In the early 1970s, the KGB presence in India became one of the largest in the world outside the Soviet bloc. Indira Gandhi placed no limit on the number of Soviet diplomats and trade officials, thus allowing the KGB and GRU Soviet Military Intelligence as many cover positions as they wished. Nor, like many other states, did India object to admitting Soviet intelligence officers who had been expelled by less hospitable regimes.
The expansion of KGB operations in the Indian subcontinent and first and foremost in India during the early 1970s led the FCD First Chief Directorate, the KGB’s foreign intelligence wing to create a new department.
Hitherto operations in India, as in the rest of non-Communist South and Southeast Asia, had been the responsibility of the Seventh Department. In 1974 the newly founded Seventeenth Department was given charge of the Indian subcontinent.
Oleg Kalugin, who became head of FCD Directorate K Counter-intelligence in 1973, remembers … ‘‘We had scores of sources throughout the Indian government — in intelligence, counter-intelligence, the Defence and Foreign Ministries, and the police.’’
In 1978 Directorate K, whose responsibilities included the penetration of foreign intelligence and security agencies, was running, through Line KR counter-intelligence department in a KGB residency in the Indian residencies, over 30 agents — 10 of whom were Indian intelligence officers.
Kalugin recalls one occasion on which Yuri Andropov KGB chairman, 1967-82, later Soviet president personally turned down an offer from an Indian minister to provide information in return for 50,000 on the grounds that the KGB was already well supplied with material from the Indian Foreign and Defence Ministries: ‘‘It seemed like the entire country was for sale; the KGB — and the CIA — had deeply penetrated the Indian government. After a while neither side entrusted sensitive information to the Indians, realising their enemy would know all about it the next day.’’
The KGB, in Kalugin’s view, was more successful than the CIA, partly because of its skill in exploiting the corruption which became endemic under Indira Gandhi’s regime …
THOUGH there were some complaints from the CPI leadership at the use of Soviet funds to support Mrs Gandhi and Congress R, covert funding for the CPI seems to have been unaffected.
By 1972 the import-export business founded by the CPI a decade earlier to trade with the Soviet Union had contributed more than Rs 10 million to Party funds. Other secret subsidies, totalling at least Rs 1.5 million, had gone to state Communist parties, individuals and media associated with the CPI.
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8226; Publisher’s note: As The Mitrokhin Archive makes clear, the two chapters on India should be seen in the context of the project as a whole, covering KGB operations around the world in two volumes containing almost 60 chapters
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The funds which were sent from Moscow to party headquarters via the KGB were larger still. In the first six months of 1975 alone they amounted to over Rs 2.5 million.
In the mid-1970s Soviet funds for the CPI were passed by operations officers of the New Delhi main residency to a senior member of the Party’s National Council codenamed BANKIR at a number of different locations. The simplest transfers of funds occurred when KGB officers under diplomatic cover had a pretext to visit BANKIR’s office, such as his briefings for visiting press delegations from the Soviet bloc.
Other arrangements, however, were much more complex. One file noted by Mitrokhin records a fishing expedition to a lake not far from Delhi arranged to provide cover for a transfer of funds to BANKIR. Leonid Shebarshin of the KGB’s New Delhi residency and two operations officers from the main residency left the embassy at 6.30 am, arrived at about 8 am, and spent two and half hours fishing.
At 10.30 am they left the lake and headed to an agreed rendezvous point with BANKIR, making visual contact with his car at 11.15. As the residency car overtook his on a section of the road which could not be observed from either side, packages of banknotes were passed through the open window of BANKIR’s car.
C. Rajeshwar Rao, general secretary of the CPI from 1964 to 1990, subsequently provided receipts for the sums received. Further substantial sums went to the Communist-led All-India Congress of Trade Unions, headed by S.A. Dange.
INDIA under Indira Gandhi was also probably the arena for more KGB active measures than anywhere else in the world, though their significance appears to have been considerably exaggerated by the Centre the FCD’s HQ, which overestimated its ability to manipulate Indian opinion.
According to KGB files, by 1973 it had 10 Indian newspapers on its payroll which cannot be identified for legal reasons as well as a press agency under its ‘‘control’’. During 1972 the KGB claimed to have planted 3,789 articles in Indian newspapers — probably more than in any other country in the non-Communist world. According to its files, the number fell to 2,760 in 1973 but rose to 4,486 in 1974 and 5,510 in 1975.
In some major NATO countries, despite active-measures campaigns, the KGB was able to plant little more than one per cent of the articles which it placed in the Indian press.
Among the KGB’s leading confidential contacts in the press was one of India’s most influential journalists, codenamed NOK. Recruited as a confidential contact in 1976 by A.A. Arkhipov, NOK was subsequently handled by two Line PR political intelligence department in a KGB residency officers operating under journalistic cover: first A.I. Khachaturian, officially a Trud correspondent, then V.N. Cherepakhin of the Novosti news agency.
NOK’s file records that he published material favourable to the Soviet Union and provided information on the entourage of Indira Gandhi. Contact with him ceased in 1980 as a result of his deteriorating health …
THE KGB was also confident of its ability to organise mass demonstrations in Delhi and other major cities. In 1969, for example, Andropov informed the Politburo, ‘‘The KGB residency in India has the opportunity to organise a protest demonstration of up to 20,000 Muslims in front of the US embassy in India. The cost of the demonstration would be Rs 5,000 and would be covered in the … budget for special tasks in India. I request consideration.’’ Leonid Brezhnev wrote ‘‘Agreed’’ on Andropov’s request.
In April 1971, two months after Mrs Gandhi’s landslide election victory, the Politburo approved the establishment of a secret fund of 2.5 million convertible rubles codenamed DEPO to fund active-measures operations in India over the next four years.
During that period KGB reports from New Delhi claimed, on slender evidence, to have assisted the success of Congress R in elections to state assemblies.
Concluded
PART I
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