The Unending Game: Ex-spymaster Vikram Sood’s book is a treatise on espionage marked by understated brilliance

Ian Fleming gave us James Bond — the British super-spy with a licence to kill. Bond drives a flashy Aston Martin, dons Savile Row suits, drops savvy one-liners, picks up beautiful women, and powers one of the world’s highest-grossing movie franchises. When Bond walks into a pub for instance, he draws all eyes to him. And while you were busy watching him, you wouldn’t have noticed the nondescript balding man sitting right next to you, with a deadpan expression. George Smiley, that polite British spy from John le Carre’s novels, is everything that Bond isn’t: dull as a doorknob, bland as boiled cabbage, dowdy, apologetic, inconspicuous. Smiley — the Bond antithesis — is so vague and discreet that he attracts even lesser attention than a gecko on the wall. Behind that practised self-effacing exterior, however, resides a cunning, tough and ruthless operator. “James Bond is fantasy, George Smiley is real,” Vikram Sood tells us in The Unending Game: A Former R&AW Chief’s Insights Into Espionage. And that line is the soul of his book. There’s a little bit of Smiley in Sood, the retired spymaster who ran R&AW (the Research and Analysis Wing, India’s foreign intelligence agency) until his retirement in March 2003. And one may trace a little bit of Koval in him too. Koval, who? Zhorzh (George) Abramovich Koval, the deep-cover Russian spy trained by GRU (the erstwhile USSR’s military intelligence) was the “only Soviet intelligence officer to infiltrate the secret plans of US Manhattan Project (America’s most secret atomic facility)”. His exploits helped the USSR “speed up the manufacturing of its atomic bomb,” and the Russian spy was “discharged honourably from the US Army in 1942”. Koval eventually returned to Moscow where he led an uneventful life till his quiet death in 2006. He was 92. Only when Russian President Vladimir Putin awarded a ‘Hero of Russia’ medal posthumously to Koval a year later did the world come to know about the 20th century’s super-spy, and an embarrassed US was forced to admit its intelligence failures. The ‘perfect spy’, writes Sood, a career intelligence officer who roamed the shadowy world of espionage for 31 years, “performs (the) invaluable work assigned to him, at great risk to himself, in a hostile country and then retires to live a quiet, normal life”. Sood is doing ‘normal’ these days. Living quietly as an adviser at the Observer research Foundation, writing incisive pieces on international relations, strategic affairs and national security. He could just as well be speaking about himself. He does, but not in the way one may imagine. This isn’t the racy record of a retired spymaster. Sood discusses issues that concerned him as the head of India’s premier intelligence agency, delves into areas that concern India and its sphere of influence; but primarily, he deals with the theory of espionage. Deconstructs it, busts some myths and throws a realistic light on the world’s “second oldest profession” that in popular perception is either shrouded in mystery or reel glamour. [caption id=“attachment_4891561” align=“alignnone” width=“825”]  The Unending Game by Vikram Sood[/caption] Sood reminds us that the spy world isn’t glamorous. It requires a band of men and women to “sacrifice their individuality for anonymity and go against the grain of human nature that seeks self-adulation”. It can occasionally be as exciting as watching paint dry. And sometimes, the ‘brainy’ analyst at the desk — whose job it is to process raw data into information, knowledge and finally shareable intelligence — can trash a report that a globe-trotting glamour spy thinks is “priceless”. A dry humor permeates the book. For instance, Sood tells us nonchalantly that James Bond’s cool gadgets would have been useless (in the real world). “The Aston Martin looked good in the movies, but it was the precious old Landmaster that could merge into the background,” he writes. Like Le Carre’s Smiley, the book is unpretentious yet profound and some of the best lines are nearly imperceptible. “For intelligence to be effective, it must keep pace with all possible threats and would need upgradations, even anticipatory ones, similar to the ones needed by weapons systems,” Sood writes — a notion that is foreign in a country such as India, which is the biggest importer of arms but has routinely subjected its intelligence to bureaucratic nonchalance. Sood is quick to point out that all “intelligence activity should synchronise with the country’s defence and foreign policies and priorities.” This, he rues, “is an ideal that periodically escapes most governments.” In a span of 269 pages, the former R&AW chief paints a panoramic view of espionage, traces it through its Cold War roots, introduces us to the shadowy cabal of intelligence, ‘star moles’ of CIA, KGB, MI6, secret groups, and then brings us to the present before hand-holding us through to the future. The future is troubling. HUMINT (human intelligence), OSINT (open source intel) or IMINT (imagery intel from satellite or other aerial source) must coexist with SOCMINT (social media intelligence) because the all-pervasive nature of social media and its deep penetration into our everyday lives have given terrorists and criminals an unprecedented advantage. Intelligence, therefore, must include SOCMINT into its framework to keep a tab on what’s happening but, Sood stresses, this practice should be based on “sound systems of collection and verification and also keep in mind the moral issues of privacy and rights”.

