Spy in South Asia: Great Britain, the United States and the secret cold war of India
By Paul M. McGarr
Cambridge University Press, 2024.
Contributing significantly to the Literature Focusing on the Function of Intelligence Outside the Anglosphere and Shedding Light on the ‘Missing Dimension’ of the Cold War As It Had Played Out in the Indian Subcontinent, Paul Mr. McGarr’s New Book is Solidly Grounds in Primary Resources from Archives in the United States, the United Kingdom and India. Experienced intelligence historian, McGarr traces the characters, events, institutions, policies, publications as well as perceptions distributed on the continents, which have shaped the contours of the secret intervention by the British intelligence and security agencies and Americans, faced with imminent and American shades of red (Soviet and Indian communism), and secret cooperation with Indian agencies. At a time when there is a national examination and a global curiosity concerning Indian intelligence agencies, this book essentially explores historical experiences in their own sovereign territory with British and American intelligence and security agencies as well as its lasting influence.
The main argument that crosses McGarr’s book is that the interventions undertaken during the Cold War by the British and American intelligence and security agencies in India have proven to be “erroneous” and “largely self-defective” (p.3) . This argument is located in the context and the question of McGarr: why do the South Asians associate intelligence with a secret action, the great conspiracy and the justifications for repression, as opposed to the Western notions on surveillance? While the first half of the book reflects how these associations and concepts were carrying out the activities of foreign intelligence agencies, the second half of the book underlines how these notions were reinforced by Indian politicians for electoral gains. It is at the conclusion that we would realize that the chapter of the book not only follows a sequential chronology but also a consecutive chronology. Even today, the effects of the use of preserved mysticism and secrecy are in great interest in domestic political discourse. Those currently amused by allegations of the “malicious foreign hand” mixing in domestic policy would find interesting that such a mischief dates back to the Nehruvian era and lasted a certain number of successive governments. Similar nuances situate the book in a welcome passage of the binary is conventional west of intelligence studies on the Cold War and offer a fresh North-South perspective.
Independent India was literally given the ashes (referring to the destruction of relevant documents in New Delhi and Shimla) of the Colonial Intelligence Bureau (IB). Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel had to take up the challenge of setting up an intelligence service for the national security requirements of India which had to be “built differently” (p.15), with a reference to the colonial heritage IB. Chaya’s work gives a more in-depth examination of the first years of the culture of post-colonial Indian intelligence (Chaya, 2022, p.88-120). Indian leaders had to balance, among other things, the Indianization of the intelligence system while maintaining a security affair with the British MI5. Balachandran highlighted the danger of “possible infiltration of foreign thought” in Indian strategic and administrative policies while maintaining the intelligence link with a dominant partner like MI5. He also suggests that “IB was made a vehicle to implement the strategic ideas of the British” in the first years of the Cold War (Balachandran, 2022, p.106). This also meant priority to deal with the competing threats of communalism and communism for the national security of India. The non-alignment policy of India has offended a large part of political decision-makers in the West and most of them could not rightly assess the spirit of influential personalities like VK Krishna Menon and Indira Gandhi everything throughout the Cold War years. While the iron curtain descended above Eastern Europe, India has become a “magnet for foreign intelligence agencies” due to “favorable conditions” (p.7). This made India a special place for the MI5, MI6 and CIA as well as Soviet intelligence agencies. In this context, the book covers the policy of defections, elections and spy scandals. In this saga of secret intervention and secret cooperation, the signing of the declaration to Tashkent between India and Pakistan in 1966 was rightly called the one who marked the end of the British influence in the subcontinent Indian.
The first doubts of Indian leaders on cooperation with Western intelligence agencies were resolved by the Chinese offensive in 1962. India partnerships with British and American agencies were not limited to training agents and forces security, but encompassing intelligence sharing mechanisms and joint secret missions such as the operating hat. The pace of the intelligence partnership between Indian, British and American intelligence has been frequently broken by the most ambitious and frequently erroneous secret interventions, the objectives of which were rarely achieved. He underlines how secret interventions disrupted constructive diplomatic relations. Consequently, clumsy exhibitions, spy scandals, media coverage or politicians, paranoids on the change of diet, when the regime change was endemic, will not be blamed for diplomatic rows resulting from secret matter.
In the era of the multi-aligned foreign policy of India, there are considerations for everyone. First, for foreign intelligence agencies in friendly countries, on how they approach India and what their planned proportion of secret cooperation and secret intervention will be. Second, for Indian agencies, to redefine the terms of engagement with foreign intelligence agencies and to identify new opportunities and new limits. Finally, for Indian politicians, to reassess the use of a “malicious foreign hand” as a tool in internal political discourse for close political gains. Due to the secret nature of certain events, there are questions for which McGarr could not find a logical answer and, therefore, qualified them as uncertainties. On the question of knowing if Mi5 and Sanjeevi Pillai had been complicated to undermine the VK Krishna Menon and if Indira Gandhi was the victim of the dirty CIA towers, the author resisted the urge to push the tales half cooked .
The book will undoubtedly succeed in promoting a debate on the evolution of India’s relations with secret intelligence and its “wider global consequences” (p.13). This book could be supplemented by a work based on the files of the Cold War declassified by India in the future, which could bring out the considerations that Indian decision -makers and intelligence agencies had during these years of secret intervention and cooperation. Another free work could explore the comparative analysis of British and American intelligence relations with Pakistan and India during the Cold War.
References
Chaya, DP (2022) The culture of the intelligence of India and strategic surprises: espionage for the southern block. Routledge, pp. 88-120.
Balachandran, V. (2022) Intelligence over the centuries. Industry Source Books, pp. 106.
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