'For 7 Months, We Weren't Told To Fly Any Mission'

Air Marshal Ashok Goel (retd) was the operations manager with theRAW’s Aviation Research Centre (ARC) before and during the Kargil war. At that time, he was an air vice marshal and a key participant in intelligence gathering operations. In an interview to Outlook, he speaks on the intelligence inputs given to army and political leadership. Excerpts:

What was the situation in the crucial months preceding the Kargil war?
In April ’98, the army and navy chiefs complained to the defence minister of not getting any intelligence from RAW. RAW chief Arvind Dave then called for a meeting, briefed all. We assured that their operational needs would be taken care of. After R.S. Bedi took over ARC, we cut down the transmission of intelligence data to service HQs from 10 days to 48 hours. Intelligence inputs were being given on a real-time basis.

What role did the ARC play before and during the war?
ARC acts when it gets a specific mission. Unfortunately, though General (V.P.) Malik speaks of intelligence failure in his book, the fact is that we were asked to do a mission in October 1998. After that, till May 7, 1999, army headquarters never asked us to fly any mission. Why was there a huge gap of seven months? Someone needs to answer that.

So was there any problem vis-a-vis intelligence gathering?
Perhaps, in October 1998 there was some direction from the political leadership to the intelligence agencies in the run-up to the bus yatra to maintain a low profile. Please understand that in India there is a major problem at the level of acceptance of intelligence. Political masters accept intelligence estimates in keeping with their political considerations. And at that time, the bus yatra fell in line with the political considerations. Anyway, intelligence is the best scapegoat because these agencies work in secrecy and don’t have PR outfits to set the record straight.

What happened after May 7, 1999? This was the time when Malik left for Poland and returned on May 20.
We flew the first mission on May 7 but bad weather prevented us from getting any results. But the missions on May 14, 16 and 18 were extremely successful. It firmly established the presence of Pakistani troops because our May 16 mission revealed six Pakistani Mi-17 helicopters parked in the Mushkoh valley. This was shown to then defence minister and he was shocked. What was shocking is that the army patrols had not been able to detect any of this. That should have convinced army headquarters that this was not a simple jehadi intrusion as claimed later by senior officers. In fact, General Malik called us to his office after the ceasefire and admitted that the ARC’s efforts had helped save the day.