Paul M. McGarr. Spying in South Asia: Britain, the United States, and India’s Secret Cold War. Cambridge University Press, 2024. 348 pp. Hardcover $39.99.
Can a surreal situation become even more surreal?1
In October 1989, former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger entered a Chicago courthouse and testified that, to his knowledge, Morarji Desai, India’s Prime Minister from 1977-1979, had not been an asset of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Kissinger was referring to investigative reporter Seymour Hersh’s claim in his 1983 book, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House, that Desai had worked as a paid informant for the CIA. Hersh asserted that during the Johnson and Nixon administrations, Desai pocketed $20,000 a year as a CIA source and even divulged to the Nixon White House that, in December 1971, India planned to attack West Pakistan. It was a stunning allegation and immediately became front-page news, both in the United States and India.2
In response to Hersh’s book, Desai denounced the claim and filed a $50 million libel lawsuit against the author. It took six years for the case to reach a courtroom, and by the time of the 1989 trial, Desai was ninety-three years old and too frail to travel from India to the United States to testify in person. Yet he still sought his day in court and expected to triumph. Kissinger, who testified in general terms so as not to identify intelligence sources, claimed that while he could not definitely state that Desai had no connection with the CIA. “[I] …had nothing to do with getting the [intelligence] information, I had only to do with the end product.” If you think it is odd for a former US Secretary of State to declare that another country’s former leader was not an American spy, you’re right. During his three-and-a-half hours on the stand, Kissinger did not implicate Desai in US espionage, but he did shed light on CIA activities on the Indian subcontinent and reinforced a popular belief that the hand of the US, through the CIA, had influenced, even directed, events in Indian politics.3
The Hersh-Desai trial occurred late in US-India Cold War history—and toward the end of Paul M. McGarr’s excellent 2024 book, Spying in South Asia: Britain, the United States, and India’s Secret Cold War. Billed as the “first scholarly examination of interventions made by the intelligence and security services of Britain and the United States in post-colonial India” (1-2), McGarr constructs an engaging work that will be required reading for scholars of modern India and Cold War history. Furthermore, the book provides a greater sense of how intelligence history can fill in the gaps left by foreign relations and military histories. Security studies accounts, such as McGarr’s book, also chronicle the actions of states and their motives, especially behind closed doors. Any work that better illuminates the actions of policymakers, particularly when they are trying to obscure them, is a welcomed addition for scholars.
1947 photo of Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister of the Republic of India. (Wikimedia Commons)
Throughout his book, the intelligence individuals McGarr profiles are less James Bond and George Smiley than bureaucrats aiming to steer public opinion, but also prone to exaggerating the meaning of the actions of communists, real and imagined. McGarr repeatedly emphasizes that their bureaucratic machinations, covert or otherwise, were not particularly successful and were often self-defeating. Spying in South Asia skillfully depicts that post-WWII intelligence operations were not confined to Cold War Europe but regularly found in the developing world. This is an impressive work that challenges readers to conceptualize Cold War intelligence beyond an East-West binary and demonstrates that states like India had agency to challenge and even thwart superpower meddling.
Over ten chapters, as well as a concise introduction and brief conclusion, McGarr examines how, despite the end of British rule of India in 1947 and centuries of oppression, the UK still sought to retain the newly independent nation as an ally. Fear of losing access to intelligence about the Indian subcontinent, as well as its proximity to the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, pushed the British to maintain a relationship even as they were being shown the door by the successful Indian nationalist movement.4 The people populating Spying in South Asia are heads of state like Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and US Presidents from Truman to Reagan, diplomats such as US Ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith and the UK’s Sir Archibald Nye, and intelligence officials including CIA director Allen Dulles and T. G. Sanjeevi Pillai, the first director of India’s Intelligence Bureau (IB). McGarr’s book is focused mostly on the Cold War in South Asia, spanning the years 1947 to 1991, but his conclusion carries the story through India’s 1998 nuclear weapon tests; the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks; and more recent bombings inflicted on India by assailants traced to Pakistan. While his focus is the UK and US, McGarr also discusses Soviet actions in the subcontinent and finds attempts to steer Indian public opinion in a pro-USSR direction. These actions typically involved funding Indian publications and political organizations, and while they did not generate as much embarrassment to the Soviets as the Desai affair did for the Americans, they were no more successful than US and UK covert operations.
