
Mainak Dhar
AUTHOR’S NOTE
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Open Secrets is dedicated to Sunanda Dhar, my life partner. She had smilingly
supported my wild ways of unconventional intelligence production, even in
hostile terrains like the North East. She had shown magnanimity in tolerating my
battle of conscience and the tantrums of the two quarrelling squirrels inside me,
which often pushed us to the precipice of uncertainty and insecurity.
In Open Secrets an intelligence operator has for the first time offered an
insight into the working of the prime intelligence organisation of India—the
Intelligence Bureau. In India any open writing and pronouncement about the
intelligence community is frowned upon as an act of betrayal against the
Establishment. Such revelations are aplenty in ‘free democracies’ in the western
world, where the intelligence establishment is regularly brought under public
scanner, through legal and constitutional means. I have made the first attempt to
break the taboo of guarding the intelligence fraternity under the permanent veil. I
beg indulgence of my colleagues who lived with my unconventional ways and
had given me whole hearted support. I salute these faceless and nameless
intelligence operators.
PROLOGUE
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‘Open Secrets’ is not an autobiography. An insignificant person, who just
performed the basic human rituals of living a span of life and loving a lady,
raising a family and serving the intelligence community to earn bread, cannot
stake claim to be a part of the history of his time. Hence, he has no right to
burden the world with his story; which is not history. But, I have been, like many
other individuals in my position, a carrier wave, through which certain events of
history were transmitted from historical persons to non-historical persons; the
rulers to the ruled. Certain events had flowed down my stream that I happened to
carry to the event horizon, which is called the dustbin of history.
I feel that such carrier waves and such streams have a right to tell what gold-
nuggets and garbage of history had flown down to the event horizon through
their media. Such media wave, in that tortured logical interpretation, is a part of
the history. Hence he can also claim to be a part of the immortal events.
‘Open Secrets’ has arisen out of the Vedic feeling of ‘So Aham’—I’m the
Him; I’m the part of the Infinite. I hope those who will have time to read this
account will be magnanimous enough to pardon a megalomaniac who considers
himself as a part of the infinite-history. It is not his-story, it is not his
autobiography. It is a part of the History; it is a part of the Infinite.
With this grandiose and quixotic assertion I wish to communicate to the
readers that I do not have the temerity of writing a history of the Intelligence
fraternity of India. That is a vast and complicated subject, which can better be
treated by a scholar.
At worst Open Secret can be treated as the first open confession of an
intelligence operative.
*
Intelligence apparatus is an integral part of statecraft and governance. It is one of
the most ancient tools that has formed the integral part of the evolution of human
intelligence in certain portion of the cranium that has endowed the Homo
Sapiens with the instinct of survival, fighting against all odds and ascertaining
his superiority over his adversaries—elemental, human, animal and all sorts of
adversaries. In the crudest sense it has given the insatiable urge to a housewife to
ferret out what cooks in a neighbour’s pot and what happens below their quilt.
Intelligence as an attribute of man’s evolution through the process of selection
has become synonymous with his quest for knowledge. Intelligence
infrastructure as a part of social evolution and statecraft has become
synonymous with diplomacy, law and order, stability and welfare of the
governed and governing people and a powerful bridge between war and peace.
In internal context it is a perfect tool for repression and welfare, a supreme
tool for ensuring law and order and maiming and silencing people’s voice. In
external relations it plays complimentary roles to statecraft and diplomacy and
takes the front seat when certain objectives are required to be achieved through
means other than statecraft and diplomacy and war. Intelligence fraternity can
carry out wars through peaceful means, it can wage wars through low intensity
attrition and it can play havoc through sabotage and subversion. It can seek out
the fault lines of the enemy and cause tectonic explosion under his feet. It is as
powerful a weapon as a fusion bomb is. It depends how and in what fashion the
intelligence infrastructure is used by the ruling clique against whom and at what
point of political evolution of a nation state. It is the strongest defensive weapon
that can defend the home front by denying intelligence to the enemy and by
sniffing out his illegitimate and undiplomatic activities by using superior
intelligence tools.
