The Zero-Cost Mission/The Wily Agent

by Amar Bhushan

  The following morning, Sujal woke up early and went out for a walk. When he returned, he found Nurul waiting for him. He had come to seek his help in getting his Bangladeshi maid released from jail for overstaying her visa. Sujal avoided enquiring if he had any news of violence in Bangladesh, for he was not sure whether Mazhar had kept him in the picture about the mission’s objective. He spoke to a police officer and got the matter resolved. After Nurul left, he phoned Dayal to let him know that he wouldn’t be able to come in to the office as he was running a high fever.

  ‘Why did you lie to stay at home?’ Arpita asked.

  ‘The mission has entered its most critical phase. I want to stay at home in case anyone calls with an update. In any case, I don’t want to attend Dayal’s meetings on a Saturday,’ Sujal explained.

  He spent the day relaxing and waiting for some news but heard nothing. At 11.15 p.m., the PCO owner from across the road came to tell him that he was shutting down the shop and going home. Sujal paid him five hundred rupees to stay, in case any calls came for him. After that he retired to his bedroom but couldn’t sleep. An hour later, he got up and went to the living room, fixed a small drink for himself and sat in his easy chair. His mind was racing, trying to assess and guess what was going on in Bangladesh. At 2.30 a.m., exhausted by the futility of all his guesswork, he returned to the bedroom and lay down. Arpita was fast asleep. Just as he was about to doze off, his cell phone rang. It was Israr on the line, sounding alarmed. He said that he had tried to contact Jafrin (aka Mansoor) on the numbers given by him but they all turned out to be bogus.

  ‘Why did you try to call him?’ asked a worried Sujal.

  ‘I wanted to know if he had been able to identify the locations that I showed him on the map,’ Israr replied.

  Sujal realized that Israr, who was always very curious about every detail of the mission, having heard nothing from Sujal for several days, had decided to take matters into his own hands and call Mansoor to fish for information. Annoyed, he demanded, ‘Are you waking me up at this hour only to inform me that his telephone numbers are non-existent?’

  ‘Well, no, that’s not all. I was told in the evening that a clash between Jamaat and League activists took place in Bagerhat in which two persons were killed and one of them was Jafrin,’ Israr said.

  Sujal chided him for making unnecessary inquiries and advised him not to call anyone till he was specifically directed to do so.

  At 4.00 a.m., he was woken up again, this time by a call from Mazhar. ‘I am sorry to wake you up at this unearthly hour, but I believe the situation is bad there,’ he said.

  ‘Do you have any details?’

  ‘No. I contacted a few of my people, but they weren’t able to tell me much about the law and order situation in Dhaka.’

  With bits of news indicating that the mission had gone more or less according to plan, Sujal felt more relaxed and slept well.

  The following day being a Sunday, the Calcutta office was closed. However, Sujal decided to go in anyway to make a few discreet calls to his friends to check on the situation in Bangladesh. Since it was a holiday, only a skeleton staff was at work, manning the essential services, which suited him. Once he settled down in his room, he rang up Parimal Basu, his contact in the Anand Bazar Patrika, but Parimal was not in yet. Sujal then asked for the assistant editor and introduced himself when he came on the line, asking if he had any news of violence against the minority Hindu community in Dhaka. The assistant editor reported that there was no news yet of any widespread communal clashes in Bangladesh. Sujal thanked him and hung up.

  Next, Sujal headed for the first floor to check the news coming in on the teleprinter. He asked the operator to show him the PTI, UNI and Reuter tickers received since last night. The operator opened a carton that was lying unattended in a corner behind the shredding machine, took out bundles of tickers and handed them over to Sujal, who sat down at a desk and began going through them. A PTI news bulletin from Dhaka filed at 8.35 a.m. caught his attention. In a series of bomb explosions carried out between 1.00 a.m. and 4.30 a.m., several Jamaat madrasas located along the border and their facilities in the Satkhira, Khulna, Chittagong, Rajshahi and Jessore districts had been severely damaged. An ISI safe house at Mujibnagar in Dhaka had also been bombed, damaging a car and killing its driver. Sujal removed the relevant ticker and walked out with it. He went to the adjoining room to check if there was any encrypted cable addressed to him. There was one from Reddy who wanted him to come to Delhi before the coming weekend. As he was about to leave, another operator said that he had deciphered a cable from Dhaka that might be of some interest to him. It was actually addressed to the Bangladesh desk at headquarters and marked routinely to the Calcutta office for information, he said. It confirmed what the PTI had reported and provided a few more details on the damages. He returned the cable to the operator, demonstrating no obvious interest in its contents. After that, he left the office, driving home in his personal car.

