The monsoon had draped itself over the House of Memories like a shroud, the gentle wash of petrichor and jasmine mingling with the stench of crushing defeat. From his room inside the elegant, faux Tudor mansion at No. 290, U Wisara Road in Yangon, the Prime Minister of the Provisional Government of Free India had plotted the liberation of his nation, preparing the ministers and bureaucrats who would administer. The Azad Hind Bank had prepared sample banknotes, and new postage stamps had been printed. Then, the paper would rot in the rain.
Eighty years ago this month, the Imperial Japanese Army’s 33rd Division hurled itself at Imphal, together with some 12,000 soldiers of the Indian National Army, certain they would hammer open the gates of India. The four-year war in Burma ended, instead, in the greatest military reverse the Empire of the Rising Sun had ever suffered.
As Indians debate actor and BJP Lok Sabha candidate Kangana Ranaut’s claims that Subhas Chandra Bose ought to be remembered as India’s first prime minister, very few know he was led to this role by men who excelled in the art of deceit. Like Kim, Rudyard Kipling’s famous hero, Bhagat Ram Talwar had gone far into the north to play the Great Game. Talwar led Bose by the nose to glory, like a hapless Afghan fat-tailed sacrificial lamb.
Late in 1943, historian Sugata Bose recorded, Bose stood on the podium at the Cathay Cinema in Singapore dressed in a suit, tie and Gandhi cap, to proclaim himself prime minister of the provisional government of Free India. The moment marked the climax of a long journey Bose had made from Kolkata to Kabul, and on to Nazi Germany and Japan, to lead his army of liberation.
“When we reach Delhi’s Red Fort and hold our victory parade there,” Bose had thundered, “no one can say who among us will be there, who among us will live to see India free.”
Less than a year later, as news came in that his armies were falling back to the Chindwin River, Bose gathered with his cabinet at the tomb of Bahadur Shah Zafar, and read the last Mughal emperor’s forlorn poem:
Shab-o-roz phool mein jo tule kaho khaar-e-gham ko wo kya sahe
Mile tauq qaid mein jab unhe’n kaha gul ke badle ye haar hai
Those who were weighed in flowers, morn and night, how can they bear the thorns of grief?
They were given shackles of imprisonment and told to embrace it as a garland of flowers.
Then, in secret, Bose made fresh plans. Final victory belonged to the INA, Bose insisted in a ciphered message to his most trusted secret agent, Talwar, who was located some 10,000 kilometres away by road, at Japan’s consulate in Kabul. Even as the INA fought on, its agents inside India needed to prepare for a campaign of subversion targeting the British Indian army, and a war of sabotage against its infrastructure. Haji Mirzali Khan Wazir, a cleric long locked in war with the British in the North West Frontier, would intensify his rebellion, to tie down more colonial troops.
Late in April 1945, Bose sent further orders: “I had asked you not to go in [for] big sabotage work, but now you can start it in a systematically planned and organised way.” “I and the Japanese High Command,” Bose signed off, “fully appreciate your work.”
The man who received the orders, as we know from Talwar’s autobiography, sent back reports with glowing accounts of his progress. Talwar, however, omitted some important information. The prime minister’s trusted agent was a spy for the Soviet intelligence service, the Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del, or NKVD, and worked on its orders for British intelligence.
Each of Talwar’s reports was authored by Peter Fleming, in charge of the intelligence directorate conducting deception operations for the British Supreme Allied Headquarters for Southeast Asia.
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The making of Silver
The Black Dragon Society, they called themselves: Like other soldiers of the ultranationalist Japanese élite secret brotherhood, the man sitting across the table from Talwar in Kabul, Inouye, had given his life to setting fire to Soviet communism, using the Turkic Muslims of Central Asia. Files declassified by the Office of Strategic Service, the precursor of the Central Intelligence Agency, record that Inouye owned cotton plantations in Peru and spinning mills in Japan. Educated at universities in Vienna and Berlin, the 1887-born grandee joined the Black Dragon Society and volunteered to serve his nation in Afghanistan
For a time in the 19th century, as empires collided in the heart of Asia, the Great Game had drawn some of the most exceptional individuals of the era. “Men risked their lives to get there,” the historian Fitzroy Maclean has written. “Not many succeeded and not all of them returned to tell the tale.”
