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From a hidden bunker on a quiet avenue in New Delhi, a undercover agent watches a person ascend the steps of his three-storey residence with a nondescript briefcase in tow.
Inside is a trove of top-secret paperwork taken from India’s exterior intelligence company.
The man is a mole, believed to have been leaking delicate info to a strong ally, as a part of a high-stakes political plot to topple a international enemy.
It’s a scene seemingly ripped from 2023’s headlines — because the mission unfolds, the spy is drawn into an advanced internet of betrayal and hazard, culminating in a daring escape escape throughout borders.
But the true story behind this Netflix thriller got here nearly 20 years earlier than alleged worldwide assassination plots put India’s intelligence companies below the highlight.
Rabinder Singh was working at India’s Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) in 2004 when he grew to become the spy that vanished into skinny air.
It is a narrative so weird that it has been rehashed in a number of dramatic accounts.
Khufiya (House of Spies), launched final month, is the Netflix adaptation of a 2012 novel known as Escape To Nowhere, written by former spy chief Amar Bhushan.
While it has been promoted as a piece of fiction loosely impressed by true occasions, it bears some hanging similarities — and a few key variations — with the account provided in one other guide authored by a former intelligence officer.
RK Yadav’s guide, Mission R&AW, was launched as a tell-all memoir in 2014, detailing “the first eye-opening account … of the achievements and failures of Indian intelligence”.
Piecing collectively the information of what unfolded reveals a determined race to catch a double agent and perceive how and why the CIA satisfied an Indian citizen to activate his personal authorities.
Who was Rabinder Singh?
Singh first joined the R&AW within the late 80s, after a short army profession.
Media stories describe him as a clean-shaven man from an prosperous household in Amritsar, the son of a retired lieutenant within the Indian Army.
Having joined the Gorkha Regiments in 1970 and labored his method as much as turn into main, Singh was reportedly missed for additional promotion because of his “mediocre calibre” as a soldier.
He did participate in Operation Blue Star, a sting in 1984 targeting a group of separatists known as the Khalistan movement who had taken over the Golden Temple, essentially the most sacred website in Sikhism.
According to Yadav’s guide, which he informed the ABC was solely factual and primarily based on his personal profession in addition to interviews with inner sources, Singh was appointed to the company by an previous household good friend who had labored together with his father.
Stationed in Amritsar, Singh gained a fame for his shut relationships with native police, allegedly getting concerned in an embezzlement scheme involving secret service funds meant for clandestine operations in Pakistan.
Singh was ultimately posted to the Indian embassy in Damascus, the place he once let slip to an American diplomat about a secret Indian Air Force visit to an air strip on the outskirts of the town.
It has been recommended that it was round this time that Singh was first recruited by the CIA.
According to a number of stories in Indian media, Singh’s daughter was severely injured in 1992 or 1993, and he requested a switch to Washington DC.
“Singh said he needed a lot of money to pay for his daughter’s treatment, and that the Washington posting would help,” RL Bhatia, the minister involved in external state affairs at the time, told Frontline in 2004.
The request was declined. Instead, after Damascus, Singh was stationed as a counsellor at The Hague.
Colleagues famous his costly tastes and penchant for throwing lavish dinner events at five-star lodges the place he mingled with senior officers and international diplomats.
“Everybody in R&AW knew that he had acquired disproportionate assets to his known sources of income, but no-one dared to take any action against him due to his allegiance with a coterie of senior officers,” Yadav wrote.
“He openly used to claim in cocktail circles that he was the richest bureaucrat of India, but no-one in R&AW had the guts to question the source of his richness and lavish style of living.”
By the early 2000s Singh had returned to New Delhi, and was working as a joint secretary at R&AW headquarters centered on its South-East Asia operations.
But the man described by his peers as a “fairly ordinary” agent was hiding a secret.
The double agent arouses suspicion
Some time in late 2003, Singh’s colleagues started to note he had turn into significantly inquisitive, hanging up conversations about subjects outdoors his division’s purview and spending an uncommon period of time on the photocopier.
One officer approached Bhushan, who on the time was the senior secretary answerable for the Counter Intelligence and Security division that monitored inner threats at R&AW.
Bhushan started preliminary inquiries, and by the brand new yr, Singh was below surveillance.
Agents put in hidden cameras inside his residence and workplace, tapped his telephones and opened a mini management room down the road to watch the video and audio recordings of Singh’s conversations with company as they got here and went.
At one level, Yadav wrote, there have been greater than 20 brokers monitoring Singh’s each transfer.
The wire faucets appeared to recommend Singh had been gathering intelligence from contained in the R&AW and passing it on to an unknown handler believed to be working for the CIA.
