Editor’s Note: This is the first part of a two-part conversation with Paul McGarr.
Intelligence plays a critical role in shaping security and politics in South Asia. On January 8, South Asian Voices spoke with Dr. Paul McGarr about the past and present of intelligence in the region; the first part of the conversation covered Western intelligence activities in Cold War India and the enduring intelligence “counterculture” in South Asia. Dr. McGarr is Lecturer in Intelligence Studies at King’s College London, an expert on intelligence outside the Anglosphere, and the author of Spying in South Asia: Britain, the United States, and India’s Secret Cold War and The Cold War in South Asia: Britain, the United States, and the Indian Subcontinent, 1945-1965.
How would you describe the nature of Western intelligence activities in India during the Cold War? What motivated countries like the United States and the United Kingdom to carry out those activities?
There are three strands of that activity by Western powers, but largely the United States and the United Kingdom, who were really the dominant intelligence forces in India and Pakistan after 1947.
One was espionage. They really wanted to know what was going on in India. Partly, that was driven by the extent to which India was a Cold War “melting pot” from early on, in 1947. The rhetoric of Jawaharlal Nehru prior to independence and immediately afterwards was that India was going to be this “non-aligned” state, a liminal space in which East met West, which I think did manifest in practical terms as well. So, Delhi and other Indian cities became economic, cultural, and diplomatic melting pots, where people from the Eastern Bloc and the West actually met.
Certainly, by 1947, there weren’t that many places in the developing world where that was possible. It was a rich “honeypot,” if you like, for spies and practitioners of espionage, where they could recruit agents and find out information about the other side. This “Berlin of the East” narrative came up around New Delhi, particularly after 1947. George Blake, a famous British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) officer who was a double agent for the Soviets, famously said that Delhi was a great place to recruit people after Berlin. The fact that India was a democracy and had a free press made that movement of people and ideas quite attractive from an espionage perspective.
There was an element of intelligence liaison, as well. The West, both the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Britain’s domestic intelligence service MI5, and, latterly, foreign intelligence service MI6, were keen to work with India in terms of sharing intelligence on what was going on behind the Iron Curtain. But also regionally, just making sure that they were well connected with the Indian intelligence establishment. Partly, that came from the historic notion that the transfer of power in India was political and economic, but it was in terms of intelligence and espionage as well. India was an inheritor of the British colonial intelligence system. So, that connection was there, waiting for the British to carry into the Cold War period.
“Britain and the United States were engaging in collaborative covert action with the Indian state, largely targeting China, particularly after India’s relationship with Beijing started to break down after 1955, but also directed at domestic issues in India and particularly communist activity.”
The third thing was covert action: the United States and the United Kingdom were actually significant players in the covert action space in Cold War India from the beginning in 1947.
That’s an interesting story because covert action was undertaken by the United States and the United Kingdom in collaboration with the Indian state, which is a very controversial topic in India. In the recent exposé, for example, in the New York Times, about the operation where nuclear-powered surveillance devices were put onto Himalayan peaks in India, is retelling an old story to a new generation of people: that was a CIA and Indian Intelligence Bureau (IB) joint operation. So, it’s quite controversial in an Indian context that India—as a non-aligned state—was collaborating and cooperating with Western intelligence services some of the time.
So, there was an extent to which Britain and the United States were engaging in collaborative covert action with the Indian state, largely targeting China, particularly after India’s relationship with Beijing started to break down after 1955, but also directed at domestic issues in India and particularly communist activity. For example, in 1957, Kerala became the first significant state in the world to democratically elect a communist government. That worried New Delhi, and it worried the United States particularly, but also the United Kingdom. There was a coming together of intelligence forces from the West and from India to try and subvert that communist government in Kerala.
This was quite an interesting coming together for collaborative covert action, but also the Indian government was aware that both the CIA and British intelligence were conducting espionage and covert activity in India that they were not aware of as well. So, there’s this sort of shadow war going on between the United States and India.
Suspicion of Western intelligence agencies, especially the CIA, persists in present day South Asia, driving public discourses of foreign influence and “regime change,” particularly during moments of political upheaval. Can you discuss the origins and development of this intelligence “counterculture,” as you describe it in your book?
