Part 2 (1/2)

'Yeah, we're getting them off our back,' General Puri said. 'They're still occupying some of our areas but we're making progress. But it will take me time. Maybe a month.'

Ironically, my visit was on 4 July 1999, the American independence daythe day that Nawaz Sharif was summoned to the White House by President Clinton. It was the day that Sharif announced that the intruders would vacate Kargil; India retook Tiger Hill the next day; and the war officially ended a week later. Of course, when I met General Puri, neither of us knew that Bill Clinton had read Mian Saheb the riot act, and when we later heard what had happened in Was.h.i.+ngton, DC we were both amused that we had expected the fighting to continue for another month.

After the war was over, the chairman of the four-member Kargil Review Committee, K. Subrahmanyam, came and met me, for by that time I had taken over as secretary at R&AW.

'Why do you think Kargil happened?' he asked, with particular reference to the build-up over the preceding winter. 'There was no intelligence.'

'First, let me clarify that I was not in R&AW in the period you're talking about,' I said. 'I was in IB and there were some bits of intelligence that I thought were quite significant. These were pa.s.sed on.'

Maybe by itself the intelligence didn't amount to much, but we had information that there was unusual activity taking place on the other side of the LoC. We were keeping a watch in the aftermath of the May 1998 nuclear tests in Pakistan, and what we saw had to do with troop movement, building of bunkers, movement of weaponry. And in fact it came to my deskI was the number two man in the IBand I took it to the DIB.

'There's something unusual about this,' I told Shyamal.

'Why don't you send a note to the government?'

'I'll draw up a note, but I think this should go under your signature,' I said, 'because it's not just an ordinary thing.'

So in June 1998 the IB sent a note to the government. The Kargil Review Committee report, in its chapter on 'Findings', under the section 'Intelligence', said: 'The Intelligence Bureau (IB) is meant to collect intelligence within the country and is the premier agency for counter- intelligence. This agency got certain inputs on activities in the FCNA region which were considered important enough by the Director, IB, to be communicated over his signature on June 2, 1998, to the Prime Minister, Home Minister, Cabinet Secretary, Home Secretary and Director General Military Operations. This communication was not addressed to the three officials most concerned with this information, namely, Secretary (R&AW), who is responsible for external intelligence and has the resources to follow up the leads in the IB report; Chairman JIC, who would have taken such information into account in JIC a.s.sessments; and Director General Military Intelligence. Director, IB stated that he expected the information to filter down to these officials through the official hierarchy. This did not happen in respect of Secretary (R&AW) who at that time was holding additional charge as Chairman JIC. The Committee feels that a communication of this nature should have been directly addressed to all the officials concerned.'

Obviously, neither the home ministry nor the army took much notice of the IB report, but there was something funny happening in that area. We report whatever unusual activity that we find, and this information had come to us from Leh a year before. Whatever the Kargil committee may have said, the fact is that various governments from time to time have ignored intelligence inputs, in this case provided almost a year before the intrusions in Kargil were discovered by shepherds.

The other reality is that with our focus on counter-terrorism we are so wrapped up in actionable intelligence that we overlook tell-tale signs. This controversy was to haunt us again when 26/ 11 happened. It is so easy to make intelligence agencies the scapegoat, 'intelligence failure' is the general response.

And what was the army doing? It is supposed to send out regular patrols, which it had obviously stopped doing because it had become so routine. It's as simple as that.

In Kashmir, all we've done since 1989 is talk of infiltration, and it's the army which is the first to talk of it. But infiltration continues. Every summer as the snow begins to melt, you get a plethora of intelligence reports saying that Pakistan is sending in new batches of militants. Yet for all these dire warnings, people come and people go. The army has not been able to stop it.

Yet the army won the Kargil war in July, and in August I took over as chief of R&AW. Just before I took over, Dave one day said to me: 'These R&AW guys run a trade union here. I don't allow them into my room.'

