Undercover

Bruce Riedel’s comment that although BN Mullik, India’s Intelligence chief, wouldn’t give President Kennedy credit for providing aid during the 1962 Sino-Indian war, ‘he did give Nehru credit for asking for it’ reveals his innocence of India’s complex attitude to the United States of America. Given the secrecy that shrouded the request, and Lal Bahadur Shastri’s flat denial of it nearly three years later, Mullik’s revelation may have embarrassed rather than flattered Nehru.

Riedel worked for the American Central Intelligence Agency for 30 years and was national security adviser to four US presidents. Writing on the basis of recently declassified records, he paints a vivid picture of war, diplomacy and covert action enlivened with fascinating vignettes. We learn that Nehru enjoyed filet mignon (beef steak) and ‘an occasional Scotch as long as it was all in private’, tastes his daughter shared. When Kennedy tried to flatter Zulfiqar Bhutto by saying if he were American he would be serving in the Kennedy cabinet, the Pakistani retorted that if he were American, he would be president with Kennedy in his cabinet. Kennedy’s larger-than-life ambassador to India, John Kenneth Galbraith, communicated directly with him because going through the state department was like ‘fornicating through a mattress’. But this exciting narrative is an American story, and we see only one side of the coin.

The title, JFK’s Forgotten Crisis, itself is a giveaway. The 1962 war may be forgotten in the US but is written on Indian hearts as Queen Mary said India was written on hers. The Henderson Brooks-Bhagat Report hasn’t been released not because Indians have forgotten that defeat but because no Indian government is prepared to risk the censure its disclosures might invite. Riedel’s view that it wasn’t Jawaharlal Nehru’s ‘ill- advised forward policy’ (his phrase) that provoked China but suspicion of what India might be up to in Tibet isn’t very plausible either, for by his account Nehru wasn’t even aware then of the CIA’s covert operations there. Nehru was criticised for readily surrendering to every Chinese demand in Tibet. Whatever the reason for the invasion, the legacy of 1962 remains the biggest obstacle to a proper rapprochement with India’s second biggest trading partner.

Neither Manmohan Singh’s love affair with George W Bush nor Narendra Modi’s fawning over Barack Obama has succeeded in smoothening out the hitches in a relationship that perplexed William B Saxbe, US ambassador to India in the 1970s. “When I call on cabinet ministers, the president, or governors, they all love to talk about their sons, sons- in-law and daughters in the United States and how well they’re doing and how well they like things,” he mused. “The next day I read in the papers the very same people are denouncing the United States as a totally different kind of country.”

Of course, Riedel is only concerned with presenting what the Kennedy administration regarded as the two great challenges it faced. He doesn’t pretend to analyse US-India relations or investigate its constant ups and downs. But no crisis can be divorced from the context. From the American point of view, the Cuban threat and Himalayan invasion were part of the same Communist aggressiveness that had precipitated the Korean War. In discussing that, Riedel dwells on KM Panikkar (Dean Acheson’s ‘panicky Panikkar’) whose warnings, based on conversations with Zhou Enlai, the Americans foolishly disregarded. Similarly, he might have usefully paid some attention to the speeches and writings of Sudhir Ghosh whom I can describe best as a high-level, well-meaning busybody with access to everybody, of whom Mahatma Gandhi was very fond and Nehru was not.

The omission suggests that contrary to general belief in this country, the famous foreign hand doesn’t have a finger in every pie. Riedel provides valuable new archival information on the precise military demands listed in Nehru’s two ‘agitated’ (Harold Macmillan’s term) letters to Kennedy. But if he had read Ghosh’s Gandhi’s Emissary, he would have known that the appeal itself had leaked out. Selig Harrison reported it in The Washington Post in February 1963. As The Indian Express noted a month later, Congressmen were baying for Ghosh’s blood ‘for daring to speak in Parliament the truth about the desperate appeal for help made by Mr Nehru to Mr Kennedy when India lay open to a serious invasion by the Chinese.’ Ghosh absented himself from Parliament when Shastri issued his denial so that he was not forced to contradict his leader.

Shastri could take refuge in the technicality that Ghosh had erred in detail. He charged Nehru with asking for an aircraft carrier whereas the request was for air cover. As Riedel recounts, Nehru wanted ‘some 350 combat aircraft and crews’, ‘air and radar equipment’, ‘a minimum of 12 squadrons of supersonic all-weather fighters’, at least 10,000 American personnel ‘to man these fighters and radar installations’, ‘US fighters and transport planes manned by US personnel’ to protect Indian cities, ‘two squadrons of B-47 Bombers’, and, finally, immediate training facilities in the US for Indian pilots and technicians. Nehru was prepared to barter his lifelong faith in non-alignment—even his country’s sovereign independence, according to some Indian critics— for military protection against a perceived threat.

