Raw And Rudderless

A lack of skilled officers, a host of controversies and little accountability. Has India’s premier intelligence agency touched a new low? TUSHA MITTAL reports

Photo: ABP

IN APRIL this year, well before the commencement of India’s recent wave of urban terror attacks, Western intelligence bureaus gave the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) information about potential strikes in several cities, including Jaipur, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Kolkata. At the time, RAW chief Ashok Chaturvedi was on leave, having reduced his work commitments ostensibly owing to bad health, though it was also no secret that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was unhappy with his performance. Passing over his organisational second-in-command PV Kumar, Chaturvedi chose Sanjeev Tripathi, currently at number four in the agency, to fill in for him during his absence. With intelligence assessment at the core of his brief, Tripathi, it is believed, either ignored the information or did not deem it important enough to act upon.

In his 18 months as the head of RAW, Ashok Chaturvedi appears to have embarrassed himself and his organisation. Today, the situation at India’s external intelligence agency is at such a low that, sources say, foreign intelligence outfits are reluctant to pass it information — little, after all, happens when they do. As RAW chief, Chaturvedi enjoys a degree of autonomy unusual for intelligence bureaus the world over. In the US, for instance, the Central Intelligence Agency head has four levels of supervision; Chaturvedi has one.

Earlier this year, Chaturvedi was on the verge of being sacked, a first for any RAW chief. The Prime Minister stopped short, however, after the intervention of former RAW chief GS Bajpai, who is also Tripathi’s father-in-law. This, along with Chaturvedi’s long-time friendship with Tripathi, is the reason sources ascribe to Tripathi’s disproportionate influence in the agency, and to Chaturvedi’s backing his bid to succeed him when he retires in February 2009. Not removing Chaturvedi may have been the first mistake, say insiders, and handing Tripathi the prized seat could be the second.

Photo: INDIAN EXPRESS

Chaturvedi and Tripathi are part of a domineering Indian Police Service (IPS) lobby within RAW. The IPS candidates, along with those on deputation from other civil and paramilitary services, have always been at loggerheads with RAW’s own cadre, the Research and Analysis Service. The hostilities are currently manifesting themselves in the fight for the number one position. Most are rooting not for Tripathi but for Kumar, who belongs to the RAW. Ever-shifting guidelines for those on deputation have worsened rivalries. The most recent change allows those on deputation to work with RAW without resigning from their parent cadre. They can rise in seniority within RAW and return whenever they feel dissatisfied with their position. This has created a lot of resentment within RAW; many see the agency’s revolving door of arrivals and departures as preventing the creation of a unified team committed to intelligence gathering.

Some startling revelations show the extent to which petty personal issues are obstructing work at the agency. According to a reliable source, a RAW officer posted in Bangladesh got intelligence before last year’s Hyderabad blasts that the Harkat-ul-Jehad-al Islami (HUJI) was planning an attack on a major South Indian city. This intelligence was sent to Delhi. Shockingly, because of a grudge against the officer, his Delhi counterpart did not pass the information to his supervisors and to the Prime Minister’s Office, as is protocol. “Everybody inside knows about it, yet no disciplinary action has been taken,” the source said.

But insiders say disciplinary action is not something India’s premier intelligence agency is known for. Sources told TEHELKA that after the 2002 Gujarat earthquake, a RAW officer posted in Bhuj was found to have swindled 70 percent of the relief material, but was let off with a mere demotion. “Should someone of dubious integrity be allowed to work in intelligence?” questioned a source.

The dearth of qualified, motivated staff is severely impacting RAW’s ability to col-lect quality human intelligence at the grassroots level. Strangely, the deputation phenomenon has led to a crucial problem: competent candidates who clear the civil services examination don’t want to join RAW at the bottom, because they know they can join another service and enter RAW at the Class I level. This allows them to escape the agency’s mandatory requirements of learning a foreign language and spending time on India’s borders.

