Revealing India’s Cold War secrets

Indians worried about interference by “the foreign hand” in their affairs might have over-estimated their adversaries.

Mark Pierce

7 February 20253 min read

Spy stories remain hugely popular because they offer us outsiders an intimate glimpse into the intricate deceits and dissimulations of espionage. Covert motives and intentions are meant to be exposed, plots and cabals laid bare, the world saved once more by the clones of James Bond. By contrast, histories of spying can often seem bogged down in minutiae, clogged with jargon, distracted by turf squabbles, or hemmed in by continuing classification of needed documents.

After all, lots of spying is waiting, watching, collating, then waiting some more.

Honourable exceptions include the jaunty assurance in Tim Weiner’s history of the CIA (Legacy of Ashes), the forensic curiosity informing Ben McIntyre’s study of Philby’s defection (A Spy Among Friends) and a few of many patriotically romanticised accounts of Mossad’s exploits.

Now Paul McGarr, a British lecturer, enters the field with his chronicle Spying in South Asia: Britain, the United States and India’s Secret Cold War.

McGarr introduces his subject by promising “the first scholarly examination of interventions made by the intelligence and security services of Britain and the United States in post-colonial India”. “Scholarly” may connote “thorough” and “learned” as well as “academic” and “pedantically detailed”. For McGarr as for other histories of spying, the litmus test is whether his research is comprehensive, conclusive and confirmed – insofar as that can ever be true in summaries of furtive ventures in an ostensibly secret underworld.

Before reading McGarr, students of Indian history might assume that Russia, Pakistan and China were far more deeply enmeshed in spying in South Asia than was the West. For each of those three countries, the stakes were higher, the issues more urgent, and resources on the ground possibly more plentiful. Weiner, for example, includes two references only to India in the index to his book, compared with entire columns for both Vietnam and Iraq.

As McGarr unequivocally concludes, many Western interventions in India “proved to be misguided and largely self-defeating”. On occasion, the spies engaged bear less resemblance to those in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, still the classic tale of spying in South Asia, and more to the duffers in Kipling’s Just-So Stories.

Cover image of Spying in South Asia

Indians worried about interference by “the foreign hand” in their affairs might have over-estimated their adversaries. Nonetheless, as one US Ambassador (Daniel Patrick Moynihan) observed, “the paranoia out here (in India) is thicker than the dust”. Indira Gandhi scored domestic political points by contending that CIA agents lurked ubiquitously, “beneath charpoys and behind neem trees”.

For any intelligence agency dealing with India, or indeed any country, the essential conundrums remain the same. How to work through the undertows of caste, corruption, regional loyalties and religious animosities? How to work around India’s bitter, entrenched hostility towards Pakistan? How to make sense of non-alignment, of India’s reluctance to conform or comply in an aligned, polarised world?

McGarr navigates through these issues, starting with the “precipitate and problematic” handover by British spooks on independence (1947). He consistently demonstrates not only exhaustive research but also a flair for illuminating context as well as for introducing the background, views and flaws of each main character. Stella Rimington, later head of MI5 and later still a spy novelist, started out as a research assistant in New Delhi, moonlighting for an amateur dramatic society.

McGarr’s account is especially compelling when he examines the distinguished if disjointed career of Krishna Menon, who ended up forced to resign as Defence Minister after India’s ignominious defeat in its 1962 war with China. On the one hand, Menon is rebuked for “intellectual arrogance, duplicity, and cynical abuse of his relationship with Nehru”. On the other, McGarr’s judicious and exacting assessments rescue Menon’s reputation by documenting the ways Western powers misrepresented his views or misunderstood his influence.

That 1962 war forms the centrepiece of McGarr’s analysis, revealing not only the flaws in India’s own intelligence but what happened when Nehru’s government asked for help. McGarr deals at length with other matters: allegations of a CIA spy in Gandhi’s cabinet; airdrops to the Tibetan resistance; eavesdropping on Chinese missile capabilities; illicit flows of funds to political parties; fake news disseminated by British officials; and much more. His story may be cluttered, but his eye is clear and his judgments firm.