  From the news that was beginning to filter in, it seemed that the mission had been accomplished as planned. Though the Jamaat facilities had been hit badly and its inmates had sustained injuries, the attacks had not caused major clashes between Jamaat and League volunteers nor had there been a backlash against Hindus, as feared by the Chief. Sujal’s main interest was in finding out the details of how his agents had played out their parts, but he knew that he would have to wait for at least three weeks before they started contacting him. Nonetheless, he knew enough to sense that he had delivered and a feeling of relief swept over him.

  When he got home, he parked the car and rang the bell. As Arpita opened the door, he told her that he had succeeded again.

  ‘Shariful called on your cell phone several times,’ she told him as they settled down in the living room.

  ‘He must have called to convey his sense of betrayal by an Indian friend. He would have felt that for my sake he managed to persuade Crescent to accept most of my conditions, but here I was, attacking his facilities and refusing to reciprocate his offer,’ Sujal told his wife.

  The Aftermath

  Sujal landed in Delhi a week later. Receiving him warmly, Vishwanath Reddy said that he was proud to have reposed his faith in him.

  ‘Sujal, although the mission went as planned, for me, personally, it is not important whether its successful execution will slow down the waves of illegal immigrants or the entry of militants from Bangladesh.’ Sujal looked a little surprised as Reddy continued, ‘What matters the most to me is that it has given me an immense sense of belief in the ability of some of the Agency’s officers to pull off such a difficult operation with only moral support from the leadership. Well done.’ He smiled.

  ‘Sir, I’m not sure what to say,’ Sujal responded, overwhelmed at Reddy’s warm words.

  ‘No need to say anything. Your actions have spoken far louder than any words could have. Now, let’s go meet the Chief. He’s been waiting to receive the jewel of his crown.’

  As they entered Aulakh’s office, he stood up and came around his desk to embrace Sujal. ‘Congratulations, Sujal. It is a rare accomplishment for any officer to execute a mission with zero cost to the Agency. It is definitely the first of its kind in my entire career,’ the Chief enthused. ‘Although no reward can match your deed, still, as a token of our appreciation, I have approved your assignment to a European station.’

  ‘Sir, thank you, this means a lot,’ Sujal said.

  ‘You’ve earned this. Now you will neither have to borrow money to run operations nor work under interfering officers,’ Aulakh reassured him. ‘Reddy, I want you to recommend Sujal for the Agency’s highest operational honour.’

  Not accustomed to hearing such praise, Sujal simply thanked the Chief for his generous words. As they walked back to his room, Reddy confided to Sujal that he had already initiated the paperwork to transfer him from Calcutta to headquarters.

  Back in Calcutta, Sujal was in high spirits. He couldn’t wait to share the news of hi
s assignment to a European desk with Arpita. However, he had a few things to take care of before he could start packing and planning for his next assignment.

  The first thing he did was to meet Mazhar and request him to make an additional twenty-five lakhs available to reward the boys for executing the mission. Although Sahib initially refused, saying that he had agreed to pay for the mission and not for rewarding crooks, Sujal’s promise to help ensure his political rehabilitation eventually swayed him and he agreed to release the money. With the money secured, Sujal’s final task was to make arrangements for it to be collected and distributed amongst the boys. He called Aminul Islam, a businessman and one of his all-weather contacts in Dhaka, and told him that one Mustafizur would contact him the following week to hand over sixteen lakh taka. This was to be distributed among five individuals who would approach him shortly with slips notifying the amount. He excluded Israr from the list of beneficiaries of the reward because Shaukat had complained that instead of the promised eighty lakh taka, he had received only seventy-eight lakhs. Sujal was convinced that Israr had siphoned off the two lakhs.

