Team Of Rivals

How the strange case of an alleged mole at

the High Commission in Pakistan revealed a
turf war between two of Indias own
intelligence agencies
By KRISHN KAUSHIK | 1 August 2012

IN EARLY SPRING 2010, a few of the most powerful men in the Indian
security establishment sat down for a special meeting at the Ministry of
Home Affairs in New Delhi. The list of participants had been deliberately
kept to a minimum to ensure there would be no leaks: the head of Indias
external intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), KC
Verma; the Home Secretary, GK Pillai; and the director of the Intelligence
Bureau (IB), Rajiv Mathur, along with one of his officers.
This gathering was not the routine morning meeting that P Chidambaram
had instituted when he took over the home ministry in November 2008
an hour-long daily briefing on intelligence and internal security with the
director of Intelligence Bureau (DIB), the national security adviser (NSA),
the home secretary and the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee.
(The R&AW chief, who bears the cabinet title Secretary (Research) rarely
attends meetings at the home ministry.) Chidambaram was not invited to
this meeting, and there was only one item on the agenda: the Bureau had
discovered a mole inside the Indian High Commission in Pakistan.
A few weeks earlier, the DIB had informed the home secretary that the
Intelligence Bureau had placed an Indian diplomat in Islamabad under
surveillance after suspicions had arisen that she was passing classified
material to Pakistani intelligence. Nothing was recorded in writing, and the
details of the operation had not been shared with anyone outside the IB.
It is not uncommon for government officials with access to strategic
information, inside the country and at missions abroad, to be put under
counterintelligence surveillance for a few weeks, or even months, at a
time; in most cases, nothing turns up. But in this case, the suspicion
persisted as the investigation continued, and news of the spy in
Islamabad made its way from Pakistan to the desk of the DIB.
It had been less than a year and a half since Pakistani terrorists killed
more than 160 people in a bloody attack on Mumbai that unfolded live on
television for three excruciating days and deeply embarrassed the Indian
intelligence establishment. The insistent calls for war in the wake of the
attack had faded, but India was still seething, and another intelligence
failure would inflict grave damage to the battered reputations of IB and
R&AW.
According to a person privy to the details of the meeting, Mathur told Pillai
and Verma that IB was almost certain there was indeed a mole inside the

High Commissiona low-ranking diplomat named Madhuri Gupta. But the

investigators had not yet confirmed the nature and extent of the
information being passed to Pakistani intelligence; nor had they
determined whether Gupta had any accomplices inside the High
Commission. A sudden move to arrest her would alert any other involved
parties who had thus far escaped detection, so it was decided that the
surveillance should continue for two or three weeksat which point Gupta
could be quietly summoned back to India by the Ministry of External
Affairs (MEA), whose officials had not been informed of the investigation.
For a few more weeks, at least, the operation would remain a closely
guarded secret: nobody else in India knew, and nobody in Islamabad was
to be informed.
While Gupta remained under surveillance, the person familiar with the
operation told me, false information was planted in channels to which she
had accesslike a tag whose movements could be tracked. If Indian
sources inside Pakistan confirmed that the counterfeit information had
arrived, the leak could be traced back to Gupta.
In the world of intelligence, where suspicion cloaks every transaction,
careful steps must be taken to corroborate accusations of betrayal before
taking action against the guilty party. But as several retired intelligence
chiefs explained, there is no standard protocol for undertaking such
investigationsno single solution that fits all possible problems.
Counterintelligence is like quantum mechanics: if youve located the
particle, its speed will change; if you think youve found the perfect
solution, the problem has changed.
When the home secretary, DIB and Secretary (R) were told that Guptas
leaks had been confirmed, the home ministry asked the MEA to summon
her back to India. Under the pretence that Gupta needed to report to
Delhi to consult on preparations for an upcoming summit in Thimpu at the
end of April for the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, an
official order was issued requesting her return.
On 21 April 2010, Gupta flew from Lahore to Delhi on Pakistan
International Airlines flight PK-270, the only direct connection between
the two cities, and spent the night in her home in West Delhi. The
following morning, she reported to the MEA offices in South Block, where
she had been asked to attend a meeting with an additional secretary,
Ashok Tomar. Outside Tomars office, unaware of the charges against her,
she chatted with a few colleagues she had worked with in her 27 years as
an MEA official. But when she was called into Tomars office for what she
thought was a briefing for officials attending the Thimpu summit, she was
met by Tomar, a joint secretary in MEA named Gaitri Kumar and three
men from the IB.
Tomar placed a call to the Special Cell of Delhi Police, who had already
been informed of the case. He asked them to come and arrest Madhuri
Gupta, a Grade B Indian Foreign Services official and second secretary in
the press and information wing at the Indian High Commission in

