"INDIAN INTELLIGENCE - THOUGHTS ON NEW APPROACH TO CHANGE"
Shri Ajit Doval
In
constant race against time and ever searching for new ideas to defeat
ingenuity of their adversaries, for intelligence agencies to change is
not an option but a compulsive necessity. Regrettably, those who change
only when they have to, pay an un-affordably high price. Worse, it is
often preceded by a nation bruised if not bled. Imaginative changes,
innovation in tools of intelligence generation and analysis and constant
up-gradation of capacities only can keep them a step ahead of their
adversaries. The paper analyses the dynamics of change in the Indian
context and some of the new realities that Indian intelligence need to
factor in for designing its strategy for change. 
Intelligence
agencies, consciously or otherwise, pursue three discernable patterns
of change. First is the evolutionary pattern. Accounting for most of the
changes, these are slow, routine and continuing in nature. They
are mostly triggered by contemporaneous developments leading to
resetting of priorities, leadership changes in organizational
hierarchies and evolving pressures within the organizations to address
professional, structural or administrative problems. Though mostly going
un-noticed, these changes are vital as they keep intelligence agencies
progressive, time consistent and forward looking through constant course
correction and problem solving. Most
of these changes are effected within the organization and do not impact
on working arrangements with other organs of the government or involve
change in law or government’s Rules of Business. Though known to few,
the score board of Indian Intelligence, particularly the Intelligence
Bureau, on this count has been outstanding. Even in the absence of
additional resources, new empowerments and living with security
insensitive, if not illiterate, culture of governance, it has been able
to bring about changes in real time to face new problems of
insurgencies, terrorism, espionage, border intrusions, socio-political
conflicts etc. even in remotest parts of the country. Decisional
autonomy enjoyed by the Director Intelligence Bureau (DIB), his
proximity to political leadership, a strong culture of loyalty and
esprit de corps within the organization besides quality leadership at
various levels have made this possible. However, the great contribution
of evolutionary changes notwithstanding, it needs to be underlined that
the phenomenon operates within a limited band-width and cannot address
fundamental infirmities. It is unfit to bring about changes that have a
long gestation period, involve high expenditure, require major
technological or structural changes or have legal implications. It also
cannot alter basic approaches towards security management of which
intelligence is only one component, particularly in a ruckus democracy
like India. One down side of such in-house innovations and
improvisations is that it makes the governments complacent mistaking the
success of fire fighting efforts as a solution to the cause of fire.
Quite often, the fore warnings and ignored pleas for action to offset
the impending threats in India go unaccounted and unpunished, making systemic failures revisit with vengeance.
The
second set of changes may be called ‘reformist’. They are triggered by
some major reverses or failures forcing the governments, either on their
own volition or under pressure of public opinion, to bring about
fundamental changes. Changes following the attack on Pearl Harbor and
post war emergence of Communist threat to the US, India’s 1962 Chinese
debacle, post 9/11 threat of jehadi terrorism etc. fall in this
category. Often the governments appoint inquiry commissions or experts
committees to study the failures, analyze the causes and recommend
reforms. Warren Commission on the assassination of President Kennedy,
Senate Committee on the Watergate Scandal, Shah Commission on the role
of intelligence during emergency in India etc. are illustrative. They
examine not only the internal workings of the organization but also
functional relativity with organizations and systems outside the
intelligence community. Public committees serve a very useful purpose as
they are able to examine and evaluate the functioning of intelligence
agencies in the broader context of political environment, systems of
governance and legalo-constitutional framework. However, at times, meant
only to serve political purpose or silence mounting public criticism,
these committees are less than objective and swayed by
extra-professional considerations. They
also often get over influenced by populist perceptions of the causes
and remedies which are not always correct. Consequently, their findings
and recommendations do not always lead to improvements in the efficiency
and effectiveness of intelligence agencies. The Shah Commission’s
findings and recommendations are a case in point. On the contrary,
committees on reforms that are led by the professionals are able to come
out with more specific, incisive and doable recommendations. The
Shankar Nair Committee report, despite its limited mandate on
intelligence reforms, came out with some highly commendable
recommendations.
The
third category comprise of changes that are brought about by
intelligence agencies on their own or in conjunction with the larger
security set up of the country envisioning futuristic threats and
challenges. Transformational in character, they involve constructing
future scenarios, assessing the environment in which intelligence
agencies will have to operate and calculating gaps between existing
capacities and these required to meet emerging threats. This
exercise necessitates intensive study of futuristic trends, their
implications for national security, analyzing policy options and
formulating strategy for change. Forecasting intelligence needs of the
country, it should attempt to architect new doctrines, suggest
structural changes, aim at optimization of resources and examine
administrative and legislative
changes required for empowerment of intelligence agencies. While
intelligence agencies in developed countries frequently attempt this
exercise, the Indian intelligence has rarely made a conscious effort in
this direction. One such exercise was carried out in the late eighties
in the Intelligence Bureau on the initiative of Shri M. K. Narayanan,
just before he was tipped to take over as the chief.
At
national level, the Report of the Group of Ministers on National
Security in 2001, was the first macro level attempt in this direction.
Though it came as an aftermath of Subramaniam Committee report on
Kargil, it was an integrated futuristic attempt to restructure national
security under four categories namely, defence, intelligence, internal
security and border management. It came with some outstanding
recommendations but unfortunately with the change in regime the momentum
of change could not be sustained. One of the major recommendations,
that was lost sight of, pertained to the review of the national security
by a high powered Groups of Ministers every five years. If implemented,
there would have been perspective action plans for intelligence and
other reforms in 2006 and 2011. For this category of changes to be
really effective, a political will is necessary, that requires serious
and enthusiastic involvement of the senior political leadership of the
country. Unfortunately, in India, national security is a low agenda item
for the politicians except when the nation finds itself in the midst of
a serious security crisis. Unfortunately, that is the most ineffective
setting for change. In an ideal situation, the government should develop
a long term bi-partisan consensus for these transformational changes.
It
needs to be emphasized that both the evolutionary and reformist
approaches to change though important by themselves are inadequate to
meet threats of the future. These approaches to change are premised on
the assumption that if shortcomings of the past were redressed the
future would be safe. They allow us to analyse the causes of failure,
examine existing systems and processes, and suggest their readjustment
to prevent their recurrence. The broader legal, administrative and
security frameworks are taken for granted; presuming that intelligence
would be able to deliver the moon only through changes within – every
time everywhere. Unfortunately, this is an erroneous premise. At best,
they equip the country to win the war that is already over.
Reforms
exclusively based on experience of the past suffer from another
infirmity. It fails to factor in the innovations and transformations
that the adversaries keep on bringing about in their capacities,
resources, strategies, collaborative network, technology, equipment,
targets, modus operandi etc. As former US Secretary of Defence, Donald
Rumsfeld, reflecting on the 21st century threats observed
that the changes will have to be fast and constant to “defend against
the unknown, the uncertain, the unseen and the unexpected”. These sets
of changes though more valid in operational areas of intelligence
generation like trade craft, surveillance, penetration, technology
improvisation etc. also have relevance in tools of analysis.
Indian
intelligence in next ten years should press into action an integrated
strategy for change incorporating a judicious mix of all the three sets
of changes namely evolutionary, reformist and transformational. In
working out this strategy for change, in addition to its long
conventional experience it may be necessary to factor in some new
emerging realities. Following are few such factors that may impact intelligence work in years ahead.
Indian Intelligence in times ahead will have to operate under greater public gaze, media scrutiny and accountability regimen. It will have to develop capability to operate in a translucent, if not transparent environment. One
of the conventional strengths of the intelligence organizations have
been their ability to operate in a relatively opaque and insulated
environment. It was an
accepted norm that in the larger security interests of the state and
safety of its people, intelligence agencies be allowed to operate
outside the public gaze. Even outside the government, there was a tacit
acceptance of this reality and the media, courts, scholars and analysts
etc. implicitly respected this
privilege and were careful not to draw them into public controversies or
expose their activities that might undermine national or public
interest. Criticism was mostly confined to intelligence production when
it was felt that intelligence agencies failed to alert or forewarn the
governments. Except the interested political groups who occasionally
leveled charges of use of intelligence for political purposes, the
intelligence processes by and large remained under a veil of secrecy.
This provided the requisite deniability to the intelligence
professionals even when they had no legal cover to carry out their
secretive functions.
The
voluntary restraint exercised was not so much to protect the
intelligence agencies or the governments but more to deny undue
advantage to the enemies of the state, who stood to gain by such
exposures. Today, one of the main sources of intelligence for the
terrorists, spies and saboteurs is media reports. They learn about the
thinking and policies of the government, movements and plans of the
security agencies, details about arrests of their gang members and disclosures
made by them, the people and places on the radar of intelligence
agencies etc. through open sources. In addition, media provides wide and
prominent coverage to violent groups and their depredations which
enables them to get wide publicity and achieve the objective of
terrorizing the people. It also enables them to discredit and demoralize
the governments in power - the political objective of perpetrating terrorist
actions. The live coverage of Mumbai 26/11 terrorist attack that was
being monitored by mentors of the terrorist group in Karachi, and who in turn were directing tactical movements of the terrorists, is a case in point.
In times ahead, this problem is going to get further deepened and accentuated. Soft
states with open democracies, like India, will find themselves
particularly vulnerable. For political reasons, legal restraints or
advisories to the media will neither be enforceable nor advisable.
Frequency and intensity of front organizations supporting the cause of
anti-national forces, masquerading as human right groups, to put
pressure on the intelligence and security agencies will show a marked
increase. Even, demands for inclusion of intelligence agencies, or at
least part of their activities, covered under Right to Information Act
may find political support.
Unlike in the past when it was not a tabooed subject, intelligence has entered the arena of public discourse. We
have to accept the reality as it is and not as we wish it to be. Not
only the intelligence production -- which can be a legitimate matter of
public concern -- but even the processes, structures and systems will
increasingly come under public scrutiny. Demands
for parliamentary oversight, intervention in internal administrative
matters, resistance to legal empowerment, like in the case of National
Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC), etc. are indicative of the changing
environment. It will be desirable for the Indian intelligence agencies
to start revisiting their systems and making preparations for change
compatible to the future realities without undermining vital national
interest.
The
Intelligence agencies should start deliberating on a public interface
mechanism which, in the long run, may even include a media and public
relation exercise. In the way Indian democracy is evolving, it will be
in the national interest to educate the media and have working relation
with it rather than allow it to go haywire for want of knowledge and
authentic information. A well thought out action plan on this count may
take two to three years before it is made operational.
Secondly,
it will be desirable to have a group of experienced officers examine
the entire working of the IB and R&AW and re-visit its security
needs through VED-analysis. Through a calibrated strategy it can secure
vital secrets that may impinge on national security while allowing
controlled oversight by parliamentary or other bodies where it will not
hurt the vitals. Besides changes in tradecraft doctrines and practices, the
changes will involve whole new regimen of security re-classification,
change in documentation and filing systems, communications, maintenance
of records, weeding out of files etc. Intelligence agencies should be
able to bring about this change in next three to four years.
Technology
will have to be another focus area for transformational change. This
has two distinct dimensions in intelligence. First is neutralizing
efforts of the adversaries to acquire and operationalise technologies to
undermine our national security. The second, pertains to up-gradation
and integration of state of art technologies by us to enhance our own
defensive and offensive capacities.
The
rate at which terrorists, spies, saboteurs and hostile intelligence
agencies are acquiring new technologies pose a serious threat. These
include a whole ambit of weapon systems, explosives, communication
equipments, defeat systems against conventional intelligence tradecraft etc.
Recently, the use of social media for creating lawlessness and inciting
people to violence has underlined scope of technology driven threats.
Incessant efforts being made by the jehadi terrorists to acquire radioactive
explosive devices (dirty bombs) is a matter of serious concern. With
the conditions of instability in Af-Pak region getting accentuated after
2014 drawdown, ideologically motivated Islamists taking charge of
senior positions in Pakistan Army and intelligence setups, deepening
collaborative linkages of ISI with home grown radical groups like Indian
Mujahedeen in India the intelligence challenges will get compounded
manifold. Terrorist groups are also fast acquiring capabilities of safe
communication which will render the task of interception quite
difficult. In the area of defence, fast technological up-gradation
through heavy investments being made by hostile intelligence agencies
like ISI of Pakistan, MSS of China etc. in electronic warfare, offensive
cyber capabilities, space surveillance, maritime encirclement of India
etc. will have to be factored in for developing counter capabilities.
Another
aspect of technology in intelligence work relates to acquisition,
improvisation and integration of new technologies. Though its necessity
is disputed by none, the intricacies are understood by few. India’s
strategic partnership with the US and greater security cooperation with
the West notwithstanding, no developed country will share real state of
the art intelligence technologies with India, particularly as a total
system. Even where the second rung technologies are made available they
are fraught with danger as the suppliers will insist on not transferring
the codes or allowing us to change them without their involvement.
Secrecy of our systems in this dispensation is seriously undermined.
India will do well to take advantage of the offset clause in acquisition
of defence equipment and use part of it for indigenous production of
intelligence equipment. With India purchasing over $100 billion worth of
defence equipments in the next seven to eight years, 30% of it under
the offset clause provides us a
huge investment opportunity for this. Development of internal Research
and Development capabilities are extremely expensive and time consuming.
Unfortunately, even in areas where such initiatives were viable, we
were not able to exploit them due to paucity of funds and lack of futuristic vision in organizational leadership. Coming
up of the National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO) is a welcome
move but its functioning so far does not inspire confidence. Its focus
should be more on developing intelligence technological capabilities
rather than getting involved in intelligence production for which it is
least qualified.
Revolution
in informatics and emerging cyber threats will constitute another area
of challenge for security agencies. The task of handling massive open
data emanating from diverse sources, both secret and classified, will
make the task of analysis quite difficult. Deliberate efforts to use the
information highways for disinformation, propaganda and subversion will
compound the problem. Of late many youth in different parts of the
world are being sucked into the vortex of
radicalism without any physical contact. Concurrently, terrorist and
other anti-national forces are acquiring capabilities to wage cyber wars
targeting critical infrastructure, intrusion in classified domains,
damaging vital national data etc. The challenge is compounded by the
fact that the perpetrators are able to operate from unknown destinations
using inaccessible platforms, thousands of miles away from Indian soil.
Another
futuristic challenge against which Indian intelligence will have to
brace itself will be the capacity and resilience to cope with challenges
of Covert Action (CA) and the Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW). The
traditional use of military power to further a nation’s strategic,
political or economic interests has been undergoing a change since the
late eighties. This trend is going to further consolidate in times
ahead.
With
wars increasingly becoming cost-ineffective ventures of unpredictable
consequences, Covert Action will increasingly be used as a new variant
of ‘war through other means’ to achieve strategic and political
objectives. Covert Action, is a deliberate state policy directed against
the target state manifesting itself in various forms like engineering
political instability, causing social disruption, retarding economic
progress, accentuating disaffection and unrest in civil society and
manipulating media. In violent forms, it includes promoting terrorism
and insurgencies, political assassinations, social disruption, sabotage,
subversion etc. It is a low cost sustainable offensive with high
deniability aimed to bleed the enemy to submission. Moral pretensions,
and international laws notwithstanding, this option has been equally
used by developed countries, like
USA in Afghanistan against the Soviets and poor countries like Pakistan
against India in Kashmir, Punjab etc. Unfortunately, the doctrine of
‘protecting supreme national interests through all means’ has bypassed
India; though it has been its worst victim with nearly 75,000 civilians
and 10,000 security personnel killed as its consequence.
Conventionally,
the causes, instrumentalities, resources and consequences of internal
threats are domestic as against the external threats in which they are
of external origin. However, in the new dispensation, internal security
has become highly vulnerable to external manipulations. Hostile powers
target it to achieve their politico-strategic objectives by internally
bleeding the adversary, exploiting its internal faultlines. In Covert
Action (CA) the planning, motivation, finances and often manpower is of
the sponsoring country and so is the strategic objective it is aimed to
achieve. Today, in India, while conventional internal threats involving
violence are steadily on the decline, threats from externally sponsored
covert action has gone up several notches. Though beleaguered for nearly
two decades, India has failed to develop capabilities and a viable
national response to the CA threats, both at the strategic and tactical
levels. Response has been episodal with short memories, often with time
consistency not lasting beyond the next election. CA is a threat against
which Indian intelligence will have to develop capabilities both in
defensive and offensive-defense modes. Their role will assume added
importance since in this war intelligence agencies would be primary, if
not the sole, players. Besides collection of intelligence, the new role
will necessitate proactive and
interventionist operational actions requiring adequate legal
empowerment. Seen in this perspective, opposition to the National
Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC) in India was ill-advised.
Thus
both the internal and external adversaries will try to achieve their
political objectives by coercing the government through internal
violence and destabilisation. This
will increasingly take the world to what is known as Fourth Generation
Warfare (4GW), conflicts in which the civil society will play primordial
role. The subversive and
violent groups disguise themselves as crusaders of disaffected or
alienated sections of the society and indulge in violence and other
unlawful activities. This will be a war against the invisible enemy
hiding within the civil society, stunning to silence the majority
through violence, fear and terror and making the governance impossible
for its inability to protect them. Inability of the governments to
protect their civil societies and redress their genuine grievances make
them highly vulnerable to the mechanizations of hostile intelligence
agencies.
The
future pattern of conflicts would increasingly be more civil society
centric. This fight against an invisible enemy, conceptualised as Fourth
Generation Warfare (4GW), will aim at collapsing the enemy internally
rather than physically destroying him through military might. As
observed by William Lind,
“Distinction between war and peace will be blurred to the vanishing
point.” In this nonlinear war against the invisible enemy there will no
defined battle fields and the difference between civil and military
targets would get obliterated. The disaffected and alienated sections of
the society will be targeted by the enemies, both within and outside,
to provide cause and the cover for subversive and violent actions. State
security apparatus with high fire power, mobility, technology and
logistic base will find themselves at a loss to fight this battle where
there is no defined territory to be dominated and visible enemy to be
destroyed. Propaganda, skillful use of media and information
intervention may be extensively used by the adversaries to discredit and
delegitimise lawfully established governments. Actions taken by the
government to protect law abiding citizens or to enforce rule of law
will be portrayed as persecution and oppression further eroding
government’s legitimacy. American war in Vietnam and Soviet Union’s
fight in Afghanistan are illustrative. Intelligence will be the primary
instrumentality through which these wars would be fought. To fight these
futuristic conflicts, the
intelligence agencies will have to build an extensive network of agents
of information and influence among potentially vulnerable sections of
the society. Psy-war capabilities integrating modern state-of-art
technologies will have to be adopted. A US study paper on ‘The Changing
Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation’ has rightly asserted that
“Fourth generation adversaries will be adept at manipulating the media
to alter domestic and world opinion to the point where skillful use of
psychological operations will sometimes preclude the commitment of
combat forces. Television news may become a more powerful operational
weapon than armored divisions.” India with its social fault lines,
economic inequalities and fragmented polity is highly vulnerable to
civil society conflicts that can lead to instability. The external
factor in the form of activities of hostile intelligence agencies,
foreign NGOs with a political agenda, trans-border ideological influence
of some radical or extremist groups etc. can exploit alienated groups
to their advantage. Though these threats have existed for quite some
time but with revolution in informatics, accessibility to new
technologies and collaborative networking among anti-national forces
these may become more extensive and acute in future. Indian intelligence will have to develop new capabilities to meet these threats.
The challenges that Indian
intelligence is going to face in years ahead will be much more serious
and complex. India’s emergence as a major power centre provides it an
opportunity as also adds to its vulnerability. There is a need to work
out a long term strategy for transformational changes on one hand and
internal reforms on the other. Under a time bound programme a plan of
action should be prepared and pressed into action with full earnestness.