The notion of suspicion and paranoia around—particularly Western—intelligence agencies is not unique to South Asia. It’s very prevalent in Latin America, particularly with events in Venezuela recently. There’s a long heritage of American interventionism in the Western Hemisphere which has fueled paranoia and suspicion, particularly about the CIA, in the post-World War II period. But it is a strong narrative in India, which I think comes from two dominant themes. One goes back before 1947, and one comes after 1947.
Before 1947, both Britain and France relied upon intelligence and a repressive security state to keep the colonial project alive. Lots of historians have written about this: Martin Thomas, a historian at Exeter University in the UK, has published a good book called Empires of Intelligence, which looks at French and British colonial intelligence in the 19th and early 20th centuries. They don’t have lots of troops stationed in their colonial outposts; economically, it was quite difficult to fund a security state. So, they used intelligence, oppressive surveillance, and quite coercive measures to make sure nascent nationalism was suppressed in the French Empire and in the British Empire, particularly in British India.
Throughout the British colonial project in India prior to 1947, intelligence loomed large in public consciousness, both generally amongst the public, in that they’re aware that they’re subject to surveillance and coercive measures, but also particularly amongst Indian nationalists. Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, all these people had been subject to oppressive surveillance: their families had been harassed, they’d been imprisoned, their mail had been opened. It was really quite an oppressive security state that the British used to suppress Indian nationalism, particularly after the First World War, which gained traction in the 1930s as Gandhi’s movement began to make inroads toward eroding the control of the British colonial state. That establishes this notion that security is a pervasive part of Indian social and political life. Nehru has written in his selected writings, diaries, and memoirs about how intelligence had a big impact on him as an individual, how it really colored his approach to intelligence, what intelligence could do in terms of suppressing freedom of speech and expression.
This oppression lingers in the Indian consciousness. After 1947, the Cold War takes over and Indians are acutely conscious that not only the United States and the United Kingdom, but also the Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc, are continuing to conduct covert activity within India, so subjecting India to espionage, but also to covert action. In fact, they’re doing so around the world. The developing world is a project and they’re talking to each other. Indian leaders such as Nehru are conscious about what’s going on in Iran in 1953, about what’s going on in Guatemala in 1954, about the Bay of Pigs in 1961, about Patrice Lumumba in the Congo in 1961—all these interventions mounted by the United States with their allies, the list goes on and on and on. The extent to which intelligence and the CIA particularly, but also British intelligence, are heavily involved in what appeared to be repressive measures designed to stifle nationalism across the developing world was a real concern to Indians.
There’s quite a lot of evidence that the CIA—throughout the 1950s and 1960s—are seeking to influence domestic politics in India: funding right-wing candidates, supporting the Congress Party, trying to weaken socialist parties. It’s to the extent that John Kenneth Galbraith, when he’s posted to India as John F. Kennedy’s ambassador, is horrified by what he finds in the CIA station files about the extent to which the Agency is bribing politicians and trying to influence elections in India, and tries to shut down or at least contain what he regards as excessive CIA activity in India’s domestic politics. Galbraith does so for a number of reasons. One, because he thinks it’s morally reprehensible. But two, more practically, he just thinks it’s pointless, it’s not working, it’s running huge risks, and it’s actually failing to influence politics in India in any way that’s helpful to the United States.
When we get to the 1970s, particularly with Richard Nixon’s tilt to Pakistan in 1971, Indira Gandhi becomes really concerned about what the United States might do to undermine her regime. She’s thinking back to Iran and Guatemala and other examples. But she’s also thinking back more recently to 1973 in Chile and the removal of Salvador Allende in a military coup, and the extent to which the CIA was or wasn’t involved in that activity in Latin America. Gandhi, I think, was genuinely concerned that the Nixon administration and the United States had always been in the business of regime change in the developing world, and she may have been next on Richard Nixon’s list for regime change after Allende.
Gandhi was also quite a sophisticated political operator. She’d been prime minister in India since 1966. She knew it would sit well with the Indian people if she could revive that narrative of a foreign hand, or a reason why the Indian economy is tanking, or why things aren’t getting done in India. It’s a convenient domestic political scapegoat to say, look, it’s not me or my party and my politics, we’re being undermined externally by the United States and the CIA.