Early on, the Game drew in many Indians, just as it did Talwar. The legendary spy Mohan Lal Zutshi—“endowed with a genius for traitor-making,” his chief Sir John Kaye would record—negotiated with Persian princes, gathered intelligence for wars in Afghanistan, and ransomed British prisoners headed for slave markets in Central Asia. Forgotten by his imperial masters, and hated by his countrymen, Zutshi retired after the rebellion of 1857 and lived out his last years in Delhi’s Azadpur, in the company of a small army of wives and concubines.
Bose’s trusted agent, Talwar, was a spy for the Soviet intelligence service, the Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del, or NKVD, and worked on its orders for British intelligence.
Talwar was the great-great-grandson of Sardar Jassa Singh, an ethnic Punjabi employed by Nawab Qader Khan of Toru. He was born in 1908, in the village of Ghalla Dher, near Nowshera. Historian and journalist Mihir Bose has noted in his authoritative biographical account of Talwar that Nowshera had emerged as the largest air force base in India, from where British forces staged regular strikes targeting rebellious tribes along the North-West Frontier.
Like most landowners in the region, Mihir Bose recounts, Talwar’s father, Gurdasmal, was largely pro-British and earned several certificates attesting his loyalty to the empire. Following the 1919 massacre at Jallianwala Bagh, however, Gurdasmal’s politics transformed. In 1921, he attended the Congress session at Allahabad and returned radicalised. Gurdasmal pulled down his certificates and hung up portraits of MK Gandhi instead.
Even as he studied at the Har Bhagawan Memorial High School in Ferozepur, Talwar was drawn to the Naujawan Bharat Sabha founded by Bhagat Singh. His brother, Harkishan Talwar, went even further, joining a plot to assassinate Punjab’s Governor, Geoffrey de Montmorency. Harkishan was hanged in 1931 for firing the gunshots, which left Montmorency seriously injured and killed a police officer.
From 1940, Talwar became active in the Kirti Kisan Party, an anarchist-influenced regional communist organisation that traced its roots to the Ghadar movement. He became close to Harminder Singh Sodhi, an NKVD-trained Kirti Party revolutionary who was conducting subversion operations among a Sikh squadron of the British Indian Army’s 21st Horse. The work conducted by Sodhi, military historian Philip Mason has recorded, led dozens of soldiers to mutiny in 1940, and refuse service in Europe.
Later, senior Kirti party official, Achhar Singh Chhina, appeared in Ghalla Dher. The son of a prominent Punjab landowner, Mihir Bose wrote, Chhina had dropped out of his studies at the University of California, Berkley and began working at Ford Motors in Detroit. There, he was recruited by Sodhi, and sent to Moscow for training. Following his return to India, Chhina made strenuous efforts to unite the Kirti party with the official, pro-Soviet Communist Party of India—armed with generous offers of cash, likely provided by the NKVD.
The Pashto-speaking Talwar—married just a week earlier to a wife he never again mentions in his autobiography—was told he would soon have to travel to Afghanistan to escort a “very important person of international eminence to the Soviet Union”. The making of a spy had begun: In British intelligence files, he would bear the code name Silver.
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The Great Escape
Late, on the evening of 21 January 1941, the Frontier Mail rolled into Peshawar: The radical Abad Khan, waiting to receive him on the platform, immediately recognised the slightly portly, distinguished Féz-wearing gentleman, who carried cards identifying him as Muhammad Ziauddin, B.A., LL.B., Travelling Inspector of the Empire of India Life Assurance Co. Ltd. Khan hired a horse cart to take them to the upmarket Dean’s Hotel, Sugata Bose recorded, but the Tangawallah protested that his obviously-devout guest would be uncomfortable in a den of kafirs.
From room six at the appropriately Islamic Taj Mahal Hotel, Subhas Chandra Bose-in-disguise prepared for his long journey north. There is, in retrospect, considerable evidence that British intelligence was happy to see the back of the nationalist leader they had just released from prison. Abad Khan, Mihir Bose has noted, purchased arms for Indian revolutionaries, but he also served as an agent for Mian Abdul Hanan, who ran an espionage network for the British out of Quetta.
Together with an Afridi guide and party comrade Muhammad Ziauddin, Talwar set off from Peshawar in a car organised by Abad Khan. By the afternoon of 26 January 1941—the eleventh anniversary of the day the Indian National Congress had committed itself to independence—Bose was safely outside the territory of British India. Bose had been scheduled to appear in court in Kolkata the next morning.
