Indian Espionage: Success, Failure, and Tradition

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Notes

1 See, for example, Matthew Crosston, “Bringing Non-Western Cultures and Conditions into Comparative Intelligence Perspectives,” International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2016), pp. 110–131.

2 The subtitle of this book, “Spying for South Block,” will puzzle non-Indian readers and is never explained. The most important ministries in the Indian government sit in the Central Secretariat in New Delhi, comprising two symmetrical buildings or “blocks.” The Prime Minister’s Office and the ministries of Defence and External Affairs are in the South Block.

3 Adda B. Bozeman, “Introduction,” Strategic Intelligence & Statecraft: Selected Essays (Washington, DC: Brassey’s (US), 1992), p. 16.

4 Also known as Chanakya and sometimes compared to Machiavelli, Kauytilya was “reportedly was chief minister to the emperor Chandragupta (c. 300 BCE), the founder of the Mauryan dynasty.” Britannica, “Artha-Shastra,” https://www.britannica.com/topic/Artha-shastra (updated 2 February 2024).

5 See, for example, Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia (New York: Kodansha USA, 1994).

6 Wikipedia, “Arthashastra” (internal citations omitted), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthashastra

7 Nehru had also counted on the Soviets to back him if the Chinese attacked. But after China backed the USSR in the Cuban Missile Crisis earlier in 1962, the Soviets would have to remain neutral. Unlike Mao, Nehru also believed that the threat of an invasion of the Chinese mainland from Taiwan would make China leery of causing trouble on the Indian border.

8 I am indebted in this discussion to an unpublished paper by Daniel Cebul, “Lessons from the Kargil Hilltops,” for my seminar on emerging technology and intelligence in the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the autumn of 2023.

9 Treating an assessment of likelihood as a doctrine is reminiscent of the conclusion by Israeli military intelligence in 1973 that Egypt would not attempt to cross the Suez Canal until it had received Soviet MIGs that would let them contest Israeli air superiority; or Sherman Kent’s conclusion, despite evidence to the contrary, that the USSR would not place missiles in Cuba. All three cases represent unshakable psychological anchoring.

10 Whether Sharif knew of the Kargil incursion in advance is debatable. The Indians were indeed deceived, but at what level did the deception occur? Sharif asserted that his government was itself deceived by the Army about the Army’s intentions in Kargil. The Army says he knew.

11 It is beyond the scope of this review to assess the extensive scholarly disagreement over theories of intelligence surprise. For a compendium of those theories, see the opening pages of Joseph Bar Joseph and Rose McDermott, Intelligence Success & Failure: The Human Factor (Oxford University Press, 2017).

12 Cebul, “Lessons from the Kargil Hilltops,” citing the Kargil Review Commission Report, p. 153.

13 Executive Summary, Kargil Review Commission Report, 29 July 1999, https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/India/KargilRCB.html

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Joel Brenner

Joel Brenner is a Senior Research Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for International Studies. He is a former Head of U.S. counterintelligence under the Director of National Intelligence and a former U.S. National Security Agency Inspector General.