by admin | May 25, 2021 | Muslim World, Opinions
By Saeed Naqvi,
“Problems” like Afghanistan, even Iran, created in the thick of the Cold War, are now in the lap of a declining sole superpower in a withdrawal mode. Since I was witness to both, the Saur and Islamic revolutions, I thought the New Year might be a good occasion to ferret out material from my notebook focusing on the Genesis. To synchronise with the arrival of 2019, let us revert to New Year’s Day, 40 years ago, 1978, when President Jimmy Carter accompanied by his National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski arrived in New Delhi. Morarji Desai was Prime Minister and Atal Bihari Vajpayee the Minister for External Affairs.
The two events need not be bound together by conspiracy theories but within four months of the Carter visit, the Saur revolution on April 28 brought Communists to power in Kabul. The next morning my story was banner headlines with the Indian Express. That Communists had taken over in Afghanistan. It was a world scoop. And I owed it to one impeccable source.
A year after Carter’s New Delhi visit, the Shah was dethroned by the Ayatullahs in Tehran. The youth in the vanguard of the revolution laid siege to US embassy from November 4, 1979, for 444 days until January 20, 1981. I still remember the tears of relief in Carter’s eyes as he embraced Vice President Walter Mondale when the hostages were released. The Carter presidency was consumed by Iran. Soon murals of Uncle Sam went up with cryptic captions: “Shaitaan e Buzurg” or Senior Satan. These incidents continued to cast a long shadow on the West’s fluctuating relations with Iran even during the bizarre Iran-contra deal when Iran, Israel and the US were in one amazing scrum.
The Shah’s notorious Savak agency, never secretive with the CIA, planned to eliminate the Left which was gaining in influence around then Afghan President Mohammad Daud who had deposed King Zahir Shah in a coup in 1973. Thereafter, the King lived in exile, in Rome, until the post 9/11 US occupation when he returned as Father of the Nation.
Two communist parties of Afghanistan, Khalq and Parchan, corresponded more or less to India’s CPI and CPI-M. I was able to attend the historic press conference addressed by Afghanistan’s head of the government after the coup, Noor Mohammad Taraki. He was leader of the Khalq faction. It was on the margins of this occasion, where well-informed middle level communist leaders were present, I picked up bits and pieces of how the coup came about.
On April 17, Mir Akbar Khyber, a trade union leader attached to the Parcham faction, was murdered, exposing prematurely the plot to eliminate the Left. Thus alerted, Communist cells in the army and the air force led by Aslam Watanjar and Abdul Qadir were activated. Reinforcement entered the palace and killed Daud. Coming of the Communists to power paved the way for the Soviet invasion in December 1979.
Brzezinski was back in the region, this time in Pakistan, peering over the parapets into Afghanistan, plotting the world’s largest programme of breeding Salafists, arming them to the hilt, to wage war against Soviet occupation. After this war had been won, spare ultra-Islamic jehadis, their morale boosted by having helped defeat a super power, flexed their muscles in Kashmir, Cairo, Algeria where the West blundered by helping the army upturn the result of the 1991 election which brought the Islamists Salvation Front in the lead.
The cancellation of election results bred more Islamism. Another complicating factor has not been mentioned yet. Since 1990, the US egged on by UNICAL, the gas giant, has developed a major interest in TAPI, the Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India Pipeline. Brzezinski shrugged his shoulders: We wanted to bring down the Soviet Union; “we were not worried about some stirred up Muslims”.
I must put it down to lack of hard work on my part but the beginnings of the Islamic revolution have remained something of a haze. Was Ayatullah’s first instinct to give the new regime a civilian face in Iran? A few days after the revolution, journalists like me were directed to meet the suave Prime Minister, Mehdi Bazargan. In form, feature, sartorial detail, he was the very antithesis of the Ayatullah. He looked very European in a bow-tie and spoke English like a French grandee.
That he lasted barely nine months in that post was because of his strong opposition to the occupation of the American embassy and the taking of US hostages. Abolhassan Banisadr, who escorted Ayatullah Khomeini from exile in Neauphle-le-Chateau, 30 km from Paris, was made President. He was exiled because of internal conspiracies.
From the holy city of Qom came stories of the civilians plotting to oust the Ayatullahs who required a civilian front because a true blue Islamic revolution cannot be deemed to have taken place in the absence of the 12th Imam whose appearance will impart legitimacy to the revolution. The concept of the awaited messiah is common to all Abrahamic religions.
Various interests jump into a revolutionary situation to extract advantage. Just the other day, Marine Le Pen, with her fascist agenda, tried to move in sideways into the yellow vest agitation in Paris. The confusing chaos caused a strong wing of the Ayatullahs dust up the theory of Vali Faqih, or the intermediate Imam who can guide the revolution pending the appearance of the Mehdi or Messiah.
