The book Escape To Nowhere has already received rave notices. I have no doubt it will be one of the best-sellers of this year. I am sure an exciting movie will follow provided a woman could be introduced into the film script. One misses the presence of a spooky woman in Amar Bhushan’s narrative. There are women-spooks in the R&AW---some doing very well. Any spy-fiction has to highlight their role in Smiley’s World.
The book will have a very high excitement value. I hope it will also have an equally high educative value. There is an acute shortage of scholarly works on the craft and profession of intelligence in India. There is an even greater shortage of works on the craft and profession of counter-intelligence.
Some of us, who had served in the intelligence profession, have come out of the spooky purdah and started sharing with the public our thoughts and insights on the state of our intelligence in the hope of better educating the public, but we still hesitate to write freely and frankly on the state of our counter-intelligence lest we unwittingly play into the hands of foreign intelligence agencies looking for clues as to how our counter-intelligence operates. What are their weak and strong points? What are the techniques employed by our counter-intelligence? It is much more difficult to write carefully on counter-intelligence than on intelligence without weakening our armour. Amar has sought to do this, but some professionals will doubt the advisability of his discussing the techniques of surveillance employed by the R&AW. A description of the techniques is exciting for a fiction and a movie, but hazardous and weakening for a counter-intelligence set-up.
Your intelligence capability helps you to collect information about others that you need for strengthening your national security. Your counter-intelligence capability enables you to prevent others from collecting information about you which they could use against you. You may be able to collect valuable intelligence about others, but if you are not able to prevent others from collecting intelligence about you, your national security will remain weak.
The best intelligence comes from human and technical penetration of other governments, intelligence and security agencies, terrorist and other organizations. In Smiley’s World, there is a demonic competitive bid to penetrate each other. The more capable you are in penetrating others, the better the quality of your intelligence.
The highest value is attached to the penetration of foreign intelligence agencies. When you manage to place a mole in a foreign agency, you are not only able to collect high-grade intelligence, but also influence the thinking of the political leadership and policy-makers of the penetrated countries through intelligence officers who are generally very close to the senior levels of decision-makers. That is why when there is a mole in an intelligence agency, it is difficult to make a damage assessment when the mole is discovered. It is comparatively easy to establish what information was lost through the mole, but it is difficult to establish what wrong decisions were taken by the political leaders and policy-makers as a result of the use of a mole by a foreign agency to influence thinking at the decision-making levels.
The likelihood of the penetration of an intelligence agency by a foreign agency is a constant nightmare for all counter-intelligence set-ups. The ability of an agency to prevent penetration by a mole depends on various factors---the personal and professional integrity of its officers, their security consciousness, their loyalty to the country, their ethical standards, their ability to withstand temptations, their courage to report to their seniors any indications of suspicious conduct of their colleagues and even close friends. When these factors are weak, penetration is facilitated.
That is why we as a nation and the R&AW as an intelligence organization ought to have been worried by the ease with which the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) penetrated the R&AW twice and managed to evade detection for a long time. The penetration and the ease with which the CIA and its moles managed to evade detection spoke poorly of the state of counter-intelligence in the R&AW.