Paul M. McGarr, <i>Spying in South Asia: Britain, the United States and India's Secret Cold War</i>

In the early 1970s, Piloo Mody, a leader of India's Swatantra Party, a small, feisty, free-market-oriented party, wore a placard emblazoned with the words, “I am a CIA agent” to the Indian parliament. Mody, a witty parliamentarian, was caricaturing Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's persistent claims that many of India's policy woes could be attributed to the machinations of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) across India. Her idée fixe about the CIA's apparently pernicious role in India stemmed in part from Richard Nixon's decision to send the U.S. Seventh Fleet into the Bay of Bengal during the East Pakistan crisis of 1971. This failed attempt on the part of the United States to cow India had convinced Gandhi that U.S. leaders, relying on the CIA, were determined to undermine her government.Gandhi's misgivings about the possible machinations of the CIA were doubly ironic. Despite her father Jawaharlal Nehru's commitment to a policy of nonalignment and a degree of distrust of U.S. policies in South Asia and beyond, India's intelligence apparatus had actively cooperated with intelligence agencies in the United Kingdom and then the United States. The apogee of such cooperation had come both before, and especially after, the disastrous Sino–Indian border war of 1962. Some of these activities have been previously discussed by Mohan Singh Kohli and Kenneth Conboy in their Spies in the Himalayas and by John Kenneth Knaus in his Orphans of the Cold War. Both Kohli and Knaus had been deeply involved in many of these operations—Kohli as an avid mountaineer and an Indian Army officer and Knaus as the CIA case officer responsible for training and supporting Tibetan exiles keen on challenging the repressive rule of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in their homeland.It also ironic that, despite this level of cooperation, Paul M. McGarr, a well-known British diplomatic historian argues in Spying in South Asia, based on substantial evidence, that both British and U.S. intelligence agencies were not especially dexterous in their activities in India and South Asia. McGarr not only discusses those derring-do episodes but provides a superbly panoramic and extraordinarily detailed account of the role of British and U.S. intelligence agencies in India throughout the Cold War. His account, quite understandably, begins at the time of the transfer of power in India with the end of British colonial rule. To no surprise, India's Intelligence Bureau (IB) was really an inheritor of the colonial intelligence apparatus. Drawing extensively on colonial archives, McGarr masterfully traces the lineage of the IB and discusses in extensive detail how it continued to work with British intelligence after India's independence.British intelligence had two interrelated concerns: the dangers of domestic Communist subversion and Soviet Communist influence in India. India's new spymasters shared the fears of their British counterparts. Prime Minister Nehru, however, was far more concerned about the possible destabilizing effects of ethno-religious conflict and violence in the sanguinary aftermath of the violent partition of the British Empire. Despite this dichotomy of perspectives, New Delhi and London agreed in the early days after independence, to place an intelligence representative in their respective embassies. Sadly, this cooperation proved to be short lived, in part because of Prime Minister Clement Atlee's aversion to British covert action in India and later because of budgetary considerations. Not until after the disastrous Sino–Indian border war was the earlier collaboration renewed.The book also provides a fascinating, nuanced account of the role of a highly controversial politician, V. K. Krishna Menon, who had been a close confidante of Nehru. Menon had earlier played an important role in nationalist circles in the United Kingdom and was well known for his pro-Soviet views. Nevertheless, because of his close association with Nehru, he came to serve as India's high commissioner to the United Kingdom and then as India's defense minister. Menon, McGarr shows, was quite hostile toward the IB because of its role in cracking down on Communist subversive activities in India. Indeed, at one point, he had such an unpleasant exchange with the head of the IB, Sanjeevi Pillai, who was visiting London, that India's Home Minister Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel had to intervene with Nehru to rein in Menon.Oddly enough, McGarr has little to say about Menon's relationship as the defense minister with the IB on the eve of the 1962 Sino–Indian border war. Instead, he focuses much of his attention on the organizational limitations of the IB on the eve of the conflict. As other scholars and analysts had previously argued, McGarr affirms that the IB was both the producer and the consumer of intelligence it was collecting on the PRC. In considerable part, this fundamental flaw in design contributed to the intelligence failure leading up to the war.McGarr really comes into his own when he discusses the extensive collaboration that ensued between the IB and the newly created Research and Analysis Wing in the wake of the war. India's political leaders, traumatized in the aftermath of the war, gave considerable leeway to the CIA to carry out a range of intelligence operations directed against the PRC, including the provision of overflights launched from within India.These collaborative ventures continued for several years. However, in the late 1960s, as Prime Minister Indira Gandhi found herself increasingly beleaguered on the domestic front, she increasingly resorted to blaming the CIA for many of the country's socioeconomic woes. Ironically, McGarr shows that her misgivings about the CIA stemmed at least in part from her voracious consumption of several critical U.S. accounts of the CIA's global covert operations, including the well-known book by John Marks and Victor Marchetti, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence.In the latter parts of the book, McGarr also dwells on an important controversy involving one of Gandhi's successors in office, Morarji Desai. Seymour Hersh, the controversial U.S. investigative journalist, claimed in his book The Price of Power that Desai had been on the payroll of the CIA. Quite understandably, Desai sued Hersh, demanding that he reveal his sources. After a protracted trial, the U.S. judge dismissed the charges and held that Hersh was not obligated to do so.The discussions of these sensational episodes aside, McGarr's conclusion about the role and efficacy of Western intelligence agencies in India is quite sobering. He concludes that their inadequate appreciation of India's nationalist legacy, lack of understanding of its cultural norms and mores, and misreading of its political culture often led them to reach flawed judgments and conclusions.