The World Was Going Our Way

by Christopher Andrew

  Though there were some complaints from the CPI leadership at the use of Soviet funds to support Mrs Gandhi and Congress (R),60 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 10 million rupees to Party funds. Other secret subsidies, totalling at least 1.5 million rupees, had gone to state Communist parties, individuals and media associated with the CPI.61 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 2.5 million rupees.62

  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. Shebarshin and two operations officers from the main residency left the embassy at 6.30 a.m., arrived at about 8 a.m. and spent two and a half hours fishing. At 10.30 a.m. 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.63 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.64

  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, which overestimated its ability to manipulate Indian opinion. According to KGB files, by 1973 it had ten Indian newspapers on its payroll (which cannot be identified for legal reasons) as well as a press agency under its ‘control’.65 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 1975.66 In some major NATO countries, despite active-measures campaigns, the KGB was able to plant little more than 1 per cent of the articles which it placed in the Indian press.67

  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 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 .68 Though not apparently aware of the KGB’s involvement in the active-measures campaign, P. N. Dhar believed that the left was ‘manipulating the press . . . to keep Mrs Gandhi committed to their ideological line’.69 India was also one of the most favourable environments for Soviet front organizations. From 1966 to 1986 the head of the most important of them, the World Peace Council (WPC), was the Indian Communist Romesh Chandra. In his review of the 1960s at the WPC-sponsored World Peace Congress in 1971, Chandra denounced ‘the US-dominated NATO’ as ‘the greatest threat to peace’ across the world: ‘The fangs of NATO can be felt in Asia and Africa as well [as Europe] . . . The forces of imperialism and exploitation, particularly NATO . . . bear the responsibility for the hunger and poverty of hundreds of millions all over the world.’70

  The KGB was also confident of its ability to organize 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 organize a protest demonstration of up to 20,000 Muslims in front of the US embassy in India. The cost of the demonstration would be 5,000 rupees and would be covered in the . . . budget for special tasks in India. I request consideration.’ Brezhnev wrote ‘Agreed’ on Andropov’s request.71 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.72 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.73

  Among the most time-consuming active measures implemented by Leonid Shebarshin as head of Line PR were the preparations for Brezhnev’s state visit in 1973. As usual it was necessary to ensure that the General Secretary was received with what appeared to be rapturous enthusiasm and to concoct evidence that his platitudinous speeches were hailed as ‘major political statements of tremendous importance’.74 Since Brezhnev was probably the dreariest orator among the world’s major statesmen this was no easy task, particularly when he travelled outside the Soviet bloc. Soviet audiences were used to listening respectfully to his long-winded utterances and to bursting into regular, unwarranted applause. Indian audiences, however, lacked the experience of their Soviet counterparts. Brezhnev would have been affronted by any suggestion that he deliver only a short address, since he believed in a direct correlation between the length of a speech and the prestige of the speaker. His open-air speech in the great square in front of Delhi’s famous Red Fort, where Nehru had declared Indian independence twenty-six years earlier, thus presented a particular challenge. According to possibly inflated KGB estimates, 2 million people were present - perhaps the largest audience to whom Brezhnev had ever spoken. As Shebarshin later acknowledged, the speech was extraordinarily long winded and heavy going. The embassy had made matters even worse by translating the speech into a form of high Hindi which was incomprehensible to most of the audience. As the speech droned on and night began to fall, some of the audience started to drift away but, according to Shebarshin, were turned back by the police for fear of offending the Soviet leader. Though even Brezhnev sensed that not all was well, he was later reassured by the practised sycophants in his entourage. Shebarshin was able to persuade both himself and the Centre that the visit as a whole had been a great success.75 The KGB claimed much of the credit for ‘creating favourable conditions’ for Brezhnev’s Indian triumph.76

  Leonid Shebarshin’s perceived success in active measures as head of Line PR almost certainly helps to explain his promotion to the post of main resident in 1975 and launched him on a career which in 1988 took him to the leadership of the FCD. In a newspaper interview after his retirement from the KGB, Shebarshin spoke ‘nostalgically about the old days, about disinformation - forging documents, creating sensations for the press’. It was doubtless his days in India which he had chiefly in mind. 77 Among the KGB’s most successful active measures were those which claimed to expose CIA plots in the subcontinent. The Centre was probably right to claim the credit for persuading Indira Gandhi that the Agency was plotting her overthrow. 78 In November 1973 she told Fidel Castro at a banquet in New Delhi, ‘What they [the CIA] have done to Allende they want to do to me also. There are people here, connected with the same foreign forces that acted in Chile, who would like to eliminate me.’ She did not question Castro’s (and the KGB’s) insistence that Allende had been murdered in cold blood by Pinochet’s US-backed troops. The belief that the Agency had marked her out for the same fate as Allende became something of an obsession. In an obvious reference to (accurate) American claims that, in reality, Allende had turned his gun on himself during the storming of his palace, Mrs Gandhi declared, ‘When I am murdered, they will say I arranged it myself.’79

