India heard Pak President’s phone calls during 1971 war. This man made it happen

The man at the head of the organisation that had produced the intelligence was Rameshwar Nath Kao, the first chief of the Research and Analysis Wing. R&AW had existed for barely three years.

Established in 1968, R&AW, which completed its 58th year of existence on September 21, was built from scratch by Kao, a former Intelligence Bureau officer whom Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had tasked with creating India’s first dedicated external intelligence agency. The achievement was not merely the establishment of a new agency. It was the speed with which Kao gave it the people, skills and institutional culture needed to operate at the highest level of national security.

According to former R&AW Additional Secretary B Raman’s book “Kaoboys of RAW”, in the first few months after its formation, Kao gave officers two priority tasks: strengthen its capability for the collection of intelligence about Pakistan and China and for covert action in East Pakistan. “A little over two years is too short a time to build up an effective covert action capability, but the R&AW managed to do so,” Raman said in the book.

He also recalls how Kao’s men had completely compromised General Yahya Khan’s communications. “Almost every day, Indira Gandhi and others entrusted with the conduct of the war had at their disposal extracts from the telephonic conversations of Yahya Khan and others with their officers in East Pakistan,” Raman says in the book.

A childhood of loss

Yet the man behind the organisation remained largely in the shadows. As V Balachandran, a former R&AW officer who worked with Kao, tells The Indian Express, “People see then Army chief Sam Maneckshaw and BSF chief Rustam Ji in context of the Bangladesh war. But it was Kao who had laid all the groundwork for their achievements to follow. Kao never wanted to be talked about. He believed intelligence work had to be done quietly.”

Kao’s instinct for discretion was not simply professional. It had roots in a childhood shaped by loss and humiliation.

His father died when he was five, leaving his mother widowed at 25. The family struggled financially. Born in Varanasi, Kao found school in Baroda socially difficult. Classmates repeatedly mispronounced his surname as “Cow” and mocked him with nicknames such as “brown buffalo” and “sack of potatoes” given his obesity. According to Nitin A Gokhale’s biography “R.N. Kao: Gentleman Spymaster”, which draws from Kao’s personal papers and recordings, Kao remembered himself at 11 or 12 as a boy who had become acutely conscious of being watched. He later recalled that he could not bring himself to eat in public without a servant accompanying him.

Decades later, he wrote that the discomfort of eating in public had never entirely left him. “I tended to withdraw into my own shell,” Kao wrote, recalling those years, and believed that this had laid “the foundations of an introspective withdrawn approach to life in general”. It is a revealing admission from a man who would eventually spend his career mastering the art of watching others without himself being noticed.

There was, however, another side to Kao. He developed an interest in ancient Indian history, temple architecture and sculpture, practised yoga and worked with clay, wood and stone, says Gokhale’s book. He studied English literature, history and Persian at Lucknow University before completing an MA in English at Allahabad. He was interested in flowers and animals, and was known among colleagues for his cultivated tastes.

He joined the Indian Police in 1940 and moved to the Intelligence Bureau after Independence. Working under IB chief B N Mullik, he was put in charge of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s security. His travels with Nehru brought him into contact with foreign intelligence chiefs and exposed him to the workings of intelligence agencies beyond India.

The 1962 war with China prompted the creation of the Aviation Research Centre, which Kao headed from 1963 to 1966. The ARC, with American assistance, developed aerial intelligence capabilities. Kao also helped establish the Special Frontier Force, which was intended to operate in the difficult terrain along India’s northern borders.

How it began

After the 1965 war with Pakistan, Gandhi and her principal adviser P N Haksar tasked Kao with designing a separate external intelligence organisation. The new agency was to be different from the police-centric structure of the IB. It required people with varied expertise who could operate abroad without attracting attention.

Kao brought Sankaran Nair into the project. Nair, an experienced officer with a deep understanding of Pakistan and the wider Islamic world, became a central figure in shaping the organisation. Gokhale records that Nair regarded the structure Kao designed as his “magnum opus”. The Cabinet Secretariat eventually gave the agency its name: Research and Analysis Wing.