The atmosphere at R&AW was less collegial than it was in the IB and that was because while the IB was h.o.m.ogenous in its composition of officers from the Indian Police Service, R&AW comprised several servicesincluding its own service, the R&AW Administrative Service (RAS). The founder of R&AW, Ram Nath Kaoa man so mysterious that there was apparently no photograph of himhad envisioned R&AW would have its own service. Initially the recruitment was from the open market, much in the way the CIA or the MI6 does; Kao took from various streams, such as the postal service, the revenue service, the army, etc. His idea was that people would leave their parent services and join the RAS.

However, Kao and his deputy, K. Sankaran Nair, did not lay down clear rules of seniority for people joining from different services and this has plagued the service from day one. As a result, many people did not opt for the RAS, fearing they would lose out on the seniority their parent service offered them and defeating the very purpose the RAS was set up for. This has resulted in groupism in the RAS, unnecessary because in my experience the R&AW had officers who were as top-notch, man for man, as those in the IB despite the heterogeneity of backgrounds: for example, my successor, Vikram Sood, who had a very good tenure as chief, was originally from the postal service. Similarly, one of our bright officers who was posted in Pakistan, Vipin Handa, and who later died tragically early in a malfunctioning lift at R&AW headquarters, was from the revenue service.

One consequence of the groupism was trade unionism, as Dave put it, and I was mindful of that. As it was, the buzz going around R&AW was that Dulat was taking over and bringing in his own gang from the IB; furthermore, the rumour was that my staff officer would be someone from IB. I made it a point not to bring officers over from the IB, and I asked someone, 'Who's the most difficult fellow here? Who's the ringleader of the RAS?' 'Jayadeva Ranade,' I was told. I appointed him as my staff officer. He was very good at his work, and we're still good friends.

In fact, the irony of the matter was that as a fallout of this running rivalry between the RAS and non-RAS personnel, Ranade did not get his promotion or was made additional secretary till a few days before he retired; something that would have affected his pension had it not come through. The same government that had second thoughts about making him an additional secretary then made him a member of the National Security Advisory Board, where he was the China expert. This is the craziness of government functioning.

Appointing Ranade wasn't the only surprise my colleagues got. At the R&AW headquarters there are eleven floors, and the chief's office is on the eleventh; to access it he has a private lift at the back of the building. The building has been structured in such a way that the chief can enter the grounds, drive around and come up the private lift which goes straight to the eleventh floor, without anyone knowing. It's called 'the chief's lift'. Everyone else comes in through the main entrance, which has a whole row of lifts on the far end of the s.p.a.cious lobby.

When I heard of this, I thought I can't come in sneaking around the back. In any case, I'm a guy who comes to office late, and if I come late then everybody should be able to see that I come a bit late. I wanted to make a point so I began using the main entrance. I said I would use the private lift only when I was going out during the day, or for my guests, or when I was going home at night. A colleague pointed out to me how much of a departure this was. According to him, I was the first to do so, the others used to come by the private lift and leave by it. 'Saab, aapse pehle iss taraf se koi nahin aayaa. Peechhe se aatein hain, peechhe se hi chale gaye.' It was another example of the way things were at R&AW.

Days after I joined, I decided to pay a visit to R.N. Kao, who was nearing ninety and living in Vasant Vihar, a posh colony for retired senior bureaucrats. I called him up and asked if I could visit. 'This is a good decision you have made, to call me up,' he said rather modestly, and invited me over.

He was a tall, thin man with a hawk-like nose, and we chatted about the organisation that he built. Apparently, when Indira Gandhi gave him the go-ahead to set up an external intelligence agency he went to London and met the second-in- command at the MI6, Sir Maurice Oldfield, who later took over as 'C' (and who was rumoured to be one of the models for 'C' in John le Carre's spy novels), for advice on setting up R&AW. The one thing that stood out from our conversation was his advice to me that now that I was in charge, I need not worry about anyone else; I should run it as I thought best, without looking over my shoulder. 'You've got the best job in the government,' Kao said. 'Now don't worry about anyone else, and just do your job.'

