Tony Blair's 2001 Delhi bugging scare and the secret Anglo-Indian spy alliance

When Tony Blair visited India as Prime Minister in 2001, two listening devices were reportedly discovered in his New Delhi hotel suite. British security officers swept the room and removed the bugs before word leaked. Blair, determined not to cause a diplomatic stir, quietly swapped his suite for the room of a junior member of his delegation and carried on with the visit as planned.

Dr Paul McGarr of King’s College London says the incident—first hinted at in Alastair Campbell’s memoirs—was later “corroborated by former British intelligence and security personnel.” No culprit was ever named, he adds, “but a finger of suspicion was pointed at RAW.”

The episode, he suggests, was a reminder of how intelligence rivalry survives even between friendly governments. Yet it also echoed an older story of cooperation that began in the early years after independence. Half a century earlier, London and Delhi were bound together by a series of quiet understandings that linked the two intelligence services long after the formal empire had gone.

“The extent of the relationship is confirmed by the training Indian intelligence officers received in the UK—training even extended to Indian officers learning Russian in the UK rather than Moscow,” McGarr told The Tribune during an exclusive two-hour conversation at King’s College.

“The degree to which India and the UK shared or pooled intelligence was extensive, and India was even willing to conduct covert operations on Britain’s behalf—for example, by passing intelligence gleaned by Indian business people travelling behind the Iron Curtain to London.”

Those officers, drawn largely from the Intelligence Bureau, attended short courses and briefings run by British instructors who had served during the Second World War. The language lessons were discreetly arranged, often under civilian cover, and reflected India’s urgent need for Russian speakers at a time when the Cold War made direct training in Moscow politically risky. It was a practical solution that deepened institutional ties rather than severing them.

McGarr said the level of trust was reflected in the access MI5 liaison officers enjoyed inside India’s political and security establishments, “a privilege never extended to the Soviets.” The arrangement, he noted, showed how old colonial habits adapted rather than disappeared after 1947.

His new book, Spying in South Asia: Britain, the United States and India’s Secret Cold War, published by Cambridge University Press, explores this hidden chapter of post-colonial history—one in which cooperation quietly replaced confrontation. It draws on declassified material from both sides, much of it previously overlooked, to show how India, Britain and the United States built channels of communication that continued through the turbulence of the Cold War.

When we met in his book-lined office overlooking the Thames, a crowd of pro-Palestine students happened to be demonstrating outside. McGarr looked out at the placards and smiled. “I see you’ve brought your friends with you,” he joked, his eyes twinkling. The remark set the tone for a candid discussion about the enduring entanglements of empire.

He explained that the post-Partition partnership dated from 1947, when Home Minister Sardar Patel authorised reciprocal liaison posts with Britain. Patel sought British help to rebuild India’s depleted intelligence apparatus and to counter communist influence. In return, British officers were granted unusual access to the new establishment in Delhi.

According to McGarr, even Jawaharlal Nehru—despite his public commitment to non-alignment—recognised the practical benefits of working with London and Washington when faced with threats from Pakistan, China and internal insurgencies. That pragmatic streak produced moments of quiet cooperation, from the handling of the Dalai Lama’s flight from Tibet in 1959 to discreet exchanges of strategic information with Western agencies.

McGarr also revisits what he calls “the murky question” of foreign funding in Indian politics. He cites ambassadors Bunker, Galbraith and Moynihan as having acknowledged CIA payments to the Congress Party, while Soviet archives record parallel KGB support. Indian politicians of every stripe, he says, “took funds from both sides.”

He argues that the 1958-59 effort to unseat Kerala’s communist government was a joint operation involving the IB, CIA and SIS—a pattern later repeated elsewhere. “The still-classified files on that episode are the ones I most want to see,” he said.

Indira Gandhi’s suspicion of the CIA, McGarr explained, was “both genuine and political theatre.” Her anti-American rhetoric, he said, served as useful cover for domestic troubles and helped deflect criticism of her own party’s record.

Although the Cold War ended, McGarr believes the methods it normalised did not. India’s present-day intelligence culture, he suggests, still draws on Anglo-American models that legitimised covert action as an instrument of statecraft. His analysis connects the cautious cooperation of the 1950s to the more assertive instincts of India’s contemporary security establishment.

“Spying has been called the second-oldest profession,” he mused.

“Mughal India had a far more sophisticated intelligence system than Britain did at the same time. The Raj was an empire of intelligence, and much of what became modern British signals intelligence originated in India before being exported back to Europe.”

He added that “Indian intelligence remains structured on colonial lines. The Intelligence Bureau and, to a large extent, RAW still draw heavily on a police culture that Indira Gandhi tried, unsuccessfully, to unpick.”

The 2001 Blair bugging incident, McGarr concluded, simply confirmed an enduring reality. “Every country spies on its friends,” he said. “The real issue is scale and intent. Minor indiscretions are ignored; systematic surveillance, like the NSA’s bugging of Angela Merkel, becomes a scandal.”

Whether the listening devices in Blair’s suite were planted by over-zealous hosts or rivals, the message, he suggested, was clear: the networks of trust and suspicion built under empire never truly vanished.

“Decolonisation,” McGarr reflected, “is not binary or absolute. It’s a process with long afterlives. In intelligence as in economics, the ties between Britain and India have proved remarkably hard to break.”

(Shyam Bhatia’s forthcoming espionage novel, The Silent Correspondent, is being published by Juggernaut in January 2026)