  Mrs Gandhi was also ea
sily persuaded that the CIA, rather than the mistakes of her own administration, was responsible for the growing opposition to her government. Early in 1974 riots in Gujarat, which killed over 100 people, led to 8,000 arrests and caused the dissolution of the State Assembly, reinforced her belief in an American conspiracy against her.80 Irritated by a series of speeches by Mrs Gandhi denouncing the ever-present menace of CIA subversion, the US ambassador in New Delhi, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, ordered an investigation which uncovered two occasions during her father’s premiership when the CIA had secretly provided funds to help the Communists’ opponents in state elections, once in Kerala and once in West Bengal. According to Moynihan:

  Both times the money was given to the Congress Party which had asked for it. Once it was given to Mrs Gandhi herself, who was then a party official.

  Still, as we were no longer giving any money to her, it was understandable that she should wonder to whom we were giving it. It is not a practice to be encouraged.81

  A brief visit to India by Henry Kissinger in October 1974 provided another opportunity for a KGB active-measures campaign. Agents of influence were given further fabricated stories about CIA conspiracies to report to the Prime Minister and other leading figures in the government and parliament. The KGB claimed to have planted over seventy stories in the Indian press condemning CIA subversion as well as initiating letter-writing and poster campaigns. The Delhi main residency claimed that, thanks to its campaign, Mrs Gandhi had raised the question of CIA operations in India during her talks with Kissinger. 82

  On 28 April 1975 Andropov approved a further Indian active-measures operation to publicize fabricated evidence of CIA subversion. Sixteen packets containing incriminating material prepared by Service A on three CIA officers stationed under diplomatic cover at the US embassy were sent anonymously by the Delhi residency to the media and gave rise to a series of articles in the Indian press. According to KGB files, Mrs Gandhi sent a personal letter to the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, enclosing some of the KGB’s forged CIA documents and a series of articles in Indian newspapers which had been taken in by them. The same files report that Mrs Bandaranaike concluded that CIA subversion posed such a serious threat to Sri Lanka that she set up a committee of investigation. 83

  One of Mrs Gandhi’s critics, Piloo Moody, ridiculed her obsession with CIA subversion by wearing around his neck a medallion with the slogan, ‘I am a CIA agent’.84 For Mrs Gandhi, however, the Agency was no laughing matter. By the summer of 1975 her suspicions of a vast conspiracy by her political opponents, aided and abetted by the CIA, had, in the opinion of her biographer Katherine Frank, grown to ‘something close to paranoia’. Her mood was further darkened on 12 June by a decision of the Allahabad High Court, against which she appealed, invalidating her election as MP on the grounds of irregularities in the 1971 elections. A fortnight later she persuaded both the President and the cabinet to agree to the declaration of a state of emergency. In a broadcast to the nation on India Radio on 26 June, Mrs Gandhi declared that a ‘deep and widespread conspiracy’ had ‘been brewing ever since I began to introduce certain progressive measures of benefit to the common man and woman of India’. Opposition leaders were jailed or put under house arrest and media censorship introduced. In the first year of the emergency, according to Amnesty International, more than 110,000 people were arrested and detained without trial.85

  Reports from the New Delhi main residency, headed from 1975 to 1977 by Leonid Shebarshin, claimed (probably greatly exaggerated) credit for using its agents of influence to persuade Mrs Gandhi to declare the emergency.86 The CPI Central Executive Committee voiced its ‘firm opinion that the swift and stern measures taken by the Prime Minister and the government of India against the right-reactionary and counter-revolutionary forces were necessary and justified. Any weakness displayed at this critical moment would have been fatal.’ Predictably, it accused the CIA of supporting the counter-revolutionary conspiracy. 87 KGB active measures adopted the same line.88 The assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and much of his family in Bangladesh on 14 August further fuelled Mrs Gandhi’s conspiracy theories. Behind their murders she saw once again the hidden hand of the CIA.89