That was good advice because there weren't too many dull moments in the months after I took over. For one thing, on 12 October 1999, General Musharraf took over in Pakistan in a military coup d'etat. I had been in the job for two months or so, and everyone in R&AW was caught unawares. I can claim credit for a lot of things (actually I can't, due to the Official Secrets Act) but the fact was that as far as the coup was concerned we were caught unawares.

In a nutsh.e.l.l, Musharraf had gone to Sri Lanka for the weekend to attend their army's 50th anniversary celebrations. On the way back, he was sacked by Nawaz Sharif, who appointed the ISI chief, Khwaja Ziauddin, in his place. The army quickly surrounded the prime minister's residence and arrested him, but not before Mian Saheb sent a message to Karachi International Airport not to let Musharraf's flight land, and instead re-direct it to India. ('Over my dead body we're going to India,' Musharraf reportedly shouted at the pilots while waving his pistol in the c.o.c.kpit.) The flight was allowed to land once the army surrounded the airport, and Mian Saheb was thrown in jail; he would later be exiled to Saudi Arabia. Musharraf went to President Rafiq Tarar and declared himself chief executive.

Who would have thought that this guy would get off a flight and lock up his prime minister? Come to think of it, who would have antic.i.p.ated that the prime minister would have sacked him? It all happened so fast.

We knew that this fellow was uncompromising. During Vajpayee's bus trip to Lah.o.r.e, for instance, the story was that Musharraf conveniently came to meet our prime minister without his cap. In the military, you salute with your cap, and if you're not wearing your cap, you don't salute. Musharraf obviously had refused to salute Vajpayee. And then of course was Musharraf's conversation with his number two during the Kargil war that R&AW had intercepted and that the government had played for the world.

It was a turn of events that saddened Vajpayee, for he had gotten along with Mian Saheb. Now not only was the peace process in tatters, but he was genuinely concerned for what would happen to Nawaz Sharif. I saw that there was a real shock to Vajpayee and Brajesh Mishra, but to their credit they would eventually get over it and try to do business with Musharraf. It helped that the CIA chief came and shared his opinion with us that Musharraf was someone people could do business with.

But that was still in the future, for just two months after Musharraf took over, India faced another crisis that was inspired in Pakistan and blessed by Musharraf: the hijacking of its Indian Airlines flight IC-814.

3.

TWO HOSTAGE CRISES.

If you were to ask me, Gen. Pervez Musharraf had to have had a hand in the hijacking of Indian Airlines flight IC-814 on 24 December 1999. The reason one can say so is that such an operation could not have been undertaken without ISI support; a hijacking was no cakewalk, even in those pre-9/11 days. And Musharraf, being the army chief and that too in a country where the military had taken direct control, was all powerful. In fact, the story we heard was that when the hijackers took the plane to Lah.o.r.e they were given a bag of weapons. Thus with three events in quick successionthe Kargil intrusion, the coup d'etat, and the hijacking of IC-814there was every reason to be wary of Musharraf, who one suspected had a hand in all three incidents. The hijacking itself made for a harrowing final week of the final year of the century, what with the pressure upon the government from the families of the 176 pa.s.sengers held hostage, and the international isolation in which India found herself, while the West celebrated Christmas. IC-814 was en route from Kathmandu, Nepal, to New Delhi on Christmas Eve when five armed men, threatening to detonate a bomb onboard, hijacked the plane at around 5 p.m. They told Capt. Devi Sharan to take the aircraft further west than its intended destination, towards Lah.o.r.e, but fuel ran low and the plane had to be landed in Amritsar, where it remained for 45 to 50 minutes. That was the only moment when India could have taken control of the hijacking incident. Once it left Amritsar then the only way it could have ended was with India giving into the terrorists' demands, which is what happened.

