1 May 2010
Where do you stand on the telephone tapping controversy, and how does one strike a balance between the imperative of intelligence collection and civil liberties?
Tapping is being done all over the world. The Americans claimed to have tapped the late Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev's telephone, so it goes on all the time. Actually we have come into this game very late. I advocated as a deputy secretary in 1964 that we should get into this but it was only as chairman of the Kargil Committee that I was able to recommend that it is important, and that is how it started in 2004, 40 years after it was originally mooted. So we have started this just now. Money-laundering happens, smuggling happens, an Indian Mujahideen claims a politician gave him asylum ... in all of this you cannot be waiting for orders. Monitoring one person often leads to another. The question to be asked is what is done with the records of the conversations? What is a way out ..? One way out is that both the agency and the people on top of it observe proper norms, not harass people even if you have recorded their conversations. A story goes that the man who shot Martin Luther King fled the US. The Americans knew the assassin's name, James Earl Ray, but couldn't find him in the US. So the National Security Agency asked its computers whether a James Earl Ray has sent any communication, and the computer threw up a cable he had sent from London and then he was caught. In the 1940s, the intelligence agencies of the US and the UK concluded an agreement with telephone and telegraph companies which said all overseas communications should be made available to them. The US and the UK accept that national security needs that. There is another story, very plausible, probably true. The FBI was monitoring a gangster and naturally they monitored the gangster's moll and what did they find? The moll was in telephone contact with President Kennedy. The FBI overheard Kennedy's conversations. So when our politicians and others say how can anybody dare to tap our phones, they better beware ! Suppose somebody is monitoring Dawood Ibrahim's man in Mumbai and he is in contact with some other gangster, and that gangster is in touch with a local politician ... naturally the politician will come on the radar. So it all depends on the quality of politics.
But there is scope for abuse ...
Abuse will take place, it does take place. France and Germany complain about the CIA monitoring conversations by commercial houses and making them available to American businesspersons. So when French or German businesspersons bid for a big contract in India, the American knows how much they have bid and he can undercut it. That kind of complaint can come up.
Do you support a legislative oversight on intelligence matters?
I support it, I am all for it, but for that to happen we require a Parliament and assemblies of a different kind. We cannot have MPs or MLAs on the committee who do not have the calibre to do such oversight. If you form a committee, you'll have smaller parties wanting a place on it. How can you expect the committee to work when the MPs do not allow parliamentary proceedings to be conducted in a dignified manner? But now I have to ask you a question, do they have oversight over police? I was home secretary in Madras during the Emergency. After the Emergency was lifted, when MG Ramachandran took over as chief minister, he convened a meeting which I attended. He wanted to tap telephones, but I objected. A week later, the Inspector-General (IG) told me another meeting was held, to which I was not invited, and it was decided that telephones would be tapped. The IG asked me, do you know who's on top of the list of people to be tapped? The number-two man in MGR's Cabinet. Now suppose you have an oversight committee in Assembly, and it grills the police chief under oath. Do you think the chief minister would like that to happen? Therefore, the standard of politicians and integrity of the people in the agencies matters.
What do you make of the arrest of an Indian official on charges of spying for Pakistan and how it became public on the eve of India-Pakistan talks in Thimphu?
It happens in every country, every government. These are human frailties. After all, what is spying? It goes on all the time. In the US, people had spied for 20-30 years before they were caught. So it goes with the profession. It is alleged by some that the Home Ministry did it deliberately. I'm not in a position to contradict the allegation. It could be that one wing of the government was against another wing of the government as a result of turf war. I can't rule it out but at the same time I cannot assert that it was the case. All embassies are supposed to keep an internal watch, and they found out about this lady.
We've read and heard about intelligence and counter-terrorism cooperation with the US. Are we headed in the right direction?
Yes, we are, but could we do better? Of course we can. First, I don't think our communication with the Americans is as good as it should be, at the political, bureaucratic level. Second, we've got a major structural weakness in the sense of intelligence assessment. We require a director of national intelligence who will be the over-all in-charge of national intelligence agencies. There have been ideas floating around about appointing one, but it has not yet come about. I'm also critical of how successive National Security Advisers have functioned.
Do you think the US will give India direct access to David Coleman Headley?
The US will make him available but they will do it in their own time, according to their own procedures. What we must know is this. Headley is what is called an agent who the Americans used to penetrate the Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (LeT). But over a period of time, he became sympathetic to the LeT. He gave the US agency some information and he did reconnaissance for LeT in India. It is because the Americans were operating him that the US was able to warn India in 2008 about attacks from the sea, on hotels, they told us all that. The terrorist strikes were originally fixed for September but they were shifted to November. Our hotels were on full alert (prior to November) but then they relaxed. The Americans can't hand over Headley totally to us because they want to control what he will tell us, they don't want us to know all. Therefore they say, OK, we will do it, but wait for some time. We will have to negotiate with them and but it would have been better if from the beginning we had joint interrogation, but that kind of relationship between India and the US is not yet developed, so it will take time.
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