Islamabad, suspected of passing sensitive official information to agents of

Pakistani intelligence.
Gupta was taken into custody, and formally placed under arrest early the
following morning, on 23 April. The case remained secret for the next few
days, while Gupta was interrogated in police custodyuntil 27 April, when
police and security officials began to leak the news of Guptas arrest to
reporters, and news agencies carried the sensational revelation that an
Indian diplomat in Islamabad had passed extremely sensitive information
to her contacts in ISI till her movements came under surveillance of
Intelligence Bureau sleuths. But the first reports, based on official
sources, contained an even more sensational accusation: that the R&AW
station chief in Islamabad, RK Sharma, who was posted as a counselor at
the High Commission, had also come under suspicion, for allegedly
abusing his position and passing information to Gupta. The name and
designation of Indias top intelligence officer in Pakistan were broadcast
far and wide: Sharmas official cover in Islamabad had been blown by his
own country, a move that seemed certain to damage R&AW operations in
Pakistan and bring his assignment to a swift and ignominious end.
But the leaks did not end there: in the weeks that followed, details of
Guptas interrogation poured into the press, painting a lurid and
occasionally contradictory picture of her character and motivations. She
had passed information to Pakistan willingly and without any financial
benefit to teach a lesson to her arrogant seniors in the MEA,
according to some reports, which suggested she had an endless litany of
complaints against the ministry and felt deprived of recognition.
Unidentified sources claimed she had brazenly taunted the security
officials who arrested her, asking, What took you so long to get me?
Other reports suggested she had been handsomely compensated for her
services to Pakistans Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), and that a healthy
cash balance in her bank accounts was being investigated. Still further
reports portrayed the unmarried 53-year-old as a lonely spinster who had
been lured into a romantic liaison with a Pakistani agentwho had even
dispatched her to Jammu and Kashmir to obtain information about Indias
development plans there. A correspondent in Islamabad who had
interacted with Gupta reported that she could appear brash and
fearless, and quoted her boasting that she would soon receive a plum
diplomatic posting in London or Washington.
Or perhaps, as the headline of another report on 29 April suggested,
Madhuri Gupta may have embraced Islamand secretly become a Shia
Muslim six years earlier. That same day, a presenter on Aaj Tak
introduced a special segment titled Mohabbat mein deshdrohTreason
for Lovethat described how the traitor had fallen into a honeytrap
set by Pakistani intelligence. By 8 May, an article in Mail Today sketched a
dubious past for Gupta, claiming that her senior officers had been
suspicious about her conduct as far back as 1983 and citing her
excessive drinking while working as a press officer at a summit that
yearwhile another national newspaper reported that Gupta, who
supposedly confessed to all charges under interrogation, had since

claimed in court that she had been framed.

More than two years later, little more has been revealed about the
strange case of Madhuri Gupta, whose trial finally began in a Delhi
courtroom earlier this year. The initial narrative that unfolded in the
media, of a disgruntled spinster-turned-spy, spilling state secrets for love
or money or revengeperhaps with the assistance, witting or unwitting,
of the R&AW station chiefappeared to have come from the officials that
investigated the case in the IB and Ministry of Home Affairs. The fact that
RK Sharmas identity had been leaked as well, however, suggested there
might be a bigger story that had gone untold: one that had little to do
with Madhuri Gupta, but instead revealed a bitter turf war that had played
out inside the Indian High Commission in Pakistan, which pitted officers of
Indias two civilian intelligence agencies against one another.
TWO
THE TRIAL OF MADHURI GUPTA began on the morning of 22 March
2012, almost two years after she was first taken into police custody. She
had been jailed until January of this year, when she was formally charged
with violating two sections of the Official Secrets Act (OSA) of 1923an
offence which carries a maximum three-year sentenceand released on
bail, having already served 21 months in Tihar Jail waiting for a trial.
Shortly before 10 am, Gupta was chatting amiably with the policeman on
duty inside courtroom number 17 at North Delhis Tis Hazari Courts
Complex. Home to about 400 courtrooms, the complex is among the
largest of its kind in Asia, a series of imposing concrete slabs built in the
1950s and now painted a dull yellow. Abuzz with solicitous lawyers trying
to sell their services to prospective clients, and suffused with the odour of
a slightly clean public toilet, the place presents a dim picture of the
depressing realities of justice at work.
Pawan Kumar Jain, the additional sessions judge who chairs court number
17 and frequently handles OSA cases, was not present, so there would be
no hearing; but Gupta, still out on bail, was required to report herself to
the court. She was wearing a henna-green suit, and her straight black
hair, neatly parted in the middle, fell just below her chin. Gupta has a
round face, with dark, broad lips and a small, flat nose. She appeared to
have lost a little weight in the two years since her arrest, when pictures of
a short and heavyset older woman, splashed across newspapers and
television broadcasts, invited sneering insinuations about her vulnerability
to the romantic attention of her alleged ISI handlers.
I had been trying to meet Gupta for more than a month. After I went to
her house in Vikaspuri, in mid-February, and left a note with her servant,
a grey-haired man named Narayan Singh who insisted Gupta was not at
home, she responded with a single email refusing my request for an
interview. You will kindly appreciate that this is hardly the time for any
storythe matter being sub judice, Gupta wrote, adding that she was
seized with numerous problems of survival. Please have some mercy on

me and kindly leave me alone, she concluded.

