Immediately after the explosions, Prime Minister Rao accepted the advice of R&AW that we should invite the counter-terrorism experts of the US, UK and other Western countries to visit the spot and see the weapons and other evidence gathered by the police during the initial investigation. The detonators and timers were of American origin, the hand-grenades of Austrian design and some AK-47 rifles of Chinese-make. The evidence indicated the terrorists had got all this from Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence.
The idea was that if the Western counter-terrorism experts saw the evidence immediately after the explosions, they might go back and tell their political leadership they were convinced that the ISI was behind the explosions, even though they might not share their findings with us.
The US experts wanted to take a detonator and timer which had been recovered intact to the US for forensic examination and promised to return them after the examination. I agreed to it. A few days later, they gave an unsigned report that they were of American origin and were part of stock given to Pakistan during the Afghan war in the 1980s.
The report added this did not necessarily mean the terrorists got them from the ISI. It pointed out that in Pakistan there was a lot of leakage of government arms and ammunition to smugglers and expressed the view that the terrorists might have procured them from the smugglers.
When I asked them to return the detonator and the timer as promised by them they replied that their forensic experts had by mistake destroyed them. They did not apparently want to leave any clinching evidence against Pakistan in our hands. This was a bitter lesson to us that in matters concerning Pakistan one should not totally trust the US. They would do anything to ensure that no harm came to Pakistan.
When the US experts were visiting the spots in Mumbai a British journalist posted in New Delhi came to know from a source in the Mumbai police about their visit and the name of the hotel where they were staying. He rang them up and wanted to interview them. They strongly denied they were counter-terrorism experts, cut short their stay in India and went back to the US. They were apparently afraid if the terrorists came to suspect the US was helping India, they might target US nationals.
We gave to the Chinese details of the AK-47 rifles of Chinese-make recovered in Mumbai and asked them whether they had sold them to Pakistan. They claimed that in Chinese arms factories record-keeping was in a mess and as such they had no record as to whom they had sold them. They pointed out that in the past they had sold AK-47 rifles to a number of countries in Asia and Africa and added that the recovery of the rifles in Mumbai did not necessarily mean the terrorists got them from Pakistan.
Only the Austrians gave a signed report that the hand-grenades had been made in a factory in Pakistan set up with their assistance.
Within three or four days of the explosions, the Mumbai police, the Intelligence Bureau and R&AW had solved the case, identified the terrorists responsible, procured documentary evidence of their travel to Pakistan for training and details of the arms and ammunition got by them from Pakistan and recovered the unutilised ones.
We are so good in investigating an act of terrorism after it has taken place, but our record of prevention leaves much to be desired. It is not that we do not get preventive intelligence. For every successful act of terrorism there are many which were prevented by timely and precise intelligence, but the public will always judge the intelligence agencies by what they could not prevent and not by what they did.
For months after the explosions, there was an intense debate among officials in New Delhi whether the Mumbai explosions were due to an intelligence failure. Intelligence officials strongly contested this and pointed out that investigations had revealed there were persons, including public servants, posted in Maharashtra , who were apparently aware there had been clandestine landings of arms and ammunition on the coast though they did not know these were meant for use in Mumbai. They chose not to alert the intelligence agencies and police about it. Intelligence officials therefore contended this showed it was not a case of failure of intelligence, but failure of integrity. The government decided not to order an enquiry as to whether there was an intelligence failure.