JYOTI SINHA, former RAW officer Photo: RAKHI SINHA

It is no surprise, then, that insiders say RAW’s own recruitment standards are below par. Its technical cadre has not had a single qualified BTech graduate for at least four years. There is no benchmark or specific aptitude test to qualify for the agency. Sources say that those who do not make it to the more highlyregarded services are RAW’s most likely recruits. “The glamour associated with the agency has quietly faded and fewer and fewer people want to join,” a former RAW chief told TEHELKA.

Jyoti Sinha, who took premature retirement from the agency, agrees that personnel reform is urgently needed. “Unless you have a sound, consistent policy, it is impossible to develop the kind of expertise and experience you need in the field of intelligence. Frequent changes in personnel policy have led to so much uncertainty. It has eroded the quality of human resource and expertise. Not only RAWbut the government must also share the blame for this deficiency.”

ASENIOR OFFICER told TEHELKA that RAWis relying too heavily on technology and failing to cultivate reliable on-the-ground sources. “The money that should be spent on cultivating sources is being spent elsewhere, and RAWhas no way of checking this,” another source added. RAW has a budget running into thousands of crores, and yet there is no external performance or financial audit. There seems to be no mechanism to check whether what RAW is delivering is worth the near-inexhaustible funds at their disposal. There are several indications to show it may not be.

Sources say the lack of actionable intelligence is also because of the organisation’s dearth of members of minority communities, especially Muslims. “In my six years of service, I did not come across one Muslim employee,” says a former senior RAW officer. Some justify this by saying that intelligence agencies the world over tend to follow the right-wing mainstream makeup of a country, to safeguard against being compromised. But past scandals show this has not insulated RAW from traitors.

AS DULAT, former RAW Chief Photo: K SATHEESH

Ironically, when intelligence inputs do come, RAW fails to analyse them adequately. “They have state-of-the-art inter-ception equipment but the intercepts are not read properly,” says a source. The reason is astonishingly simple: the lack of adequate language skills. A senior officer who recently left RAW told TEHELKA that while he was in the organisation not one analyst on the Pakistan desk knew Urdu. “All the analysts do is correct the grammar of the briefs and pass them on to the Prime Minister,” he added, emphasising that most lack any background in the desks they are handling. There is no mandatory requirement, and assignments are mostly arbitrary, depending on vacancy. “It would be pure coincidence if someone from Tamil Nadu was handling the LTTE desk,” he said.

FURTHER, SOURCES say, even most field officers do not know the language of the country they operate in. “Having enough language skills to converse with locals should be a basic requirement. But that is not the case in 90 percent of RAW’s postings,” said a former RAW officer. Sources told TEHELKA that the current RAW officer in China does not know Chinese, the person in Saudi Arabia does not know Arabic, and the person currently posted in Paris is one of the few in the organisation who actually knows Pashto. Languages like Pashto, Burmese and Singhalese are, in fact, considered inferior and officers are not even willing to learn them, a senior reliable source said. “Everybody wants to learn French or Spanish,” he added. Another basic issue at the root of RAW’s intelligence failures is the agency’s refusal to make a distinction between field operatives and analysts. In most agencies, these are two distinct jobs, allowing complete secrecy for operatives while giving analysts the chance to mingle in other circles to widen their perspective. But in RAW, the blurring of this distinction is compromising the effectiveness of both operatives and analysts.

In fact, intelligence gathering is being compromised by the blurring of another key distinction: the line between the personal and the official. This comes from the chief himself. Even the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has been roped in to give weight to Chaturvedi’s personal dislikes. Only recently, it was asked to press charges against Major General VK Singh for his 2007 book, India’s External Intelligence: Secrets of Research and Analysis Wing. Curiously, these instructions came months after the book was published. Sources say Chaturvedi only ordered the action after he discovered he had found mention in the book. Highlighting RAW’s lax work culture, Singh had said in his book that a senior officer did not come to office for six to eight months, peeved that someone else had been promoted instead of him. The officer turns out to have been Chaturvedi himself.

