IC 814: Former RAW chief AS Dulat, special secretary Anand Arni refute claims made in Netflix show, say, ‘Didn’t get any warning before hijack’ 

“We had no warning at all,” said Dulat, categorically denying any such claims made by the makers of the show. “There was no reason for the station head to sit on information like this. This is all just imagination.” Supporting his claims, Anand delved a bit deeper into the machinations of such intelligence gathering, and said, “There are 100 prompts that come out of our intelligence network, and they might have even said that a certain ISI Station is active. But there were no active and direct warnings of a possible hijack.” 

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Anand tried tracing the origin of this, and said, “I think there was an article or a book written by someone who used to be with the agency in the 70s. This person was relieved in the 80s, and he had no access to the documents or even the building. He wasn’t active during the 90s at all. So yeah, we had no information about a potential hijack.” 

Another claim that was made in the Netflix show was how the intelligence agency heard the news through the media, and had to scramble around to know what was happening. Anand urged that the agency picked it alongside the media, and they had a control room set up almost immediately. “It was ready as the story was breaking out,” said Anand, whose version was corroborated by Dulat. Recalling that he was part of a Christmas Eve party, Dulat said, “An officer rushed in and asked me to come to the Crisis Management Group (CMG)  meeting. I left immediately, a few joined later. They were all there within 20 minutes, that’s when the CMG started functioning.” 

The conversation then veered towards the depiction of the Kathmandu R&AW representative finding information about RDX smuggled into the plane, and the Al Qaeda agenda. “We didn’t know anything about RDX on the aircraft. Yes, the hijacked aircraft with the relief crew wasn’t getting permission to leave, and it was said that the Taliban brought their trucks, and they were looking for a red suitcase. Even JRD Rao, the Joint Managing Director of Air India, said that they were looking for something. But we don’t know what they were actually looking for,” said Anand, and once again, it was corroborated by Dulat who revealed that the Indian agency was in an urgent need to get over with it. “Yeah, the RDX story did float around, but we didn’t know anything about it. We just wanted to finish it and get done with the ordeal.” 

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Starring Vijay Varma, Arvind Swamy, Naseeruddin Shah, Pankaj Kapur, Manoj Pahwa, Dia Mirza, Aditya Srivastava and Kumud Mishra, IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack is based on the book, ‘Flight Into Fear’, by Captain Devi Sharan and Srinjoy Chowdhury.