New Delhi: The Central Intelligence Agency used India as a base to conduct reconnaissance targeting a nuclear weapons test range in China, declassified documents newly released by the United States government have revealed. The reference to “reconnaissance coverage from India of a Chinese Communist test range” comes in a memorandum of a meeting of the high-level Covert Action Panel held at the White House on 6 June, 1964.
Few additional details have so far become available in the newly declassified documents, but the reconnaissance operation likely targeted the Lop Nur test range in Xinjiang, where China conducted its first nuclear weapons test in October 1964.
The document was among a cache published Monday by the National Security Archive at Georgetown University, the world’s largest archive of declassified Government secrets. The documents primarily deal with CIA covert action programmes aimed at destabilising the governments of Brazil, Cuba, Congo, Chile and Haiti.
Even though the close India-CIA relationship, which developed after the People’s Liberation Army attacked across what is now the Line of Actual Control is well known, the document offers new details on the objective and timeline of joint espionage against China’s nuclear programme.
An unsigned CIA analysis issued on 7 October, 1964, nine days before China detonated a device on the Lop Nur range, had predicted that the country was “now ready to test their first weapon”. The paper had gone on to suggest that China would produce 30-50 nuclear weapons a year and produce a thermonuclear weapon by 1968. China, in fact, tested its first thermonuclear weapon in 1967.
Earlier revelations on CIA-India nuclear collaboration centred on the unsuccessful effort to plant a plutonium-battery-powered listening device on Nanda Devi in 1965, which was publicly acknowledged by Prime Minister Morarji Desai in 1978. To dispel rumours that the CIA had sought to covertly plant the device, the prime minister had said, “It was done with the best of intentions, in the national interest.” The device was lost and has never been recovered.
The new document, however, confirms long-standing claims that the CIA was also conducting spy plane flights to gather data on Lop Nur, operating out of the Intelligence Bureau’s base at Charbatia in Odisha.
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Foreign hands
Links between the CIA and the Intelligence Bureau were established long before the 1962 war, though.
T.G. Sanjeevi Pillai, the Tamil Nadu-cadre Indian Police Service officer hand-picked to lead the Intelligence Bureau after independence, visited the US in July 1949. George Kennan, then director of policy planning at the US Department of State, understood the significance and opportunities of the visit. To address the threat from Maoists in India, he noted, Sanjeevi would have to “look beyond India’s borders and seek to influence policy in regard to dangers from without”.
The visit did not begin well, historian Paul McGarr has written. Sanjeevi was affronted by the behaviour of the imperious director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover. The IB chief came away with positive impressions of his meetings with CIA officers, however. These included Colonel Richard Stilwell, Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt, and the director of central intelligence, Roscoe Hillenkoetter.
For decades after, even as the two countries publicly clashed over questions of geopolitics and policy, this intelligence relationship proved remarkably durable.
Late in 1960, former CIA officer and scholar Bruce Reidel has written, Sanjeevi’s successor B.N. Mullik, was briefed on covert flights operated out of Chittagong in what was then East Pakistan, to supply weapons and materiel to Tibetan Khampa rebels fighting the PLA. “Mullik did not object to the project,” Reidel adds, “though he did warn the Americans that if one of the CIA’s covert aircraft crashed in Indian territory, it would be a very damaging blow to US-India relations.”
India’s official war history of 1962 shows New Delhi had considered the possibility of using its own military forces to support Tibetan resistance to China in 1950.
According to historian Christopher Andrews, Mullik kept much of the liaison out of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s view, fearing he would shut it down.
The eminent scholar John Garver, who has chronicled the growth of the CIA-India relationship, has noted, “Whatever the actual extent of Indian complicity with US covert operations, Beijing believed that Nehru knew of and cooperated with CIA efforts.” This laid the foundations for the series of border clashes that erupted in mid-1955, leading to the war in 1962.
Playing with Pakistan
The United States, the documents show, ran a parallel surveillance project from Pakistan, though this one focussed on the Soviet Union. Encountering resistance against its surveillance operations from General Ayub Khan’s military regime in 1963, at a meeting of the CIA’s Special Group on 18 July, members were told of “difficulties which have been encountered recently in getting the Pakistani government to go along with the expansion of our special intelligence facilities in that country”.
Following discussions, the Group “agreed that the best method of approach is to make it entirely clear in presenting the proposed three-year MAP programme to Pakistan authorities that the maintenance and expansion of US intelligence facilities at Peshawar is an essential part of the bargain”. “It can also be reaffirmed to Ayub,” it was noted.
The MAP, or Military Assistance Programme, provided extensive support to Pakistan’s armed forces, beginning with $266 million in 1955 and $1,086.5 million the next year. In 1964, Pakistan received $187.55 million, down from $292.31 million the previous year and $549.02 million in 1962. The assistance continued until 1965, when Pakistan went to war over Kashmir.
General Ayub’s concerns might have been linked to the assistance provided to India after the war of 1962, which led the US to help improve its defensive capabilities. A meeting of the Special Group held on 20 June, 1963 recorded, “The US government stands behind previously expressed commitments to ensure that India does not use its own increased military strength to mount an attack on Pakistan.”
Economist S. Akbar Zaidi has written that overall aid to Pakistan in the 1960s, including in the civilian sector, made up as much as 5 percent of its Gross Domestic Product, and was critical in giving impetus to the country’s industrialisation and development. According to Zaidi, American assistance drove Pakistan’s high growth rates of six-seven percent in this period.
(Edited by Mannat Chugh)
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