Godspeed, Ramanji. From the Times of India obituary: [...]On
Sunday evening, the 77-year old Raman - Raman mama to some of his
acolytes - one of the founders of India's spy outfit Research and
Analysis Wing (RAW) and the public face of its underrated and
understated analysts community, passed away in Chennai. In the arcane
world of espionage, where practitioners generally keep a low profile
(particularly in India), Raman became a prolific contributor to public
discourse on intelligence matters, often challenging conventional
wisdom, and going upstream of establishment flow, especially on Pakistan
and the United States. In a political establishment that is
increasingly in thrall of Washington, he repeatedly counseled caution
and vigilance, a result of what he saw as repeated American betrayal of
Indian interests.
In fact, the United States was the only
country that riled him up in conversations - not even Pakistan, which he
dismissed as a basket case beneath contempt. He said he ''always loved
the US...and always liked the American people'' but he despised
Washington's policies. ''There is one American species, which I could
never bring myself to like during the 27 years I spent in the
intelligence community -- the officers of the US State Department,''
he writes in his memoirs, The Kao-boys of R&AW: Down Memory Lane,
the title being an admiring tribute to the RN Kao, RAW's principal
founder and first chief.
Two incidents, both relating to
Pakistan -- and to one individual in particular -- deeply colored his
perspective of Washington and its mandarins. The first came after the
1993 Mumbai blasts engineered by Pakistan through Dawood Ibrahim. Raman
headed the counter-terrorism division of RAW
at that time and rushed to Mumbai soon after the serial explosions that
killed 259 people, just two weeks before the first World Trade Center
attack by Ramzi Yousef. Among the evidence gathered by the police were
detonators and timers that were of American origin. On the advice of
then Prime Minister Narasimha Rao, Raman said he shared this evidence
with US experts, and at their request, allowed them to take the material
back to America. Bad mistake, he later regretted.
A few days
later, Raman said, the Americans gave an unsigned report saying the
detonators and timers were of American origin and were part of stock
given to Pakistan during the Afghan war in the 1980s. The report
gratuitously added this did not necessarily mean the terrorists got them
from the ISI. It pointed out that in Pakistan there was a lot of
leakage of government arms and ammunition to smugglers and expressed the
view that the terrorists might have procured them from the smugglers.
''When I asked them to return the detonator and the timer as promised
by them they replied that their forensic experts had by mistake
destroyed them. They did not apparently want to leave any clinching
evidence against Pakistan in our hands,'' Raman wrote later. ''This was a
bitter lesson to us that in matters concerning Pakistan one should not
totally trust the US. They would do anything to ensure that no harm came
to Pakistan.'' [...]
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