Following a not-always-comfortable journey, sometimes on a mule—“Neta-ji was not used to walking distances on foot, especially in rugged terrain,” Talwar delicately noted—the men finally reached Kabul. There, a bizarre effort to make contact with the Soviet mission began, one of which involved panicking two diplomats’ wives on a Kabul street, and another in ambushing Ambassador Konstantin Aleksandrovich Mikhailov when his car bogged down in the snow.
The Soviets, however, had no desire to become mired in British Indian politics. Their intelligence services, moreover, had assessed Bose would almost certainly join the Axis powers. “The situation had an element of comedy about it: two Indians, one a major political figure, pretending to be Afghans staying in a dosshouse, unable to contact the Russians,” Mihir Bose wrote.
Fed up, Bose made contact with the German mission in Kabul. Even as British intelligence listened in to radio signal traffic of his activities, and explored the possibility of assassination, delighted Nazi diplomats secured permission for the politician’s transit through Moscow, and on to the Third Reich.
By the afternoon of 26 January 1941—the eleventh anniversary of the day the Indian National Congress had committed itself to independence—Bose was safely outside the territory of British India.
Early in April 1941, historian Romain Hayes recorded, a man identifying himself as an Italian diplomat named Orlando Mazzotta arrived at the offices of Nazi foreign ministry undersecretary Ernst Woermann. Elated German officials hoped Bose would help them plot the destruction of the British empire. The Führer, then busy with planning his war on the Soviet Union, had already instructed his headquarters to consider an offensive through Central Asia to India, Lieutenant-General Walter Warlimont has recorded in his eyewitness memoir.
Then, on 22 June 1941, 3.8 million Axis troops—the largest invasion force in human history—struck east into the Soviet Union, changing the course of the Second World War and history. Like many Indian communists, Talwar now confronted the question of whether his principal enemy was still the British empire, or if it was now an ally in the struggle against the global threat of fascism.
From his first-hand experience of British jails, Talwar knew the empire hated India and Indians. Prime Minister Winston Churchill, summing up the prejudices of the time, infamously described Hindus as “a foul race protected by their mere pullulation from the doom that is their due.” To Ivan Mikhailovich Maisky, the Soviet ambassador in London, Churchill prophesied that Indian Independence would mean “Eventually, the Moslems will become master, because they are warriors, while the Hindus are windbags.”
Talwar was willing to take the abuse. England’s empire would fall apart in time, but fascism posed a far deeper danger to the entire human race.
Elated German officials hoped Bose would help them plot the destruction of the British empire.
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The quintuple agent
Little is known about just when the NKVD recruited Talwar as an agent, but the stellar work of the Czech historian Milan Hauner makes clear he was encouraged to deepen his contact with Axis missions in mid-1941. Two wireless sets given to Talwar by the German intelligence organisation Abwehr’s Second Section, commanded by Colonel Erwin von Lahousen, never reached the North West Frontier, where they were to have been used by rebels to make contact with Bose. Instead, the NKVD used them to maintain a steady flow of disinformation to Berlin. Large sums of money the Nazis gave to Talwar to foment rebellion by the Faqir of Ipi ended up with the Soviets, too.
Germany had long invested in Afghanistan, hoping to challenge British influence. Engineers and teachers arrived in large numbers, and by 1938 Germans made up the largest expatriate community. Lufthansa had a weekly flight to Kabul from Berlin and firms like Siemens contributed significantly to Afghanistan’s first moves to industrialise. The Germans also established the country’s first meteorological station and wireless telegraphic system.
These investments, Germany hoped, would push Afghanistan to its side—something Emir Amanullah indeed considered, as news of British reverses came in from Europe. Key officials in the Emir’s secretariat were also sympathetic. The best-known of them, Saiyed Mubashir Tirazi, devised a scheme in which 10,000 Uzbek exiles in northern Afghanistan would mount horses and, like a modern-day Mongol army, sweep over the Soviet border, Mihir Bose has recorded.
For the most part, though, the Abwehr was unable to generate a return on its investment. Fred Brandt and Manfred Oberdorffer, the Abwehr’s top agents, were shot while attempting to reach the Faqir of Ipi in July 1941. Throughout the entire period of the war, only the Italian diplomat Enrico Anzilotti managed to visit the Faqir in June 1941 for a few days, Hauner wrote. The Faqir did indeed agree to work with the Axis for cash, but needed weapons delivered. This, the Germans could not arrange.