Singh has now filed 21 Right To Information (RTI) applications to show that Chaturvedi’s case against him is baseless. The CBI chargesheet accuses him of revealing the names and locations of RAW officers, information the organisation holds top secret. Astonishingly, Singh says this information is easily available in the public domain. Through RTI applications, he was able to get the names of all RAW employees from the Department of Personnel and Training. From the Ministry of External Affairs, he procured the names of all Indian embassy employees world-wide. Matching the documents, Singh says he knows the name and location of every RAW officer posted abroad. Yet RAW insists this is classified information. “RAW has created a hush-hush aura around itself so it doesn’t come under the scanner and its anomalies are never exposed,” Singh says. “Clerks are taught from the day they join to label everything top secret, even circulars for tea parties.” What is even more ironic is the wealth of information about RAW one can find online. Wikipedia gives the exact coordinates of several RAW bases, including ones in foreign countries. “Even I did not know we had a base in Kazakhistan,” Singh says. “But I found out about it on Wikipedia.”

VK SINGH, retd Major General Photo: SHAILENDRA PANDEY

Singh had pointed out several instances of corruption in his book. He now tells TEHELKA that all the systems he had pointed out as corrupt were initially removed but reinstated after he left. The only concrete action has been a new rule that no employee can write a book about RAW even after retirement.

Sources point to another disconcerting trend — foreign postings in RAW are decided not by operational needs and merits, but by personal motivations. For instance, reliable sources tell TEHELKA that a RAW officer currently posted in the Northeast was sent there as a punishment, because it was believed he had been leaking stories about Chaturvedi to the media. More surprisingly, an operative currently in Vietnam is not even from the intelligence department. He is an administrative officer sent because the RAWchief wanted to return a favour. Similarly, the officer posted in Indonesia a few years ago was from the ministerial cadre. “Older people who have never been abroad are given a foreign posting as a reward, so that they can make some money before they retire,” a source said.

THE LURE of the ‘plum’ foreign post in ‘luxury’ countries like the US or the UK has also led to a dearth of officers willing to go where it matters. There has been no RAW operative in Iraq for the last four years, says Lieutenant Colonel S Maladi, who joined RAW’s technical cadre on deputation from the army in 2000. Of his own experience, he says, “I was offered the Afghanistan cover post and I wasn’t even in the intelligence department,” adding that he soon learnt three others in the bureau had been sent notices to leave for Afghanistan, but had refused to go. Current RAWofficers defend the organisation, saying this work culture is prevalent throughout the civil services. That, perhaps, is the crux of the problem. “RAWseems to operate like any other government department and lacks the ethos of an elite intelligence unit,” said a former senior officer.

Under Chaturvedi, RAW has been described as a rudderless ship, and there seems to be a sense of despair among the few proud sailors who have seen better days. “I only spent two years in the organisation and I am very fond of it,” former RAWChief AS Dulat told TEHELKA. “I hate to see all this dirt flying around, running it down,” he added. But the grime is more evident now than ever before. In the latest episode to discredit the agency, Nisha Bhatia, a director at RAW’s training institute, tried in August to commit suicide outside the Prime Minister’s office, indicting Chaturvedi and joint secretary Sunil Uke on sexual harassment charges. Bhatia told TEHELKA she was driven to this extreme step after requests for action found no response. She initially told Chaturvedi that Uke had offered her Rs 30,000, withdrawn from the secret service fund. TEHELKA has a copy of Chaturvedi’s reply: “Please call both the concerned officials and sort out the problem. I don’t wish to be disturbed on such issues,” he wrote. While Chaturvedi has termed the allegations baseless, Bhatia says she is willing to take legal action. If she goes ahead, it will not be the first time RAW is dragged to court. If appeals for more accountability and for the creation of a parliamentary oversight committee looking into RAW go unheard, it may not be the last. •