  According to Shebarshin, both the Centre and the Soviet leadership found it difficult to grasp that the emergency had not turned Indira Gandhi into a dictator and that she still responded to public opinion and had to deal with opposition: ‘On the spot, from close up, the embassy and our [intelligence] service saw all this, but for Moscow Indira became India, and India - Indira.’ Reports from the New Delhi residency which were critical of any aspect of her policies received a cool reception in the Centre. Shebarshin thought it unlikely that any were forwarded to Soviet leaders or the Central Committee. Though Mrs Gandhi was fond of saying in private that states have no constant friends and enemies, only constant interests, ‘At times Moscow behaved as though India had given a pledge of love and loyalty to her Soviet friends.’ Even the slightest hiccup in relations caused consternation.90 During 1975 a total of 10.6 million rubles was spent on active measures in India designed to strengthen support for Mrs Gandhi and undermine her political opponents.91 Soviet backing was public as well as covert. In June 1976, at a time when Mrs Gandhi suffered from semi-pariah status in most of the West, she was given a hero’s welcome during a trip to the Soviet Union. On the eve of her arrival a selection of her speeches, articles and interviews was published in Russian translation.92 She attended meetings in her honour in cities across the Soviet Union.93 The visit ended, as it had begun, in a mood of mutual self-congratulation.

  The Kremlin, however, was worried by reports of the dismissive attitude to the Soviet Union of Indira’s son and anointed heir, Sanjay, an admirer of Ferdinand Marcos, the corrupt anti-Communist President of the Philippines.94 Reports reached P. N. Dhar (and, almost certainly, the New Delhi main residency) that one of Sanjay’s cronies was holding regular meetings with a US embassy official ‘in a very suspicious manner’. Soon after his mother’s return from her triumphal tour of the Soviet Union, Sanjay gave an interview in which he praised big business, denounced nationalization and poured scorn on the Communists. Probably annoyed by complaints of his own corruption, he said of the CPI, ‘I don’t think you’d find a richer or more corrupt people anywhere.’ By her own admission, Indira became ‘quite frantic’ when his comments were made public, telling Dhar that her son had ‘grievously hurt’ the CPI and ‘created serious problems with the entire Soviet bloc’. Sanjay was persuaded to issue a ‘clarification’ which fell well short of a retraction. 95

  The emergency ended as suddenly as it had begun. On 18 January 1977 Mrs Gandhi announced that elections would be held in March. Press censorship was suspended and opposition leaders released from house arrest. The New Delhi main residency, like Mrs Gandhi, was overconfident about the outcome of the election. To ensure success it mounted a major operation, codenamed KASKAD, involving over 120 meetings with agents during the election campaign. Nine of the Congress (R) candidates at the elections were KGB agents.96 Files noted by Mitrokhin also identify by name twenty-one of the non-Communist politicians (four of them ministers) whose election campaigns were subsidized by the KGB .97 The Soviet media called for ‘unity of action of all the democratic forces and particularly the ruling Indian National Congress and the Communist Party of India’.98 Repeated pressure was put on the CPI leadership by both the New Delhi main residency and Moscow to ensure its support for Mrs Gandhi. The CPI General Secretary, Rajeshwar Rao, and the Secretary of the Party’s National Council, N. K. Krishna, were summoned to the Soviet embassy on 12 February to receive a message of exhortation from the CPSU Central Committee. Further exhortations were delivered in person on 15 February by a three-man Soviet delegation. KGB files report Rao and Krishna as saying that they greatly appreciated the advice of their Soviet colleagues and were steadfast in their support for Mrs Gandhi.99 Their appreciation also reflected the unusually high level of Soviet subsidies during the C
PI election campaign - over 3 million rupees in the first two months of 1977.100

  Agent reports reinforced the New Delhi main residency’s confidence that Indira Gandhi would secure another election victory. Reports that she faced the possibility of defeat in her constituency were largely disregarded.101 In the event Mrs Gandhi suffered a crushing defeat. Janata, the newly united non-Communist opposition, won 40 per cent of the vote to Congress (R)’s 35 per cent. One of the KGB’s bêtes noires, Morarji Desai, became Prime Minister. When the election result was announced, writes Mrs Gandhi’s biographer, Katherine Frank, ‘India rejoiced as it had not done since the eve of independence from the British thirty years before.’ In Delhi, Mrs Gandhi’s downfall was celebrated with dancing in the streets. 102