The first three chapters of the book trace the end of the British Empire in South Asia and independent India’s early intelligence liaisons with Britain. Even with the British formally gone, their influence was still felt economically, socially, culturally, politically, and legally. As Nehru helped construct an Indian state to address urgent matters like hunger and poverty, he also established intelligence services that would partner with the US and UK. Nehru, who had been surveilled and imprisoned by British authorities for decades, now relied on them as the foundations of his nation’s spy agencies. In time, though, he lamented that India’s intelligence infrastructure was too much influenced by the British, replicating the same oppressive methods that characterized the colonial era. The early part of McGarr’s book shines a spotlight on the IB’s first Director, T.G. Sanjeevi Pillai, who, despite a long career in law enforcement, had no previous experience working in intelligence. McGarr quotes colleagues who struggled under the director’s “prickly temperament and an abrasive self-confidence” (19). Throughout his tenure, even British intelligence officials, who sought a deep partnership with Indian security services, grew skeptical of the director, especially his thirst for power and his dictatorial tendencies.
1967 photo of Svetlana Alliluyeva, Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin’s daughter and a Soviet defector to the US, in New York City. (Wikimedia Commons)
Spying in South Asia’s middle segment, chapters four through seven, is strong, focusing primarily on India in the 1960s. Like any good work on India during this decade, there is a thoughtful discussion of the 1962 Sino-Indian War and how unprepared India was for the fight. McGarr contributes to the war’s vast literature, which has greatly benefited from recent scholarship reexamining the conflict by historians Bérénice Guyot-Réchard and Tanvi Madan.5 By the 1960s, British intelligence influence had peaked due to budget cuts and a lack of personnel operating in the subcontinent. Filling the vacuum was the CIA, including through its support of Tibetan rebels against China, which injected India squarely into a burning Cold War conflict. Even after the Dalai Lama fled Tibet in March 1959, finding sanctuary in India, the CIA continued to sneak fighters into Tibet for years (115). US Ambassador to India John Kenneth Galbraith (1961-1964) appears prophetic, seeing early on in his tenure that the CIA was more a problem in India than a solution. He sought to curtail the agency’s work in the subcontinent, and the organization strived to keep matters away from the diplomat. Neither side was successful. McGarr’s middle chapters illuminate the UK’s Information Research Department, operating out of the Foreign Office, which produced anti-Communist propaganda. Chapter seven, about Cold War dissidents and defectors, analyzes high-profile cases, including Svetlana Alliluyeva’s March 1967 defection from the Soviet Union to India. Defections increasingly strained India’s relations with the Soviet Union, but the fact that Stalin’s own daughter had fled was both a diplomatic coup and headache.6
The book’s final section, comprising chapters eight through ten, is its most impressive, a triumph for McGarr, as his narrative builds and builds to a thoroughly entertaining crescendo. McGarr astutely connects a series of 1967 events that exposed the CIA’s long-standing role in funding a number of international institutions and cultural bodies. Bombshell exposés in Western publications revealed how CIA funds made their way to the ledgers of US outfits such as the Asia Foundation and such Indian organizations as the Indian Committee for Cultural Freedom (181-183). The same year, the weekly newspaper of India’s Communist Party purportedly divulged the name of CIA officials in India, the office location from which the CIA operated in New Delhi, and the agency’s plans to influence Indian democracy. In time, it also became apparent that the KGB had an extensive disinformation campaign and believed that attacking the CIA was the best means to support communist parties in Indian elections. Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was all too eager to believe and campaign against CIA subterfuge, real or imagined. As McGarr points out, even well into the 1980s, after her dictatorial rule during India’s Emergency, political exile, and return to power, she continued to believe the CIA plotted her downfall (192). Like Galbraith before him, US Ambassador to India Daniel Patrick Moynihan became a critic of the CIA, surmising that its estimates of Soviet power in India were unfounded and that the agency’s lust for secrecy threatened US foreign policy.7 The concluding section also examines publications like Hersh’s The Price of Power and Thomas Powers’ The Man Who Kept Secrets, about CIA Director Richard Helm, as well as articles that promised firsthand accounts from CIA officers turned critics who revealed the agency’s handiwork in funding Indian elections, keeping Indian assets like the accused Morarji Desai on the US’s payroll, and monitoring nuclear activity in the subcontinent. There was a market for any work that claimed a CIA hand in Indian affairs, but the record clearly shows that the CIA was hardly an effective and secret force at work. McGarr correctly points out that “Toward the end of the Cold War, the Agency had become anything but the all-seeing and all-powerful force in South Asia that its detractors claimed” (208).
