India joined exclusive surveillance group after 26/11, says book

NEW DELHI India, ignored by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) over Pakistan during America’s “war on terror” and the decades preceding it, became the member of an exclusive surveillance group after the 26/11 Mumbai attacks, making it a formidable intelligence force, according to a book by journalists Adrian Levy and Cathy Scottclark.

The book, “Spy Stories – Inside the Secret World of the RAW and ISI”, releasing this week, says Pakistan’s entropy, despite being enriched with billions of dollars post 9/11, brought the American intelligence community, begrudgingly, to Delhi.

In 2008, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), received an invite from US National Security Agency (NSA) to join a regional body known as SSPAC (Signals Intelligence Senior Pacific), which, the book says, was a “step up” for India, which had been trying to gain Washington’s

attention for a very long time.

The members of this exclusive surveillance group included the so called Five Eyes countries – the US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Britain – and also South Korea, Singapore, and Thailand.

The SSPAC is a platform for sharing technical intelligence, and here countries pooled their signals, gathered through eavesdropping, but also built trust and learned new surveillance techniques from the world’s most powerful spy agencies.

The book says the RAW finally began breaking through and winning NSA plaudits. “The RAW officers were now ‘read into’ some highly classified reports and introduced to data produced by cutting-edge technology and coding that bored into Islamist hotspots.”

A significant part of the surveillance was “contact chaining,” a method used by British technical intelligence at GCHQ in Cheltenham, to describe entire networks linked to a single exposed phone. “Analysts examined calls, messages, and emails from one suspect and derived from them lists of others and their associates, building a matrix of association in top-secret projects, codenamed CLASP and Prime Time,” the book adds.

The writers add that the Congress party walked the country back from war after 26/11 and with its allies.

The journalists spoke to the who’s who of India and Pakistan’s counterterrorism and security structure for the book over the years.