Pathankot Effect: Fiction in Times of National Security Challenge

A leading newspaper’s stories on front page about Pathankot firing has no factual backing. Read to know why.

Many years ago, while reading the celebrated Spy Catcher by the late British MI5 officer Peter Wright, I came across an expression -- “barium meal” -- that the author used to suggest the volume of disinformation that the counter-intelligence agency that he worked for ingeniously disseminated to fool and mislead the KGB at the height of the Cold War.

This morning while reading some stories on the Pathankot attack in The Times of India, I was reminded of the barium meals that unnamed officials in India’s security establishment fed to the reporters concerned. Two stories in particular stood out as either the Indian security establishment’s perfidy or plain fabrication on the part of this otherwise reputed newspaper.

The first, headlined ‘Attack planned in Pak army HQ’, carried as a brief news item on Page 1 with details on Page 8 of the Delhi edition of the newspaper, claims that the strike at the airbase “may have been masterminded by the Pakistan army’s headquarters (GHQ) in Rawalpindi, as per an assessment by senior officials of the Indian security establishment.”

The question is: on what basis did the Indian security establishment assess this? Surely, the Research and Analysis Wing, which has no HUMINT or TECHINT resource of any worth in Pakistan, has no mole inside the Rawalpindi GHQ.

Had RAW had any well-placed asset within the GHQ, the spy should have informed his controller in the Indian agency forthwith so that the attack could have been nipped in the bud by strengthening the border or eliminating the terrorists the moment they crossed over to the Indian side. The fact is Indian intelligence does not run strategically placed agents in Pakistan -- either within its civilian government or the military establishment. It has zilch.

I am reminded of the new-born CIA’s failed attempts in the early 50s to land armed saboteurs in Albania to carry out largescale attacks against communist regimes in Eastern Europe.

They would be para-dropped alright, but would be gunned down in no time. Those attempts failed because Harold Adrian Russel ‘Kim’ Philby, the KGB’s greatest spy within the British MI6, which worked very closely with its cousin, the CIA, would betray all the secrets of the operations to the Russians.

The second story, which read like complete fiction, is headlined ‘Airman held for spying knew of plot’. The single-column story suggests that K K Ranjith, a lowly-ranked IAF officer, who was arrested on December 28 on charges of spying for the Pak ISI, was aware that the air base in Pathankot would be attacked.

How? Surely, his ISI handlers would not have revealed their plans to a spy who could be anything but trustworthy. Besides, it is a basic technique in the tradecraft to thoroughly interrogate an arrested spy and squeeze out all information from him or her.

Surely, Ranjith was not put through the toughest of interrogation. Assuming that he had disclosed the Pathankot attack plan, it was the duty of the Intelligence Bureau and the Punjab Police to have used the information supplied by him to pre-empt the terrorists’ hostile design. That they failed to do so proves either they are rank incompetent or that Ranjith had no knowledge of the attack. The story in the Times was planted to suggest that Indian intelligence possessed prior information of the attack.

But The Times of India swallowed both the “stories” or the “barium meals” hook, line and sinker. This exemplifies a new low in Indian journalism -- to not only publish any story without verifying what is being fed to reporters but also unquestioningly print everything that show abject failures as grand successes or praise the ordinary achievements of one person when he deserves only opprobrium.

Pakistan has had a long and potent history of employing strategic deception and its military and the ISI do it much better than our IB and RAW. The ISI in particular has waged its secret war with great intensity and “cold rage” unmatched by India’s intelligence agencies since 1980 in the backdrop of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Additionally for Pakistan, since its defeat in the 1971 war, it has been a daily battle of deception with India, a battle which involves a maze of agents and terrorists.

But India’s command bunker in the secret war of espionage and counter-espionage is empty, full only with national security bureaucrats who push more pens than run agents across the invisible and blurred front lines that separate the trenches across the India-Pakistan border.

The IB and RAW’s war with the ISI is undeniably just but the reality is absurd. They have been stuck with the total lack of assets and resources in Pakistan and insulated by secrecy for so long that absurdity is the only logic they know.