Unknown to even senior MTNL officers, the Research & Analysis Wing, the country’s premier external intelligence agency, has changed the entire series of its telephone numbers.
In all, besides the PBX numbers of its headquarters in the Central Government Office (CGO) complex in the capital, some 200 office and residential numbers were changed.
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This comes at a time when R&AW is still trying to assess the damage caused by the defection of Joint Secretary Rabinder Singh, most possibly to the United States.
At the R&AW headquarters, while Secretary C D Sahay, speaking to The Indian Expresssaid he had ‘‘no comment’’ to offer on the phone revamp, others admitted it was one of the most drastic measures the agency resorted to to beef up security. Sources said that besides heightened security in its headquarters, stricter closed-circuit TV and telephone surveillance have been put in place.
At MTNL, officers at the level of Divisional Engineers (who are normally in the loop on requests for a number change in the zone) say the number switching was done in a hush-hush manner. ‘‘It was all done at a high level. Instructions were received from the Cabinet Secretariat and executed by a select few,’’ said one official. ‘‘We only got to know about all the R&AW numbers being changed when some people called us and said on dialing, they got a recorded message that the numbers do not exist.’’
Ritu Sarin is Executive Editor (News and Investigations) at The Indian Express group. Her areas of specialisation include internal security, money laundering and corruption.
Sarin is one of India’s most renowned reporters and has a career in journalism of over four decades. She is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) since 1999 and since early 2023, a member of its Board of Directors. She has also been a founder member of the ICIJ Network Committee (INC). She has, to begin with, alone, and later led teams which have worked on ICIJ’s Offshore Leaks, Swiss Leaks, the Pulitzer Prize winning Panama Papers, Paradise Papers, Implant Files, Fincen Files, Pandora Papers, the Uber Files and Deforestation Inc. She has conducted investigative journalism workshops and addressed investigative journalism conferences with a specialisation on collaborative journalism in several countries. ... Read More
