India’s Cold War Spies and the Miss­ing Dimen­sion of Intel­li­gence Studies

In the second KCSI Insights blog, In Praise of Intelligence Studies,  Sir David Omand noted that, back in 1984, a seminal work of intelligence history by Christopher Andrew and David Dilks, The Missing Dimension: Governments and Intelligence Communities in the Twentieth Century, had admonished academic historians for side-lining intelligence. Andrew and Dilks noted that: 

In the period since, the academic study of intelligence has flourished. The publication of official histories of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, alongside an abundance of work on seemingly every aspect of intelligence, from counterintelligence to covert action and analysis to OSINT has brought intelligence in from the cold. And yet, an overwhelming majority of books and articles published in the field are framed in narrow Anglocentric terms, although there is a fair amount of literature on Russian intelligence as well. Keen on learning about British intelligence? No problem, a quick Google search returns thousands of books and articles on the topic. Want to know more about the CIA? You have a veritable mountain of literature from which to choose. Interested in intelligence in an Asian, African, or Latin American context? Bad luck. The options are much more limited. 

My latest book, Spying in South Asia: Britain, the United States and India's Secret Cold War was, in large part, intended to redress a continuing imbalance in intelligence studies. It is true that each year more work appears on intelligence elsewhere, or intelligence beyond the Anglosphere. Recently, important new studies have examined Africa’s intelligence services, provided fresh insights on Latin American intelligence cultures, and advanced our understanding of national intelligence agencies across Asia and the Middle East.

Nevertheless, more needs to be done. Academics, students, and publics are interested in intelligence work conducted by non-Western agencies. And the flow of studies covering these topics is a little heavier than a trickle. To place the issue in perspective, the intelligence journal of record, Intelligence & National Security (I&NS), currently references over two thousand articles on American intelligence. A comparable number of entries is listed for British intelligence. For Russian intelligence that number is reduced to about a thousand. The returns for India number 400. For Africa, 700. For Latin America, 300. But that is not the whole story. The lion’s share of I&NS articles seemingly engaging with intelligence beyond the Anglosphere or Russia address Western interventions in the Global South. Consideration of local agency is often absent or marginalised in these papers. Reference to local intelligence services is seldom more than cursory. 

So what? Does it matter that an imbalance persists in intelligence studies and that the discipline remains predominantly Anglocentric? Is it reasonable to highlight the irony that the field manifests its own internal and parochial ‘missing dimension’? Well, to borrow a familiar analogy, the sound of one Anglospheric hand clapping will never, as Andrew and Dilks underscored in the broader context of intelligence and diplomacy, result in a full or satisfactory rendering of what is, after all, a global secret world.  

Currently, we know little about the history of liaison relationships between Five Eyes members and their intelligence counterparts in the Global South. In the context of India, Spying in South Asia builds upon important work undertaken by Andrew, Calder Walton, and others to expand and enrich our understanding of interactions between MI5, SIS, the CIA, and India’s intelligence and security services, the Research and Analysis Wing and Intelligence Bureau.

The full extent of the intimate and mutually productive relationship that MI5 maintained with India’s Intelligence Bureau for much of the Cold War is only now becoming known. In the late 1940s, when British intelligence came under pressure from Whitehall to develop sources inside the Soviet Union, MI5 approached the Intelligence Bureau to run Indian citizens travelling to the Soviet Union as joint agents.  In return, MI5 helped the Intelligence Bureau to identify the networks Russia and China used to filter illicit propaganda material into the subcontinent. 

The extent of the collaboration was such that both parties believed it held great, almost boundless potential. Though, as perhaps is inevitable in intelligence affairs, a degree of suspicion was impossible to erase. One Deputy Director General of the Security Service, Guy Liddell, while pleased with the strong bond MI5 established with the Intelligence Bureau, bridled at the pressures that came with familiarity. Indian colleagues, Liddell grumbled, were “obviously reluctant to believe that we have not got agents in the Kremlin.” 

In a broader sense, engaging meaningfully with intelligence elsewhere has already pointed to valuable new perspectives in intelligence studies, and not simply in relation to geography, but also chronologically, thematically, and in terms of the socio-cultural impact that Western covert action has had on societies beyond the Anglosphere. 