Inside the courtroom, I introduced myself to Gupta, and tried once again
to convince her to talk. She smiled, and confidently declined my request.
I have a great story, she said. Why will I give it to you? I will write a
book on it when the case finishes. She had already begun writing another
book, she said, about the substandard conditions for female prisoners at
Tihar Jail. She would say nothing further, she insistedthough when I
asked her about her experience in Pakistan, she gave a quick reply: I had
a great time.
The trial began in earnest the following day: the judge was now present,
along with Pankaj Sood, the investigating officer in the case, and a few
other constables from the Special Cell of Delhi Police. Gupta, wearing
another green suit, sat confidently at the front of the courtroom, but the
public prosecutor was absent, as were all four of the summoned witnesses
from the MEA: Ashok Tomar, the complainant in the case; TS Tirumurti
and Gaitri Kumar, both joint secretaries in the MEA who had been present
for Guptas initial interrogation; and RK Tyagi, now the ambassador to
Norway, who had in 2010 headed the department that analysed the
contents of the emails Gupta was alleged to have sent to her handlers.
According to the charge sheet filed in the case in 2010, 73 emails19
received, and 54 sent, totaling more than 300 printed pageshad been
recovered from the email account atlastrao@gmail.com, which Gupta had
used to correspond with her Pakistani handlers. Special Cell had asked the
MEA to analyse these emails, and the charge sheet records the opinion of
RK Tyagi, filed in May 2010, that they contained information classified as
secret or of classified nature; that this information can be prejudicial
to the safety, security and interest of the state; and that the information
is connected with security and defence matters of the country, which
can be directly or indirectly useful to an enemy country. As proof that
Gupta had indeed sent these emails, the charge sheet cites her confession
along with a message on her BlackBerry confirming it had been set up to
use this particular email account, though the charge sheet does not show
any attempt to match the IP addresses of the emails with Guptas home
or office computers in Islamabad.
A few weeks before the trial began, I had gone to interview Pankaj Sood,
who had recently been posted as an inspector at the Old Police Lines
police station, just opposite the court complex. After he had arrested
Gupta in April 2010, he said, she had been placed under interrogation for
14 to 16 hours each day for a weekwhich included questioning by
officials from MEA, R&AW and IB. According to Sood, Gupta was
immediately cooperative: she willingly disclosed the details of her email
account (including its amateurish password, her date of birth) and the
accounts used by her Pakistani handlers, and admitted that she had
agreed to pass them any information she could obtain at the High
Commission.
She told everything she knew, Sood said several times, though he

added that she had also attempted to implicate another Indian officiala
man named Sanjay Mathur, who had been the chief IB officer in Pakistan,
and whom Gupta alleged had introduced her to the sources in Pakistani
intelligence. But there was no evidence against him, Sood said.
During her interrogation, Sood continued, she admitted that the email
account had been created for her by Mubshar Raza Rana, identified in the
charge sheet as one of two officials of Pakistani intelligence agencies to
whom she had sent information, after being introduced to Rana and
another man, identified only as Jamshed, by a Pakistani journalist named
Javed Rasheed, early in 2009. She told them everything she knew, or
could find, Sood said. When I asked him about the nature of the
information she had disclosed, he said she had blown the covers of all the
Indian intelligence officials in Pakistan, disclosed biographical details for
every employee at the High Commission, and also mentioned the
existence of some secret routes to India.
But Guptas lawyer, Joginder Dahiya, was one of several people who
suggested that the contents of the emails were distinctly unsensational.
These emails are the backbone of their case, Dahiya told me. But what
is in those emails? Its trivial stuff. Though she had been given the
designation of a second secretary in the High Commission, this was
essentially an acknowledgement of her long service as an IFS grade B
officera second-tier rank of the foreign service that consists of support
staff for the higher-ranking IFS cadre. As a translator, her duties
consisted of monitoring the Urdu media; she was responsible for
preparing two daily dossiers summarising and interpreting developments
from the Urdu press. In other words, information flowed from Gupta to
the senior staff, and not in the other direction.
During my interviews with more than a half-dozen former R&AW and IB
chiefs, and another half-dozen retired secretary-level intelligence officials,
there was unanimous skepticism regarding the gravity of the information
Gupta had allegedly leaked. B Raman, a former additional secretary in
R&AW, pointed to Guptas position as a second secretary in the
information and press division, suggesting that she would not have any
access to classified information. I have seen what kind of work these
guys do, Raman said. One former head of R&AW responded similarly,
arguing that while Gupta was made to look like the spy of the century,
she could not have passed anything but very low-end type stuff. A
Member of Parliament who had visited the High Commission since Guptas
arrest said that when he had inquired about the case, he was likewise
informed that she had no access to substantial information, and therefore
her disclosures had caused minimal damage.
From these accounts, the information Gupta is accused of leaking to
Pakistani intelligence seemed to fit with what B Raman had separately
described to me as Whisky-Soda conversationwhos who in the High
Commission, whos coming and whos going; essentially, gossip and
administrative details of the sort that might be exchanged over dinner or
drinks. Leaked information, Raman explained, could be classified into
three categories of escalating severity: whiskey-soda talk, official reports

and documents, and worst of all, cipher codes, which would allow a rival
agency to obtain access to encrypted communications. Along similar lines,
numerous former retired officers of IB and R&AW described a hierarchical
classification of possible sources: acquaintances and friends, casual or
regular contacts, casual or regular sources, and finally full-scale assets.
Though an acquaintance might share low-level information of the whiskysoda variety, access to classified material or cipher codes typically
involves a full-scale asset, who would be compensated accordingly for his
services.
A person who passes information to another intelligence agency, I was
told by one former IB officer, can do so knowingly or unknowingly,
wittingly or unwittingly, and willingly or unwillingly. And to knowingly,
wittingly and willingly reveal secret information to an enemy state
requires strong incentives. Money is the most common and effective
motivation, another former R&AW chief told me, but sex, blackmail,
revenge and ideology are also strong players. Sex, he added, is often a
hook that leads in turn to blackmail, which can be used as leverage to
extract further information.
In terms of the above classifications, the charge sheet depicts Gupta as a
full-scale asset who passed sensitive official informationand her
motivation, according to the prosecutions case, was love. They threw a
young man at her and she got trapped, Pankaj Sood said. One of Guptas
two handlers, known only as Jamshed, was a younger man, about 30,
whose job was to romance the older single woman, and thereby obtain
information from the High Commission. The main thing is, she was
caught in a honeytrap. Thats it, Sood concluded.
To this end, the charge sheet contains the contents of only one email
allegedly sent by Gupta, dated 3 October 2009, which is intended to
provide evidence of her romantic entanglement. It is a message from
Javeria to SultanaGupta and her handler Rana, according to the
prosecutionthat laments the end of her relationship with Jim,
supposedly an alias for Jamshed.
I know that you tried your best and I shall always remember your
kindness, the email begins:
but its final goodbye to all of you because Jim has also said his final
goodbye to me. He has a lot of complaints against me that he is under
a lot of pressure but I am doing nothing for him; that I do what I
want, that I dont listen to him; I have changed and I am bewafa
[disloyal], and so on. I have done my best for him and for his sake
but he treats me like a dog. He has position. Till we are married and
till I am in the present job I have to behave and live accordingly but
Jim has strong objection to my socializing with any Pakistani. Why
does he have such a poor opinion of his own people? In any job that I
take up this attitude of Jim will be a big hurdle. I am not used to just
sitting at home in purdah. After marriage he will neither socialize
himself nor let me socialize with anyone.

So it is better that we part our ways. He told me to find my own way

and Inshallah I will find my own way.
Please convery my thanks and goodbye to your senior doctors. Tell
Jim ki Pakistani ko aazma ke dekh liya. [Now I know what a Pakistani
man is like.]
I shall find some way to return your SIM cards.
Please do not try to contact me otherwise I shall be happy to leave
this place for ever within a week. Jim has already said that he would
be very happy if I left today instead of tomorrow. He asked me to
leave him alone and I am happy to do at least one thing that he wants
me to do.
Regards,
Javeria
Though the email provides a putative motive for her spying, it
simultaneously suggests a volatile relationship between Gupta and one of
her ostensible handlers: if Jamshed-Jim had successfully cultivated a
source inside the Indian diplomatic mission by feigning love, why would
he push her away? And why, as has been alleged, would Gupta continue
to provide information to Jamshed or Rana?
A retired senior intelligence official familiar with the details of Guptas case
admitted that it would be highly unusual for a handler to risk losing a
source with such erratic behavior, but insisted that she had broken down
and confessed to the charges against her. When I saw the initial reports,
he said, I asked, how are they going to prove in a court of law that she
had sent those emails? Where is the proof? All she had to do was keep her
mouth shut, but she confessed she was in love with the guy. Though
Gupta said she was a spy, the official told me, he had seen the emails
and there was nothing secret about them. Gupta, he suggested, had
probably attempted to pass off routine information as classified to impress
her handlers. I can write secret on the top of a file and give it, but that
doesnt make it a secret. I dont think it fooled the Pakistanis even for a
day.
Guptas lawyer, Dahiya, told me that his client was being framed, though
he refused to say whether he intended to contest her authorship of the
emails described in the charge sheet. Gupta, he argued, was a victim of a
fight between IB and R&AW. The retired senior intelligence official
dismissed any suggestion that Gupta was innocentciting her
confessionbut he indicated that Dahiya might be partially correct. Yes,
there was a turf war, he told me. There was a lot of unpleasantness at
that timeunpleasantness that included leaking the identity of RK
Sharma, R&AWs top man in Pakistan, to the media. His name was
muddied in the papers, that he was involved, the official said. Thats
total fiction. I asked him if the leaks had come from IB, as Guptas

lawyer had suggested. I cant confirm it, he said, and I cant deny it.
THREE
ABOUT TWO WEEKS after the first sensational stories of Guptas arrest
began to appear in the media at the end of April 2010, two high-ranking
retired officials from the MEA and R&AW hinted publicly that the torrent of
information leaked to the media was far out of proportion to the
significance of the case. We normally dont talk about such things, the
former R&AW chief Vikram Sood told a national newspaper. I am
surprised by the hype surrounding this case. We are making a spectacle of
ourselves in front of the world. In the same article, G Parthasarthy, the
former high commissioner in Pakistan, directly raised the prospect that
the media reports were evidence of a turf war between the Indian
intelligence agencies. The leaks were unseemly and unnecessary.
Theyve left a clear impression that this was a case of IB and R&AW trying
to settle scores with each other.
All of the former intelligence officials I spoke withincluding the retired
R&AW and IB chiefsconfirmed that there have been occasional
outbreaks of conflict between the two agencies, though every man was
quick to add that this was hardly a phenomenon unique to India, usually
by citing the well-publicised disputes between the American Federal
Bureau of Investigation and Central Intelligence Agency. These things
happen, I was told by a retired high-level home ministry bureaucrat, who
said that when R&AW and IB officers come face-to-face overseas, bitter
rivalries sometimes result. Maybe one guy is smarter than the other
guyhe gets more information. The other guy doesnt get as much, so
then his boss might call up and say, The other agency tells me all this is
happening, but you havent given me a thing. After you get a few of
these calls, you might go to the other guys turf to get the information
next time.
One former R&AW chief, who stressed that turf wars between IB and
R&AW were not widespread, said they were usually caused by competition
over informationor the sources who provide it. Officers in the field, he
said, are protective, or even possessive, of the sources theyve cultivated;
if one guy feels his agent is being threatened by the other guy, a fight
may break out. Sometimes there can be clashes, he said. In an ideal
situation, it should not happen.
Another retired R&AW official, however, insisted that conflicts of this sort
were far more common than the intelligence chiefs admit. These things
happen very often, he told me. There are hundreds of cases. The
synergy in the outside missions is just not there. It was a conflict of
precisely this sort, he said, that had transpired at the High Commission in
Islamabadand which led, after Guptas arrest, to the leaks that blew RK
Sharmas cover. It was a turf war, and there was a problem, the official
told me. Gupta was working under RK Sharma, but that was it. He never
involved her in any of his operations. This guy Sanjay Mathur wanted to
implicate Sharmahe said that Gupta was some sort of conduit between

R&AW and ISI. But the theory did not stick.

The name of Mathur, who had been the top IB officer at the High
Commission in Islamabad, was first mentioned to me by Pankaj Sood, the
Delhi Police inspector who led the Madhuri Gupta investigation. During her
interrogation, Sood had said, Gupta attempted to implicate Mathur,
claiming that he had introduced her to Javed Rasheed, the Pakistani
journalist identified in the charge sheet as the initial link between Gupta
and her handlers.
Mathur had been Guptas boss in the press and information wing at the
High Commission, where he served as first secretary and spokesmanhis
diplomatic coverfrom 2006 until he returned to India in 2009. According
to a diplomat posted to Islamabad at around the same time, Mathur, then
38, seemed to have a cordial professional relationship with his much older
subordinate. Relations between Mathur and Sharmaboth Indian Police
Service officershad appeared to be similarly amicable since Sharma
joined the mission under diplomatic cover as the economic and
commercial counselor in early 2008. Sharma and Gupta, roughly the same
age, had a closer friendship; Sharma and his wife occasionally dined with
Gupta, the diplomat said, and she had a habit of walking into his office
without knocking, even if Sharma had guests.
For the two intelligence men, Islamabad presented considerable pressure
and not much excitement. Contrary to the publics imagination of deathdefying operations behind enemy lines, the life of an Indian spy in
Pakistans capital is more Veer Zaara than Agent Vinod. People dont
want to go to Pakistan, a retired senior R&AW official told me. Nobody is
willing to go, but you dont need the brightest personwe just need a
body there, being present and observing the country and the politics.
Indian officials and their families in Pakistan are tailed around the clock by
Pakistani intelligence, making it impossible to run operations from inside
the country. But in the capital, even the ordinary work of intelligence
gathering is a challenge. The problem with Islamabad is that it is a very
very sterile diplomatic town, another retired R&AW official said. You
dont meet the general public. There is no interaction. The more people
you know, the more chances of raising sourcesand if you cannot meet
anybody its difficult.
Both Mathur and Sharma hosted occasional parties at home, like many
diplomats; invites went out to journalists, politicians, academics, army
officers, businessmen and other local elites. But most of the usual party
crowdeven those who attended other diplomatic eventstended to steer
clear of Indian intelligence officers, whose diplomatic covers are almost
always a poorly-kept secret. Any prominent person who wished to avoid
the unwelcome attention of Pakistani intelligence wouldnt think of
mingling with Mathur or Sharmawhich meant that anyone who did
mingle was either of little interest, or already well-acquainted with the
ISI. One acquaintance of Mathurs said he sometimes lamented aloud that
anyone willing to attend these gatherings had almost certainly obtained

clearance from Pakistani intelligence before arriving.

Its not clear if Javed Rasheed, a senior correspondent with the Urdu daily
Jang, attended any parties thrown by Mathur or Sharma, but his presence
would not have been a great surprise. As the high commissions official
point of contact with local media, Mathur dealt with many journalists
including Rasheed, whose beat includes covering India and terrorism.
When I called Rasheed in May, he told me that he had visited India about
a dozen times in the past three decadesand met various eminent
political leaders: Kalam sahib, Advani, Sonia Gandhi, Mulayam Singh,
Ram Jethmalani...
Rasheed confirmed that he knew Mathur: We were friends, he said. I
had been to his house a few times. He had met Madhuri Gupta, he said,
but they were only casually acquainted. Asked about the other men
named in the charge sheet as Guptas handlers, Mubshar Raza Rana and
Jamshed, Rasheed said he didnt know any such men, and hadnt
introduced Gupta to anyone.
In the aftermath of the terrorist attack in Mumbai on 26 November 2008,
Rasheed had been the only journalist from Pakistan to obtain an Indian
visa: he came to Delhi for two or three weeks in December 2008, he said,
and filed dispatches for his paper on the escalating tension between India
and Pakistan. But he did not come on a journalist visa, he admitted:
Mathur, who headed the press and information wing in Islamabad, helped
him secure a blood relation visa, intended for Indians and Pakistanis
visiting family members, though Rasheed confessed he did not actually
have any relatives in India. Without the help of the press secretary in the
Indian High Commission, its impossible to come to India, Rasheed
explained.
Though Rasheed denied that he had any connections to the intelligence
agencies of either countryI do not do any work related to intelligence
or anything of that sort, he saidputting together all the details he
described in our interview would appear to suggest otherwise. Like many
other well-connected reporters in India and Pakistan, Rasheed seemed to
occupy a grey area between intelligence work and journalism.
Rasheed had made repeated visits to India, which two former R&AW
officials suggested would be unlikelythough not impossiblewithout the
blessing of ISI. But he had also had frequent interactions with Sanjay
Mathur, who had said himself that any Pakistani who approached him had
obtained clearance to do so from the countrys intelligence agencies. The
fact that Mathur, who could not have ignored his own maxim, had
arranged an Indian visa for Rasheed under a false pretext, at an
extremely volatile moment in India-Pakistan relationsa decision that
could not have been taken without consent from the home ministry
cannot but present the impression that Mathur or the IB regarded
Rasheed as a valued source.
For the past several years, however, Rasheeds visa requests have been

summarily denied. By the time he filed for another visa a few months
after returning from his post-26/11 trip, a new high commissioner,
Sharath Sabharwal, had arrived in Islamabadand his friend Mathur had
been prematurely called back to India, five months before his anticipated
departure and without any successor in place. The reason for Mathurs
unexpected exit was openly discussed inside the High Commission,
according to two sources who were then posted in Islamabad: Mathur,
they said, had been sexually involved with his domestic help, a young
Pakistani woman. Mathurs lapse rendered him vulnerable to exploitation
by Pakistani intelligencefatally compromising his continued service to
the IB in Islamabad. Shortly after Sabharwal arrived, Mathur confessed,
and was promptly sent back to India.
Mathur has since been returned to his IPS cadre in Tamil Nadu, where he
was appointed police commissioner of Madurai earlier this year. Contacted
by phone, Mathur confirmed that he had been posted in Pakistan until
April 2009, but declined to comment further; he did not respond to
subsequent interview requests. Several of the former R&AW and IB chiefs
told me that it was rare for an intelligence officer to be remanded back to
their cadre. Without commenting directly on Mathurs case, the former
intelligence heads, who used words like uncommon and unusual,
suggested that similar movesparticularly for an officer previously
deemed fit for a sensitive post like Pakistanwere usually a form of
punishment or an acknowledgement that the officer had lost the trust or
confidence of the agency.
In the wake of Mathurs sudden departure, which left the IB without a
presence at the High Commission, his position as head of the press and
information wing was filled by one of the missions junior R&AW officers,
who had been working under Sharma in the economic division. It was
around this time that Javed Rasheeds repeated visa requests began to be
met with unfavourable replies. The Indian High Commission refuses to
even comment why I am not getting a visa, Rasheed told me. The R&AW
officers in the high commission apparently saw no reason to repeat the
efforts Mathur had made on Rasheeds behalf; perhaps Mathurs
unceremonious farewell had cast doubt on his erstwhile contacts. But if
the IB had indeed considered Rasheed a worthwhile source, he had now
been completely cut off.
When Mathurs replacement from the IB finally arrived in Islamabad in
October 2009, he was not given the post occupied by his predecessor atop
the press and information wing, and was instead assigned to a role under
Sharma in the economic division. (Though a few of the retired R&AW and
IB chiefs suggested that the occasional rotation of diplomatic covers was
not necessarily uncommon, most suggested that it was conventional for a
new officer to fill the role held by the person they replace.) By this point,
the turf war inside the High Commission mentioned by multiple retired
senior intelligence officials was under way, and R&AW appeared to have
the upper hand.
It is still not clear when suspicions about Madhuri Guptas conduct were
first raised inside the High Commission. But the investigation of her

activities, which was conducted by the IB, must have begun between
October 2009, when a new IB officer arrived to fill the agencys vacancy in
Islamabad, and early 2010, when Rajiv Mathur, the DIB, first presented
its preliminary conclusions to the R&AW chief and home secretary inside
North Block a few weeks before Guptas arrest.
This case was the IBs baby, a retired senior R&AW official said, and his
agency was kept out of the loop until the very endwhen they were
shocked to see the name of their top man in Pakistan muddied and
spattered all over the news.
FOUR
ON A CHILLY WINTER MORNING in Delhi two days before Christmas in
2009, the home minister, P Chidambaram, took the stage in the Plenary
Hall of Vigyan Bhawan to deliver the 22nd annual Intelligence Bureau
Centenary Endowment Lecture. The 1,200-seat hall was filled to capacity
with senior police officers from every state in the country, bureaucrats of
joint secretary rank and above, and a number of parliamentarians and
cabinet ministers. The national security adviser, MK Narayanan, and the
DIB, Rajiv Mathur, were seated on the stage next to Chidambaram.
In slightly more than a year since taking up his new portfolio in the
aftermath of 26/11, Chidambaram had moved aggressively to overhaul
the home ministry, trumpeting his determination to build a strong central
security apparatus. In his speech, whose title promised A New
Architecture for Indias Security, Chidambaram unveiled his plan to
implement a sweeping reorganisation and centralisation of the countrys
intelligence services, under the supervision of a newly-created National
Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC).
The proposed NCTC, whose logical and natural place would be under the
Ministry of Home Affairs, would assume full responsibility over a handful
of smaller agencies, while the positioning of R&AW, the Aviation and
Research Centre and the Central Bureau of Investigation would have to be
re-examined, such that they too came at least partially under the
oversight of the NCTC. The disposition of the IB, already under the
supervision of the home minister, was conspicuously not discussed. It is
my fervent plea, Chidambaram added, that this should not result in turf
wars.
Chidambarams speech, however, was itself the latest and most audacious
salvo in a turf war of his ownand it was unquestionably acknowledged
as such by his rival combatant, MK Narayanan. After sitting through a
lecture spiked with thinly veiled criticism of his own leadership, which also
proposed to radically diminish the NSAs role in security policy, Narayanan
resolutely walked out of the event he had helped to establish in 1987
during his stint heading the Intelligence Bureau. The walkout was first
reported a month later in The Telegraph, which characterised it as an
undisguised revolt by the NSA against the home minister, the culmination
of months-long sparring between two of the most powerful men on

Raisina Hill.
For many months, the report continued, Chidambaram had slowly and
steadily encroached on Narayanans turf. But the NSAs silent revolt
came far too late. By the end of January 2010, Narayanan had been
vanquished to Raj Bhavan in Kolkata, and replaced by Shivshankar
Menon, a career diplomat whose status as an outsider to the intelligence
apparatus made him a far less formidable rival to Chidambaram.
Before Narayanans removal, a Congress MP said, there was a huge turf
war in the current government, with Chidambaram trying to take the
entire internal security architecture under his winga campaign that
culminated with the proposed creation of the NCTC.
When he became home minister in 2008, Chidambaram had introduced a
daily hour-long briefing on security issues, which he chaired, to increase
coordination and share intelligence between agencies. Narayanan
resented what he saw as Chidambarams move to appoint himself as
intelligence czar; the home minister, by contrast, sought to portray
Narayanans unwillingness to participate as an attempt to avoid
accountability and guard his own turf. A retired high-level home ministry
bureaucrat told me that Narayanan felt he was entitled to keep his
distance from the home ministry. He preferred to exercise his powers
from the back room, the bureaucrat said. When he came into the front
room, he had to say yes or no; from the back room, you can do things
and not be held accountable.
This was the old way of doing things that Chidambaram sought to sweep
away while bringing the intelligence architecture under his ministry. But
Narayanan had come up through this system over several decades:
shutting down the back room was essential for Chidambaram, because it
would deny Narayanan the upper hand. Though the home minister
controlled the IB, Narayanan had been its director, and his deep contacts
inside the agency made it easy to bypass Chidambaram. He had a whole
lot of people in the IB who were his subordinates, the retired bureaucrat
said. You know people by their first names, you can pick up the phone
and get information directly.
Menon, he said, was focused on the big picture and avoided the nittygritty, unlike Narayanan. But then, if you have always been doing the
nitty-gritty for 35 years, then even if you go out [from intelligence] you
want to keep doing thatyou dont want to give the elbow room to the
new bosses.
However unfair, the bureaucrats dig at Narayanan may capture a few
essential traits of the intelligence community he inhabited: resistance to
change, hostility to oversight and a commitment to infighting. For two
decades after Independence, the IB, which had been inherited from the
Raj, was the countrys only civilian intelligence agency, responsible for
both domestic and international espionage. Its notable lack of success in
the latter department, widely exposed during the 1962 India-China war,

led Indira Gandhi to bifurcate the bureau six years later at the urging of
her influential principal secretary, PN Haksar.
The history of infighting between IB and R&AW dates back to the birth of
the younger agency. RN Kao, the revered first chief of R&AW, sparred
with his counterpart atop the IB, MML Hoojaand within five years of its
founding, R&AW could claim victory in the first turf war between the two,
after Kao used his considerable influence with Indira Gandhi to have Hooja
removed.
The executive order establishing R&AW gave its chief the designation of
secretary to the Government of India, answerable only to the prime
minister. The R&AW chief had unchecked administrative and operational
powers: he could create any post he thought was necessary, and recruit
any person he wished to fill it, without any effective oversight. What his
right hand created, his left hand nurtured, and R&AW quickly earned a
reputation for nepotism, cronyism and corruption; before long it was
being called the Relatives and Associates Wing.
According to an intelligence expert at the Institute for Defence Studies
and Analyses (IDSA), a government think-tank, the birth of R&AW led
directly to efforts by the IB to expand its own authority as well. Once
R&AW had been created without the administrative structures that bound
the IB, the IDSA expert said, the IB chiefs sought to emulate the example
of their counterparts. The power of R&AW tempted IB to become a clone
of R&AW, he said. Before R&AW came into being, the director had
operational independence, but after R&AW he began to have financial
independence as well, and then the IB became an empire like R&AW.
Both IB and R&AW, in fact, exist in a legal grey area: neither agency was
created by an act of Parliament, and there is no law or statute that
enumerates their powers and responsibilities, or gives constitutional
sanction to their activities. The absence of a statutory basis has several
consequences, but the simplest one is that it renders both agencies
essentially exempt from legal and parliamentary accountability.
The funding for the intelligence agencies is shrouded in secrecy. The
retired intelligence chiefs all declined to answer questions on this matter:
a few noted the figure was officially secret, while others insisted even they
had no idea about the actual amountthough as one said, There was
never a lack of funds.
The overall spending for both agencies can be divided into two portions:
budgeted expenditures, which cover regular administrative needs like
salaries and logistics; and secret service funds, presumably far larger,
which cover anything else deemed to be involved in intelligence
operations.
In the case of IB, the planned expenditures are allocated directly from the
home ministry and listed in the governments annual budget. (This years
official figure is R10.73 billion.) For R&AW, however, the budgeted

expenditures are drawn from the Cabinet Secretariat, Prime Ministers

Office, foreign ministry and defence ministry. But even these allotted
expenditures are not disclosed in the governments overall budget or
those of the individual ministries, which do not allocate funds directly to
R&AW; instead money is withheld from the ministries budgets and routed
through the Consolidated Fund of India. Though the figures are hidden
from the public, this portion of R&AWs budget is subject to internal audit,
like any other government department.
But the real money power that feeds the two behemoths, the IDSA expert
said, comes from unaudited secret service funds, whose existence is not
reflected in the governments annual budget. The government has never
explained where the money comes from, he said. No question has ever
been asked, and no auditing has ever been done. A few retired
intelligence officials and politicians offered me their broad speculative
estimates of the total spending each year, which ranged from about R50
billion all the way up to a few trillion rupees. (For the sake of comparison,
this years defence budget is about R2 trillion.) There is no conceivable
way to gauge the accuracy of these figures; for the purposes of analysis,
theyre functionally useless. But the stupendous range between the low
and high estimates is telling in its own way, as a reminder that even
insiders cant quite grasp the whole picture.
FIVE
AFTER RK SHARMAS NAME was leaked to the Indian media in
conjunction with the case against Madhuri Guptablowing his cover, but
also hinting that he may have been somehow involvedthe expectation
was that he would return prematurely to India, just as Sanjay Mathur had
done a year earlier. But R&AW officials were confident that Sharma had
not been even peripherally involved with Guptas alleged disclosures, and
were unwilling to lend any credence to the leaks by pulling him back.
According to a retired senior intelligence official, they sent one of their
own men to join the ongoing interrogation of Gupta, partially to put a stop
to any further leaksand told Sharma he should remain in Pakistan until
whenever he wished to return.
Though the details of this particular episodean accused spy, the public
leak of a R&AW officers identityare extraordinary by any standard, most
of the retired intelligence officials I met suggested that the increasing
overlap between R&AW and IB officers posted abroad made similar future
conflicts inevitable. Since the early 1990s, two former IB directors told
me, more of their officers have been sent overseas, on the logic that the
agencys responsibility for domestic security will sometimes require the
collection of intelligence abroad. You cannot just say to the other agency,
My job stops here, and now you should take over, a former R&AW chief
told me. Information, he continued, doesnt obey national borders. As
might be expected, the IBs expanding footprint outside India has not
gone over well with R&AW. But it has also displeased the MEA, whose
diplomats would prefer fewer, rather than more, intelligence officers in
their embassies.

The MEA officials I contacted were unwilling to discuss what had taken
place at the High Commission in Islamabad, particularly the charges
against Madhuri Gupta. When I called Ashok Tomar, the complainant in
the case and a special secretary at MEA, he responded with evident
displeasure, and insisted that I could not even report that he had declined
to speak. (All of this is non-attributable, he said.) Rahul Kulshreshth,
who served as the deputy high commissioner in Islamabad during this
period, flatly declared that he was now working in a different department,
and quickly hung up the phone.
On the second day of Guptas trial, back in March of this year, I arrived
early at the courtroom to discover Gupta sitting on a bench in the corridor
outside, waiting for the hearing to begin. I tried to talk to her once again.
She refused to discuss the case, or anything about her time at the High
Commission in Islamabad, apart from declaring she was innocent, but
allowed me to sit next to her and ask a few questions.
Prior to her assignment in Pakistan, she said, she had been posted in Iraq,
Liberia, Malaysia and Croatia. Immediately before moving to Islamabad,
she had been sent to the Indian Council of World Affairs in Delhi to serve
as an assistant director. She completed her MA History from Delhi
University about 10 years earlier; now she was pursuing her PhD, on what
she called the emergence of political systems in medieval Rajasthan,
under the famous historian BD Chattopadhyaya. It was her academic
work, Gupta explained, that led to her learning Urduwhich in turn led to
her posting in Pakistan. It was a desirable post, she said, because it was
not too far away from home; during her time in Islamabad, she frequently
made visits back to Delhi, usually driving by herself along the Grand
Trunk Road through the border at Wagah. While we talked, Gupta was
chewing tobacco; the women in her family, she told me, have had this
habit for generations.
She lives alone, she said, in a house built by her parents in the late
1970s. Her mother and father had been teachers, but were both
deceased; she has one brother, who lives with his family in the United
States. Though her status as a single woman in her 50s had frequently
been mentioned in news reports, most often to suggest her vulnerability
to the charms of young Pakistani spies, she said she had never felt the
need to marry. I loved my work, she told me. I didnt marry because I
was so happy with my job. This was marriage for me. As she discussed
her work in the foreign servicewhich she would presumably not rejoin,
even if acquittedGupta went quiet. After about 10 seconds, I heard her
sniff, and then noticed a few tears roll down her cheeks. She quickly
regained her composure and apologised. A few minutes later, another
journalist walked over to ask her some questions, and I got up to walk
into the courtroom for the start of the hearing.
The next time I saw Gupta was two months later, when her trial resumed
on 6 June. She politely said hello, but it was clear she had no further
interest in talking. This was the third hearing in her case. Three witnesses
from MEA named in the charge sheet, including Ashok Tomarfrom
whose office Gupta had been arrestedwere now present in the court

after having skipped the first two dates. A few minutes before the
proceedings began, Tomar spotted me taking notes, and told the head
constable on duty that any journalists should be removed. At this point,
the judge declared that the hearing would proceed in camera, and cleared
everyone from the room.