NEW DELHI: Indian intelligence agencies not only eavesdrop on domestic telephone lines but have also been intercepting international communication traffic passing through the SEA-ME-WE submarine cable connecting Western Europe, the Middle East and South East Asia, in violation of international laws. Set up in 2000, the cable is the main source of connectivity for telephones and broadband Internet services in the region. Major General VK Singh, former head of the Research and Analysis WingÂ’s (RAW) technical cell, claims that the agency has procured interception-technology from France. The equipment has been installed at the VSNL (IndiaÂ’s overseas communication service) gateway in Mumbai, he says.
Spilling the beans in his latest book “India’s External Intelligence: Secrets of Research and Analysis Wing (RAW),” Gen Singh says RAW, in its bid to emulate the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), has been unnecessarily tapping telephone traffic between, for example, Germany and Japan.
Gen Singh also claims in his book that the CIA has repeatedly tried to intrude on the Indian intelligence network over the past few decades. He believes “honey traps” are one of the favourite techniques employed by the CIA to hook Indians. As the latest case, he cites a woman officer in the US Embassy, Rosanne Minchew’s involvement in breaching the security of the National Security Council Secretariat (NSCS).
Gen Singh, who is the first officer to write a book on his former organisation, says earlier accounts written by civilian Ashok Raina in 1968, and reproduced by Fahmida Ashraf in Pakistan in 2004, were highly inaccurate.
In his book he lends credence to reports that Indian commandos did not storm the hijacked IC 814 aircraft in December 1999 when it landed at Amritsar because a senior RAW official was onboard. Quoting a report from Asianweek, he says the individual was Shashi Bhushan Singh, a senior RAW undercover officer posted at the Indian embassy in Kathmandu, and the brother-in-law of NK Singh, the most senior bureaucrat at the time in Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s office. The author also lashes out at the former NDA government for going public with the famous interception of a telephone conversation between Gen Pervez Musahrraf and his chief of staff, Lt Gen Mohammad Aziz, to prove Pakistan’s complicity in the Kargil war. Gen Singh believes India may have won some brownie points with the United States by going public with the intercepted conversation, but it led to Pakistan immediately closing the satellite link between Beijing and Islamabad, which RAW had been tapping into for quite some time. “It is impossible to estimate the value of intelligence that would have been obtained if the link had continued to be used,” he writes.
Demanding parliamentary oversight over intelligence agencies, Gen Singh says lack of accountability is the most glaring shortcoming of RAW. Incompetent leadership as well as mistrust are also eating into the credibility of the organisation.
Since RAW officials are not answerable to any outside agency, many officers treat themselves as being above the law, and in fact as a law unto themselves, he adds.
“This sort of belief is often found in police and intelligence agencies in totalitarian regimes, but appear out of place in a democracy,” writes the former chief of RAW’s technical intelligence cell. |