As enlightening as McGarr’s book is, a couple of critiques are in order. One is that certain actors and events seem shoehorned into the narrative, such as chapter three’s examination of longtime Indian political figure V.K. Krishna Menon. The chapter does offer an intelligence angle, to wit, years of surveillance found that despite his decades-long connections to British and Indian communist groups, Menon was not a communist or a secret agent of the Soviet Union. Nor was he a prominent figure in Indian intelligence (despite heading the Defense Ministry during India’s disastrous 1962 war with China), and his inclusion in this book seems unnecessary, something of a rerun of material McGarr has previously published. Another matter is that the book’s subtitle first references Britain in India’s secret cold war, but focus on the British is limited, and their diminishing influence is less a matter of an intelligence failure or policy disaster than the more mundane fact that the British government simply cut funding for intelligence programs in South Asia and employed fewer people to do the work there. British influence waned not because of blunders but because of budgets and bureaucracy. In the end, McGarr’s assessment of British intelligence in India was anticlimactic.
McGarr made great use of archival collections in the US, UK, and India, including the Nehru Memorial Museum & Library and the National Archives of India. If his use of Indian sources seems limited, however, that is likely because conducting archival research in India, particularly on sensitive subjects like statecraft and high-level government actions, is challenging as many files are not yet open to the public.8
As with his 2013 book, The Cold War in South Asia: Britain, the United States and the Indian Subcontinent, 1945-1965, Paul McGarr has produced a superb and expertly crafted work of Cold War history. Scholarly knowledge of the Cold War keeps expanding thanks to McGarr’s thorough investigations of US, UK, and Indian relations through diplomatic, military, and now intelligence sources. Readers of Spying in South Asia will gain a better sense of intelligence history and how it enriches our understanding of the Cold War. The period between 1945 and 1991 saw arms, space, and foreign aid races, but also an intelligence race. In that race, one takeaway from McGarr’s book is that there were no winners, only losers. Through his two books, McGarr has told the story of independent India from its founding to modern day. One wonders where he will go next in telling the history of India. Wherever that is, you don’t need a secret agent to tell you it will be a great work of history.
1958 photo of pro-Tibet and anti-China protesters, in India, holding a banner that reads, “Communist China Hands off Tibet.” (Wikimedia Commons)
- The author thanks Elizabeth Mahan for her advice and encouragement as well as copyediting guidance through the writing and revision process.
- Paul M. McGarr, Spying in South Asia: Britain, the United States, and India’s Secret Cold War (Cambridge University Press, 2024).
- For more information on the Hersh-Desai episode, see pages 209-210 and 225-231.
- Besides having access to Indian subcontinent intelligence and easier ways to spy on Russia and China, other reasons McGarr states the British sought to stay involved in South Asia were closer access to Middle Eastern oilfields, India’s vast supply of cheap labor, its potential as an industrial base especially as Nehru pushed for Soviet-style rapid industrialization, and the US’s lack of interest in the area as opposed to Europe.
- Bérénice Guyot-Réchard, Shadow States: India, China, and the Himalayas, 1910-1962 (Cambridge University Press, 2017); Tanvi Madan, Fateful Triangle: How China Shaped U.S.-India Relations During the Cold War (Brookings Institution Press, 2020).
- For more on the March 1967 defection of Svetlana Alliluyeva, see Chester Bowles, Promises to Keep: My Year in Public Life, 1941-1969 (Harper & Row Publishers, 1971).
- For more of Moynihan’s criticisms of the CIA, see McGarr, 198-221.
- McGarr does mention India’s external intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), which has existed since 1968, but has not produced an official history. For more on the R&AW, see Shreyas Shende and Rudra Chaudhuri, “The Research and Analysis Wing” in Institutional Roots of India’s Security Policy, ed. Milan Vaishnav (Oxford University Press, 2024).
