KGB support did little to revive Menon’s fortunes. Before he became Defence Minister, most of his political career had been spent outside India - including twenty-eight years in Britain, where he had served for more than a decade as a Labour councillor in London. As a result, despite the personal support of some ardent disciples within the Congress Party (at least one of whom received substantial KGB funding),22 Menon lacked any real popular following in India itself. By the time he returned to India from foreign exile, the only language he spoke was English, he could no longer tolerate spicy Indian food and he preferred a tweed jacket and flannel trousers to traditional Indian dress. After failing to be renominated by Congress in his existing Bombay constituency for the 1967 election, Menon stood unsuccessfully as an independent. Two years later, with Communist support, he was elected as an independent in West Bengal. Some of the issues on which he campaigned suggest that he had been influenced by KGB active measures - as, for example, in his demand that American troops in Vietnam be tried for genocide and his claim that they were slitting open the wombs of pregnant women to expose their unborn babies.23 Well before his death in 1974, however, Menon had ceased to be an influential voice in Indian politics.
Following Menon’s political eclipse, Moscow’s preferred candidate to succeed Nehru after his death in May 1964 was Gulzarilal Nanda, Home Minister and number two in the cabinet. The Delhi residency was ordered to do all it could to further his candidature but to switch support to Lal Bahadur Shastri, also a close associate of Nehru, if Nanda’s campaign failed.24 There is no indication in the files noted by Mitrokhin that the KGB was in contact with either Nanda or Shastri. Moscow’s main reason for supporting them was, almost certainly, negative rather than positive - to prevent the right-wing Hindu traditionalist Morarji Desai, who began each day by drinking a glass of his own urine (a practice extolled in ancient Indian medical treatises), from succeeding Nehru. In the event, after Desai had been persuaded to withdraw reluctantly from the contest, Shastri became Prime Minister with the unanimous backing of Congress. Following Shastri’s sudden death in January 1966, the cabal of Congress leaders (the ‘Syndicate’) chose Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi (codenamed VANO by the KGB), as his successor in the mistaken belief that she would prove a popular figurehead whom they could manipulate at will.25
The KGB’s first prolonged contact with Indira Gandhi had occurred during her first visit to the Soviet Union a few months after Stalin’s death in 1953. As well as keeping her under continuous surveillance, the Second Chief Directorate also surrounded her with handsome, attentive male admirers.26 Unaware of the orchestration of her welcome by the KGB, Indira was overwhelmed by the attentions lavished on her. Though she did not mention the male admirers in letters to her father, she wrote to him, ‘Everybody - the Russians - have been so sweet to me . . . I am being treated like everybody’s only daughter - I shall be horribly spoilt by the time I leave. Nobody has ever been so nice to me.’ Indira wrote of a holiday arranged for her on the Black Sea, ‘I don’t think I have had such a holiday for years.’ Later, in Leningrad, she told Nehru that she was ‘wallowing in luxury’.27 Two years later Indira accompanied her father on his first official visit to the Soviet Union. Like Nehru, she was visibly impressed by the apparent successes of Soviet planning and economic modernization exhibited to them in carefully stage-managed visits to Russian factories. During her trip, Khrushchev presented her with a mink coat which became one of the favourite items in her wardrobe - despite the fact that a few years earlier she had criticized the female Indian ambassador in Moscow for accepting a similar gift.28
Soviet attempts to cultivate Indira Gandhi during the 1950s were motivated far more by the desire to influence her father than by any awareness of her own political potential. Like both the Congress Syndicate and the CPI, Moscow still underestimated her when she became Prime Minister. During her early appearances in parliament, Mrs Gandhi seemed tongue-tied and unable to think on her feet. The insulting nickname coined by a socialist MP, ‘Dumb Doll’, began to stick.29 Moscow’s strategy during 1966 for the Indian elections in the following year was based on encouraging the CPI and the breakaway Communist Party of India, Marxist (CPM) to join together in a left-wing alliance to oppose Mrs Gandhi and the Congress government.30 As well as subsidizing the CPI and some other left-wing groups during the 1967 election campaign, the KGB also funded the campaigns of several agents and confidential contacts within Congress. The most senior agent identified in the files noted by Mitrokhin was a minister codenamed ABAD, who was regarded by the KGB as ‘extremely influential’.31
During the election campaign, the KGB also made considerable use of active measures, many of them based on forged American documents produced by Service A. An agent in the information department of the US embassy in New Delhi, codenamed MIKHAIL, provided examples of documents and samples of signatures to assist in the production of convincing forgeries.32 Among the operations officers who publicized the forgeries produced for the 1967 election campaign was Yuri Modin, former controller of the Cambridge ‘Magnificent Five’. In an attempt to discredit S. K. Patil, one of the leading anti-Communists in the Congress Syndicate, Modin circulated a forged letter from the US consul-general in Bombay to the American ambassador in New Delhi referring to Patil’s ‘political intrigues with the Pakistanis’ and to the large American subsidies supposedly given to him. Though Patil was one of the most senior Congress politicians defeated at the election, it remains difficult to assess how much his defeat owed to KGB active measures.33 Modin also publicized a bogus telegram to London from the British High Commissioner, John Freeman, reporting that the United States was giving vast sums to right-wing parties and politicians. The fact that the KGB appears to have had no agent like MIKHAIL in the High Commission, however, led Service A on this occasion to make an embarrassing error. Its forgery mistakenly described the British High Commissioner as Sir John Freeman.34
Other Service A fabrications had much greater success. Among them was a forged letter purporting to come from Gordon Goldstein of the US Office of Naval Research and revealing the existence of (in reality non-existent) American bacteriological warfare weapons in Vietnam and Thailand. Originally published in the Bombay Free Press Journal, the letter was reported in the London Times on 7 March 1968 and used by Moscow Radio in broadcasts beamed at Asia as proof that the United States had spread epidemics in Vietnam. The Indian weekly Blitz headlined a story based on the same forgery, ‘US Admits Biological and Nuclear Warfare’. Goldstein’s signature and official letterhead were subsequently discovered to have been copied from an invitation to an international scientific symposium circulated by him the previous year.35
After the elections of February 1967, the KGB claimed, doubtless optimistically, that it was able to influence 30 to 40 per cent of the new parliament.36 Congress lost 21 per cent of its seats. The conflict between Indira Gandhi and her chief rival Morarji Desai made its forty-four-seat majority precarious and obliged her to accept Desai as Deputy Prime Minister. By 1968 Desai and Kamaraj, the head of the Syndicate, were agreed on the need to replace Mrs Gandhi.37 Congress was moving inexorably towards a split.