Like the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, one use of the Islamic revolution was to be the bulwark against the Soviets. But for them to play this role, the pro-Soviet Tudeh party, which had played a role in the success of the revolution, had to pay a price. They were no longer underground, as they had been during the Shah, and easy targets to be eliminated. A more radical Mujahideen-e-Khalq, crossed over to Iraq where Saddam Hussain nursed them as an anti-Ayatullah force.
If the CIA had a hand in eliminating the Communists, well, by the same token they have helped consolidate the Ayatullahs. What joy in this outcome?
(Saeed Naqvi is a commentator on political and diplomatic affairs. The views expressed are personal. He can be reached on saeednaqvi@hotmail.com)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Opinions
By Saeed Naqvi,
Indira Gandhi declared the Emergency in 1975, plonk in the middle of the most intense phase of the Cold War. Detente was going so badly for the Americans that stand up comedians in Washington were comparing it to a wife swapping party “from where you return alone”.
After the Vietnam debacle, Washington was going to exert every muscle not to allow Moscow to build upon the strategic asset it had created for itself in New Delhi during the 1971 Bangladesh war.
In fact, the Congress split of 1969 was itself an advantage for Moscow. Indira Gandhi had discarded the conservative, pro-capital big wigs, more comfortable with Congress stalwarts like Morarji Desai whom she had defeated in the Parliamentary party contest to become Prime Minister in 1966.
Not only was a former card carrying Communist (from Eton and Oxford too), Mohan Kumaramangalam, part author of the split, he had worked out an arrangement with the General Secretary of the CPI, S.A. Dange, described as a policy of “Unite and Struggle”. We shall, said Dange, unite with the Congress’ progressive policies but “struggle” against its “anti people” deviations.
This was a pronounced leftward lurch and it was going to be resisted by a coalition of the Right, both internal and external. Indeed, as early as 1967, within a year of her coming to power, Indira Gandhi was given notice: she lost elections in eight states to parties of the opposition. This groundswell would obviously suit the purposes of the Congress old guard discarded by Gandhi.
The most succinct observation on Gandhi’s ideological leaning came from the correspondent of the Times London, Peter Hazelhurst: “She is a little to the Left of self interest.”
Her ideological inconsistency becomes apparent if one reverts to her earliest days in 1959 as President of the Congress. She dismissed the world’s first Communist government which had come to power through the ballot box in Kerala. That she took American help to unsettle Kerala to justify the state government’s dismissal was revealed by US ambassador, Ellsworth Bunker in an oral interview kept in the Columbia University archives. Whatever doubts there might have been about the Bunker revelations, were cleared later by Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan in his memoirs.
During her Prime Ministership in 1976, the Congress party raised a storm against the US having installed a nuclear device on Nanda Devi peak to spy on China. The controversy had many twists. A joint CIA and Intelligence Bureau effort to install the device in 1965 (Lal Bahadur Shastri was Prime Minister then) had failed because of bad weather. Worse, two plutonium laden capsules had been lost. According to the Intelligence estimates the plutonium was enough for half a Hiroshima bomb.
In the course of an interview, Chester Bowles, US ambassador during Indira Gandhi’s first innings, took my breath away. He couldn’t understand Congress protest. “After all Indira had asked me to complete in 1966 the project which had been aborted in 1965.”
Well, this is how the Congress’ attitude towards the super powers varied from time to time. But for the West the spectacle of Gandhi and Dange in a warm embrace was alarming because of the context. The West had taken a series of knocks – Vietnam, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Nicaragua were all Communist. Additionally Communist leaders Enrico Berlinguer, Georges Marchais, Santiago Carrillo in Italy, France and Spain respectively were a headache for the West. Given this state of play, India was too priceless a trophy to be easily lost to Moscow’s sphere of influence.
The obstacle in the way of a counteroffensive was Gandhi’s personality. She had evolved into a charismatic and, therefore, invincible leader. Proprietor of the Indian Express, Ramnath Goenka and Nanaji Deshmukh, fell into deep thought.
The Indian mind reveres renunciation. It occurred to the head hunters that once a top ranking Socialist leader, Jayaprakash Narayan, had renounced political power. He was keeping himself busy with Gandhiji’s ashrams and such unlikely causes as Acharya Vinoba Bhave’s Bhoodan or Land Gift movement. JP agreed to lead the movement provided it remained peaceful.
