CIA's classified documents show India has porous info walls

That the higher echelons of India's military, bureaucratic and political elite were riddled with moles is evident from the recently declassified CIA documents. On January 18, the US intelligence agency published over 9 lakh classified documents to an online portal, following a practice of declassifying documents older than 25 years.

A sizable chunk of these documents is dedicated to intelligence on India. The tranche shows that the vice grip that CIA had - and possibly still has- on India's economic, military and political scene from as far back as 1951.

What is even more disconcerting is the detail and the precision with which purportedly secret information is revealed in these documents. For instance, a CIA update on the India-Pakistan 1971 war captures with alarming precision the logistical and armament strength of India as well as Pakistan.

From the total number of camps on the border, to the number of personnel tents, cargo trucks, utility trucks and even to the number of tanks, everything is captured in the update.

It also contains a monthly log of "deployed military activity" for July 1972, stating that "23 military camps and 10 vehicle parks with 9,858 personnel tents, 1,165 cargo trucks, 203 utility trucks, 24 tanks and 23 tank transporters" were pushed into action.

Besides this, the CIA dossier gives away co-ordinates of the location of camps in the Jammu and Amritsar areas. Other dispatches show that India's military movements and deployment were not so much of a secret as the administration would like to believe and were quite accessible to the Americans.

The documents also list the movement of fighter planes -- Flogger and Jaguar on Ambala airfield -- as well as the location of surface-to-air missile sites in the Chandigarh-Ambala area and New Delhi and identifies T-72 tanks in the Suratgarh barracks.

Another dispatch, with its date blocked out, records delivery of 30 D-30 122MM howitzers at the Bombay Port by the Russians. Even training drill movements were not out of reach of the CIA's intelligence network. A key report from December 1982 identifies deployment of "1st armoured division and 14th independent armoured brigade and the SA-6 surface-to-air missile-equipped Air Defense Group". A number of documents declassified are accompanied with satellite imagery demarcating areas of potential interest such as barracks, airfields, missile sites, ammunition storage units, roads etc.

Another set of documents concerns the growing influence of USSR in India in the background of the cold war. India's appeal, at that time, to USSR lay in its geo-political heft in Asia and as a possible counterweight to China's growing might.

A December 1985 intelligence assessment report states that the Soviets were "deeply involved" in the Indian political scene through covert contributions to party funds. Along with this, the dossier claims that the Soviet embassy was maintaining a large reserve of money, which was channeled into making "clandestine payment to Congress-I politicians. It claims that as many as "40 per cent of the Congress-I MPs in Mrs Indira Gandhi's last government had received Soviet political contributions."

The documents also show that even in the political firmament, CIA's network was strongly entrenched. A May 1976 memorandum sheds light on the agency's assessment of former prime minister Indira Gandhi during the Emergency days.

"In both government and party, Gandhi has made it clear that she wants individuals whose loyalty to her is beyond question. Development of a personality cult around the prime minister has been one of the more prominent features of the Emergency....the prime minister relies for advice on a small group of confidants including her son, Sanjay. This inner circle is composed of bureaucrats and family retainers, reflecting the prime minister's general distrust of politicians who might one day challenge her control, " it says.