The Himalayan Arc

by Namita Gokhale

  Another occasion came instantly to mind, an occasion to which I could hear the dinner party conversation now turning. In 2004 the Maoist Valley Commander, […] Sadhuram Devkota, whose nom de guerre was ‘Prashant’, died in custody at the Balaju barracks in Kathmandu. It had struck me at the time as odd that my British friend was so keen for me to believe him when he insisted, casually, that Prashant really had hung himself. Apparently, he was suicidal because his comrades had betrayed him, and because his comrades had come to suspect him, although in fact he was loyal. Something like that. I hadn’t been especially interested in the case. Everybody knew, they’d known for years, that the army tortured and killed prisoners all the time. And now my mind was reprising every conversation I’d ever had with certain people. Had I ever told them anything that now seemed so much more important?

  […] It’s obvious that Kathmandu is a nest of spies. The South Koreans and the Japanese are there to watch the North Koreans, who use the same tradecraft everywhere. The North Korean embassy is so poor it has to run a restaurant (called Pyongyang) to finance itself. The NID trails Pyongyang’s manager as he travels halfway across town, to save few rupees on the price of melons and mangos in the bazaars south of New Road. The North Koreans also make money by selling Viagra, which they apparently produce themselves. According to Nepali assessments, it works. Nepali surveillance reports that the North Koreans are the only embassy that troubles to sell its empty beer bottles (always Carlsberg) to the man who comes around on a bicycle buying old newspapers and glass.

  The Chinese are there to watch the Tibetan refugees. They are said to run extensive networks under the cover of volunteer teachers and language institutes, NGOs, restaurants, and small businesses; and they place agents among the refugees themselves before they escape across the mountains. A neighbourhood like Boudha, where the refugees gather, is jumping with informants and watchers.

  The Indian intelligence agency RAW operates a station of scores of officers, because the Pakistani ISI uses Nepal to infiltrate counterfeit currency into India. Explosives have been found in Kathmandu in houses linked to Pakistani diplomats, and when an Indian Airlines flight from Kathmandu was hijacked in 1999 Pakistani diplomats were implicated. But mostly the RAW works on infiltrating and manipulating Nepali political parties, and many other institutions. ‘RAW’s not like a normal intelligence agency,’ a Western intelligence officer said. ‘It doesn’t do intelligence, it does political interventions.’

  Restaurants and coffee shops where diplomats do their business are kept under domestic surveillance, but this is mostly to see which Nepalis are talking to whom. Nepalis don’t seem to spy on foreign governments very seriously, but they spy on each other with vigour. The buzz-cut young men who loiter near the homes of power players might be from the Directorate of Military Intelligence. They often wear a tika on their forehead, so the police say, thinking it makes them look more innocent. Those who mourn the final failure of the monarchy believe the palace had become an abyss of intrigue, in which everyone was serving a double or a triple agenda. In happier times, before a lack of belief turned it inside out, the palace used the NID to spy on its democratic opponents. (Some people claim that Operation Mustang did a bit of that as well.) ‘Many party leaders worked for our department at one time,’ an NID officer told me. ‘We still have the reports they submitted. If our boss wants to blackmail them he still can. Cash was hard to come by in the Panchayat, and four thousand rupees was big money. A top level Congress guy now used to draw an agent’s salary of four thousand then.’

  About half of the NID is apparently still dedicated to spying on the government of the day’s political opponents, which must create a bewildering maze of personal calculation, because the organizationis stuffed with political appointees, and the government changes so often. […]

  During the war, Kathmandu’s characteristic modes of treachery naturally achieved full expression.

  I interviewed a senior NID man in his house, amid all the paraphernalia of a senior public servant’s visiting room: framed certificates, trophies, framed photographs of ceremonies, silver and gold models of Pashupati and Swayambhu in glass cases, drinking tea his wife had made, and he told me how the war got started from the bureaucratic point of view. ‘Our political leaders, they have good sides, but they have bad sides much more. Their corruption, their power-hunger. So the Maoists used the Congress and the UML and the king at different times. When they attacked Congress party members in the districts the UML thought, “they are our brothers”. After some time they started to attack the UML and the Congress thought, “it’s okay, they are attacking the UML”. Sometimes they didn’t speak against the monarchy. Then the king thought, “they are attacking only Congress and the UML”. Gradually they became successful.’

  One could see Mao’s tactical doctrine in this, or read it as an application of the age worn formula for political mastery; saam daam danda bhed; conciliate, bribe, coerce, divide. When everyone is applying it to everyone else, saam daam danda bhed creates an opaque environment. There are retired army officers and home ministry officials who maintain that members of the royal family channelled funds to the Maoists in the early days, to undermine the democrats.