The youth were in agitation across the globe against the excesses of the Vietnam War – Grosvenor Square, London, barricades in Paris, police shooting down of students at the Kent state university in Ohio, US. Soon thereafter the Navnirman Andolan, youth agitation in Gujarat erupted on a seemingly flimsy issue of hostel fees. After visiting Gujarat, JP was prevailed upon to launch a similar movement against corruption and bad governance in Bihar. It was a tepid agenda livened up only by the media dedicated to the task of keeping up the pressure on New Delhi, boosting notions of a “total revolution” one day, asking police and the bureaucracy not to obey “bad” orders another, and so on. The immediate target of the “movement” was a hapless Chief Minister, Abdul Ghafoor, quite bewildered by his own eminence. Why was he in the eye of a storm? He had sunken cheeks and a drooping frame, draped in a much worn Sherwani. By way of hospitality for visiting scribes, he would fetch a bottle of old smuggler Scotch whisky from his wardrobe full of smudged clothes which were clearly waiting for laundry. He was a simple man, not a plausible enough crook to invite a national movement for his ouster.
JP, who had invited me to stay in his house in Patna’s Kadam Kuan, listened to my stories even about the Chief Minister with a kindly smile. He was a trusting man and totally non judgemental about the wide range of political interests who had clambered onto his movement.
The movement was carried mostly by RSS cadres, with a sprinkling of socialists, Gandhians and Congress (O), mostly those who had been shown the door by Gandhi in 1969. This exactly was the rough outline of the group which morphed into a coalition in the course of the movement. The coalition came to power in 1977 as the Janata Party.
Supposing the Allahabad High Court had not disqualified Gandhi, how would events have shaped? If Sanjay Gandhi, Siddhartha Shankar Ray, Muhammad Yunus and others had not forced her hand on the Emergency, how would the Gandhi-JP standoff have concluded?
(A senior commentator on political and diplomatic affairs, Saeed Naqvi can be reached on saeednaqvi@hotmail.com. The views expressed are personal.)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Books
By Vikas Datta,
Title: A Legacy of Spies; Author: John le Carre; Publisher: Penguin Random House UK; Pages: 320; Price: Rs 599
Old soldiers never die but fade away but what about spies? Do they live in the same secretive anonymity of their careers or dread the spooks’ curse: “May I read about you in the papers” coming true as archives open, revelations pour out and a new regime oblivious of earlier conditions or their contributions is in charge.
It is the latter fear that strikes long retired British spy as he is suddenly summoned from his uneventful retired life in the remote French countryside to London by his former service for a matter which might be a bit urgent.
The message to Peter Guillam, the trusted right-hand man of George Smiley of the “Circus” (as Le Carre termed the MI6), says that a matter in which he appears to “have played a significant role some years back has unexpectedly raised its head” and they need him to help them respond to it. And the bland message has also subtle but unmistakable threat too.
And as he goes to meet the service’s current legal adviser and a woman from the historical section, he finds himself stumped to be confronted with something he fervently wished was forgotten – Operation Windfall. “Does an easing of the soul take place when you realize your worst expectations have been fulfilled? Not in my case”.
For this, longtime Carre fans and followers might recall, was what formed the basis of his iconic “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” (1963). And even half a century after it, the spy-turned-writer, now 85, proves he has lost none of his powers as he provides the definite closure to the story that propelled him to enduring fame with its prequel and sequel here.
As is Le Carre’s wont, the story begins midway in the unforgiving present, where Guillam, who played a small role in “The Spy Who..” but came into his own with “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”, is asked to come clean on this disaster which ended with the death of British spy Alec Leamas and his innocent girlfriend Liz Gold on the newly-constructed Berlin Wall.
For Guillam is told that it turns out that both Leamas and Gold had children who are determined to raise the issue in the parliament, press and courts for the wanton death of their parents but the service cannot do much as it turns out most of the files on this particular operation are missing.
This leads to Guillam recollecting the story of the eventful story of what was behind Leamas’ mission – and what the aftermath was, though being careful to avoid telling his interlocutors more than what he needs to, despite all their pressure and inducements. Instead he plays for time, stonewalling as much as he can before making gradual concessions.
There are also a couple of encounters with Leamas’ son, who offers him a “bargain deal” for dropping the matter. But it only ends when Guillam takes matters into his own hands and contacts another old operative, who tells him how to get in touch with Smiley. And it is the old fox, who finally makes his appearance in the final few pages – well worth the wait – who settles everything.
Filled with the minutiae of espionage techniques and purposes, the back-biting and cliques and the fragile nerves of spies, operatives and helpers, Le Carre’s latest work is again a taut account of the amorality, split-section decisions and deception this line of business requires in its successful practitioners.
It also places “The Spy Who Came..” in a more bleak context that it was, as well as revealing the fate of many old characters never seen in subsequent works including Smiley’s long term-adversary Karla and the supposed beneficiary of the Operation Windfall among others.
And it also shows how even effective spies, how much they conceal or suppress it, can never totally subdue their conscience. As Guillam observes in the beginning, “a professional intelligence officer is no more immune to human feelings than the rest of mankind”, and in the end: “How much of our human feeling can we dispense with in the name of freedom…”
That is the question that Le Carre always raises – and never loses its importance.
(Vikas Datta can be contacted at vikas.d@ians.in)
—IANS