  With the loose ends all tied, Sujal left Calcutta to join headquarters, unaware of the misfortunes that were awaiting him.

  The first to go after him was Dayal. Although he had tolerated Sujal while he was posted in Calcutta, knowing that he didn’t have much choice in the matter as he was running an operation for Reddy, Dayal wasted little time in trying to put Sujal in his place after the latter was transferred to headquarters.

  Dayal wrote a letter of complaint to Jaspreet, his immediate senior officer at headquarters, alleging that Sujal had kept him in the dark on most of his operations. He requested Jaspreet to find out whether Sujal had indeed been authorized by Reddy to run an operation independently because Sujal had informed him that Reddy’s operation had been abandoned. He alleged that Sujal had used his posting in Calcutta to float businesses in the name of his family members with the help of his Bangladeshi sources and friends.

  Jaspreet was convinced by Dayal’s accusations and decided to get to the bottom of what had happened. He confronted Sujal with the allegations.

  ‘I am not authorized to speak about Mr Reddy’s operations,’ Sujal said. ‘As for my business interests, they are a private matter and I will not discuss them,’ he added.

  Fuming at the brush-off, Jaspreet met both the Chief and Reddy. They paid no heed to his complaints and accusations. To mollify Jaspreet, however, the Chief advised Sujal to file a report highlighting the operation’s purpose as cultivating Jamaat’s top leadership, but leaving out the violent aspect of the plan, names of assets and the source of funding.

  Jaspreet found the report insulting and went after Sujal with renewed vigour. This was helped by his chance discovery of an outline of the plan in Vijay’s computer. Dayal added fuel to the fire by informing Jaspreet that one of his assets claimed that Sujal had paid lakhs to mysterious travellers from Bangladesh and that Saumen Das, a junior field officer in the Calcutta office, had arranged for their escort and accommodation. A cable from the Agency’s station chief in Dhaka further confirmed Jaspreet’s suspicion. It quoted one of his assets as claiming that Sujal had spent crores on an operation but had paid nothing to one Israr, who was made to sign a receipt for five lakh taka for working as Sujal’s courier. When Jaspreet reported this to Reddy, the latter advised him not to carry out an autopsy on a dead mule. Jaspreet’s meeting with the Chief was even more frustrating. The Chief heard him out patiently and then enquired about his ailing wife. Once again, his efforts to uncover the ‘truth’ didn’t get him very far.

  Jaspreet was convinced that the Chief and Reddy had invested hugely in the operation, which had been horribly botched, and the trio was busy covering up their dirty tracks.

  Things changed for worse when the Chief retired and Reddy was transferred out of the Agency. With Sujal’s supporters no longer in the picture, Jaspreet resumed his inquisition. The first thing he did was to visit Dhaka, but he was unable to find any incriminating evidence. The source who had referred to Israr’s claims did not come forward for questioning. Jaspreet was also unable to find any records on Israr either in Dhaka or in headquarters. The man existed nowhere.

  Still, he refused to give up. He summoned Sujal again.

  ‘I have evidence that you ran a bogus operation, pocketed huge sums of service money by underpaying sources and later destroyed the accounts of all transactions. The choice before you now is to either seek voluntary retirement or be dismissed from the service on security grounds,’ he threatened.

  ‘What are you waiting for?’ Sujal countered. ‘I know what evidence you are referring to. I can also line up hundreds of witnesses to manufacture evidence.’ He stormed out of the room.

  Infuriated by Sujal’s intransigence, Jaspreet briefed the new Chief about a fake operation that Sujal had run in collusion with ‘an operationally naive’ Reddy and alleged that the officer had misappropriated a huge amount of service money to float several businesses under bogus names. The Chief promised to look into it and, if needed, order a departmental inquiry against the officer. True to his word, the Chief summoned Sujal and asked for a detailed briefing on the Jamaat operation. At the end of it, the Chief remarked that the operation sounded more like fiction, as he found it hard to believe that anyone would fund an operation to kill his own countrymen.