No wonder he wanted it kept secret like his taste for filet mignon and Scotch. The US was such a political untouchable that Nehru was mortified at the publicity the American media gave to Operation Shiksha, a defence exercise involving British, Canadian, Australian but mainly US aircraft, equipment and personnel. Air Marshal Aspy Engineer, who was waiting on the Palam airport runway with Ambassador Chester Bowles to receive a squadron of 18 American F-100s, flatly refused to utter a word of welcome for the visiting instructors and airmen. They had to be content with tea and sandwiches. At the same time— and this is also part of the Indo-US paradox— Indians were disappointed at what was seen as Kennedy’s tardy response to the danger. The most charitable explanation was that Cuba and the Soviet Union took up all his attention. For as Galbraith put it, “In the same week, on almost the same day, that the two great Western powers confronted each other over Cuba, the two great Asian countries went to war in the Himalayas.”

It will therefore surprise Indians to read that Kennedy said only a few weeks before he was assassinated in November 1963, “I can tell you that there is nothing that has occupied our attention more than India in the last nine months.” It was known that the Cuban missile crisis had already been resolved with Nikita Khrushchev withdrawing Soviet nuclear weapons from the Caribbean island. What was not known was Riedel’s disclosure that as a quid pro quo, Kennedy quietly removed American nuclear weapons from Turkey. It is clear from this book that not only did he fear a resumption of the Sino-Indian war but seriously believed the Chinese would slice through the chicken’s neck of the Siliguri Corridor and annex the entire Northeast beyond. BRUCE RIEDEL’S COMMENT that although BN Mullik, India’s Intelligence chief, wouldn’t give President Kennedy credit for providing aid during the 1962 Sino-Indian war, ‘he did give Nehru credit for asking for it’ reveals his innocence of India’s complex attitude to the United States of America. Given the secrecy that shrouded the request, and Lal Bahadur Shastri’s flat denial of it nearly three years later, Mullik’s revelation may have embarrassed rather than flattered Nehru.

Riedel worked for the American Central Intelligence Agency for 30 years and was national security adviser to four US presidents. Writing on the basis of recently declassified records, he paints a vivid picture of war, diplomacy and covert action enlivened with fascinating vignettes. We learn that Nehru enjoyed filet mignon (beef steak) and ‘an occasional Scotch as long as it was all in private’, tastes his daughter shared. When Kennedy tried to flatter Zulfiqar Bhutto by saying if he were American he would be serving in the Kennedy cabinet, the Pakistani retorted that if he were American, he would be president with Kennedy in his cabinet. Kennedy’s larger-than-life ambassador to India, John Kenneth Galbraith, communicated directly with him because going through the state department was like ‘fornicating through a mattress’. But this exciting narrative is an American story, and we see only one side of the coin.

The title, JFK’s Forgotten Crisis, itself is a giveaway. The 1962 war may be forgotten in the US but is written on Indian hearts as Queen Mary said India was written on hers. The Henderson Brooks-Bhagat Report hasn’t been released not because Indians have forgotten that defeat but because no Indian government is prepared to risk the censure its disclosures might invite. Riedel’s view that it wasn’t Jawaharlal Nehru’s ‘ill- advised forward policy’ (his phrase) that provoked China but suspicion of what India might be up to in Tibet isn’t very plausible either, for by his account Nehru wasn’t even aware then of the CIA’s covert operations there. Nehru was criticised for readily surrendering to every Chinese demand in Tibet. Whatever the reason for the invasion, the legacy of 1962 remains the biggest obstacle to a proper rapprochement with India’s second biggest trading partner.

Neither Manmohan Singh’s love affair with George W Bush nor Narendra Modi’s fawning over Barack Obama has succeeded in smoothening out the hitches in a relationship that perplexed William B Saxbe, US ambassador to India in the 1970s. “When I call on cabinet ministers, the president, or governors, they all love to talk about their sons, sons- in-law and daughters in the United States and how well they’re doing and how well they like things,” he mused. “The next day I read in the papers the very same people are denouncing the United States as a totally different kind of country.”

Of course, Riedel is only concerned with presenting what the Kennedy administration regarded as the two great challenges it faced. He doesn’t pretend to analyse US-India relations or investigate its constant ups and downs. But no crisis can be divorced from the context. From the American point of view, the Cuban threat and Himalayan invasion were part of the same Communist aggressiveness that had precipitated the Korean War. In discussing that, Riedel dwells on KM Panikkar (Dean Acheson’s ‘panicky Panikkar’) whose warnings, based on conversations with Zhou Enlai, the Americans foolishly disregarded. Similarly, he might have usefully paid some attention to the speeches and writings of Sudhir Ghosh whom I can describe best as a high-level, well-meaning busybody with access to everybody, of whom Mahatma Gandhi was very fond and Nehru was not.

