Spy Stories: A thriller the ISI would readily endorse
Book Title: Spy Stories: Inside the Secret World of the RAW and the ISI
Sandeep Dikshit
‘Spy Stories’ would suggest an ongoing high-voltage clash between the forever enemies — the RAW and ISI. The title and the authors’ pedigree suggest it will hit the bestseller list without breaking a sweat. The astute pre-launch publicity also had tantalising behind-the-curtain snippets of the biggest terrorist massacres. There were hints that the authors had broken through the RAW’s reticence and were thick with spymaster Ajit Doval.
But in the book, Doval chose to neither “agree or disagree” to their questions on the various incidents. In other words, he kept mum. And these were soft questions; there were none on the gaping intelligence gaps that showed up in Pulwama and Pathankot that Doval’s career too is weighed with.
A former RAW chief appeared equally reticent. His only revelation was that Ilyas Kashmiri was not an ISI man because intercepts showed he did not acknowledge Musharraf’s appreciation for an attack on an Indian Army post. On a side note, was this the RAW chief who briefed the UPA government to tell Parliament that “men dressed like Pakistan army” had beheaded the jawan? This was a quote that gave the BJP a field day for weeks.
The book is naturally a racy read by the two. Their past six partnerships have produced engrossing and well-researched accounts. This one hinges on narratives from RAW and ISI agents Monisha and Major Iftikhar, both of whom had severed ties with their parent organisations.
A small window into a turf war between the RAW and IB fails to excite as it has been reported with greater depth in India. Another juicy part details the haemorrhaging of RAW by the CIA. Nine RAW officials were compromised by the CIA with sex offers but only the Rabinder Singh saga is detailed, which again has been more extensively covered here.
One of the narrators, Major Iftikhar, not yet rogue, slips in and out of Kashmir with ease. And while in the Valley, he goes after all the bad guys giving the ISI a bad name. So, he tips off the J&K STF to “encounter” Ghazi Baba and also avenges Hizbul leader Majid Dar’s killers. Kuka Parrey had a double death sentence. He was not just giving the Kashmir ‘freedom struggle’ a bad name but had murdered the girl who looked after Major Iftikhar in Kashmir. The seeds of an Akshay Kumar or Salman Khan-starrer here?
While going about killing the “freewheelers”, Major Iftikhar has a change of heart and joins them.
As per the authors, this cabal of LeT, LeJ (Lashkar-e-Jhangvi), Jaish, al Qaeda, former Pakistan army and ISI officers carried out the Mumbai attack. In that case, what about the role of the then serving Col R Sadatullah who purchased the VoIP cards to minutely guide the terrorists through the bloodletting in Mumbai?
They also triggered the J&K Assembly attack to undermine Musharraf’s call for truce with India. Pathankot too was cut from the same cloth. The ISI had no hand in the Parliament House attack either. The disgraced police officer Davinder Singh arm-twisted Afzal Guru and brought in men whom the ISI, surprise, surprise, wanted dead. It was an inside job by Indian agencies by implication though the subsequent revelations about Davinder Singh do give room for thought.
Pulwama, too, was the handiwork of a freewheeler. Best of all, the planning was done in Helmand province of Afghanistan. That absolves the ISI not only of the operations part, but also for masterminding it on its soil. Despite this “evidence”, Doval was thirsting for a Balakot to humiliate the Pakistan military.
Astoundingly, even Masood Azhar is described as one who doesn’t listen to the ISI yet undergoes dialysis at military hospitals.
Monisha manages to piece together narratives each time that implicate the poor ISI in the eyes of the West, which perhaps doesn’t have independent insights into the region.
Major Iftikhar abandons the freewheelers when asked to participate in killing Benazir. Here, too, the ISI was negligent at best.
Monisha meanwhile gets increasingly disillusioned because Lodhi Road now tells chauvinist Hindu-centric stories “that excoriated minorities like Muslims and helped sectarian politicians rather than the secular vision of our country”.
The only outage where the ISI doesn’t get a free pass is the abduction of Kulbhushan Jadhav, who was trapped by gangster-smuggler Uzair Baloch, currently busy implicating Opposition PPP politicians for extortion in Karachi.
Burhan Wani’s is a bitter tale about the youngster, without proof, allowed to live by Indian intelligence so that it could bump off the starry-eyed jehad proponents who went to meet him.
Once the book’s main theme is out of the way — that the ISI was never involved in the attacks on Hamid Karzai, Mumbai, Pulwama, or Pathankot, the authors get to the heart of the matter. It is time for both India and Pakistan to talk since the slate on both sides is supposedly clean.
