The C.I.A.’s management of its myth is perhaps its greatest work. We all have our favourite books, documentaries, and movies. Stories from this precinct have been told brilliantly from Langley’s perspective. The democracies of India and Pakistan, to devastating effect. officers went off the rails, their brutal excesses were aped too by the I.S.I. Wooed by those it shunned, pandered to by its current protégés and partners, the C.I.A., as the stories that emerge here suggest, was a catalyst for change and security in Pakistan and India, when it did well. now prefers) to grow as a strategic buffer to China, while opening-up its markets to American industry.
(it now mistrusts) against a desire for India (and the R.A.W., which the C.I.A. These waystations in history saw the Agency balancing its need for the I.S.I. The second was in 2017, as Donald Trump became the surprise pick for president and actioned a covert plan to spring from a Pakistan jail a local doctor accused of conspiring with the C.I.A. pact, after an American long-range U2 surveillance plane was permitted to take off from a base near to Peshawar (to carry out a deep, unparalleled reconnaissance mission over the Soviet Union). One was the Gary Powers spy-plane calamity in 1960, which glued together an early version of the I.S.I.–C.I.A. This is not a book about the Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.) but it is everywhere, framed by two secret missions.
Also here are extracts from their liturgy, the powerful creation stories, and religious justifications, drawn all the way back from the conspiracy in 1981 to kill President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, and re-purposed for the 9/11 levies. And, like a crimewave family, a small band of men (and the thousands they recruited and sent to their deaths) triggered a cascade of incidents, small and large, that almost engulfed the entire region in war, and raised nuclear hackles. The (religious and secular) insurgents in India and Pakistan that these spies tracked, recruited, ran as assets, or tried to kill, over two decades, emerge anew in the following pages too, as a small band of capable, relentless, and ruthless antagonists, with names that are familiar but whose goals and antecedents are surprising. A small number who have never stepped into the sunlight remain committed to hot-metal solutions, impatient with the Some who began as hawks and arch pragmatists have become pacifists, now believing in dialogue over warfare, advocating for negotiation as the path to resolution. On other occasions, their vehemence reflects the hold their outfits still have over them, framing everything they see and do. Their stories are deeply subjective, sometimes confessional, and nearly always partial thanks to operational security that throttled their vision so that often they only saw their own inputs and outputs. Many of the events they participated in are well-known outrages, but they have redrawn them in the book in intimate, and revelatory ways, shedding new light, providing fingertip context, and drawing, sometimes, contrary, and shocking, conclusions. These are politically tinged tropes, and in the pages that follow spies from both secret services appear altogether different, as they describe how they became (and some still are) invisible protagonists, knee-deep in chaos, a few of them becoming militant, some losing traction, others having religious and political epiphanies, some going rogue, a few becoming crazy. The principals in this book are from India’s Research and Analysis Wing (R.A.W.), which is rarely talked about at all, and has been denigrated as a bureaucratic viper’s nest, while its enemies, in Pakistan’s InterServices Intelligence (I.S.I.), are spoken about all the time, but mostly portrayed as mysterious, self-serving, and deadly. For Z&A “It is always better to admire the best among our foes rather than the worst among our friends” Viet Thanh Nguyen, The SympathizerĪcknowledgements and a Note on Sources and Methods What follows are personal accounts – and, occasionally, the regretful recollections – of rival officers and analysts working to outwit and trap one another in the ground zero of the spy wars.
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