Fears of penetration in a democracy

On March 7, a leading Indian columnist quoted KGB defector Vasili Mitrokhin’s ‘Archives’ (1999-2005) to say that India is the most ‘penetrated’ country since the days of Indira Gandhi. He was making this reference while ridiculing the NDA government’s paranoia over the alleged anti-India ‘conspiracy’ by three young women and Indian farmers.

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Yet, he said, our government is unable to detect clear signs on what constitutes the real national danger, such as China’s hacking of our power plants. While agreeing with his conclusion, I am doubtful whether we should consider Mitrokhin’s version as true since his chief Leonid Shebarshin, who was handling India-Pakistan during 1964-77, had denied it. In December 2001, he told Vlast, a Russian weekly, that while Indira Gandhi valued the Soviet Union’s friendship, she was “not a friend” as she took her own decisions.

Also, ‘defector literature’, especially from the erstwhile Soviet Union, cannot be counted as authentic as they were the best experts in forgery well before the computer was invented. A defector like Mitrokhin had to please his hosts to stay useful for his settlement in a foreign country. Otherwise, he would have met the same fate as RAW defector Rabinder Singh — of being abandoned soon after his ‘ex-filtration’ in 2004 and dying in penury in the country of refuge.

Mitrokhin had additional problems as his papers in Russia were retrieved by some, including MI-6 officer Richard Tomlinson who was later jailed for betrayal.

The only way defector literature could become authentic history is either by being minutely scrutinised by veteran intelligence historians like Christopher Andrew or subjecting the story to be compared with genuine foreign intelligence archives or foreign agencies on its end result.

In India, we have never developed the habit of studying intelligence as part of serious history. As a result, books written even by former intelligence officers cater more for stimulating public weakness for pulp fiction.

The possibility of a joint study is rare as even the friendliest countries do not permit that type of intelligence cooperation for fear of penetration. In December 1943, William Donovan, father of modern American intelligence visited Moscow, then a close US ally in World War-II, to propose further intelligence cooperation. The NKGB gleefully agreed, although it already had their spy Duncan Chaplin Lee in Donovan’s personal office since 1941.

Also, such joint service-to-service scrutiny, even subsequent, has happened only once when a landmark joint US-Russian project was launched during the Yeltsin bonhomie years (1991-99) to study how both the rivals had performed during the secret ‘Berlin Tunnel’ project. The result was Yale University’s Battle Ground Berlin (1997), jointly written by former CIA and KGB intelligence officers who had actually conducted the operations, moderated by American journalist George Bailey.

How do mature democracies deal with such fears of penetration? Do they lock down their countries, banning all foreign contacts, even through internet, and making conditions for climate activists and human rights NGOs difficult, as our government is doing?

Here, a story recounted by former CIA director Allen Dulles in 1963 would be relevant: Pawel Monat was the Polish military attaché in Washington DC from 1955. According to Dulles, he was actually working for the KGB and was found to be very ‘successful’. In 1959, he defected to the US. In 1962, he published a sensational book Spy in the US jointly with John Dille, the then military editor of Life magazine.

This was at the height of the Cold War when the US was in the grip of deep paranoia about intrusive Soviet intelligence. The federal government was being subjected to “loyalty” tests initiated by President Truman in 1947 and continued by President Eisenhower in 1953. Senator Joseph McCarthy was carrying on his “witch hunt” on the “red scare” until the Senate stopped it in 1954. A book like this rekindled American fears on how easy it was to penetrate a free society like America.

On June 13, 1960, the “US Senate Sub-Committee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act & Other Security Laws”, under the Judiciary Committee, summoned Monat to understand how the Soviet intelligence was operating in the US.

Monat frankly told them that “America is a delightful country in which to carry out espionage”. One of their weakest links in the nation’s security was “the yearning friendliness of her people”. He was able to find “one American after another who seemed impelled — after a drink or two — to tell me things he might never have told his own wife.”

He also told them that magazines like the Aviation Weekly and the Missiles and Rockets carried so much of classified information that “would have taken months of work and thousands of dollars to agents to ferret out the facts one by one.”

The ease with which the Soviet intelligence was able to operate in America alarmed everybody. On March 7, 1963, a ‘highly respected’ Congressman, George Mahon, then Chairman of the House Defence Appropriations Sub-Committee, exhorted all, including the media, for “halting the erosion of our national intelligence effort” by open official statements made by individuals and the media on US defence planning.

Still, this did not provoke US lawmakers to invoke draconian laws like our colonial Official Secrets Act or the indiscriminate use of sedition by their agencies, as is happening now in India. Instead, the later decades saw more transparency and accountability even in their secret services.

The US still follows what President Harry Truman had said in his ‘State of the Union address’ on January 7, 1948, after successfully terminating World War II. He said that religious freedom, free speech, human rights and freedom of thought were the cherished American values.

To a great extent, Canada, Australia and the Great Britain also do not expect their free societies to abandon their chosen forms of government and social traditions. This is because they are confident in the capability of their own security agencies in a free society even when facing ‘penetrations’ here and there by foreign countries or agencies.

The moral is that we also should also have more confidence in our security services.