En route this fascinating journey, Sood offers an honest, if scathing, review of the Indian setup and tackles some of the most profound questions of our time — the polarising debate between privacy and national security, the moral dilemma around espionage in a democracy and the tug-of-war between long-term assessment and short-term ‘instant coffee’ analysis. He takes an absolutist position on no topic because life isn’t defined by absolutes. Sood’s realism is apparent.

What sparkles, though, is the minimalist approach. No frothy musings over pegs of rare liquor of the kind we were subjected to in The Spy Chronicles: RAW, ISI and the Illusion of Peace where two superannuated spy chiefs from enemy nations “are shallow enough to believe that everything can be fixed over a drink” (as Sushant Sareen wrote in his caustic review for the Daily O). Instead, Sood’s book fills on the shelf an important space so far left unattended where the ideological and structural difference between Pakistan and India is made apparent through the configurations of their respective intelligence agencies. Sood writes: “In Pakistan’s case, the ISI is part of the force that drives the country’s foreign policy and determines its strategic priorities; in India, the R&AW remains a service provider to policymakers. The ISI is a military formation headed by an army general answerable to the army chief” and its strategic capabilities include interfering in domestic politics, tweaking and coercing “political parties, the media, Islamists and the terror networks that make this organisation uniquely powerful and dreaded”. As such, “there can be no objective comparisons” between the ISI and the R&AW (or any intelligence agency in a democracy). An understanding of this distinction is crucial to decoding India’s relationship with Pakistan, where the civilian administration is little more than a puppet under the army’s hands and the master puppeteer preserves for itself the exclusive rights of setting Pakistan’s security and foreign policy. Therefore, surmises Sood, “talks of joint consultations and intelligence-sharing between the two agencies as part of confidence-building measures (CBMs)… are simplistic and sentimental statements totally divorced from reality.” The former spy chief minces no words when he writes, “There is an inability or unwillingness to understand the ethos of Pakistan, its army and its increasingly fundamentalist Islamic thought process from where it draws its ideological strength. Peace with India is not part of this ideology and there is no common ground between the two.” One can’t imagine Sood’s assessment going down well among the Track-II crowd whose domain expertise includes washing down galouti kebabs with a smoky single malt. He also deals a blow to ‘peaceniks’ in India, forever ready to forgive Pakistan’s perfidies and push for ‘talks’. “Pakistan is hardly going to share intelligence about terrorists and the terror attacks it has had a hand in sponsoring on Indian soil and there is little else on the basis of which mutual trust can be built,” Sood asserts. This position isn’t without context but is placed within Pakistan’s ideological opposition to the idea of Hindustan and follows an elaborate account of Pakistan’s quest for the ‘Islamic Bomb’ that kicks off the book and sets the pace. Sood reveals that India’s moment of glory in 1971 was ironically also the time that Pakistan’s new President and founder of PPP Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was arranging for a secret meeting in Multan where the agenda was straightforward and simple: Pakistan had to have the bomb, and soon, even if its people “had to eat grass to finance it”. Sood’s account of Bhutto is laced with characteristic dry humor. The former R&AW chief calls him the actual ‘father of the Pakistan bomb’ who could be “Uriah Heep one moment and an arrogant Sindhi feudal lord the next”, at ease in an agrarian setting as well as nursing a glass of Scotch in his pinstripes. The account of Bhutto’s retail shopping for the nuclear bomb across Europe — armed with US nonchalance and funds from some Islamic states — is detailed and pacey. It sent R&AW into a tailspin as the intelligence officers were “scouring the globe to find out how and from where Pakistanis were acquiring material and expertise”. R&AW’s job was made even tougher by the “indiscretions and opposition of their own people” writes Sood, and he has some unflattering things to say about former prime minister Morarji Desai, the acerbic Gandhian whose political opposition to Indira Gandhi caused him to nearly destroy the institution built by her when he assumed office in 1977. Desai, writes Sood, “went about systematically decimating the organisation” by ordering the shuttering of stations, surrender of posts, slashing of budgets and “closure of sensitive operations that had taken years to build”. Sood warns that in the world of espionage, as in any other institution, “when you lose personnel, you save money but lose institutional knowledge and operational experience”. The words are restrained, and therefore demand greater attention. The R&AW remains vulnerable to domestic political upheavals and this cannot be good for any institution’s health. It seems a generic issue in India where we have failed not only to build institutions but have failed to preserve them or even leave them alone to pursue brilliance. Sood takes us through the “lost decade” for R&AW where it had “as many as nine heads in succession” and yet, never the time, attention or ideas that it deserved. The ISI, all the while, was getting stronger and had mounted a “vicious campaign of terror in Jammu and Kashmir.” It was left for the NDA government under Atal Bihari Vajpayee to pick up the pieces and recover some ground: “It understood the role of and need for effective intelligence.”