*
As a modern nation state India has inherited a well defined intelligence
machinery from the British which had chiselled out a well-greased system of
collection of intelligence with the uncanny combination of gathering strategic
and tactical intelligence through established machineries in the Central
Intelligence Bureau, Intelligence Units in the Armed Forces, Border Scouts,
Special Rangers and well-groomed individual agents, besides the finely groomed
revenue collectors, village level officials and civil servants. In British India the
system was well orchestrated between the Central Intelligence Bureau and the
intelligence and criminal investigation departments of the British governed
provinces. There was no dearth of coordination between the British Indian
territory and the territories governed by the princes and kings, on matters related
to the security of the Crown Empire. The Empire was interested in limited areas
of activities of the Indian nationalists, a little bit of communal situation,
communist infiltration and activities of groups and individuals that threatened
the stability of their colony. Its intelligence machinery was also required to tailor
its threads with the intelligence machineries at the Home Office and other
intelligence gathering machines elsewhere in the Crown Colonies. The British
ruled with an iron hand and did not harbour any pretension of following legal
niceties when it came to the perceived subversive activities of the nationalists. It
suited the Empire to treat its Indian intelligence branch as a ‘bureau’—a
subsidiary administrative unit.
No one expected the Empire to restrain its administrative machineries in
dealing with the ‘swadeshi rogues.’ The Intelligence departments at the centre
and the provinces were as mercilessly used as the police and army were. All
spheres of human activities were covered by the agents of the Empire—the
academia, the campuses, labour forces, print media, performing arts, government
and private offices and even the bedrooms of the suspects. In a limited way the
gadgets of technical intelligence were used to intercept mails, communications
and dissemination of revolutionary and seditious ideas. In short, the intelligence
apparatus gave blanket coverage to all activities inside the country. The
intelligence gathering in the neighbouring countries and areas of influence were
discharged through diplomatic missions, trade missions, liaison offices and
itinerant spies; all accountable to the Viceroy and the Home Office.
The growth of British intelligence system in India and other key colonies was
independent of the growth of MI5 and MI6, the internal and external wing of
intelligence system of Great Britain. There were frequent interchanges between
the intelligence personnel of the colonies and the home-based personnel. But in
India the evolution of the Central Intelligence Bureau, the intelligence outfit of
the Great Empire had followed the contour of specific requirements of the
Empire, in India and in the neighbouring countries, especially China, Russia,
Afghanistan, Middle Eastern countries and some countries in the South East
Asia.
*
The history of the intelligence infrastructure of the countries like the USA, UK,
France, and Germany show that each country had fashioned its machineries
according to the historic requirements it faced from time to time. They went
through an evolutionary process. The USSR had also fashioned its intelligence
apparatus in accordance with its needs to build up a closed and captive society in
the name of communism. It is the case with China.
In ‘free countries’ like the USA, UK and France the modern versions of the
intelligence infrastructure in post-World War scenario amply bear the testimony
to the fears and aspirations of the respective nations. However, in accordance
with the democratic traditions the USA and the UK have finally opted for
adequate legislation to streamline the functioning of their intelligence
organisations. There is no doubt that certain ruling cliques of certain period in
modern history of these two democratic nations have used the intelligence
machineries against its own people and institutions. Even the post-9/11
legislations and activities of the FBI, Homeland Security and the CIA have given
rise to certain questions if the USA was not taking away liberty of its people in
the name of protecting them. Same questions are being raised elsewhere too.
Such questions are being asked because these countries value democracy as
well as liberty enshrined in their respective constitutions and conventions. They
are equally apprehensive of the sanctity of their elected democratic system as
well as their freedom and liberty. There are inbuilt institutions in the system to
ask uncomfortable questions to the ruling cliques and investigate into their
actions, including the intelligence gathered by their agencies on internal and
external security matters. The CIA and the FBI are accountable to the Congress
and the Senate and other statutory bodies. The MI5 and the MI6 cannot get away
with intelligence faux pas and every action of the system is zealously scrutinised
by the watchdog committees of the Parliament. It is, however, admitted that the
intelligence organisations of these ‘free countries’ do give wide coverage to the
activities of their citizen in almost all sphere of activities. Their systems keep
track of the citizen from the Cradle to the Grave. No other country, except,
perhaps the former Soviet Union, has documented their citizen in such
exhaustive and comprehensive manner.
India has not been able to keep track of its own citizen. The faulty system
allows unhindered entry of alien nationals from the neighbouring countries.
Periodically some Indian politicians wake up and raise slogans for
comprehensive documentation of the citizens of the country. Vote-bank beggars
in the right, left and centre of the political spectrum oppose them, because they
depend a lot on illegal migrant voters from the neighbouring countries. They
also shed crocodile tears in the name of ‘secularism’—an apartheid mechanism
devised by the Indian democracy. Once in a while the intelligence and police
agencies are whipped up to trace out the illegal settlers. They even violate the
rights of the natural citizens.
However, the intelligence institutions of the USA and the UK by and large try
to avoid the clumsy ways and means that openly violate the democratic and
constitutional rights of the citizen.
