Finish him now, finish him, brother, finish him, don’t take too much time,” the message from New Delhi pleaded. “Push these guys, push these guys.” From a flat in the capital’s middle-class Vasant Kunj locality, an import-export dealer had reached out to a drug dealer in New York to hire a hitman to assassinate a lawyer living in a plush apartment on the 59th floor of the iconic Empire State Building. And now, the Indian spy who’d allegedly organised the $15,000 advance to be paid for the hit was demanding delivery.
Everything seemed set—except the drug dealer was a snitch for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), America’s federal anti-narcotics agency, and the hitman who had received the payment in crisp $100 bills was an undercover officer.
The alleged plot to kill Khalistan propagandist and lawyer Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, for which prosecutors in the United States have indicted Delhi businessman Nikhil ‘Nick’ Gupta and former Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) officer Vikash Yadav, had all the comic elements of an old-fashioned Bollywood cop movie.
For India’s external intelligence service, this case is arguably the biggest debacle in its history. It raises hard questions about whether R&AW is truly prepared to stage operations under the gaze of hostile agencies overseas. Even setting aside diplomatic embarrassment, the allegations suggest breathtaking lapses in communication security, amateurish handling of sources, and poor tradecraft.
Weaponising R&AW
Long before Prime Minister Narendra Modi took office in 2014, National Security Advisor Ajit Doval had been advocating for the intelligence services to engage in more covert action against adversaries. In a 2012 article for The Indian Police Journal, Doval called for “a low cost sustainable offensive with high deniability, aimed to bleed the enemy to submission.” Later, Doval elaborated the underlying reasoning: “Wars have ceased to be effective instruments for achieving political or military objectives. They are too expensive and unaffordable.”
The mandate wasn’t alien to R&AW. The agency had staged successful covert operations in Bangladesh in the build-up to the 1971 war, using the crack Establishment 22 to harry Pakistani forces. During the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)-backed Khalistan terrorist campaign from 1981 to 1993, it set up CIT-X, an elite unit, to conduct retaliatory bombings in Pakistan, according to former top R&AW officer B Raman.
Few senior officers in R&AW embraced covert action with enthusiasm, though. Current deputy NSA and former R&AW chief Rajinder Khanna, who led the intelligence agency from 2014 to 2016, was sceptical of plans to set up a new covert station in Iran to target Balochistan. Khanna argued that the individuals involved did not have the right training, sources familiar with the operation told ThePrint.
Even when operations were successful, the outcomes weren’t always as anticipated. R&AW’s Pakistan desk head, R Kumar—once a contender for the top job—provided pinpoint coordinates for the Jaish-e-Mohammad seminary bombed by India after the 2019 Pulwama attack. Errors in targeting, though, meant that the seminary remained undamaged, while the crisis escalated to dangerous levels for both countries.
A botched attempt to kidnap fugitive diamond merchant Mehul Choksi ended in embarrassment for the Government of India, with local courts ruling that he had been subjected to torture. The still-ongoing legal proceedings—involving a St. Kitts diplomat with close links to India’s government and two British Punjabis—have led to disclosures that could damage future Indian efforts to extradite criminal suspects from foreign jurisdictions.”
Fights within the security establishment brought even more unwelcome attention to R&AW, raising questions about the professionalism of the Indian Police Service (IPS) officers who had come to dominate the organisation after the Rabinder Singh spy scandal in 2003.
Former Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) officer DSP Ajay Kumar Bassi alleged in the Supreme Court that his agency had intercepted conversations between former R&AW chief Samant Goel and banker Somesh Prasad, warning the Dubai-based fugitive not to return to India at any cost.
Senior R&AW officials told ThePrint that Goel was seeking to insulate R&AW from the consequences of the litigation, as Somesh Prasad and his brother Manoj Prasad had long handled overseas bank accounts that the organisation used for covert operations. The accounts, the sources said, were set up by the banker brothers’ father, Dineshwar Prasad, a former R&AW officer.
“Goel needed to step in to help these guys because the organisation’s interests were involved,” one senior officer said. “In doing so, he showed a high level of commitment to the [agency], but also indiscretion, because things like this should never be discussed over the air, no matter how secure you think your phone is.”
“Large numbers of Indian Police Service officers now serving in R&AW don’t have long experience of the covert life, or the skills it needs to operate in a hostile environment,” another senior R&AW officer said. “They’re [just] six months [of] training away from a life where they were rulers of a district, and could pretty much say what they liked, do what they liked and get away with it. The habits of a lifetime are hard to unlearn.”
Even though R&AW has significantly expanded its cadre of regional-language experts—hiring many junior personnel familiar with Mandarin and other critical languages—relatively few of its IPS leadership possess long-term experience in covert operations. “There’s no point [in] playing spy if your only experience of the world is operating under the protection of diplomatic cover,” the officer added.