The omission suggests that contrary to general belief in this country, the famous foreign hand doesn’t have a finger in every pie. Riedel provides valuable new archival information on the precise military demands listed in Nehru’s two ‘agitated’ (Harold Macmillan’s term) letters to Kennedy. But if he had read Ghosh’s Gandhi’s Emissary, he would have known that the appeal itself had leaked out. Selig Harrison reported it in The Washington Post in February 1963. As The Indian Express noted a month later, Congressmen were baying for Ghosh’s blood ‘for daring to speak in Parliament the truth about the desperate appeal for help made by Mr Nehru to Mr Kennedy when India lay open to a serious invasion by the Chinese.’ Ghosh absented himself from Parliament when Shastri issued his denial so that he was not forced to contradict his leader.

Shastri could take refuge in the technicality that Ghosh had erred in detail. He charged Nehru with asking for an aircraft carrier whereas the request was for air cover. As Riedel recounts, Nehru wanted ‘some 350 combat aircraft and crews’, ‘air and radar equipment’, ‘a minimum of 12 squadrons of supersonic all-weather fighters’, at least 10,000 American personnel ‘to man these fighters and radar installations’, ‘US fighters and transport planes manned by US personnel’ to protect Indian cities, ‘two squadrons of B-47 Bombers’, and, finally, immediate training facilities in the US for Indian pilots and technicians. Nehru was prepared to barter his lifelong faith in non-alignment—even his country’s sovereign independence, according to some Indian critics— for military protection against a perceived threat.

No wonder he wanted it kept secret like his taste for filet mignon and Scotch. The US was such a political untouchable that Nehru was mortified at the publicity the American media gave to Operation Shiksha, a defence exercise involving British, Canadian, Australian but mainly US aircraft, equipment and personnel. Air Marshal Aspy Engineer, who was waiting on the Palam airport runway with Ambassador Chester Bowles to receive a squadron of 18 American F-100s, flatly refused to utter a word of welcome for the visiting instructors and airmen. They had to be content with tea and sandwiches. At the same time— and this is also part of the Indo-US paradox— Indians were disappointed at what was seen as Kennedy’s tardy response to the danger. The most charitable explanation was that Cuba and the Soviet Union took up all his attention. For as Galbraith put it, “In the same week, on almost the same day, that the two great Western powers confronted each other over Cuba, the two great Asian countries went to war in the Himalayas.”

It will therefore surprise Indians to read that Kennedy said only a few weeks before he was assassinated in November 1963, “I can tell you that there is nothing that has occupied our attention more than India in the last nine months.” It was known that the Cuban missile crisis had already been resolved with Nikita Khrushchev withdrawing Soviet nuclear weapons from the Caribbean island. What was not known was Riedel’s disclosure that as a quid pro quo, Kennedy quietly removed American nuclear weapons from Turkey. It is clear from this book that not only did he fear a resumption of the Sino-Indian war but seriously believed the Chinese would slice through the chicken’s neck of the Siliguri Corridor and annex the entire Northeast beyond.

Riedel says more than once that only the signal Kennedy sent saved India from that dire fate. The significance of American backing is not to be minimised but the war was over before American military supplies could be used. The Chinese may also have had their own reasons for withdrawing after announcing a unilateral ceasefire. Their hold on Aksai Chin with its then vital road linking Tibet with Xinjiang had been consolidated, and the dormant claim to Arunachal Pradesh activated for future bargaining. With Nehru diminished in the eyes of Asia and the world, China could claim a reputation for statesmanship and magnanimity in victory instead of taking on the burden of administering several conquered Indian states whose rebellious millions would have to be fed, clothed, housed and gainfully employed.

Sunanda K Datta-Ray is a journalist and author of several books including Waiting for America: India and the US in the New Millennium. He is a contributor to Open Riedel says more than once that only the signal Kennedy sent saved India from that dire fate. The significance of American backing is not to be minimised but the war was over before American military supplies could be used. The Chinese may also have had their own reasons for withdrawing after announcing a unilateral ceasefire. Their hold on Aksai Chin with its then vital road linking Tibet with Xinjiang had been consolidated, and the dormant claim to Arunachal Pradesh activated for future bargaining. With Nehru diminished in the eyes of Asia and the world, China could claim a reputation for statesmanship and magnanimity in victory instead of taking on the burden of administering several conquered Indian states whose rebellious millions would have to be fed, clothed, housed and gainfully employed.

(Sunanda K Datta-Ray is a journalist and author of several books including Waiting for America: India and the US in the New Millennium. He is a contributor to Open)

About The Author

Sunanda K Datta-Ray