The surveillance workforce have been engaged on the belief that Singh had by some means been transferring paperwork via a courier.
But earlier than they might collect sufficient proof or catch Singh within the act, he acquired a tip-off that he was being watched.
“Surveillance is only effective as long as the suspect doesn’t know they’re being watched. But then once he knows he is being watched, he has power,” Bhushan explained in a documentary last year.
Singh utilized for go away from work, ostensibly to attend his daughter’s engagement ceremony within the United States. The request was turned down, confirming his fears.
According to Yadav’s guide, tapes from the bugs put in at R&AW headquarters confirmed Singh desperately ransacking his workplace looking for hidden cameras — a scene re-created within the movie adaptation primarily based on Bhushan’s novel.
One morning in April, the counter intelligence workforce watched as Singh stacked piles of papers into bundles, able to be squirrelled out of the constructing. They pounced.
Bhushan directed his officers to frisk each R&AW worker as they left the constructing.
“Hundreds of classified documents were seized from senior and middle level officers of R&AW being taken out of headquarters,” Yadav wrote, together with pen drives, CDs and DVDs, and a big quantity of pornographic supplies.
But nonetheless there was not sufficient to pin down their principal goal.
The spy who vanished
Singh, now suspicious that counter intelligence brokers have been tailing him, wanted to hatch an escape plan.
Meanwhile, operatives put in a trick photocopier in his workplace that recorded digital copies of each web page he scanned.
Over 16 days, Singh took copies of greater than 210 stories, together with categorized paperwork that contained delicate details about R&AW’s evaluation of actions in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and several other of its neighbours, in keeping with Yadav.
The investigation seemed to be gathering steam, however senior brokers have been pissed off that there was nonetheless no conclusive proof that may enable them to query Singh or establish who he was working with.
They have been below stress to arrest their goal, or drop it solely.
Singh took his likelihood. On May 1, 2004, he and his spouse Parminder Kaur made their escape.
They borrowed a automotive and drove to the border with Nepal, crossing over at Nepalganj, where they were met by Singh’s CIA contact, David Vacala.
The three of them stayed the night time at a lodge earlier than reserving a home flight to Kathmandu, the place they stayed on the American embassy.
There, Singh and his wife were issued US passports under new names: Ram Prasad Sharma and Deepa Jumar Sharma.
On May 7, the Sharmas boarded an Austrian Airlines flight sure for Washington DC.
After Singh had failed to show as much as work for a number of days, counter intelligence officers checked metropolis hospitals and interrogated relations about his whereabouts.
A workforce was dispatched south to Chennai, however discovered no hint of their man.
They contacted worldwide airports, however hadn’t sufficient proof to dam Singh’s passport.
“We came fairly close to understanding that there could be a security implication. But we simply did not have conclusive evidence at that point,” a senior source told Outlook India in 2004.
A search of Singh’s residence lastly delivered the smoking gun they’d been on the lookout for: a laptop computer that Singh had been utilizing to ship digital copies of his pilfered paperwork.
The counter intelligence wing quickly found out his whereabouts, however by the point they contacted the Indian embassy in Kathmandu to attempt to intercept him, it was too late.
The fallout
Singh was formally dismissed as a R&AW officer in 2005, under an article of India’s constitution that allows the president to do so without holding a formal departmental inquiry if it isn’t thought-about to be within the nationwide curiosity.
A senior official on the company reportedly accomplished an inner inquiry, however its findings have been by no means made public.
The Indian media was whipped right into a frenzy over the “spy who disappeared”, and the secrets and techniques he might have offered to one of many nation’s strongest allies.
So what occurs to a double agent as soon as they’re compelled to flee their residence base and are minimize off from a community of informants?
In Singh’s case, it could appear, they turn into far much less helpful.
According to at least one account, only a few months after he landed state-side, he was dropped by the CIA.
“They stopped paying him, scuppered his attempt at gaining employment with a think tank, and declined to support his request for naturalisation,” wrote Shaunak Agarkhedkar, an Indian spy novelist.
In November 2004, an individual calling themselves Surender Jeet Singh petitioned the US Court of Appeals to evaluate a call by the Board of Immigration denying him asylum.
In court docket paperwork, he defined that he had been recruited by a CIA-like division in India known as the Research and Analysis Wing, to report on people believed to have been pushing for a separate state often known as Khalistan.
He claimed to have stop the R&AW when “he was ordered to aid in the assassination of a very religious person he had investigated”.
Singh informed the court docket that after hiding with pals for a yr, he had used his personal passport to come back to the US, and testified that he can be killed if he returned to India.
The immigration decide denied Singh’s asylum request, discovering him not credible. In a subsequent attraction, the choice was upheld on the idea that he introduced “no corroborative evidence whatsoever” that the R&AW even existed.
