Author: Rohit Parihar
Publication: India Today
Date: June 17, 2002
Introduction: Besides terrorists,
the Indian intelligence now has to cope with an equally deadly network
of espionage agents from across the border
As Arun Duggar, Rajasthan's intelligence
chief, was on his way to Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot's residence for a
routine briefing on a hot May morning, his cell phone rang. All that the
business-like caller told him was that it was "time to go ahead in Bikaner".
The call had come from an officer of a sister agency and Duggar swung into
action. He made a series of calls and by the time he was at Gehlot's residence,
Ashgar Ali, a Pakistani spy, had been arrested. Ali's interrogation was
revealing: the 30-year-old was passing on information about the missile
systems deployed at Bikaner in connivance with a generator operator in
the Indian Army's Mechanical and Engineering Services .
With India and Pakistan eyeball-to-eyeball
on the border, Ali's arrest was timely. It pre-empted the stunning possibility
of sabotage during missile attacks in the event of war. And with it came
the realisation that India's targets were no longer just terrorists but
also ghostly "resident" agents of the enemy.
Investigation into the modus operandi
of the spies reveals a daring attempt to survive in the enemy land while
cultivating the local people and defence personnel, procuring documents,
including passports, channelling money through hawala and passing on key
data through the Internet and through other means. Trailing a suspected
spy is just as tricky. In Ali's case, Indian investigators had been keeping
tab on the movements of a tall Punjabi-speaking youth for two months. When
he was finally picked up from Bikaner, he claimed he was Vijay Sagar, a
local. By then, the intelligence agencies had traced his roots to Sadiqabad
in Rahimyar Khan of Pakistan.
The eighth Pakistani mole to be
caught in Rajasthan in one year, Ali's journey was a typical tale of desperation.
As M.K. Devrajan, IG (intelligence), Rajasthan, reveals, he was a debt-ridden
pesticides trader who took to stealing vehicles. After his arrest he ended
up as an informant for the Pakistani police. Following a short training
course, he arrived in Delhi in March 2000 on a Pakistani passport. Before
the police caught up with him at Bikaner, he was at the Hisar army base
in Haryana for over a year posing as a Hindu. There he befriended an out-of-business
tailor who introduced him to Pappu Ram, a peon in the defence audit department.
Through Ram, Ali gained access to
the cantonment as an electronic goods dealer but vanished when he suspected
he was under surveillance. Along the murky way, Vazir Singh, a clerk in
the Chandigarh defence audit department, also came into the picture. "Since
the defence audit receives salary and other bills from various regiments,
it knows about all locations," says an investigating officer pointing to
the importance of every link in the spy network.
The presence of women in the chain
often comes in handy. The arrest of Mohammad Imran Afzal alias Katora in
Delhi reveals how the Pakistani cloth trader, fell in love with an Indian
girl at the Turkman Gate locality, on one of his espionage missions. The
relationship was exploited to the hilt by the Pakistani intelligence.
In a similar case, Abdul Rashid
alias Mohammad Yasin, who was arrested in April, freely sought the help
of his women acquaintances. A resident of Kot Radha Kishan in Pakistan,
he had been operating in India for a decade. He used Zarina, a resident
of trans-Yamuna Delhi, and Mariam of Jaipur to ferry documents to Pakistan.
A few days before his arrest, it was again a young woman contact at Doha
in Rewari, Haryana, who tried to hide some crucial documents that Rashid
had obtained. But during the police raid, the papers, which were tucked
away in her salwar-kameez, accidentally slipped out.
Among the many documents in the
possession of the spies, the passport is of great value. The moles who
come to India on a Pakistani passport are often required to send them back
to their mentors soon after. This way, they are under pressure to stay
on in the enemy country. Equally important is the acquisition of an Indian
passport. Some like Rashid, who owned both passports, can easily move in
and out of the country. When his network was cracked in Alwar in 1997,
he escaped to Pakistan and returned two years later. Similarly, when his
new base at Bharatpur was destroyed, he visited his home country twice.
In December 2001, when the Samjhauta Express entered India on its last
trip, he was on board again. This time, he had a fake Indian passport,
making another escape difficult.
Shuttling to and fro is no longer
easy due to the snapping of air and rail links with Pakistan. But the spies
are using foreign passports, other international flights and jumping the
fenced border-120 persons were caught making the crossover in Rajasthan
last year. Nepal is a hot favourite when it comes to Pakistani intelligence
operations. It is used as a convenient route to fly in agents. Munir Ahmed
of Rahimyar Khan in Pakistan came to Ferozabad in Uttar Pradesh through
this route. He was finally arrested on charges of spying at the Jodhpur
air force station where he procured employment as a gas stove mechanic.
The moles and their mentors also
meet regularly in the neighbouring kingdom. Ramjan, an Indian accused of
spying for Pakistan in Jaisalmer, had befriended Indian Army clerk Joginder
Singh, who was flown to Nepal to meet a Pakistani Army major. His task:
to provide information on the Agni missile for a price.
Pakistan has also been targeting
Nepalese ex-servicemen who have served in the Indian Army. This came to
light in January with the arrest of Tek Bahadur Kharka of Nawalprasi, a
former naik in the army. Employed by the Pakistani Embassy in Kathmandu,
he posed as a vegetable vendor, even a priest at times, at Suratgarh where
he monitored movement in the restricted areas. He visited Nepal every month
to brief his Pakistani masters.
Such meetings apart, much of the
information is passed on via the Internet. The messages are posted on a
dozen or so e-mail accounts. The intended receivers, who know the passwords,
read the mails and delete them. They make minimal use of fax and telephone.
Among the most prolific Internet user-spies have been Nasir Mehmood alias
Samir and Zeeshan Alam, both arrested in December 2001. A tailor from Multan
in Pakistan, Mehmood came to Jaipur on a Bangladeshi passport, on a Karachi-Mumbai-Dhaka
flight. Here he frequented a cybercafe and assumed its owner's name, Samir.
During his two year stint in the city, he managed to send vital information
from the nearby Hasanpura sector. Alam from Gujranwalan, on the other hand,
was working at a Jodhpur computer firm that serviced machines for the army.
While on duty, he regularly downloaded data for his masters. Like other
spies, the two received money through hawala transactions. Their arrest
led the intelligence agents to Dilshad Beg, a spy settled in Siliguri in
West Bengal, and also to Ikramuddin, a Pakistani Army subedar operating
in Kanpur.
The arrest of these virtually invisible
operators is heartening, but the Indian intelligence is still treading
a difficult path. The spy vs spy exercise, if it could be called that,
isn't as simple as one would like it to be.
