First Chief of India's external secret service agency Research & Analysis Wing R N Kao

NEW DELHI: Since R.N. Kao, 23 more chiefs have headed the agency and all have continued to follow the path that was laid down by their founder, of avoiding public attention.

It was more than 56 years ago that Rameshwar Nath Kao became the first chief of the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) in September 1968. Working on the orders of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, with no or little mandate except to safeguard India’s interest from foreign powers, for which he was also given verbal order to carry out covert acts across the borders to defend India’s strategic interests, Kao had no time or the inkling to make “RAA” (as it is pronounced by Pak military officers), to make it open to public interface or use public’s eyes and ears to collate information that might be useful for its own purpose.

Since Kao, 23 more chiefs have headed the agency that prides itself as something which works in darkness, and all have continued to follow the path that was laid down by their founder, of avoiding public attention.

This has happened despite the agency’s counterparts like the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of America, Directorate-General for External Security (DGSE) of France, Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) of Australia, Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst) of Germany, Mossad of Israel, MI5 of United Kingdom, Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) of Canada among others, operating their website, telling about their work and interacting with the public to seek inputs and information related to their work.

The CIA, which functions under the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that has a budget of $71 billion, the highest for any intelligence agency, has prominently written on its site on how it seeks information from the public. “People from all over the world share information with the CIA daily. If you have information you think might help us and our foreign intelligence collection mission, there are many ways to reach us.” The interested user is provided with multiple options to reach out to the CIA through its website, including the easiest of them, through email.

However, if an Indian citizen or a foreign national wants to reach out to RAW which functions under the administrative office of Cabinet Secretariat to provide possibly vital information, there is no way to do it.

Like Delhi, Beijing too for a long time practised the art of keeping the working of its secret intelligence agency as a secret.

The Chinese intelligence agency, Minister of State Security (MSS), which completed its forty years of existence this year, till 2014 was known for being super-secret regarding its existence. However, after getting inspired from the Western countries including its arch rival, Washington, Chinese President Xi Jinping decided to lift the veil around MSS. It was read, and perhaps rightly so, as a show of confidence and an effort to be on the equal footing with other intelligence agencies who have exhibited that they can work by talking about themselves, that the MSS in 2015 launched its website and a hotline so that the people could reach out to it with information. It soon after debuted on social media.

India, given the speed with which misinformation, that is attributed to its intelligence agency has been spread in the recent times (among other, stories related to Gurpatwant Singh Pannun) and in the past which has amplified due to a lack of a strong and formal rebuttal, perhaps needs to learn lessons from Beijing if not Washington on why and how its intelligence agency needs to have a public face. The agency’s eyes and ears, which are right now very low when compared to other global counterparts, will increase manifold if it even opens a one-way channel to solicit information from the public.

In an interview of Vappala Balachandran, who served in the RAW for 19 years and retired in 1995 as Special Secretary, published in January 2024 by Dheeraj Paramesha Chaya, Lecturer in Intelligence, Crime and Policing, University of Hull University of Leicester, who was formerly with Department of Geopolitics and IR, Manipal Academy of Higher Education [MAHE], while responding to the question of the interviewee on what was the nature of media-intelligence relationship during his time, Balachandran, while alluding to an old article about a former RAW chief, said, “That news article was very weird. It was totally false. Unfortunately, even from the beginning we had no relationship with the media. We were afraid to go near the media. I remember Mr. Kao never gave a single interview, even informally. We simply followed the same practice and kept away from the media. When I was in the Bombay Special Branch, I had a very good relationship with the media and some of my friends became national media leaders. So, I could have done the same in the RAW, but we were asked not to. And we actually suffered because of not having such a relationship.”

Balachandran, in a significant insight on the dilemma that RAW has faced when it comes to the question of becoming more “public” and when was the only time that it broke this practice, stated, “In the 1980s, there was a strike in the RAW and the IB, and certain disgruntled elements who wanted to make it sensational, started placing exaggerated and, in some instances, false stories in the media. For example, they started saying that there was no insurgency in the North-East, and it was the intelligence agencies that started the violence. Even with Khalistan, they started saying RAW was orchestrating it. These stories were absolutely false. When the Bodo insurgency started, there were sensational reports that we were training them. My chief A.K. Verma asked me to tap some of my good friends in the media and I had to go and meet the chief editor of Statesman and point out that these were all false stories.”

He went on to add, “Then there was a discussion on whether we should have a PR officer or similar. It led to a question on what such a position would entail. If we hold a press conference, then they would ask various things which may affect our operations and access to certain channels of information. So, as long as I was there, we remained undecided about how to approach the media.”

“But I can give you one instance when we broke that unwritten taboo since it was a larger strategic issue. From 1977 onwards, we were monitoring Pakistan’s clandestine nuclear weapons programme. However, nobody was willing to believe our findings. It was quite frustrating that the Americans were not believing us, and our own Atomic Energy Commission was reluctant to do so. Two New York Times journalists, Steve Weissman and Herbert Krosney, were investigating Pakistan’s covert nuclear programme. For the first time, the government made a conscious decision to reach out to foreign media because only then would the Americans be convinced. We gave them our assessment with a request to not reveal the source. So, this was the only time we interacted with the media for a strategic reason.”

The dilemma that RAW and Balachandran faced two decades ago continues to haunt the agency even now. Even as its strategic competitor and its strategic ally—Beijing and Washington—respectively have done with good results, what Delhi and RAW still continue to believe is something that needs to be avoided.