  ‘If you think I am weaving a tale, I can arrange for you to meet Mazhar in Calcutta,’ Sujal said.

  A week later, on Sujal’s advice, the Chief travelled to Calcutta to meet Mazhar. Amazed at what he heard and realizing that Sujal had indeed managed to pull off a unique operation, the Chief asked Sujal to submit a full account of the mission to him. This he put in his archive along with the Agency’s other untold success stories and rewarded Sujal by clearing his posting to a European station that had been approved by his predecessor.

  Jaspreet’s parting shot was to record in Sujal’s annual confidential report that he had a tendency to misuse government funds, fudge reports and run bogus operations. When it was sent to Reddy to review, he tore the adverse remarks apart and gave Sujal a thumping chit. The Chief agreed with Reddy.

  Four years later, Dayal, who had by now moved up the ladder in the Agency’s hierarchy, refused to give up his witch-hunt. He consistently gave Sujal poor performance assessments and blacklisted him for future foreign assignments. By this time, Jeevnathan had returned to headquarters. Jeev listened to his protégé’s travails and was amazed at how he had managed to retain his fighting spirit, his eagerness to launch challenging operations and his zest to work for the nation’s good. Although it was too late to repair the damage to Sujal’s career, he did what he could to make the leadership realize why Sujal was different from other officers. He was also able to get the embargo on his foreign assignments removed.

  Sujal Rath bore the indignities he suffered well and seldom betrayed his pain. He refused to resign or seek voluntary retirement even when his juniors were promoted over him, some even serving as his bosses. He once told Jeevnathan that he wanted to test his mental strength to see if he could overcome falsehoods and continue serving as he saw fit. He did not let the politics of his senior officers affect his morale and continued to conduct operations on his own terms, contacting and meeting his overseas sources and political friends without informing the Agency. He used one of them to get Sahib rehabilitated and thus kept his promise to Mazhar. Never shy of reaching out to his foes, he revived his contact with Shariful Hossain and Crescent and tried very hard to save the latter from being incarcerated, but the League would not agree to Crescent’s freedom. They eventually hanged him.

  Sujal Rath has since retired. However, politics in Bangladesh remains his abiding passion. Defying the Agency’s norms that prohibit officers from maintaining contacts with assets after leaving the office, he regularly meets and communicates with his Bangladeshi assets.

  About the Book

  In The Zero-Cost Mission, India’s relati
ons with Bangladesh are undermined by the activities of the Jamaat-e-Islami, whose camps and facilities are being used to help Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, which sends its agents to carry out acts of terror in India. Vijay Shukla, in charge of Bangladesh operations at India’s external intelligence agency, has a plan – a daring one, and one that requires utmost secrecy, lest word gets out that India is interfering in Bangladesh’s internal affairs. Only a certain type of operative can be entrusted with its execution. One with remarkable operational abilities, a taste for challenges and a certain disregard for authority. Vijay Shukla assigns Sujal Rath to orchestrate the destruction of several Jamaat facilities deep within Bangladesh, pulling off a mission that not only seems impossible but which runs the risk of being derailed by the agency itself.

  Soon to be a major motion picture by Vishal Bhardwaj, this double-bill of pacey thrillers highlighting the exploits of India’s intelligence agency will have your pulse racing.

  About The Author

  Amar Bhushan joined the Indian Police Service in 1967 and was assigned to Madhya Pradesh. For seven years, he dealt with crime and law and order problems but remained a reluctant policeman. When the opportunity for working in intelligence organizations came, he grabbed it and never looked back till he retired as the chief of India’s foremost technical intelligence agency. He began the second innings of his career by briefly serving in the BSF intelligence, State Special Branch and Intelligence Bureau and ended up with working in the Research and Analysis Wing for the next twenty-four years.

  His last published work, Escape to Nowhere, remained on bestseller lists for eleven weeks. He lives with his wife and daughter in Bangalore but seldom misses an opportunity to visit his granddaughters in the US and his mother in Jasidih, a village in Jharkhand.