Tinker, tailor, journalist, spy

Spies and journalists cannot live without each other

Some months back, I found myself in the company of a young, attractive diplomat from a western country. She had been with her government for only a while and was trying hard to make sense of India. I answered her inane questions on Indian politics, and we chatted about Indian films, weekend getaways and everything. We parted with promises to remain in touch. We never did. Last month there were reports of how a diplomat had been asked to leave the country for having to tried to bribe some employees of India’s intelligence set-up. It took me a while to figure out that my beautiful companion had been a honey trap.

I tried hard to recap our conversation wondering if I had leaked some information that would harm national interest. Aamir vs Shahrukh is hardly a state secret. The fact that she never got in touch with me was proof enough that I was of no use to her when it came to fulfilling her snooping mandate. She may have preferred government ministers, bureaucrats in sensitive positions and people in the army.

People in high places are easy picking for many such agencies. If former foreign minister Jaswant Singh alleges that there was a mole in the government of PV Narasimha Rao, then there would be very few people who would get scandalised by this charge. In turn they may ask: what did Jaswant Singh give to US official and information hungry former journalist Strobe Talbott to win him over? Just information?

Journalists are important for spies. They may not have enough classified information for the spies, but they provide perspective and analysis of events that could elude them some time. Intelligence agencies know that journalists and columnists are suckers for exclusive information and they use this weakness in them to plant all kinds of stories. During the Cold War the Americans and Soviets spent a lot of time feeding friendly journalists with all kinds of information, much of it doctored. Gullible journalists or those who were ideologically inclined towards one of the two ideologies never really bothered to check the facts as long as their enemy was being rubbished. Left-leaning newspapers like Link, Patriot and Blitz carried many “exclusive” articles, which on hindsight could have been supplied by the KGB. Mitrokhin Archives brought out this fact in ample measures. In 1987, Blitz carried an article on how the CIA with the help of a conservative think tank, Heritage Foundation, was trying to bring down the government of Rajiv Gandhi through an “avalanche of accusations”. There was a howl of protest from Washington, which strenuously tried to show that the letter of Heritage Foundation was forged and given by forgers of some intelligence agency. Blitz stuck to its guns.

This was not the only case where intelligence agencies played a role in providing journalistic scoops. There are hundreds of big stories where one simple rule of thumb to figure out whether the story is planted by an intelligence agency in a media outlet or not—that includes our own Intelligence Bureau—is how detailed and comprehensive it is. No journalist can procure pictures, documents, phone taps—as seen in many high profile scams including Bofors—till a dossier has been given by an intelligence agency.
Most of the defence purchase exposes come from intelligence agencies of those countries that have lost a contract. India’s intelligence agency personnel do not sit idle. They feed with great abandon information, backgrounders to all those TV personalities or writers who in their reckoning would bend public opinion. An eminent writer made a big name due to the “exclusives” he received from his handlers. When his sources dried up, it was later discovered that he just could not write a simple sentence in English.