It is notable that, from the 1950s onwards, Cold War competition amongst the superpowers for hearts and minds of citizens in former colonial states across Asia, Africa and Latin America drew foreign diplomats, aid workers, scientists, technicians, educators, businesspeople, and journalists to cities such as New Delhi. The Indian capital acted as a magnet for intelligence officers attracted by the opportunities India’s non-aligned status presented. A free press, open society, and freedom of movement were boons to any intelligence professional’s work. The former SIS officer, and Soviet spy, George Blake observed that Western and Eastern bloc intelligence agencies ranked New Delhi alongside Berlin as an especially favourable location for espionage activity and agent recruitment. The significance of intelligence hubs inside the Global South, India’s capital included, has largely been overlooked. Casting a critical eye beyond Berlin, London, Washington, and Moscow, and broadening the geographic lens of intelligence studies to include more sustained consideration of southern ‘spy cities’ is warranted and overdue. 

Temporally, engaging with the politics of intelligence in the Global South offers similarly profitable avenues of enquiry. In 1961, the Berlin Wall went up and the numbers of defections staged from East to West inside Europe declined. Conversely, beyond Europe defections multiplied, and nowhere more so than in India. Shifts in the pattern of defections were reflected in popular culture. In Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, John le Carré situated his account of George Smiley’s abortive attempt to persuade Karla to defect not in the well-worn literary borderlands between East and West Germany but in India. An individual with a reasonable claim to represent the most famous Cold War defector of all crossed over from East to West through India’s capital. In March 1967, Svetlana Alliluyeva, the only daughter of Joseph Stalin, walked into the American Embassy in New Delhi and was promptly spirited out of India by the CIA and on to a new life in the United States. 

That same year, 1967, has been characterised in Spying in South Asia as ‘India’s Year of Intelligence’. Coming eight years before its more celebrated American namesake, the processes by which public revelations of malfeasance in India on the part of foreign intelligence services, and the CIA, in particular, became amplified by enquiries and intense media interest bears a strikingly resemblance to later events on Capitol Hill. India was subject to its own Church and Pike committees, although on a smaller scale and away from the glare of public scrutiny. India was confronted by a media storm that kept intelligence on the front pages of national newspapers for months, if not years. India too experienced the corrosive impact on public trust and executive authority that followed on from intelligence scandals in the United States.  

Thematically, the time has come to revisit reductive East-West and North-South binaries in intelligence studies and to embrace new frames of reference. The point is not to criticise current or former intelligence historians, whatever facet of intelligence they work on, and whatever country or region they study. Rather it is to call for a more inclusive and innovative approach to intelligence history. At the risk of succumbing to repetition, there now exists a pressing need to move beyond the Anglosphere in intelligence studies and to more accurately reflect the shifting realities of geopolitics in the twenty-first century. 

As part of that endeavour, we might consider paying more attention to South-South intelligence networks, or intelligence liaison relationships within and between nations of the Global South. As far back as 1958, Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first prime minister, and one-time London School of Economics PhD candidate, received support from India’s Intelligence Bureau to establish his country’s first intelligence service, the Foreign Service Research Bureau. Nkrumah’s approach to India was motivated by a desire to avoid Ghana becoming overly dependent on Western intelligence. Elsewhere in Africa, the Research and Analysis Wing is known to have provided support to the African National Congress in its struggle against apartheid South Africa. Former Indian intelligence officers have also written about New Delhi’s close intelligence relationship with Iran prior to the Islamic revolution in 1979. 

Perhaps more consequential is evidence of intelligence exchanges between India and Latin American nations. In 1973, on the day that the death of Chile’s prime minister, Salvador Allende, filtered through to New Delhi, India’s premier, Indira Gandhi was dining with a visiting foreign dignitary. Gandhi’s guest was Cuba’s leader, Fidel Castro. Given ubiquitous rumours that the CIA was behind Allende’s demise, and accounting for the many and varied plots that the Agency had hatched to eliminate Castro, it is not hard to imagine the tenor of conversation between Gandhi and Castro. This is a roundabout way of saying that South-South intelligence connections have a long and intriguing history about which we know little.  Self-evidently, given an ongoing shift in the balance of global power from North to South, we should strive to learn more. 

That said, it is undoubtedly challenging to research intelligence in the context of the Global South. Logistical hurdles, economic costs, a lack of official transparency, the retention of government documents, and linguistic barriers can make the task complex and difficult. Yet, all the problems noted have at one time or another applied to the study of intelligence within the Anglosphere and its European periphery. All have, by and large, and by various means, been successfully overcome. 

The King’s Centre for the Study of Intelligence has committed to promote and support the study of intelligence elsewhere. Through KCSI Insights, through our seminar series that actively seeks to grow the boundaries of intelligence studies and, perhaps most obviously, by sponsoring the Kjetil Hatlebrekke Memorial Book Prize that recognises scholarship on non-Five Eyes intelligence cultures and systems, KCSI is doing its bit to expand the frontiers of intelligence history. We urge you to join us on that journey.