  Shortly after the insurgency began the prime minister, who was an elderly veteran of the Congress party, told a meeting of security officials, ‘It is difficult to revolt with catapults. The Congress had guns but we couldn’t revolt. How can they revolt with catapults?’ The NID was less sure, and produced a report showing how the rebellion could spread to ten districts. It called for the recruitment of security personnel from those districts, to improve the agencies’ access to information. ‘The home minister came with a list and told the Chief, “We have accepted your proposal. Here are the names, enrol them.” So what happened, the minister recruited his own people. We needed people from Rukum, Rolpa, and Jajarkot, but we recruited only from Dang. I am telling you how the government failed,’ he said. The price was 5 lakhs for an inspector’s job and 3 lakhs for an Assistant Sub Inspector (the NID uses police ranks). By the turn of the millennium the Maoists in the Valley ‘were more informed than us. They had deep penetration in our department also.’

  Just after the war ended I’d interviewed the commander of the Maoists’ Special Task Force, which operated covertly inside the Valley. He was still semi-underground at the time, and we met in a room of one of the bleak hotels at Sundhara. His arrival was preceded by his Special Task Force bodyguard, the usual stocky tracksuited type. The commander was short and young and personable. He described something of his organization, and how it gave force to the crowds confronting the police around the ring road. I asked him if they’d had senior people in the royal government paying them off or giving them information. ‘Generals, ex-generals, government secretaries, ex-secretaries, ministers, MPs, all pay the Party,’ he said. ‘A general informs us that another general has a lot of money. Even industrialists and ministers do that. We get secret information from generals, from the palace, from the prime minister’s office and the cabinet. People are driven by personal selfishness and they inform us. How could we survive until now if we didn’t get this kind of information?’

  A few years later I paraphrased these remarks to the NID man in his sitting room.

  ‘They were more informed than us,’ he repeated, ‘because actually our loyalty was not with the government. Our attitude was only for money money money money.’

  ‘You cannot imagine who is involved with the Maoists,’ another senior spy told me. ‘They all want power and money only.’

  ‘There’s big money at stake in these rivalries,’ a former royal advisor explained.

  The Maoists, on the other hand, killed suspected informants, which made informants difficult to recruit, even if many of those the party killed were only the victims of personal vendettas. The war provided an opportunity for settling all sorts of antagonisms and, more than usual, people of every status and throughout the country had to live by their polit
ical skills.

  British support to the Nepali security apparatus was already long standing. The generation of men who led the NID during the war had received training from MI6, and the CIA, as new recruits during the Panchayat. Renewed British interest in bolstering the Nepali state against terrorism preceded 9/11 by a couple of years. The British supported the establishment of a National Security Council Secretariat, which was also a pet project of King Birendra in the last years of his life. It seems the army and the palace hoped the NSC would be a useful administrative smokescreen between the palace and the army. The British saw it as the equivalent of their Joint Intelligence Committee in Whitehall. It would be a clearing house for intelligence and the coordination of security agencies, nestled right beneath the cabinet. A procession of generals and senior spies was taken to London to see how the JIC works and to be shown around the MI6 headquarters. According to Nepali generals, MI6 paid for the NSC building, and the CIA was also involved in the project. Amid all of the British support to Nepal recorded in Hansard, establishing the NSC secretariat is not mentioned anywhere that I could find.

  Around the same time, the British army was helping the Royal Nepal army to establish the Military Intelligence Support Group (MISG). More people went to the UK for training and to be shown around MI6. In 2001, before the army entered the war, a British team came to Nepal to help set up the MISG within the Directorate of Military Intelligence. British officers instructed recruits at an intelligence training school near Bhaktapur. The MISG, with a unit in each regional division, was involved in surveillance operations, agent handling, handling defectors and operations to snatch or kill Maoist targets. Some of the British officers involved with the MISG were later involved in Operation Mustang. Important figures in the British embassy retained close links with the DMI throughout the conflict, and so did the CIA.

  The British also suggested that the Royal Nepal army produce a counter insurgency ‘bible’, which they assisted in drafting, drawing on their experience in Northern Ireland and Malaya and recent covert operations in Sierra Leone. So, by the time the army entered the war at the end of 2001 British military and intelligence support was already being provided. Nevertheless, the army was spectacularly unprepared. According to a general, there was not a roll of barbed wire in the stores.

  It was a busy time for generals. ‘There used to be the ICRC [International Committee of the Red Cross] raising hell, Amnesty International, all the embassy officers, and the merchants of death coming round.’ This last was a half-jocular reference to the arms dealers who now descended on Kathmandu. There was a procurement spree. ‘Every night there was some party I had to attend.’ At these parties the defence attachés made their offers of military support.

  Operation Mustang was being set up at the same time. The original initiative seems to have come in 2001, but it took time to prepare (the safe houses, the radio network, the new bug-proof building inside Singha Durbar for which, according to the disgruntled spies, those involved on the NID side managed to double the costs). This preparatory work was undertaken by a different man from the one who took charge of the Nepal end once it was ready to go. The training of the Nepali officers in such topics as the principles of counter insurgency, surveillance, and agent handling took place at the Ambassador or the Yak and Yeti Hotel, and at the safe houses. When an instructor observed his students conferring in the car park after a session he realized they didn’t understand English properly, so some were sent to the British Council for lessons. The specialists who planted the bugs needed special training. It’s not clear exactly when Mustang became operational. Staff deployments indicate it may have been around late 2002 or early ‘03.4 It was ‘a big operation’, ‘all singing, all dancing’, ‘the full works’, ‘very expensive’, and apparently ‘signed off by the secretary of state’, who was Jack Straw at the time.

