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Israeli spy masters to train Indian intelligence operatives By By Qutubuddin Aziz
India’s espionage
operations in Pakistan have burgeoned in their intensity and scale in
the past three years under Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpaee’s BJP-led
Government. His Pakistan-hating Home Minister, Mr. L.K. Advani, is said
to be the architect and executor of plans for the revamping of India’s
principal secret service for external espionage, the RAW (Research and
Analysis Wing). Having conferred with Israel’s intelligence heads in Tel
Aviv in June, Mr. Advani wants his RAW to have the Israeli
cloak-and-dagger
Mossad as its role model. According to a research paper by Ejaz Akram,
a Ph. D student at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC,
published in the Spring 2000 issue of the USA’s Journal of South Asian
and Middle Eastern Studies, the RAW had deployed some 35,000 agents in
Pakistan between 1983-93 and it was operating some 40 terrorist training
camps in Rajasthan, East Punjab, Indian-held Kashmir and Uttar Pradesh.
The training camps are run by RAW’s Special Service Bureau. Some Indian
RAW agents, who were arrested in Pakistan recently, were shown on the
Pakistan TV network; they had confessed that they had committed acts of
sabotage and spying after being trained in India. Ejaz Akram’s article
about India’s RAW and Israel’s Mossad refers to RAW’s hand in the hijacking
of an Indian airliner to Lahore in 1971 in order to foist a terrorist
label on the Kashmiri freedom movement, RAW’s training of the Mukti Bahini
force of the Awami League in India and its funding of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s
election campaign in East Pakistan in 1970. Akram says that more recently,
the RAW was beefing up the secular forces and the Hindu minority in Bangladesh.
A revelation made in Akram’s article is that “outside of the Subcontinent,
RAW is busy in espionage in the United States. There is an extensive network
of Indian operatives controlled and managed by the Indian Embassy. Some
of its covert activities include infiltration of U.S. long distance telephone
lines and obtaining valuable information used to blackmail the relatives
of U.S. residents in India in order to achieve its objectives. It is also
known to covertly fund political candidates running for elections in the
U.S.”
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