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Flailing in action
Failures of tradecraft—the skill-set on which intelligence officers rely for their survival—run through the indictment filed by prosecutors in New York. Yadav and Gupta are alleged to have openly discussed the plot to murder Pannun, as well as the killing of Sikh separatist leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar, evidently convinced that their encrypted messaging application was secure. However, as even ordinary citizens familiar with the Pegasus surveillance scandal would know, no electronic communication is guaranteed to be safe from the prying eyes of the intelligence services of nation-states.
Fears have been voiced within R&AW that Yadav’s indiscreet conversations might have allowed the DEA to harvest information not only shared between Gupta and Yadav but also among the intelligence officer’s bosses.
Following the payment of the advance, the indictment records that Yadav asked for proof that the hitmen were surveilling Pannun in preparation for the attack. He received images of Pannun’s neighbourhood with GPS coordinates—material readily available on the internet. “Excellent,” an evidently naive Yadav allegedly responded, “[T]hey are proving that they are quite serious now.”
Little effort seems to have been made by Yadav or his superiors to verify the reliability of Gupta’s drug dealer contact, despite a string of recent cases revealing that the DEA has heavily infiltrated narcotics cartels. Two police sources told ThePrint that the DEA may have had prior interest in Gupta, who is listed in the indictment as communicating with the drug dealer in English punctuated with Spanish phrases.
Gupta, the indictment alleges, provided Yadav with access to the drug dealer in exchange for help in quashing potential criminal proceedings in Gujarat. The case, one police officer said, concerned unproven allegations of payments made to Gupta for people smuggling through Mexico—an activity conducted by drug cartels and a long-standing subject of interest to the DEA.
Gupta was allowed to leave India for the Czech Republic, where he was arrested, two weeks after the murder plot failed to materialise. “A professional officer should never have allowed someone like Gupta to visit an area where he could be apprehended by Western law enforcement,” one officer said.
“The real questions Indians should be asking,” the officer added, “are why such poor tradecraft is countenanced. How good are R&AW’s procedures? What are the standards of its recruitment? What is the robustness of senior officer oversight on operations?”
As ThePrint revealed on Saturday, Yadav had worked as a probationer in R&AW for nine years before finally going to court to secure a permanent appointment. Two months after the Gupta indictment became public, he was appointed a Senior Field Officer at R&AW’s sister image-intelligence gathering agency, the Aviation Research Centre.
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Looming fallout
The one man who knows the answers to the many mysteries surrounding the Pannun case is the affable, smiling spymaster Samant Goel, a veteran of Punjab Police counter-terrorism operations who led R&AW for four years from 2019 and placed covert action against Khalistanis at centre stage.
Late one summer night at the beginning of June, a former R&AW officer found himself sharing space on a Hong Kong-bound flight with his old colleague and boss, Samant Goel. Goel’s tenure was scheduled to end that month, and the colleague offered his congratulations on what most insiders believed would be a certain third extension of service, which would allow the spy chief’s tenure to run into the general elections and beyond.
“Goel smiled and told me his success was all because of the blessings of his seniors,” the officer recalled to ThePrint. “He knew this wasn’t strictly true, because we hadn’t had the best professional relationship, but he had probably forgiven my many arguments with him.”
The following day, however, the Government of India announced that Goel would be succeeded by Ravi Sinha, a St. Stephen’s College alumnus and a Delhi-educated 1988 batch IPS officer of the Chhattisgarh cadre reputed for his disdain for the “Ray-Ban Rambo” culture that had taken hold at R&AW.
For the other key players in the Pannun case, the future may be less comfortable. Journalist Mahender Singh Manral of The Indian Express revealed this week that Yadav was arrested on extortion charges in December, soon after the Indian government dismissed him from service in apparent response to US demands.
Yadav cannot be extradited as long as he faces criminal proceedings in India, but he spent four months in jail before finally obtaining bail without opposition from prosecutors. Future diplomatic pressure could conceivably lead to a reversal of the bail or even new charges.
Even as R&AW engages in—inevitably agonising—debate about its future, the solutions might well lie with politicians, not spies. All major democracies have engaged in covert assassinations, despite their illegality in international law, but Israel and the US require the political executive to issue legally vetted authorisations. India has no similar system.
The lack of a legal framework protects political leadership from the consequences of covert actions that go wrong, experts like Shreyas Shende and Rudra Chaudhuri argue, reducing the incentives for reform and capacity development.
Faced with the brutal spotlight that comes with spectacular failure, India’s intelligence community will inevitably be tempted to seek dark corners to bury the truth. This, though, would only lay the foundations for future, even more consequential mistakes. Tough as the process might be, the time has come for thorough introspection.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)