Kao’s ability to identify talent and impose standards was central to the organisation he built. According to Gokhale’s book, Vikram Sood, who was recruited by Kao, recalled that the spymaster would carefully assess prospective officers and insist on precision in their reports. A report that failed to meet his standards could be returned with a simple annotation: “off”. He was demanding but rarely theatrical, running disciplined meetings without shouting.

The 1971 war brought together the organisation’s intelligence-gathering, covert and analytical capabilities. R&AW cultivated contacts with Bengali political leaders and resistance groups and helped prepare the ground for the war. The agency’s role was to coordinate different elements of the Bengali resistance and sustain a campaign of attrition against Pakistani forces before the Indian Army’s final intervention.

Balachandran says Kao had recruited people with specialised skills outside the normal bureaucratic channels; among them was a retired Army officer whose unit provided advance intelligence about Pakistan’s planned air attack on December 3, 1971. His contribution, Balachandran says, was substantial precisely because it was not visible.

There were successes after Bangladesh. R&AW played a major role in the events surrounding the integration of Sikkim in 1975. But there were also failures, or at least moments that exposed the limits of intelligence.

In August 1975, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and most of his family were assassinated in Dhaka. There were questions about whether R&AW had been caught unprepared.

Balachandran denies this. “In 1975, Mr Kao went incognito to Bangladesh and informed Mujibur that a conspiracy was brewing. But Mujibur did not take it seriously. After the assassination this question around what RAW was doing was asked by a police officer during a meeting. Mr Kao said, ‘All I can say is that we were not surprised’. He did not boast that he had gone and warned Mujibur,” Balachandran told The Indian Express.

Emergency cloud

R&AW also came under the shadow of Emergency when Kao was at the helm. The Opposition accused it of being the government’s handmaiden. Balachandran, however, disputes this. “George Fernandes had once alleged that he had been arrested by RAW people during the Emergency. It was not true. IB was the one arresting people. Not RAW. Kao actually tried to keep RAW away from all the palace politics. Sanjay Gandhi didn’t think very highly of Kao. Mr Kao was very unhappy during those days,” Balachandran said.

As the Janata government took over, Kao retired prematurely in 1977, in an environment where the government was suspicious of the agency and had begun cutting down its budget and powers.

But retirement did not end Kao’s influence. That year, R&AW chief N F Suntook sought Kao’s assistance in persuading Homi Sethna, then chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, to advise Prime Minister Morarji Desai against signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Balachandran says Kao chose him to convey the message to Sethna.

A similar example of Kao’s strategic imagination emerged in 1981, when India was struggling to convince foreign governments that Pakistan was pursuing a clandestine nuclear weapons programme. Diplomatic and intelligence channels had failed to gain sufficient traction.

When Kao learnt that The New York Times was investigating the “Islamic bomb” with BBC Panorama, he advised Suntook to have Balachandran approach a senior Paris-based journalist and arrange a meeting with the newspaper’s team. It was an unusual move: using the international press as a channel through which intelligence could influence policy.

Kao, meanwhile, had returned to the government. According to Balachandran, A C N Nambiar, one of Indira Gandhi’s closest confidants, recommended that she rehire Kao. In 1981, Kao became Senior Adviser in the Cabinet Secretariat. Balachandran says he was effectively performing what would today be described as the National Security Adviser’s role, but with an office of only two or three people.

His second innings ended abruptly. In October 1984, Kao was in Beijing, exploring a possible opening with China, when Indira Gandhi was assassinated on October 31. Chinese authorities arranged his passage to Hong Kong, from where he returned to India. After Gandhi’s cremation, he met Rajiv Gandhi and asked to be relieved.

He never again held formal government office. Nor was he seen in public. He rarely appeared in photographs and did not publicly claim credit for his work. This did not surprise Balachandran — for, the Kao he knew was always “an extremely low-profile person”.