During 1969 there were major policy reorientations in both Moscow and Delhi. The growing threat from China persuaded the Kremlin to make a special relationship with India the basis of its South Asian policy. Simultaneously, Mrs Gandhi set out to secure left-wing support against the Syndicate. In July 1969 she nationalized fourteen commercial banks. Desai was sacked as Finance Minister and resigned as Deputy Prime Minister. Encouraged by Moscow, the CPI swung its support behind Mrs Gandhi. By infiltrating its members and sympathizers into the left-wing Congress Forum for Socialist Action (codenamed SECTOR by the KGB), the CPI set out to gain a position of influence within the ruling party.38 In November the Syndicate declared Mrs Gandhi guilty of defiance of the Congress leadership and dismissed her from the party, which then split in two: Congress (O), which followed the Syndicate line, and Congress (R), which supporte
d Mrs Gandhi. The Syndicate hinted that Mrs Gandhi intended to ‘sell’ India to the Soviet Union and was using her principal private secretary, Parmeshwar Narain Haksar, as a direct link with Moscow and the Soviet embassy.39
From 1967 to 1973 Haksar, a former protégé of Krishna Menon, was Mrs Gandhi’s most trusted adviser. One of her biographers, Katherine Frank, describes him as ‘a magnetic figure’ who became ‘probably the most influential and powerful person in the government’ as well as ‘the most important civil servant in the country’. Haksar set out to turn a civil service which, at least in principle, was politically neutral into an ideologically ‘committed bureaucracy’. His was the hand that guided Mrs Gandhi through her turn to the left, the nationalization of the banks and the split in the Congress Party. It was Haksar also who was behind the transfer of control of the intelligence community to the Prime Minister’s Secretariat.40 His advocacy of the leftward turn in Mrs Gandhi’s policies sprang, however, from his socialist convictions rather than from manipulation by the KGB. But both he and Mrs Gandhi ‘were less fastidious than Nehru had been about interfering with the democratic system and structure of government to attain their ideological ends’.41 The journalist Inder Malhotra noted the growth of a ‘courtier culture’ in Indira Gandhi’s entourage: ‘The power centre in the world’s largest democracy was slowly turning into a durbar.’42
At the elections of February 1971 Mrs Gandhi won a landslide victory. With seventy seats more than the undivided Congress had won in 1967, her Congress (R) had a two-thirds majority. The Congress Forum for Socialist Action had the support of about 100 MPs in the new parliament. Mrs Gandhi made its most vocal spokesman, the former Communist Mohan Kumaramangalam, Minister of Mines; one of his first acts was the nationalization of the coal industry. Kumaramangalam seemed to be implementing a ‘thesis’ which he had first argued in 1964: that since the CPI could not win power by itself, as many of its members and sympathizers as possible should join the Congress, make common cause with ‘progressive’ Congressmen and compel the party leadership to implement socialist policies.43 Another leading figure in the Congress Forum for Socialist Action was recruited in 1971 as Agent RERO and paid about 100,000 rupees a year for what the KGB considered important political intelligence as well as acting as an agent recruiter. His controllers included the future head of the FCD, Leonid Shebarshin (codenamed VERNOV).44
In August 1971 Mrs Gandhi signed a Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Co-operation with the Soviet Union. According to the Permanent Secretary at the Indian Foreign Office, T. N. Kaul, ‘It was one of the few closely guarded secret negotiations that India has ever conducted. On [the Indian] side, hardly half a dozen people were aware of it, including the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister. The media got no scent of it.’45 A delighted Gromyko declared at the signing ceremony, ‘The significance of the Treaty cannot be over-estimated.’ Mrs Gandhi’s popularity among the Soviet people, he later claimed, was demonstrated by the ‘large number of Soviet babies who were given the unusual name Indira’.46 The Soviet Union seemed to be guaranteed the support of the leading power in the Non-Aligned Movement. Both countries immediately issued a joint communiqué calling for the withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam. India was able to rely on Soviet arms supplies and diplomatic support in the conflict against Pakistan which was already in the offing. According to Leonid Shebarshin, who was posted to New Delhi as head of Line PR (political intelligence) at a time when ‘Soviet military technology was flowing into India in an endless stream’, the Centre - unlike many in the Foreign Ministry - concluded that war was inevitable. Shebarshin realized that war had begun when the lights went out in the middle of a diplomatic reception at the Soviet embassy on 2 December. Looking out of the window, Shebarshin saw that the power cut affected the whole of the capital. Leaving the embassy hurriedly, he drove to a phone box some way away to ring a member of the residency’s agent network who confirmed that hostilities had started. 47 Another member of the network arranged a meeting between Shebarshin and a senior Indian military commander:
It would be an understatement to say that the general’s mood was optimistic. He knew precisely when and how the war would end: on 16 December with the surrender of Dacca [later renamed Dhaka] and capitulation of the Pakistani army [in East Pakistan] . . . They were in no state to resist and would not defend Dacca, because they had no one from whom to expect help. ‘We know the Pakistani army’, my interlocutor said. ‘Any professional soldiers would behave the same way in their place.’48
Despite diplomatic support from both the United States and China, Pakistan suffered a crushing defeat in the fourteen-day war with India. East Pakistan gained independence as Bangladesh. West Pakistan, reduced to a nation of only 55 million people, could no longer mount a credible challenge to India. For most Indians it was Mrs Gandhi’s finest hour. A Soviet diplomat at the United Nations exulted, ‘This is the first time in history that the United States and China have been defeated together!’49
In the Centre, the Indo-Soviet special relationship was also celebrated as a triumph for the KGB. The residency in New Delhi was rewarded by being upgraded to the status of ‘main residency’. Its head from 1970 to 1975, Yakov Prokofyevich Medyanik, was accorded the title of ‘main resident’, while the heads of Lines PR (political intelligence), KR (counter-intelligence) and X (scientific and technological intelligence) were each given the rank of resident - not, as elsewhere, deputy resident. Medyanik also had overall supervision of three other residencies, located in the Soviet consulates at Bombay, Calcutta and Madras. 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 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.50 The expansion of KGB operations in the Indian subcontinent (and first and foremost in India) during the early 1970s led the FCD to create a new department. Hitherto operations in India, as in the rest of non-Communist South and South-East Asia, had been the responsibility of the Seventh Department. In 1974 the newly founded Seventeenth Department was given charge of the Indian subcontinent.51
Oleg Kalugin, who became head of FCD Directorate K (Counter-Intelligence) in 1973, remembers India as ‘a model of KGB infiltration of a Third World government’: ‘We had scores of sources throughout the Indian government - in intelligence, counter-intelligence, the Defence and Foreign Ministries, and the police.’52 In 1978 Directorate K, whose responsibilities included the penetration of foreign intelligence and security agencies, was running, through Line KR in the Indian residencies, over thirty agents - ten of whom were Indian intelligence officers.53 Kalugin recalls one occasion on which Andropov 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, realizing 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.54 As Inder Malhotra noted, though corruption was not new in India:
People expected Indira Gandhi’s party, committed to bringing socialism to the country, to be more honest and cleaner than the old undivided Congress. But this turned out to be a vain hope. On the contrary, compared with the amassing of wealth by some of her close associates, the misdeeds of the discarded Syndicate leaders, once looked upon as godfathers of corrupt Congressmen, began to appear trivial.
Suitcases full of banknotes were said to be routinely taken to the Prime Minister’s house. Former Syndicate member S. K. Patil i
s reported to have said that Mrs Gandhi did not even return the suitcases.55
The Prime Minister is unlikely to have paid close attention to the dubious origins of some of the funds which went into Congress’s coffers. That was a matter which she left largely to her principal fundraiser, Lalit Narayan Mishra, who - though she doubtless did not realize it - also accepted Soviet money. 56 On at least one occasion a secret gift of 2 million rupees from the Politburo to Congress (R) was personally delivered after midnight by the head of Line PR in New Delhi, Leonid Shebarshin. Another million rupees were given on the same occasion to a newspaper which supported Mrs Gandhi.57 Short and obese with several chins, Mishra looked the part of the corrupt politician he increasingly became. Indira Gandhi, despite her own frugal lifestyle, depended on the money he collected from a variety of sources to finance Congress (R). So did her son and anointed heir, Sanjay, whose misguided ambition to build an Indian popular car and become India’s Henry Ford depended on government favours. When Mishra was assassinated in 1975, Mrs Gandhi blamed a plot involving ‘foreign elements’, a phrase which she doubtless intended as a euphemism for the CIA.58 The New Delhi main residency gave his widow 70,000 rupees from its active-measures budget.59
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