R.N. Kao: The Spy Chief Behind Dharma Productions’ New Film

When Karan Johar's Dharma Productions announced it was reviving a film on Rameshwar Nath Kao, it revived public interest in a man whose entire career was built on staying out of the public eye.

Kao founded and led India's external intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), and quietly shaped some of the subcontinent's most consequential events — the 1971 war that created Bangladesh, the merger of Sikkim into India, and decades of clandestine diplomacy most Indians never heard about.

He was, by every account, allergic to publicity even as he built one of the world's most respected intelligence services.

From Benares To The Intelligence Bureau

Rameshwar Nath Kao was born on 10 May 1918 in Benares, in what was then the United Provinces of British India, into a Kashmiri Brahmin family. He studied English literature, history and Persian at the University of Lucknow and took a master's degree at Allahabad, before joining the Indian Imperial Police around 1939–40. His deputation to the Intelligence Bureau (IB) soon after independence set the course for the rest of his life. There, he built a reputation quietly, including a stint managing VIP security around Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who is said to have personally valued him for sensitive assignments that fell outside the remit of ordinary police or military channels.

By the 1960s, Kao had also gained experience working on intelligence-linked institution-building abroad, including in Ghana, which sharpened the organisational skills he would later need on a much bigger canvas.

Why India Needed A New Agency

India's 1962 war with China exposed a critical gap: the country had almost no reliable external intelligence on Chinese military movements along the Himalayan frontier. The 1965 war with Pakistan reinforced the lesson. The Intelligence Bureau, built primarily for domestic and counter-intelligence work, was not equipped to run sustained foreign operations. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi decided the answer was to split external intelligence away from the IB entirely and create a dedicated agency built for the purpose.

In September 1968, she did exactly that, creating R&AW with Kao as its founder and first Secretary (Research), a position he would hold until 1977.

Building R&AW “From Scratch”

Kao inherited no template. He had to design an organisation capable of running foreign sources, gathering intelligence overseas and feeding assessments to policymakers — a mandate the IB had never fully executed. He started small, reportedly building around his initial team a close-knit cadre of a few hundred handpicked officers, many drawn from the IB itself. This inner circle became informally known across Indian intelligence folklore as the “Kaoboys” — a nickname that stuck for generations of R&AW officers who trained under Kao's direct influence.

His management style reportedly favoured recruiting specialists who wouldn't normally come through standard government channels, and instilling a distinct institutional culture — professional, disciplined, and famously discreet. Kao himself rarely allowed himself to be photographed and avoided public statements throughout his career and after retirement, a trait former colleagues say set the tone for the agency's broader ethos of secrecy.

The 1971 War And The Birth Of Bangladesh

R&AW's first major test came within three years of its founding. As unrest grew in East Pakistan through 1970 and 1971, Kao's agency quietly supported the Mukti Bahini, the Bengali guerrilla force resisting the Pakistani military. R&AW is credited with training large numbers of Mukti Bahini fighters and running covert operations that helped tip the balance before the formal Indo-Pakistani war broke out in December 1971. The war lasted less than two weeks and ended with the creation of Bangladesh.

Kao stayed engaged with Bangladesh well past the war's end. When Bangladesh's founding leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman began losing his grip on power in the mid-1970s, Kao reportedly traveled to Dhaka himself to warn him of a plot against him, a warning Mujib did not heed before his assassination in August 1975.

Cultivating Foreign Intelligence Partnerships

Kao also understood that a young agency needed friends abroad. Soon after R&AW's creation, Indira Gandhi asked him to build a clandestine relationship with Israel's Mossad, a delicate task given India's public support for the Palestinian cause.

Kao succeeded, and the India–Israel intelligence relationship that exists today traces its roots to that early liaison. He is also credited with building a personal friendship with George H.W. Bush during Bush's tenure as CIA director, a relationship Kao later leaned on to press Washington over support for Khalistani separatists.

Relationship With Prime Ministers and Later Years

Kao's career spanned multiple prime ministers. Nehru trusted him early; Indira Gandhi built R&AW around him and relied on him through the 1970s' most turbulent moments; and after her return to power in 1980, Kao came back from the political wilderness of the Janata years to serve as her senior security adviser, later continuing in that role under Rajiv Gandhi.

During the Morarji Desai government of 1977–79, by contrast, Kao's influence was sidelined, and his successor as R&AW chief reportedly resigned in protest when the position was downgraded

The Intelligence Philosophy He Left Behind

Kao's legacy inside India's intelligence establishment rests less on any single operation than on the institutional culture he built: professionalism over publicity, meticulous tradecraft, loyalty to the organisation over personal credit, and an insistence on cultivating both domestic expertise and international partnerships rather than relying solely on either.

He died in Delhi on 20 January 2002, having spent his life avoiding the spotlight even as he helped redraw the map of South Asia. That contradiction, a man whose actions were historic and whose identity remained deliberately obscure, is precisely what Dharma Productions' film, and the growing shelf of books about him, are now trying to capture.