So, it’s a complex web of genuine fear on the part of Indian politicians, particularly during the Gandhi years, about external influence and the so-called “foreign hand,” and also their realization that this could be politically convenient. They can take back some agency and use the CIA against the United States in ways that are helpful to them.
This “counterculture” of mistrust seems to have persisted into the present, as evidenced by discourse around events like the ouster of Sheikh Hasina in Bangladesh and the alleged U.S. “pressure to remove” Imran Khan? What explains the durability of these ideas, and how will it influence relations between the West and South Asia moving forward?
It’s partly historical memory. This is not to denigrate policymakers in the West or elsewhere, but I think policymakers tend to have quite short historical memories, even ahistorical in many senses. They forget that often populations, particularly in the Global South, are not ahistorical. They have long memories about Western intervention and what it means, so they tend to look back and frame contemporary events in that historical perspective.
So, for example, Sheikh Hasina, as you mentioned, in Bangladesh: they look back to 1975 and the horrific murder of her father and much of her family. She was luckily in London at the time with one of her sisters, so she escapes the massacre that ensues in the military coup that removes Mujibur Rahman. But this notion also comes back to this convenient reflexive response about Western omnipotence. People think, “that’s happened in Bangladesh, it could not have happened without the United States or CIA playing some role in that coup in 1975,” even though I’ve never seen any firm evidence that the CIA was directly involved in that operation.
Often there’s a conflation, I think, between the CIA speaking to political parties across the whole spectrum in South Asia and influencing people. The job of any intelligence agency is to know what’s going on: that means they have to speak to politicians and political activists across the whole spectrum of any country’s polity. They do that regularly, because that’s their job. But often that gets conflated to, “well, if they’re speaking to these people, they must have influence, they must be directing or tasking them.” That’s a huge intellectual leap, which, in practice, often doesn’t stand up to any sustained scrutiny.
“There is a sense of trying to root it within historical facts, but then to extrapolate that out and manipulate it for domestic political purposes—this can be quite a potent and toxic combination.”
I think that’s the case, perhaps, when we talk about Pakistan, Imran Khan, and Donald Lu; Lu is having discussions with Pakistan about possible scenarios. He’s voicing an opinion about Imran Khan going to Russia, for example, just after the invasion of Ukraine. That doesn’t necessarily translate into a directive from Washington to remove Imran Khan and his government. There’s this easy conflation in popular imagination, also for politicians: that makes it easy for Imran Khan to say, “this is the United States asking for my removal.”
I think that with Sheikh Hasina in Bangladesh, it’s a similar sort of narrative. There are strong parallels between Indira Gandhi in 1975, and what happened very recently in Bangladesh, where there’s endemic corruption, mismanagement, economic chaos, repression of a free press, a pivot towards authoritarianism. So, lots of people in the country have genuine concerns and uneasiness about the way the country is being run. Then, for that upswelling populist reaction against the government to be dismissed or explained away with, they argue, “this must be a foreign hand, this must be the CIA meddling.” This is very similar to Indira Gandhi’s narrative when she declared an emergency in 1975. There’s a tendency for politicians of all stripes, and I’m thinking about Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India, to fall back on an easy narrative about a foreign hand when they’re under pressure, when things aren’t working out for them economically or politically.
Partly, it’s because of that historical memory. Partly, it’s invented and it doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny. But the key thing is that, in part, it does. People look at Venezuela, at the Congo, at Iran, at Guatemala, and they say, “well, they have done this in the past.” There is a sense of trying to root it within historical facts, but then to extrapolate that out and manipulate it for domestic political purposes—this can be quite a potent and toxic combination.
Views expressed are the interviewee’s own and do not necessarily reflect the positions of South Asian Voices, the Stimson Center, or our supporters.
Also Read: SAV Q&A with Srinath Raghavan: India’s Multialignment Strategy and Neighborhood Policy
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Image 1: U.S. National Archives and Records Administration via Picryl
Image 2: U.S. National Archives and Records Administration via Picryl
