Author: Ashok Malik
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: August 1, 2006
The Prime Minister's Office argues that Jaswant
Singh's communication reveals no names of "moles" or "informants"
in the PV Narasimha Rao PMO.
The BJP leader argues that the papers he has
forwarded to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh are authoritative enough.
Who's right? Is the former foreign minister
throwing up red herrings - or is the PMO being disingenuous?
Copies of the documents forwarded by Jaswant
Singh to the Prime Minister are available with The Pioneer. They don't indicate
any "mole" - in the sense of a long-cultivated agent - in the Indian
Government, but do point to two individuals who can be accused of loose talk,
deliberate or otherwise.
While The Pioneer obviously cannot testify
to the authenticity of these documents, they offer clues that are such that
identifying the two people should actually be very easy for the Government.
In early 1996, Jaswant Singh received not
one but two letters, it now appears. His sources expected him to use these
to "embarrass the Rao Government in Parliament".
The first was a position paper written by
strategic affairs scholar Stephen Cohen to Senator Dianne Feinstein on the
feasibility of a "Camp David" for south Asia. This was purely a
theoretical exercise and made only a passing reference to the nuclear issue.
Appended with it was another letter - from
Thomas W Graham, then head of the International Security Programme at the
Rockefeller Foundation, to Harry G Barnes, former American ambassador to India
(1981-85) and, by the mid-1990s, at the Jimmy Carter Centre.
This second letter is the one that has been
quoted in Jaswant Singh's book, A Call to Honour. An edited version was published
in India Today this past week.
In his letter, Graham, an arms control specialist
with impeccable academic credentials, writes to Barnes about two recent meetings
he has had.
No dates are mentioned but the letter seems
to have been written in 1995, and makes reference to the upcoming Thanksgiving
vacation. In 1995, this fell between November 23 and 26.
Siddhartha Shankar Ray was the Indian ambassador
in Washington in this period. He was succeeded about three months later by
Naresh Chandra. Graham writes of his conversation with two individuals - identified
as "senior person" and "junior official". His is a non-official
intelligence input and he seeks Barnes' advice on how to deliver it to relevant
quarters in the US administration - "people like [Strobe] Talbott"
- because dependence on the formal intelligence mechanism will "almost
guarantee a leak".
The "senior person" - who appears
to be based in Washington or to have met Graham there - warns his American
interlocutor that the Indian Government is close to testing a nuclear weapon.
He talks of a "super secret meeting" in Bangalore where he will
be present. The source appears to know the positions participants will take
- including the likely pro-test stance of scientists R Chidambaram, APJ Abdul
Kalam and Raja Rammana.
The source says that if Chidambaram and Kalam
are allowed to retire, the danger could pass, as "younger scientists
... were not as hawkish".
Graham's "senior" source is particularly
well informed about the soon-to-become Indian ambassador to the US, Naresh
Chandra. Chandra, the letter says, "is trying to provide the PM with
informed views counter to those being advocated by the ministries". The
source also reveals Chandra's travel plans, and that he will be visiting London
and Frankfurt before getting to Bangalore.
Graham's second conversation takes place with
a "junior official" who participated in a Bangalore meeting "where
he had been an advocate of incremental steps including placing some Indian
reactors under safeguards". It is not immediately clear if this is the
same Bangalore meeting that the Prime Minister called to discuss a possible
test.
The "junior official" appears to
be a Foreign Service officer and particularly garrulous. He interacts with
Graham at a meeting, apparently in Washington, where others are present. Graham
"assumed" the "junior official" had "been sent to
the US" to assist the "senior official" and make an assessment
of the diplomatic fallout of a possible test.
The relatively pro-test "junior official"
tells Graham that, "The Canadian prime minister had been invited to attend
the Republic Day parade January 26, 1996, but when the government of Canada
had pressed India not to test ... the invitation had been withdrawn."
Graham's conclusion in his letter to Barnes
is that "even if Rao does not approve resumed nuclear testing",
there is a chance that his successors will resort to it. He refers to the
BJP's pre-election promises.
In Jaswant Singh's book, this is the key issue.
It "establishes", he says, that the Americans had an idea that the
NDA Government would test and were not "taken by surprise" or "betrayed"
as they claimed.
Who are "senior person" and "junior
official"? Travel dates from the winter of 1995 should be enough for
the PMO to find out.
Jaswant's decoy:
# Not once in A Call to Honour does Jaswant
Singh use the word "mole". Even so, on pages 125-126, he does quote
a letter and says it "had been sent that very year (1995) to a United
States senator". It now appears that the letter was written not to a
member of the US Senate but to a former ambassador, then working in the Carter
Centre. As such, did the former foreign minister mislead his readers?
# Jaswant Singh says he had his reasons for
obfuscation: "Perhaps it was an error. But I used it as a deliberate
diversion to protect the identity of the Indian official referred to in the
letter."
