The Inception: KGB's Early Intrigues in Post-Independence India

The Third World country on which the KGB eventually concentrated the most operational effort during the Cold War was India. Under Stalin, however, India had been regarded as an imperialist puppet. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia dismissed Mohandas 'Mahatma' Gandhi, who led India to Independence in 1947, as 'a reactionary who betrayed the people and helped the imperialists against them; aped the ascetics; pretended in a demagogic way to be a supporter of Indian Independence and an enemy of the British; and widely exploited religious prejudice'. Despite his distaste for Stalinist attacks Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of independent India, "did not doubt that the Soviet revolution had advanced human society by a great leap and had lit a bright flame which could not be smothered". Though later eulogized by Soviet writers as a leader of an international magnitude' who ranked 'among the best minds of the twentieth century', Nehru was well aware that until Stalin died in 1953 he, like Gandhi, was regarded as a reactionary. During the early years of Indian independence, secret correspondence from Moscow to the Communist Party of India (CPI) was frequently intercepted by the Intelligence Branch (IB) in New Delhi (as it had been when the IB was working for the British Raj).

According to the head of the IB, B.N. Mulik, until the early 1950s 'every instruction that had issued from Moscow had expressed the necessity and importance (for) the Indian Communist Party to overthrow the "reactionary" Nehru Government'. Early in 1951, Mullik gave Nehru a copy of the latest exhortations from Moscow to the CPI, which contained a warning that they must not fall into government hands, Nehru; 'laughed out loud and remarked that Moscow did not know how smart our Intelligence was'.

Neither Nehru nor the IB, however, realized how thoroughly the Indian embassy in Moscow was being penetrated by the KGB, using its usual varieties of the honey trap. The Indian diplomat PROKHOR was recruited probably in the early 1950s, with the help of a female swallow, codenamed NEVEROVA, who presumably seduced him. The KGB was pleased with the material which PROKHOR provided, which included on two occasions the embassy code-book and deciphering tables, since in 1954 it increased his monthly payments from 1,000 to 4,000 rupees. Another Indian diplomat, RADAR, was recruited in 1956, also with the assistance of a swallow, who on this occasion claimed (probably falsely) to be pregnant. A third KGB swallow persuaded a cipher clerk in the Indian embassy, ARTUR, to go heavily into debt to make it easier to compromise him. He was recruited as an agent in 1957 after being trapped (probably into illegal currency dealing) by a KGB officer posing as a black-marketer. As a result of these and other penetrations of the embassy, Soviet codebreakers were probably able to decrypt substantial numbers of Indian diplomatic communications. As KGB operations in India expanded during the 1950s and 1960s, the Centre discovered (and perhaps even exaggerated) the extent of the IB's previous penetration of the CPI. According to a KGB report, an investigation into Promode Das Gupta, who later became the secretary of the Bengal Communist Party, concluded that he had been recruited by the IB in 1947. Further significant IB penetrations were reported in the Kerala and Madras parties. By the 1960s KGB's penetration of the Indian Intelligence community and other parts of its official bureaucracy had enabled it to turn the tables on the IB. After the KGB became the main conduit for both money and secret communications from Moscow, high-level IB penetration of the CPI became much more difficult. As in other Communist parties, this secret channel was known only to a small inner circle within the leadership.

In 1959 the PCI General Secretary, Ajoy Ghosh, agreed with the Delhi residency on plans to found an import-export business for trade with the Soviet bloc, headed by a senior Party member codenamed DED, whose profits would be creamed off for Party funds. Within little more than a decade, its annual profits had grown to over 3 million rupees. The Soviet news agency Novosti provided further subsidies by routinely paying the CPI publishing house at a rate 50 percent above its normal charges.

Moscow's interest in Nehru was greatly enhanced by his emergence(together with Nasser and Tito) as one of the leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement, which began to take shape at the Bandung Conference in 1955. An exchange of official visits in the same year by Nehru and Khrushchev opened a new era in Indo-Soviet relations. On his return from India in December, Khrushchev reported to the Presidium that he had received a warm welcome, but criticized the 'primitive' portrayal of India in Soviet publications and films which demonstrated a poor grasp of Indian culture. Khrushchev was, however, clearly pleased with the intelligence and personal security provided by the KGB during his trip and proposed that the officers concerned be decorated and considered for salary increases.