When the hijacking became known the government convened a Crisis Management Group (CMG) headed by the cabinet secretary, Prabhat k.u.mar, to monitor the situation and deal with it. While the plane was on the ground in Amritsar, Punjab Police was in charge of the situation. The Punjab Police chief was Sarabjit Singh, a batchmate, who was based in Chandigarh and had taken charge a few weeks earlier. Sarabjit and I had known each other throughout our careers, and he later told me his version of what happened while IC-814 was in Amritsar.

Sarabjit had just come out of a dentist's appointment when he got news of the hijacking. As in the past, Amritsar airport would be the most vulnerable in Punjab, so he immediately spoke to J.P. Virdi, the inspector general (border), posted in Amritsar. The state police had commandos in Amritsar and Virdi had two companies sent immediately to the airport. The deputy inspector general (border), Jasminder Singh, had the presence of mind to reach the air traffic control (ATC) tower even before IC-814 landed. Jasminder kept reporting to Sarabjit on the developments as they unfolded.

Sarabjit decided to monitor the situation from Chandigarh and await instructions from the CMG in Delhi, because he felt he was not in a position to act on his own. This was not a position that former Punjab Police chief Kanwar Pal Singh Gill would have taken.

K.P.S. was the man credited with leading the police from the front in the fight against terrorism in Punjab. In 1993, he had dealt with a similar situation when an Indian Airlines flight from Delhi to Srinagar was hijacked and forced to land in Amritsar. The hijackers wanted the plane taken to either Lah.o.r.e or Kabul, but a quick operation by the paramilitary National Security Guard (NSG) ended the episodein a span of 12 seconds, all four terrorists were immobilised and the main hijacker, Mohammed Yousuf Shah, killed. You needed a man like Gill in 1999 to make a quick a.s.sessment and disable the aircraft without wasting time waiting for clear instructions from Delhi.

Sarabjit did consider that he had at his disposal in Punjab commandos who were trained in anti-terrorism, and that they could storm the aircraft, but there would be casualties. He told Delhi, which responded that the government's top priority was that there be no casualties. Sarabjit was also in touch with his chief minister, Parkash Singh Badal, who was at the time visiting his village. Badal's instruction was: be careful. The chief minister did not want a mess in Punjab and did not want to be blamed for anything. He too said that no harm should come to the pa.s.sengers.

On the other hand, DIB Shyamal Datta asked Sarabjit why he did not puncture the tyres of the aircraft and immobilise it. 'They were talking to me as if there was a bicycle there,' Sarabjit mused years later. (Since I knew Sarabjit and I knew what pressure he would be under with everyone breathing down his neck, I avoided talking to him during the crisis.) Sarabjit said that Delhi never told him that IC-814 was not to be allowed to take off. After the event he came in for a lot of flak for allowing the aircraft to leave, and even K.P.S. joined the chorus to say that the Punjab Police should not have allowed the plane to fly away. 'I wasn't Gill,' Sarabjit said in all modesty. 'I wasn't of his stature to stake leaders.h.i.+p because of the bad luck by which the plane landed in Amritsar.'

Sarabjit decided to sit tight and do just what Delhi instructed him. The fault, thus, would lie with the CMG, which could not come to a clear decision on what to do.

Captain Sharan also came in for criticism, but his role was exemplary. He kept telling the ATC to help with fuel; that the hijackers had already killed a pa.s.senger, maybe two; and that even flying on reserve fuel to Lah.o.r.ewhich was a short distance away, on the other side of the borderwas a risk. Worse, the plane was parked midway on the runway, instead of at the end from where it could begin its takeoff.

The hijackers insisted that the plane keep taxiing and told Captain Sharan to take off however he could. The body language of the hijackers showed them to be quite panic-stricken, and so the captain took off with only half a runway. At Lah.o.r.e he was refused permission to land and Lah.o.r.e ATC even turned off the airport lights; it was only when Captain Sharan threatened to land on a road that they permitted IC-814 to land. The hijackers had been so filled with panic that they didn't think they would get out of Amritsar and killed Rupin Katyal, ultimately throwing his body out in Dubai.

