Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024. US$33.00, cloth. ISBN 9781108843676.
Practitioners, scholars, and journalists have spilled considerable ink to illuminate the intelligence wars of the twentieth century. The eminent historian Christopher Andrew produced landmark tomes, such as The Sword and The Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (Basic Books, 1999) revealing the extensive covert operations of the Soviet Union’s dreaded KGB. Pulitzer Prize winner David Hoffman conveys the daring exploits of a Soviet scientist who provided cutting-edge technological secrets to the CIA in his gripping work The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal (Doubleday, 2016). Bookstore shelves are lined with the memoirs of erstwhile Western operatives who toiled in the shadows of Europe’s Cold War battlefields. Some accounts contain painful lessons, while others merely grind bureaucratic axes.
Paul McGarr’s Spying in South Asia is a singular contribution to the burgeoning field of intelligence studies owing to its originality and extraordinary depth of research. McGarr, a lecturer at King’s College in London, brings to light previously obscure periods of intelligence collaboration between the United States, the United Kingdom, and India. Much of what has been written about the practice of intelligence privileges Western narratives and settings. The literature on the intersection of geopolitics and intelligence in postcolonial India, let alone the entirety of South Asia, home to a quarter of humanity, is thin. Intelligence in South Asia is understudied, to say the least. Some retired Indian officials, such as former Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) Secretary A. S. Dulat, authored retrospectives of their service to Delhi. The R&AW is India’s external intelligence agency. In 1971, B. N. Mullick, the second director of India’s Intelligence Bureau (IB), the country’s domestic security service, published a book chronicling the tumultuous events preceding the 1962 India-China war. Nonetheless, few have undertaken a scholarly investigation of the evolution of Indian intelligence and its interplay with policymakers and external powers comparable to Spying in South Asia. Accordingly, McGarr breaks new ground, citing a trove of declassified material.
Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s founding prime minister, championed non-alignment at the outset of the Cold War, eschewing alliances with the US- and Soviet-led blocs. He was skeptical of intelligence because of the abuses of Britain’s colonial security apparatus, which targeted India’s independence movement. Nehru complained that intelligence assessments reaching his desk lacked substance, and he castigated the CIA for conducting “espionage and secret service activities” inside India (82). At the same time, McGarr details how Nehru and successive prime ministers, despite their misgivings, approved of extensive secret cooperation with London and Washington. The IB and its British counterpart MI5 forged a special postwar relationship to the point that India hosted an MI5 liaison officer until budget cuts prompted the end of the program. Ties between the IB and MI5, and later the CIA, ran so deep that Mullick cautioned a British officer that Nehru would have curbed the relationship had he known the whole picture.
McGarr recounts how the CIA supported the establishment of the Special Frontier Force, a paramilitary unit initially designed to act as a stay-behind force in the event of another border war with China. Nehru permitted US flights access to Indian airspace to insert and arm Tibetan guerillas fighting Chinese authorities, and his IB even facilitated ground infiltration into Chinese-controlled Tibet. The Tibetan program achieved lackluster results, but such cooperation underscored how India’s doctrine of non-alignment did not constrain wide-ranging clandestine collaboration. McGarr’s book reveals the lesser-known yet substantial Indian contribution to strengthening US reconnaissance. Between 1964 and 1967, the CIA ran secret U-2 surveillance flights from an Indian airstrip to gather intelligence about China’s nuclear testing sites. The Soviet shootdown of the U-2 piloted by Francis Gary Powers in 1960 spotlighted Pakistan’s role in hosting U-2 spy planes, but India played the same game, as well. In addition, the CIA helped to create India’s Aviation Research Center (ARC) in 1963, providing aircraft for aerial observation missions in western China. US-Indian intelligence cooperation reached a new zenith under Operation Hat, a joint CIA-IB initiative to install sensor equipment to monitor China’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs. No less than three Indian prime ministers, including Nehru, sanctioned Operation Hat. In 1978, Prime Minister Morarji Desai publicly confirmed India’s role in the operation, sending “shockwaves through the nation’s political establishment” (121).
The bonds between the CIA and Indian counterparts also yielded diplomatic benefits. During periods of discord between Washington and Delhi, both sides relied on intelligence channels to keep ties stable. McGarr writes that during the 1971 India-Pakistan War, when relations with India cratered owing to President Richard Nixon’s “tilt” toward Pakistan, the CIA and R&AW maintained “strong channels of communication” (195). McGarr quotes a US diplomat who believes these channels “played a critical role in ending the [1971] war” (195).
McGarr also examines the downside of intelligence, namely the encouragement of Indian paranoia toward a “hidden hand” in domestic politics. Spying in South Asia is replete with examples of how broad swaths of Indian society perceived outsized meddling by US intelligence—an enduring problem exemplified by farfetched claims in contemporary Indian media. McGarr’s research demonstrates how Soviet agencies amplified anti-American propaganda within India while also elucidating Washington’s failure to address the ensuing reputational harm adequately, especially among Indian politicians primed to assume the worst of the United States. Nonetheless, McGarr’s book challenges the conventional wisdom that India kept the West at arms-length during the Cold War. There was far more complexity to the story that we can now grasp decades later owing to McGarr’s archival digging. Secret cooperation insulated from the vicissitudes of nationalist politics flourished while serving the interests of all parties involved. As policymakers consider leveraging an accelerating strategic partnership between the United States and India to balance against China, McGarr’s lesson is that quiet collaboration might be just as consequential, if not more so, than what is publicly visible.
*The views expressed in this review reflect solely those of the author.
Zachary Constantino
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver