New Delhi: A secret visit to Tel Aviv by then Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) chief A.K. Verma in 1987 — one of the first steps in efforts to normalise ties between Israel and India — was almost derailed by a spat over visas being denied to an Israeli table-tennis team, highly placed intelligence sources have told ThePrint.
Israel had been promised that visas would be issued to the team to attend the World Table Tennis Championships in India ahead of Verma’s visit to meet with his Mossad counterpart, Nahum Admoni.
The visas were meant to be the first step in a graded process of normalisation sought by then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, the sources said.
But even as Verma was on a flight to Tel Aviv through Brussels, the MEA rejected the visas.
“There was a lack of communication between the Prime Minister’s Office and the MEA over the issue,” a former RAW officer involved in the process said. “The RAW chief arrived in Tel Aviv to a somewhat cold reception.”
Following the scheduled meeting between spy chiefs Verma and Admoni, however, both sides decided to move past the ping-pong debacle, the sources said.
Even as the visa denial led pro-Israel demonstrators to stage protests outside the Indian embassy in The Hague, Israel’s then prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, held a personal meeting with Verma.
The meeting marked an unusual departure from normal protocol and signalled Israel’s eagerness to establish diplomatic ties.
“Tell your prime minister that if his concern is the reaction of the Palestine Liberation Organization, I can guarantee that diplomatic ties between our countries will obtain their full support,” Shamir told Verma, according to the official.
Apart from discussing the wider diplomatic relationship, the sources said, Verma sought technologies to counter the threat posed by improvised explosive devices fitted to radio-controlled model aircraft.
The Red Army Faction, a German terrorist group, was reportedly known to have toyed with the idea of assassinating the provincial prime minister of Bavaria, Franz Josef Strauss, with a bomb that would have been flown into his apartment.
Although the plan did not materialise, Indian intelligence worried that the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and Sikh separatist groups could use similar technologies.
“The United Kingdom and the United States had been totally unresponsive to our requests for assistance,” said a second RAW officer who served under Verma. “The Israelis gave us the technology they had, and told us to feel free to reverse-engineer it.”
“We handed over the jamming device to the Defence Research and Development Organisation,” he recalled, “but, unfortunately, nothing came of whatever reverse-engineering they tried, and we could not duplicate the device.”
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RAW channels
Even though no documentation relating to the RAW-Mossad relations has been declassified, contact between the two intelligence services is believed to have been authorised by former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi soon after she established the Indian external intelligence agency in 1968.
The two sides are believed to have held a succession of meetings, organised by the covert services’ stations in Brussels.
Although India recognised the state of Israel in 1950, two years after its creation, full diplomatic relations were delayed by concerns over the Arab reaction and its impact on the Indian diaspora in the Middle East.
R.Govindarajan — former Reserve Bank of India governor Raghuram Rajan’s father, and long-serving staff officer to founding RAW chief R.N. Kao — conducted regular liaison meetings with senior Mossad officers in Brussels, the sources said.
According to the sources, Admoni, then a relatively junior Mossad official, met with Kao on at least one occasion, as part of a series of liaison meetings held in Kathmandu.
The contacts intensified in the early 1980s, driven by shared concerns over terrorism, as well as worries about Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme.
In 1986, intelligence officers from the two countries are reported to have met in Paris to discuss Pakistan’s nuclear fuel enrichment facility at Kahuta.
The contacts with Mossad weren’t the only links RAW maintained that ran contrary to India’s stated foreign policy.
Verma and former Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) chief Hamid Gul met twice in 1987 and 1988, at Amman in Jordan and in the Swiss resort town of Interlaken.
The meetings were brokered by former Jordanian crown prince Hassan bin Talal, whose wife, then crown princess Sarvath, comes from Kolkata.
Israel, scholar P.R. Kumaraswamy has written, also maintained intelligence contacts with Pakistan, as it did with many other countries it had a politically volatile relationship with.
Following Verma’s retirement, the Mossad-RAW contacts continued quietly, until normal diplomatic relations were established in 1992.
Efraim Halevy and Gauri Shankar Bajpai, who headed the covert organisations of their countries at the time, established a formal intelligence relationship operating through designated officers serving in their embassies in Tel Aviv and New Delhi.
(Edited by Richa Mishra)
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