The Ninth Circuit Court, nonetheless, determined in any other case.
“We can notice that the government of India exists. We can notice that the office of the Prime Minister of India exists. We can notice that a part of the Prime Minister of India’s office is the RAW,” the judge wrote, referring the matter back to the board of immigration appeals.
While there isn’t a official file of Singh’s ultimate asylum software, it seems he was allowed to remain within the nation.
India’s Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) — one other Indian intelligence company that runs individually to the R&WA and oversees home crimes — had requested Interpol to difficulty a world arrest warrant for Singh in 2007, however Interpol declined on the grounds that the costs have been political.
That identical yr, the Indian embassy in Washington confirmed to the New York Times that Singh and his spouse have been needed by the Indian authorities for violating India’s Official Secrets Act.
Media stories have recommended Singh spent a number of years residing as a recluse in New York, Maryland and Virginia, close to his prolonged household, before dying in a road accident in 2016.
Questions of a cover-up
At the centre of those recountings of the Singh case are just a few key questions: why would the US have to spy on India, and the way did this agent handle to flee?
Several theories have been floated about what precisely the CIA hoped to realize from Singh’s leaks, starting from intelligence on terrorist exercise amongst India’s closest neighbours, significantly Pakistan and Afghanistan, to proof of Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction.
Yadav and others have recommended that the highest precedence would have been details about India’s personal nuclear capabilities, after current failures by US intelligence to anticipate a series of nuclear tests known as the Pokhran-II tests.
In any case, Bhushan says the paperwork that Singh did handle to cross on have been principally minor when it comes to sensitivity.
While the R&AW by no means made its inner inquiry public, it did affirm within the wake of the Singh episode that eight of its key operatives had gone missing since the agency was formed in 1968.
The revelation prompted appreciable backlash locally, and questions in regards to the integrity of R&AW’s officers and its choices.
In Yadav’s guide, in addition to granular element in regards to the Singh case that he says was gathered from inner sources, he made the case that R&AW was in pressing want of reform to deal with unprofessional behaviour and corruption.
The actual particulars of what went on contained in the R&AW within the months main as much as and immediately following Singh’s escape are tough to confirm. But Yadav provided the next account.
He believes that many officers have been fairly blissful for Singh to fade, if he took with him the potential penalties of any additional investigation that would level to them as conspirators.
“There is a strong Indian myth that a crow never bites a crow,” he wrote.
Yadav wrote that 57 officers of the R&AW have been discovered to have been concerned in Singh’s deception ultimately, in keeping with the suppressed inner inquiry.
He listed the names of 19 workers who he argued have been conspirators, having both assisted or allowed Singh to flee the nation, or offered info that Singh handed on to the CIA.
Yadav filed a criticism to the CBI asking them to look into the matter.
The criticism landed in Delhi’s High Court, which in 2009 declined to press CBI any further, on the grounds that Yadav had not offered ample proof.
“Your complete petition is nothing but hearsay. You have no authenticity and without any evidence you are asking us to initiate action against the officers,” Chief Justice A P Shah stated.
In his guide, Yadav explains the lengths he went to with the intention to compel an official physique to take additional motion towards the individuals he says helped Singh to flee justice. He maintains to today that he has solely ever sought to show the reality.
“He was chased away. Had [Rabinder Singh] been arrested here, then those officers who shared information with him would have faced court under the official secrets act. Therefore, they made him escape,” he informed the ABC.
A review of Yadav’s book published by the CIA famous that it was “difficult to analyse as it has no footnotes, no end notes, and no bibliography, which means there are no citations from secondary sources, archives, or documents to support the claims”.
“The book is strongest when Yadav discusses what he witnessed and experienced, but the sections that contain historical narrative lack independent sources necessary to document the events,” the reviewer wrote.
According to Bhushan’s model of occasions, there was corruption on the centre of the Singh case — however solely of 1 man.
“We have perfect institutions. We have laws, we have rules, we have procedures. What’s lacking is people who work within this and implement it,” he informed the EPIC Channel documentary.
“From what I understand and see in this case, give lure of money to anyone, he gets tempted. Then he doesn’t know where to stop. If you don’t realise where to stop, you can’t come back.”
Few former brokers have gone on file about what went on on the R&AW.
Retired intelligence officers are now required to seek prior permission from the top of their organisation earlier than publishing any particulars in regards to the inside workings of presidency companies.
One former R&AW officer is currently being sued by the CBI for allegedly publishing categorized info in his 2007 guide titled India’s External Intelligence – Secrets of Research and Analysis Wing.
For now, these with lingering questions on what actually occurred to Singh will maybe flip to the accounts penned by his former colleagues — one which calls itself reality, and the opposite fiction.
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