  The peace talks began at the beginning of 2003. According to a Western official, King Gyanendra was keen at first but then he cooled off and the talks stalled. By the summer the question was how to break the ceasefire while giving the Maoists the blame. ‘There was a view, “we can beat these people”,’ a general confirmed. Gyanendra was lingering in London when the talks collapsed.5 Then the army went to work without restraint. And it appears that counter intelligence in Kathmandu turned the corner. There was a cluster of arrests as soon as the fighting resumed.

  Early on I was keen to establish how intelligence was shared by the NID with the other security agencies, because I saw Mustang as an operation to arrest people, and I wanted to know what had happened to them. In principle NID reports were shared with several offices, the home minister’s and the prime minister’s among them. There were weekly, sometimes daily, meetings of the security chiefs (including the NID chief) at the palace, and the NSC secretariat provided a mechanism for intelligence sharing between all the agencies. British intelligence officers spent a fair amount of time at the NSC, it being a British initiative of sorts, but senior officials of the time say that most actionable intelligence was shared more informally, according to the principal peoples’ relationships and political judgment. After the ‘Unified Command’ structure was introduced at the beginning of November 2003 the civilian security agencies came under the military in what a general described as ‘a sort of semi-army rule’. Anyway, it appears that for the NID the most important relationships were with the palace and the army.

  ‘At that time the army and the NID had a special pact,’ according to a senior policeman, involved in counter terrorism. The same thing was attested by many others. ‘The British I think helped the NID a lot,’ said a general. ‘Whatever success or whatever you call it that we had, maybe it was down to that. Otherwise, it would have been worse.’

  ‘The NID never acted, they just gave information,’ said another general. According to him, the main conduit for NID intelligence was through the Palace Military Secretariat. ‘The NID were involved in many incidents,’ he said. When the information came to the army it would most likely be passed to the DMI or the elite 10 Brigade, headquartered at the Rana palace of Laksmi Niwas in Maharajganj. This is often referred to as the Bhairabnath Battalion: ‘They used to snatch people and do all those things,’ explained a general. Thanks to a UN report, Bhairabnath has become the most notorious interrogation centre, from which 49 people were probably extra-judicially executed in the space of three months alone at the end of 2003.

  ‘How many people were arrested on NID intelligence?’ I asked a senior NID man.

  ‘So many,’ he said. ‘Actually, of the four security agencies, only we had deep penetration of the Maoists.’

  There’s no doubt that MI6’s contribution was appreciated, and the British spies are still fondly thought of. ‘They were trying to protect democracy against the Maoists,’ another senior NID man said. ‘These people must be punished, who exposed the operation and embarrassed the British government.’

  ‘It was sincere help for the enhancement of the NID in regard to international terrorism,’ said another.

  A senior NID officer lamented that the army didn’t always share material from interrogations with his department in return for its tip-offs. ‘So many senior people were arrested on the basis of our information,’ he said, ‘but the army didn’t share what they got from them. Time and again [the British officers] used to say to them, “you have to share that information, because the army can’t do this job, but the NID can”.’

  A general remembered one of the British intelligence officers as ‘a very fast chap … a very nice man, a very intelligent man. He knew whom to talk to.’ And according to a close confidant of the king during the period, another British intelligence officer ‘was a great friend of mine. He had a great sense of humour, and he was a great help. We were coordinating. It’s just a pity that they left.’ He searched his memory for another name but couldn’t reach it. He picked up his phone, dialed, waited, and spoke in Nepali. ‘Who was that person who used to email the weekly reports?’ he said. �
�Ah yes,’ and repeated the name of another British spy. ‘He was great,’ he assured me, ‘and he coordinated. He helped us organize our intelligence, and the kind of information that he made available worked wonders!’

  ‘I thought the British were working very secretively through the NID,’ I said.

  ‘As far as this is concerned, these are not clear-cut sort of things,’ replied the courtier. ‘NID, NSC, the palace, they were all the same.’

  On a chilly day at the end of winter I met a senior NID officer in a deserted hotel garden, on the deck chairs by the empty swimming pool. He’d had a central role in Operation Mustang. We were wrapped in our jackets. The waiter brought us tea and left. I asked him how many people were arrested on NID information in Kathmandu.

  ‘Likely one hundred,’ he said.

  ‘About a hundred? More, or less?’

  ‘In between,’ he said.

  ‘And who made these arrests?’

  ‘The Unified Command.’ The British were always ‘very pleased’ to hear of these successes and to see that their support was ‘getting some result’. ‘We never nabbed any people, we just gave the information. Sometimes the police quick response team did it…’6

  ‘And if the army?’ I asked.

  ‘If the army ordered them, “send the prisoner in my barrack,” the police used to send them. The army used to beat them. And if someone dies that’s another thing. They used to send the dead body back to the police, then the headache will come to them.’

  ‘How many people who were arrested on NID information were tortured or disappeared?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘because the army had camps in different places in the Valley. You know Maharajganj? Some forty-nine people in a common grave, in a single grave, in Shivapuri.’