Madhuri Gupta case - mole in Pakistan HC - reveals turf war between agencies

ejazr

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Very interesting article in the Caravan Magazine. Its a long read but worth it to undestand how turf battles between agencies is compromising our security. The starting few paras are below to whet your appetite

Team of Rivals
IN EARLY SPRING 2010, a few of the most powerful men in the Indian security establishment sat down for a special meeting at the Ministry of Home Affairs in New Delhi. The list of participants had been deliberately kept to a minimum to ensure there would be no leaks: the head of India's external intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), KC Verma; the Home Secretary, GK Pillai; and the director of the Intelligence Bureau (IB), Rajiv Mathur, along with one of his officers.

This gathering was not the routine morning meeting that P Chidambaram had instituted when he took over the home ministry in November 2008—an hour-long daily briefing on intelligence and internal security with the director of Intelligence Bureau (DIB), the national security adviser (NSA), the home secretary and the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee. (The R&AW chief, who bears the cabinet title Secretary (Research) rarely attends meetings at the home ministry.) Chidambaram was not invited to this meeting, and there was only one item on the agenda: the Bureau had discovered a mole inside the Indian High Commission in Pakistan.

A few weeks earlier, the DIB had informed the home secretary that the Intelligence Bureau had placed an Indian diplomat in Islamabad under surveillance after suspicions had arisen that she was passing classified material to Pakistani intelligence. Nothing was recorded in writing, and the details of the operation had not been shared with anyone outside the IB.

It is not uncommon for government officials with access to strategic information, inside the country and at missions abroad, to be put under counterintelligence surveillance for a few weeks, or even months, at a time; in most cases, nothing turns up. But in this case, the suspicion persisted as the investigation continued, and news of the "spy" in Islamabad made its way from Pakistan to the desk of the DIB.

It had been less than a year and a half since Pakistani terrorists killed more than 160 people in a bloody attack on Mumbai that unfolded live on television for three excruciating days and deeply embarrassed the Indian intelligence establishment. The insistent calls for war in the wake of the attack had faded, but India was still seething, and another intelligence failure would inflict grave damage to the battered reputations of IB and R&AW.
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