Sood points out that “intelligence agencies are the sword arm of the nation (not the government)” and therefore, “external intelligence, espionage and covert operations are a country’s first line of offence and defence”. He credits Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi and Atal Bihari Vajpayee for understanding the “benefit of advice from an agency that would tell them the truth as it existed and not what they hear” which is impossible unless the agency is kept “in a cocoon, sheltered from coalition or regional politics”.

There are some important pages on the Kargil invasion, which Sood is at pains to point out was as much a result of intelligence gaps as the ‘willful’ ignoring of several intelligence inputs offered by the R&AW, IB and military intelligence between May 1998 and April 1999. Pakistan was aware of the Army’s practice of deserting the Kargil heights every winter. Sood takes issue with the final report of the Kargil Review Commission (KRC) that spent “considerable time looking into the reports and discussing them with R&AW and (the) Aviation Research Centre between August 1999 and December 2000 as it tried to collect evidence of intelligence failure.” The KRC, writes Sood, “discovered that the intelligence reports have been ignored by the ‘consumers’ and this fact was omitted in the final report”. The KRC report caused consternation among intelligence officers who felt it “had been unfair to them”. This sense of quiet indignation was heightened when General VP Malik, COAS during the Kargil War, in his book attributed the Pakistani invasion to an intelligence failure. Sood’s sangfroid slips ever so slightly when he writes that “the common feeling was that while the general was entitled to seek vindication for himself and the army, it should not have been at the expense of other agencies that had gamely allowed themselves once again to be treated as whipping boys in the larger national interest.” One may be tempted to conclude that one of the motivations behind Sood’s book was to set the record straight. But that would be a misleading conclusion. Sood paints on a much larger canvas. He perceives a grand strategy for India, lays down the rules for it and finds our setup hopelessly inadequate. He calls for lateral recruitment instead of letting generalist career bureaucrats, who have no imagination or stomach for risk-taking, dominate the corridors of intelligence. “The underlying principle was that intelligence collection and operations should be performed by a dedicated service whose men and women wished to devote their entire careers to intelligence work and had been specially trained for it,” Sood explains. Non-adherence to this principle has resulted in a situation where “instead of (a) growing band of professionals, there is now a growing band of amateurs.” One hopes Sood’s words won’t escape the notice of powers-that-be. The only issue I have with the book is in places regarding “secret groups” arising out of the Cold War where the former spymaster leans towards conspiracy theories regarding the Pinay Cercle, Gladio A&B, The Safari Club or The Bilderbergers — exclusive clubs of the super-rich and influential who apparently work silently behind the scenes to “run the world”. This isn’t to discard his postulation on the deep state and its machinations, however, that remains a reality if only removed from public discourse. Sood’s work is as valuable as a treatise as a book. It never indulges in sensationalism yet offers invaluable insights from an unobtrusive corner — but only to the patient reader. It is also marked by an understated brilliance that perhaps mirrors the character of its author. The Unending Game: A Former R&AW Chief’s Insights Into Espionage, by Vikram Sood | Penguin Viking Publication | 304 Pages | Rs 599