Readers may remember that IC-814 was the last hijacking that took place in India. Long before that there were lots of hijackings taking place all over the world and whenever anyone heard of a hijack they would cross their fingers and hope that the hijacked aircraft would not land in their territory. A hijacking was a no-win situation that no one wanted on their head. By the time IC-814 happened, most had gotten over the hijacking phobia, but India's most vulnerable airports remained Srinagar, Jammu and Amritsar. Soon after the hijacking of IC-814 the government decided to station NSG commandoes at these airports.

On 24 December 1999, however, the CMG debated how to deal with the hijacking, and while the CMG was debating, IC-814 flew away. It debated matters such as how to deploy the NSG commandoes to Amritsar fast enough. In all that debate the opportunity to gain the upper hand slipped away. To give credit to the home minister, L.K. Advani, he landed up at the CMG and took charge after the plane left Amritsar.

I was a part of the CMG since I headed R&AW, and several people have asked me about what happened inside the CMG during those 50 minutes; most of the publicly available literature blames 'mismanagement' for the missed opportunity to get a handle on the hijacking. Even filmmaker Vishal Bharadwaj, who was working on a film script (and later made the excellent film Haider, based on Basharat Peer's script), asked me to reveal to him what happened in the CMG, but it is not my place to disclose the contents of a secret meeting.

What I can say, however, is that the CMG degenerated into a blame game, with various senior officials trying to lay the blame for allowing the aircraft to leave Indian soil on one another; the cabinet secretary, being the head of the CMG, was one target, and the NSG chief, Nikhil k.u.mar, became another. It was a fraught time and nerves were unfortunately constantly on edge.

In either case, the plane landed in Lah.o.r.e, was refuelled and as the story went, the hijackers received a bag of weapons. Then the plane went to Dubai, where twenty-seven pa.s.sengers were allowed to leave; and then the aircraft went to Kandahar, Afghanistan, at that time ruled by the Taliban. While IC-814 was in Dubai, India had contemplated a commando raid at the Dubai airport, but the local authorities refused to cooperate. We tried to prevail on the Americans to put pressure on the United Arab Emirates to allow us a raid, but as I mentioned earlier, India found itself isolated internationally. Nothing seemed to be going our way.

After the plane reached Kandahar, which incidentally was the base of the one-eyed head of the Taliban government, Mullah Mohammed Omar, we heard of the hijackers' demands: the release of thirty-five terrorists from Indian prisons, the main one being Maulana Masood Azhar, a dreaded veteran terrorist leader; and $200 million in cash. We sent a team of negotiators, the best professionals in the business, including future IB directors Ajit Doval and Nehchal Sandhu, as well as my senior colleague C.D. Sahay (who would take over as R&AW chief after Vikram Sood); there was an external affairs ministry representative, Vivek Katju, and representatives of other departments like the Bureau of Civil Aviation Security. A truly high-powered team without much power to do anything on the soil of a country governed by people sympathetic to the hijackers.

This was evident in the fact that the Taliban surrounded the aircraft with tanks and soldiers, which they said was to dissuade the hijackers from any further violence, but which we understood was a signal to us not to try a raid by commandos to immobilise the hijackersan option that we discussed in detail. It became clear that the airport was essentially under the ISI's control, and that the Taliban were being guided throughout the episode by the ISI. Pakistani journalist Zahid Hussain, who was in Kandahar during the hijacking, later wrote in his book, Frontline Pakistan: 'Afghan sources . . . revealed that the hijackers were taking instructions from Pakistani intelligence officers present at the airport.' For Hussain, 'the extent of Taliban/ISI/jihadi cooperation was revealed during the Indian hostage crisis of 1999'.