NEW DELHI: A forthcoming book claims that India’s external intelligence agency, Research and Analysis Wing, had staged the highjack of an Indian aircraft in 1971 to counter moves by Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) to highjack Indian planes carrying VVIPs. The RAW, according to the new book by a former Indian spy R K Yadav, arrested a Pakistani agent and foiled the move by ISI to highjack a plane that was being piloted by Rajiv Gandhi from Srinagar Airpot.
Author of the book, R K Yadav, has been an active intelligence officer in the RAW. He left left the service in 1989 and is being known among intelligence circles as one of the toughest spies .
This tell-all book is reported to have revealed sensational secrets and providing explicit details about the important events like 1962 conflict with China, the role of Indian intelligence agencies in the 1965 war with Pakistan, the agencys role during the 1975 Emergency and also the stories behind the many vanished R&AW spies.
Interestingly it also claims that the hijacking of the IC-814 flight in 1999 in Kandahar could probably have been averted if an intelligence input from a junior operative in Nepal had not been dismissed as a rumor by his superior officer.
Yadav describes how the RAW, under the leadership of R N Kao, thwarted the ISI attempt to hijack a plane from Srinagar. This was in early 1971. The agency arrested an ISI agent in Srinagar, and during questioning, he told his interrogators he was there to hijack a plane. The plan was to hijack a plane in which Rajiv Gandhi was the pilot, Indian newspaper Deccan Herald quoted Yadav as said.
However, the RAW leadership decided to use this to get back at the ISI. They made the agent hijack a plane and it was landed in Lahore. This incident gave us the opportunity to ban flights from Pakistan from using our airspace, and hampering military transport to East Pakistan (Bangladesh). This was a masterstroke from Kao, he said.
As a Class I officer recruited in 1973, Yadav served on the China desk and various other postings in Rajasthan and Punjab. Sources say he was close to R&AW founder-director R N Kao and his successor K Sankaran Nair.
Yadav claims in his book that although the CIA was found directly involved in compromising two R&AW officers Rabinder Singh and K V Unnikrishnan, at least eight other R&AW officers managed to clandestinely migrate and settle in foreign countries like the US and Canada with the help of their spy agencies. He says, Sikander Lal Malik, personal secretary to Kao for 17 years, managed to get two years extension after completing his mandatory tenure in New York.
Malik got a green card with the help of US officials, and resigned from the R&AW. Yadav says Malik settled in the US permanently in 1976 and he could have been debriefed enough to cause extensive damage to Indian Intelligence.
Another senior field officer Ashok Sathe was recruited by the CIA while posted at the Indian Mission at Ulan Bator in Mongolia. Sathe was covering China operations and was later transferred to Khorramshahr, Iran.
While serving there, Sathe was caught embezzling secret funds and was recalled. He set fire to his office, destroying all the secret documents before departure and subsequently retired from R&AW in 1977.
Soon after retirement, it was discovered that Sathe had a green card. He settled in California, Yadav claims in his book.
Rabinder Singh was another R&AW agent about whom Yadav writes, there has been a lot of speculation. He says, Singh was spying for the CIA, when he disappeared before he was apprehended for spying for the US. Serving as a joint secretary in R&AW at the time, Singh allegedly flew to America from Kathmandu along with his wife on May 7th, 2004 using a fake identity in the name of Mr and Mrs Rajpal Prasad Sharma.
The R&AW unit at Kathmandu did nothing despite clear intelligence on Singhs escape plans. The R&AW even managed to get copies of their visas and embarkation cards.
These documents reveal that the CIA on April 7th, 2004, issued US passport number 017384251 to Singh. His wife Parminder Kaur was also given a US passport on the same day in the name of Deepa Kumar Sharma. Both boarded Austrian Air flight number 5032 on May 7th, 2004, from Kathmandu. Singh was assisted by CIA operative David M Vacala.
How intelligence input on IC-814 flight hijacking was dismissed by R&AW official.
TOI reports that days before the hijacking of Indian Airlines’ IC-814 flight, a RAW officer in Kathmandu had generated an input that the flight could be hijacked but his superior did not believe him and allegedly failed to send it to the RAW headquarters. Ironically, the day IC-814 was hijacked, this superior official was on board the flight.
This along with several other sensational claims, including the failure of timely action by the Narasimha Rao government to the secure release of kidnapped foreign tourists in J&K in 1995, RAW operations to destroy Karachi harbour during 1971 war and Vice President Hamid Ansari’s alleged inability to protect R&AW agents during his tenure as ambassador in Iran, are included in RK Yadavs book.
Report says that Yadav, hit the headlines in 1980 when he floated a R&AW employees’ union and was suspended for it. He claims in his book that prior to the hijacking of IC-814 from Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu, a junior RAW operative, UV Singh, informed his counsellor, a senior officer of RAW at the Indian Embassy, that there was apprehension about hijacking of the plane by Pakistani terrorists.
“That RAW operative was asked by (the counsellor) to check the veracity of this report. When RAW operative told him that his source was a responsible officer, (the counsellor) rebuked him and warned him not to spread rumours. This report was never sent to RAW headquarters …” the book says. It further details how a few days later, the flight was hijacked by Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorists and the counsellor was flying in it. He kept his identity a secret, the book claims, or else he would have been killed.
The book, which has detailed chapters on India’s war with China and Pakistan, also narrates a fascinating story of a RAW operation under K Sankaran Nair in the build-up to the 1971 war to collect information for a pre-emptive strike on Karachi harbour. Then defence minister Babu Jagjivan Ram had asked R&AW to collect information on certain defences installed by Pakistan on cliffs near the harbour so that they could be destroyed and Karachi harbour bottled up to prevent Pakistan Navy from disturbing the free movement of Indian ships in the Arabian sea.
For this, two RAW operatives were prepared with pseudonyms of “Rod and Moriarty”, who with the help of a Parsi doctor whose ship would go to Quwait via Karachi harbour, clicked pictures of the installations to help a naval strike. The two operatives posed as chicken pox patients on the ship preventing any Pakistani officer from checking them physically at Karachi.
The book also says that in 1995 when six foreign tourists had been kidnapped by J&K militants, RAW’s Aviation Research Centre had located the place where they were kept and Special Frontier Force was kept ready for a rescue operation. However, a detailed note sent to the PMO was not communicated to PM Narasimha Rao who was on a visit to South India. On his return two days later, he gave his consent for an operation but by then the terrorists had changed the location.
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