'KGB moles infiltrated Indira's PMO'- The Times of India: "
RASHMEE ROSHAN LALL
LONDON: Indira Gandhi's India was awash with KGB spies, a Left-leaning bought-up media, wild, well paid-for rumours about CIA conspiracies to foment trouble in Assam and Punjab, millions of Soviet roubles pumped into the governing Congress party and remarkably successful Soviet plots to use honey traps and 'swallows' to seduce Indian diplomats, one of the world's leading Cold War historians has told TOI .
The astonishing revelation, totally undreamt of in scale, ambition and detail, says India was the only country outside the Soviet bloc to be most successfully penetrated by the KGB, right up to the office of the prime minister. The man who has seen the KGB files and written a book about them is Cambridge University professor Christopher Andrew.
On Saturday, he told TOI that his astonishing account of 'the secret history of the 20th century, including the extent to which the KGB was so good at intelligence-gathering and so bad at interpreting it', was important to have a full picture of our world today.
On Monday, Andrew publishes the second volume of the astonishingly detailed KGB files brought to the West by disaffected former KGB agent, the late Vasily Mitrokhin. The 'Mitrokin Archive II', which goes on sale in India on October 15, deals with the KGB's attempts to 'communise', 'Sovietise', make friends and influence people in the developing world.
It includes, Andrew told TOI, a remarkable account by the KGB's main India and South Asia specialist in Delhi, Leonid Shebarshin, telling the story of how, in one instance, he paid a midnight visit to Delhi's corridors of power, "bringing two million rupees around as a gift from the Politburo to Congress (R)".
'The Mitrokhin Archive II' is the sequel to a whistle-blowing volume that set the western world aflutter six years ago because of the authoritativeness, quality, minutae and detail of the information copied from thousands of KGB files by Mitrokhin, who defected to Britain after the USSR collapsed in 1992.
'The Mitrokhin Archive', based on six large containers of top secret KGB documents copied by one of its senior agents in a 12-year period, has been described by the FBI as "the most complete and extensive intelligence ever received from any source".
The British government, which was initially knocked askew some years ago by the details and revelations of the papers, officially described the material in September 1999 as "a major intelligence coup of enormous significance to the UK and its allies—provid(ing) a large number of leads to KGB activities in a period of at least 40 years before Mitrokhin's retirement in 1985".
The second volume, says Andrew, underlines the extent to which India was the red hot theatre of the Cold War game of intelligence-gathering and propaganda wars through the media.
The Soviet embassy in Delhi was upgraded to the status of the KGB's "main residency", he says, "which may be a boring title but it's the equivalent of getting a knighthood". The KGB files, reproduced in 'The Mitrokhin Archive II', show that ten Indian newspapers as well as one press agency were on the Soviet payroll. In 1972, the KGB claimed to have planted more than 3,500 articles in Indian newspapers. "
RASHMEE ROSHAN LALL
LONDON: Indira Gandhi's India was awash with KGB spies, a Left-leaning bought-up media, wild, well paid-for rumours about CIA conspiracies to foment trouble in Assam and Punjab, millions of Soviet roubles pumped into the governing Congress party and remarkably successful Soviet plots to use honey traps and 'swallows' to seduce Indian diplomats, one of the world's leading Cold War historians has told TOI .
The astonishing revelation, totally undreamt of in scale, ambition and detail, says India was the only country outside the Soviet bloc to be most successfully penetrated by the KGB, right up to the office of the prime minister. The man who has seen the KGB files and written a book about them is Cambridge University professor Christopher Andrew.
On Saturday, he told TOI that his astonishing account of 'the secret history of the 20th century, including the extent to which the KGB was so good at intelligence-gathering and so bad at interpreting it', was important to have a full picture of our world today.
On Monday, Andrew publishes the second volume of the astonishingly detailed KGB files brought to the West by disaffected former KGB agent, the late Vasily Mitrokhin. The 'Mitrokin Archive II', which goes on sale in India on October 15, deals with the KGB's attempts to 'communise', 'Sovietise', make friends and influence people in the developing world.
It includes, Andrew told TOI, a remarkable account by the KGB's main India and South Asia specialist in Delhi, Leonid Shebarshin, telling the story of how, in one instance, he paid a midnight visit to Delhi's corridors of power, "bringing two million rupees around as a gift from the Politburo to Congress (R)".
'The Mitrokhin Archive II' is the sequel to a whistle-blowing volume that set the western world aflutter six years ago because of the authoritativeness, quality, minutae and detail of the information copied from thousands of KGB files by Mitrokhin, who defected to Britain after the USSR collapsed in 1992.
'The Mitrokhin Archive', based on six large containers of top secret KGB documents copied by one of its senior agents in a 12-year period, has been described by the FBI as "the most complete and extensive intelligence ever received from any source".
The British government, which was initially knocked askew some years ago by the details and revelations of the papers, officially described the material in September 1999 as "a major intelligence coup of enormous significance to the UK and its allies—provid(ing) a large number of leads to KGB activities in a period of at least 40 years before Mitrokhin's retirement in 1985".
The second volume, says Andrew, underlines the extent to which India was the red hot theatre of the Cold War game of intelligence-gathering and propaganda wars through the media.
The Soviet embassy in Delhi was upgraded to the status of the KGB's "main residency", he says, "which may be a boring title but it's the equivalent of getting a knighthood". The KGB files, reproduced in 'The Mitrokhin Archive II', show that ten Indian newspapers as well as one press agency were on the Soviet payroll. In 1972, the KGB claimed to have planted more than 3,500 articles in Indian newspapers. "
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