The situation left the Nazis and their allies almost completely dependent on Talwar, and his imaginary insurrectionary organisation. Two Abwehr wireless operators—Wilhelm Doh, codenamed Giessen and Zugenbühler, codenamed Rashad—had arrived to supplement the one already there. Doh mentored Talwar in the use of the equipment. Fifty pistols were also provided to support the revolutionary assassination campaign in India. To his delight, Talwar received 800 gold sovereigns and £14,625 in English currency notes from the German Embassy’s safe in Kabul. The money, guns, and wireless sets ended up a short walk away, at the NKVD office in the Soviet mission.
For NKVD operatives, the timing of Nazi requests to Talwar were significant clues on their strategic intent: Efforts to create chaos in British India, after all, were likely to coincide with offensives in Europe. The NKVD and MI6 shared information on Talwar’s work, through British intelligence’s liaison head in Moscow, George Hill. Together with the NKVD officer-in-charge of the Talwar operation, Gaik Badalovich Ovakimyan, Hill watched as Nazi Germany was fed colourful accounts of non-existent operations by Bose supporters in India.
The one danger was that the operation might be compromised during Talwar’s visits to India, where he maintained regular contact with his old comrades. To his bosses in London, Mihir Bose has recorded, Hill wrote that he “had a nightmare in which a zealous young Indian policeman covered himself in glory by apprehending Bhagat Ram.”
Exactly that happened—but Talwar survived, offering to work with the British in India. From 1943, the Eton and Oxford-educated Fleming took charge of handling Talwar, now focussing his energies on feeding disinformation to the Japanese. British code-breakers, listening-in to encrypted Nazi Enigma transmissions, learned that Bose was being moved out of Germany in a submarine. There was panic that the Talwar operation would be exposed once the leader renewed his direct contact with India. Plans to intercept the submarine, though, failed—leaving spies to handle the fallout.
Fleming used the communication link between the Abwehr and Talwar, to establish his utility to Tokyo. In the summer of 1943, Azad Hind Radio, broadcasting from Berlin, transmitted coded information asking Talwar to make contact with the German mission in Kabul. Fleming responded, from a station hidden under the Viceroy’s garden in Delhi, producing a mass of false information on British troop dispositions and weapons.
In Kabul for his 11th visit, armed with lists of spurious safe-houses—where Fleming’s personnel were waiting to receive INA spies—Talwar met face to face with Inouye, the old Great Game warrior. Talwar passed on information that the British had decided to end their land offensive through Burma and stage a naval operation instead. The agents sent by Bose, meanwhile, were being arrested. Several turned double agents, agreeing to feed misleading information back to the INA. Those who refused to play that role were executed as traitors.
The collapse of the Japanese in Burma, and the death of Bose, brought the curtain down on Talwar’s incredible career—one that had seen him work for the three Axis intelligence services, as well as two Allied ones, an achievement unparalleled by any agent in the history of espionage. The spy was pensioned off with a lump sum, the records of which were destroyed when the British left India. “We may be sure it was not as much as he had fleeced from the Italians, the Germans and the Japanese,” Mihir Bose wryly noted.
For years, Talwar would appear at the fringes of press conferences and political events in New Delhi, basking in the sunshine of being the Independence movement hero who helped Bose escape. Talwar’s autobiography made no mention of his role in the leader’s downfall, and as a British agent; those had to await Hauner’s path-breaking excavation of the archives, and Mihir Bose’s biography.
Like so many stories about spies, this one has no closure: Was Talwar a principled communist, a traitor to his nation, or just an adventurer serving his own cause? There is no evidence that greed or personal ill-will guided the course of Talwar’s life. There is little to suggest a durable communist commitment either. To Fleming, he said he preferred adventure over local radical politics in the North-West Frontier. “I have no clues to offer for an understanding of his intriguing personality,” Hauner wrote.
Talwar succeeded, in the final analysis, because his words seduced the Nazis, the Japanese, and Subhas Chandra Bose, giving them what they wished to hear. The spy’s greatest ally is the human power of self-delusion. Even the most venerated idols have feet of clay, which too easily dissolve with the poisoned touch of vanity.
(Edited By Theres Sudeep)